The Fourth Watcher

25

"Colonel Chu,” Frank says. He looks at Leung, who does something economical with his shoulders that might be a shrug. “Ugliest mole in China.”

“He and three others,” Rafferty says. “Thai.”

“Local help,” Frank says. “Nobodies,” He sits on the edge of the bed in a backpackers’ hotel on Khao San Road. Ming Li had changed tuk-tuks in Mah Boon Krong and redirected them to Bangkok’s budget travelers’ district, her eyes on the road behind them every yard of the way. Now Rafferty sits on the opposite bed, beside Ming Li. Leung squats peasant style, smoking a cigarette in a corner near the door.

Frank wears a rumpled shirt that he obviously slept in, and his thin hair has a bad case of bed head. “Arnold Prettyman,” he says disgustedly. “Why didn’t you just hire a skywriter?”

“You knew Arnold?”

“Knew about him. Arnold was a stumblebum. Now he’s a dead stumblebum.” He looks older and frailer in the morning light. When he glances up at Poke, Poke sees the little burst of gold in the brown iris of his left eye, something that had fascinated him as a kid and that he had forgotten completely. “Christ,” Frank grumbles, “even when he was working, Arnold was usually the flare.”

“The flare?” Rafferty glances at Ming Li, who has her eyes fastened disapprovingly on the wrinkles in Frank’s shirt.

“The distress signal, the guy you give the wrong info to, so he can leak it to make people look somewhere else while you do whatever you have to do. Of course, the flare can’t be smart enough to figure out the dope is wrong, because if the other guys decide to come after him and get persuasive, he has to believe it. That’s what Arnold was really good at, believing nonsense. For that, he was highly qualified. He was unevolved, one foot in the Mesozoic and the other in his mouth. You were probably okay until you called him. We came here to warn you just in case, because you’re my kid, but now you’ve really screwed yourself. And worse than that. Not just yourself.”

“You, for example,” Rafferty says.

Frank pulverizes a peanut he has been holding and lets the whole thing drop. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I don’t.” The sharpness in Rafferty’s voice surprises even him.

“No, of course not. You’re the aggrieved party, the blameless victim.”

“Actually,” Rafferty says, “that’s my mother. I’m just fine.”

Frank reaches out to the small table between the bed and picks up the bowl of unshelled peanuts he has been dipping into. Beside it is a saucer with several shelled nuts on it. “Fine? You’re an open wound.”

“Like a lot of egotists, you overestimate your impact.”

“I wish that were true,” Frank says. “But it’s not.” He drops a shell to the floor and adds a nut to the pile on the saucer, then holds the saucer out with exaggerated politeness. “Peanut?”

Poke gives him the politeness right back. “No, thanks, but it’s so kind of you to offer.”

“You’re being a horse’s ass.” Frank’s eyes wander away from Poke and gradually settle on Leung. “Colonel Chu. Well, that’s not a surprise.”

“I assume he’s got some weight,” Rafferty says.

“Oh, yes,” Frank says. “The colonel has some weight.”

“If he’s here,” Leung says, “there are others.”

Frank makes the face of someone who’s just realized he put salt in his coffee. “Not a chance. He can’t let anyone know about the box. That’s why he’s using locals.”

“Who went after my family,” Rafferty says, and suddenly he is furious. “Picking my lock in the middle of the night. Going into my apartment with their guns drawn. Where my wife is. Where my child is.”

“I called you,” Frank says. “If I hadn’t been watching. .”

Rafferty feels his face grow hot. “Gee, and I forgot to bring your fucking medal. Just once, just for practice, why don’t you try seeing something from somebody else’s perspective? Just for the sake of your tiny, mummified little soul. You pop up, materialize out of whatever dimension you normally hang around in, and barge into my life-which is finally on the verge of being the life I want, the life I’ve worked for- dragging a bunch of unwholesome shit, like Marley’s chains. You were dead, remember? And you’ve been gone longer than I knew you. How do I know who you are by now? So I tried to find out. Poor old Arnold was the litmus paper, and guess what? He turned blue.” Poke gets up, just to move. “Whoever you are, you failed the acid test. You said you were on the run. I didn’t want to know why, I didn’t want to spend a few chatty hours catching up with you. I just wish to Christ you’d run in a different direction.”

“I knew this was going to be difficult,” Frank says.

Ming Li says, “Poke. You have to know.”

He stops pacing. He feels light, empty, as though there is a vacuum at his center.

“For God’s sake, sit down,” Frank says. “Trust me for three minutes. Stretch yourself. It’s good for your character. Have a fucking peanut.” He holds out the dish.

Rafferty takes a seat on the other bed. Ming Li sighs. The bed is hard and narrow, the room furnished with nothing small enough to steal. The guesthouse in which Frank has gone to ground is a recessed, nondescript building announced by a sign that originally said home away from home guest house before someone changed one letter with Magic Marker to make it read homo away from home. A statistically improbable number of teenage boys had been lounging on the couches in the lobby when Rafferty and Ming Li came in. A couple of them had been wearing lipstick.

“I already know some of it,” Rafferty says. “Courtesy of my chat with that woman-I mean, Wang, Ming Li’s mother-all those years ago.”

“Back further.” Frank makes a waving gesture, paddling time toward the past. “I told you I stole her. What I didn’t tell you, because you walked out, was that I stole more than that.” He reaches behind him and plumps a pillow, settles it against his lower back, and leans against the wall. “This is ancient history, but it’s pertinent.” He sighs and glances up at Ming Li.

“I was young,” Frank says. “Hell, I was just a kid. You ever do anything stupid, Poke? And of course I was in love, which, for all the nice songs about it, doesn’t really raise the old IQ. You have no idea how beautiful Wang was. Or maybe you do. Look at Ming Li-that’s where she gets it. She was so beautiful it made me ache, and she was lost. More lost than I ever thought anyone could be. Just a kid, and about to be punctured by some fat toad, and then she’d have eight, ten years of getting screwed front, back, and sideways seven or eight times a day before they tossed her into the street to fight dogs for garbage.”

Ming Li gets up and moves to the other bed to sit beside her father. She puts her right hand on the back of his left. He uses his other hand to pat his shirt pocket.

“You don’t smoke anymore,” Ming Li says.

“And if I did,” Frank says to Rafferty, “she’d tell Wang.”

“She’d know,” Ming Li says, “without me telling her.”

“But obviously,” Frank says, resuming the thread, “my employers weren’t going to give me any bonuses for stealing Wang. She was capital to them, they’d invested money in her-all those bowls of rice, all those nights sharing the bed with twelve other girls. They’d paid her mother for her, probably twenty dollars. And the problem was, they were as real as she was. They really did kill people once in a while, sometimes even for cause. So I used the skills they’d taught me, and I took a little something along when Wang and I decided Shanghai wasn’t home anymore.”

“How little?” Rafferty asks.

“Twenty-seven thousand dollars, American. A fortune in those days.”

“It’s not scratch paper now.”

“And to these particular guys, it was also a loss of face. They couldn’t allow it. It would have been like taking out a full-page ad: ‘Free Money.’

The trouble with being a crook is that you have to work with crooks.

Give them an inch and they’ll take your foot.”

“Worse still,” Ming Li says, “you were a foreigner.”

“So it was a racial slap, too,” Frank says. “There were still signs in Shanghai then, ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed.’ The men I worked for took that personally, and why wouldn’t they? They’d been shit on often enough.”

“All this,” Rafferty says. “It’s a long time ago.”

Frank gives him an assessing glance. “That’s what I thought, too. When I went back.”

As Frank tells it, it had taken him almost a year to find Wang. It took his former employers less than a week to find the two of them.

At the time Frank thought they’d been watching Wang. It wasn’t until later that he realized that the People’s Republic was a nation of spies, a tightly woven fabric of betrayal. All the way from the top down, from cities to neighborhoods to blocks to individual apartment houses, there was always someone whose job it was to keep an eye open, to report anything out of the ordinary. A white man in China, living with a Chinese woman, in the 1980s-that was out of the ordinary. Word was passed along. And, unfortunately for Frank and Wang, word reached the wrong ears.

They’d been shopping that day, buying a space heater. Shanghai was cold in December, and Wang’s room had no heat. They’d been huddling beneath blankets for days, watching their breath drift upward as they talked. When they returned to the room and opened the door, two men were waiting for them.

They wore the same gray, shapeless uniforms that Frank saw everywhere, had the same nicotine-stained fingers, the same winter-city pallor. They could have been anyone: fry cooks, night-soil collectors, gardeners. Their rank showed only in their eyes and in the heavy jade rings they wore. The man in charge, the taller of the two, had sharply incised Mongolian eyes, the lids sloping heavily downward to frame pupils as hard and dry as marbles. A large nut-brown mole, bristling with coarse hairs, decorated his left cheek. The shorter one trained a gun on Wang, but it was the tall one Frank feared. The tall one didn’t need a gun.

The man without the gun smiled, a perfunctory rearrangement of the facial muscles that could have signaled either enjoyment or gas pains, and said, “Welcome back.”

Suddenly Frank needed badly to visit the bathroom. “Mr. Chu,” he said.

Mr. Chu snapped the smile off, quick as a binary switch, and let his eyes flick from Frank to Wang and back again. “Colonel Chu,” he said, and slid the hard eyes back to Wang. He made a sympathetic clucking sound. “She’s changed more than you have,” he said. “Do you like her this way?”

“I like her fine,” Frank said. His mouth was so dry his lips stuck to his teeth.

“Time is so cruel to women. How much do you weigh now, darling?” Chu asked Wang.

“Seventy-three kilos,” Wang said in a whisper.

“And how much did you weigh when he left?”

“About forty kilos.”

Chu nodded. “Seventy-three kilos. What does that come to in pounds, Mr. Accountant?”

“About one-sixty,” Frank said.

“If I could sell her for two hundred dollars a pound,” Chu said, “I could recoup what you stole. Unfortunately, she wasn’t worth that much when she was beautiful. Now she’s not worth anything. Enough fat to make a few dozen candles. Would you like some candles, Mr. Accountant? The nights are long now. You could read by her light.”

“I can pay you back,” Frank said.

The man holding the gun laughed, a sound rough enough to have bark on it.

“I don’t believe you can,” Chu said. He turned to face Wang, his whole body, not just his eyes. “Undress,” he said.

Frank took a step forward, feeling heavy as iron, and the gun swiveled around to him. “Leave her alone,” he said to Chu. He barely recognized his own voice. It sounded like something from the bottom of a well.

Wang was already taking off her coat.

“Don’t do it,” Frank said to her.

“She’s smarter than you are,” Chu said. “If I’d known how stupid you were, I’d never have hired you. I was paying for brains, discretion, and honesty. I didn’t get any of them. The pants now,” he said to Wang, and Wang untied the drawstring on her pants and let them drop to the floor. She hooked her thumbs under the elastic of her frayed underpants. “Come on, come on,” he said sharply. “Are you out of practice? They used to come off quickly enough.”

He had been speaking English, but now he switched to Mandarin for Wang’s benefit. “You thought she was a virgin, didn’t you? You whore-loving son of a pig. She’d been taking it in the ass for years, from me, from my partners, from anyone with a dollar and some grease. You could have bought her from me, you stupid Anglo, I’d have sold her to you for a hundred dollars, employee’s discount. Tell him, Wang. Tell him about all your butt-pluggers.”

“It’s true,” Wang said. She was naked, her arms at her sides, making no effort to hide her heavy breasts, her sagging belly. She was covered in gooseflesh. The sight of the broken arm brought the sting of tears to Frank’s eyes, but the hopelessness in her face filled him with a heat so intense he thought it would blow the top of his head off, and he stepped toward Chu, barely seeing him through the sudden darkness in the room.

“Look at her,” Chu said, his eyes locked on Frank’s. “Old and fat, gorging at the people’s trough. She’s obviously expensive to feed now, and for what? What’s she good for? I know a man not far from here who makes films of women with dogs and horses. He might use her, if no one else was available. I don’t know about the dogs and horses, though. They’re used to better.”

Frank took another step. Each leg weighed a hundred pounds.

“Would you like those candles?” Chu asked pleasantly. “Or would you prefer the film? For me the candles would be easier.” He shrugs. “But of course you’d use up the candles eventually, and you could keep the film forever. The mind’s eye,” he said. “It fades as we get older.”

“I have the money,” Frank said without hope.

“And the interest? Must be a couple of hundred thousand by now. For that? It must be true,” he said to the other man, eyebrows lifted as though he’d just discovered something interesting. “Love is blind.”

“I can get it. All of it. I can pay it back.”

“And you will,” Chu said with enough venom to stun a snake. “But not that way. You’ll do it our way, or she’s a present to the dogs.” He cleared his throat roughly and spit at Wang, hitting her midchest. Wang didn’t even flinch. “Get dressed. Your ugliness offends me. And you,” he snapped at the other man, “put the gun away. It’s rude.”

Chu watched the gun being holstered and then sank cross-legged to a sitting position. “Get those clothes on, whore, and make us some tea. And, Frank,” he said, “sit.” The smile returned, and for an instant he looked like someone’s happy, benevolent grandfather. “We have so much to talk about. You’ve only just come back to us. I’m not sure you know how much the world has changed.”