The Fourth Watcher

26

"You became their white man,” Rafferty says. It has dimmed outside, and Leung has gone out twice to make the circuit and come back in, wet enough to tell Rafferty it is raining

again. The room is uncomfortably hot. Ming Li is stretched out on the opposite bed, an arm over her eyes, either asleep or pretending to be. Leung drips silently in the corner.

“Chu was right,” Frank says. “The world had changed. Assholes were still on top. But now they were Chinese assholes, vindicated after all those years, finally fulfilling their destiny as the only true humans in a world of apes. They had power at last. The problem was that white people still had most of the money.

“China was Opening Up,” he says, framing the last two words with his hands, as though they were on a marquee. “I always loved that phrase. It sounded like part of some master agenda, another damn five-year plan, when what really happened was one day they woke up and looked around and realized they’d built a new Great Wall, and all the money was on the other side. The government woke up, I mean. Colonel Chu and all the other Colonel Chus had always known where the money was, and they’d erected some amazing financial structures, cash siphons of staggering complexity, mostly through Hong Kong and a few million overseas Chinese who had thoughtlessly left their loved ones behind as collateral. Every time your mother bought dim sum at Choy’s Cafe in Lancaster, Colonel Chu, or someone like Colonel Chu, pocketed a dime.”

“Was that why you never ate there?”

“You know,” Frank says wearily, “one of the three or four million things I regret is that I never got all dressed up and took your mother there. Not that it was the kind of place you dressed up for, but. .” His voice trails off, his gaze on Poke.

“I know what you mean,” Rafferty says.

Frank lets his eyes roam the room. “I didn’t understand anything then, not how anything worked, or. . I just knew that it hurt to eat Chinese food. It might as well have been glass. Even the smell of it made me hate myself. I read the papers every day. I knew what was happening there. You have to understand, Poke, that none of it made me love your mother any less. I loved her every day I was with her. I still love her.”

After a moment Poke says, “Fine.”

Frank lowers his head, looking down at his lap. “Thanks,” he says.

“China was opening up,” Poke prompts, more at ease with the past.

“They needed me. Well, they needed somebody, and I was there, and they knew I’d do anything to protect Wang. They could have told me to walk on coals, and I would have asked which shoe to take off first. But they didn’t want me to walk on coals. It was my face they needed. They knew that white people were more comfortable dealing with white people. I was the front.”

“And this involved what?”

“A lot of things. Business, you know? If a business deal wasn’t forthcoming, we pushed it along. ‘Facilitated it,’ Colonel Chu would say. Drugs, girls, boys, espionage frames, if that’s what was needed. Take some rough-and-tumble tire executive from. . oh, I don’t know. . Akron, Ohio, some bush leaguer with a crew cut and a calculator who’s holding out for a deal breaker, and put him in a room with a willing girl or boy. Let the tape roll. Get his hotel to put the movie on next time he turns on the TV. Or give him a bunch of papers in Chinese that turn out to be specs for some outdated missile system and point the cops, whom you own, at him. Akron’s a long way off, and the contracts are in the next room. The deal breakers turn out to be not so serious after all, and suddenly you own part of a tire factory.”

“In the meantime, though,” Rafferty says, “Mr. Akron blames you. Word’s got to get around, got to damage your usefulness.”

“Me?” Frank grabs a handful of peanuts and drops a couple into his mouth. “I had no idea. I do Claude Rains: I’m shocked-shocked-to learn about it. Tell me everything, I say, and I’ll see what I can do. Give me the details, and we’ll go to court and break the contract. Well, of course, he’s not about to give me the details, just like he’s not about to go back to the office and say, ‘Hey, you know that factory we just built? If I’d kept my pants on, it’d be in Malaysia.’ ”

Rafferty relaxes slightly. It’s not as bad as he’d feared. Corruption is old news in Asia, reflexive as breathing. “But come on, the factory delivers, right? These guys are smart enough to make sure the bottom line’s okay, no matter how it got built.”

“Sure,” Frank says listlessly. “Lots of money left over even after the skim.”

“And nobody got killed.”

A pause. “No.” Frank dumps the peanuts back into the saucer. “Not in a case like that.”

Rafferty gets up-maybe too quickly, feeling a little light-headed- and goes to the window, looks down on a wet and shining street, courtesy of yet another instant rainstorm. A car plows past, its headlights bright cones of rain against the cloud-seeded gloom of the day. The world going on, he thinks. To Frank he says, “I’m not sure I want to know any more.”

“That’s most of it.” Poke’s father sounds drained. “Just bear with me for a minute more.”

“Why not?” Poke says. “It’s raining anyway.”

“Over the next few years, I learned a lot.” Frank folds his hands, leans back against the wall, and closes his eyes. He swallows noisily and clears his throat. Rafferty realizes he has clenched his own fists, and he relaxes them, one shoulder pressed against the cool glass of the window, wishing he could melt through it, out of the room and back into his life.

“After ten or twelve years, I had a set of skills that I hadn’t known anyone possessed and a map of China in my head that didn’t look like anything on paper. Take any country, Poke, and on top of the paper map you can put another map, a map of how the authority flows and where the obligations are, a map of hidden paths and corners. Blind alleys. The feng shui of power. The secret map, under the radar. One that nobody else has.

“So I began my own map. Each project I took on, I added to that map. I built it up a province, a city at a time. Other countries, every once in a while. A relationship, a promise, a pressure point. A betrayal here, a broken heart there. Somebody’s in love, somebody owes somebody money, somebody’s got a secret, somebody wants revenge. Revenge is always a good one-you can open a lot of doors when somebody wants revenge. The Chinese are superlative haters. They honed the skill during hundreds of years of being treated like shit. I found fulcrums and figured out how much pressure it would take to use them.”

Frank nods, apparently satisfied with the way the story is unfolding. “By then they had some fulcrums of their own. Ming Li had been born, which relaxed Colonel Chu considerably. He was having trouble believing that I still cared about Wang. But with a baby, he knew he had me. Like a lot of Chinese, he believes that the bond of fatherhood is sacred, unbreakable. What he didn’t know was that I had plans for Ming Li.”

“Major-league baseball?” Rafferty asks.

“Do you mind if we discuss you in the third person, Ming Li?” Frank asks.

“Why not?” She doesn’t stir.

Rafferty has thought she was asleep. “What kind of plans?”

Frank doesn’t open his eyes. “How many windows in this room, Ming Li?”

“Three.” She still has her arm over her face.

“How many light fixtures, and where?”

“Ceiling, console, bathroom. Number four is just outside the door in the hallway.”

“Door open out or in?”

“In. Hinges on the left, if you’re facing it from inside the room. The top hinge pin is high in the bracket, easy to get a knife under.”

“What color are the bathroom towels?”

“The color of piss, but they used to be bright yellow. They say ‘His’ and ‘His.’”

Rafferty asks, “How many boys were in the lobby when we came in?”

“Six. Two of them wore lipstick. One of the pretty boys and one of the butches were talking on cell phones. One of the butches had a bleached buzz cut and a port-wine birthmark on his cheek.” She rolls over onto her side, facing him, her head resting on her arm. “Left cheek,” she adds. She pokes her tongue into her cheek to show where it was.

“We started when she was two,” Frank says. “She was drawing maps by the time she was six. At seven she followed me across town without my knowing it.”

“Not easy,” Leung says.

“Not that hard,” Ming Li says, grinning.

“And the point was. .?” Rafferty asks.

“Anything that was on my map that wasn’t on theirs was leverage. Ming Li was on my map. Leung was on my map.”

Frank absently checks his watch. “So Ming Li was a double-edged sword, although Chu didn’t know it. He didn’t know he’d given me Leung either. Chu assigned Leung to keep an eye on me for an operation in Pailin, in Cambodia. Industrial rubies, smuggled as costume jewelry, the biggest, ugliest stuff you ever saw. Millions of dollars’ worth, set into crud too vulgar for Imelda Marcos. No customs officer in his right mind would think it was real. Like me, Leung was under a certain amount of pressure.”

“Sister,” Leung says. “Chu never threatened her, just sent her chocolates on her birthday every year. So I’d know that he could get to her whenever he wanted to.”

“And Leung was better than I was,” Frank says. “So I learned from him, and then I turned it around, and when he called Chu to report in, I was there.”

“With a gun,” Leung adds. “We had a candid exchange of views.”

“And came to an understanding. That was two years ago. We took our time, because you don’t hurry with these boys. Five days ago Leung’s sister fell off the map, went down the rabbit hole. Caused no end of consternation on Colonel Chu’s end of the phone. I helped out as best I could, sent his guys to three or four plausible places, and while the hounds were hunting, I made Wang disappear.”

“This isn’t about that,” Rafferty says. He is so tired he can barely stand upright. “This isn’t just an escape. It’s bigger than that.”

“He’s not slow after all,” Ming Li says.

Frank’s eyes are on Poke, the fleck of gold in the left one catching the light. “You’re right, Poke. It is. I did something before I closed up shop in China. I stole the rest of Colonel Chu’s life.”

“This is great,” Rafferty says. He is still at the window and feels as though he has been there for hours. “You took something that could have been business-nasty, dirty business, but business-and you turned it personal.”

“Afraid so.” Frank shells another peanut, and Rafferty suddenly feels beneath his bare feet the sharp edges of peanut shells, perpetually scattered over the living-room carpet in Lancaster. Remembers his mother grumbling behind the vacuum.

“Essentially, that makes me fair game. My family and me.”

“You were always fair game. Chu isn’t someone who plays by rules. This is a guy who would shoot a hotel telephone operator who got his wake-up call wrong.”

“In case you think Frank is just being vivid,” Ming Li says, “he’s not.”

“So you. . what? You tried to kill him? Obviously, you missed. But this means no negotiation, doesn’t it? One of you is going to have to die.”

Frank smooths his long, thinning strands of hair. “I didn’t say I tried to kill him, Poke. I said I took the rest of his life.”

Rafferty brings up his hand and massages his eyes. His chest feels uncomfortably dense, as though his lungs are full of water. “The rest of. .” The phrase means nothing, but a word pops into his mind, and he looks at his father. “What box?”

“Ah,” Frank says. He looks at Ming Li.

“You said Chu wouldn’t want anyone to know about the box. What box?”

“Good for you,” Frank says. “Actually, there is probably some room for negotiation, enough at least to get him within range.”

“Of what?”

“A really good gun.” Frank leans down and reaches beneath the bed, and when he comes back up, there is a leather box in his hand, about the size of three hardcover books in a stack. It has a small clasp on the front, and Frank twists it open and lifts the lid. “Pailin,” he says.

Rafferty crosses to the bed, leans forward, and sees rubies, maybe three or four hundred of them, anywhere from half a carat to two or three carats. They shine under the fluorescents like frozen blood.

“They’re flawless,” Frank says. “Most rubies are occluded, did you know that? They’ve got clouds of opaque mineral material in them. Very few are clear enough to cut into big stones. That’s why they’re so expensive. Chu’s been sifting through the Pailin take for decades to fill this box. It was part of his getaway stash, just in case.”

“Worth how much?” Rafferty asks. He can’t take his eyes off them.

Frank looks down at them regretfully. “Well, if you have the luxury of selling them one at a time, through legitimate channels, maybe three million. The way I’ll have to do it, I figure I’ll get one.”

“Is this about three million dollars, or is it about face?”

“Both. And something else. Dig down through the rubies. All the way to the bottom.”

Rafferty sits and does as he’s told, the rubies cold and smooth on his skin. At the bottom of the box, he feels paper. A large envelope. He works it out carefully, not wanting to spill any of the rubies from the box.

“Open it.”

The envelope is half an inch thick. He opens the flap and pours the contents onto the bed. He sees papers, folded in thirds, and an American passport. When he opens the passport, he sees a photo of an old man with a large mole on his cheek and the name irwin lee. Slipped into the passport are a Virginia driver’s license in the same name, and a Social Security card.

“What the hell?”

“Look at the other papers.”

The deed to a house in Richmond, Virginia, also in the name of Irwin Lee. Credit-card statements, some of them showing activity less than a month old. Irwin Lee is a vigorous consumer. Rafferty says, “This is a whole life.”

“It’s Chu’s future,” Frank says. “He’s had someone being Irwin Lee for almost fifteen years. Creating a space for Chu to slip into, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.”

“It’s his retirement plan?” Rafferty asks.

“He’s more than seventy,” Frank says. “There’s a generation behind him that’s getting impatient. They’re entrepreneurs, Poke, like so many people in China today. They’re tired of the old ways and the old men who won’t let go of them. If Chu doesn’t make a move of some kind, he’s going to get the ax, and that’s probably not a figure of speech.”

“Jesus,” Rafferty said. “Why didn’t you just kill him?”

Frank is silent, but Ming Li says, “Because we wanted him to suffer first.”

“You have to understand, Poke,” Frank says. “We never thought he’d come here. We were only going to be in Bangkok long enough to sell the rubies, and then we were going to disappear off the face of the earth.”

Poke says, “But I talked to Arnold.”

“Yeah,” Frank says. “And Arnold was a stumblebum.”

“Let’s assume you can still get out of here. Do you actually know somebody who has a million on hand to pay for a box of rocks?”

“Sure,” Frank says. “The North Koreans. Anything that’s discounted right now, anything they can turn around-”

Rafferty slices the air with the edge of his hand, and Frank stops in mid-word. “How do you know the North Koreans?”

“My shop, so to speak,” Frank says, as though it were obvious. “And shops like my shop. They’re among the very few people in the world who’ll do business with the North Koreans.”

Rafferty reaches out, grabs a handful of his father’s peanuts, and gets settled. He smiles at Ming Li, who gives him a puzzled smile in return. “Do tell,” he says.