Ghost Month (33 page)

“Ou-Yang, an American told me to say …”

“Oh, an American! All right, I get it. Say no more.”

“What just happened?”

“You let me know it’s all being handled at a higher level.” Ou-Yang slapped my shoulder and walked back to German and General Yang.

The fire had died down to the point where I could enter where my front door had been. The whole house looked a lot smaller now that the Sheetrock walls were gone. My bedroom had been adjacent to the west wall and so had my CD rack. I looked down at what used to be my music collection. It looked like a puddle of burned macaroni and cheese.

The smell was worse than when I first arrived. I cupped my nose and mouth with my left hand as I jabbed the shovel around, cracking melted plastic.

My desk had caved in, and my PC was sitting in the middle of the wreckage looking like a fried, deflated volleyball. Nothing remained of my plastic speakers.

The bathroom tiles had disintegrated, so I guess they weren’t made from genuine ceramic, after all. The sheet-metal sink had wilted to the side. The only thing that remained unscathed in the entire house was the squat toilet, that oval of porcelain set in the floor. It would probably withstand a missile attack from China, as well. The survivors wouldn’t be lacking places to poop.

I stepped back into what had been the living room and saw what looked like a little pile of flour. I poked it with my shovel, and two blackened metal spirals rolled out. I realized that the coils were the remnants of my old notebooks and that my little box of high-school memorabilia was a heap of ashes.

The yearbook with the picture of me and Julia was gone.

I knew I should have scanned it, but I had never gotten around to it. Well, even if I had digitized the picture, it would have ended up as part of the twisted blob that my PC was now, because I wouldn’t have uploaded it anywhere.

It also meant my high-school diploma was gone. A sudden realization stopped me in my tracks.

My house had been burned down to destroy Julia’s box of stuff. Only my arsonist didn’t know I had it stashed at Nancy’s apartment. Maybe it wasn’t Black Sea who had firebombed my house. Maybe it was the CIA, trying to cover their tracks. I didn’t know if I could believe the American.

I gulped in some air and nearly retched. There was a terrible oily taste in my mouth.

A cable-news van pulled up, scraping its guts against the curb as the side door drew back. A woman tumbled out and immediately began to haul out canvas bags of equipment. A man came out of the cab and helped her.

Ou-Yang came up to me. “Jing-nan, get out of there.”

“Out of where?”

“Get out of the rubble, it’s dangerous, plus you’re destroying evidence. There are still some open flames in there.”

“It’s not dangerous anymore.”

Ou-Yang yanked me out of the foundation of my house. He pointed at my nose with the index finger of a hastily pulled-on
industrial-strength rubber glove. “Stay the fuck out, you!” He grabbed my shovel and began to root around.

General Yang was also compelled to act before the cameras were turned on. It sure would look bad for the police and fire fighters to be standing around idle at a fire. On a slow news day, the loop could be playing until the afternoon.

Obviously, Ou-Yang had more experience at posing than General Yang.

“How long do you need in there?” Yang asked Ou-Yang, his voice breaking.

“Shut up, fatso!” Ou-Yang replied. “I’m working!”

Yang headed to the fire truck and yelled, “Let’s get those hoses out!”

Ou-Yang continued to scrape around. The TV people were setting up.

The driver was also the cameraman. “This place smells like shit,” he said as he unwound cords.

“It was an illegal house,” said the reporter. “They smell awful when they burn down.”

“This was my house,” I told her. “Are you going to do a story about it?”

“Maybe,” she said cagily. The woman looked me over. “You lived here by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you live here?”

“I used to live here with my parents and my grandfather. They’re all gone now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said with the empathy of an automated voice menu. She was younger than me and also tougher.

Ou-Yang called me over. “Is this yours?” he asked, holding up half of what used to be a digital clock radio.

“No,” I said. “We … I only had a round clock in the living room.”

“This isn’t yours?”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“This was part of an explosive device. The fire radiated out from where I found it.”

“Hey,” called out Yang. “Are you done in there already?”

“Yeah, go spray it down,” said Ou-Yang. He bagged the clock radio and lit a cigarette. He walked over to the reporter, smiled at her and asked if she smoked.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Nancy sounded sleepy when she finally answered. I suppose she could have been in bed, considering it was about four thirty in the morning.

“Jing-nan? Why are you calling me on the intercom phone?”

“Because you wouldn’t answer your cell phone.”

“But how in the world did you call in to the intercom system?”

“I’m in your lobby. Right now. Please tell them it’s okay for me to come up. The guy at the desk is looking at me like I’m crazy, and the doorman wants to beat me up.”

I handed the phone back to the desk attendant, a tall man with a short temper. He put the receiver to his ear and listened, which seemed to require an enormous effort.

“That’s fine,” he said to Nancy, “but you have to come down to escort your guest up. It’s the policy at this time of night.” He replaced the handset and rubbed down his stringy eyebrows. “You,” he said to me. “Take your elbows off the desk.”

I was so relieved I had been able to get in touch with Nancy. Plan B was buzzing Peggy Lee to ask if I could crash on her couch.

Nancy came down in a zipped-up pink hoodie and cut-off sweatpants. Appropriate dress for the glacial temperature of the lobby. When she got closer, I saw a few centimeters of a black slip peeking out like snail meat from just under the waistband of the hoodie.
The doorman broke away from eying the soft parts of my throat to leer at her legs.

Nancy smiled at me and signed something at the desk. We walked to the elevators. I waited for the doors to open before saying anything.

“My house was blown up,” I whispered. “It’s probably on the news right now.”

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed in English.

I put my hands on her shoulders. “Everything I have is gone.”

She covered her mouth and nose. The elevator came and brought us up.

We got into her apartment and she ran her hands up and down my body, checked the number of ears, fingers and other things.

We sat on the couch, and I explained to Nancy what the American had essentially told me: that I had run afoul of the Black Sea gang, the one that was still cleaning house by getting rid of a faction of dissident members who had killed Julia or caused her death.

“The CIA is working with Black Sea,” I said. “They think the gang is more stable than the government.”

Nancy pointed at my nose. “Of course the Taiwanese-American’s working for the CIA,” she said. “It makes so much sense.”

I got up, walked into the kitchen and poured two glasses of iced water. “He mentioned something about you,” I called from the kitchen.

“What did he say?”

I came out and handed her one of the glasses. “He said you noticed the smell from the cooking oil they used when they installed the microphones in my house.” I took a long sip; I hadn’t realized until then how dehydrated I was.

“They were bugging your house?” She stared into her glass and turned it in her hands.

“It turned out to be a waste of time, too. I’m the guy who knows the least about the situation!” I gulped more water.

Nancy touched my hand. “Do you think the CIA burned the building down because they didn’t want anybody to find the microphones they used?”

I looked directly at her. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Ah-ding’s company makes specialty chips for intelligence
operations. Ordinarily, if a chip is recovered, you can open it up and read it like a book to see who made it and who was using it. But the specialty chips melt away like solder—you can’t even tell what it used to be.”

I sucked a small ice cube into my mouth. “I hadn’t thought about that at all,” I said. “I thought they were only interested in burning the box with Julia’s stuff in it. Now I see they saw it as a two-birds-one-stone deal.

“Since my family’s gone, it somehow makes sense that our house is gone, too. It was a temporary house that lasted for three generations of Chens, so it did its job.” I swallowed the sliver of ice that was left in my mouth. “I’m glad, though, that we got to go through the yearbook together.”

“Isn’t it funny that the three of us—me, you and Julia—were all in that picture together?”

“She would have liked you a lot, Nancy,” I said. She blushed immediately.

Nancy drank some more water, then stood up. “I need to have some shrimp chips,” she said. “When I drink iced water, I need shrimp chips.” She headed for the kitchen.

“I hope you don’t mind …” I called after her. “I mean, if it’s okay with you, could I stay with you …? Until I have my own place again, of course. It shouldn’t take too long.”

Nancy padded back from the kitchen and jumped onto the couch with a bag of spicy shrimp chips. “You don’t even have to ask,” she said. She tore a side of the bag open and grabbed a handful of chips, which were formed into shapes like French fries. As soon as you bit them they’d collapse into shrimp-flavored dust. They were made out of processed wheat and palm oil that was probably poured over a shrimp armpit. A perfect snack for mindless munching.

“These are really bad for you,” I said as I shook a few into my left hand.

She blinked. “It’s one of my favorite snacks.”

“I don’t think you should be eating them anymore.”

She held the bag open. “Well, if they’re so bad for you, then put your chips back in.”

“No!”

She tried to grab them out of my hand, but I shoved them all into my mouth. They were hot. I choked a little bit and drank down some water. She slapped my back.

“Serves you right. Making fun of my food.” After I managed to swallow she asked a serious question. “Is all your music gone?”

I sighed and fell back on the couch. “Everything was destroyed. Even my toothbrush was melted away.”

“Don’t worry, Jing-nan! I have all the best music files from the music store. Bauhaus had everything, certainly everything from Joy Division. Now I have them, too.” She crunched down some more shrimp chips.

I asked her something I’d been wondering. “Nancy, is Bauhaus owned by Black Sea?”

“Naw, not enough cash flow. Bauhaus is owned by a local
jiaotou
.”

“A
jiaotou
who’s into Joy Division?”

“Yeah, he’s a nice guy.”

I walked back into the kitchen to pour two cups of hot decaf oolong tea from the Japanese dispenser on the counter. Had to wash out that hot shrimp-chip taste.

“Are the cops going to help you?” Nancy asked when I handed her some tea.

“They’re going to investigate,” I said as I eased into the couch. “That doesn’t mean shit, though. The American already told me they won’t solve this case. Nobody was killed, so it wasn’t that serious, and they have their own relationship with Black Sea to maintain. Not to mention that German Tsai’s company is the mortgage holder.”

Nancy was crunching her way to the bottom of the shrimp-chip bag. “Who do you think burned down your house?” she asked. “Black Sea or the CIA?”

I shrugged. “Or the two of them working together. Why count anybody out?” I drank some tea, which was just the right temperature. I relished its hint of bitterness.

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll come after you again?” Nancy asked, cradling her teacup in a bird’s nest of fingers.

“No. The American said that if I stopped looking for trouble I was going to be fine. I’m just going to stay away from the Huangs’ place, that’s for sure. German already said he was going to sort everything out for me, because the fire was technically an attack on his turf, but I asked him not to make a big deal out of it on my behalf.”

Nancy licked her fingers to get the chip crumbs off them and then stroked my hair. “You lost everything,” she said.

“Well, you’re going to give me all the music files, right?”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking about that. I meant that box of Julia’s.”

“I didn’t lose the box.”

She straightened up. “You said everything in your house was burned.”

I drank some tea to prepare myself. “Julia’s box is here. It’s in the hallway closet.”

She stood up in fear. “Oh, God, Jing-nan, you have to get rid of it. That thing is dangerous!”

I held two pleading hands up to her. “First thing in the morning, I swear,” I said.

“Even before you shower.”

“Yes.”

“Even before you pee.”

“Yes.”

She crossed her arms and glanced at the clock. “Man, it’s almost five thirty in the morning! I have to sleep!” She yawned into her right elbow. “When I saw you come into the music store, I never imagined I’d be in this situation now.”