Sweat (16 page)

Cigarette in his mouth, he patted down his shirt and swerved as he ran his hand on the floor and in the crack of the passenger seat searching for a lighter. The radio crackled and Earl Wallace tuned in, catching every word of the seemingly secret language of police radio dispatchers. The radio ended with a statement that even the Sesame Street crowd could comprehend. “Police requested at McPherson Metro station. Body discovered.”

Earl Wallace snatched the unlit cigarette from his mouth and threw it out the window. The Metro station was two blocks ahead.

Two marked squad cars stopped beside Wallace as he pulled his increasingly heavy frame from the seat. Wallace paused at the top of the escalator and looked down at the scene below. He shook his head and walked down the stairs, his knees creaking the creak of an old athlete with new arthritis. The Metro Transit Authorities arrived ten minutes later and joined the EMTs as they made their way down the long escalators that were still powered off.

“Does Metro Transit want this? It's your jurisdiction if you call it,” Detective Wallace asked the two Metro Police officers who had yet to approach the body. Wallace already knew the answer. When it came to dead bodies, the Metro Transit Police deferred to the D.C. Police. The city cops had more “stiff” experience.

“It's all yours, detective,” came the reply.

Detective Wallace nodded and forced his heavy frame down on his painful knees and got to work.

The emergency personnel took up official positions at official distances around the scene. Detective Wallace gathered Marilyn's personal belongings and put them into separate plastic bags. He grabbed the broken shoe and the heel that had hung from the bottom of the hooker-red footwear by a strip of leather. He looked at the break in the heel and rubbed it with his fingers through latex gloves.

He looked up at the escalator and the steep angle at which it dove underground.

“If I had to guess, I would say that she broke a heel and then fell,” Detective Wallace said, based purely on the evidence. “Or lost her balance as she broke her heel and then fell.”

“No chance that the heel broke during her fall?” a white Metro Transit officer asked out of curiosity, as if the detective had all the answers.

“Maybe. Maybe she just lost her balance. But looking at the shoe, one thing is certain. If she had been walking on the broken heel it would have been scratched or embedded with grime. The break is very clean,” Wallace said, putting the shoe into a plastic bag, the heel into another.

Both officers looked up at the looming staircase and the long tunnel to the lights of the street above. “Ouch,” the white officer said. “A true fashion victim,” he added with the type of police humor that was a prerequisite to get fellow officers through the reality of the job.

Detective Wallace didn't reply to the comment. He was still on the job. He asked the commuter who found the body a few questions, got his name and number, and then released him. He dragged his former-college-football-star body up the escalator stairs and checked the top of the landing for clues. Seemingly a mile below, the uniformed police entourage watched as the body was put on a stretcher. Detective Wallace stayed until the crime scene was officially closed. He took one last look down the stairs, rubbed his chin, and went back to the police station to fill out the paperwork for an accidental death.

Chow Ying, refreshed from the kill, walked the fifteen blocks to his home-away-from-home at the Peking Palace in Chinatown. The old man who ran the hotel was watching an old circa Seventies black and white TV. When Chow Ying walked in, the TV went off.

“Mahjong?” the old man asked, inviting Chow Ying into his living room at the back of the house-turned-hotel.

“And beer?” the old man added with a gappy smile.

Chow Ying, as politely as he could, asked him if he had anything stronger.

The old man nodded, walked to the kitchen, and pulled out a bottle of label-less liquor from a cabinet.

“Are you sure your wife won't mind?” Chow Ying asked as the host poured a glass of the nameless high-octane brew for each of them.

“No. It's almost midnight. She has been asleep for hours. And at our age, she isn't waiting up for a roll in the hay,” the old man said with a straight face.

“I suppose not,” Chow Ying answered, not knowing what else to say.

The hotel owner broke into a laugh that only old men can produce—old men who have seen things, been there, lived it. Three hours of drinking and mahjong later, the old man pushed a pillow under the head of the sleeping giant and covered him with a blanket. The sofa was empty, but Chow Ying was too heavy to move. The old man would have needed a forklift to get him off the floor.

“Sleep well,
nian qing ren
,” the old man said, using a Chinese term of endearment meaning ‘young man.'

In the morning, the old man's wife stepped over Chow Ying on her way to make breakfast. She left the house on errands before the Mountain of Shanghai awoke, and by the time she returned, he was back in his room sleeping off the effects of the old man's gasoline in a bottle.

On her fourteenth day of confinement, Wei Ling took the situation into her own hands. After her morning tears—which accompanied the realization that sleep was only a temporary break from reality—her head cleared to an epiphany. Lee Chang wasn't going to help her. The doctor was never coming back. The compassion of the Chang servant who served her breakfast, lunch, and dinner began and ended with a smile. Peter Winthrop, the one man powerful enough to help her from her predicament, was a thousand miles away, either not knowing her predicament or not caring. It had been a week, maybe more, since Shi Shi Wong had paid her a visit. Her roommate had promised to come back to see her when she could, but Wei Ling knew the girls were in lockdown. No communication with the outside world. No TV. No radio. Just work. It happened occasionally, usually when one of the girls escaped the premises or took off on her company sponsored chaperone while on a trip in the city. The missing girls always showed up. There was no Chinese consulate on Saipan. There was nowhere to run. Sometimes the girls made it to the police, who turned them back over to Lee Chang, who in turn, donated to the monthly “police assistance” plan. Wei Ling was trapped. If she was going to get help, it was going to have to start with her.

Breakfast came and Wei Ling feigned a stomachache. She asked for something hot to drink. The Chang servant smiled, removed the food, and returned with a perfectly blended cup of green tea. Wei Ling thanked her and put the earthenware on the side table. Humans can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

Wei Ling wasn't trying to kill herself, just the baby.

The three feet of freedom that Wei Ling had were now gone. She was tied to the bed, shackled at both the wrist and ankles. Her left arm was in a makeshift splint, bones sandwiched so tightly between two small boards that the skin was pinched flat against the grain of the wood. The intravenous drip in her immobilized arm was pumping the good stuff, a mixture of medication and vitamins. Something to take the edge off and keep her healthy. The tube running down her nose provided fifteen hundred calories a day.

The doctor from Beijing who replaced the dead American doctor had the bedside manner of Joseph Mengele. The dead doctor, while a part-time puppet for Lee Chang, had a glimmer of humanity when you looked in his eyes. He did what he was paid to do, even when it was wrong, but he did it with compassion.

The new doctor was expressionless. He was fit, in his early sixties, and in Lee Chang's infirmary he was all business. His patients were nothing more than objects he tried to keep alive. It was hard to experiment on the dead.

The doctor had become interested in medicine when he learned his father was killed in a WWII Japanese torture camp known as Unit 731. Over the course of WWII, Unit 731 was a medical team that ran a concentration camp in Pingfan, China. The unit, with approval from the Japanese government, took great pleasure in torturing Chinese citizens through a dreadful mix of concoctions devised to incapacitate and humiliate. Chinese citizens with no military connection were placed in closed quarters while rodents infected with un-pleasantries ranging from the plague to measles ran roughshod over their naked bodies. Live dissections were performed on prisoners who were fed healthy diets before their death in order to measure more accurately the affect on a normal body. Limbs were frozen and then amputated, the victims still alive. Prisoners, known as “logs,” were drained of their blood, one pint at a time, day after day, until there was nothing left. All in the name of science and medicine.

Unit 731 was not a war-era secret medical facility, but those responsible did escape prosecution. Unlike many Nazis who were hunted down for killing Jews, the members of the Japanese torture squad Unit 731 were granted clemency. Some of the “doctors” involved went on to distinguished careers in post-war Japan. Not a single person was prosecuted for crimes against humanity. In return for leniency, the U.S. merely requested translations of the nature of the tests conducted and the results of the experiments.

The doctor now standing in front of Wei Ling had become a monster through hatred. He learned how his father had been tortured and killed, and soon thereafter the doctor's train to a righteous life jumped the track. In his mind, he saw medicine as a way to seek revenge. The doctor studied medicine with an equal passion of learning how to heal and learning how to hurt. Learning how to heal made him rich. Learning how to hurt was a life-long hobby.

The doctor found as much pleasure in the study of medicine as he did in the control of people. With the right dosage of the right medicine, he could have the final say in who lived and who died. It was a decision he made with as much thought as he put into his lunch menu. He specialized in internal medicine and was a Beijing legend in the circles of herbal medicine, acupuncture, and acupressure. When the great C.F. Chang slipped in the bath and injured his shoulder, the old doctor became C.F. Chang's personal physician. Three weeks of acupuncture and firm pressure applied to very specific points on the bottom of the feet brought relief and eternal gratitude. C.F. Chang paid well and the doctor took to the life of serving semi-royalty like a pig to mud.

Wei Ling looked at the new doctor and saw darkness in his dead-fish eyes. There would be no talking with this one. They were both Chinese, but that was where their similarities began and ended. Rural Guangzhou and downtown Beijing were worlds apart.

Wei Ling's hunger strike had lasted exactly two days. When she refused to eat her fifth consecutive meal, the middle-aged servant brought in Lee Chang. The conversation was short and ended with: “You will have this baby.”

Wei Ling didn't cry. She had moved beyond self-pity. She would not have the baby. It was a battle of wills and it was a fight Wei Ling believed she could win.

The intravenous line in Wei Ling's arm caused a dull ache, just short of real pain. She had been kicked, punched, slapped, and pushed into walls since her arrival in paradise. The needle was far less punishing. The psychological affect was the worst. Being tied down and having someone stick a tube up your nose and needles in your arm was just a rude reminder that they were in control of her body. The only control she had was her mind, and she had turned the corner toward mastering her will. The IV and feeding tube pumped a solution with enough vitamins and calories for a healthy person to live, and a little extra for the valuable bundle of joy being treated as a scientific experiment. The doctor warned her that if she didn't cooperate, an additional dose of sedation would be added to the mixture. Wei Ling needed her senses. Being doped-up wasn't in her best interest. So she played along. For now.

The tears were flowing at the reception desk when Jake stepped out of the elevator. Mascara streaks painted the receptionist's cheeks, her blonde hair ruffled. Jake avoided eye contact, said “good morning,” and didn't break pace as he blew past the emotionally charged Winthrop Enterprises employee. The receptionist was prone to outbursts, and it didn't take much to send her fragile psyche over the edge. A bad hair day. A run in her pantyhose. Jake had quickly learned not to ask.

The somber ambiance and solemn faces of the other Winthrop Enterprises employees told him the receptionist's tears weren't a simple case of running out of hair gel.

Jason McDonald, financial wizard with a receding hairline, broke the news to Jake. “Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Marilyn passed away this weekend.”

Jake's posture slumped, the invisible punch to the stomach taking his breath away. “How?”

“She had an accident on the elevator stairs at the Metro. Broken neck,” Jason said, shaking his head.

Jake's legs almost buckled and he put one hand on the corner of the desk for support. Jason McDonald quickly pulled over a chair.

“When did this happen?” Jake asked in a hushed voice.

“Friday night.”

“Good God.”

The timeframe of Marilyn's death made Jake nauseous. His head filled with images of his mother on the sofa, each breath more shallow than the last until the one that never came. She went quietly, with a smile, her hand in Jake's. Being the last person to see someone alive was not a prize to be cherished.

“I'm sorry to be the one to tell you. You two seemed to have gotten close in your short time here,” Jason said, running his hand across his expanding scalp, as if plowing his fingers through an imaginary mane.

“Yeah, I guess. We had a few things in common, as it turns out.”

“Well, don't let it get you down. The office will be closing early tomorrow. There will be a service at a funeral home in Alexandria. Then her body is going to be flown back to Milwaukee on Wednesday for burial in a family plot. Her brother is stopping by the office later to pick up some personal items. Maybe you could say a few words, offer your condolences.”

“Yeah, sure. I will.” Jake agreed, still in a daze. “Is my father in?”

“Not yet. He has been running around trying to help with arrangements. She was his secretary for twenty-five years.”

Don't remind me
, Jake thought. “Thanks again, Jason.”

“Sure thing. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.”

Jake found his office and moved his chair to stare out the window. He shed a single tear for Marilyn and wiped his face when he knew it was going to be the last.

The anti-abortionists were next on the list for the protest-of-the-week, and their numbers were growing in Franklin Park across the street. Jake stared out the window at several mothers holding posters that read “abortion is murder,” their children beneath them in their strollers holding smaller versions of similar signs. There were men and women, the religious element, and the politically charged. Jake gazed out the window and his mind wandered. The girl in Saipan. His father forcing Marilyn to get an abortion at the same time his mother was pregnant with him. Madness.

The street vendors were doing a brisk morning business feeding the anti-abortionists donuts and coffee at a three-hundred percent mark-up. A muscle bound man with a ponytail and twin boys joined the line, his children pointing at everything on the menu. Jake paused and squinted at the figure in the park. Something clicked in the back of his mind and for the second time in ten minutes his stomach dropped. “Son of a bitch,” he said to himself.

Jake peeked under the edge of the bridge before walking past Al's neighbors who waved to the only guest their neck of the woods had seen in months. In the winter, Social Services and various help-the-homeless non-profits stopped by when the temperature fell below freezing. When it dropped to the single digits, the space under the bridge was one of the prime spots for the city workers to find a frozen body. In the summer, no one cared. Few homeless died of heat exhaustion or exposure, especially among the “river rats” who lived near the banks of the Potomac. Relief was only a bucket of water away. Nasty, undrinkable water, but still useful enough to drop a body's core temperature a few degrees.

Jake disappeared from the sun into the damp atmosphere of Al Korgaokar's living room. Al was sitting in his wicker chair with his feet on a milk crate, his eyes closed behind dark sunglass, one arm of a broken pair of Ray Bans clinging to his left ear.

“Al?” Jake asked, not sure if he was asleep or not.

“Jake?” Al answered without opening his eyes.

“Yeah Al, it's me, Jake.”

Al moved his feet from the crate and placed the heels of his boots on the ground. He flipped the sunglasses to the top of his head, exposing a pair of crystal-clear blue eyes. “Have a seat,” he said, pushing the empty crate forward with his feet. The guest chair for the day.

Al turned to his right and pulled back the corner of an old tattered blue tarp he had fished out of the river since Jake's last visit. A new piece of furniture covering for the living room.

“Marilyn is dead,” Jake said abruptly.

Al shot upright in his chair and his sunglasses fell off his head. “When?”

“Friday night. It was in Sunday's paper.”

“What happened?” Al asked. He reached for his stack of newspapers from the weekend, not believing he missed any piece of published news.

“She fell down the escalator at the McPherson Square Metro station. That's the report anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Al asked, pulling out Sunday's Metro section.

“I was with her on Friday. And I'm not really sure, but I think we were being watched. Followed. I don't know.”

Al's eyes watered as he stared off into the distance. “Tell me
exac
t
ly
what happened. Details count.”

“We went out for drinks after work and went our separate ways near the station. As I was getting into a taxi, I think someone was watching me. An Asian guy.”

“That's it?”

Jake told Al about Marilyn crying in the office and the morning conversation that had ruined his appetite for the day and his taste for waffles for life. “There is a service for Marilyn tomorrow evening,” Jake said with compassion. “I thought you might want to know.”

“Thanks.” Al rubbed the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. There was something there, something below the surface that Marilyn's death had stirred up.

“Did you go to the police?” Al asked.

“Not yet. I wasn't sure if I should. Like I said, I don't know if it was anything. I don't know if it was a coincidence, or if the guy was just zoned out on crack. But he was definitely looking at me. Gave me goose bumps.”

Al thought in silence before speaking. “It was probably nothing. I know a lot of homeless guys who will stare you down for no reason.”

“I guess that's the truth.”

“You know that girl you are looking for?”

“Did you learn something?”

“She works for Chang Industries, but I think you already knew that.”

“Yeah, I knew where she worked. I wanted to know if
you
could find out where she worked.”

“Thanks for the show of confidence. Let me see if I can tell you something you didn't know. Chang Industries is a sweatshop for which Winthrop Enterprises serves as the middleman. A guy named Lee Chang runs the sweatshop. Call it whatever you want, but Chang Industries, as benign as the name sounds, is not a nice place.”

“I haven't heard anything about either Lee Chang or Chang Industries at work.”

Al thought it over. “What do you know about your father?”

“Not much, really. Why? Do you think Winthrop Enterprises has something to do with this?”

“Probably not. Your father is just a middleman. A very good one. Very savvy. He knows a lot of people.”

“I'm not following you.”

“All right. I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a product you need to have manufactured. You go to someone like your father, and he arranges for you to see different factories and facilities. You name the location.”

“So he just sets up meetings and acts as the intermediary.”

“Yes. And, depending on the deal, he gets a cut of the profits. He could even finance some of the deal for a bigger cut of the profits.”

Al was still thinking about Marilyn, trying to put the seemingly unrelated pieces together while carrying on his current conversation.

“So what's the story with the Wei Ling girl?”

“She's in Saipan on a work visa. It was renewed this June. Good for a year. She's still in Saipan. No record of her leaving the island. On a personal note, she is twenty-three, five-foot-three, one hundred and ten pounds. She is from a small town in the Guangzhou province. No siblings, not surprising as China has a one-child policy unless you are wealthy enough to pay a steep fine for additional children. Blood type O.”

“Now how do you know what blood type she has?”

“A magician never reveals his secrets.”

“You said she hasn't left the island?”

“No. She is still there. Why do you ask?”

“My father said she went back to China.”

“So your father is hiding something.”

“Hiding a few things I imagine,” Jake said. “Speaking of hiding, you said you would tell me about my father working as a spy for the CIA.”

“A spy? Hell no, Jake. He wasn't employed by the CIA—he provided information to the CIA, via yours truly.”

“You were a spy?”

“An Official Cover Operative.”

“What the hell is an Official Cover Operative?”

“A CIA employee working under the safe umbrella and diplomatic immunity of the State Department. A perfectly legitimate spy, if there is such a thing.”

“A spy who spends his whole life telling everyone that he works for the State Department.”

“Not just telling everyone, actually working in the State Department, with State Department personnel. The only difference was that my boss was located at Langley.”

“So if my father wasn't a spy…”

“He didn't work for the CIA, but he fed the CIA information, for money. A very subtle difference.”

“I don't think my father needs the money.”

“Jake the snake, when you're right, you're right. It wasn't a matter of money with your father.”

“Then why did he do it?”

“For the chance to be a big shot. We are talking twenty some years ago. Your father had started Winthrop Enterprises and was traveling the globe making connections, signing deals and hobnobbing with the international elite.”

“That's what he's doing now.”

“Yes, but aaaaah, the world was a lot smaller twenty-five years ago. There weren't a lot of westerners running around Tokyo and Beijing. Your father stood out. A young, successful, globetrotting American businessman.”

“I still don't see the connection with the CIA.”

“Connection. Good choice of words. Your father was a connection.”

“How?”

“We paid your father to report on what he saw in Tokyo and Beijing. Who was talking to whom about what business. Deals in the works, activities of interests. Protests, if there were any. Incidents of bribing. Whatever he could tell us.”

“Wouldn't the CIA know all of this?

“Sure, well, some of it anyway. But it cost a lot of money to get intelligence through formal channels. Renting real estate, setting up front companies, implementing electronic surveillance, these things aren't free and believe it or not the CIA does have a budget. Paying American citizens to tell us what they know is cheap.”

“So what did he tell you?”

“Your father was a good source of intelligence for a few years. He tipped us off to the sale of certain illegal hi-tech goods in Asia that we weren't aware of. Some technology that ended up in a North Korean sub that washed ashore in South Korea years later. You can learn a lot from drunken businessmen in Roppongi. Hell, you can even get their business cards.”

“Okay,” Jake said, stretching out the second syllable.

“But after a few years we suspected your father of fabrication. We compared a lot of the intelligence from your father, and people like him, with our own intelligence. It is a good checks-and-balances measure. We started to see large discrepancies in the information from your father and the intelligence generated by the CIA through other means.”

“Are you saying my father was lying to the CIA? I find that hard to believe.”

“Not lying…exaggerating. But we couldn't really prove it either. And even if we did, there was nothing the CIA could do. The CIA is not a law enforcement organization. We are actually an organization designed for the sole purpose of breaking the law, just not American law. Your father is an American, he wasn't selling U.S. secrets to anyone, he wasn't in the military or in a position to have sensitive military information, and he was gathering intelligence for us. It wasn't a matter of national security.”

“What happened?”

“We told him his services were no longer needed and that we suspected some of the information he gave us had been inaccurate. We turned his name over to the FBI, to have his information added to a watchlist, and that was the end of my involvement with him. There was nothing else we could do.”

“And that's it?”

“That's it.”

“So you know my father?”

“I worked in Asia during the same period that your father supplied us information. I was the one who discovered the discrepancies. I was the one who arranged for him to be recruited.”

“Recruited?”

“Yes. The recruitment was finalized in a sauna in Tokyo, after several less-than-chance meetings I had arranged.”