The Foreigner (16 page)

I removed an envelope from my breast pocket and placed it on the table.

"What is?"

"One thousand U.S.," I said. "In
tai bi
."

First he looked startled; then he grabbed for the envelope with both hands. I drew it back a little.

"This is conditional." He made another swipe; again, I pulled the envelope away. "Leave Little P out of it. This is between you and me."

He grabbed the envelope without concession and counted out the money. It took a while; I chewed a hangnail. The Taiwan dollar was one of the weaker currencies, with many zeros after its conversion.

When he was satisfied, he gave the bills an approving pat and turned to me. "I say eight thousand, not one."

A bastard, when one really came down to it. All pity shriveled and died by the light of the shit-eating grin he gave me.

I leaned in close. "You touch my brother, you get nothing."

He blinked and dug a nail into one of his little rat ears, flicking his waxy fingers to the floor. Then he laughed expansively and held up his hands in a gesture of good-natured surrender.

"Okays, okays," he said. "I said I am the nice guy. We say, you give me eight-oh-oh-oh by
zhong qiu jie
." His eyes narrowed. "You know what means
zhong qiu jie
?"

"No."

"Ai-ya!"
In one explosive movement he upended the makeshift bar.
"Gan ni ma! Fuck your mother!"
Vodka and corrosive whiskey leaked out onto the floor. "What
do
you understand? Nothing! Nothing. Son of a turtle’s egg! You are not the fucking Chinese. You are not the fucking anything! Talk, speak, but understanding
nothing
! Maybe you understand this?"

He grabbed a bottle of vodka and smashed it, then backed me to the wall, the jagged end of the bottle to my crotch.

"Zhong qiu jie,"
he said, suddenly calm. "Mid-Autumn Holi-day. Very nice. Moon very big, very bright. Look up to the sky, see the Princess Chang-e waiting for lover. Maybe have barbecue. Very nice." He dug the bottle in slightly, grinding it against my zipper. "This year
zhong qiu jie
is October. One month. Little more than one month, I give you. Very"—he searched his vocabulary list—"big heart, no?"

"Just leave Little P alone," I said through my teeth.

He let me go, pushing me roughly toward the door.

"You not to worry about Xiao P," he said, soothing. "We leave his finger alone. Finger is not good, not
special
. I work in the outdoors market, I know. Finger is bone. No meat, worth nothing. But the
cojones
"—he smiled and cupped his groin tenderly—"the
cojones
worth big buck. Eight-oh-oh-oh, maybe?"

"I don’t speak Spanish." I cradled the purse of ashes against my chest and backed away. "Seven thousand," I said. "And you don’t touch him. Fingers or balls."

M
Y INHERITANCE LAY IN THE SHADOW
of two flanking apartment buildings, down a narrow lane. It was low and dank, made of a kind of stucco, with a roof of leaking corrugated tin.

"Here," said Angel, pushing at the gate. A rusted padlock scraped and fell into the weedy overgrowth. The yard was sealed off, broken glass embedded along the top of the walls to keep intruders out. Inside lay a private Eden lush with neglect. Grass, sumac, a splash of overgrown ragweed in the corner. Mosquitoes swarmed up from the weeds leaning high against the house and bit at my hands.

The real estate agent trampled a path to the front door and let us in. It was an odd thing, to see the place where you had begun: you imagined mystics and incense, a wizened old sage, and got instead packing boxes, water damage, mold climbing the walls. Maybe it was only neglect, but it seemed to speak of a more basic meanness. The agent chattered as we moved through the small rooms, as if I were a buyer, not a seller, but it barely registered. I was thinking of my mother, who had never been at home among the grizzled, dopefied tenants of the Remada. She had always longed for one of those huge tract homes with its naked aspirations and ugly symmetry, a three-car garage, respectability. Her first and last actions of the business day had always been to check her appearance in the cracked glass over the register, for she would not be seen without her hair combed and her harsh white makeup applied.

"Aiii-eeeek!"

Angel shrieked from a back bedroom. I dropped a box of musty linens and ran to her.

"Look out!"

Something soft and winged strafed my head as I charged into the room. Soft-bodied bump; scrabbling, scritching in the eaves. Dirt rained down into my collar.

"Kill it!" shouted Angel.

The agent screamed like she was being stabbed. "Kill it!"

I picked up a ceramic pot that was near to hand and threw it. The bat redoubled its frantic efforts, wings blurred, clattering like a pack of cards. A battery of glasses and cups hurtled through the air—Angel, blindly picking up and throwing whatever she could.

"Quit it!" I shouted. "Just calm down!"

A length of heavy pipe did it at last. The bat peeled suckingly off the wall, impaled on the pipe’s joint end.

"God, what a mess," said Angel, looking around at all the smashed pottery and glinting shards as if surprised.

I sighed and tossed the pipe away. It smashed against a shelf with a tinkle of glass. The agent, recovered from her fit, patted her hair and began her bright, chirping spiel again, though her smile had slipped a little.

"She wants to know what your timeline is," said Angel. "She thinks, with a little work, it’d be worth at least five hundred thousand… certainly an optimist"—lowly, under her breath. Then, "Hey! Are you listening to me?"

I had approached the dark corner where the pipe had fallen. Something in the configuration of the shelf and the dirt-filmed mirrors made me move closer.

It was, I saw, a shrine—an altar exactly like the little shelf reserved for the garlanded portraits in my mother’s apartment at the Remada. The two frames were not mirrors but photographs of my grandparents, the glass overlaid with dirt. The shelf held an arrangement of candles, wicks burnt out; a vase; a little bowl of blackened fruit. The chiming grew stronger, two bells sounding off each other, the tones threatening to resonate together in a single note. I had already seen the shrine at Uncle’s house, of course, but this was different; something about it would not let go. Not the portraits, which after all Uncle had had too.

Then it came to me. It wasn’t just the objects themselves; it was the arrangement of them that showed so clearly the imprint of my mother’s hand. The candles laid in threes, the swag of the garlands, the brittle plastic flowers carefully fanned out and centered between the portraits. In them I could see the little altar in the motel, as if peering through a rent in the curtain of years. A signature, a message read aloud after the source was gone.

The agent prattled on. I turned to Angel. "Tell her to get out of here, will you?"

"Huh?"

"I said I’m not selling."

Her mouth fell open slightly. She looked at the smudge the bat had left. "Then… what are you going to do?"

For the first time since arriving, I felt a flint of happiness strike in my heart. "Live here."

THE PLACE
Little P had asked me to meet him was around the corner from the Palace, a bilevel
xifan
eatery full of steam from the huge vats of congee, and the tiny jewel-like colors of the little side dishes lined up along the buffet. Though it was midnight, the place was busy: tech men just off work in their bland white oxfords, scanning the newspaper for the Taiwan Index; students; a crowd of old men gumming their food, shouting at one another. I had put on the better of my two suits as a kind of ceremonial costume for this exchange. The great wad of cash lay in my breast pocket, loud as a shout; I crossed and recrossed my arms to hide it.

Half an hour passed without any sign of my brother. Finally I got up and walked down the street to the Palace.

One of the clerks dozed at the reception desk, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, pinned possessively by a greasy, nicotined finger, even in sleep. The lobby was deserted, although I could hear both the nasal strains of an old Shanghainese pop song and the boom-and-bust bass line of some hip-hoppy track coming from the upstairs karaoke rooms. My mother had liked those pop songs from the mainland herself, the old, plaintive ghost of Shanghai glamour singing sadly about the age of blossom, islands in the graveyard. A strange underwater atmosphere prevailed as I moved toward the office, the thin melody distorted, echoing. I opened the office door.

"I hope—" I began, then stopped.

Little P was on his knees, facing the far wall with hands on head, his back to me. A gun, a hand, a black uniform. All these things registered discretely as I stood dumb at the door.

The man in black grabbed Little P by the collar and spun around, catching my brother in a headlock and pressing the gun to his temple in defense as he turned to glare at me. Tall, sallow, he was familiar: the man at the spa, the long-faced man with the slow eye.

He hissed something at me, finger on the trigger.

"Please," I said, quavering. The words fell weakly in the dreadful silence. "Anything. But not him. Take me."

This seemed to enrage him, though he could hardly have understood the English. The cop—for his uniform was that of an officer—tightened his choke hold on Little P and grunted through his teeth.

Little P clawed at the man’s arm.

"Ta,"
he said, his voice rasping, choking.
"Ta you." He has it
.

The officer looked at me with new interest.

Trembling, I withdrew the envelope of cash and held it out to him. He motioned me closer with a jerk of the head. When I was close enough, he snatched for the envelope. I clutched it to my chest.

"Ta,"
I said, shaky, pointing at Little P, making clear this was a trade.

He released Little P, pushing him roughly back against the wall. Little P coughed and choked. I handed over the envelope, and the cop directed me toward the wall with the nose of his gun.

As he counted, I bent over my brother, whose rasping breaths were getting easier. I put my hand on his back, but he swatted me away violently, as if I’d burned him.

The cop pocketed the money. I expected him to leave, but instead he went to the office door and closed it. A panicky feeling made my heart race, as it used to when the lights went down in theaters. There was to be a second act.

He strolled deliberately over to the desk and picked up a book, thumbing through it at leisure. Every so often he ticked his ring against his nightstick, slow, calculated—
tick tick,
like chips of gathering tinder. He put the book down and made a slow circle around the perimeter of the desk. A toothpick dangled from the corner of his mouth. Someone—the water lilies person, I assumed—had hung a poster of
Nude Descending a Staircase
on the wall, and he studied this for a long moment, shifting his toothpick from one side to the other.

Suddenly he laughed. He had a high-pitched giggle, joyful and pure as a madman’s. He swung around abruptly and spoke to Little P, his voice low, pleasant, tinged with an undercurrent of polite, deadly calm. Little P answered without looking at him, or me, staring at the floor. It was an argument of some kind, a negotiation perhaps. I watched the cop warily. His slow eye gave him a blind expression. You couldn’t tell where he was looking, what he might do next; it was like circling a two-headed snake.

"You have your money," I said. Anxiety made my throat close up on the words. "What else do you want?"

They ignored me, murmuring low and harsh. The cop made another measured round of the desk, stopping right beside me.

I didn’t see it coming at all, so that when he pistol-whipped me across the face, the shock splintered my vision—a bright white flash, the taste and texture of bitten metal. The ceiling lowered, pressed upon me.

"What do you want?" I clung to the edge of the desk, stunned, vision blurred by tears. The cop backhanded me again, and again. Pain shot down my scalp, tingled in my groin. I yelped. "What do you want?" Through the mist of shock, I peered at Little P, who seemed in my dimming sight, strangely isolated, passive—no protest, no surface emotion, just a flat, unreadable expression.

When my vision cleared, the mouth of the gun gaped in my face, issuing a faint breath of graphite, cinnamon.

"What do you want from me?"

No answer. Stillness, silence. Little P was watching us simply, without speaking.

They remained this way, locked in dreadful defiance, until finally the officer lowered his pistol. He stood, looking for a moment blind and uncertain, before recovering himself. Some muttered expletive as he stalked toward the door.

"Qian wan bie wangle,"
he said, glancing over his shoulder at Little P, who merely stared back. The cop shrugged, picked up his cap from a banquette, checking the inside of it before putting it on.

But when he reached the door, he paused, drew his gun, swift, smooth, and fired.

"HE WAS
holding that book upside down," I said to Little P.

"What book?"

"The book he took off your desk. The thesaurus. He was reading it upside down."

The
xifan
eatery was still warm and crowded. Little P had gotten a bottle of Taiwan beer from the refrigerator and drank it wearily, leaving his porridge almost untouched. I had no appetite either; my nose was bleeding, and my temples rang. The cop’s shot had narrowly missed my shoulder, and I could still hear the singing of the bullet, feel the raw place in my throat where a shriek of terror had torn out.

"Officer Hu," said Little P. "He likes to think he speaks and reads English. He also likes to touch my things. Intimidating, he thinks."

"For my money, there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned gun for intimidation."

Little P took another swig of beer and said nothing.