The Foreigner (21 page)

"No, with a
bullet,
" she said. "With a gun. Someone shot Li as he was arriving." She indicated the television screen, where footage of the shooting was being replayed. The candidate smiled and waved, then the moment of impact; his body convulsed dreadfully.

"My God. Is he all right?"

"The bullet shattered his shoulder. They think he’s okay. But he’s in the hospital."

She had ordered a green tea milk shake, which sat untouched in front of her.

I was still shaken from my encounter on the river. "Good news, then," I said, vague. "Relatively? But you’re still upset."

She looked over at me wonderingly, like a zombie, or a doe-eyed fawn.

"I couldn’t get a good place in the lineup at the podium," she said.

"I’m sure your editor will understand."

"That’s not what I mean. I couldn’t get Li, so I was taking pictures of the
crowd
."

She handed me the camera.

The LCD screen was tiny but clear. She had magnified the corner of a frame to show the blocky, pixilated outline of a silver Vespa near the edge of the crowd, a little apart. The rider wore a black mirrored helmet. No different from the helmets on the street every day. But there was something familiar about the way he wore it, and the upright posture: thin, polite, correct. The faint but unmistakable detail of a gun showed in his hand.

I looked at it for some time, then put the camera down.

"No," I told Angel. The same dazed apprehension that gave her the look of a sleepwalker was beginning to claim me.

"It could be him."

"Why would he shoot his own candidate?" I asked. "And the gun?" My shock was so great that the basic logistics of the act overwhelmed me; they appeared as vast and insurmountable as the idea of Atticus—quiet, courtly Atticus; my friend—as an assassin. I wouldn’t believe it. But I remembered the helmets lined up on the console, the gun, and my chest felt cold, as if it harbored a secret knowledge that was closer to the truth.

"What should we do?" I asked Angel.

She shook her head. "I gave the photos to the
Times
already. Just not the ones with Atticus."

I looked at the camera as Angel picked it up again.
You know what to do
. But I could not quite say it. A vague fear gathered around the idea, like cloth pinched tight and tighter around a drawn knot. Atticus knew something about Little P. He would be asked about the shooting only, of course, but in custody, under duress, what would he disclose? I didn’t know. But if I did not know, I didn’t want anyone else to know, either. I had my finger close to the vein, I thought; eventually I would uncover everything, whatever there was to know. Until then, keep quiet, keep low.

"Erase them."

"But I don’t—"

"
Erase
them!"

It was the work of a moment to empty out the images. The LCD screen went dark.

I should have felt relieved, but I didn’t; I felt only lingering distress and the burden of being complicit, which lay like intimacy between Angel and me. Tentative, she touched my hand under the table, held it.

"What do we do now?" she asked.

W
HATEVER RESPITE HAD BEEN PROMISED
by the mild weather ended abruptly. It rained for the next several days without stint, a typhoon that flooded the streets and rotted the wild undergrowth tangled in the yard. Angel didn’t call; I did not want to call Atticus. Grace was not home. I tried to dial Little P, but each time I picked up the phone, I saw the bloody mess wrapped in newspaper, and nausea curdled my stomach. The rain beat down.

Around ten o’clock on the second night of rain, I got up to empty the buckets under the leaks in the roof. As I put on my raincoat, I heard the gate outside slam, and the streetlight in the half-boarded window flickered, as if shapes had crossed it. I put down the buckets and peered out.

Two figures shifted in the darkness near the door.
Thieves,
I thought instantly and felt for the ashes. I seized a broomstick for defense. But then a knock sounded, rapid and peremptory.

It was raining so hard that it could have been anyone standing there, framed in the crack of the door as I put my eye to it. Then I smelled candy and knew who it was.

"What do you want?" I asked, training my flashlight on him.

Poison squinted and put up a hand; I was reminded of a possum on a back fence, hissing in the glare of a headlight.

"Open," he said.

"Tell me what you want first."

He grinned nastily. "You want I break the door?"

I didn’t doubt that he would do it. Reluctantly, I opened the door, broomstick held tense and ready. He strolled in, dripping, sucking his teeth as if he had just polished off a meal. Uncle shambled after him, silent and hooded.

Poison shoved back his hood and took a slow turn around the living room, hands in pockets. The house was still junky, mildewed, but I had put up some pictures: Grace smiling, flashing a V for victory sign; Angel with her camera; an old photo of my mother; a picture from the Sanchong Bridge, where the sunset had spilled onto the river in oily splendor. It shocked me slightly, seeing those pictures from an outsider’s standpoint: I seemed to have… a kind of life.

"This your home," said Poison, with scorn.

"What do you want?" I asked again.

"Is not what I want. Is what
you
want."

Uncle barked harshly and banged his hands on the makeshift table. Poison muttered to him, and he subsided, glowering. I had not seen Uncle since the spa. His presence seemed a bad omen, an escalation of sorts, as if he had come to survey the work he had ordered, to see it done properly.

"The Mid-Autumn Festival is still ten days away."

"I know when is
zhong qiu jie
," he said, irritated. "Who tell you when is the
zhong qiu jie
firstly, guy? I not come for money."

"Then why?"

Poison surveyed my picture wall coolly, pausing at Grace.

"I am the honorable guy," he said. "I have say already not touch Xiao P. You not to worry." He licked his thumb and rubbed a smudge from the glass.

I went cold. "What do you mean?" I looked at Uncle, who stared blankly back. "Why not?"

Poison waved Grace’s picture at me. "Very beautiful. But all woman is cheap, is whore,
shibushi?
Little money, little fun, is all love to them. How much you pay for her?"

Casually he dashed Grace’s picture to the floor, hooked Angel’s frame with a finger. "This one, too." He pursed his lips. "Little whore. You pay little whore little money? For less size?" He let the photo drop.

I picked up a bamboo rod and swung it at Poison’s head. He caught it in one hand, tore it from my grip, whipped it like a sword at my face. I ducked; the rod smashed the whiskey bottle on the table instead.

He’d been half-smiling, like a satisfied cat, but now the smile had disappeared, and he looked nasty and deranged, inhabited by a theatricality bolstered by many episodes of
The Sopranos
—inert fantasy more dangerous than calculation or intelligence. Uncle brayed. Poison’s hand twitched, then stilled. Scowling, he flung the rod across the room.

"Ten oh-oh-oh," he said. "And I do not touch the whores."

His voice held a double note, a threat beneath the threat. With unchecked violence, he grabbed my arm and flung me against the wall. His face was only inches from mine; I saw his lip tremble with rage as he grabbed my groin and twisted, pinched. I understood; it was not just Grace or Angel he was after. I was the collateral too.

"You," he said, pinching harder. "You not forget my present?
Cojones
. You remember."

"Fuck off," I said through my teeth. "
I need more time
." My heart pounded, though not for fear of my cousin. I
need more time
: it sounded like a line from a movie—a lie. It wasn’t time I needed. It was will. If I really wanted to, I felt, I could find a way to get the money. Why couldn’t I just pay the ransom and get it over with? "Is what
you
want"—Poison had come so unwittingly close to the truth. Little P, my only demon, and my only kin.

Poison’s cell phone rang, a little hip-hop melody against the thunderous rain. His eyes flickered. Reluctantly he let go of my crotch and picked up—"
Wei?
"—disappearing into the back bedroom.

Uncle, still standing near the door, groaned suddenly. His legs shook.

"Here," I said, halfheartedly pushing a chair over. His redrimmed eyes looked me over with reptilian cold, but I couldn’t just let the man collapse on my floor. He seized the back of the chair and leaned on it. Still his legs shook.

"For God’s sake." I went over and hefted him into the chair, wrenching his arm crudely. Uncle muttered and tensed, as if to shake me off.

"Fine, okay." I backed off. "Makes no difference to me, you bastard. You could shove off right here. You were supposed to help my brother, not drag him under." I lowered my voice and bent down close, even though he would never understand me, nor would Poison.

"What’ve you done for him that he owes you so much?" I hissed. "Or is it something you’ve done
to
him? Whatever it is, I’ll nail you for it, if I have to spend the rest of my life here. I’ll nail you, I swear."

The dull eyes followed me without signs of comprehension, but somewhere, far back, a light of some kind shone. His mouth wobbled as if to speak.

All at once I couldn’t stand it. I gripped his wet lapels and shook him. "
Ni shuo!
Speak, you asshole!
Ni shuo!
"

He moaned in alarm, looking toward the doorway of the bedroom.

At once I dropped him, ashamed. The ashes sat quietly by the dim battery-powered lamp, near Uncle’s elbow: brother and sister, one dead, one only half-alive. I stood back and tried to breathe evenly. Where the hell was Poison? I started toward the back room.

Uncle’s hand descended on my wrist in a vise grip. Startled, I looked at him and saw that the light I had suspected in his wasted face had come forward at last. But it was not, as I had thought, the light of a knowingness or intelligence. I recognized it instantly. It was fear. He was trembling with effort as he looked up at me and laid a tremoring finger on my sleeve.

"You," said Uncle, in a guttural, forced English that terrified me. He had something small and hard gripped clumsily between his halting fingers, and he raised it slowly, hand shaking. "Xiao P," he said, again with frightening clarity. "You."

Poison came back into the room. The object dropped noiselessly on the floor as Uncle sank back into the chair.

"You give me the pain," said Poison. "But I am the nice guy. I am the generous guy. I look. I see. I think maybe you not to lie,
duibudui
? The rich guy, the American, he not live
here
. In
this
. So I give the discount. Nine thousands. I leave the girls alone. Only you."

He unwrapped a peppermint. "We watch you, assholes. You not to forget. Nine thousand.
Zhong qiu jie
. No funny stuffs."

He popped the candy in his mouth and cracked it with his molars. That faint clacking was the last I heard of them as he and Uncle disappeared into the storm.

When they were gone, I dropped to my knees to retrieve what Uncle had dropped. A plastic vial, empty, no markings.

THE ROXY
glimmered like a lighthouse across the flooded gutters of Jinshan Road. I sloshed toward it with a sense of drowning as a fresh gust of wind whipped down the street. The rain had let up momentarily. A cab sloshed by, headlights doused, trolling for a double fare.

The bar was almost deserted. Lights blazed, and instead of music, there was only the ICRT broadcast of the weather conditions, warning people to stay indoors. Among the few patrons, I did not see Grace.

"Dammit."

The lights blinked and dimmed briefly. The wind rose, and I thought of Poison, waiting in the dark outside Grace’s building, or slipping up behind her on the street, muffling her cries with a gag and the threat of pain.

Heads turned as I stumbled against a table, my legs suddenly weak, vision blurred by the horror of possibilities. My mind whirled. The radio seemed to blare: "…high winds up to one hundred kilometers per hour, the storm coming off the South China Sea. Officials have said nearly seventy people are stranded in the southern part of the island following…"

Then, like a voice out of a storm, I heard a thick American voice say: "Let me guess what you had for dinner."

A stood several feet from me, holding a glass of milky whey protein and regarding me with a dull expression of judgment and pity.

"High fat content," he said. "McDonald’s? KFC?" He gestured at my hand, which was clutching the back of a chair. "Fat blunts your optimal NO performance. Less blood flow."

"Where’s Grace? I need to talk to her."

He furrowed his brow. "She’s not here."

"Where is she?"

Again the brow furrowed. "At home, I guess," he said finally.

I grabbed his arm, startling him. "Where’s home?"

"Hey, careful." He pulled his arm away and inspected it briefly. That plodding self-regard was like an impenetrable wall.

I tried again. "Please, this is important," I said, speaking slowly. "She may be in some danger, and I can’t get her on the phone. If you could just give me her address."

He looked at me with a flicker of life, then laughed. "Aw, no," he said, wagging his finger in my face. "Not falling for that. You think I’m stupid?"

"I am not trying to
trick
you. Come
on
."

"No way, man." He laughed again and searched my face for signs of levity. Seeing none, he sobered up a little.

"Suppose I give you her info," he said. He didn’t go on, but the language of extortion had become familiar to me.

"How much?" I asked.

"It’s not money, exactly."

"How
much?
"

"I’m not trying to bribe you."

He looked toward the back of the bar furtively. Then he made a motion for me to follow.