The Foreigner (24 page)

"Little P?"

I knocked, rested my hand on the doorknob. Somehow I knew, instinctively, that he was not there. The locks were not locked. Slowly I turned the latch and let the door swing in.

The place was empty. The trash, the makeshift furniture, even the cracked mirror on the wall—gone, and the smell of antiseptic hung in the air, as if to erase all traces, not only of Little P but of any human touch. The light, when I flicked it on, was cold, blue, unyielding. Wind rattled the windows.

In the kitchenette, I opened the drawers and cabinets slowly, one by one, knowing what I would find: nothing, and nothing.

The screen door to the tiny balcony flapped. Mechanically I went outside to close it, looking down at the shadowed street whipped by the wind as I wrapped my coat around the ashes to keep them warm. The red lights of the Buddhist temple burned ghoulishly in the street below, the open entryway glowing like fire in a cave.

The wind picked up suddenly, rustled the trash bags in the corner of the porch. Something light and hard rolled against my foot. I bent down to retrieve it.

It was a vial, a little plastic vial identical to the one Uncle had fumbled and dropped. Fear rose again—fear, confusion. Was it drugs after all? That was too easy an answer to be right. Then I remembered Uncle’s look of lucidity and terror. No. Whatever the vials were, they were a secret beyond any conventional drug cartel.

I tucked the vial in my pocket and left, not bothering to close the door behind me. Back down in the street, I hurried toward Roosevelt Road.

THE PALACE
beckoned, just across the busy six-lane dividing the long walled courtyard of Longshan Temple from the Wanhua district. From the outskirts, and in the buzzing light from McDonald’s and the ancient streetlamps, the neighborhood seemed more than usually dingy, the dark, craggy buildings like the walls of a canyon, the road a crevasse down which I skittered with a peculiar dread. Quiet for a Saturday night, dirt scudding along in the gutters, skinny, misshapen alley cats darting in the shadows. I stopped directly across the street from the karaoke, looking up at the poor, stained façade. Strange how deserted the Palace was, always.

A sudden arc of light: a truck turned the corner at the end of the street, came barreling through, turned again. As it passed, I saw, suddenly, a glimpse of a shape reflected in the dark glass doors of the Palace—brief, huddled, staring out from behind a stack of Shaoxing wine boxes behind me.

I whirled around. She tried to duck away but was not fast enough, and instead crouched like a cornered cat. The notched lip: the girl from Uncle’s—the one Little P had called Poison’s girl. Her legs were bare and scratched, her skinny frame hidden by a stiff, cheap new dress. She didn’t recognize me, of course, only stared in mute terror, holding a plastic bag to her chest as if for warmth.

I raised my hand uncertainly in greeting. Instantly she bolted across the street, disappearing into the alley next to the Palace.

"Wait!"

But she was already gone.

I stood paralyzed for a few moments, uncertain whether to follow. The doors to the KTV opened, and I had to draw back farther into the shadows, for it was Little P who stepped out. He looked carefully up and down the street, put on his sunglasses, dug in the pocket of a black overnight bag slung over his shoulder. When he lit a cigarette, I cursed inwardly; I would never find the girl again now.

At last he ground the smoke out, wheeled his scooter into the road, left. As soon as he was out of sight, I ran around the corner where the girl had gone.

I found myself in an alley that dead-ended in a concrete wall. She could not have gone very far; she could not have doubled back without me seeing her. I looked around, bewildered. She could be inside the Palace now, but then how could she have gotten in? There was no back exit, no fire escape, very few windows—no windows near the ground at all. I walked up and down the length of the building.

A stack of corrugated tin rose several feet on a wooden flat. Someone extremely agile could jump from the top of it to the balconies of the adjoining apartments, and from there to a second-story window. The window did, in fact, appear to be broken.

With difficulty, I clambered onto the flat and hopped up and down, trying unsuccessfully to gain a handhold on the nearest grille. It seemed impossible; she could not have gone this route. The tin sheets made so much noise that I was afraid someone might call the police. The ashes twisted about my waist on their thin cord, binding me. At one point I had a firm grip, but a tearing pain in my right shoulder forced me to let go, and I dropped back onto the flat, panting.

With dreadful precision, I jumped up and caught the rails again, swinging my legs heavily forward for momentum. Again my shoulder pulled, but this time the pain was endurable. I hung there for a moment like a sack of grain, then struggled wildly, pulling myself upward until my toes gained a hold on the metal. My weight bent the rails slightly; the balcony screeched and groaned. It was not the most subtle of break-ins, especially since I was now looking full-face into various apartments as I sidled, awkward, from balcony to balcony, trying to reach the broken window. A little boy observed me stolidly from behind a screen door as I passed by. On the next balcony, a washing machine slopped warm, soapy water all over the floor. Almost there. The window was wider than I had thought, but the frame still held shards of glass like a mouthful of jagged teeth. After some hesitation, I wrapped my hand in my handkerchief and gingerly grasped the side frame. A moment of panic as I let go of the balcony grille. Then I was inside.

It seemed to be a storage room. Cardboard file boxes and plastic tubs leaned up against the walls. There were more of the torn-out banquettes jammed in here at angles, along with a few low tables of the kind that stood in the karaoke rooms, and boxes in which mirrored balls were nested among their electrical wiring like large bejeweled eggs. I recognized, as my eyes adjusted, the dismantled lid of a coffin, which was propped in the far corner like the dim outline of a tomb.

The coffin itself lay on the floor behind a row of broken TVs. The light reflecting through the window was veiled, dim. I picked my way around the furniture, banging my shins once or twice. Somebody might have heard me, but it didn’t matter. The closer I got to the heart of the matter, the less I cared for caution. I stood over the casket, assaulted by a dizzying sense of claustrophobia that surged violently and then passed.

The interior was empty, but the coffin had been sealed and then unsealed at some point. There were holes in the top-facing surface as well as bent nails strewn about the floor. A splinter caught in my palm as I ran my hand along the top edge of the casket, trying to think: Atticus saying, "Principle!"; Officer Hu and his gun; the stonemason; Little P, his lean, wolfish face full of anger and remote misery: "You wouldn’t understand."

My fingers had been automatically tracing a kind of Braille cut in the side of the casket, near the lid: rows of dots hammered out with the smallest of nail tips in the thick-hewn wood. The dots were the size of ants, close-set and decorative, I supposed, running the length of the coffin. I pulled my hand away.

I went out into the hallway, checking it cautiously first, but the Palace was not open yet, and the second floor wasn’t for customer use anyway. The fluorescent tubing had gone out in all but two fixtures, which buzzed and trembled with a greenish light. There was a smell of paper and incense, and of something organic or fecal—close, sour-sweet, like a humid pasture in summer.

I crept along, keeping close to the wall. The floor was eerily silent, and my shoes squeaked so loudly that I took them off and continued in my stocking feet. My moment of recklessness was over. I didn’t want to know about Little P’s misdeeds anymore; I just wanted to get out of the Palace uninjured and undetected. There was nothing incriminating to be seen here anyway. The doors were all closed and locked, the transom windows covered over with yellowed newspaper.

As I rounded the next corner, the elevator suddenly came to life. The doors slid open on my floor. A soft voice, a man’s, muttered lowly, and then the brisk sound of footsteps approached. I fled noiselessly down the corridor. The voice grew louder.

It was Big One; he seemed to be hectoring someone, alternately coaxing and demanding. He kept saying, very pointedly,
"Ni,"
meaning "you," and I supposed he was on the phone. I had no time to consider, however, because he kept approaching. I tried the doorknobs desperately: locked, locked. One was unlocked. I slipped into the room and shut the door just as he rounded the corner.

In the dark, I pressed myself up against the wall and listened. His tone was a queer mix of coyness and threat.

I waited until the footsteps disappeared. The unwashed smell I had noticed in the hallway was stronger in here, and gradually I became aware that I was not alone. The air was too warm; it had a quality of breath. Something bumped softly against the back wall. My hand found the light switch; the overhead bulb flickered on.

They stared back at me, four or five of them: girls of about fourteen or sixteen, huddled together on a cot in the corner. They were dark and skinny, and stared dumbly at me, blinking in the sudden exposure. Bare-legged, they pulled their skirts down instinctively, veins showing like contusions on their skin. One of them had been tatting in the dark, a length of dirty lace across her lap. The harsh gray-green light revealed the stark room without mercy: two cots, some boxes for clothing; that was all. The floor was bare, and the walls hadn’t been finished. Peels of paint came off the surface like sores. The girl with the tatting spoke up.

"I don’t understand," I whispered. She was speaking some kind of dialect. I think I spoke in English; I was so shocked that I didn’t know. She repeated herself and then, in a terrible, primitive gesture, pointed into her mouth to signify food.

I turned out the light again; it didn’t seem callous, it seemed the only thing to do. Darkness resettled; I went back out into the hallway, closing the door softly behind me. Dazed, I wandered down the hall, not caring that I was in plain view.

Bits of song rang intermittently through the corridor. Big One had occupied a room at the end of the hall, leaving the door ajar, like a boast. He had turned on the disco ball so that the room was full of points of lights in soft, dreamy rotation and was seated on the black banquette, holding a microphone in one hand and singing along with the lyric prompts in a lusty tenor.

The girl I had followed in from the street was draped across his lap limply. Big One’s fingers made little wet circles along her inner thigh. Her thin dress had been torn off; her body was like a child’s, thin and flexible, and her face was flat and unemotional as she lay humiliatingly sprawled against Big One’s bulk.

The song ended. Big One sighed, momentarily sated, then grasped the girl by the arm. She began to struggle, her face still silent and affectless. Big One slapped her and grunted in slippery, intimate Hokkien. He stood up and pinned her to the banquette, one fat thigh between her legs. He fumbled with his zipper. Again, he spoke, the harsh sound of threat and seduction together.

She made a hard, bitter sound. Big One laughed, twisted his hand in her hair, and pulled it hard. She cried out, flailing. He stroked her throat tenderly with both thumbs and muttered some kind of expletive, gasping as he rubbed himself against her. Suddenly he pushed her roughly onto her side and barked a command: Roll over.
"Bie jiao."
Don’t scream.

Obedient, she put her head down on the banquette and rolled over. She saw me in the doorway over Big One’s shoulder, I think. Her expression did not change. The disco ball made its soft, mitigating rounds as the next song began. Strains of the melody followed me down the hall, back out the window.

N
EXT WEEK
,
Little P had said.
Hong Kong. Chungking
. These three facts, dimly recalled from that eerie trip to Jilong, took slow root in my mind.
Next week. Hong Kong. Next week
.

I arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday evening, blinking in the sudden dazzle of Chek Lap Kok, the white, glassed-in hangar filled with late orange sun. Kowloon Bay glistened, a sheet of wrinkled silk, as the Airport Express sped toward the metropolis. The sky looked like fire.

I closed my eyes, but the impression of flames remained. Flames, prayers, money for ghosts. Longshan Temple, where I had gone to burn an offering for my mother only a week ago. The darkened portals of the temple had led directly into the cavernous apse, the idols of the deities arrayed, smoke-lidded and pensive, on a dais before rows and rows of tables. The murmurous quiet of supplication, the punctuating clatter of wooden bones being thrown. In the back: a fire in an enormous kiln, banked on all sides by mountains of gray ash, while behind the temple, a pyre cordoned by a low stone wall burned duskily with paper prayers submitted for the dead.

My eyes flew open. The Airport Express shuddered along its track, and the numbness that had gripped me ever since the discovery at last dissolved. Disgust welled up; I put a handkerchief to my mouth, retching. The purse of ashes sagged beside my carryall. I kicked it under the seat, suddenly enraged. My mother—her blind loyalty to Little P was worth nothing, would change nothing. I had been prepared to accept anything: drugs; embezzlement; arms smuggling; even, perhaps, murder. But this—it wasn’t even mere prostitution. I knew instinctively that the girls I’d seen were just the surface of it; a malevolent shadow moved behind them, and I was afraid.

As I sat, a cold rill of sweat ringing my neck, an old beggar with a tray came shuffling down the aisle. He touched my shoulder, spilling his pathetic wares into my lap: a single pen, a package of nuts, a dirty silk scarf. I shook my head. He insisted, pawing at my arm. I got up, gathered my things, and moved to a seat in the next car. I felt horrible doing it, but I couldn’t bear his presence. It wasn’t his dirt that was repellent, or his rank smell. It was the importunate, half-formed sounds he made as he pushed his merchandise. They reminded me of that hoarse voice in the back room, asking for food, for help. I had no idea what to say.