The Foreigner (25 page)

LITTLE P
had not mentioned a time for his arrival at Chungking Mansions, which meant that I would have to position myself in the lobby and wait for him to appear. This plan, conceived in innocence, was immediately crushed as I stood in the garish neon-lit maw of the Chungking entrance that evening and watched helplessly while throngs of foreigners pushed through the open arcade. Not a hotel so much as a marketplace, a mall, and a city of itinerants. Money changers sat resolute and forbidding behind their bulletproof glass and cages; a Sikh with a rifle dozed catlike and watchful. I waited for an hour, studying the restless crush of residents intently. Indians, Pakistanis—men of the subcontinent shuffling around in pairs, mostly, and some strung-out backpackers, a crush of indistinct locals buying pirated software. The Sikh was getting suspicious. His eyes flicked at me from time to time, and he held his clips more prominently in view. I stood my ground. Another half hour passed. I would never find Little P this way.

But as I was about to leave, I caught a flash of metal rounding the corner to the elevators. Keeping an eye warily on the rifle, I edged toward it. I don’t know how I knew it was Little P; something in the heart recognizes its own.

I’d hesitated for only a moment, but it was enough for him to slip into the elevators, for the sallow doors to slide shut and the ancient cables and cogs to churn upward, slowly. Eighth floor. I skirted a group of nuns and darted into the other car.

The burnt-out corridor smelled of cardamom and rot. A pipe had burst somewhere, and wet footprints ran in all directions across the tiles. Odd voices from behind an apartment door, which swung open in a burst of chatter to reveal a full restaurant with brocaded tablecloths and wine and candles, like a mirage in the desert. Then the door fell to, and in the restored dimness, I saw again the flash of metal, down at the end of the long hall.

Slipping a little, I followed it, footsteps squeaking. He did not look back, but he began, imperceptibly, to walk faster, with a hunted gait. I hazarded after him without trying to conceal myself. I was through with that. Atticus was right. Caution, fear—they diminished you, shriveled you. If there was a darkness to behold, I wanted to know it; I wanted to look into my brother’s face and see it fully once and for all. Perhaps then I could begin to build the bond again: banish the darkness, take him home. I slipped in a puddle and fell heavily against the wall. Still without turning, he broke into a swift, silent run, darting through an exit and down the stairs. I struggled up. I could not lose him.

"Little P!" I shouted. The cry redounded senselessly in the piss-smelling stairwell. He did not look up, only flew down the steps. "It’s me! It’s Emerson!"

He might have gotten away, but the door on the ground floor was locked. I could hear him jimmying the knob frantically as I limped down the last flight. Cornered, perhaps at last he would talk.

"I only want to know…" I said. Then stopped, for the man cowering against the door was not my brother. He was older, more devolved, more debased; his eyes shone with an addict’s dreadful misery and desire, and he whimpered as I stood before him.

The stairwell door suddenly opened from the other side, and the junkie fled past a couple of Indian men, who brushed by me without looking; they did not want to involve themselves. The door closed.

In the stillness, a great exhaustion came over me. Even if the man had been Little P, what would I have done? I could not even imagine anymore. Somehow my brother had made the future into something blank and terrible, resistant to all efforts at love, or thoughts of possibility.

I caught a sound above me on the concrete stair—not loud but stealthy, deliberate. Quickly I flattened myself against the door, mind whirling. Only Atticus knew where I had gone. A soft muffle of footsteps trying to conceal themselves in the bare chamber.

A silhouette appeared at the top of the stairs, dark, plain, oddly retiring.

"Who is it?" I whispered.

Silence.

"Who are you?"

She came forward, a shadow separating out from shadows.

My legs began to tremble. I sank down on the urine-stained floor and pressed my fist to my breastbone, trying to breathe.

"Angel."

"Don’t get mad," she began, standing over me.

"How the hell… ?"

She blushed.

"You followed one me."

"The whole way."

Her mouth primmed up in silent defense. Planting her heel on the ground, she cocked her head skeptically and stared me down. "So. Are you going to buy me a drink or what?"

I HAD
not seen her since that dismal steak dinner, and it was clear, from her pointed silence, that she had not yet forgiven me.

"So what did you come for, anyway, if you’re so pissed?" I asked finally. We were in Lan Kwai Fong, the cobblestone walks packed with revelers and colored lights, the clinking of ice in highballs.

Angel forged ahead, tight-lipped, her steps clipped and angry as I trotted after her. "What makes you think—" but then the rest of her words were swallowed up by a burst of laughter from the open windows of a pub.

"What?"

She whirled around. "I
know
!"

"Know what?"

"About your brother!"

I grabbed her arm as she turned away. "What do you know?"

She twisted out of my grasp and fled down the street.

Stumbling, I followed her into a dark churchyard surrounded by a thick hedge. Water trickled somewhere; white statuary peered eyelessly from the hushed steeple.

"Angel!" I hissed.

She was scrunched in a nook of the hedge, sitting on a wooden bench. One boot was off, and she was rubbing a twisted ankle. I planted my foot at the end of the bench. The seat jumped violently, jarring her.

"Just what do you know about Little P?"

She sniffed. "That he should be in jail."

"Prostitution is legal in Taipei," I said, defensive.

"Yeah, but smuggling’s not."

When I didn’t say anything, she looked up again. "
Human
smuggling, Emerson. Those girls… they’re not local. They look like they’re from the mainland. Sold, most likely. Or else someone lied to them to get them to come."

I sat down on the edge of the bench.

"I thought you knew," she said, suddenly frightened.

I pressed my hand to my breastbone, wanting to loosen the bond about my chest. "I didn’t know the girls were illegal."

"What did you think?" said Angel skeptically. "That they were just staying in those horrible little rooms for fun?"

"I don’t know what I thought," I said. "I didn’t think." Rather, I didn’t want to know. I thought of my brother: when he was little, he had gone through a phase in which he could not sleep unless his pillows were arranged in a certain way. I would look in on him after closing up the office and find him in his hot, close room, sleeping hard and serious in that little-boy way, arms flung up over his head in an expression of trust. "Will you fix it?" he would ask, coming to my room with his broken transistor and hopping up on the bed. There was the way he always sat too close as I took the radio apart, curious and rapt. How could I connect those memories with the degradation in the back rooms of the Palace?

"How do you know about this, anyway?" I asked Angel.

She chewed a nail.

"Good God, have you done anything but follow me in the last week?"

"I wasn’t spying," she said. "I was… You pissed me off, you bastard."

She calmed down. "It’s not important. Anyway." She pulled her camera out of her bag. "I followed you to the Palace. There’s an easier way to get in, you know. Through the basement of the building next door." She fiddled with the camera, which blinked on with the sound of chimes. Then she handed it to me.

The shots had been taken at night, from outside the Palace, under the sodium-looking lights of the alley. The exposure was bad, but you could see clearly enough the Palace signage, and the outline of two men. From that distance I couldn’t tell who they were; they might have been Poison and Big One, or they might have been Uncle or Little P or any of the clerks they kept at the desk. They carried a large block between them.

"Coffins," said Angel. "They’ve been transporting them in coffins from Jilong down to Taipei. They bring them across the strait at night, I think."

The shots of the Palace disappeared; the next was a close-up of the coffin I had seen dismantled in the upstairs room. The tiny Braille markings I had felt in the wood were holes, airholes. Why had she documented it so thoroughly? I fast-forwarded through the rest of the frames unthinkingly.

"Why haven’t you gone to the police?" I said, suddenly hoarse.

She frowned and tucked a lanky piece of hair behind her ear.

"I don’t know." She glanced at me, then away. "Because he’s your brother. I thought… if you wanted me to hide these… just until you can get him out of it."

Angel, I don’t love you,
I wanted to say—just so she would remember, and perhaps protect herself. Pity and gratitude throbbed in equal amounts, giving me a headache that seemed to encompass more than just anxiety for Little P. I shook my head to clear it.

"I have to talk to him," I said. "I can’t understand how he got mixed up in all this." I plucked at the grass. Shame swelled in me. "If it’s just money, he has an out. My mother left him the motel."

"Is your uncle threatening him?"

The old man, with his menacing bulk; the shuffling; the asphyxiated breath; the snorting and labor it took to keep him alive. No, perhaps he didn’t do the threatening himself, but he had Poison and Big One and his other minions to do it for him. Then I remembered his visit to my house, the strange flash of fear, the little plastic vial, which still rattled hollowly around in my pocket. It made no sense. But if Little P was under pressure, we would get him out somehow. I would get him out.

"It was brave of you to come," I said suddenly, looking down at Angel. She didn’t look up. I put my hand over hers and squeezed it once. She waited. When nothing happened, she gently pulled her hand away.

ANGEL, IT
turned out, had done a good amount of snooping. Along with the pictures, she had managed to trunk-track Little P’s phone calls with a CTEK cable pilfered from the electronics market. Through the static, she had heard him murmuring about a meeting—seven o’clock, Friday—though the place was not clear, nor was she certain whether it was 7:00
A.M.
or 7:00
P.M.
I would have to stake out the Mansions at both times.

No sign of Little P in the lobby on Friday morning, though I arrived two hours early and stayed until almost ten o’clock. The room I had rented in Wan Chai was bleak and stuffy when I returned, discouraged; I called Angel, but she was nowhere to be found.

That evening, however, I had not made it halfway to the Wan Chai station when I noticed her hanging back behind me, trying, I suppose, to follow. I ignored her; she knew everything already. Shadowing me through a transfer at Central, she nearly stepped on my heel, but I allowed her to think she was doing relatively well, until I boarded a car that was almost unoccupied. She drew up short. Then, coolly, she walked to the opposite end of the car and sat down. The absurdity lasted three stations.

"You might as well come over here and sit," I said finally. "You’re not fooling anyone."

Shamefaced, she got up and walked over to me. We rode in silence for another stop.

As we approached the Mansions, I began to lag.

"What are you doing?" asked Angel, frowning.

"I don’t know what to say to him," I said. My palms were sweating. "He’s not a little boy anymore."

"Look, boyo. First, you’re going to tell him you know about the girls. Then, you’re going to tell him we have proof. You don’t have to blame him; tell him we know he’s just Uncle’s henchman, and that he won’t be implicated if he gets out now and leaves—goes back to the U.S. or somewhere, doesn’t matter where. It’s the goddamn timing that’s important. Give him, I don’t know, a week. A month."

"You should be making the demands," I said dully. "I don’t have the stomach for it."

"This is for
him,
you idiot, for his own good. Sooner or later he’s going to be caught if he keeps on."

"And what if he doesn’t listen to me? What if he calls my bluff?"

"What bluff? We’re not bluffing. If he doesn’t get out, he’ll be reported too."

"I’m not reporting my own brother," I said, appalled.

Angel looked at me.

"It’s abhorrent, what they’re doing," she said, very quiet, and I knew she would not be swayed. "They’re
prisoners
. They’re being held like animals. I should have gone to the police with these right away," she said, biting her lip.

"
No
. Please. I know it’s wrong, I
know
. But I can’t turn him in. There’s something not right about all this. He’s just… confused. Or else he’s being pressured somehow. If I can just get him to—"

She grabbed my arm and gestured. A figure had come out onto the sidewalk; in the flare of a match, Little P’s thin face lit up, then died out. It was too dark for him to identify me, and he seemed disinclined to look around in any case. I raised my hand weakly and said, "Uh… ," the way one signals a waiter, but still he didn’t see me. He moved off down the street.

"Shh," said Angel. She signaled for me to follow.

In the rain, people appeared indistinct, vague shapes moving behind a scrim. Little P followed the jagged back street for a few blocks, then turned on Nathan Road and headed toward the harbor. He walked purposefully and fast, through the throngs wrapped in plastic ponchos, then darted across the street, holding a newspaper over his head, disappearing into the crowd farther ahead.

"There he is," said Angel, pointing. A cab nearly ran her over as she dashed out into the road.

We followed him all the way to the Promenade, where across the darkened harbor, the Bank of China rose like a prism from the gray sea. The crowd was sparse here; we hung back and watched, in case Little P should turn his head and spot us. A bedraggled seagull huddled beneath a bench, letting out a plaintive scree now and then as the waves splashed the guardrails. If he was aware of being watched, Little P did not show it. He crossed the wide plaza around the clock tower and went into the ferry building.