The Foreigner (27 page)

He rattled the ice in his glass and signaled for another.

"I thought Uncle could help me without involving you and Mom. I went to see him totally unannounced, and he gave me a job. He sponsored me for a work visa. He let me stay with him until I made enough to move out on my own. He was good to me. He was good to everyone," he said. "That was part of the problem."

He shook out a cigarette. One of the dancers came up and lit it for him, which he barely acknowledged with a wave.

"For a long time I didn’t know exactly what the Palace did. I mean, I knew it was a karaoke bar, with girls, but the girls were legitimate. The economy was better back then. Uncle and his family weren’t lucky enough to invest a lot when the index shot up. But everyone was feeling the rush of the boom, and when I got there, the Palace was swinging. So I never had any reason to think about the business at all.

"Later on, stuff tapered off—not drastically, but enough so that we ended up short one year. Nothing to worry about. If it was just Uncle acting alone, the Palace wouldn’t have changed. But Poison complained. He thought it was the hostesses bleeding us; they got good contracts, fucking Coco Chanel wages. But they were hard to deal with: bitchy, picky. The Palace was high-class then. Uncle wanted to be fair.

"So Poison’s idea was to bring in girls from the mainland. He had friends in Fujian who were willing to round up girls from the countryside. Poor as dirt, happy to work for less. Mainland cunts fetch a higher price than local ones anyway. Uncle agreed. He didn’t want to, but the Palace was hurting now. He had to do something.

"I didn’t understand all of this at the time. My Chinese was still a baby’s, and no one really talked to me anyway." His face flushed, and he made an unconscious fist. "But they made that mistake of assuming I was stupid because I couldn’t speak. That’s why they chose me to take the cutter out to meet the boats in the strait; they thought I wouldn’t understand what I was doing. And you know what? The
wangdan
were right. I didn’t understand. Not at first."

He put a hand to his eye, touching it blindly.

"It was one night," he said, halting. "Near dawn, more like. Done the same run a hundred times now, but I was more nervous this time. The Fujian boat was really late; I could see them steaming toward me through the fog, and I thought… I thought it would be risky to try to get back to shore; I knew the coast guard’s beat. But I didn’t say anything. I just loaded them on and headed back.

"It was going to be a beautiful day. It’s shitty that I remember thinking that, but it’s true. It was so quiet on the water, and the mist was rising. I look at those Chinese landscape paintings sometimes, the ones with the mist and the mountains and water, and I know exactly what kind of peace they’re trying to show. There isn’t anything like it anywhere else in the world. It was summer. I even remember a seabird coming straight down from the sky.

"But then I saw the patrol. They were pretty far off. Too far off for them to get a good look, but I could tell they were making a direct line. They were coming right for me. No way I could get back to shore without being intercepted; I’d waited too long. So I panicked. Don’t even remember what I thought. Just—threw them off."

"The… girls?"

"I threw them off. I picked them up and threw them overboard. One of them, I remember, was grabbing at me with these warped fingers. But she’d painted them, you know—her nails. They had this sparkly pink polish on them, like she thought she was going to be married or something. Stupid cunt." His voice broke, then smoothed. "They were tied up, their legs and arms. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t swim anyway, they were from inland somewhere, some dirt farm. The way they looked at me—like animals dying. Without understanding a single fucking thing."

The girl in the back room, with her haunted, feral eyes. A blackness surged up in my chest. But I had not fully understood. "So they… What did they do?"

He looked at me with contempt, or pity, the rims of his eyes red with the alcohol. "They drowned, you asshole."

I could not speak. I gripped the ashes hard beneath my arm and was glad for once that my mother had not lived long enough to see Little P again. One side of his mangled face glistened in the weird blue light, but I wasn’t sure if he was crying. I concentrated on his thin white scar, the old one on his cheek; it seemed the only lingering mark of the brother I knew.

"But why didn’t you just leave Taiwan then? You had no obligations to the Palace."

"It was… for Uncle’s sake."

"I don’t believe you," I said flatly. "You really must think I’m some kind of asshole, with a lie like that. You’re no Boy Scout. You have no fucking loyalty. You’d sell your own mother." I waved the will, then slammed it down on the table.

"I don’t give a shit what you believe," he said, but I caught a look of fear in his face. "It’s the truth."

"Let’s just say it is, for the sake of argument. You still have no obligation to keep working there."

"You
are
an asshole." His sloe eyes blazed, scornful. "These girls earn more in one day than they’d earn in a month in China! They get breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a new outfit every three months. Hot showers, and we let them earn their way back to the mainland after five years. You may not like it," he said, cold. "It doesn’t fit with the rules of the decent little Shangri-la you carry around with you. But that’s how things work. That’s how you get it on."

"So this is
what
? A public
ser
vice?" I shouted, feeling sick. He had reached the point of drunkenness where he was no longer exposing anything true; it was sheer ugliness and twisted logic. "You think you’re some kind of
savior
?"

I went on in lowered tones. "You’re not stupid. I know you know what’s what. So what’s the
real
reason you keep on?"

He went silent, staring down into his glass. I felt him slipping away, and knew therefore that I had hit upon a truth.

He propped his head up painfully on his good arm. I was having a hard time breathing.

"Get out of this, Little P," I said softly.

"I can’t." He shrugged off my hand.

"What about the pictures?"

"What about them?"

"Don’t make me choose."

"You’ve already chose," he said. "Haven’t you? You’ve already made up your mind. Nothing I say or do will change that. Am I right?"

Stiffly, he got to his feet and glanced around the Admiralty with distaste.

"Well," he said. "See you."

I didn’t even notice until later that he’d taken the will.

U
NCONSCIOUSLY, I
think, I was counting on Angel, counting on her desire to be loved, but she was not in the end as conveniently smitten as I’d hoped she would be.

"I was wrong," she said the minute we were through customs.

She had been silent the entire flight from Hong Kong, eating her crackers and sipping a Coke with unaccustomed pensiveness. I’d watched her, apprehensive, as her jaw began to jut forward like a barometer of thought: a decision was being made. Now she turned to me abruptly in the concourse.

"I can’t believe I even considered it." Her face had blanched, her lips white and trembling.

"What are you talking about?"

She wiped her eyes and gathered up her bags with grim determination. "I’m going to the police."

"No!" I dogged her, desperate—ashamed too, but I could not do otherwise, whatever she might think. "
Please,
Angel! Just a week. I’m begging you. A favor."

Outraged, she turned on me. "A favor? And what have you ever done to deserve it?"

"I was honest with you."

"My
dentist
is honest with me," she said. "But I wouldn’t cover up murder for him." She regarded me in a way that shriveled my soul, as if I were a stranger, and repellent. "So take your honest, pious ass and shove it. You won’t make me an accessory to rape."

No argument could be made against her; there was no argument except that of blood, and Little P was not her brother. I watched her disappear into the crowd.

My phone rang insistently.

"Wei?"
I said dully.
"Wei?"

ATTICUS WAS
dozing when I arrived at the hospital, head nodding in sleepy assent over a book, his fingers still vaguely pressed to the page, as if he had been in the middle of a discovery when he drifted off. He looked small and gnarled in the clean institutional bed, and I was shocked by the transformation of his face, which was hollow and gray, the features drawn together as if by a taut string. He had collapsed at home a few nights ago; no medical explanation had been proffered, only nerves, exhaustion, overwork. Asleep, he seemed broken. I stood at the window and watched a thin breeze stir up the grit in the gutters.

When I turned back, Atticus was watching me. He had closed the book and sat with his hands folded across the cover. "So," he said faintly. "You are back from your trip."

I nodded. Tentatively I came closer to the bed.

"You don’t need to say," he said. "I see that Xiao P has already said."

"I offered him a way out," I said, "but he won’t take it. It’s like he’s… joined a cult or something." Atticus stirred beneath his sheet, fingers plucking at one another restlessly. "Those girls. Those poor girls."

"The girls then, or the girls now?" said Atticus.

"You knew about the girls he killed?" I was startled—unreasonably so, for of course he would know. Everyone at the Palace had known. But for Atticus to know, and do nothing about it…

"And you never went to the police."

He reached for his tea. I put the cup ungently in his hand.

"I am not a vigilante," he said. "It is not my business to make things in the world fair."

"They were
murdered,
" I said. It was the first time I had said it aloud. I thought of a body sinking silently down through a dark, shadowed canyon of cold water.

"I am weak, I have admit to you already," Atticus was saying. "I have warned you many times."

"Weakness doesn’t even
begin
to describe it," I said. Tears ran down my face.

Atticus sighed, winced. "I will tell you something, Xiao Chang," he said quietly, "and you do not need to repeat this to anyone else,
haobuhao?
A talk between friends."

I made a noncommittal noise. He looked at me, a note of pleading in his eyes, then went on.

"I have report on the Palace before."

"You… When?" I stared.

"A few years ago, when I have just come back from the States. When I was braver." He was silent; he seemed for a moment transported to darkness. Lines of pain, perhaps of despair or shame, creased his face.

"And?"

He looked down at the coverlet. "And. And nothing. And I come home from work one night, and there is a man in the alley who says he is a friend to my sister. And I invite him upstairs, and when I close the door, he attacks me, and break my legs. Both legs. With a pipe."

His voice shook, regained its poise.

"And then I do not remember. And he hit me in the head, and I am unconscious. And he drives me out to Tainan, and he leaves me there, in the country. In the field."

He began to tremble, sweating, and moved his head violently in a gesture of escape. "And there is your ’and,’ Xiao Chang."

"Atticus." My stomach had clenched into a tight fist, aching. "Why didn’t you ever say so?"

"I do not wish to recall," he said. "I wish to forget, as much as possible."

He closed his eyes for a moment, as if swallowing something painful.

"But then you went back to work there. After they tried to kill you."

He shook his head. "It will not seem rational, I know. But after my legs heal, after I am out of work for so long, no one else will hire me. I depend on the money. I am an old man; I have spent my life in other countries. In France, in the U.S. So there is no pension. I have built nothing up. And I cannot live without some extravagance. I cannot live without some luxury. The Palace"—he shuddered slightly—"they know this. They know I am safe now. They know I will never talk. They know I am their—the French say
larbin
. You understand
larbin
? Their servant, their slave,
mais plus vulgaire
…"

"Their bitch."

"Yes. They know I will not talk. And I am useful to them." He smiled, sickly. "It is the way the business works. The way
this country
works. Reporting would do no good,
duibudui
? The problem is deeper. What is needed," he said, "what is needed is a new order. A new world."

I sat back, all anger dissipated. What good would it do, making a sick old man suffer again the horrors of an event, the horrors of conscience? It wouldn’t change anything about Little P.

Atticus winced, his face blanching briefly with pain, and I sprang up.

"No, no." He gestured for me to sit down again. "I am all right."

He composed himself, lying back tiredly against his pillows. After a moment, he said, "So what will you do?"

"I don’t know," I said. Something occurred to me. "You told Poison where I lived."

He grimaced. "I ask for your forgiveness. They have their ways to convince, you know. You will forgive weakness in an old man."

I shook my head; it was such a small thing now. "It doesn’t matter anymore."

Then I frowned, preyed upon by a new concern. "If I go to the police," I asked, "will you… be implicated too?"

He smiled broadly. "Don’t worry about that," he said. "I do not care too much about my well-being anymore. It may not matter, very soon."

He sounded as if he were consigning himself to death, or predicting it. The clock on the wall ticked louder.

I put my hand on the bed.

"It was you, wasn’t it? The shooting at the rally."

He regarded me impassively, retreating behind his veneer of silent wisdom. It was impossible to know him; there was a barrier beyond which I could not reach.

"I do not deny," he said at last. "I do not confirm."