The Foreigner (29 page)

Behind the rotting fence of my courtyard, the house was burning, a violent yellow flame in the front window, which had already been shattered by the heat. The frame stood broken and silhouetted against the blaze, and the fire was burning hard enough that it seemed viscous, the thick roiling of the flames like mercury, like oil and water. A piece of the frame broke and fell into the yard, and the hedge went up with bright, crackling alacrity while the house roared. Far off, there was a siren.

"Angel!" I yelled through the fence. The fire cut a neat swath through the undergrowth. I ran to the gate and tore it open.

A neighbor grabbed my arm.
"Ni bu yao jinqu,"
he said. You can’t go in there. Wait, sir. Wait… But I pulled free and charged ahead.

"Angel! Angel!" The flames from the window bit the edge of the roof, curling the tin back upon itself with a dreadful shrieking. Inside, glass crashed like a breaking board, the tinkling like a chime.

The south side of the house was still quiet and dark, waiting for the coming destruction. Coughing, I ran around the side yard to the back.

"Angel!"

I thought I heard a weak voice calling from the kitchen, but as I rounded the corner, a hand, impossibly large, loomed up in my side vision, and the voice dropped to black as my sight inverted and fell away. Pain filled my head slowly, and I thought I heard myself say, "Where did you go?" But I couldn’t be sure, and whatever the meaning was, was lost.

A
LIGHT JIBBERED, GIGGLED, GLOWED
, then became a silver static that jumped into focus now and then, a dull talking head with stock prices running top to bottom along the sidebar.

"Xiuli,"
shouted Big One, waving his tiny
paocha
cup in the air. Fix it!

"I can’t fix it!
You
fix it," said Poison. He punched the television. The picture jumped, then settled back into snow. He pulled off the wilted antenna and threw it to the ground.
"Ni ma de!"

One side of my face felt hot and poisoned as I raised my head from the floor. The first thing I felt for was my mother, who, miraculously, was still there, though the cord had left a rope burn on my neck and had frayed at the join. Everything else lay behind a matted screen. With some painful squinting, I made out a pair of odd white, egglike spots on the floor, an arm’s length away, and contemplated these for a while. Upon concentrated inspection, they turned into my glasses, bent and cracked beyond repair. I reached out blindly and put them on. The room jumped into semiclarity threaded with lines, like a picture in a broken frame.

I was in some kind of basement or garage, without windows, and with white tube lights exposed and humming on the ceiling. The floor was bare concrete, and the walls were pitted and daubed with plaster. The closeness of the air made me drowsy, and there was the inevitable smell of incense and exhaust. The banquettes, pushed at random angles against the walls, told me that we were somewhere in the Palace. Big One had pulled a crate up next to him and was dousing his teapot with boiled water in a shallow stone bowl. A couple of other men sat at a card table near the door, looking bored. One of them handled his piece awkwardly, spinning it around his right index finger.

"Put that away," said Poison, cuffing him. The man put the gun down on a crate, and I saw that an assortment of weapons had been laid out there, knives mostly, also a heavy joist with a nail. I wondered if the joist had come from my house, and if that was what they had used to knock me out.

A faint nausea rolled up from my stomach and tightened my throat. I turned my head to the right. Angel was lying slack and bloodied next to me, her cheek pressed into the ground.

"Angel?" I whispered. We were not tied up; I inched closer and touched her hair. "Angel?"

She groaned quietly. I looked over at the thugs. They were still occupied with the television reception. "Are you all right?"

Then she was awake. She raised herself painfully and gasped, lifting her left hand, which was grayish and swollen. She had been cut across the scalp; dark rivulets had dried on her skin.

"We have to get you to a doctor," I said.

"I’m all right," she said. She cradled her wrist and looked around the miserable little room. "The photos," she said suddenly. "The photos."

"It’s too late to think about that now," I whispered.

"I have them…" she began, but Poison, alerted by one of the other men, saw that we had come to and interrupted us with a bang of the joist.

"No talk!" he shouted.

"You can have your fucking money!" I shouted. He blinked, startled. "Tell him," I said to Angel. She relayed the message tremblingly. There was silence in the room, then a burst of laughter. Big One rubbed his feet together in amusement as he emptied the spent tea leaves into another bowl, and the man at the table began spinning the gun again. Poison smoothed his hair back and sneered.

"He says he knows," said Angel. "He says he’ll get it from you one way or another. But this isn’t about the money."

"Then what’s it about?"

Poison shook his head and grinned.

"I don’t know what he just said," said Angel.

"I want to see my brother," I said, trying to get up. Immediately Poison hissed at me, brandishing the two-by-four.

"Sit down."

"I want to see my brother."

Swiftly he crossed the room and advanced on me. The nail in the board was rusty.

"Sit down."

I sat. After a moment of tenseness, Poison smiled and sauntered back to the television.

We waited. The minutes crept by, as uniform and indistinguishable as ants along a baseboard.

"I’m thirsty." Angel had crawled over. "What’s happening?"

"I don’t know." I looked at my cousins. Poison had managed to fix the reception so that the newscast held steady, though the screen was split between bottom and top, and he had settled back with a magazine, thumbing the pages industriously like a schoolboy. Big One was asleep. The others were eating something—it smelled like curry and rice—out of foam boxes. "If I could somehow get hold of Little P, maybe he could do something. Get us out…"

"I have to use the bathroom."

"Can’t you wait?"

"I don’t think so."

Angel stood up. Instantly the men sprang to their feet; Poison brandished his magazine.

"Wo dei qu xishoujian,"
she said haughtily, even fastidiously. The thugs looked at one another; this was not a provision they had prepared for. They rubbed their necks and shuffled their feet. Poison cursed.

Finally, they sent one of the younger, anonymous men out through the side door with her. He carried a knife, but he did not look at all certain about how to use it, and I hoped that Angel would make an escape. Minutes ticked by. The television went blank again. Poison pounded it with his fist.

But eventually they came back in again. Angel had cleaned herself up; her face was raw and pale, and her wet hair stuck to her scalp.

She waited until Poison had readjusted the television and the others had settled down in their former positions before she crawled over to me.

"It’s not locked," she said in a low voice.

"What isn’t?" I looked at the main door, which was heavily guarded by the four men.

"The side door," she whispered. "I pushed the lock when I came in. If we can just make it over there…"

She was distracted by sudden activity around the card table. The men were standing up, clearing the table, and collecting their knives and joists and guns. Poison had been talking on his phone, but now he snapped it shut and took up a little snub-nosed revolver. Big One turned off the TV. Startled, Angel and I froze.

There was a long silence as the thugs stood about. They seemed to be waiting for something. Poison kept eyeing the entrance, and at last I heard a quiet step in the hall. It approached modestly, without any hurry or hesitation. When it stopped, there was a tapping at the door.

Little P stepped inside, shutting the door quietly behind him. He gave me a long, straight look as he entered, as if nothing had ever happened between us, and I stood up, weak and relieved. He spoke to the men, who stood back; Poison made a little argument that I couldn’t hear or understand, but finally he stood back as well, muttering.

Little P stood facing us, though he did not come any farther into the room. His injuries had healed a bit since Hong Kong; the only permanent mark would be a kind of line across his upper lip. He looked smaller somehow, more condensed, as if everything that was inessential had been boiled down since I’d last seen him, and what I saw now was my brother in full truth.

We regarded each other silently for a while. Finally I raised my hand.

"Hello, Little P," I said faintly.

"Hello." It must have started raining at last; he wore a dark trench coat, and his head was sleek and wet, though his shoes were spotless. He tucked his hands into his voluminous pockets and came a few feet closer.

"How’ve you been?" I asked after a moment.

He considered me. "You really want to know?"

"No. Yes. No."

"Good," he said. "No more lies, right? No more bullshit. From here on out, just the truth between us."

"There isn’t any more truth to tell, Little P."

Angel had stood up next to me, holding my arm involuntarily, but Little P didn’t even glance at her. There was a deep, unfocused look in his eyes, eerily calm; the eyes seemed to flicker over me searchingly, without coming to any conclusions. He took another step.

"You’re right," he said. "Maybe the problem is too much truth. I wish you hadn’t told me about those pictures," he said.

"I wanted to help you."

"It makes everything so hard."

"It’s not hard at all," I said. "Leave. Get out. Do you think I want you to be caught? I wouldn’t do that to you."

He shook his head.

"It’s not that simple." He lifted his chin at Angel. "She’s still got the originals."

I felt a little sick. "How do you know that?"

"Officer Hu gets his cut," he said. "We expect at least some protection."

"He stole the report," I said. "He took the disk."

He inclined his head noncommittally.

"Okay," I said. My chest was being clamped by an inexorable hand; I struggled for breath. "All right. All the better. Bought you extra time. Run now. Come with me. Get out of here while you still can. I’ll help you sell the Remada. You can live off the deposit. Anything. Just get out."

"No. I can’t leave."

"I don’t understand!" I shouted. "I don’t understand! What have they ever done for you here that you owe them your loyalty? Have they ever given you a second thought?" I pointed wildly in Poison’s direction. "He was going to kill you, you know that? Because of a debt I owed. For eight thousand bucks, he would’ve knocked you off. Is that family to you? Is that devotion?"

"You poor fuck," he said. "Do you really believe Uncle’s the puppet master? You really think he’s running this place, in his condition?"

"With Poison. With Big One."

"Those assholes?" He cocked his head. "Don’t insult me. No more lying to yourself."

He took another step. "It’s me," he said simply. "It’s always been my show. All those cocklovers"—he indicated the men ringed silently around the room—"they answer to me. Those girls upstairs, they brought them here on my order."

"But Uncle—"

"Uncle," he said, almost scornful. "Screw Uncle. I used to respect the man, you know? A real leader. But his weakness is conscience. Conscience and age. He’s got no fire anymore. If he did, I wouldn’t have to keep him down. I wouldn’t have had to take over at all."

"Keep him down?"

He tucked his hands deeper in his pockets and shrugged. "His stroke. It was never the kind to turn him into a vegetable."

Darkness encroached as my hand closed over the vial in my pocket. Trembling, I brought it out. Little P regarded it with a level gaze, unsurprised.

"Zolpidem," he said. "It slows the nerves. Inhibits reaction."

"But why?" I whispered. "Why?"

"The man runs a whorehouse for seven years. All of a sudden he gets religion or something and says he wants to close? No fucking way," he said. He blew a bit of betel nut out of his mouth. "He was going to run it into the ground. Somebody had to do something."

The tic at his mouth had stilled for once. "I could’ve taken him out a long time ago. But he’s more useful alive. We need someone to hang it on if it ever goes down."

He took another step. "What I said to you in Hong Kong. After those girls drowned. I stopped writing to you then. Stopped calling home. You have no fucking idea what it’s like, what pictures go through your head. Year after year." Another step. Getting close enough now that I could see the faint white line of that old scar, that old wound from childhood. "I robbed; I cheated; I lied; I killed. Exile is the punishment. No court in the world could do worse. I cut everything inside of me out. There’s nothing left in here," he said, knocking on his breastbone. "Nothing but the fact of what I did. I cut myself off from any kind of grace. If the Palace goes under, I’ll be damned for nothing."

He shifted. The tic threatened to return, but he fought it down.

"So let it be for something," he said. "Let it be a mark that I was here. Any kind of mark is better than none. Grace," he said. "Immortality. You have to earn it. I wish you hadn’t told me about those photos. But I’m the
laoban,
now. As boss, I have obligation."

The lack of article seemed to signal something broken, or failing. From the pocket of his coat, he withdrew a small revolver.

"No!" cried Angel. "Don’t! I’ll give you the pictures! Right here! Right here!"

"Angel,
don’t
!"

But she took the memory key from her pocket and threw it. Without thinking, I dodged forward, trying to intercept it. A flash of white phosphorescence blinded me before the report shattered the air. Angel screamed.

I dropped to the ground. Little P’s face intent and murderous as he loomed over me, put his foot over the key, aimed. A shout, enraged, as Angel threw him off balance. Again the flash, the splintering shot.