“The truth is, I just don’t know anymore what the right thing to do is,” Diane says as she lowers her head and begins to cry.
“You said it yourself, Diane,” Jake says as he grips Diane’s wrist more tightly. “Qiang needed to make things clear. That’s what he’s been doing with the documentary film. How could you have stopped this? None of us could stop him. I knew this was risky. The more I reminded him, the less he wanted to listen.”
Diane pulls a tissue from her handbag and dabs her eyes, tracing the underside of her eyeliner.
“So what do you think we should do now?” she asks as she crushes the damp tissue into a ball and tucks it into her bag.
“All I know is that we need to do more than listen obediently,” Jake says.
“I agree, and I have something for you,” Diane says. She reaches into her bag, pulls out a thumbnail drive and puts it in front of Jake.“Pass this to one of your friends in the foreign press corps,” Diane says. “I don’t recommend that you publish anything on this.”
“What’s on this,” Jake asks. “And why can’t I do anything with it.”
“It’s a paper trail of payments made by Beijing Capital Land to one of the members of the International Olympic Committee. Ben helped me connect the dots.”
“Shit,” Jake says, looking at the USB and then back up at Diane. “But…”
“We want this information to have some impact but not too much yet,” Ben says. “Bribing one IOC member wouldn’t have handed Beijing the win against the other cities. We think we can find paper trails for remittances from China to other IOC members but that’s going to take some time and the three of us are going to have to work together.”
“So,” Diane continues, “we can’t let the authorities know that you have anything to do with this story. That’s why you can’t publish it. We need someone else to publish it so they don’t suspect us.”
“Even if you find more, what difference will it make?” Jake asks. “Didn’t the U.S. bribe IOC officials to get the Salt Lake City Olympics, what, just few years ago?”
“We don’t know what effect it will have. Whether or not the U.S. played the same tricks, Beijing’s not going to want this getting out. We want this to be a warning shot, something that will make the Foreign Ministry uneasy,” Ben says. “Later, when the time is right, if necessary, we let them know where this story is coming from.”
Jake wonders how long Diane and Ben have been working together to produce the information on the USB stick. The thought then makes Jake confront his own poor judgment about them. Diane, in particular. How easily he threw her into a category and tagged her as someone willing to acquiesce completely to the authorities. It was in the midst of anger, Jake realizes, that he formed his opinion and refused to reconsider it.
“When you’re covering the trade talks with Congressman McKee, I’m assuming you’ll be working next to other reporters,” Diane says.
“Yes. I will be able to pass this stuff to my friend Regine at Trask News. My main objective was to get your letter and the documents about Qiang to McKee and I was kind of hoping that McKee would help get this all resolved.”
“He might,” Ben says. “But he might not. That’s why we need a plan B and a plan C.”
“So details about IOC bribes is plan B. What’s plan C?” Jake asks
“Let’s not go there yet,” Ben says.
Jake pauses. “Ok, then I just have one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“Can you both forgive me for being such an asshole?”
May, 2005
The first direct rays of sunlight over a building across the street wake Dawei from another troubling dream.
He’s in large apartment. Modern, like the lobbies of so many of the new buildings he’s passed in Beijing, spaces with objects that don’t define themselves clearly and where he can’t figure out what’s artwork and what’s a seat. Or where uniformed security guards stand awkwardly against clean white emptiness. Dawei is looking for something that he needs to give to his parents in Yongfu. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, only that he’ll know when he comes across it. But in a space full of strange objects, all Dawei knows is that he’s an intruder and he’s likely to be discovered by someone who knows he doesn’t belong. Dawei runs for the exit but can’t figure out which door will let him out. None of the doors has a knob, just keypads like on a phone, and none of them will open without the correct number. Dawei’s only option is to turn and fight off the attacker.
When Dawei used to wake from a bad dream in Yongfu village, his mother would calm him by explaining matter-of-factly that bad dreams never become reality. Bad dreams have one benefit. Whatever they depict hasn’t happened and won’t happen.
Dawei has had many troubling dreams since he left Macau a week ago. Dozing on park benches doesn’t let him descend to the depths of sound sleep. Hard work makes one too tired for bad dreams, his father used to say. And Dawei hasn’t been working. Instead, he’s been wandering aimlessly, trying to figure out where he might be able to work.
He rights himself into a sitting position and looks around for one of the vendors that sell roasted chestnuts. One of them is from a village in northern Heilongjiang Province not far from Yongfu. Dawei recognized the accent and started a conversation. The vendor gave him some extra chestnuts yesterday but must be elsewhere this morning.
As he cracks one of the few remaining chestnuts, Dawei eyes a travel agency across the street. He ties up the plastic bag with the rest of the chestnuts and puts it under everything else in his backpack: an extra t-shirt and pair of socks that need laundering. A separate plastic bag with a bar of soap, a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste. A manila envelope holding several photos of him with his parents and with Auntie and Uncle. Also, the plastic folder containing the screenplay that Zhihong gave him. He’s tried to read it a few times but always ends up getting lost in the illustrations that the author drew in the margins, some of which snake around the lines of dialogue.
He’s in an older neighbourhood, further away from the city centre, where the surroundings look like the area where Auntie and Uncle live in Harbin, where the stores are more familiar to him. He finds a main thoroughfare lined with mature trees that spread out and provide the whole area with shade and flanked by bicycle lanes separated from the vehicles by wide dividers.
He opens the screenplay again and descends into the story to pass the time until the travel agency opens.
Standing in the shade in front of a display window, Dawei eyes a giant model of an airplane with Air China livery that sits at a slightly upward angle on a stand in the window. The plane, more than a metre long, is banked to one side as though it’s really in flight. Dawei’s never seen a passenger jet in such detail. He’s only seen them as tiny pellets in the sky, trailed by white lines and moving so slowly he wonders why they don’t fall out of the sky. The chestnut vendor told Dawei that many people take airplanes because prices have fallen. Some travel agents can’t find enough people to deliver tickets. He said his nephew in Harbin is making good money delivering tickets on his bicycle and is saving enough to open his own travel agency in the next couple of years. Some travellers are too busy to go to the airline office or to a travel agent themselves. They order tickets over the phone, pay with the numbers on their credit card and expect the ticket to be delivered within hours. Sometimes even within the same hour.
Dawei enters. There are no customers and the four chairs in front of the counter, just a few steps away, are empty. But Dawei doesn’t draw any attention from the two women who sit behind the counter, each talking on their phones, mechanically quoting prices and schedules.
Several smaller airplane models sit on the counter. China Eastern Airlines, Hainan Airlines, another one has English words on it and what looks like the solid red circle on the rear fin, the Japanese flag. A small, plastic oscillating fan buzzes back and forth on the left side of the counter causing the smaller model to rattle.
/> The younger of the two women wears a pink blouse with a drawstring around the neckline and the older one, somewhere in her 40s, is in a dark blue blazer over a t-shirt with a foreign word spelled out in shiny round dots. D-K-N- Y. Both women fixate on their computer screens as they continue rattling off numbers and airline names. It doesn’t seem to matter that no customers are present and that the four chairs in front of the counter are empty. A third phone, in between the two women, starts to ring. They both ignore it.
Dawei approaches the chair in front of the younger woman but doesn’t sit. He leans in to see the front of the computer screen. He’s never seen one so thin. They look like the televisions he’s seen in the lobbies of expensive buildings, hanging like paintings.
Without moving her head, the younger woman looks up at Dawei. They lock stares for a split second and then she scans Dawei down to his waist. Dawei knows what she’s trying to determine with the small sliver of attention she’s giving him while she exchanges information with the client at the other end of her phone line. The client apparently needs to be on the earliest flight to Shanghai tomorrow but doesn’t want to pay more than 500 kuai. She seems to know that Dawei’s not going to buy an air ticket, though, and so Dawei needs to speak up quickly. And he mustn’t stutter.
“I…I…want to know if you need anyone to deliver tickets,” Dawei says.
The woman points to her colleague and her eyes focus again on her screen. The middle phone continues to ring. The other woman, probably the owner or at least the manager, is talking about flights to Hong Kong.
“Twenty-eight hundred, if you want the first flight out tomorrow. There’s only one airport in Hong Kong,” she says impatiently. The boss glances at Dawei much the same way as the younger one and looks back at her screen.
“If you want cheaper, you can fly to Shenzhen and take a bus or a train over the border. For twenty-two hundred. Hello?”
She drops the receiver into its cradle and picks up the middle phone which has been ringing nonstop since Dawei walked in.
“Yes? Shenyang? When are you going?”
He feels his cheeks flush. Every interaction like this cuts him down by another centimetre. This one is so pathetic he’ll lose half of his height. If he doesn’t learn to stand his ground now, he will become too small for anyone to see. “Give up and you’ll wind up washing dishes here or sorting soybeans back in Yongfu,” Auntie used to say before the explosion that sent him from Harbin. That’s how she and Uncle left northern Heilongjiang to become engineers in Harbin. Dawei’s own parents, who spent their school years on communes reading Mao, never had a chance to escape.
They recounted the story of Auntie and Uncle’s accomplishments, how they forfeited sleep and drove themselves to the limits of exhaustion to study for the university entrance exams. Dawei knew the stories were meant to motivate him to work harder in school but they began to have the opposite effect every time he had trouble understanding what was on the blackboard. Once they found a way to get Dawei to Harbin for his last two years of high school, after paying bribes and forging papers, Auntie continued the motivational efforts that often tipped into harassment. “Don’t give up or you’ll be back to washing dishes.”
“I…I…just want to know if you need anyone to deliver tickets,” Dawei says, loud enough to interrupt the boss.
“Hang on a moment,” she says to the customer on the other end of the line. She points at Dawei, sending a jolt down his spine as he starts to shift his weight to turn and leave.
“Do you have a bicycle?” she asks without a note of offense or aggression.
Dawei nods.
“No. Not you,” she says into the phone. “You think I’d suggest you ride a bike to Shenyang? Hang on a second.”
She raises her head, chin forward, signaling to Dawei.
“Sit down. I’ll be with you soon.”
Dawei looks at the row of bikes under a canopy of corrugated metal between two residential buildings in a neighbourhood marked by the character 拆, a character that he now knows means demolish. A breeze blowing the leaves of the mature oak trees nearly drowns out the hum of traffic on the east Fourth Ring. He sees parents returning from work, walking quickly with plastic bags in hand and elderly residents watching their grandchildren chase each other around broken benches and clamouring around a derelict water feature of rocks sloping down into a basin that looks like it’s been dry for a decade.
There are more than 100 bicycles, a jumble of colours muted by a uniform tinge of brownish grime. Some of them stand out because they’ve been wiped clean. Or maybe they’re just new. Most are the ordinary one-speed variety with built-on locks that loop through the back wheel. Pressed together, they form a kind of giant industrial python. He knows he can snap any of the locks on the one-speed bikes by bracing the back tire between his legs and ramming the lock with the heel of his palm. He saw Uncle do it to Auntie’s bike when she lost the key. The canopy will block the view of anyone looking down from the old brick buildings. To be sure, though, he’ll come back at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. He won’t steal a new bike or an expensive one. Even if he wanted to, they have newer locks of metal braids encased in plastic. He notices that several of them look abandoned, covered with a layer of particulate matter so thick that it masks all colour and detail. Dawei will take one of them.
MONDAY, April 9, 2007
7:52 p.m.
The PSB investigator searches her database for Gregory Nell’s cell phone number. She’s received a report that Nell is with the American journalist, Jake Bradley, who is having a drink at the bar in Aria. Part of the sprawling China World complex, the bar and restaurant is popular with expats. Various national security bureaus station operatives at Aria to gather intelligence on foreign companies, on which banks are negotiating debt deals or structured loans with which manufacturers, on which UN officers are meeting with which NGO’s and which diplomats are chummy with each other.
A mobile technician notified the PSB investigator that the American journalist’s microphone isn’t accessible. He’s probably taken the battery out, though he’s not likely to suspect that the PSB knows who he’s with or that they can tap Greg Nell’s phone.
Happy hour at Aria has been a habit for Jake since the place opened, a refuge of candlelight and jazz, like what he imagines night spots are like on New York’s Upper West Side. Jake usually looks for many of the same associations that the intelligence officers are there to note, at least until his third glass of wine, at which point he no longer cares.
Contemporary, earth-toned velvet chairs are arranged in random clusters around coffee tables with inlaid geometric designs. Some of the larger clusters have love seats that well-dressed patrons recline into as they sip red wine and frothy beer. In front of the windows looking onto an east Third Ring flyover jammed with traffic, a woman with bleached blonde hair sings “Stormy Weather” in a deep, tobacco-leavened voice. Wearing a deep purple, baby doll dress under a black leather petticoat, she’s backed by her pianist, a black man wearing a fedora and a crisp, white shirt.
Jake sees Greg come out of the dining room, dressed in a grey suit and carrying his weathered leather briefcase. One curl of his wavy hair hangs down over his forehead interrupting the square-jawed symmetry of his face, like Superman. Jake wonders if he checks periodically throughout the day to make sure it’s hanging correctly. How often does Greg re-shape it? What time is it anyway? Jake’s been nursing his third or fourth glass of merlot since last call for happy hour. Maybe the fifth?
“What client were you dining with and what news can you divulge?” Jake asks as Greg sits next to him.
“Such a warm salutation. It’s good to see you too, Jake. Sometimes I wonder why I keep pushing you to go into PR.”
“Fuck you.”
“Ah, the charm never stops.”
“Oh Greg, you put up with me because I turn more of your PR pitches into real stories than anyone else in this city. Do you know how many fights I’ve been in with editors over sto
ries you’ve pitched.”
“Indeed.” Greg summons the bartender. “I’ll have the Bunnahabhain Islay twelve year and, please, give this gentleman another of whatever he’s having.”
Greg reaches for the finger bowl of bar mix from which Jake has picked out all of the pretzels and almonds, leaving only barbecue-flavored corn chips which Jake believes intensifies dehydration. “Ok Mr. Bradley, since you’re so keen to cut to the chase, two things. First. Are you interested in joining us? There’s a position opening in Hong Kong that pays probably double what you’re making now.”
Double? Close to a quarter million a year? The number clears Jake’s mind of all other thoughts like a gunshot in the woods silences birds. With this money, Jake could become, several years from now, a real New Yorker and not someone who simply imagines what life is like in New York. Magnet Hill, Kentucky would no longer be a place he is from. Kentucky would become nothing more that a place where he was merely born. It would become a place where all the taunts and indignities he suffered could be placed, like cheap objects, in an imaginary box that he can toss into some dark corner of his mind.
“Double? Really?”
“Well, almost,” Greg says as the bartender sets down their drinks.
Jake now has nearly an entire bottle of wine in him, on a stomach that’s empty save for a few salty snacks. This makes it difficult to pair the random thoughts racing through his head with any values. He sees images of modern, open-concept Manhattan apartments with blonde wood flooring and stainless steel kitchens, spaces as pristine as those in Architectural Digest. These images compete with the dark of the room that Qiang might be occupying. Or the cell. Or the grave. Perhaps there’s nothing he can do and he’ll need the uncomplicated luxury of a pristine condo to finally give him the gratification that’s always seemed so elusive.
“You know, you could make an argument for double,” Greg says. “The company is desperate for Mandarin-speakers with strong ties to the financial press.”
The Wounded Muse Page 15
