by Francie Lin
"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.
On my hands and knees behind the embankment of banquettes, memory key in hand. Angel was close behind. Bullets rained on the booths, pitting the back wall. We ducked and crawled toward the side door. Gun smoke and concrete powder rose dreamily in the air. Through it, above the vinyl seat backs, I could see Little P advancing like a specter on a battlefield, sighting along the muzzle, expression obscured. No time to say a last good-bye before he disappeared, swallowed up by a foreign land, with its foreign code of honor.
Another flash. Angel shrieked, stumbled. Her shout was enough to jolt me out of numbness. I caught her up, throwing her arm around my neck, and we ran.
CHAPTER 24
NIMEN YAO QU NALI?" asked the cabbie. Water rose in the streets. The storm had hit sometime in the night, the rain now weak but steady. Shaken, we didn’t answer; where was there to go now? A crowd of brutish faces had converged on the cab window as I slammed the door shut and locked it, desperately. I would never get that image out of my mind. Angel gasped a little; she had been hit, her arm grazed by a bullet. Blood bloomed on her sleeve.
"Huochezhan. Baituo ni kuai yidian," she told the cabbie weakly.
"You need a doctor," I said. "We can’t get on a train."
"We can’t stay in the city. Look." She glanced back through the window. A couple of pinpoints of light showed on the street behind us, gaining speed. Of course; they would follow us—hunt us until nothing, no trace of the degradation in that back room, existed anymore.
"Where will we go?"
"Wherever we can."
At the station, she instructed the cabbie to go around back, among the empty buses and delivery trucks. In the graveyard of loading bays, we skirted the building and ducked into the cavern of an open dock. The taxi drove off. A few seconds later a couple of scooters swung around and paused, idling. Waiting. From this distance one couldn’t make them out clearly. The lights above the door of the loading bay flashed a warning; the door would close.
"Go," said Angel quietly. We scrambled down.
Inside the ticket hall, the placards on the enormous timetable shifted at intervals like blinking eyes. We scanned the board: the train to Hualien would leave in two minutes. Angel hung back, looking white and drawn. I took her hand and coaxed her down the stairs to the platforms—"Just a little farther. Just a little more. Just a little more, and then you can rest"—even though I didn’t believe it myself. There was no peace to be found, not anymore. Little P had killed it. Another casualty of his.
Underground, the station and its grim tracks had a nightmarish glare. The train waited. At the end of the silent car, Angel and I huddled, watching the platform: nothing. The band about my chest loosened a little. Perhaps we had earned a little respite, a little bit of rest.
Suddenly the door separating our car from the next opened. Big One grinned, wielding a knife, his gums dark and bloody red. He seized me in a headlock and dragged me, gagging, silent, toward the end of the car. I seized the back of a seat and held on, resisting. He dug his blade into my knuckles, tightened his choke hold. I let go.
But he had not counted on Angel. Through the roar of blood in my ears, I heard her shout, saw her lunge at us with the fire extinguisher. A light, heady poison filled my lungs as she pulled the pin. Big One coughed, gasped, his hold loosening but not letting go.
"Emerson!" Angel dragged at my legs.
Blind, Big One flung open the exit door at the end of the car, choking, still dragging me. One foot
balanced on the metal joint connecting the cars, he tensed, ready to spring to the platform, but just then the train shuddered and began to move. For a horrible moment, as he slipped, I thought I too would be pulled under in his killing grip, to be ground up beneath the train along with him. Then he shrieked, let go, falling to the murky tracks as the engine picked up speed.
Angel grabbed my arms and hauled me back into the car. The doors closed implacably. I saw, with a flood of fear and sickness, figures rushing the platform as we pulled out of the station. Only the underlings, I thought, not Little P himself—but the wound had not gone deep enough yet, and I couldn’t help but look for him.
AT HUALIEN, we were swarmed by taxi drivers the moment we exited the station. The rain had abated, but a jagged breath of fog obscured the peaks of the mountains in the distance, and the sky had lightened by only a degree, into a tumescent shade of pearl. The town was like an afterthought, clustered around the rails, small and ragged, tattered pennants flying from the turret of a castle façade, as if we had come to the ends of the earth and found the remains of a carnival. We would head up to the mountains. Angel plodded on gamely behind me as we walked, looking for a car rental.
"Angel?"
Silence. When I turned around, she was slumped up against the grille of a shuttered shop, holding her arm.
"Sit down." Gently, I eased her down onto the sidewalk.
"Go," she murmured, her lips gray. "They’ll be here soon. On the next train."
"No. They know you know. It’s not safe for you."
She closed her eyes. Despairing, I looked around; a dingy Cosmed sign glowed down the street.
"Wait," I begged her. "Wait."
I bought two rolls of gauze and some cotton batting and propped her up, babbling nonsense as I ripped away her sleeve and applied peroxide, swabbing at the ragged edges of the wound: "…when you get back home… a job at the Times… no more of these silly reviews… you’ll do what you’re meant to… when you get back home…"
"Emerson." She winced as I tightened the gauze about her arm.
"Yes?"
"Look."
Some distance down, a few shadows crossed the mouth of the alley. Even from here, there was a malevolence in the air. Angel shivered. We were half-hidden in a doorwell, but the cover would not last. I dragged Angel to her feet.
"Can you walk?"
She nodded faintly.
"All right." I checked the street; the shadows had disappeared. "Just a little farther."
We walked as if in a dream. A fog was moving in; bells and whistles from the pachinko parlors echoed gaily through it, like the clanging of a lost buoy.
"Where are we going?" said Angel mazily.
"There was a rental, a car and bike rental up by the Cosmed—" I pulled up short. "Ssh."
Someone had paused at the intersection ahead of us. A bank of fog drew in, let out; still, I could not see his features. Tentatively I took a step backward. The man seemed to make a movement toward us, sniffing. Again I backed up. Someone had been burning money in the rain. My foot hit the edge of the metal canister and sent it sprawling, clanging like an alarm.
"Come on!"
Half-running, half-dragging, Angel stumbled on my heels. Ahead, the mouth of a darkened video arcade beckoned. A black light filled the interior. Angel’s face showed up stark and luminous as we ducked blindly through the maze of battered consoles.
At the back of the arcade, we stopped, panting, to listen. Voices carried in the dim ether, calling out "Dance!" and "Fire in the hole!" The arcade was long and low, video gunshot echoing softly in the rafters. We crouched down and waited. Minutes passed. My back cramped. It might have been merely a local out there… There was no proof that the men were Little P’s…
I began straightening up, feeling duped, when Angel grabbed my arm. Footsteps approached, fleet and searching, then the smell of cherry candies. A neon blue light flashed, and Poison’s shadow was thrown up on the back wall.
Angel gestured. There was a large black booth in the corner, mounted on a platform with heavy black drapes drawn over its entrance. It might work, or we might be trapping ourselves; I counted on Poison’s general stupidity.
Noiseless, we climbed up and drew the drapes over us. The interior smelled of heat and vinyl. A dim red bulb showed an exact replica of an old Chevy, the kind my parents had once had—bench seat, lap belts, enormous steering wheel—except a projection screen hung down where the windshield should be. Huddled below the dashboard, tired, afraid, I had a kind of hallucination: I was eight years old again… my father was still alive… and my mother… I counted the swags of phone lines in the window as we drove…
I don’t know how long we waited. Outside, the dreamlike voices went on, calling "Fight! Fight! Fight!" but the drapes mostly muffled any outside sound. Time ticked. I had never really believed that blood would betray its own. But he had meant it; my brother would kill me if he could.
"I have obligation," he said, and when I turned in wonderment to look at him, he fired, sending the bullet into the back wall. I reached out and touched the place where the lead had entered. He fired again. Was it only wishful thinking, or had he hesitated—thrown his aim? Hope rose. Perhaps some blood feeling still lived in him.
"Let go," said Angel.
I startled awake.
She pulled her arm away. I had been gripping it hard to stanch the blood. "Let go. I think it’s better now. I think he’s gone."
Stiffly, we climbed up onto the seats. I rested a hand on the steering wheel.
"We have to get moving," she said, but didn’t move. It was too difficult, just now, to think of leaving the quiet, muffled peace for the storm.
Suddenly, the platform bucked.
"Emerson," said Angel queerly. The platform bucked again.
Slowly, the dim bulb died out, leaving us in the dark. For a moment nothing happened.
Then a picture flickered up on the screen. The film was dated, scratchy and discolored, but it was clear enough. We seemed to be driving slowly down a street, down a wide avenue lined with houses and sidewalk and lawn. A dream of an American avenue on a summer’s day, the sun glinting in coins on the windshield. Two lines of trees made a canopy over the blacktop, the wind tossing the leaves.
Sun dappled the asphalt as we made a wide arc onto another street of broad-leafed trees and picket fences. The speakers were broken; children played noiselessly in the street. A woman in a neat dress and toque walked along the sidewalk, greeted the milkman, walked on past the neat cape houses with their trim lawns, and flowers blanched and washed out by the acids eating away the film. Main Street, with its stone-laid town hall and drugstore with a new striped blind. My heart ached at the brightness of the vision. The wheel spun of its own accord beneath my hand. My childhood had been the motel and the tenants, I-80 and the cargo trains running less than a mile away. These dreamlike trees and boulevards, sunlight and fences—they had never been a part of my experience. Where, then, did the longing come from? As if somehow, somewhere, a memory of home had been injected into me like a virus, false, foreign, and without a cure.
"Look," whispered Angel, reaching for my hand. We were approaching the highway. A little fan in the corner whirred; the platform creaked and tilted to give us the illusion of banking on a curve. The road dipped, swelled. We were going faster. The white painted lines seemed to skim off the screen and fly toward us, and I let go of the wheel, which turned without me. Up ahead, the highway crested; the peak loomed before us. We were going fast now. At the top, I closed my eyes and waited, breath suspended, for the road to drop away.
THE ROAD to Tianxiang led first across a drab flatland dotted with quarry works, then up through Taroko Gorge along ledges blasted from marble. Daylight was dying, the dark storm clouds funneling off over the sea. Angel kept her head turned, looking out her window.
"If something happens," she said after a while, "tell my parents that I love them."
"I don’t know your parents," I
said. "You’ll tell them yourself."
She looked at me, and I knew she was hoping for more—an admission, a lie; a cheap exchange of words that would never hold weight when the trouble was over. I cared for her—but that was all. She waited. I concentrated on the road.
After a while, she turned back to the window. She was crying, I think. For the first time, doubt ran below my conviction, like a hint of a stain. Perhaps Little P was right. The desire for purity—in love, in life—had ruled me to the exclusion of everything, both love and life. To deny Angel comfort, even if it were a lie—that amounted to a kind of cruelty. But it was too late for me; I didn’t know how to do any differently.
We continued on, kilometer after kilometer in the growing dusk. Angel made us pull off at the rest stop shakily erected on a wide, flat outcropping of cliff, and while she was in the bathroom I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked over: far below, a river cut like a chalk line through the gray stone. Angel came out; she had rebandaged her arm by herself, and her face looked gray and pinched as she got back in the car.
We went on in silence, until all at once Angel pulled herself upright. "There’s a car behind us," she said.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. Through the heavy mantle of mist, I could see a dark shape some distance away, without headlights.
"There’s only the one road," I said. "Of course there’s someone behind us."
"But it’s been behind us since we left Hualien. It should have passed us at the rest stop."
I tried to look more closely. The tires slipped onto the shoulder.
"That can’t be the same car," I said, but a cold rill passed through me. Without exactly meaning to, I pressed on the gas, inching the speedometer up. The car behind us kept pace. Angel faced forward.
"Don’t stop at Tianxiang," she said. "Follow my directions." She scrabbled in the glove compartment for a map. "If we can make it as far as—Emerson!"
