Dragon Day

by Lisa Brackmann

  Sidney sighs and lifts his hand. Immediately the waitress appears. She pours us both more of the fancy cognac.

  “No,” he says. “He does not care for the art. He cares for the expensive cars and clothes. Girls. Things like that.”

  Not my MOS, that’s for sure.

  Sidney leans forward. “I think maybe he falls into some bad company.” A reluctant confession.

  “I see,” I say, but of course I really don’t. So the kid’s a spoiled little emperor, driving hookers around in his Ferrari or whatever. What’s that got to do with me?

  “I warn him, but he doesn’t listen. I tell him maybe I take away his money, but he already has his own. ‘I can make more,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t need anything from you.’”

  The way Sidney hangs his head, I feel a little sorry for him. A guy so rich he owns his own ghost city, and he still can’t get his kid to listen up. Which doesn’t answer the essential question: Why me? Because I’m such a fuckup that he thinks maybe I can give him advice on how to deal with another one?

  “I think it is because of this American,” Sidney says suddenly. Like it’s a curse word. “I think he is the bad influence on my son.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Sorry.” Maybe I’m supposed to be apologizing for the sins of my countryman.

  “I investigate him,” he says, jabbing a finger in the air. “He is a businessman. A consultant.” He spits that last word. I kind of don’t blame him. It’s harder to be a total con-artist foreigner than it used to be, but there are still plenty of sketchy white dudes calling themselves “consultants,” or “market-intelligence strategists,” or whatever.

  “What does he want with Gugu?” I think to ask.

  “Don’t know. Gugu won’t say.”

  And all of a sudden, I’m getting a feeling why Sidney invited me out tonight.

  “So … of course I’d be glad to help. But … it’s not like I have any connections who can tell me about this guy. Wo meiyou zheyangde guanxi. Nide guanxi bi wode geng hao.”

  My guanxi, my connections, aren’t as good as yours. Not even close.

  Sidney waves his hand, as if he’s swatting a mosquito. “Not about guanxi. About moral character.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Moral character. But, um … I don’t know that I’m … I mean …”

  “You are American,” he says, jabbing his finger again. “You are the better judge. You can tell me, his, his … shenqian.”

  His intentions.

  My head is spinning. And not because of the Courvoisier.

  Okay, maybe a little.

  “But … if Gugu won’t talk to you … why would he talk to me?”

  “Gugu likes foreign girls,” Sidney says, with a smile that I am thinking is not about finding something funny or pleasurable. “And he is staying in Beijing now.”

  “But—”

  “Vicki will arrange.”

  Oh, shit.

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when Vicky Huang arranges something, it stays arranged.

  “On the one hand, it’s good to have a powerful patron. On the other …” Harrison Wang pauses as his ayi, “Annie” from Fujian, brings out two steaming mugs of coffee.

  “Yili, ni hao,” she says to me. She’s a middle-aged woman, small, thin, all tendon and bone. “Ni xihuan chi shenme? Omelet? French toast?”

  I’m really not hungry. Mostly I’m tired after an overnight train from Shanghai, where as usual I didn’t sleep much. “Just coffee, thanks.”

  The coffee is amazing, of course.

  “Micro-lot, single-estate, from El Salvador,” Harrison explains. “Fresh harvest.” He sips his. “I’m investing in a new coffee business. Something a little more specialized and upscale than Starbucks. We’re opening first on Doujiao Hutong and then in Sanlitun if the demand is there.”

  I got back from Shanghai on the overnight train around 9:00 A.M., dropped my bag off at my apartment, and headed to Harrison’s place. After the karaoke marathon with Sidney the night before yesterday, I called Harrison to arrange a meeting.

  I never wanted to get involved with Sidney Cao, but he didn’t leave me much choice. He’d wanted a piece of Lao Zhang’s art, and he was going to get it no matter what it took. If that had been the end of me and Sidney, I’d count myself lucky. Maybe even have a few warm fuzzies for the guy, since he did kind of save my ass.

  But that wasn’t the end, and now I’m getting tangled up even deeper. I don’t like the feeling.

  Harrison and I sit in the breakfast nook of his penthouse apartment in central Beijing, on the southern edge of Chaoyang District. He’s dressed for business meetings, which means slacks and this beautiful button-down shirt so totally, absolutely black that it’s like staring into a black hole, looking for stars that aren’t there, or that you can’t see. Which is pretty much Harrison’s MO.

  “So what’s the other hand?” I ask.

  “His power is connected to certain factions in the government. If those factions lose out in the coming leadership transition …” He sips. “I think these beans may be a little overroasted.”

  This whole thing is making my head hurt. “Well, you’re powerful.”

  Harrison laughs shortly. “Not like Sidney Cao.”

  Harrison is my boss, sort of, at a distance. He set up the foundation that I use to sell Lao Zhang’s art. Or was using, before Domestic Security got on my case. Otherwise he’s a venture capitalist/patron of the arts with an interest in “concepts of community in postnationalist societies emerging from the New World Disorder.”

  This is from our nonprofit’s mission statement. I didn’t write it.

  “Who’s he connected with?” I ask. Not like I’m any kind of expert in Chinese politics, but I’ve paid enough attention to get some idea about the Chinese Communist Party’s different factions. That the CCP has different factions anyway. I couldn’t tell you much about what any of the factions stand for. Just that some of them go back to family feuds from before the Cultural Revolution.

  “From what I know, Tuanpai—Communist Youth League. But I’ve heard he has some contacts with the Shanghai gang as well. And of course there are the hong er dai.”

  The “princelings”—children of the original revolutionaries. Richer than shit, a lot of them.

  Harrison takes another exploratory sip of his coffee. “Anyone with his amount of wealth obviously has some high-level relationships.”

  “What do you think I should do?” I ask.

  “Well, it will be hard not to go along with him for the time being.”

  I don’t need this. I don’t need to get any more involved with Sidney Cao than I already am. I mean, he has people killed. It’s not relaxing to be around.

  “Great.”

  Now Harrison puts down his cup and focuses on me. “What I recommend is that you do as little as possible to fulfill your obligation. Meet his son, meet this American, offer your expert opinion. That’s all he’s asked of you. Don’t volunteer anything else.”

  Like I’d do that.

  I’m heading to the nearest subway stop, thinking about a nap. The last thing I want to do is think about all the potential complications with Sidney and now his kid.

  I’m sleepy, and I’m distracted, so when the door of the black Buick parked with two wheels up on the curb opens in front of me, my first reaction is just to step out of the way.

  Then two guys get out, two muscular guys with short haircuts and nondescript clothes.

  My heart pounds in my throat. Not this again.

  “Qu liaotianr,” one of them says. Let’s go for a chat.

  “Just for tea,” the other says, smiling.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ★

  “I ALREADY TOLD you. I don’t know where he is.”

  Pompadour Bureaucrat leans back in his chair. He doesn’t sigh or anything like that. Just gives me a look over his steepled fingers before picking up his glass teacup and blowing on the steaming water, pushing around the leave
s that float on the surface till they sink to the bottom.

  “Nothing has changed?” he finally asks.

  “No. Nothing.”

  Which of course is a lie.

  Like before, he’s interrogating me about Zhang Jianli—my former sort-of-not-quite-boyfriend and current client. Lao Zhang, who got into trouble with the government a year ago for having the wrong friends and creating a community that helped like-minded people find one another. “Government doesn’t care for it when too many people get together,” he told me once. As far as I know, he hasn’t actually been charged with anything. Not yet anyway. That isn’t how things work in China. First they decide you’re a threat. Then they find a label for it.

  And also like before, I’m sitting in an anonymous room in an anonymous “business” hotel that reeks of stale cigarettes and fake-flower-perfumed room deodorizer. This time the hotel is somewhere in west Beijing, in Fengtai. I know this because of the billboard we passed that said, in English, WELCOME YOU TO FENGTAI! LEADING EXAMPLE OF AN URBAN-RURAL INTEGRATION DISTRICT AND AN ECO-FRIENDLY RESIDENTIAL DISTRICT. FULLY INVOLVED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A BRAND-NEW CITY IMAGE OF AN ENVIRONMENT-FRIENDLY BEIJING!

  You’d think in a city like Beijing, Rising China’s capital, full of shiny new architectural wonders by famous avant-garde architects, high-speed trains and freshly built subway lines crisscrossing the city like a spider’s web, with luxury malls displaying endless amounts of Gucci and Prada and designer crap, that they would have worked a little harder on fixing the Chinglish.

  Not so much.

  I have time to be thinking all this because Pompadour Bureaucrat is fond of long silences as a part of his interrogation method. Like if he sits back and blows on his tea long enough, I’m suddenly going to break down and confess all.

  I’m not naïve enough to think that’s all he’s going to do. At some point things have to escalate, right? And it’s not like I’m some badass who’s going to hang tough if things get really bad.

  This is the second time Pompadour Bureaucrat and the Domestic Security Department have asked me to “drink tea”—that’s cute secret police talk for “interrogation, off the record.”

  He did offer me actual tea, for what it’s worth.

  I don’t know this guy’s name. I don’t know his title. I assume he works for the DSD, but for all I know, he could belong to some other Chinese security agency. It’s not like he’s going to show me his credentials or explain himself to me.

  The only thing I know for sure is that he has the power to fuck with my life.

  Now Pompadour Bureaucrat does sigh. A long exhale that sinks the remaining floating tea leaves. He’s a middle-aged dude with that swept-back, dyed-black hair that just about every Chinese official seems to favor, wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a red tie with a pattern of white dots. More formal than the last time I saw him. Maybe he got a promotion. Maybe he’s inspired by the 18th Party Congress coming up, ’cause he’s dressed like every single one of those Standing Committee guys you see displayed in awkward lines in the official photographs.

  I focus on the tie. If I stare long enough, the dots look like they’re moving.

  “You know, your status here can change at any time,” he finally says.

  Like before, he speaks to me in Mandarin. I don’t know how much English he understands, if any. My spoken Chinese isn’t bad, but I’m not sure it’s up to this.

  “Wo zhidao.” I know.

  I try to hide the shiver. Because he could just mean, We’re revoking your visa and kicking you out of the country. Which would suck. But lately I’ve been thinking about leaving anyway. It’s just getting too weird here.

  But he could also mean, We’re throwing your ass in jail. An official prison or a black jail, off the books.

  And that whole prospect, I don’t do so well with that.

  “I can only tell you what I know,” I say. “I know Zhang Jianli’s email address. I already gave it to you.”

  “But you manage his art.” He smiles, baring his teeth. “Hard to understand how you can do this without knowing where he is.”

  We’ve been over this before.

  “He left me instructions. It’s not so hard.”

  “You sell his art, then.”

  “I sold some art,” I correct. We haven’t sold a thing since February. When this whole “fun with the DSD” game started.

  “You sell his work,” Pompadour Bureaucrat repeats. “Then how does he get paid?”

  My heart thumps harder. This is a sensitive subject. “I just collect the money. He hasn’t taken any yet.”

  A frown. “But this is a little strange. This is his money, after all. His work. He behaves … almost like a man who is no longer alive.”

  Oh, shit.

  I do not like where this is heading.

  “All I know is what he told me. What I told you. He wanted some time away from Beijing, so he could work. Get fresh ideas. Too many distractions here.” I risk a tiny smirk, ’cause I just can’t help it. “See, he likes coffee. He’s not so fond of tea.”

  I stumble out of there in the late afternoon, into the yellow-grey haze of a hot May afternoon. Smog mingles with the dust of a construction site, where this huge jackhammer thing rises like an insect on steroids above temporary metal walls covered with photo murals of new, modern China: sleek high-speed trains, spaceship skyscrapers, and, to show proper respect to tradition, and tourism, the Temple of Heaven.

  I’m pretty sure it’s a subway they’re building. They’re building them everywhere. I wish it were done, so I could ride down some long escalator, past ads for Lancôme and real estate and cell phones and socialist modernization, into some shiny new train that would whisk me away, underground, below all the traffic and noise, and I’d emerge in my own neighborhood, safe at home, like magic.

  Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen.

  I limp past a yellow Home Inn and signs for some sports complex left over from the ’08 Olympics, and I can see a line of tall, straight trees in an empty field at the side of an expressway, maybe a ring road, but I don’t know which one, because I’ve hardly ever been to Fengtai before, except for the Beijing West Railway Station, a place I hate that’s hard to avoid: ugly Soviet mainframe built like a cheap brown suit topped with Chinese pagodas. I’m a lot deeper into Fengtai than that, though, right at the edge where it turns into crumbling old villages and farmland.

  A taxi, I think. I need to find a taxi.

  Either that or a drink.

  I buy a bottle of Nongfu Spring water at a newsstand and take a Percocet.

  I need them, I tell myself. It’s not like I’m some addict who just wants to get high. I’m in pain most of the time. The Percocet takes the edge off. I mean, what else am I supposed to do? I’ve tried acupuncture. It helps, sometimes. So does exercise, sometimes. Tried smoking pot or hash, which helps, too, but, you know, it’s technically illegal, and with the rising tide of shit I’m already in …

  I feel like the little boat that’s about to get swamped.

  I sit in the back of the taxi and tell myself to think about something else. Something that doesn’t make my heart pound and me break out in a cold sweat.

  Like, what am I going to do when I run out of the Percocet stash that my mom brought me from the States? That’s really gonna suck.

  Another good reason to leave the country.

  If they’ll let me.

  I stare out the window at the barely crawling cars on the Third Ring Road, at banks of skinny high-rises, whatever colors they once were bleached by smog, their rusting balconies crowded with laundry.

  Well, at least they let me out of that cheap-ass hotel.

  Another reason to leave: the fucking construction in my neighborhood.

  This big stretch of Jiugulou Dajie is torn up, with temporary walls and those blue-trimmed white construction dorms and giant machinery pounding away at the earth, and I swear I feel like I’m living inside a fucking drum sometimes. Anoth
er subway line that’s going to hook up with Line 2 at my stop, Gulou, and while I’m totally in favor of subways, this is really starting to suck. All my favorite snack stands are gone, swept away for no real reason that I can see. I mean, they aren’t digging the line down there, I don’t think—they just decided to knock a couple blocks down because … I don’t know why. No one does. Shit like this happens constantly, and you mostly have to guess at the reasons, because no one is going to tell you or ask for your opinion.

  ’Cause if they had, I would have said, Whatever you do, keep that yangrou chuanr guy! He makes the best mutton skewers in Beijing! I used to love to watch him work, carefully dusting the chunks of meat with red spices, rotating them just so, and it was good meat, not some tiny, gristly hunks of who-the-fuck-knows-what animal. It was weird, because he was so into it, so happy doing this simple thing, it seemed like. I would stand there sometimes, waiting for my skewers, wanting to ask him, So what’s the secret of life? Because I was pretty sure he had the answer. Something to do with taking pride in doing simple things well or some bullshit like that.

  Now he’s gone, and I don’t know where. I never had a chance to ask. No warning. I just walked down the street one day and all those guys were gone—all the stands in front of grey old hutong buildings, all those blackened metal grills, the little signs for chuanr made from tiny red lights on twisted wire frames. The old buildings, too. All gone. Replaced by temporary metal fencing, with slapped-on billboard murals of high-speed trains and the Temple of Heaven.

  Fuck this, I think, unlocking my apartment door. If I can’t sell Lao Zhang’s artwork, I’m not going to make enough money to pay for this place anyway.

  There’s an explosion of happy barks and yips. My dog, Mimi.

  I open the door and she’s dancing around: a medium-size, long-haired yellow dog with a dark muzzle and a feathered tail. She sees me and puts her paws up on my hips, but gently, looks up at me with this Omigod, I love you more than anything! expression.

  She needs a walk. I can tell. And in spite of the fact that there’s major serious shit I need to deal with, in spite of the fact that what I really want to do is drink two or three large Yanjing Drafts (because that’s what it takes to get any kind of buzz off the weak-ass beer here), what I decide to do is take the dog for a walk.