He was the first one to the breakfast buffet, watched as businessmen catching early flights trailed in with roll-on suitcases. Fucking these guys is reasonable! It’s not my job. Nope: not my job. My job is punching Peter Harrington, dirtbag financier, in the face. How’s that for reasonable?
Charlie and the driver picked him up at eight o’clock, and they drove down to the Bund. Charlie didn’t want to get out of the car because there were surveillance cameras—and if it ever came to that, he didn’t want records of them together—but he pointed out how it was going to go down. Charlie was hit-man cool. “See those lions? That’s the old Hongkong Bank. That’s where you’re going to intercept him. You’ll be waiting around the corner and Mr. Chen will be in a car over there, by that cross street. He’ll be watching me. We’ll be walking toward the bank from the opposite direction, and Mr. Chen here will be watching and he’ll text you when I’m a block away. That should be about twelve fifteen. I’ll get your man over by this second lion, and I’ll delay him there. You should be able to approach, hit him, and then walk directly over to the street by that traffic light. Do not look at me, do not speak to me, do not acknowledge me in any way. If you do, you’ll put me at risk. Understand?”
“I understand. Don’t let on that I’ve ever seen you before.”
“That’s right. It’s very important. These situations are fluid, and I may have to say or do something unexpected, but you’ll ignore me. If I go down, ignore me. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“I’ll have another man nearby to intercept the bodyguard if he decides to chase you and gets past me. Don’t look for him. Mr. Chen will be waiting with a taxi and he’ll bring you straight to the airport. You’ll have a first-class ticket on Cathay Pacific, and he’ll take you through VIP security. Mr. Zhang already set it up. You’ll have an hour and a half to make the flight, starting from this point. Now repeat that all back to me.”
He went over the whole thing for Charlie, and, yeah, he was feeling it a little. Light in the stomach, pulse running faster.
“Good.” Charlie looked him in the eye. “What are you going to say when you walk up to him?”
“I’m going to say, Hey, I’m Pete Harrington, and you ripped me off for eight million dollars! Then I hit him.”
“I guess that works.”
“Or I could say, You owe me eight million dollars, and I’m taking it out of your ass!”
“Okay—”
“Or maybe, Motherfucker—”
“You mean you haven’t thought this through?”
“Well, yeah, Charlie, I’ve thought about it a lot, but, you know, it’s like writing lyrics: it takes a few tries to get it right.”
The old man put his forehead down to his hand, shaking it back and forth, then looked up at him again, smiling. “Well, whatever you say, don’t get in an argument with him. You’re not there to dialogue. Say it; hit him before he understands what’s going on; if he goes down, maybe kick him a couple of times; then walk to the car quickly.”
“Got it. But there’s one thing we haven’t talked about, Charlie: how are you going to get away?”
“That’s the easy part. I’ll give you a call when I get back to Los Angeles.”
* * *
They dropped him off at the hotel, and he went back up to his room. He had a hard time staying still, half-watched the television as he sat on the edge of the bed. At eleven, he went to the lobby and checked out; then Mr. Chen came for him and put his luggage in the taxi that he was driving now. By eleven forty-five he was in place, two blocks from the old Hongkong Bank building, waiting. The driver would text him when it was time to go.
The morning was cool and his leather jacket wasn’t quite doing the job. He was shivering, and that probably wasn’t just from the cold. Charlie had told him it would be like this, and he kept calling up Charlie’s calm, fatherly face. Keep a level mind, stay with the job. Get in, get out. You trained for this. You’re ready.
He looked at his reflection in the window of a restaurant, the street reflected in back of him, as if it was a green screen and someone was just projecting him there. A music video, the one of “Kickin’ It with The Man,” except the video he’d imagined happened in a universe waiting for an avenger to punch greed in the face, and instead some dumbass had green-screened him into a universe that just didn’t give a fuck!
What was he doing here? Standing on the street in Shanghai about to go assault some dude—this was fucking crazy! He should be back in L.A., working on a song, planning his tour. Why was he pretending to be some kind of hero? He looked at his watch. Another twenty minutes to kill, and now his body was starting to shake. He was freezing out here!
He drifted to the window of a jewelry store. Glittery bits of glass on metal: bullshit fishing lures for the rich. The street front of some sort of upscale shopping gallery. He wandered inside. Men’s clothing. An audio shop. He wandered over: those new Bose headphones. Nice. Some speakers. Norwegian shit. It felt comfortable, so he wandered in, and the salesman came up to him. Youngish Chinese guy, casual hipster clothes. He recognized him, seemed embarrassed. “Mr. Harrington! Hello!”
Give the dude a little salute: “G’day.” Christ, where’d that come from? Was he fucking Australian now?
The salesman still seemed starstruck, but he went into his routine. He probably didn’t know what else to say. Talking about, Have you seen the new Bose headphones? Very good signal-to-noise ratio.
And he was like, Dude, I’m getting ready to assault somebody! That’s the only noise I’m hearing! But he didn’t say that, just waved at him and drifted out of the shop, back out onto the street, and he could see the salesclerk talking excitedly to someone else, and then the two of them came over to the front of the shopping gallery, came out the door saying, Hello, Mr. Harrington. Can I take a picture? They didn’t wait for an answer: whipped out their cellies and started filming him. He waved and smiled, then tried to get some space, but they were following him with their phones, calling out to him, saying something in Chinese. Now other people were looking at him, too, and it was like feeding goldfish: when the first ones come to the surface, all the other ones come, too, until you’ve got a swarm of goldfish blowing bubbles all around you. He kept a vague smile on his face and tried to fade away, but he really had no place to go, because he was supposed to wait here for the text. In a couple of minutes, he had four or five people taking videos of him, asking for autographs, and when people saw that, they whipped out their cell phones, too, clueless little smiles on their faces, like, Who the fuck is this foreigner, and why am I taking a movie of him?
Okay, this is fucking off the crazy scale! Did I make this? Did I create this world and this street and this nervous guy waiting to go do violence to someone? And I’m doing this why? He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket, and he pulled it out and looked at it. It was the driver. The text said, “GO.”
He swallowed. He was doing this. Day of reckoning, right? That was it. Fucking day of reckoning. Say it, step in, trap, and hit. Kick him if he goes down. Head for the traffic light.
The sidewalk was crowded but he could see the lions a couple hundred yards off. A few people were walking alongside him with their cell phones out, filming him, silently, but he wasn’t paying attention to them. He could see Charlie up ahead, talking to another man, and beside them a third man, the bodyguard. They were staring at the buildings, so they couldn’t see him yet. The guard was listening and following what Charlie was saying.
His heart was speeding along. This was stupid! Was he really doing this? Now only a hundred yards away, and he could make them out clearly. Charlie had his camera out and was pointing it at the building. The bodyguard and the financier were all looking that way. This was it. This was the guy who’d ripped him off and cost him his house and his career. The guy who’d fleeced the world and laughed about it. Fucking Peter Harrington! He was only fifty yards away, and now Charlie glanced over and, without actually looking his way, move
d so that the bankster saw him coming, too, dragging his little entourage of Chinese celebrity hounds. Charlie moved in between the bodyguard and Peter Harrington. He was twenty yards away. Should he say something now? Was this the time? Wait another few paces? What was he was going to say? Something about eight million dollars? Or six hundred million?
He was only thirty feet away now, Peter Harrington seeming now like just a regular guy on the street standing with an old man and a local. They locked eyes, and then he saw it: the face lit up in that way he’d witnessed a million times. That dumbstruck recognition, that worshipful stupor, that wonder, that amazement, that sense that the whole world had just expanded into something huge and fabulous, like a movie or a video. He was a fan!
Charlie was looking his way. He was supposed to say something, right? Something about owing, or payback or something, but he couldn’t remember, because the guy was a fan! For Christ’s sake, the guy was smiling! He looked like he’s about to ask for a fucking autograph! And now he was only three feet away from the fucker, completely blank-minded, and the guy was reaching his hand out to shake, and the bodyguard was starting to shift a little like he senses something.
“Hey,” Harrington said softly, in a flat tone of voice. “I’m Pete Harrington.”
“I know you are!” the financier said. “I really like your music!”
He was frozen there, and Charlie was just gaping at him now, five feet away, with this look of anger and fucking horror, like, How could I go all this way with you, all the way to China, and you’re just fucking going to forgive and forget because this guy’s a fan? Charlie was shaking his head now, subtly, but visibly.
“Yeah, well—” He could barely get it out: “You’re a fucking dirtbag!”
He saw the expression of puzzlement and hurt on his opponent’s face; then the bodyguard started to move toward him. In that instant, Charlie came lurching toward him, saying, Listen you, who do you think you are! And then Charlie seemed to trip and go stumbling sideways into the bodyguard. He spotted Charlie’s leg wrapping behind the bodyguard’s leg, and then both of them went down in a tangle of limbs, with Charlie sprawled out on top of him, swearing.
The financier had a look of disbelief on his face. Pete stepped forward, his left hand moving up to execute the trap, even though the banker was too stupefied to raise his hand. In a motion he’d practiced thirty thousand times, he shuffled in with his left foot, drew his right fist back, and then sent it snapping forward like the piston of a locomotive. He felt the small bones of the bridge of the other man’s nose under his knuckles, and heard a faint clicking, mashing sound as he hit. Harrington staggered backward a few steps and then sat down clumsily on the sidewalk.
The bodyguard was trying to struggle to his feet, but Charlie was rolling around on top of him, tangled up with his legs, yelling, “Get off of me! You’re hurting me!”
The financier was curled up on the pavement with his hands over his face. Pete stepped in and kicked him a couple of times in the legs. “Remember this while you’re spending all that money!”
He turned and began walking quickly toward the car. There were at least ten people with cell phones out, filming him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Peter Harrington still on the ground, covering his nose, while the bodyguard was still trying to get free. He reached the car and ducked inside. The bodyguard was up now, but it was too late, and as they pulled out into traffic he took a few running steps and then stopped. A million cell phones were out, a million eyes. He had done it. He’d touched the untouchable. He just wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do next.
V
Return of the Noise
1
The House near Monthey
When Beth Blackman was in third grade her classroom had featured a poster printed by the Swiss Ministry of Tourism. It showed a steep-roofed chalet floating in a vast green ocean of pastureland. There were flower boxes below the windows and stacks of logs, and she spent hours as the teacher droned away in the distance, wandering into its spaces and imagining who lived there. It never occurred to her that one day she would find out.
It happened when she was thrashing in the wake of her divorce from Pete Harrington. She was trying to put the experience behind her and Nino seemed like the perfect vehicle for that. He was the exquisitely dressed scion of an old Italian family who had come to Los Angeles to be a movie producer. Nino was beautiful and hapless and she knew within ten minutes of meeting him that he would not be successful. He presented no threat to her whatsoever, and that was why she’d accepted his invitation to go skiing in Switzerland. She wasn’t really a skier: three days into the trip, she sprained her wrist and was content to sit in the lodge reading or poking through the little villages below the slopes.
They would stay at one resort for a few days and then drive to the next in the 1962 Alfa Romeo that Nino kept telling her was a classic. Somewhere between Gstaad and Monthey the red light on the dashboard of the old car began to flicker. Nino pulled to the side and opened the hood, absorbed in his little drama of the manly and mechanical. She got out and glanced at the engine in a show of support, then turned to examine the landscape.
They were in a wide snow-caked valley that ran along the left side of the road. On the right the mountains sprang directly upward, silhouetted against a colorless sky. It was high, empty farmland, and she imagined that in the summer it was transformed into lush grassy fields with cows and wildflowers. Now, it was a great empty tablecloth scratched by stone walls and leafless branches. Nino declared that they needed water for the radiator, and they got back in the car and drove slowly along, their eyes on the steadily climbing temperature gauge. Soon they came to a small stone house that seemed anchored there among the heaving landscape.
The roof was high and peaked, with deep overhanging eaves, and someone had stacked firewood to head level along the heavy walls. It reminded her instantly of a house in a tourism poster that had hung in her classroom, and in moments she had convinced herself that it was the same house, or, if not the very same, somehow, the same.
They pulled into the driveway and turned the car off, opened the hood, and then stood for a moment in the silent landscape. She breathed in the crystalline air. Around them, the sky was stuffed with undulating masses of silver and gray that vaulted over the mountains. She’d never seen clouds like that before. Sets of skis were leaning against the wall, five or six pairs of different sizes, and a snowboard. The ground floor of the house seemed to be a sort of stable for animals, and she could hear the scoffing voices of the goats as they climbed the wooden stairs to the front door. Something exciting was happening. It was that house. She was actually here. Nino rang the bell.
The door was opened by a blond woman who seemed in her forties and wore a sweater and jeans. She looked heavy and strong, in the way of German women, with big breasts and hips, but not ungraceful. More like a very well-made object: strong and in proportion and not liable to break easily. She had a wide, clean face with light-colored eyes. She looked like the kind of woman she might want to be at that age, if she lived here in Switzerland, instead of in Los Angeles.
The woman looked at Nino, and then her eyes moved to Beth, and she seemed more at her ease to see a petite young American in a ski jacket and fur-topped boots. Beth smiled at her and said, “Hello, I’m Beth!” as if it was a professional setting. The woman smiled back and said her name, but it wasn’t Marta, or Gertrude, or anything Beth had ever heard before, and she forgot it as soon as the woman finished speaking. Nino started explaining about the car, but the woman didn’t seem to know English, or French, or Italian. Finally Nino motioned at the steaming chassis and said “Wasser? Wasser?” The woman hesitated a moment, her gaze moving between the two of them. She glanced past them, up toward the mountains, and stared at the heights for a few seconds. She uttered a few words in a language that might have been Polish or Hungarian, and then she pushed open the outer door and motioned them in.
It took a few moments for Bet
h’s eyes to adjust to the interior. It seemed like an old house, with wooden walls interspersed with stone that had been plastered and painted over. There was a cuckoo clock above the sink, and the black cast-iron woodstove in the corner had a kettle on it, gently steaming. She could imagine the woman getting up each morning and lighting the stove and winding the cuckoo clock. A steep stairway disappeared into an upper floor.
The woman offered them coffee and then set a pot of water to boiling before leading her to an armchair by the woodstove. She turned to Nino. “Wasser!” she said with great emphasis, and she led him outside.
Beth sat in the armchair, feeling the dry warmth of the stove and looking out the picture window at the white landscape. Her mind wandered out into the vast porcelain trough of snow-covered valley, off past the wooden fence posts that poked from the snow, down toward the faraway clumps of trees and to the neighbor’s houses, so small that she could hide them with her thumb.
What did this woman do here, alone each day, hour after hour? There was a family: she could tell by the selection of boots and shoes by the door. She could imagine their footsteps moving across the ceiling as they woke up. What was her husband like? Was he handsome, quiet? Did he have a pleasant voice, or a harsh Germanic manner? And what about their children? She could spot several feminine coats, and the sort of colorful rubber rain boots that looked like they might be worn by a teenage girl. A schoolbook sat on the bench by the door.
She tried to imagine all the circumstances that had led their hostess to this house in a country where she didn’t speak the language. She made guesses about her life: this was a woman comfortable in the cold. This was a woman who could carry things. This was a woman who cooked, who bought gifts for her children. She thought, with a pang of grief: this was a woman whose husband would never cheat on her.
This Is How It Really Sounds Page 21
