by James Church
Li’s door was shut, which wasn’t normal. I knocked and went in.
“Bo-ting, what’s the problem?” If by some miracle he didn’t know about Madame Fang yet, I wasn’t going to tell him. If Li didn’t know, then maybe Beijing didn’t either. Unlikely, but maybe for once things were not that dire, at least not yet. Still, there was no reason to relax. If Li needed to see me urgently and his door was shut, something was wrong.
Lieutenant Li had a fair complexion, but this morning fair had turned to deathly pale. As soon as he saw me, he leaped from his chair. “Let’s go for a stroll and enjoy the air. I want to stretch my legs.” Bo-ting and I only went for a “stroll” in serious emergencies. Air had nothing to do with it.
“Can it wait a few minutes?” Going back outside into the rain was not something I wanted to do right away. “How about I have some tea first?” The closer I looked at Li, the more he resembled a corpse. It was unnerving. “You feel all right?”
“This country is full of tea,” he said and waved his arms. “We can get some down the street.”
“Yes, we can, but it’s storming, you realize.” His fishpond was full to overflowing, and the trees behind it were bending perilously in the wind. “The roads are flooded near the river. I got soaked on the way in; all the buses were throwing up sheets of water.”
“Then don’t go near the river! Stay on streets with no buses!” Li is always calm. I didn’t like to see him in this exclamatory mode. “Rain is not our biggest concern right now, trust me. And this storm is nothing compared with what is coming up from the south. I’ll meet you outside in two minutes. Get an umbrella.”
Gloom enveloped me as I walked back to my office. I never should have let that woman into my house, pearls or no pearls. Umbrella in hand, I was on my way out, reaching for the doorknob when the new man, Jang, looked up. “Going somewhere, sir?”
“Where have you been, Jang? I rang before and you didn’t buzz me in. Something wrong with the wiring?”
“I must have been in the bathroom. I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not used to the food up here. It’s not like Shanghai.”
“There’s a drugstore in the building out front. Get yourself fixed up when you’re on break.”
“Thank you, sir. Are you going somewhere?”
“Out.”
“Contact number? Is your cell phone on?”
“When I need a nanny, Jang, I’ll put in for one.”
“Yes, sir. Just trying to be helpful. It’s standard procedure in Shanghai: Keep in touch. That way, if something comes up, there’s no gap in communications. The chief there always wants to be in touch. By the way, the rain has picked up. You might consider wearing a hat. I don’t think an umbrella will do much good in this wind. This is Shanghai weather.” It was said smugly.
I turned around and walked back to the duty desk. “This is not Shanghai weather. This is our weather. Shanghai hasn’t got a lock on the heavens. How things get done or from which direction the wind blows in Shanghai is of no interest to me. None. Nor is it of any interest to you as long as you are attached to this office. We have our own procedures here. They are effective. They are what we are comfortable with. Moreover, they suit our tastes. The chief in Shanghai can…”
Jang went on alert, his little dog nose twitching. I discarded what I felt like saying and fell back on less descriptive language.
“… do whatever he wants.” I despised the chief in Shanghai. The feeling was mutual, which didn’t bother me. I knew that he had his hair done once a week in a beauty shop and that he owed his position to a relative. “I’m going. Period. I will be back. Period. Over and out. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir, only one thing. Who’s in charge in your absence? Lieutenant Li went out the door a minute ago. If you don’t mind my saying so, he was wearing a hat.”
“Give it a rest, Jang.” New officers could be fussy, trying to prove their worth, but Jang was worse than normal. He was unusually worse, and if he was from the Third Bureau, it complicated the task of flushing him down the toilet. At least I was alert as to what I was up against, not like with Fu Bin. I made a mental note to put something nasty in Jang’s file at the proper time. “There won’t be any emergency for the next twenty or thirty minutes. We’re in Yanji. It’s quiet compared to the big cities. That’s how we like it, and that’s how we plan to keep it. Try to remember that.”
When I stepped outside into a ferocious wind, Bo-ting was braced against the wall, holding on to his hat with one hand and looking at his watch impatiently. “We don’t have much time,” he said.
“Fine, we can talk as we sail over to the tea shop on Dooran Street.”
5
The tea shop was one of Lieutenant Li’s regular haunts. It wasn’t actually on Dooran Street but tucked away in an alley nearby. The couple that ran it worked for us part-time. They were old and liked the extra money. It wasn’t hard work, and it wasn’t much money, but it gave them something to do beyond pouring tea. If someone odd wandered in and watched the door anxiously from a table in the back; if there was a long conversation between people who shouldn’t be having a long conversation; if something didn’t seem right about someone, Li heard about it when he stopped by. Mostly, the couple heard things from the girls who worked on Dooran Street. The girls were like little birds; they came in on cold evenings and huddled together, chirping and laughing about their customers before it was time to go out and work some more. They knew enough to tell the old couple if one of their customers let drop a piece of information that would interest us. We could have employed the girls directly, but that would have led to a lot of extra paperwork. This way worked fine, through the teahouse couple, so Li and I agreed we should just let it alone.
On the walk over, through the wind and the rain, Li gave me a quick summary of what he’d heard from his sources. There was a Headquarters operation in the works, he said, and it looked like it was going to be unusually ugly. He didn’t actually have the order in hand yet. I listened and didn’t ask any questions. How he knew what he knew, I had long since stopped wondering. His sources were his; if he trusted them, so did I. The main thing was that I knew Li wouldn’t hold back. Whatever he told me would be everything he knew from his sources. Anything he didn’t say was what he didn’t know. There was no need for poking or prodding.
Once we were in the teahouse, we sat glumly, dripping and windblown, for a few minutes. After the tea arrived, Li came to life again and filled in the details. We were about to receive orders to launch a special crackdown—a “hard strike,” as Headquarters likes to call these things in a dramatic flourish—in both Yanji and Tumen. In a break with normal practice, the bureau wasn’t going to handle this one alone. Two, maybe three squads would show up suddenly—no date yet—from Headquarters with a list, and in the space of twenty-four hours, we were to assist them in rounding up everyone on it. Li said even his sources hadn’t seen the final list, but as soon as they did, they’d pass it along.
Having Headquarters squads show up suddenly, without any notice, would complicate our lives. These squads were clumsy, and they smirked.
Li kept piling on the bad news. The list apparently would go beyond the normal quota of ten or fifteen officials suspected of taking money on the side, selling off state assets, or stepping too ostentatiously on people who had then not suffered in silence but complained so loudly it had reached the ears of outsiders, especially Western reporters.
“Bad,” I said.
Li poured some tea into my cup. “Worse,” he said. “The list includes Chinese or Korea-Chinese who have dealings with North Korea.”
I groaned.
Li indicated there was more. “The order, it’s numbered.”
That was like a death sentence, only not as welcome. Numbered meant the order was part of a sequence. A number one meant there would be a number two, and then a number three. Maybe more. There was no way to cauterize this wound. We would be bleeding for months.
When he was done, Li looked
at me numbly. Li didn’t like hard strike operations of any type or size. They disrupted the rhythms he’d established, scrambled relationships, cut links painstakingly forged with people whose activities we needed to know about. It took months to put things in order again. This monster would set him back a year, at least. What neither of us said, but we both knew, was that the timing of this operation was ominous; nothing special was going on in Yanji, other than Madame Fang’s appearance. Expanding things to include people with contacts across the river meant Headquarters knew something we didn’t, and that meant we were goats.
Almost as an afterthought, Li added that he was working on my meeting with Handout. If he could, he said, he’d arrange it before the hard strike teams showed up so that Headquarters wouldn’t be able to complain that we had overlooked a source that could have given us important information—even though both Li and I knew that Handout was the last person on the planet who had important information on anything.
I thanked Li, finished my tea, and left. He’d do whatever he had to do to warn his local contacts. My first thought was that I needed to get home and see if my uncle knew anything that might be helpful. Before that, I decided, I might as well stop at Gao’s. It was on the way, and on top of everything, my uncle had reminded me that Gao owed us money. The debt was an old one. Not long after my uncle arrived unannounced at my door, Gao had appeared to ask his help in discovering the source of several threatening notes that had been wrapped around bricks and thrown through his windows. I hadn’t told anyone that my uncle had once been a police detective in Pyongyang; after Gao left, I asked my uncle how word got out.
“Beats the hell out of me,” he said.
The case turned out to be ridiculously simple. Uncle O had charged only for five days’ expenses, but because he didn’t like Gao—I didn’t know why, and he wouldn’t tell me—the expenses had been abnormally high. Gao had looked the bill over, taken a few puffs on the Cleopatra hanging from his lips, and said he would pay in a couple of weeks. “The man charges like Sholock Hams, Bingo,” he said the next time I saw him, “but in this case, it’s worth the money.”
Apparently, it was so much worth the money to Gao that he neglected to pay the bill. I’d forgotten all about it, but a debt is a debt, especially one that was two years overdue. Other than our general lack of cash, I couldn’t figure out what had sparked my uncle’s interest in debt collection at this moment. At least it was a good sign that he was finally paying attention to our financial situation, which—as I kept trying to impress on him—was dire.
The rain had stopped, but the wind was not about to give up yet. It blew trash along the street, sending empty cans clattering and discarded broken umbrellas spinning down the sidewalks. I made my way to Gao’s neighborhood, which is several notches below nondescript. The front door to the place was locked. That got my attention. Gao never took vacations, and if he was sick, he had his younger brother take care of the betting. One thing Gao didn’t want was for customers to walk away because of a locked door, especially customers who made the trip in stormy weather, maybe especially those who particularly came in stormy weather because they didn’t want anyone else to see them. I went around to the back door, which was slightly ajar.
“Gao,” I called. “You in there?”
There was no answer, so I went up the steps and knocked. I heard a thud and then a groan. There wasn’t time to call the police, and anyway Gao didn’t like them nosing around. He didn’t consider me the police, mostly because when I was there, I made it a point not to notice the other customers. If local officials walked in, they didn’t see me and I didn’t see them. I had a harder time ignoring provincial officials, but Gao kept the lights dim enough that it was possible to pretend. I listened for half a second, heard nothing else, and pushed the door open.
“Nobody move,” I shouted. Since I wasn’t armed, that seemed the safest thing to say at the moment.
“Don’t worry, Bingo, I’m not going anywhere, OK?” Gao was on the floor, his face twisted in pain, like when some high-stakes gambler got lucky at his expense. He groaned as he raised himself up on his elbow. “Can you get me a cigarette? They’re on the counter, next to the betting slips.”
“What happened?”
“I slipped, OK? I think I hit my head on the way down.”
“How come the front door was locked? You on strike?”
“What are you, a one-man interrogation bureau? I hit my head, I twisted my ankle, OK, and I need a smoke. If you don’t want to help, get the hell out and come back tomorrow.”
Gao wasn’t known for his bonhomie, but I could see he was worried about more than his ankle. “You alone?” I glanced at the doorway into the next room.
“No, I’m not alone. There’s a troupe of half-naked dancing girls in the front parlor drinking tea, OK, what do you think? Stop asking questions.” He frowned and rubbed the back of his head. His hand came back with blood on it.
“I think you may have broken your ankle.” I looked at the blood on his hand. “Let’s take a look at your head, too, while we’re at it.”
“You’re a doctor on top of being a lousy gambler? My head hurts, OK, more than my ankle. I told you, I slipped.”
“You don’t seem in a mood for company. Maybe I should leave you here on the floor.”
“Maybe I owe you money.”
“Yeah, you do, quite a bit. When I put on the interest for late payment, it’s going to come to a nice package.”
“I’ll pay, OK, next week.”
I thought about telling him he’d pay me right now, just to see how riled he would get, but I decided to let it go. “Fine.”
“Your uncle sent you?”
That might have caught my attention if it hadn’t miffed me. “My uncle doesn’t send me places. I’m allowed to make my own decisions. I even have a decree from Headquarters giving me plenipotentiary powers in that regard. You know what plenipotentiary means? It means I can kick your tail all the way to Mount Tai if I want to.” I patted my pockets. “Damn, the paper must be in my other trousers. I’ll bring it next time I’m in the neighborhood. You’ll still be there on the floor, of course. Your ankle will have swollen to the size of a basketball.” I turned to go. “You might even have gangrene. They amputate for gangrene. Not too many one-legged gambling shop operators, but it might increase business—you can never overestimate the novelty factor.”
Gao looked at his ankle. Then he gave me a slippery smile. “Lucky you dropped by.”
“Yeah, lucky. I was on my way home and remembered you owed us. I thought I’d stop in. It seemed like a good time to collect, but I guess not. See you around.”
I was out the door and on the first step when Gao shouted, “Get back in here, OK? I got something to tell you.”
6
“Uncle, we don’t have time to waltz around each other.” I was standing in the workshop, among the pots of glue.
“Good, we’ll skip the dancing. You’re welcome to sit, or are you in a crashing hurry, as usual?”
“I am, and I’m not.”
“In that case, sit on the edge of the chair. That way you can spring up and leap out the door if necessary. Can I offer you refreshments? Tea?” He pointed to the brass teapot he kept on a hot plate near one of the glue pots.
“I wish you’d move either that hot plate or the glue. Sooner or later there’s going to be a fire in here.”
“So you say once a week. You mentioned you have a problem, and we can be sure it isn’t how I arrange my workshop.”
“The problem is a special order from Beijing.”
“A special order.” My uncle wasn’t easily impressed. “You don’t mind if I make some tea? Would you like a cup?”
“No, I don’t want a cup. I want to talk about this order. It’s numbered. When they number orders, that’s a bad sign. It signifies a series, and that means the first one isn’t the only arrow in the air.”
“Go on.”
“All of a sudden, they wan
t me to come down hard on corruption in this sector. Not just a normal cleanup. Not the light dusting we do a couple of times a year. It’s to be something thorough, a tough, hard strike, that sort of thing. They’ll want quick prosecution followed by even speedier execution of several people—enough to scare the daylights out of the rest of the crooks for a good long time.”
My uncle nodded. “Off with their heads.”
“Let’s hope they don’t order me to raid Gao’s place. Half the provincial government will be shot. He’ll be furious, probably cut off my entrée for at least a few weeks. That is, if they don’t shoot him, too.”
“Did he pay up? If he’s executed, I don’t want him leaving this planet with what he owes us.”
“He said he’d do it next week. Just before I arrived, I think, someone hit him on the head to keep him from talking, probably someone who knows about this corruption strike order. They might as well put these supersecret operations on billboards with flashing lights.”
“Someone hit him on the head? What do you think they used?”
“A length of dark wood.”
“It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t waste a good piece of lumber on his skull. That man must have a long list of enemies by now. All sorts of people owe him money, and for his part he probably owes some very bad people a pile. Look at how he’s held off paying us.”
“What do you have against Gao, other than the fact that he’s stiffed us for so long?”
“What makes you think I have something against him?”
“When he came over here to ask your help that first time, I had the feeling you two already knew each other. Bad vibrations.”
