Flower Net

by Lisa See

  “The storm,” Zhao said. He shifted his gaze away from David and out to the water. “It was bad. We were here like this—outside. We tie ourselves to”—the man struggled to find the word, gave up, and pointed to the railing. He brought his eyes back to David. “People wash away. I see it with my own eyes. Jie Fok—he was a farmer near Guangzhou. Some others too—I don’t know their names.”

  “And the crew?”

  “They are yelling. They are saying the ship is going down. And then this boat comes. We think it has come for us. But it is small. The captain, the others, they get in a saving boat.”

  “A lifeboat?”

  “Yes, lifeboat. They get in that boat and they go down to the water. They have a rope to pull them to the other boat. Even so, I see some of those men wash away too. Then that other boat, it just goes away.” Zhao paused. “You think we are going down soon? You think someone comes before the next storm?”

  “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “Every night another storm comes. This ship is going down.”

  David ignored this and asked, “Who did you contract with to come on this trip? What are the names of the crewmen?” But Zhao had turned away and was no longer listening. David stood up again and headed back toward the helicopter. Why would anyone expose himself to this danger, David wondered, and what sort of men would want to profit from this misery?

  David knew the answers. The immigrants—like most immigrants—wanted freedom. These days, freedom was synonymous with money. The men and women on this ship were coming to America to make their fortunes. Since most of the immigrants didn’t have money to begin with, they contracted with the triads—a free trip, room, and board in exchange for years of indentured servitude. These people would work in sweatshops and restaurants, as prostitutes and drug runners. Once they’d earned back their contracted price, they would be free. The problem was that it was almost impossible to meet their contractual obligations.

  The triads, of course, were also motivated by money. A ship the size of the China Peony could carry about four hundred people in relative comfort. For this voyage, the boat had been loaded with five hundred passengers. Each of these people had contracted for an average of $20,000 apiece to get to the United States. Some—like Zhao—had probably agreed to pay back as much as $30,000 for the privilege of a seat on the deck in the fresh air. Less fortunate travelers would have agreed to between $10,000 and $12,000 to be crowded below. Altogether the gross revenues would total about $10 million.

  The rub for the U.S. government was that this “catch” was insignificant. The INS and the State Department estimated that for every Chinese who came to this country legally, another three arrived illegally. At least a hundred thousand illegal Chinese crossed the border each year, by every means imaginable—from airplanes to fishing boats to freighters like this one.

  As David considered all this, he realized there was something about the China Peony’s situation that didn’t sit right with him. Why had the Rising Phoenix walked—sailed—away from $10 million?

  He was halfway back to the chopper when Gardner found him. The young man looked awfully green. “I know,” David said. “The crew’s gone. You tell Campbell?”

  “Yeah, I told him. He’s on the radio now.”

  “I need to talk to him. We’ve got to get these people off of this thing.”

  The men and women who clustered around the helicopter created an aisle as the two Caucasians approached. Campbell and the pilot sat in the chopper with the doors shut, both with their headsets on, both taking turns shouting into the radio and scribbling down notes. Every once in a while they would look at each other and grimace. Finally Campbell pulled off his headphones in disgust and opened the door.

  “I’ve got nothing but bad news. The storm’s coming in faster than the weather service expected. We can’t take off because we won’t beat the bastard back to shore. The Coast Guard won’t be here until tomorrow morning. They’re going back to the harbor! And I don’t know about you guys, but I doubt this sucker will make it through the night.”

  This last bit of news sent Gardner to the railing, where he promptly puked. Campbell reached back into the chopper, then handed David a couple of Dramamine. “You’ll have to swallow them dry. I don’t think you want to drink any of the water on board—if there is any water on board.”

  David took the tablets and swallowed. Campbell went on. “Gardner’s out of it for a while. So I guess that leaves you, me, and Jim here to work things out.” Campbell’s black face wrinkled into a broad grin. He held up the piece of paper with his notes. “Here are our instructions to keep this tub afloat. Let’s see if they’ll work.”

  By six, darkness had settled and rain had begun to spot the deck. David and Jack Campbell had found a few people—including Zhao—who spoke a smattering of English. These men were conscripted as translators. “We need to find someone who knows something about ships,” Campbell told them. “Anybody—a sailor, a fisherman. Find them.” Miraculously, they found an electrician and a mechanic. These two men—Wei and Lau—went below to see if they could get the engines started. Immediately they sent word back. The ship was in trouble; there was too much water in the bilge and the pumps were out.

  For the first time, David went below decks, where conditions were even worse than outside. The air was thick, hot, humid, and eye-stingingly pungent. In the vast holds of the ship, David found dozens of people weakened by seasickness, lack of fresh water, and meager rations. Some of the men had vomited or defecated right where they lay. Most of the women were too weak to stand, let alone go out on deck to see what all the commotion had been about. A few people appeared delirious; others seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. Adding to the misery was the strong sense of fear that permeated these dank rooms. These people knew they were finished; their dream of finding a new life in America was ruined.

  Again, David had the feeling that there was something more here. These immigrants—at least the healthy ones—seemed more frightened than those he’d seen detained and deported in the past. Perhaps they feared the Rising Phoenix. The organization was known to be obsessed with retribution and brutal punishment. But this didn’t make sense, because the profiteers themselves had abandoned their valuable cargo. Perhaps the immigrants were just afraid the ship would sink. Just afraid the ship would sink! David himself was terrified.

  For the ship to stay afloat through the night, everyone needed to help. Some of the stronger men—those from above decks—wrapped pieces of cloth around their noses and mouths, then created a line from the first open-air deck down to the lowest part of the ship. Buckets were passed from hand to hand—slowly, painstakingly removing the water from the hold and throwing it overboard. Not knowing what else he could do, David took a place in the line.

  As the sea became rougher, men fell ill and vomited where they stood. But no one left the line. The only relief came when every twenty minutes or so the line would rotate up. Those who had been at the very bottom would move twenty paces closer to the fresh air; those who were at the top took their turns down at the very bottom where the water—scummed with oil and who knew what else—seemed never to diminish. No one spoke. The men—their faces set in tight lines of determination—grimly continued their work.

  Every so often they heard the choke of the engine. It would catch for a moment, then fall silent again. The men only intensified their labor. After five hours, one hold had been emptied. The men showed David where there were others. He felt lost under here. The air was vile with oil fumes, human waste, and what David could only surmise were dead rats. Corners melted into darkness. Iron stairs seemed to go nowhere. Hallways ended abruptly. He would walk with a group of five or six, get partway down a hallway, then the group would break into loud, intense arguing. The men screamed at each other in their harsh voices, gesticulated wildly at David, and refused to let him pass. Zhao would finally speak a few words in English. “This is not the way. We go othe
r way.” And they would all turn around and go back the way they had come. It seemed to David that they were walking in circles, and yet, they had found five more holds that were waist deep in icy water.

  Around midnight as the storm buffeted the Peony, the engine sputtered and came to life. Throughout the ship a collective cheer went up, but even this was short-lived. They still had so much to do. Within minutes, the pumps were started. Against their steady drone, David abandoned the men he’d been working with to look for Campbell. He found the FBI agent in the engine room. The older man was sweaty and grease stained, but neither his energy nor his humor had ebbed.

  “You look like shit,” Campbell said, and laughed.

  For the first time, David looked down at his suit. Sometime this evening he’d taken off the jacket and left it somewhere. His shirt was smudged and a sleeve had a tear along the shoulder seam. His pants—wet with the fouled water from the hold—clung to his legs. David couldn’t help but grin himself, but the moment of levity quickly dissipated.

  “Okay, this is where we are,” Campbell said. “We’ve got the engines going…”

  “That I know.”

  “We’ve got the pumps going. Are they working? Can you tell?”

  “Yeah, and they sure beat doing the work by hand.”

  “Wei tells me that if we keep the ship headed into the waves and everything else sealed up, we should be all right.”

  David looked at Wei. He was small—maybe five feet three inches—wiry and toothless. “If that’s what he says, then we’ll do it.”

  “Great. Get everyone below decks and—as they say in the movies—batten down the hatches.”

  It seemed like an easy enough job, but it turned out to be one of the most challenging of the day. Many of the immigrants—including Zhao, who had gone back to his old spot and was sitting with a tarpaulin around his shoulders—refused to leave the deck.

  “Come on, Zhao,” David insisted, shouting over the storm. Strong winds from the west pelted him with rain. “I need your help. We’ve got to get everyone down below.”

  “I stay out here the whole trip.”

  “You’re going to die out here is what’s going to happen.” He motioned to the sea. Towering waves caused the ship to pitch violently. Every so often the Peony’s propellers could be heard as they rose up out of the water. “You’re going to wash overboard.”

  “I make it this far. I make it to end.”

  David squatted. “I need you, Zhao. I need you to help me with the others. If you help me with them now, I promise to help you later.”

  The Chinese man considered. “How do I know if a white ghost tells the truth?”

  David extended his hand for a formal handshake. “I always tell the truth.”

  By four in the morning, the worst of the storm had passed over the China Peony. Campbell had called to shore to say they were going to make it and to get off their asses and get a ship out here to tow them in, please. Here and there, men dozed. Others clustered in groups, smoking cigarettes, speaking in low voices. Gardner, still sick, was resting in the captain’s cabin. Campbell had fallen asleep at a long table in the crew’s galley, his head resting in the crook of his left elbow. His right arm swung at his side in rhythm with the ship’s movements.

  David lay on the top bunk in a cabin that must have been shared by four crewmen. He’d stripped off what was left of his clothes and had draped them over the end of the bunk to dry. Below him, two men gently snored. The helicopter pilot occupied the upper bunk across from him, but he’d turned to the wall. David stared at the ceiling, where a handful of postcards had been taped. Whoever had bunked here had been at sea a long time. One postcard showed a sweet-faced Chinese maiden posing before a colorful bouquet of carnations. Others showed Hong Kong Harbor, a neonlit Tokyo street, the Golden Gate Bridge. David wondered wearily where that sailor was tonight. Had he washed into the sea when the crew had abandoned ship? Or was he in Chinatown, singing at a karaoke bar?

  David closed his eyes and listened to the reassuring pulse of the engines. He could honestly say he’d never had a day like this before in his life.

  In that stage between sleep and wakefulness, something started to edge in on David’s consciousness. What was it they had been trying to hide from him down in the hold? He opened his eyes. He whispered, “Jim, you awake?” The pilot didn’t move. David hopped down, slipped on his damp clothes, then quietly pulled open the heavy door and went out into the deserted hallway. He turned left and headed down a flight of stairs.

  He paused to look at the immigrants. No one noticed him. He continued down another flight and down again. By now the stairs were little more than steep metal ladders. The air was humid and rotten, the hallway dimly lit. David closed his eyes and tried to think back, visualizing where he had been earlier in the day. There was a place where the men kept blocking his way. That was where he wanted to go. He passed the holds where they all had worked so hard. He turned a corner and found himself in a huge, deserted room with a ten-foot-high iron tank sitting against the wall. He had been there before, only to be led off in another direction time and time again.

  He walked over to the tank and knocked on the side. It sounded hollow, but what did that mean? If the day had proven anything to David, it was that he didn’t know anything about the sea or ships. The door was painted a drab green. Rust stains seeped from hinges and bolts. He tried the round crank. It moved easily in his hands. He turned once, twice, pulling hand over hand….

  A force pushed him back, and he fell to the floor. Water splashed over him for a moment, then spread out into a shallow puddle. An odor of decay filled the air. Next to David lay a mound of putrefying flesh. The body—human—was grossly swollen. The eyes and tongue protruded. The lips had pulled back, revealing black teeth. The skin—what was left of it—was covered in greenish black algae. The distinctive band of a Rolex glinted in the decomposing meat of the wrist.

  David pushed away, sliding across the slippery surface of the floor. As he looked down, he saw on his chest something that looked like a glove. He tried to bat it away, but it stuck to his shirt. Then he realized what it was. The skin and fingernails of the dead man—woman?—had come loose and slipped off. Panicking now, David forced himself to look at the body again. The flesh from both the hands and feet had come off—like gloves, like socks.

  That was enough to send David reeling to his feet. He staggered out of the hold and scrambled up the narrow staircases, paying no attention now to how much noise he made. Finally, he pushed through a last door and was on the deck. The rain was coming down hard and the ship still pitched relentlessly. David grabbed hold of the railing and threw up repeatedly.

  But even as he was sick, even as one part of his mind recoiled at what he had seen, even as he wished that he could scrub from his body the horrible slime of that chamber, another part of his mind was already working. How was he going to find out who that person was? Shivering, his head hanging over the railing, his body soaking wet, David began to plot. Order an autopsy. Have Campbell call the FBI—better yet, the State Department—to make inquiries about missing persons in China. Arrange for extra interviewers at Terminal Island. Because two things were certain: That watch did not belong to an ordinary immigrant, and the mass of illegals on board knew about the body.

  3

  JANUARY 21–22

  Terminal Island

  The next ten hours were a nightmarish blur. David could vaguely remember stumbling back to the galley and waking Jack Campbell. He could remember how smoothly the FBI agent responded, calming David down, getting him to explain what had happened, then going down again to that horrible place. He could remember Campbell sealing off the hold, leaving the body half floating in muck. David recalled the helicopter pilot bringing in a bottle of liquor dredged out of a first-aid kit and the feel of the harsh brown liquid as it slid down his throat. David desperately wanted to change clothes and sluice his body with seawater, but Campbell wouldn’t allow it, claiming t
hat evidence might be destroyed.

  And then they waited. David could remember sitting out on the deck and watching as a cold, gray dawn rolled across the sky. Rain still lashed the deck, but the ocean had tamed to undulating swells. Finally Jim loped out to his helicopter and called to shore. David could remember Jim saying that the Coast Guard would be there in a few hours to tow them back to the harbor and that he was ready to fly back himself. Campbell had wanted David to go, but he’d refused. After Jim and Noel Gardner left, Campbell and David began interviewing the immigrants.

  Last night, David had worked side by side with many of these men. They had labored together to save one another’s lives. This morning most would not speak to him, and none would meet his eyes. “I have that man on me,” David said once in frustration, but nothing he said made any of them speak. Even Zhao turned away.

  When they reached port late that afternoon everything moved rapidly. Officials from the INS and the Coast Guard boarded and spoke both in Mandarin and Cantonese over bullhorns. The immigrants gathered their few belongings and padded down the gangplank and into what looked like a gigantic warehouse. David was whisked away in an ambulance. All the while he resisted, repeating over and over, “I need to be there. Take me back.” Finally, the paramedic clamped an oxygen mask over his face. At the hospital David was treated for shock and dehydration, then given a tetanus shot. With an FBI forensics expert on hand, David’s clothes were removed, wrapped in plastic bags, and labeled. At two in the morning, he was released wearing hospital scrubs. David had never felt so alone as he did when he walked into his empty house. With considerable effort he figured out that he’d gone without sleep for forty-three hours. He showered, changed into sweatpants and a sweater, and fell into a fitful sleep.

  He woke up abruptly at six-thirty in the morning, showered again—he thought he would never get the slime of that night off him—and went for a mind-clearing run around the Lake Hollywood Reservoir near his house.