Flower Net

by Lisa See

  David shook his head. “Neither of those can be right.”

  “Why?”

  “As you said yourself, neither of us would be working on this case if it weren’t for Guang.”

  Hulan reached across the table and took his hand. “Let’s not talk about the case anymore. Please?”

  He looked at her then, relishing the delicious irony of her request. Only a few days ago, he was pleading with her to talk about something besides the case. Besides, she was right. They had done a lot in the last two days. What harm could there be in having some time just for the two of them?

  After dinner, they returned to Hulan’s hotel room. They stood facing each other. He put his hand on her cheek, then slowly let it glide along her neck, over her collarbone, down to her breast. They took their time unbuttoning each other’s clothes. His mouth lingered on Hulan’s nipples. She moaned in response to the caress. Soon her lips sought the tender nook under his left ear, then went to the hollow place at the base of his neck before continuing their downward journey. Tonight David and Hulan would make their passion last.

  Several hours later, they were awakened by the ringing phone. It was a sign of how much Hulan had let down her guard that she didn’t hesitate to answer.

  “Hello,” she said sleepily.

  She and David had been nestled together on their left sides like two spoons. His hand had draped over her waist and held her left breast. Now she felt that hand begin to travel as the voice on the phone said in educated Mandarin, “We have something to discuss. Please meet me at the Green Jade Café on Broadway. You may of course bring Mr. Stark.”

  Hulan put the receiver down and pushed David’s hand away. In a low voice, she reported what she had just heard. He sat up, looking worried. “We’d better call the FBI. They can get ahold of Gardner and Campbell. Let them take care of this.”

  She shook her head. “No. The caller asked us to come. He wants to tell us something. If we want to hear it, we’d better go alone.”

  “It’s dangerous,” he insisted, but her look told him she was not afraid.

  After David and Hulan left the room, they stopped and knocked quietly at the door of Peter Sun’s room. When they received no answer, Hulan glanced at her watch. It was after midnight.

  “He should be back by now,” she said.

  “He’s just with Campbell. Don’t worry about it.”

  David drove down to Chinatown. Pink, yellow, and green neon lights from the closed shops and restaurants glowed on the deserted streets. David pulled into the open-air parking lot of one of the strip malls that lined Broadway. For the first time since being in California, Hulan felt chilly, and David put an arm around her as they walked to the Green Jade Café. Neither of them carried a weapon.

  Once David and Hulan reached the windows of this modest establishment, they could see that it was closed for business. Hulan suddenly flashed on the image of Cao Hua’s body. Believing now that another gruesome spectacle awaited them inside the restaurant, Hulan wished that they’d followed David’s advice and called the FBI or the police. The Green Jade’s door stood wide open, and they entered. The smell was enough to tell them why they had been summoned there.

  “Maybe you should wait here,” Hulan whispered.

  “I was going to say the same thing to you.”

  “I’m accustomed to death,” she said.

  He took her hand. “We’ll do this together.”

  Cautiously they walked into the restaurant. They listened but heard nothing. David gestured toward the kitchen and Hulan nodded. They edged around the cash register and pushed through the swinging doors.

  Zhao lay in five pieces. His arms and legs had been cut off in the traditional punishment for betrayal against the triads and tossed carelessly aside. His head and torso lay discarded in the middle of the floor. Behind him, on the stove, a huge triple-layer dumpling steamer sent out putrid fumes. Hulan was the first to move, crossing the blood-smeared floor gingerly and turning off the burner. David bent over Zhao, looked into the man’s eyes, and relived the moment on the Peony when he had felt that tug on his pants leg. Gently David closed Zhao’s eyes, stood, and went to Hulan’s side. She seemed paralyzed, staring at the huge steamer.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

  David carefully lifted the large bamboo lid and set it on the counter. Inside lay a mass of steamed flesh. This was all that remained of Noel Gardner.

  16

  FEBRUARY 6–7

  The Federal Courthouse

  They phoned the police and the FBI. They called the hotel and woke up Peter, who’d returned from his night on the town. An FBI agent brought him down to the restaurant an hour later still half-drunk. When Jack Campbell didn’t answer his phone or page, a couple of FBI agents went out to his house and found the phone off the hook, the pager on an end table in the living room, and the agent sprawled across his bed in a deep sleep—his reward for an evening of boozing and rabble-rousing. Campbell arrived at the Green Jade, claiming he wanted to see with his own eyes what had happened to his partner. Afterward, he sat down in one of the dining room chairs, put his head in his hands, and cried.

  It was close to four in the morning when David and Hulan left the restaurant. As they stepped through the doors that led to the street, they were immediately assaulted by minicam lights, microphones thrust in their faces, and a barrage of questions from local news teams that had picked up the reports on their police scanners. David took Hulan by the arm and they pushed through the crowd to his car. As he drove toward Hollywood, he kept one hand on the steering wheel, while the other held tightly onto Hulan’s cool palm.

  Once off the freeway, David let go of Hulan to focus on the curves that wended from the bottom of Beachwood Canyon up the narrow road to just below the HOLLYWOOD sign. He pulled into the garage, opened the door to the house, punched in the security code for the alarm system, and led Hulan through the kitchen and into the living room. She was drawn to the arched picture window and stood before it, gazing at the lights of the city below. How many times over how many years had he longed for this moment? But looking at her profile silhouetted in the dim light, he felt only desperate sadness.

  “Do you want a drink? Brandy? Water? A cup of tea?”

  She turned to him and said mournfully, “I feel responsible.”

  “So do I, Hulan, but we’re not. We couldn’t know it would turn out this way.”

  “Did they have families?”

  “Noel was single. God, he was just a kid, you know? He hadn’t really started his life. And Zhao? I read his file, but I can’t remember what it said.”

  Hulan rubbed her eyes. There was nothing to say.

  He took her by the arm. “Let’s go to bed.”

  David held Hulan to him, and suddenly he wanted to tell her everything that he’d held back since first seeing her again at the Ministry of Public Security.

  “You haven’t asked about my wife,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She sounded sincere, but he said, “I don’t want any more secrets. If tonight has shown us anything…Life is short. The future is uncertain. They’re clichés, Hulan, but there’s truth in them.” He squeezed her closer to him. “I just don’t want the past to stand between us. Not now, not ever again.”

  He could feel her breath against his chest. Finally she said, “Tell me about her.”

  “We met on a blind date. Jean was a lawyer, too, and Marjorie—remember her? at the firm?—set us up. It was Jean who first suggested that I was looking at what had happened with you all wrong. You left me in the worst possible way. You didn’t give me an opportunity to try to change your mind. You didn’t give me a chance to argue. You must have had a plan in place all along and it specifically involved hurting me. And I have to tell you, when I realized that, I hated you. Because I’d loved you when we were together. Because you’d lied to me. Because I couldn’t stop loving you even though you’d treated me so badly.”

 
; “I’m sorry…”

  “No, let me finish. We got married very quickly. You could say I was on the rebound, or that I wanted to trap her before she could get away, or that I needed to prove to myself that I could keep a woman. In retrospect, all of those things were true up to a point. I gave the marriage as much as I could. We bought this house. Our careers were going well. We had friends and went on vacations. I wanted to have children. But here’s the truth of it: I didn’t love her.”

  “You don’t have to say that.”

  “But it’s true,” he admitted. “Throughout our marriage I was still acting in reaction to you. What would you think if you saw this house? What would you think if you saw the necklace I bought Jean for her birthday? What would you think if you saw us with two children, a dog, and—Christ, I don’t know—a Volvo?”

  “So you divorced her.”

  David laughed bitterly. “She left me. She often threw you up to me. She called you the phantom who haunted our happiness. But when it came down to the end, she didn’t leave because of you. She left because I went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. ‘Why leave private practice when things are going so well?’ she asked. What she meant was, Why leave a cushy, high-paying job for a hard, low-paying one? What could I say? That I remembered how you used to talk about doing good in the world? That I remembered how we had talked about how we could make things better through the law? That even five, seven, ten years after you disappeared I still thought about you, that I still cared about what you would think of me if we ever met again?”

  Hulan waited, sensing that he wasn’t finished.

  “I got to a place where I couldn’t bear the thought that I would run into you and the best I could say for myself was that I’d filed another lawsuit, written another brief, or billed two thousand hours,” he continued. “In this country, people talk a lot about being true to oneself, about midlife crisis, about living for the moment. I made the move to the U.S. Attorney’s Office knowing it would drive Jean away and knowing at the same time that it was my only hope to regain my sense of who I was. No one in the office really cared about Asian organized crime, so I asked Rob to let me have those cases. I bugged him and Madeleine, too. The whole time—whether I won or lost—I was thinking, hoping, that maybe I would run into you.”

  “And you did.” Hulan pushed herself up on her elbows and stared at him. “You had no idea what I was doing. You were going on blind faith. And still you found me.”

  “I love you,” David said simply.

  Hulan ducked her head. When she raised it, he saw that her eyes were bright with tears. “I love you, too,” she whispered.

  “Now that we’re together again, I want us to stay that way.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “You don’t have to go back to China. You can stay here. I’ll get you asylum. Everything will work out.”

  “I want that as much as you,” she said.

  She put her head back down on his chest and closed her eyes. Outside a pink and lavender sky pushed away the night. Birds greeted the dawn tumultuously. David lay awake for a few more minutes, wondering.

  An hour and a half of fitful sleep and David and Hulan were up again. David had never gotten used to the time change going to China and had woken up there every morning at three. Since coming back to Los Angeles, he and Hulan experienced the reverse, partly due to jet lag and partly to desire. But this last night was different. They were running on adrenaline now, but still thoroughly exhausted.

  David showered, shaved, and dressed in a suit. They left early so that Hulan could stop by her hotel to change. From the Biltmore, David drove to the parking lot used by assistant U.S. attorneys. David put an arm around her shoulders as they walked up to the federal courthouse. On the twelfth floor, Lorraine buzzed them through. Outside David’s office they found Jack Campbell, Peter Sun, and dozens of other special agents from the FBI already waiting for them. Campbell looked terrible. His clothes were rumpled. He needed a shave. His eyes were red from tears and a raging hangover. He smelled as though he’d been sweating everything he’d drunk the night before—a corrosive combination of scotch, beer, and black coffee.

  David and Hulan were introduced to the other agents—white, black, old, young, but basically interchangeable in their suits, ties, starched shirts, holstered guns, and outrage. They were all expressing that anger in frustrated, intense voices. Finally David shouted, “Shut up!” At his outburst they did just that and David said, “We’ve got a preliminary hearing to set bail for Spencer Lee in a half hour. And I’m telling you right now, he’s going to walk out of here unless you can give me something—some real piece of evidence to tie him to Noel’s death.”

  “And the death of Mr. Zhao,” Hulan added, but the immigrant was far from the minds of the assembled agents.

  They went over their scant and circumstantial evidence. At the end, David said, “I think we have to face facts. Lee’s going to be on the streets in about two hours, which means you’ve got that much time to do whatever you need to do to get your surveillance in place. He may not have committed these murders, but he’s the key to them, and I don’t want to lose sight of him for a minute.”

  At this point Madeleine Prentice summoned David, Hulan, and Peter to her office. Rob Butler was there, as were two men from the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles. Madeleine made the necessary introductions, then said, “Okay, I want everyone to see this.” She flicked on the television and with the remote control zapped from channel to channel, stopping at local morning news shows.

  On one station, the honorary mayor of Chinatown reassured the populace that the enclave was still a safe place to visit. On another, the Chinese consul general in Los Angeles viciously attacked local law enforcement, the city, the state, the nation, and the president for the death of a Chinese national and for placing in jeopardy two Ministry of Public Security agents who had come here at the invitation of the United States. On one of the networks, Patrick O’Kelly unctuously opined that these murders were not connected to the arrest of the Chinese involved in the sale of nuclear trigger components of a week ago. And, of course, there were late-night clips from the crime scene. Body bags. Agents dressed in windbreakers with “FBI” printed in electric yellow on the back. Hulan and David leaving the restaurant, saying “No comment,” slipping into his car, and driving away. Jack Campbell—his face blotchy, his eyes puffy—ferociously putting his hand up over a camera lens.

  Madeleine flipped off the television, then said, “We’ve got several problems going at once. David, I understand you’re going to be in court in a few minutes. We’ll get back to that one in a minute. I’m dealing with Washington as best I can. I’ve got to tell you, you’ve put me in a tough position. And someone’s going to have to talk to the press. We need to get our voice in there and do a little damage control if we can. David?”

  “Can’t we put the press off?”

  “Are you crazy? Forgive me, but an FBI agent doesn’t get chopped up and cooked every day, and there’s the little matter of the illegal. What was his name?”

  “Zhao.”

  “Right, Zhao. What were you thinking? How could you have used someone like that? At the very least, we needed to discuss it. Christ! Don’t you watch the news? We’ve got an international crisis going on and you’re sending an illegal Chinese undercover.”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”

  “Well, your good idea has turned into an international incident of its own. Washington’s gone ballistic over the death of Special Agent Gardner. The mayor of Chinatown is threatening to sue. On what grounds, I don’t know, but he’s been a busy man these last few hours. He’s either been on every morning news show, as you’ve already seen, or he’s been on the phone to me, yelling and screaming about how badly this reflects on his community.”

  As David started to say something, she held up her hand. “I’m not done. Given all this, I’ve asked the consulate for help. We were the sponsoring agency for this fiasco,
and I personally feel terrible about what happened. Mr. Chen and Mr. Leung very graciously agreed to come to this meeting. They are worried about the safety of Inspector Liu and Investigator Sun and believe they should return home immediately.”

  David wasn’t going to let that happen. “We still need Inspector Liu to advise us on the case.”

  “I agree,” Peter said. David and Hulan looked at him in surprise. “She’s needed here.”

  “She is wanted in Beijing,” said Mr. Chen.

  “She will return when the case is over,” Peter retorted.

  “You will both return today,” Mr. Chen commanded.

  Hulan cleared her throat. “Excuse me, but don’t I have a say in any of this?”

  “We have received orders…”

  “You have received orders. I have not. And until I hear personally from Section Chief Zai or Vice Minister Liu, Investigator Sun and I will remain to fulfill our obligations.” It was a ruse, but one that might buy them some time.

  The two men from the consulate argued with Hulan in Chinese, but she remained firm. Then the men stood, made curt bows to Madeleine Prentice, and left. The U.S. attorney sighed.

  “What about the press?” she asked wearily.

  “I’ve got court in a couple of minutes,” David said, “then I want to stay with the FBI.”

  She looked at him in disappointment. “I remember a day not too long ago when you said you wanted to stick with this as long as it was your case. We gave you a lot of rope.” Mercifully, she didn’t add, And you’re hanging yourself with it. “I’ll deal with the press, all right? You get down to court and do everything you can to keep Spencer Lee in custody.”

  When the meeting was over, David hurried down to the courtroom. Hulan and Peter hung back. “I think I owe you an apology,” she said, thinking of all the times she had cut him out of her investigations.

  “There is no need, Inspector.”