Flower Net

by Lisa See

  The people in the intersection reacted as though the circus had just come to town. Peddlers abandoned their stalls, knowing no one would steal from them. Mothers stopped their gossiping, picked up their children, and gathered around the truck, following its intentionally slow progress around the circle. As David and Hulan elbowed their way through the crowd, the people threw themselves wholeheartedly into their expected role.

  “You corrupt so-and-so!”

  “Death to the murderer!”

  “To the killer the same fate!”

  And Spencer Lee, who had never shied away from a performance, gave it his all. He shouted to the crowd that they were cowards. He called out to a winsome young woman that she was lovely and he would be happy to take her as his wife. Shouts of “Cow dung!” and “Hooligan!” met his proposal. Spencer Lee held his head high, smiled broadly, then burst into an aria from a Peking Opera. His audience was thrilled. He was one of the best doomed men they had ever seen.

  David and Hulan reached the side of the truck. They each found a handhold and let themselves be pulled along as it continued through the crowd and off the main thoroughfare.

  “Spencer!” Hulan called. “Spencer Lee!”

  Hearing his American name through the cacophony, the young man looked out over the sea of faces.

  “Spencer, we’re down here. Look!”

  “Inspector Liu, Attorney Stark!” Lee laughed crazily. “I go to my death. You are here to celebrate, correct?”

  “No! Spencer, listen. We’re here to stop this,” Hulan said.

  A voice called out, “Shut up! Let the man sing!”

  Spencer stared out at the mass of people who pressed against the truck, slowing its progress, then he shifted his gaze back to Hulan. His swagger left him and he looked like what he was—a very young man going to his death. “It’s too late, Inspector.”

  “I can stop them!”

  Spencer smiled. “You can’t. I can’t. You see, I was wrong.”

  “Tell us in Chinese!” someone shouted. “We all want to hear.”

  “I am from the Ministry of Public Security,” Hulan yelled. “Let me through. This man is innocent!”

  “She must be his real wife,” someone called out. The crowd laughed.

  David didn’t understand the Chinese words, but he could see that they would never get to the gate unless the people let them through. “Move!” he shouted. “Get out of the way!”

  He felt someone jab an elbow into his side. David lost his hold on the truck and fell back into the crowd. A man hissed, “Go away, foreigner. You have no place here.” David shoved the man aside and grabbed for the truck.

  “Tell us the story of your guilt,” a voice trilled. “Confess before you die.” The people sent up a loud roar in support of this suggestion, but Spencer Lee ignored them, looking over the front of the truck’s cab to his final destination. There wasn’t much time left before they would reach the high gates at the end of the street.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” he admitted at last.

  “We know,” David said.

  “I just did what I was told. They promised I would be protected. Do you understand?”

  “Who? Tell us who!”

  Spencer avoided their questions. “Everything you said about the Peony was true. I hired the ship. I was there when the immigrants were loaded. I made them sign their contracts. But that was all.”

  “The bear bile?”

  “A new business for us. A mistake for me. Obviously.”

  “We’re going to stop this,” Hulan vowed.

  Spencer Lee looked down at her. “You can’t. It was fixed. It was fixed from the beginning.”

  “How?”

  “The embassy. Your ministry. What does it matter now?”

  The crowd was getting impatient.

  “Criminal!”

  “Black heart!”

  “Hooligan! Hooligan! Hooligan!”

  “Country bumpkin!”

  This last caught Lee’s attention. His head jerked up. He looked out at the faces and singled out the man, a vegetable peddler, who called out the insult again. “You!” Lee shouted. “Who are you calling country bumpkin? You can’t even afford a stick to beat your drum. You have to use your penis!” The crowd broke into cheers. Even the peddler laughed. “Take your stinking fart words back to your own outhouse,” Lee yelled. “You’re smelling up the whole village here!” People congratulated the peddler for eliciting such entertainment from the dead man.

  Lee found Hulan and David again. “I did as I was told and I was guaranteed protection. They lied to me. I was a dope.”

  The truck stopped. Guards pushed against the crowd, trying to clear a space so that the gates might be opened.

  “There’s no more time,” Spencer said.

  Hulan shouted to the guards. “I am from the MPS. You must let me through.” But the guards couldn’t hear her. There were still dozens of people between her and the front of the truck.

  “Spencer…” Hulan’s voice was filled with regret. There was nothing more she could do.

  “Make this mean something,” David said. “Tell us who you were working with in China.”

  “I can’t. I don’t know.”

  “Then the dragon head in Los Angeles,” David said. “He sold you out. Tell me his name.”

  “Lee Dawei,” the young man said. The truck lurched forward, then stalled.

  “Give me something I can use to get him.”

  The young man shook his head wildly from side to side. “I can’t.”

  David searched his mind, then blurted out, “The Chinese Overseas Bank! We think the organization keeps its money there. Give me names. Give me accounts. Make them pay for betraying you.”

  The truck rumbled back to life. As it crept forward, Spencer Lee began shouting out names and numbers obviously long memorized into a rhythmic chant. The truck pulled into the courtyard, the gates closed, and the crowd fell silent. Hulan pushed through the people and banged on the gate. No one answered.

  Everyone but David knew what would be happening now inside the compound. The placard would be removed from the condemned man’s back and tossed aside. He would be brutally pushed to his knees. The executioner would take his position directly behind the boy, aim his pistol at the back of his head, and fire. When the shot cut sharply through the air, several in the audience winced. Then the entertainment was over. The crowd, subdued now, began to disperse.

  Suddenly the ground was rocked by a deafening explosion. The repercussion blew glass from windows, sending fragments slashing into flesh. Pandemonium broke out as people darted in all directions at once. Hulan and David found each other, then were pressed along in the current of humanity as everyone ran to where they could see smoke mushrooming up in a dense, acrid cloud. They poured into the crossroads. Merchants—whether injured or not—bolted for their stands, hoping that their wares weren’t destroyed. A few people collapsed—overwhelmed with relief that they were alive. Some bled from cuts. Others wailed—in fear, in pain. A few called out frantically for loved ones.

  At the edge of the circle, the Saab was a charred mass of twisted metal. The smell of burning gasoline, rubber, leather, plastic, and flesh billowed into the air. Inside the car, David and Hulan could see Peter’s skin peeling away as flames licked up about him. Hulan rushed forward, trying to reach the car, but David pulled her back. “It’s too late. He’s dead.” She buried her face in David’s chest and he held her tight. He couldn’t distinguish the shaking of her body from his. Then one of the tires exploded, sending the crowd into another chorus of cries. A few good Samaritans ran for hoses and began dousing the blaze.

  David and Hulan stood together in the traffic circle staring at the smoldering Saab, their breath ragged, their hearts racing. They knew they were supposed to be dead.

  The fire was out. Peasants packed up and began trekking back to the countryside. Workers went back inside to their factories. Mothers returned home to start preparing the midd
ay meal. Only a few children—their pink faces streaked with soot—stood in nosy little groups in the traffic circle.

  David and Hulan slowly regained their equanimity as well, so that by the time the Neighborhood Committee director, a man in his eighties, informed them that he had sent someone for the local police, they were already calm enough to begin plotting their next move. Hulan was about to search for a phone to call the MPS when she saw the Neighborhood Committee director poking at the burned-out car with a stick. When Hulan told him to step away, that he shouldn’t contaminate the evidence, the old man wandered off. Then Hulan, with David in tow, walked to a gas station to try to put through a call to Beijing, but the lines were still out.

  Back outside, they sat on the curb. Hulan fished through her bag, brought out a notebook and pen, and handed them to David. He wrote down the names and numbers that Spencer Lee had shouted. When he was done, Hulan asked, “Will that help?”

  “Yes, if he told the truth, and I think he did. The way he chanted those names…” He shook his head, remembering Lee’s final ride.

  When they returned to the circle, they saw the old man with his head back under the hood. Hulan chased him away with a string of threats. Instead of being frightened by the inspector, he invited her to a café for lunch. He overrode her reluctance by saying that the phone lines to Beijing had been temperamental for the last six months, that the local police were corrupt and unresponsive, and that she could still watch the circle and the car from the café.

  The Neighborhood Committee director guided Hulan and David to an open-air café decorated with New Year’s banners and couplets. He introduced his granddaughter, this simple establishment’s owner and chef. Hulan went with her into the kitchen and kept an eye on her as she made three bowls of noodles. Hulan warned the woman to make sure she used boiled water for the broth so that the foreigner wouldn’t get sick. The woman seared slivers of ginger, garlic, and dried red chili peppers in the bottom of the wok, threw in shredded pork—fresh just this day, she assured Hulan—then added hot water from a thermos and some noodles. At the last moment, the woman scrambled some eggs in a bowl and poured the mixture on top of the soup, where it instantly floated apart into flowery petals. Once everything had boiled again to Hulan’s satisfaction, the woman ladled the soup into bowls, dribbled in hot chili oil, and carried the meal to a table on the sidewalk, where the men sat next to a brazier.

  David could have sworn that he wasn’t hungry, that he’d never eat again, but the first sip of the hot and fiery broth brought instant warmth to his body. For a few minutes, no one spoke, preferring to slurp their noodles appreciatively. Then the old man began to talk, criticizing his granddaughter for being a bad cook and announcing that when he died she would probably starve to death. Hulan understood this for polite conversation.

  Then the Neighborhood Committee director started to reminisce in the way of old-timers about the Civil War and his part in it. He had carried messages from camp to camp. He had met his wife while marching back to Beijing. “Only one problem,” he said. “She didn’t speak my dialect. My comrades tell me, ‘This is good. You won’t understand her complaints.’ For fifty years, this is true. All we care about are the unspoken words of the bedchamber.” When Hulan translated this to David, he surprised himself by laughing.

  David’s grin soon collapsed. How can I laugh, he thought guiltily, when death surrounds me?

  Hulan reached over and put an arm around him. “We’re human, David,” she said. “All we can do is eat, breathe, maybe laugh a little. It shows we’re still alive.”

  Meanwhile the committee director rambled on about his wartime exploits. Hulan had heard this sort of nonsense many times. If all of the old-timers who said they’d been on the Long March had made that journey, every village and city in China would have been emptied. Then the old man was chuckling about how he hadn’t seen a bomb like this one for forty or more years. Hulan’s attention snapped back into focus. “So simple to make,” he was saying. “Any soldier, any peasant, can construct it, and it’s deadly enough to accomplish Liberation. So easy, set the timer, walk away, and bam! That’s why Mao liked it so much.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your bomb brings back many memories. Only an old-timer like me would remember how to make one. Only an old-timer like me could even savor the handiwork.”

  “You used bombs like this during the war?” Hulan asked.

  “Yes. Mao liked it, but you can see the problem.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  The old man sipped his tea, then said. “It’s unreliable. It has a timer, yes. But half the time it goes off when it wants. Bam! Maybe you kill the right person. Maybe you kill the wrong person. Maybe you don’t kill anyone at all.”

  David and Hulan hitched a ride in the back of a truck loaded with grain to downtown Beijing. With the wind, the temperature was well below freezing. David and Hulan huddled together against the filled burlap sacks, trying to keep warm. “When I get back to L.A.,” David said, “I can open a real investigation. I may not get the Rising Phoenix on what’s already happened, but money laundering and tax evasion ought to be easy.”

  “Do you really think they had anything to do with today?”

  “Oh, Hulan, I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “The Rising Phoenix is a relatively young organization,” she mused. David looked at her questioningly. She tilted her head, thinking. “It doesn’t have a long history, and the members are young.”

  “So?”

  “Remember what the old man said about that type of bomb? It was used during the Civil War.” David nodded, and she went on. “Whoever built it had to be of a certain age. He had to have been in the army with Mao during the thirties or forties.”

  “An old guy’s done all this?”

  “You suspected Guang until this morning,” she said. “He’s certainly old enough.”

  “Who else do we know who’s that age?” he asked.

  “Zai. My father.”

  “Come on, Hulan.” David laughed. When she didn’t join in, he turned serious again. “What about this Lee Dawei? Maybe he was in the army.”

  “But, David, that’s what I’m saying. The Rising Phoenix is a young organization. Spencer Lee was in his twenties and was the number two or number three man. If the dragon head was in his late sixties or early seventies, would he place that much trust in someone so young?”

  “No. Lee Dawei is probably a kid, too.”

  “Exactly. So here’s what’s bothering me. We were the targets of the bomb.”

  “I know.”

  “The old man told us that it was easy to build but unreliable. Doesn’t that suggest it had to be planted recently?”

  “I suppose so. Otherwise it might have gone off when we weren’t in the car.”

  “I think it was put there when we were in Guang’s office.”

  “Now you’re back to Guang?” His voice registered surprise.

  “I know,” she admitted. “But maybe he told us about the bear bile and Henglai because he knew we’d never be able to use it.”

  “Ah, Christ.” He pounded one of the grain sacks in irritation. He was fatigued and no longer thinking clearly. “No, wait! What about Peter? No one could have planted the bomb with him waiting in the car.”

  She blanched at the mention of Peter’s name, then composed herself and said, “Suppose he went to make a phone call or have a cigarette.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “So again, why not Guang?”

  “Several reasons,” David said, and began itemizing them. “You said the person has to be of a certain age. Guang is that age, but he was with us. Do you really see him hiring someone else to hook up the bomb? I don’t. Besides, he didn’t have to say a word about the bile or Henglai. He could have kept quiet and we wouldn’t have had a way to stop the execution. Don’t you see, Hulan? Whoever wanted us dead wanted Spencer Lee dead even more.”

  The
truck bumped over a pothole. David glanced around trying to determine where they were. When he couldn’t, he adjusted the collar of his coat to keep the wind off his neck and ears, then looked back at Hulan. She was staring at her hands clasped together in her lap.

  “You’re thinking about Peter,” he said.

  “How can I not?”

  He let the silence hang. Finally she spoke. “From the day he was assigned to me I didn’t trust him. I knew he reported on me and I hated that. But when we were in L.A., I saw a different side of him. That day in Madeleine’s office he stood up for me. He didn’t have to do that.”

  “He was just doing his job…”

  “Which I’d never given him a chance to do before,” she said. “When we got back here, I thought, Things will be different and we’ll be real partners. In the past I never would have sent him to Cao Hua’s apartment. I never would have let him get this close to an investigation. And now?” Hulan looked at him in anguish. “If I’d just let him come with us…”

  “Everything happened so fast,” he said. “The other cars, the people, Lee coming through the intersection. I would have done the same.”

  She was going to say something more, but the truck pulled to a stop. They were at the back entrance to the Forbidden City. Wordlessly, Hulan grabbed her purse and jumped to the ground. From here, they caught a bus to her neighborhood. When they reached her house, they found a black sedan waiting outside, but Hulan didn’t stop to speak to its occupants.

  “They’re from the MPS,” she said. “I recognize the car.”

  She unlocked the front gate to her compound and they entered. Hulan stoked the embers in the living room stove, then excused herself to take a bath. David was dirty, exhausted from jet lag and the constant push of the investigation, and emotionally drained from seeing so much death. He wandered through the courtyards and open rooms, hoping to recover some sense of balance but realizing his senses were too jangled.

  He’d had visions of how Hulan lived, but her home was far larger, far more beautiful than anything he had imagined. Her personality was everywhere—in the way a piece of embroidered cloth draped over a chair, in the way low celadon pots filled with narcissus bulbs perched on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, in the way she’d set up her New Year’s altar, in the way the rich hues of the antique wood pieces softened the rooms’ clean lines. He lingered by her desk, feeling the smoothness of the rosewood’s grain beneath his fingers, picking up a cloisonné letter opener, caressing the fine lines of a Cantonware vase. Here was Hulan’s life—a little plastic wind-up toy he’d given her more than a decade ago, a photograph of a woman David presumed to be her mother, a few bills, several bankbooks neatly stacked.