Flower Net

by Lisa See

  One young woman remained. She was dressed in pale pink shorts, a skintight white vest, flesh-colored knee-highs, black patent-leather high heels that had seen better days, and a black leather jacket, which she left open. She wobbled across the cobblestoned parking lot to David and Hulan. “I know where you can get bear bile, but it will cost you,” she said.

  “How much?”

  “For directions, a hundred dollars U.S. For the product, you will have to do your own negotiating.”

  “One hundred dollars is a lot of money,” Hulan observed. It was almost a third of the average annual income in her country.

  “I will not bargain with you,” the woman responded with a toss of her hair.

  “You’ll take us there?”

  “I said directions, a hundred dollars.”

  “What if you’re not telling the truth?”

  “I work here every day. You can find me tomorrow.”

  David pulled out his wallet and handed the money to the young woman. The budding entrepreneur counted the bills, folded them, and squeezed them into her pocket. Only then did she give the directions to the Long Hills Bear Farm, which, she explained, was also owned by the Guang family.

  After the woman had disappeared down one of the alleyways, Hulan sighed. “Can you drive?” That was the last thing David wanted to do, but hearing the fatigue in Hulan’s voice, he took the keys. Fortunately, he had several side streets to navigate before he reached the main road. Still, it came faster than he wanted, for suddenly there he was, trying to keep alive and not kill anyone else. At first he drove slowly and cautiously. After five diesel trucks passed him, he picked up the pace. When a man with a pushcart strolled into the automobile lane to pass two old women without even looking back over his shoulder to see what was coming, David tapped the horn for a few half-hearted trills. When a bus spewing black exhaust slowed just long enough to allow a woman to throw up out the rear window, David crossed the center line, put his foot to the floor, laid his hand firmly on the horn, and got around the offending vehicle. Once back in his lane, he turned to Hulan and grinned.

  After another hour, when they reached the small village of Yingxiuwan, David turned off the main road and crossed a bridge over the upper reaches of the Min Jiang. The road narrowed and automobile traffic all but ceased. Still, pedestrians wandered along the side or down the middle of the road. From here, David and Hulan followed the Pitao River, a tributary of the Min Jiang. The car’s engine groaned as the incline grew steeper. By now, David was almost wishing for the zaniness of the main highway as the road turned into slithery gravel and deep potholes. To their right, a deep ravine cut into the rhododendron-covered mountains, their tops cloaked in mist. Even up here, every inch of soil was put to good use. There were terraces, of course, but more impressive were the tracts of land sometimes only a few feet wide that were planted with cabbages, bok choy, and onions.

  Twilight was just falling when Hulan yelled, “Stop the car!” David pulled over to the edge of the ravine. “Look!” she said excitedly. “Look down there!”

  David leaned across her and peered over the cliff. He saw the river and some men working along the bank. Behind them, an imposing building—low, compact, windowless—sat bleakly and totally out of place in this almost idyllic environment.

  “Do you know what that is?” She didn’t give David a chance to answer. “It must be the Pitao Reform Camp. It’s the place where my father was sent.”

  “Let’s take a closer look.”

  “I don’t think we should.”

  “We’re up here. They’re down there,” he reasoned. “I think we’ll be okay.”

  They got out of the car and stood together on the edge of the precipice. Inside the yard of the camp, where not one blade of grass grew, they could see several men in dull gray uniforms breaking boulders into rocks. Others packed these rocks into baskets, slung them onto their backs, and carried their heavy loads through the front gate and down to the riverfront. Another group of men stood in a row in the water, some only up to their ankles, others up to their waists. Although Sichuan Province was much warmer than Beijing, the waters that rushed by came from recently melted snow. The men with the baskets set down their burdens and began passing the rocks from man to man out into the river.

  “What are they doing?” David asked.

  “If this were somewhere else—near a stretch of cultivated land, for example—I would guess they were doing some kind of diversion or irrigation project. But look, those rocks must be washing away in the current. They aren’t building anything. They’re just keeping busy.”

  “It’s hard to imagine your father and Guang doing that kind of work.”

  “And Uncle Zai, too, even though he was here later,” Hulan added. “Oh, David, what a waste!”

  “It was all right in front of us, but we couldn’t see it. Guang’s ties to Sichuan, the bear farm, this place. Think of the years Guang and Zai must have plotted. And your father…”

  “Right,” she said. “Everything must have started here.”

  23

  LATER

  Long Hills

  By the time Hulan and David reached the landmark the young woman at the Panda Brand facility had described—a pair of stone pillars marking a dirt road on the left—darkness had enveloped them. They bounced over the rutted road, which led down into a canyon. The headlights danced crazily into groves of dense bamboo. They came around a corner and almost had a head-on collision with a black sedan that shimmied within inches of David and Hulan’s car and sent them skidding off the road and into a low ditch.

  “What was that?” David exclaimed.

  “I don’t know. Are you all right?”

  David nodded. “And you?”

  “I’m fine, I think.” They waited a moment, feeling shaken, then Hulan asked, “Who was that? Do you think we should follow him?”

  “He’s already got too much of a head start. Let’s find the farm first.” David put the car in reverse and with much squealing of tires and billowing dust edged back onto the gravel road. A few minutes later they came around another curve, and the road opened up. Ahead of them, in the beam of the headlights, they saw a couple of low buildings enclosed by a fence and a sign that read LONG HILLS BEAR FARM. David stopped the car and the two of them sat staring ahead into the darkness.

  “I wish I had a weapon,” Hulan said.

  “I wish you did, too, but I’d settle for a flashlight.”

  By opening the car doors David and Hulan seemed to shatter the silence. When they shut the doors, they were again plunged into inky blackness. They waited for their eyes to adjust.

  “Ready?” Hulan whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  They met at the front of the car and crept forward. Hulan gently pushed open the gate. Its creak seemed louder than the car doors’ slam.

  “Let’s look out back first,” Hulan suggested softly. David nodded and followed her between the two buildings. As soon as they reached the other side they could hear deep breathing and could smell the bears. A few more tentative steps and they came to the first cage, which stood several feet above the ground on four posts. Beneath it, excrement and old food that had fallen through the mesh rose up in a pile a good two feet high. Inside the cage, a moon bear looked at them and groaned. This sound roused the animals in other cages.

  As they edged forward, David and Hulan saw several cages, each with a moon bear. The animals had no room to stand or even sit up. They all wore metal corsets around their middles. Some of them had gangrenous infections that festered and oozed pus from beneath their corsets; others seemed to be suffering from dementia.

  “Is there something we can do for them?” David asked.

  There was no mistaking the impatience in Hulan’s voice as she said, “What? How? We’re in the middle of nowhere, David. Come on, we’d better see what’s inside.”

  The first building was locked, but from the sounds of movement and heavy animal sighs inside, they determined tha
t it must house more bears. Then they walked to the second building. It appeared to be a storage shed of about fifteen by fifteen feet with several window-size openings. David poked his head through one. He could smell the warm aroma of fresh hay mingled with the feral odor of more bears, which he could hear breathing deeply. But he couldn’t make out anything else. The door easily opened and they entered. But the room—with only starlight to illuminate it—was pitch black. Then, just ahead of them and to their left, they saw the small orange glow of a cigarette’s tip as someone inhaled.

  A voice in English said, “I have been waiting for you.”

  Hulan was not surprised to hear her father. “Baba,” she said.

  “Yes, it is I.” Then a match was struck and a kerosene lantern lit. In its flickering light, David saw Vice Minister Liu, dressed not in a sharp Western suit but in the clothes of a peasant. A pistol dangled casually in his hand. David knew nothing about guns, but this one looked to be of a large caliber. Liu smiled. “It took you so long to get here. But now that you have arrived, are you surprised?”

  “No,” Hulan answered. “I think I suspected you after the bomb…”

  “Hulan!” David’s voice was rough.

  “I tried to tell you and you laughed the idea away,” she told David, not taking her eyes off her father. “Then there were so many other things. What happened with Spencer Lee’s petition, how the execution papers were so easy to find in Section Chief Zai’s office, how the vice minister told us Zai was in Tianjin, then seeing the Pitao camp.”

  “But you didn’t follow your instincts,” Hulan’s father admonished gently.

  “Oh, Ba…”

  The regretful sound in Hulan’s voice erased the smile from her father’s face, which twisted with rage. In that moment, the horrible reality of their situation hit David. They were alone with this man miles and miles from anywhere and anyone. Father and daughter began to speak, but David deliberately tuned them out to concentrate on how they might escape. The room had only the door for an exit. If worst came to worst—and David had no illusions that it wouldn’t—he might be able to push Hulan out of harm’s way either out the door or behind one of the eight bear cages that were set two to a wall. But how long would that protect her? A minute? Five? And then what?

  “But why the triads?” Hulan was asking her father. “I see now I didn’t know you, but I always thought you held them in contempt.”

  “When I hear you like this,” Liu mused, “I think, My daughter is not so stupid. She is slow maybe, but not stupid. You are right. I abhor the triads.”

  “But you made some connection with the Rising Phoenix during the ministry’s past investigations,” she surmised. “That’s why you’d never let Section Chief Zai take his evidence to the courts.”

  “They offered me money,” Liu said, jutting his chin. “I took it. Then, when this opportunity came along, I thought, Here are people who can transport our shipments and distribute the product in the United States. We had a very good relationship…”

  “Until?”

  “The others wanted to make more money. Those boys and the father went behind my back and made a deal. So I killed the boys. But I also wanted to send a message. And I did. But I think you and Attorney Stark figured this out.”

  “David did, yes.”

  Liu turned his virulent gaze to his daughter’s lover. “Tell me, David”—the sound of his name spoken in such a patronizing tone sent a chill down the American’s spine—“how did I do it?”

  “You needed information first,” David said. “You knew that your partners had made some kind of a deal with the Rising Phoenix. Were they planning to cut you out entirely?”

  Hulan’s father nodded, then said, “Go on.”

  “Henglai was smaller, so you probably overpowered him first. Those boys must have been surprised. You were their partner.”

  “They thought I was a weak old man. They were wrong.”

  “Billy was a tough kid, so you focused on Henglai. You tortured him with—what?—cigarettes?” When Liu said nothing, David went on. “You didn’t need to kill Billy at all. He could have passed on your message. But by then you were carried away.”

  “But my method,” Liu said irritably.

  “The beetle,” David answered quickly.

  “Correct. It was so easy to put a little of the powder on a cloth and hold it over their mouths and noses. But then…” Liu shook his head in distaste. “It was unpleasant, watching the blisters form on their lips and nostrils, listening to their screams, waiting for the stomach hemorrhage that would finally silence them.” He mutely relived the memory, then inquired in an interested voice, “And where were they killed?”

  David and Hulan didn’t know. Liu grunted. “A warehouse, but who cares?”

  “Afterward, you took Billy Watson to the park,” David continued. “You wanted him to be found, and you wanted him to be found where his father could see him.”

  “If the top beams aren’t straight, the bottom ones are crooked also,” Liu recited. “Do you have that saying in America?”

  “No.”

  “But you understand the meaning.”

  “I think so. Like father, like son?”

  “Exactly. And the son had to be destroyed to make the father see his mistakes. This betrayal…” Liu’s jaw clenched. “This betrayal was Watson’s doing. He thought he was the big man. He thought that just because he had the ranch that he was taking the biggest risks. He thought, I have the two boys, I have the Rising Phoenix, why do I need old Liu? But the whole thing had been my plan. I was in charge. It was a hard lesson, but Bill Watson learned the truth.” Liu stared at David with cold black eyes. “Now tell me about Henglai.”

  “The canal, am I right?”

  As Liu nodded, the lantern’s light glinted off the lenses of his glasses. These two had appreciated his work.

  “You delivered your second message,” David continued. “You wrapped up Henglai and placed him in the water tank in place of the shipment of bile that the others had arranged for.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Liu said, “putting that boy in there was no easy task. I am not as strong as I once was, and that boy was just dead weight.” He cackled at his pun, then said, “I wanted the Rising Phoenix to understand who they were dealing with. I couldn’t let them cheat me.”

  “So you ruined their shipment of immigrants.”

  “It didn’t have to be that way,” Liu said apologetically. “All they had to do was throw the body overboard.”

  “But they didn’t,” David said.

  “Who can explain the stupidity of others?”

  “They weren’t that stupid. They knew we were coming.”

  Liu grimaced. “You give them too much credit. No, I think they simply panicked in the storm. The Peony was adrift and moving into U.S. waters. What else could they do but abandon her?”

  David chose not to pursue that, saying instead, “You also took care of Spencer Lee.”

  “That was unfortunate,” Liu said, then explained himself. “I was ready to continue my partnership with the Rising Phoenix. Even the dragon head agreed we should continue our shipments. But after the arrests in Los Angeles, things became more difficult. Someone had to fall, and we all agreed that the boy was expendable. I signed a paper,” Hulan’s father confessed. “I used Zai’s stamp. There is no artistry there.”

  “Why bear bile, Ba? Was it because of Mama?”

  “After your mother came back from Russia, I tried many things to help her. I finally heard about Dr. Du.”

  “Is he a part of this?”

  “Of course not.” Liu cleared his throat and spit in disgust. “He’s an old fool, but he has a lot of knowledge and he likes to talk. He’s very free with information, as I’m sure you found out.”

  “The government was sending him out to talk about medicines made from endangered animals,” Hulan recalled from their interviews with Du. “They had even sent him on some raids here in Sichuan.”

&n
bsp; “You see? He talks too much. He’d brag about these things, too, whenever I took your mother to see him. When the time came to find a farm, I knew where to look.”

  “And in Henglai you found someone who could be very useful to you,” Hulan said. “Did you seek him out?”

  Liu lazily waved his gun back and forth. “To tell you the truth, Henglai came later. First, I had the Rising Phoenix and we did a few insignificant jobs together to build trust.”

  Liu fell silent, waiting for David and Hulan to inquire about those other “jobs.” When they didn’t, he asked, “Haven’t you wondered, Attorney Stark, how so many people could leave China on a freighter from a major port without attracting the attention of Chinese authorities?” David didn’t respond. Liu sneered, “Let’s just say I used my influence to make sure people would look the other way.” He paused, then added, “Oh, there are so many things I’d like to tell you…” As Liu’s voice trailed off, David realized that the other particulars could come later, if there were a later.

  “No,” Liu continued, “all this happened because of Billy Watson. You know by now that he was a hooligan. One day he is brought to my office for some minor offense. He’s sitting there telling me about his father. I had met the ambassador, of course. I thought, Let’s bring Big Bill Watson in here and see what happens.”

  Liu again turned his attention to his daughter. “You know how Americans are. They are so brash and think they own the world. He says to me, ‘Maybe we can work things out.’”

  “He offered you a bribe,” Hulan deduced.

  Liu nodded. “But I didn’t want his money. I said, Let’s meet for lunch at the Black Earth Inn.”

  “When Nixon Chen said ‘your boss’ comes here, he meant you,” Hulan said.

  “Don’t interrupt me! I am talking!” Liu chided his daughter. He paused to gather his thoughts, then said, “On that first day I am thinking, Who knows how this will turn out? Soon we are having lunch every week in a private room. Then Billy is coming and bringing his friend Henglai. The first time we all meet everything comes together for me. Henglai! Guang Mingyun’s son!”