teeth were ground down to brown stumps.
'She say you not honest with her, she want to help you! She say you not like her, you not think she make good medicine, you very insult.'
'Let's go to the hotel, for God's sake.'
The old woman understood and came up to Charlie, barely reaching his chest, chattering so angrily that he took a step back. She shook her fist as she talked, staring at him fiercely, as if she didn't believe he didn't understand her.
'She say she need to see.'
'Right.' He glanced at the people in the shop, who now crowded all the way back to the door. They smiled and nodded helpfully. 'Can you tell them to go?' he asked the driver.
The driver hollered something in Chinese. No one moved.
'This is pretty embarrassing,' said Charlie.
The driver hollered again, but without conviction. More people came into the shop. What could he do? His back throbbed in every position. He could barely stand. He turned his back toward the crowd and provisionally loosened his pants. The old woman came around behind him and without warning yanked them down so that they dropped around his knees. He clutched the elastic of his underwear. 'What is she-!'
She pulled his shirttail up and his underwear down and inspected his pale, scarred buttocks, which now hung out sadly for all to see. The crowd murmured loudly. She poked the largest scar and proclaimed something in Chinese at the driver, then yanked up Charlie's underwear.
'She say she make you very good medicine.'
He hurriedly pulled up his pants, and the driver helped him with his jacket. The old woman returned to her concoction and subtracted and added several items, looking up at Charlie repeatedly like a quick-draw street portraitist. Then she mashed up the items into a rough powder, picked out a few extraneous bits of matter, blew softly on the pile, funneled the paper into a square envelope, sealed it, scrawled some Chinese characters on it, and handed it to Charlie. The crowd hummed its approval.
'This is a tea. You drink morning and night. Five days,' the driver said.
'I pour a little into hot water?'
'Drink water, drink medicine, drink every bit.'
He sniffed the envelope. It was foul. Probably poison. 'What's this called?'
The driver asked the woman. She answered without looking up as she cleaned her counter.
'Spring bamboo,' said the driver.
The Peace Hotel, a gloomy Art Deco pile, sat on the other side of the river. Outside the hotel, cabs and bicyclists streamed along Zhongshan Road, and money changers clustered furtively on the corners. Women selling postcards badgered anyone who looked foreign. A half dozen of the city's million-odd construction workers slumped together in an alleyway, sleeping off their night shift, peasant boys from the far provinces who owned not much more than their tools, boys already hardened by labor and impossibly outclassed by the desirous young Shanghai girls with their American makeup and Japanese cell phones. The cab driver carried his bags inside the hotel.
In his room, he ordered hot water to be delivered, and when it came, he spooned some of the old woman's powder into a cup, poured in the hot water, stirred it, dumped in some sugar, drank it off in three horrid gulps, then lay down on the bed with the phone. It was 6:00 p.m. in Shanghai, 6:00 a.m. in New York. Too early for Towers, the investigator, to be in his office. He dialed anyway.
The call was answered. 'Towers? Charlie Ravich. I was going to leave a message.'
'I get in early. We're finishing that report on the three women.'
Including Pamela Archer, the woman who lived on the farm, whom he had not finished interviewing because of Tom Anderson's phone call. 'Right,' Charlie said.
'We'll have that today. Sent to you.'
'Fine,' he answered, not particularly interested. 'Wait, don't send it to my office. Send it to me here.'
'Okay.'
'I have one more name I need you to check out.'
'Lay it on me.'
'Melissa Williams. Lives in the city. Downtown, I think. In her mid-twenties, educated.'
'You don't have a Social Security number, I suppose.'
'No.'
'It's okay. We can get it in about a minute. What about her appearance?'
'White, slender, dark hair, maybe five seven.'
'Okay.'
He got up off the bed and stood at the window. Across the river glittered the lights of Pudong. 'How fast can you get back to me on her?'
'I can have some information tomorrow. Won't be much.'
'I understand.'
'Anything else?' asked Towers.
'Yes, for God's sake, don't tell Martha about this last name.'
'Technically I'm retained by her.'
'Not on this one,' Charlie said. 'Bill me directly.'
'You want to pay?'
'I want to pay.'
He said goodbye, caught up on CNN's baseball scores from the night before, then rose to go downstairs to meet Tom Anderson in the hotel's French restaurant. In the elevator he tested his back. Maybe better. Anderson, a fleshy kid of thirty-five wearing a good suit, was waiting for him, and pumped Charlie's hand confidently. 'Great to see you, Mr. Ravich.'
'I'm in a hell of a bad mood, Tom.'
'Yeah, I guess.'
'I'm not on the other side of the world,' Charlie went on as they sat down. 'You think I am, but I'm not. I will hound you until you get this thing built, Tom. I will call your bosses and tell them what a completely shitty job you are doing. Your company has bids in on five other telecom factory construction jobs in Asia, Tom. They're not direct competitors of ours. I know the CEOs of three of those companies personally. In twenty minutes I can call each of them. A lot of people have put a lot of trust in you, Tom, though I don't know why. Now you need to pull something out of a hat. You need to fix a broken situation. Or I'll hire someone else. It'll cost more but might put us back on schedule. It'll also mean that we will sue your company to recover those extra costs.' He paused, wondering what effect this had. 'You're understanding me now, yes?'
'Yes.'
They sat. The Chinese waitresses, edgy as sparrows in their silk uniforms, stayed back. Anderson smoked his cigarette down to the filter. Charlie watched him. Same age Ben would have been. He waited a few minutes more, just to let the kid's suffering ripen, and then he said, 'Listen, I have a feeling I know what's happening.'
Anderson looked up. 'You do?'
'You've been in Shanghai what, six months, a year?'
Anderson nodded miserably. 'Ten months.'
'It's screwing you up?'
'Yes.'
'But it's not the heat and the language and the crowding and the noise, though those things are all pretty bad.'
'No.'
'What's that street with all the expat bars?' Charlie had been there-the places were full of Germans and Australians and Americans, three or four beautiful Chinese girls for every Westerner. 'You're having a little problem with the local culture?'
Anderson nodded.
'You're married with young kids back home?'
'Yes.'
