brother and his cronies could be building a conventional position in a stock, they could have bet that it would fall, or they could be dealing with a company's competitors or suppliers. They could even be using her good information to sell disinformation. The one thing she did know was that they preferred smaller American companies for which the trading volume was low enough that they could move the price with their buying or selling.
The CorpServe ploy had been in business for four years now, and in that time it was fair to say they had been spectacularly successful. Her brother had purchased three large buildings in Shanghai, built himself a new house, bought an apartment in Hong Kong for one of his mistresses, and started getting his face massaged each morning.
And had Chen given Jin Li much in return? No, not enough. A good salary, by New York standards. By Chinese standards, a fortune. But no security. The opposite of security, even as he'd gotten rich. She was the one who could be prosecuted in the United States, thrown into federal prison or deported. The one the men had been after. Her brother needed to find her now, she knew, because his whole empire ran on the stream of information he received from her. No one else at CorpServe knew what to do, what to look for. No one else could be trusted to be loyal. Chen and his investors had taken huge speculative positions that required that Jin Li's hands and eyes be connected to their minds-to their money. A discarded scrap of paper on one side of the globe could conceivably be convertible to millions of dollars on the other side. Chen could not afford to lose touch with her, lose control of CorpServe, or have her disappearance known about. Her brother, she knew, was desperate now.
But maybe she didn't want him to find her. And maybe he would figure that out. Chen would call Mr. Ling, an old Hong Kong lawyer who still worked in a little office above Canal Street in Chinatown, and Mr. Ling would figure a way to get into Jin Li's apartment and find her bank statements, credit card activity. Well, let them do that. She had plenty of cash set Wait! A noise?
She crept to the window, slid it open higher. Did she dare look out? Someone gazing up would easily see her.
She hazarded a peek out of the window.
Nothing.
She glanced at her cell phone. She wanted to turn it on but knew not to. Chen would have called, just to see if she picked up. To talk, yes, but to continue their ongoing argument. That he had sex with Russian and Eastern European prostitutes meant nothing to him, but the fact that Jin Li preferred not to sleep with Chinese men was an insult to him. Why are Chinese men no good for you? he had screamed. She didn't have an answer. It was no one particular thing. She liked the whiskers on American and German men, she admitted it. She liked how they were taller and heavier than most Chinese men. You have a colonial mentality, her brother said, in your head. It is deep in your head, like one hundred years ago. Can you not see that? Her answer to her brother: Fuck you, you do not understand women. Not at all. She liked some of the American men and the European men because they did not know her Chineseness. They knew she was Chinese but that was all. When she said the word 'father' or 'mother' in English to them they did not know what she meant. They knew what the words meant in their languages but not hers. Their language did not have her pain in it, her heaviness. A strange thing, admittedly. I have a Chinese part of me and I have a me part of me, she told herself.
Was this why she liked Ray? Yes, among other reasons. He was like her in some ways, secretive and quiet. Most of the American men she'd dated wanted her to get to know them as soon as possible, as if that was a great honor they were bestowing. Not Ray. He spoke but somehow stayed reserved. He was 'reticent,' one of her newer vocabulary words. They had fun, walking down Broadway at night, going out for dinner. He knew the city; it was where he'd been born. She often had the feeling he was looking at the individual buildings but he never said why. Inspecting them somehow. Often they took a drive in his red pickup truck. She might have left a pair of yellow tennis shoes in the cab, she remembered sadly. She found the big scar on Ray's belly interesting, its little mountain ranges of swirling tissue, the squarish skin grafts like fields below. Strangely beautiful to her, though she would never say that. Because he wouldn't believe her. She knew that he had traveled a lot. She had poked through his papers and found his passport and seen the stamps from China, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sudan, Thailand, lots of countries. She noticed how good he was with chopsticks. Not careful with them, but bringing the bowl close to his mouth and flinging the food into his mouth like a peasant.
But what else did she know about him? Even less than he knew about her. He lived with his father in Brooklyn, spent some time overseeing his father's rental houses. Caring for him until he died, but also waiting for something, waiting to be called away. Never talked about his work, either. She'd asked once, but he'd just smiled and shaken his head softly. But he wasn't 'morose'-another vocabulary word-he was energetic and fun. He read a lot, she saw. Which she liked. Mostly philosophy and history, topics that didn't much interest her, though the fact that they interested him intrigued her. He had a physical regimen that he performed each day, like the old Chinese ladies exercising on the flat roofs of the apartment buildings in their cities, except tougher. He'd hung a long rope out of his father's top window, secured it, and then climbed straight up from the garden below to the window, feet flat against the clapboard siding, then rappelled downward and done it again. Five times a day he did this. No belts or harnesses, no rock climber's equipment. Fearless, and maybe stupid, yes, but she had been impressed. All arm strength. This explained his arms and shoulders. Rock hard, even a little scary. But he wore loose shirts, never showed himself off. How could a man be so strong like that? And more to the point, why? What dangerous exploit was he preparing himself for?
Jin Li had her suspicions but no answers. The closest she had come to learning had been a few weeks earlier, right before she'd broken it off. They had been walking along Fifth Avenue after eating when a fire truck had raced by. Like most New Yorkers, Jin Li had become inured to the sound of fire truck's sirens, seeing them as a noisy irritation as they passed. 'Goddamned things,' she'd muttered, then turned to Ray.
He'd looked at her, saying nothing, eyes cold.
'What?'
But he didn't answer. Stood there rigid, as if bracing for an attack. His teeth were set against each other, his eyes unblinking, feet spread apart. An instinctual response. She'd said something he found ignorant, and she sensed that whatever had happened to him-the scar, the unwillingness to say why he'd drifted around the third world for years-related to this very moment. She felt him capable of violence.
'Ray? What is it?'
He stared at her, traveling great distances in his mind.
'Don't look at me like that. Please!'
Then his face eased, blue eyes warm again. Ray had nodded to himself, the emotions put back in the safe place in his head where they'd been, and took a step along the sidewalk with her, as if the moment had never happened. But it had. She had seen into him. Finally, she knew that Ray A noise! This time for certain! A door opening downstairs.
She slipped over to the window again, looked out. Two Chinese men were standing on the street below, waiting.
Now she heard noises in the stairwell. Two sets of feet stomping upward. They passed her floor and continued higher. Searching from the top, she thought.
Jin Li gathered her small number of things into a pile, pushed a dozen boxes around, and created a tiny hiding hole within the expanse of crumbling cardboard. Here she squatted down into a cannonball position and waited, the smell of dry-rotted paper in her nose.
She did not have to wait long. The two men pushed through the door, the old floorboards creaking under their weight. The Russian custodian, from his voice. And another man, whom she watched through a crack between boxes. Another Chinese man. With a big bandage taped on the end of his nose.
'It is very big room,' said the Russian. 'Many boxes.'
The Chinese man did not answer. She could no longer see him but she could hear him walking heavily along the floor. She smelled a cigarette and assumed the Russian was waiting while the other man finished his inspection. But then she noticed that the Russian had moved to the window behind her. She held her breath and twisted her head around. The Russian was casually sliding the window shut, his tattooed fingers gripping the frame. She'd forgotten to close it! She watched his face. A grimness there. The window was the old kind with iron sash weights that rattled in their tracks, but the man was deliberate and slow, easing the window down with minimal noise, his mouth pressed tight as if trying to hold its sound within him. When he was done, he let his hands drop to his sides. But they opened and closed and opened again expectantly, each hairy finger marked with a bluish spider of ink. Then he stepped forward quickly, making it appear that he had been standing elsewhere.
