grandfather. She'd never seen him again. And certainly he was dead now, it had been so long. That was the saddest thing and yet she would never cry about it, ever. She and her brother had lived in a little apartment in a crumbling block in old Shanghai, one room with mold on the window side, long since bulldozed to make way for an elevated highway now clogged with new cars, trucks, city buses. Her mother found work in a factory where she affixed a tiny piece of plastic lettering to the front of DVD players all day long. She used an electric hot-glue gun and had to do eighteen thousand pieces per twelve-hour day if she wanted to be paid at the end of the six-day workweek. About one piece every two seconds. Within two years, as Jin Li and her brother went to school, her father built up the scaffolding company enough that he was able to buy a small plot of ground and build a three- story apartment house. That same year Jin Li's mother became so tired and sick from the long hours of work and the smell of the glue that she fell asleep as she worked and the hot-glue gun shot a long wad of burning adhesive onto her cheek. She was fired from the factory and came home, and Jin Li took care of her. The wound became infected and a doctor they paid came and cut out the infection and cauterized it. It healed but left a jagged, rippling scar and nerve damage that made one side of her mother's mouth droop. Her mother retreated into their house and would not come out. Jin Li and her brother did the shopping. Her father chose to sleep in the fold-out bed in the front room and rarely spoke to her mother. He no longer let her cut his hair and meanwhile began to wear better clothes. Soon her father was dining out with minor government officials, sometimes taking Jin Li's brother to these meetings, where he began to learn the ways of business as it was done in the new China. Meanwhile, Jin Li learned English in school and studied as hard as she could, without passion, she saw now, but as a way of escaping- escaping something, everything. When she was fifteen she received the third highest score on the school tests in all of Shanghai District and that included the children of rich parents who had tutors who knew whom to pay to get a copy of the previous year's test. Her best score was in chemistry. Her mother came to the ceremony, but her father did not. Then came her proudest day: she was admitted to Harbin Institute of Technology, one of the finest universities in all of China, specializing in astronautics, mechatronics and automation, hot-working technology, communication and electronic systems, physical electronics, and optronics. Her team built the first plasma immersion ion implantation equipment in China! But in her third year her professors encouraged her to study American capitalism and information technology. We might need you for something different, Jin Li, they said. And of course her father and now her brother had been behind this, with his government connections. They wanted to use her to make money. Her English, her good looks, her ability to mix. Sometimes we send special people to work in America, they said. Very secret. So she studied American corporations, she read the history of New York City, she translated old copies of Time magazine, and she listened to radio broadcasts about traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Abraham Lincoln Tunnel. She read a funny, old-fashioned novel about New York called Bright Lights, Big City that made no sense to her. She learned about taxis and subways and the Chrysler Building and why Greenwich Village was famous. And then How exciting it had been to come to America! But so strange. With every passing day, every week, she had felt herself changing in ways she did not understand. America was much different from what she'd expected. People were so… so free. They had the freeness in them. She hated them at first, thought them foolish and weak. But then a few years went by. She began to make a lot of money-what Americans called 'big money'-for her brother and his fellow pig-men investors. The government supervisor from the consulate who was supposed to check on her every two months seemed less interested in checking up on her. China was changing rapidly, and yet she was not supposed to return. I am so dislocated, Jin Li thought, so 'disjointed'-another vocabulary term that maybe wasn't quite correct. I am not in my country, I am not in my own self. She read the newspapers relentlessly, finding the New York Post and Daily News easy enough, and then after a year moving on to the New York Times. Always she was careful, especially on the phone. She knew about the American government computers searching for information, listening to phone calls, seeking word patterns, filtering through e-mails and search strings, linking hundreds of variables to hundreds of other variables. That was cutting-edge, major league. Although China's population was much bigger than America's, and Shanghai much larger than New York, she understood financial scale better now, after sifting through all those pieces of corporate trash. The American companies were so large! They operated all over the world! How tiny was her brother's enterprise! So small it should not be noticed. But someone had noticed. Who?
Now she heard shoes on the steps. The Russian, coming back, as he'd promised! She pulled her most precious items into the small green suitcase, as well as the bag of apples, and darted out the fire door and up the stairs. Third floor, fourth floor, fifth.
'Chinese girl!' came the Russian's voice behind her, this time deeper, with more of a breathy, slurry growl in it. 'I know you are there on stairs, heh, I can hear you.'
Jin Li reached the top of the steps. He was coming up behind her, his footsteps heavy but determined, his rising cigarette smoke reaching her first.
I am not scared of him, she decided, not very much.
'Chinese girl,' came the voice, clearly drunk, 'I am going to give you very good excellent Russian fucking.' His wheezy cackling echoed in the stairwell. 'I am going to give you good old Soviet… going upstairs, heh? Okay. I go faster.'
She pushed open the door to the fifth floor and hurried around and through the iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks. Thousands of white people had washed themselves in these tubs and sinks, all of them now no doubt long dead. A room of naked ghosts soaping their crotches. She was looking for the wooden ladder that led to the roof hatch, and she found it, climbing easily, suitcase in one hand.
'Chinese girl, now is time you will have very good sex with me, heh,' came the boozy, excited voice, confident of its own intentions, eager for satisfaction. 'I am excellent at good fucking, you like to fuck, I can see it in your eyes and the Chinese man say you like to fuck white men, so now I will-'
The roof hatch had a blue wooden door kept shut with a heavy steel padlock. But the lock was held by old screws in boards that had been rained and snowed upon for almost one hundred years. And anyway, Jin Li, honor graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, had quite cleverly pulled out those screws the night before, using the hard edge of her nail clippers, while making her silent investigations through the building. Now she pushed against the blue boards with her fingertips and the door sailed open, caught by an evening wind that carved over the uneven flat tops of the connected buildings. In an instant she was out on the tar-papered roof, lifting her dress as she scampered past the old brick chimneys, many crookedly bent as if they'd melted ever so slowly over the many decades. The sky was not quite dark yet, and she could see where to quickly place her feet, where to avoid the angled black vent pipes that jutted up like elongated metallic mushrooms as well as the other rooftop clutter of telephone wires, satellite TV dishes, rusted cans of roof cement. By the time the Russian man lurched into the open doorway of his roof hatch, Jin Li was many buildings away, hiding behind a chimney with her little green suitcase and bag of apples. She breathed easily, even feeling a bit of defiant triumph, dark eyes flashing, but she knew that he would tell Chen about her now, which was also to say that she was in more danger than ever.
8
You do what you gotta do, and he was going to do it. Ray pulled his truck into the beach parking lot just as the sun went down. There was nothing special about the place except for the vista of water in front of it and a few red-hulled container ships out on the horizon. Trash and bottles. The kind of place teenagers used for drinking and screwing around, like he'd done when he was a teenager. Why would Jin Li be here with two Mexican girls in the wee hours of the night?
He parked in the far corner of the lot, away from the few cars there. He'd waited until dusk because he didn't want people to see him, and anyway, it was dark in the storm drains all the time. The lot was large enough that it had eight drains, and the question, he supposed, was where they went. Pete Blake had said they emptied into a gulley. Under most circumstances in New York City the drains would empty into the sewage system. But the elevation of the parking lot was four or five feet lower than the parkway fifty yards back and itself not much higher than the waterline, which meant that in a heavy fall storm when the tide was high, the waves probably flooded the parking lot. You couldn't have seawater draining into the New York City sewage system.
Each side of the lot had four drains, two on the corners and two centered in the middle. There was indeed a gulley of brackish water parallel to the lot, and Ray stepped through the high weeds and found a sizable pipe of corrugated aluminum. It was screened. He detected a thin whiff of excrement. He walked back to his truck and
