first.
The Chinese girl screamed.
Victor swung the shovel at her to keep back. Then he lifted the shovel blade like a guillotine over Ray's neck, about to chop downward, but Ray spun to the side and the blow hit the cement floor.
Ray scrambled over toward Jin Li. She backed away and picked up the bucket of foul chemical jelly, handing it to Ray.
'Make it go on fire!' she screamed. She stepped in front of Ray just as Victor swung the shovel, and took the next blow on her shoulder. She fell to the floor.
Ray understood. He thrust the bucket up to the hot lightbulb, pressing the bulb deep into the mixture, and instantly it burst into flames. Victor was reaching into his pocket. Ray swung the bucket at Victor, its burning liquid contents leaping across the intervening space and splattering across his eyes and nose and mouth, adhering to him and burning blackly. Victor howled and lunged blindly at Ray, his hands grabbing him by the throat, and the two men stumbled backward toward the tub-which is where Ray tripped, and as he fell he twisted sideways and Victor sprawled awkwardly across the tub, sinking heavily into the lumpy mixture and simultaneously setting its contents on fire. The big man writhed beneath the burning jellied surface, his hands grabbing weakly at the edges of the tub, his feet kicking to make him stand, and for a moment he lifted the black shape of his head but then his movements ceased and he slumped into the flames, his clothes and skin charring rapidly.
The little room filled with black smoke. Ray took a breath at floor level, where the air was better, again hoisted Jin Li over his shoulder in the fireman's carry, and staggered his way up the ladder and out of the room, pushing her past the underside of the van and scrambling after her. He kicked the hatch door shut behind him, knowing that whatever was left of Victor would soon be a carbonized, heat-eaten, faceless husk.
He carried Jin Li outside, and as she panted heavily, he reflected that he, a fireman, had just set another human being afire. I never wanted that, he thought, feeling the blood on his forehead. He was dizzy but okay. And how strange that he had tripped and Victor had gone over him. You can't be luckier than that, Ray thought-as lucky, but not more so.
46
All pleasure ends. Thirty stories above Central Park, a man worth $1.2 billion pisses into his bathtub. His prostate-removal surgery is scheduled for the next morning. It's a bloody operation with a long recovery time. I can get you another ten years, the surgeon has said to him, and that's good enough. But it will be weeks on the comeback, and he suspects-knows-that he will never be the same again. He's going to be tired, cautious, weakened. Older. What a good thing that the Good Pharma problem is gone now, resolved, the stock restored to its rightful former price, his block of shares sold off, the $89 million in proceeds booked into the Martz New Century Partners Fund, where he is going to let the money sit safely. Yes, there was a little unpleasantness involving the Chinese speculator, but in the face of his coming operation, he doesn't quite wish to recall the particulars. And as for Tom Reilly, the guy came through in the end, and that's who you want as your captain. Lands on his feet! Wall Street likes the guy. Reilly's future looks very good indeed. Heard he was getting divorced, though. But a guy like that, getting remarried will be easy.
In the kitchen his wife scrambles some eggs, sprinkles in dried peppers, and realizes, as if for the first time, that she will never have children if she stays married to this man. I have been very stupid, she tells herself, rich but stupid.
A wave of grief passes through her.
A moment later she is thinking about how to redecorate the yoga room of their villa in Palm Beach.
In Shanghai a young man tells his fellow investors that he was late in his return from New York because he had important business meetings. They nod politely; they know he drinks too much and has a weakness for expensive prostitutes. And, after all, what happens in America stays in America. They are more interested in hearing about his new CorpServe manager, another Chinese woman. For his part, the young man has reflected on his experience in New York and suspects that he will never see his sister again. She had called him and said she was safe. And that she was done working for him. Where will you live, he had asked his little sister. Don't worry about me, she'd said, forget about me. Americans are more aggressive than I realized, he thinks. It seems certain that China and the United States, which is weakening every day, will someday be at war, and like many of his fellow investors, he looks forward to this moment in global history.
In her midtown law office a woman in her thirties remembers her afternoon tryst with the man who had an old red pickup truck. She has thought of him too often, and wonders, still, what happened to him after the men in the white limo took him away. She turns her attention to New York magazine, some article in there about the sex lives of women in wheelchairs. She reads a page then flips the mag aside. Enough already, she thinks. Tonight she is going to hit a bar or two.
In the Mexican pueblo of San Jacinto, five hundred miles south of the Texas line, a woman in her fifties, dressed in black, shuffles across the cool stone floor of the church and lights a candle to the memory of her daughter. Her sweet girl is buried safely now in the churchyard, the cost of bringing her coffin home paid by a Mexican man in New York named Montoya. The other girl was buried in her town, too. The woman reminds herself that she must buy corn flour. Also, her youngest daughter needs shoes today. She has made the decision to go to El Norte. Despite what happened. America is rich, mami, she says, and no one can argue with that.
In Brooklyn, the obese owner of a check-cashing operation sighs, not yet able to gather the courage to claim the body of Victor. She's been told what is left of him. I'm the only one who will do it, she realizes. She has been thinking about the two Mexican girls and their families and has arranged, at a most reasonable price, for the sale of Victorious Sewerage-land, building, trucks, client list-to a very enterprising young man from New Delhi, and when the check arrives to her care, she is going to send every goddamned blood-soaked penny to the families of the Mexican girls. This act will not bring anyone back, but she feels it is the least that she can do. Karmic restitution, she calls it, if not for Vic then perhaps for herself, since she loved him. A terrible, heartless, paranoid killer. But she loved him, yes, she did. There is still an inch or two in the bottle of Drambuie that he brought her not long ago, and she reaches out for it, drains it off. The heavy sweet liquid settles in her, warms her, and she decides to phone another man, a deep-voiced Nigerian she has come to favor.
Forty blocks away, a young man with an old scar on his stomach holds a Chinese woman in his arms, her forehead resting against his chin. The stitches in his temple will come out soon. She bathed afterward and happily wrapped herself in his warm bathrobe, and they have spent the night talking and being together. She had to kiss him a few hundred times, everywhere, just could not help herself. She is asleep now and dreams of her grandfather and the apples he gave her. The man listens to her breathing and wonders if the people in her dreams speak English or Chinese. He will ask her when she wakes up.
Downstairs, the retired NYPD detective has told the hospice nurse what she must do. He has said this to her many times, pleading, begging, ordering, but, she reflects, they all say that. She knows there is a time that is too soon and there is a time that is right. It is better that he has lived this long. Good things happened that otherwise would not have. Though his friend, the other detective, was killed. But now this man has suffered enough. She sees that the cancer has invaded his eye and the roof of his mouth. Chances are very good that it is through his brain. He doesn't have much time left as a human being, but he could be a dying animal for many days to come. She loads the Dilaudid machine, punches in the right code, and, softly pressing the button every minute, takes him down. His last movements are the nervous system's misfiring response, which causes the man to jerkily wave his arms, as if conducting a great symphony. His eyes are closed, his mouth open, white head sunk into the pillow. But his skeletal arms wave wildly, with passion. This eerie sight would be disturbing, but she has seen it before and finds a beauty in it, the last moment of the life force being released. She presses the button again, and again, and soon his arms softly fall to the blanket, and if the man thinks of anything as he dies, it is of his son. The nurse gently kisses the man on the forehead, as she does with all of them. She wants to believe they feel this last benediction. Then she removes all his tubes and arranges him in the bed. She will read her Bible until his son comes downstairs.
A typhoon three hundred miles wide spins across the sea to Indonesia, soon to flood a hundred villages. Relief workers from around the globe will fly in as quickly as they can. They will find that they are needed. They will find death and they will find life.
