The fourth watcher

Frank wipes the liquid from the back of his hand and lifts the coffee to sip at it, raising one finger- wait-as though Rafferty has politely expressed interest. “She’d been there-in the brothel, I mean-since she was ten. Just tidying up and stuff, not working yet. Sold by her family, of course, but I suppose you know all about that, considering what you write about. I had business with the guys who ran the place-I had given myself a crash course in accounting, and I did their books-and she took care of me when I was there, brought me tea. A couple of times, she massaged my feet. A really sweet, exquisitely beautiful kid.”

Rafferty tries, and fails, to match this description to the woman he had met in Shanghai.

“She learned my name,” Frank says, “although she couldn’t pronounce it for shit. But it meant something to me to hear her say it.” He catches his upper lip between his teeth and then blows out, so hard it ripples the surface of his coffee. “Anyway, the time came for her to make her debut. So to speak. At the age of twelve.” Leung is turned away from Rafferty, watching the room. Ming Li listens impassively, as though they are talking about someone she does not know. She runs the tip of her right index finger over the blunt-cut nails of her left hand as though thinking about pulling out an emery board.

“So I bought her,” Frank says. “I bought her for her first week, before some asshole could jerk off into her and then forget her. She’d never forget it, of course. It would have been the beginning of her life as a whore.” He dips his head as though in apology. “One of those moments when someone else’s life changes forever, and I was just standing there with my hands in my pockets. So I bought her for a week. I gave her a place to sleep. I fed her. I got her some nice clothes. I left her alone at night, obviously. She was a child. It was a typically stupid Westerner’s gesture, Don Quixote to the rescue, putting a Band-Aid on an amputation. Great, she had a week before the machine took its first bite out of her, and she’d be different forever.”

“It was a good thing to do,” Ming Li says.

He lifts a hand and rests it briefly on her shoulder. Ming Li leans against it and produces her fractional smile. “But it was pointless. I thought about it every night she was in my house. Kept me awake all night long. You know, I’d seen hundreds of whores in Asia-everybody from the top-level courtesans to the saltwater sisters who accommodated sailors against the walls of the alleys around the harbor. And of course lots of kids-twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. Shanghai was the commercial sex capital of the world then. I was surrounded by prostitutes, and not just in my professional capacity. But I hadn’t seen one at that moment, the moment when her real life ended, when she became something else. So I made a commitment. When it was time to take her back, I didn’t. I stole her.”

Rafferty has no idea what to say, so he doesn’t.

“Well, that created a fuss.” Frank is watching Leung watch the room. “As I said, I’d been doing the books for the brothel, one in a chain. All short-time stuff, just in and out, so to speak. Today they’d probably call it McSex. The firm I was working for, very proper and British in public, was really Chinese-owned, and it was on retainer for every triad in Shanghai. So I had some insight into how the system worked. I bought her for a second week, just to get a head start, and then we took off.”

“You should write a book,” Rafferty says, but he is interested in spite of himself.

“I’m in enough trouble already.” His eyes flick away. “Anything happening, Leung?”

“Only cops,” Leung says.

“Where?” Rafferty doesn’t see any uniforms.

“Table near the door. Three of them. Plainclothes. You can tell by the phones.”

Sure enough, black boxy things with short antennae. “I’m impressed.”

“Leung earns his keep,” Frank says.

“I work cheap,” Leung says, and laughs. Then he says to Frank, “Back door?”

“Through the kitchen,” Frank says, lifting his chin half an inch in the direction of a swinging door behind Leung. It is a very Chinese gesture.

Leung nods and lets his back touch the upholstery behind him. His version of relaxed.

“We got out of Shanghai and headed south, with Wang-that’s Ming Li’s mother’s name, by the way, Wang- dressed as a boy, a servant. Sorry not to be more original, but there you are. She was my valet.”

“She’s still your valet,” Ming Li says with a smile.

“I need a lot of looking after,” Frank says.

Poke is watching the way Ming Li looks at her father. “You didn’t used to.”

“Well, it wasn’t like your mother lived to take care of me.” He raises his hand before Poke can speak. “I’m not saying anything against her. Angela is a wonderful person.”

“She’d be thrilled to hear you say that.”

“Angela is well taken care of,” Frank says. “I left her a rich woman.”

“Yeah, but you left her.”

“For twenty years I was a good husband.” Frank finally allows his irritation to show, a sudden bunching of the muscles at the corners of his eyes. “I stayed home, I raised a family. I built a house for her.”

“She burned it down,” Poke says with some pleasure.

Frank’s cup stops halfway back to the saucer. “She what?”

“The day you left. She read the letter you wrote her-real personal, by the way, a bunch of bank-account numbers and some safe-deposit keys-and then she toted all the stuff she cared about outside and set fire to the Christmas tree. Oh, I forgot, she called a cab first. Then she sat there, and we watched it burn until the cab came.”

“That was a nice house,” Frank says. “I put a lot of work into that house.”

“It made a lovely light.” He leans forward, driven by an impulse to cause pain. “Oh, and you’ll like this. Seven years later she had you declared dead.”

“I’m dead?” Frank says. He seems more interested than surprised.

“She ran an obituary and everything.”

Frank and Leung exchange a glance Rafferty can’t read. Frank says, “That could be useful.” Leung raises his eyebrows and draws down the corners of his mouth.

Frank blinks and leaves his eyes closed a little too long. When he opens them, he is looking at a spot above Poke’s head. “I lived with Wang down south, out of sight in Yunnan, for a year, until I had to leave China. We lived like brother and sister. You have to remember, Poke, I was really only a kid myself then. We were happy. If things had gone on, eventually, we’d have found our way to bed. But come 1950 it was obvious that I was going to have to leave. I put it off for as long as I could-too long, actually. So we went out to a stone where we sat every day-have you ever been to Yunnan?”

“No.”

“It’s exquisite, at least where the rice is grown. Whole mountains carved into terraces that are flooded with water that reflects the sky. We sat each evening on a stone that looked down on a giant stairway of rice paddies, and waited for the stars to come out. The night before I had to leave, after I’d spent days packing and trying to prepare her, we went up to the stone and married each other. We took each other’s hands when the sun went down and waited until the stars appeared in the paddies below us, and then we said we were married. She needed that. She needed to know I was coming back.”

“Why didn’t she go with you?”

“She wouldn’t. She was afraid to leave China. And you forget, she was one of the oppressed masses. Remember them? She was one of the ones who were supposed to benefit. People’s paradise and all that shit. Who was more downtrodden than a peasant girl who’d been sold into prostitution? What she didn’t know was that Mao was a puritan. Officially, I mean. He had his fifteen-year-old Girl Guides-whole squadrons of them, if his doctor’s memoir is to be believed-but everybody else was supposed to sleep one to a bed. Prostitutes were contrary to the common good. It’s been said that the thing about Communists is that they have nothing and they want to share it with you. The problem with prostitutes was that they still had what they’d been sharing. So they were all shipped off to be ‘reeducated.’ They got Wang’s attention by breaking her arm.”

“You know,” Poke says, “it’s an interesting story, and it probably would have held my attention about twenty years ago, but now? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Just shut up,” Ming Li says. “He’s obviously got a point.”

Rafferty continues over her. “I’ve got a family now-I won’t bother telling you who they are, since you’ve spent all that time paddling around in the usual channels-but they’re going to get worried if I don’t get back to them. So cut to it, okay? What’s happening that’s so important you had to kidnap me? You want to tell me about the past,