they tossed her into the street to fight dogs for garbage.”
Ming Li gets up and moves to the other bed to sit beside her father. She puts her right hand on the back of his left. He uses his other hand to pat his shirt pocket.
“You don’t smoke anymore,” Ming Li says.
“And if I did,” Frank says to Rafferty, “she’d tell Wang.”
“She’d know,” Ming Li says, “without me telling her.”
“But obviously,” Frank says, resuming the thread, “my employers weren’t going to give me any bonuses for stealing Wang. She was capital to them, they’d invested money in her-all those bowls of rice, all those nights sharing the bed with twelve other girls. They’d paid her mother for her, probably twenty dollars. And the problem was, they were as real as she was. They really did kill people once in a while, sometimes even for cause. So I used the skills they’d taught me, and I took a little something along when Wang and I decided Shanghai wasn’t home anymore.”
“How little?” Rafferty asks.
“Twenty-seven thousand dollars, American. A fortune in those days.”
“It’s not scratch paper now.”
“And to these particular guys, it was also a loss of face. They couldn’t allow it. It would have been like taking out a full-page ad: ‘Free Money.’
The trouble with being a crook is that you have to work with crooks.
Give them an inch and they’ll take your foot.”
“Worse still,” Ming Li says, “you were a foreigner.”
“So it was a racial slap, too,” Frank says. “There were still signs in Shanghai then, ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed.’ The men I worked for took that personally, and why wouldn’t they? They’d been shit on often enough.”
“All this,” Rafferty says. “It’s a long time ago.”
Frank gives him an assessing glance. “That’s what I thought, too. When I went back.”
As Frank tells it, it had taken him almost a year to find Wang. It took his former employers less than a week to find the two of them.
At the time Frank thought they’d been watching Wang. It wasn’t until later that he realized that the People’s Republic was a nation of spies, a tightly woven fabric of betrayal. All the way from the top down, from cities to neighborhoods to blocks to individual apartment houses, there was always someone whose job it was to keep an eye open, to report anything out of the ordinary. A white man in China, living with a Chinese woman, in the 1980s- that was out of the ordinary. Word was passed along. And, unfortunately for Frank and Wang, word reached the wrong ears.
They’d been shopping that day, buying a space heater. Shanghai was cold in December, and Wang’s room had no heat. They’d been huddling beneath blankets for days, watching their breath drift upward as they talked. When they returned to the room and opened the door, two men were waiting for them.
They wore the same gray, shapeless uniforms that Frank saw everywhere, had the same nicotine-stained fingers, the same winter-city pallor. They could have been anyone: fry cooks, night-soil collectors, gardeners. Their rank showed only in their eyes and in the heavy jade rings they wore. The man in charge, the taller of the two, had sharply incised Mongolian eyes, the lids sloping heavily downward to frame pupils as hard and dry as marbles. A large nut-brown mole, bristling with coarse hairs, decorated his left cheek. The shorter one trained a gun on Wang, but it was the tall one Frank feared. The tall one didn’t need a gun.
The man without the gun smiled, a perfunctory rearrangement of the facial muscles that could have signaled either enjoyment or gas pains, and said, “Welcome back.”
Suddenly Frank needed badly to visit the bathroom. “Mr. Chu,” he said.
Mr. Chu snapped the smile off, quick as a binary switch, and let his eyes flick from Frank to Wang and back again. “
“I like her fine,” Frank said. His mouth was so dry his lips stuck to his teeth.
“Time is so cruel to women. How much do you weigh now, darling?” Chu asked Wang.
“Seventy-three kilos,” Wang said in a whisper.
“And how much did you weigh when he left?”
“About forty kilos.”
Chu nodded. “Seventy-three kilos. What does that come to in pounds, Mr. Accountant?”
“About one-sixty,” Frank said.
“If I could sell her for two hundred dollars a pound,” Chu said, “I could recoup what you stole. Unfortunately, she wasn’t worth that much when she was beautiful. Now she’s not worth anything. Enough fat to make a few dozen candles. Would you like some candles, Mr. Accountant? The nights are long now. You could read by her light.”
“I can pay you back,” Frank said.
The man holding the gun laughed, a sound rough enough to have bark on it.
“I don’t believe you can,” Chu said. He turned to face Wang, his whole body, not just his eyes. “Undress,” he said.
Frank took a step forward, feeling heavy as iron, and the gun swiveled around to him. “Leave her alone,” he said to Chu. He barely recognized his own voice. It sounded like something from the bottom of a well.
Wang was already taking off her coat.
“Don’t do it,” Frank said to her.
“She’s smarter than you are,” Chu said. “If I’d known how stupid you were, I’d never have hired you. I was paying for brains, discretion, and honesty. I didn’t get any of them. The pants now,” he said to Wang, and Wang untied the drawstring on her pants and let them drop to the floor. She hooked her thumbs under the elastic of her frayed underpants. “Come on, come on,” he said sharply. “Are you out of practice? They used to come off quickly enough.”
He had been speaking English, but now he switched to Mandarin for Wang’s benefit. “You thought she was a virgin, didn’t you? You whore-loving son of a pig. She’d been taking it in the ass for years, from me, from my partners, from anyone with a dollar and some grease. You could have bought her from me, you stupid Anglo, I’d have sold her to you for a hundred dollars, employee’s discount. Tell him, Wang. Tell him about all your butt- pluggers.”
“It’s true,” Wang said. She was naked, her arms at her sides, making no effort to hide her heavy breasts, her sagging belly. She was covered in gooseflesh. The sight of the broken arm brought the sting of tears to Frank’s eyes, but the hopelessness in her face filled him with a heat so intense he thought it would blow the top of his head off, and he stepped toward Chu, barely seeing him through the sudden darkness in the room.
“Look at her,” Chu said, his eyes locked on Frank’s. “Old and fat, gorging at the people’s trough. She’s obviously expensive to feed now, and for what? What’s she good for? I know a man not far from here who makes films of women with dogs and horses. He might use her, if no one else was available. I don’t know about the dogs and horses, though. They’re used to better.”
Frank took another step. Each leg weighed a hundred pounds.
“Would you like those candles?” Chu asked pleasantly. “Or would you prefer the film? For me the candles would be easier.” He shrugs. “But of course you’d use up the candles eventually, and you could keep the film forever. The mind’s eye,” he said. “It fades as we get older.”
“I have the money,” Frank said without hope.
“And the interest? Must be a couple of hundred thousand by now. For
“I can get it. All of it. I can pay it back.”
