Ghost Month (18 page)

“We apologize for the delay. The car should be moving shortly,” a woman’s voice said in English, Mandarin and Taiwanese, then what must’ve been the same thing in Hakka and Japanese. Her message kept looping through the languages.

The Taiwanese was clean-shaven but had bad skin. Pockmarks on his face glistened with sweat, looking like the crust bubbles on a pizza slice after the cheese has slid off. He seemed to take his cues from the American. Maybe he’d been the one driving last night; he would know the roads, being a native of the island. The fucking Green Hornet’s Kato.

The American spoke, showcasing his bad Mandarin. “Jing-nan, I told you to stop asking about Julia. How come you didn’t listen?”

I gasped for breath and whined a little, unable to speak.

The Taiwanese cradled my chin roughly. “Little Jing-nan, a friendly poke couldn’t hurt you this badly.” He spoke bad Mandarin, too, but I was more interested in the piece of rope he took out from a back pocket. I quickly assessed that it could wrap around my throat twice and have enough left over for two fat fists to grab.

“Hey, come on! No need for that,” said the American. “He gets it now. He’s a smart boy. Aren’t you, Jing-nan?”

The pockmarked man let the rope dangle from one hand. “We should kill him right now,” he shouted over the sound of the prerecorded woman’s voice. “That way we know for sure he won’t keep talking.”

“We don’t have to kill him,” said the American, laughing a little bit. “He just didn’t know how serious the matter was. Now he knows. Isn’t that right, Jing-nan?”

“I’ll be good,” I said breathlessly. “I didn’t know.” I felt stupid and weak for wishing Dwayne were there to stick up for me.

“See? We don’t have to do anything to him. He’ll stop right now. He knows he can’t fool us anymore.”

“Let me have just one punch,” said the Taiwanese as he wrapped the rope around his right fist menacingly. “One in the gut. It won’t leave a mark, I promise.”

The American looked up and petted his own neck thoughtfully. “Jing-nan, my friend is upset because we had to buy these umbrellas for six hundred NT. Each. I think if you agreed to pay for them, he would calm down considerably.”

My right hand shot to my wallet. I managed to stand upright and paid the exact amount. Twelve rose-colored hundred-NT bills, all featuring a portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese revolution and the one man unreservedly loved on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Sun’s engraved likeness somberly reprimanding me for all my wrong actions leading up to this moment.

Shit. Twelve hundred NT. I probably grossed ten times that on an average night, but a thousand NT was my allotted weekly disposable income, after I paid off the debt and interest.

“You still have enough to eat?” the American asked me as he held up the folded bills. He looked contrite and seemed ready to peel off a Sun or two and hand them back.

“He’s got that fucking food stand!” objected the Taiwanese. “He could still eat if we took his whole goddamned wallet. If you still don’t get it, boy, guess where we’re going to show up next!”

“Stop,” growled the American. “You don’t know when you’ve gone too far.” He released the emergency tab. The elevator rose for a few seconds and then slowed. The Taiwanese looked meaningfully at me and tapped his temple.
Don’t forget this warning
.

The doors opened and the men filed out, snapping their umbrellas shut. I lunged at the panel to close the doors and then pressed the button for the ground floor. The smells rising up from the food court—so different from a night market and so appetizing not even an hour ago—now made me nauseated.

The worst thing about the encounter, I decided later, was that despite the fact that the emergency stop had been on for a few minutes, no one had broken in over the intercom. Typical blasé Taipei thinking: alarms only go off by accident.

I
WASN
’
T GOOD AT
hiding things from Dancing Jenny. She freaked out when I finally gave her the brief version of events, from Julia’s parents to the guys who had warned me off and roughed me up.

She raised her hands and called up to the sky. “Oh, Mazu,
Mother of Heaven,” she said. I could see Jenny’s nipples darken and push against her nearly transparent bra and cheesecloth shirt. “Are you badly hurt?”

“Naw, I’ll be all right.”

“Lift up your shirt,” said Jenny.

“Why?”

“I want to see something.” I complied and she gasped. “It’s as bad as I feared. I can see auras, you know!”

I bent over and saw a baseball-sized splatter of purple.

“Gan,”
I whispered.

“I know you don’t want me to, but I’m going to be praying for you, Jing-nan. I’m going to ask for all the protection you can get!”

“I don’t need help from gods. I just need a gun.”

Anger flashed in her eyes.

“Hey, I’m kidding, Jenny!”

“I’ve had enough guns in my life. Don’t even joke about it, Jing-nan.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Make sure you drink a lot of liquids. Your body needs to wash out the damaged tissue.”

“You know best.”

I left and went to Big Shot Hot Pot. Kuilan was away, so I said hi to her husband. Her son was chopping chives in the back, and he didn’t break from his hacking motion even when I waved to him. I’m glad my grandfather had the sense not to have a dumpling-and-soup business. The fillings are cheap because they’re mostly vegetables, but you have to spend a lot of time chopping.

“Y
OUR COLOR DOESN
’
T LOOK
good,” Dwayne informed me. “You never liked my color,” I said.

“I’m not joking, kid. You look sickly. You feeling okay?”

“Two guys threatened my life today, Dwayne.” Fuck it. I told Jenny, how could I not tell Dwayne, the guy I talked to more than anybody?

“What!” he thundered.

“But everything’s all right now, I’m pretty sure.”

He stared at me, a knife erect in his right hand. I could tell from
his eyes that his mind was set to “kill.” “Who threatened your life?” Honestly, I was touched he was sticking up for me.

“Two guys. Not
jiaotous
. Probably affiliated with big gangs.”

“You think they were Black Sea?”

“I’m not sure. But one of them was a
taiyi
asshole.”

“You got pushed around by a Taiwanese-American! On your own turf!”

I lifted my shirt and exposed my bruise.

“Gan!”
Dwayne and Frankie shouted.

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“I’ll make that guy’s face look worse!” Dwayne vowed. He threw the knife into the sink for emphasis.

“Let’s forget it for now,” I said. “C’mon, let’s focus on work.”

“Not yet!” Dwayne pointed at Frankie. “You! Have you been doing your duty?”

Frankie’s face tightened just the slightest. “
You’re
questioning
me
?”

“I can’t think of a reason why else our young boss here was accosted by gangsters, Mr. Cat.”

Frankie said, “I’ve been keeping him out of trouble.”

Dwayne sighed and said to me, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t blame Frankie,” I said. “This didn’t happen around here. They got me at Taipei 101.”

“God, I hate that place. The Han Chinese built that thing to give the finger to my people. So they roughed you up, huh? Shit.”

“I also had to pay them twelve hundred NT.”

Dwayne whistled. “Next time you get ripped off like that, you goddamn call me and I’ll show up and kick some ass!”

“I would’ve called you, but I was too busy trying to breathe.”

“What did they say to you?”

“They want me to stop looking into Julia’s death. I was asking an old classmate for information. Somehow they knew.”

Dwayne rubbed his stubbly chin. “What are you going to do?”

“I have no choice.” By that, I meant I had to keep on going. Dwayne nodded. “I think we should report this to the Black Sea people, Jing-nan. Frankie has connections with those guys.”

“Shouldn’t we report it to the police?”

“Naw, it’s faster and more effective if we go straight to Black Sea.”

“I’ll handle it,” said Frankie as he patted my right shoulder. “Don’t worry.” He walked off.

“Hey, I didn’t tell you the details, the circumstances!” I called after him.

“I heard enough.”

“It can wait, Frankie!”

“No, it can’t. Right now I’m just going to take a leak, Jing-nan! I’ll talk to Black Sea later.”

I
T WAS A BUSY
night, and I didn’t notice Ming-kuo’s email on my phone until we were closing. The alumni office had forwarded my email and he was excited that I was getting in touch. I felt a little bad reading his note, because he thought we were going to resume an active friendship when there hadn’t really been one to begin with. Ming-kuo seemed to think we’d had a lot of good times together. I couldn’t remember even talking to him for more than thirty seconds at a time.

Shit. Cookie Monster was still in Taipei, and he sounded needy, if not flat-out desperate. I wondered how he would react when he found out I just wanted to pick his brain for info on Julia. I wished we could have done so via email. There was no way to avoid an in-person meeting now.

Wait. I wasn’t even giving the guy a fair chance. High school was a long time ago. It might be fun to hang out with an old classmate and laugh a little about the old days, back when I was the king of the world and he was Cookie Monster. Hadn’t things ended nicely with Peggy? My conversation with her, anyway, not the aftermath.

W
HEN
I
WAS DONE
with work, I drove home keeping one eye on the rearview mirror.

I sent Ming-kuo a short reply with my phone number, saying it was great to hear from him. I was tired now from work, I wrote, but I would love to talk late in the morning or early in the afternoon, whichever was better.

I took off my shirt and noticed that the bruise had expanded into an ugly nebula of blue, purple and red jam. I didn’t know
injuries could be so colorful. I went to the bathroom mirror to admire my bruise in full.

My phone rang.

I didn’t recognize the number, but it had to be Ming-kuo. Did he just skim my email? It was like three in the freaking morning. Didn’t he know how late it was now? Shit. If I didn’t answer now, I’d have to call him back at some point, and it would never be enjoyable. Why draw it out?

“Hello, is that you, Ming-kuo?”

“Jing-nan! It’s good to hear from you again! I wasn’t sure if you were still here in Taipei!”

“I’ve been here a long time, Ming-kuo.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, clearing his throat. “I was sorry to hear about your parents. I didn’t know you stayed. I thought you would have gone back to UCLA.” His voice was the same. Squeaky and fast, like a gerbil on a sugar high.

“Yeah,” I said. “There was a lot for me to take care of here.”

“I heard about Julia,” he said.

“You did?”

“Jing-nan, it was all over the TV!”

“Ming-kuo, where are you? It sounds like there’s a big commotion over there.”

“I’m at work.” He chuckled to himself. “I have a late shift at the front desk of a love hotel.”

Damn, and I thought I had it bad. Think of the scumbags and lowlifes he had to deal with.

“Is something really funny there? I hear people laughing.”

“A guy is checking in with three girls. They’re all pretty drunk.”

“That explains the terrible singing.”

“Do you want me to send you a picture?”

“No, I don’t need that.”

“They’re leaving the lobby now. Boy, this job is crazy sometimes.”

“Ming-kuo, are you working two jobs?”

“No, this is my only job.” I heard facial stubble brush the phone as he switched to the other shoulder. “Who would have thought I’d end up here? This economy sucks. What do you do, Jing-nan?”

“I work the night shift at a restaurant. It’s sort of a menial job.”

“Oh,” he said, unable to disguise his disappointed tone. “Look at us. The smart guys in high school stuck with these dumbass jobs.”

“Maybe we should talk later, Ming-kuo. I don’t want to bother you at work.”

“No, don’t worry! They don’t care if I’m on the phone. It helps keep me alert.”

This could be my break. If he could help me over the phone, I wouldn’t have to see him in person.

“Let me ask you something. Were you in touch with Julia through college?”

“You know, Julia was really busy at NYU. Every time I ran into her, she was in a rush to go somewhere, whether it was the library or to an afternoon nap.”

“She liked to keep herself busy.” And away from Cookie Monster.

“I saw her when she was working at the betel-nut stand, only a few months ago.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“I saw her from the car a few times. It was by an exit, so I drove slower. I got a good look, but I wasn’t absolutely positive it was her. Until, you know, after the news.”

“Where exactly was the stand? The news didn’t say.” I looked out my window into the haze where ghosts were supposedly slipping by, looking for bodies to possess.

“It was out in Hsinchu City, the second exit on National Highway One.” Less than an hour away by car to the southwest of Taipei, right on the coast. “If you get to the intersection with National Highway Three, you’ve gone too far. When you get out of the exit, there are about seven betel-nut stands. She was at the one that had sort of a little parking area. None of the other ones had one. It might have changed.”

“What sort of
binlang
stand was it? Did it seem sort of rinky-dink?”

“Not at all. It was a classy place. That whole area is, actually. You try to offer money for sex and no one will take it.”

How desperate were you, Cookie Monster? There are plenty of
red-light districts right in Taipei, unless you got yourself banned from all of them. I fumbled around with a piece of paper on my desk and wrote down the directions. Second exit to Hsinchu, place with parking lot.

“Were you working in Hsinchu City, Coo—er, Ming-kuo?”

“No, no. I wasn’t working at the time. I was driving around, trying to figure out what happened to my life. This job fell into my lap not too long after. Life wasn’t fair to any of us, Jing-nan. We were the smart ones! You, me and Julia.”