Sweat (14 page)

“So why don't you believe them?”

“I don't know about the Saipan Police, but I could tell my father was lying.”

“And if they were both lying?”

“I don't know.”

“Wrong answer.”

Jake was getting perturbed. “Then what is the right answer, Al?”

Al stumbled with the rebuttal. “What are you going to do to help this girl?”

“Whatever I can.”

“Well Jake, there are a million tragedies played out every day in this world. If there aren't a hundred dead bodies no one cares. You may not be able to help this girl, Jake. Just so you know. Some things are beyond our control as humans.”

“Well, I'd feel better about myself knowing I tried.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Failure has a flavor all its own, and you aren't going to see it as a pizza topping any time soon.”

“Probably tastes like giving up,” Jake answered.

Al rubbed his three-day-old stubble. “Okay, Jake. I'll see what I can find out. Give me a couple of days.”

Al dug through a small pile of street throwaway goodies and pulled out a cloth environmentally-friendly shopping bag with a faded picture of the earth on the side. Al stuffed a pair of shoes, a few newspapers, and a sweatshirt into the bag. He stood and smiled at Jake, his reddish-brown hair and blue eyes alive. “I have somewhere I need to be, Jake. Gotta run. Come back in a few days.”

“How long is a few days?” Jake asked, looking for a specific day and time. “Does that mean Wednesday? Thursday…?”

“A couple of days, Jake. It's not like I'm going anywhere. I don't move to the winter house until November,” Al said, laughing.

Al walked away, leaving his front door open and his guest standing in his living room.

Jake asked a parting question. “No offense, but how are
you
going to find out about a girl halfway around the world?”

“Jake, I have my ways. I wasn't always homeless you know.”

“Yeah, I know. You're a homeowner.”

“A homeowner who used to work in intelligence.”

“Intelligence?”

“Yeah, intelligence, Jake. That's how I met your father,” Al said walking away. “Come back in a couple of days,” he added over his shoulder, his voice echoing under the bridge.

Chow Ying walked from Union Station to Chinatown, a fifteen minute stroll through what used to be some of the meanest streets in D.C. Gone were the open-air crack markets and shooting galleries, the hookers and the pimps. A prolonged police crackdown in the late-Nineties eventually took its toll on the local dealers. Those who didn't end up behind bars, or dead, simply migrated across town, one rundown block at a time, until they reached southeast D.C. or Anacostia. The crackdown on dealers had been good for the neighborhoods but hell on the crack consumers who had to follow their fixes across the city.

Chow Ying glided through barren lots and boarded up buildings that melted together, a ghost town on the verge of transformation into half-million-dollar condos. He walked without a care, map in hand, cigarette dangling from his lips. He ignored the group of young men who heckled him from a slow-moving, low-ride Cadillac with tinted windows and gold-framed license plates. Chow Ying was on a mission. It was a simple one. Do whatever it takes to stay alive long enough to figure out how he was going to stay alive.

D.C.'s Chinatown was shrinking by the day. Construction of the city's main sports venue, the Verizon Center, opened the floodgates of development hell on Chinatown and its quiet existence as a ten-square-block neighborhood north of the Capitol. Development led to higher land values, higher taxes, skyrocketing rent. One by one, half the Chinese businesses were bought out, moved, or just disappeared. Starbucks, CVS, and a conglomeration of franchised watering holes moved in, all with signs in English and Chinese to keep the right atmosphere. Burgers and fries were going head-to-head with kung pao chicken and hot and sour soup, the winner to be decided later.

But a healthy handful of restaurants and other Chinese establishments survived, and Chow Ying knew that even a shrinking Chinatown was his best bet for lying low in a city he didn't know. He checked his map, turned the corner at Seventh Street, and walked half a block. He stopped walking at the bottom of the steps beneath an unprofessionally crafted sign with Chinese characters. He made his way up, pushed open the door to the four-story, ten-room crash pad formally known as the Peking Palace, and asked for a luxury suite just for kicks.

The old Asian man behind the counter, dressed in a sweaty cotton tank top and matching white shorts, smiled and handed him the key to Room 312. “The stairs are in the back, just follow the hall,” the old man said, pointing with a boney finger attached to a bonier arm. “The gourmet buffet breakfast starts at seven o'clock,” the old man added, just to show that he, too, had a sense of humor.

Chow Ying threw his bag on the only chair in the room, a leftover piece from an old dining room set bought at a yard sale. He punched the button on the window air-conditioning unit and a cool stream of air steadied out. Relief. He pulled out the piece of paper he had received from Mr. Wu and looked at the name and address. It was nothing more than ink on paper. He had no feelings for what he was going to do. He didn't have time to get emotional. Time was ticking. C.F. Chang didn't ask you to do something at your leisure. You were always on the clock.

Chow Ying milled about for half the day among the lawyers and lobbyists in the 1300 block of K Street. Winthrop Enterprises was in an area of D.C. that wasn't on the tourist map, and the large Chinese with a ponytail stood out like a Hawaiian shirt at a black tie formal. Beyond the lobbyists and lawyers in suits, there just wasn't much to see on K Street during the day in the business part of the District. The Mountain of Shanghai, sweating like a cook at an open-pit BBQ, bought a bottle of water from a local convenience store where the mainstay of its sales seemed to be lottery tickets to attorneys in expensive cars. Chow Ying bought five dollars' worth and slipped the tickets into his front pocket. You never know.

He watched every face that came and went from the address of the building written on the piece of paper in his pocket. Peter Winthrop had neither come nor gone. Chow Ying was good with faces. He had spent an evening with the CEO and Senator Day as their chauffeur when they were on Saipan. And though no one was asking, he didn't care for either Peter Winthrop or the senator the Chang family had in its sights. They were foreign exploiters, which in Chow Ying's mind was greatly different from homegrown, full-blooded Chinese exploiters. There was no doubt in his mind he would remember his target on sight. He was equally sure Peter Winthrop would recognize him. Everyone did.

The bus stop, with its backless bench, was the only seat on the block with a direct view of the door to the building that housed Winthrop Enterprises. Chow Ying watched the buses come and go, their arrivals and departures, the occasional summer skirt the only break in the monotony of the task at hand.

Wilting under the heat, Chow Ying sprang to his feet when his mark came out the door. He stared hard and wiped the sweat from his brow. The familiar man in the suit stopped, dug around in his bag for his cell phone, turned his back toward Chow Ying and made a call.

Eight hours in the sun were just about to pay off. He sized up his target as he walked—right size, right build, same measured movements and air of self-confidence. How he loved the hunt. Chow Ying picked up the pace, moving briskly through the crowds on the opposite side of the street, his eyes fixed over his right shoulder as he weaved between the suits.

When the light turned green, Chow Ying crossed the street with the afternoon crowds. As he passed the UPS truck picking up deliveries, Chow Ying grabbed the knife from the small of his back and moved it to the front of his body, still under his shirt. Thirty yards away and closing.
Just a quick stab, angled upward beneath the rib cage, combined with a twist of the neck and the deal would be done
.
By the time the blood was pumping out of Peter Winthrop and the crowds on the sidewalk broke into hysteria, Chow Ying would be gone. He would be out of town in less than an hour, and out of the country by midnight.

When Jake clapped his mobile phone closed and turned, Chow Ying was fewer than fifteen feet away, hand tight on the knife. The Mountain of Shanghai looked at Jake's face through the crowd and slammed on the brakes to his emotions. Jake, oblivious, turned and walked in the direction of the subway.

Salt from sweat burning his eyes, Chow Ying again wiped his brow and followed Jake as he slipped below the surface of the Washington sidewalk.
That has got to be his son
, he thought as the escalator inched its way into the shadows. Twenty steps below stood his newly acquired target, one hand on the handrail, the other hand on the sports page. Maybe the young man would lead him to his father, Chow Ying thought, his expression blank. He was on automatic pilot. A patient hunter looking for the right opportunity and willing to track his prey as far as he had to.

Chow Ying grabbed a subway map on his way out of the Cleveland Park Metro station. He walked with one eye on the map and one eye on Jake while weaving through a throng of senior citizens strolling in front of their assisted living complex.

The conceptual layout of D.C. was easy. Letter streets ran east and west in alphabetical order. Number streets ran north and south ascending in both directions as you leave the Capitol. Combine that simple plan with a few hundred memorials and museums to mark the landscape, and one had to really put some effort into getting completely lost. One-way streets and circles wreaked havoc on driving, but walking the city was a breeze.

Jake stopped at the convenience store to pick up a pack of condoms. Chow Ying waited outside, smoked a cigarette, and tried to get his bearings. It was an old habit. Walking was the one form of transportation always available, and Chow Ying kept the compass in his head as accurate as possible. When trouble reared its ugly head, he wanted to know which direction to run. He took a look at the sun, then the block numbers on Connecticut Avenue, and made a rough assumption that he was three miles west of his temporary abode at Peking Palace. He was accurate within a quarter mile.

Jake made a second stop at a Thai restaurant called Otong's for an order of Pad Thai from the street-side carryout window. Chow Ying stepped into the McDonalds two doors down for a less opulent double cheeseburger and large Coke to go, keeping Jake in sight through the glass.

Chow Ying trailed the young Peter Winthrop back to his apartment at a distance far enough to go unnoticed. Jake, unaware of the danger he just led to his door, entered his apartment building without looking back. The Mountain of Shanghai, ketchup in the corner of his mouth, committed the address to memory.

The Hart Senate Building was built on one of the highest pieces of ground in D.C., the altitude giving the third floor office of Senator Day a sweeping view of the capitol and the national mall that ran two miles southwest to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a room with a view, and one the senator had jockeyed position to get for two terms. Competition for perks was intense, and there was no shortage of battles to fight to improve one's position within the elite of the elite. Senators aren't usually elected by mistake, but when it does happen, the constituents tend to notice by the end of the first term. Three inaugurations was the standing record.

Senator Day's page shuffled around the office, making coffee and planning his work schedule, wedging personal agendas between whatever the senator had on his plate for the day. The senator's Ivy League all-star aide, still recovering from his water skiing injuries incurred in the west Pacific, was sorely missed. The page, a recent grad named Doug, was now teamed with Dana and four other full-time helpers. They had one task among them—caring for the self-admitted brashest senator on the Hill.

Senator Day was on the speakerphone when Dana slipped into the room and delivered the envelope. With lips colored fire-engine red, she mouthed the words “he said it was important,” before walking out. The senator nodded, gave a slight wave, and watched the tightest ass in the Hart Senate Building sway its way out of the room. The perfect office assistant.

Senator Day opened the envelope without trepidation, still engrossed in a conversation over a proposal to build a high-level bioresearch center in downtown Boston. A future incubation and study mecca for the most deadly pathogens and viruses known to man, many of which the human species itself created. The highly contested topic was gaining momentum on both sides of the political coin. Local Massachusetts politicians were focusing on the prestige and jobs the center would bring. Everyone else with an IQ above the water temperature on Cape Cod was estimating the potential death toll should a mishap occur in the state's most populated area. As it was with most decisions, it was coming down to the important issue—money. The senator was weighing the proposals, and presently having his ear chewed off by the Mayor of Hopkinton, a small town west of Boston that was also bidding for the project.

The senator pulled the contents from the envelope and read it slowly, continuing his conversation on the bioresearch center, pausing between sentences. Yes, he understood the ramifications of a biological agent being released into downtown Boston. Yes, he understood the potential death toll could be in the tens of thousands. Yes, he could only hope that if such a calamity occurred it would claim his ex-wife as a victim. When the senator reached the second paragraph of the letter, his chest tightened, and he cut the conversation short. “I will have to get back to you, Mayor.”

The senator felt light-headed as he staggered out of his personal office. The reception room was smaller than his office with two short hallways running in either direction. The senator could hear members of his staff at work as he approached the front desk. His face pale, he asked his faithful Senate page and unfaithful office entertainment a simple question. “Where did this envelope come from?”

Both employees looked at the senator with concern. Identifying shock doesn't require formal medical training. The senator stared at his dumbfounded dynamic duo and asked the question again, this time with enough force to arouse the rest of the staff in the adjacent rooms from their chairs. Dana looked around the reception office as if she didn't understand the question, which may have, in fact, been the case.

Doug the Page, wearing a stunning pink bow tie, answered. “Someone dropped it off about ten minutes ago. An Asian man. Very polite. Very well-spoken.”

“Did you get a name?”

“No, he didn't leave one.”

The senator asked for a description of the delivery person, someone doing his best to give the senator an early morning coronary. Doug the Page and Dana the Bimbo gave matching descriptions of an unremarkable Asian figure. Senator Day, face now turning crimson, walked back to his office and slammed the door behind him hard enough to put a crack in the small transom above the frame. Staring at the letter, fuming with anger, Senator Day picked up the phone.

Two floors below, Walter Payton, a seasoned veteran of the Capitol Police force, looked down at the blinking red light. A direct line ran from every Senate office in the building to the main security booth, and when the red light flashed, per protocol, everything else became less of a priority. Walter Payton raised his hand trying to silence the madness going on around him and picked up the phone.

“This is Senator Day, I'm ordering a security shutdown.”

“Good morning, Senator. This is Walter Payton of the Capitol Police. What is the situation, exactly?”

“I'm requesting the immediate apprehension of a suspicious person on the premises. Consider the suspect armed and dangerous,” the senator added with authority, almost delirious.

“Are you injured, sir?”

“No.”

“Is anyone on your staff injured?”

“No.”

“Was anything stolen or vandalized?”

“No. No crime has been committed…and I was hoping we could avoid one.”

Most of the calls to the “bat phone” were lame, emergencies only in title, urgent only to an elite group whose lives ran as smoothly as the Tokyo subway system. The adrenaline the red light had stirred in Officer Payton was already subsiding. “Could you provide a description of the suspect?” the uniformed officer asked, almost bored.

“An Asian man, approximately five-foot-six.”

Walter Payton looked down the crowded entrance hall and scratched his head. “An Asian man, you say?”

“Yes, goddamn it, an Asian man. Did I stutter?!” Senator Day screamed, saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth as he leaned over his desk and yelled into his phone.

Walter Payton peered out of his steel and Plexiglas security booth at the sea of black heads surrounding him. The newly formed group calling themselves Asian Welfare and Rights Equality (AWARE) was packed into the hall, five abreast. It had taken the busload of bag-toting citizens nearly an hour to go through security, and the main hallway on the first floor of the Hart Senate Building was now buzzing like a standing-room only sushi buffet. Senator Hamilton from the state of Washington scrambled to lead the group to an open committee room, trying desperately to appease his constituents. Showing full support for the oppressed minority was a PR opportunity no elected official dared to miss.

The AWARE group was on a mission, and Kazu Ito was their poster boy. The murder of a young straight-A student, who was then framed by the police, had galvanized the Asian rim population in the Seattle suburb. They had had enough. Trumped-up moving violations by the police at four times the rate of the white population had been the tip of the iceberg. Then came Kazu, the latest of three innocent lives snuffed out in their prime.

Not even a cross-country bus trip with a toilet that overflowed twice between Minneapolis and Chicago would prevent Kazu Ito's father from having time on the Hill. But being herded like cattle into the cramped hall, going through repeated security checks, and being forced to stand for hours was making the bus ride, stink and all, seem pleasant by comparison. The AWARE group had passed impatient. Waiting for an empty committee room only further emboldened them and strengthened their push for greater protection of their equal rights.

Senator John Day, in a rage, was about to throw gasoline on the AWARE fire, and then fart for good measure.

Walter Payton looked at the scene in the hall and shook his head ever so slightly, the phone still in his ear. “All right, Senator. I can hold them, but you better hurry.”

Senator Day grabbed Doug the Page by the arm and headed for the first floor. Dana followed as fast as her three-inch heels would allow, her ankles on the verge of snapping as she swayed and bounced her way to forward momentum.

Senator Day roared out of the elevator, turned the corner, and came to a screeching halt, mouth open. Five-dozen jet-black heads turned toward the senator as Officer Payton stuck out his hand, pointed, and announced to the hall. “There he is.”

Senator Hamilton, grabbing the opportunity to make the news for doing something positive, stopped berating Officer Payton who remained in the comfortable confines of his bulletproof glass booth.

It was a small riot in terms of people involved and duration, but a riot nonetheless. Senator Hamilton, sixty-two and in need of all the voting support he could get, tried to simultaneously calm the AWARE group while dishing out a tongue-lashing the likes of which Senator Day hadn't received since he burned down a neighbor's horse barn when he was twelve. Senator Hamilton articulated his threats with grace, the overtures for impeachment with eloquence. He deftly redirected the real mission of the AWARE group, confidently guaranteeing that the newly labeled “most racist senator in modern U.S. politics” would never be re-elected. The senator from Washington, milking the chance to be a hero to his constituents, worked toward a climax. He huffed and puffed, postured and postulated. But before he could deliver the punch line to his impromptu speech, Senator Day, the target of his ire, simply turned and walked away.

The senator from Massachusetts returned to his office, his page and Dana behind him, both less impressed with their fearless leader than they had been when they arrived earlier in the day.

Pausing on his way to his office, he looked at Dana and his page and raised a finger, “Not a word to anyone about an Asian man or a letter. Not a word.”

The senator found his way behind his desk and sat in a daze, alternating between re-reading the letter and downing Jack Daniels, straight up. Just when he thought things were back on track. Being blackmailed for money was one thing. This was something else entirely. The cluster-fuck in the hall downstairs merely made the sting of the letter more poignant. Senator Day called his chief aide at home and checked on the progress of the wire-transfer-hide-and-seek he was playing with a trail of banks in China. No news. The senator cussed into the phone. He had let himself believe that the danger had passed. He had paid the money for the original blackmail and waited. He now realized the silence he had been enjoying was merely a lull in the storm.

The AWARE group set up camp outside the Hart Senate Building and made three calls to the local media. As the news trucks converged on the scene with cameras rolling, Senator Day sent his staff home with a week off, unplugged the phone, and barricaded himself in his office.

He picked up the letter again and read it slowly. It was simple. Unless he wanted to hear about an illegitimate child fathered by a senator with a sweatshop seamstress on the news, Senator Day was to follow the directions to the smallest detail. The letter wasn't demanding money. It was requesting something far more difficult to obtain, far more challenging; something that required a far greater degree of cunning. He wished he could just write a check.

There was an upcoming recommendation by the Special Senate Committee on Overseas Labor regarding the exportation of jobs to third world countries and the establishment of an international minimum wage for American companies doing business overseas. As a show of good faith, and as a measure of Senator Day's resolve as Chairman of the Special Committee, the letter was demanding a unanimous, unequivocal position against a proposed bill that would limit what the letter's composer referred to as “free trade” and “globalization.” The letter was a test. And standing between the senator and success were three colleagues on the Special Committee who didn't share his desire for further internationalization of the great American corporate machine.

Senator Day had work to do.

The senator cringed at the television set in the oak cabinet across the room. He reeked of bourbon, a stench that went beyond his personal space and pervaded every corner of his office. One of the senator's shoes was under his desk, the other shoved toe-first into the thin gap beneath the leather sofa and the carpet. His tie was on the shelf under the window. A swig remained at the bottom of the bottle of Jack on his desk. Outside it was dark, and the only indication of time was that the sun went down somewhere near nine o'clock at the beginning of official summer. The senator's head pounded, an appropriate feeling to go with one of the worst days of his silver-spoon life.

The fiasco with the Asian equality group was turning into a nightmare. Kazu Ito's father, the leader of AWARE, wasted no time in milking the press coverage for everything it was worth. The group's own handheld video recorder had caught most of hallway humiliation from earlier in the day. The quality of the tape was poor, the audio scratchy, the hand of the cameraman shaky, but it all came together with great cinematic appeal. And the AWARE group mainlined it straight into the capital's news veins. The timing was perfect. They had been stopped as suspicious visitors in the halls of the Senate, the very halls where their elected officials worked and breathed. Plans to bring their organization and the plight of their Asian brethren to light couldn't have been better orchestrated. It was time to shine. Kazu Ito's death was going primetime.

The eleven o'clock evening news opened with the crowd outside the Hart Senate Building. In his office, the senator's eyes were still glued to the screen. The crowd outside, which had surged to over two hundred thanks to calls from Kazu Ito's father to every Asian organization in the D.C. phone book, had dwindled to fewer than twenty. Most of the AWARE group was now back at the hotel in L'Enfant Plaza, strategizing their plan for tomorrow. The group knew that protesting at night defeated the purpose. There was no traffic to block, no passers-by to incite.

The news crews finished their last clips for the night and were closing up shop. In the confines of his foxhole, Senator Day pulled himself together with a cup of coffee and a wet towel across his face. He put his shoes on, first trying the left shoe on his right foot, and then making the switch.