Sweat (7 page)

“Waterskiing can be dangerous.”

“Everything can be dangerous,” the senator answered. The senator saw his segue into the heart of the topic he was looking to broach. “By the way, I wanted to thank you and Lee Chang for your assistance with my aide. Lee was most helpful in coordinating the medical care on Saipan. Under the circumstances, I felt somewhat responsible for my employee's injury.”

“Lee Chang knows Saipan very well.”

“Yes, he seemed to be very well-connected. A very interesting man.”

There was a slight change in the nuance of the conversation, a mild shift in mannerisms Peter immediately recognized. “In what way, Senator?”

“I understand Lee comes from a very successful family.”

“Yes, he does.”

“So why Saipan? Running a sweatshop seems like, how should I put it…an underachievement.”

Both men jogged for position.

“The Chang family has manufacturing interests in a half-dozen Asian countries,” Peter said, pausing briefly to sip his brandy. “But Chang Industries on Saipan is the most profitable.”

“Lee has brothers, no?”

Peter knew the senator had been doing his homework. “The Chang family has a proud lineage in China going back too many generations to count. Lee has two elder brothers who are successfully running other business interests of the family.”

“In China?”

“Yes, on the mainland.”

“In Hong Kong?”

“No,” Peter answered.

“So only Lee resides outside of the country?”

Peter didn't respond. Years of doing business with snakes taught him never to divulge all his information at once. The truth was simple. After Lee was caught with the underage daughter of a high-powered politician in the Chinese Ministry of Trade, Lee's father had been forced to make a decision. And C.F. Chang chose money over his youngest son.

“Yes, Lee is the only son working outside of China on a full-time basis,” Peter finally answered, his mind filtering every word of the conversation, trying to gauge where the senator was going.

“What about money?”

Peter smelled blood. “I'm sorry, Senator?”

“Does Lee share in his family's fortune?”

“I imagine he is well taken care of.”

Peter thought about the senator's question and stored it in his memory bank. “Is there a problem?”

“No. No problem at all. I'm just gathering background information. I know I asked some questions about Chang Industries before our trip, but I wanted some more information on our host. I need to be prepared for the Senate Committee. You know how it is with politicians. Any imaginable question could come up.”

“I understand, Senator.”

“Of course you do, Peter. That is why you have your office right here in D.C., close enough to hear the whispers circulating the halls on Capitol Hill.”

“I'm not hiding my intentions, Senator. I'm into money, politics, and women. Usually in that order.”

“Please, there is no need to get defensive. I'm just saying that you could have your office anywhere, but you choose to keep it in D.C. Very prudent. Keep an eye on legislation that will affect your business. Very smart.”

“Senator, my home is D.C., but the world is my office.”

The senator had asked enough questions for one evening. He reached to the table and raised his glass. “To continued success.”

The two powerhouses clinked their glasses and sipped their drinks. They finished their cigars and brandy, dousing themselves in alcohol, thick smoke, and suspicion.

The stainless steel handcuff dug into Wei Ling's left wrist, leaving a purple bruise in the shape of a bracelet like a punk-rock fashion statement. Her backside was sore from lying hours on end, the only alternative she had to standing directly next to the bed. A bedpan in need of attention rested on the floor under the mattress, just beyond the outstretched toes of her bare feet. She was trapped in a world so narrow it made a cell in the solitary confinement block seem like a suite at the Four Seasons.

The middle-aged lady who took care of Lee Chang visited Wei Ling three times a day. She brought soup and rice for breakfast, noodles with a plate of steamed vegetables for lunch, and a full meal in the early evening. It was a balanced diet, and better than the food from the sweatshop kitchen served to the able-bodied seamstresses. Wei Ling's food was coming directly from Lee Chang's personal refrigerator. No bruised fruit. No vegetables on the verge of spoiling. Every dish contained real chunks of chicken, pork, or beef, a vast culinary improvement over the usual unidentifiable meat particles. Everything had its positive side, and for Wei Ling the food was the only thing she had to look forward to.

Food aside, Wei Ling knew she was in trouble. No one with your best interest in mind locks you in a storage room and chains you to a bed. The good doctor hadn't come since the morning she was diagnosed as pregnant, and Wei Ling wasn't holding her breath waiting for his next visit. With the bloated body of the doctor sitting on a slab in the morgue, skull caved-in, she was right to assume he wouldn't be stopping by anytime soon.

Wei Ling wanted an abortion. She didn't care that it would cost her five hundred dollars in penalty money to the Changs. The baby would bring shame to her own family, and her family's honor had led her to Saipan in the first place. The honor of working overseas. Honor and a little cash to help her struggling family in Southern China's Guangzhou region. Coming home with a baby, worse still a half-breed, was not an option. Her family would disown her, and she wasn't from a place in society where a single mother would be met with open arms. She knew the path. Her family would disown her, she would be deemed unemployable, and she would end up on the street.

Having the baby wasn't an option.

Lee Chang promised her daily that an abortion was on the way, per company policy. Two other girls had become pregnant since Wei Ling's arrival at Club Paradise, and the doctor had acted quickly, under the orders of Lee Chang. So she waited for her fate in the recently transformed storage room, one arm cuffed to the metal bed frame. She was a prisoner, and like all prisoners, her life choices were limited. Worse, she was alone.

The seamstresses' quarters, for all its rules, regulations, and downright mean spiritedness, was a hell of a lot better than where she found herself now. And she missed her friends. Shi Shi Wong and the other hundred seamstresses were her family. Misery loves company, and in the seamstresses' quarters, they all helped each other to get by.

Her current isolation took away her only mental outlet. The handcuff on her wrist took away her physical ones. She never thought she would say it, but all she wanted was to have an abortion and be allowed back to work. She wasn't asking for much, but Wei Ling had a growing suspicion she would never see the inside of the seamstresses' quarters again.

Shi Shi Wong looked for her slippers in the piles of footwear scattered on the floor and stacked into four-foot-high bookshelves near the back door of the seamstresses' quarters. She wedged her feet into her green-trimmed flip-flops and slipped out the unlocked door into the rainy night.

The grounds were off limits after lights-out, a nightly ritual marked with a five-second alarm blast at eleven-thirty sharp. The doors to the seamstresses' quarters were locked some nights and open others, depending if the guards remembered to bolt them, which in turn was dependent upon the nightly poker game and how much the night guards drank.

But the locks were the least of Shi Shi's worries. The guards kept an eye, albeit an inebriated one, on the property, and any girl on the grounds after hours was guaranteed a beating. No whips or batons—just a good old-fashioned, barehanded roughing up with a few kicks thrown in for emphasis. A beating bad enough to remind the guilty party and her co-workers of the rules. A beating just short of an injury that would prevent her from working. It was a fine line, and the guards needed to look no further than Lee Chang to see how it was done with precision.

Shi Shi stooped as she walked behind the seamstresses' dorm and stopped at the corner. A lone guard stood at the front gate, his silhouette visible under the dim overhead light. Shi Shi crouched down, held her breath, and listened. The light pattering of rain on the puddles of mud that had formed on the dirt ground was the only audible sound. She looked around in the darkness between the buildings, stood, and covered the distance between the seamstresses' quarters and the factory in short, quick strides. She moved quietly among the fabric sheds behind the factory that held rolls of cotton, nylon, and hi-tech concoctions with fancy names like Rip-Proof Synthetic and Moisture-X.

Shi Shi stopped and repeated her crouch-and-listen routine.

Nothing.

With a final short sprint from the darkness, Shi Shi touched the side of the infirmary wall, crouching under the security lights just beneath Lee Chang's residence. She wiped at the wet glass with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and peered through the window into the empty infirmary. “Where are you?” she said to herself in her native tongue.

She shuffled among empty boxes, garbage cans, and crates of discarded swatches of unused fabric. A dull yellow glow emitted from the next window on the first floor, the weak light drowning in the rain as it reached the end of its spectrum. A TV blared from Lee Chang's residence above, the sound of screaming soccer fans broadcast live from China overpowering the sound of rain hitting the fabric sheds' tin roofs. Shi Shi stepped up on two old crates and looked in the window next to the infirmary. The rain on her face and the textured sliding windows didn't prevent her from immediately recognizing the body of her bunkmate of two years. She tapped on the window and Wei Ling sat straight up, pain shooting down her arm to her elbow. She looked through the glass, saw Shi Shi's face, and began to sob.

Wei Ling tugged at the bed, moving the heavy frame and mattresses inch by inch until she could reach the bottom of the window. She put the pain of her left wrist out of her mind and stretched with her free hand, turning the lock and teasing herself with freedom. Shi Shi, still standing on the crates, pushed the window open, rain splattering into the room. She grabbed Wei Ling's outstretched arm and embraced it.

“Wei, are you ok? We've been worried about you.”

“I knew you would come looking for me,” Wei Ling said, tears streaming from her eyes. “I'm pregnant,” she said before the sobbing spell escalated.

“From that night?”

“Yes. The American.”

“Wei. I'm so sorry.”

“Lee Chang keeps telling me that the doctor is coming to take me to the hospital, but I've been chained to this bed for a week now.”

“The doctor is dead.”

“Dead?”

“They found his body on the beach earlier in the week.”

“Are you sure?”

“Putani, the new girl from Thailand, is sleeping with one of the guards. He told her. He thought it was funny.”

“You have to get me out of here. That crazy Lee Chang is going to kill me.”

“It's okay. If he wanted you dead, you'd be gone by now. I‘ll think of something, but I can't get you out tonight. I'll talk to some of the girls and see if they can help.”

“Make it quick.”

“What about Peter?” Shi Shi asked. “He will come looking for you sooner or later.”

“I hope so.”

“I'll be back tomorrow or the next day. As soon as I can get out without getting caught.”

“Hurry.”

“Take care.”

Shi Shi kissed Wei Ling's hand as Wei Ling caressed her face with her fingertips. The meeting through the window ended suddenly, the crate supporting Shi Shi's small frame creaking once before giving way with a violent crash. Shi Shi's arm was ripped out of the window and a muffled cry slipped out.

“Shi Shi?” Wei Ling repeated several times with no reply. She stretched to shut the window, her flesh cutting against the handcuff. Wei Ling sat down on the bed and continued to cry.

Hopeful tears combined with hopeless ones.

Shi Shi's weight crashing through the crate brought the night guards out of their poker shed, whiskey and beer bottles in hand. Not detectives to begin with, their observation skills were further numbed by alcohol, their ambition robbed by greed and the chance to take money from each other through five card stud, deuces wild.

Shi Shi hid behind the building that housed the sweatshop floor and waited for the three guards to finish their half-hearted search of the back of the facility. When the cussing started again in the shed, Shi Shi limped across the small patch of wet ground to the seamstresses' quarters and opened the door.

She limped down the hall, blood and mud trailing behind her. Her ankle was already starting to swell, a faint blue ring forming around the outside of the bone. She grimaced when she walked, the pain telling her something was broken.

Her roommates heard Shi Shi before she reached the room—the panting sound of the injured girl dragging one leg behind her. “Shi Shi!” her roommates said, turning on the small light next to the door.

“Shhhhhhhh, the guards are outside,” Shi Shi responded, flopping her butt onto the mattress of the lower bunk bed. Blood ran down her leg from her knee to her foot, a deep gash that everyone agreed would need stitches.

The roommates, dressed in light shorts and t-shirts as sleeping apparel, hurriedly tended to the wound with soap, water, and a stream of small Band-Aids. It was all they had.

“Did you find Wei Ling?”

“Yes. She's in the storage room of the infirmary. They have her chained to a bed. She's pregnant.”

Curses flew out in Chinese, English, and Thai.

“She's in serious trouble. Lee Chang keeps telling her the doctor is coming and that they will take her to the hospital to get an abortion. But we know the doctor is dead.”

Shi Shi told the girls what she knew. It was a story no one wanted to hear. It could have just as easily been one of them. They had all been used as a tool to drum up business for Chang Industries. They would have to help her. She was family. And she would do it for any of them.

Lee Chang took his morning walk around the grounds with a cup of black tea. He spot-checked the fence out of habit, looking for holes or places where the fence had been pulled back. No one had tried to break into Chang Industries since a group of thieves had stolen a shipment of silk nearly two years earlier. The police were subsequently put on the payroll, and patrols of the road leading to Chang Industries increased enough to thwart any further crime from outsiders. He walked behind the building, checked the security of the sheds, and headed toward the sweatshop floor to see if everyone was in place. Heading back to his apartment for his morning shower, Lee Chang passed the broken crate under the window. He took two steps before the green-trimmed sandal registered in his mind. He set his cup of tea on the top of an empty blue plastic barrel and reached into the broken remains of the crate. He looked up at the window to the storage room and his heart skipped a beat. He slapped the bottom of the sandal against the palm of his open hand. “Son of a bitch.” He looked at the sandal closely, knocked off some dirt, and squinted at the faded Chinese characters. Lee Chang read the characters to himself, and then aloud with one addition, “Shi Shi fucking Wong.”

Shi Shi had her head down, sewing through her fifth jacket in the bottom half of the hour. A breakneck pace. Beneath her sweatpants, her leg was swollen, her cuts bleeding into the tissue that encased the lower leg like a soft-sided cast. She ignored her leg as best she could, putting the energy from the pain into her work. She thought about herself and then thought about Wei Ling.

She never saw the baton or the hand holding it. Lee Chang dragged her from her seat by her hair, Shi Shi's screams bringing the work floor to a halt. When Shi Shi found her feet, Lee Chang punched her in the face until she lost her balance. It was the vicious beginning to a permanent vacation.