The Stone Monkey (26 page)

Yin-yang, light and dark, male and female, sorrow and joy.

Deprivation and gift...

Chang rose and walked to his sons and sat down to watch the television with them. He moved very slowly, very quietly, as if any abrupt motion would shatter this fragile familial peace like a rock dropping into a still morning pond.

to Wednesday, the Hour of the Rat, 1 AM.

In Wei-Chi ... the two players facing the empty [board] begin by seizing the points they believe to be advantageous. Little by little the deserted areas disappear. Then comes the clash between the conflicting masses; struggles of defense and offense develop, just as happens in the world.

—
The Game of Wei-Chi      

His wife was getting worse.

It was now early evening and Wu Qichen had sat for the past hour on the floor next to the mattress and bathed his wife's forehead. His daughter had painstakingly brewed the herbal tea he'd bought and together he and the girl had fed the hot liquid to the feverish woman. She'd taken the pills too but there seemed to be no improvement.

He leaned forward again and wiped her skin. Why wasn't she getting better? he raged. Had the herbalist cheated him? And why was his wife so thin to start with? She wouldn't have gotten sick on the voyage if she'd eaten right, gotten more sleep before they left. Yong-Ping, a fragile, pale woman, should have forced herself to take better care of herself. She had responsibilities....

"I'm frightened," she said. "I don't know what's real. It's all a dream to me. My head, the pain..." The woman began muttering and finally fell silent.

And suddenly Wu realized that he was frightened too. For the first time since they'd left Fuzhou, a lifetime ago, Wu Qichen began to think about losing her. Oh, there were many things about Yong-Ping that he didn't understand. They had married impulsively, without knowing much of each other. She was moody, she was sometimes less respectful than his father, say, would have tolerated. But she was a good mother to the children, she was dependable in the kitchen, she deferred to his parents, she was clever in bed. And she was always ready to sit quietly and listen to him—to take him seriously. Not many people did.

The thin man glanced up and saw their son standing in the doorway. Lang's eyes were wide and he had been crying.

"Go back and watch television," Wu told him.

But the boy didn't move. He stared at his mother.

The man stood. "Chin-Mei," he snapped. "Come here."

The girl appeared in the doorway a moment later. "Yes, Baba?"

"Bring me some of the new clothes for your mother."

The girl disappeared and returned a moment later with a pair of blue stretch pants and a T-shirt. Together they dressed the woman. Chin-Mei got a clean cloth and wiped her mother's forehead.

Wu then went to the electronics store next door to the apartment. He asked the clerk where the closest hospital was. The man told him that there was a big clinic not far away. He wrote down the address in English, as Wu asked; he'd decided to spend the money on a taxi to take his wife there and needed the written note to show the driver; his English was very bad. When he returned to the apartment he said to his daughter, "We'll be back soon. Listen to me carefully. You are not to open the door for anyone. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, Father."

"You and your brother will stay in the apartment. Do not go outside for any reason."

She nodded.

"Lock the door and put that chain on it after we leave."

Wu opened the door, held his arm out for his wife to cling to and then stepped outside. He paused, heard the door latch and the rattle of the chain. Then they started down Canal Street, filled with so many people, so many opportunities, so much money—none of which meant much of anything to the small, frightened man at the moment.

"There!" the Ghost said urgently, as he turned the corner and eased the Blazer to the curb on Canal Street near Mulberry in Chinatown. "It's the Wus."

Before he and the Turks could find their masks and climb out of the vehicle, though, Wu helped his wife into a taxi. He climbed in after her and the cab drove away. The yellow cab was soon lost in the busy traffic of rush-hour Canal Street.

The Ghost eased back into traffic and parked in a space directly across from the apartment whose address, and front-door key, Mah's real estate broker had given him a half hour ago—just before they'd shot him to death.

"Where do you think they've gone?" one of the Turks asked the Ghost.

"I don't know. She looked sick, his wife. You saw how she was walking. Maybe to a doctor."

The Ghost surveyed the street. He measured distances and noted particularly the number of jewelry stores here at the intersection of Mulberry and Canal. It was a smaller version of the Midtown diamond district. This troubled the Ghost. It meant that there would be dozens of armed security guards on the street—if they killed the Wus before the stores closed they might expect one of them to hear the gunshots and come running to the sound. Even after-hours, though, there would be risks: he could see the square boxes of dozens of security cameras covering the sidewalks. They were out of sight of the cameras here but to approach the Wus, they would be well within range of the lenses. They'd have to move fast and wear the ski masks.

"I think here is how we should handle it," the Ghost said in slow English. "Are you listening?"

Each of the Turks turned his attention to him.

After her father and mother had left, Wu Chin-Mei made some tea for her brother and gave him a tea bun and rice. She reflected how badly her father had embarrassed her in front of a handsome young man in the grocery store by actually bargaining for the food they'd bought this morning when they'd arrived in Chinatown.

Saving a few yuan on tea buns and noodles!

She sat eight-year-old Lang down in front of the television with his food and then walked into the bedroom to change the sweat-stained sheets of their mother's bed.

Glancing at the mirror, she studied herself. She was pleased with what she saw: her long black hair, wide lips, deep eyes.

Several people had remarked that she looked like Lucy Liu, the actress, and Chin-Mei could see that was true. Well, she would look more like her after she lost a few pounds—and fixed her nose, of course. And these
ridiculous
clothes! A pale green workout suit ... how disgusting. Clothes were important to Wu Chin-Mei. She and her girlfriends would raptly study the broadcasts of the fashion shows from Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, the tall models swiveling their hips as they walked down the runway. Then the girls, thirteen and fourteen, would stage their own fashion shows, traipsing down a homemade runway then ducking behind screens to change.

One time, before the party cracked down on her father for opening his loud mouth, the family had gone with him to Xiamen, south of Fuzhou. This was a delightful town, a tourist draw, catering to many Taiwanese and Western travelers. At a tobacco shop where her father had gone to buy cigarettes Chin-Mei had been stunned to see more than thirty fashion magazines in the racks. She'd remained in the store for a half hour while her father did some business nearby and their mother took Lang to a park. She worked her way through all of them. Most were from the West but many were published in Beijing or in other cities in the Free Zones along the coast and showed the latest creations of Chinese designers, which were as stylish as anything produced in Milan or Paris.

The teenager had planned to study fashion in Beijing and become a famous designer herself—possibly after a year or two of modeling.

But now her father had ruined that.

She dropped onto the bed, grabbed the phony cloth of her cheap running suit and tugged at it in a fury, wanted to rip it to pieces.

What would she do with her life now?

Work in a factory, stitching together crappy clothes like this. Making two hundred yuan a month and giving it to her pathetic parents. Maybe that would be how she'd spend the rest of her life.

That
would be her career in the fashion business. Slavery... She was—

A sharp knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.

Gasping in fright, she sat up fast, picturing the snakehead in the raft, a gun in his hand. The pop of the shots as he killed the drowning victims. She walked into the living room and turned the volume on the TV down. Lang looked up with a frown but she touched his lips to keep him silent.

A woman's voice called, "Mr. Wu? Are you there, Mr. Wu? I have a message from Mr. Chang."

Chang, she recalled, the man who had saved them from the hold of the ship and sailed the raft to shore. She liked him. She liked his son too, the one with the Western name William. He was sullen and lean and handsome. Cute but a risk: he was clearly triad bait.

"It's important," the woman said. "If you're there, open the door. Please. Mr. Chang said you're in danger. I worked with Mr. Mah. He's dead. You're in danger too. You need a new place to stay. I can help you find one. Can you hear me?"

Chin-Mei couldn't get the sound of the gun out of her mind. The terrible man, the Ghost, shooting at them. The explosion in the ship, the water.

Should she go with this woman? Chin-Mei debated.

"Please ..." More pounding.

But then she heard her father's words ordering her to stay, not to open the door for anyone. And as angry as she was, as wrong as she thought her father was in so many ways, she couldn't disobey him.

She'd wait here silently and not let anyone in. When her parents returned she would give them the message.

The woman in the alleyway must've gone—there was no more knocking. Chin-Mei turned up the volume on the TV again and fixed a cup of tea for herself.

She sat for a few minutes, studying the outfits of the American actresses on a sitcom.

Then she heard the click of a key in the latch.

Her father was back already? She leapt up, wondering what had been wrong with their mother. Was she all right now? Did she have to stay in hospital?

Just as she got to the door and said "Father—" it opened fast and a small, swarthy man pushed inside, slammed the door behind him and pointed a pistol at her.

Chin-Mei screamed and tried to run to Lang but the man leapt forward and grabbed her around the waist. He flung her to the floor. He took her sobbing brother by the collar and dragged him across the room to the bathroom, pushed him inside. "Stay there, be quiet, brat," he snarled in bad English. He pulled the door shut.

The girl wrapped her arms around her chest and scrabbled away from him. She stared at the key. "How ... where did you get that?" Afraid that he'd killed her parents and taken it from them.

He didn't understand her Chinese, though, and she repeated it in English.

"Shut your mouth. If you scream again I'll kill you." He took a cell phone from his pocket and made a call. "I'm inside. The children are here."

The man—dark and Arab-looking, probably from western China—nodded as he listened, looking Chin-Mei up and down. Then he gave a sour sneer. "I don't know, seventeen, eighteen ... Pretty enough ... All right."

He disconnected the call.

"First," he said in English, "some food." He seized her hair and dragged the sobbing girl into the kitchen. "What do you have to eat here?"

But all she could hear were those three words looping over and over through her mind.

First, some food... first, some food
...

And
then?

Wu Chin-Mei began to cry.

In Lincoln Rhyme's town house, gray and gloomy thanks to the storm's early dusk, the case wasn't moving at all.

Sachs sat nearby, calmly sipping that disgusting-smelling tea of hers, which irritated the hell out of Rhyme for no particular reason.

Fred Dellray was back, pacing and squeezing his unlit cigarette, not in any better mood than anyone else. "I wasn't happy then and I ain't happy now. Not. A. Happy. Person."

He was referring to what he'd been told were "resource allocation issues" within the bureau, which were delaying their getting more agents on the GHOSTKILL team. The tall man contemptuously spat out, "They
ac
-tually said 'RAI,' if you kin believe it. Yep, yep. 'It's an RAI situation.'" He rolled his eyes and muttered, "Jesus loves his mother."

Dellray's take was that nobody in the Justice Department thought human smuggling was particularly sexy and therefore worth much time. In fact, despite the executive order in the nineties shifting the jurisdiction, the bureau
didn't
have as much experience as the INS. Dellray had tried explaining to the assistant special agent in charge that there was also the little matter that the snakehead in question was a mass murderer. The response to that was also tepid. It fell into the category of LSFH, he'd explained.