The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (22 page)

Neal reached ahead and grabbed Li by the shoulder.

“Where are we?”

“The Walled City.”

“What is it?”

“It is what you see.”

She brushed his hand off and started ahead. He pushed Pendleton aside, grabbed her by the collarbone, and spun her around.

“What is it?” he asked again.

“It is the Walled City!” she screamed at him. “People—you would call ‘squatters’—live here. The gangs rule it. It is drugs, it is prostitutes, it is sweatshops. It is rats, it is packs of rabid dogs. It is children gang-raped and sold as slaves, it is people living in holes! It is filth. It is when nobody cares!”

“I never knew a place like this existed.”

“Now you know. So what?”

“What are we doing here?”

“We are hiding.”

“For how long?”

“Don’t you like it here?”

“For how long?”

She calmed down. He hadn’t seen rage in her before, and it scared him. Pendleton stood aside like a frightened, overgrown child.

“Until you can phone your Simms.”

“Can he get in here?”

“With the people he knows.”

“Gang people, Triad people?”

“Of course.”

“Are there telephones here?”

“There is everything here.”

She turned around and went ahead. She turned left into a slightly wider alley where people sat slumped against the walls in a doped-out haze. Then she turned right into a concrete tunnel, where they walked through muck, stepped over sleeping bodies, and ducked under dangling light bulbs and power cords. They stepped into another alley, narrower and filthier than the last.

“Jesus!” Pendleton gasped.

A pack of rats was feeding on the bare feet of a human corpse. Neal hunched over and finally vomited, trying hard not to touch the walls.

“Come on,” Li Lan hissed. “We are there soon. It is better.”

The alley led to a T-junction. They went to the left, then through a series of zigzags, then straight on and made two more rights.

We’re in a goddamn maze, Neal thought, and we can hardly see the sky. He suddenly realized that he wouldn’t stand a chance of finding his way out of there. Not a chance.

They came onto a small circular patch of bare din that formed a hub for five alleys.

Four teenage boys, dressed in sleeveless white T-shirts, baggy khaki slacks, and rubber sandals squatted in a circle, smoking cigarettes and rolling dice. It was clearly their turf. The boys stared at the newly arrived trio with amazement. An unexpected bonanza of rape and pillage had been dropped in their midst. The biggest one, the leader, rose to his feet and approached Li Lan. He gazed at her with frank sexual interest, stretched his face into an exaggerated leer, and made a comment to his buddies. They chirped with amusement and got to their feet. The leader pulled a knife from his pants pocket and held it up to Li’s face.

Pull the gun, Lan, Neal thought. This is no time to be a Buddhist.

She didn’t pull the gun, but said what sounded to Neal like two words. The boy’s grin crumbled into a frown of concern and his hand dropped to his side. He barked an order to the others and they took off running down one of the alleys. Then he launched into a monologue of obsequious friendliness. Neal didn’t understand a word, but knew shuffling when he heard it, and this kid was tapdancing for his ass. Li wasn’t buying it. She stood looking at him sternly, not throwing him as much as a crumb. The kid started to shuffle harder.

Ten minutes later, Neal saw why. The two errand boys came back escorting a guy who had “honcho” written all over him. He was older, maybe in his early twenties, and sported a gray pinstriped suit, a blue shirt, a plum tie, and a charcoal fedora. A lit cigarette was jammed in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t show any fear toward Li, but he was polite and respectful, bowing slightly to her as he approached and then nodding to Neal and Pendleton.

He listened to Li for a minute, nodded again, and quietly issued orders. The three boys started to run off, but he stopped the leader, then gave him a vicious backhand to the face. The boy fell into the dirt, picked himself up, bowed to Li Lan, and ran off. The honcho shook his head, then reached into his jacket and produced a pack of Kool Lights. He offered one to Neal and Pendleton, who declined with polite smiles and shakes of the head.

“He’s a stupid boy,” he suddenly said. “Useless. I will kill him if you wish.”

“Thank you for the courtesy, but no,” Li answered.

He’s a clever bugger, Neal thought. Making the offer in English to give Li tremendous face in front of her guests.

He turned to Neal. “Don’t worry about White Tiger. They are big men in Kowloon. This is not Kowloon.”

This isn’t Kowloon, thought Neal. This isn’t even the fucking earth. The honcho’s appearance had attracted an audience. The local kids were gathered around them in a wide circle, and Neal looked up to see people looking out the windows of the ratty concrete and wooden buildings that surrounded the circle. The alleys were filling with wishful gawkers.

“Mr. Carey will need to use a telephone,” Li said. Neal got the idea she said it just to fill a silence.

“Sure … anything,” the honcho said casually.

Yeah, okay, how about a helicopter?

The honcho’s acolytes pushed their way through the crowd and apparently announced that they had accomplished their mission.

“Will you come with me, please?” Honcho asked Li. The crowd parted in front of him as he led them up one of the alleys, into a courtyard ringed by shacks full of sewing machines, through one of the shacks and out a back door into another alley, and then into a cul-de-sac.

At least it looked like a cul-de-sac. When Honcho led them down a stairway into what appeared to be a basement building entrance, the steps ended in a concrete wall. Just to the right, however, there was a narrow crack in the wall. Honcho turned sideways and squeezed through, motioning his guests to follow.

Neal could just fit through the crack, and he shuffled along sideways for about ten feet, trying not to scrape himself on the walls, which pressed against his back and his nose. The walls were home to about ten thousand strains of exotic bacteria, and Neal figured that one open wound would be good for about twenty-five different blood tests. He could feel slime rubbing off on his shin and pants, and was grateful for once that he couldn’t see up or down. He didn’t want to know.

This alley, if you could call it that, ended in another wall. This time the crack led off to the left, and Neal endured another twenty feet of rising claustrophobia before they reached their apparent destination. He had to hand it to old Li Lan: She couldn’t have found a better place to hide.

Some jerry-rigged wooden steps rose straight up from the alley into a dark hallway. They passed by two closed doors before knocking on the third.

Neal followed them in through Door Number Three, not really thinking he’d find Monty Hall, the patio set, and the trip to Hawaii. What he did find was a bare, low-ceilinged eight-by-eight room. In the right corner a homemade ladder provided shaky access to a primitive loft that had been literally carved out of a wall. The loft was just large enough for a stool and, incredibly, a telephone. Maybe it was for running a book, maybe for taking drug orders, maybe it was for calling up local shops and asking them if they had Prince Albert in a can, but there it was. A stubby black rotary telephone. Neal wasn’t sure he had ever seen anything so beautiful in his whole life.

An old man and a boy squatted on the floor of the main room. They held rice bowls to their lips, and their chopsticks were flashing furiously, scooping the dirty white rice into their mouths. The old man wore a sleeveless T-shirt that may have been white sometime during the Sung Dynasty, and a pair of khaki shorts that came down to his calves. His white hair had been shaved close to the scalp, and he had a wispy white beard. His eyes were dull and yellow and showed the resentment he felt at being interrupted in his meal.

The kid, on the other hand, was delighted. He stared unabashedly at Neal, and dropped two or three grains of rice onto the black sports shirt he wore over denim cutoff and rubber sandals. His grin showed bad, crooked teeth, and his eyes looked milky and runny. Infected. Neal figured the kid to be maybe twelve, the old man about a hundred and twelve.

The kid reached under his shirt and came out with a comic book, which he held up to Neal’s face.

“Hulk!” he screamed, then screwed his face up and hunched over, growling and showing teeth. “Hulk! Hulk!”

“That’s pretty good,” Neal said, trying to be friendly.

He reached for the comic book to express admiration, but the kid snatched it back. Then he pulled himself up, threw out his chest, put his hands on his hip, and flashed a confident, macho smile.

“Superman?” Neal asked.

The kid shook his head, then hit him with the smile again.

“
Bat
man,” Neal said.

“Batman! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da … Batman!”

“You’re good.”

“Marvel Comics.
Ding hao!
Marvel!”

Honcho pointed to the horizontal telephone booth above them with deliberate nonchalance. “Ma Bell,” he said. “Knock yourself out.”

Pendleton had flopped down in a corner, head in hands. He was done in. Li Lan stood in the center of the room, looking at nothing, expressionless, waiting for the next thing to happen. Neal knew that the next thing was to call Simms and arrange to get the hell out of here. Wherever here was.

“Are you guys ready to do this?” he asked Li and Pendleton.

Tough shit if you’re not, he thought, because we are definitely doing this.

Pendleton kept his head in his hands, but nodded.

Li Lan said, “Yes, we are ready.”

“It’s a local call,” Neal said to Honcho as he climbed the ladder.

“Doesn’t matter,” Honcho answered. “We don’t pay.”

The loft was the size of a baker’s oven and about as hot. There was no room to stand up, and Neal had to bend over, even sitting on the stool. The phone cord came through a small hole that had been drilled in the wall.

It’s a nice scam they have going here, Neal thought. Stealing phone service. Wonder how much they charge the locals to make a call. He dug in his pocket for Simms’s number.

Great. There was no fucking dial tone.

“I think I’m not doing this right,” he said.

Li Lan came up the ladder and leaned into the loft. Even in this sewer she looks gorgeous, Neal thought. Absolutely killer. And she was looking into his eyes so deeply he thought for a moment that he actually might die.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry. Just show me how to use the phone.”

She reached over and gently pulled the cord. It fell out of the hole.

“Is not real,” she said.

A dummy phone for the dummy.

“Why?” he asked.

This time the eyes were angry. As cold and hard as ice.

“You can see all this,” she said, sweeping her arm around to indicate the neighborhood, “and ask why? Why I am a communist? Why I fight for the people? The question you should ask is why you are not, why you do not. You created all this, you made it. Now you can live in it.”

He couldn’t breathe. His chest felt like it was in a vise. Live in it? Live in it?! She can’t mean what I think she means. Jesus God, please, no.

He could barely make himself ask the question, and it came out in a hoarse whisper. “Are you leaving me here?”

“Yes.”

Not even a hint of regret. Cold, hard, and straight.

She started down the ladder. He grabbed the top of it and held on, then twisted himself onto the ladder. He stopped when he felt the blade press against the tendons of his knee. He looked down to see the boy, all of his bad teeth showing in an immense and joyful grin, holding the chopper to his leg. The message was clear: Make a run and you’ll be hobbling for life. And anyway, where would you run? Neal climbed back into the cave. The boy pulled down the ladder, then reached up and took away the stool.

Honcho, Pendleton, and Li were gone.

9

Joe Graham hated Providence, a sentiment that united him in at least a small sense with the rest of the world. Providence is a town for insiders, for third-generation harp politicians, Quebecois priests with a gift for gab and a glad hand at charity breakfasts, and mafioso smart guys who run sand and gravel companies and therefore know where the bodies are buried.

It was also a town for a bank that knows where the money is buried, and Ethan Kitteredge was sort of the ace archaeologist of bankers. He could make old money look new, new money look old, and lots of money look gone, and he did it in layers. Ethan Kitteredge was so good at taking care of other people’s money that he had even started a side operation to take care of his investors’ very lives. Friends of the Family looked out for the family friends—that is, the people who put enough money in the Kitteredge family bank to allow the Kitteredge family to live in the quiet splendor to which it had become accustomed. And AgriTech had run a whole lot of money through Ethan Kitteredge’s bank.

This fact made Joe Graham hate Providence even more than usual on this particular day, because Joe Graham had been summoned to a rare meeting at Kitteredge’s office to discuss the AgriTech file. The office looked like a captain’s cabin on a whaling ship. Nautical models plied the grain of expensive wooden bookcases filled with navigation texts and sailors’ memoirs. Kitteredge’s enormous mahogany desk was about as old as the ocean, and had on it a model of the Man’s pride and joy, his schooner
Haridan.
The place reeked of the sea, which further irritated Joe Graham, who thought the ocean was one gigantic waste of space. He had been to the beach once and hated it: too much sand. So he sat in one of those hard New England chairs, staring pointedly at Ed Levine, while Kitteredge and some preppie cracker discussed the finer points of government policy over a pot of tea. Joe Graham couldn’t give a rat’s ass or a hamster’s dick about government policy. He only wanted to know what had happened to Neal Carey.

So while this Simms yokel was mumbling something about the Chinese tradition of quid pro quo, Graham interrupted him to ask, “So where is Neal Carey?”