Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“Chu was right,” Frank says. “The world had changed. Assholes were still on top. But now they were Chinese assholes, vindicated after all those years, finally fulfilling their destiny as the only true humans in a world of apes. They had power at last. The problem was that white people still had most of the money.

“China was Opening Up,” he says, framing the last two words with his hands, as though they were on a marquee. “I always loved that phrase. It sounded like part of some master agenda, another damn five-year plan, when what really happened was one day they woke up and looked around and realized they’d built a new Great Wall, and all the money was on the other side. The government woke up, I mean. Colonel Chu and all the other Colonel Chus had always known where the money was, and they’d erected some amazing financial structures, cash siphons of staggering complexity, mostly through Hong Kong and a few million overseas Chinese who had thoughtlessly left their loved ones behind as collateral. Every time your mother bought dim sum at Choy’s Cafe in Lancaster, Colonel Chu, or someone like Colonel Chu, pocketed a dime.”

“Was that why you never ate there?”

“You know,” Frank says wearily, “one of the three or four million things I regret is that I never got all dressed up and took your mother there. Not that it was the kind of place you dressed up for, but. .” His voice trails off, his gaze on Poke.

“I know what you mean,” Rafferty says.

Frank lets his eyes roam the room. “I didn’t understand anything then, not how anything worked, or. . I just knew that it hurt to eat Chinese food. It might as well have been glass. Even the smell of it made me hate myself. I read the papers every day. I knew what was happening there. You have to understand, Poke, that none of it made me love your mother any less. I loved her every day I was with her. I still love her.”

After a moment Poke says, “Fine.”

Frank lowers his head, looking down at his lap. “Thanks,” he says.

“China was opening up,” Poke prompts, more at ease with the past.

“They needed me. Well, they needed somebody, and I was there, and they knew I’d do anything to protect Wang. They could have told me to walk on coals, and I would have asked which shoe to take off first. But they didn’t want me to walk on coals. It was my face they needed. They knew that white people were more comfortable dealing with white people. I was the front.”

“And this involved what?”

“A lot of things. Business, you know? If a business deal wasn’t forthcoming, we pushed it along. ‘Facilitated it,’ Colonel Chu would say. Drugs, girls, boys, espionage frames, if that’s what was needed. Take some rough-and-tumble tire executive from. . oh, I don’t know. . Akron, Ohio, some bush leaguer with a crew cut and a calculator who’s holding out for a deal breaker, and put him in a room with a willing girl or boy. Let the tape roll. Get his hotel to put the movie on next time he turns on the TV. Or give him a bunch of papers in Chinese that turn out to be specs for some outdated missile system and point the cops, whom you own, at him. Akron’s a long way off, and the contracts are in the next room. The deal breakers turn out to be not so serious after all, and suddenly you own part of a tire factory.”

“In the meantime, though,” Rafferty says, “Mr. Akron blames you. Word’s got to get around, got to damage your usefulness.”

“Me?” Frank grabs a handful of peanuts and drops a couple into his mouth. “I had no idea. I do Claude Rains: I’m shocked- shocked -to learn about it. Tell me everything, I say, and I’ll see what I can do. Give me the details, and we’ll go to court and break the contract. Well, of course, he’s not about to give me the details, just like he’s not about to go back to the office and say, ‘Hey, you know that factory we just built? If I’d kept my pants on, it’d be in Malaysia.’ ”

Rafferty relaxes slightly. It’s not as bad as he’d feared. Corruption is old news in Asia, reflexive as breathing. “But come on, the factory delivers, right? These guys are smart enough to make sure the bottom line’s okay, no matter how it got built.”

“Sure,” Frank says listlessly. “Lots of money left over even after the skim.”

“And nobody got killed.”

A pause. “No.” Frank dumps the peanuts back into the saucer. “Not in a case like that.”

Rafferty gets up-maybe too quickly, feeling a little light-headed- and goes to the window, looks down on a wet and shining street, courtesy of yet another instant rainstorm. A car plows past, its headlights bright cones of rain against the cloud-seeded gloom of the day. The world going on, he thinks. To Frank he says, “I’m not sure I want to know any more.”

“That’s most of it.” Poke’s father sounds drained. “Just bear with me for a minute more.”

“Why not?” Poke says. “It’s raining anyway.”

“Over the next few years, I learned a lot.” Frank folds his hands, leans back against the wall, and closes his eyes. He swallows noisily and clears his throat. Rafferty realizes he has clenched his own fists, and he relaxes them, one shoulder pressed against the cool glass of the window, wishing he could melt through it, out of the room and back into his life.

“After ten or twelve years, I had a set of skills that I hadn’t known anyone possessed and a map of China in my head that didn’t look like anything on paper. Take any country, Poke, and on top of the paper map you can put another map, a map of how the authority flows and where the obligations are, a map of hidden paths and corners. Blind alleys. The feng shui of power. The secret map, under the radar. One that nobody else has.

“So I began my own map. Each project I took on, I added to that map. I built it up a province, a city at a time. Other countries, every once in a while. A relationship, a promise, a pressure point. A betrayal here, a broken heart there. Somebody’s in love, somebody owes somebody money, somebody’s got a secret, somebody wants revenge. Revenge is always a good one-you can open a lot of doors when somebody wants revenge. The Chinese are superlative haters. They honed the skill during hundreds of years of being treated like shit. I found fulcrums and figured out how much pressure it would take to use them.”

Frank nods, apparently satisfied with the way the story is unfolding. “By then they had some fulcrums of their own. Ming Li had been born, which relaxed Colonel Chu considerably. He was having trouble believing that I still cared about Wang. But with a baby, he knew he had me. Like a lot of Chinese, he believes that the bond of fatherhood is sacred, unbreakable. What he didn’t know was that I had plans for Ming Li.”

“Major-league baseball?” Rafferty asks.

“Do you mind if we discuss you in the third person, Ming Li?” Frank asks.

“Why not?” She doesn’t stir.

Rafferty has thought she was asleep. “What kind of plans?”

Frank doesn’t open his eyes. “How many windows in this room, Ming Li?”

“Three.” She still has her arm over her face.

“How many light fixtures, and where?”

“Ceiling, console, bathroom. Number four is just outside the door in the hallway.”

“Door open out or in?”

“In. Hinges on the left, if you’re facing it from inside the room. The top hinge pin is high in the bracket, easy to get a knife under.”

“What color are the bathroom towels?”

“The color of piss, but they used to be bright yellow. They say ‘His’ and ‘His.’”

Rafferty asks, “How many boys were in the lobby when we came in?”

“Six. Two of them wore lipstick. One of the pretty boys and one of the butches were talking on cell phones. One of the butches had a bleached buzz cut and a port-wine birthmark on his cheek.” She rolls over onto her side, facing him, her head resting on her arm. “Left cheek,” she adds. She pokes her tongue into her cheek to show where it was.