Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

His second thought: Where can I buy some cigarettes?

He found a kiosk selling newspapers and bought a pack.

When he looked at his change this time he thought: Ten judges of hell! Nearly three dollars for a single pack! He smoked at least two packs a day, three when he was doing something dangerous and needed to calm his nerves. He'd go broke in a month living here, he estimated. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as he walked through the crowds. He asked a pretty Asian woman how to get to Chinatown and was directed to the subway.

Jostling his way through the mass of commuters, Li bought a token from the clerk. This too was expensive but he'd given up comparing costs between the two countries. He dropped the token in the turnstile, walked through the device and waited on the platform. He had a bad moment when a man began shouting at him. Li thought the man might be deranged, even though he was wearing an expensive suit. In a moment he realized what the man was saying. Apparently, it was illegal to smoke on the subway.

Li thought this was madness. He couldn't believe it. But he didn't want to make a scene so he stubbed out his cigarette and put it in his pocket, muttering under his breath another assessment: "One crazy fuck country."

A few minutes later the train roared into the station and Sonny Li got on board as if he'd been doing it all his life, looking around attentively – though not for security officers but simply to see if anyone else was smoking so that he could light up again. To his dismay, no one was.

At Canal Street Li stepped out of the car and climbed up the stairs into the bustling, early morning city. The rain had stopped and he lit the snuffed cigarette then slipped into the crowd. Many of the people around him were speaking Cantonese, the dialect of the south, but aside from the language, this neighborhood was just like portions of his town, Liu Guoyuan – or any small city in China: movie theaters showing Chinese action and love films, the young men with long slicked-back hair or pompadours and challenging sneers, the young girls walking with their arms around their mothers or grandmothers, businessmen in suits buttoned snugly, the ice-filled boxes of fresh fish, the bakeries selling tea buns and rice pastries, the smoked ducks hanging by their necks in the greasy windows of restaurants, herbalists and acupuncturists, Chinese doctors, shop windows filled with ginseng roots twisted like deformed human bodies.

And somewhere near here, he was hoping, would be something else he was very familiar with.

It took Li ten minutes to find what he sought. He noticed the telltale sign – the guard, a young man with a cell phone, smoking and examining passersby as he lounged in front of a basement apartment whose windows were painted black. It was a twenty-four-hour gambling hall.

He walked up and asked in English, "What they play here? Fan tai? Poker? Maybe thirteen points?"

The man looked at Li's clothes and ignored him.

"I want play," Li said.

"Fuck off," the young man spat out.

"I have money," Li shouted angrily. "Let me inside!"

"You Fujianese. I hear your accent. You not welcome here. Get outta here or you get hurt."

Li raged, "My dollar good as fuck Cantonese dollar. You boss, he want you turn away customers?"

"Get outta here, little man. I'm not going to tell you again."

And he pulled aside his nice black jacket, revealing the butt of an automatic pistol.

Excellent! This is what Li had been hoping for.

Appearing frightened, he started to turn away then spun back with his arm outstretched. He caught the young man in the chest with his fist, knocking the wind out of him. The boy staggered back and Li struck him in the nose with his open palm. He cried out and fell hard to the pavement. The guard lay there, gasping frantically for breath, blood pouring from his nose, while Li delivered a kick to his side.

Taking the gun, an extra clip of ammunition and the man's cigarettes, Li looked up and down the street. Two young women, walking arm in arm, pretended that they hadn't seen. Aside from them the street was empty. He bent down to the miserable man again and took his wristwatch too and about three hundred dollars in cash.

"If you tell anyone I did this," Li said to the guard, speaking in Putonghua, "I'll find you and kill you."

The man nodded and sopped up the blood with his sleeve.

Li started to walk away then he glanced back and returned. The man cringed. "Take your shoes off," Li snapped.

"Shoes. Take them off."

He undid the black lace-up Kenneth Coles and pushed them toward Li.

"Socks too."

The expensive black silk socks joined the shoes.

Li took off his own shoes and socks, gritty with sand and still wet, and flung them away. He put on the new ones.

Heaven, he thought happily.

Li hurried back to one of the crowded commercial streets. There he found a cheap clothing store and bought a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a thin Nike windbreaker. He changed in the back of the store, paid for his purchases and tossed his old clothes into a trash bin. Li then went into a Chinese restaurant and ordered tea and a bowl of noodles. As he ate he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his wallet, the sheet that he'd stolen from Hongse's car at the beach.

August 8

From: Harold C. Peabody, Assistant Director of Enforcement,

U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service To: Det. Capt. Lincoln Rhyme (Ret.) Re: Joint INS/FBI/NYPD Task Force in the matter of Kwan Ang,

AKA Gui, AKA The Ghost

This confirms our meeting at ten a.m. tomorrow to discuss the plans for the apprehension of the above-referenced suspect. Please see attached material for background.

Stapled to the memo was a business card, which read:

Lincoln Rhyme

345 Central Park West

New York , NY 10022

He flagged down the waitress and asked her a question.

Something about Li seemed to scare her and warn that she shouldn't help this man. But a second glance at his face must've told her that it would be worse to say no to him. She nodded and, eyes down, gave him what Li thought were excellent directions to the street known as Central Park West.

"You look better," Amelia Sachs said. "How are you feeling?"

John Sung motioned her into the apartment. "Very sore," he said, and closing the door, joined her in the living room. He walked slowly and winced occasionally. An understandable consequence of having been shot, she supposed.

The apartment that his immigration lawyer had arranged for him to stay in was a dingy place on the Bowery, two dark rooms, containing mismatched, damaged furniture. Directly below, on the first floor, was a Chinese restaurant. The smell of sour oil and garlic permeated the place.

A compact man, with a few stray gray hairs, Sung walked hunched over from the wound. Watching his unsteady gait, she felt a poignant sympathy for him. In his life in China, as a doctor, presumably he would have enjoyed some respect from his patients and – even though he was a dissident – may have had some prestige. But here Sung had nothing. She wondered what he was going to do for a living – drive a taxi, work in a restaurant?

"I'll make tea," he said.

"No, that's all right," she said. "I can't stay long."

"I'm making some for myself anyway." There was no separate kitchen but a stove, a half-size refrigerator and a rust-stained sink lined one wall of the living room. He put a cheap kettle on the sputtering flame and took a box of Lipton from the cabinet over the sink. He smelled it and gave a curious smile.

"Not what you're used to?" she asked.

"I'll go shopping later," he said ruefully.