They took out a roll of wide packing tape and taped our mouths shut. Then they bound our hands with it and put us together and wrapped us up in a big circle. They were hitting Luobu, demanding between blows, What are you looking at, huh? What are you looking at?
The five of us sat passively, staring blankly ahead. None of our eyes met.
Finally they stuck pillows in between us to separate our bodies and threw a quilt over our heads, the same quilt Saining and I slept under. They strutted off and didn’t close the door.
Luobu was the first to work free of his bonds. He yanked off the quilt covering our heads and pulled the nylons from Kitten’s mouth.
Don’t worry about us right now! she yelled. Go after them! Catch them!
Luobu did not dare. Kitten scrambled out the second-story window.
Nanjing Noodles and I couldn’t stop spitting. We couldn’t see Kitten or the robbers. There was nothing but the usual noisy activity in the street below. The street I lived on was famous, and tonight it was filled with the usual assortment of prostitutes, pimps, beggars, little girls selling flowers, police, vendors, passersby, and drug dealers.
I spotted Dalong sitting on the ground in front of a small shop.
Dalong was younger than I. He was an orphan, and his friends had brought him down here from Shanghai to be a pimp, but he’d set up a stall and sold kebabs, grilled quail, and roasted corn. Every night, Dalong came out here along with the prostitutes, and they plied their respective trades until dawn. He became good friends with the girls who worked the street. There was some secret ingredient that Dalong put in his meat skewers that made them addictive. Once, he was caught in the supermarket shoplifting some condoms for one of the girls, but fortunately I happened to be walking by just then and I paid his fine. I helped him out because I felt that his shish kebabs had real soul and that anyone who could make such wonderful food had to be a good person.
Dalong! I shouted across the road. I’ve been robbed! Can you spot me twenty
yuan
right now? I need to go get a loan.
Despite what I’d just been through, I felt great. I borrowed some more money from Sanmao’s girlfriend and went to the supermarket and bought a bunch of food. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep much that night. I got home and found, for the second time that evening, several strange men sitting in my apartment. None of the lights were on, and nobody greeted me. Cat, Kitten, Nanjing Noodles, and Luobu were all still there.
I heard someone say in Nanjing dialect, Shit, Nanjing people do the stupidest things! And then all of us lose face!
I started sifting through our things. One of Saining’s acoustic guitars was gone. That guitar had been with Saining longer than any of his others, and I wasn’t sure how he would react when he found out it was missing. I started to feel upset.
I made a call to Beijing. The phone rang and rang for a long time, but no one answered it. I hung up and called again. Still no one answered. I hung up again, then called right back. This time, after two rings, a woman with a lazy drawl picked up the line. Is Saining there? I asked. Who’s Saining? she said. He’s my boyfriend, I said. Who’s your boyfriend? she said. Who are you? I said. You have a lot of nerve! Don’t you have any manners? she countered. Listen, I said, just because I ask you who you are doesn’t mean that I don’t have any manners. She said, What’s it to you who I am? I said, Nothing, I hope. Otherwise, we have a problem.
I hung up on her and sat on the bed sobbing and eating chocolate.
Someone knocked on my bedroom door, and in walked a refined-looking young man in a ridiculous suit and white shoes. His hair was slicked back, his skin very pale.
I’m Ah Jin, he said. Honestly, I didn’t have anything to do with what happened here earlier. I’m just as confused as you are.
Get out, all of you! I said. This noise is killing me.
They all left, and I got to work cleaning the place up.
An hour or so later, Cat, Kitten, Nanjing Noodles, and Luobu came back. The moment she stepped inside, Kitten dropped down on her knees before me with a loud thud.
I’m so, so sorry, she said. When you were gone, I brought some people over here, and there was obviously some kind of trouble among them. But they clearly knew our habits, the way they came and robbed us at seven o’clock at night. It’s all my fault.
Don’t say that, I said soothingly. You were robbed too. I can’t blame you. Just forget about it, OK? Now, stand up!
And the four of us women had a good cry together.
There was something naggingly weird about the whole incident. Who was this Ah Jin, anyway?
Ah Jin, it turned out, was a pimp, and the previous week at the New Capital Restaurant one of his girls had ripped off a client to the tune of more than
100,000
yuan.
No way! Some guy was walking around with
100,000
yuan
in his pockets? Why didn’t he drop it off at home first?
Really, it’s the truth. The whole Nanjing crowd knows about it.
Kitten and Cat started arguing loudly. When they got into arguments, they usually switched to Nanjing dialect, which drove me crazy.
Forget it! I said. Let’s just forget about this whole mess. I don’t want to call the police, and neither of you has any proof, so what’s the point in reporting it? The truth is, I’m the one who screwed up. I didn’t realize what they were up to, and if I hadn’t called Nanjing Noodles out of the bedroom, and if the door to the bedroom had stayed shut the whole time, things could have been very different. From the moment they walked in the door, all those guys really wanted was to see who was inside that room, to see if there wasn’t some other thug in there.
Kitten said, Actually, the moment they said they were looking for Ah Jin, I panicked. I just wanted to get them out of here. If I could lure them away, I wouldn’t have to be afraid of them anymore, because I knew there was a gang from Nanjing hanging out in the food stall downstairs.
Things are pretty mixed up between me and Saining right now, I said. The last thing I want is for him to come back and find everything in such a mess. You two are going to have to stay out of trouble from now on.
I’ve been wanting to go back to Nanjing for a long time, Cat said. But I was waiting until I’d made enough money.
I don’t want to go home! put in Kitten. I just want to make lots of money!
Oh, so that’s how you go about making money, is it? countered Cat. By stirring everything up. And to top it all off, you rip off your clients too.
He insulted me, Kitten protested.
The way we earn money is an insult to us all by itself, do you understand? Why can’t you just accept that you’re being paid to be humiliated?
Kitten said, Fuck you! That bastard couldn’t pay me enough for that.
The phone rang, and when I picked it up, the person on the other end of the line asked if she had reached such and such a number. A familiar voice and a familiar question. If some woman was always calling my house and saying she had the wrong number, I’d have to suspect that it wasn’t a wrong number at all, just the wrong person answering the phone: me. So this time I didn’t want to let her go so easily. I waited a moment before speaking and then I asked, So tell me, who are you? Maybe there was something menacing in my voice, because I sensed fear in the way she hurriedly hung up on me.
After I’d hung up, I turned to Kitten and Cat.
Would you two stop bickering! Tomorrow I’ll take you to a place where you can get jobs as salesgirls. You’ll be on commission. Try it out for a while. If they make you this bitchy, you should quit your hostess jobs. The worst mistake you can make is to think that you’re not qualified for anything except being a bargirl.
The next day, I took Kitten and Cat to meet a man I knew, a man that I knew liked me. His name was Ji, and I figured that he could help me with this. We all had dinner together, and afterward I went home to get some sleep. Ji said he wanted to take the other girls to the seashore.
Later that night I saw Kitten return home alone. She said that Cat had gone over to a friend’s house.
First thing the next morning I got a phone call: my friend Ji had been robbed by my friend Cat.
Cat had lured Ji into bed the same way she did her clients, and she had not only taken more than ten thousand
yuan
in cash, plus Ji’s watch and gold jewelry, but worse yet, she had stolen his good-luck charm. Ji said that a man only takes off his amulet at one time—when he’s having sex. Now he couldn’t go home and face his old lady, and he was going to have to spend his nights in a hotel. This was the first time I’d heard anything about Ji’s having a wife. But I felt responsible for getting him into this trouble. By and large, I only went to see Ji when I needed something from him, so I felt a little guilty toward him to begin with. Now I felt even more guilty. Finally, Ji tossed me two thousand Hong Kong dollars, saying, Fly up to Nanjing and see if you can find Cat and straighten things out!
Once more, Kitten was begging me to forgive her. This time you can grovel all you want, I told her, but it won’t do you any good. There’s nothing I hate more than being lied to.
I asked Kitten if she knew where Cat’s house was in Nanjing, and Kitten said she did.
Then in that case she won’t go home, I said. Does she have a boyfriend in Nanjing?
Yes, and she’s crazy about him. She only came down here to make some money for him.
Does he ever go out? I asked.
Sure.
Does he have a favorite hangout?
Yes. And I know where it is.
Good. We’re going to Nanjing!
I decided to go to Nanjing to find Cat, with Kitten guiding the way. After some thought, I concluded that it would be wise for us to bring a man along. Dalong said he’d go. We should settle this business, he said. We have to get Ji’s charm back. Let’s go tomorrow!
As soon as we reached Nanjing, Dalong went to buy a knife. He said that we couldn’t be halfhearted about this; we had to show people we meant business, because if we didn’t, people wouldn’t take things seriously. Kitten said, You don’t need to buy a knife. She said there were plenty of knives at her place. But Dalong went for a walk and bought me a very nice charcoal-colored toy gun.
I said, The girl has to be punished for what she did, and we’re going to do everything we can to get justice, but we can’t kill anyone. That scares me.
It took us only a short time to find the restaurant, where an older guy in his thirties was having drinks. Kitten said that he was Cat’s boyfriend. I walked over to him.
Where’s your girlfriend? I asked.
The man didn’t answer.
Dalong brought me a stool, and I sat down. I repeated my question, but the man still didn’t respond.
Dalong was wearing some new clothes I’d just given him, but on Dalong even new clothes got filthy in no time. He had big eyes and thick eyebrows, but he was very skinny, emaciated even, and extremely soft-spoken. You could describe Dalong as sensitive and entirely lacking in self-confidence. From time to time, the man would cast a disdainful look in Dalong’s direction. Dalong was stung. I was furious.
Fortunately the man was alone. Emboldened, I pulled the toy gun out of my handbag, which was hidden from view by the table. Look down, I said. Over here. Take a good look.
As I spoke I started to shake, because whenever I get nervous I get excited, and when I get excited I get the shakes, and when I get the shakes, things get dangerous.
The old guy turned his head and looked down. He said, How’s your aim?
In a split second, I thrust the gun between his legs, into his balls.
I never miss, I said.
As I spoke, Kitten and Dalong whipped out their knives. My face went hot. The knives didn’t seem to scare him—maybe he was carrying a blade of his own—but the gun pointing at his genitals scared the hell out of him. Of course, if the gun I was pointing at him were real, why would I need to have Kitten and Dalong waving a pair of knives around?
But this didn’t occur to him. We’d caught the old fart off guard, and he was still reeling. I was feeling off balance myself, and hearing myself say I had great aim frightened the hell out of me too. My arms started to go limp, but the man didn’t move a muscle, and it was a good thing he didn’t budge, because if he had I don’t know what I would have done.
He had the restaurant manager make a call for him. I held my gun between his legs for twenty whole minutes, struggling all the while to keep my thoughts from running away with me. The man, Dalong, and Kitten all wore intensely serious expressions, and I had a powerful urge to laugh, but I knew that if I even cracked a smile, Dalong would break into a grin, and we’d be finished. The man was a seasoned old criminal, and he would never let us get away.
Cat came in. She handed over Ji’s wristwatch and charm. The chain that went with the charm was gone, and so was the money. I didn’t dare look Cat in the eye. I felt acutely embarrassed, even though she was the one who should have felt ashamed, and it was getting more awkward by the second. I even found myself starting to empathize with her. Suddenly I felt bored with the whole thing. I wanted to drop it, to forget all about it.
To hell with it, Dalong said. Cat’s a stupid cunt, but she’s had a crappy life. Let’s just forget this ever happened.
I had only just learned that Cat was a single mother, with a four-year-old son, and this man had always been there to help her.
Without speaking to Cat, Kitten turned to Dalong and me.
Cat always gets mixed up in the sleaziest schemes, she said.
We wanted to go over to Kitten’s place, but she didn’t want to take us there. She came from a broken home, and her older brother was in prison. The house is empty, she said.
Kitten started working at Ji’s company, and she moved to a new apartment. I couldn’t picture Kitten lasting long in an office job, but she actually went to work every day, nine to five. Kitten and Dalong became good friends, and the three of us often got together at my place. Dalong cooked for us, and we always talked until dawn, mostly swapping stories about things that had happened on our street.