Meaner Things (9 page)

“He has an office in our home in West Van. There’s a small safe behind one of the paintings. He’d never admit it, but sometimes he gets a bit absentminded so he keeps the combination written in the back of his diary, in the top drawer of his desk. The office is locked when he’s out of town. I hired a locksmith and took a look.”

I could imagine the kind of look. “And you found . . . what exactly?”

“Letters, faxes, his personal financial records. My dad trained me to read that stuff. It didn’t take me long to figure out that his biggest assets are coming from undeclared imports – smuggling – including people smuggling.”

“What did you do then?”

“I confronted him. That was an even bigger mistake.”

“How come?”

The apartment was at a perfectly air-conditioned temperature, but she physically shivered. “He already knew what I’d done. The housekeeper must have blabbed. I’d never seen him like that before; he was usually just smug and belittling. This time he raged, out of control. He got violent, Michael. Hit me. I threatened to leave him.”

“What did he say to that?”

She twisted a soggy tissue between her fingers and looked up at me. “He laughed. Said he owned me and he’d never divorce me.”

For the first time since we’d met again, I felt sorry for her. She went on to explain that he’d thrown her out of his West Vancouver mansion and she’d been living in this luxury apartment of his ever since. She’d begun legal proceedings against him, but he’d immediately contested them. Fighting an ongoing legal battle was using up all her savings from her father’s business.

“Can’t you just divorce him anyway?” I asked.

“Normally, yes. It’s a bit complicated. We got married in some little village about fifty miles north of Beijing. So that all his relatives could attend, he said. Basically under Chinese divorce laws, husbands get everything.”

“But you can still get one?”

“Sure, I’m divorcing him under Canadian law. But he’s contesting it, arguing that he hasn’t lived here for twelve months prior to separation as our law requires. That’s a lie, of course, but he can easily fabricate Chinese documentation, and his family will back him to the hilt.”

“Will that matter?”

She smiled ruefully. “Over there, bribing government officials is a way of life. Jonathan has an endless supply of poor officials eager to stuff residency documents into his hands. He can keep this going until he bleeds me dry.”

“What’s he hoping to gain by that?”

“He thinks I’ll come around to his way of thinking, knuckle down and play the dutiful little housewife.”

“At least you’ve got this apartment,” I said, as if I knew anything about it.

She shook her head. “The contents are all itemised. His lawyers sent me a letter about it. He insists I stay here because of some honour thing. But I’m just a tenant. Like the saying goes, a bird in a gilded cage.”

“If you do eventually divorce him, you’ll get a chunk of his Canadian assets under our laws, right?”

Again, the little head shake, her hair tumbling softly. “I signed some prenuptial stuff his Vancouver lawyer gave me. Claimed it was just for business reasons. I’ll get nothing.”

“The relatives in China probably insisted on it,” I ventured.

She gave me the ghost of a grin. “You could be right there. Anyway, prenups are watertight. He was smart; I was stupid.”

By now I was pretty sure she was telling the truth. It seemed too bizarre and embarrassing a story to be pure invention. I could now see the full state of her predicament. Her fall had been a steep one. There wasn’t anything I could say to help her, no comforting words that really meant anything. But she was resilient, she could adapt. If anybody knew that, I did.

“He holds all the cards,” she added, pulling two fresh tissues from the box.

I told myself it wasn’t any of my business. From one angle, her ambitions had been pretty sordid; a desire for wealth and power had got her into a mess of her own making. Still, I wished there was something I could do to help her. I was surprised with myself for wanting to, but I did feel that way.

“Are you still angry with me?” she said. Her voice cracked and the tissues went to her eyes.

“You didn’t lift a finger to find me in ten years,” I said.

“No,” she replied. At least she was honest about that.

“Give me time to think about it.” I expected to be happy about how she had ended up. Even if she lost everything, she’s still be better off financially than me, with a lot better prospects. There’d be another male dupe along presently for her to exploit. My brain was clear on that, but maybe my eyes and my body were telling me something else. This should have been my moment of vindication, but right then I honestly didn’t feel it. Maybe I’d been angry too long.

There was a long moment of silence and then we both stood up. I don’t know which of us initiated it, I guess it was her, but somehow we were hugging. She sobbed gently on my shoulder.

We stood like that for a long time. Despite the circumstances, it felt good to be physically close to her again after all these years.

There wasn’t much for either of us to say after that. Eventually I uttered something trite about having to go. At the door we looked at each other and she put her arms around my neck and drew me to her. This time our lips met. The feel of her body tight against me generated the old response and I felt guilty about it. I felt like pulling away, as if this was too much, too soon. I told myself I had to find out more about this situation, that I didn’t really know this woman, never had known her, that she was a liar, maybe worse. Could I really be this stupid?

Then I realised I didn’t care.

“Build my gallows high.”

She took a half-step back. “What’s that?”

I smiled. “Just a line from an old movie. Funny the things that pop into my head sometimes. But you always knew that.”

“Can we see each other, Mike?”

She used the shortened version of my name. It brought back a flood of memories.

“Are you sure you want to?” I said.

“Yes. I want to.”

I felt I’d passed the point of no return. I gave her my number and she scribbled it down.

“You already have mine,” she said. “Call me tomorrow, won’t you?”

“OK. I will.” I’d worry about all this later.

And we left it at that.

*

I thought about her a lot that evening.

To put it mildly, it hadn’t been the kind of meeting I’d expected. Yesterday I’d seen her position in life, compared it to my own and felt small. A failure. Turns out, she had a lot more on her plate that I did.

I went to the storage cupboard in the hallway and pulled down a cardboard box from a high shelf. I hadn’t looked at it in years and it was covered with dust, rising up in a cloud into my eyes and leaving grey tracks on my clothes.

I set the box on my bed, ignoring the dust marks it was leaving on the quilt, and opened the flaps. What I wanted was at the bottom, a folder of old photos from my student days. I fished it out from under a heap of useless junk.

There was one really good one of her and me, my arm around her, the calm, deep blue of English Bay in the background. She still had her hair long then, a blonde fountain coming out the top of her head. On anybody else it would have looked ridiculous. Nowadays she wore her hair down, in long tresses, and her face looked a little fuller, more sophisticated. More make-up, I suppose. Otherwise she hadn’t changed much at all.

I took the photo out, propped it upright on my desk and stared at it for a while. My thoughts went to the night of the heist, as they always did whenever she came to mind. I replayed it in my head for the millionth time.

I discovered that, for the first time in a decade, the anger wasn’t there. In fact, it was completely gone. In the weeks afterwards, while I was still on the crutches or stick, I’d experienced sheer, uncontrollable rages, rising up and roiling around inside me, making my heart pound and my face redden. Then, over the months, this had changed to an intermittent, smouldering anger. In the last few years, when I’d thought of her at all, it had been with quiet contempt. But now all those anger feelings were gone.

Yesterday I had fully intended to tell her to stuff her apology and go to hell. I had had ten years to work on clever putdowns in preparation for the day. Sitting in the coffee shop I had even considered pouring my coffee into her five-hundred dollar handbag and storming out the door, never to lay eyes on her again.

The strangest thing of all was that I now no longer felt the burning curiosity about her that had – I grudgingly admitted to myself – consumed me for years. It wasn’t just anger that I’d been harbouring, it was a yearning to know why it all happened.
Why
,
why
,
why
,
Emma
? Why, for example, the name change, why the identity switch? It occurred to me that she’d married Zheng under a false name. I wondered how that affected her divorce and prenuptial, if at all. Presumably she’d looked into it and would have exploited any loopholes if they existed. Apparently they didn’t.

My anger, my desire to confront her; what else had changed? The biggie was that, now that we’d met and talked, I couldn’t accept the idea of never seeing her again. The truth was, I almost grudgingly conceded as I put the box back, she was even more stunningly beautiful now than back then. She had gained a kind of untouchable elegance, and lost nothing. Among all the emotions whirling around inside me now – filling the vacuum left by the evaporated anger and questioning of ten years – there was also an old, very familiar one when it came to Emma.

Sheer physical desire.

I looked around my bachelor apartment. It was exactly shoebox shaped, with one big window to my left, stretching nearly all the way across the wall. Next to my tiny desk there was just enough room for a low bookcase with my flat-screen TV on top, followed by a small dining table from IKEA’s bargain basement. I had a rickety old couch opposite it, bought second hand for twenty bucks because it was missing part of its back cushion. The little kitchenette stood beside it, with its drab brown cupboards, then the tiny bathroom in which I had to close the door
before
sitting on the toilet as it was much too cramped to do so afterwards. Apart from a few small closets, barely able to hold a normal-sized vacuum cleaner, that was it.

And this being Vancouver, the second most expensive city in the world to live, I was paying nearly three quarters of my bookstore wage to live here. It had its good points, chiefly the light from the big window and its convenient location, just a few blocks from Vancouver General and West Broadway. A place like this was sought after and could go for a lot more rent. At least that’s what my landlord kept telling me every time I was late with the monthly cheque. That was happening a lot more frequently these days.

I had a choice to make: go on living this boring, penurious, lonely, unglamorous life, or become involved with her again. I definitely liked the idea of having her back in my life. With her, maybe I could get back the sense of purpose I hadn’t felt in the last ten, drifting years.

The unresolved secrets from her past – the mystery of her false identity and her vanishing act from the roof – still bothered the hell out of me. I needed to resolve those sooner or later. But it could be, would be, later. In the meantime, maybe I could help her in her present fix. I already had an idea how to do that.

There was only one fly in the ointment, a pretty big one from earlier in the day. Namely, the ugly brute waiting for me outside Emma’s building when I left. That had been one hell of an unpleasant surprise.

I let myself out the glass-panelled front door, heard a deep
clunk
as it locked behind me, and realised that I was being observed by a stranger. He was leaning against a shiny black BMW parked at the kerb directly in front of the building. I stood still and gave him a good stare in return. The longer I looked, the less I liked what I saw. Broad, muscular shoulders tapered up to a head that looked small in comparison. He was probably mid to late thirties, and wore a tight white t-shirt and jeans. Under the dark, buzz-cut hair he was watching me through aviator-style sunglasses. I expected his name to be ‘Rhino’ or maybe ‘T-800’.

It suddenly occurred to me that Zheng was exactly the type of control freak who would keep a beady eye on his soon-to-be ex-wife. He’d want to know where she was going and who she was seeing. This macho goon was probably just one of several on the job.

If he was waiting here for me, he had probably watched me go in too. He took off the sunglasses, and a sort of smirk, like the smile of a shark, appeared on his face. I had no doubt left: he was watching me and didn’t care that I knew it. In fact, he wanted me to know it.

I had to walk right past him on the narrow sidewalk. As I approached he stood to his full height, at least a head taller than my six foot. Sweat trickled down my armpits but I tried to walk normally and keep outwardly calm.

I concentrated on his feet but as I passed him I managed to force myself to look up into his face. Now there wasn’t any smirk or frown or sneer. In fact, no expression at all. His face was completely emotionless, the eyes hard grey stones. I could have been a bug that he was about to crush.