Frantic to know something, to
do
something, she swept her hand all the way under the truck seat. Her fingers found a Tupperware container. She popped open the top. Inside was what—a dead animal? No, it was hair, thick and curly and black. How disgusting! A note was tucked inside. She pinched it up, careful not to touch the hair. The note said:
Hey Ray-Gun, I
told
you I'd send you my beard. What did you do with yours? I'm riding the surf here in Melbourne. Come visit me if you want. I'm with you—given up e-mail. It's too fast. I need to slow down, a lot. I'm just waiting for the next assignment. Also I got some weird head pains from those pills they made us take. I am having my usual postmission meltdown. It's the little bodies that do it to me most. You understand, I know you do. Sorry to hear about your dad. I know you love him so much. Not sure if I can keep doing this. Will drink and whore my way to higher consciousness. Maybe you survive it better than me. Maybe not. I don't have many ideas anymore, not sure if I'm actually a genuine American. Might not be. Can't see myself going home, just too weird. You get any good ideas, send them to me. Let me know if you get a new assignment. All right, surf's up in like an hour.
Z
Beneath the scruffy hair was a photograph of two muscular men with long beards. Ray and another man, presumably Z, the one who'd written the letter. Deeply tanned, in dirty T-shirts, mountains behind them. Soldiers? she wondered. She didn't see any weapons. Her eyes
lingered on Ray's arms and shoulders, their obvious strength. She knew what they felt like against her fingers.
The phone in her pocket rang, startling her. She folded up the note and shoved it and the photo back into the Tupperware and the shoe back under the seat, as if the caller might be able to see her. It was her mother, ready to have the usual conversation. She hopped down from the truck and went back into the kitchen.
"Mom, let me call you back."
But her mother wouldn't. They got into it from there. The doctor's visit. Your father's arthritis. Another ten minutes of her life gone to this. She found herself drifting into the bedroom to look at the rumpled bed. The sheets seemed to still have some of Ray in them. But he was gone.
"You sound like you're
crying,"
her mother said. "You crying? What's the matter?"
She hung up. All right, she was crying. She meets a great-looking guy in
her driveway,
lets him screw her brains out for an hour, and she's happily cooking him dinner when—
hello?
—a bunch of gangster-ish Chinese men drag him out the door? Who wouldn't be freaked out by that? Of course I'm going to cry! In the kitchen, she found a flashlight in the drawer. Maybe there was more stuff in Ray's truck. She went to the kitchen door and opened it.
The old red pickup truck was gone, like it had never been there. Like Ray had never been there, never been with her . . . and she knew, with that odd true knowledge that sometimes reaches far beyond oneself, that she would never see him again.
They took the Belt Parkway toward Manhattan, gliding at a smooth seventy, the open water to their left. One of the big ocean liners was leaving the harbor, portholes lit up in the dark, a silent enormity. The four Chinese men around him didn't seem to notice. They appeared lost in their own thoughts, as if Ray were an inanimate package they were transporting. He told himself to relax. What were they going to do—kill him? He doubted it. There was just the beginning of a logic to
all this. Jin Li had told him one night at dinner she couldn't see him anymore, that she was very sorry, there were things she couldn't explain. Yes, it had to do with her brother Chen, she admitted, the one who lived in Shanghai and considered himself a big-deal businessman. She'd sounded anxious. Ray had tried calling. They hadn't fought. He'd been worried about her, cursed himself, and called a few more times. But nothing, no communication, for two weeks. Long enough that you think it really is over. Long enough to get lonely. Maybe the men knew why Jin Li hadn't answered her phone. How had they found him? They must have located his father's house, forced him to tell them where Ray was, gone to that address, seen the truck, seen the lights in the nice woman's kitchen. Seen Ray sitting at the table.
"Guys," he said. "I need to call my father, that okay?"
The men looked at him silently.
Ray pulled out his phone. "He's sick and I have to check—"
One of the men grabbed the phone and handed it to the man who had spoken to Ray in the kitchen. He scrolled through the numbers. He looked up at the others and said something about Jin Li.
"Yes, her number is in there," Ray admitted. "I've called her a lot."
"Who else did you call?" asked the man.
"Not too many people," said Ray. He waited. "So let me call my father, guy."
They didn't answer him and he counseled himself to be patient, not to overreact to what was obviously some kind of kidnapping. He hoped that his father had pushed the button on the little electronic box that delivered a preset bolus of Dilaudid, which was synthetic morphine only much stronger. The machine, which had a tube that went straight into his father's arm, provided dosages at regular intervals but also allowed his father to receive a limited number of optional doses when the pain became too great, which happened more frequently now. Ray prayed his father had taken the extra doses and been knocked out, would sleep through Ray's absence. He'd said he'd be home before nine, and that wasn't going to happen. His father got anxious when Ray wasn't there and pawed the blankets in worry, twisting his head painfully toward the doorway. Ray was just going to have to assume
that Gloria, the night nurse who had cared for hundreds of terminal patients, would be sure his father was comfortable. He'd set up the hospital bed in the living room, which had more space for equipment and chairs for visitors. Ray was paying for private-duty hospice nurses around the clock, $10,000 a week to care for his father. The policemen's medical insurance didn't do enough. The six houses together were worth at least a couple of million. So spend it. All those windows fixed, crummy bedrooms repainted and repainted again, more than twenty-five years of dealing with deadbeat tenants, busted water pipes, broken refrigerators. Now it was payback time. His dad deserved the best. Ray had gone down to the local bank where his father had first gotten his mortgages, long paid off now, and explained the situation. He'd cashed out one of the houses, and even at $10,000 a week, the money would last many months. It was his father's time that was running out.
"Hey," Ray tried again. "What about the phone?"
The Chinese man in the suit looked at Ray, pushed a button that made the window drop, and flipped the phone into the rushing darkness outside. The cool air swirled around inside the car, then the window went up.
The permanent government of New York City, the true and lasting power, is found in the quietly firm handshake between the banking and real estate industries. Nearly every other business—television, publishing, advertising, law firms, hospitals—is comparatively insubstantial. Only the banks and the developers can tear out a section of the city and replace it with something new. Can alter the feel of a neighborhood, where people walk, eat, and live, and thus actually change what New Yorkers say and feel about themselves, remap their minds even as their city is remapped beneath their feet. The developers destroy the past to improve the future, they make nothing into something, they push away humans they can't use and pull in new ones they can. Who else could gouge a hole large enough for five thousand swimming pools at the southwest corner of Manhattan's Central Park, then erect the Time Warner building, a garish twin-towered, tuning
fork of an edifice, stuff it at the lower levels with the very same luxury-junk stores found elsewhere, then charge $40 million for enormous apartments above it?
Of course the apartments were all quickly bought by aging movie stars who didn't care about being hip anymore, Saudi princes with dyed beards, London speculators, the newly rich Spanish, Russian oilmen who'd gotten their money out before Putin stopped them, computer company execs from India. Moguls near and far, not all of whom realized that the "eightieth-floor" penthouses were quite an achievement for a building only sixty-nine stories high.
The limo pulled to a stop outside this building and the men walked Ray to an unmarked side entrance manned by two guards. The intercom buzzed them through and a moment later they stood in an enormous elevator. The men kept the floor display panel hidden from Ray, so he counted seconds. He knew from his training that they were rising about forty feet per second, which put them close to the forty-eighth floor when the elevator stopped. They proceeded to a marbled foyer and arrived in a huge living room with a view over Columbus Circle and northeast to Central Park.
A Chinese man of about thirty, very slender in a tailored black suit, emerged from another room. His eyes flicked over Ray's work boots, old jeans, and green T-shirt.
"Thank you Mr. Ray for coming to see me," he said, waving at the sofas, an enormous gold watch around his wrist.
They sat. The other men moved to the back of the room and stood.
"My name is Chen," said the man. "I have big problem. And I want you to fix this problem."
Ray was silent.
"This is my problem," he went on. "You were boyfriend for my sister, Jin Li. She works for me in New York City. She tells us about you. Everything about you. She loves you very much, everything like that. Then maybe four days ago, she not appear."
"Disappeared?" said Ray. "How do you know?"
"Let me finish talking to you."
"Fine."
"That's right," Chen growled. "Fine for you, fine for me."
Ray started to say something, thought better of it.
"So I will talk now. You listen. Jin Li calls me in China. Very upset. Like that. Two girls that they are with her get killed in their car. The men in the Brooklyn village, they put the shit in the car. But not my sister. Nobody find her. This does not surprise me too much, Mr. Ray. She is, what do you say, self-reliant. Too self-reliant, maybe you know. She leave our family and come to United State. I give her job running my company here and then she not appear. That is my problem. The American police do not know who kill the two girls."
"I wouldn't be so sure."
"I am sure. I pay people to tell some things."
"You can pay people, but that doesn't mean they know."
"I am paying a man who knows all these things!"
Ray shrugged.
"Do you know about this bad thing that happened?"
Ray shook his head. He wasn't following the news much these days.
"The American police do not know my sister was in that car. I read the New York City
Daily News
on the Internet in my country. You can still do that if you know what to do. China government say one big thing, everybody do the other thing, the little thing. The paper only say two Mexico girls, where they put the shit into the car. Very bad. Jin Li, she call me and then she does not go to work, like I say before. I have to tell somebody to run my business. That is big problem just like that. Where is Jin Li, I say. She is good at the business for me. I talk with my lawyer in Chinatown. He say if you ask American police to look for Jin Li they will ask too many question. Just like China! I do not like too many question. I am boss, I have the question. In China we do not like the police. We do not trust them. I do not trust polices anywhere. I want to know where is Jin Li but I cannot find her in this city."
"I'm sure there are plenty of good Chinese private investigators in the city, retired detectives, people like that."
"That is what my lawyer say. Are you a lawyer, too?"
"No," answered Ray.
"So my lawyer get some man to look in her apartment, look at her
bank, look at her money, and everything. We do this, we do what he say. Nothing. She is really really hiding, you know what I mean? Or maybe she is dead but how come they do not find the body? I do not think she is dead. She call us, like I say to you. She is upset. This is what she is. Then she did not call anymore to us. But I ask myself why her white boyfriend does not look too much for her? Why he not asking her friends, where is Jin Li? Have you seen her? Maybe he does not love her so much today. That is what my lawyer say. White boy, Chinese girl, no big deal, right?"
"You want me to talk now?" Ray asked.
"No." Chen pointed at one of his men and said something in Chinese. The man left the room. Then Chen turned back to Ray. "Here is what I think. She is hiding somewhere-place and you know where, Mr. Ray, you help her now."
"I don't. I have no idea where she is."
"Then why you do not ask about her and everything like that?"
"I didn't know she was missing."
"I do not believe you."
"I haven't spoken to her for a couple of weeks, and she stopped returning my calls. In America, we call this getting dumped. And you know, we only saw each other a few months. She didn't tell me much about herself."
Chen smiled hatefully. "Maybe you were too busy fucking my sister in the pussy to ask so many question."
"She didn't seem to mind."
"You like the Chinese pussy? You like how tight it is, Mr. Ray? Not like the big fat white—" Chen's interest was distracted by the return of the man who had departed; he carried a cardboard box. The man set it down in front of Chen, who inspected its contents, nodded, and then looked back at Ray. "Let me tell you some extra things. We know many informations about you, Mr. Ray Grant. We pay lot of money to retired NYPD detectives who tell us about you. We know your father was New York City detective. Sixty-three Precinct. There are many people who do not like him. Right now someone could walk into his room and shoot him."