EPTJack followed the director out the door of his building, squinting as the remnants of the afternoon sun filtered their way through the haze and smog of Shanghai. His long legs left staggered prints on the rain-slicked, laminated asphalt. Threading his way through a crowd of bankers and appartchiks of the new new China, Jack smelled baking syncrab steaks and sixteen brands of perfume. Jack was thirty. At twenty-seven, he’d been a protector, a guardian, someone who kept old ladies and children safe in their beds at night. He’d been trained by the best, Joey Luo and Ruslan Alexandrov, MSS and Cheka, legends among legends.
Two years later he wanted to quit. For twenty-four months all he did was zip up bodies and accompany them to the morgue. There was alwas this itch he couldn’t scratch, a vague sense of unease that struck when he pulled that black sheet over another human life. He liked that itch, though, because it kept him human.
The feeling slowly faded from that place in his brain, calluses growing where sympathy once resided.
Once, deep inside a morgue, acrylized and fresh corpses all around him, he’d suddenly become aware--aware that there was no nausea creeping up the back of his neck, no pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, aware that the itch was gone.
That night, he woke up, shirt soaked, sullenly eyeing the engraved red star on his police-issue Norinco that lay on the nightstand. His stare grew distant and drifted to the window. But the gun pointed at his wife and child, sitting on the table, menacing. An outsider might have thought that it was the nine that actually watched over the family, that Jack was just a prop.
His wife had caught him that night, loading up with the metastable hydrogen tips that would go from a finger into a fist upon impact. They’d fought and then she packed up the kid. Two days later he quit the force. He’d given up looking for his daughter.
As the sun set behind the smoke and mist of the harbor, the China Life hologram was firing up from its offshore perch, thousand-meter-flickers of red and ivory splitting the television sky, the opening lines to the symphony that Shanghai put on every night. After the China Life holo, he was greeted by the arcologies of Pudong, an alphabet soup of four- and five-letter-acronyms diffused between spires of laminated composites. The long-dead ghosts of Puxi answered back with their own countermelody, AIG, British-American Tobacco, lost whispers of light in what was now a cacophony.
In his darker moments, Jack had often laughed at the irony. No one in Shanghai ever slowed down to notice that their city consumed more electricity in this spectacle than some African countries did in a year. The only audience to the ensemble was the gulls that wheeled above shoals of drifting white plastic.
They stopped in front of one of the rare older buildings in the Pudong new district. The Chinese had gotten better at architecture in the past half-century, which made the flying-saucer perched on the roof look all the more obvious.
The director waved the security bots away with a tab on his keychain and they found themselves inside an unusually spacious elevator. It was only when they were halfway up when Jack saw the interactive menu projected on the elevator window and realized that this led to a restaurant. Then Jack looked at the menu again and blinked. There were no prices. Director Zhang was smiling.
"You didn't have to."
"I hope that gets your attention."
As soon as the elevator doors opened, Jack was greeted by the smell of grilling meat. Of course the menu didn't have prices; you paid for cowflesh in gold, real gold, the kind that the Nigerians hustled down in the bazaar by the rusting mountains of shipping containers.
Though the rooftop steakhouse may have resembled a futuristic ornament, the inside of the restaurant was layered in walnut-wood and frosted glass more reminiscent of Capone. They slid through a haze of conversations and cigarette smoke and into a leather-and-wood booth by the wall.
"Jack, I need you for a private favor." The director offered Jack an obscenely expensive cigar.
"I don't smoke anymore. What'll it be, boss?"
"I'm not your boss anymore either. My wife, I believe, is seeing another man."
"Nora? Really?"
The director was silent for a minute. "Nora died a year ago, Jack. You remember that nurse from Chengdu? The daughter of the party boss there?"
"Yeah. She the new missus?"
"Yeah." It was at this point that director Zhang's nose aspired toward a sneer. "Normally, I'd take care of that little bitch and whatever punk she's running around with myself, but I'm due for a promotion and the disciplinary committee is on my ass like monkeys at a picnic."
"Plus her daddy might think that domestic violence is not appropriate behavior from a model party member like yourself."
The director nodded and looked down with an embarrased smile. The waitress took their orders, one medium porterhouse and one rare picanha. Jack watched the director eye her cleavage for a moment before asking the next, logical question.
"How do you know she's running around on you?"
"I found this inside her purse." He handed over a bag of condoms inside a plastic baggie. Jack began to open it when Zhang stopped him.
"Don't. Prints."
Jack was confused. "How is this proof?"
"I had a vasectomy right before I married again." Jack nodded and sipped his tea.
"Did you run a check on the prints?"
"This is why I need you. One positive match--a M. Reed-Luo, drifter from the Suzhou River."
Jack coughed out his water. "Suzhou? What? She's banging ghetto trash?"
The director nodded sadly. "I had no idea. I mean, I don't get it at all, she's a nurse, she should know that those guys have all sorts of diseases... and she has the gall to come home and sleep in my bed, and hold me..."
At this point he turned his face away and took a small white pill, which Jack knew was for his hypertension.
"Look, man, don't worry. I'll go down there and get him."
The director's face brightened just a hint too much. "Thanks, Jack. Maybe I can hire you on the force as an outside consultant when all this is done."
"No thanks, boss. I owe you enough now, and plus, I should limit myself to things I can handle." But the director was no longer looking at him. The waitress had reappeared with two giant platters of meat and potatoes.
