EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=404705
Sometime in 2013
She smelled like the boy she'd just taken, a mix of first-timer sweat and cologne.
Around us, a ballroom bash - a thousand-square-meter, climate-conditioned, glassed box overlooking the Monument to the People's Heroes and Mao's Mausoleum. College interns carried hors d'oeuvres; smoked abalone, foie gras, langoustine floating in pastry cups filled with clarified butter. The buffet featured Peking duck, crown roast of lamb, and red-braised pork belly. A crowd of bankers and apparatchiks, the revolutionary vanguard of the new, new China, snacked off gilt-porcelain plates; Swarovski chandeliers glittered off the hardwood parquet.
I held Patty Kwok's arm tightly, led her to the stage, then let go - a bomber detaching a cruise missile, straight into the careers of Shenghan's enemies. Patty adjusted the microphone to accomodate her one-hundred-seventy-six centimeters and heels, smiled, and began to speak.
I felt a camera poke my spine, followed by a hard clap on the shoulder.
"Hey nerd, it's been a while. What are you doing here?"
Judging by the Burberry aftershave and Grey Goose on his breath, it had to be Phillip Chang. I turned around and politely clinked glasses. His wrist shook ever so slightly, then steadied as he downed his second vodka tonic of the evening - early-onset delirium tremens.
"Looking for your sister. And I thought Sino-International didn't need trashy hacks like you. What are you doing here?"
"Trying to find your mother so I can get a discount." We laughed.
"So you're the friendly journalist I've heard so much about."
In my past life, Phil and I had interned together at a ten-Chinaman advertising firm named after a dead white guy. Phil had the build and the goatee, so he got to party and turn in his photos a week late. I got to figure out how to edit the byproducts of his lifestyle into something that would fulfill our contracts without attracting public indecency charges. Every night, as Phil wined, dined, and rode his models, I consoled myself by thinking of the STDs and pancreatic cancer he was no doubt picking up - while honing my cover letter to the Ministry of State Security.
"If that's what you wanna call it. All I do is sniff up people's assholes from time to time."
I laughed again, keeping the tone familiar. Then I withdrew a fat wad of pink yuan. "You want a scoop?"
He raised his eyebrows, then smiled. "Sure." The yuan vanished into a buttoned pocket.
"Meet the hotel manager - his name's Bao - and head up to the Shenzhen Suite at one AM tonight. Bring the cops and a camera."
"Who are you trying to set up?"
I nodded towards the stage. Phil's eyes widened. "Her? But- but- why? I thought you guys were on the same team."
"We were. She's listing all her new teammates now. Come morning, we'll have nothing to do with her."
"And that's why Shenghan isn't here."
I nodded; Phil shook his head; both gestures showing the same admiration. Onstage, Patty began reading off a list of prominent guests, thanking them for coming to her charity ball.
The winds had shifted under the new leadership; banquets and Audis were out, vows of poverty were in - so Shenghan decided to tar most of the other young contenders to the Central Committee with a pedophiliac Hong Kong heiress. None of the other invitees had been notified of the evening's Bacchanalian arrangements; nobody outside a dead Anson, a living Shenghan, and me knew of Patty's unique tastes in young flesh.
Phil spoke again, his voice low. "I thought it was his wife, you know." He turned to me, searching, but I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead. "Didn't you hear about her? Seems you're pretty close to them."
I shook my head. "Not my business."
"Oh, don't bullshit me. You even had a fling going with her, back in the day."
"What makes you think that?"
"It's my job. Anyhow, what do you have to say about it?"
"You're drunk, Phil." I turned to leave. In my glass of whisky, Phil's reflection gripped my shoulder once more. He leaned in, the aftershave and vodka suddenly enveloping my nose.
"Look. I'm being serious here. Sitting Vice-Chairman of one of China's - no - the world's - largest banks, and his wife runs off to Singapore? Oh, and let's not forget that his bodyguard-cum-bagman was banging her before they got married. Something's not right here. You better watch your ass, pal."
I leaned in close, next to his ear, survival instincts in a lifetime of secrecy imagining his unshaven jawline under the pale green lights of a morgue. "Thanks for the heads-up." From somewhere below my waist, a phone buzzed. I ignored it and leaned away from him again. Phil receded into the crowd and I found the missed call.
It was a string of zeroes.
A half-hour later, as I closed the door on Patty Kwok's suite, my phone buzzed again.
I found him by a food stand in an apartment courtyard off Jinsong Bridge. He saw me midway through slurping down zhajiangmian, oily brown flecks of soybean paste on his Savile Row pinstripes reflecting mercury floodlamps alive with fluttering moths.
Zhang Shenghan finished his bowl, placed down a twenty-yuan note, and told the stand owner to ignore the change. Then he led me into a Khrushchev-era residential stairwell, wrapped me in a bear hug, and started crying.
Crying?
They train you to do a lot of things in the Ministry. Hell, China starts training you far earlier - how to defer to authority, how to play the greasy pole, how to compete like a duck - perfectly placid on the surface, but paddling furiously underneath - but no amount of training prepped me for a crying vice-ministerial ranked cadre.
Crying?
I didn't know what to do, so I held his shoulders, felt his hot, garlicky, tears course down his cheeks, and kept telling him that it was ok.
"I fucked up."
What did he mean, I said.
"I fucked up with Persephone. I thought I could give her the world, and that would be enough. But it wasn't."
What did he mean, I repeated.
"She... I gave her everything. Money, lab space, everything for her to achieve her dreams... and she took it all, ran away..."
I pried myself loose from Shenghan's bear hug and asked him what I was to do.
"Here... take this... a one-way ticket on the next flight out. Take your time... just get her to come home."
And if I couldn't?
Shenghan's answer arrived via overnight express.
The box was made of cardboard and slightly larger than my Ferragamo shoebox. Along all six sides were various iterations of "FRAGILE: precision machined parts" in English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. I sat on the edge of the temperfoam hotel bed and opened it; out fell a rat-tail file and a smaller box. The clue was so obvious, the smaller box might as well have been transparent.
A QSZ-92 service pistol, one of a million just like it, cold as they come. A detachable silencer. Fifteen rounds of 5.8x21mm hollow points, the kind that left pinpricks going in and two-centimeter-wide holes going out. A short note with only one request.
Love letters, straight from his heart to hers.
Read part 26 here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=410368
