Chapter Eleven

★

He calls me the next day.

“Can we have lunch?” he asks.

“You found something?”

“Maybe.”

We meet at a Sichuan place out in Haidian, the sort of typical large restaurant that has nothing distinguishing about it: round tables covered by oil-spotted red plastic, beige and faded green decor, blocky radiators and drink refrigerators, the kind of bathroom that you really have to need to use to make yourself use it, and as loud as a football game: shouted conversations, plates dropped on tables, and the clinking of beer bottles. My kind of dive.

Since it’s Haidian, the university district, there’s a bunch of foreigners here, so John and I don’t attract any particular attention. Just a couple of pals out for some mapo dofu and yuxiang rou si.

John waits until we’ve ordered. Rather till he’s ordered. It’s a Chinese-guy thing. Sometimes it’s irritating, but in this case he knows what I like, and he doesn’t bother to ask.

After the fuwuyuan brings our Yanjing Draft beer and some vinegar peanuts with spinach, John reaches into his jacket pocket and gets out his smartphone. Unlocks it and finger-swipes a few times. Then holds it out to me.

I take it. My fingers brush against his, and yeah, I’m still feeling those little electric shocks, and a part of me is thinking maybe we could go someplace after lunch.

Bad idea, McEnroe, I tell myself.

I look at the phone screen.

On it is a photo of a young woman. Almost a mug shot, except she’s smiling. She’s wearing a sort of uniform smock with a plastic badge that has a name and a number on it.

“Her name is Wang Junyi. She worked at Cao Tiantian’s party,” John says. “And she does not come to work the next day. They say maybe she has just left for a better job.”

I shiver a little. I study that smiling face, and it’s a broad smile, one that looks real, and I think, God, I hope you left for a better job.

Please don’t be that dead girl with the bruised, shattered face.

“Did you find out where she lives?” I ask.

He nods.

“Did you go there?” My mouth’s gone dry, and the words catch in my throat. I swallow some beer.

“Not yet.” John looks up at me. There’s something soft about his dark eyes. “I promise you I tell you first.”

Oh, man. My heart’s beating hard. It’s like he’s trying to make me really like him. And it’s maybe even working.

“So . . . after lunch. Can we go there?”

Because, yeah. I just have to push it.

He closes his eyes and does that little grimace I’ve come to know so well. “Why?” he asks with a sigh.

I shrug. “Just . . . because.”

The truth is, there’s no real reason I should go at all. I just want to see what he’ll say. Maybe I want to make him mad, I don’t know. So he can turn me down and I can go back to a safe distance, where I don’t have to trust him.

“Okay.” He picks up a mouthful of spinach and peanuts with his chopsticks. “We can make up a story to tell them, I think.”

Well, shit.

Turns out her place isn’t that far from the restaurant. It’s right near the Line 13 qinggui stop for Da Zhong Si, the Big Bell Temple, which John once told me was near his childhood home. I never did find out if that was the truth or not. I did visit the temple once. It’s now a “bell museum.” The front courtyard selling souvenirs: bells and Buddhas, T-shirts, kites, and toys. The temple’s surrounded by a forest of tall, skinny high-rises painted in this color scheme of yellowish cream and brick red that you see everywhere in China, built a couple decades ago and now washed over with grey grime and black soot.

We drive in John’s silver Toyota, down a major road, three lanes each side. Pass this giant . . . I don’t know what it is. A shopping center? Multistory pink walls and green tubular trim, an entrance resembling part of a mammoth Lego set. The whole building looks like it’s surrounded by scaffolding, some kind of metal latticework to hold up huge signs for products I’ve never heard of.

“You really grew up around here?”

John nods, scanning the road for something, an address maybe. “Different now,” he says. “Used to be farms not far from here. Fields.”

We turn right. A smaller street than the near highway we were just on, only four lanes across. Blocks of high-rises with businesses on the first few floors that face the street. The usual stuff. Electronics and cell-phone stores. Restaurants. Barbershops, some of which are sex joints. All lit up by the afternoon sun, filtered through a yellow-grey haze.

“I liked playing in the fields,” John says suddenly. “We had all kinds of games. Mostly Chinese Red Army against the Japanese devils. Of course the Red Army always wins.”

We turn down an alley. To the left there are steel barriers marking off a small parking lot, I guess for the high-rises in front of and behind it.

“Here,” John says.

He shoehorns the car into half a space by driving the front wheels up onto a curb. We get out.

It looks like a pretty nice complex, actually. A few trees that aren’t dying, a couple of stone benches beneath them in a little quadrangle in the center of a cluster of apartment buildings that look to be twenty or so stories high. The exteriors stained and speckled with black grime and trickles of rust. Closed balconies where the windows are permanently fogged by the pollution. But, you know, nice.

John looks at something on his phone. “This one,” he says, pointing to one of the buildings that fronts the sidewalk.

We go into the lobby. It’s not bad. Finished granite floors, wood-grain wallboard, a little flat-screen TV beaming ads between the brass-trimmed elevators, a couple of decorative plants.

John’s studying the mailboxes that line the wall across from the elevators.

“Looks a little pricey for a fuwuyuan,” I say. “Even one who’s working for a high-class caterer.”

I’m thinking maybe Wang Junyi has a little business on the side.

John nods. Looks at his phone again. “This house number . . . not here.”

“What do you mean?”

He points at the mailboxes. “All the numbers have floor, then house number. So tenth floor, house number five, is 1005. Her number is 41.”

“Maybe it’s the first floor?”

“No. First floor start with ‘one.’ And no floor has forty-one apartments.”

“Huh.”

I think about what this might mean. Maybe she gave her employer a fake address?

John meanwhile strides to the lobby door and heads outside. I follow him as he approaches a stout older woman in a dark blue smock and pants who is slowly sweeping the cement path with a straw broom. “Laodama,” I hear him say. Auntie. I hear bits and pieces of the conversation, John asking about the apartment number, about Wang Junyi. I hang back, listening to the cars honking on the street behind me, to a thin stream of music, some Chinese pop with a high-pitched chick singer, and I feel a sudden shiver in the warm, yellow afternoon. I don’t know why.

“Hao, hao. Xiexie ninde hezuo.”

Thanks for your cooperation.

When he reaches me, his expression is neutral. “Okay,” he says. “I know how to find her place now.”

We walk around the building. A narrow alley runs along one side, the ragged cement blackened with soot and worn-in grease, from the Xinjiang restaurant next door, I’m guessing. I can smell the roasting lamb and charcoal and lighter fluid.

There’s a heavy steel door, painted beige and dented in places. John opens it. He doesn’t wait for me to go first. Instead he steps inside, holding the door open but standing in front of me like a shield.

I cross the threshold. He lets the door close behind me.

We’re at the top of a stairwell. Unpainted cement, lit by a single fluorescent bulb. John points at the stairs.

We go down a flight, pass the first landing we see, and head down the next flight. Long, steep flights. When we get to the bottom, I figure we’re two stories below the first floor.

There’s a corridor, harshly lit by a couple more fluorescent lights in bare, rusting cages. Seeing them reminds me of something else, a place I was at back in the Sandbox, a place I never want to see again but still can’t get out of my head.

Some people can just forget shit. Why can’t I?

“Something wrong?”

I wipe my forehead. It’s covered in sweat. “No. Just hot down here.”

Pipes run along the ceiling, water pipes that drip, plus electric conduit and tangles of loose, frayed wire. There’s a sign next to a junction box warning of danger, with a little black silhouette of a man getting zapped by a black lightning bolt.

We walk a ways. On one side there’s more machinery: boilers and stuff, I guess, plus a jumble of crates and dusty boxes, mopeds and bikes. On the other it’s flimsy wallboard, interspersed here and there with those dented blue tin panels they use to make temporary fences at construction sites. We turn right, and then it’s wallboard and blue metal panels on both sides.

I catch the sweaty scent of hot, packaged noodles before I really get it.

“People are living down here, right?”

John nods. “Rat tribe,” he mutters.

I don’t know if it’s an insult, calling them that: the legions of Beijing’s workers who serve and cook in the city’s restaurants, who clean its fancy hotels, the migrants who come here to make money and who can’t possibly afford a real apartment in the city, the college grads and dreamers and artists who’ve ended up in tiny cubicles in the basements and subbasements of high-rises and former fallout shelters. I mean, there are worse things than being called a rat in Chinese culture. I was born in the Year of the Rat, and everybody says that means I’m a clever survivor.

So, hey. Embrace the suck.

I don’t get the feeling that there are that many people here right now. No conversations. No laughing, or shouting, or crying. If I listen hard, I can hear a faint strain of some Chinese pop music, so quiet it’s like I’m almost imagining it, like maybe I’m hearing something else, a pump or a rattling air conditioner, and I’m conjuring music out of it.

I guess most everyone’s at work this time of day. Or sleeping.

We walk down the makeshift hall, John checking out the numbers stenciled and in some cases scribbled in thick black marker on the wallboard. It’s pretty dark, with the only light coming from behind us. No hint of daylight anywhere. How could there be? We’re in a fucking basement fallout shelter.

John stops about halfway down the hall. Points at a blue construction panel. It’s a makeshift door, I finally realize, with holes drilled on one side and thick wire running through those and into the wallboard. Light leaks out around it like a glowing frame.

I think, Okay, there’s light. So she must be there, right?

Someone is anyway.

John raps on the door.

There’s a rustling sound, someone moving, and then, “Shi shei?” A young woman’s voice.

John jabs a finger at me.

Me? I mouth.

He nods, with that hint of irritation I’ve seen on him before, like I’m missing something obvious.

Whatever. “Ni hao. Wang Junyi ma?” Hello. You’re Wang Junyi?

The door rattles, then opens a crack. She’s got some kind of chain on it, which is pretty funny. A couple of good, hard shoves and you’d rip the wire “hinges” right off this “door.”

“Bushi. Ni yao shenme?” No. What do you want?

Shit. I really should’ve made something up ahead of time.

“A couple of nights ago, I went to a party,” I say in Mandarin. “Wang Junyi was working there. She left something. I wanted to give it to her.”

John nods, this time with something close to a smile. Like I’m not such a bad liar after all.

He should know.

“You saw her?”

“Yes.” Which, you know, I probably did.

The door opens a crack wider. “You’re a foreigner,” she says.

“Right.”

More rattling.

The door opens.

I can’t see her that clearly, with the light coming from behind her. She’s young, I’m pretty sure. Short, a little stocky. She takes a step back, her body rigid.

“Who’s he?” she asks.

“A friend.”

“He was at the party?”

“No.”

She hesitates. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. It’s hard to see her face.

“Come in,” she finally says.

It’s a little cubicle with white walls. The floor space is almost entirely taken up by a couple of twin mattresses. There’s a pole running above our heads from one side of the room to the other that’s hung with clothing, a couple of salvaged shelves piled with shampoo and cosmetics, stacks of magazines, some folded T-shirts, a laptop, and an electric kettle, the plug for that stuck into a power strip plugged into an extension cord that runs up to the single ceiling light. There’s stuff on the walls, a plastic poster-size slick ad for Lancôme cosmetics that looks like it came from a subway station, the face of a beautiful woman holding up a tiny bottle like it’s got a genie inside. A picture of Rain, the Korean pop star, next to a mountain landscape that looks familiar but that I can’t place.

“Huangshan,” she explains. “We both come from Anhui. Do you know Huangshan?”

“I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it,” I say.

“Most beautiful mountain in all of China. You know the saying in China: ‘Once you visit Huangshan, you would not want to visit any other mountain.’”

“I did not know that,” I say.

John and I sit on one of the mattresses while she makes tea. “Juliet is my English name,” she tells us. She has one, even though she doesn’t speak more than a few words of the language. “I saw the movie with Lai’angnaiduo Dicapuliao. Luomiou yu Zhuliye.”

It takes me a minute. “Oh. Leonardo DiCaprio. Romeo and Juliet,” I say in English.

She nods vigorously, smiles a little. “So romantic.” She hands me a glass with some loose leaves floating on top. “Be careful,” she tells me. “Hot.” It is, almost too hot to hold. “But I think I’ll change my name soon.”

“Why?”

She shrugs as she hands John his tea. “It is a silly idea. Dying like that for love.”

Finally she sits on the mattress across from us. “So Junyi’s belonging, what is it?”

I squirm a little. The glass really is hot. I put it on the floor in front of me.

“Her identity card,” John says. “So we want to give it to her personally.”

It’s a good lie. They use that card, the shenfenzheng, for all kinds of things in China. Buying train tickets. Opening a bank account. Applying for a job.

Juliet nods, staring at the floating leaves in her glass. She twists it around in her hands, which I notice are reddened and chapped. “I don’t know where she is,” she says at last. “She hasn’t come home since that night. I call her phone, I call her work, I call her friends. No one has seen her.”

I get that horrible, collapsing feeling in my gut. Because I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen her since that night. A picture of her anyway.

“Did you contact the police?” John asks.

Juliet snorts. “The police? What for? We don’t have Beijing hukou, why would they want to help us? Anyway, the police are useless.”

John blushes a little. I doubt Juliet would notice, but I do.

“But if she is missing . . .” he says, almost gently.

Then Juliet starts to cry. I hate it when people cry. I never know what to do.

“We are friends from Anhui,” she says between sobs. “We came to Beijing together to make money. I don’t know what to do.”

John reaches out and pats her on the shoulder. “I am sorry,” he says. “But you must go to the police. Tell them she is missing. I know a detective. You can go to see him.”

Juliet looks up. Her face, like her hands, is red and blotchy. Her body is suddenly tense, like she might bolt, or maybe attack. Fight or flight. I can’t tell which.

“Why do you care?” Her voice shakes, and I’m not sure how much is anger and how much is fear. We could be anyone, and maybe we’re not here to help. “What do you really want?”

“Justice,” John says.

“She called me from that party. She said if she worked late, she had a chance to make more money.”

I guess Juliet believed him. But then, John’s pretty convincing when he wants to be.

Maybe he even means it.

“When she said this, how did she sound?” John asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Angry? Happy? Scared?”

Juliet frowns a little, pursing her lips. “Just . . . normal. She said she was tired. But she was happy to have a chance to make more money. This is why we came to Beijing. To make money.”

John nods. “I understand. This company she works for. Do you know anything about it?”

“Just that they like pretty girls.” She shrugs. “Junyi is very pretty. Not like me. I could never work there.”

They were all pretty girls, the ones working at that party.

“How long has she worked there?”

“Not long. Maybe . . . two months.”

“Does she like it?”

Juliet snorts. “She likes the money. Much more than her last job. She says maybe we can get a better apartment soon, because the money is good.”

“Has she worked late before?” I ask. Because I’m wondering what that might have involved.

“Only once.”

I hesitate, because I really don’t know how to put this. And while my Chinese has gotten pretty decent when it comes to the basics of talking to people, I don’t exactly have much skill in the way of nuance.

“What did she say, after that first time?” I ask. “Did she tell you about it?”

“No,” Juliet mumbles, rubbing her roughened hands, not meeting my eyes. “I already went to sleep.”

“Huh.”

Her head snaps up. “Anyway, what does it matter? Why are you asking all these questions?”

“I told you,” John says. “I have a friend who is a detective.”

She stares at him. I’m not sure if she’s buying it. “You came to bring her identity card. You can leave it with me.”

John shakes his head. “Since she is missing, it must go to the police.”

Her eyes are tearing up again.

“Here.” He produces his wallet, pulls out a business card. Looks like the same card he gave me once, the one for his supposed company, “Bright Spring Enterprises,” where his name’s Zhou Zheng’an.

I’m pretty sure it’s not a real business either.

He holds out his card to her. “You can call me if you want. I will tell you what the police say.”

She doesn’t take the card. She squeezes her eyes shut, like she doesn’t want to see it.

I get it, I think. If she calls him, maybe she’s going to hear something she doesn’t want to hear.

“If there’s news, you want to tell her parents, don’t you?” he asks softly.

Finally she nods and takes the card.

“So what do you think? The catering company has ‘girls selling smiles’ after hours?”

He’s been quiet during the ride back to Gulou. Distracted.

“Maybe so. Or maybe someone just has this expectation.”

“Yeah, could be,” I say, thinking of Milk Lady, a little detail I have not told John about. I mean, for all that the guy is great in the sack, in a freaky kind of way, he’s got a moralizing streak a mile wide, plus he seems to have a bug up his ass about rich people in general, the Caos in particular.

“What now?” I ask.

“I thought you want to go back to Gulou.”

“No, I mean . . . Okay, so we think we know who the dead girl is. What happens next?”

“Hmmm.” His forehead wrinkles. “We can tell Inspector Zou. But maybe we can wait a little while.” His eyes get that dark look again, the one that kind of scares me. “I think I want to meet these Caos first.”

I slump back in the seat. This is not going to end well, I’m pretty sure.