In between sets of push-ups on the floor of my little room in Ai’s underground lair, I sit on the side of the bed and replay the events of the last twenty-four hours—the last-minute arrangements in San Dimas, the flight, the rude awakening to the reality of our situation in Beijing—and think about how I might regain a modicum of control over my life.
I do push-ups on my fingertips. I cross one ankle over the other, then switch. I bring my hands together beneath my chest for a set, then plant them wide for another. I step my feet up onto my bed for a different angle. I plank on my forearms.
Someone taps on my door. I silence the music on my phone and say, “Come in.” Sun pokes his head through the door.
“You’re exercising,” he says.
“Just a little. Helps me think.”
He sets a plastic shopping bag on the ground and sits down on the bed. “How many can you do? In a row?”
“I don’t know. I never max out anymore. But when I was a kid, Dad used to make me do fifty straight before dinner. Every night.”
“Me, too.” We share a smile at this shared history, then sit a moment in silence as the weirdness of the thing settles in.
“Actually,” Sun says, “he made me do one hundred.”
I wonder if Dad was more worried about Sun getting killed in some alleyway than me getting overpowered on defense. “You said my dad hired you off the streets. How did that happen?” I ask.
Sun hunches forward, rests his elbows on his knees. “Old Li saw me begging near a lamb skewer place where he liked to eat lunch, kowtowing on the sidewalk with a tin can in front of me. He came up to me and said, ‘Are you busy or can you take a break?’ He was smiling, of course. It was a few years after he had returned to Beijing from Hong Kong, and he was in his early thirties, the prime of his life. I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I’m going to eat over there. I’ll treat you.’ So we ate lamb skewers together and some hand-cut noodles as well. He didn’t say anything to me the whole time. Then he paid and said to me, ‘If you’re here at the same time tomorrow, I’ll treat you again.’ I was eight years old.”
I want to ask how he ended up begging on the street, but it seems like an impolite question. So I say, “What happened after that?”
“We continued like that for a while. Each day he would ask me one question after we ordered, while we waited for the skewers and noodles to be prepared. Sometimes it was a question like ‘Where is your hometown?’ or ‘Where do you sleep?’ and sometimes it was a question like ‘Tell me about that man; what’s he thinking?’ Then we would eat in silence. After having lunch like that every day for a few weeks, he asked me if I wanted to work for him. At that time, I had nothing. I didn’t think about it too hard. I just said, ‘Okay.’ Actually, it was the best day of my life. Right after lunch he took me to the Happy Year office in Chaoyang. Back then, all four of them worked from the same place. There was already a cot set up against the wall. That was my home for eight years.
“Every morning I woke up there and made congee for myself. Then I had two hours of martial arts lessons and two hours with a tutor, learning how to read and write. In the afternoon I would do errands for him: delivering messages, picking up lunch, that sort of thing. When there was nothing to do I would hang around the office, do homework, and practice handwriting. He trained me to copy his handwriting perfectly, and then he trained me to copy other people’s handwriting as well. He brought me simple clothing when I needed it, and I could eat at a few different restaurants in the neighborhood on his credit. He sparred with me and taught me sleight-of-hand tricks. He taught me to pick pockets, but he made me promise not to do any stealing that wasn’t part of the job. Trust and loyalty were very important to him. He liked to repeat that proverb, ‘Zhōngchéng lǎoshí chuán jiā yuǎn—The families of the loyal and honest will thrive’”—
I finish it for him: “—‘lángxīn gŏufèi bù jiǔ cháng—and the betrayers with hearts of wolves and lungs of dogs will perish.’”
Sun shakes his head ruefully. “You know, he was always singing around the office. I didn’t know any kids my age, but everyone in the office was nice to me, and I could stay up late watching TV if I wanted to. I didn’t ask any questions. My whole world was Happy Year.
“On my sixteenth birthday, your father told me I would start getting paid. I would have enough to rent a room for myself and buy my own clothes. It wasn’t much, he said, but it would go up ten percent every year. I would have more responsibilities, too. I was very excited to hear this news. But then he told me I would still be his assistant, but Ai would supervise my work. He was moving to the United States. He would be back a few times every year.”
Sun pauses for a moment, studying his hands, smilingly slightly.
“He didn’t see or didn’t want to see that I was sad. I didn’t know what it meant to have a family, but he was my best friend. I just said thank you, but then that night I followed him home. That was the first time I saw his wife and children. I sat in a tree and watched through a window as he cooked the same dishes he had taught me to cook for myself. I watched all through dinner and after, when he read you and Lianying stories before you went to sleep. Finally, when all the lights were turned off, I climbed down from the tree and went back to the office.”
Sun falls silent after this. He looks a little flushed with emotion, matching the heat of exercise on my body. I’m not good at these moments, so I think about Andre, who is, and then I reach out tentatively and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He looks up into my face with a curious light in his eyes, and in that moment I see all the boons and burdens that Dad gave him, the traits we have in common, the fire and the cool, the rock and now the pain, too. There are those things and the differences, too, the edge that is already sharp inside of him, the harsh lessons I am only beginning to learn.
Sun breaks eye contact, manages one of his ducky little nods. “I owed him a lot. He owed me a lot. It’s something that gives me complicated emotions.”
“Yeah.” I cut my eyes away to the floor and we both stare at our feet for a minute or two.
“So, Wei Songqin is Ai’s assistant like you were Dad’s?” I ask, breaking the silence.
Sun nods.
“And she has ninja training, too?” I ask, trying to be light.
“In fact, she can fight a little. Ai asked me to train her in self-defense.” Sun says. “But she has other capabilities.”
“Other capabilities?”
“You didn’t notice anything about her that stands out? Something that she could use to her advantage?”
“Oh,” I say, frowning. “Jeez. I bet she’s good at it.”
“She is an expert at using other people’s emotions and disguising her own,” he says. “But—she is our friend.”
“And what about Ai? Is he our friend?”
Sun thinks, then nods. “We have put him in a dangerous position by coming here. He can’t refuse you, because you are Old Li’s son. But he doesn’t want to go to war with Ouyang and Zhao, and he fears that if we expose them, he will be exposed as well.”
“What’s up with that coin he was fidgeting with?”
“It’s a silver tael from the Qing Dynasty. Ai had the blackest background: his family were aristocrats in the Qing. So he suffered the most during the Cultural Revolution. Both his parents were sent to labor camps.”
“I can’t figure out if he’s supposed to be one of the good guys or the bad guys.”
“I’m not sure there’s such a thing as good guys and bad guys,” Sun says. “But we should be grateful for the help he’s giving us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, are you ready?”
I look up at him, a little startled. Clearly, sentimental Sun is done and all-business Sun is back.
“Ready for what? It’s almost midnight.”
“Yes, the timing is perfect. Here, I have some clothes for you.”
He holds out the plastic shopping bag. Inside it I find a rayon black button-down, some slim-fit black jeans, and a black-on-white pair of box-fresh Chuck Taylors.
“What’s with the clothes?” I ask.
“Nice enough for the dress code, but also good for running. You have the gun?”
“I haven’t even checked.” I look in the bottom of my bag. Back in San Dimas, Sun had written some kind of code on an envelope, stuffed it full of cash, and taped it to the PPQ. Now the gun is here and the envelope is gone.
“I can’t believe that works.”
“Only works for one at a time,” Sun says absentmindedly. He has produced a box of bullets from his pocket and popped out the empty magazine, and now he’s loading it with mechanical efficiency. Fifteen rounds. “Very hard to get these into China. For larger quantities, you have to go overland from Myanmar. How about the rest of the cash? We will have to promise most of it to Feder.”
“It’s all there,” I say, nodding to the orange shoebox I had slid partway under the bed. “Did you say something about a dress code? Where are we going?”
“Velvet,” he says. “It’s a nightclub.”