This Is How It Really Sounds (20 page)

“So you did. Let's head in here and get something to eat.” Charlie pushed the door of the deli open. He turned back to the singer and said in a lower voice, “I think the waitress has her eye on me. And I kind of like it.”

 

IV

Cathay Hotel

 

1

The Buried City

The trip to Shanghai
was the longest flight Charlie had taken in two decades, and he wasn't really sure he was up to it. After the first two hours, his back had started to hurt, and by the time they got to Tokyo, nine hours later, he was squirming in his seat like a two-year-old. His bad foot started to throb from all the blood pooling in it, and he had to go to the bathroom about a dozen times, waiting in line beside the tiny cubicle and trying not to fall down. He had to lean against a seat, and the woman in it kept giving him dirty looks. He felt a bone-tiredness that bordered on the painful, as if all the muscles that held his spine together were too damn beat to do the job and everything was going out of alignment. In Tokyo he managed to find a rest lounge and lie down to sleep for an hour, so deep under the darkness that when Pete woke him up and he rose to his feet, he was still dreaming of Millie and the old farm in Washington, before their son died. The way those dreams always went. Nothing really happened in them, it was just the presence of his son, but all so much more vivid than he could ever re-create in his waking life. It wasn't like when he tried to remember him, it was just
him
, with the clothes and the smell and the haircut, all of him instantly there and alive. They were in the house. Eddie was about eight, standing in a white T-shirt like kids wore back then, and he was so overjoyed to see the boy, he'd gone straight to him and thrown his arms around him and said, “Eddie! I miss you so much!” and the boy had hugged him back. Then he'd felt someone shaking his shoulder, and there was Pete, telling him to get up, that they'd called their flight to Shanghai, and the only thing left was that furry rotten taste of sleep in his mouth.

He had to force himself to get back on the plane for the last three hours to Shanghai. He managed to doze off, his mouth hanging open and his snoring so loud that a man across the aisle finally poked him and said something unpleasant in Chinese. The lights in the cabin snapped an obnoxious glow into the cabin, and useless little hot towels were handed out with tongs, as if you could actually get your hands dirty in a sealed corridor thirty thousand feet above the earth. They watered the passengers with pots of green tea, brought a breakfast of noodles and red barbecued pork, which blocked up the aisle when he desperately needed to piss. He waited until he was practically salivating with the need to go, then begged them to let him pass and managed to reach the bathroom just as his bladder started to give out: he was only a little wet but he sprayed urine all over the bathroom floor and wiped it up as well as he could out of embarrassment and shame. He dried his pants and tried his best to cover himself as he made his way back to his seat. It was nine at night when they got to Shanghai.

He recognized absolutely nothing. The Shanghai he'd known had disappeared as completely as the sixty-odd years since he'd last been in this city. The airport back then had been more like an oversize airstrip, mostly military traffic. Some DC-3s, C-40 Constellations cashiered from the war. The world was still clearing rubble from the streets, and people had better things to do than tour around a country like China in the last phases of a civil war. Nineteen forty-nine. The Nationalists were leaving town with everything they could carry: crates and crates of stuff from palaces and mansions, military ordnance, fancy prewar automobiles. He still remembered a maroon and white Bugatti limousine a half a block long being backed into a wooden crate while an army officer held a loaded pistol on the owner. The damn thing was probably sitting in a museum in Taipei now.

Zhang met them at the airport and took them to their hotels. They'd traveled on opposite sides of the plane and were staying at separate hotels, just in case somebody looked into it later. Zhang had gotten gray in the twenty years since they'd last seen each other, when Charlie'd come over to Beijing on a trade mission for Hughes Aerospace. Zhang shook hands warmly, but he looked tired, and Charlie realized he must be close to seventy now, a lifelong smoker. He'd been the chief of the Shanghai branch of the Public Security Police in the eighties and early nineties, then retired to make a lot of money in the new China. Still had enough
guanxi
there to coast along for the next decade doing little odds and ends like this. Zhang was doing him a favor more than anything else: Charlie'd saved his father's life in 1944. He'd given Zhang the financier's name, and Zhang called back a week later with a whole dossier: names of his business partners, both Chinese and American, entries and exits, photos, right down to the girl he was seeing. The beauty of a police state.

They dropped the musician at a name-brand hotel in the center of Shanghai. Charlie didn't want to go in because of the security cameras, so he said good-bye in the car. Pete clapped him on the shoulder. “You okay, Charlie?”

“I've felt better, but I've felt worse, too.”

“We'll be up and running after a good sleep.”

He watched through the glass doors while Zhang's driver helped him check in. It was funny traveling with Pete Harrington. He always looked around as if he expected to be recognized, and, surprisingly, he often was. Even in the boarding line at the Tokyo airport, a young Chinese girl had come up to him and asked for his autograph.

“I'm a cult figure in China,” Harrington announced to him.

Charlie chuckled. “Why is that?”

“Who knows, man? Wayne Newton is a major draw in Slovakia. Guns N' Roses is still huge in Argentina. Something hits at the right time and you've always got that moment. I toured here in 1992, one of the first big Western acts, and it, uh, created a little stir.” The singer lingered on that memory, then left it quickly behind. “The girls on that tour? I don't even want to talk about it. They were all like little geishas.”

“That's Japan.”

“Yeah, whatever, Charlie. Don't bludgeon me with facts. I'm a big-picture guy.”

Now Harrington was getting shy looks from a little cluster of young Chinese workers behind the reception counter. He saw one of the boys work up the nerve to ask for his autograph, which the singer gave him with a little flourish that so cowed the kid that he stepped back a few feet and stared incredulously at the piece of paper.

They drove off to his hotel, a couple cuts below his client's, but Zhang could get him checked in under a phony name here. A lot of polished stone and brass, an updated version of the better Chinese state hotels he remembered from twenty years ago. A camera over the reception area, another over the door. The guy in the black sport coat talking to the bellhop looked like security, but maybe not. The place wasn't that expensive.

By the time he got to bed it was eleven at night, and he lay there for an hour, wide awake. Something in the airplane food had given him a bad stomach, and his gut was rumbling until two. He had to go sit on the toilet every twenty minutes. His goddamn foot was still throbbing from the flight. If he didn't watch it, he'd end up in the hospital with a blood clot. Wouldn't that be fun to explain to his client? Charlie'd crossed the Atlantic in the gun turret of a B-17, dropped into Burma, into Kunming, into Germany. All so long ago. Like Pete Harrington's great career. They were both trying to salvage something here.

The next morning it took him a few seconds to figure out where he was, and then he could barely get out of bed. His foot was killing him. His asshole was raw from the diarrhea. He had that doped-out feeling from jet lag and exhaustion, but this time he didn't have any uppers to snap him out of it for the mission. He dragged himself into the shower and let it run over his head, massaging the back of his neck until he could at least move it to one side, and he put his knees together and moved them in big circles to try to loosen up the tendons, the way he'd learned to sixty years ago. The damn things were shot, too much jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, but it helped a little bit. That's how it was now. He spent a half hour every morning loosening and stretching his old-man's body, and when he was all finished it was only twenty percent better than when he started. He did his back exercises and twenty push-ups and then he did the strange stretching and strengthening movements he'd picked up in China. Tiger Scratches the Tree. An Archer Opens the Bow. The Bear. Back when he'd had real muscles, he'd used to like looking in the mirror when he did these. Now he did them as he looked out at the city. After that he sent a quick e-mail to Beth Blackman and told her everything was on target.

It took him an hour and a cup of tea to get rolling. He got down to the cafeteria at 6:30 and surveyed the copper chafing dishes of the buffet. Bleached-out sausage, runny scrambled eggs. A halfhearted nod to the few Western travelers who'd gotten marooned here. He found a big cauldron of rice porridge, something he'd developed a taste for in his old Kunming days, when they'd gone sneaking through the jungles and a cup of cold porridge was a damn feast. The tribesmen used to put insects in theirs, when there was nothing else, but he'd never been able to do that. He spooned some out and stirred in a few pickled vegetables.

At 7:00 Harrington still wasn't answering his phone. He didn't really need him today—he wasn't the person to take along when you didn't want to be noticed—but the lack of discipline brought all his old doubts back, too. The singer had trained hard, and he'd trained lonely, but that didn't mean he'd pull it off. He went outside to make sure the driver was waiting for him, and then he left a message at Harrington's hotel. “I'm going out to look around. Keep your cell phone handy. I'll see you this afternoon.” It was Thursday morning in Shanghai.

Zhang had hired them a car: a white Audi, Chinese-made. The most forgettable car in the world. Also two cheap local cell phones that they'd tested during the ride in from the airport. Zhang had found him a man he'd worked with before who spoke decent English and had the necessary experience, including keeping his mouth shut. Zhang had written out the relevant addresses for him in Chinese and English. They were headed to the financier's home. On the way there he tried out the little bit of Chinese he remembered from the war, but his pronunciation was all off, and he didn't want to use up the man's good humor on it.

Peter Harrington lived in the old French Concession, and he remembered it as one of the calmer areas of Shanghai. At least it was still recognizable as the same place. The plane trees with their mottled pale-green bark, still lined the streets, and the high white walls sealed the houses off from the road. A good area for running, which was one of Harrington's exercise routines. From his house to his health club, five mornings a week. If the target was like most people, he could probably trace out his running route just by downloading a map from the Internet.

He loved to study people: what routes they took, what stores they stopped in to pick up a coffee or a newspaper, where they really went when they were supposed to be somewhere else. A person's life was built up out of habits like that, and once you knew the habits, you could move them around like a chess piece. If a man had a secret, you could ruin him, or control him. If someone wanted him dead, you could whack him, easily. It was almost mathematical, most of the time. Like that arms dealer in Mexico City: he had a crew of six very capable bodyguards trained by the East German government, all attached to the embassy. But he
loved
German food. So Charlie's team opened up a restaurant a few blocks from the embassy: brought in a chef from Germany, advertised it, made sure they got a few glowing reviews in the papers. They were doing land-office business. The embassy crowd was in there every day. A month went by, then another one. The place was actually making money, which kept the guys back in Washington happy. Life was fairly normal, other than that he was down there to kill someone. A couple more months went by, and finally the target showed up with his security team. They sprinkled a little ricin in his Wiener schnitzel, and he was dead in twenty-two hours, a fact that would have hurt the place's reputation if the East Germans hadn't tried so hard to make it go away. The place was still in business, last he heard.

The address they had for Peter Harrington was 65 Wu Li Lane. The house was tucked away in a little rabbit warren of alleys and small connected homes, built in the early thirties when Shanghai was booming, and the whole maze of tiny streets was closed off with an iron gate and a guard in a blue uniform reading a newspaper. You could spend twenty minutes bumbling around trying to find the place and be seen by a dozen people. He pulled out a real-estate broker's card that he'd asked Zhang to print up for him then had the driver hand it to the guard. Brokers always had a reason to be snooping around. “Ask him to show us where Sixty Wu Li Lane is.”

The guard let them in and walked them into the elegant little enclave, with small trees and plantings framing a narrow brick walkway, a dollhouse sort of neighborhood. There was no number 60, of course, but the guard walked them right up to Harrington's residence while he looked for it.

“Ask him if there's another entrance. Tell him maybe we were supposed to meet another broker there.”

The guard dutifully led them to the back entrance and opened the gate onto a mossy little alley that was closed off by a pile of old paving stones. Pretty clear Harrington would be using the front entrance. So much the better: the place even had a café across the street where he could sit by the window and wait for Harrington to exit.

Christ, this was easy! During the bad old days, if you weren't careful, you'd be the one to end up with someone following you, or they'd make you and never let on, just let you chase your own tail for weeks. In some places, of course, it could get you killed. Not this job. He ordered a pastry and settled down to wait.