This Is How It Really Sounds (26 page)

“Let's get you home,” he said.

They walked back to Nanjing Lu and flagged a taxi, both of them silent. He'd just killed someone in cold blood, without any government stamp on it. No commendation for this one, no extra bar or star. It was more like he'd just cleaned up a particularly ugly mess, something with a bad odor, and now that it was done there wasn't any sense of accomplishment, only relief that it was finished, and the suspicion that some part of the smell still clung to him.

Anna sat beside him in the taxi, staring straight ahead, glassy-eyed, like she had a concussion. Seeing a man's throat cut at close range, let alone being part of it, would shake up a front-line soldier, and she was just a young girl who played beautiful things on the piano. The taxi let them out and he walked her to the door. Her father was at his warehouse at the docks, taking care of the last details, and he didn't want to leave her alone, so they sat together without saying anything. He poured himself a whiskey, and he poured her one, too. She forced it down with difficulty. She opened up the cover of the keyboard as if she would play something, then closed it again. They hadn't spoken in an hour. Finally she turned to him. Her face had a sort of gaiety to it, like she was trying to make a witty remark, but her voice came out flat.

“Charlie,” she said. “I don't think you'll ever go back to that farm.”

He thought of his parents again, and of his younger sisters, all together in the living room around the stove, the whole peaceful dream, and then the picture rushed away from him. “No. You're probably right.” And what he knew she was saying was that she would never go back to that farm, either. That all of that was gone, if it had ever really existed.

He was sent to Nanjing a few days later. Then to Inner Mongolia and to the Philippines, where the Huks were stirring things up. Sometimes he wondered if someone in Washington had gotten wind of it and wanted to move him to a different locale for a while. He sent Anna a few letters, but he was moving around so much only one of her letters ever reached him. It was as grave and affectionate as she herself was, but he never knew if she'd sent others. He didn't get back to Shanghai for three years. He rang up Hermann Maier that very day, but the number had been reassigned to someone else who didn't speak English. It was 1949 and everyone was clearing out of Shanghai. Nobody knew what had happened to Hermann Maier. His office was closed. Even Vorster had left.

He couldn't resist going by the house, but other owners were living there, and they looked at him suspiciously as he stood at the wrought-iron gate. There was no music.

*   *   *

He woke up at the sound of a car horn outside his window, not knowing where he was, and instinctively looked at his watch. Five o'clock. That was it: his driver had dutifully followed the banker back to his residence and they were sitting it. A paper cup of cold black coffee was resting in the cup holder and he took a sip. He'd eaten almost nothing all day. He went into the café and got some sandwiches and used the bathroom, then returned to the car. He didn't expect the financier to go out for at least another hour. He called Harrington.

“Hi, Charlie.” Even those two words sounded bruised and dispirited.

“Have you eaten dinner?”

“No. I've been here at the hotel waiting for your call. What's the plan?”

“Come on over to where I am. I got you a turkey sandwich. And I got you one of those cream-filled pastry things for dessert. I don't know what it's called, but it's French. Is that okay?”

He heard Harrington warm up. “Yeah. Thanks, Charlie.”

“And we changed cars. We're in a black Peugeot now. See you soon.”

Twenty minutes later, he heard Harrington knocking at the window. The sight of his smiling face cheered him up.

“How are you feeling?” he asked the singer as he slid into the car.

“Got some jet lag happening. It comes in waves.”

“I know.” The cellophane crinkled as he pulled the sandwich from the bag and handed it to him.

“So what are we doing here?”

“We're sitting his residence. At some point he's probably going to come out and have some dinner, and then he'll probably go to one of his favorite bars. At that point, I'll try to set something up.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to take a look at him so you can be sure to recognize him immediately when it's time. I want you to get used to the idea that you're going to walk up to this man, say a few words, and then hit him, like you've practiced.”

“Okay.”

“This is your show,” he reminded him. “You made this happen.”

They waited silently. The driver had gotten out to smoke a cigarette. He needed to build Pete up after coming down so hard on him earlier in the day.

“So what was that all about, with the girl?”

“I'm sorry about that.”

“No, I mean what was it really about? I can't figure it out. You train for two months, you spend a bunch of money, you fly over here, and just when it's all about to happen, you want to shack up with some Chinese Kewpie doll you met on the street. You caught me by surprise on that one.”

“It's an old habit.”

“No, it's more than that. It's compulsive.”

“Yeah, it is more than that.” The singer was looking out the window on the street side, rather than toward the gate. “You want to know the truth? No bullshit? I'll tell you, because I just figured it out myself this afternoon. I mean, I think I knew, but I never named it. You know I toured here before, when I first went solo. 1992.”

“I read about it. You said something about Tiananmen Square and they shut you down.”

“Yeah, here in Shanghai. We were about halfway through our tour. I got up on the stage in the second act, and I said, ‘This is for the heroes of Tiananmen Square!' in Chinese. This was only three years after the massacre, and not something you talked about here. In fact, I think they still don't talk about it.”

Charlie spoke without looking away from the entrance to the financier's complex. “You said it in Chinese?”

“Yeah.”

“So, some gal with a pretty face used you to rub dirt in the eye of the Communist Party.”

“Crap, Charlie!” Harrington chuckled, but there was something slightly self-mocking about it. “Okay! Guilty! She was superhot. She had a brother who was killed at Tiananmen, and I agreed to do it because I felt sorry for her. And, you know, I'm no China expert, but I think we can say that killing a couple thousand students in a few hours is probably a bad thing to do.”

“I'll grant you that.”

“But I had no idea what kind of shitstorm it was going to kick up. Boom! End of tour! Boom! My ass on a plane to Tokyo! My manager screaming at me and telling me every Chinese roadie on the tour has been arrested to see who put me up to it. Then, boom! Back to the States, and suddenly I'm a fucking hero. The TV networks were on it like I was fucking Solzhenitsyn. I mean, Amnesty International invited me to speak at some banquet in D.C. I probably got asked a thousand times why I'd done it, and I couldn't tell the truth, because it'd get her arrested, which she probably was anyway. So all I could say was,
Because those people deserve to be remembered.
And it was bullshit. I said it because she played me, just like you did, at the health club.

“But man, they rolled out that Hero carpet, and I walked down it. I was the guy who stood up to the Chinese and gave them a big black eye. Bobby put an American flag on my next album. Fucking country music stars wanted to record duets with me. I even got asked to do a gig at the White House, and the president came up and jammed with us. It was all just a big lie. And that's when everything started to feel hollow.”

Harrington sighed. “I just didn't want to do that fake rock-hero shit anymore. So I failed my way out of it. But once you get in that habit, it's a hard one to break.”

“And now you want to do something real.”

“Yeah. This isn't for an audience. This fucker's a predator, Charlie. He thinks he's untouchable. Somebody's got to touch the untouchable.” He laughed. “You know what I'm talking about. I know you do.”

Charlie didn't answer.
Always the ugly sister.

The street was dark now. The driver said, “Here is his car,” and the financier's chauffeur pulled up in the black Mercedes. Suddenly, Peter Harrington was emerging from the gate.

“There's your man,” Charlie said.

“I see him.” Harrington watched intently as the financier moved toward the street. “Seems kind of pudgy.”

“At least some of it's muscle. He plays squash five times a week. He probably lifts weights. You can't go to a health club and not lift weights.”

Harrington seemed to be thinking that over. There were a few more seconds of silence. “Fuck it!” the musician said. “I can take him!”

“I know you can. And you will.”

As Peter Harrington moved toward his car, a man walking along the street seemed to approach him. Charlie watched the banker's driver subtly put himself between the pedestrian and the financier. Not too bad, but he seemed more of a crowd-control guy than a serious custodian. “That driver also doubles as his bodyguard.”

The singer sounded intimidated. “How do we deal with him?”

“That's my job.”

Harrington turned to him. “Seriously?”

“I can get you about ten seconds from the time he sees you as a threat. That's plenty of time if you don't waste it.”

“You know, Charlie, if this might get you hurt—”

He cut him off. “I appreciate that. But I've done this before. With a little luck, he'll be off parking the car, and I won't have to do anything. The main thing is, no matter what happens, you have to stay focused. Otherwise, everything we've done will end up being for nothing. I'll do my job. You do yours.”

They watched their target get in his car, then followed it out into the flow. Traffic was tight and slow, so it was easy to keep him within sight. The black Mercedes never left the French Concession and pulled over at the entrance to a warren of upscale businesses and restaurants. Charlie asked the driver to follow him, and he disappeared on foot behind their target. A few minutes later Charlie's cell phone rang. The financier had gone to a French restaurant called Franck, where he'd met a young Chinese woman.

He told the driver to wait twenty minutes and then go in and order a drink.

They waited over an hour, leafing through English magazines in the streetlight that came through windows of the car. After a while their driver called ahead and told them the target was moving, and a minute later Harrington came out of the lane into the brightly lit street, walking with his companion.

“She's got some talent,” the singer commented.

Charlie didn't want him to empathize with the target. “She should thank you for paying for part of her dinner.”

They left the French Concession and headed toward the Bund, as Charlie'd suspected he would. They pulled up to the old Chartered Bank, as he thought they might. Upstairs was the Bar Rouge, which Zhang had put down as one of his hangouts. They watched him go in.

“Now what?” Harrington asked.

“You go back to the hotel. I want you to rest and get your mind right for the next step. I'm going inside.”

“What are you going to do there?”

“Well…” Charlie almost laughed as he thought about it. “Maybe I'll walk right up to him and introduce myself.”

“You're bullshitting me, right?”

Charlie laughed and put his hand on Pete's shoulder. “This is what I'm good at. Just go back and try to rest. I'll come by your hotel in an hour or two.”

Charlie'd worked a lot of covers over the years. He'd been a businessman, a scrap-metal salesman, a foreign-aid worker, even a college professor. Now he didn't even need a cover. He was just the old vet.

Not too old for the prostitutes to swerve over to him as he crossed the sidewalk. Thank God for small favors. He took the elevator up, and the door opened. A wall of what passed for music these days slammed into him. A few people glanced his way as he came in, but nothing about him held their interest. He was old, and that made him invisible in this crowd.

He looked around and spotted Peter Harrington and his date in a little cluster of people, two Western men and two Chinese women. He recognized one of the men as Harrington's lunch appointment, probably his business partner, Kell McPherson. He could work his way into the group, but that could complicate things. Better to get Harrington alone. He noticed the financier and his date didn't have drinks, which meant he'd go to the bar or else order from a waitress. Staking out the route to the bathroom could work, but it could be awkward, too. If nothing else, he'd have to get him on his route tomorrow: maybe catch him at the health club and play the lonely old tourist, or “recognize” him somewhere and tell him what a bum rap he'd gotten in the press. That might work. Harrington had a lot of time on his hands and would probably go in for some interesting stories. He only needed a couple of minutes.

He positioned himself equidistantly between the route to the bathroom and the bar and watched his target. He'd already built an identity on some old vet he'd found on the Internet. Ernie Sivertsen, member of Merrill's Marauders and whatever other outfits Charlie decided to sign him up for. He had enough of a trail on the Internet that Peter Harrington would find him, but not enough to show his death date, unless Harrington went all the way to page 18, which was unlikely. The cover story would be easy. He'd spent plenty of time in western China and the border area. He'd barely even be making this up.

The financier didn't seem to be having such a great time with his friends. The short one had the fuzzy motor skills of a drunk: slopped his drink, leaned in too far when he spoke. Harrington tore himself away to the bar, and Charlie moved up behind him and spoke up. “Helluva scene, isn't it?”