This Is How It Really Sounds (27 page)

He turned around, not very curious. He was being polite to an old man. “Yes, it
is
a hell of a scene. Is this your first time in Shanghai?”

That was all Charlie needed. He'd done this dozens of times. When he'd been a contractor for the Agency, they'd often hire him to get close to people they wanted to recruit or compromise. Sometimes it was to pick up information or to see about doubling a foreign agent. Sometimes it was to solve a problem. He'd set up a couple of people for termination. He didn't lose any sleep over it: they were bad people. Just like it didn't bother him to be setting up Peter Harrington right now. Truth be told, the man was overdue. Maybe not at the top of the list, because it was a very long list, but definitely deserving of some instant enlightenment. Hell—it'd probably make him a better person.

Just like he'd hoped, in the eight minutes it took Peter Harrington to get his drinks, Charlie had already set up a meeting with him the next day. He'd be putting him exactly where he wanted him, when he wanted him. He hung around another twenty minutes after Harrington went back to his group of friends. It could all go wrong, of course. Harrington could change his mind, or get sick, or the driver might suddenly need a day off. And if that happened, he'd figure something else out. Just like always. Christ, it felt good to be working again.

He was dead tired by the time he got to Pete Harrington's hotel, but he called ahead and asked him to come and meet him at a little bar across the street. The musician had ordered a glass of Coca-Cola, as if to show his seriousness. “Are you ready, Pete?”

“Are you going to ask me to drop down and give you forty push-ups in the middle of this bar?”

“No. We're beyond that. But you can still change your mind.”

“I'm not changing my mind.”

“Okay, then. This is how it's going to happen.” Charlie related the conversation he'd had at the Bar Rouge, and his appointment the following day with the financier. “I'm going to drive you past the place tomorrow, and I'll show you where to wait for the driver to signal you. Try not to make too many friends along the way.”

“Cool.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Well, I thought of wearing some sort of disguise.”

“No. Don't do that. Let your hair down, dress the way he thinks of you. If he recognizes you, he'll be confused. You can deck him before he knows what's happening.” Harrington seemed to be bothered by that idea. “Pete, this isn't about having a fair fight. Use the element of surprise and act before he understands what's happening. Do it quick and do it right. Otherwise, it's going to get messy with the bodyguard.”

“What if the bodyguard chases me?”

“I won't let that happen. Besides, his job is to stay with the client in case there's a second attacker. You stay focused on hitting your target and getting back to the car.” The musician looked uneasy. “You're nervous, aren't you?” He patted his shoulder. “That's okay, Pete. It's normal. Just remember why you're doing this. You came here to give him his day of reckoning. This is it.”

 

2

Green-Screen Universe

The jet lag
was not working in his favor. When Charlie called about meeting at the bar, he was so tired he could barely get out of bed, but, after dragging himself back to his room, he slept three hours and then woke up ready to charge at two in the morning. All he could do was lie there for three hours watching television and thinking how he should have kept the girl on tap after all. Fuck, man—there he went again! He finally got up, did some push-ups, practiced some hits and kicks, and took a shower. He separated the clothes he was going to wear—a leather jacket, white shirt, blue jeans—then threw the rest into a suitcase. He checked his e-mail, saw nothing of interest, then made some coffee in his room and stared out the big picture window at the sun coming up behind Shanghai's skyscrapers. He thought of writing Beth, saying,
fuck yeah, it's
on! Just to let her know he wasn't fucking up again. It was really happening today. Go time. Showtime. Whatever-the-hell-you-called-it time. The weird thing was, he wasn't really that pissed at Peter Harrington anymore. Sure, the guy deserved an ass kicking on general principles, let alone what he'd done to him personally, but looking at it from the rest of the world's point of view, which he usually tried to avoid doing, it did seem a mite extreme to fly across the Pacific Ocean to kick the crap out of somebody.
Reasonable, Pete. Never be fucking reasonable!
That's the death knell: next thing you know, you're a guy wearing shirts with royal flushes on them.

He was the first one to the breakfast buffet, watched as businessmen catching early flights trailed in with roll-on suitcases. Fucking
these guys
is reasonable! It's not my job. Nope: not my job. My job is punching Peter Harrington, dirtbag financier, in the face. How's that for reasonable?

Charlie and the driver picked him up at eight o'clock, and they drove down to the Bund. Charlie didn't want to get out of the car because there were surveillance cameras—and if it ever came to that, he didn't want records of them together—but he pointed out how it was going to go down. Charlie was hit-man cool. “See those lions? That's the old Hongkong Bank. That's where you're going to intercept him. You'll be waiting around the corner and Mr. Chen will be in a car over there, by that cross street. He'll be watching me. We'll be walking toward the bank from the opposite direction, and Mr. Chen here will be watching and he'll text you when I'm a block away. That should be about twelve fifteen. I'll get your man over by this second lion, and I'll delay him there. You should be able to approach, hit him, and then walk directly over to the street by that traffic light. Do not look at me, do not speak to me, do not acknowledge me in any way. If you do, you'll put me at risk. Understand?”

“I understand. Don't let on that I've ever seen you before.”

“That's right. It's
very
important. These situations are fluid, and I may have to say or do something unexpected, but you'll ignore me. If I go down, ignore me. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“I'll have another man nearby to intercept the bodyguard if he decides to chase you and gets past me. Don't look for him. Mr. Chen will be waiting with a taxi and he'll bring you straight to the airport. You'll have a first-class ticket on Cathay Pacific, and he'll take you through VIP security. Mr. Zhang already set it up. You'll have an hour and a half to make the flight, starting from this point. Now repeat that all back to me.”

He went over the whole thing for Charlie, and, yeah, he was feeling it a little. Light in the stomach, pulse running faster.

“Good.” Charlie looked him in the eye. “What are you going to say when you walk up to him?”

“I'm going to say,
Hey, I'm Pete Harrington, and you ripped me off for eight million dollars!
Then I hit him.”

“I guess that works.”

“Or I could say,
You owe me eight million dollars, and I'm taking it out of your ass!
”

“Okay—”

“Or maybe,
Motherfucker—
”

“You mean you haven't thought this through?”

“Well, yeah, Charlie, I've thought about it a lot, but, you know, it's like writing lyrics: it takes a few tries to get it right.”

The old man put his forehead down to his hand, shaking it back and forth, then looked up at him again, smiling. “Well, whatever you say, don't get in an argument with him. You're not there to dialogue. Say it; hit him before he understands what's going on; if he goes down, maybe kick him a couple of times; then walk to the car quickly.”

“Got it. But there's one thing we haven't talked about, Charlie: how are you going to get away?”

“That's the easy part. I'll give you a call when I get back to Los Angeles.”

*   *   *

They dropped him off at the hotel, and he went back up to his room. He had a hard time staying still, half-watched the television as he sat on the edge of the bed. At eleven, he went to the lobby and checked out; then Mr. Chen came for him and put his luggage in the taxi that he was driving now. By eleven forty-five he was in place, two blocks from the old Hongkong Bank building, waiting. The driver would text him when it was time to go.

The morning was cool and his leather jacket wasn't quite doing the job. He was shivering, and that probably wasn't just from the cold. Charlie had told him it would be like this, and he kept calling up Charlie's calm, fatherly face.
Keep a level mind, stay with the job. Get in, get out. You trained for this. You're ready.

He looked at his reflection in the window of a restaurant, the street reflected in back of him, as if it was a green screen and someone was just projecting him there. A music video, the one of “Kickin' It with The Man,” except the video he'd imagined happened in a universe waiting for an avenger to punch greed in the face, and instead some dumbass had green-screened him into a universe that just didn't give a fuck!

What was he doing here?
Standing on the street in Shanghai about to go assault some dude—this was
fucking
crazy! He should be back in L.A., working on a song, planning his tour. Why was he pretending to be some kind of hero? He looked at his watch. Another twenty minutes to kill, and now his body was starting to shake. He was freezing out here!

He drifted to the window of a jewelry store. Glittery bits of glass on metal: bullshit fishing lures for the rich. The street front of some sort of upscale shopping gallery. He wandered inside. Men's clothing. An audio shop. He wandered over: those new Bose headphones. Nice. Some speakers. Norwegian shit. It felt comfortable, so he wandered in, and the salesman came up to him. Youngish Chinese guy, casual hipster clothes. He recognized him, seemed embarrassed. “Mr. Harrington! Hello!”

Give the dude a little salute: “G'day.” Christ, where'd that come from? Was he fucking Australian now?

The salesman still seemed starstruck, but he went into his routine. He probably didn't know what else to say. Talking about,
Have you seen the new Bose headphones? Very good signal-to-noise ratio.

And he was like,
Dude, I'm getting ready to assault somebody! That's the only noise I'm hearing!
But he didn't say that, just waved at him and drifted out of the shop, back out onto the street, and he could see the salesclerk talking excitedly to someone else, and then the two of them came over to the front of the shopping gallery, came out the door saying,
Hello, Mr. Harrington. Can I take a picture?
They didn't wait for an answer: whipped out their cellies and started filming him. He waved and smiled, then tried to get some space, but they were following him with their phones, calling out to him, saying something in Chinese. Now other people were looking at him, too, and it was like feeding goldfish: when the first ones come to the surface, all the other ones come, too, until you've got a swarm of goldfish blowing bubbles all around you. He kept a vague smile on his face and tried to fade away, but he really had no place to go, because he was supposed to wait here for the text. In a couple of minutes, he had four or five people taking videos of him, asking for autographs, and when people saw that, they whipped out their cell phones, too, clueless little smiles on their faces, like,
Who the fuck is this foreigner, and why am I taking a movie of him?

Okay, this is fucking
off
the crazy scale! Did I make this? Did I create this world and this street and this nervous guy waiting to go do violence to someone? And I'm doing this
why
? He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket, and he pulled it out and looked at it. It was the driver. The text said, “GO.”

He swallowed. He was doing this. Day of reckoning, right? That was it. Fucking day of reckoning. Say it, step in, trap, and hit. Kick him if he goes down. Head for the traffic light.

The sidewalk was crowded but he could see the lions a couple hundred yards off. A few people were walking alongside him with their cell phones out, filming him, silently, but he wasn't paying attention to them. He could see Charlie up ahead, talking to another man, and beside them a third man, the bodyguard. They were staring at the buildings, so they couldn't see him yet. The guard was listening and following what Charlie was saying.

His heart was speeding along. This was stupid! Was he really doing this? Now only a hundred yards away, and he could make them out clearly. Charlie had his camera out and was pointing it at the building. The bodyguard and the financier were all looking that way. This was it. This was the guy who'd ripped him off and cost him his house and his career. The guy who'd fleeced the world and laughed about it. Fucking Peter Harrington! He was only fifty yards away, and now Charlie glanced over and, without actually looking his way, moved so that the bankster saw him coming, too, dragging his little entourage of Chinese celebrity hounds. Charlie moved in between the bodyguard and Peter Harrington. He was twenty yards away. Should he say something now? Was this the time? Wait another few paces? What was he was going to say? Something about eight million dollars? Or six hundred million?

He was only thirty feet away now, Peter Harrington seeming now like just a regular guy on the street standing with an old man and a local. They locked eyes, and then he saw it: the face lit up in that way he'd witnessed a million times. That dumbstruck recognition, that worshipful stupor, that wonder, that amazement, that sense that the whole world had just expanded into something huge and fabulous, like a movie or a video. He was a fan!

Charlie was looking his way. He was supposed to say something, right? Something about owing, or payback or something, but he couldn't remember, because the guy was a fan! For Christ's sake, the guy was smiling! He looked like he's about to ask for a fucking autograph! And now he was only three feet away from the fucker, completely blank-minded, and the guy was reaching his hand out to shake, and the bodyguard was starting to shift a little like he senses something.