Imagine you are in another country.
One where you cannot speak the indigenous languages, know no one local, are unfamiliar with the grid, and through no fault of your own, stick out like a hangnail on a sore thumb.
You obviously do not belong here.
And it is only a matter of time before some grown-up, some authority figure, strolls in and asks what the hell you think you’re doing.
So—what do you do?
Further imagine that after fewer than 24 hours on this alien planet, you have met the person who objectifies your hatred…and failed to kill him.
That during a mad popper-party of shooting, screams and panic, you may have caught a transient glimpse of an old ally from home—a glimpse so fleeting that it might have been a hallucination of wish-fulfillment.
But you cannot pause to debate that information because you have gained a new benefactor, a sharp Asian woman who knows how to deal with gunfire.
Your brain, playing mind tricks on you, gives you another flashpop look at the man you think you know,
but already your mind is confusing the new helper with the old helper, and the endorphins are flooding because you are in wild retreat and have just stopped a bullet.
Stupid, careless, getting tagged like that.
None of this matters because in one stuttered, brokenfilm eyeblink of time, you’re facedown in a freezing, fast-flowing river with a bullet in your shoulder.
Now imagine what your last thoughts might be.
Sorry, Val. Sorry, Lucy. Sorry, everybody. I could not save anyone, or change a single bad thing. I have disappointed every person with whom I have ever come in contact.
But strong hands fish you from the black maw of the water, telling you no one should die so ignominiously just for the sake of being dead. And your dying mind agrees that this, in fact, is a reasonable point of view.
So—what do you do?
You try to answer the question your rescuer has posed to you.
Where is Qingzhao Wai Chiu?
You say: Dead, I think. I’m not certain.
The rescuer says: Are you certain of anything?
Then he says: It is true that if I had needed to kill you, you would be dead. My offer still stands. I can show you a way out. No police. No adversaries.
But first there is the tiny matter of digging his own bullet out of your shoulder.
This is accomplished in an apartment…somewhere…an identity-less box, a clean and welllighted place, as Hemingway might have said. A window offers a choice view of Shanghai nightlife, far below.
You find yourself naked in an old-fashioned bucket
shower, an anomaly in this modern place. You remember a water dipper. Stitches. Candlelight. A bowl of noodles. You’re disconnected, but ravenous. Ninety percent of your identity seems to have astral-projected out of your body and gone somewhere else, and you have a quick thought about the pharmaceutical painkillers that are probably coursing through your system along with the soup.
Then you forget the thought.
There is a saying in China, Noodle Man tells you. “The heat of anger burns only the angry.”
Great, you think. Did you read that on a fortune cookie?
The fortune cookie was invented in America, Noodle Man tells you with a total lack of irony.
Ivory, you remember. This person is called Ivory. He even introduced himself to you, back at the casino.
I need to express my sympathy, Ivory tells you. For your sister. Is it your intention to avenge her death?
Dumb question.
I did not participate, Ivory tells you. Romero, Chino, some of the others used her very badly. Cheung ordered it. I am far from innocent. It saddens me still.
Spare me, you think. This man Ivory consorts with Valerie’s murderers.
Unless he is lying about his own negligence or blameworthiness.
You feel you have begun something, Ivory tells you. A process in which you are trapped, and you feel a misguided urge to see it through to some end. The end can only be catastrophic for you. Do you see that?
Your brain tries to frame a counterargument but your thoughts are leaking out, wino-bagged in a sieve. Some drug in your blood is definitely messing with you.
Would you leave China now, if you had the chance? Ivory asks you.
So—what do you do?
It becomes very important for you to say the word NO. Aloud. Repeatedly.
Shanghai can be a very dangerous place. You are not sure if Ivory says this, or if you just think it. Fifty-fifty.
The drugs keep your brain drunk but your reflexes vital and threat-responsive, you discover later. Most likely, the prescription changed.
You are given an attacker and your entire personality reverts to instinct.
You are given a mask so you may be hidden in plain sight.
You fight through a waterlogged gray curtain, as though puppeteering a bloodless simulacrum in one of the violent games children so love to entertain themselves with back home, sitting lazily in front of the television. But there is no laziness to it here, nor even very much sitting. Just violence.
And in a way you accomplish what you came halfway across the planet to do. You kill. You prevail.
That
is what you do. It is who you are, now.
The food, the drugs deftly separate you from a world that had little use for you, back there in behind-time.
It is not such a bad life, fulfilling in its primal imperatives. Fight. Survive. Eat. Sleep. Fight again.
You see a man in a cage, less fortunate than you. You are in control of your little universe. The man in the cage has no control. Perhaps you will face this Other in the fighting pit.
But a minuscule ember of memory remains. You recognize this person.
His name is Gabriel. You were introduced to him once.
“Mitch!” said Gabriel, bum-rushing his own bars. “Michelle! You’re alive!”
“I won,” she said, as though that were an answer. She regarded him oddly. Off-center. Head cocked. Sparse recognition in her green eyes. Yet she had remembered his name.
“Who pulled you out of the river?” Of the dozen questions Gabriel could have asked, this one floated to the surface first.
“Some man,” she said.
“Don’t you remember? We were at the casino. You were shot. We all went into the river together.”
“The dream,” she said. “The dream of being someone else.”
“It’s not a dream—look, Mitch, they
did
something to you. Shot you up with drugs or lobotomized you or…I don’t know.”
“Mitch,” she repeated.
Gabriel watched her worry the name in her head. It was a slim hope, a doomed chance for her real self to flicker alight.
“I am Jin Huáng,” she said. “I have fought five. I have won five.” She showed him the Iron Fist, still strapped to her hand.
“No, you’re not! You’re—”
“When your time comes,” she added curtly, “I’ll win against you.”
“Jin Huáng, this is your rest period,” said Ivory.
Mitch hung her head and shuffled away.
“Await me,” Ivory said to her back. She stopped walking. Then started up again.
“You’ve drugged her into some kind of…robot,” Gabriel said from the cage.
“A preparation from Mr. Cheung’s resident mystic,” said Ivory. “It subverts the will.”
“I’ll say.”
Ivory unpocketed a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Gabriel.
“No thanks,” said Gabriel. “I never got to finish my drink.”
“We of course had your identity the moment you entered the Zongchang casino,” said Ivory matter-of-factly, not even looking at Gabriel. “I suspected some connection between you and this woman. The cameras confirmed it when you took them both into the river.”
“Well, good for you,” said Gabriel. “I gather this is the part where I’m just supposed to listen to your brilliant strategy and not ask you why the hell you have me locked up in a cage.”
“Unfortunately for you, you have been tricked into
consort with the Nameless One,” said Ivory. “Mr. Cheung is very protective of his interests, and disapproves of those who would oppose him for shallow and misguided reasons.”
“You mean like because he murdered your newest fighter’s sister in New York?”
“Ah. That is the link, then.” Ivory rubbed his forefinger against his lips, a nervous gesture. “And you sought to redress this injustice?”
“Mitch did,” Gabriel said. “All
I
wanted to do was get her out of here. That’s the honest truth.” He hoped he sounded sincere. “This is not our country. Your fight’s not our fight.”
Ivory pondered a moment, then said, “Let me tell you a story.”
“I don’t see how I can stop you.”
“Let us say that this story is about an imaginary person named Valerie Quantrill. Who worked quite expertly in the transfer of digital data. Let us imagine that Mr. Cheung’s company hired her to bring everything in the organization online for access via the latest state-of-the-art equipment. Broadband literacy is essential to a man who aspires to take an entire country to a new horizon.”
“But he didn’t count on his imaginary data transfer czar being broadband-literate herself,” said Gabriel. “And stumbling on things he didn’t want her to know.”
“There was no stumbling, Mr. Hunt. It was deliberate, premeditated and malign. She hacked firewalls, she stole passwords. All deliberate. She deliberately gained access to data that was damaging to us. We foresaw blackmail, threats, sealed envelopes in secret drops. But Mr. Cheung was not enraged—he was
pleased. He saw this initiative as a valuable skill. He seeks to encourage people to their best potential—that is why so many in China take him seriously.”
“He’s a madman who participates in slave auctions,” said Gabriel.
“You persist in Western linear thinking,” said Ivory. “But I believe you to be an intelligent and perceptive man. Think of the small crime with yield for the greatest good.”
“Every madman in history has justified his madness that way. Look at Hitler.”
“Yes, yes, Hitler.” Ivory glared at him. “Are you quite through?”
“Not quite,” said Gabriel. “But I’m the one in the cage. I’m through if you say I’m through.”
“Let us say that instead of chastising Valerie Quan-trill, Mr. Cheung offered her a new and expanded role in his grand plan—one that would potentially have made her very wealthy, and free to move about the world as she pleased. And let us say further that she came to the meeting in New York to turn him down. That would have been an entirely honorable decision, you understand—but a bad choice. Mr. Cheung would have perceived her disinclination as a threat to use what she knew.”
“You mean he lost his temper and killed her. Hypothetically speaking.”
Ivory pressed his lips together and looked at the floor for a moment. He released a sigh, as though venting psychic decay.
“If this happened,” he said, “I assure you it was not with my approval.”
“You didn’t prevent it,” said Gabriel.
“Perhaps a Westerner cannot understand. It is not
my place to prevent Mr. Cheung from doing what he wishes. I am bound by my fealty to him.”
“Fealty?” Gabriel shot back. “Ivory, he’s not even really Chinese!”
“I know. I have accepted this.”
“Look—you’re
better
than this guy. You saw Mitch come to kill him and you saved his life, but you saved
her
life, too. Only now you’re letting your sense of obligation hamstring you.”
“I saved her out of regret for her sister’s fate,” Ivory said. “Were I a disloyal man, I would not have informed Mr. Cheung. Instead I proposed an alternate course, and he approved.”
“And if he hadn’t? If he’d told you to kill her? What would you have done?”
“I would have killed her,” Ivory said, but he said it quietly, in a voice of utter commitment but also some sadness.
There was a deep conflict aboil just under Ivory’s bulletproof surface. Gabriel had sensed it the first time they had met.
“You’re
attracted
to her,” Gabriel realized. “More than that, you’ve got the obligation of her sister hanging around your neck. Putting her in a human cockfight may not seem merciful, but it beats killing her—at least she has the chance to defend herself. Cheung is happy. And you get to control her. You’re her steward. Her trainer. Her keeper. Her man.”
Ivory shook his head forcefully, but not without a little sweat on his face.
“Beats buying yourself a wife—you didn’t even have to pay anything,” said Gabriel, gripping the bars. “You’re the guy who jams her with drugs, I’ll bet, and I’ll bet you do it in the most loving way. You take
care of her after the fights, don’t you? Backrubs and front-rubs, all that. And this’ll go on until she dies, or maybe until you get tired of her, till your aching conscience quiets down. Then what? Do you throw her away, the way Cheung discarded Qi?”
Here at last was a charge Ivory could answer and he leapt at it. “The Nameless One failed Cheung. I corrected that oversight.”
“You
corrected
…you tried to kill her!”
“I
trained
her,” shot Ivory. “She was the best of our candidates! And at the critical moment, she failed. Her failure permitted Mr. Cheung to be wounded, something that is not allowable, and I—”
“You nothing,” Gabriel overrode. “You turned your back and Cheung threw her to the same pack of thugs and murderers that killed Valerie, assuming he didn’t participate himself. Only Qi somehow survived to come after you. Yes, you—not just Cheung, don’t fool yourself, she wants you, too. She wants to kill Cheung, but
you
…you she wants to humiliate. And what greater dishonor than to kill Cheung right under your umbrella of protection?”
Ivory’s stilted quiet was an indictment in itself. At last he said, “Her story will end very soon. Tuan betrayed her. He betrayed us, too, of course, but that is no more than one should anticipate from denizens of the Night Market.”
“And what happens to Tuan?” said Gabriel.
“Tuan’s story is already over.”
“I see. Did you kill him yourself?”
“It was my honor, and Tuan knew that.”
“Your honor,” Gabriel said. “You make it sound so very noble. Never mind the dirty, grubby politics of it—the fact that it also conveniently eliminates one of
the three other power-bosses on the Bund. Who’s left that isn’t under your control yet? Hellweg, the water-and-power guy, right? And the fellow who runs the police; I forget his name.”
“Zhang,” said Ivory. “You are right—to win Zhang to our cause would be to put the entire army at our disposal.”
“Why not just kill him the way you killed Tuan?”
“Zhang has not betrayed Mr. Cheung. He will be offered a deal, as Mr. Hellweg will be.”
Gabriel almost wished Ivory weren’t being so open in discussing his plans—it surely meant he was confident Gabriel would never leave the cage alive.
“Listen, Ivory,” Gabriel said, figuring he might as well confront it head-on, “you and I can work out a deal, too.”
“I am sorry for your unfortunate confinement,” Ivory said, “but no. If I were to let you go, I would have to answer to Mr. Cheung. As I would if I allowed Qingzhao to continue living. There are no options.”
“There are always options,” Gabriel said. “And if I find one before you do, you may regret not making a deal with me.”
“You speak very bravely for a man in a cage, Mr. Hunt.”
“I’m not being brave,” said Gabriel, “just telling you the truth. I have something Mr. Cheung wants very badly. How long do you think he’ll keep me in this cage?”
Gabriel caught the fleeting expression of uncertainty that ghosted across Ivory’s face at this news. But he had no time to appreciate it, because while he was watching Ivory someone slipped up from behind and jammed a spike full of joy juice into Gabriel’s shoulder.