The Dog (7 page)

“Let's discuss the boy's case,” Omar said. A gun wasn't necessary for these negotiations and it surprised him that the officer had put it into play. But the Chinese were good at psychology. They had hundreds of clever tricks to knock their detainees off balance.

“His file was called up for a minor charge,” said Fatty Bo, “but some research turned up unpaid license fees.” He graced the young guard with a wry smile. “What is he? A raisin salesman?”

“A furniture importer,” Omar said. “We can take care of this quickly.”

“I haven't even told you how much he owes. How much do you think he owes?”

“In range of three thousand,” Omar said quickly. He didn't care what the officer was claiming the boy had done. The officer would have the money and Omar wasn't going to stand in his way.

Fatty Bo chewed on it for a moment. “Damn close. It's good that you're on top of his business.”

“Four,” Omar said.

“Look, it's a symbolic act. A measure of good faith.” Fatty Bo focused intently on Omar, his eyes narrowing.

“I wouldn't call it symbolic,” Omar said.

“Can I tell you something about myself?” Fatty Bo said. “I'm an unlikely success, you know? The odds were staggering. I was very sick as a child. As scrawny as him.” He tipped his chin at Anwher. “Unable to defend myself. Can you believe it, looking at me now? Things change.”

“Things change,” Omar said.

“And listen to this: My father was taken by the Red Guard, strapped to a log, and pushed over a waterfall,” Fatty Bo said. “My mother and I lived like a couple of rats in a hole. If someone had told me I'd be here today…”

“You'd never have believed it,” Omar said.

“Yes! Exactly.” Fatty Bo looked at Omar appreciatively. “You haven't had an easy life, either, but look at you—you've done well for yourself. That's why I feel I can talk to you. So what's money between two men like us? My men tell me you didn't even raise your voice to them. You spoke without speaking, right? It impressed them, I'll tell you that much. Between you and me, you scared them stiff. When was the last time you woke up bloody in a jail cell? Not in my lifetime, am I right? That's a mistake you only make once. But this poor boy. This generation worries me. They're soft. None of this ‘eat bitter' bullshit for them. He'll never be able to hold your empire together by himself, that's what you're thinking. Not that there haven't been dangerous homosexuals—remember Queen Li? That guy and his fucking wooden knives!”

Omar kept his eyes level and his hands by his sides.

“You're worried,” Fatty Bo said. “Let me put your mind at rest.” But that was all he said. He expelled a weary sigh.

“He's been saying he wants to move back to Ürümqi,” Omar ventured.

“Is that a fact?” Fatty Bo said.

“It is. He's had it almost as bad as you and I, so it's understandable.”

“I very seriously doubt that.”

“When he was a child in Ürümqi. Both of his parents. My daughter—” Omar brought his finger across his neck.

“No,” Fatty Bo said.

“Yes. Truly. Killed in the street.”

“By Chinese?”

“Yes,” Omar said.

“That's no surprise. They used to send the top-notch psychos out there. All this bad blood is their fault. Everyone got off to a terrible start.”

“And still, the boy wants to go home.”

“If only things could have been different early on,” Fatty Bo said.

“I've told him to stay here, but he's a grown man. He can do what he wants.”

“It's too late to change the course of history. Isn't that what they say?”

“He's a grown man, but I'm responsible for him.” Omar brought his hands up, as if to apologize for this insoluble family bond. “I can have the money here very quickly,” he said.

“That's a good idea. You should pay the fine and I'll let the boy go.” Fatty Bo leaned toward Omar and put his mouth close to his ear. “You understand I'll have to interrogate him. To appease the men. They're animals. No ability to recognize the nuances of the situation. Our history creates expectations.”

Only the four of them—Omar, Fatty Bo, the young officer, and Anwher—were there.

“You'll do what's expected,” Omar said.

Fatty Bo sighed and held his gun out to the young officer. “Give me your stick. And don't let this old man get the drop on you. He's got a trick or two up his sleeve.” The young officer nodded gravely.

Standing over Anwher, Fatty Bo slapped the baton into his meaty hand. “Now, young man. Whenever you're ready to apologize for your crime, let me know.” Anwher scrambled into a corner, but Fatty Bo was all over him. With a great sweeping arc he raised the stick above his head, then brought it smashing down on Anwher's back. “This is unnecessary,” Fatty Bo said to no one in particular. Beatings no longer interested him the way they once had. But a man did his duty.

He hit Anwher until the Uyghur stopped struggling, and by that time his own back was starting to seize up. It took all of his concentration to ignore the pain. He tried to swing from the hips to minimize the cramps.

He directed some shots to Anwher's head, the baton reverberating sharply in his hand. Then he stopped and looked at Omar. Omar met his gaze but said nothing.

Anwher was making noises. It could have been an apology, but Fatty Bo's back was killing him, the muscles yanking like someone snapping out a wet cloth, and he couldn't think about anything but the cramps. He tore open his jacket to reveal a sweat-stained T-shirt underneath and attacked with a dull furor, the blows momentous, every one a raging earthquake. Anwher's hands crept over the floor, as if he were trying to drag his ravaged body out of the cell, out of the station, away from Beijing entirely. In his homeland, a man could walk in a deep valley for days without encountering another soul.

“Why?” Anwher cried, his voice suddenly clear.

Fatty Bo stopped long enough for Omar to respond to his grandson. When the old man said nothing, Fatty Bo looked up. “This can go on indefinitely,” he said.

Omar knew it could.

“So be it,” Omar said. “Show us what you're made of.”

 

MOUNTAIN OF SWORDS, SEA OF FIRE

 

Someone had hung an enormous red banner across the back of the newsroom that read “Farewell and Long Life, Li Pai!” The man of the hour had positioned himself at a metal folding table directly beneath it. Young reporters came with his memoirs open to the title page, then solemnly presented letters of recommendation they had written for themselves. Li Pai signed them all. Ning had spent the morning watching from his cubicle as they filed by, so worshipful, so eager to drink from the font of the great one's knowledge. The whole damn thing turned his stomach. Had anyone asked, Ning had no quarrel with him: Li Pai was a treasure. But Ning wasn't one for celebrations.

There was to be a party that night at the Green Room. Just thinking about it made Ning cringe. He knew how it would play out. Fang, the economics editor, would kick things off by delivering a speech listing her own accomplishments and thanking Li Pai for his contributions to her stratospheric rise, and old Bang Wen would stutter his way through a selection of Du Fu's poetry. The chief would grunt out whatever he'd written on his BlackBerry on the way over, while everyone, arms crossed, stared at the floor and listened for their cues to laugh. The toasts would go on so long Ning would begin to fantasize, like a man crawling across the Gobi, about a single drop of lukewarm beer. And by the time every editor in the place had said his piece, the drunks from the copydesk and production would feel compelled to chime in. But, much as he wanted to, Ning couldn't escape it. He was the only one old enough to have known Li Pai from the beginning, and the chief's assistant had been hounding him for weeks about his speech.

Like Li Pai, Ning was in his sixties, and for longer than he could remember, he had marked time by the various injustices the thoughtless world visited upon him, the speech being one. Another prime example occurred just after lunch, when one of Li Pai's acolytes called across the newsroom, “Hey, Ning! Great news! You just got scooped by the Baby Reds!”

Ah, perfection, he thought. He'd taken some extra time to do some deep research, and here was his reward. If he'd been younger, he'd have hopped a bus over to the
China Youth Daily
's dotcom operation and taken it out of the kid's hide—he didn't have to be told who'd stolen this story from him. He already knew. But he had a bigger problem, which was how to explain himself to the chief.

“Hey, no shame, no shame,” said the chipper young reporter in the cube next to Ning. He was wearing a necktie and had a pencil tucked behind one ear. He'd been on the job exactly one week, and he'd been a constant annoyance to Ning for the full length of his tenure. “I'm sure this happens to everyone from time to time,” the reporter said, his voice expectant.

“What a comfort,” Ning said. His phone was ringing but he ignored it. With some effort, like a man feeling his way through a blacked-out room, he located the story on the
Youth Daily
's site and printed it before turning his attention to his neighbor. “To think. All these years without you. It's a miracle I've been able to find my own dick without your sage counsel.” The reporter shrugged and rolled back into his cube, unfazed. It was perhaps the least offensive thing Ning had said to him all week.

Ning didn't much care about good stories anymore, not his own or anyone else's, and he'd given this one about as much thought as he would have the purchase of an umbrella during a downpour. It was about a security guard who'd acted courageously and had been stabbed nearly to death. The doctors had sewn him up, and he was on the mend, but because he'd refused to tell a white lie that would have harmed no one, his case was tangled in red tape and the hospital was refusing to discharge him. Ning had visited the guard, and as he'd listened to his story, he'd felt himself leaning in at one point, eager to hear more, but he'd lost interest again almost as soon as he'd left the hospital. Instead of filing the story, he'd burned the rest of the week doing research on thoracoabdominal penetrating injuries, and now he was going to hear about it.

Sure enough, before Ning had even had time to finish reading the story, the chief's assistant arrived at his desk. Her blue cotton dress had red flowers printed on it, and atop that she wore an apple-green sweater buttoned up to the neck.

“Mercy,” he said. “Is it mating season for your species?”

“Don't start with me, old man,” she said.

“So you've come down from your lofty perch just to subject me to this thing,” Ning said, pointing to her outfit. “I'm nearly blind as it is.”

“You don't think I called first?” She had the face of a middle schooler, and though she claimed to be twenty-five and a college graduate, Ning had his suspicions. She was someone's niece, or her father was in real estate.

“I didn't hear it,” he said, his chair creaking as he leaned back.

“You didn't hear it,” she said.

“Who can hear anything in here?” he said, waving a hand at Li Pai's table.

“If you read your e-mail—” she said.

“I don't read e-mail.”

“Of course you don't,” she said. “How inconsiderate of the rest of the company to communicate in such a manner. I'll draft a memo immediately and have a copyboy rush it down. Shall I have the little urchin rinse your inkpot and wash your brushes while he's at it? Ning Wang's wish is our command.”

“Tell me,” he said, “how exactly did you avoid becoming an infanticide statistic?”

She flashed her eyeteeth. “Please, at your convenience, grace us with your presence. I'm sure the chief will be happy to wait,” she said, and walked away, her dress cutting around her legs.

“I'm sure he will,” Ning yelled after her. He put up his feet to make clear that he didn't take orders from anyone, least of all her, and began to read slowly through the
Youth Daily
story. He paused every so often to laugh derisively, loud enough so that the reporters near him could hear, and when he finished, he made a show of dawdling around his desk before sauntering out to the elevators for the ride up to the eleventh floor.

“Well, I'm here,” he announced when he arrived outside the chief's office.

“He'll be overjoyed,” the chief's assistant said, picking up the phone to buzz the chief. She waved Ning in. “Always a pleasure!” she called after him.

Inside, the chief motioned for him to sit. “Took you long enough.”

“She's as unpleasant as she is ugly,” Ning said, gesturing through the glass. “You really ought to kick her down to production. She makes me go soft every time I lay eyes on her.”

The chief didn't answer. He was scribbling on a layout for a weekend insert, and Ning waited without saying anything else. When he saw the thick red pencil stop moving, he went on the offensive.

“I know why I'm here, and let me just go on the record as saying that it's a hack job,” Ning said. “You know it, and I know it. This kid who filed it—I saw him at the hospital. Probably followed me there.”

The chief stared at him.

“Second of all, this is exactly why I don't file to the Web. It's nothing but garbage like this. I've seen better stories in school papers. I bet you haven't had a chance to read the whole thing, have you? I have a printout right here,” Ning said, holding up the story. “This thing's got so many holes, you can hear the wind whistling through it. Really, it pains me to read it,” he said, before doing just that, aloud and in its entirety. The chief reshuffled the layouts on his desk and went at a new one with his grease pencil. Ning read, pausing every so often to affirm his amazement at the reporter's incompetence. He punctuated the end of the story with a hearty guffaw.