The Interior (41 page)

“Meaning more profits to you. But,” Henry said, gesturing around him, “this can’t be the checkmate you wanted.”

A small smile played on Doug’s lips. “It will do.”

“Come on, Doug,” Amy interrupted. “Let’s get moving.”

Doug nodded and motioned for Amy to get to work. The woman tucked her revolver in the waistband of her skirt and began pulling handfuls of fiber out of big burlap sacks and tossing it on the floor. The intention of this action was immediately felt by the hundreds of women in the room. These foreigners planned to light a fire.

“And what will this get you? You’ll destroy your prize,” Henry said.

“It covers this mess,” Doug answered. “I figured we could deal with a lawyer, but the police? Once the inspector showed up we had to change strategies. But don’t worry. We’ve made plans to pick up from the ashes.”

David’s eyes darted back to where Hulan had collapsed. She hadn’t moved, but the two girls had. One was on her feet, darting from the safety of one machine to another, while the other crawled along more cautiously. Both were passing word of some sort. Their movements went unnoticed by Amy Gao, who now looked ghostly in a cloud of fluff, while the two men in the center of the room seemed completely unaware of the electric fear pulsating throughout the room.

“All you had to do was walk away from the deal,” Doug said. “But
look
what it took! It makes me think you’re not as smart as everyone says.”

“And you’re still telling me you did this for the technology?” Henry asked skeptically.

“Dad.” The word was drawn out and as patronizing as any from a rebellious teenager. “It was the skim. It was the potential of this land. I mean, my God, look around! We could have had all of it for
nothing
. But yes, it was the damn technology. You hit it, Dad. You actually hit it. It’s so much bigger than Sam & His Friends. The other toy companies want it. The studios have been banging at the door. Think what this could mean to Warner Brothers and the
Batman
films or to Paramount and the
Star Trek
franchise or to Lucas and the
Star Wars
empire. Everything that’s old could be new again, and everything that’s new could be…Well, others have talked about interactive toys, but you
did
it. Seven hundred million was peanuts. Even if we make one hundred million a year and the stock market values us at thirty times earnings—which is modest these days—we’ll have a company worth three billion, with nowhere to go but up.”

Henry’s face was unreadable. Finally he said, his voice disappointed, “Our family has been in the
toy
business. Did you once stop to think what that meant?”

Doug turned his eyes away from his father and settled on some women cowering nearby. Seeing them seemed to remind him what had to happen next. When he looked back at his father, he seemed determined. “I’m sorry you see it that way, Dad.” Then, “Amy, I think that’s enough. Let’s go.” Amy walked to his side, her heels clicking staccato against the floor and wafting bits of fluff and lint behind her. Doug reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter, weighing it in his left hand.

“There’s just one thing I need to know,” he said. “Did you ever think I could run the company? Did it ever just once cross your mind?”

David moved into a crouch, ready to pounce. He kept his eyes on Henry, primed for a signal, so he saw, just as Doug saw, the look that came over the older man’s face.

“No, Doug, it didn’t,” Henry admitted sadly, and as he spoke these words it was abundantly clear that the realization that he’d so little faith in his son was even more painful than the fact that his son was a murderer.

Doug, the revolver steady in his right hand, flicked open the lighter. Just as he did so, hundreds of women rose en masse. Immediately they were joined by those who hadn’t gotten the word that had circulated. Whatever opportunity David had to attack was blocked. In that same instant a shrill voice screamed something in Mandarin, something clicked and clicked again, and the machines revved to life.

Doug took a step backward and waved his revolver around. Amy reached for hers. In that second the women rushed forward. Amy was wrestled to the ground. Doug struggled, got off a couple of shots, pushed away from the grabbing hands, lost his balance, and flew back into one of the machines. Blood spurted from the center of the crowd of women. Doug’s scream was cruel and very short.

A moment later the machines were shut down and an eerie quiet fell over the room. David picked his way through the pink-smocked women. Doug had been grabbed by the claws of the fiber-shredding machine. His body was a mangled and bloody mess. Henry stood at Doug’s side, a hand touching his son’s lifeless ankle.

David heard Madame Leung’s voice over the loudspeaker, giving instructions of some sort. The women obeyed and began drifting in an orderly fashion toward the exit. David hurried to Hulan’s crumpled form. Two girls—one about fourteen, the other also a teenager—kneeled at her side. He felt for a pulse and didn’t feel one. He put his ear on her chest and heard nothing.

Then someone screamed. Then another scream, and another, and another as the preternatural calm of moments before was replaced by panic. One of the girls holding Hulan’s hand looked at David in terror. She moved her lips. He didn’t understand the word. She repeated it again and again. Finally he understood the word through her heavy accent. Fire.

He scooped Hulan up into his arms and stood. Now that he was upright, he saw the flames kicking up from the fiber fluff. Hundreds of women shoved and pushed to get out the door as the flames spread quickly through the piles. David, holding Hulan, with the two girls clinging close to his side, joined the others in a desperate attempt to escape. Acrid smoke filled the air, creating even more panic. A lot of people would die in here if someone didn’t do something. David lowered Hulan’s feet to the ground and motioned for the two girls to take her arms and get her out of the building. He took one last look at Hulan’s ashen face, then turned and walked into the smoke.

25

B
ECAUSE OF THE SOUNDPROOFING IN THE BUILDING, MOST
of the fatalities were in the final assembly room. By the time the fire had spread far enough to alert the women there, the fumes from the burning plastic and fiber had made any chance of survival impossible. Fortunately, almost all of the women had made it out of the primary assembly area where Hulan had worked. But here too many women lost their lives due to smoke inhalation or being crushed in the stampede. The remoteness of the factory had done little to help matters. Many women died on the way to Taiyuan. More died in the hospital, inundated as it was by so many injuries. The final death toll reached 176.

David had done his best to fight back the fire, swatting the flames with the empty burlap bags that had once held the stuffing for Sam & His Friends. Madame Leung, who stayed at David’s side until the very end, helped his efforts. Miraculously, she’d found a couple of fire extinguishers. If not for these, they wouldn’t have made it out of the building alive. For her efforts Madame Leung was given a medal by the central government.

And then there was Hulan. When David emerged from the burning building, choking, his eyes running, his lungs scorched, he found Hulan stretched out on the ground, the two girls who’d brought her out still at her side. The only way he knew she was alive was that her skin radiated an intense feverish heat. He knew that when the medical teams arrived, the doctors would dismiss Hulan as less urgent, for she looked peaceful and physically uninjured compared to the others who were in such agony from their burns. He half staggered, half ran back to the Administration Building, made his way back through the deserted hallways to the conference room, thinking that he’d have to take the car keys off Lo’s body. Instead he found Lo shot but conscious. David helped Lo out to the car, drove to where Hulan was, put her in the backseat along with Siang, the girl who spoke a little English, then, under Lo’s directions, pulled out of the compound and made it to the hospital in Taiyuan before the hundreds of others arrived.

It was a good thing David thought to bring Siang, because by the time they reached the hospital Lo had gone into shock. With eyes wide, Siang presented Lo’s and Hulan’s Ministry of Public Security credentials to the nurse, who quickly summoned help. Hulan and Lo were wheeled away, and David waited.

Siang didn’t have the language skills to translate the doctors’ words, but eventually someone was found who’d studied at Johns Hopkins. Still, the words—tachycardia, oliguria, anoxia, tachypnea—were as foreign and had as little meaning for David as the Mandarin. Even the terms he understood he couldn’t allow himself to comprehend. The doctor seemed to be telling him that the sepsis had gone so far that Hulan’s heart, brain, or liver could be overwhelmed at any moment. If the poisoning turned out to be viral, the doctor added regretfully, there was nothing anyone could do. They had twenty-four hours, if Hulan lived that long, to wait for the results of the blood culture. In the meantime Hulan was intravenously dosed with broad-spectrum antibiotics.

Those twenty-four hours were the worst of David’s life. Now that he knew what Hulan had, all of her ailments of the last few days fell into place—the flu-like symptoms, the lethargy, the fever followed by chills, her rapid breathing, her racing, then feeble pulse. The guilt he felt over this was superseded only by the terror at the prospect of losing her.

Eventually the right cocktail of antibiotics was found, and Hulan’s doctors announced that she would probably live. The survival of the baby, however, was still an issue. The baby’s heart continued to beat, but more tests needed to be run.

By that time much had happened. Henry Knight, who survived the ordeal at the factory, led an expedition up Tianlong Mountain to ferret out Governor Sun, while Siang was informed about Tsai Bing’s death and her father’s hand in it. David, who never left Hulan’s side, spent hours on a cell phone, talking to the partners at Phillips, MacKenzie & Stout, to Anne Baxter Hooper, to Nixon Chen (who was enlisted to help Henry), and to Rob Butler at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Rob and David had much to discuss, but in the meantime Rob negotiated for and won the right to send a team of forensic accountants from Los Angeles to the Knight compound to try and pull up the financial records that Doug had tried to eliminate from the computer. Through it all, David had the help and support of Vice Minister Zai, whose concern for Hulan’s well-being seemed sometimes to surpass even David’s.

One day Hulan’s doctors crowded into her room and announced that the tests on the baby looked good. This news gave Hulan a surge of energy, and she began to regain her strength. Though Zai and the doctors preferred that Hulan be spared the details, she was adamant that she hear everything. She reviewed the media coverage, studied the photos of the burned-out building, read over the casualty list, and cried first at the number of names, then at the individual names of people she’d known. Once she was deemed well enough to return to Beijing, they flew to the capital on the Knight jet and settled back in the compound with round-the-clock nurses. Hulan’s mother and her nurse came back from the seaside. Cooks and maids were brought in to help, and the compound bustled with activity. Finally there came a day when Hulan told David that he had unfinished business to attend to and that she’d be fine with all her extra caretakers. With deep misgivings, David did as he was told.

Many questions still needed to be answered, but those who might have answered them most truthfully—Miles, Doug, and Sandy—were dead. That left Aaron, Jimmy, and Amy. Aaron Rodgers, who had the great fortune to have been in Taiyuan on the day of the fire, admitted to a healthy libido befitting a twenty-five-year-old placed in the happy circumstance of being one of a handful of males amongst a thousand females. Ling Miaoshan had been the first of many conquests. His age, his isolation in the Assembly Building, and his stupidity (which became apparent to all concerned as the investigation unfolded) conspired to keep him blissfully in the dark to the financial shenanigans. As for conditions in the factory, Aaron used the predictable and well-worn excuse that he thought that’s how things were supposed to be in China. As his mother and father, who flew out to Taiyuan, said, their son didn’t know any better. No criminal charges were filed. He gave testimony against Jimmy and Amy in court; then his parents took him home. He would never again return to China.

David then turned his attention to Jimmy and Amy. David wasn’t the only one who wanted answers, and so it was that Henry pulled himself away from the ruins of the Knight factory, where he’d worked practically without sleep since the fire, to accompany David to Taiyuan’s provincial jail. On their arrival they were handed a file pertaining to one James W. Smith, which had been faxed from the Australian authorities. As Hulan guessed when she’d first seen Jimmy, he had an extensive criminal background, which included armed robbery and a couple of cases of battery. He’d been in and out of prison since the age of eighteen. Two years ago yet another warrant had been issued for his arrest, but he’d managed to flee, ending up, the record showed, in Hong Kong. It was presumed that he had met Doug in that city, been hired, and had moved into the Knight compound even before the factory opened.

Also, as suspected, the Knight records showing that women who’d suffered injuries of one sort or another and had chosen to “go back home” proved false. Using the doctored files, Chinese investigators had contacted local Public Security Bureaus across China and ascertained that those women had never returned home. No wonder Xiao Yang had screamed so when Aaron had carried her off the factory floor. No wonder she’d been found dead not long after.

But had this murder been too hasty, a matter of convenience on a day that was busy? Or had it been part of the plot to keep pushing Henry in one direction so he wouldn’t look in another? Had Jimmy thrown Xiao Yang off the roof? Had he run down Keith? The record showed that he’d been in Los Angeles on the date in question. Was he the one who’d killed Pearl and Guy? The answers to these queries would help address a major underlying question: How much of a monster had Douglas Knight been? But Jimmy Smith wasn’t talking. David pleaded. Henry begged. Obviously the local police had tried persuasion of another sort, all to no avail. Whatever Jimmy knew would die with him.

David and Henry were dealing with a bureaucracy, and for their next meeting they were asked to move to another room. The pitiful room that passed for a visiting area was filthy and stiflingly hot. Amy Gao, who ten days ago had looked so snappy in her suit at the banquet at the Beijing Hotel, now wore a dirty prison uniform. She had not been allowed to bathe, wash her hair, or brush her teeth since her confinement.

Like Jimmy, she kept quiet at first. But as David peppered her with questions, he could see her mind begin to work. David, a prosecutor, had seen that look a hundred times before. If Amy gave them information, what could she get in return?

“What do you want?” David asked when Amy finally revealed her thoughts.

“What do you think they’d be willing to give?”

“In China, as it is in the U.S., a lot depends on what you tell us…”

It was the thinnest shred of hope, but the desperation with which Amy grabbed hold of it made him realize just how young and inexperienced she was. He almost felt sorry for her, almost, that is, until she opened her mouth. With no promises written or otherwise, she plunged into her story.

Jimmy had not driven the SUV that killed Keith. Doug had been at the wheel; Amy had fired the warning shots. That David had been with Keith that evening was just an unlucky coincidence. The other women who’d disappeared from the factory had fallen under Jimmy Smith’s job description. What he did with them, Amy didn’t know. Pearl and Guy? She smiled when their names came up. “That was your son’s genius at work, Mr. Knight,” she said. They didn’t ask for more details. Had Sandy Newheart been a part of the conspiracy? No. “We were always working
around
him,” Amy explained. “He had his paperwork. We had ours.” Why had he been killed? Amy sighed. “That last day things got a little out of hand,” she admitted. Sandy Newheart simply had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Who pulled the trigger?” Henry Knight asked.

“Let’s just say that someone didn’t think that through,” Amy said. Her remark, so boastful really, placed blame squarely on Doug.

“Did you get what you wanted?” David asked.

“Obviously not.” She smiled wistfully. “But I think you’re really asking me if the ends justified the means.”

“If that’s how you want to put it.”

“You in America and the West want us to be like you,” she said. “You believe that we should have democracy in your form. You believe we should be able to make money and spend it on consumer goods—
your
consumer goods. For centuries the West has wanted a piece of us. Sometimes you’ve gotten it. To me it comes down to exploitation. In the last century the British intoxicated us with opium, forced us to open our ports, and very nearly destroyed us. Now you want to come in here—into the very heart of China—and force your will upon us. You’re allowed to do your very worst, and your people look the other way.”

“I think you have it backwards,” David cut in. “What
you
were doing was criminal—”

“No, it was purely American.”

David looked at her aghast. This woman was either deluded or crazy.

“Can you show me one thing that we did that wasn’t done somewhere along the line in America’s rise to prominence?” she asked. “Look back at your history. Your growth was accomplished on the backs of slaves. You were able to finish your westward migration because of the work
my
countrymen did building the railroad. And you didn’t limit yourselves to people of—how do you so euphemistically call it?—people of color. No, you sent women and children into factories and into mines.”

“All that was a long time ago.”

“But today, looking back from a position of world domination and tremendous prosperity, wouldn’t you have to say that the ends justified the means?”

“And what were you going to get out of it?”

Amy sneered. “You still don’t see it? With Henry and Sun out of the way, we could do anything. I helped Doug, he helped me. Doug wanted your company,” she said, acknowledging Henry. “I wanted the governorship.”

Amy’s confession, for what it was worth, gained her little but some soap, toothpaste, the promise of bottled water, and a towel.

One day when Hulan’s mother and her nurse had gone to see Dr. Du and David was on a trip to Los Angeles, Hulan heard a ring at the front gate. She padded out through the courtyards and opened the door. Though it was the middle of the day, the alley had been cleared of all people except for a man who announced that her presence was required elsewhere and she should get in the car please. She obeyed, knowing that if she didn’t come back, no one would ever know what had happened to her.

The driver took her through the narrow alleys of the
hutong
, then popped out on the opposite shore of Shisha Lake from Hulan’s home. Here the driver’s progress stopped while he waited for a flock of Secrets of the Hutongs Special Tourist Agency pedicabs, each loaded with one or two Westerners, to pass. This tour was a new fad in Hulan’s neighborhood, and she wasn’t quite sure how she felt about it. On the one hand, she didn’t like to see so many foreigners in this little enclave; on the other, the success of the state-owned agency might help to keep the neighborhood from being razed. As the sweating pedicab drivers slowly pedaled out of the way, Hulan stared out across the lake. Old men with fishing poles dotted the shore. Just outside her window, three skinny boys took turns jumping into the water. Their hollers, hoots, and squeals came to her on a soft breeze.