Take No Names, page 6
“Good news? Really? Because it sounds like you rode your bicycle through a car wash.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Lying has never been my strong suit. And the people who know me best always see through me right away.
“I’ll explain later, I promise. Any cop visits lately?”
She sighs that sigh that reminds me of Mom. “Not for a couple of weeks,” she says.
“Great. Okay, well. Have a good day.”
“Wait! Victor, stop stonewalling me!”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Jules, I can’t explain right now, okay? I’m just doing what I need to do.”
“What you need to do is face the music, Victor. I’m the only family you’ve got. When are you going to come home? When are you going to stop blaming Sun for your own stupid decisions and turn yourself in?”
The same questions she asks me every time we talk. The ones I think of when I decide to not call. I grit my teeth. “I dunno, Jules. Maybe five, ten more minutes?”
“Okay, fine. Forget I asked. Forget I even exist.”
“I’m never turning myself in, okay? Signing up for three to six years in a racist, privatized prison is not ‘facing the music.’ And I don’t blame Sun. I was an idiot to believe his lies. I know what Dad put him through.”
“So if you saw Sun today, what would you do?”
I think it over as an ancient man pushes a nearly empty shopping cart across the parking lot of the Japanese supermarket at a pace that would bore a tortoise. I could picture Sun Jianshui perfectly: his unassuming posture, his attentive eyes, his deadly hands. Sun killed Dad because Dad had taken advantage of him for twenty years. Thinking about it uncorks a torrent of conflicting feelings.
But the strongest of those feelings is that Sun Jianshui cannot be trusted.
“I’d run,” I say.
These words hang in the ether as the ancient man reaches the edge of the parking lot, wraps his arms around his lone bag of groceries, and walks off at the same snail pace.
And I seem to hear Jules stare at her shoes. Bite her lower lip. Press her palm against the side of her head.
“I have class,” she says.
“All right,” I say. “Bye, Jules.”
The line goes dead.
I’m feeling awful, thinking about calling her back, wondering what I could say, when I spot Mark’s van at a stoplight two blocks away. So I power off my phone and toss it in the trash can at the bus stop on the corner.
Then I glance at my watch. Almost ten in the morning now. Which means we need to make it to the border in twenty-three hours. That’s when Jerry’s phone, charging in his cottage, will send its scheduled messages to Len Byrne, Trevor P, Chad Nicholls, and “Bones.”
I climb into the passenger seat of the van and drop my backpack into the foot well.
“Did you file all your toenails?” I ask.
“Bank didn’t open until nine.”
He releases the parking brake and eases the van into the morning traffic. Although he’s changed his clothes, there’s still a splatter of dried mud on the back of his neck. It occurs to me that Mark’s primary bathroom is the one at the gym.
“Want to shower at my place before we hit the freeway?”
“No. Thank you.”
His eyes stay fixed on the road, his jaw locked tight, the blue vein on his right temple terrifically embossed. While our dustup with Jerry was a carousel ride compared with what I saw in Beijing, it seems to have disturbed painful recollections within him.
Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with that? Having killed someone?
As we merge onto I-5 South and Chinatown disappears into the distance behind us, I’m not getting a discuss-our-darkest-secrets vibe from the Mark-shaped pressure cooker in the driver’s seat. So I click on his radio, which is tuned to KZOK Classic Rock, as usual. I roll up my sleeves and treat the cuts on my wrists with alcohol pads. Antibiotic ointment. Gauze and tape. Thank you, Anhui aunties.
Mark finally breaks the silence when I start eating my congee.
“Smells like heaven,” he says.
“I got you one,” I say. “Shiitake mushroom and barbecue pork. Want it now?”
He sizes up the shallow plastic spoon in my hand. “Maybe when you’re driving.”
“Yeah. About that.”
He hears it in my tone. “What about that, Lao?”
“Victor.”
“Right.”
“I don’t have a license.”
Mark stares at the road and grips the steering wheel even tighter. “When you proposed the twenty-hour drive instead of the three-hour drive,” he enunciates, putting a little extra pop on his consonants, “I thought that just maybe you’d be able to take a few turns at the wheel.”
“I looked up the address. It’s in Mexico City,” I say. “So, twenty hours to Tijuana, and then twenty-five more from there. I should be okay to drive while we’re still in Washington and after we get to Mexico. But in between, well. Even if I had a license.”
It feels easier to leave the threat unspoken: an overzealous cop could crush our timetable with a thorough search. And these days, Highway Patrol is likely to devote extra attention to a Chinese-looking dude driving a rickety van with out-of-state plates through the middle of the night.
Mark punches the hazards and swerves onto the shoulder. He keeps both of his hands on the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white even after we’ve screeched to a halt.
“Every mile we drive south is a mile farther into this country,” he says. “So tell me again why we’re not headed north.”
“You know this, Mark. A painite without papers is worthless in Canada.”
He jerks his hands upward, fingers splayed. “Yeah, well, it’s also worthless if we never cross the border because we’re too busy getting cavity-searched in Chico.”
I pull Song Fei’s notebook out of my backpack and hold it up to him, open to the dog-eared page with the address and the per-carat price.
“Burmese gem. Chinese seller. Mexican buyer. What does that tell you? Even if this address is a dead end, we have a much better chance of selling it in Mexico. Ever since we built the border wall, Mexico has started to align with the Chinese. You know about all the money Mexico is borrowing from China, right?”
He looks back and forth between the notebook and me, giving me a face like we’re sitting in a canoe and I just asked him where the bathroom was.
“Duì niú tán qín méi yòng,” Dad would say—There’s no use in playing the lute for a bull.
I put the notebook back in my bag and rephrase my argument in Mark’s terms. “Okay. Yes, it’s forty more hours on the road. But for each of those hours, you’re making an extra three grand to spend in a country where a beer costs fifty cents.”
He drags a hand downward across his face. “If you don’t have a license, how do you plan to cross the border?”
“I have a Chinese passport under a different name. It’s a forgery,” I admit. “But it got me through immigration at the Beijing Capital Airport twice. So I expect it to play at San Ysidro.”
He stares at me for a moment, cupping his chin in his palm. Then he unbuckles his seat belt. “You can explain that to me later. For now, I eat. Then I sleep. You drive.”
* * *
When we cross the Columbia River into Oregon three hours later, Mark’s still snoring. It’s the middle of the day, and there are plenty of cars with Washington plates on I-5 South, so I decide to let him sleep. I keep the van in the second lane, locked into cruise control at the speed limit. Whenever my eyelids get heavy, I stab my fingers into the welts on my torso from Jerry’s air gun until I’m wide awake with the pain.
Mark finally stirs about halfway across the state.
“Mother,” he groans, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. We switch seats in the parking lot of a burger place in Sutherlin, and I promptly fall into a deep, dreamless slumber of my own.
When I wake some five hours later, the sun is freshly set, its rays still glancing off the waifish cirri in the western skies, igniting them a thousand hues of creamsicle and crimson. The interstate is flat and wide here, lined on both sides by endless geometrical arrangements of almond trees.
California.
Mark is humming to himself. He drums his thumbs on the steering wheel in time with a Kinks song playing on a local FM station.
“My head,” I manage to grumble.
He hands me a paper sack containing an energy drink, a bag of Corn Nuts, an empty water bottle, and a bottle of painkillers. I chew three pills to powder before washing them down with a slug of Monster.
“My hero,” I say. “Where’d we stop?”
“Shasta.”
“Can we pull over?”
“What do you think the water bottle’s for?”
“Silly me.”
As I relieve myself, the Kinks intone their final chorus before ceding the airwaves to the Police. Water, sugar, and caffeine filter into my bloodstream. And the events of the previous evening flood back to me in a slideshow of nauseating images.
“We should’ve left Jerry one of these.” I screw the lid back on the warm water bottle and stow it under my seat. Roll down the window, stick my swollen face into the dry, dusty air. A flock of Harleys thunders by, the roar of their drilled-out baffles cascading through the Doppler shift as they weave around the van. The first freeway sign I see is Exit 610. Artois. Bluegum. I check the dash clock: 8:52 p.m.
Twelve more hours to do six hundred more miles. Not too bad.
“So,” Mark says. “Chinese passport.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I take another sip of the energy drink. I hadn’t expected Mark to follow up on that little detail. Now that I’ve slammed one door closed for him and opened another, has he decided that he wants to know a thing or two about me? Perhaps he spent some of the past hours wondering what happens if our plan works. We make it to Mexico City. We sell the stone. We split the dough.
But then maybe we decide that it’s nice to know another soul when you’re all alone in a foreign land. So we start a new security firm together. Or we open a beach bar in a surf town on the coast. And once a year, midway through June, we sip tequila and reminisce about when we drove forty hours from one life into another.
“What the hell,” I say. “I guess we have the time.”
I give Mark the long version, starting with Dad and his restaurants. How I’d had no idea about his criminal past until he was murdered in the home I grew up in. I tell Mark about Sun Jianshui, how Dad had taken him off the streets as a kid and raised him as a son and a slave, trained him in violence and deception. And I tell him how Sun tricked me into going with him to Beijing, how he tried to wash Dad’s blood off his hands with the blood of Dad’s old partners.
Mark doesn’t yawn or interrupt. He doesn’t turn up the radio and say, Great tune. He nods along, glancing over at me now and then, asking a question or two to clarify what the hell I was thinking. I talk for an hour, almost two, as twilight gives way to dusk, and dusk gives way to a moonless night lit bright by the Milky Way.
I’m getting to the part where I shot Sun Jianshui in the leg at that house in Pasadena when Mark holds up his hand and tips his head to the side. Then I hear it, too: a high whine from somewhere in front of us.
The van’s engine.
And Mark’s starting to say something about maybe giving the old gal a breather when the whine intensifies into a scream and the chassis starts to shudder like an old roller coaster.
10
We spend ten nerve-shredding minutes riding the shoulder in first gear before we reach the next exit: the Elkhorn rest stop, fifteen miles outside Sacramento. The van howls and shakes all the way down the off-ramp. We sputter into a parking spot by the bathrooms, and the ancient engine promptly shuts itself off with a shudder and a sigh.
Mark unleashes a barrage of f-bombs and palm strikes at the steering wheel. Then he presses his thumbs into his eye sockets for a full minute.
Finally he says, “How much cash have you got?”
“Hardly any,” I say. “I keep my savings in crypto.”
“Absolutely lovely,” he says. Then he dives into the back of the van. I watch him dig through his canvas duffel bag and extract a roll of hundreds from a sock. Next he snatches his laptop out of his backpack, flips it open while chanting “Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi” under his breath.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, yes! Don’t talk right now. Don’t think, either,” he snaps at me. “No more of your bright ideas.”
He pecks and squints at his laptop for another minute, then slaps it shut and shoves it into my hands.
“Search for limo services in Sacramento,” he says. “Start with the ones with the worst websites. See if you can get someone on the phone, but don’t say a word about Mexico. If they send a car, we’ll negotiate in person.”
“Um, okay,” I say. “What are you going to do?”
“Fish for rides.” He scampers around the back of the van, tossing things into his duffel. “Big fish, I procure a vehicle. Little fish, I get us a lift as far south as possible. If they’ve only got room for one, I’m taking it. I don’t see that I have a choice. So if that’s the case, I wish you the best of luck.”
A fat tentacle of despair coils up my spine from tailbone to skull.
“But Mark—”
“Save it! No time!” He snatches a greasy rag off the floor and darts back to the front seat. He takes one of my phones from my backpack, tosses the rag into my chest, and commands me to wipe the entire van, inside and out, for prints.
Then he slings his duffel over his shoulder and saunters off to affect maximum cool on the bench by the bathrooms.
I stare at him for a moment, my eyes wide and tingly, my throat hollow and dry. Then I open the laptop. The last item in the search history is “casinoes near sacremento.” I do as he asked, calling all six of the local limo services. Two of them answer the phone, but to no one’s great surprise, neither will send a car to an interstate rest stop for someone unable to provide a credit card number.
So I put the laptop aside and wipe the van like Mark told me to, wondering all along why it matters. Then I return to the passenger seat and watch him through the windshield. He stands up to accost a guy in a baseball cap. The guy turns around and says something back to Mark, who smiles, gestures with his hands, and does a shrug like, You know how it is.
I peer at him through the darkness, parsing his body language for a signal that he’s still my friend. Is he negotiating our escape, or just his? Half an hour ago, he listened intently as I spilled my life story. Back then, I was useful: the guy with the painite and the plan. But now? I wish you the best of luck. I’m dead weight.
The guy in the baseball cap shakes his head and walks away. Mark watches him for a moment, then kicks the ground and slumps back onto the bench.
I check the time: five minutes to midnight. Nine hours left to make the eight-hour drive to Mexico. Don’t think about it. No more of your bright ideas. Don’t think about what happens if those nine hours dwindle to seven. Or if Mark catches a ride with a teamster and leaves me stranded fifteen miles outside the capital of the state where I’m wanted for murder.
I punch on the map light, and my reflection springs up in the windshield. Then I pull my backpack into my lap. I’ll focus on Song Fei instead. Because doing nothing will fuel the tempest of fear in my guts, and because hey, maybe I’ll still make it to Mexico, with or without Mark.
And if I do get to Cerrada 5 de Mayo 17, my best play with the buyer will be to associate myself with Song Fei. So I need to figure out why she was flying around the United States with a giant gemstone locked in a puzzle box.
The first thing I do is use a phone cable to connect Song Fei’s hair clip to the laptop’s USB port. But of course, the contents are password-protected. Next I open the notebook to the page with the price per carat in Chinese. And this time, I notice a few characters written in pencil on the back of the page. 买方, the word for buyer, next to a character in brackets: [砍]—kǎn, as in kǎnjià—to bargain or haggle. Right beneath that character, she’d written 假名—alias—and four Chinese characters from the subset used for phonetic transliterations: 伊莎贝尔—yīshābèi’ěr—written large and circled twice.
Yīshābèi’ěr. Isabel. The buyer’s alias is Isabel.
The following pages contain the list of dates, names, and cities. Atlanta, November 12, 艾莉森-外丝—àilìsēn wàisī. Who could that be? I open up Mark’s laptop again and type “Alison Wise” into Google. “Allison Wise.” “Alyson Whise Atlanta.” None of my searches turn up anything helpful.
The next entry is Seattle, November 16, 艾登-布莱尔—àidēng bùláiér. Eden Blair? My pulse quickens when Google asks me if I’m searching for Aiden Blair. Senior senator from Washington. Chairwoman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Could she have something to do with the Burmese gem boycott? I do a few more quick searches for Aiden Blair, Myanmar, China, painite, sanctions, Rakhine refugees, genocide—but there doesn’t seem to be any connection.
I shut the notebook and dig all ten fingernails into my scalp. What am I doing? What’s the point? None of this matters if I never get to Mexico. I look through the windshield to the bench, where Mark is thumbing around on the burner phone like he hasn’t a care in the world, even though it doesn’t have an internet connection. Each time someone walks out of the bathroom, I see him lift his head and speak, but hardly anyone so much as turns to acknowledge his existence.
I hate him, I need him, I hate myself for needing him. I press my face into my hands for a minute. Then I turn back to Song Fei’s notebook. The next page is the poem in classical verse.
The ancient seas are vast
Who knows how far across?
You’ll travel beyond the nine lands
Farther than the sky is deep
Your home lies to the east
Your sail must trust the breeze
Baike.com informs me that the verses are from an eighth-century poem by Wang Wei, a poet, musician, painter, statesman, and all-around stud nerd of the Tang dynasty, who wrote it to say farewell to a Japanese diplomat named Abe no Nakamaro. Thanks to my long hours on Huayiwang, I know enough about the written language to notice something unusual about Song Fei’s transcription. The strokes in her characters have the distinctive look of those written by a southpaw, like me. This makes Song Fei rather extraordinary—much rarer than the average lefty—because most left-handed Chinese people are forced from childhood to write with their right.
