She ran to the chain-link fence, exposed and vulnerable, the camcorder hanging at her back. Crossing that fence offered a finality for her. Once on the other side she was fully committed. But there was no moment of pause. Her fingers webbed tightly through the rusting wire and she pulled herself up, higher with each grasp. The fence wobbled and threatened to throw her off. She reached the top edge, a row of twisted wire spikes. Twice she tried to throw her right leg up and over. On her second attempt, the cellphone spilled from her coat pocket and clapped loudly down onto the asphalt. Mistaking it for a gunshot, she vaulted the fence effortlessly, clawing her way down the other side and jumping the final four feet. The camera slapped her back as she landed. She froze, her knees throbbing, ears ringing. Her cellphone lay broken in pieces on the other side. So much for the cavalry. But there was no turning back.
She hurried across the open wharf and into shadows thrown by the docked ships. Lightheaded, almost giddy, she felt like a teenager sneaking out of the house.
A wharf rat the size of a house cat skittered along the very edge where she stood, heading directly for her. She didn’t scream, but her body locked, seized by fright, and she couldn’t so much as take a step. The rodent saw Stevie and slithered out of sight, but the experience stung her. Su-Su would have said the rat was good luck, guiding her. That the rat had come to her as a teacher, not a threat. It was this flicker of remembrance of her former governess that supported Stevie’s decision to do this, reminded her of her father’s efforts to smuggle Melissa out of China alive. And it was there, standing on that deserted wharf, that for the first time Stevie confronted the small glances and occasional touches exchanged between Su-Su and her father. There, as an adult, she suddenly reinterpreted those glimpses of intimate contact. Realization charged through her: Father had been in China nearly a year before summoning Stevie from the school in Switzerland. The dread of truth crept into her. Those looks between Su-Su and her father. The occasional tears. The reality of the nickname Su-Su had given Mi Chow, the risks Father had taken to get Mi Chow to America. The legal adoption. Melissa was no political prisoner born to parents killed during the Cultural Revolution: all fiction for a necessary illusion. Melissa was, in fact, just as Su-Su called her from the very beginning: Little Sister.
True or not, at that moment Stevie accepted it, embraced it, the depth of her feelings for the girl making so much more sense. No matter what, she believed—a necessity perhaps born of the moment. No matter. Suddenly, there was no courage, no fear, no question about any of it. She felt bulletproof. Righteous.
The power cable climbed up the line toward the ship’s bow. She climbed the net on the tanker’s side, pulling herself higher and higher above the wharf, finally reaching the upper deck and the lip of slimy steel. She peered over this edge thinking there was no landscape as eerie as something man-made left abandoned. The lines creaked and sighed. Water slapped lazily all around her. The electric hum grew perceptibly louder.
She pulled herself under the rail and down onto the cold damp deck, and crawled into the shadow. She crouched and hurried toward the bow past ladders and winches, railing and line, the air thick with rust and algae. She reached the power cable and followed it to starboard, to where it spilled over the side and down to an abandoned river ferry listing badly to port, its stern also low in the water. The ferry’s deck was a good fifteen to twenty feet below her, the heavy cable passing across it and on to the next ship. Elevated on the tanker, she took a moment to look around at the graveyard. Deck, rail, stacks and bridges.
Gray decaying steel. Rust the color of dried blood. To her right she saw a steady path of gangways, ladders and planks leading one deck to the next out to the center of the graveyard and a large fishing trawler where it stopped.
Below and to her left the black cable ran straight for that trawler, looking like a piece of thread dropped from the sky.
She could see Melissa here—could recall the videos. Excitement stole through her. Little Sister!
In the distance she heard the air brakes of a bus or truck. There was no mistaking that sound.
She crossed back around to the other side of the tanker in time to see a figure scramble down a steep path through the vegetation to the only gate in the chain-link fence. A big man. A man wearing a sweatshirt and a hood. Stevie ducked out of sight.
CHAPTER 72
ama Lu looked like a prizefighter, dressed as she was in a powder blue silk robe embroidered in yellow and orange with scenes of peasants tilling the rice paddies. Her rich black hair was hoisted into a bun and secured with what looked to Boldt like an orphaned enameled chopstick, and her false teeth shined with the brilliance of having been recently dipped and cleaned. There were acres of cloth in that robe and years of wisdom in those agate eyes, and she could tell both from Boldt’s solemn expression and his timing that they had problems.
‘‘Come sit down. My legs tired.’’
The apartment above the small grocery was three or four times the size that Boldt had originally believed. The first room where she chose to receive guests and take her meals was simple and spare for the benefit of appearances; but as she led Boldt into the inner sanctum of room after room of stunning Asian antiques and artwork, of jade and scrolls and intricately carved ivory, he grabbed a glimpse of the real woman with whom he came to cut a deal.
‘‘You are bothered, Mr. Both,’’ she observed. ‘‘Please to sit.’’
He took a velvet-padded captain’s chair with mahogany arms of lion’s paws. She seemed to occupy the entire love seat where she sat. It fit her like a throne. ‘‘You like tea, don’t you?’’ She rang a small glass bell summoning a young woman of twenty dressed in a simple black silk dress and rubber slaps. ‘‘Tea,’’ she instructed. ‘‘He takes half-and-half and sugar in his,’’ she said, surprising him.
‘‘Is there anything you don’t know?’’ he asked.
‘‘We shall see,’’ she said, allowing a smile.
He nodded. She had such an uncanny way of coming directly to the point without ever seeming direct at all.
‘‘I know about the helicopter,’’ she informed him. ‘‘And yes, even the arrests on Delancy Avenue. I know that you do not visit an old woman late at night looking the way you do without much on your mind. So what is it, Mr. Both?’’
‘‘It’s bad,’’ he said.
She bowed her formidable head slightly. ‘‘Whatever is, is,’’ she said unexpectedly. ‘‘It is neither bad nor good. It exists for the reasons it exists. To qualify it is to contain it, to limit its undermining potential. Let us not judge too quickly, Mr. Both.’’
Boldt bit back his temptation to speak too quickly.
She sighed. ‘‘Are you here to arrest me?’’
‘‘I hope not,’’ he conceded.
‘‘The patrol cars,’’ she said, explaining how she guessed this. ‘‘The press?’’
‘‘On its way.’’
‘‘Most impolite.’’
The tea was delivered silently and artfully, a graceful dance of arms and hands and gold-rimmed cups of bone china. The young woman was beautiful and smelled of lilac. When she left the room her dress whispered them quiet again. Boldt sipped softly and drank a tea as rich as any he had tasted, hoping she might say something. He finally said, ‘‘I can connect your import company to the polarfleece recovered in that first container. If I have to, I’ll use it.’’
‘‘A Customs violation. A federal charge. This is not your business, Mr. Both.’’