"Was that why you never ate there?"
"You know," Frank says wearily, "one of the three or four million things I regret is that I never got all dressed up and took your mother there. Not that it was the kind of place you dressed up for, but…" His voice trails off, his gaze on Poke.
"I know what you mean," Rafferty says.
Frank lets his eyes roam the room. "I didn't understand anything then, not how anything worked, or… I just knew that it hurt to eat Chinese food. It might as well have been glass. Even the smell of it made me hate myself. I read the papers every day. I knew what was happening there. You have to understand, Poke, that none of it made me love your mother any less. I loved her every day I was with her. I still love her."
After a moment Poke says, "Fine."
Frank lowers his head, looking down at his lap. "Thanks," he says.
"China was opening up," Poke prompts, more at ease with the past.
"They needed me. Well, they needed somebody, and I was there, and they knew I'd do anything to protect Wang. They could have told me to walk on coals, and I would have asked which shoe to take off first. But they didn't want me to walk on coals. It was my face they needed. They knew that white people were more comfortable dealing with white people. I was the front."
"And this involved what?"
"A lot of things. Business, you know? If a business deal wasn't forthcoming, we pushed it along. 'Facilitated it,' Colonel Chu would say. Drugs, girls, boys, espionage frames, if that's what was needed. Take some rough-and-tumble tire executive from… oh, I don't know… Akron, Ohio, some bush leaguer with a crew cut and a calculator who's holding out for a deal breaker, and put him in a room with a willing girl or boy. Let the tape roll. Get his hotel to put the movie on next time he turns on the TV. Or give him a bunch of papers in Chinese that turn
"After ten or twelve years, I had a set of skills that I hadn't known anyone possessed and a map of China in my head that didn't look like anything on paper. Take any country, Poke, and on top of the paper map you can put another map, a map of how the authority flows and where the obligations are, a map of hidden paths and corners. Blind alleys. The feng shui of power. The secret map, under the radar. One that nobody else has.
"So I began my own map. Each project I took on, I added to that map. I built it up a province, a city at a time. Other countries, every once in a while. A relationship, a promise, a pressure point. A betrayal here, a broken heart there. Somebody's in love, somebody owes somebody money, somebody's got a secret, somebody wants revenge. Revenge is always a good one-you can open a lot of doors when somebody wants revenge. The Chinese are superlative haters. They honed the skill during hundreds of years of being treated like shit. I found fulcrums and figured out how much pressure it would take to use them."
Frank nods, apparently satisfied with the way the story is unfolding. "By then they had some fulcrums of their own. Ming Li had been born, which relaxed Colonel Chu considerably. He was having trouble believing that I still cared about Wang. But with a baby, he knew he had me. Like a lot of Chinese, he believes that the bond of fatherhood is sacred, unbreakable. What he didn't know was that I had plans for Ming Li."
"Major-league baseball?" Rafferty asks.
"Do you mind if we discuss you in the third person, Ming Li?" Frank asks.
"Why not?" She doesn't stir.
Rafferty has thought she was asleep. "What kind of plans?"
Frank doesn't open his eyes. "How many windows in this room, Ming Li?"
"Three." She still has her arm over her face.
"How many light fixtures, and where?"
"Ceiling, console, bathroom. Number four is just outside the door in the hallway."
"Door open out or in?"
"In. Hinges on the left, if you're facing it from inside the room. The top hinge pin is high in the bracket, easy to get a knife under."
"What color are the bathroom towels?"
"The color of piss, but they used to be bright yellow. They say 'His' and 'His.'"
Rafferty asks, "How many boys were in the lobby when we came in?"
"Six. Two of them wore lipstick. One of the pretty boys and one of the butches were talking on cell phones. One of the butches had a bleached buzz cut and a port-wine birthmark on his cheek." She rolls over onto her side, facing him, her head resting on her arm. "Left cheek," she adds. She pokes her tongue into her cheek to show where it was.
"We started when she was two," Frank says. "She was drawing maps by the time she was six. At seven she followed me across town without my knowing it."
"Not easy," Leung says.
"Not that hard," Ming Li says, grinning.
"And the point was…?" Rafferty asks.
"Anything that was on my map that wasn't on theirs was leverage. Ming Li was on my map. Leung was on my map."
Frank absently checks his watch. "So Ming Li was a double-edged sword, although Chu didn't know it. He didn't know he'd given me Leung either. Chu assigned Leung to keep an eye on me for an operation in Pailin, in Cambodia. Industrial rubies, smuggled as costume jewelry, the biggest, ugliest stuff you ever saw. Millions of dollars' worth, set into crud too vulgar for Imelda Marcos. No customs officer in his right mind would think it was real. Like me, Leung was under a certain amount of pressure."
"Sister," Leung says. "Chu never threatened her, just sent her chocolates on her birthday every year. So I'd know that he could get to her whenever he wanted to."
"And Leung was better than I was," Frank says. "So I learned from him, and then I turned it around, and when he called Chu to report in, I was there."
"With a gun," Leung adds. "We had a candid exchange of views."
"And came to an understanding. That was two years ago. We took our time, because you don't hurry with these boys. Five days ago Leung's sister fell off the map, went down the rabbit hole. Caused no end of consternation on Colonel Chu's end of the phone. I helped out as best I could, sent his guys to three or four plausible places, and while the hounds were hunting, I made Wang disappear."
"This isn't about that," Rafferty says. He is so tired he can barely stand upright. "This isn't just an escape. It's bigger than that."
"He's not slow after all," Ming Li says.
Frank's eyes are on Poke, the fleck of gold in the left one catching the light. "You're right, Poke. It is. I did something before I closed up shop in China. I stole the rest of Colonel Chu's life."
"This is great," Rafferty says. He is still at the window and feels as though he has been there for hours. "You took something that could have been business-nasty, dirty business, but business-and you turned it personal."
"Afraid so." Frank shells another peanut, and Rafferty suddenly feels beneath his bare feet the sharp edges of peanut shells, perpetually scattered over the living-room carpet in Lancaster. Remembers his mother grumbling behind the vacuum.
"Essentially, that makes me fair game. My family and me."
"You were always fair game. Chu isn't someone who plays by rules. This is a guy who would shoot a hotel telephone operator who got his wake-up call wrong."
"In case you think Frank is just being vivid," Ming Li says, "he's not."
"So you… what? You tried to kill him? Obviously, you missed. But this means no negotiation, doesn't it? One of you is going to have to die."
Frank smooths his long, thinning strands of hair. "I didn't say I tried to kill him, Poke. I said I took the rest of his life."
Rafferty brings up his hand and massages his eyes. His chest feels uncomfortably dense, as though his lungs are full of water. "The rest of…" The phrase means nothing, but a word pops into his mind, and he looks at his father. "What box?"
"Ah," Frank says. He looks at Ming Li.
"You said Chu wouldn't want anyone to know about the box. What box?"