“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?”
“Good for you,” Frank says. “Actually, there is probably some room for negotiation, enough at least to get him within range.”
“Of what?”
“A really good gun.” Frank leans down and reaches beneath the bed, and when he comes back up, there is a leather box in his hand, about the size of three hardcover books in a stack. It has a small clasp on the front, and Frank twists it open and lifts the lid. “Pailin,” he says.
Rafferty crosses to the bed, leans forward, and sees rubies, maybe three or four hundred of them, anywhere from half a carat to two or three carats. They shine under the fluorescents like frozen blood.
“They’re flawless,” Frank says. “Most rubies are occluded, did you know that? They’ve got clouds of opaque mineral material in them. Very few are clear enough to cut into big stones. That’s why they’re so expensive. Chu’s been sifting through the Pailin take for decades to fill this box. It was part of his getaway stash, just in case.”
“Worth how much?” Rafferty asks. He can’t take his eyes off them.
Frank looks down at them regretfully. “Well, if you have the luxury of selling them one at a time, through legitimate channels, maybe three million. The way I’ll have to do it, I figure I’ll get one.”
“Is this about three million dollars, or is it about face?”
“Both. And something else. Dig down through the rubies. All the way to the bottom.”
Rafferty sits and does as he’s told, the rubies cold and smooth on his skin. At the bottom of the box, he feels paper. A large envelope. He works it out carefully, not wanting to spill any of the rubies from the box.
“Open it.”
The envelope is half an inch thick. He opens the flap and pours the contents onto the bed. He sees papers, folded in thirds, and an American passport. When he opens the passport, he sees a photo of an old man with a large mole on his cheek and the name irwin lee. Slipped into the passport are a Virginia driver’s license in the same name, and a Social Security card.