What would Fu Tsong have put in that small wicker suitcase? Fong opened her drawers but, like most men couldn’t tell what was missing or not missing. Then he opened her closet. Everything seemed to be there, but as he went to close it his eyes were drawn to an empty hook on the door. His heart almost stopped.
Fu Tsong owned two bathrobes: a beautiful silk one that she wore all the time, which was still there, and a tattered plaid terrycloth robe that was too big for her, but which she would wear whenever she was ill. “It makes me feel safe and warm while the sickness rages inside. It’s my way of helping everything get fixed,” she’d often said.
That robe was gone. The empty hook seemed cruel.
His mind was afloat, lost in a wash of terror. He forced himself to answer more questions. Where would she go to get fixed? The Pudong rose in his throat like a round hard thing. He swallowed it down and forced himself to concentrate. Fu Tsong’s life depended on it. His baby daughter’s life depended on it. His whole world depended on it.
Where exactly would she go? The Pudong is a big place. She’d never been able to remember an address in her life. She’d write it down. But she’d hide something like that from him. Where, though? He started with her desk in the living room corner. No, couldn’t be! It was too open to him. Where would she hide something from me? She’s smart! Where did she know I’d never accidentally look? Nothing on her bedside table. Nothing in her closet or clothing. Nothing in the medicine cabinet over the sink. . . but even as he went to close the cabinet he knew where Fu Tsong would hide something she really didn’t want him to find.
On the shelf over the toilet Fu Tsong kept a set of brushes, some face cream, and an unusually shapeless bag with a zipper. In the bag she kept her spermicide and her now unused diaphragm.
He pulled out the beige diaphragm case. It opened with a plop. He picked out the plastic dome revealing a cheap business card on the bottom of the case. On the card was printed a name and an address in the Pudong. Below the address was a guarantee of satisfaction in its services “for women desirous of giving birth to male children.” For a moment Fong’s knees went weak.
The phone rang in the other room.
He listened to Wang Jun’s voice say that they had located the dispatcher and had sent a car to get him. Fong hung up before Wang Jun was finished.
Pelting rain against the windshield of his police car. Hand held down hard on horn, flashers going, siren piercing the downpour. Screams of anger as he whipped past hundreds of bicyclists in their cheap plastic ponchos that made them look like coloured pyramids on wheels, and sped down Yan’an.
The address in the Pudong was in the north sector. He roared toward Beijing Road. A traffic jam at Nanjing Road and Xian brought him to a screeching halt. It was solid for almost six blocks in all directions. Something had spilled or stopped or someone was hit. He was still over two miles from the Pudong address where his wife and daughter were. Abandoning his car, he ran like a wild man, screaming and shouting, toward the overhead walkway. Racing up the rain-slicked steps he leapt over a prone beggar and got to the centre of the strangely elegant structure.
Only a supreme act of will kept him from stopping in the middle of the overpass spanning the busiest intersection in Asia and screaming Help me, help me, help me!
Charging toward the Xian side he slipped on the wet overpass pavement and careened down the forty-five steps to the street below. Then he was running again. A sharp pain in his hand drew his attention. Two of the fingers of his left hand must have landed awkwardly in his fall. One dangled backward at a peculiar angle. The other had been pushed back over the knuckle. The former he ignored. The latter, with a yell of pain, he yanked back to its original length.
At Beijing Road he flagged a cab, pulled the driver out and dumped the surprised man in the gutter. Before the cabby could open his mouth to complain Fong was speeding away from him toward the Bund.
Inside the cab, Fong floored the late-model Santana and controlled the fishtailing as he careened toward the river. In a flash of lightning he saw the huge television tower across the Huangpo River. And momentarily thereafter he smelled the river. Even in the rain once you crossed Delicious Food Street the river announced its imminent presence.
He turned south. A second traffic jam, this one a half mile of cars trying to get onto the new suspension bridge heading toward the Pudong. Once again he abandoned a car and took to foot, this time racing toward the suspension bridge across the Huangpo.
Anyone paying attention would have marvelled at the lone running figure clearly etched against the darkened, lightning-streaked sky. So tiny, insignificant when com- pared to the suspension bridge’s massiveness. The bridge swayed in the wind as the tiny figure dodged and weaved and at times climbed over cars stalled by the intense downpour.
At the end of the bridge, Fong was in the Pudong. Instantly the familiarity of home flooded him. It was like the Old City where he had grown up. In the downpour few people were on the streets to ask for directions. He finally found a steamed bun shop open and raced in, shouting the address at the old lady behind the counter.
If the sight of the soaked, broken-fingered man surprised her she didn’t let on. She simply pointed farther down the street. Running in the direction the woman pointed, Fong turned a sharp bend in the road and was instantly greeted by the new Pudong: towering cranes, massive construction sites, mud and mud-coated haulers of progress. No one seemed to know where the address was that the short madman was shouting at them. Finally a foreman, drawn by the ruckus, came up and, hearing the address, pointed toward the one remaining shanty in the midst of the moonscape of construction sites.
Fong ran directly toward the ancient structure, not bothering with roads. He raced into a construction site, across it and up the other side, and then through, across, and up a second until he stood panting at the closed door of the old house.
The building was bathed in the eerie glow of the construction site’s arc lights.
Fong was about to yell Fu Tsong’s name when he heard her moaning.
The door burst open under his running thrust, and he was greeted with a vision from hell.
The baby must have been in the breech position. A botched attempt to “untimely rip.” Something had ruptured. The butcher fled-and left this.
White walls, grime encrusted. Aluminum table. A single lightbulb swinging wildly from the ceiling. Rain pouring through the roof. And there in the midst, on the table, wrapped in her tartan bathrobe, a small line of her blood dripping off the table onto the already blood-rich earthen floor, Fu Tsong clutched a blood-and mucus-covered thing to her-and screamed for the mercy of death.
Fong felt his heart click in his chest.
Then everything stopped. Fu Tsong’s eyes opened wide for an instant, her arm swung off the side of the table and something infinitely cold filled the room.
Fong felt himself falling, plumeting through darkness, utterly, totally alone.
Even as Fong was fighting his night demons, Wang Jun was remembering how he had found his young friend that night four years ago in the Pudong. It was a vision Wang Jun could not easily forget.
A lightning flash had silhouetted Fong against the open back door of the shanty. The outline of the small man, his feet seemingly stuck to the mud floor of the horrible little room. Then a scream filled the confined space. And the small man moved with terrible speed. Before Wang Jun could intercede, Fong lifted the inert bodies of his wife and unborn child and raced out the back door into the rain.