Because if she’d found two fakes, there had to be more.
At the same time, while Michael Doyle was preparing to leave work for the night, the lab results came back on Xiaoli’s tooth. He didn’t read Chinese, but he knew the characters for her name, and the layout of the lab report was a thing with which he was intimate. He scanned it until he found the number he was looking for, the lead level in the child’s tooth, in parts per million. At birth, Xiaoli’s cord-blood levels had been eight micrograms per deciliter-an entirely different measurement, apples and oranges; lead concentrations in solid tissue were much smaller and reflected prolonged exposure. Now her solid-tissue reading was twenty parts per million. Not good news. This was a very bad lead level for a seven-year-old child. And lead poisoning was so endemic here that only the sickest kids got chelation therapy.
So record it, he thought, and he made his mind a blank as he had learned to do. He pulled up the forms on screen, entered the data, recorded this little girl’s current reading. Click, enter, send. It was done.
He went out and took the subway up to Andingmen and walked to Jiaodaokou Nan, then turned on Houyuan'ensi Hutong. The noise of the city fell away. Down the lane he was grateful to see, small and far ahead, the green sign of the guesthouse. One reason was her. He had caught himself wondering where she was, what she was doing. Thinking about her. So when he stepped through the gate, he walked into the courtyard where she was staying instead of the one on the other side where he lived.
He could see she was there. The light was on. Pausing by the door, looking through the thin cotton curtains, he could see her cross-legged on the bed. She was curved over her computer, concentrating. Her legs were bare, just her long shirt.
There was a pressure on his chest, he was afraid to breathe, afraid even the sound of air filling his lungs might alert her to the fact that he was there, looking at her. On the desk by the window he saw her hearing aids, delicate little bumps of plastic. Her attention was on the screen. He stepped back, and this made a small scritch on the stones. He stiffened, waited; still she didn’t look up. She couldn’t hear.
He turned and walked quickly out again, to the lane. She had not eaten; that much he knew. He could tell by looking at her. He knew that manic, overworked look. The mania that hides fear. The fear that hides aloneness. The aloneness that leads to more work.
So he went down the hutong, west, curving south. Down this way there was a big food intersection. He would buy something to take back to her. It was dinner, he told himself. That was all. He was taking her dinner.
He found the food bazaar vibrant with people, bright with lights strung around the overhanging branches. Cooks called out to him from behind sizzling griddles. People hurried with stacked steamer tins to take home. Young girls cruised in tube tops, skintight pants, high heels. Older men sat on the steps, at their leisure, in undershirts; cotton trousers rolled up to their knees and legs planted wide apart.
Doyle moved past the griddle-masters to the little enclave of people who made soup dumplings and noodles. They were big-voiced and dramatic with their frothing tureens and their boardloads of noodles, fresh-pulled, soft and clunky. This was what he wanted.
He picked out a square-shaped man with receding hair and big square hands and asked for a broth with dumplings. The man brought the broth to an instant and furious boil, ladled in steaming square-folded dumplings with skins like see-through pearls, and then filled the container to the brim with hot soup. “Man man chi,” the man said politely, Take your time in eating, and Michael paid him and walked back.
By the time he got to the guesthouse, to her room, the thin cardboard soup container felt like it had burned all the skin off his fingers, and he’d long since wrapped the bottom of his T-shirt around it. He knocked gently. She didn’t respond. He could see her on the bed with her computer, still working. He knocked again, hard enough to make the wooden door vibrate. This time she looked up in a start. He waved, then stepped back and turned away to let her get into her clothes and her hearing aids. A few seconds later she yanked open the door. “Hi!” she said, surprised.
“Hi.” He held out the soup in both hands. “I brought you something.”
She shook her head in disbelief, a smile spreading across her face.
“Take it, it’s hot.”
“Sorry!” She took it. “You are so kind. I can’t believe you did this. Please.” She reached down and scooped a pile of papers off the desk chair, wiped the bare wood with her hand. She smiled back up at him. “Come in.”
He took the chair. “You’re working too hard,” he said.
“You’re right. I am. I’m over the edge. But-my God, Michael. I can’t believe you brought me this.”
He liked the softness in her eyes. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I was happy to do it.”
“No. You don’t know what it means to me. It’s just one of those things for me, you know? Chicken soup.” She smelled it and her smile welled up again.
“Man man chi,” he said in Chinese, just as the man who’d sold it to him had said, and laughed.
She sat back on the bed, the only place left. She took a spoonful. “Oh,” she said, “it’s wonderful. Thank you.”
“Enough,” he said. “Eat.”
“Okay.”
He watched her approvingly. “Your Chinese seems very good,” he said after a minute.
“Somewhat. My spoken Chinese is okay. I never use it. I don’t live in that-you know-that vernacular world, which is basically only here on the Mainland when it comes to Mandarin, here and Taipei. Most of my work is in Hong Kong, New York, and London. I mean, there are always Mandarin-speaking clients, but…” She shrugged. Clients were by their nature rich, cultured, globalized people. The final language of all the biggest transactions tended to be English. “With Chinese I read and write. I have to for my job.” She bit into a dumpling and got a spill of hot savory ground pork. “Do you speak Chinese?”
“I’m trying. I’ve learned a little. I took six months of classes before coming here. Basically I’m pathetic.”
“I doubt that.”
“And don’t give me that casual 'I read and write' stuff,” he said. “I know how much it takes to read and write Chinese.”
“But that’s what I majored in.”
He was watching her. “Your hair is down,” he said.
It was true, her hair was loose from the nape of her neck. She had twisted it back out of her way while eating. “I can’t braid it up all the time. I have to take it down and let it rest.”
“It’s nice.”
She let go of a laugh and touched her mouth with the back of her hand. “It’s not a fashion statement.”
“I like it.” Watching her, the clarity of her skin, her fingers, he reminded himself to apply the brakes. “What is it you’re working on?” he asked.
“I’m logging some of the things I saw today.”
“Don’t you do that as you go along?”
“I create an inventory for the job, sure. But at night I make sure I’ll remember the pots. That I’ve committed them to memory.”
He leaned his body forward, balancing himself on his elbows against his knees. “You want to remember them?”
“It’s a thing of mine, memory. A sort of world. I put all the pots I see in their places and that way I’ll always have them.”
“Personally, I try to forget as much as possible.”
“That’s like most people.” She smiled, and went back to eating.
He watched her, watched her mouth, a wide thin mouth. He liked how it changed when she smiled. “How'd you come up with this? The memory thing.”