If that’s one of his guys with Tiantian, then he already knows.
I turn it on, heart hammering as it boots up.
I grab a pen from my backpack and scribble the number on my palm.
Then I power off the phone and retrieve my backup. Punch in Betty’s number and text: this is ellie. you can talk to me or you can talk to the police or how about internal security? they’re looking into tiantian’s party. call me or i’ll give them your name.
A minute later she texts me back.
not safe to talk to you.
you’re not safe now, I type. look what happened to celine.
I wait for a return text. For a minute, nothing. I think maybe she isn’t going to bite.
Then: what happened?
you better come talk to me, I type back.
I’m sitting on a bench outside the hall wearing a gold Qing-dynasty robe over my jeans and T-shirt and a hat with an embroidered band, dangly beads, and a crown that’s a cloud of wispy feathers when Betty shows up.
She’s looking around and not spotting me. Which is good, because I don’t want to be spotted. I might not look Chinese, but at least I look like a tourist.
“Hey.” I lift up my hand.
She does a little double take. Lifts her own hand to her mouth and almost giggles before I guess she remembers there’s some serious shit going on here.
She approaches the bench, her fingers clasped in front of her, her feet turned slightly inward, wobbling a bit on her platform Converse sneakers. Stands in front of me. I can see the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, along the lower lids.
“You better sit down,” I tell her.
She does, on the bench next to me.
Now that she’s here, with her Ed Hardy baseball cap and skinny jeans and designer sequined T-shirt, I don’t know what to say. She looks like a kid. A little kid, on the verge of crying, her lower lip trembling. Like she knows she’s going to hear something bad, but she’s still hoping she’s wrong.
“Celine’s dead.” Because just get it over with. There’s nothing I can say that would make this news any better.
She squeezes her eyes shut and nods.
“They think it was heroin. Baifen,” I add. “Did she do drugs like that?”
Betty shakes her head, her eyes still squeezed shut. Then she says, “Maybe, sometimes. But not a lot.”
Well, that’s the way it goes with heroin, right? You don’t do it regularly, you don’t do it a lot, you encounter some good, relatively uncut shit, and you die.
“She died the night before last,” I say. “At a gallery in Caochangdi. Do you know anything about that?”
Betty gasps and chokes back a sob. Nods.
“You better tell me,” I say.
She looks around, like she’s making sure no one can hear us. There are a couple of other costumed tourists clowning around by a guardian-lion statue, taking pictures of each other. They aren’t paying any attention to us.
“Gugu and Marsh pick us up to go there,” she finally says. “Celine knows the owner. Sometimes she work there. We go because Gugu want to look at this new art. He say he want to learn about it. But he is already very tired.”
“Tired. You mean drunk?”
She hesitates and nods.
“What time?”
“Maybe ten.”
So after dinner. Yeah, Gugu was pretty drunk.
“Who else was there?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Some people. Like a little party.”
“So what happened?”
“We just… Gugu doesn’t want to stay. He is too tired. Celine and Marsh say they are having fun, so…” She sobs for real this time. “We just leave them there.”
Celine and Marsh.
She’s crying now. “I didn’t think… I didn’t think anything bad…”
“But something bad happened at Tiantian’s party. And you know about it.” Now I’m pissed off. “Come on, Betty. Don’t bullshit me.”
“I just… hear bad things,” she whispers.
What she tells me is this:
It got late. Most of the guests went home. A few men stayed. “They have girls for them,” Betty says.
“Where was this? Where in the siheyuanr?”
“I was in the front north house.”
The main house. Where the bigwigs were hanging out.
“I see a few of those men go across courtyard to that east house.”
Where Gugu was. Where I left Marsh.
“I want to leave, but I come with Gugu, and I don’t know where he is. If I can find Celine, I just leave. But I cannot find her. So I wait. Play games and watch video on my phone.”
“You were alone?”
She nods. “I think maybe I fall asleep for a while.” She squeezes her eyes shut. Shakes her head back and forth like she’s trying to shake the bad thoughts out of it.
I know how that goes.
“I hear screams,” she says, whispering again. “A girl’s screams. A man, shouting. He is angry.”
“Could you tell where it was coming from?”
“The back house, I think.”
Tiantian’s man cave.
“She keeps crying, but not so loud. She… she moans. Then I can’t hear her anymore.”
I have a sudden flash of those photos of the dead girl, of her battered, swollen face.
“Okay,” I say. “What happened next? What did you do?”
“I run,” she says. “I just run. I get to the gate of the siheyuanr, and I know if I am running, maybe the guards will stop me. So I walk.”
“And they let you out?”
“Yes.” She pauses to get a Kleenex out of her little Gucci purse. Wipes her nose. Not a country girl, no blowing her snot onto the pavement for this one.
“I just walk as fast as I can away from that place,” she says. “I get to Yonghegong, to a taxi, and then I think, Celine. I leave my friend behind. I am… terrible.”
“You were scared.”
Because I know what it’s like. I know how it is to be young and dumb and in over your head. And I’m still beating myself up for what I did.
For what I didn’t do.
“I call her,” Betty says. “She does not answer. I don’t know what to do. So…” She hangs her head. “I just go home.”
I’m sweating under the embroidered band and dangling beads and cloud of feathers of my goofy fake Qing hat. I take it off and lay it on the bench next to me.
“Did you talk to Celine after the party… about what happened?”
“Yes. She calls me. Very late, almost morning, but I am so glad to hear her voice.”
Betty’s crying again. She covers her face with her hands.
“She tells me yes. A bad thing happened. She tells me I should be very careful around the Caos.”
Now Betty’s doing a quick, nervous scan of the perimeter again. Searching for bandits.
She looks at me. “Especially Tiantian,” she says.
“Oh, well, that’s just great.” I throw up my hands. “So why are you here?”
Betty rolls her eyes like I am too impossibly stupid. “Gugu wants me to come.”
“You think if you stand by your man, he’s gonna marry you or something?”
She flinches at that. Bingo.
Anything’s possible, I guess.
“Look, I know you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do, but if I were you, I’d get out of here and I’d stay out of Beijing for a while. You don’t want to be in the middle of all this.”
“Gugu can protect me from his brother,” she says.
Here’s hoping. Assuming Gugu’s hands are clean and it’s not just Tiantian she needs to worry about.
That’s when I get one of those sudden drops in my gut, that sickening rush, because I’m the one who needs to worry, and I’ve been sitting here too long.
“Good luck with that.” I push myself to my feet, wait for my bum leg to stop spasming, just trying to breathe through it.
“Please think about what I said,” I say when I can.
She nods.
I pick up my fake Qing hat and start to walk away.
“Celine say something else.”