Unfortunately, no. There they are, pretending like they don’t see me pretending not to be looking for them.
Okay, I think. Okay. I’m just going to keep hobbling down the street here. Look for a cab. If they have a car, they’ll need some time to get back to it, and maybe that will be enough time for me to lose them.
Here’s the problem: There aren’t very many taxis in Yangshuo. None here on Xi Jie, which is pedestrians-only on this stretch. I need to walk up to the intersection, then hang a left and go up to whatever that big street is, where the buses run.
Okay.
“Miss? Bamboo raft?”
A tiny woman in traditional clothes, from whatever “ethnic minority” lives around here, thrusts her laminated tourist brochures in my face.
“No thanks.”
“Impressions show? See Ancient Village? Rock-climb?”
“Buyao!” I snap. Then think.
“Oh, you can ask those guys behind me,” I say. “They want a bamboo-raft trip. Don’t believe them if they say no. They are looking for a good deal.”
“Ah, okay, okay.”
Off she goes, like a lamprey seeking a shark.
Up ahead on my left is the Last Emperor. And I think maybe I’ve got the wooden frogs on my side, because slouching by the entrance is Kobe, fedora pulled low on his forehead, unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Hey, lamei.” He puts on a smile, but I don’t think he’s really that happy to see me.
“Kobe, ni hao. Listen… uh, can I use your bathroom?”
“Bathroom? You sick?”
“No, I…” I glance over my shoulder. There’s Mr. US Polo Team and his buddy in the generic windbreaker hovering on the corner, letting the tourists flow around them. I guess they weren’t tempted by a cheap bamboo-raft ride. “These two guys, they’re following me. I don’t know why. Something I saw in Shantou, or Guiyu, and…”
He frowns. “Police?”
Technically, the DSD aren’t police. “I don’t think so.”
Now Kobe looks past me, trying to spot my tails. Hesitates. Maybe he’s trying to decide if it’s a good idea to get involved.
“Okay,” he says. “Sure.”
“Is there a way out the back? I need to catch a taxi.”
He nods. “Past the bathrooms. At the end of the hall. That door, it should be open. If anyone asks, tell them I said it’s okay. If you don’t see a taxi on Pantao Road, go up to the traffic circle on the way to Moon Mountain. You can find one there.”
“Thanks.” I stand there for a moment. He’s wearing the T-shirt with the pistol-packing panda, I notice. I feel as if there’s something else I should say. It’s like I want to apologize, and I’m not sure why.
“Thanks, Kobe,” I say.
He shrugs. “No problem. Come back sometime. I make you my special drink.”
As I hobble inside, as fast as I can manage, I hear Kobe engage the guys behind me, telling them, “We have two-for-one drink today! Margarita! Sex on the Beach! Here’s a discount card!”
As before, the place is mostly empty, the dance floor dark. A waitress drops a pizza on a table where two stoned-looking Westerners sit; another waitress leans against the bar, texting on her phone. I head toward the back, to the hall where the bathrooms are. To my right is the kitchen, smelling like stale grease and ammonia. Ahead of me is the door.
“Hey, ni buneng jin nar qu!” You can’t go there.
It’s a middle-aged woman wearing a stained apron, her hair tied up and tucked under a baseball cap with a Chanel logo, waving her hand at me as I try to duck out the back door.
“Kobe said I could,” I say in Mandarin. “Because these two men, they’re bothering me.”
She follows the tilt of my head, looks over my shoulder into the bar. “Okay,” she says gruffly. “Go quickly.”
“Quickly” in my case is relative, but I walk as fast as I can, out the back door, into a little cement alcove crowded with reeking trash cans and a couple of bikes locked to the rusting rail. Up the three stairs, slick with grease, to the street above. Follow that to a broad avenue. Okay. Here’s a bus stop, in front of a Li-Ning sporting-goods store. I’m on Pantao Road. I head up the street toward the traffic circle, on the way out of town. I don’t see any cabs. I think if I don’t see one soon I’ll duck into a store or a restaurant. Stay there or sneak out another back door. Staying is sounding good, because my leg’s really hurting, swelling against the bandage, and I think I’d better ice and elevate it, but mostly what I’m passing are shops, with open storefronts or glass windows, not great places to hide, and I see a hotel, but I think I’ll have to show a passport there, and if these guys are DSD…
A taxi. Letting off a couple of girls in front of a shanzhai Juicy Couture boutique. I don’t even ask the driver if he’s available, I just slide into the backseat.
“Moon Mountain,” I say. Not that I want to go there, but I don’t have Sparrow’s card handy, and what I mainly want to do right now is get the fuck out of town.
“MOON MOUNTAIN“-YUELIANGSHAN-IS called that because of the crescent-shaped hole in the middle of it, like someone took a giant Christmas-cookie cutter and punched it out. It’s where Mom and Andy and me went to the Italian restaurant… was it a week ago? It feels like a lot longer.
First thing I do, I switch off the GPS in my phone. Think about it some more, and then I turn the phone off. They might be able to find me that way, depending on who these guys are.
I wasn’t really thinking too much when I told the cabbie to bring me here. It was just a place I knew that was down the road from Yangshuo proper and easy to get to. But as we drive, passing a fancy resort on one side of the road and then a huge billboard for a NEW SOCIALISM COUNTRY MODEL VILLAGE on the other, I realize that it’s not a bad destination. There are a fair number of tourists who come here: Chinese tour groups in buses who arrive for lunches of beer fish at farmers’ restaurants and leave afterward to go on to their river cruises or whatever, Europeans who like the “boutique hotel” where the Italian restaurant is. There are public shuttle buses that run up and down the main road outside the village, and where there are a lot of tourists, odds are there might also be a few taxis.
“You can stop here,” I tell my driver. I pay him and get out. I figure just in case those guys back in Yangshuo made this cab, better I should switch for the trip to Sparrow’s sanctuary. I’m feeling all James Bond for having thought of this.
Especially because I’m not thinking too clearly. I’m really not feeling all that great. Aside from my leg, I’m dizzy, hot. Those aren’t DVT symptoms. I don’t think. Probably just because I haven’t eaten. And I’m having a little trouble catching my breath, but that makes sense, considering that strange men are following me and I’m freaking out, right?
I should breathe into a paper bag or something.
I ignore the vendors selling flower garlands, pass the group of Chinese students on their cruiser bikes, posing for photos, walk on by a three-story farmers’ restaurant still crowded with Chinese tour groups, and go down the dirt road with stalls and shops on either side until I come to a cab parked outside some kind of paintball business called War Game (in English), with huge signboards depicting camoed soldiers with infrared goggles and M1s, plus photos of happy customers blasting the shit out of each other.
I shudder and approach the driver, who drinks tea from a glass jar.
“Ni hao,” I say. “You working now?”
SPARROW’S PLACE IS ABOUT a half hour away from Yueliangshan, first up the main road, through a town that straddles the highway, then down a series of smaller roads and dirt paths that run through tiny villages and rice paddies and tombstone-shaped mountains. I have no fucking clue where we are. I’m not sure I care at this point.