He dialed the Brooklyn sewage service.
"I would like to speak with your owner, please." No trace of an accent, when he wanted. He'd learned by watching Lou Dobbs on CNN.
A minute passed.
"Yeah, who is this?"
"I am someone who knows you," said Carlos.
"Who?"
"I am very familiar with your business," he said.
"Oh?"
"I am very familiar with what you put in your overflow tank. What you put in and when you took it out."
"What d'you want?"
"I think you might know."
"Fuck off." The phone went dead.
Carlos called back. The man answered.
"Why do you hang up on a polite caller?" Carlos asked in his best CNN voice.
"You call back, I'm going to hunt you down and kill you," snarled the voice. "Then I'm going to rape your wife and children."
Now it was Carlos who hung up. I think I have a little project now, he told himself, savoring a nasty happiness in himself. Yes, I have a little game with a white man who kills Mexican girls.
14
Okay, so I panicked, thought Jin Li as she waited for the ferry. I never should have hidden in that old building downtown. She wore big sunglasses and a Yankees cap pulled low, on the assumption there were security cameras in the terminal. Well, she had been scared. Instead, she should have first done exactly what she had just accomplished the previous night, which was to rent a room and private bath in Harlem from an old black woman named Norma Powell who owned a five-story brownstone carved up into a boardinghouse. Jin Li's room was just large enough for a bed, a dresser, and a wall mirror. The paint was no good and a mold stain that looked like Australia stretched across the ceiling. But the room had a good door made of real wood and a brass dead-bolt lock. But even better was the fact that Norma Powell's middle-aged son sat in the front room all day watching television. He appeared to live in the front room, in fact. He weighed perhaps four hundred pounds, more than half of that fat, but he projected a kind of elephantine protectiveness toward his mother that Jin Li found reassuring. Anyone breaking into the house would have to get by or over him. On the other hand Jin Li didn't really like Harlem, which was also her way of admitting that she felt uncomfortable in a black neighborhood, but that was its advantage. Harlem wasn't where you'd first look for a Chinese woman.
Jin Li had said that she was a Korean exchange student at Columbia University, an explanation that had seemed unnecessary to the widow Powell as soon as she counted Jin Li's cash: $300, per week, payable every Monday morning, put your envelope in my mailbox, honey, and no gentlemen callers after seven p.m. or it's out you go. But Norma Powell did want the phone number of the previous landlord, so she could follow up and confirm that Jin Li had been a good tenant. Fine, whatever, as she'd heard the American teenagers say; feeling only somewhat sly, she gave Norma her own phone number in her office in CorpServe's Red Hook building. If she really bothered to call, Norma would find this number useless, since it had no greeting on it and after three rings automatically kicked over to a fax machine-set that way so Chen could send her written information that avoided the Internet. As for her name, Jin Li had actually given her real one, since it matched her forms of identification, but said her hometown was Seoul, South Korea, where her father worked in a Kia Motors factory. It was both amusing and a little disgusting that she was pretending to be a Korean, especially since her name was in no way Korean sounding, but Norma Powell didn't know that. Anyway, there was an American phrase for this she liked: Ya do what ya gotta do. That's me, Jin Li thought, I'm doing what I gotta do. She had unpacked her meager belongings from her suitcase and taken a very nice long hot bath in her bathroom, attended by three cockroaches. They didn't bother her; in Shanghai their building had been infested with Asian water bugs, which were much worse. She'd scrubbed her face and later done her nails and altogether felt a lot more determined about everything. Maybe the police had caught the men who killed the Mexican girls. Or maybe she would call them up anonymously, not using her cell phone, and describe what had happened.
Maybe, but not yet, because she had a plan. After all, she had been trained to think, trained well at Harbin Institute of Technology, by professors in logic, systems analysis, data management, and probability analysis. CorpServe had many crews leaving jobs the night she was attacked, yet the crew singled out was the one carrying Jin Li. Why? The only plausible reason was that she was the person who knew exactly which offices were being plundered for information. The response by the assailants, or rather by whoever had hired them, was crude, indeed, stupid. There were many other approaches they could have taken. They could have changed the access to their facilities. They could have fired CorpServe. They could have called law enforcement or a private investigation agency. They could have spoken to her in person, called, written, or threatened legal action. Such actions would be morally and legally defensible, would have created a useful paper trail, and had the benefit of remaining controllable from an executive position. When two guys dump shit into a car in the dark in Brooklyn, she reflected, a corporate executive is not there to supervise. The actions may not be what he ordered, what he would accept, or what he is subsequently informed about. He has almost no control. Executives, she knew from reading thousands of pages of their correspondence, craved control, because they believed it was the essence of power. The attack in Brooklyn, from a corporate perspective, was insane, almost suicidal. It created negative information and initiated events outside the corporation.
It was the action of someone who had panicked.
Who? With this question she had a distinct advantage. Whoever had ordered the attack could not know that she alone knew which eight companies CorpServe was actively probing. In three of them, the stock price had recently gone up, creating great wealth for her brother and his associates. In another four, the stock price had drifted sideways for several months, awaiting developments. The last one was a relatively small pharmaceutical company, Good Pharma, which had suffered significant erosion in its stock price, something like 30 percent, in the last few weeks. She'd been feeding Chen information about the bad news regarding its synthetic skin product, which was due to receive FDA approval. The expected market for the product was enormous; it wasn't just burn victims who needed new skin-at this her thoughts traveled to Ray's stomach, the grafts and scars there that formed some kind of mysterious, erotic calligraphy on him, an accidental tattoo she had come to love-not just burn victims, no, but old people with wrinkled, sun-damaged skin that was thin now and tore like tissue paper. The product wasn't for vanity but for health. As the baby boomers aged, the nursing homes and life-care facilities would be crowded with people confined to their beds, where bedsores were a major issue. Bedsores were simply spots of necrotic tissue-skin that had died from being under continuous pressure, which cut off the circulation of blood. Existing techniques for avoiding bedsores, frequent turning and shifting of the bedridden, couldn't prevent them. The synthetic skin product, which did not yet have a trademarked name, was meant to be grafted atop the fragile, thin skin of the bedridden, providing an extra layer of protection, and causing a minimal immune system rejection response. But the product was not working very well in clinical trials, a fact that Jin Li had reported to Chen.