Rafferty has no idea what to say, so he doesn’t.
“Well, that created a fuss.” Frank is watching Leung watch the room. “As I said, I’d been doing the books for the brothel, one in a chain. All short-time stuff, just in and out, so to speak. Today they’d probably call it McSex. The firm I was working for, very proper and British in public, was really Chinese-owned, and it was on retainer for every triad in Shanghai. So I had some insight into how the system worked. I bought her for a second week, just to get a head start, and then we took off.”
“You should write a book,” Rafferty says, but he is interested in spite of himself.
“I’m in enough trouble already.” His eyes flick away. “Anything happening, Leung?”
“Only cops,” Leung says.
“Where?” Rafferty doesn’t see any uniforms.
“Table near the door. Three of them. Plainclothes. You can tell by the phones.”
Sure enough, black boxy things with short antennae. “I’m impressed.”
“Leung earns his keep,” Frank says.
“I work cheap,” Leung says, and laughs. Then he says to Frank, “Back door?”
“Through the kitchen,” Frank says, lifting his chin half an inch in the direction of a swinging door behind Leung. It is a very Chinese gesture.
Leung nods and lets his back touch the upholstery behind him. His version of relaxed.
“We got out of Shanghai and headed south, with Wang-that’s Ming Li’s mother’s name, by the way, Wang-dressed as a boy, a servant. Sorry not to be more original, but there you are. She was my valet.”
“She’s still your valet,” Ming Li says with a smile.
“I need a lot of looking after,” Frank says.
Poke is watching the way Ming Li looks at her father. “You didn’t used to.”
“Well, it wasn’t like your mother lived to take care of me.” He raises his hand before Poke can speak. “I’m not saying anything against her. Angela is a wonderful person.”
“She’d be thrilled to hear you say that.”
“Angela is well taken care of,” Frank says. “I left her a rich woman.”
“Yeah, but you left her.”
“For twenty years I was a good husband.” Frank finally allows his irritation to show, a sudden bunching of the muscles at the corners of his eyes. “I stayed home, I raised a family. I built a house for her.”
“She burned it down,” Poke says with some pleasure.
Frank’s cup stops halfway back to the saucer. “She what?”
“The day you left. She read the letter you wrote her-real personal, by the way, a bunch of bank-account numbers and some safe-deposit keys-and then she toted all the stuff she cared about outside and set fire to the Christmas tree. Oh, I forgot, she called a cab first. Then she sat there, and we watched it burn until the cab came.”
“That was a nice house,” Frank says. “I put a lot of work into that house.”
“It made a lovely light.” He leans forward, driven by an impulse to cause pain. “Oh, and you’ll like this. Seven years later she had you declared dead.”
“I’m dead?” Frank says. He seems more interested than surprised.
“She ran an obituary and everything.”
Frank and Leung exchange a glance Rafferty can’t read. Frank says, “That could be useful.” Leung raises his eyebrows and draws down the corners of his mouth.
Frank blinks and leaves his eyes closed a little too long. When he opens them, he is looking at a spot above Poke’s head. “I lived with Wang down south, out of sight in Yunnan, for a year, until I had to leave China. We lived like brother and sister. You have to remember, Poke, I was really only a kid myself then. We were happy. If things had gone on, eventually, we’d have found our way to bed. But come 1950 it was obvious that I was going to have to leave. I put it off for as long as I could-too long, actually. So we went out to a stone where we sat every day-have you ever been to Yunnan?”
“No.”
“It’s exquisite, at least where the rice is grown. Whole mountains carved into terraces that are flooded with water that reflects the sky. We sat each evening on a stone that looked down on a giant stairway of rice paddies, and waited for the stars to come out. The night before I had to leave, after I’d spent days packing and trying to prepare her, we went up to the stone and married each other. We took each other’s hands when the sun went down and waited until the stars appeared in the paddies below us, and then we said we were married. She needed that. She needed to know I was coming back.”
“Why didn’t she go with you?”
“She wouldn’t. She was afraid to leave China. And you forget, she was one of the oppressed masses. Remember them? She was one of the ones who were supposed to benefit. People’s paradise and all that shit. Who was more downtrodden than a peasant girl who’d been sold into prostitution? What she didn’t know was that Mao was a puritan. Officially, I mean. He had his fifteen-year-old Girl Guides-whole squadrons of them, if his doctor’s memoir is to be believed-but everybody else was supposed to sleep one to a bed. Prostitutes were contrary to the common good. It’s been said that the thing about Communists is that they have nothing and they want to share it with you. The problem with prostitutes was that they still had what they’d been sharing. So they were all shipped off to be ‘reeducated.’ They got Wang’s attention by breaking her arm.”
“You know,” Poke says, “it’s an interesting story, and it probably would have held my attention about twenty years ago, but now? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Just shut up,” Ming Li says. “He’s obviously got a point.”
Rafferty continues over her. “I’ve got a family now-I won’t bother telling you who they are, since you’ve spent all that time paddling around in the usual channels-but they’re going to get worried if I don’t get back to them. So cut to it, okay? What’s happening that’s so important you had to kidnap me? You want to tell me about the past, write a letter.”
“We’re going to get to it,” Frank says. “In a second.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cell phone, then holds out his other hand to Leung, who reaches into his own pocket and brings out Rafferty’s. Frank turns on Rafferty’s phone, dials a number on his own, and waits until Rafferty’s rings. Then he turns off Rafferty’s phone again and hands it back to Leung. “In case you need my number,” he says.
Rafferty says, “I’ll give you a call on Father’s Day.”
“Fine. Until then Ming Li’s right. Shut up. There’s a point here. We grabbed you the way we grabbed you because you were being followed all the time, and we didn’t know by whom. Did you know you were
being followed?”
“Yes,” Poke says.
“Who is it?”
“Nothing to do with you.”
“I’d like to be the judge of that.”
“We’d all like something,” Rafferty says. “But what we get is each other.”
“Poke.” Frank leans back, and the light catches the puffiness beneath his eyes and a new heaviness under the chin. Suddenly, Rafferty sees that time and gravity have gotten to his father after all. “I can’t apologize to you. I can only explain. Okay, so I’m not Father of the Year. But I owed something to Wang. I made her a promise. You can’t just walk away from something like that. Still, I waited. I waited until you were almost grown and away from home, and I waited until there was enough money for Angela. Then I took what I needed, and no more than I needed, and I went back.”
“And when I came after you-”
Frank’s head is still resting against the wall behind him, his chin raised, but his eyes drop to Poke’s. “Did it ever occur to you,” he says, “that I was ashamed to face you? That I left it to Wang because I was a coward?” He reaches over and takes Ming Li’s hand, and she turns to face him. “Also, I have to tell you, I saw no reason to bring my families together.”
“Until now,” Rafferty says.