If his father was a hole in his heart with specific dimensions, Director Zhang, his mentor, was not designed to fill the space. It was clear from their first meeting, in which the Director, smiling and frank, said: “You scored 2,913 points in all your thirty-one courses—three points higher than I did. There’s a lot going on up there! Yes,” he mused, “a lot going on.” He shrugged, the gesture twitching away whatever security his words might have delivered. “So I’m recruiting you. Because if I let you go out into society and you cause mayhem, it’ll be hard--very hard--to catch you.”
Director Zhang was not a bad man. Actually, Lu Li appreciated his honesty. It’s just that it left him nowhere to stand.
Eight years later, the notion implicit in Director Zhang’s words has crystallized within Lu Li, to the point that he has given it a name: inherent crime.
Is it because of his genetic heritage, the DNA that allowed the police to catch his father? Or is it that the shock of loss, the reversal of his life, the hollowing-out of his parental role model might have transmitted to Lu Li a new, upside-down world view, along with ample reason to hate the world he saw?
It doesn’t matter whether nature or nurture was the whip hand. The problem is there at the root, either way. What Director Zhang saw was some unfolding potential in Lu Li to wreak havoc. On the world; perhaps on himself.
For the first several months he starts a lot of internal monologues with when I get home.
When I get home I’ll open up a little place, a bed-and-breakfast on the pretty side of the harbor; I’ll hire someone to play the piano, I’ll hire a little old man to sit on the pier, looking picturesque and catching fish so the guests can see him from their rooms. When that does well, I’ll move my mother into her own suite, two nurses, cocoa every morning, imported croissants, anything she wants.
When I get home I’ll give Yinuo a seal stuffed animal with the smoothest fur; I’ll tell her all about riding the ferry and the sound of the bells as you sail under the Golden Gate Bridge.
When I get home I’ll put my life in his hands, like a jewel.
Chi Zhen takes off his sunglasses and cleans them on his sleeve. It’s freezing out; the ocean’s grey like he’s never seen, the surf’s high enough to frighten him, sitting in his rental car on the turnout surrounded by mounded ice plants. The wind batters his car. On the road just ahead, someone’s house has slid down the cliff and lies collapsed on the rocks at its feet like a pile of matches.
His phone rings.
“What do you need?” he asks, in English. It’s his standard greeting now.
“The fuck are you, man?” This English-speaker has a Russian accent. “Waiting over an hour.”
He’s never going home, Chi Zhen understands then.
“Sorry, I know, sorry. Your place is pretty far north, you know? Kind of a little lost,” Chi Zhen says, unmoving, staring at the ocean.
“It was Baccarat,” Chi Zhen explains, watching the fire. “Rouge à l’or, all right? Made entirely by hand. The most expensive…”
Lu Li’s spent. His entire body’s boneless, aching like it’s been left under a train. He inches forward, the microfiber throw underneath him slipping across the polished floor, closer to the fire, closer to the source of warmth, closer to Chi Zhen.
Chi Zhen puts out a hand, feeling blindly, finds his partner on his blanket in the dark.
“It was that much?” Lu Li asks.
“It was more than that. It was…” Chi Zhen picks up his snifter, drinks, grins. “It was Chanel Number Five, thirty ounces of pure perfume in a handmade bottle—not eau de anything, it was extrait de parfum, OK? Nothing more, nothing less—and part of the deal was hand-delivery. To anywhere. Anywhere in the world.”
“The magic of capitalism,” Lu Li says. He’s starting to recover his wits. Chi Zhen’s hand drifts along his spine.
“They sent me,” Chi Zhen says, “to be the genie of that particular bottle.” Lu Li lifts an eyebrow, rolls onto his side to regard Chi Zhen’s profile in the firelight.
“And this is the weirdest thing they ever had you do?” he says. “Kowtow to some turtle of a rich old lady, who…”
“Not what you’re thinking, Lu Li,” Chi Zhen says, swirling his cognac. “You just don’t trust me even a little, do you? Anyone can be abused by a rich old lady. No. This isn’t that kind of story.” He puts his glass down and pulls Lu Li haphazardly into his lap, like a cat. Lu Li sighs; his head’s on Chi Zhen’s naked thigh, his own legs stretched toward the fire. He feels Chi Zhen’s fingers snake through his hair; his eyes close with the pleasure of it.
“What, then,” he says.
“I had to drive this bottle out into the rainforest somewhere halfway between Myanmar and Nagaland. Just me and a Land Rover in forests that… there are monks out there, hermits, people who, I saw one, floating…” Chi Zhen stops himself. “Another story,” he says, almost to himself. “I drove. For two days. I had to carry my own gas. I ate granola bars; slept in the Rover. Not a soul on the road. The streams were all swollen with water. It spilled across the road sometimes, cascades going off the embankments, down into gorges so deep…. In the rainforest, I drove with headlights on at high noon. There were butterflies so black, they were almost blue…” Chi Zhen shakes his head. “Eventually the road ran out.”
“No GPS?” Lu Li doesn’t care for perfume, but the story has started taking hold. Chi Zhen laughs.
“Are you joking? Hermits live out there on platforms in the trees. In caves, with birds.” He’s got Lu Li’s head in both hands, working his knuckles into place where the stiff tendons meet the ridges of his skull. Lu Li makes a soft sound in his throat and throws an arm around Chi Zhen, nuzzling his hip.
“I had to leave the car,” Chi Zhen says. He feels almost furtive, a thief of bliss; sitting there before the fire, savoring Lu Li’s sudden burst of affection like a fruit he’s never tasted before. “It’s just me and this bottle, about the same size as Egg Waffle’s bulk bottles of mouthwash, you know the ones…”
“Giant,” Lu Li murmurs.
“And I’ve this map, right? This hand-drawn map by some terrified kid who’d made the sale in the first place, this ridiculous thing… in the middle, right in the middle of precisely nowhere, Lu Li, me wondering if I’d ever see daylight or a city again, there’s this hill, cresting the trees, right? And I hear this girlish voice calling. And she comes walking down the hill.”
Chi Zhen doesn’t tell Lu Li about the bone ornaments she wore, the butterflies that clustered around her head.
“She must have been eighty. She’s carrying this splendid handbag…”
Lu Li laughs, actually laughs, no; he actually almost giggles.
“You’re shitting me,” he says, his arms tightening around Chi Zhen.
“Lu Li! I’m not lying, I wouldn’t lie, the whole point of this story is that it’s true,” Chi Zhen says. “She opens the bag. Pulls out thirty thousand dollars. American! Hands the money to me. Points back up the hill. ‘Come with me,’ she says; I think that’s what she says; it’s Burmese, I don’t even have survival Burmese, right? I follow her up the hill, carrying this fuck-you gigantic bottle of Chanel Number Five.”
Lu Li struggles upright in Chi Zhen’s arms. Looks searchingly into his eyes.
“I can’t believe,” he says, “this actually happened to you.”
“You haven’t even heard the best part,” Chi Zhen says. “The Part, you know? There’s a tiny shack on top of this hill, and a little Tibetan-style reliquary stupa…”
“Someone’s grave?” Lu Li wonders, fingers tracing the edges of the scar on Chi Zhen’s naked back.
“I didn’t dare ask,” Chi Zhen says, eyes wide, remembering. “She puts down her little quilted handbag, with the little chain, and she gestures to me. I bring over the bottle. It’s stoppered with wax, and this stuff—it’s called baudruchage? Some kind of onion paper. I don’t know. Keeps the perfume fresh, I guess. She opens the bottle. There’s cedar incense and these clouds are billowing all around us. She’s kind of transparent in the smoke, right? And she takes this bottle, this thirty thousand dollar bottle of perfume. And she dumps the bottle. Pours it all out. Right in front of the stupa.
“Then she comes over to me.” Chi Zhen rubs the back of his neck, remembering. “She pulls my head down, and she shakes the bottle—she’s like four feet tall, all right? She really has to reach—she shakes it out over my head. The last drops.” Chi Zhen feels for his cognac, finds it, drinks. “She puts the bottle down in front of the stupa, the sun’s come out, the bottle’s so…” Luminous, he thinks, looking down at Lu Li’s skin. Glowing, as if from within. “She picks up her handbag, pats me on the cheek, points back down the hill. ‘Bye-bye,’ she says. So I went, trailing this incredible odor of Chanel Number Five.” Chi Zhen laughs. “I smelled like that for a week.”
Lu Li, his eyes half-closed, entranced by warmth and touch, murmurs, “That’s completely crazy.”
“It is,” Chi Zhen agrees. “And it’s still not the craziest, most incredible thing that’s ever happened to me, either.”
“No?”
“Nope,” Chi Zhen says, running his fingertips over Lu Li’s eyebrows.
The train he needs, Chi Zhen discovers, travels under the Bay.
He’s underwater, surrounded by expressionless white faces and the rattle and roar of the train. He crosses his arms, tries to ignore his smelly neighbor, and settles down to wait; twenty minutes underwater to reach the city.
The City, natives call it, as if it’s the only one in the world. It’s got a famous profile and some fancy bridges, and when he stands on top of one of its seven hills, staring at the sky, he feels every kilometer separating him from his home.
--
Chi Zhen’s nickname in Little Lanya is “The Loupe.” He hates it.
For a long time—more than six months—he has sustained this paper-thin identity with sheer force of will. Since then, though, a few lucky breaks and a lot of late-night studying has earned him the reputation he’d been assigned by Boss Chen when he’d gotten out of Lanya with a wad of cash and a fake passport.
Now he smiles, pats babies, and shows the shy expats what they want to see: quality from a trusted source.
Hua City has hundreds of unfinished buildings, left to stand in rain and rot when the financial winds failed to circulate. You could move in, Lu Li knows; you could live like vermin, survive on the edges until the investments shifted, the money came through, the developers kicked everybody out, and the cycle started all over again.
Meanwhile, though, you could hide, Lu Li thinks; you could hide for quite some time.
Lu Li can’t direct the attention of his officers to these buildings, have them shine a light into these places. He doesn’t want the law finding Chi Zhen.
So he goes by himself.
By himself, in the dark, his phone turned off, he makes the rounds of the abandoned buildings.
It would be understandable. After all, here was a chance to erase the trajectory that faced him—prison, scandal, penury; it was all too much. Exhibit A: Chi Zhen’s bijou apartment, tiny and perfect. Exhibit B: he is a man unaccustomed to standing in cafeteria lines, unaccustomed to taking exercise in the yard. He’s a man in nice shoes, in silk shirts, a man who likes having money, even if it isn’t his own. What would this prison stay do to such a man?
Then again, maybe it’s too much to say he thought of no one else; it’s possible he thought of his mother, upended, humiliated, her love choked off. The truth was that if you were going to destroy the illusion, destroy the remnant son, you might as well kill her, or him.
You don’t come back from that. Better he was dead.
And in a moment of incomprehensible shock, that possibility arrived. Here it was. Actually, he could die: dying, he could be reborn. So maybe Lu Li never crossed his mind as he gathered his strength, leaving his phone behind in a pool of blood.
Maybe that’s how it was.
—
It might be comforting to tell that story. Any decent lawyer could make something of that story. It wouldn’t be hard at all.
Besides, what does it matter what Chi Zhen thought? If Chi Zhen worked it all out in his head as the train rattled from station to station?
If he stayed, stayed in the blood; if he stayed in Hua City, whether he went to prison for Lu Li for years or were implausibly, miraculously convicted of a lesser charge, he would be a thread for Dong Lingqi’s long fingers to pick loose. He would be a knife in Dong Lingqi’s dead hand. He would be the instrument after all, the vehicle of Lu Li’s end.
For Lu Li’s position was already precarious. His movements that day were suspicious and far from opaque. He might pass a gunpowder test that would absolve him of actually pulling the trigger; but there were too many questions whose answers pushed toward an inappropriately close relationship with a highly motivated murderer.
So die: erase that trajectory. Erase any chance of being used by the man he’d killed.
And keep silence, for the sake of the man he’d saved.
If he reached out, found a way to tell Lu Li he was still alive, it would force Lu Li to act. How could he not? Chi Zhen had watched the same dynamic play out for Lu Li two times already. He’d harbored two murderers already: if the first time he’d been all unknowing, the second time, with Wu Wenxuan, when the light finally dawned, where had he been left? What would be left of Lu Li if he acted, if he failed to act?
Contact meant collusion. Collusion meant averting his eyes. To avert his eyes a third time would destroy him.
—
So maybe Chi Zhen never thought of his friend as he sat on that train, blood oozing from his side. Maybe he didn’t cauterize his heart to keep Lu Li safe.
No goodbyes. No hand on his shoulder. No eyes to look into.
Chi Zhen put on his sunglasses and exited the train.
“No! no—it was, well, sure, it was wholesale, all right? I didn’t sell my soul for it or anything, but it’s real. And I really paid for it. OK? If you don’t like it, give it to Yinuo.”
Lu Li holds it up to the light. It’s round, honey-colored, almost as big as his fingernail. It keeps changing as it turns on its chain; the jeweler cut it like an open lotus.
“You’re ridiculous,” he says, his face red.
“Just—“ Chi Zhen takes it from him, fumbles with the clasp, and fastens it around Lu Li’s neck. He pulls the collar of Lu Li’s shirt down and settles the sapphire in the hollow of his throat, where the collarbones meet. Then he twitches the collar back up; the stone’s hidden now. “Like that,” he says, a little hoarsely. “No one’ll bother you. You’re the only one who knows it’s there.”
If his father was a hole in his heart with specific dimensions, Director Zhang, his mentor, was hardly a substitute. It was clear from their first meeting, in which the Director, smiling and frank, said: “I’m recruiting you because if I let you go out into society and you turn to crime, it’ll be a pain to catch you.”
Director Zhang was not a bad man. Actually, Lu Li appreciated his honesty. It’s just that it left him nowhere to stand.
