[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.One of the Chinese men, following Lightborn’s eyes, turned and looked down at me.I saw pomade and cufflinks and shined shoes.His eyes were watery from the open cognac sitting on the sideboard.He’d taken his suit jacket off, and his belt divided his belly into two loaves.His partner struggled with the plastic wrapper around a pack of cigarettes.It slipped unopened from his hands, and he crushed the pack under his heel.The man with the divided belly shouted at me, and his partner with the crushed cigarettes joined in, but louder.He rushed to slam the door, but before it closed, I had one last look at Armand, the bagginess in his face.I spent a vertiginous second lost in his soupy eyes.I saw ladders of men ascending above Lightborn, men who had the standing to argue with him, to lay their hands on him, and I imagined men incomprehensibly more powerful than even those men, who surveyed the rest of us from the height of some Babel tower that could not be crushed.I heard the door latch, and I stood listening for another moment.There was no more conversational noise, only a shuffle of footsteps.Distantly from the deck, I could hear a cacophony of Russian and English and Chinese, and I thought it could be the roar of six more arguments, but perhaps it was one vast celebration.BACK IN THE barroom, Rose had straightened her bright yellow dress, and she smelled like a fashion magazine filled with competing perfume cards.The Russian girl smelled like stomach acid and slept on the bar.Rose shook her awake, and together we dragged her to a love seat.The girl’s body unfurled like a carpet.The bartender kept apologizing, like this was his fault, or we were the people to whom he owed explanations.Rose fidgeted like she was afraid to appear too familiar with me.After awhile, Robbie came inside.He glanced at Rose and the unconscious Russian.“I’m supposed to say it’s safest for you to stay out of sight and we’ll contact you in the morning,” Robbie said in a monotone.He asked for the name of my hotel.“That’s it?” I said.“Fluid situation,” he said.“Is Leo okay?” I said.“Tell me that much.”“He isn’t dead,” Robbie said.He waited for me to press him for more.“Enjoy this now,” I said.“You’ll be me someday.”Robbie had been instructed to tell me exactly what I did not believe—that if I could just pass one more night alone, then tomorrow would dawn with infinite promise.I was being sent off with the hope that Lightborn wasn’t so bullied or distracted by that universe of his connections, so incomprehensible to me, that Leo would be attended to while I’d be forgotten.I hoped that one day Robbie’s children would have to carpool out to an upstate prison on Sundays to visit him.“Do you ever read Chinese poetry?” Rose said suddenly.She stared at the men on deck with a faraway look, but she was talking to Robbie.“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he said.He shook his head at us both and took a bottle of cognac from behind the bar.He spread his fingers and stuck them like tentacles into four short glasses.On deck were the ballplayer and ebullient officials of whatever sort and the painted ladies in their company.I watched Lightborn join them.From a distance, I could detect no turmoil in his manner.He was somehow smiling.I didn’t see either of the men he’d been speaking with.He threw his pitching arm around the ballplayer.Rose looked contemplatively from the shallow-breathing Russian girl to the clustered men.She told me she’d remembered some lines of Li Bai she once memorized in school:Empty a wine-cup to end grief, and grief remains grief.You never get what you want in this life, so why not shake your hair loose on a boat at play in dawn light?She left me and joined the party.I watched Lightborn kiss her neck.We came banging into a pier somewhere near Suzhou Creek and the teepee form of the Monument to the People’s Heroes.I don’t know where the rest of the night took Lightborn and the ministers, or the ministers above those ministers, but as I walked off the boat, I’d never felt more envious, or more small, or so overfilled by hatred.IV.RETURNING TO MY hotel late that night, two clerks halted me in the dim lobby.One took the lead, wringing his hands.He asked if I was Mr.Slade.A pair of public security officers appeared from the darkness behind him, looking brutish but bored.The older officer stepped forward and spoke almost into my ear: “Please you will come with us.For tea.”“Should we sit?” I said.I pointed at an arrangement of lobby chairs, empty of guests at this late hour.“Sensitive matter,” the officer said.He brought his arm out mechanically and rested it on my shoulder.He seemed to move several seconds behind his thoughts.He led me forward, and in a clipped voice I asked everything I could think to—what this was about, and where I was being taken.The clerks fled, in search of any other task they might perform [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]