The Devil to Pay Read online

  I took off my clothes and took a hot shower, thawing my jangled nerves. I had flown halfway around the world, leaving the “most dangerous place in the world,” only to nearly be murdered in a civilized British colony.

  When I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a hotel robe, Lily was sitting on my bed, her back against pillows propped up against the headboard. She wore a sheer nightgown. I was beginning to wonder if she owned any clothes that weren’t see-through. She had a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

  “We must celebrate.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Being alive.” Lily patted the pillows beside her.

  I hesitated.

  Lily said, “Please, don’t be angry at me. I did not know we were going to be shot at.”

  “I think there is a whole list of things that I don’t know.”

  “Yes, but you must also understand that there are things that you should not know. You have come to China for your reasons; I have come for mine. I will not interfere with yours. You should not interfere with mine.” She patted the bed again. “There may be more bad moments ahead of us. I came in to make friends because we may need each other.”

  That made sense. I sat on the bed. She poured me champagne. I sipped it and shut my eyes. After a moment I said, “That man, he’s not your uncle, is he?”

  “I call him Uncle; many people do.”

  “Do you actually have family in Hong Kong, blood-relative types?”

  “No.”

  “So all your family is in Shanghai, except for your father?”

  “Yes.”

  She said “yes,” but my ears heard “no.”

  “And Dr. Soong’s not your father, is he?”

  She didn’t answer and I drank more champagne. I had my head back, my eyes closed, when she said, “I do what I have to do to survive. I used to have to do things just to get enough food to eat. Now I want more than my stomach full.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to what she said or even if she expected a response. Finally, I said, “I had a strange upbringing, but it was not a terrible life; I never had to worry about food, for sure. My mother was wonderfully crazy. If she had been Irish, people probably would have said she thought like a pixie. She fought for causes, social change, but never stuck to anything, anyplace, not even any cause. We moved from town to town, I went to a different school almost every year, lived in a different house, but I think in most ways that sort of gypsy life just made me more pliable, better able to deal with change, emergencies, anything out of the norm.”

  I droned on about how gypsies didn’t have their feet stuck in cement and more about life with my mother, as I sipped champagne. The alcohol was relaxing my mind and body. I only talked to make up for the silence. I felt like I had to keep conversation going so Lily wouldn’t have to reveal things about her life that she was ashamed of—or that would make me sad.

  After a while, Lily opened another bottle of champagne. I was feeling warm and snug when I heard her voice.

  “My mother worked like a farm animal.”

  I said nothing. My instincts told me I was going to hear things that made me feel like a Rich—and Ugly—American in a world of need.

  “Girls were not wanted because they could not do as much physical labor as a boy. The government forbade the killing of girl babies, but there are millions of peasants in China who hardly know the government exists. I was lucky that I was the first girl-child in the family—none of my sisters lived more than a day. They had to be killed before my parents bonded with them.”

  Jesus.

  “My mother was a wrinkled old woman by the time she was thirty. She sent me away at twelve. It was not to a finishing school in Switzerland. It was not even to a life someone like you can imagine. She did not think she was doing a terrible thing to her daughter; she sacrificed by sending me away at a time when I finally reached the age where I could do the job of a grown woman in the fields. She did it to help me.”

  “What does she think of your life now?”

  “I don’t know; I’ve never been back.”

  “You never went back to see your parents?”

  “No. It would shame them.”

  “How about some music?” I turned on the radio and selected soft listening music to tune out the horrors of life.

  Lily had not revealed what kind of life her mother had sent her to, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize there weren’t that many options open for a poor, uneducated girl in China. I didn’t want to hear any more. I felt compassion for her. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  “You did fine; so did your mother. You did what you had to do.”

  I finished my champagne and set the glass on the end table. My eyes were closing on me. That’s how liquor affected me; wine, beer, champagne, too much made me sleepy. But it also relaxed me and gave me a glowing feeling inside.

  I was fading when she kissed me.

  I don’t know if I was expecting it; maybe I had even invited it. I don’t find myself attracted sexually to other women, but sometimes an intimacy arises between women that goes beyond the usual hug and kiss friends give each other as a greeting.

  When I felt her lips brush mine, I got an image of another time a woman’s lips had been on mine. It was in high school; a girlfriend had stayed the night, sharing my bed. We had laughed and talked and giggled about boys and sex, comparing the male anatomy each of us had seen—and felt. We were huddled together, getting hot from our imaginations, when my friend leaned closer to me and kissed me. She said, “I’m horny.”

  I didn’t react much at all. I lay there thinking about it, then said, “I’m sleepy,” and turned over.

  I felt Lily’s lips again. The first time she had just brushed mine, hardly touching them. Now her lips parted and pressed against mine. The kiss lasted only a moment. She cuddled up against me, her forehead against my cheek, her warm breath against my neck. I felt something against the side of my face and I realized she was crying, softly.

  My heart bled for her. I could only imagine what had happened to her on the streets of Shanghai.

  I shut my eyes, letting the champagne close down my mind. She stirred beside me and her lips found mine again. This time she licked my lips with her tongue, first outlining the shape of my lips, then slipped her tongue in my mouth.

  She parted my robe. I was warm, too hot, and having the robe pushed back felt good. Her fingers teased my abdomen, tracing the circle around my belly button, and worked her way down as far as the mound of my pubic hair. Her hand came back to cuddle my breast. She squeezed gently. Her head started to go down to my breast and I slid my hand in between.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Let’s go to sleep now.” I pulled the robe back over me and rolled over onto my side, away from her.

  She didn’t say anything and just draped her arm over my side.

  * * *

  I AWOKE IN the middle of the night with the tip of her finger stroking my nipple. I lay still, as I first recognized the pleasant sensation, then felt the desire begin to stir in my body. My nipple was hard and her finger was as gentle as a feather.

  She leaned over me and her wet mouth found the nipple. She rolled her tongue around it, then tickled it with the tip of her tongue. The touch sent a shiver through my body.

  Her hand went over the mound of my pubic area and split the lips of my vulva. As her finger started to massage my swollen clit, she kissed me on the lips. Her mouth felt soft and warm.

  “Lily—,” I whispered.

  “Shhh.”

  The ache inside me was building the more she touched me. She teased one nipple and then another, moving back and forth, sending waves of sensuous pleasure through my body. I didn’t stop her but gave in to the ecstasy.

  She worked her way down my abdomen. I couldn’t control the explosion that coursed its way through my body. She grasped my clit with her lips and teeth and I moaned out loud as the climax racked inside me.

 
; As the orgasm subsided, she straddled me, a knee on each side above my chest.

  This was the first time I had seen a woman with no pubic hair.

  SHANGHAI

  Everywhere one jostled adventurers and rubbed shoulders with people who had no inkling how extraordinary they were; the extraordinary had become ordinary; the freakish commonplace.

  —SIR HAROLD ACTON, MEMOIRS OF AN AESTHETE

  Tea is East;

  Coffee is West.

  34

  We were met at the airport with a Mercedes limo driven by a gangster type with another riding shotgun.

  “Another uncle in the triad business?” I asked.

  Lily said nothing. The China Doll had again retreated into herself. We had hardly spoken since we got up this morning and dressed. No mention was made about the intimacy we had shared. But there had been a subtle change in her. I didn’t get vibes that she was being deceitful every moment. She seemed a shade more relaxed, but definitely introspective. I wasn’t sure exactly what was waiting for her in Shanghai—hopefully, nothing worse than three guys with machine guns shooting up a nightclub.

  We were driving for ten minutes before she spoke. When she did, she held a magazine up in front of her mouth and whispered.

  “I’m not going to be seeing you once we reach the hotel. Be careful. You are in no danger as long as you stay away from me.”

  “That explains a lot,” I murmured back.

  We were to have separate rooms at the hotel, but I had expected her not only to help me book meetings but to attend them with me. Lily already knew the basics about coffee—it would be much harder with a translator. But I was actually glad I would be running alone. I didn’t want to share any more intimacies with her. I already had enough complications in my life; I didn’t need a sexual one.

  Shanghai appeared to me to be very much like all cities with enormous metropolitan areas, endless apartment and business buildings. I told Lily what I’d read in the guidebook.

  “Shanghai’s the biggest city in China, but if you count all the millions of people who live here but aren’t registered with the government, it’s probably the biggest city in the world.”

  Along the Bund, skyscrapers faced the river.

  “The Bund was called million-dollar row back in the thirties,” Lily said. “The price tag is back on it, but now they call it billion-dollar row.”

  Small talk. It was the first time we had engaged in it. She told me more about the city, again surprising me with her knowledge. I knew she was from Shanghai, but until recently, I hadn’t realized what a smart lady she was.

  On the East China Sea coast, it was both a river port and a seaport and was the most significant transportation center in the country. The Huangpu River winds through the city before dumping into the Yangtze, the longest and most important river in China.

  “We were the first major Chinese port to be opened to trade with Europe,” she said. Defeat in the Opium Wars resulted in China not only permitting the opium trade but making concessions to Britain and later other powers. Those concessions permitted the Western countries to take over and put their imprint on designated areas of the city. Explaining how the Europeans created millions of Chinese opium addicts out of greed, she said, “That’s why old Chinese still refer to Western foreigners as devils.”

  The Chinese communists made a great physical impact on the city, but their focus was on the suburban areas. There was little development in the downtown area; so many of the pre–World War II buildings that once housed diplomatic missions and foreign corporations were still standing, giving some parts of the city a 1930s retro look, a little Oriental art deco.

  She made a comment in Chinese to the driver and said to me, “I told him to take us by the Old City. It’s Old China, with narrow alleys. I have been there a hundred times and still can get lost.”

  It was near the river, half-surrounded in the old days by the French Concession. “There used to be a wall around it. The foreigners thought the wall was there to protect them, but the Chinese believed it was there to keep out the devils.” She smothered a giggle.

  I found Shanghai fascinating. I had never been in a city with so many clashes of history and cultures. The ambiance had been tempered by Chinese emperors and Chinese gangsters, by Imperialistic Westerners—the British, French, Americans—by “White Russians” fleeing communist revolutions, communists and capitalistic Chinese armies and warlords, over decades of communist austerity and Brave New Worldism, and now was being recast as the Queen of the Far East.

  * * *

  THE PEACE HOTEL was a remnant from the days of grand hotels of yesteryear’s Shanghai. It was known as the Cathay Hotel in the days when Shanghai was decadent, but the Red Chinese had changed the name, probably in an attempt to wipe away the hotel’s stigma as one of the hot spots when the city was called the Whore of the Orient.

  Unlike the five-star modern hotel we stayed at in Hong Kong, the Peace Hotel had old-world charm. It was art deco, a relic of the golden era before World War II. I liked it immediately. The hotel was elegant and had aged gracefully. Long and narrow, twelve stories high, it had a peaked structure mounted like a crown on the front. On the Bund, facing the Huangpu River, it was centrally located in the city’s business heart.

  Our rooms were on the same floor. When we stepped out of the elevator with the bellman, a man came out of a room at the end of the hall and leaned against the wall next to the door he had exited.

  He was a handsome Chinese, perhaps on the sunny side of thirty years old. I had by now become familiar with the black suits and expensive, colorful shirts preferred by the young men I’d come to identify as triad gangsters—and he fitted the mode perfectly.

  I glanced at Lily. She had a wide smile at seeing him—and bedroom eyes. Old acquaintances, for sure.

  I was relieved. I didn’t care if she fucked gangsters; sex was preferable over having them shoot up the hotel with me in it.

  While the bellman was depositing my luggage inside, I paused by my open door as Lily spoke in a sotto voce undertone to me.

  “Be careful. Shanghai is more dangerous than Colombia. Pablo is a mad-dog killer, but in my country we are thousands of years ahead in intrigue and violence.”

  “Okay.”

  “You may be called to meet him. If you do, take care in what you say. And be pleasant and submissive. Don’t ask any questions. Answer truthfully; he will know if you are lying.”

  “Meet who?” I asked.

  “The Master of the Mountain.”

  As I shut the door behind me, three things struck me. The first was that there was actual concern in her voice for me. I knew it wasn’t from the intimacy we had shared—she was a woman whose profession catered to intimacies, no doubt with both sexes. But something else had transpired between us when we exposed a little about our backgrounds to each other—perhaps mutual understanding and respect.

  The second was confirmation of what she had implied earlier when she said we wouldn’t be seeing each other—whatever need she had for me had evaporated. She was now back in Shanghai and I was excess baggage. She had cut me loose.

  That was fine with me, even if it would’ve been easier having her along—though the thought did occur to me more than once that she might have been more of a distraction than a help, a distraction because I probably would be dealing with male buyers who would be ogling her while I tried to hold their attention with a cup of coffee.

  I threw my luggage on the bed and stepped to the window.

  “I’ve come to Shanghai to sell coffee and I have a plan!” I announced.

  None of the people on the street ten stories below seemed to take notice of my proclamation.

  Before I left Colombia, I contacted a business research firm that I had used frequently during my tenure analyzing business operations for the Seattle think tank. I had them do research on fast-food-type chain store operations in Shanghai. Best of all, because they didn’t know I had left my old firm and the count
ry, I had them send the bill to my cheatin’ heart former fiancé.

  By “fast-food” I didn’t mean hamburger or finger-lickin’ chicken places. Those were not yet in great supply in the city that was still under communist rule. I was looking for business firms that had experience selling directly to the public from multiple locations. I was surprised that there were few such operations. Maybe it was too capitalistic for the communist leadership that had opened the door to Shanghai to the West. But the research firm had come up with several names, including a tea merchant with business contacts in Hong Kong and Honolulu.

  Best of all, the tea man, Feng Teh, spoke English. Mr. Feng—last names were first in Chinese—was on the top of my list. There were other tea merchants who ran stands, but none of them had the size and type of operation Feng had.

  And none spoke English.

  Of course, there was a third thing that bothered me: Lily’s last comment. Who—or what—was she talking about when she warned me about meeting the Master of the Mountain?

  I recalled Ramon’s comment on the plane that the word “assassin” came from “hashish” and that the leader of terrorists was called the Old Man of the Mountain.

  I just hoped the Master of the Mountain wasn’t China’s version of a master of assassins.

  35

  I needed to soak up the atmosphere of Shanghai, to understand the culture of the city. The Hong Kong history professor that I had met on the plane was right. If I was going to sell coffee to tea drinkers, I had to know how to fit it into their lifestyle.

  The best place to start was in the nightlife.

  I was too wound up to sleep or even take a nap. The sun had gone down as I set out to walk as much of the strange city as I could.

  I learned from the concierge that most of Shanghai’s new wave restaurants and bars were run by foreigners or by Chinese who had studied or worked abroad. Many of the Chinese were the children of people who had decades before fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan.