The Devil to Pay Read online

  “Mr. Feng, I will not insult your business acumen by claiming I know more than you do. You are a successful businessman with a long-established business, selling a product that has been around probably since humans conquered fire. But I identify with a different group of people than you. You are right; people of tradition will not rush to coffee. But with the greatest respect, I am going to point out that there is a race to change, and you are one of the leaders of it in this city. You may not be ready to start drinking coffee, but the people who are your customers, people we would call yuppies in my country, do not need their arms twisted to buy coffee drinks.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “If that is true, it is a revelation to me. And quite a conclusion to be raised by a young woman who has been in China for little more than twenty-four hours.”

  “The fact that I stepped off a plane yesterday is exactly why I was able to reach the conclusion. I wasn’t born and raised here; I haven’t been in business for years here; my ancestors can’t be traced back to the Three Kingdoms. So I see the city with completely fresh eyes.”

  “And what do those fresh eyes see?”

  “Change. Radical, racing, revolutionary change. Led by an invasion of Western culture.” I took a sip of coffee and let him digest that a bit. He kept his features blank. “Over the centuries, China has exported and imported culture, often in the form of food. Chinese food is common in America and Europe and so is tea drinking. Right now the Euro-American business sector isn’t just invading the city and the country with business technology; it’s changing the way the youthful, upwardly mobile people dress, dance, listen to music, drink liquor, soda pop, and … tea.”

  He smiled and nodded. “My tea shops. There were many in the city who said I was a fool to offer a cup of tea at a price for which people could brew a whole pot themselves in their office.”

  “The secret to the success of your tea shops is their locations. You placed them where the new breed, the Chinese yuppies, work. Unlike their parents, they will pay a premium for a cup of tea, especially if it is presented to them as something special.”

  “And your idea is that we simply start selling coffee drinks along with tea.” He shook his head. “We have the facilities, but there still is a question of taste.”

  “Let me give you the bottom line—the yuppies of Shanghai are aping Western culture. A coffee boom is sweeping America and Europe. Coffee has transpired from being a breakfast drink to being a fashion statement.”

  He was still completely expressionless. I felt like reaching over and grabbing his necktie and giving it a jerk. My patience was beginning to wane.

  “On the plane over from the States, I met a professor of Chinese history who told me that I wouldn’t be able to sell coffee to the Chinese until I was able to fit it into the culture. Last night I walked the streets of Shanghai. What I saw was a clash of cultures, East meeting West, East aping West while keeping its own identity.

  “It won’t be long before fast-food hamburgers are drawing money away from the fish stalls—and people who used to stand in line to buy tea drinks are going to be buying coffee drinks.”

  I picked up my bag. “Your coffee drinks.”

  37

  The session with Mr. Feng wasted me. I was worn-out from not just expending nervous energy but worrying about what he thought. His inscrutable features were unreadable. I didn’t know if I’d made any points at all. His expression never changed. Now I knew what “poker-faced” meant.

  He thanked me for coming, gave me a gift of rare jasmine tea and a delicate old teacup.

  Everything but an agreement to buy my coffee.

  His response to my question of whether he would venture into the coffee business with Café de Oro was to mutter, “We’ll see; we’ll see.”

  My tail wasn’t there when I came out of the warehouse. Either the police had lost interest in me or being followed had been a figment of my imagination. The fact that I wasn’t being followed also changed my plans to cut and run.

  I decided not to hit the hotel at a run and race for the airport. If I wasn’t being followed by the police, there was no longer any rush to leave. And desperation had set in. I had foolishly set my hopes on Mr. Feng, I suppose because he spoke English and his chain of tea shops was perfect for coffee sales. For sure, I needed to see the other businessmen on the list, all of whom would be more difficult because none of them spoke English or had ready-made outlets for my product.

  My room phone was ringing when I came through the door. I answered it.

  “It’s me,” Josh said. “Listen, don’t talk—”

  “What do you mean—”

  “The police are coming!”

  “What?”

  “You have to get rid of the stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “There’s a bag of dope, maybe two, in with your coffee samples; it’s hidden somewhere in the suitcase.”

  “What?”

  “Get the dope and flush it down the toilet, tear up the bags it came in, too, and flush them down. Listen to me—be careful: Don’t sniff the stuff; don’t breathe it in when you dump it; don’t even get it on your hands or clothes. Cover your nose and mouth with a towel when you dump it in the toilet. Don’t breathe any of it in.”

  “What is going on? How do you know—”

  “Do it; hurry.”

  He hung up.

  I gaped at the phone, my mind blown. I dropped the phone and spun around. I had to get rid of the—

  Somebody shouted in Chinese outside my door.

  Then it was crashed open.

  Oh my God!

  38

  Seated at a small table in a police interrogation room, I stared across at a man who was preoccupied with papers in front of him. My hands were in my lap, twined tightly together. When I put them on the table they shook.

  My mind screamed, This can’t be happening to me!

  I had been seized in my room by police officers with guns. In a matter of seconds I was out of the room, handcuffed, and in a police car.

  No one had said anything to me in English or Chinese.

  The man at the table was the Joey Chin look-alike who I had spotted following me. Another man entered the room and spoke to the seated officer.

  After he left, the man seated across from me said in English, “The penalty for bringing narcotics into the People’s Republic of China is death.”

  I was terrified and ready to cry, but now a calmness had settled over me. It wasn’t that I was no longer scared. But now my life had taken another bizarre twist, a surrealistic, dreamlike quality.

  Here I was in a police station in Shanghai with a Chinese police officer telling me I was facing the death penalty.

  This can’t be happening to me.

  “That’s really funny,” I said.

  He reared back a little, frowning at me. “Did you say … funny?”

  “Humorous, ha-ha, funny.”

  “A penalty of death is a joke to you?”

  “Oh, no, no, no, I wasn’t talking about what you said; that’s serious. I was thinking about Seattle and Shanghai. A Chinese criminal almost killed me in Seattle; now a Chinese police officer says I may be killed here in Shanghai. They both start with an S, Seattle and Shanghai,” I babbled, my mind in a state of calm hysteria.

  He just stared at me. I had managed to make him speechless.

  I rubbed my forehead. “I’m sorry; you probably think I’m a nutcase, a crazy. It’s just that everything’s gone to hell in my life the last few weeks. Everything was normal and now it’s all insane.”

  “Is that why you smuggle drugs? Because you need money?”

  He slipped it into the conversation casually. But the words carried a lethal charge—an affirmative answer would qualify me for the death penalty.

  “I know nothing about drugs.”

  My mind wasn’t functioning on all cylinders and the whole situation jangled my nerves, but I wasn’t ready to confess to something I didn’t do. In fa
ct, I wasn’t ready to admit to anything but my name and address, something like the name, rank, and serial numbers POWs limited themselves to when they were being questioned.

  A friend who was constantly calling the police on her husband—and vice versa—told me that the best way to deal with a cop was deny, deny, deny. “Otherwise they twist everything you say.”

  So that was the only tactic my stunned brain could manage. It would be particularly easy in this case because I knew nothing.

  “What about the drugs found in your room?”

  “I have not brought any narcotics into your country. If anything was found in my room, I did not put it there or know it was there.”

  “It will go better for you if you just tell me the truth. Someone asked you to bring drugs here to Shanghai. Who was that?”

  “I brought no drugs. If you found anything, someone hid it in my luggage.”

  He shook his head. “We know you brought the drugs in. It will go easier on you if you tell me where they are. If we have to find where you hid them, we will seek the maximum penalty.”

  The implication that they hadn’t found any drugs dawned on me. It meant one of two things: Either they didn’t realize that I had given a bellman the suitcase containing my samples … or Lily had already gotten the drugs out of the suitcase.

  In any case, they hadn’t found the drugs. If they really existed. For all I knew, this was all some sort of hustle by the cops; maybe they were—

  No, Lily had used me to smuggle contraband into the country. It all fit too well.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about. I came to Shanghai to sell coffee, not narcotics.”

  As he went on and on about my need to cooperate, I gave him the same essential reply—I knew nothing about narcotics.

  “You came to Shanghai in the company of a woman who calls herself Lily Soong.”

  “I flew in on the same plane, if that’s what you mean. She came here for her own reasons; I came here to sell coffee.”

  “She is the one who was smuggling the narcotics—is that correct?”

  “I know nothing about Lily Soong and smuggling. If she was smuggling anything, it was without my knowledge. I want to contact the American consulate.”

  I deliberately avoided the opportunity to put the blame on Lily. The problem with telling the police that the drugs belonged to Lily was that showing any knowledge at all would implicate me. I was between a rock and a hard place. I couldn’t even put the blame on the guilty without proving to the police that I knew she was smuggling drugs into the country—and I had helped her, even inadvertently, by putting them in my luggage.

  It went on and on, he asking me to tell him where the narcotics were—or to at least confirm that I knew of their existence—and me denying any knowledge and asking for the American consulate.

  My head was splitting, my stomach volcanic, my throat raw and dry, after what seemed like hours of the monotone questions-accusations and my monotone replies.

  They had taken my watch and jewelry, but I still had the clothes I was arrested in when they took me to a cell. It had a single bed and a hole in the floor that passed for a toilet. The “sink” was a faucet that came out of the wall and flowed into the hole in the floor, the same hole used as a toilet. It wasn’t part of a cell block, but a single cell by itself.

  I was sick from fright, but I maintained my own version of being poker-faced.

  I was given a bowl of spicy fish and rice soup. I couldn’t stomach food, but I forced myself to sip the juice. It burned my raw throat.

  I lay on the mat on the cot and turned to the wall. Certain that I was being watched by hidden video cameras, I kept my face hidden as I sobbed.

  39

  “You are being released,” my monotoned tormentor told me.

  He showed up at my cell in the morning and escorted me to a counter where a woman gave me back my personal possessions.

  “You must leave Shanghai within twenty-four hours.”

  “I’ll be on the next plane. Just give me a ride to the airport.” The plane can be going to hell for all I care, I wanted to say.

  “Colombia is a lawless country and you are a lawless person.”

  I smothered a reply that would prove his point.

  “To return to China will subject you to arrest and prosecution.”

  “I guarantee you won’t see me again. I’ve had enough Chinese hospitality to last a lifetime.”

  A limo was waiting outside. The window rolled down and Lily stuck her smiling face out. “We will give you a ride.”

  I returned her smile. “You bitch, I’d rather drink Drano than ride with you.”

  An evil-looking man in a black suit stepped away from the wall of a building. He had his hand in his pocket. He wasn’t clutching his comb. He nodded at the limo. I took the hint and got in.

  Lily and her boyfriend were the only other occupants in the passenger area. He rattled off something to me in quick-fire Chinese. I didn’t understand a word of it, but the fact he was pissed at me came across clearly.

  “Where is our stuff?” Lily asked.

  “Your stuff?”

  She smiled. “My boyfriend is not patient. We need to know what you did with the package.”

  “I didn’t do anything with it.”

  “You must have hid it—if the police had found it, you would still be in jail. And so would I.”

  “I didn’t hide anything; I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The boyfriend pulled a gun and shoved it in my face.

  “No!” Lily yelled at him.

  He put away the gun. He struck me as a loose cannon that could go off again at any moment.

  She patted his face. “I love him, but he’s crazy.”

  “How nice for both of you. Maybe you can enjoy a murder-suicide someday together. Would you mind dropping me off at my hotel so I can get my things and head for the airport? I just spent the night in jail and almost got the death penalty because of you.”

  “What did you tell the police?”

  “The truth. It was easy; I don’t know anything.”

  “There was a package in your suitcase, one of the bags of coffee beans, but it wasn’t coffee inside.”

  I shook my head and smiled sweetly. “I don’t know anything about a package, other than the ones that have coffee in them. If there had been something there, the police would have found it. And you and Bugsy would be the ones facing the death penalty.”

  Bugsy got my drift. He went for his gun again and Lily was all over him.

  She said to me, “Because you are my friend, I am trying to keep him from killing you. But I will not be able to hold him back much longer; he’s very excitable. We need the package. The police don’t have it or they wouldn’t have released you. I bribed a maid to enter your room to get the package, but your suitcase was gone. What did you do with it?”

  “It was stolen.”

  “What?”

  The lie just popped out. But it fitted nicely. If I told her I’d left the suitcase with the bellmen and she got caught grabbing it, I’d be back in the Shanghai jail in a flash.

  Lily locked eyes with me. “Listen to me. If we don’t give him the drugs, he will go into a rage and kill both of us.”

  I was ready to break out crying. I smothered it and spoke in a firm tone. “Lily, use your head; you know I don’t have the drugs. If I did, the police would have them and I’d still be in jail.”

  Her boyfriend didn’t catch my drift. He pulled out his gun. Lily threw herself on him, shouting something. I heard the bang, a loud explosion, and she jerked back.

  The driver slammed on the brakes and the three of us were flung forward. We crashed into something; I saw another car beside us. My door suddenly swung open and a man with a gun fired into the passenger area. The other door jerked open and more shots were fired.

  It all happened so fast. My hearing was stunned, my nose filled with the acrid stench of gunpowder.

  I was
pulled out of the passenger area by gunmen and shoved into another limo.

  Mr. Feng smiled and nodded. “So good of you to join us, Miss Novak.”

  40

  Another man was seated in the limo’s rear passenger area, an older Chinese man about Mr. Feng’s age, thinner and dressed as conservatively. The tea merchant said the man’s name was Mr. Chow.

  The limo flowed smoothly in Shanghai traffic.

  Mr. Feng listened on his car phone for a moment. He hung up and gave me a small, polite smile.

  “So many questions you must have. And no doubt a low opinion of our city.” He waved his forefinger at me. “But don’t judge a city of millions by the few.”

  I nodded. Or at least my head bobbed on my shoulders. My mind was numb.

  “The lover of the woman you call Lily worked for Mr. Chow. But he recently decided that he wanted to work for himself.”

  I looked at the blood on my clothes.

  Mr. Feng said, “Yes, his blood. He no longer works for anyone.”

  “Lily…?”

  “She has a small wound, mostly burn from her lover’s pistol going off. Did he try to kill her?”

  “He tried to kill me; she stopped him.”

  Mr. Feng rattled off something in Chinese to Mr. Chow, I assume a report about Lily.

  I spoke slowly. “Will you explain what is going on?”

  Mr. Feng sighed. “I am ashamed of my countrymen, ashamed for my whole country. But as I say, there are just a few bad people among so many good.”

  I nodded at Mr. Chow. “Who is this gentleman?”

  “As I said, he is—was—the boss of the man who was killed.”

  I nodded. “Triad?”

  “I have heard that word used.”

  “Is he the Master of the Mountain?”

  Mr. Feng giggled and spoke in Chinese to Mr. Chow, who joined him in the mirth.

  “As the hotel concierge told you, we know nothing about triads or Master of the Mountain.”

  Which meant that they knew plenty. Mr. Chow was a chip off the same block as Lily’s Hong Kong “uncle.” I wouldn’t doubt that they were brothers.

  “The concierge told you about my conversation?”