The Devil to Pay Read online

  Looking back, I think she was only trying to protect me. What would I have done had she given me the name? Gone knocking on his door, of course. And what reaction would I have gotten as he stood there with his wife and family staring at me? A look of horror, no doubt. Before he slammed the door in my face.

  As my mother told me more than once, “We can survive fine, just the two of us,” and she would then proceed to give me a lecture on how a woman was just as capable as a man. Now, of course, women my age expect to have the same rights as a man—but she had had to fight for them.

  Anyway, back in California after the Peace Corps, my mother strapped me on her back and took me with her when she returned to school to get a master’s. By then it was the age of Vietnam riots, the sexual revolution, the war between the sexes over women’s rights, and the battle by minorities for equal rights. Like the era that Dickens wrote about, it was the best of times and the worst of times … but one hell of a time; even I bore a scar from the era.

  My favorite show-stopper comment at parties was to tell people that I was wounded during the Vietnam War. And it was true. My mother would take time out from classes at Berkeley to participate in slogan-shouting, rock-throwing anti-war demonstrations. Once, while she was running from a police barrage of water cannons and tear gas with me strapped to her back, I got hit in the shoulder by a flying tear gas canister. I still have the scar.

  My mother received her master’s degree in something called public administration, which, as she explained, enabled you to become a bureaucrat, a word that summed up everything she hated about politics. But there was a method to her madness—in her mind, her degree gave her the right to infiltrate politics and bring some honesty and hard work to the game.

  She had a wonderful sparkling, effervescent personality and a sincere and uncontrollable impulse to help the underdog. Frankly, she was also one part flimflam artist and one part dramatic actress. The combination made her a terrific fund-raiser for social causes, and that became her forte.

  Fund-raising was a pastime that kept us on the move as the number of worthy causes increased and their distance apart became more widespread. The dynamics of moving and change also suited my mother’s personality perfectly. As for me, I learned to live out of a suitcase, changing schools and making and losing friends on a regular basis.

  When I complained, my mother made me read the experiences of Nellie Bly, America’s first female investigative reporter, who, in 1889, raced alone around the world by ship, train, and carriage to beat the eighty days of Jules Verne’s fictional character Phineas Fogg. “And that was before planes, ATMs, and tampons,” my mother would remind me.

  If keeping up with my gypsy-soul mother had imbued me with any distinctive character, it was the ability to cut and run. I was now using that ability to escape the police before they put me away where I’d be helpless and took my passport so I couldn’t leave the country even if I escaped.

  I needed money for my defense and Colombia was the only place where I would get it. The fact that the country had changed since my mother’s Peace Corps days did put a small damper on my enthusiasm.

  As the newspapers put it, Colombia was the most dangerous place in the world.

  And Medellín was the murder capital of Colombia.

  SHANGHAI

  Whore of the Orient

  One never asked why someone had come to Shanghai. It was assumed everybody had something to hide.

  —LADY JELLICOE

  6

  Shanghai, three months earlier

  “Golden Goddess.” That was what the foreigner had called her. She stood in front of a full-length mirror in her room in a house of pleasure and wondered what she looked like through the eyes of “the foreigner” and the other men who benefited from the pleasure she gave. She was naked except for long clusters of diamonds dangling from each ear.

  Her name was Lily Soong, but neither was her birth name. Her sign was the tiger. She had beauty and was cunning, both marks of the animal sign she was born under.

  Skin of golden ivory, it was like the lush blond-fawn of a newborn gazelle. Her hair, pulled to the top of her head, exposing her long, slender gazelle neck, had the fine sheen of black velvet. The raven hair contrasted with red lips and perfect white teeth, so perfect they were called “diamond teeth.”

  Her eyes were almond and partly concealed by the taper of her eyelids, her eyebrows thin, little more than pencil marks.

  She knew there were women in Hong Kong and Tokyo who had plastic surgery to open their “slanted” eyes, but she considered them fools—the tapered lids of women of the Far East spoke of mystery and the exotic, temple doors guarding secrets.

  She touched her breasts, putting her hands under the small mounds, pushing them up. The daughter of a poor farmer, when she was twelve and the blood had come she had been sold to a “fishball stall” in the Nanshi, the Old City district of Shanghai. The small booths specialized in providing young girls for quick sex to busy men, a kind of fast-food fucking. The shops were called fishballs because the breasts of the girls were small, pale, and soft like the dumplings in fish soup.

  The foreigner was fond of touching her breasts, of kissing and sucking on her taut nipples. Chinese men were not as intently interested in a woman’s mammary appendages as Western men, though some had their own unique fetish: For centuries, Chinese men had their prurient interests aroused not by breasts, buns, or legs but by the horrible deformity of bound feet. Baby girls’ feet were tightly wrapped to keep the feet from growing normally, causing them to bunch up until the feet, when full grown, were only a few inches long.

  A euphemism for the ugly stumps that fit into tiny, child-sized silk slippers was “lily-feet,” so named when an emperor’s concubine bound her feet with her toes down so she walked like a lily swaying in a breeze. The practice was gone, but many men still prized tiny feet. Even a younger generation of men, to whom the practice was nostalgic.

  Lily Soong’s most erotic feature, the one that most stimulated men, was her baby-smooth pubic mound. Her stomach was flat and firm, her skin warm and silky. The curves of her abdomen ended at her naked mons pubis. But unlike other women in the house of pleasure who shaved pubic hair, Lily Soong had been born without the ability to grow the hair in that area.

  For eons, the great sculptors of history had re-created the female body in marble without hair in the private area. To the ancients and the artists of the Renaissance, hair was too lower animal to put on a stone goddess. Lily’s naked mound made her a goddess, too, a golden one. It had been one of the reasons she had been lifted from fishball stalls to a pleasure palace to practice the most ancient of all professions.

  Her door opened without a sound and a small bent but ageless woman dressed in black entered. She moved silently, fluidly, like a shadow.

  Lily Soong waited until the woman was beside her before she acknowledged her presence.

  “Great Mother.”

  “Are you fresh?” she asked. The old woman called Great Mother had spent almost her entire life in the House of the Celestial Gate, entering as a servant during the remarkable days when Shanghai vibrated with excitement and adventure, a feast for the senses of warring gangsters and beautiful women of the night, where spies and warlords rubbed shoulders, secrets were sold dearly, and life was cheap.

  Over the decades, the old woman had learned the craft of whores without ever becoming one, becoming a master at training young girls to lose their innocence and permit their bodies to be violated, often by men old enough to be their grandfathers. Yet she had never lain with a man. She found no pleasure in matters of the flesh, and approached the conversion of girls into whores with little philosophical difference from a nun introducing girls to God.

  “Yes, I am ready.”

  No part of a woman’s body was sacred from a man’s lust. Every part of the body, every inch of her flesh, had to be ready for a man’s pleasure. Men particularly found Lily Soong’s private area stimulating. When women shav
ed the area, or removed the hair with wax, there was always residue in feel or appearance that reminded the man that hair had been there. But Lily Soong’s pubic area was as smooth and bare as a baby’s.

  “You understand what you have to do? You have been instructed about the foreigner?” She used the Mandarin word for foreigner, waiguoren. Mandarin was the official language of the country, the “common language” used nationally, but a Shanghaiese dialect was still generally used in the city. The madam, who had the bureaucratic heart and soul of the old officious Imperial eunuch class that dominated centuries of Chinese emperors, spoke only the official language, refusing to use the local dialect or even the Cantonese tongue of her birth. The Imperial eunuchs had passed into history, but there would always be people with their passion for bureaucratic red tape and steel-trap mentality.

  When she spoke of the foreigner, her tone conveyed the contempt the Imperial eunuchs had had for Westerners, a people they considered to be devils and barbarians. Lily would not have been surprised if the woman had used an even older word for foreigners, one that conveyed the inference that foreigners were truly devils and barbarians—fan kuei.

  Lily Soong dipped her finger in a jar of cream and rubbed the lotion on her breasts. Oil from the seeds of the opium poppy was in the cream. It was said to act as an aphrodisiac for men who smelled and licked it.

  “Yes, I know what I must do.”

  * * *

  THE WILD, WILD East. Wild and crazy, he thought. As a man from the West, the foreigner was a head taller than most of the crowd, but that didn’t make it any easier for him to fight his way along the densely crowded, almost impassable streets.

  The Chinese were probably the most polite and courteous people on planet Earth, especially to strangers. Under normal circumstances, when people saw the foreigner approaching, a man of a different skin color and a head taller than most others on the sidewalk, they would veer away, making space for him. Most Chinese were too polite, and their cities too crowded, to play the rude, king-of-the-sidewalk games of New York and Chicago.

  But it was the New Year under the old Chinese calendar and a billion people were celebrating—and he was sure most of them were on the street he was trying to make his way down.

  He had been in Shanghai for a week and had come down these same streets of the Old City almost daily from his hotel on the Bund. Even when the city was not celebrating, the back streets and narrow lanes of the Old City were a pandemonium of people, smells, and sounds that assaulted the senses—ri nao was what the Chinese called it. Hot noise. Food stalls, with their pungent smells of fish heads, pork rumps, and the city’s succulent hairy crabs, along with endless chatter, offered a significant portion of the din.

  The importance of food was characterized by a common greeting: “Ni chi fan le mei yo?” Have you eaten your rice yet?

  Some cities evoke images of foreign intrigue, of dangerous streets and shadowy figures in trench coats—Istanbul, Cairo, Tangiers, Casablanca, Macao. Shanghai was another city that carried a reputation as a place of mystery and intrigue. But unlike cities that could only boast of their intrigues, Shanghai also had a reputation for being rapacious and licentious. If there was a Sodom and Gomorrah of the East, it was this city where pleasure and sin had always been synonymous.

  It was like no other city he had ever experienced or even imagined.

  China was an ironfisted communist country and Shanghai its largest city. Those facts inferred that the city would be boring and sterile, its spirit of individualism smothered by communist red tape—communists rivaled the notorious Imperial eunuchs for their ability to drown humans under a bureaucratic morass.

  But Shanghai was anything but a stereotype paradigm for urban socialism. Seeing the economic failure of communism from North Korea to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and embarrassed by the economic “miracles” in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, by the mid-eighties Red China loosened its bureaucratic leash on Shanghai so the city could achieve its old standing as a world-class financial empire with a swinging, stunning social scene—aping Western disco culture.

  In its Sodom days of decadence before the Second World War and the people’s victory of Mao, the city called itself the Paris of the Orient, but it was a bastard child, part Oriental, part Occidental, a mixture that gave the city its own provocative persona. Now, the communist overlords of the modern city advertised it as the Pearl of the Orient. But old China hands, the businessmen and diplomats who had experienced the city when the yellow demon, opium, was king, when murder and sex, gangsters and sing-song girls, rubbed shoulders with warlords and revolutionaries in the city’s nightclubs, called it the Whore of the Orient.

  In the 1800s, the Western powers, led by the British, invaded and brought Chinese governments to their knees to force them to permit the sale of opium to their people, creating tens of millions of addicts. But in the true fashion of proverbial Eastern revenge, a slow strangle rather than a bullet to the head, the day would come when China would export opium’s most potent by-product, heroin, to millions of addicts in Europe and America.

  * * *

  THE FOREIGNER HAD to leave his taxi blocks away and push his way through the press of people on the streets. Stepping into the gutter, he walked a block alongside a long red dragon that slithered down the center of the street, moving its head from side to side and blowing fire that brought shrieks from children.

  Distracted by an endless sea of excited people, fantastic costumes, and the monsters of Chinese mythology, he never realized he was being followed by a killer.

  * * *

  THE SMALL, SLENDER man moved like a wraith behind the foreigner. His real name had long been extinguished by nonuse and he went now by his number, 186, and the name his fellow gang members gave him—Snake, a tribute to his ability to slither along behind a victim without being noticed.

  Had the foreigner he was following known about Snake, he would have called him a “triad” gangster. But “triad,” which was meant to imply a Chinese criminal organization like the Mafia, was a word used by Westerners for the secret organization, not by Far Easterners.

  Secret societies have flourished in China almost during its entire recorded history. With their rituals, oath taking, and harsh penalties for violations of rules, societies were formed to give strength in numbers, beneficial clubs to aid business or workers. They were usually kept secret to keep oppressive governments from destroying them. But many secret societies found their tao, their heavenly path or way, with crime. These were called black societies.

  The triad name arose from the obsession the black societies had with things associated with the number 3. Thus a triangle representing the tripartite of existence—heaven, earth, and man—became a banner and things in triple became used in ceremonies and even membership standing. Snake’s gang number of 186, like all gang numbers, was divisible by 3. Perhaps the fact that 9 is considered a lucky number to many Chinese also fits into the equation of 3s.

  Snake’s gang was called the 24 Karat Society. It was well established in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, the communists were never able to stamp out gangs, in either China or other Red countries.

  In the British Hong Kong colony, which was due to be turned back over to Red China in 1997, the gang had sometimes been used by China’s KGB-type intelligence agency for “wet work,” i.e., assassinations. Other times the gang was used to kidnap and bring back dissidents and scientists who had fled to foreign soil.

  Snake was not an international gangster flush with a luxury car, palatial villa, and beautiful women, nor was he a simple triad “soldier” who ran drugs or hijacked trucks of computers. His specialty was quiet, efficient murder. Like his namesake, he slithered up behind his victims and struck without warning. He took neither pleasure nor regret from his work—it was simply the path his life took.

  Like Lily Soong, the pleasure girl, his own path had been established when he came into the world as another mouth to f
eed in a family that had a less nutritious diet and less medical attention than most cats and dogs in America.

  7

  When he was a hundred feet from the House of the Celestial Gate, the foreigner pushed his way through the crowd to reach the front door. The bottom floor of the five-floor building was a karaoke bar. He went into the bar.

  The bar looked typical for karaoke, a man and woman singing along to the canned instrumental accompaniment, people drinking, laughing. But this was Shanghai, and nothing was what it appeared to be. The women were the tip-off—their eyes were too savvy from having seen too much; they were much too worldly to be wives or girlfriends; their clothes covered too little and cost too much. They wore traditional feminine dress—the chi-pao, a long tunic with a slit on the side—but instead of the modesty of long pants underneath, bare flesh was exposed by slits that came up to naked thighs. Their shoes were the “spike heels” that went in and out of vogue.

  “China Dolls” was how Westerners thought of the bar girls—petite figures in bright red and yellow satin dresses, balanced on high heels. The girls looked as fragile as ceramic dolls but made men shake with sex.

  The karaoke bar was an updated version of the nightclubs and “teahouses” where dime-a-dance and sing-song girls drank fuck-wine—dark, cold tea paid for as high-priced whiskey by male customers—and offered more than small talk to sailors and businessmen.

  There were other bars and party rooms, places where any perversion or appetite could be satisfied, but his destination was a private room on the fifth floor where Lily Soong was waiting.

  * * *

  LILY SOONG ANSWERED a discreet tap on her door. She opened the door to Snake.

  He looked at her with a question on his face.

  “He’s down in the karaoke bar,” she said. “They’ll call me when he leaves.”