This Is How It Really Sounds Page 15

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  By the time a month had passed, he’d written six new songs. “Kickin’ It,” “Vanity Fair,” “Never Grow Old,” “Cold, Hard, and Dangerous,” “Buried Alive,” and “Perfect.” Duffy had worked on all of them, and they shared the songwriting credit, which was good, because with songwriting credit came publishing royalties, and that was where the money was. Duffy had a stake in it now. And Bobby—for the first time in years Bobby didn’t seem to be sleepwalking through his career. Bobby would check in with him every week or so or stop by the apartment and listen to the latest cuts. He’d firmed up another date on the tour, and actually seemed to be working the phone a little harder to line up more gigs.

  He was also up to thirty push-ups. When he hit the bag, he moved it. Not with a little push, but with a loud smack and a little shock wave that made it flex around his fist, like the bag was taking a little tiny bow. He’d done the trap and hit at least twenty thousand times, by his count, and when he finally worked up the nerve to go back to the health club, a trainer there taught him how to throw a hook and do a front kick, and he incorporated those motions into his routine. He went to the club every day now, worked with the trainer, rode the exercise bike, did the strange exercises Charlie had taught him, even though everyone stared at him, and finally, drenched in sweat, he’d sit down to read a magazine. He still didn’t know how he would find and confront Peter Harrington in Shanghai. He tried to put together an MO from various private-eye shows he’d seen on TV. He’d enter a squash tournament and punch him out on the court. He’d charm the receptionist at the Portman Hotel Health Club and get the dirtbag’s address. He’d follow him on the street with his collar turned up and one of those earbud radios talking with some dude on the other end of it, saying shit like “I’ve got a visual!” or “The package is moving.” If he had to, he’d fly to Shanghai and make it up as he went along.

  He missed Charlie a little bit, since he was the one whose routine he was following. Even though Charlie had dumped him, Pete reasoned that maybe that was just what had to happen. Charlie thought he couldn’t do it, but Charlie was all the people who’d ever told him he couldn’t do something, whether it was moving to L.A., or hitting it big with the DreamKrushers, or going solo. On and off during his workouts he’d think of the old man, thinking, Check this out, Charlie! In a way, Charlie was present. He didn’t know how present until he sauntered into the cool-down area one day and sat in his usual chair. On the table next to it was a copy of Modern Maturity magazine. He looked at it, on top of a stack of other magazines; then he glanced around the room. A couple of people noticed him—he was still Pete Harrington—but he knew better this time. He picked up the magazine. The note was inserted next to the first page:

  65 WU LI LANE. LET’S TALK.

  He found the old man waiting patiently outside the club. He felt like hugging him. “Charlie, man, you punked me again!”

  Charlie, smiling at him, reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “You gotta have a little fun in this business or it gets you down. I heard you finally learned how to throw a punch.”

  “Don’t make me drop you, old man!”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows amiably; then his face suddenly changed and he gave a guttural snarl and slowly reached for Harrington’s throat with both hands. The musician reflexively reached up and grabbed Charlie’s wrists, and before he knew it, without feeling anything but a gentle insistence from Charlie, he found himself somehow turned around backward and hunched down with his wrist at the breaking point and his arm locked stiffly out to the side. He was pinned in place like an insect, looking at the lower front door of the health club.

  He heard Charlie laughing again up above him; then he was turned loose. The old man’s yellow wolfish teeth were exposed in an expression of pure joy. “Oh, that was funny!”

  “What the hell did you do?”

  “Just a little Chin-na. You may need more than a month of training to drop me.”

  “Teach me how to do that!”

  Charlie started walking down the street, and Pete followed him. “I’m sure you wouldn’t find it very interesting.”

  “No, seriously!”

  “It’s old-guy stuff.”

  “C’mon, Charlie! Cut me in on the good shit!”

  Charlie turned to him. “Maybe later. How many push-ups can you do?”

  “I’m up to thirty an hour. I can do forty, max.”

  “On your knuckles?”

  “Does this answer your question?” He made a fist in front of Charlie’s face, hearing the joints crackle into a solid ball of bones and muscle. The knuckles were covered with thick yellow calluses.

  “Let’s see.”

  “Here? On the street?” They were on the sidewalk between a law office and a kosher deli. At any given moment there were three or four people passing by.

  “Right here. On your knuckles.”

  Pete dropped to the ground. He could feel the pebbly surface of the concrete, but the skin was thickened enough that he didn’t feel any pain. He knocked out thirty push-ups quickly, slowed down progressively on the next six, labored heavily on the following three, then stalled halfway up on his fortieth before fighting his way to the top. Just before he finished, Charlie said, “Do one more.”

  He went down again but there was nothing left in his arms. He could see people’s ankles slowing down and halting around him. He pushed as hard as he could, but his body didn’t rise from the pavement. His arms began trembling.

  Charlie’s voice came down to him, harder than he’d ever heard it. “Do it!”

  He summoned everything he had and focused all of it into his arms. It was the entire universe squeezed into one gesture of will, there on the Fairfax Avenue sidewalk with its pedestrians and its litter of car horns and paper cups and plastic bags and stray music. If he failed, he would fall on his face. He rose a quarter inch, then an inch, and with that movement he seemed to build some unlikely momentum and shivered slowly to the top and held himself there. He hesitated a moment, and then, when Charlie said nothing, he bent his knee underneath himself and stood up, breathing hard and feeling the blood swelling in his face. He faced the trainer, who looked at him levely, his slightly cloudy blue eyes unyielding. “Are you still going to Shanghai?”

  “Yeah,” he puffed.

  “That’s a coincidence. Because I’ve been thinking of going there myself. I’ve got some loose ends to tie up.”

  Pete grinned. “Let’s do it!” He lifted up his fist for a bump, but Charlie just looked at it.

  “What’s that for?”

  “It’s a fist bump, Charlie. We bump knuckles.”

  The old man carefully raised his fist and moved it gently toward Pete Harrington’s until it touched.

  “Hell yeah!” the musician said. “I told you I’d keep the faith, Charlie.”

  “So you did. Let’s head in here and get something to eat.” Charlie pushed the door of the deli open. He turned back to the singer and said in a lower voice, “I think the waitress has her eye on me. And I kind of like it.”

  IV

  Cathay Hotel

  1

  The Buried City

  The trip to Shanghai was the longest flight Charlie had taken in two decades, and he wasn’t really sure he was up to it. After the first two hours, his back had started to hurt, and by the time they got to Tokyo, nine hours later, he was squirming in his seat like a two-year-old. His bad foot started to throb from all the blood pooling in it, and he had to go to the bathroom about a dozen times, waiting in line beside the tiny cubicle and trying not to fall down. He had to lean against a seat, and the woman in it kept giving him dirty looks. He felt a bone-tiredness that bordered on the painful, as if all the muscles that held his spine together were too damn beat to do the job and everything was going out of alignment. In Tokyo he managed to find a rest lounge and lie down to sleep for an hour, so deep under the darkness that when Pete woke him up and he rose to his feet, he was still dreaming of M
illie and the old farm in Washington, before their son died. The way those dreams always went. Nothing really happened in them, it was just the presence of his son, but all so much more vivid than he could ever re-create in his waking life. It wasn’t like when he tried to remember him, it was just him, with the clothes and the smell and the haircut, all of him instantly there and alive. They were in the house. Eddie was about eight, standing in a white T-shirt like kids wore back then, and he was so overjoyed to see the boy, he’d gone straight to him and thrown his arms around him and said, “Eddie! I miss you so much!” and the boy had hugged him back. Then he’d felt someone shaking his shoulder, and there was Pete, telling him to get up, that they’d called their flight to Shanghai, and the only thing left was that furry rotten taste of sleep in his mouth.

  He had to force himself to get back on the plane for the last three hours to Shanghai. He managed to doze off, his mouth hanging open and his snoring so loud that a man across the aisle finally poked him and said something unpleasant in Chinese. The lights in the cabin snapped an obnoxious glow into the cabin, and useless little hot towels were handed out with tongs, as if you could actually get your hands dirty in a sealed corridor thirty thousand feet above the earth. They watered the passengers with pots of green tea, brought a breakfast of noodles and red barbecued pork, which blocked up the aisle when he desperately needed to piss. He waited until he was practically salivating with the need to go, then begged them to let him pass and managed to reach the bathroom just as his bladder started to give out: he was only a little wet but he sprayed urine all over the bathroom floor and wiped it up as well as he could out of embarrassment and shame. He dried his pants and tried his best to cover himself as he made his way back to his seat. It was nine at night when they got to Shanghai.

  He recognized absolutely nothing. The Shanghai he’d known had disappeared as completely as the sixty-odd years since he’d last been in this city. The airport back then had been more like an oversize airstrip, mostly military traffic. Some DC-3s, C-40 Constellations cashiered from the war. The world was still clearing rubble from the streets, and people had better things to do than tour around a country like China in the last phases of a civil war. Nineteen forty-nine. The Nationalists were leaving town with everything they could carry: crates and crates of stuff from palaces and mansions, military ordnance, fancy prewar automobiles. He still remembered a maroon and white Bugatti limousine a half a block long being backed into a wooden crate while an army officer held a loaded pistol on the owner. The damn thing was probably sitting in a museum in Taipei now.

  Zhang met them at the airport and took them to their hotels. They’d traveled on opposite sides of the plane and were staying at separate hotels, just in case somebody looked into it later. Zhang had gotten gray in the twenty years since they’d last seen each other, when Charlie’d come over to Beijing on a trade mission for Hughes Aerospace. Zhang shook hands warmly, but he looked tired, and Charlie realized he must be close to seventy now, a lifelong smoker. He’d been the chief of the Shanghai branch of the Public Security Police in the eighties and early nineties, then retired to make a lot of money in the new China. Still had enough guanxi there to coast along for the next decade doing little odds and ends like this. Zhang was doing him a favor more than anything else: Charlie’d saved his father’s life in 1944. He’d given Zhang the financier’s name, and Zhang called back a week later with a whole dossier: names of his business partners, both Chinese and American, entries and exits, photos, right down to the girl he was seeing. The beauty of a police state.

  They dropped the musician at a name-brand hotel in the center of Shanghai. Charlie didn’t want to go in because of the security cameras, so he said good-bye in the car. Pete clapped him on the shoulder. “You okay, Charlie?”

  “I’ve felt better, but I’ve felt worse, too.”

  “We’ll be up and running after a good sleep.”

  He watched through the glass doors while Zhang’s driver helped him check in. It was funny traveling with Pete Harrington. He always looked around as if he expected to be recognized, and, surprisingly, he often was. Even in the boarding line at the Tokyo airport, a young Chinese girl had come up to him and asked for his autograph.

  “I’m a cult figure in China,” Harrington announced to him.

  Charlie chuckled. “Why is that?”

  “Who knows, man? Wayne Newton is a major draw in Slovakia. Guns N’ Roses is still huge in Argentina. Something hits at the right time and you’ve always got that moment. I toured here in 1992, one of the first big Western acts, and it, uh, created a little stir.” The singer lingered on that memory, then left it quickly behind. “The girls on that tour? I don’t even want to talk about it. They were all like little geishas.”

  “That’s Japan.”

  “Yeah, whatever, Charlie. Don’t bludgeon me with facts. I’m a big-picture guy.”

  Now Harrington was getting shy looks from a little cluster of young Chinese workers behind the reception counter. He saw one of the boys work up the nerve to ask for his autograph, which the singer gave him with a little flourish that so cowed the kid that he stepped back a few feet and stared incredulously at the piece of paper.

  They drove off to his hotel, a couple cuts below his client’s, but Zhang could get him checked in under a phony name here. A lot of polished stone and brass, an updated version of the better Chinese state hotels he remembered from twenty years ago. A camera over the reception area, another over the door. The guy in the black sport coat talking to the bellhop looked like security, but maybe not. The place wasn’t that expensive.

  By the time he got to bed it was eleven at night, and he lay there for an hour, wide awake. Something in the airplane food had given him a bad stomach, and his gut was rumbling until two. He had to go sit on the toilet every twenty minutes. His goddamn foot was still throbbing from the flight. If he didn’t watch it, he’d end up in the hospital with a blood clot. Wouldn’t that be fun to explain to his client? Charlie’d crossed the Atlantic in the gun turret of a B-17, dropped into Burma, into Kunming, into Germany. All so long ago. Like Pete Harrington’s great career. They were both trying to salvage something here.

  The next morning it took him a few seconds to figure out where he was, and then he could barely get out of bed. His foot was killing him. His asshole was raw from the diarrhea. He had that doped-out feeling from jet lag and exhaustion, but this time he didn’t have any uppers to snap him out of it for the mission. He dragged himself into the shower and let it run over his head, massaging the back of his neck until he could at least move it to one side, and he put his knees together and moved them in big circles to try to loosen up the tendons, the way he’d learned to sixty years ago. The damn things were shot, too much jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, but it helped a little bit. That’s how it was now. He spent a half hour every morning loosening and stretching his old-man’s body, and when he was all finished it was only twenty percent better than when he started. He did his back exercises and twenty push-ups and then he did the strange stretching and strengthening movements he’d picked up in China. Tiger Scratches the Tree. An Archer Opens the Bow. The Bear. Back when he’d had real muscles, he’d used to like looking in the mirror when he did these. Now he did them as he looked out at the city. After that he sent a quick e-mail to Beth Blackman and told her everything was on target.

  It took him an hour and a cup of tea to get rolling. He got down to the cafeteria at 6:30 and surveyed the copper chafing dishes of the buffet. Bleached-out sausage, runny scrambled eggs. A halfhearted nod to the few Western travelers who’d gotten marooned here. He found a big cauldron of rice porridge, something he’d developed a taste for in his old Kunming days, when they’d gone sneaking through the jungles and a cup of cold porridge was a damn feast. The tribesmen used to put insects in theirs, when there was nothing else, but he’d never been able to do that. He spooned some out and stirred in a few pickled vegetables.

  At 7:00 Harrington still wa
sn’t answering his phone. He didn’t really need him today—he wasn’t the person to take along when you didn’t want to be noticed—but the lack of discipline brought all his old doubts back, too. The singer had trained hard, and he’d trained lonely, but that didn’t mean he’d pull it off. He went outside to make sure the driver was waiting for him, and then he left a message at Harrington’s hotel. “I’m going out to look around. Keep your cell phone handy. I’ll see you this afternoon.” It was Thursday morning in Shanghai.

  Zhang had hired them a car: a white Audi, Chinese-made. The most forgettable car in the world. Also two cheap local cell phones that they’d tested during the ride in from the airport. Zhang had found him a man he’d worked with before who spoke decent English and had the necessary experience, including keeping his mouth shut. Zhang had written out the relevant addresses for him in Chinese and English. They were headed to the financier’s home. On the way there he tried out the little bit of Chinese he remembered from the war, but his pronunciation was all off, and he didn’t want to use up the man’s good humor on it.

  Peter Harrington lived in the old French Concession, and he remembered it as one of the calmer areas of Shanghai. At least it was still recognizable as the same place. The plane trees with their mottled pale-green bark, still lined the streets, and the high white walls sealed the houses off from the road. A good area for running, which was one of Harrington’s exercise routines. From his house to his health club, five mornings a week. If the target was like most people, he could probably trace out his running route just by downloading a map from the Internet.