There’s no good option. He’s not going to kill her, and he doesn’t want to choke her out, and even if he did he doesn’t think he could do it silently, so he guesses he has to let her go. He decides to give her money, both to buy her continued silence and goodwill and because Kayla, his ex, who seems far in the past now, had been militant about kindness to sex workers. As he reaches into his front pocket for his money the bullpup dips to the side, which she appears to read as an indication that she should leave, and her face doesn’t change as she sidles toward the door, staring at him fixedly, and he wants to say wait, take some money, take your clothes, at least take the bathrobe, but of course he can’t say a thing, and then she’s gone.
He realizes he’s done there, unless he wants to tiptoe into the bedroom and shoot Hiro in the face, an idea of considerable strategic merit, but if just one person hears the gunshot and calls the cops or even the lobby then his life is done, and Hiro could have killed him in Kuan Lon, in fact had meant to but instead let him live, gave him gifts and the place he’s now discarding.
Out in the hall he closes the door carefully, wonders if Akemi is watching from somewhere and will lock it behind him, but he doesn’t hear a click. He looks to his left and there’s the girl speed-walking away, and just at that moment she looks back over her shoulder, sees him, hesitates. On her back is a tattoo of a phoenix, its wings unfurled over her shoulder blades, its long tail reaching her coccyx, and in the corridor’s low light its feathers flash green and blue, as iridescent as the throat of a hummingbird, an effect he’s never seen in a tattoo and of a quite hypnotic loveliness. Her eyes are on the bullpup, which he’s holding at port arms, so he clicks on the safety and lowers it, which is her signal to sprint off down the corridor like a startled deer. He tears his eyes from her lean grace and stuffs the gun into his duffel as he strides off the other way.
*
As the elevator falls past the ninetieth floor he realizes he didn’t close the duffel fully and the bullpup’s stock is protruding. He shoves it back into the bag, zips it shut and looks up at the car’s tiny security camera. A capital offense to be in possession, Hiro had said. He wonders if anyone is watching—probably not, in one elevator among many in the middle of the night, but what if they have automatic image recognition for guns? Does that even exist? Lares had said something about image recognition being a hard problem, but was that just for faces and people? It occurs to him that outside of fighting he doesn’t really know how anything works and has to guess his way through the world.
The girl’s tattoo shimmers in his memory. The phoenix must be a potent symbol in her personal iconography, and he wonders what fires she’s passed through, what rebirth. Lares once said that soldiering and hooking were essentially the same job—dangerous, but more money than you could probably get otherwise, and they’d generally take you, if you were young and healthy, and both put you a little beyond the law.
As the elevator falls past the fiftieth floor he takes out the phone, sees that it still has the earpiece attached. If she’s not on the phone he has no way of finding her, and no option but to leave Hong Kong and disappear as best he can, but when he puts the earpiece in she cheerily says, “So I guess it worked out, huh?”
“Yeah,” he says, happy to hear her voice, and that once again they share a perspective. “I’ve got the phone. I’m in an elevator, going down. I don’t think Hiro woke up.”
“Well done.”
“I thought maybe you’d have been watching. I mean, you did find my room.”
“It was dark in there, and then my net access went out,” she says, which seems strange, because aren’t phone access and net access basically the same thing? “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s fine. Now let’s get you the hell out of dodge.”
*
She guides him through a succession of freight elevators and service corridors where maids and housekeepers and waiters bustle past, seeming not to see him, as though he bears some mark that tells them he belongs.
Down in the basements she guides him to a room that looks like it used to be a meat locker, but now a Filipino vendor has set up a kind of general store, his goods neatly stacked on blankets on the floor. “Get the highest-bandwidth satellite phone he has,” she says in his ear. “And lots of data cables. Like, thousands of feet. Also water, nuts, candy, whatever has the most calories per pound.”
*
Ditching the bullpup in a dumpster full of cardboard and sodden vegetables, he feels spiritually lighter.
“Where are we going?” he asks as they walk through rooms full of boxes labeled in Chinese and middle-aged ladies squatting on the floor playing mahjong.
“There’s a village up the coast,” she says. “Fishermen and smugglers, mostly, and apparently a bar scene. The government turns a blind eye, so it’s a surveillance blank spot. We can buy a boat there and no one will ask questions.”
“I don’t know how to sail.”
“It’ll be easy. You just have to motor out and meet these ships at sea.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Something like that. They’re unmanned drones, so you just have to motor up, climb on and hitch a ride. There’s an island on the equator and they’ll take you all the way there.”
“Is that where you are?”
“It will be by the time you get there.”
“Am I rescuing you or what?”
“There’s something I need you to do on the island. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll show you when we get there.”
The corridor ends in double doors that open onto estuarine mud and salt water leaden under the low fog in the predawn light. He walks out into the black, sucking mud, feeling free, grateful to be out of doors even though his shoes are immediately ruined. A heron rises heavily into the air, croaking loudly. No sound but gulls, the low rush of waves. He looks back at the mass of rust-stained concrete—strange that Hong Kong, which had seemed inescapable, ends so abruptly. He looks up toward the city’s towers but they’re invisible in the fog.
54
Unwieldy, Lovely, Perhaps Eighteenth Century
Night flight to Delhi.
She half-wakes, feeling observed.
The first class cabin is almost dark. The woman next to her, deep in her unrejuvenated fifties, is staring at the swelling on her jaw.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, but doesn’t look away. Her yellow skirt-suit is very good, but her face is a map of old pain. Overcoming her diffidence, the woman proffers her cup of ice, saying, “Does he do it much?”
From a dream of nothing Irina says, “Just once, so I stole both his breath and the light in his eyes. But there’s someone else, and much worse, who would take everything from me.”
Silence but for the air-conditioning.
“You have to hurt him,” says the woman. “Badly. Everyone has a weakness. My husband hasn’t seen our children in five years, and so help me God he never will.”
Another silence.
“Take this,” the woman says, almost tenderly, again offering the cup of ice. “It’ll help with the swelling. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll look better this way.”
Irina accepts the cup, presses it to her jaw. The woman leans back, shuts her eyes.
*
There’s a hotel inside the Delhi airport.
Her room is a windowless, minimalist no-place; with nothing to grate on her sensibility, it’s easier to think.