Mad Dog saw him first. “Flower Heart! Over here.”
Laser was too deferential to call Zhang “Flower Heart.” He called him “Laoban”—boss—or “Lao Zhang.”
“What are we drinking?” Zhang asked.
“Beer,” Laser said.
“And whiskey,” said Mad Dog.
There was a girl in a red sweater behind the bar. Zhang caught her eye and ordered three whiskeys and three Tiger beers.
They took the stage at a quarter to eleven. As Zhang was tuning his 1964 Gibson, he saw Naemi in the crowd. Denim jacket, smudged black eye shadow. Her blonde hair messier than usual. She gave him a thumbs-up, then looked away towards the bar.
They began with “Stormy Monday,” very slow and jaded, the vocals not sung so much as muttered, and followed it with a sinister brush-drum version of the Howlin’ Wolf classic “Killing Floor.” By the time they finished the second number, Naemi was near the front of the stage and off to one side, leaning against a pillar that was papered with flyers. Zhang decided to play one of his own compositions, a song called “Red Rope Blues.” It told the story of a man who becomes obsessed with a girl in a massage parlor. He meets her in a bleak anonymous apartment building near Hongqiao airport after a night of heavy drinking. It is almost four in the morning. He takes off his clothes and lies down on a bed. A girl hangs above him on a length of scarlet silk that is suspended from the ceiling. She is also naked. To start with, there is distance between them as she twists and turns on the red rope, but gradually, artfully, she begins to close the gap. As she descends, he falls for her. It is her hair that touches him first. Her long black hair. She brushes his body lightly with it. Later, she uses her mouth. She is still suspended above him, though the gap has closed to a few inches. He has never seen anyone more beautiful…The next day, he thinks of her dancing in the air above him, pale as a star. He thinks about her all the time. But it is a week or two before he is able to return to the apartment building in Hongqiao, and when he asks for the girl he is told that she has left. He is offered another girl. He turns away. The red rope dangles above an empty bed. Outside, a siren wails. The early-autumn rain is coming down.
When they left the stage, they sat on the terrace with Naemi, and she told them how much she had enjoyed the set.
“You’re really good musicians,” she said, “all of you.”
Mad Dog watched her, but said nothing.
Laser asked about B.B. King, and soon Naemi was talking about how she had stayed at the Peabody hotel in Memphis, and then driven down Highway 61, stopping at famous blues towns like Clarksdale and Greenville. They were so deep in conversation that Zhang left the terrace to go to the toilet. Once he had climbed the stairs to the first floor, he stopped and looked out of a small window that was half open. A fine rain was falling through the light of a nearby streetlamp, like the last line of his song.
On his way back to the bar he met Mad Dog, who surprised him by pushing him up against the wall. Mad Dog’s mouth had widened and straightened, and he had gritted his teeth. This was a look he got when he was on his way to being very drunk. He always appeared to be bracing himself for some kind of impact.
“Listen.” Mad Dog glanced left and right to check nobody was around. “That girl you’re with…”
“What about her?” Zhang said.
“Stay away from her.”
Mad Dog’s face was only inches away, and though his eyes had narrowed they had a sudden fierce clarity, which kept Zhang from mocking him or making a joke.
“What’s got into you?” he asked.
“Something isn’t right.” Mad Dog looked at Zhang for a moment longer, then let go of him, muttered a few derogatory words, and pushed past him, towards the toilets.
The old fool, Zhang thought. He was probably just jealous. Either that or he was prejudiced, like a lot of Chinese men his age. Zhang straightened his clothes and set off down the stairs.
When he reached the bottom, he saw that Naemi and Laser were sitting at the bar.
“We came back in,” Laser said. “It started raining.”
“I know,” Zhang said.
Naemi gave him a tilted look, half challenging, half mischievous. “That song you sang,” she said. “The one about the rope. Was it autobiographical?”
* * *
—
It was after midnight, and the streets had the gleam of patent leather. The air smelled of wet cement. Standing under the soaring concrete pillars of the Yan’an highway, Zhang and Naemi watched as Mad Dog set off in an easterly direction, bent over under the weight of the double bass that was strapped to his back.
“Isn’t he too old to be doing that?” Naemi said.
“Probably,” Zhang said. “But he won’t have it any other way.”
If he ever offered Mad Dog a lift, he went on, or money for a taxi, Mad Dog always refused. The old man prided himself on not accepting any favors, not even from his friends, and if he had been drinking his pride tended to redouble. After a session at the recording studio, it would take him two hours to walk home. Once, when a moped ran into him and he had to go to hospital, it took three days.
Naemi asked if he would be all right.
“He’s staying with family tonight,” Zhang said. “His cousin lives half an hour away.” He looked off down Kaixuan Road. By now, Mad Dog was a small hunched figure in the distance. “He’s pretty indestructible.”
“I’m not tired yet,” Naemi said. “How about a drink?”
“I have an early start tomorrow.”
“One drink?”
Zhang signaled to Chun Tao, who was waiting nearby with the Jaguar.
As they drove east, lightning crazed the sky up ahead, like cracks in a dark glaze. He had yet to talk to her about his passion for Yue ceramics—he hadn’t even told her why he visited the museum after hours—but he would in time, he thought, despite what he had said about the power of a secret. He instinctively felt that she would experience what he experienced.
“I don’t think Mad Dog likes me,” she said suddenly.
“He doesn’t like anybody.” Zhang remembered how Mad Dog had shoved him against the wall outside the toilets. Stay away from her. “Did he say something to you?”
She hesitated. “Not exactly. It was more the way he looked at me.”
“Don’t worry about it. He’s a bit unhinged.” He looked across at her. “Hence the nickname.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He wanders the streets on his own. Sometimes he bites.”