He told her about the drinks in the bar, the late-night walk. He told her Mad Dog had fallen down a flight of steps and hit his head. He said he was the last person to have seen him.
She moved from the bed to the window and stood facing away from him. “I’m sorry. He was your friend.” She seemed affected by the news, more than he would have expected.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you,” he said. “You only met him once. You hardly knew him.”
“I heard him play…”
“He was good, wasn’t he.”
“Yes, he was.”
He was about to say something else when his phone rang. It was the concierge. Wang Jun Wei was in the lobby. Zhang glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes after six. Probably Jun Wei had been out all night.
“Should I send him up?” the concierge asked.
“Tell him to wait,” Zhang said. “I’ll come down.” He ended the call and saw that Naemi was by the window, watching him. “It’s Wang Jun Wei. He’s in the lobby.”
“I’d rather he didn’t see me.”
Zhang nodded. “I’ll show you out the back way.”
He pulled on a T-shirt and trousers, then took her hand and led her through the living room and the kitchen and on into the utility room. There was a door he rarely used, which opened onto the service lift and the emergency stairs. He pressed the call button and heard the lift grind into motion somewhere deep down in the building.
“When will I see you?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
The lift arrived. He kept his finger on the button to prevent the door from closing on her as she stepped inside. She turned to face him. The fluorescent strip light in the ceiling lit her gold-blonde hair and her smooth forehead. Her eyes were in shadow. As she stood on the gouged and battered metal floor in her dark clothes, the harsh white light splashing down on her, he remembered what the girl in Quik had said. She was amazing-looking, like a comic-book character or a superhero. In that moment, with his finger still pressing the button and the door of the lift still open, the realization hit him. There wasn’t anyone who looked like her—not in Shanghai, not anywhere. There wasn’t anyone who even came close. It had to have been her.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“You never went to London,” he said, “did you.”
She stared at him, her blonde hair gleaming, her eyes shadow-black, unreadable.
“It was you.” His voice was calm. A sense of dream or wonderment. “You killed him.”
He had taken his finger off the button, and the door was sliding shut, but he could still see her through the small, smeared window. The light above her head began to flicker on and off. Rapid, flashed glimpses of her. Her face a maze of cracks and wrinkles. Her hair all white. Flecks of blood flew at the glass, like paint flicked from a brush. He stepped back, his heart beating so hard he felt his whole body was being shaken.
Then she dropped out of sight.
For a few long moments he didn’t move. He couldn’t. He wasn’t sure what he had seen.
When the lift jolted to a halt at ground level, and the cables had fallen still, he backed into the utility room and locked the door and leaned against it, looking towards the kitchen but not seeing it, a hissing in his head, like tinnitus, his throat parched and dry. He closed his eyes and felt the cool painted wood beneath his hands. He remembered Jun Wei, who would be waiting in the lobby. At least ten minutes had gone by since the concierge had called. Opening his eyes again, he pushed away from the door and fetched his phone from the bedside table. When the concierge answered, he asked to speak to Wang Jun Wei.
“He just left,” the concierge said.
Zhang called Jun Wei’s number, but there was no reply. He sent a text instead. Sorry to miss you. Flying to Beijing this morning. Back on Monday. After showering and getting dressed, he packed a small bag, picked up a set of car keys from the kitchen counter, and left the apartment. Once in the lift, he pressed B for basement. His mind seemed to have closed down. There were no thoughts. Only practicalities.
In the car park under the building, Chun Tao was already waiting.
“Change of plan,” Zhang said. “I’m going to drive myself to the airport. I won’t need you again till after the weekend.”
In the far corner of the car park was a black Mercedes, which he kept for private use. He watched Chun Tao depart, then he walked over to the Mercedes and got in. Putting on his dark glasses, he drove up the ramp and out into the daylight. When he stopped at the security barrier, he glanced in the rearview mirror. The road behind him was empty. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to see.
At the first red light, he called his wife. They had arranged to meet the following day, he reminded her, but he would also like to have time with his son. She told him that Sunday would be best. He drove towards the Yan’an Road Tunnel, which would take him west, to the airport in Hongqiao. Though it was the second week of October, a kind of summer had returned. It wasn’t the Autumn Tiger, when the weather was unseasonably hot and dry. This was something else. Something humid. Clammy. Something that didn’t have a name.
The curved silver edge of a CD was protruding from the CD player. He pushed it all the way in. It was a Howlin’ Wolf album called Killing Floor, and the title song had never seemed more apt. I shoulda quit you / A long time ago…For years, he had assumed that “killing floor” referred to the Chicago slaughterhouses, where so many black men ended up working when they fled the Deep South, and he wasn’t necessarily wrong, but then he had read an interview with the Wolf’s guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, which had cast a new light on the lyric. Sumlin explained that the Wolf’s wife had suspected him of being unfaithful to her while he was away on tour. The day he returned, she opened fire on him from the front window of their house. The Wolf was picking buckshot out of himself for weeks after. On the killing floor, Sumlin said. It’s when a relationship brings you down so low you wish you were dead.
Zhang drove towards Hongqiao, with Howlin’ Wolf’s abrasive voice scouring the inside of the car. Every now and then, he checked his rearview mirror. He still didn’t know what he was looking for. Probably he felt dogged or poisoned by what he had witnessed, and was struggling to shake it off.
* * *
—
Five days later, on Monday morning, his plane touched down in Shanghai. The trip to Beijing had not been a success. When he met Xuan Xuan, she had done nothing but complain about money—she needed a new car, among other things—and he had agreed to increase the limit on her credit cards. The next day, he visited his mother in the nursing home. As usual, she didn’t speak or move. It seemed unlikely that she knew who he was, or even that he was there. Her eyes were misty. Blind-looking. He sat with her for an hour, then kissed her on the forehead and left. That evening, he took Hai Long out to dinner, but the fifteen-year-old spent most of the time on his phone. He responded to Zhang’s questions with a kind of distant courtesy, as if they had no relevance to him whatsoever and he was simply providing answers that he imagined might be appropriate. Zhang sensed boredom and contempt beneath the politeness, and perhaps that was only to be expected. All things considered, he had not been much of a father.