Hour of the Rat (24 page)

I glance over at Kang Li. He’s got his aviator shades on, his careless, confident vibe, and I think I understand what kind of guy he is: the kind who gets off on a little action.

“I have a small problem,” I say.

“S
URE
, I
CAN WAIT
.” Kang Li grins. I told him about my mystery stalkers, and, just like I figured, he’s into it.

I direct him around the back of the hostel. It’s on an alley, with an overflowing dumpster and a rack of cruiser bikes and a minuscule parking lot, two of the three cars there double-parked. “Ten minutes,” I say. All I’m going to do is run up to my room, get my duffel bag, and check out.

The back entrance to the hostel is unlocked. I head up the sagging wooden stairs to the second floor. Swipe my key card. The Do Not Disturb sign is hanging on the doorknob where I left it.

Inside, it’s dark, the blackout curtains drawn, the lights turned off. I never really unpacked, so all I have to do is grab my duffel from the chair by the desk and TV where I left it. So I do that. Head downstairs. Approach the battered front desk, where a girl with dyed blue hair sits and stares at her monitor.

“Hey,
ni hao. Wo xihuan jiezhang
.”

I push my receipt for the deposit across the counter. She nods, picks up a walkie-talkie, calls for a
fuwuyuan
to check out
my room and make sure that I didn’t leave anything and/or steal the television.

While she’s doing all this and toting up the figures, I stand there anxiously, the nerves in my back and shoulders twitching like whiskers on a mouse.

I owe less than the deposit I’d left. She hands me a night’s worth of yuan, a hundred fifty and change.

“Okay, thank you very much, please come visit us again!”

“I will, thanks,” I say, jamming the money into my jeans pocket. “Very nice hotel!”

And I am out of there. I walk as fast as I can, which is not very—daypack on my back, duffel on my shoulder, Yangshuo walking stick helping me balance—open the back door to the tiny parking lot, and I notice two things: First, Kang Li and his Jeep aren’t there. Second, a new black Buick is, and leaning against the driver’s door reading a manga is US Polo Team.

I close the door. Fumble for the dead bolt. Lock it. Scramble as fast as I can back into the minimal lobby. Blue-haired girl looks up and smiles.

“Sorry!” I say. “Wrong way!”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Did he see me? And Kang Li—
fuck
. I thought I’d read him right. Guess not. What the fuck do I do now?

Out the front. Look for a taxi. Ditch the duffel if I have to.

I shouldn’t have gone back. So what if they have my passport number? My visa? So I get into trouble and pay them a bribe later. Like I’m not in worse trouble now?

I push open the Plexiglas door. Step outside. Look toward Xi Jie. And see Plain-Wrap Windbreaker, stationed by the lamppost.

He lunges toward me. I stumble back.

“Hey!” I hear behind me. I half turn. And there’s Kang Li.

Who takes two steps up, balls his hand into a fist, swings, and connects with the guy’s jaw.

Windbreaker staggers, Kang Li kicks him in the side of his knee, and he goes down, hard.

“Come on!” Kang Li yells. “
Lai, lai!
”

He gestures over his shoulder, and there’s the Jeep, parked way illegally, two wheels on the sidewalk.

I throw the duffel into the back and scramble into the passenger seat as Kang Li vaults into the driver’s seat, just like in the movies, and jams the key into the ignition.

“Where to?” he asks as we bounce off the curb, brakes squealing.

“I
WAIT FOR YOU
, and I see the Buick. The guy in the jacket. Just like you told me. So I move the Jeep to the front. Hope you find me.”

“Good plan,” I manage. We’re weaving through traffic on the main road out of Yangshuo, and I seriously don’t know how he missed the middle-aged couple on the tandem cruiser bike and the kid on the skateboard.

“Who are these guys?” Kang Li asks. “What you do to piss them off?”

“Wish I knew.”

We swerve around a bicycle cart loaded with a mountain of Styrofoam packing, and now we’re on the highway heading back to Guilin.

“You think it has something to do with this … with these seeds? The thing that Han Rong and David—
Sha bi!
” He waves his fist as we screech around a tractor that crawled onto the road and barely chugs into gear. “Some people should not be driving,” he mutters.

“Heh. Yeah.”

“So where you want to go?”

I think about this. “Guilin, I guess. If that’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble. We can be there in half an hour.”

The way he drives, probably so.

Kang Li glances at his rearview mirror. His face scrunches up in a frown. “That the same car?” He points a thumb over his shoulder.

I look behind me. The Jeep has a roll-bar frame with a battered canvas roof, a scratched plastic “window” in the back, and it’s hard to see through it. I check the side mirror. And see a new black Buick, moving out from behind a bus, trying to pass it.

“Same kind of car,” I say. But I can’t be sure. Buicks, for whatever reason, are prestige cars in China. There are a lot of them here.

The Buick nestles in between the bus and a taxi, which is the car right behind us.

“Huh,” Kang Li says. “Let’s find out.”

He glances to his left and suddenly spins the steering wheel hard in that direction, and we cut across the oncoming lane, right in front of a military truck, and barrel onto a small road that leads into a little town, but I have my eyes closed and am not sure of that part for a moment.

“Holy shit,” I gasp.

We’re flying down that road, and now I open my eyes and can see the town, built mostly of that yellow brick they use around here, interspersed with white tile and concrete, and as we pass, a couple of panicked chickens flutter into the air and a mom yanks her kid back away from the street, and we careen around a corner, barely avoiding a guy selling yams off a cart.

“You see him now?” Kang Li asks.

I look. Fuck if the Buick isn’t following us.

“Yeah.”

“
Cao dan
,” he mutters. He steers hard right, and the Jeep goes up on two wheels as we take the corner onto another narrow street. Through the gaps in the low buildings, I can see fields, and before too long the buildings fall away and we’re bouncing down a rutted dirt road bordering rice paddies. We turn again, onto an even bumpier lane that turns to mud as it suddenly runs downhill into an even smaller village. The Buick is still right on our ass. We nearly take out an old guy on a bike and we kick pebbles onto a couple of old aunties shucking corn out on a stoop, and then we’re through that village and into more fields. The road’s even muddier now as we barrel along, the Buick behind us, and I think, okay, maybe this was why Sparrow didn’t tell Kang Li about the whole David–Han Rong thing, because this is insane, and that’s when Kang Li pulls the Jeep off the road and heads into a flooded field. The Buick follows. The Jeep chugs and churns and keeps moving, oversize wheels throwing up wads of mud.

The Buick? Sits there. Stuck. Wheels spinning in the muck. We pull away, leaving them behind.

Kang Li pumps his fist. “
Diu na ma!
” he shouts, grinning.

“Hoo-ah!” I yell back. “That was awesome!”

“
Zhen niubi!
” he agrees.

We’re at the end of the field now, and with a grinding of gears the Jeep crawls up onto another tiny road. I look back at the deep gashes our tires made through the field. “I hope we didn’t trash his crops too much.”

“Not planted yet. Besides”—Kang Li shrugs—“let the guys in the Buick pay.”

Works for me.

“To Guilin?” he asks.

I nod. “Sounds good.”

I
ASK
K
ANG
L
I
to drop me someplace with wireless, close to the train station.

Here’s the thing: Sure, planes are faster. But when you buy a plane ticket, you have to show your passport. Trains? Just hand over your cash.

I don’t know who those guys are, who they’re working for, but if they’re at all connected, I’d rather not leave them an easy way to figure out where I’m going.

Which brings up the question: Where do I go now?

I figure I have three choices. Back to Beijing. Or to Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, or Dali, in Yunnan, where the other two seed companies from Daisy’s list are.

Beijing is probably the sensible choice.

I haven’t decided, I tell myself. I’ll think about it for a while, and then I’ll make a decision. Based on … you know, rational shit, like the train schedule and what makes the most sense for me to do.

Yeah, right.

T
HERE
’
S A HOSTEL WITH
a bar and a café about ten minutes’ walk from the station, advertising free Wi-Fi. Kang Li drops me off at the curb. On it, more accurately. “Get you close,” he says.

So it’s only a couple of yards, but I appreciate it. My leg hurts like hell, from sitting in the car, from the kidney-rattling chase through the rice paddies.

It’s no big, I tell myself. It’s just pain.

“Thanks,” I say. “Thanks a lot. I mean, that was … that was …”

Kang Li waves a hand, brushing my appreciation aside. “
Mei wenti
,” he says. Not a problem. “It was good fun.”

We get out of the Jeep. Kang Li grabs my duffel from the back. “I’ll take it inside for you.”

“No need. It’s not heavy.”

He hands the duffel to me, and I sling it over my shoulder.

“You sure you don’t know who they are?” he asks.

“I really don’t.” I hesitate. “I don’t think they know about me visiting the sanctuary, whoever they are.”

Unless they’re connected to someone at the Gecko. Someone who saw me talking to Sparrow.

I push the thought aside.

“You should still be careful.” I fake a smile. “Sparrow needs you to take care of the cats.”

He grins. “I will.
Bie jiaoji
.” Don’t worry.

I
GET A TABLE
at the bar/café. One wall has money from all over the world plastered to it. Another is fake brick. It’s just after 1:00
P
.
M
., so I order a beer and a pizza and get out my laptop.

Of course I’ve got a ton of emails, and I tell myself not to get sucked into those, though I do take a minute to read the one from my mom (“
Back in Beijing, the apartment’s fine, except the toilet in the guest bathroom isn’t flushing and there are some pretty bad smells, so I just have the door shut for now
“). I note that I have a couple from Vicky Huang, and I think, Shit, I was supposed to meet with her, or with Sidney Cao, or with somebody, while I was in Yangshuo, but that’s going to have to wait.

I look for the email from Sparrow with the link to the video she showed me, the one that Jason helped put together.

I watch it again.

There’s that one glimpse of Jason, loading the crated cats into a car.

How is this going to help me?

I check out the links on the video. Here’s one for Yangshuo Friends of Animals. I click on it and find their website. In Chinese,
of course. It would help if I read Chinese better, but I don’t. So I just scroll down until I come to a post with photos, photos of cats, in bamboo cages. The truck. The rescue. This is it.

And here’s the embedded video.

I go to Babelfish, an Internet translator. It’s not perfect, but in a pinch it will give you a quick and dirty translation of a web page.

And at the bottom of the post it says, “Thanking for the production of video element to Wolf Child.”

I look up “wolf” on my handy iPhone Chinese dictionary. “Wolf child,”
langhai
, has its own entry. It doesn’t just mean “baby wolf.”
Langhai
is a term for a human child raised by wolves.

What did Dog say about his and Jason’s parents? I try to remember. It wasn’t like we talked about things that much, back in the Sandbox. Our whole “relationship,” if you want to call it that, wasn’t exactly about sharing serious emotional stuff. He mostly gave me shit, and we occasionally messed around.