in life now. He followed the rankings of hisfavorite European soccer teams, he drank not vodka but four bottle-inches of Sambuca each night from the same crusty glass, and if asked whether he really cared about who came to and went from the cramped and dirty building on Nineteenth Street, he would have admitted he cared not at all.
Returning to that building by way of the stairwell to the second floor, one could easily discover that Jin Li had pushed around some of the boxes of federal housing records to create a small room within them; in this dim space was all she carried with her: an inflatable mattress, a fat wad of cash, her Chinese passport, a small green suitcase containing not only her blue CorpServe uniform but also one nice cotton dress (why she'd hastily packed this, she had no idea), a bag of toiletries, a cell phone now carefully turned off, and a Styrofoam ice box. On the mattress lay Jin Li, looking at the ceiling, thinking again she had heard something downstairs.
What? Anything?
She listened. Nothing—
maybe.
At least she had planned ahead, Jin Li told herself, keeping the key that the Russian had given her when she'd come looking for cheap office space for CorpServe a few months earlier. The place had been all wrong for her purposes, but its obscurity and neglect had struck her as potentially useful in other circumstances. In China nowadays buildings like this were soon demolished and someone like her brother would put up a cheap apartment building three times higher. The Russian had never asked for the key back and so she'd kept it—in her purse and in the back of her mind as a place she could hide. No one would want to rent space in a firetrap that had no electricity or heat. But still she was anxious. She could have been followed—that was possible. The men at the beach in the big trucks had followed her, after all, had been looking for her and her alone. She was sure. The Mexican girls didn't know anything. How did the men identify Jin Li? She had been so careful. Did they plan on coming back? Were they still looking for her?
And then there was her brother, Chen. As soon as she'd called from a pay phone, he jumped on the first flight he could find to New YorkCity and started asking around for her, making things worse. Usually it took forever to get a visa to visit the United States, but Chen knew people, was owed money and favors by men and women all over Shanghai and even in Beijing. He'd panicked when she'd called him—not over
her,
but that his clever international criminal enterprise was endangered. "What did you do?" he'd screamed at her in their family's Mandarin dialect. "How did you fuck up?"
It was a question Jin Li couldn't quite answer, though she'd thought about it constantly. CorpServe had been carefully created by Chen with one devious purpose in mind, but in order to appear to be a conventional company it contained three divisions, two of them legitimate business units operating in the open. The first division cleaned New York City offices at conventional rates, bidding for contracts with management companies and corporate operations people. This part of the company ran daily crews in thirty-two buildings, the number naturally fluctuating as contracts were won or lost upon expiration. The crews dutifully cleaned, collected, and hauled dry waste—paper, cardboard boxes, printed matter, coffee cups, and so on—down to the service bays where the refuse was loaded and removed by one of the city's private carting companies, another distinct business so cutthroat and residually mobbed up that one entered it only at great risk and with even greater connections. It would be a good two generations before anyone with a Chinese name operated such a company in midtown Manhattan.
The second part of CorpServe, which serviced seventeen buildings, both collected dry waste and provided onsite "chain-of-custody" document destruction. The company owned nine forty-four-foot mobile units, each of
Returning to that building by way of the stairwell to the second floor, one could easily discover that Jin Li had pushed around some of the boxes of federal housing records to create a small room within them; in this dim space was all she carried with her: an inflatable mattress, a fat wad of cash, her Chinese passport, a small green suitcase containing not only her blue CorpServe uniform but also one nice cotton dress (why she'd hastily packed this, she had no idea), a bag of toiletries, a cell phone now carefully turned off, and a Styrofoam ice box. On the mattress lay Jin Li, looking at the ceiling, thinking again she had heard something downstairs.
What? Anything?
She listened. Nothing—
maybe.
At least she had planned ahead, Jin Li told herself, keeping the key that the Russian had given her when she'd come looking for cheap office space for CorpServe a few months earlier. The place had been all wrong for her purposes, but its obscurity and neglect had struck her as potentially useful in other circumstances. In China nowadays buildings like this were soon demolished and someone like her brother would put up a cheap apartment building three times higher. The Russian had never asked for the key back and so she'd kept it—in her purse and in the back of her mind as a place she could hide. No one would want to rent space in a firetrap that had no electricity or heat. But still she was anxious. She could have been followed—that was possible. The men at the beach in the big trucks had followed her, after all, had been looking for her and her alone. She was sure. The Mexican girls didn't know anything. How did the men identify Jin Li? She had been so careful. Did they plan on coming back? Were they still looking for her?
And then there was her brother, Chen. As soon as she'd called from a pay phone, he jumped on the first flight he could find to New YorkCity and started asking around for her, making things worse. Usually it took forever to get a visa to visit the United States, but Chen knew people, was owed money and favors by men and women all over Shanghai and even in Beijing. He'd panicked when she'd called him—not over
her,
but that his clever international criminal enterprise was endangered. "What did you do?" he'd screamed at her in their family's Mandarin dialect. "How did you fuck up?"
It was a question Jin Li couldn't quite answer, though she'd thought about it constantly. CorpServe had been carefully created by Chen with one devious purpose in mind, but in order to appear to be a conventional company it contained three divisions, two of them legitimate business units operating in the open. The first division cleaned New York City offices at conventional rates, bidding for contracts with management companies and corporate operations people. This part of the company ran daily crews in thirty-two buildings, the number naturally fluctuating as contracts were won or lost upon expiration. The crews dutifully cleaned, collected, and hauled dry waste—paper, cardboard boxes, printed matter, coffee cups, and so on—down to the service bays where the refuse was loaded and removed by one of the city's private carting companies, another distinct business so cutthroat and residually mobbed up that one entered it only at great risk and with even greater connections. It would be a good two generations before anyone with a Chinese name operated such a company in midtown Manhattan.
The second part of CorpServe, which serviced seventeen buildings, both collected dry waste and provided onsite "chain-of-custody" document destruction. The company owned nine forty-four-foot mobile units, each of
Similar Books
