Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Page 30

  Chapter 10

  Guilin

  THE RING IS jarring and shrill as a baby’s cry. Jolted awake, I fumble for the receiver. The earpiece is cold against my cheek.

  “Is this Miss Susan Gilman?” a man’s voice asks, unmistakably Chinese. “My name is Jonnie. I am a friend.”

  “Huh?” It takes me a moment to remember where I am. A damp bath towel is stuck to my knees. The light on the nightstand casts a lurid apricot glow over the room like a heat lamp. “Excuse me?”

  “Miss Gilman. I need to talk to you. I have just been to the Yangshuo police station. I have just seen your friend.”

  I sit up. “You’ve seen Claire?”

  “I would like to talk to you about her. It is important.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “I amhere in the lobby. I need you to come downstairs immediately.”

  With that, he hangs up.

  I throw back the covers, my heart pounding.

  “What is it?” Eckehardt says groggily.

  “Some guy downstairs says he’s just seen Claire.” I feel around for my glasses in a panic. “Christ. What time is it?” The room is in complete disarray. I have no idea where anything is. I can’t locate my bra, my panties, my Reeboks. Finding my pants and T-shirt on the floor of the bathroom, I pull them on without any underwear.

  “It is three o’clock in the morning,” Eckehardt says, squinting at his watch.

  I jam my feet into my flip-flops. “He told me to meet him immediately.”

  Reluctantly Eckehardt sits up. “Do you think I should come with you?”

  I hunt around for the room key. “You’ve done enough. Wait here. Go back to sleep if you can.”

  Hurrying down the corridor, I feel waterlogged with exhaustion but also strangely adrenalized. “C’mon, you piece-of-shit elevator.” I watch the illuminated strip overhead slowly tick off the floors. When I finally reach the lobby, there’s no one behind the reception counter and no one seated in the cluster of shiny chocolate-brown sofas. The restaurant has been shuttered for the night, its floor sign reading “Welcome” turned to face the wall. It’s eerie. The lights are still burning, but the place is completely deserted.

  “Jonnie?” I call out. My voice echoes off the tiles.

  I push through the glass doors. Outside, the warm night air is pungent with fermentation. The pavement glistens with humidity. I walk a few yards down the circular driveway, but the asphalt quickly gives way to darkness, a vacuum of silence.

  “Jonnie?” There is a rustling in the bushes behind me. But when I turn around, no one is there.

  ———

  “What happened?” Eckehardt groans from the bed. In my absence, he’s pulled on a pair of white cotton briefs and an inside-out undershirt with the label on the front. His hair is a tumult.

  “No one was there. You think it’s someone’s sick idea of a joke?”

  That moment, the telephone rings again.

  “Where are you, Miss Gilman?” the man barks. “I told you to come downstairs immediately.”

  “I did. Where are you?I searched all over. You weren’t there.”

  “You searched the front lobby,” says the voice. “I am in the back. The back lobby. You come down here to the back lobby. Immediately. Please.”

  What back lobby? I’m fully awake now. Something is not adding up.

  “Look, it’s three a.m.,” I say. “I’m not running around downstairs looking for some stranger in some back lobby somewhere. You wanna talk to me? Then come upstairs to my room.”

  I slam down the phone and roll my eyes. “Christ,” I snort. “How much you wanna bet this guy isn’t even at the right hotel? Sometimes it seems like this whole country is run by the New York City Department of Motor Vehicles.”

  ———

  Three minutes later, there is a loud, insistent knock on my door. Opening it, I find a young Chinese man squinting at me through small wire-rim glasses. He is dressed like a middle-aged college professor in a cable-knit sweater and blue polka-dot tie. He appears uncomfortable in these clothes, as if they’ve been rented for the occasion. He holds before him an oxblood leather briefcase. Flanking him are two military police officers in full uniform.

  The officers have faces like carvings on Easter Island. They stare at me stonily from beneath their green and gold caps. The sharp seams of their uniforms are delineated with red piping. Gold epaulets hang from their shoulders like stiff vegetable brushes.

  “Hello, Miss Gilman,” the young man announces brightly. “I am your friend, Jonnie. I have come to help you.” His affability is a direct contrast to the two officers looming behind him like a pair of executioners. Strangely, this Jonnie does look similar to the “real” Jonnie from Dinghai. He’s got the same bowl haircut, the same eager-to-please beagle eyes. He nods at the officers. In unison, they all take a step forward.

  When a stranger arrives unannounced on your doorstep in the middle of the night accompanied by the military police, many people, I suspect, would get nervous and demand to contact their embassy. I am smack in the middle of a Communist country known for its human rights abuses and political torture. Amazingly, in my fatigue and disorientation, I simply wave them inside like the hostess of a Tupperware party.

  I accept that Jonnie is exactly who he tells me he is—a university student whom the Yangshuo police have recruited to help out in this situation as a translator. I assume, too, that the only reason he has a pair of military escorts with him is to help him find the correct hotel and perhaps for dramatic effect; doesn’t everyone love an entourage? The fact that he has arrived on my doorstep at three a.m.—when it takes only fifty-five minutes to drive between Yangshuo and Guilin—in no way strikes me as odd, either: I figure that’s how long it’s taken the Chinese to get their act together. Infrastructure, after all, isn’t exactly the strong suit here.

  I feel genuinely sorry for the officers, in fact. They’ve no doubt had to climb out of bed in the middle of the night and get all dressed up in the dark to trek over here while their wives and kids continue sleeping.

  “Please. Come in. Sorry there’s no minibar,” I say. “You guys want some tea? There’s an electric kettle in the bathroom. And there are cookies, too. Cookies, guys? Anything?”

  The officers fix me with an icy gaze. Jonnie smiles with embarrassment. “Please. That will not be necessary.”

  “You sure? Because I think there’s a pack of cookies in my backpack.”

  Instead, Jonnie moves one of the hotel’s cushioned chairs so that it is directly facing the other. “Why do you not have a seat and we will talk?” He sits down in the chair closest to the door. The two officers remain standing, positioning themselves on either side of him.

  Lowering myself into the chair opposite him, I finally realize where my bra is. When I tossed it out of the bathroom earlier that evening, it landed on top of the floor lamp. Jonnie is now seated directly beneath it. The lacy underwire cups are unfurled sequentially above his head like an obscene banner for a peep show. There’s no way to remove it discreetly from the lampshade, though leaving it dangling there is preposterous. I can’t look at him and not see it. I wonder if the two officers have noticed.

  “So you’ve seen Claire?” I say. My bra, I can’t help but observe, is long overdue for a wash. “Is she all right?”

  Jonnie’s back stiffens and he frowns. “Yes. She is fine.”

  Before I can ask anything further, he reaches into a shirt pocket beneath his sweater. To my surprise, he pulls out her passport.

  “This young woman, is she a good friend of yours?” Jonnie asks.

  I shrug, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible. “Not a good friend,” I say cagily. I feel guilty saying this; it’s as if I’m abandoning her. But I can’t help sensing that it’s still to our advantage to have me establish some distance between us.

  “I went to university with her. But I didn’t really know her until just before graduation, when she said she wanted to travel to Chi
na, and I was, like, ‘Hey. So do I.’

  “Why?” I ask. “What did she say?”

  Staring down at her passport, Jonnie runs his fingers over the number punched into the leathery blue cover like Braille. His hands, I notice, are small and smooth, the nails buffed like the pinkish insides of shells.

  “Would you please describe your friend’s family please?” he says.

  Again, I shrug. “I’m not really sure I can. She has three stepbrothers who’ve all gone to university. They’re all very smart. Very upstanding citizens. Her mom—I mean, her stepmom—seems nice enough. Big dog lover, very into homemaking and stuff. And her father, he is a very important businessman, you know.”

  Saying this, I’m appalled to hear my voice inflected with the same preening tone as Claire’s. Yet suddenly Mr. Van Houten’s wealth and prominence don’t seem like such bad things to trumpet.

  “Is Claire still at the police station,” I ask, “or have they put her up at a hotel?”

  Jonnie glances at his watch. “Would you tell me, please, exactly what happened yesterday?”

  I sigh. In a nation lacking photocopiers, computers, faxes, and typewriters, most Chinese, I assume, can only verify information by asking the same questions over and over.

  Yet again I recount my sanitized version of events. That Claire and I had a fight. That she impulsively jumped on a bus in order to put some distance between us. That she instructed me to meet her here at the Osmanthus Hotel, but never showed up. And that’s it. End of story.

  I’ve been repeating this so much that I’m actually starting to believe it myself—that we simply had a fight over a boy after traveling together for weeks on end, stockpiling all sorts of resentments between us.

  “It was a silly argument.” I shrug. “I really don’t know what happened.”

  For the first time Jonnie glances at me in a way that suggests he does not quite believe me. He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms.

  “You say you have all of her belongings with you. All of her valuables and identification?”

  “Yeah. She was really annoyed. I guess she just forgot them. Or, you know, she wanted to leave me with all her stuff to carry, as, like, punishment.” I smile at him broadly, in what I hope is an expression brimming with cooperation and goodwill. For some reason, the air-conditioning has clicked off, and the room is growing uncomfortably warm. It smells of varnish, mildew, cabbagey body odor.

  “Obviously, I had Claire’s passport,” I tell him, “which I gave the authorities as soon as they asked for it. I also have her wallet, which has her driver’s license in it, and her credit cards, and both her Chinese and American money—”

  “So she had no money with her when she got on the bus to Guilin?” Jonnie interrupts.

  “Well, we gave her some at the last minute. About eighty yuan.”

  And that’s when all the pieces suddenly come together, and it clicks.

  The money that Eckehardt tossed Claire as the bus doors were slamming shut: It was Chinese money, renminbi. Even though shopkeepers gave us change in renminbi all the time, possessing it as a foreigner was technically illegal. When Claire tried to buy a bus ticket using local money, the driver must have felt obliged to refuse it and handed her over to the local authorities. This is why she never made it to Guilin; this is how she’s disappeared. I feel a flood of relief. Of course! China is practically built on bureaucrats and tickets.

  At the police station, no doubt Claire had tried to cash her traveler’s checks for FEC money. But without her identification, there was no way she could’ve done this, and without her phrase books, there was no way she could’ve communicated anything to the officers either. I imagine her standing inside some dank concrete outpost in the countryside, pantomiming furiously before an indifferent police chief. She points at the chunky telephone on his desk, then to her bundle of American Express traveler’s checks. With her finger, she outlines the shape of a rectangle in the air, then mimes driving toward Guilin. When he does not respond, perhaps she looks around in vain for a pen and a pad of paper in order to draw an American flag. Finally, distraught and tear-streaked with frustration, she begs, “Ni shou ying wen ma?”

  Yet the policemen in Guangxi province speak only a dialect, so her Mandarin is useless. Having absolutely no idea who she is, where she’s from, or what she wants, the officers regard her first with contempt, then with a growing combination of pity and perplexity. They have no idea what to do with her. They cannot simply release her onto the side of the road. She is a mysterious foreigner without any FEC money, ID, or a ticket.

  In my mind’s eye, Claire is then shown to a metal folding chair in the corner and instructed to take a seat. A kindly older officer arrives with a tin bowl full of noodle soup, a pair of chopsticks, a lone, dented spoon. She sits there holding it despondently while the police stand around the desk gesticulating and arguing about what to do next. Locals, who’ve heard that a strange blond big nose is at the precinct, start dropping by to sneak peeks at her through the open doorway. They set down their bundles, their enormous baskets stuffed full of bok choy and scallions, and motion and call to their neighbors to come and see. People point and light cigarettes and even attempt to offer her one through the window. Finally Claire has had enough. Setting down her bowl, she stands up defiantly, shoos them away, and is about to make a scene when the police chief’s telephone rings. An alert has been issued across the province from the manager of the Osmanthus Hotel. An American woman in Guilin says her friend is missing. She says she was on a bus from Yangshuo without money or ID. Quickly the Chinese put two and two together.

  So now here at last is the final piece of the puzzle. Jonnie, I conclude, has been dispatched to confirm Claire’s identity and get the money needed to release her. Perhaps she will be required not only to pay for her bus ticket but also to sign some sort of bogus confession admitting to having traded on the black market. Perhaps the Chinese have incurred expenses for her meals and a hotel room that they want me to reimburse. Whatever: In a moment this fiasco will finally be over. I have plenty of FEC money. Better yet, I have all of Claire’s ID, so she can cash her traveler’s checks directly.

  “Listen. It’s okay. Claire has traveler’s checks with her,” I reassure Jonnie. “Over a thousand dollars’ worth. They’re inside her purse.”

  Jonnie frowns. He glances fleetingly at the officers on either side of him, then leans forward. “There is no purse,” he says flatly.

  “Yes there is,” I say. “She had it with her when she left. It’s dark brown leather, with a big brass buckle. It looks like a saddlebag, but it’s a purse.”

  “There is no purse,” he repeats. “Your friend’s purse is gone.”

  The way he says this sends a chill through me. A terrible feeling takes hold.

  “What? What happened? Was she robbed?” I suddenly imagine someone yanking the bag from Claire’s shoulder, smacking her across the face with the buckle.

  Jonnie looks me dead in the eye. “Her purse is in the river,” he says, as if this explains everything.

  “The river? What river? How did it get in a river?”

  “Your friend took it with her,” he says plainly, “when she jumped in.”

  ———

  The room constricts and distorts around me as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. I blink rapidly in the dim orange light. I don’t think I’ve heard him correctly. I’m suddenly aware only of the bedside clock ticking ominously, the exhaust fan whirring in the bathroom, my own congested breathing.

  “Claire jumped in a river?” I say after a moment.

  “Yes. But do not worry,” Jonnie adds hurriedly. “The peasants fished her out.”

  “Peasants?”

  “Yes. And they gave her clothes.”

  “Clothes?” I say faintly. “What happened to her clothes?”

  “It seems she took them off,” he replies, “when she jumped in the river.”

  Claire, who didn’t even want me to see he
r in the communal shower at the Pujiang? She tore off her Izod shirt and her khaki wrinkle-free pants and flung herself off a bridge in the middle of Southwest China? No matter how erratic and paranoid her behavior was, she never once struck me as suicidal. And until this very minute, I’ve still somehow kept telling myself that the scene she made on the streets of Yangshuo was just that, a scene—that she was acting.

  “No,” I say emphatically. “Claire didn’t do that.”

  “I am so sorry,” Jonnie says, nodding. “But I am afraid that she did.”

  He regards me with genuine sadness.

  “Christ,” I cry, clamping my hands over my mouth. “Jumped in a river? What the hell was she trying to do? Is she crazy?”

  Not realizing that I am being rhetorical, Jonnie nods. “Yes,” he declares. “We do think she is crazy. We think that she has tried to die.”

  Despite the vast cultural and linguistic differences that exist around the world, certain acts, it seems, are interpreted universally: Voluntarily throw yourself off a bridge for no apparent reason, and it’s generally assumed that you’re trying to kill yourself.

  Eyeing me steadily, Jonnie leans forward with his fingers spread across his knees. “We need to know if you do, too, Miss Gilman, ” he says.

  “If I do what?”

  He enunciates each word slowly, as if he is loading a pistol: “We… need… to… know… if… you … think… your… friend… is… crazy.”

  We, he has said. We is plural.

  That’s when it dawns on me that Jonnie is not a student.

  My friend, an American, has just attempted suicide on Chinese soil. She has stripped herself of all belongings and identification. And for all I know, she was overheard screaming about the CIA, the FBI, and the Mossad beforehand. This is not some trifling matter of an unpaid bus ticket or a public temper tantrum. This is a big fucking deal. And the Chinese know it. They have her in custody. None of these three men in my hotel room are temporary hires, fumbling bureaucrats, or local Keystone Cops at all. They are skilled, high-level Communist and military officials. They have woken me up at three a.m. deliberately. They want to catch me off guard in order to get information—confirmation, perhaps, of something they already know or suspect. I am not being briefed casually about Claire’s condition whatsoever. I am being interrogated.