Reamde

Csongor considered it. You would think that by this time he and Yuxia and Marlon would know everything there was to know about one another, but the rigors of the voyage had left little time for getting acquainted; Yuxia knew that Csongor’s father was deceased, but little else about his family. “My mother is a nice lady with high blood pressure who has little strokes all the time. I will send her a note saying I’m out of the country on business, but I can’t possibly tell her what has been going on—it would be like throwing her off a bridge. My brother is in Los Angeles working on his dissertation and I talk to him maybe four times a year.”

Yuxia seemed taken aback that any family could be so small and poorly organized.

“What I really want to do is some research,” Csongor said. “I want to see if there is any information about a black, English-speaking Islamic terrorist whose code name or real name might be Jones.”

I’d like you to have a look at the pistol that Mr. Jones is holding up to my neck, Zula had said on the pier.

“For all we know,” Csongor went on, “there are pictures of Mr. Jones up on the Internet, and if I can identify him by name, then I could consider going to the authorities and telling them ‘So-and-so was in Xiamen a couple of weeks ago and he has a hostage.’”

“Which authorities?” Marlon asked.

“I have no idea,” Csongor said.

“Whoever cares,” Marlon suggested.

They dove into the food, almost literally, and did not speak much for a while. It was the finest meal of Csongor’s life, and he cursed himself for not having bought ten times as much of it.

“Do you want to get in touch with your family, Yuxia?” Csongor asked, when he was able to speak again. This created a pang that was obvious on her face and that left both of her companions somewhat aghast. “It is all I think about,” she said eventually, “but I want to wait until we are somewhere that feels safer.”

Csongor went into the bathroom and found Yuxia’s and Marlon’s damp clothes strung up all over the place. All of them had been wearing the same garments for two weeks, rinsing them occasionally in salt water. He turned on the shower and climbed in fully clothed, using bar soap to squeeze lather in and out of the fabric, then stripped down and left it all on the floor of the tub while he washed himself, letting the soapy water run off his body and down into the clothing, treading on it with his feet. Finally he spent a minute squeezing rinse water through them, then turned off the shower and began toweling himself off. He was a hairy man, a living advertisement for the body waxing industry, and it seemed as though his pelt was capable of holding a liter of water. He wrung out his clothing as best he could and hung it up wherever he could find a place, but despaired of its ever getting dry. But under the sink was a hair dryer stashed on a little ledge, which he pulled out and used to dry his underwear, then his trousers—which he had long ago cut off at the knees to make into shorts—and then his shirt.

After he was dressed, Yuxia and then Marlon rotated through the bathroom, drying out their clothes and putting them on, and then they went downstairs and across the street to NetXCitement!, where they devoted a little time to getting themselves situated. The standards and practices here were radically different from what prevailed in a Chinese wangba, and this took Marlon a bit of getting used to. Here there was no need to show ID, and there were no PSB cops hanging around to keep an eye on things. The place might be large by the standards of this provincial town but it was tiny compared to a Chinese wangba; it had no more than twenty terminals, plus counter space where perhaps another twenty patrons could plug in their own personal laptops. And instead of being filled with Chinese teenagers mostly playing games, it played host to a smattering of old white men mostly looking at racy pictures.

Having negotiated these cultural rapids, Marlon claimed the fastest and most expensive computer in the place, on the grounds that running T’Rain consumed a lot of memory and processing power, and Csongor rented a run-of-the-mill one nearby.

There was yet more culture shock as Marlon discovered that T’Rain was not even installed on his computer and that he would have to download it, a procedure that in some precincts would have consumed a great many hours. Here it took twenty minutes. For whatever reason, NetXCitement! had an extremely fast Internet connection.

Meanwhile Csongor had been thinking about Yuxia’s predicament. “I think I know of a way you could send a message to your family without giving away our location,” he said.