LITMIR.BIZ

       BEIJING

      WE FLEW BUSINESS class for nearly a day on a packed and pork-smelling China Eastern Airlines jet, chasing back the sunset. Ambien and all the in-flight Harry Potter movies, my companions. When I fell asleep, I was pursued by wizards and schoolchildren with the powers of the devil. Strange how much of life you spend wishing it would only pass, faster, even faster.

      Our driver from the Beijing airport wore white gloves and a bellhop’s cap. A drifting April haze gave the city a gray tint, with dark and shapeless buildings that blurred out on the horizon even as we approached them. My first city view was from our Buick, at a stoplight: fifteen construction cranes strapped to naked three-quarter buildings, many of which looked too tall already to support themselves. I followed one up as far as I could see until the smog and sunshine swallowed it.

      “See it, Luke?” my boss said, pointing. “The national bird of China.”

      “What’s that?” I said.

      “The construction crane,” he said.

      I’d heard him try this joke around the office in the days before we left. I’d heard all his bits. I made a laugh anyway. Congressman Leonard Fillmore—Republican, California, Fifty-First Congressional District—self-styled Asia hand, now embarked on his first visit to mainland China. He was a presidential hopeful with a familial claim to the office: Leo Fillmore was a distant relation of the thirteenth president of the United States, one of the least distinguished in our history. Nearing sixty, Leo looked to me much older, probably from carrying twice his body weight in grudge and grievance. To his friends he was sometimes known as “Leo the Lion.” But the nickname had spread far and wide among his enemies, too—you could hear it whispered up and down the Rayburn Building corridors: “Leo the Lyin’.”

      “Who do we see at the whatever the fuck? Trade people, right?” the congressman said. “I’m fucking starving.”

      I reached into my messenger bag for our schedule. The bag, the nicest thing I owned, was a beautiful dark leather piece of work my ex-girlfriend Alex had given me on my twenty-third birthday. I never gave her, in our whole relationship, anything half as thoughtful. Two weeks ago, I’d turned twenty-four, but we hadn’t spoken. I pulled out every piece of paper, sorting through shape-shifting documents, looking for a schedule I was certain I had. Apparently, no. The congressman turned, as much as he could in his seat belt, to give me a shriveling stare. I didn’t acknowledge it. I’d once been more afraid of Leo. I had once been more respectful. Now we just bickered, like he did with his wife—except that she still loved him, possibly.

      “You’ve lost the schedule, Mr. Slade?”

      He called me “Mr.” only when he was being condescending.

      “Everything got scattered when I came through customs,” I said. I’d had to dig deep to find my passport, detained for additional questioning while Leo had already scampered to the bathroom.

      “Unbelievable,” he said.

      I pulled out my loaner phone and was alarmed to find it had no working signal. Our phones, like the trip, had been provided to us by a real estate firm called Bund International, a Chinese-American joint venture whose American face was a benefactor of Leo’s named Armand Lightborn. We had a five-day itinerary. The pace would be a horse race, and our ever-changing appointments were basically written in water. To be uncontactable was a piss-poor beginning. I shoved my phone and papers back into my bag and found a handwritten note on stationary someone had filched from the Savoy Hotel in London. When I recognized the scrawl, I felt it in my gums, like a dentist’s needle. It belonged to Leo’s wife.

       Luke—

       Make sure he takes his meds.

       No booze.

       No whores.

       I’m serious.

       xx,

       Theresa

       P.S. Daily updates.

      MEN IN ORANGE vests—in groups of ten, and there were tens of these groups—were planting weeping willows and begonias by the road. The congressman watched from behind

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