The Stone Monkey

away from its crowded streets, the smells of seafood, the stink of rancid oil from the tourist restaurants. He reflected now on how elegance and comfort like this, which he’d fought hard to achieve, had long been targets of the Communist Party.
    Why do you pursue the path of decadence?
    You are part of the old! Do you repent your ways?
    You must rid yourself of old culture, old customs, old habits, old ideas! You must reject your decadent values.
    You are infected with wrong thought and wrong desires!
    Wrong desires? he considered, smiling cynically to himself. Desires? Feeling the familiar crawling sensation in his groin. An urge he’d been very familiar with—and often ruled by—all his life.
    Now that he’d survived the sinking of the ship and hadescaped from the beach, his thoughts were returning to his normal priorities: he needed a woman badly.
    He’d had none for over two weeks—a Russian prostitute in St. Petersburg, a woman with a broad mouth and breasts that lolled alarmingly toward her armpits when she lay on her back. The event was satisfying—but only barely.
    And on the Fuzhou Dragon ? None. Usually it was a snakehead’s prerogative to ask one of the prettier women piglets to his stateroom, promising to reduce her transit fee in exchange for a night in his bed. Or, if she was traveling alone or with a weak man, simply to drag her to his cabin and rape her. What was she going to do, after all? Call the police when they arrived in the Beautiful Country?
    But his bangshou, hiding out in the hold as his spy, had reported that the women piglets on the Dragon weren’t particularly attractive or young and the men were defiant and smart, perfectly capable of causing trouble. So it had been a long, celibate voyage.
    He now resumed fantasizing about the woman he called Yindao, the Chinese word for female genitals. The nickname was contemptuous, of course, but not particularly so in her case—for the Ghost thought of all women, except for a few businesswomen and female snakeheads he respected, solely in terms of their bodies. A number of images came to mind about the liaison he had planned with Yindao: her lying beneath him, the distinctive sound of her voice in his ear, her arching back, his hands gripping her long hair . . . such beautiful silken hair . . . . He found himself painfully aroused. For a moment he thought about forgetting the Changs and the Wus. He could meet Yindao—she was here in New York—andmake the fantasies real. But, of course, it wasn’t in his nature to do that. First, the piglet families would die. Then he would be able to spend long hours with her.
    Naixin.
    All in good time.
    A glance at his watch. It was nearly 11 A.M . Where were the three Turks? he wondered.
    When the Ghost had arrived at the safehouse not long ago he’d used one of the stolen cell phones he kept there to call a community center in Queens with which he’d done business several times in the past. He’d hired three men to help him find and kill the piglets. Ever paranoid and wishing to keep his connections between himself and his crimes as distant as possible, the Ghost hadn’t gone to any of the traditional tongs in Chinatown; he’d hired Uighurs.
    Racially the vast majority of mainland China is Han, tracing their ancestry back to the dynasty of that name, which established itself about 200 B.C . The other eight or so percent of the population is made up of minority groups like the Tibetans, Mongolians and Manchus. The Uighurs (pronounced “wee-gurs”), whose people are from western China, were one such minority. Predominantly Islamic, their native region is considered central Asia and before being annexed by China was called East Turkestan. Hence, the Ghost’s name for them: “Turks.”
    Like the other minorities in China the Uighurs were often persecuted and under great pressure from Beijing to assimilate into Chinese culture. Separatists were often brutalized and killed and Uighurs were very vocal in their demands for independence; most of the terrorist acts in China could be traced to Uighur freedom fighters.
    The Uighur community in New York was quiet, devoutand peaceful. But this particular group of men from the Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens was as ruthless as any triad the Ghost had ever dealt with. And since this assignment involved killing families who were Han Chinese they were the perfect choice to help him; they were motivated by both years of oppression