The Stone Monkey

back and Li struck him in the nose with his open palm. He cried out and fell hard to the pavement. The guard lay there, gasping frantically for breath, blood pouring from his nose, while Li delivered a kick to his side.
    Taking the gun, an extra clip of ammunition and the man’s cigarettes, Li looked up and down the street. Two young women, walking arm in arm, pretended that they hadn’t seen. Aside from them the street was empty. He bent down to the miserable man again and took his wristwatch too and about three hundred dollars in cash.
    “If you tell anyone I did this,” Li said to the guard, speaking in Putonghua, “I’ll find you and kill you.”
    The man nodded and sopped up the blood with his sleeve.
    Li started to walk away then he glanced back and returned. The man cringed. “Take your shoes off,” Li snapped.
    “I—”
    “Shoes. Take them off.”
    He undid the black lace-up Kenneth Coles and pushed them toward Li.
    “Socks too.”
    The expensive black silk socks joined the shoes.
    Li took off his own shoes and socks, gritty with sand and still wet, and flung them away. He put on the new ones.
    Heaven, he thought happily.
    Li hurried back to one of the crowded commercial streets. There he found a cheap clothing store and bought a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a thin Nike windbreaker. He changed in the back of the store, paid for his purchases and tossed his old clothes into a trash bin. Li then went into a Chinese restaurant and ordered tea and a bowl of noodles. As he ate he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his wallet, the sheet that he’d stolen from Hongse’s car at the beach.
    August 8
    From: Harold C. Peabody,
    Assistant Director of Enforcement, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
    To: Det. Capt. Lincoln Rhyme (Ret.)
    Re: Joint INS/FBI/NYPD Task Force in the matter of Kwan Ang, AKA Gui, AKA The Ghost
    This confirms our meeting at ten a.m. tomorrow to discuss the plans for the apprehension of the above-referenced suspect. Please see attached material for background.
    Stapled to the memo was a business card, which read:
    Lincoln Rhyme
    345 Central Park West
    New York, NY 10022
    He flagged down the waitress and asked her a question.
    Something about Li seemed to scare her and warn that she shouldn’t help this man. But a second glance at his face must’ve told her that it would be worse to say no to him. She nodded and, eyes down, gave him what Li thought were excellent directions to the street known as Central Park West.

Chapter Twelve
    “You look better,” Amelia Sachs said. “How are you feeling?”
    John Sung motioned her into the apartment. “Very sore,” he said, and closing the door, joined her in the living room. He walked slowly and winced occasionally. An understandable consequence of having been shot, she supposed.
    The apartment that his immigration lawyer had arranged for him to stay in was a dingy place on the Bowery, two dark rooms, containing mismatched, damaged furniture. Directly below, on the first floor, was a Chinese restaurant. The smell of sour oil and garlic permeated the place.
    A compact man, with a few stray gray hairs, Sung walked hunched over from the wound. Watching his unsteady gait, she felt a poignant sympathy for him. In his life in China, as a doctor, presumably he would have enjoyed some respect from his patients and—even though he was a dissident—may have had some prestige. But here Sung had nothing. She wondered what he was going to do for a living—drive a taxi, work in a restaurant?
    “I’ll make tea,” he said.
    “No, that’s all right,” she said. “I can’t stay long.”
    “I’m making some for myself anyway.” There was no separate kitchen but a stove, a half-size refrigerator and a rust-stained sink lined one wall of the living room. He put a cheap kettle on the sputtering flame and took a box of Lipton from the cabinet over the sink. He smelled it and gave a curious smile.
    “Not what you’re used to?” she asked.
    “I’ll go shopping later,” he said ruefully.
    Sachs asked, “The INS let you out on bond?”
    Sung nodded. “I’ve formally petitioned for asylum. My lawyer tells me that most people try for it but don’t qualify. But I spent two years in a reeducation camp. And I’ve published articles attacking Beijing for human rights violations. We downloaded some as evidence. The examining officer wouldn’t guarantee anything but he said there’s a good case for asylum.”
    “When’s the