Free A Drop of Chinese Blood by James Church Page A

done. Water down the drain. She’s gone. Good riddance. Anyway, it’s only money.” It was a lot of money, some of it won during a rare lucky streak at Old Gao’s but most of it from a trip to Macau many years ago. I had kept it at home, since laundering it would have raised flags I didn’t want raised. I had thought a lot about what to do with the money; having my wife take it with her hadn’t been on my list of options.
    “Only money.” My uncle ran his fingers across the teeth of his Turkish saw. “Well, it’s your business, you’ll figure it out.” He didn’t think I’d figure it out; that much was obvious by his tone of voice. He cleared his throat. “You’re right. Money brings nothing but unhappiness. The worst cases I ever had to handle were about money. Sex came in a close second.”
    “What about this case?”
    “This case?” He picked up a pencil and prepared to redraw an old set of plans for bookcases with vertical shelves. “I don’t like the sound of it.”
    “What sound? The only sound so far is fifteen thousand yuan rustling in an envelope.”
    “Even so, I might not take it.”
    Take it or I’ll break your arm, I thought. I picked up a crowbar from against the wall and hefted it in my hand. Aloud I said pleasantly, “We’ll see. At least you can give her a hearing.”
    “Her? Where is she from?”
    “I don’t know. She didn’t give anything away over the phone. From her voice, I’d say she is from Yunnan.”
    My uncle groaned. “Kunming,” he said more to himself than to me. “A woman from Kunming.” He groaned again.
    “Something happen to you in Kunming?”
    “Another time. Fix up the office so it’s less of a dump. If she has drug money, we’ll know soon enough. Drug people are fussy about room hygiene. Can’t you hang up next time?”
    At two o’clock, there was a knock on the front door. My uncle was at his desk in the office, reviewing drawings for three pairs of rolling bamboo bookshelves. They were part of a contract for an open-air library to be built on Hainan Island. He insisted that he couldn’t work under contract, but I had finally convinced him at least to submit a bid.
    I opened the door to a young woman, fashionably dressed, holding an embroidered handkerchief to her nose.
    “I didn’t realize you lived in an industrial area,” she said. The accent was even lighter in person than it was over the phone. “I hope you keep the windows closed. It smells like there is a rendering plant next door. Surely that’s illegal.”
    “Industrial area? You must mean the neighbors. They are fond of piglets, at least the husband is. He thinks they are good for his vitality. It leads to a lot of squealing.”
    The woman lowered the handkerchief and gave me a determined frown, though it didn’t detract from her many good features. “I’ve heard this neighborhood is up for redevelopment. It can’t happen too soon.” She put the handkerchief back over her nose, which was small, like a button. Her mouth, by contrast, was wide, with the result that the lower half of her face was mostly occupied. Her lips were the color of cherries—I’m no fan of clichés, but that’s what they were, the color of ripe cherries—and full. She was wearing a hat that made her look taller than she was, though I wouldn’t want to call her short even in her bare feet. Not that her feet were bare at the moment. They were in expensive shoes, probably handmade, probably from leather that could double as butter. Though it was a warm afternoon, she had on a long coat that must have cost multiples of what she had agreed to pay just to step into the house. The coat matched the color of her lips. A sudden craving for fruit came over me.
    “Are we going to do this interview on the front step?” This put a bit more of Yunnan in the air, but not much.
    “No, of course not.” For the second time in a week I had nearly left a beautiful woman standing outside. It was a bad habit that needed