Free White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon Page A

saw part of a hospital bed. I could hear that same breathing as on the phone. Even up close it sounded like it had come from far away, like a faint breeze off the river that just barely brushes your curtains.
    “What about family back in Taiwan?” I asked.
    “Not that I know of. No mail, no phone calls. Excuse me.” Durel grabbed a roll of paper and what looked like a plastic bicycle pump and hurried around the corner into the alcove. I realized that the breeze had stopped. He’s dead, I thought, and held my own breath for a few agonizing seconds. Then Liu Ping started up again, exactly like before. His breathing had a wistful air, as if he were merely sighing. Relieved, I started nosing around the kitchenette. It was painted the same beige as the door, and the linoleum was yet another horrendous floral print. I saw a file beside the sink and opened it up. I don’t know where I got the nerve. Maybe from pretending to be a detective.
    I flipped past the medical information to a section entitled “Personal.” By “DOB” it said only “1915?” The place of birthwas “Taipei, Formosa.” Then it said, “Arrive US Customs: December 19, 1935.” I heard Durel approaching and shut the file.
    “Sorry,” he said, walking in. “His lungs fill with mucus.” I stepped aside sprightly as he put the spattered pump in the sink.
    “And he never talks?”
    “I don’t think he speaks English. Anyway, if he did, he forgot it. Just like he forgot everything. Even his name. Now he can’t even remember how to swallow.”
    I left the apartment in a state of somber excitement, or perhaps melancholy elation: I had found Liu Ping. What that meant, I didn’t know, but whoever Liu Ping was, that was him. Plus I’d found another clue. I went to the library to track it.
    I found nothing in the major dailies of the day, the
Times,
the
Tribune,
the
Daily News,
but after hours in front of a microfilm machine, I dug down to a layer of long-defunct tabloids focused on celebrity gossip and the police blotter. One weekly, the
New York Speculator,
seemed in the winter of 1935 to be particularly obsessed with ethnic crime. I slid through page after page of black-and-white drama, knifings in Harlem nightclubs and mafiosi with their hats over their faces, and then I saw it: The headline read, “Chinatown’s Poisonous Den: Deadly Love Pact or Harlot’s Shocking Revenge?” The photo showed a broken-down hotel with a Chinese sign, maybe even one we’d passed before. The story related how, in the middle of the night, hotel guests heard one Mr. Liu Ping, age 20, moaning for help in the hall, where he was discovered crawling on his hands and knees. Miss Su Li-Zhen, 19, was found dead in the room.She had overdosed on raw opium and cut her wrists. Mr. Liu Ping had also eaten opium, but had thrown it up and managed to survive. Witnesses and cops figured this had been a suicide pact that only one party had the guts to go through with. But Liu Ping’s family attorney offered a different take: Liu Ping had broken off his affair with Su Li-Zhen, a prostitute, and told her of his intention to return home. She had then poisoned him with opium-laced wine before taking her own life.
    I left the library and called Nina. We had a date to meet back downtown, but I asked her to come to the coffee shop instead: I did it, I told her. Case closed.
    “What?” Nina was outraged. “He’s alive? In his own body?”
    “Sort of.”
    “He didn’t kill himself? Bastard!” She snatched the printout of the article from my hand and ferociously scanned it. She smacked the table and waved the paper at me. “First of all, I’m not a prostitute.”
    “I didn’t say you were.”
    “I was a courtesan.”
    “Right.”
    She read the rest and slammed the table again. “And I did not try to murder him. We were supposed to die together, for love. That coward. That asshole. I can’t believe he let me die. And here I am looking for him in the next life, like a