“I love you, Mom,” he blubbered.
And they both cried for a long time, and when he risked a look at Jie, she was crying, too.
“Mom,” he said, choking back snot. “I have a favor to ask of you. A big favor.”
“You’re in trouble.”
“Yes.” There was no point in denying it. “I’m in trouble. And I can’t explain it right now.”
“You’re in China, aren’t you?”
He didn’t know what to say. “You knew.”
“I suspected. It’s that gamer thing, isn’t it? I did the math on when you answered my messages, when you called.”
“You knew?”
“I’m not stupid, Leonard.” She wasn’t crying any more. “I thought I knew, but I didn’t want to say anything until you told me.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you coming home?”
He looked at Jie. “I don’t know. Eventually. I have something I have to do here, first.”
“And you need my help with that.”
“Mom, I need to you order a shipment from Shenzhen to Mumbai.” Big Sister Nor had suggested Mumbai, and Jie had shrugged and said that it was fine with her; one place was as good as any other. “I’ll give you the container number. And you have to have Mr. Alford call the port authority here and tell them that I’m authorized to access it.”
“No, Leonard. I’ll call the embassy, I’ll get you home, but this is—” He could picture her hand flapping around her head. “It’s crazy, is what it is.”
“Mom—”
“No.”
“Mom, listen. This is about a lot more than just me. There are people here, friends, whose lives are at stake. You can call the embassy all you want but I won’t go there. If you don’t help me, I’ll have to do this on my own, and I have to be honest with you, Mom, I don’t think I’ll be able to do it. But I can’t abandon my friends.”
She was crying again.
“I’m going to be at the port in—” he checked the screen of his phone—“in three hours. I’ve got my passport with me, that’ll get me inside, if you’ve got it squared away with the port authority. The container number is WENU432134. It’s at the western port. Do you have that?”
“Leonard, I won’t do it.”
“WENU432134,” he said, very slowly, and hung up.
There were five of them in all: Matthew, Jie, Wing, Shirong, and Wei-Dong. Jie had Matthew’s number on her phone, and he rounded up the rest. They didn’t know Wing and Shirong very well, but they’d been fleet of foot enough to escape the raid. They’d stopped at a 7-11 on the way to the train station and bought as much food as they could carry, asking the bemused clerk to pack it in boxes and seal them with packing tape.
As they approached the port, they stopped talking, walking slowly and deliberately. Wei-Dong steeled himself and walked to the guard’s booth. He hadn’t called his mother back. There hadn’t been time. Shenzhen was in chaos, police checks and demonstrations everywhere, some riots, spirals of black smoke heading into the sky.
He motioned for Wing to join him. They had agreed that he would play interpreter, to make Wei-Dong seem like more of a hopeless gweilo, above suspicion. They’d found him some cheap fake Chinese Nike gear to wear, a ridiculous track suit that reminded him of the Russian gangsters he’d see around Santee Alley.
Wordlessly, he handed his Port of Los Angeles ID and his passport—his real passport, held safely all this time—to the young man on the gate. “WENU432134,” he said. “Goldberg Shipping and Logistics container.”
He waited for Wing to translate, watched him sketch out the English letters on his palm.
The security guard looked over his shoulder at the two policemen in the booth with him. He picked up a scratched tablet and prodded at it with a blunt finger, squinting at Wei-Dong’s passport. Wei-Dong hoped that he wouldn’t try something clever, like riffling its pages looking for a Chinese visa.
He began to shake his head, said “I don’t see it—”
Wei-Dong felt sweat run down his butt-crack and over his thighs. He craned his neck to see the screen. There it was, but the number had been entered wrong, WENU432144. He pointed to it and said, “Tell him that this is the one.” He sent a silent thanks to his mother. The guard compared the number to the one he’d entered and then seemed about to let them pass. Then one of the policeman said, “Wait.”
The cop shouldered the security guard out of the way, took the passport from him, examined it closely, holding a page up to the light to see the watermark. “What are you bringing?”
Wei-Dong waited for Wing to translate.
“Samples,” he said. “Clothes.”
He opened up the box at his feet and pulled out a folded t-shirt emblazoned with some Chinese characters that said “I’m stupid enough to think that this shirt looks cool.” Jie had bought it from one of the few stubborn peddlers left on the street outside of the metro entrance near the train station. The cop snorted and said, “Does he know what this says?”
Wing nodded. “Yes,” he said. “But he thinks that other Americans won’t. If they like it, they will order twenty thousand from us!” He laughed, and after a moment, the cop and the security guard joined in. The cop slapped Wei-Dong on the shoulder and Wei-Dong forced a laugh out as well.
“Okay,” the cop said, handing back his papers. The security guard gave them directions. “But you’ll have to use the north gate to leave. We’re closing this one for the evening in half an hour.”
Wing made a show of translating for Wei-Dong, who had the presence of mind to pretend to listen, but he was rocking on his heels, almost at the point of collapse from lack of sleep and food.
They walked in total silence to the container, and Wei-Dong managed to only look over his shoulder once. Jie caught his eye when he did and waggled a finger at him. He smiled wryly and looked ahead, following the directions.
The container was just as he’d left it, and his key fit the padlock. The four marveled at the cleverness of his work inside as they efficiently unpacked their food.
“Three nights, huh?” said Jie, as he pulled the door shut behind them.
“After they load us.”
“When will that be?”
He sighed. “I need to call my mother to find out.” He pulled out his phone and Jie handed him her last SIM and a calling card.
Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang and Justbob had no warning this time. Three men, small-time crooks working on contract for a man in Dongguan who owned one of the big gold exchanges, worked silently and efficiently. They followed Justbob back from a Malaysian satay restaurant that she was known to frequent, back to the latest safe-house, a room over a massage parlor on Changi Road, where the Webblies could tap into the wireless from a nearby rent-by-the-hour hotel. The men waited patiently outside for all the windows to go dark.
Then they methodically attached bicycle locks to each doorway. It was nearly 5AM and the few passers-by paid them no particular attention. Once they had locked each door, they hurled petrol bombs through windows on the ground floor. They stayed just long enough to make sure that the fires were burning cheerily before they got into two cars parked around the corner and sped off. The next morning, they crossed into Kuala Lumpur and did not return to Singapore for eight months, drawing a small salary from the man in Dongguan while they laid low.
Big Sister Nor was the first one awake, roused by the sound of three windows smashing in close succession. She smelled the greasy smoke a moment later and began to shout, in her loudest voice, “Fire! Fire!” just as she had practiced in a thousand dreams.
Justbob and The Mighty Krang were up an instant later. Justbob went to the stairs and ventured halfway down toward the massage parlor before the flames forced her up again. The Mighty Krang broke out the window with a chair—it had been painted shut—and leaned way out, far enough to see the lock that had been added to the door. He breathlessly but calmly reported t
his to Big Sister Nor, who had already popped the drives out of their control machines. She handed them to him, listened to Justbob’s assessment of the staircase, and nodded.
They could hear the screams from the floor below them as the girls from the massage parlor broke out their own windows and called for help. A girl emerged, legs first, from one of the massage parlor’s small, high windows. She was screaming, on fire, rolling on the ground. A few people were in the street below, talking into their phones—the fire department would be here soon. It wouldn’t be soon enough. Choking smoke was already filling the room, and they were forced to their knees.
“Out the window,” Big Sister Nor gasped. “You’ll probably break a leg, but that’s better than staying here.”
“You first,” The Mighty Krang said.
“Me last,” she said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “After you two are out.” She managed a small smile. “Try to catch me, okay?”
Justbob grabbed The Mighty Krang’s arm and pulled him toward the window. He got as far as the sill, then balked. “Too far!” he said, dropping back to his belly. Justbob gave him a withering look, then hauled herself over the sill, dropped so she was hanging by her arms, then allowed herself to drop the rest of the way. If she made a sound, it was lost in the roar of the flames that were just outside the door now. The floor was too hot to touch.
“Go!” Big Sister Nor said.
“You’re our leader, our Big Sister Nor,” he said, and grabbed her arm. “We’re all nothing without you!” She shook his hand off.
“No, you idiot,” she said. “I’m not magic. You don’t need me. I am nothing more than the switchboard. You all lead yourselves. Remember that!” She grabbed the waistband of his jeans, just over his butt, and practically threw him out the window. The air whistled past him for an instant, and then there was a tremendous, jarring impact, and then blackness.
Big Sister Nor was on fire, her loose Indian cotton trousers, her long black hair. The room was all smoke now, and every breath was fire, too. She smelled her own nose-hairs singe as a breath of scalding air passed into her lungs, which froze and refused to work anymore. She stood and took one step to the window, standing for a moment like a flaming avatar of some tragic god in the window before she faltered, went down on one knee, then the flames engulfed her.
And below, the crowd on the street began to cry. Justbob cried, too, from the pavement where she was being tended by a passerby who knew some first aid and was applying pressure to her left leg. The Mighty Krang was unconscious, with a broken arm and three broken fingers and four broken ribs.
He woke in the same hospital as before, an eternity later, in casts and bandages, hazed in sedative. The hospital administration remembered him well and they took a certain satisfaction in ordering his isolation: no computers, no phones, and a kind of half-coma of sedation that would keep him out of trouble.
The nurses and cleaning staff remembered him, too, and with much more fondness than the administration. They reduced his meds, brought him his phone and a little disposable keyboard, brought in the cards and letters from Webblies around the world, and let Justbob come and sit silently at his side, good eye red and swollen, leg huge and ungainly in its cast. She held his unbroken hand tightly and sometimes a tear seeped out from under her eye-patch, though her remaining eye never wept.
The haze of sedation lifted, and though he couldn’t remember the ambulance ride or the work on him afterwards, he remembered what Big Sister Nor told him, and he wrote those words down, typing them with his left hand in English, Malay, Hindi and Chinese, recording them with his smoke-ruined voice from his hospital bed.
His words—Big Sister Nor’s words—went out all over the world, spreading from phone to message board to site to site. I’m not magic. You lead yourselves.
The words spread over the Webblies’ networks. They were heard by factory girls all over South China, back on the job after a few short days of energetic chaos, mass firings and mass arrests. They were heard by factory boys all over Cambodia and Vietnam. They were heard in the alleys of Dharavi and in the living rooms of Mechanical Turks all over Europe, the US and Canada. They were published in many languages on the cover of many national newspapers and aired on many national broadcasts.
These last treated the words as a report from a distant world—“Did you know that these strange games and the people who played them took it all so seriously?” But for the people who needed to hear them, the words were heard. They were the rallying cry of the largest and best-organized guilds in every game. They were spray-painted over the phone numbers of counterfeiters outside of the Shenzhen stock exchange. They appeared in English on t-shirts in China and in Chinese on t-shirts in the US. Guatemalans sold them from mesh bags to people at the net-cafes in Santee Alley.
The words were heard by five friends who downloaded them over the achingly slow network connection on the container ship, a day out of Shenzhen port. Five friends who wept to hear them. Five friends who took strength from them.
They hid in the inner container when the ship entered the Mumbai Harbor, heading for the Mumbai Port Trust. Wei-Dong had googled the security procedures at Mumbai Port, and he didn’t think they were using gas chromatographs to detect smuggled people, but they didn’t want to take any chances. They buttoned down in the airtight chamber. It was crowded, and the toilet had stopped working, and they had only managed to gather enough water for one brief shower each on the three-day passage.
They fell against one another, then clung to the floor as the container was lifted on a crane and set down again. They heard the outer door open, then shut, and muffled conversations. Then they were rolling, apparently on a truck-bed.
Cautiously, they opened the inner door. The smell of Mumbai—spicy, dusty, hot and wet—filled the container. Light streamed in from the little holes Wei-Dong had drilled an eternity ago on the passage to Shenzhen.
Now they heard the sound of horns, many, many horns. Lots of motorcycle engines, loud. Diesel exhaust. The huge bellowing air-horn of the truck that was carrying their container. The truck stopped and started many times, made a few slow, lumbering turns, then stopped. A moment later, the engines stopped too.
The five of them held their breaths, listened to the footsteps outside, listened to a conversation in Hindi, adult male voices. Listened to the scrape of the catch on the container’s big rear doors.
And then sunlight—hot, with swirling clouds of dust and the pong of human urine—flooded into the container. They shielded their eyes and looked into the faces of two grinning Indian men, with fierce mustaches and neatly pressed shirts. The men held out their hands and helped them down, one at a time, into a narrow alley that was entirely filled by the truck, which neatly shielded them from view. Wei-Dong couldn’t imagine backing a truck into a space this narrow.
The men gestured at the interior of the container, miming, Do you have everything? Wei-Dong and Jie made sure everyone was clear, and then nodded. The men waggled their chins at them, shook Wei-Dong and Jie’s hands, brief and dry, and edged their way back along the space between the truck and the alley’s walls. The engine roared to life, a cloud of diesel blew into their face, and the truck pulled away, lights glowing over a handpainted sign on the bumper that read HORN PLEASE.
The truck blew its horn once as it cleared the alley and made an impossibly tight right turn. The alley was flooded with light and noise from the street, and then they saw a man and a girl walking down it toward them.
They drew close. The girl was wearing some kind of headscarf worn as a a veil that covered most of her face. The man had short, gelled hair and was dressed in a pressed white shirt tucked into black slacks. The two groups stood and looked at one another for a long moment, then the man held his hand out.
“Ashok Balgangadhar Tilak,” he said.
“Leonard Goldberg,” Leonard said. They shook. It was another short, dry handshake.
The girl held her hand out. “Yasmin Gardez,” she said.
She barely took his hand, and the shake was brief.
“We all lead ourselves,” Leonard said. He hadn’t planned on saying it, but it came out just the same, and Wing understood it and translated it into Chinese, and for a moment, no one needed to say anything more.
“We have places for you to stay in Dharavi,” Yasmin said. Leonard translated. “We all want to hear what you have to tell us. And we have work for you, if you want.”
“We want to work,” Wing said.
“That’s good,” Ashok said, and they set off.
They emerged beside a hotel. The street before them thronged with people, more than they could comprehend, and cars, and three-wheelers, and bicycles, and trucks of all sizes. It was a hive of activity that made even Shenzhen seem sedate. For a moment none of them said anything.
“Mumbai is a busy place,” Yasmin said.
“We’re lucky to have you as guides,” Leonard said. He translated into Chinese, too.
“We have friends in the Transport and Dock Workers’ Union,” Ashok said, casually, setting off down the crowded pavement, ignoring the children who approached them, begging, holding their hands out, tugging at their sleeves. Leonard felt as though he was walking through an insane dream. “They were glad to help.”
The street ended at the ocean, a huge, shimmering harbor dotted with ferries and other craft. Ahead of them spread an enormous plaza, the size of several football fields stitched together, covered in gardens, and, where it met the ocean, an enormous archway topped with minarets and covered with intricate carvings, and all around them, thousands of people, talking, walking, selling, begging, sleeping, running, riding.
The five of them stopped and gaped. Three days locked in a container with nothing to see that was more than a few yards away had robbed them of the ability to easily focus on large, far-away objects, and it took a long while to get it all into their heads. Yasmin and Ashok indulged them, smiling a little.