Sweat Read online

  The car pulled up to the front of Jake’s mother’s house. The light from the kitchen cast a faint yellow hue into the living room.

  “I’ll see you around, Shawn.”

  “Take my card, Jake. If you ever need a ride, give me a ring.”

  “Only if I can charge it to my Dad’s account.”

  “Hey, he’s your father. That’s between you and him. I just drive the car.” ***

  The Presidential Club was the place for Washington’s elite to quench their thirst. Groups of large leather chairs huddled around small marble-top tables, the thick burgundy carpet reaching up to grasp the bottom of the table legs. Cigars and glasses of brandy kept each other company on the tables as the power circles drew and redrew their political lines in the sand.

  Senator Day made his way through the room, nodding at colleagues, acknowledging familiar faces through the dim light and thick cigar smoke. The Presidential Club was Washington’s version of Las Vegas. What happened in the expensive lounge stayed in the lounge. It wasn’t called a club by accident. Wives of members were permitted but frowned upon. Lovers were a different story. Call girls made the occasional guest appearance.

  Senator Day directed Peter to a table near the rear of the club, and a waiter with a small humidor appeared as the two sunk into their respective leather chairs. Peter selected two Dominican cigars wrapped with tobacco grown from the finest Cuban seeds and handed one to the senator. The waiter placed a cigar cutter and a box of oversized matches on the table before disappearing in search of the senator’s favorite brandy, stored on the private shelf behind the full bar.

  “How is business, Peter?” the senator asked. Peter understood that dinner with Jake and the senator’s blonde aide was merely a preamble to the discussion at the club. A meal for the sake of a meal before real conversation could take place.

  “Very well, Senator. Thank you for asking. If all goes well, I may have some upcoming business in Brazil.”

  “Brazil?”

  “Yes. Have you been?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “The women are beautiful.”

  “I’m sure they are.” Inside, the senator cringed at the thought of another international tryst.

  Peter continued. “The Brazilians understand the balance between work and life’s other pleasures. They don’t let one interfere with the other.”

  “An admirable quality.”

  “Indeed.”

  The senator inhaled as he ran his nose along the length of the cigar. He reached for the cutter on the table, snipped off half an inch, and put the unlit cigar to his lips.

  “How did your filming efforts turn out?”

  “Very professional. We completed editing last week. All told, our trip produced thirty solid minutes of footage.”

  “When is the film scheduled for its big screen release?”

  Senator Day squirmed slightly in his chair. His thoughts turned toward the photographs he had received in the mail and the wire transfers that vanished without a trace into a bank in Hong Kong. The senator lied. “I’m planning to work it into the schedule this month with the Special Committee on Overseas Labor. We are at a critical juncture and need to make our recommendation to the Senate.”

  “I’m sure your constituents will be pleased with your recommendation.”

  The senator flashed his best smile. He knew all too well how deep Peter kept his hand in Congress’s pocket. His guest understood that the senator had a vested interest in the garment industry. Peter personally knew many of the businessmen with manufacturing interests in the senator’s home state—businessmen with thick briefcases and thicker wallets that pushed, coerced, and bullied for status quo and the ability to overlook a little human suffering in the name of making money.

  “I would love to see the footage from Saipan,” Peter said.

  If you only knew what I know, the senator thought. That tape and those photos could ruin my life.

  The senator lied again. “That can be arranged.”

  “Please let me know. Of course, I’d also be happy to testify before the committee in any way that you see fit.”

  Now there is an idea. “That may be very well received, Peter,” the senator said, his mind churning.

  “I’m at your disposal.”

  Peter took a sip of his brandy and a pull from his cigar. The senator looked around the room to keep tabs on the night’s list of who’s who.

  “How is your chief-of-staff?”

  “Scott? Took a few weeks before they could even do surgery due to swelling and internal hemorrhaging. He was scheduled to be back at work this week, but that was before he developed a staph infection. The doctors aren’t saying when he will be released. In the meantime, the rest of my staff is floundering to cover for him. Twenty employees who can’t get out of each other’s way.”

  “Waterskiing can be dangerous.”

  “Everything can be dangerous,” the senator answered. The senator saw his segue into the heart of the topic he was looking to broach. “By the way, I wanted to thank you and Lee Chang for your assistance with my aide. Lee was most helpful in coordinating the medical care on Saipan. Under the circumstances, I felt somewhat responsible for my employee’s injury.”

  “Lee Chang knows Saipan very well.”

  “Yes, he seemed to be very well-connected. A very interesting man.”

  There was a slight change in the nuance of the conversation, a mild shift in mannerisms Peter immediately recognized. “In what way, Senator?”

  “I understand Lee comes from a very successful family.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “So why Saipan? Running a sweatshop seems like, how should I put it…an underachievement.”

  Both men jogged for position.

  “The Chang family has manufacturing interests in a half-dozen Asian countries,” Peter said, pausing briefly to sip his brandy. “But Chang Industries on Saipan is the most profitable.”

  “Lee has brothers, no?”

  Peter knew the senator had been doing his homework. “The Chang family has a proud lineage in China going back too many generations to count. Lee has two elder brothers who are successfully running other business interests of the family.”

  “In China?”

  “Yes, on the mainland.”

  “In Hong Kong?”

  “No,” Peter answered.

  “So only Lee resides outside of the country?”

  Peter didn’t respond. Years of doing business with snakes taught him never to divulge all his information at once. The truth was simple. After Lee was caught with the underage daughter of a high-powered politician in the Chinese Ministry of Trade, Lee’s father had been forced to make a decision. And C.F. Chang chose money over his youngest son.

  “Yes, Lee is the only son working outside of China on a full-time basis,” Peter finally answered, his mind filtering every word of the conversation, trying to gauge where the senator was going.

  “What about money?”

  Peter smelled blood. “I’m sorry, Senator?”

  “Does Lee share in his family’s fortune?”

  “I imagine he is well taken care of.”

  Peter thought about the senator’s question and stored it in his memory bank. “Is there a problem?”

  “No. No problem at all. I’m just gathering background information. I know I asked some questions about Chang Industries before our trip, but I wanted some more information on our host. I need to be prepared for the Senate Committee. You know how it is with politicians. Any imaginable question could come up.”

  “I understand, Senator.”

  “Of course you do, Peter. That is why you have your office right here in D.C., close enough to hear the whispers circulating the halls on Capitol Hill.”

  “I’m not hiding my intentions, Senator. I’m into money, politics, and women. Usually in that order.”

  “Please, there is no need to get defensive. I’m just saying that you could have your office an
ywhere, but you choose to keep it in D.C. Very prudent. Keep an eye on legislation that will affect your business. Very smart.”

  “Senator, my home is D.C., but the world is my office.”

  The senator had asked enough questions for one evening. He reached to the table and raised his glass. “To continued success.”

  The two powerhouses clinked their glasses and sipped their drinks. They finished their cigars and brandy, dousing themselves in alcohol, thick smoke, and suspicion.

  Chapter 7

  The stainless steel handcuff dug into Wei Ling’s left wrist, leaving a purple bruise in the shape of a bracelet like a punk-rock fashion statement. Her backside was sore from lying hours on end, the only alternative she had to standing directly next to the bed. A bedpan in need of attention rested on the floor under the mattress, just beyond the outstretched toes of her bare feet. She was trapped in a world so narrow it made a cell in the solitary confinement block seem like a suite at the Four Seasons.

  The middle-aged lady who took care of Lee Chang visited Wei Ling three times a day. She brought soup and rice for breakfast, noodles with a plate of steamed vegetables for lunch, and a full meal in the early evening. It was a balanced diet, and better than the food from the sweatshop kitchen served to the able-bodied seamstresses. Wei Ling’s food was coming directly from Lee Chang’s personal refrigerator. No bruised fruit. No vegetables on the verge of spoiling. Every dish contained real chunks of chicken, pork, or beef, a vast culinary improvement over the usual unidentifiable meat particles. Everything had its positive side, and for Wei Ling the food was the only thing she had to look forward to.

  Food aside, Wei Ling knew she was in trouble. No one with your best interest in mind locks you in a storage room and chains you to a bed. The good doctor hadn’t come since the morning she was diagnosed as pregnant, and Wei Ling wasn’t holding her breath waiting for his next visit. With the bloated body of the doctor sitting on a slab in the morgue, skull caved-in, she was right to assume he wouldn’t be stopping by anytime soon.

  Wei Ling wanted an abortion. She didn’t care that it would cost her five hundred dollars in penalty money to the Changs. The baby would bring shame to her own family, and her family’s honor had led her to Saipan in the first place. The honor of working overseas. Honor and a little cash to help her struggling family in Southern China’s Guangzhou region. Coming home with a baby, worse still a half-breed, was not an option. Her family would disown her, and she wasn’t from a place in society where a single mother would be met with open arms. She knew the path. Her family would disown her, she would be deemed unemployable, and she would end up on the street.

  Having the baby wasn’t an option.

  Lee Chang promised her daily that an abortion was on the way, per company policy. Two other girls had become pregnant since Wei Ling’s arrival at Club Paradise, and the doctor had acted quickly, under the orders of Lee Chang. So she waited for her fate in the recently transformed storage room, one arm cuffed to the metal bed frame. She was a prisoner, and like all prisoners, her life choices were limited. Worse, she was alone.

  The seamstresses’ quarters, for all its rules, regulations, and downright mean spiritedness, was a hell of a lot better than where she found herself now. And she missed her friends. Shi Shi Wong and the other hundred seamstresses were her family. Misery loves company, and in the seamstresses’ quarters, they all helped each other to get by.

  Her current isolation took away her only mental outlet. The handcuff on her wrist took away her physical ones. She never thought she would say it, but all she wanted was to have an abortion and be allowed back to work. She wasn’t asking for much, but Wei Ling had a growing suspicion she would never see the inside of the seamstresses’ quarters again. ***

  Shi Shi Wong looked for her slippers in the piles of footwear scattered on the floor and stacked into four-foot-high bookshelves near the back door of the seamstresses’ quarters. She wedged her feet into her green-trimmed flip-flops and slipped out the unlocked door into the rainy night.

  The grounds were off limits after lights-out, a nightly ritual marked with a five-second alarm blast at eleven-thirty sharp. The doors to the seamstresses’ quarters were locked some nights and open others, depending if the guards remembered to bolt them, which in turn was dependent upon the nightly poker game and how much the night guards drank.

  But the locks were the least of Shi Shi’s worries. The guards kept an eye, albeit an inebriated one, on the property, and any girl on the grounds after hours was guaranteed a beating. No whips or batons—just a good old-fashioned, barehanded roughing up with a few kicks thrown in for emphasis. A beating bad enough to remind the guilty party and her co-workers of the rules. A beating just short of an injury that would prevent her from working. It was a fine line, and the guards needed to look no further than Lee Chang to see how it was done with precision.

  Shi Shi stooped as she walked behind the seamstresses’ dorm and stopped at the corner. A lone guard stood at the front gate, his silhouette visible under the dim overhead light. Shi Shi crouched down, held her breath, and listened. The light pattering of rain on the puddles of mud that had formed on the dirt ground was the only audible sound. She looked around in the darkness between the buildings, stood, and covered the distance between the seamstresses’ quarters and the factory in short, quick strides. She moved quietly among the fabric sheds behind the factory that held rolls of cotton, nylon, and hi-tech concoctions with fancy names like Rip-Proof Synthetic and Moisture-X.

  Shi Shi stopped and repeated her crouch-and-listen routine.

  Nothing.

  With a final short sprint from the darkness, Shi Shi touched the side of the infirmary wall, crouching under the security lights just beneath Lee Chang’s residence. She wiped at the wet glass with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and peered through the window into the empty infirmary. “Where are you?” she said to herself in her native tongue.

  She shuffled among empty boxes, garbage cans, and crates of discarded swatches of unused fabric. A dull yellow glow emitted from the next window on the first floor, the weak light drowning in the rain as it reached the end of its spectrum. A TV blared from Lee Chang’s residence above, the sound of screaming soccer fans broadcast live from China overpowering the sound of rain hitting the fabric sheds’ tin roofs. Shi Shi stepped up on two old crates and looked in the window next to the infirmary. The rain on her face and the textured sliding windows didn’t prevent her from immediately recognizing the body of her bunkmate of two years. She tapped on the window and Wei Ling sat straight up, pain shooting down her arm to her elbow. She looked through the glass, saw Shi Shi’s face, and began to sob.

  Wei Ling tugged at the bed, moving the heavy frame and mattresses inch by inch until she could reach the bottom of the window. She put the pain of her left wrist out of her mind and stretched with her free hand, turning the lock and teasing herself with freedom. Shi Shi, still standing on the crates, pushed the window open, rain splattering into the room. She grabbed Wei Ling’s outstretched arm and embraced it.

  “Wei, are you ok? We’ve been worried about you.”

  “I knew you would come looking for me,” Wei Ling said, tears streaming from her eyes. “I’m pregnant,” she said before the sobbing spell escalated.

  “From that night?”

  “Yes. The American.”

  “Wei. I’m so sorry.”

  “Lee Chang keeps telling me that the doctor is coming to take me to the hospital, but I’ve been chained to this bed for a week now.”

  “The doctor is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “They found his body on the beach earlier in the week.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Putani, the new girl from Thailand, is sleeping with one of the guards. He told her. He thought it was funny.”

  “You have to get me out of here. That crazy Lee Chang is going to kill me.”

  “It’s okay. If he wanted you dead, you’d be gone by now. I‘ll t
hink of something, but I can’t get you out tonight. I’ll talk to some of the girls and see if they can help.”

  “Make it quick.”

  “What about Peter?” Shi Shi asked. “He will come looking for you sooner or later.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. As soon as I can get out without getting caught.”

  “Hurry.”

  “Take care.”

  Shi Shi kissed Wei Ling’s hand as Wei Ling caressed her face with her fingertips. The meeting through the window ended suddenly, the crate supporting Shi Shi’s small frame creaking once before giving way with a violent crash. Shi Shi’s arm was ripped out of the window and a muffled cry slipped out.

  “Shi Shi?” Wei Ling repeated several times with no reply. She stretched to shut the window, her flesh cutting against the handcuff. Wei Ling sat down on the bed and continued to cry.

  Hopeful tears combined with hopeless ones. ***

  Shi Shi’s weight crashing through the crate brought the night guards out of their poker shed, whiskey and beer bottles in hand. Not detectives to begin with, their observation skills were further numbed by alcohol, their ambition robbed by greed and the chance to take money from each other through five card stud, deuces wild.

  Shi Shi hid behind the building that housed the sweatshop floor and waited for the three guards to finish their half-hearted search of the back of the facility. When the cussing started again in the shed, Shi Shi limped across the small patch of wet ground to the seamstresses’ quarters and opened the door.

  She limped down the hall, blood and mud trailing behind her. Her ankle was already starting to swell, a faint blue ring forming around the outside of the bone. She grimaced when she walked, the pain telling her something was broken.

  Her roommates heard Shi Shi before she reached the room—the panting sound of the injured girl dragging one leg behind her. “Shi Shi!” her roommates said, turning on the small light next to the door.

  “Shhhhhhhh, the guards are outside,” Shi Shi responded, flopping her butt onto the mattress of the lower bunk bed. Blood ran down her leg from her knee to her foot, a deep gash that everyone agreed would need stitches.