The Dog by Jack Livings Page B

They were nothing if you looked past their disguises. He’d once interviewed Johnny Chan, the world champion, and he could read Chan’s tells within five minutes of sitting down across from him. That was, in his own estimation, his greatest skill as a reporter, his ability to recognize a man’s true intentions.
    He watched long enough for a fortune in chips to change hands several times. At the commercial, he reached down, slid open his desk drawer, and pulled out the speech he’d been working on for the last month. It was nothing more than a list of sentimental recollections and professional triumphs cribbed from Li Pai’s memoir, written in a style that approximated ground meat shooting into a sausage casing. He’d never been able to work out the introduction. “What can I say about Li Pai that hasn’t already been said?” he’d begun the latest draft. The line had been scratched through, rewritten, and scratched through again, the pen scoring deeply into the paper. The more he worked it over, the worse it got. He didn’t want it to be good, but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself.
    He dropped the speech and slammed the desk drawer closed. He wasn’t going to fire sugarcoated bullets. Tell it straight or don’t tell it at all. Over the years, this stance had cost him friends, but he tallied those losses not as indicators of some failure on his part, but as the inevitable consequence of maintaining his ideals.
    The poker game ended in what Ning could tell was a staged win, the victor thrusting his hands aloft as his vanquished opponent lowered his face to the felt. They’d probably meet in a hotel room later to split the winnings.
    An F1 race came on next, and he watched, vaguely hoping for a crash.
    A cleaning crew of blue-bibbed women wheeled their carts through the newsroom, dumping trash cans and chatting to each other across the cubicles, oblivious to Ning’s presence. He checked his watch. He supposed it was late enough, and he gathered a few mementos—a press pass from the ’08 Olympics, a sliver of Shenzhou 1 ’s heat shield encased in resin, a photo of him at the U.S. Embassy protests in ’99—and stuffed them into the pockets of his coat. He opened the desk drawer again and pulled out the speech.
    *   *   *
    When Ning got to the Green Room, he nearly turned around and went home when he saw who was posted at the door.
    â€œYou’ve got some balls,” the man said. He was called Baby Zhou. So painful an example was he of the shopworn convention by which hulking men are given petite names that Ning cringed every time he set eyes on the guy. Baby Zhou was, indeed, a man of infantile proportions—a perfectly round head, high, perpetually rosy cheeks that gave the impression he was always smiling, stubby arms that seemed to project from the sides of his neck. Because of that, Ning had always caught a whiff of cruelty in the name, the possibility that it had been bestowed as an act of retaliation. If that was the case, Zhou seemed blissfully unaware. Whatever the name’s origin, Ning considered it a sad commentary on human nature.
    â€œNope. Nope. Not a chance,” Baby Zhou was saying.
    â€œI’m not going to tell you how to do your job, and you’d probably be right not to let me in,” Ning said.
    â€œNot a chance.”
    â€œBut you might show some respect to a man twice your age,” Ning said.
    â€œIf I killed you and threw you in a ditch out back, do you think anyone would care?” Baby Zhou said, stepping closer.
    Ning noticed that Baby Zhou’s eyes were incredibly puffy. “No, probably not,” he said.
    â€œI’d get a cash reward,” Baby Zhou said. “Do you think anyone’s forgotten about what happened last time you were here?”
    â€œThat kid should have known better than to go shooting his mouth off,” Ning said. Just then the