The Great Divide Read online

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  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real events, businesses, organizations, and locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bunn, T. Davis, 1952–

  The great divide / T. Davis Bunn.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.U4718 G74 2000

  813′.54—dc21 99-086341

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55334-8

  Copyright © 2000 by T. Davis Bunn

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  FOR ISABELLA

  Who gives meaning and joy both to the gift

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  THE DAY AND THE WORLD were as gray as the sky. Grim and hot and terrifying. There was no escaping how scared she was. Fear gripped her with the strength of an eternal desert. The fact that she was here, that she might actually succeed at what she had planned and schemed over for so long, meant nothing. Not now.

  Gloria turned to the next person scuttling toward the gates, and spoke in a voice that she did not recognize as her own. “There, ask this one. Wait, please don’t run away!” Gloria wheeled on the cowering interpreter. “Why aren’t you asking him?”

  The interpreter was a wizened man she had hired in Hong Kong. She had gone through an agency and paid twice what the same services would have cost on the street. But she had wanted a paper trail. If she was being watched, as she hoped, Gloria wanted to make sure they knew she was coming.

  The interpreter stared at her with angry defiance. “They not talk with you.”

  “You need to be quicker, catch them before they enter the compound.” She gripped the padded shoulder of his cheap jacket and spun him around. “There, hurry, here comes another busload!”

  “Don’t touch suit!”

  She released her hold. “All we need is one person who works in Factory 101! Just one!”

  He muttered an angry expletive, jerked his lapels straight, and stalked toward the disembarking throng.

  Gloria risked a single glance at the gates. Guards clustered by the gatehouse and eyed her sullenly, talking among themselves. But none made any move toward her. She turned back, anxious that her plans might fail. Terrified that they might succeed.

  She watched the interpreter work the crowd. She knew what he was saying because he had told her. Factory 101, anyone work at Factory 101, we seek someone who has been there or seen inside. Anyone who has spoken to the workers inside Factory 101. Anyone.

  In the parking lot’s dusty sunlight, the disembarking laborers seemed burdened by the shift they had not yet begun. Some had journeyed from the far reaches of Guangdong Province, traveling as many as ten hours on these rusting, overcrowded buses. They came for a week of dormitory life and ten-hour workdays. Then back for one day in squalid farming villages and families who were desperate for any wages at all, before returning for another round.

  Even so, most still chattered noisily as they started toward the Guangzhou Industrial Compound’s main gates. Yet as soon as they heard what her interpreter was asking, all animation vanished. Time and time again Gloria watched it happen. Upon hearing the interpreter, the workers showed a single flash of terror, then nothing. The curtain descended. They hurried by, never glancing her way. It was all the confirmation she required.

  The interpreter returned to Gloria’s side. “They no speak to you.”

  “Just one. All I need is—”

  “Why you no hear?” His English continued to disintegrate the longer they remained. “All have much fear. I too. Come. We go.”

  “We’ll try one more busload.”

  He motioned angrily at the compound gates. The gesture revealed gray patches of sweat beneath his arms. “The guards ask questions too!”

  Gloria glanced around. It was true. The guards snagged passing workers and pointed back to where she stood with the interpreter. The workers refused to look Gloria’s way even then. But the guards were bolder. One soldier stomped into the gatehouse, picked up a phone, and watched her through the open window.

  “We go. Now.”

  Gloria blinked through the sweat streaming into her eyes. Why did it not rain? The day draped about her like a dirty, steaming rag. Beyond the tall brick wall, dozens and dozens of smokestacks spewed multicolored clouds, the one directly behind the main gates belching brilliant yellow. The air burned her throat as she said, “We’ll try one more time.”

  Fear turned to rage. “You crazy! These soldiers, they hurt you!”

  She swiped at her face. “One more busload. Then we leave.”

  The interpreter kicked at a stone and stomped away, muttering angrily in Cantonese. Gloria remained standing in the middle of a parking lot several hundred yards wide. The unpaved lot was dotted with signs in Chinese, all for buses to various outlying villages—there were hundreds of rusting signs. Red dust floated over the uneven, potholed surface. Her clothes were stained, her face and hands sweat-sticky and layered with grit. Gloria could feel the soldiers’ hostile gaze. She had never felt so exposed. All her careful plans, all her months of scheming, all her urgency and zeal—she could not recall a single thing beyond the rising cloud of dismay.

  They had arrived too late. Gloria had planned to set off from Hong Kong before dawn. She had contracted f
or a car and driver through the hotel, and an interpreter through the agency. She had told the driver, but not the interpreter, where they were going. The interpreter had arrived two hours late, sullen and sleepy in his sharkskin suit, his dull fatigue turning fast to irritation and then to angry fear when he finally learned where they were headed. But he did not refuse, not after she had offered to triple his day rate if he came.

  The compound lay twenty-two kilometers east of the Guangzhou city limits, fourteen kilometers north of the river, eight kilometers down a road that went nowhere else. A constant stream of trucks pulled up to a second set of gates farther down the wall, adding their noise and fumes to the already overburdened air. She glanced back at the guards and the factories behind the wall. The compound was as large as a small city. Construction cranes sprouted like diseased trees within a nightmarish garden. She had researched the compound for almost eight months and still did not know how many people worked inside. Some reports said ninety thousand, others closer to a hundred and twenty. She did not even know which was the factory she sought. All she knew for certain was that it was there. A name that conjured shadows and whispery fear even among expatriate Chinese nine thousand miles away, back in Washington, D.C. Back where she desperately wished she was now.

  Even so, when the next pair of rolling buses belched black smoke and entered the lot, she almost screamed to the interpreter, “Here they come!”

  The man waved one hand and shouted back, only one word of which was in English. “Crazy!”

  “Ask them!” She had no choice but to plead. “Just this group, then we go!”

  That turned the man around. “Go Hong Kong now?”

  “Just this one group more!”

  The buses were ancient and scarred and dusted a uniform brownish gray. They rolled and dipped toward the gates and halted almost directly in front of Gloria. She shouted to the interpreter, “Please!”

  The man walked over and stood before the bus doors, his shoulders slumped in resignation. Only this time the disembarking passengers neither chattered nor looked his way as he started his speech. Instead, their eyes were locked upon the gates. Their expressions were so taut and so fearful that Gloria had no choice but to turn around.

  The first two soldiers gripped her arms and pulled her away from the buses. Two more posted themselves between her and the vehicles. The interpreter had instantly vanished. The arriving workers dispersed almost as swiftly.

  Gloria shouted, “I’m an American citizen!”

  Another man stepped in close, as diminutive as the others but younger and dressed in civilian clothes. “So, American citizen, who sent you. United Nations? Red Cross?”

  “Nobody.” Behind the man stood another civilian, bigger and older. The second man had the shape of a bull on two legs—huge arms, no neck, flattened face, eyes as hard as the young man’s voice.

  “What, you just some little tourist, you come to ask questions about Factory 101?”

  “I’m a student at Georgetown University.” Wishing she could control her voice, remove the wavering tone. “I’m researching labor practices in China.”

  “Student? You student?” He said something to the soldiers. The two who weren’t holding her arms walked over. One ripped the purse from her shoulder, the other frisked her with rudely probing hands.

  “I’m an American citizen! You can’t—”

  “You be quiet.” The young man dug into her purse, tossed her tape recorder and camera to the second man, pulled out her passport, opened it, inspected the picture, came up with her student ID, compared the two to her. “Gloria Hall.”

  “That’s right. I demand—”

  A single word from the young man and the bullish man moved so fast she saw nothing, not even a blur. One moment he was behind the young man, the next and her entire face screamed agony. Her vision grayed, almost went black. It felt like she had been hit with a wooden mallet.

  “That’s good. You quiet now, Miss Student Gloria Hall.” He flicked the plastic ID with his finger. She heard it through the ringing in her ears. “Georgetown is place?”

  “A university.” The blow had dropped her voice an octave. “In Washington, D.C.”

  The young man spoke once more. The soldiers began dragging her toward the main gates. She shrieked, “Where are you taking me?”

  “You come all this way. You want to know about Factory 101.” The young man offered a thin-lipped smile. “No problem. We show.”

  BY THE FOURTH WEEK, the work was routine enough for her exhausted mind to wander.

  Gloria stood in a line of seventy identical steam presses that ran the width of the building’s fifth floor. The walkways ran diagonally. She faced the back of a woman operating a miniature weaving machine, making shoelaces. In front of her was a young man sewing labels inside finished garments. Then came a woman laminating soles on basketball shoes. Each process multiplied by seventy. Three machines in front of the laminator was a set of metal stairs, leading to two glass-walled chambers. The room to the left was the central office, from which they were always watched. Always. The room to the right was empty now. Even so, Gloria could not look in that direction. None of them could. Except for those times when the big man came down the aisles and screamed for them to do so. Then they had no choice.

  To every side, lines of dark heads disappeared into the hot and misty distance. The noise was deafening. Many of the machines were brand-new. Others, like the press she operated, were extremely old. Her press hissed and complained every time it was rammed shut. Some of the presses were harder to operate than others. Some of the lighter women needed to grab with both hands and haul the top down by raising their feet off the floor. This was very tricky, as they had to release the handle and hit the floor and jump back before the steam hissed through the padding. After a ten-hour shift with three fifteen-minute breaks, it was hard to find the energy to keep jumping away. Exhaustion reached a point where the pain could not be felt. Gloria had seen in the showers that several of the women had welts around their middle from countless steam scaldings.

  Gloria had her own scars, but the worst of them were healing. She bore welts on her right cheek, her neck, her forehead, both upper arms, her left elbow and wrist, and the palms of both hands. Many were from learning how to handle the steam press, but not all. Her right ear still throbbed from a beating two days earlier, and the warmth on her neck suggested it was bleeding again. She did not check. It would do no good. And if she got blood on another shirt, they would beat her again.

  The throbbing and the hunger and the exhaustion worked at her mind. Which was not bad. The labor moved more swiftly and smoothly if she did not think too much. Just pull another freshly dyed and washed shirt from the hamper and slip it over the bottom padding. Smooth out the worst creases. Reach and haul down the top, ram the handle shut, squint, and lean away from the steam. Open the press, arrange the sleeves, haul and close and squint. Open the press, fold, close and lean and squint. Open and set the finished shirt in the stack to her left. Pluck out another shirt from the hamper. Repeat.

  All this week she had been doing pajama tops for the New Horizons children’s line. Which was what had started her thoughts wandering down that particular road. She peered through the steam at one unironed sleeve. Dozens of dancing teddy bears smiled up at her, each framed by the company’s famous shooting-star logo with its trailing edge of sparkling rainbows. She opened the press, folded the sleeve in, and rammed the press closed. But hiding the tiny sleeve did no good. For when she squinted through the steam, she saw not the factory but another smiling face, this one belonging to her fiancé.

  She shook her head and opened the press and folded the tiny shirt. Now it seemed as though Gary were behind her, moving in close, kissing the place at the base of her neck that always made her shiver. This time, however, the shiver released a flaming tide of regret. For the years and the life stolen from them, for the children they would never call their own. Gloria reached down and caressed the hot shirt, a
ching from the piracy of losses. So much had been taken from them.

  She was ripped from her lamentation by the feel of her ankle being unchained from the machine. She gasped in terror, then released the breath in a cry of panic when she saw the bullish shoulders and the bald head rising into view. She screamed the first words of Cantonese she had learned after her arrival: “I meet my quota!”

  The man was called Chou, and it was he who had hit her there in the dusty parking lot the day of her arrival. He had hit her enough since then, and she had seen enough of the others being struck, to know terror just by his approach. To have him come so close and see her not working was impossible. Still, it had happened. Again she screamed what everyone screamed when Chou came for them: “I meet my quota!”

  Those were the words they were forced to shout at the end of each shift. Afterward the chains attaching them to their stations were released, and they were led downstairs to the dormitories with the lines of bunks and the bare tables and the stench-ridden toilets. But now the words had no effect. Chou gripped her upper arm with an iron hand and dragged her from the bench. She screamed again and clutched the steam-drenched press. She did not even feel her palms blistering. He wrenched her free and started down the aisle.

  No one looked up from their work as she was dragged to the front. No one ever did. Not even the one friend she had made, the woman operating the laminating machine, a former university student with a few words of English. Hao Lin kept her face down and her hands busy. There was nothing anyone could do. To look up would only be a sharing of the terror, and they all carried too much of their own already. They would be forced to look soon enough.

  She gripped the railing, the stairs, the doorjamb. Just as they all did. Shrieking and wailing and still dragged into the punishment chamber with its glass wall overlooking the entire factory floor. The steam rose from the presses and the machines clattered with angry laughter at her helplessness. Gloria heard nothing save the rising tide of her own terror.

  She babbled pleas in English as she was lashed to the punishment chair. Chou straightened and left the room. He always did. Drawing out the wait was all part of the terror. She continued to moan and struggle and tremble so hard the chair rattled against the concrete floor. Chou returned, this time burdened with an armful of great metal rods. Her moans turned to sobs. She had no idea what it was he carried, only that it would hurt her very much.