Sometimes people would say, “It’s a new day!” Well, it was a new day for me, both literally and symbolically. I suddenly found myself with twenty-five grand in cash, and my everyday routine wasn’t so painful anymore. Everything was bright and shining in my head again, and even the weird games my two clients tried to play with me couldn’t spoil that. Moreover, another thirty-five grand was coming my way, and I was already seeing the wads around the corner, waving bill straps at me.

As for the literal aspect of the new day, it became apparent as soon as I took a shower, shaved, hopped into a new set of clothes, and went down the stairs to walk out of my apartment building. I looked around, surprised. It was a beautiful spring morning with a pleasant temperature, moderate wind from the south, and even a little sun in the sky. Although terribly dirty, the streets were almost dry, and nothing reminded me of the flood we had experienced the previous day.

“Well, these Chinese bastards have really messed it up big time then!” I exclaimed, amazed.

I couldn’t actually remember a nice old-fashioned winter in Nuuk for at least a decade. In recent years, climate conditions have been increasingly unstable, varying from droughts to floods in the summer and only occasional snow showers between November and March. Sometimes, there are even spring tornadoes, which is so untypical here. They say things are improving now that China has disintegrated, and the air in East Asia is becoming breathable again, but still, there is no change in Greenland. I hope I will live long enough to see it someday.

Still shocked, I turned around and briskly walked to my car, parked around the corner at the curb, glancing at my old beauty. She was so dirty that her color was almost unrecognizable. I liked her, though. She was a Ford Beijing XZ-130, and although a bit moody sometimes, she did her job well. Most importantly, she never complained about her appearance, which has always saved me the effort of cleaning her. I stepped closer to her now, smearing the dirt on the side mirror, which made it even dirtier than before, and I hopped inside to turn on the wiper blades. I had a few things to do at the police station downtown and then up into Chinatown.

About twenty-five minutes later, I sharply pulled up to the curb near the Twelfth Regional Police Station, and my Beijing screeched, stopping in a cloud of dust and leaves from the last autumn. I got out, quickly brushed my jacket clean, and sneaked into the building, passing by the guy in the reception booth who was too busy with some loud game on his cell. Then, I hurried to the second floor to meet a girlfriend of mine whose name was Jill.

Well, to be honest, I wasn’t actually sure how much of a girlfriend she was to me since she was constantly mad at me, but she had resources to help me with some information on my cases, which I needed now. She was a secretary at the office where they filed criminals into the system. The moment she spotted my figure in the doorway, she jumped to her desk, grabbing a bunch of papers, pretending she was busy as hell. She was angry at me so often because I usually couldn’t meet her standards of calling her.

“Hey, sweetie!” I played dumb as I entered. She was clearly in one of those sessions when she ignored me.

Jill didn’t say a word and just scratched wildly on the sheets with an obviously empty ballpoint pen, probably destroying official documents as she went.

“Are you okay, love?” I walked to her and sat on the edge of her desk, gently touching her spine and moving my fingers as if counting the segments of her backbone. I knew she liked that. At the same time, I secretly pinched her cell phone from the desktop with my left hand.

Jill violently jerked her head and turned around to look at me. “Oh, Mellrow! It’s such a surprise, really! I didn’t even notice you had come. Why are you here, by the way? You out of money again?”

I frowned. She was mean, which meant it had been a week or two since I called her for the last time. Sometimes, I also owed her a few bucks, but I was sure it wasn’t it. I believed I had cleared my debt.

“No, Mousie, of course not! I’m here just to see you. Right now, I have two cases, which make me financially stable.” Behind her back, I quickly went through the device menu, which I knew very well because I had reinstalled the firmware for her once.

“Very well,” Jill answered curtly, still pretending she was working. “Then you should go back to your cases instead of wasting time with me!”

I quietly slipped the phone back to its usual place on the desk and gave her my most charming smile. “What’s wrong, Mousie? I’ve tried calling you so many times but didn’t pick up. I was so worried that I came to see if you were okay. I think you’ve put me on your blacklist!”

She turned her head to glare at me so suddenly that, for a moment, I was afraid she would detach her neck from her shoulders. Sometimes, she was a bit silly, but not enough to believe my dumb explanation. Instead of facing the upcoming storm, I quickly took out my cell phone, which account I had just reactivated, and waved it before her eyes.

“Wanna see?” I showed her the list on the display, hitting her name and putting the device close to her left ear. She reluctantly listened to the signal until the line sharply broke down.

All the while, her cell on the desk remained completely silent and dark. I took it and went through the menu again to open her blacklist. The log contained a message: “A phone call from Murphy M. was blocked.”

She looked at it, dumbfounded. “I haven’t put you on any lists.” She shook her head, almost on the verge of crying. Her anger had miraculously disappeared. “I don’t even know what a blacklist is!”

“Never mind, baby. Stupid phones tend to do these things. Maybe it’s a virus or something!”

I gently embraced her over the shoulder and smiled again. She was the sort of person who almost religiously feared technology and always thought her gadgets had some kind of virus. She could easily check on her blacklist that no other phone calls from Murphy M. had been blocked except for this one, but I relied on that same fear of hers that she wouldn’t do it.

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay, Mousie. You really scared me!”

“I didn’t put you on a blacklist!” She kept repeating her plea for innocence, and it suddenly made me feel like a horrible person, which, by the way, I probably am. I had sworn in my mind to stop exploiting her at least a hundred times so far, but something unexpected would always happen, and I would always postpone it for the next time.

In her essence, Jill was a simple and naive creature—sometimes charmingly boring, sometimes boringly boring, and sometimes just boring—but she definitely didn’t deserve such treatment. To soothe my qualms about it and make it up to her, I pulled her into my arms and kissed her face, embracing her hips. I knew she liked that one too. I also knew she was insanely quick to be turned on. After just a few more reassurances and “it’s okay” kisses, she stood up, puffing in my arms like an old steamer cutting through the American prairie on the Pacific Railroad! Her body leaned down toward the desk, slowly dragging me after her with her hands, and by the time she lay on the desktop, she was already moaning louder than a dying man on his deathbed. I seriously began to worry that someone might come in and see us making out in public places like horny teenagers.

Okay, okay, sweetie.” I paused for a moment, trying to pull back. “I’ll definitely call you, and we’ll finish this in a more appropriate atmosphere, okay? This whole building is literally crammed with cops with big guns, and we wouldn’t want them to come around alarmed, would we?”

“I don’t believe you at all,” Jill grunted, unsatisfied, taking off her glasses and still pulling me toward her. “I’ve learned the hard way that I should take mine before you ditch me high and dry!”

“Don’t say that, babe!” I pulled a wry face. “You know I’d never leave you high and dry. Well, dry of money, maybe sometimes, but I’d never take advantage of you emotionally!”

She ignored my words and reached down to grab me by my belt and make me topple over her. Her formal black skirt twisted around her waist, revealing an extravagant pair of glowingly yellow panties. They looked out of tone with this place and occasion and startled me. Jill has always been weird about fashion, in fact. She was born to push the limits in this field, and if she had worked as a fashion designer, she would have had a very successful career showing other top designers how to make their clothes even less wearable.

For the record, I resisted her pulling for a little while, but I knew I would eventually cave in. Soon, I found myself thinking, “Well, if that’s what it takes to get that info, so be it!” In the next moment, I grabbed Jill by her boobs, and she almost howled like a she-wolf at a full moon, digging her right hand into my pants and poking her knees into my face. We passionately rolled onto the desk, spreading paper sheets and paperclips all over it and tumbling down the pencil basket on the floor—basically making a terrible mess everywhere—and that was as far as we could go. Suddenly, the door burst open, and a fat guy rushed inside to see what was happening. He already had his hand at the holster under his armpit, and to this day, I still wonder how he stopped himself in time before shooting us.

Both Jill and I jumped away from one another, startled, and I kneeled behind the desk, pretending I was looking for something—maybe my common sense! Jill, for her part, found it more urgent to grab her cell instead of pulling her skirt down, and she threw the device at the nuisance. She eventually put herself in order, but not before her colleague had left with the memory of her beautiful ass in glowing, yellow panties forever planted in his brain.

“Fucking jerk!” My girlfriend cried without specifying whom she cursed—me or the cop. Then she angrily added, “Now you do have an excuse for not calling me!”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’ll definitely call you!” I tried to quiet her down. “I’ll be damned if I don’t! Right now, I need you to check out a few guys for me with the system, but tomorrow… Tomorrow, I have a huge surprise for you!”

Jill rolled her eyes.

“Actually, I mean the day after tomorrow,” I had to back out of my promise the next moment because I remembered my Chinatown mission. It was a very stupid mistake, which actually made things worse. “The day after tomorrow. I promise! And here are the people I need information about and the money.

I hurriedly pulled three thousand bucks out of my wallet and kneeled to take the pencil basket and the pens from the floor, scratching Bobby, Sharon, and Li Jin Tao’s names on a piece of paper. Then I put everything beside Jill’s keyboard and leaned over to give her another brief kiss. To my delight, she responded, although a bit reserved. Nevertheless, I took that as a good sign.

“And don’t forget to keep your schedule empty, okay?” I winked at Jill, turning around to go away before some other cop with a big gun had the chance to burst in. At the doorway, I saw her in the corner of my eye, taking the paper and the money. She knew a very corrupt guy in the GBI—the Greenland Bureau of Investigation—whom I had used several times before, and I believed he would do the job again. The only weak point in my plan was my angry girlfriend, but I hoped I had fixed that problem too—at least for the moment.

I quickly went out, quietly closing the door behind me and essentially doing to Jill what I had just said I would never do to her: leaving her high and dry, which was badly turned on in this case. I had no other option, though—it was stupid to try making it up to her in the police station. I briskly walked along the corridor, anxious to avoid nasty officers coming my way, and I was so absorbed in the task that I overlooked my first enemy lurking only a few meters from where I started. When I realized the danger, it was already too late.

I sharply stopped, staring there like a dazzled deer on a highway. Behind the open door on my right, I saw the same voyeur-cop from a few minutes ago sitting behind his computer and looking at me grimly. He had his feet on his desk, and since I didn’t know what else to do, I gave him a crooked smile.

“You came around for a quickie, huh?” The man promptly grabbed his chance to cut off my way of retreating. “Why not fooling around a little in the lunch break? After all, that’s what lunch breaks are for, right?”

I sighed, annoyed. The bastard got me now, and I had to say something. I slowly stepped closer to the doorway.

“Well, sometimes Jill and I do have some fun. You mind that, Dunkin? Is there anything wrong with it?” I asked him provocatively.

I knew this guy. His name was Richard Kathungattachek. He had mixed origins, but since Kathungattachek was a damn hard name to pronounce, everybody simply called him Dunkin—probably because he liked stuffing himself with donuts too much. He was an old-school cop with a desk always full of various snacks. Even now, there were a couple of pastries, a pack of crunches, and some other junk food there.

“Oh, boy! Why would I mind that? It’s none of my damn business!” the man grunted, slightly irritated. “You could do it quieter, though. Why put other people in awkward situations like this?”

“Well, you know Jill!” I smiled again. “She often gets too excited too soon. You are wasting your snacks, by the way.”

“What?” The cop didn’t get my point.

“You have your shoe in the pack of crunches. You’re wasting it!”

Dunkin didn’t move, nor did he look to see if it was true. He was probably afraid I was trying to make fun of him. Nevertheless, somewhere in the depths of his simple mind, he knew it was unlikely I would do it in such a childish way. In any case, the heel of his left shoe was really in the pack, crushing some of the snack pieces.

“What are you doing here, Mellrow?” He growled instead of removing his feet from the desk. “You’re not supposed to be here, you know that!”

“I believe we’ve already cleared that up! As you said, I came to fool around. Don’t you remember? Unfortunately, you’ve spoiled it, though. Next time, it’d be nice to listen at the door before bursting in like a drunk cowboy in a saloon!”

After saying this, I sharply turned around and walked away, leaving the guy behind. I also wondered why he had reacted so unnaturally to the situation. He looked hurt, making me think he had a crush on Jill or something. If I was right, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come here and ask her for out-of-routine favors because she might get into trouble.

“But, why is that even my fault?” I grunted after a while, irritated. “So many guys on this planet have a crush on someone who doesn’t love them back—that’s why so many people are miserable, in fact. You simply must learn to pick your battles!”

Still thoughtful, I soon walked down the stairs and passed by the man in the reception booth, who stared at me, flabbergasted, as if I were some kind of ghost with a superpower to leave places I had never entered before. I didn’t look back at him. I just stepped out and walked to my car, quickly getting inside. Then I started the engine and hurled the Beijing on my way uptown, leaving a dust cloud by the precinct’s windows.

About an hour and a half and a few traffic jams later, I reached my final destination—Chinatown. In Nuuk, the place is quite shitty, with lots of garbage everywhere on the streets: plastic bags, organic waste, used condoms, dog shit, and even cartridge cases. On the Fifth and Thirty-Sixth, it was relatively cleaner, though. There wasn’t much dog shit there, although the cartridge cases were more abundant.

I stopped by the curb across the Red Dragon and looked out. The restaurant was exactly as in my picture; the photo was obviously recent. A few Chins were fooling around, playing a weird game on the sidewalk in front of it and being ridiculously loud. It made me wonder why the Chinese always had to be so noisy. Their shrill voices echoed throughout the entire neighborhood, and probably Nuuk, Greenland, and Europe—all the way to Shanghai!

I slowly opened the door and cautiously stepped out of the car, pretending to be an anonymous lunatic obsessed with taking walks in dangerous places. I leisurely strolled to the red telephone booth and sneaked inside. Two of the guys spotted me and stared fixedly in my direction, which didn’t surprise me. Perhaps they had never seen anybody enter that booth in ages and were alarmed. Well, they wouldn’t have been if they had seen my office!

I put on a little show for them. I acted as if sliding a coin into the slit and then talking to someone on the other end of the line. All the while, I was secretly watching them. It occurred to me it would have been far more convincing if I pretended to be a technician, but it was too late to put on overalls now. Fortunately, the Chinese got bored pretty soon, and they left me alone, recklessly swinging arms and legs in the air, shrieking not all the way to Shanghai now but to hell. I figured they were doing some kind of kung fu, although if I closed my eyes, it sounded more like a flock of wild geese fighting for a nesting place.

When I felt undisturbed again, I quickly checked up on the booth, assessed the perspective, the surroundings, and the potential ways to retreat if anything went wrong, and after a few minutes, I grabbed my invisible coin back and ceased my imaginary conversation. Then I stepped out, looking theatrically at my nonexistent watch. In my James Bond movie, I was too late, so I hurried to the car and started the engine, moving down the Thirty-Sixth. When I passed the kung fu warriors, they stared at me again, but this time they seemed indifferent. Just in case, I dove behind the glove box, searching for something I didn’t need, and slowly drove away. I felt perfectly safe in my dirty, old Ford. That’s why I actually avoid cleaning it—so no one can see and remember my registration plate if I rubbed someone the wrong way.

After fifty meters or so, I glanced in the side mirror, but the Chinese were already absorbed in their own shit. I stepped on the gas and hurried to my place, suddenly realizing my mission here wouldn’t be as trouble-free as I had thought in the morning. Unfortunately, I had no way to cancel it anymore. I just hoped my clients had prepared really good technical equipment for me because I was sure, on the next day, Greenspace’s thugs would be much more intimidating and heavily armed than the ballet dancers I had just seen.

©2016 S.T. Fargo
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