Mystery Solved

Here’s some breaking news for those of you who were wondering why those mysterious real estate agents still kept showing up at our door and calling me.

Our landlady wants to sell our apartment.

Did she tell us this directly?

No.

Instead, she had the agents make up a story about an apartment that looked just like ours and we ended up letting several groups of people (now we know they were potential buyers) traipse through the place.

So not worth the bananas.

The drama came to some kind of climax last Saturday when Bob and I were out shopping. We had treated ourselves to a jian bing on the street and as I was eating the steaming-hot crepe-like meal, my phone rang.

“Are you home?” a voice asked without introduction. “We’d like to show the apartment.”

“I’m not showing the apartment,” I said, and hung up.

My phone rang a second time. I ignored it. Cells in China don’t have voice mail, so they tend to ring and ring until China Unicom decides that the receiver has had enough of a chance to answer it.

My phone rang a third time. This was really affecting my jian bing enjoyment. Bob answered the phone. “You lied to us, we’re not showing the apartment, and don’t call this number again!” he yelled into the phone.

And that was that. We haven’t heard again from anyone, although something tells us this story is not over.

At some point, we’ll need to let people in to see the apartment. But since our lease ends in early December, I don’t see why we need to be accommodating before then. And even then, I might take up a suggestion from one of our friends to sour the deal: Tell potential buyers that I think the place is haunted. Suggest that maybe somebody died in one of the bedrooms. Chinese people have a special aversion for ghosts. This is not a lie; it’s certainly possible that something untoward happened here, I mean other than the ravioli debacle.

And in the immortal words of Charlie Bruno, I’ll fix them.