A Death in China (23 page)

“Are these the men?” Mrs. Singer inquired.

“Yes. This is very good.”

“But they weren’t driving an Oldsmobile, Mr. Jurgens. They drove a white van—like a U-Haul, only white. Mr. Broom did all the driving.”

A van, of course. Prosaic but practical—a modern hearse for an eternal warrior.

Mrs. Singer asked, “Do you rent vans like that?”

“No, only cars. Perhaps they got the van after they ditched our Oldsmobile. Well, the important thing is that these are the fellows I’m looking for.”

She gave Stratton a coy look. “I might be able to help. Mr. Broom asked to borrow a phone book—we don’t keep them in the rooms anymore. They just get stolen. Anyway, I let him borrow the telephone book. Then he walked over to that pay phone and called Delta Airlines. He made reservations for today to New York. La Guardia, I think.”

Stratton wanted to hug her.

He drove to a Holiday Inn on the other side of St. Petersburg and checked in. It was almost dusk. He turned on every light in his room, slipped out of his shoes and sat down at a wobbly desk. From another pocket in his suit jacket, Stratton took the piece of paper that Jim McCarthy had delivered to him in Hong Kong. The list was typed under the letterhead of the Boston Globe. It said:

U.S. citizen deaths May-August 1983:

Steinway, Sarah 5-10-83 — Canton — St. Petersburg, Fl.

Mitchell, Kevin P. 6-22-83 — Xian — Baltimore, Md.

Bertecelli, John 7-4-83 — Xian — Queens, N.Y.

Friedman, Molly 8-14-83 — Peking — Fort Lauderdale, Fl.

Wang, David 8-16-83 — Peking— Fort Lauderdale, Fl.

With a blue felt-tip pen, Stratton circled the name of John Bertecelli, who had died on the Fourth of July in Xian. Bertecelli’s body now lay somewhere in New York. Probably Broom and Wang Bin were already there, and maybe already at work.

Stratton thought: I ought to leave right now. There is no time to do what I had planned. Catching them will not be easy, even with the right grave.

The right grave.

Stratton contemplated his macabre odyssey. Chasing the coffins was a shell game. Five caskets, three Chinese soldiers. Scratch off McCarthy’s list the name of David Wang, whose “death” at the Heping Hotel had been staged after the theft of the warriors. That left four possible caskets.

Stratton had arrived in San Francisco with a simple strategy: geography. He could think of no other logical way to go at it. He had booked a flight to Miami where he had planned to begin the search, moving north, following his death list.

Molly Friedman had been first. A death notice published in the Fort Lauderdale News had announced that Molly was at rest at the Temple of David Mausoleum in Hallandale. A brief memorial service had been held four days after her sudden death in Peking. Rabbi Goren had kindly presided.

Stratton had found his way from the newspaper offices to the Temple of David. Bearing a small parcel of flowers from a Moonie working the stoplights on Federal Highway, he had been greeted at the door by a small balding man dressed in a dark wool suit. “Molly Friedman, please,” Stratton had whispered, and the greeter had led him down a chilly hallway with high granite walls. They had entered a huge vault bathed in purplish light that filtered from stained-glass panels set high in a rectangular ceiling.

The balding man had consulted a small, leatherbound directory. Then he had taken ten steps forward and pointed high up the wall. “There,” he had whispered, “G-one-two-oh.”

Stratton had squinted to see the name. Molly Friedman’s remains lay seven rows up, on a granite ledge—in an urn. A Chinese urn.

“Your flowers,” the greeter had whispered. “We can arrange them.”

“That will be just fine,” Stratton had said. Two hours later he had been on a plane to St. Petersburg.

And now the trail was red hot. Stratton rocked the chair, gripping the cheap desk by its corners. He was jittery, restive. How easily all the old hunting instincts had returned. He envisioned the icy-eyed old Chinese prowling a foreign graveyard, a remorseless night bandit. Why not go to New York tonight? Stratton thought. The grave of John Bertecelli waited. He could end it there.

Stratton thought of the old caretaker with the lawn mower at the St. Petersburg cemetery. He thought of the stinking garbage on the graves, the bloody swastikas, the vulgar poem—all doubtlessly the work of Harold Broom, relishing his role as a teenage vandal. If Wang Bin was a man to be feared, Broom clearly was a man to be hated. And not to be taken for granted. What if the despoliation was a double-blind, a misdirection on the off chance someone was following them? Unlikely, but …

Stratton resolved not to leave St. Petersburg without seeing the evidence with his own eyes, erasing what little doubt remained. He would do the work swiftly and neatly, leaving no clues.

He changed into jeans and a black T-shirt, and tied on a pair of Puma jogging shoes. At an Army-Navy store a few blocks from the motel, Stratton purchased a heavy-duty flashlight and a portable screw-down shovel. At midnight, he headed for the graveyard near the bay.

Stratton parked in a municipal lot not far from the gate. Carrying the shovel under one arm, he melted into a stand of pines and scouted the cemetery on foot. The caretaker had mentioned a security guard; Stratton found him in a matter of minutes. He was sitting in a compact car, reading a magazine by the dome light—a silver-haired black man, wearing the usual rent-a-cop uniform.

Stratton crossed behind the guard’s car, running low to the ground. He chose a path through the trees and scrub and purposely stayed clear of the water, which shimmered revealingly with the lights of Tampa. After about a hundred yards, Stratton flicked on the flashlight.

The caretaker had worked earnestly to clean up Broom’s foul mess. The trash was gone, and most of the glass had been swept up. The old man had scrubbed the Melmans’ grave marker until only a shadow of the swastika was visible. He had obviously devoted equal energy to the stone of Sarah Rose Steinway, although the orange crayon had proved stubborn. The Nazi emblem had become a permanent greasy smudge between the “Sarah” and the “Rose.”

Stratton unfolded the shovel and tightened a bolt at the neck. He began to dig with short, powerful strokes. There was no slab on the grave, only a layer of new sod. Below the grass, the earth was moist and soft. It gave way easily—too easily for a three-month-old grave.

For ninety minutes Stratton dug. He expected that the coffin had not actually been interred six feet deep, and he was right. He was only up to his armpits in the hole when the shovel bit struck metal. He dropped to his knees and cleared the rest of the dirt by hand. At the foot of the coffin, Stratton carved out a trench for himself. He stepped down and bent over so far that his chin nearly met the lid. In the darkness he fished like a raccoon for the corners of the coffin.

Stratton got a good grip and stood up with an involuntary grunt. The coffin came loose of the earth. Stratton backstepped out of the grave, dragging the thing half out of its cool pocket until it rested at a peculiar angle—head down, feet toward the sky.

Stratton was panting. He scoured the pines and the cart paths for headlights. His hands trembled and he wiped them on his jeans. He thought it obscene to use dirty hands for this. Obscene, but not inappropriate. With the point of the cheap shovel he gouged the seal of the coffin, and the lid flopped open with a cold click.

Stratton took a deep breath and aimed the flashlight.

The coffin of Sarah Rose Steinway was empty.

The cheap cotton lining bore the indentation of a rigid human form. Something sparkled microscopically against the fabric. Stratton ran a finger lightly along the inside of the casket, as if tracing the spine of the invisible dead.

In the beam of the flashlight, Stratton examined his fingertip and noticed a powdery film of red-brown clay. The ancient dust of another grave, another violated tomb.

The cab ride from La Guardia was no more harrowing than a spin through downtown Peking, and Wang Bin rode in unperturbed silence. He grunted once when a sleek black limousine cut sharply in front of the taxi, and jumped slightly in his seat at the sudden blast of a trucker’s horn. But it was the vista of Manhattan, seen from the Triborough Bridge, that left him breathless. At first glimpse Wang Bin leaned close to the window and stared at the vast skyline marching along the river, molten in the pink light of the late afternoon. The city was like nothing the deputy minister had ever seen.

Harold Broom glanced over and smiled with a superior air. “Hey, Pop, the cabbie is Russian. How about that?”

Broom had taken to calling Wang Bin “Pop,” an annoying term that the deputy minister did not understand.

“Didya ever think you’d be riding with a Russian through the streets of America?” Broom roared at some dim irony while Wang Bin watched out the window in fascination as the skyline swallowed them.

The two men checked into a small, comfortable hotel on Central Park South. Broom did all the talking—to the cabbie, to the doormen, to the desk clerk, to the rental car agent. Wang Bin had nothing to say; New York was richer and more bewildering than he had ever imagined. Compared to that of Peking, even the air was a tonic. The crowds of walkers were garish, and certainly less orderly than the Chinese, but the Americans were equally hurried and wore the same expressions of determination. And the automobiles were boggling—more cars than Wang Bin believed existed in all of China, stacked on every street, inching forward with horns blaring. The noise jarred his nerves.

Wang Bin stood at the window of the fifth-floor hotel room and watched a hansom cab clop down the street toward the Plaza Hotel. On the sidewalk at Columbus Circle, a ragged group of men and women waved placards and shook their fists. Two policemen stood at the corner, chatting calmly. Wang Bin could not understand why they did not hurry to arrest the demonstrators. He decided that the officers must be waiting for reinforcements.

Broom groomed himself in the mirror. “So what’s it gonna be tonight, Pop? Studio 54?”

Wang Bin scowled at the joke. “I am tired.”

“Okay, no disco. But we gotta eat,” the art broker said.

“I want to rest before we work.”

“Look out there, old man. That’s the greatest city in the world. Don’t you want to have a good time?”

“I am tired.”

“Hey, Pop, let’s celebrate a little. We’re rich, remember? You and me, we’re on a roll now. Packed our little pal off to our Florida buyer yesterday—that’s one down, two to go, and money in the bank.” Broom rubbed his hands together hungrily and gave the deputy minister another one of his winks. “Let’s see the sights!”

“You go ahead,” Wang Bin said, stepping away from the window. “I want to sleep.”

The deputy minister was dressed for the graveyard when Harold Broom returned at one in the morning.

“Hey there, Pops, you missed a good time.” Broom weaved across the room and eased down on the sofa. He kicked off his shoes and scratched at his feet.

“You are drunk,” Wang Bin said angrily.

“Don’t worry, partner.” Broom struggled out of his clothes without assistance, but Wang Bin had to guide the art broker’s arms and legs into the dark gray coveralls that they had selected as their grave robbers’ uniform.

“Didya see the Post tonight?” Broom babbled. “It made the headline on one of the back pages: VANDALS DESECRATE JEWISH GRAVES AT FLORIDA CEMETERY. Just a little story, no big deal, but they printed part of my poem. Even had a photo of one of the headstones.” Broom stretched out on the sofa and groaned feebly.

“It’s time to go now,” Wang Bin said, standing over him.

“In a minute.”

“Now!” said the deputy minister, grabbing Broom’s arm.

The art dealer easily shook himself free and pushed the old man away. “Don’t fuck with me, Pop! I got a tiny headache right at the moment so I’m gonna rest. I’m the driver, ‘member? We go when I say.”

Wang Bin sat down only when he heard Broom start to snore.

Tom Stratton slouched glumly in the Eastern Airlines lounge that overlooked the main runways at the Tampa-St. Petersburg Airport. A long line of jets sat in the slashing rain, the wing lights flicking red and white and red again, the pilots waiting for the weather to clear. Stratton’s flight to New York had already been delayed thirty minutes.

Stratton was on his second beer when he got the idea for a modest head start. He found a nest of deserted pay phones in the main lobby near the gift shops.

In a neat brownstone in one of the better neighborhoods of Queens, Violet Bertecelli cracked her shin on a coffee table as she fumbled in the dark for the telephone. When she finally found it, she was in too much pain to say a gracious hello.

“Do you know what the hell time it is?”

“Is this Mrs. Bertecelli? Mrs. John Bertecelli?” asked a fuzzy voice.

“Yes. Yes, it is. Is this long distance?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tom Stratton said. “I apologize for calling at such an hour, but it’s morning here in China—”

“What? You’re calling from China?”

“Yes, ma’am. Peking. I’m Steve Powell, with the United States Embassy. I handled the arrangements after your husband’s unfortunate … “

“Death,” Violet said helpfully.

“Yes, of course, back in July. That’s the reason I’m calling, Mrs. Bertecelli. I’m not exactly sure how to go about telling you this, but in recent months there have been reports of irregularities in the shipment of human remains from China back to the United States.”

Violet said, “Johnny died of a coronary.”

“Yes, I know. But we’ve had complaints from a couple of families about the quality of the metal on the coffins. In the case of one poor fellow, the hinges snapped off and the lid came loose.”

“The coffin was just fine. It was actually very nice. Did you pick it out yourself, Mr. Powell?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, it was lovely. Everything was just fine with Johnny. They sent him to Riordan’s Funeral Parlor and he was buried out at St. Francis with his ma.”

“That’s excellent,” Stratton said. “And our files show he was laid to rest in plot E-seventy-seven.”

“No, sir, that’s wrong,” Violet said. “It’s plot number one-sixty-six. I remember ‘cause one-sixty-six was Johnny’s best-ever score in the bowling league. That’s how I remember the plot number.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bertecelli, you’re absolutely right. I see it here now, right in the file. Plot one hundred sixty-six.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bertecelli. That was St. Francis Cemetery?”

“That’s right. Grand Central Parkway, Queens.”

Tom Stratton hung up the phone and hurried to the nearest Eastern ticket counter. The video monitor now showed that his flight to Kennedy Airport would not depart until two in the morning. Dejectedly Stratton walked back to the lounge and ordered another beer and stared out the window to the runways, where the jets still waited in the rain. He prayed that it was storming like hell in Queens.

Wang Bin sat down in a heap on the ground. His chest heaved, and he could feel drops of sweat trickling into his eyebrows. He watched furiously while Harold Broom grappled with the coffin, muttering obscenties from the dank hole where he worked. The sky was cloudy. Cars and trucks raced by on the parkway, drowning out the other night noises. Headlights from the scattered traffic would suddenly turn the tombstones yellow, and cause an eerie dance of shadows across the hillside.

“We need assistance,” Wang Bin declared.

“We need a backhoe,” Broom growled. “The dirt down here is like concrete.” He tossed down the shovel and tried swinging the pick. The musty earth around the coffin crumbled away in hard clods, but the box itself held fast where it had been buried under a chorus of Hail Marys. “Get down here and help me lift,” Broom said.

But the two of them—Broom, nauseous and half-drunk; the deputy minister, exhausted, his thin arms cramped from the shoveling—could budge the coffin only a few inches and no more.

Broom glanced at his watch. Four in the morning. Time was running out. Wang Bin was right: They needed help.

“Stay here,” he said, fishing for the keys to the rental car.

Wang Bin was too tired to object to being left alone, but after Broom had been gone half an hour, he began to worry. What if the fool never came back? What if he got scared and abandoned him? Enough money had been collected already to finance a very comfortable life for a man like Broom … and where would that leave Wang Bin?

He stood up and stretched his aching arms and legs. The headlights from the highway caught him square in the eyes and he turned away grimacing. In the opposite direction the sky was tinged orange by the incredible lights of Manhattan. Wang Bin doubted if he could ever grow accustomed to life in this city; he understood now why David had chosen a rural place, a small and orderly place. A manageable place.

Not far away, a dog barked excitedly.

Where was Broom?

The deputy minister regarded his American partner as a truly despicable man. He had not understood the vagaries of Broom’s behavior at the graveyard in Florida, only that the desecrations had been meant as a ruse to confuse the police. The art broker had assured him that no one would check the coffin after they had buried it again, and he had been right. But it was the way Broom reveled in the vandalism that Wang Bin found so utterly repulsive. He would shed himself of the man as soon as possible, and now … now he was stranded in a cemetery, desperately hoping that Broom was greedy enough to come back. Wang Bin needed Broom and this, too, was a foreign emotion. In China, he had been provided everything he needed; here, without his title, absent of his authority, he felt helpless and common. To defer to a man like Broom was disgraceful, but, for now, quite necessary.

Wang Bin’s heart raced at the sound of an automobile winding up the road toward St. Francis Cemetery. An involuntary smile came to his lips when he saw Harold Broom, flanked by two tall, slender figures, trudging down the hill.

“Pop, say hello to Tyrone and Charles.”

Wang Bin nodded but caught himself before he bowed. Tyrone and Charles were both angular black teenagers, but they appeared very strong. Tyrone sported a red ski cap and Charles was dressed in a white-and-green sports jersey of some sort. It occurred instantly to Wang Bin that the two strangers could handily overpower him and Harold Broom and steal the treasure themselves.

“These gentlemen were testing the back door of a liquor store down the street,” Broom was saying. “Good thing I happened to see ‘em before they got into real trouble. They said they’d be happy to help.”

“For how much?” the deputy minister inquired.

“Hundred bucks apiece,” Broom said.

Wang Bin said nothing. Broom shrugged. “Whaddya want at four in the morning, Pop? I didn’t have time to take out an ad in the goddamn Times. They look like good workers to me. Right, boys?”

Tyrone shrugged and Charles said, “What the hell is this deal?” He gestured at the open grave. “What’s the fuckin’ story? I ain’t messin’ with no stiffs.”

“Me neither,” Tyrone said.

“I’m not asking you to mess with a stiff, pal. I’m asking you to help us get the coffin out of the ground. A little manual labor, that’s all. Won’t kill you, take my word for it.”

“Don’t seem right,” Charles said, peering into the hole.

Broom said, “Fine! You don’t like it? Then beat it. Get the hell out of here!”

Wang Bin looked at him sharply.

“I didn’t know you guys were a couple of pussies,” Broom said. “Shit. For two hundred bucks I’ll go find a couple of men to help with this.”

As Broom waved his arms theatrically, Charles calmly seized him by the back of the neck and said, “Shut up, you greasy jive mo’fucker. Give us the bread and we’ll dig.”

The art broker huddled with Wang Bin as the two teenagers wrestled with the coffin. “You got to know how to talk to these people,” Broom explained.

“I don’t like them,” Wang Bin whispered.

“Of course you don’t.”

“I don’t trust them.”

“Relax, Pop.”

Broom hopped into the grave. Within minutes, he and the two teenagers had hoisted the coffin of John Bertecelli from the hole and laid it on the ground. Tyrone sat down on a headstone and said, “So who’s in it, Dracula?”

“I don’t want to know,” Charles said. “Let’s split.”

“No, man, I want the dudes to open it.”

“You can go now,” Broom said. “Thanks for the help, fellas.”

“Open it, man!”

“No.”

“Okay. I’ll open it.” Tyrone lifted the pick and windmilled it at the coffin. The lid skewed from the hinges. Tyrone kicked it off with one of his basketball shoes.

“Shit,” he said. “It’s a mummy!”

Swaddled in plastic, a Chinese spearman stared through wise eyes into the firmament.

Broom stepped forward and said, “That’s enough. You’ve seen it, now get the hell out of here.”

“What’s it worth?” Charles asked, leaning over the coffin, hands on his knees.

“Let’s haul it out of there,” Tyrone suggested. “You get that end—”

“No!” Wang Bin said.

The black teenagers looked up to see the old man pointing a chrome-plated pistol at them. They noticed that his arm was rigid. Charles chuckled and fumbled with the statue.

“Why you so uptight?” Tyrone said to Wang Bin. “This mummy must be somebody special for you, that right? Is this your old man?”

“Tell your friend to let go of the artifact,” Wang Bin instructed.

“He ain’t gonna break it.”

The crack of the pistol got the dog barking again. Charles wriggled on the damp ground, clawing at his right arm. Tyrone was speechless.

“Oh shit, Pop,” Broom said in a husky voice. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“I agree,” the deputy minister said. “Mr. Tyrone, would you please help Mr. Broom carry the artifact to our car? If you make trouble, I will shoot your friend again and again until he is dead.”

By this time Charles was sobbing, and his New York Jets jersey was sticky with fresh blood. Tyrone gingerly lifted the Chinese spear carrier by the head while Broom—suddenly sober—carried the other end. The two unlikely pallbearers tenuously made their way up the hillside, weaving among the tombstones. Wang Bin held the pistol steadily on his captive and wondered sourly if this was going to be the only way to gain people’s obedience.