A Death in China (4 page)

Alice Dempsey knocked on the door at eight sharp the next morning. At eight thirty, she knocked again. Stratton grunted.

“Surely, you’re not still in bed!” she said through the door. “We leave for the Great Hall of the People in ten minutes.”

Stratton groped for his watch. “I’ll catch up,” he mumbled.

He dressed and went downstairs to claim a cup of tepid American coffee in the hotel restaurant. Then he set off on foot for the Heping Hotel.

It had occurred to Stratton that David Wang’s belongings would have to be gathered for the sad trip home—clothes, cameras, textbooks, souvenirs, and the ever-present journal. Wang was not a mellifluous writer, nor was he poetic, but he wrote down all he saw. His journals were meticulous, sponge-like and even a bit silly; once he had visited Disney World in Florida and returned, sheepishly, with fifty-seven pages of diary. Tom Stratton felt a duty to recover his old friend’s things.

Everything about Stratton attracted the eyes of the Chinese—his height, his blond hair, his thick reddish mustache. In Vietnam it had been much the same. He remembered the clutter and chaos of Saigon, the heady taste and thrill of war, the horror, the ultimate revulsion: bitter, black fear. Stratton waded like a bushy mutant among hundreds of Chinese in the broad streets, a pale stalk shooting up from blue fields. He thought back to the flippant, soft-life description of academia he had foisted on Jim McCarthy. A self-justification.

“I am an obscure college professor because that is as far as I could get from guns and killing,” Stratton should have said. “I haven’t got the balls to do anything else. I lost my pride, and something more, one terrible night a long time ago.”

At David Wang’s hotel Stratton was greeted by a polite young clerk who spoke poor but passable English.

“I am a friend of the gentleman who got sick here the other night,” Stratton began. “I came for his things.”

Stratton expected a discussion, but the clerk merely smiled and led him upstairs. The door to David Wang’s room was not locked. “No one sleep here for three nights, I think,” the clerk said.

The room was small, the walls white and recently repainted. Chinese tourist hotels are not luxurious by European standards, but they are functional. A blue woolen blanket was smoothed across a single bed, and a chest of drawers had been carefully dusted. Two fresh hand towels hung on a hook near a chipped water basin.

The room was ready for a new guest. There was no sign that David Wang had ever slept there.

“Do you remember Professor Wang, the man who stayed here?” Stratton asked the timid clerk. The man nodded vigorously. “I came for his things. Where are they?”

The clerk shook his head.

“His clothes, his books … “

“Men came and took things. Comrades clean the room, that’s all.”

Stratton checked the closet and found three wire coat hangers on a dowel. Stratton went through the bureau. In one drawer he found two handkerchiefs and a pair of blue cotton socks. One of the handkerchiefs was monogrammed with the initials D.W.

“The men left with suitcase,” the clerk volunteered.

“When?”

“The day after Mr. Wang got sick.”

Somebody tapped on the open door.

A small-shouldered American in khaki walking shorts stood in the hallway. He was gray-haired and pink in the face; around his neck hung a pair of small Nikon binoculars.

“Are you a friend of Dr. Wang’s?” he asked Stratton. “My name is Saul Weinstock. I was here Tuesday night when he got sick after dinner.”

Stratton stood up from the bed and introduced himself. “You were in the restaurant?”

“No, but I was in our room downstairs when I heard the commotion. A cleaning boy found Dr. Wang and shouted for help. That’s when I ran upstairs. I’m a retired physician. Had a general practice in Queens for thirty-one years. My wife and I are on a world tour. We met Dr. Wang on a walk through one of the municipal parks.”

Weinstock told Stratton that he had seen David Wang late Tuesday afternoon, shortly after his return from Xian.

“He was tired, but he seemed in good health. We asked him to join us for dinner because we wanted to hear all about the reunion with his brother, but he declined. He promised to join us for breakfast on Wednesday morning.”

The clerk excused himself. Stratton closed the door and motioned Weinstock to sit on the bed.

“Was David still alive when you got here?”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Stratton. Let me tell you what happened, because it’s been bothering me a great deal. After I heard the room boy shouting, I ran up the stairs. As you can see, I’m not a young man. But still, it couldn’t have been more than two minutes.

“Yet already there were two men in the room. They identified themselves as medics—at least that’s what they told the hotel manager. I told them I was an American doctor, and I showed them my medical bag. But it was no use, Mr. Stratton, because they wouldn’t let me in. One of the men stood there, at the door, blocking the way. The other was here at the bed, leaning over Dr. Wang. Now I saw some movement in the professor’s legs, and I’m almost positive I heard him say something in Chinese.”

Stratton asked, “Was he in pain?”

“Yes, it sounded that way. I begged to go in and help, but the hotel manager insisted that I go back to my room. The medics said everything was under control. After a few minutes, they came out with Dr. Wang on a stretcher. A blanket was pulled up to his neck. His eyeglasses were sort of propped on his forehead, and his eyes were closed. I think he was still breathing, but I couldn’t be sure. His color was very poor. His face was gray. I followed the medics downstairs to the car,” Weinstock said.

“They had a car?” Stratton was surprised. Three-wheeled bicycles customarily served as delivery wagons and ambulances in the city.

“Not just a car,” Weinstock added, “a limousine. They put the litter in the back and roared off. And that was something else that bothered me. There’s a clinic just three blocks down the street, near the Dong Dan market. It’s a very modern facility by Chinese standards; it was included on our tour. I saw the cardiac unit myself—not great, but adequate for a heart attack. Yet the medics drove right past it, never even slowed down.”

“Maybe it was closed for the evening.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Stratton.”

“Strange, isn’t it?” Stratton mused. “Do you know who David had dinner with?”

“It was a small banquet in a corner of the dining room; all the people were Chinese.”

Together they walked down the stairs. The whole hotel smelled of turpentine and cheap new paint. On the second floor, Weinstock paused on the stairwell, as if making up his mind. “Mr. Stratton,” he said. “I’ve got something in my room that you should see.”

Gerda Weinstock was caking her cheeks with makeup when the two men walked in; she let out a tiny shriek and fled into the bathroom.

“She hates for anybody to see her until she gets her face on,” Weinstock whispered. With bony knees rubbing on the wooden floor, he hunted under the bed. When Weinstock got to his feet, he was holding a black medical bag.

“Once a doctor, always a doctor,” Stratton said.

Weinstock shook his head soberly. “No, this isn’t mine. This is what the medics left behind in Dr. Wang’s room. This is what I wanted to show you. I found it on the floor, near the bed. I opened it because I was curious. Professional curiosity.”

Inside, lying in a shining heap, were dozens of identical gadgets: a small tool, perhaps three inches long, with a small arm that swung out on a tiny hinge and flipped over to form a lever for the thumb. Pressing the lever made the sharp U-shaped jaws of the tool open and close silently.

“Do you know what these are?” Weinstock asked incredulously.

“Fingernail clippers,” Stratton muttered.

“Fifty-four sets,” the American doctor reported. “Made in China.”

“I’ll be damned,” Stratton said.

“Some medics,” said Saul Weinstock. “Some goddamned medics, huh?”

Stratton asked to keep the medical bag.

“Sure, just don’t tell them where you got it. Please,” Weinstock implored. “My wife and I don’t want to get kicked out of China before we get to see Tibet.”

“You’re damn right!” came a voice from the bathroom.

Steve Powell lifted the doctor’s bag from his tidy government-issue desk and shook it. The nail clippers clattered metallically inside. “You’ve got to admit it sounds authentic,” he said to Stratton. Then, with a dry laugh: “Welcome to China, my friend.”

Stratton ignored the consul’s invitation to sit down. “I don’t think this is funny,” he said.

“Understand something, Mr. Stratton. These ‘medics’ who attended to your friend at the hotel—of course they weren’t real medics. Forget the bullshit you’ve heard about the phenomenal modernization of Chinese medicine. It’s still backward as hell. And try to find a fucking veterinarian in this town! The embassy wives have to send their precious French poodles to Hong Kong for a lousy distemper shot.

“These guys who took Wang to the hospital were, at the very most, first-year students. They could have been janitors just as easily. The doctor bag is a prop, as you no doubt figured out. They were lackeys. Their only job was to get the patient to a hospital.”

Stratton asked about the clinic three blocks from the hotel. “It’s supposed to be very good,” he said.

“Maybe it is,” Powell said, “but David Wang was the VIP brother of a deputy minister. The Chinese knew who he was, where he was and what he was doing. When he got sick, they took him to Capital Hospital, one of the most advanced hospitals in Peking, whatever ‘advanced’ means here.”

Stratton sat down. “Yesterday you weren’t so sure.”

“Since then I’ve received a full report from Wang Bin’s office.”

As proof, Powell displayed a file folder. “You’re probably wondering what happened to Professor Wang’s personal effects.” Powell rose. “Come with me. We’ll do our own inventory.”

The two men walked to a cordoned-off area of the embassy building. Powell flashed a plastic identification card at a Marine guard, who opened a gate to a stale vault. The consul used a tiny key to spring a metal drawer on a bottom row of locked cabinets. He removed three paper bags. Each had been marked in black ink: “D. Wang, Pittsville, Ohio.”

“The Chinese authorities collected these from Professor Wang’s room. They may have overlooked a couple of things, but I think you’ll find most of Dr. Wang’s valuables are intact.”

Stratton dumped the contents on a small table in a dimly lit corner of the vault: underwear, shirts, pants, a white sun visor, an extra pair of eyeglasss, a Nikon 35-mm camera, a bottle of Excedrin, three tombstone etchings on rice paper, four books about China and Chinese dialects, three rolls of unused film and a shaving kit.

“Wasn’t there a suitcase?”

“I suppose it was just too large for the drawer,” Powell said. “Does everything else seem in order?”

“No,” said Stratton. “Where is David’s journal? He always wrote in a thick diary with a leather binding.”

“His brother has it. Wang Bin asked us for permission to read through David’s writings. We saw no reason to object. He has promised to return the journal before the body is sent to the States.”

Stratton said, “And David’s passport?”

Powell adjusted his glasses and pawed through the items on the table. The Marine stood stiffly at the door of the vault, his back toward the two men.

“It’s not here?” Powell asked lamely.

“No.” Stratton watched the consul’s composure drain. The cool eyes fluttered.

“It must be here,” Powell said. “Something so important.”

“What are the regulations in a case like this?”

“Our regulations, or theirs?” Powell grumbled as he fished in the empty pockets of David Wang’s neatly folded trousers. “Jesus, this is unbelievable. Just what I need. You say you went through the room as well?”

“Nothing much,” Stratton said. “Socks, handkerchiefs. What happens if you can’t find the passport?”

Powell had given up. He stuffed the sad remnants of David Wang’s life into the paper bags. “Well, if we can’t find it, then I have to write a report. That’s about it. I’ll have a few forms to fill out.” He eyed Stratton with annoyance. “What should happen? I mean, Christ, the man’s dead, isn’t he? He doesn’t need a passport anymore. A corpse travels on a bill of lading.”

Back at the consul’s office, Stratton waited while Powell checked another office for David Wang’s passport. Stratton sat in a chair directly across from Powell’s empty desk; there was a different file on top now. It was light blue. Stratton could see his own name on the tab. Instantly, he reached for it.

“Sir?” A woman’s voice, behind him. “Sir, please don’t. That’s confidential, for Mr. Powell only.”

Stratton faced a young woman who had emerged from an adjoining office. She had long auburn hair and brown eyes, and wore a dark blue dress with a round white collar. “You don’t have to sneak a peek,” she teased. “You know what’s in there. Want some coffee?”

“Please.” When she came back—”Watch it now, the cup’s very hot”—Stratton asked, “Where did that file come from?”

“Washington. By telex. It’s routine. It would please both governments to know that the person we’re sending home with Dr. Wang’s remains is not a smuggler or a thief or a fugitive of some sort. It’s just a routine check.”

“That’s a pretty thick file,” Stratton noted, “for routine.” The coffee was much too hot to drink, but it smelled glorious.

“You’re a war hero,” she said. “The Pentagon writes books on its war heroes. In your case, they were happy to pass it along. Proud even. Langley, too.”

“Step right up and read all about it. Hurry, hurry.”

“Sometimes Steve prefers a little synopsis,” she said, ignoring the sarcasm. “It saves time if I’m familiar with the material. Don’t worry, I’ve got clearance on stuff like this.”

“You know my name, what’s yours?” Stratton asked.

“Linda,” she answered. “Linda Greer. I’m vice-consul.”

Linda Greer. He looked at her for a moment and wondered. This hardly seemed the time, but … the only women he had talked with for days had been Alice and her gaggle, and little Miss Sun. Right now, he certainly could use some company.