A Death in China (5 page)

“Would you like to have dinner sometime?” he tried.

“No, thank you, Mr. Stratton.”

“A movie?”

“The embassy movie doesn’t change for another two weeks, and I’ve already seen it four times. Besides, you’re leaving for the States on Monday morning.”

Stratton sat back in the chair and tested the coffee again. Well, it was what he’d deserved. Linda disappeared. Powell walked in and crisply stationed himself at the desk.

“I’ll be looking into the passport matter. I hope to have some sort of explanation by the time you leave.”

“Monday morning,” Stratton said.

“Linda told you. Well, good. Did she tell you the itinerary? It’s Hong Kong, San Francisco, Cleveland. The body stays on the plane in Hong Kong, but you’ll have a customs layover in California. We’re trying to get a diplomatic waiver from Washington on that now.”

Stratton did not react outwardly. Powell shifted.

“Do you have a suit and tie?” the consul asked.

Puzzled, Stratton said: “I have a tie and a blazer. I suppose it’s good enough for Pan Am.”

“And for the deputy minister as well,” Powell said. “He’d like to see you tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. Any taxi at the hotel will take you. Here’s the address.”

Powell walked Stratton to the door. Stratton got the impression that this was a vital part of his job, walking tourists to the door.

“Linda says you were at Man-ling.”

“Yes,” Stratton replied.

Powell asked, “Was it as bad as they say?”

“Worse,” Stratton said as he walked out. “I’m sure it’s all in the file.”

In the hotel courtyard, amid gleaming rows of Chinese-made automobiles that looked like boxy stegosaur-uses, off-duty waiters played uproarious catch with a red Frisbee. Stratton sat on the stone front steps, elbows on his knees, palms supporting his face, a brown study. He watched without seeing. David Wang was dead and he did not know how to mourn him. Wang had come late to Stratton’s life, and yet for a time Stratton had felt closer to him than he had ever felt to his own father. Stratton had the feeling, without really knowing, that he had been but one of a number of private reclamation projects Wang must have quietly undertaken over the years at St. Edward’s. In Stratton’s case, it had worked. Wang had molded a scarred young officer—no, that was a euphemism; a cynical young killer—into the shape of a civilized man who could honestly savor poetry and the whisper of breeze on a pine branch. Who could sleep deeply and rise remorseless, without scrabbling for a cigarette and a gun. Who could even, more than a decade later, return to China, feeling legitimate, almost comfortable, as a genuine if unheralded and rough-hewn college professor.

But Wang had worked too well, had he not? Stratton had slipped away from him, further every year. Two disparate clouds that had met improbably, intermingled and then sailed away to different horizons. Had he been back home teaching, word of David Wang’s death might have provoked a few minutes of sharp but distanced regret, then hurried cancellation of classes and a trip to the funeral, complete, surely, with the trappings of a Catholicism that Wang knew and loved as much as the priests who would recite the final incantation. Here it was different. Was it cruel for Wang to have died in his native China? Or was it poetic? Regardless, Stratton felt grievously hurt by his death and fiercely protective of the body that lay somewhere in Peking, being prepared for a journey home. How banal, yet how true. In their last gossamer encounter, David had seemed so well …

An insistent horn snapped the reverie. Stratton levered up off the steps and strode into the parking lot. The passenger door of a tan Toyota opened invitingly. As he slid in, his gloom began to lift.

“I’m glad you changed your mind,” he said.

Linda Greer smiled. She had changed into a beige shirtwaist dress, a fetching advertisement for her long, bronzed legs that scissored with a rustle of unseen silk as she expertly maneuvered the car into bike-laden streets.

“Usually when I say ‘no,’ it’s because I mean ‘no.’ When I say ‘no’ and mean ‘yes,’ I am not above confessing my mistake. One look at your face in there, and I could tell you needed someone to talk to. And I am sorry about your friend.”

He gave her a curious look, then settled back against the seat. She swung the car quickly around a yellow-and-red bus bursting with empty-faced workers on their way home, then pulled sharply behind a three-wheel motorbike spewing a noxious trail of black smoke.

“Ugh,” Linda said. “And the Chinese wonder why the air is so bad.”

They drove past the majestic Qianmen, once the front gate of a walled Peking. Linda turned to enter the gigantic square named after the gate. Stratton’s guidebook said it was ninety-eight acres.

“Postcards hardly do the place justice,” Linda remarked. “You could land a plane in here.”

In the vastness of the square, a handful of Chinese on their haunches nursed kites through the light summer air. The handmade kites—frogs and princes, fat fish, and a clever troop of tiny sparrows suspended from the same string—danced against the backdrop of the Forbidden City, the network of palaces that had housed imperial dynasties for six hundred years. On the left stood the stark white mausoleum where the rubber-looking remains of Chairman Mao lay under glass. Beyond the mausoleum rose the Great Hall of the People, more massive than majestic.

“The museums,” Linda said, pointing. “History on the right, the Museum of the Revolution, appropriately, on the left.”

“They’re huge. You could lose an army in there.”

“That’s fitting, too. The people across the street”—she waved a cool hand toward the Great Hall—”they’re perpetually worried about losing a country.”

“Many things are sacred in China, of course, but not history. History is for rewriting. Take poor Emperor Qin. For centuries, history officially shat all over Emperor Qin.” Linda pronounced it ‘Tsin.’ “He was always the example of the most savage dictator, a kind of Chinese anti-Christ. He was the nut who commissioned the sculpture of seven thousand clay soldiers to guard him in the afterlife. And he was the maniac who once ordered four hundred Confucian scholars buried alive because they wouldn’t admit that he was smarter. Buried alive, can you imagine? But in the new history, that’s all forgiven. Qin is the man who unified China and so he’s a hero—rehabilitated two thousand years later. And his celestial army is a national treasure. What the hell, easy come, easy go … Hey c’mon, Stratton, come back to me, huh?”

Normally, she would have had all his attention. Linda Greer was more than a passably attractive woman. Quick, witty, assured. Stratton had made a fool of himself over that kind of woman more than once. The setting she had chosen for dinner added to her allure, as she undoubtedly knew, as she tossed off crystal-clear Mandarin to a smiling waitress.

They sat on an ancient balcony overlooking a moat at the rear of the Forbidden City. It was, Linda had said, the oldest restaurant in Peking. The food, particularly a kind of shaved beef that was the house specialty, was superb. The fiery mao tai she had ordered when they arrived smelled like distilled sweat socks, but went down smoothly and kicked like a mule. The Great Wall white wine, heavy and a trifle too sweet, had initially doused the mao tai fumes, but, by the second bottle, subtly fanned them. Stratton should have felt mellow, but all he really felt was sadness.

“Tell me about Wang Bin,” he said, in an effort to rouse himself.

“A year younger than David,” Linda began. “A perplexing man. His pedigree in the Party—and that’s what counts in China—is impeccable. Madame Wang, his mother, was one of China’s earliest and most vociferous revolutionaries.”

Stratton was surprised. “I knew that David’s father was a man of substance in Shanghai, but I can’t recall that he ever mentioned his mother.”

“She was quite a lady. She had the two boys, and then gave herself—physically as well as ideologically—to the Revolution. In the early days, Mao and his friends could always be assured of a warm welcome at the Wang mansion on the Bund in naughty old Shanghai. By the time Papa Wang discovered his wife was more than a salon radical, it was too late. She had left and taken Bin with her. That must have been soon after David went abroad, because in the normal course of events Bin would have followed close behind.

“Madame Wang become the mistress of one of Mao’s chief lieutenants. She actually made the famous Long March. And Wang Bin went with her, every step of the way, one of Mao’s teenage soldiers. By the time the Communists won control of the country in 1949, Wang Bin was a distinguished veteran, an up-and-coming young man.”

“Fascinating,” Stratton said, as a mental light clicked on. “In another year, he might have gone off to school with David and none of it would ever have happened. And two years earlier that might have been David’s story, too, although I can’t imagine David raising his hand to strike even his worst enemy—if he ever had one.”

“Like most of Mao’s soldiers, Wang Bin’s education had been shut off by war—although I guess most of them would never have had much schooling anyway,” Linda continued. “Bin would probably have stayed in the army and become one of those semiliterate genius-generals that still run the armed forces, but Mama Wang took a hand. He entered the University of Peking and became a major figure in the Party there.”

“That must have seemed pretty tame after what he had been through. What’d he study, theology?” It was a pale joke, but a joke nonetheless.

“Fine arts, if you can believe that. Of course, he didn’t stay long. During the Korean War somebody remembered that he spoke English—for the past two centuries all Shanghai Wangs have apparently spoken English—and back into the army he went as an interrogator of captured Americans. After that, there were a succession of jobs, mostly Party positions of increasing influence, although he did have an occasional artsy job here and there. I guess that’s what did him in.”

“Did him in?”

“Yes, sir. In the mid-sixties, along comes the Cultural Revolution—you know, Mao’s attempt to revive a revolution that was choking on its own red tape. It was incredibly destructive madness, of course, turned the Chinese universe topsy-turvy for nearly ten years. In the midst of it, Wang Bin just vanished. Turned out he had been attacked by the Red Guards because he was an intellectual—crime enough in those days. He apparently spent four or five years slopping hogs in a commune out west. Didn’t get rehabilitated until the mid-seventies.”

“And now he’s back on the track again.”

“Well, not exactly.” Linda Greer chose her words with care. “He is a powerful man. It looks as though his culture job is a kind of front for deeper Communist Party activities. He’s rumored to have his own little band of enforcers to patrol his domain. You’ve heard about the political struggle that’s going on around here, I’m sure.”

“A little.” McCarthy had given him a beginner’s lesson. Stratton wished he had paid more attention.

“Well, as far as we can figure out, all the guys Wang Bin has ridden with over the past thirty years are being systematically shot out of the saddle.”

“But not him,” Stratton anticipated.

“Not him, at least not yet. Maybe not ever, who knows? He should be struggling for his political life and instead, while all sorts of political shit flies, he invites his long-lost brother to come from America—that certainly could be used against him—and spends all his time assembling an archaeological exhibit nobody but us cares much about.”

“An overture to old Uncle Sam, right?”

“Maybe. I wish I knew.”

Stratton emptied his glass, and refilled both of theirs.

“How long have you been a spook, Linda?”

Linda Greer blushed.

“I’m not. I’m a vice-consul.”

“Sure you are.”

“Not convinced, huh?” she tried again.

“Try that on some little old tourist lady who has lost her luggage.”

“About five years, if you must know. And I am not a spook. I am a case officer.”

“Then get off my case, officer.” He watched her hackles rise.

“What do you mean by that?”

He reached across and took her hand.

“Linda, it took me all of five minutes to figure out that you didn’t pick me up just because of my sad face, but I only just now realized exactly what it is you want. Linda, I was recruited and trained and conned and sent to the wolves by guys who were playing nasty games while you were still in Pampers. This is what I would call a transitory recruitment.”

“Okay, wiseass, how does it go?”

“Something like this. Could Mr. Stratton, who is known to us and thought, on the basis of previous service, to be reliable, interject into his conversation with Wang Bin tomorrow questions that might establish Comrade Wang’s view of the United States, such as: How does Comrade Wang foresee the development of relations between our two great countries in this time of great international stress? And, providing Comrade Wang seemed receptive to that particular conversation, perhaps expressing veiled admiration for the United States, a second approach might be made. And perhaps a third, and a fourth, each one a little deeper until one day somebody, say a beautiful, art-loving vice-consul, would hold her breath and try to recruit Comrade Wang.” Stratton stared out over the sleeping canal. “Actually, it’s not a bad gambit.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Stratton thought aloud. “Let’s see, if Wang will deal and he wins this current round of intrigue, you’re in clover—you’ve got a source at a high level. And if he loses, Wang might be persuaded to accept asylum in the United States—’defect’ has a nasty ring to it, don’t you think? He would be a man with a grudge against the guys who forced him out. He would provide great inside intelligence up until the time he left, and knowledgeable guesses about how things might go from there.”

Linda Greer assayed a wan smile. “You could have been a great one, Stratton. It’s all there in your file.”

“And does the file also say that I left in such disgust that, if I had stayed, I probably would have blown my head off?”

“Or somebody else’s.”

“And no doubt the file also says I am now a straight-and-narrow, almost middle-aged college professor who hardly ever does anything more adventuresome than jaywalking?”

“That, too.”

“So why bother?”

“A spur-of-the-moment thing. Nothing we set up. We thought the fact you deliberately came to China might mean you were bored, but we were willing to let it go at that. No contact. But suddenly you have natural access—much better than any of us could ever get—to a major player in the Chinese drama. So we thought we’d try—although we had a hunch you’d say no.”

“And all this while I was supposed to think I was here in this romantic setting because of your vast powers of sympathy. Or was it my dashing figure and rugged good looks?”

She had the grace to smile.

“Stratton, Thomas Henry. D.O.B. et cetera, et cetera. Married the former Carol Webster, pediatrician. Rancorous divorce after nine years and one child, Jason, age six … “

“He’s nearly eight.”

“Okay, Mr. Rugged Looks.” Linda Greer took his hand with both of her own. “Will you do it, Tom?”

“What’s in it for you, Linda? Little gold star on that pretty forehead? Big desk at Langley, maybe. One case is all it takes, right? I know how it works.”

“Do you really?” She was hurt.

Stratton instantly regretted the nasty jabs.

“How do you think I got this job, Tom? I got it because I’m good, and I’ve got some guts. And I’ve risked my ass once or twice, literally. I’m no war hero, and maybe I don’t have your scars, Tom, but I’ve got a few little nightmares of my own. No ribbons, no plaques on the wall, just some pretty rotten dreams. And, yes, I want out of Peking. I want to work in a place where the twentieth century has arrived, where I can leave the city without a dog tag or a babysitter, where I can have a life, like a normal woman. So the answer is yes, I want this case. I want him. Wang Bin.”