The Mandarin Club (28 page)

T
he winds that whip south over the Gobi desert each spring breach the Great Wall just north of Beijing, coating the capital with a yellow film. The Mongolian dust cloud can beat for days, the stinging air driving the elderly and infirm indoors. Schoolchildren wear masks. Exposed surfaces are left with a crunchy layer of dirt.

The nagging breeze had lingered for weeks this season, making Lee’s Saturday afternoon drive more unpleasant. He had always detested traffic, and rarely drove to work. He was very much a city boy—Beijing born and raised—and preferred walking, or riding a bike, to sitting in his confining Honda. The bachelor apartment where he had moved eight years ago was close enough to the Foreign Ministry that he could usually get there in less than twenty minutes on foot. To avoid the traffic, he often took the subway to the Chao Yang Men Station next to the ministry. So he used the car mostly on weekends, as he had that day to join his father for supper at his retirement compound far out in the suburbs.

Lee had been cranky all that first week of June, feeling harassed and surrounded at work. The sharp escalation in tensions with the Americans had pinned him to his desk into Saturday afternoon. Now he lit a cigarette, cursing the fact that when the Chinese provoked trouble, they rarely had in hand a consensus plan for settling it.
An old revolutionary mentality
, he reflected:
weak on the end game
.

There was an urgency to Lee’s visits now as death approached. He was going every weekend to take supper together with his father and his pleasant nurse, Xu An. The old Army engineer had been a tall man. But age, and the advance of Parkinson’s disease, had shriveled him, shortening his stride to a shuffle. Ironically, with the progression of the infirmity, his moodiness had lifted. A severe man in his youth, the senior Lee was more amiable in his old age. Lee was humbled by how his father gracefully accepted his fate, chuckling when he dropped the backgammon dice, smiling appreciatively when Xu An or Lee helped him into his shoes.

Lee came to collaborate in an easy domestic partnership with Xu An. His father, now in a new way, was his one true hero. With each week’s visit, the old man slipped further behind the clouds of dementia. Already, Lee began to miss him and his matter-of-fact questions, the old aphorisms about duty to country.

Lee brought fresh flowers and fruit from the market when he arrived that Saturday, wearing a clean shirt and toting an overnight bag. Xu An received the flowers wordlessly in the small kitchen, arranging them in a vase before placing the fruit on the sideboard. The one bedroom apartment was tidy, order everywhere. Lee noticed again the subtle changes from another week with Xu An, a young widow who lived nearby with her mother and aunt. Now she guided the weekly reunion of father and son.

As they spoke of the weather, Lee watched her gently feed his father. Lee regarded her hands carefully as she tended to the elderly man, still quite proper as she went about her tasks. But her movements seemed softer at this hour. He saw how the evening light captured the glint of her eyes and her flowing movements as she straightened his father’s hair. She was enjoying the adult company at week’s end.

They lingered over the meal, long after Lee had come to relieve Xu An for twenty-four hours and to pay her. As the light began to die, two candles on the table illuminated a warm spring evening, the window open now that the dust clouds had abated with the sunset. Lee relished their conversation; he was eager for the human contact and acutely aware of their peculiar triangle. When Xu An at last said she would prepare his father for bed, Lee stacked the dishes, then settled into the chair in the sitting room by the window, enjoying a cigarette, gazing out at nearby apartment towers.

They were the parents, it seemed. Li, the elder, had become the infant. In his father’s waning hours, the son was the master of this tiny home. Xu An played daughter-in-law cum matriarch.
Was life merely a string of character plays?
Lee remembered voicing the same thought when he and Mickey had sat, overlooking the ocean, more than two decades ago. Mickey had agreed, rejecting Catholic theology for the omniscience of the Greek myths.
Surely the human dramas amused the gods.

“I will make you a bed now,” Xu An said, leaning slightly against the door frame, a blanket and pillows in her hands. “Come, you look weary.”

Lee began to protest. She shushed him and smoothed the sofa as he sat back and finished his cigarette. She tucked in a single sheet, then folded back a wool coverlet, hands moving swiftly to fluff two pillows and finish with a professional pat. Then she turned to him to say good night.

She saw. All those years of spy-craft Lee had practiced, the burying of self, the stone-faced denials, were undermined. Xu An saw the truth of this moment, the repressed desire, the exhaustion and fear, the yearning to share the genuine presence of a fellow human being.

She crossed the room and licked her thumb and forefinger. She pinched the two candle wicks and became a silhouette. A single shaft of city light gave an outline to her face as she came toward his seat in silence. She began to massage his neck with both hands, pulling him closer to her chest with each stroke, until he closed his eyes and buried his face in her breasts. She drew him in, working her way down his back, then up to his temples, rhythmically soothing his scalp with strong fingers.

After a few minutes, she stepped back, opening her blouse buttons one by one. She sat in a simple cotton slip on the sofa, patting the pillows again. She took off his shoes as he sat next to her. Then she lay back and welcomed him, enveloping his body in sweet safety as they held each other.

Xu An departed some time during the night. Lee had slept soundly after they made love and was not aware she had left. But she returned promptly at six the next evening.

Again they had supper. Lee was more conversational this time, almost clumsy as he affected some false bravado, playing the gregarious host. He began to confide in her, desperate to prolong the hours.

This night, it was Lee who lingered close to the dawn as they confirmed their new ritual. Xu An made up the sofa again and extinguished the candles. Lee awaited her eagerly and they made love with great energy while his father’s snores could be heard through the bedroom wall. They spoke in whispers deep into the night until, finally, Xu An slept and Lee crept out. He was confused—confused and uplifted as he made his way down the stairwell to begin the long Monday morning march through Beijing traffic.

The dawn arrived gray and ugly, an eclipse-like gloom in the sky long after daybreak. The traffic backed up on the capital’s second ring road, moving at an airport-counter crawl. Lee rode the brakes in the fast lane, stop and go at seven a.m. The closer he got to the office, the more the oasis of the weekend dissipated.

His arrival at the Ministry found his staff none the better. Lee sat at his desk, poring through his morning intelligence summary, attempting to calm himself with the deferred gratification of his second Camel of the day as he contemplated his next move. Things were going way too fast.

He had to hand it to the guys in the intelligence bureau of the PLA. They rarely showed their face at the Foreign Ministry, virtually boycotting the tense quarrels that plagued interdepartmental meetings. But the fear of their mounting power existed among the moderates in the inner councils. Increasingly, Lee and his colleagues recognized that the hard-liners were gaining the upper hand.

Once again, they were pounding Taiwan in the psychological-warfare department. They had grown quite adept at this lately. Indeed, there was a government-wide commitment in Beijing to “fighting local wars under high tech conditions.” That was the new mantra, the doctrine of the day. Jamming radar of surveillance aircraft. Hacking into Taiwan’s military computer network. Sprinkling false data throughout the region. Playing their own masterful brand of dirty tricks.

As Lee observed the flowering of these new techniques, he developed his own doubts about the veracity of Alexander Bonner’s sensational “Taiwan-is-going-nuclear” story. He saw threads in the peculiar tale that led him to question its sources.
The Bad Boys over at the PLA? If this latest ruse was entirely a Second Directorate operation, it had yielded one killer disinformation campaign.

The intelligence bureau’s “active measures” made the Foreign Ministry team very nervous—a bit of not-invented-here jealousy combined with the diplomats’ innate caution and preference for the status quo. Lee’s worst suspicions were confirmed that Monday noon when he met his Defense Ministry counterpart Chen for a quick lunchtime prep session before their bosses convened in the war room. Lee had to fence and probe before Chen finally acknowledged the ruse: the Taiwan nuclear flirtation story was an intelligence set-up, a brilliant gambit with only a few kernels of truth. Score one for the PLA provocateurs.

Remarkably, Chen’s own access to his colleagues’ doings was quite limited. Over at the Second Directorate—he conceded to Lee—they had developed a rogue group within a rogue group. They ran their operations on a level that somehow floated above the factionalism that divided recent internal debates in China. Chen had only ferreted out their role in the latest ploy through an inadvertent slip-up from a colleague in the gym.

PLA operatives had planted the krytron story—sure to throw Taiwan on the defensive—then sat back, ready to pounce when the international press inevitably rose to the bait. The story had ensured maximum media coverage—and provided justification for a firm Chinese response.

Now the American officials were on the defensive—right where the Chinese wanted them on the eve of the summit. The tit-for-tat diplomatic escalation that ensued was swifter than Beijing had anticipated, though. China’s recall of its ambassador had Washington stumbling. The White House was already pressing for yet another kiss-and-make-up mission to Beijing.

“There is a limit to how much you can manipulate the Americans,” Lee warned Chen as they walked off their lunch.

“They’re not like the Russians, though,” Chen dismissed him. “The Americans try so hard not to lose their tempers. Bad for business.”

Lee regarded him coldly, lighting a cigarette. “We are playing a dangerous game.”

“Yes. But it is a rough world we live in.”

“So what is the plan if the Americans cancel the summit?”

“We’re still in good shape,” Chen said.

“Good shape for the Party Congress?” Lee pressed. “Nice way to frame things, to be butting heads with the American superpower. Have our relations go to shit and watch trade cutbacks slow down our economy. We’ll set back the whole modernization effort.”

“America is not the only superpower.”

“Right. In another thirty years, our economy will catch theirs. In the meantime, is the People’s Liberation Army going to march across the Pacific and take Los Angeles? Or maybe have a new Cold War alliance with Moscow?”

Chen glared back. “You Foreign Ministry boys are out of touch—behind the times.”

“Why must you mistake reason for weakness?” Lee countered as he gazed at the civil servants on parade. “Where will this game end?”

“End? What do you mean? The krytron business?”

“Beyond that. America and China?”

“When?” Chen asked, regarding him skeptically. “In one hundred years? Two hundred years?”

“I mean sooner. In our lifetimes. We have two global powers with nuclear weapons and a lot of military hardware buzzing each other. Is it inevitable the two systems will collide?”

“Of course. America is corrupt, immature, never satisfied,” Chen said. “Americans always wants more. To push others around. To bend us to their will. Well, the Chinese will never submit. We are a great country. Ours is a superior civilization.”

“So, you really believe that confrontation is unavoidable? That reclaiming Taiwan is the only way China can get respect?” Lee asked, pulling furiously on his cigarette between questions. “You believe that is the fate of your children, and your children’s children?”

“You don’t get it, my friend,” Chen replied. “We may never even have to attack Taiwan with conventional arms. The Chinese on Taiwan worship money. They have sunk so much capital into the Mainland that they will make Taipei’s politicians bow before us. They have sold their own independence dream just to keep their production costs low. Typical of the capitalists!”

“Who in China really gives a damn about Taiwan, except the old generals and weak politicians?” Lee asked as they began to walk more briskly, throwing out his heresy as a simple aside.

“Come again?”

“Some of my friends say we should get real about this obsession with Taiwan. For centuries, the place was mostly aborigines and smugglers. After the Japanese occupied it in 1895, the Mainland never really controlled Taiwan. And the people’s government, the PRC, never did. Never. The Taiwanese are like a different tribe. We are more than one billion people. They live on a tiny polluted island of less than twenty-five million. Why don’t we just ignore them?”

“I am sure you have corrected your friends’ thinking,” Chen said.

“Yes, I am very reliable when it comes to reminding them of the Party line,” Lee snapped.

“You like to live dangerously, don’t you? You like having dangerous friends.” Chen was shaking his head. “You know what the guys at Defense call your office?”

“Sure.”

“The Traitor’s Ministry.”

“We know.”

“If it weren’t for your father,” Chen warned, “they might lift your Party membership for such thinking.”

“Maybe they’ll have to send us all to the countryside for re-education.”

“What is your problem, Lee?” Chen was seething now. “Do you
want
to see us fail? Do you think China is some second-rate civilization? That five thousand years of superior culture should bow before the American dollar?”

“What kind of victory is it to swerve from confrontation to confrontation? To squander billions on buying weapons? We’ve got millions of unemployed people crowding into the cities because our corrupt Party bosses are closing industries and cutting deals with foreign investors. We’ve got tens of millions of men without brides, and no hope of a family, because the Party’s one child policy has produced lots of dead baby girls. Couldn’t we just meet the people’s needs first?”