The Old Boys (10 page)

Charley had the gift of enthusiasm. His Rooseveltian diction, usually well under control, now burbled in my ear.

I said, “Slow down. When we have the original we can do the tests to see how old it is and whether the ink is right and all the rest of it. It’s not authentic till then.”

“
If
we get it first. I sincerely doubt that our pious friend in the desert is going to have it carbon tested before he pushes the button.”

“Good
point,” I said. “And now, Charley, I really must go to bed.”

As I went upstairs I heard Stephanie’s voice on the answering machine.

“I know you’re there, Horace,” she said.

But I wasn’t, not really.

The next afternoon, with a twinge of guilt (but nothing so serious as to cause me to ring Stephanie from the airport), I flew to Delhi. As arranged, David Wong and I met in an restaurant frequented, David said, by the movers and shakers of New Delhi, and indeed there were lots of men in business suits at tables glittering with silver and crystal. Midway through the soup, we were joined by a friend of his, an honest old uncle of a fellow whom David introduced as Yussuf. Although he was not Han—he wore Muslim clothes and his Turkic face with its beak of a nose was the color of strong tea—he was a visa clerk in the Chinese consulate, and he brought his stamps with him. He inked visas for Xinjiang into our passports while we dined.

It was a Hindu establishment. Yussuf declined the unclean food. He held up a hand in refusal when I offered to make a contribution to his children’s education. Whatever old debt he owed to David, it wasn’t hard to see that he was no happier than he should have been to be meeting a couple of Americans in a public place where an honest Muslim’s food might be poisoned. I assumed that Yussuf would disappear as soon as he had taken care of us, but David and he were soon deep in conversation in a language that I could neither understand nor identify. I was glad enough to be left out. The long flight had done nothing to cure
my aching bones. I had a burning thirst with nothing to drink but water that I did not trust. The gritty lukewarm Indian beer in its huge bottle tasted of dust. My tandoori chicken was dry; so was the rice. I ate a mouthful of each and put down my silverware. Sitar music came out of scratchy speakers and I was reminded, as if an iris had opened in my brain, of the everyday boredom of a life in espionage. One is always waiting for someone who does not show up, for something that does not happen. The obsequious waiter came and made an unhappy face at my uneaten plate.

In due course Yussuf departed, making half-hearted
namaste
to me. David had things to tell me. He flicked the ashes off the imaginary cigar of an imaginary Groucho and wiggled his eyebrows. He explained that the language he and Yussuf had been speaking together was Kazak, the Turkic tongue used in various dialects by Muslim tribesmen on both sides of the frontier between Kazakhstan and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The Kazak, like the other non-Chinese Muslim peoples along this border, did not acknowledge a line on a map drawn by their conquerors but drifted back and forth across it with their flocks and herds and trade goods. And sometimes, when fomenters of native uprisings like David got involved, they drifted back and forth with arms and ammunition and dangerous ideas.

Yussuf had news of Paul Christopher—third-hand news, hardly better than gossip, but news nevertheless. One of Yussuf ’s cousins had heard from another relative that an elderly white man who spoke rough peasant Mandarin—Paul had learned the language from his prison guards—had appeared on the Kazakhstan side of the border. He had somehow managed to get through the high mountains of the Borahora Shan on horseback and had reached the fringe of the quarantined territories. Apart from the polar regions, it may be the bleakest place on earth.

“I asked what questions Christopher was asking,” David said. “The word was that the old man was inquiring about a very old European woman who he said was his mother,” David said. “They thought he was crazy. The last they saw of him, he was riding east
toward the forbidden area. They warned him that he would be locked up forever if the Han caught him, but he just thanked them and rode on.”

I truly didn’t know what to make of this.

David read my mind. “Christopher must have had some word from somebody to send him into the mountains,” he said. “The people who saw him said he acted like a man who knew exactly where he was going.”

“Based on what?”

“The way he acted. He seemed happy. That’s why they thought he was nuts. There’s not much to be happy about in that country for a foreigner who’s all alone and sticks out like a sore thumb.”

On the spot, David called the rest of the Old Boys and gave them this new information. Jack Philindros listened without comment, then asked to speak to me. He was in Rome. He had spoken to Zarah’s monk.

“It wasn’t a very productive conversation, though he did confirm Lori’s presence in Prague,” Jack said. “He was wary. He’s a member of the Dominican order. He’s dying and will soon be interviewed at the gates of Heaven, so he’s reluctant to give up secrets that belong to God. Remember, it was the Church that sent him to Prague.”

“Was he there at the right time?”

“Oh, yes, in January 1942. He was an art appraiser for the Church—an expert on private collections in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. Heydrich heard about him from one of his men and borrowed him from the Pope for a few days.”

“That would make him the last person to see Lori.”

“That’s right,” Jack said. “I showed him some pictures of 1930s women and he picked out Lori immediately. He remembers her vividly. She did live with Heydrich. She was under tight self-control but was so filled with hatred that he feared for her soul. He couldn’t help her because she wasn’t a Catholic, or even a Christian. That was all he was willing to say about her.”

“Surely it’s a short step from there to the scroll.”

“You’d
think so, but he hasn’t taken the step yet.”

“Then what was his mission?” I asked.

“He didn’t specify,” Jack said. “But the ice has been broken. I’m going to go see him again today.”

I said, “Is he going to live long enough to talk?”

“Talking seems to revive him,” Jack said. “He was much healthier looking when I left him than when I arrived. This time I hope to ask the larger questions.”

An hour or two later, Jack called me back. When he reached the hospital, the Dominican’s room was empty.

“According to the sisters he died in a state of grace,” Jack said. “I’m going to knock on some different doors.”

Vast and overpopulated though China is, the police know exactly who everybody is and exactly where they ought to be. They keep track of the teeming masses in the old-fashioned way, on 1.25 billion file cards. My own card, which had been gathering dust for fifteen years or so, popped up on the watch list when I presented my passport at the airport in Urümqui, the capital of Xinjiang. As I had expected, it caused a stir. I might now be an honest tourist with no evil designs on the People’s Republic of China, but not so long ago I had been the chief American spy in Beijing, and the Chinese official had not been born who was willing to believe that I wasn’t still what I used to be. The delay was long and the interviews gave my rusty Mandarin a workout. However, the visa that Yussuf had stamped in my passport turned out to be genuine, so they let me in, but without a welcoming smile. David Wong passed through the controls with far less trouble. The Chinese were just as suspicious of him, probably even more so because he looked Chinese and lived in China, but they had more recent reports of him and therefore had fewer questions to ask him. As we got into a taxi together, we saw that our minders were already on the job: two obvious sidewalk men, bored but competent, stayed close behind us on
bicycles. The taxi driver kept an anxious eye on the rear-view mirror so as not to lose them in the snail’s-pace traffic.

David and I had no reason not to behave like honest men. I had told my questioners at the airport a version of the truth—that I was here on behalf of my family to gather information about the death of my cousin. Playing shamelessly on Han reverence for graves, I said we were deeply unhappy that Paul’s body had been cremated in Urümqui instead of being returned to us for burial among his ancestors. They could follow me around as much as they liked and never catch me asking questions about anything else.

As soon as we checked into the hotel, a brand-new Holiday Inn, we started making phone calls to the local officialdom. Out of a dog-eared pocket notebook, David provided the name of the policeman who was head of the section that dealt with foreigners. I called his office. According to the young policeman who answered, Captain Zhang Qiying was very busy. I should route my request through the American consulate.

I said, “Please write down two names.”

My name in Mandarin is Han Huan Ren. Paul’s prison name had been Yang Geng Qi. I described the ideographs in which the names were written, along with our dates of birth and other standard index-card content. This took a long time on the telephone, but that’s one of the inconveniences of a language that has no alphabet. Clearly the man on the other end of the line thought that this was a waste of time, but he had been trained to copy down information. For political cops, from the FBI in the heart of our great American democracy to Captain Zhang in the backwater of the last big totalitarian state on earth, the possession of information is the object of the game. It doesn’t really make any difference if the stuff in the files is useful, or even true. Getting hold of it and squirreling it away is the object of the exercise.

“Please ask Captain Zhang to consult his files to see if those names appear,” I said. “I assure you he will be interested. I’ll await his call.”

While I waited I went for a walk, followed closely by one of our
two minders. The other one, no doubt, was trying to keep up with David, who was hoping to collect some information at the crematorium. It’s a tough job to follow a man one-on-one and I probably could have lost my minder even though my head with its big nose and ears and five o’clock shadow stuck up above the crowd. But I was glad of his company because I was trying to establish my innocent intentions, so I walked slowly and stopped often. Like most Chinese cities, Urümqui is a combination of medieval warrens and spanking-new office towers wrapped in a sulfurous pall of pollution. Cars crawled through a traffic jam comprised of pedestrians, bicyclists and the occasional horseman or camel rider, mixed in with coolies carrying astonishing loads. A man on a donkey talked on a cell phone at the top of his lungs. Half the crowd was doing the same when not coughing convulsively into each other’s faces or spitting on the pavement. According to a tourist pamphlet I read on the plane, Urümqui means “beautiful meadow” in Mongol, but if there was a blade of grass in the whole city I did not see it.

David and I had arranged to meet on Red Square. This space turned out to be almost as vast as its namesake in Beijing, but David knew the ground and had named a meeting point. When I found it, he was already there. There is no such thing in China as a place to sit down in public unless you want to find a space on the curb where the saliva is fairly dry. Therefore we walked some more, followed now by David’s tail as well as my own. The din of the crowd made conversation difficult. I was glad that it was David Wong and not Jack Philindros whose words I was trying to catch in this hubbub.

David had, of course, made friends at the crematorium; he showed me a picture of grinning workers in the viewer of his digital camera. They were not smiling, David explained, because they liked their jobs. They disliked the unnatural idea of burning corpses. It may have been state policy to cremate the dead, but it was an idea whose time had not come in China. David had brought with him from the States a gym bag filled with small
gifts—pens and pencils, cheap watches, cigarettes, miniature bottles of liquor. A new watch, a pack of Camels and two ounces of firewater poured into a cup of tea at nine in the morning seldom renders anyone unfriendly.