The Old Boys (11 page)

“The fellows at the crematorium say they mostly burn Communists who are trying to make a good impression on their superiors, plus a few foreigners,” David said. “Otherwise it’s slow—so slow that it’s hard to keep in practice.”

“What about Paul?”

“They remember cremating two foreigners—one about a year ago and the other in September of this year. The first was a Russian who died of a heart attack. They have a good file on him—medical report, death certificate, photocopy of his passport. He was a fat man. They got a look at him because it’s standard operating procedure to open the coffin to double-check the identity of the deceased before it goes into the flames. Also, I imagine, to harvest any valuables on the corpse.”

And the other one, the one that was burned in September?

“It was delivered by the police,” David said. “They didn’t open that coffin because they were told that the body was badly decomposed.”

“Decomposed?”

“Yep.”

This was curious, because even in summer flesh does not quickly decompose in the parched air and weak sunshine of the Xinjiang high desert. Archeologists find mummies that are thousands of years old but still have the lustrous flowing hair and the fresh though tanned and shrunken faces of young men and women.

One of Captain Zhang’s policeman, wearing plain clothes, awaited us when we returned to the hotel. At his polite invitation I plunged back into the mob and followed him to Zhang’s office.

Despite his junior rank, Captain Zhang was no longer young— salt-and-pepper hair, office pallor, tired eyes, the slightly slumped posture of a man who has gone through the same motions too many times. However, his intelligence was as apparent as his fatigue. He worked from behind a clean desk, without notes, which told me that he had either mastered the details of Paul’s case or, more likely, had no intention of telling me the truth. It was in his power to throw me out of China, so I was prepared to act out two different roles: elaborate politeness that would give him no reason to expel me, plus an informed curiosity that might give him a reason to let me run so he could keep an eye on me and maybe learn something. Unless Paul had changed all of a sudden, it was a safe bet that Zhang had little or no idea what he had really been up to when he was in these parts.

After the usual cup of tea and exchange of pleasantries, Captain Zhang was remarkably open and direct. Although we were speaking Mandarin he called Paul by his English name.

“We remember Mister Paul Christopher quite well,” he said, gesturing with the stained fingers of a heavy smoker. “And you, too, of course, Mister Horace Hubbard.”

I
nodded pleasantly. How kind. Paul was the most notorious American spy ever captured by the Chinese, and in a more modest way I, too, had enjoyed an evil reputation in this country.

Zhang said, “And now we learn that the two of you are cousins. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“This is new information.”

“Is it? We certainly never made a secret of it.”

“How strange. You spoke to us about him so many times in the past in your official capacity, when you were trying to secure his release from prison. Yet no notation was ever made that you are so closely related.”

Zhang looked expectant, but I made no response to his remark. It wasn’t my fault if the Chinese counterintelligence service didn’t ask the right questions.

Finally I said, “On behalf of our family I wish to thank the Chinese authorities for returning the ashes to us, but I am sure you understand how bitterly we regret that our relative’s body could not be buried in the family cemetery. Uncertainty has been created.”

He made me wait just slightly longer for his reply than my own silence had lasted. Then he said, “Regrettable. But there are no embalmers in Ulugqat. I believe your friend Mister Wong has already ascertained that the body was not in good condition when it reached Urümqui.”

Zhang knew that David had been poking around the crematorium. Zhang’s eyes and ears were everywhere. He wanted me to know that. But amazingly for a secret policeman, he also wanted me to understand that he was willing to let himself be questioned. Or at least pretend to have a conversation instead of asking all the questions himself.

I said, “I wonder if you have any idea what my cousin was doing in Ulugqat.”

Zhang did not exactly answer the question, but he did amaze me again by giving me information. “Mister Paul Christopher was brought down from the mountains by some Tajik herdsmen who
found him lying at the bottom of a chasm. He was badly injured with many broken bones and unable to speak. They thought he had fallen off his horse, which was found grazing at the top of the defile.”

“How far was this from Ulugqat?”

“A considerable distance, I believe. The Tajik don’t use maps, so it’s difficult to pinpoint.”

“I see,” I said. “But in any case these herdsmen left their herds and brought Christopher to Ulugqat for medical attention.”

“Yes,” Zhang said, with a look that told me not to mention how remarkable this was before he had explained the matter. “He was a foreigner and quite old. They thought he might be an important man. Or perhaps a spy. Unfortunately he died before they reached Ulugqat.”

“They thought he looked old? Why?”

“He was, I believe, seventy-five years of age.”

“I see. But they brought his corpse into town anyway?”

“Obviously. It was their duty to do so. He had been dead for some time when his body was delivered, and then it took several days to bring it into Urümqui.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why not just bury the man in Ulugqat?”

“Impossible,” Zhang said. “There was no foreign cemetery. He could not be buried in a Muslim graveyard or in one of ours, for that matter. Secondly, the death of any foreigner on Chinese soil is a serious matter. Once we identified this particular foreigner, the matter became even more serious, because of Mister Paul Christopher’s history. An autopsy was ordered. That procedure couldn’t be done in Ulugqat.”

“And the results of the autopsy were?”

“As I said, many bone fractures including a serious compression of the skull. A ruptured spleen, a torn liver, internal bleeding.”

“They brought him down the mountain on horseback?”

“Yes. The Tajik had no motor vehicles.”

“So he was alive when they found him?”

“That
is my understanding.”

“It’s a wonder he could survive—how many days?—lying over a horse like a sack of grain.”

“Indeed.” Zhang nodded respectfully to Paul’s admirable ghost. “He was a very strong and determined man, as we in China have reason to remember.”

I said, “I suppose photographs of the corpse were made, fingerprints taken?”

“Of course, but these are official records that cannot be disclosed.”

“Then you can show me no proof that the man the Tajik brought in was, in fact, my cousin?”

“Proof?” Zhang said in real astonishment. In China, proof was not something you asked a policeman for; it was something only a policeman had a right to demand. He said, “You have his ashes.”

“We have ashes. We don’t know if they are his.”

Silence. Resentment. Zhang lit a rank cigarette, his fifth since we had started talking half an hour before.

I said, “I’m sure you wondered why Christopher had come back to Xinjiang.”

Squinting through the cigarette smoke, Zhang said, “Not at all. He explained at the airport that he wished before he died to see the place where he had been imprisoned.”

“And this was acceptable to you and your superiors?”

“Why should it not be? He already knew all about the place, and in any case it’s no longer a secret location. It is now quite empty, abandoned. He went there on his motorcycle.”

“On his
motorcycle
?”

You laugh? So did I.

“Yes, he bought one, a new Suzuki, soon after he arrived,” Zhang said. “He brought camping gear with him—a tent, a sleeping bag, a small stove, dehydrated food, and so on. He rode around quite freely, chatting with people, asking questions.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Strange ones. He seemed to be looking for his mother. This
was odd behavior for a man his age. I’m afraid we concluded that he was not quite right in his mind.”

“But you let him ride around asking questions?”

“They were harmless questions.”

Zhang let me know by a small gesture and a change in tone of voice that he had answered enough questions, harmless or not. I asked another one anyway.

“When he was in prison, the political officer in charge of his re-education, the man who questioned him every day for ten years, was a party official known to Christopher as Ze Keli. Have you any idea if Christopher contacted this man, or attempted to contact him?”

“No,” Zhang said. “And now, Mister Hubbard, I have these for you.”

Squinting through the smoke of his cigarette, he opened a drawer and removed a package wrapped in cloth. He undid it and placed before me, one by one, Paul Christopher’s passport and wallet, along with the Rolex watch he had been wearing since the 1950s. He had been wearing it when he was captured by the Chinese. They had given it back to him when he was released. It was a self-winding watch. I shook it and it immediately began to run. I wondered if Paul had done the same after all those years in prison where he had no means of measuring time.

The story Captain Zhang had told me was almost certainly hokum. At the same time, the delivery of Paul’s personal effects was disturbing. On the face of it, they were evidence that my cousin was either dead or in Chinese custody. How else could Zhang be in possession of his watch, his passport, his wallet, his money—the entire contents of his pockets? But this was a hoary trick. By laying these familiar objects before me, Zhang wanted me to abandon hope and believe his story. Therefore I took it with a grain of salt.

“Christopher could have ditched his identity,” David said.

This was possible. A switch of this kind was difficult for a white man to make while swimming in a sea of Han, but in his time Paul had done even more improbable things and gotten away with them.

Reading my thoughts—after all we had both breathed the same paranoid air of tradecraft for half a lifetime—David said, “He couldn’t change names and nationalities while he was still in Xinjiang and under surveillance. But if he crossed a frontier…”

“What frontier?”

“Take your pick. But if his destination really was the forbidden zone, he could have crossed into Tajikistan, taken a train to Kazakhstan, and come back into Xinjiang over the Horgas Pass.”

“Despite
dire warnings that he was almost certain to be discovered and arrested.”

“Correct,” David said. “And looking on the dark side, if in fact Christopher was captured, that would explain how Zhang happened to have his personal belongings in his desk drawer.”

Yes, it would. It could also mean that Paul was back in a Chinese prison. If that was the case, no one would ever see him again and it would be a far better thing for the Chinese if the family believed that he was dead.

This conversation took place on the bus to Ulugqat. Captain Zhang’s men were waiting for us at the bus station. They made no effort to be discreet. They wanted us to know that they would be part of our lives as long as we were in China. This was fine by us; we were here for the honest purposes already stated, to find out whatever we could about my cousin and his death. After checking into a hotel, we began asking questions. We never asked about anything but Paul. Evidently Paul had made his usual good impression because people usually smiled when they heard his Mandarin name. A surprising number of people had seen Paul and remembered him, but none had anything interesting to tell us. He had come on a motorcycle, he liked their food. Ulugqat is not exactly a tourist destination, so for most of its citizens a visit by a foreigner was an interesting event.

David and I took long walks at night. It was our only chance to talk to each other with a reduced chance of being recorded. The streets were hardly less crowded after dark and you could find excellent food in the Tajik quarter—not the usual sticky Han delicacies but fat roast mutton with noodles and fried bread, and delicious yogurt made from sheep’s milk. We found a particularly good restaurant and went back three nights in a row. On the third night, when we were still empty of new information and close to giving up, a Tajik with the butterscotch skin of a man who lives outdoors seated himself at a table facing us. Our minders were behind him, so they could not see his face. He engaged us in a jolly conversation about religion. He had the hearty, self-certain manner of an Episcopalian
deacon. If Moses and Jesus Christ were among the Christian prophets, why did Christians call God by the wrong name? Why did they reject Allah’s last messenger? As he got ready to leave, he came over to our table and leaned on it, and while David talked, slowly and distinctly whispered to me two short phrases in Mandarin.