The Shanghai Factor (12 page)

It was good to be in Manhattan, where I had spent the winters of my boyhood, the summers having been daydreamed away in Connecticut. I immersed myself in the city’s money-gulping culture—museums, concerts, theater, movies, basketball games. I joined a gym. I visited bars I had liked when I was a kid, but they were full of kids and drunks, so I drank at home—four ounces of the Macallan before dinner, seldom more, never less. I didn’t enjoy dining alone at the bar in loud restaurants at one hundred dollars a plate and being treated like a mendicant, so I usually had a mock-gourmet dinner delivered to the apartment. I didn’t want company, and when women struck up a conversation in a public place, I was polite but distant. Nothing had happened to my libido. The problem was, I was looking for a Mei in a world where there was only one Mei. I wanted my Shanghai life, stage-managed though it almost certainly had been, to come back. Maybe I just wanted someone to talk to, certainly I wanted a particular face to look into while making love. My Mandarin, I knew, was flying away. Sometimes in mid-town I overheard phrases on the street that I didn’t really understand. In dreams I saw a Chinese woman in Central Park who usually turned out to be a Mei who didn’t know me from Adam. If it was the real Mei she probably would have told me I should learn another Chinese language. “It’s ridiculous to speak only one Han language,” she would say in her dream-woman voice, which croaked a little, like Jean Arthur’s English. “You should perfect your Shanghainese and learn Yue.”

One night in spring, after seeing a play on Forty-fifth Street, I decided to walk home. The weather was warm, the air was still. As I emerged from the theater, I noticed a young Chinese couple. Half hidden in the crowd, they walked along behind me for a few steps, the woman talking on a cell phone. At Sixth Avenue I turned left. The couple kept on going east. There were few pedestrians on the avenue. The yellow moon, almost full but flattened on one edge, hung overhead between two tall buildings. I gazed at it, my head bent far back. This posture was slightly dizzying. For once I was content, free of exasperation. I had enjoyed the play, I was glad to see the moon in such a beautiful phase. Because of the pollution and the glare of electric light, it was a rare night when you could see any of the lights in the sky over Shanghai or any other city in China or for that matter, anywhere else in the world unless you were in the Sahara Desert.

A man’s voice said, “Be careful. You’re walking into traffic.”

I woke up, and I unbent my neck. He was right. I was inches from the curb. I said, “Thanks.” But I was on my guard. He was smaller than me, but he might have a gun or a knife or maybe Mace, which was as often a robber’s weapon as a victim’s defense. There was enough light to see that he was Chinese, like the young couple that might have been following me outside the theater.

He moved into the light of a store window. He wanted me to see his face. He waited for me to recognize him. I did so immediately. He was dressed as he had been the last time I saw him, in that Washington restaurant, but now he wore a leather jacket over his black T-shirt and a baseball cap. What was he doing here? I didn’t know whether I wanted him to know I remembered him.

He refused to play the game. “I thought it was you,” he said. “The Peking duck. The young lady in distress.”

“And Laozi,” I said. “I remember. How are you?”

“I’m well, thank you. What are we doing in New York?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” I said. “You first.”

“A long story,” he said. “Shall we walk together?”

If nothing else, this was an opportunity to speak Mandarin. I thought I knew what he was, why he was here, whom the Chinese woman had been talking to on her cell phone. I said, “Why not?”

Neither of us mentioned Laozi again. Nor did we exchange names. For two or three blocks we didn’t exchange a word. As before, my companion asked no personal questions, volunteered no personal information. A person who offers no information is the reverse image of one who offers too much—follow the logic? After ten minutes or so, I broke the silence. How did he like New York? It was the greatest city in Christendom, he said. I didn’t think I had ever before heard that particular word spoken aloud. He began to talk. Small talk. My new friend was a basketball fan. He watched the Knicks on television and liked a pickup game. So did I, I said. Then I said, “We haven’t answered your question.”

“What question was that?” he asked.

“‘Why are we in New York?’”

“I live here,” he said.

“So do I.”

“Really? I took you for a man of Washington. A civil servant, perhaps.”

We marched on. He was exercising, not strolling. I asked if he knew a lot of civil servants.

He said, “Far too many. I work at the United Nations.”

“As U.N. staff?”

“No, in China’s delegation,” he said.

“Do you find the work interesting?”

“Not especially,” he said. “The U.N. is an artificial thing. It makes a lot of its great purpose, but in fact it has no purpose except to be the choo-choo toy of Washington.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“Someone must protect the small fish from too much handling,” he said.

At last we reached my building. Though he may have regarded the address as valuable information, he barely glanced at it, as if he already knew where it was.

He said, “Do you play basketball?”

“I used to. But I’m older now and not as nimble as I used to be.”

He handed me his card. “I have access to a gym,” he said. “If you feel like playing a little one-on-one, give me a call.” He didn’t ask for my card. I didn’t offer one. I was pretty sure he already knew who I was, that this encounter was not accidental.

I said, “I’m sure you’d beat me.”

“Who knows?” he said. “Games are in the lap of the gods. I’m shorter and older and not especially interested in winning. We can bet on the outcome—a dollar a game.”

I said, “Maybe we should play
weiqi
instead. Then you’d be sure to win.”

“That’s an idea,” he said. “Also for money?”

I said, “Now you’re making me worry. Are you a ringer?”

He knew the outdated slang, he caught the double meaning. I could see it in his eyes. He smiled a disarming smile and, without answering, lifted a hand and walked away, moving even more swiftly than when we had been walking together. I looked at his card. The Chinese characters gave his name as Lin Ming. His title was “economics attaché.” Read “Guoanbu.” What next?

I didn’t call him. Making the first move would be the wrong move. There was little doubt in my mind that there would be, in due course, another chance meeting. I made no change in my habits, so as to make things easier. A couple of days later I realized I was being watched—four mixed-gender, all-Han teams of three people each, just like in Shanghai. Here, they stood out a bit more even though they stayed farther back and there was nothing unusual about seeing three Chinese scattered in any New York crowd. I pretended to be oblivious to their company. Since the goal of tradecraft is a natural appearance, why not just be natural? The adversary will watch you whether you know he’s there or not. Let him watch, for who knows who watches the watchman? Just the same, remembering Burbank’s lecture on the right to self-defense, I started carrying a can of pepper spray and a short fighting knife, and was careful not to let anyone get too close to me when I went walking after dark.

One afternoon a month or so after bumping into Lin Ming, I stopped at a sandwich shop that served excellent meatball sandwiches, then went to the movies. I saw a Woody Allen film, a very enjoyable one set in Barcelona—amusing story, good acting, beautiful ardent women. I wondered if Mr. Allen realized how much better his movies had become since he stopped casting himself. Lin Ming was far from my mind as I walked, still smiling, out of the theater. I had stopped in the men’s room, so the rest of the audience had scuttled away by the time I reached the sidewalk. It was raining—a downpour. Darkness was falling and the cars had their headlights on and their windshield wipers thumping. The rain blurred the scene, you couldn’t read the signs on the buses or make out faces. I waited under the marquee for it to let up. After a moment or two my eyes adjusted. A few feet away, also under the marquee, stood Lin Ming, smoking a cigarette and watching the traffic. When he saw me, he dropped the butt, ground it out with the sole of his shoe, and said, “Hello there.” No smile of delighted surprise. Meeting by chance in a cloudburst in the middle of a city of eight million was the most natural thing in the world, of course it was.

“Hello yourself,” I said.

Lin Ming did not explain himself. In some not so very elusive way he reminded me of Burbank. I imagined telling Burbank this and watching his reaction. The comparison would tell him something about Lin, something about me, something to lock up in a safe.

To Lin Ming I said, “Let me guess. You just happened to be passing by and there I was, coming out of the movies.”

Smiling at last, the winner of the game of wits, Lin Ming said, “Actually, yes. I was just getting out of the rain and you appeared as if beamed down like Captain Kirk.” How did he know these things? He was carrying a gym bag. He said, “Basketball?” Pointing at my Keds, he said, “You’re wearing the right shoes. The gym is right around the corner.” I shook my head and smiled regretfully.

The rain was letting up. Lin Ming shifted his gym bag from one shoulder to the other. He looked at his watch. “I’d better go or I’ll miss my time,” he said. “It was nice to run into you. Big city, small world. Long odds.”

“Odds can be odd,” I said.

He walked away.

Feigning impulse, I called after him, “Wait up. I could use some exercise.”

An hour later, panting and drenched in sweat, I owed Lin Ming three dollars even though I was five inches taller and years younger than he was. Under the basket he was quick, deceptive, a deadeye shooter. He played in the same way that he walked—fast, silent, no expression whatsoever on his face, no movement of the eyes or body to tip off his next move. Besides, I had let him win.

I went home to shower, and as hot water washed away sweat and unknotted muscles, I wondered where and when I would run into my new friend next. And how long it would take him to pop the question.

16

Every week or so
I cleaned out the mailbox. The usual yield was a large accumulation of junk mail addressed to my mother, sometimes a bill her executor had forgotten to pay, and almost always, several appeals from dodgy strangers who wanted her to give them money. Mother subscribed to the
New Yorker
and
National Geographic
and most of the other genteel slicks that people of her generation and kind displayed for a while, then threw away after looking at the pictures. She also received a couple of beefcake magazines as well as some soft-porn publications. Rifling Mother’s mailbox I learned secrets she never meant me to know, and this evidence of her humanness caused me to love her a little more. It also brought back those long-ago female howls from the master bedroom.

A few days after I ran into Lin Ming under the marquee, I found a small envelope addressed to me in a nymphet hand—the kind in which the letter
i
is dotted with a little circle. This puzzled me, since no one knew I was here except the doormen, Lin Ming, and maybe Burbank in his omniscience. I waited until I was alone in the apartment to open the envelope. Inside was an invitation from Dr. Brook Holloway and Mr. Henry Smithers to the christening of their infant son, Stanley Austin Holloway-Smithers, at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields on Hudson Street at ten o’clock in the morning of the coming Friday. Business attire, no gifts, please. Friday was two days away. As I had never known anyone called Holloway or Smithers, I surmised that this was a summons from Burbank. That meant that the place named was a cover name for another place, the day and time likewise. The problem was, I didn’t know what the wild cards meant, and therefore I couldn’t possibly get to the right place at the right time. There was no RSVP phone number. The return address was a post office box with an Upper West Side zip code. Of course I had the number for the phone that Burbank never answered, but even if someone picked up, I could hardly ask to be told over an open line, in plain English, what “the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields” stood for, what the actual time of the meeting was, and what was the significance, if any, of those tin-ear aliases. I looked in the envelope again and found a smaller card inviting me to a reception following the baptism at an address on Washington Square. Was it possible that at some point in my life I
had
known a Holloway or a Smithers, or both, and that the invitation was puzzling because it was genuine? After playing a few hands of solitaire on my new laptop, I decided to go to Saint Luke in the Fields at the time indicated and see what happened.

Wearing one of my Shanghai suits and a shirt and tie and buffed-up leather shoes, I showed up at the church at the precise time indicated. The doors were locked. I lingered for a few minutes, another breach of protocol, since the unmet agent is supposed to consider himself under observation by the adversary and to slink away without delay. No one approached me. I took a cab to an imaginary address on Eighth Street, loitered until the hour of the reception, and tried to find the address on Washington Square. It did not exist. The amount of time wasted every day by spies of all nations on comedies of errors of this kind would provide hours enough for a terrorist cell composed of two illiterate brothers and a cousin living in a cave to build a nuclear device. By now it was well past eleven. I decided to take a walk around Greenwich Village. Maybe someone would follow me, tap me on the shoulder, and explain this fiasco. It would be easy to keep me in sight. It was Friday, so I was almost the only guy on the street wearing a suit, and as usual, I was taking no noticeable countermeasures.

On Fifth Avenue, a young man was handing out leaflets, but only to men. With each leaflet he shouted, “Here you go, dude, get laid! Only twenty bucks.” I gave him a wide berth. This offended him. He yelled “Hey!” and ran after me, then walked backward in front of me, red-faced and shouting, spit flying. Was I too effing good to read a leaflet about the crimes of the secret elite? Was I some kind of effing right-winger? Did I effing love it when some effing American assassin murdered innocent Muslims with an effing Hellfire missile? I stopped in my tracks. He walked toward me, crazy-faced. When he was close, he murmured, “This one is special for you.” He handed me a leaflet. I took it. Up close he was a nice, clean kid with freckles who smelled of shampoo and whose loving parents had paid for about ten thousand dollars worth of work on his teeth. He said, “Read this, it will show you the way to the Lord.”