The Shanghai Factor (23 page)

I heard female voices and went out into the foyer. A group of women, chattering and laughing, was descending the main staircase. There were fewer of them than the decibel level had led me to expect. One of them especially had a bell-like voice—Alice Song, of course. She was in the middle of the pack and some of the women at the front turned around and looked upward at her, as if they wanted to absorb the whole glamorous experience of her—voice, face, mind, the aura of her brilliant career, smashing clothes even if it was dress-down Friday. Certainly that’s what I wanted. She was tall. She was striking, with a beautiful face that was not quite a woman’s face, as if it were a female duplicate of the face of a handsome father. She spotted me immediately but went on with her story.

At the bottom of the stairs most of the women headed for the exit. Three of them including Alice disappeared into the lavatory. The other two emerged after a long interval and left. Five minutes after that Alice appeared. She walked up to me as if she knew I had been loitering. She looked neither happy nor unhappy—bemused, I thought, by the sight of me. She said, “So, someone paid the ransom?”

“I escaped my kidnappers,” I said. “Who are your friends?”

“The house committee. Did you have dinner here?”

“The pasta.”

“How was it?” she asked.

“It was okay. The service was a little grumpy, but I came late. There are no male members of the house committee?”

“There used to be,” Alice said. “That’s why the food was so bad. Men just show up at the mess hall. Women bitch.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re the chairperson.”

No response but a level stare—what else would she be? All this was a way of avoiding a discussion of the mystery of the disappearing schmuck. She didn’t want to suggest that she gave a damn about my running away by asking for an explanation. I couldn’t apologize, couldn’t explain. Alice wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see me, but at least she was talking to me.

I said, “Can we have a drink together?”

“Not here,” Alice said. “The bar closes at ten.”

The club’s grandfather clock whirred and struck the three-quarter hour. We went to a place down the street. Alice was a cautious drinker but voluble nonetheless. We spoke Mandarin—she started it. We talked about China. She had never been there, though she had lived in a replica of it while growing up in her parents’ house in a Chinese neighborhood. Facts were her thing, though she knew as only a lawyer can know there is no such thing as immutable truth. She had been in court all week defending a company that had poisoned an entire river in Massachusetts with chemicals from its paper mills that turned the water green or magenta or yellow, killing everything that lived in it and making people who lived on its banks sick. In her heart she hoped her clients would be impoverished by the jury’s verdict, but she was trying hard to keep that from happening because such an outcome would cost her firm money. The practice of law, she said, was morally exhausting. She said she would never say that in English. Neither would I regarding my own profession, or in Mandarin either. Alice asked what I did for a living. I told her I worked for the government.

“In which part of it, doing what?” she asked.

I said, “I’m not a civil servant. I consult under a contract.” All of which, technically speaking, was the truth.

“Consult about what?” Alice asked.

“The mysterious East.”

“Poor darling.”

She let it go at that. I guess she thought she already knew all she needed to know about me from the classroom, the tennis court, the hallowed halls of yesteryear even though we had barely known each other in college. As a sexual possibility she became more intriguing by the moment. My girlfriends had always been on the small side. I had never known a woman who looked anything like Alice, who was so tall, who had so much voice, such a brain, who got so much more likeable as the evening wore on. She reminded me of no one.

We exchanged cell phone numbers. I put her in a taxi at 2:00
A.M.
She had a dinner party the next night. We made plans to spend Sunday together, maybe drive up to Connecticut or somewhere and have lunch, then go for a walk in the fresh air. She had to be home by five, when her ex-husband would bring their child back. She had only the one kid. She liked it that way. Her daughter, whose outside name was Caitlin (in Mandarin, at home, Liling) was a nice person for a six-year-old, but Alice felt like a slacker because the child did not have a sibling. She said she might be better off living in China, where she would have no choice in the matter.

32

Next morning
I listened to Mandopop while I ate breakfast and read the newspapers. The music activated a mental slide show—Mei in daylight, Mei in the dark. To pass the time I played solitaire on the laptop. By setting the level of difficulty at “beginner” I managed to win 8 percent of my games. The computer refuses to be cheated, and that takes away a lot of the fun of the game, but even so solitaire opens the mind. That was the problem—more Mei, more Chen Qi, more Yangtze. After an hour or so I surfed the Web and found one of those ads that invites you to track high school classmates. I clicked on it and typed in the name of Mei’s high school. She had told me she played volleyball, so I tried “girls volleyball team.” No luck. I tried different class years, and on the third try, there in the team photograph was sweet seventeen-year-old Mei in gym shorts, kneeling first row center. She was identified as Susan Peng. I typed this name into the search box and found her graduation picture—apparently the book had gone to print before she was thrown out of America on a morals charge. The caption said: “She is full of vim and vigor and is always on the go.” Her nickname was “SuSu.” She was a member of the National Honor Society and had participated in volleyball, skating, debating team, Shakespeare Society, math club, waltz club, class play, school newspaper, and more. She was president of the math club. She was a princess of the homecoming queen’s court. She was elected class brain and class madcap. I couldn’t believe my luck. Never had a Headquarters file told me so much about her. Had she stuck to rules and lied to me about where she went to high school, I would never have tracked her down. The information was useless, of course, because the name she used as a student could not be a true name. Had Burbank recruited her when she was in high school and sent her back to China to lie in wait for the sucker who would give him entrée into the shadow land that was Guoanbu headquarters? This was an old question. There were no new answers.

With half a day and an evening to kill and a lot to think about, I lunched at the meatball sandwich place and went to a popcorn movie at the theater around the corner. Emerging from the theater at dusk I half expected to see Lin Ming in the crowd with his gym bag, but he wasn’t there and neither was anyone else I had ever seen before. A light rain fell. Headlights bounced off the shiny pavement. I walked back to my building. The rain intensified. Although it’s easier to follow someone in the rain because the target’s mind is on not getting wet, there were no signs of surveillance, just lots of people hurrying through the downpour.

The doorman stood under the awning with his big black umbrella. As he opened the door for me he said, “You got a delivery.” He unlocked a drawer in his desk and withdrew a padded envelope and the ledger in which he recorded deliveries. “Came in at three fifty-seven,” he said as I signed the book. “By messenger,” he added.

“What did the messenger look like?”

“Guy on a bicycle. Skinny.”

“American?”

“How can anybody tell anymore?” he asked. He thought, then shook his head. “Just a guy,” he said.

Inside the apartment, I examined the envelope—my name and address typed on a plain label, no return address. I slit the sealed end with a kitchen knife and shook the contents onto the kitchen counter. A thumb drive fell out. There was nothing else in the package. I inserted the drive in my laptop. A photograph of Da Ge, Mei’s favorite princeling, popped up. His real name was Chen Jianyu and he was, as I already knew, the son of Chen Qi. There followed a narrative of many pages, with references to other semiprincelings, including Mei as an unnamed subject. In some of the pictures she was with Chen Jianyu, in others with me. In the ones with Chen Jianyu she was radiantly happy. I had always supposed and now I was certain that there was something between the two of them.

I read for hours. It was a workout. Mandarin bureaucratese is no less convoluted than the same kind of gibberish in any other language, and I sometimes had to use the dictionary, so it was slow going. Toward dawn I made some tea and ate some cereal. As I chewed the Raisin Bran I tried to think. When at last I was done reading, I felt a great unease. Was this file a document or a forgery? Why the indecent haste to put it into my hands, mere hours after I had horrified Lin Ming by asking for this material?

Someone was trying to tell us that we had set the hook in Lin Ming’s lip. Maybe we had—anything was possible.
The wise man does not believe in triumph,
I thought, inventing a Laozi proverb. I was tired, eyesore, completely sober. My stomach was sour. My eyes hurt. I turned everything off—Mei first, then the rest. I flopped on the unmade bed without bothering to undress. What a busy day I had had, what dark dreams I had to look forward to if I could talk myself into falling asleep.

When I woke at midmorning my mind was on Lin Ming, as though continuing a thought that had begun while I was asleep. Still abed, I called the number of the cell phone I had given him in Riverside Park. He did not pick up.

“Hey buddy,” I said in English to his voice mail. “I’ve got an extra ticket to the game right here in my hand. Good seats. Gimme a ring before twelve if you’re interested.”

This message had hidden meanings, wild cards on which I had briefed Lin Ming when I gave him the phone. “Extra ticket” meant I wanted to meet, “right here in my hand” meant urgent. “Good seats” meant the Museum of Natural History at the entrance to the Planetarium. “Gimme a ring” meant cough twice if the coast is clear. “Twelve” meant three o’clock because its two digits added up to three. “If you’re interested” meant
really
urgent. Could Tom and Huck, swearing a blood oath in McDougal’s cave, have been more devious?

It was ten-forty now. After showering and shaving for the first time in two days, I poached two eggs in the microwave, remembering to prick the yolks with a needle. I made some toast and heated milk for instant hot chocolate. I tried to read the
Times
but failed because yesterday’s ideograms still fluttered in my head like moths.

At two-thirty I headed for the Planetarium, the thumb drive containing Chen Jianyu’s file in the watch pocket of my jeans. According to my maternal grandfather, who in 1943 parachuted into Lombardy for the OSS, the Gestapo never looked for the watch pocket when frisking a captured American agent because Old World pants did not have watch pockets. That’s where the men of the OSS hid their suicide pills, said Gramps.

The museum was mobbed, just as it had been on Sundays when I was a kid. Shrill adolescent voices bounced off the walls. Inside this clamor, quiet and still, stood Lin Ming. The hood of his Knicks sweatshirt was up, making him hard to recognize or even to tell that he was Chinese. He saw me and coughed twice, his all-clear signal. I saw but did not hear the cough.

And then, with a twist of the bowels, I remembered Alice Song and our date for lunch. I looked at my own watch—not a signal to Lin Ming that the coast was clear, though maybe he took it for that, but a spasm of embarrassment and guilt and panic. I was an hour and forty minutes late: strike three. I walked into the crowd, trying to escape from my own stupidity. Lin Ming followed.
Asshole!
I called myself.
Idiot!
Because of the noise it was impossible to call Alice, and anyway how could I make amends and why would she pick up after she saw my name on caller ID? I paused in front of a glassed-in display of American birds. The skylarking crowd surged beyond us, reflected in the big backlit pane. All the kids seemed to be wearing baseball caps and costly sneakers. Lin Ming obviously thought this was no place for a clandestine meeting. Actually, it would have been perfect had we continued on into the darkened Star Theater. When the stars and planets and galaxies were out and everyone else’s eyes were fixed upon the ceiling, it was an ideal place to pass documents and money. Plus, the microphone that could filter our voices in this bedlam had not, as far as I knew, yet been invented.

In a loud voice I asked Lin Ming a question. He could not hear me. I asked it again, even louder. He still could not hear me. I pulled the thumb drive out of my watch pocket and showed it to him.

“Put that away,” Lin Ming said, genuinely shocked by this breach of security. “Are you crazy?”

“Please answer the question.” I was still bellowing.

Lin Ming said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“Not yet.
Did
you
send me this?”

“I’m going. You can follow me if you wish.”

He walked away. I followed. Lin Ming threaded his way through the screeching, rowdy, chaotic mob, never slowing down but never bumping into anyone either. Outside, he led me into Central Park, then slowed his steps until I caught up and was walking beside him.

He said, “So what was it you wanted to know?”

“The provenance of the material I received yesterday.”

“Ultimate or immediate? How was it delivered?”

“By bicycle messenger.”

“At what time yesterday?”

“Three fifty-seven.”

“In the afternoon?”

Lin, who had been so depressed only two days before, was now making fun of me. This is not the way humble assets are supposed to behave, but Lin Ming was no garden-variety asset. He was used to being the case officer. In his mind he had been born to be the case officer and that was what he still was and always would be. He was certain that he was a lot smarter than I was. Such hubris was supposed to give me the advantage, but I wasn’t so sure about that. Chances are he was right. He started to say something.