A Death in China
Carl Hiaasen
Bill Montalbano
A DEATH IN CHINA
In 221 B.C., China came to be ruled by the formidable Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, whose dynasty was China’s shortest, but arguably its most important. It was Qin who unified the feudal country. He built a road system, organized a central government, standardized Chinese language and coinage, and it was he who ordered construction of the Great Wall. Qin’s hope for China’s future was tied to a belief in his own immortality; to achieve that end, he was both ingenious and brutal, and when he finally died, he was interred in a giant tumulus near his capital of Changan, now the modern city of Xian. In the last decade, no archaeological dig has aroused more world interest than that involving the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi, the Son of Heaven. …
—From a lecture by Dr. David Wang
St. Edward’s College, Ohio
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Prologue
CHANGAN, CHINA, 213 B.C.
“WHERE IS CONFUCIUS?” the emperor demanded.
Princes, nobles, councillors, generals, diplomats, servants and eunuch-ministers mimicked the emperor’s angry mien. Square-jawed, flint-eyed, they stared at the cluster of old men whose robes and formal bearing marked them as scholars. Silence wrapped the throne room. It was not a question to be answered. Everybody knew Confucius had been dead nearly three hundred years.
“Is Confucius in heaven? Where is heaven? What do your books tell you? Is he a bush, or a river, or a bird that flies through the forest? Does he live still? Tell me, scholars.”
The eldest scholar, gnarled as the cane he clutched with both hands, responded in a voice that held no fear.
“Where the master is we cannot say. But his spirit is among us men.”
“You know nothing!” the emperor snapped. “Am I then just a man, like any other?”
“You are foremost among men, and more,” answered a councillor named Li Su in prayerlike incantation. “You are Qin Shi Huangdi, August Sovereign, the Son of Heaven. You are the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom.”
“Have I lived as other men?”
The ritual required a general to answer: Men Qian, the emperor’s best.
“Your feats have surpassed all others.”
The emperor allowed himself a smile and cocked an eye; a parody of surprise.
“You have unified the Middle Kingdom,” the general continued. “You have given us a great wall, stretching many months’ journey, from the great ocean to the desert to protect us from the barbarians. So wide six horsemen may ride abreast. So tall and so strong that it will never be breached.”
“So I am not just any man, am I? I am the Son of Heaven, ruler of the mightiest empire. Tell me, scholars, in your wisdom: Is that not right?”
The old man ran a clawed hand through his wispy beard.
“‘Let the prince be prince, minister be minister, father father and son son.’ So it is written,” he said.
The royal fingers kneaded an elaborate bronze chalice, and a serving boy, unnoticed, carefully poured more wine.
“They are all men. Men die. But I am different; the Son of Heaven. I shall not die. My body may stop, but I shall not die. I shall be immortal.”
There were none to vouchsafe the emperor a response. The eldest scholar folded his hands around the cane and stared out over the exquisite royal city, where five palaces and fifty temples drowsed in the summer sun.
“I have heard the criticism of the scholars,” the emperor said. “They ridicule my dealings with sorcerers and alchemists. They deny immortality because it is not written in their books.
“Scholars! It is not enough for an empire to be strong and orderly. No, they insist as well that the emperor must also be a sage, must also follow the teachings of Confucius, who is not here.”
The eldest scholar replied softly, as though rebuking a child. ‘“To govern is to set things right. If you begin by setting yourself right, who will dare to deviate from the right?’ That is what Confucius said.”
“I am the Son of Heaven and I have set things right in this world as I will in the next. You have seen my preparations. They have taken more than thirty years.” The emperor cocked his head. “Did you not believe what you saw?”
“I believe in the majesty of the work I saw,” the old man said evasively.
“Majesty? Yes, my old friend.” The emperor nodded. “Majesty indeed. A mountain whose insides have been carved into the shape of the cosmos by hundreds of thousands of workers who have labored a lifetime. I have made a generation of peasants dig through subterranean streams and seal them off with bronze to create a burial chamber where I shall rule for eternity. Palaces, pavilions—with fine vessels, jewels, stones and rarities. With quicksilver I have created the waterways of the empire, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, and even the great ocean itself, and made them flow mechanically. Perfect models. And above I have depicted the heavenly constellations, and below, the geography of the earth. All this you have seen?”
“Yes,” the old scholar answered.
“And the vaults?”
“Yes.”
“Majestic, would you say? Large vaults surrounding the mountain, filled with clay soldiers, thousands of them, infantry, archers, charioteers and generals. Each carrying a real weapon.” The emperor’s eyes flashed.
“Your celestial army,” the scholar said.
“It will protect my perpetual reign.” The emperor emptied his cup. “And having seen my tomb and my army, scholars, can you still deny my immortality?”
There was a long pause then. Every eye was riveted on the small group of scholars before the throne. After the pause, the eldest replied.
“Ideas, like Confucius, are immortal. Men die.”
“Fools!” the emperor screamed.
The next day, four hundred and sixty wise men, gathered from all corners of the empire to assay the emperor’s immortality, were made to watch as soldiers burned their books.
Then they were led to a deep pit not far from the emperor’s celestial kingdom. From atop the steep sides of the pit jeering peasants shoveled clods of thick red earth. Most of the scholars kept their dignity. A few cursed and one or two of the younger ones cried. Before noon, they were all buried and dead. But then, three years later, so was the emperor, laid to rest under the perpetual vigilance of his fierce clay soldiers.
Chapter 1
PEKING, AUGUST 1983
THE HIGH-CEILINGED LOBBY seemed carved in time, socialist testimony to yesterday’s barren promises. A wine-red carpet crawled like a stain toward the horizon. Improvident columns that were neither attractive nor altogether round highlighted bile-green walls. The furniture was of blond wood and indeterminate proportion. Waist-high counters cluttered every inch of wall space, each chock-ablock with white-coated workers. Some were accountants, some receptionists, some managers. Most were watchers.
Tom Stratton threaded through a knot of noisy Americans. He skirted a gaggle of Japanese clustered around a guide waving a flag. He neatly sidestepped a functionary listlessly pursuing a fifty-pound vacuum cleaner. Reaching the stand where an empty-eyed girl protected trays of almost fresh fruit, Stratton bought two apples. She weighed them on a digital scale and made change of his one-yuan note with an abacus.
“Ba lou,” Stratton told the elevator operator in phrase-book Mandarin. He was eventually deposited on the eighth floor.
The room was a monstrous little brother to the lobby, but already, after a week, it seemed like home. Stratton kicked off his shoes and padded into the bathroom. The hot water tap snuffled and growled, barked and hissed. On past experience, the chances that the water would be hot when it finally appeared were exactly one in two.
Stratton ate the apples and fingered leaves of tea into a thin-walled mug. Tenderly, he added water from a thermos on the night table, then threw back the red velvet drapes to let in the last rays of sunshine and sprawled on the bed. It was one hell of a place, Peking. Stratton had not decided whether to love or hate it. The city sprawled in all directions, a flat, dusty, one-story town punctuated by brick chimneys thrusting toward the smog like phallic exclamation marks. Graceless monuments of revolutionary architecture dwelt alongside exquisite, gold-roofed survivors of the city’s imperial past. Stratton scissored off the bed to watch the evening rush hour flow past a hundred feet below. He had just calculated the bicycle flow at nearly five hundred per minute when the room door flew open.
“Comrade! The chairman wants to see you right away.”
“Hello, Alice.” Stratton stifled a grin behind the tea mug. She had become a China groupie, a parody in blue cotton. The pants Chinese women wear with shapeless abandon strained across Alice’s ample rump. The jacket was buttoned to the neck and fashionably wrinkled. The flat-brimmed hat bulged in a frustrated attempt to contain a mass of bottle-blond hair. Clinging precariously to the cap was a sheet metal button, red on white. AAAH, it said.
“You could pass for a native,” Stratton mocked. Alice Dempsey was not his favorite woman.
“Bought it all at the Friendship Store. Why didn’t you come with us?”
“I felt queasy.”
“Baloney!” she snorted. “Every chance you get you slip away from us. What have you got against art historians anyway? I’ll bet you don’t even wear your badge, do you?” She rolled her eyes up toward her own AAAH. American Association of Art Historians.
“It’s a fine group, very nice folks,” Stratton said with forced politeness. Alice Dempsey was ugly as sin and as annoying as a rash, but she did have wit and will enough to be a prized member of an excellent faculty in California.
“Fact is, I’d rather walk around than ride on a bus.”
“Well, it’s rude to our Chinese friends. The guide, little Miss Sun, is always asking about you: ‘Where is Professor Stratton?’ At least don’t forget about the acrobatic show tonight.”
“Sure, Alice.”
STRATTON’S HEART had not been with the tour since he had bumped into David Wang outside the Summer Palace, just as if they had been on Adams Street in Pittsville, Ohio, or at one of those ad hoc seminars Wang had loved to lead at St. Edward’s, stockinged feet curled to the fire in the old library.
It was Stratton’s first time in Asia in more than a decade, and he had still not worked out to his own satisfaction why he had come. Asia was a dead letter. Had he come because a two-week package tour of the People’s Republic was cheap and exotic? Or because it would spare him dull hours of summer research at the small New England college where he taught? Not that, either. The research would have to be done, sooner or later, one way or the other; long nights followed by a slim volume only initiates would read. The job was waiting when he got back. Say he had come to escape the shards of a divorce that still hurt, a year later. Was that the real reason? Part of it, maybe, but only a lesser part, if Stratton was in the mood to be honest with himself. Carol was gone and he did not really miss her, although sometimes he ached to be with the boy.
Boredom. That was closer to the truth, wasn’t it? His friends would know it intuitively. Stratton had worked hard to become a scholar. He was a legitimate historian, an able professor of emerging reputation. And … so what? Passing years that dulled the senses, blank-faced students in vacuous procession. What next, Stratton? Midlife crisis. Male menopause. Maybe there was no next.
So he had come to China. To throttle the boredom. No, there was something deeper. He was also testing the scar tissue, the way an athlete will gingerly measure the recovery of an injured limb. Something else, too. Thomas Stratton, as he alone knew, had come to weigh the man he had become against the one he had once been.
At Peking Airport, standing before the immigration officer in white jacket and red-starred cap, visions of yesterday had come flooding in with a gush he had battled to control. The man had fingered his passport without interest.
“Is this your first time in China?” the inspector had asked in slow, careful English.
“Yes,” Stratton had lied. “Yes, it is.”
“You are perspiring. Are you ill?”
“No. It is hot.”
The man had stamped his passport and Stratton had sought the refuge of protective coloration in the gaggle of art historians.
Stratton shook his head at the memory and sipped his tea.
That night he skipped the acrobatic performance. Too bad about little Miss Sun. Once Stratton was sure his tour mates had left in the green-and-white Toyota minibus in which all tourists in China seemed to live, he went looking for dinner. On the way, he conducted prolonged negotiations with the white-jacketed floor attendants. If there was a telephone call for Professor Stratton, could they transfer it to the restaurant? It might work. Even if it didn’t, it was not crucial. If punctilious David Wang called once unsuccessfully, he would either leave his number or call again.
The restaurant—foreigners only—was a purely functional place of round tables, soiled tablecloths, spotted silverware and spicy food in the inevitable blue-and-white crockery. The tour group ate three meals a day there, Western for breakfast and Chinese for the other two—a procession of savory dishes that appeared unordered.
Stratton settled into a small table and began leafing through a purple-covered issue of the Peking Review. About two paragraphs into the cover story, a gob of wet white rice caromed off the red plastic sign that proclaimed his table 37. From two tables away, Stratton’s assailant grinned evilly, gap-toothed and green-eyed. He was about seven years old and his chopstick catapult was poised for another round. A second child carefully probed the innards of the sugar bowl with a spoon. There were two, no three, others in tenuous custody of a pretty woman in her thirties and a great bear of a man with a bushy red beard. Stratton intercepted the next gob with his menu.
“Kevin!” the woman jerked the missile commander around to face his dinner.
“I’m sorry,” she told Stratton. It was something she had said before.
The bearded man looked up from a dam of napkins that encircled a lake of spilled soy sauce.
“Somehow it was easier at McDonald’s. Sorry,” he said.
“No problem. Actually, he’s a pretty good shot.”
From the waitress, Stratton ordered Sichuan chicken with peanuts, noodles, vegetables and a beer.
“Qingdao beer.”
“Qingdao mei you.” She pronounced it “may-o.”
“What kind do you have?”
“Peking.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, baby, that’s a bad mistake,” the bearded man called from his chaos. “Peking beer tastes like it was passed through a horse. Tell her you want Wu Xing.” He wiggled a green bottle in front of him.
“Wu Xing,” Stratton told the waitress.
Stratton abandoned the last hope of a quiet meal when something began gnawing his leg. He carried it, squirming and squealing, back to its tribe.
“An escapee, I think,” Stratton said, handing it to the woman.
“Oh, Tracey! Again, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’m used to kids. My sister has four.”
“Spend a lot of time with them?” the bearded man asked.
“Never go near the little bastards.”
“Can’t imagine why. Why don’t you join us, since we’ve ruined your dinner anyway? I’m Jim McCarthy. This is my wife, Sheila. I’ve never seen the kids before.”
McCarthy, it turned out, was one of about twenty American reporters resident in Peking, a correspondent for a big East Coast newspaper. He had an office in a hotel and an apartment in a compound on the eastern side of the city where foreigners lived in Western-style buildings behind high brick walls erected and patrolled by the Chinese government to keep Chinese out.
“You here for long?” McCarthy asked.
“Another couple of days.”
McCarthy rolled his eyes.
“Jim is not a great China fan,” his wife explained
“Yeah, one day I’ll write a book. ‘Hold the May-o’ it’ll be called. It’s the national sport. If you want something, they haven’t got it—beer to interviews. Mei you.”
After dinner, Stratton marveled at the texture of the city as he walked along a broad tree-lined avenue that ran past the Temple of Heaven. The dark summer streets bustled with life. Where puny street lamps cast wan patches of light, people gathered in loose, friendly groups to escape the heat. Almost all were men, in old-fashioned undershirts. They squatted to gossip or play cards. The few cars rode with parking lights only, wary of the swirling stream of hard-to-see bicyclists, who used no lights at all. A young couple conducted public courtship on the stone steps of a government office building. From one alleyway, Stratton heard the muffled click of mah-jongg tiles, and from a window, the beat of Western rock music from a cheap tape deck. Like headlights, mah-jongg and rock music were forbidden in Peking that summer; the headlights so that bicyclists would not be blinded, the ancient game and the music because they were decadent. It pleased Stratton to realize that people still pursued their own muses on summer nights, and to hell with the Party and its rules.
The aim of Stratton’s walk was a downtown park built on an artificial hill. The park itself was nothing special, but the circumstances of its construction were testimony to the siege mentality of Chinese communism. Perhaps forty feet high and a quarter mile around, the hill had been built entirely by hand, one bucket at a time, by volunteer workers who had scooped it from underneath the foundations of the city. In every shop, every factory, every school, Stratton had read, a well-oiled door led down to a network of tunnels. It was the most elaborate bomb shelter in the world, and it had taken more than thirty years to finish.
Bombshelter Park, as Stratton had silently dubbed it, was closed. As he strolled back toward the hotel, he thought of David Wang.
He owed much to the old professor. Wang had sensed the disillusion, no, the despair, that Stratton had brought with him to the tiny college in rural Ohio. Stratton had been running from Asia when he arrived at St. Edward’s for graduate studies. Despite Wang’s considerable reputation, Stratton had avoided his courses. Still, he had found himself attracted to the gentle and patient teacher. They had become friends, then confidants, and on the bright morning when a changed Stratton had strode forward to receive his Ph.D., no one could have missed the fatherly gleam in David Wang’s eyes.
They had drifted apart, more by circumstance than design. With Stratton teaching in New England, rural Ohio had seemed increasingly remote. It had been two years since they had seen one another. Until Peking. Stratton, avoiding his brethren art historians for the first time and feeling particularly exultant at being alone, had stood, back arched, head up, to study the magnificent lakeside arcade of the Summer Palace.
The voice had come from behind him.
“They say she was a fool—profligate—the empress dowager, squandering national riches on a marble boat when she should have spent the money to build a modern navy.”
Stratton would have known the voice anywhere, and the professorial restatement of conventional wisdom that was meant to be challenged. He had replied without turning around.
“Perhaps she knew more than most people give her credit for.”
“How so?” asked the voice.
“She may have understood that, even with modernization, the Imperial Navy would have been no match for the barbarian fleets. She foresaw the end of dynastic China and, instead of sending more young men needlessly to their deaths, decided to create that which would give her pleasure in the realization that the end was coming for her kind.” It was, Stratton thought, an inspired improvisation.
“Mmmm, an interesting theory,” the voice had conceded, “but in the end, I would think history correct in judging her a foolish spendthrift.”
“Me, too,” said Stratton, turning around to embrace David Wang.
Together, they had strolled the lake, finding amid the crush of Chinese visitors a seat aboard the ludicrous and beautiful boat the Empress Ci Xi had ordered built a century before.
Wang seemed immune to time, Stratton thought. He had looked fit and every bit the elegant, prosperous tourist in tattersall shirt, gabardine trousers, polished loafers and Japanese camera. As always, Wang looked a trifle owlish behind his thick glasses with gold frames.
“I keep hoping that if I put off everything long enough, the publisher will forget about the book contract,” Stratton had joked to explain his presence. “But how about you, David? Aren’t you the man who once told me never to look back, who persuaded me at a tough time in my life to lay the past aside and get on with life?”
“I would be distressed if I thought you were really as dogmatic as you sound, Thomas,” Wang had chided. “But of course you are teasing, and, yes, I was the one who always said that the United States was my country, China just the place I happened to be born. But then I changed my mind. It is an old man’s right, you know, to change his mind.”
“Why?”
“Two things, really. For one, I am retired, you know—”
“No, I didn’t. If I had known, I would have come to wish you well.”
“Well, it was just a quiet leave-taking, no ceremony. Of course, I expect to stay in Pittsville and keep my hand in now and then.” David Wang had smiled. Only death would ever take him from the college and the town where he had been an institution for nearly forty years.
“The second reason is that I have a brother. I had not thought much about him all these years and then suddenly there was a letter inviting me to China. In the end, I came. A good idea, I guess.”
Stratton had caught the uncertainty in the old man’s voice.
“Is something wrong? Anything I can help you with?”
“I’m just a bit bewildered is all. Call it culture shock. You know, when I got off the plane, I was nearly too nervous to speak Chinese.”
“I know the feeling.”
Wang had touched Stratton’s arm then, and they had both remembered the night by the fire in Wang’s farmhouse when an angry and confused young man had spilled the bitter dregs of senseless war.
“My problems are nothing compared to the dilemmas you once had, believe me,” said Wang. “But it would be nice to talk about them. I’ll tell you what: I’m going to Xian to see my brother tomorrow. He’s a deputy minister, you know. I’ll be back around dark on Wednesday. I’ll call you then. If you can break away from your tour, I’ll show you the real Peking and we can talk as we walk.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
WEDNESDAY NIGHT Stratton returned from his walk to Bombshelter Park about nine thirty. David Wang never called.
Chapter 2
ALICE SCOLDED. Little Miss Sun, the China Travel International Service guide, implored timidly. Walter Thomas—or was it Thomas Walters?—a foppish Egyptologist from the Midwest, spoke vaguely of “fraternal kinship,” whatever that meant. Stratton endured. When the atmosphere turned bitchy, he shrugged and walked away. The White Pagoda and a refurbished lamasery were not on his agenda that day. Stratton watched without expression while his colleagues, suitably armed with cameras in black leather cases and sensible shoes, obediently flocked onto their minibus under Miss Sun’s set-piece smile. Then he went up to his room and squeezed forty-five minutes of exercise from the cramped patch between the cracking wall and iron bedstead. When, near ten o’clock, David Wang still had not called, he prowled the gloomy hotel corridors until he found the room that Jim McCarthy used as an office.
Dust blanketed stacks of books and haphazard piles of newspapers that overburdened a loose-jawed table. It carpeted the dials of an expensive radio atop a gray filing cabinet. It lay like virgin snow on the bright yellow shade of a lamp meant more for Sweden than China.
McCarthy lolled in a swivel chair, desert boots comfortably atop the burnished top of a huge partners’ desk that Stratton identified instantly as a valuable antique.
Mechanically, McCarthy was ripping strips from a newspaper, laying them on a corner of the desk and tossing the discards in the general direction of the big straw basket.
“Hey, baby,” McCarthy lured Stratton from the doorway. “Make yourself a cup of coffee. Or there’s some Qingdao, if it’s not too early for you.” The massive head gestured toward a box-sized refrigerator on the floor.
“Thanks.” Stratton spooned Brazilian instant into a hotel cup identical to the one in his room, then added hot water from an identical pitcher.
“You teach art history. And karate, right?” McCarthy called.
“Why karate?” Stratton laughed.
“Sheila was admiring your whipcord body. I had a whipcord body, too—until I came to China.” McCarthy patted his belly. “Is it fun, teaching?”
“I like it, I really do. It’s not as exciting as being a foreign correspondent, but you do get hooked into the research. You find one piece here and another there and pretty soon you don’t know where the hours went. Then, too, the vacations are nice and long. Most summers I go out west and help a friend of mine run a wilderness company for tourists—whitewater rafting, survival hikes, sissy climbing, that kind of thing. I should be out there now, instead of screwin’ around here. But I really wanted to see China. Five cities, twenty-one days.”
“Yeah, everybody ought to see it. Once. I wish I had—shh …”
McCarthy waved for silence and Stratton heard a familiar litany lancing through static.
“…off the wall into the corner … Remy is in and Evans is around third … throw is to second but Rice is safe with a stand-up double … That’ll be all for …”
“A baseball game?”
McCarthy laughed.
“Last night’s game. We’re thirteen hours ahead of the East Coast, remember. There’s a game on almost every morning—Armed Forces radio.”
“Pretty nice, if you’re a fan.”
“Naw, not me. Only been to one game in my life. My father took me to Briggs Stadium when I was a kid. About the third inning there was this foul ball and I reached up to catch it, you know, like on television. Broke two fingers. Never went back.”
“If you’re not a fan, why do you listen?” Stratton teased.
McCarthy heaved himself upright and planted both feet on the floor. Stratton, from the other side of the desk, imagined without seeing the spurts of dust.
“It’s China, baby. In China, I’m a baseball fan because it helps kill the morning. In China, I read five or six newspapers a day and cut out things I might use six months from now, but probably never will. Savin’ bits of string, but never finding the spool. For correspondents, China is purgatory, baby. The thing about this place that drives you crazy is that there are no facts; a billion people and not one goddamned fact. Did you know that everything here is a secret until it is published, even the fucking weather forecast?”
“Then what do you do for news?”
“I worry a lot.” McCarthy grinned. “Particularly on Thursdays; that’s when stories for the weekend paper are due. Today they want a political piece, ugh. I don’t understand what’s goin’ on—that’s normal—but I have reached the solemn conclusion that neither do the Chinese.”
“Like how?”
“Like something big is bubbling beneath the surface. There are lots of little signs: people being suddenly reassigned or demoted, or simply disappearing—they could be forcibly retired, or dead—nobody knows. No one will talk about it.”
“A power struggle,” Stratton offered.
“Don’t you know it. This place has been a circus since Mao died; probably before, too. When Deng came in with his pragmatists, the old hard-line Maoists got pushed aside. Now I’d say that the hard-liners were getting their own back.”
“Most of the people who are being knocked down are the ones that Deng made respectable again?”
“That, for sure. But more than that.” McCarthy lit a cigarette. “There’s a hard-ass campaign under way right now against Chinese having anything to do with foreigners. You know the old song: ‘We welcome your technology, but no blue jeans, please.’ The idea that the decadent West will contaminate the heroic masses has been around for a long time, but now it’s worse—ten times worse—than I’ve ever seen it.”
Stratton was surprised.
“People have certainly been very nice to us. I’ve seen no hostility at all,” he said.
McCarthy nodded.
“Right. The average guy is more interested in Western ideas and culture than ever. He hears the Party’s antiforeign line and says to hell with it. But the guys who are getting axed are those whose jobs require the most contact with foreigners. They’re falling like tenpins.” McCarthy threw up his hands in mock despair. “Who’s doing it? Does it means some sort of new madness like the Cultural Revolution is brewing? That’s what my editors ask. And all I can do is to quote Confucius’s greatest line.”
“What’s that?”
“‘It beats the shit out of me, baby.’”
Stratton laughed.
“I’ll get out of your hair, but let me ask a quick question. I was supposed to meet a friend of mine today, a Chinese-American professor who’s here on a personal visit. He never showed up. How do I go about tracking him down?”
“You sure he’s here in Peking?”
“Almost. He was supposed to come back yesterday from Xian.”
“Plane probably didn’t fly. The national airline only flies when the weather is good. No joke.”
“That’s probably it. Still, I’d like to try. He’s a very old friend of mine and I’d hate to miss connections.”
“I could have the interpreter call the hotels, but it would be a waste of time. The one constructive suggestion I can make is that you ask about your friend at the American Embassy. If he’s an academic type, they should have some record of him, an itinerary.”
“Who could I ask?”
“The culture vultures would be most likely to know, but they are turds to a man. Try the consul, Steve Powell. He won’t know, but he’s the kind of guy who could find out.”
“At the consulate?”
“Never on Thursday mornings. Steve plays tennis every Thursday. Over at the International Club, the courts they call the Rockpit. Do you know where it is?”
“I’ve passed it.”
“I have to go out, but you’re welcome to use the corporate bicycle.”
“Corporate bicycle?”
“No correspondent is complete without one,” said McCarthy, fishing a small key off a large ring. “Downstairs at the bike rack, license number oh-oh-two-seven-two. It’s black, like all the rest of them. Do you know how to get there?”
“I have a map, thanks. Do you ride much?”
“Only in the line of duty.”
SEEN FROM a hotel window or a tourist bus, the infinite procession of bicycles is one of China’s most impressive sights. On every major street, broad lanes are reserved for bicycles. Even in downtown Peking they outnumber the trucks and cars by a thousand to one. Alice and her friends rhapsodized about the bicycles. They could talk for hours, insulated in the air-conditioned bus, of the silent, measured stream, as massive and as unstoppable as the Yangtze. They found in the bicycles a symbol of the progressive New China. At faculty teas it would, no doubt, sound quite profound.
Stratton learned some different things before he had wobbled two blocks. For one thing, the Chinese bicycle, copy of old English Raleigh though it may be, is more tank than scooter. It weighs a ton, steers hard and pedals harder. McCarthy’s corporate bike had no gears, and by the time Stratton passed the old imperial observatory he was sweating. What astonished him most, though, was the chaos into which he had plunged. Bicycles, he decided, as a pert young thing nonchalantly cut him off and he swerved to avoid a three-horse cart, were the ultimate bastion of Chinese individualism. To outsiders, the cyclists might look like an army of blue ants. To somebody who pedaled among them, the Chinese all had fangs. They veered without warning. They knifed through lanes of cross traffic with terrifying, expressionless élan. Chinese flirted as they rode. They hawked and spat. They sang and cursed.
The left turns were worst of all. The first time Stratton tried to make one he found he could not maneuver into the left segment of the bike lane in time. The second time he saw no way of getting across the oncoming flux of trucks and bikes. The third time he tensely negotiated the turn in the protective shadow of an old man who looked only straight ahead and miraculously emerged unscathed.
Twenty-five minutes later, Stratton pedaled past the iron gates of the International Club. He locked McCarthy’s bike near a willow tree and walked to the tennis courts. Two players volleyed steadily on a pocked asphalt surface that looked as if it had not been repaved since Peking’s last earthquake.
Stratton leaned on a chain-link fence and waited for a break in the game. It came on a gorgeous drop shot that brought one of the players, a stocky blond, lunging fruitlessly to the net. His opponent, a sandy-haired man in his early thirties, shouted in a southern accent: “Good try!”
“Mr. Powell?” Stratton called.
The sandy-haired player ambled to the fence. Stratton introduced himself. He told the American consul about David Wang.
“Mr. Stratton, I usually don’t hear about American citizens in China unless they get in some sort of trouble. Professor Wang is a man of some distinction, however, and I’ll bet the culture folks have his itinerary.”
“Yes, well, Jim McCarthy said—er—suggested …”
Powell smiled. “He said, ‘Those culture vultures are cross-eyed, close-minded sonofabitches,’” he drawled in fair imitation. “Well, I suppose he’s right. Tell you what, soon as I polish off Ingemar here, I’ll make a couple calls.”
Powell was an excellent tennis player and he ended the game with a fierce flurry. With a towel around his neck and his racket under one arm, he led Stratton into the main building of the club.
Stratton waited in the lobby while Powell used the phone in an adjoining booth.
“They’re checking on your friend,” he reported when he came out. “Have you read Too Late, the King?”
“Yes, of course.” Stratton was impressed. It was not David Wang’s best-known book, but it was his best work.
“I admired it very much,” Powell said. “Clear, sharp, almost lyrical. We’ve got a copy in the library here.”
“He’s a special man. Very talented,” Stratton said.
“Tell me more.” Powell spread out the towel and sat down on an old leather chair.
“God, by the time I met David in the early seventies he’d already been around forever. He was born here in China, of course, but came to the U.S. to study just before World War II broke out. He never went back. By the time I entered graduate school he was famous in academia for his scholarship. I was”—Stratton hesitated—“just getting interested in Asian art. So it was natural to gravitate to Dr. Wang.”
“He was originally from Shanghai, right?”
Stratton nodded. “An entrepreneurial family of the old sort. It had been making money, from salt or silk, opium or tea, from time immemorial. Toward the end of the nineteenth century both of David’s grandparents, who were business rivals, I guess, got modern. David’s father went to Columbia. His mother, who had studied at the Philadelphia Conservatory, was about fifteen years younger. When David’s time came to go off to school in the States, he was still a teenager. In the normal course of events, he would have gone home and, as the eldest son, taken over the business.”
“They were hardly normal times, were they?”
“No. Civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. Invasion by Japan. Then the knockdown years until the Communists finally won in forty-nine. I would guess that David’s father told him not to come back until it was all over. And then, of course, the wrong people had won—if you were a Shanghai millionaire. David bounced around, quietly accumulating degrees; money was never a problem, I gather, and at the end of it all, there was nothing to come back to—the Wang empire was just one more victim of revolution. Whether he was cut off from his family or broke with them I don’t know, but he never mentioned them. He settled in at St. Edward’s and never left. I suppose he—”
“Excuse me. That’ll be my boys.” Powell caught the phone on the second ring. Stratton stared out the window at weeping willows in the overgrown courtyard.
When the consul returned, Stratton sensed there was no news.
“We’ve got Dr. Wang listed at the Heping Hotel. The culture officers had invited him to call or come by when he got back from Xian, but so far no one’s heard from him. Maybe he just decided to spend an extra day or two at the digs.”
“Maybe so,” Stratton said, unconvinced.
“Our fellas are a little disappointed, too. They’re looking forward to meeting your Dr. Wang. You know about his brother?”
“David told me he was a vice minister or something.”
“A deputy minister, Mr. Stratton. Deputy minister of art and culture. A big gun. His name is Wang Bin. He’s in charge of new archaeological digs and the big museum here.”
Stratton said, “Maybe I’ll just drop by David’s hotel to see if there’s a message for me. What was the name again?”
“Heping,” Powell said. “It means ‘peace.’ It’s a nice place, off the usual Peking trails. I can draw you a map …”
“No, thanks. David would be pleased if an old student proved intrepid enough to track him down. In the meantime, if you hear anything, could you call me? I’m at the Minzu.”
“Sure,” Powell said. “Good tracking.”
Stratton nearly missed the hotel. It was tucked away in a lane barely wide enough for one car. Stratton left the bicycle in a parking lot near Wan Fu Jing, Peking’s main shopping street. An old woman with a can affixed a wooden marker with a number on the handlebars, handed him a paper receipt, and took a fee from among the aluminum coins Stratton displayed in an open palm.
It was a smaller hotel than the one he was in, and more graceful. Stratton did a full circle in the lobby looking for the front desk. There was the usual assortment of work spaces, but none of them identifiable. Finally, he chose one at random.
“Excuse me, could you tell me the room number for a guest named David Wang. He’s American.”
Three desks later a hunchback with a gray Mao jacket and some English took Stratton’s request into an inner office. Through the open door Stratton could see him staring farsightedly at what was obviously a handwritten guest register. Just as Stratton was succumbing to the sinking feeling that Wang had registered in his Chinese name—which he didn’t know—the hunchback emerged. He had obviously found something.
“You wait,” the man ordered.
Stratton watched curiously while the man trundled into a second office. There he spoke animatedly with another man whose face Stratton could not see.
It seemed to Stratton they were arguing.
Finally, the second man appeared alone. He had a hook nose and an obvious habit of command.
“The Wang man is not here,” the Chinese said in labored English.
“Couldn’t you check again? I’m a friend of his.”
“Not here.” The man turned away, walked back into his office and closed the door.
Perplexed, Stratton cycled slowly back to his own hotel. He had been lied to. Of that he was certain. Hook Nose had known something about “the Wang man” that he had chosen not to tell. Why would a hotel in Peking deny the presence of a guest?
Stratton was still thinking about it when he got back to his room.
The phone was ringing as he walked in.
“David?”
It was not David.
“Mr. Stratton, this is Steve Powell, at the consulate.”
“Oh, hello. I went to the hotel and they claimed never to have heard of any David Wang—”
Powell interrupted brusquely.
“Mr. Stratton, I am sorry to have to tell you this. David Wang is dead.”
Chapter 3
TOM STRATTON COULD SMELL the smoke. He could taste the cordite. He could see the gray shape, feel its struggle, hear its scream. He could sense the impatient clatter of the helicopter, hovering, waiting, anxious to be gone. Fire. Run. Run to the chopper, its rope ladder slowly dangling, the only lifeline he would ever get. Drop. Fire. Run from a black night and a devil-scorched patch of earth, all memory and no meaning.
Run, captain. Rope swaying. Lungs burning. Side burning as the black medic cut away the cloth and applied a salve. Eyes burning, exhaustion and shame, in the cramped cabin of a blacked-out aircraft carrier.
“You’re sure there were no prisoners!” A man, a colonel, trying to be professional, sounding only disheartened.
“No POWs.” A dirt-poor commune with a PLA company stationed on its fringes.
“Intelligence was so damn sure about the prisoners. They said there were American prisoners.”
“Not anymore.”
“How did they get on to you?”
“We made a mistake.”
“Your team?”
“Gone, all gone.”
“How long did they have you?”
“Not long.”
“Bad?”
“Real bad.”
“So what’d you tell ’em?”
“Said I was an East German, training with their Viet friends.”
The colonel laughed at the idea.
“How’d you get away?”
“I got away.”
“It was supposed to be a quiet recon.”
“It wasn’t quiet.”
“Shit, you’re telling me. Their radio is already screaming to high heaven. They say thirty-eight ‘innocent peasants’ are dead.”
“Most of them were soldiers.”
“They blame us; probably they’ll get one of their pious friends to raise hell at the UN.”
“Why shouldn’t they blame us? We did it, didn’t we?”
STRATTON WRENCHED himself from a tangle of sodden sheets. His watch said 5:47. It was still dark in Peking. His eyes felt gummy, his mouth wooden. He glanced at the bottle of whiskey he had bought the night before in the hotel lobby. Less than half full, and still open.
He had not drunk like that for a long time. And he had not hurt like that for a long time. David Wang’s death had triggered reactions and dreaded memories he thought he had buried for good.
From the street below came the muted whir of cyclists, harbingers of the morning rush hour. Stratton rejected his body’s urging for sleep. His mind would not sleep. Naked, he lurched to the bathroom and turned on the hand shower, hardly noticing that the water was stone cold.
A WRINKLED WOMAN with blue-rinse hair and stiff new Hong Kong sandals sat across from Stratton in an anteroom at the U.S. Embassy. Sitting next to her, but obviously on a separate mission, was a slender middle-aged man with a leathery face, a smoker’s face. He carried a suede valise
“How is your tour?” the old woman said to Stratton.
“Not too good,” he said hoarsely. News of David Wang’s death had left him numb. Sadness itself was slow in coming. Another old friend dead and—as in Vietnam—Tom Stratton was a long way from tears. Instead he fought a deep, dull melancholy.
“We have a lovely guide,” the wrinkled woman said. “Her name is Su Yee. Her great-grandfather helped to build the Great Wall.”
Stratton managed a polite smile.
“Where are you from?”
“New York,” volunteered the smoker. “I’m an art dealer.”
“I’m from Tucson, retired there from Chicago,” the woman reported. “My husband used to be a stockbroker.”
Together they awaited Stratton’s contribution. “I’m a teacher,” he said finally. “I teach art.”
“Asian art?” asked the man with the leathery face.
Stratton did not reply.
The art dealer hunched forward, and Stratton shifted uncomfortably. There was something felonious about the man. He was dressed well enough, but the fine clothes didn’t match the tiny brown rodent eyes that scoured Stratton from head to toe in quick appraisal.
“Do you know much about Sung Dynasty sculpture?” the art dealer asked. His voice dropped to a clubby whisper. “I’m trying to cut a deal with some government types down in the Sichuan Province. They’ve got a little gold mine of a museum down there, but I can’t persuade them to part with any of their artifacts.”
“This is our first trip to China,” the old woman interjected.
“Mine, too,” Stratton said, glancing at the door to the consular office. Surely it would not be much longer.
“Where’s your hotel?” the art dealer pressed. “Maybe we can get together for a duck dinner.” He laughed a Rotary Club laugh. “Look, I’ve done a lot of work in Western Europe, the Mideast, even Russia. But this is new territory, and I don’t know whose back needs scratching. Maybe we could help each other out.”
“I don’t see how,” Stratton said.
The man held out his hand. “My name’s Harold Broom.”
Stratton guessed that Broom was the sort of man who carried business cards in his top shirt pocket, and he was right.
“I’m always looking for experts. Especially free-lancers,” Broom said. “The more I know, the more I can take home.” The smile was as thin and hollow as the voice. “And the more I take home, the more I spread around.”
“No thanks,” Stratton said. “I’m here on pleasure, not business.”
“Too bad.”
“I have a passport problem,” said the old woman with blue-rinse hair. “I can’t find my passport. I may have left it at the opera. My husband said there should be no problem, but I told him this isn’t Europe. A passport is probably more important here. This is a Communist country.”
“Yes,” Stratton said. He was miserable.
The door opened and an American secretary beckoned. Steve Powell sat at a small desk in a tall room with one narrow window.
A gray file cabinet stood in one corner. On a table, in front of a cracked leather sofa, was a stack of American magazines.
“I’m sorry for making you wait,” Powell said. “I’ve spent the last two hours wrestling with the Chinese bureaucracy. It is intractable on the most routine matters. You can imagine the problems we face with something like this.”
“Can’t be much worse than ours,” Stratton said.
“Oh, but it is,” Powell said cheerily. “Infinitely worse. I could tell you some incredible stories …”
“What happened to David?” Stratton asked. “When I went to his hotel all the manager would say is, ‘Mr. Wang not here.”’
Powell nodded. “When you ask a question of a Chinese, expect a very literal answer. The man was telling you as much of the truth as you requested. Professor Wang became ill Tuesday night and was taken from the hotel.”
“But David told me he wouldn’t even be back in Peking until Wednesday evening.”
Powell shrugged. He slipped on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and opened a file. Stratton noticed that it was the only item on the desk. Powell was a neat young man.
“Tell me what happened to David,” Stratton said impatiently.
“Death by duck.”
Stratton’s face twisted.
“Sounds funny, I know,” Powell went on, “but that’s what we call it. It’s a new China syndrome: Aging, out-of-shape American tourist comes to Peking, hikes and strolls through the Forbidden City and climbs the Great Wall until he’s blue in the face. Then he gorges himself on—what else?—rich Peking duck, gulps liters of Lao Shan mineral water and promptly drops dead of a myocardial infarction.”
“A heart attack, that’s all,” Stratton said
“Sure,” Powell said. “Death by duck. We’ve had dozens of cases. It has nothing to do with the duck, I assure you. Just too much food, too much exertion. Might as well be Coney Island franks.”
“Just like that.” Stratton’s voice was tired and low.
“After dinner, Dr. Wang apparently felt sick to his stomach. Several guests apparently saw him go up to his room. Two hours later one of the cleaning boys went in and found him there in bed, unconscious but still alive. Two medical students came and took him to a clinic nearby. The doctors apparently worked very hard but it was too late.”
“It’s all apparently this and apparently that. Aren’t you sure?”
“Of course. I use the word as a reflex,” Powell said uneasily. “This information comes from the Chinese government. I can’t vouch for it a hundred percent, but on a matter like this, I see no reason to challenge the facts. It is, as I said before, fairly routine. Tragic, to be sure, but still routine.”
“This is a maddening place,” Stratton said. “The people at the hotel might at least have told me which hospital he went to.”
“They probably didn’t know,” Powell responded. “It took me five phone calls to find out. It was a small but very modern clinic on Wan Fu Jing Street. It has everything most hospitals in Peking don’t have—the machines, I mean. I’m sorry for the confusion, but if you’ve spent much time in Asia, you come to expect it.”
Stratton nodded. He knew something of Asian confusion.
“Why,” he asked, “was there such a delay in reporting the death to the embassy? Is that routine, too?”