by Don Winslow
Sure enough, Neal thought as he looked around, there were a number of PLA officers scribbling earnestly in their notebooks from plaques on the wall. Neal found himself staring at them and getting sidelong glances in return. But there they were, he marveled, taking notes directly from writings that were almost two thousand years old.
Wu walked him around the park, again pointing out the various flora and fauna. They strolled the edges of ponds that had fallen into disrepair and were just now being revived. Then they stopped for tea at a newly reopened pavilion that needed some roof patching and a good cleaning. But the few customers who were there on this working day didn’t seem to care. It was enough to get a cup of green tea and sit at the bamboo tables as a waitress came along with a kettle of hot water for refills.
Wu let the water steep in his lidded cup for a minute or so, and then poured the contents on the ground. The dark green tea leaves stuck to the bottom of the cup. The waitress refilled it, and Wu waited another minute before repeating the process. After the next refill, he let the cup sit for a few more minutes, removed the lid, and took a deep sip. Then he smiled with satisfaction.
“The first time, it’s water,” he said. “The second time, it’s garbage. The third time, it’s tea.”
They drank a few cups, talked about Huckleberry Finn and Innocents Abroad, complained about the vicissitudes of college life. Turned out that Wu was a recent graduate of Sichuan University, where he had studied tourism. His father had been a professor of English, had been in jail for it, and was now a room service waiter in a Chengdu hotel. But the authorities, realizing that they would need English-speakers to service the tourist trade they now coveted, pulled Wu’s file from a thousand others and admitted him to university. A job with CITS, the China International Travel Service, followed straight away. Wu’s great ambition was to become a “National Guide,” one of the elite cadre who escorted tourist groups for their entire stay in the country.
“Right now,” he explained, “I am just a local guide, authorized for Sichuan only. But I would very much like to see the rest of China, especially Beijing and Xian.”
“They put your father in jail for teaching English?” asked Neal, who knew a few English teachers who could profit from the experience.
“For speaking English.”
“Why?”
Wu shrugged.
“Cultural Revolution,” he said, as if the phrase explained everything.
“Do you think he’ll ever get his teaching job back?”
“Perhaps.”
I guess they don’t have tenure in China, Neal thought. In the States, once a professor got tenure, you couldn’t fire him if he buggered a goat on his desk during a lecture. You couldn’t get him out of that professional chair with a tow chain and an ox. But here you had English professors getting the sack for … speaking English.
“So what do you think about Mao now?” Neal asked.
Mao now? How now, Mao?
Wu stared at the table. “He liberated the nation, but he made some mistakes, I think.”
Wu was so clearly uncomfortable talking about it that Neal let it drop. It wasn’t the time to push. At this pace, there’d be plenty of time for that later. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry, that was for sure. What were they waiting for, he wondered.
Wu must have figured the conversation had gone on long enough, because he brought them back to touring with a vengeance. They hit the Cultural Park and the tomb of Wang Jian, a Tang Dynasty mercenary and self-styled emperor. They dropped in on the Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which served to refresh Neal’s memory of his bout with acupuncture. They wrapped the afternoon up with a visit to the People’s Park, where seemingly thousands of would-be swimmers were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in three Olympic-size pools.
“You sure have a lot of parks in this town.”
“Chengdu people like to relax.”
They were driving back to the hotel when Wu casually pointed out the Xinhua Bookstore.
“The what?” Neal asked. “Did you say ‘bookstore’?”
“Xinhua Bookstore, yes.”
“Stop the car.”
Neal noticed that the driver hit the brake just a half-second before Wu gave the instruction.
“Let’s walk,” Neal said.
“You are not tired?”
“Suddenly I have all sorts of energy.”
Wu told the driver to meet him in the hotel lot.
“Xiao Wu,” Neal said as the driver pulled away, “do they sell English books here?”
Wu said, “They only sell textbooks at the university.”
“No, I mean books in English. Novels, short stories, the dreaded nonfiction.”
Wu shuffled his foot on the sidewalk. “Perhaps.”
“Come on, Wu.”
“I am not authorized to take you there.”
“Were you ordered not to take me there?”
Wu brightened. “Noooo …”
“Wu … Wu, I haven’t had anything to read in three months. Do you know what that’s like?”
“Are you joking? Cultural Revolution?”
“So help me, Wu.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you my best abusive words.”
“Like what?”
“Cocksucker.”
Neal watched anxiously as Wu put the compound together and a glimmer of understanding came to his eyes.
“Cocksucker,” Wu intoned, his eyes widening. “Does that mean—”
“Yup.”
Wu burst into a hysterical giggle. He repeated the word several times, each repetition sending him into a fresh paroxysm of laughter. He was bent over double on the sidewalk, oblivious to the stares of passersby, muttering “cocksucker” until he cried.
“And that is an abusive term?” he asked when he had caught his breath.
“Oh, you bet.”
“In Chinese … tsweh-tsuh.”
“Tsweh-tsuh.”
That set him off again, and his fresh hysteria set Neal off, and they both stood on the sidewalk laughing until their stomachs hurt and they couldn’t laugh anymore.
“Okay, cocksucker,” Wu said. “Let’s go to the bookstore.”
Bookstore. Bookstore. Wu might as easily have said “Paradise” or “Heaven.” Neal breathed it in as he went through the door. The smell of books, that clean paper smell, filled his nostrils and went straight to his brain. He looked around at the shelves filled with books—all in Chinese, all absolutely incomprehensible to him—and then went around touching them. He stroked their spines, and felt their covers, and examined them as if he understood their titles and could read their pages.
Wu went over to the checkout counter and had a quiet conversation with the clerk. Neal felt his heart sink when the clerk shook his head vigorously, but Wu kept talking patiently and quietly, and a few minutes later he had procured a key.
“Come on,” he said. “There are some English books in the storeroom. Try not to look so … obvious.”
Wu opened the door and Neal stepped into heaven. Hundreds of paperbacks filled some cheap metal shelves and were piled up on the floor.
“I love you, Wu.”
“Cocksucker.”
“I’ll take them all.”
“Just one. And hurry, please.”
“Cocksucker.”
They were mostly medical texts. Wu explained that there had been a medical college that had once been staffed by Americans and Canadians. But there were also some volumes of fiction. Melville’s Billy Budd, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn had found spots on the shelves amid the anatomy tests and emergency-aid manuals.
“Any Hemingway? Fitzgerald?”
“Decadent.”
Then Neal spotted a pile of books in the corner. All Penguin Classics. Goddamn, he thought, could it be? Could I get so lucky? He attacked the pile like a rat in a garbage can. Bleak House … Oliver Twist … Bleak House again. Jude the Obscure … fucking
Beowulf…
Then there it was. Unbelievably, in the middle of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, southwestern China … Tobias Smollett … Roderick Random. There is a God and he loves me, Neal thought. He grabbed the book before it could disappear into an opium dream.
“This is it,” he said.
“I never heard of it.”
“You will.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
“I want two books.”
“Not safe. Too obvious.”
“Please.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Have I told you about ‘motherfucker’?”
“But two is all.”
Neal took the copy of Huckleberry Finn off the shelf.
“Do you own it?” he asked.
Wu flushed. “No.”
“Please. My gift.”
“I am honored.” Wu bowed deeply and quickly. “Now let’s go.”
Wu picked up two thin Chinese books in the main room and sandwiched the English volumes between them before he brought them to the counter. He took the appropriate amount of cash from Neal’s wallet, paid the bill, and walked quickly out into the sunshine.
“Thank you so very much for the book,” he said.
“Thank you so very much for bringing me here. Is it a problem? And is the book safe for you to have?”
“I think so, now.”
Wu escorted Neal back to his room and said he would pick him up again at nine the next morning. Lest Neal have any illusions about his role, he heard the lock click with the shutting door.
The human mind is a funny thing, Neal thought. When he was lying in shackles in the Walled City, all he wanted was to get out of there. He would have given anything he had—his heart, mind, and soul—for salvation from that hellhole. When Li Lan had come, he had wept with relief and gratitude. In the long, sleepy days of his confinement he had simply given in to the care and comfort until first his body and then his mind came back.
But now his mind was back, and the funny thing was that it wasn’t happy. He had all the necessities, all the creature comforts he had longed for in Hong Kong. He was well treated, out of danger—he even had books to read—but his mind started to think about other things.
First there was Joe Graham. When Neal had left him on the San Francisco street, he had thought it would be a matter of days or weeks, not months, before he would contact his mentor. Graham must be going crazy with worry, Neal thought. If he knew Graham—and he knew Graham—the leprechaun would have dogged him to Hong Kong, maybe even tracked him as far as the Walled City, maybe even now would be making deals to try to find him and get him out. But even Graham couldn’t make this jump, couldn’t have any way of finding out that he was sitting in Chengdu with a different identity, a prop in some sort of show-and-tell game run by his jailer-hosts.
Second, what was the game? He didn’t buy this identity-wash bit for a second. They had him here for a reason, and Neal was beginning to think they were stalling before deciding just what that reason was. Maybe they were waiting for further developments, waiting for another move in the game to see which way they’d move him.
Which was the third thing that was troubling him. He had become a game piece, a passive pawn that other people moved around at their whim or will. Shit, he hadn’t done anything active since his rooftop bomber routine on Waterloo Road. They had beat him, knocked the confidence out of him, and he was just starting to recover from it. It was time to get back in the game. Time to do something to get his own life back.
With his copy of Roderick Random and a pen, he got to work. He was still working when the waiter came with his dinner tray. Having devoured the meal, he took the book with him to read while he soaked in an almost scalding bath, and then went back to work at his table. He took the book with him to bed, and woke up with it on his chest when the waiter rattled the breakfast tray.
“Are you taking him out again today?” Xao asked. He lit his second cigarette of the early morning.
“Yes, Comrade Secretary,” Peng answered. “And no surveillance appeared yesterday?” “Only our own.” “You are quite sure?”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”
Oh, yes, Comrade Secretary, I am quite sure. None appeared because I ordered none.
Xao inhaled the smoke and worried. On the face of it, it was good that no government surveillance had picked up their “Mr. Frazier,” but faces often lied. And young Frazier’s American friends were raising quite a fuss in Hong Kong. Why had it not reached Beijing? If it had, they would arrest Frazier as soon as he appeared above ground. We certainly trotted him around enough yesterday. Better to be safe and put Mr. Frazier on display a bit more. If the security police picked him up, there would still be time to dig Li Lan and Pendleton in deeper. If the police were truly unaware of Frazier’s true identity, then the rest of the operation could be activated.
“Show him around the city again today,” Xao ordered. “If all stays quiet, take him to the countryside tomorrow.”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”
“Good morning.”
Peng turned on his heel with the curt dismissal. Perhaps Comrade Secretary Xao will learn more courtesy when I have the opportunity to interrogate him. Perhaps I shall ask him to light my cigarettes and watch me smoke them.
But first to put them all together—the woman, the scientist, and the persistent young American. Yes, gather them at the scene of Xao’s intended treason, these three strands of the rope with which Xao will hang himself.
Patience, he cautioned himself. Move slowly. Let Xao think it is safe.
Xao waited until Peng had left and then called in his driver.
“How is it?” Xao asked.
“Wu and the American get on well. They are becoming friends.”
“Good. Good. You will be their driver again today.”
The driver nodded deferentially. Xao handed him the pack of cigarettes and motioned him out the door.
I would have more men like him, Xao thought, instead of that snake Peng. He is not clever enough to win, just clever enough to cost me resources and trouble. But he has his uses.
“Good morning, cocksucker,” Wu said.
“Good morning, motherfucker.”
Wu giggled with delight and opened the car door for Neal.
“Today we see the east side of the city,” Wu announced.
They started with the zoo.
Neal Carey liked a zoo as much as the next guy, provided the next guy thought that they were among the most depressing places on earth. He understood that they were necessary, probably even beneficial, in that they were used to breed species that mankind had succeeded in almost wiping out. He also knew that the animals in zoos spent their days pretty much the way their cousins did in the wild, sleeping and eating. There was just something about looking into cages—or even over the hedges and moats that the enlightened Chengdu Zoo featured—at the individuals of another species, that downright demoralized him.
Nevertheless, he feigned polite interest at the golden monkeys, the speckled deer, and the gibbon apes that led up to the featured attraction, Sichuan’s own giant pandas. The two pandas had their own entire section, an “environment” of rocks and bamboo separated from the admiring public by a high railing and a moat. The pandas didn’t actually do much, just sat there eating bamboo and looking back at the gawkers.
Wu was quite enthusiastic and gave Neal a thorough rundown on the history, physiology, and behavior of the giant panda, as well as on the government’s efforts to save it from extinction. This was followed by a complete history of the Chengdu Zoological Association and its tribulations during the Cultural Revolution. Even the pandas had not been immune from political analysis, and might well have been liquidated as a symbol of bourgeois preoccupation with pets had not it shared a name with the Chairman—the Chinese name for panda being “bear cat,” Shr Mao—and hence been immune from criticism. It was true that certain radical Red Guards had seen the zookeepers’ confinement
of the panda as symbolic of the bureaucracy’s hemming in of Mao Tse-Tung, and demanded that the pandas be set free, but the zookeepers trumped them with an offer to release the pandas along with all the other mao, such as lions, leopards, and tigers, on the condition that the Red Guard open these cages themselves. The Guard declined.
“Too bad,” Wu muttered. “I would like to have seen those bastards try to put a dunce cap on a tiger.”
“Did they do that to your father?” Neal asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Neal didn’t answer, but from the hard, angry look on Wu’s face he knew that it mattered. Big time.
They strolled through the zoo for a while longer, eating peanuts in place of lunch as Wu described the natural history, habitat, and folklore of every animal in the zoo.
“I never knew my father,” Neal said as they neared the parking lot.
“You are a … bastard?” Wu asked. He was shocked, not only by the fact, but that Neal would choose to reveal it.
“Yeah.”
“I am sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Wu shook his head. “In China, family is everything. We are not so much individuals as we are family. A person will happily sacrifice his life to ensure that the family survives. Do you have no family?”
“No family,” answered Neal. Unless, he thought, you counted Joe Graham and Ed Levine, Ethan Kittredge, and Friends of the Family.
“No brothers or sisters?”
“Not that I know about.”
“That is very sad.”
“Not if you don’t know any different.”
I guess.
“Perhaps not.”
Wu was quiet as they drove away from the zoo, and he provided only cursory narration for the scenery of apartment blocks and factories that made up the northeastern part of the city. He brightened a little as they came to Sichuan University.
“What university did you attend?” he asked.
“Columbia, in New York City.”
“Ah,” said Wu politely, although he had clearly never heard of it. “What did you study?”