Carl Hiaasen & William D. Montalbano

by A Death in China

Broom sauntered down the street to a corner telephone booth. Wang Bin collected the lunch debris and placed it in a trash can outside the Burger King. He stretched his legs and breathed deeply of the summer day. He felt the butt of the pistol dig into his midriff, and he adjusted the gun a fraction in his waistband. From the highway overpass came the now familiar din of speeding traffic. Wang

  Bin thought how pleasant it would be to find a place untouched by the big road and all its relentless noise. A city of bicycles had certain advantages.

  Harold Broom returned to the car with a pinched look on his face. He refolded the spiral notepad in which he had scribbled the vital phone numbers and slipped it into his pocket.

  “I’ve got bad news, Pop,” he grumbled. “Real bad news.”

  FOR NINE HOURS Tom Stratton kept his place in the amphitheater. In throngs the tourists came and went, cameras dangling, children bounding up and down the marble steps. Twice an hour one audience replaced another, yet Stratton held his place, watching the lean young men in their dark blue uniforms. He glanced now and then down the gentle hill where Kevin Mitchell was supposed to be buried.

  Eighteen times Stratton watched the guards change at the Tomb of the Unknowns. The cameras clicked most often when the guards faced each other and presented arms. There were three or four different Marines, working in shifts. Despite the heat and humidity, each man looked crisp and fresh as he strode to the marble crypt. For Stratton, the drill was his clock. From the amphitheater he had a clear view of grave 445-H, third row, fourth from the end, a small white cross in a sea of crosses, geometrically perfect.

  Perfect, Stratton mused. Perfect was always the way the military wanted its men, but in war that was impossible. In death it was easy; dead soldiers can march precisely as desired.

  Stratton thought of Bobby Ho, and wondered morbidly what had become of his friend’s body after the massacre at Man-ling. Had the Chinese buried it? Burned it? Displayed it as a trophy? Perhaps they had fed Bobby’s flesh to the starving dogs and cats of the village.

  Arlington was for heroes.

  Bobby ought to have a place here, Stratton thought. If not his body, at least his name. Wouldn’t take much space, and God knows he was more of a hero than most of the men planted in the sea of crosses that rolled toward the Potomac.

  The last tram of the day sounded its horn, and the tourists thundered from the amphitheater. Stratton rose from his spot, as if to follow, but instead took a different path downhill, and melted into the trees to wait for nightfall. He sat down at the base of an old oak and took out a pair of small Nikon field glasses. From his new vantage, Stratton could read the name on the cross.

  LT. KEVIN P. MITCHELL, USAF

  B. 11-22-29

  D. 6-22-83

  A fighter pilot, Korea. Medal of Honor. After the war Mitchell had joined Boeing as a test pilot and later became a captain with Pan Am. He’d died on a vacation to China—a heart attack, the U.S. Embassy had reported, while riding a bus to the Qin tombs at Xian. Death by duck.

  Baltimore was where the family had wanted the coffin sent—a family plot, Stratton had learned, where one of Mitchell’s brothers was buried.

  Arlington had been an afterthought, Mrs. Mitchell’s idea. A real honor, the family agreed. The Medal of Honor ought to count for something.

  But Baltimore was where the embassy had sent the coffin, and Baltimore was where Broom and Wang Bin would go first, Stratton reasoned. He would wait for them at Arlington—days, weeks, whatever it took. How they could dream of ever trying it here …

  Someone was walking among the graves.

  Stratton panned with the binoculars along the crosses until he froze on the figure of a woman, dressed in black. Dusk was cheating him of the finer details. She was tall and wore a veil. Chestnut hair spilled down her back. She walked slowly, elegantly, stopping every few steps to study the names on the crosses.

  She was young, Stratton decided, younger than the soldiers who lay buried in Section H. Too young to be a widow.

  The woman in black stopped walking when she came to grave 445. She stopped to read the inscription. Then she reached out and touched the cross with her right hand. It began as a light and sentimental gesture, and from a distance would seem nothing more than a sad moment. But through the field glasses Stratton could see that the woman was not merely touching Kevin Mitchell’s cross, but testing it, pushing on it with discernible force. Then she stood up straight and with a quickened pace made her way out of the rows of graves to a footpath. There was something familiar …

  Stratton followed at a distance. He was careful to stay in the grass so his steps would not echo. Arlington was nearly empty now. The trams had stopped running and the tourists had gone back to the city. The woman in black walked alone, no longer in the gait of a mourner. Her heels clicked sharply on the pavement, and the sound dominoed along the tombstones.

  “Hey there!” Stratton called.

  Self-consciously she slowed, then turned as Stratton ran up. She looked at him and smiled. “So there you are!”

  “Linda!” Stratton said.

  “How’d I do?”

  “I like the dress. Black becomes you. What are you doing here?”

  It was a pointless question. She knew. He knew.

  She kicked out of her high heels and said, “These things are killing me. Come on, walk me to the car.”

  “I can’t.”

  She took his arm. “Come on, Tom, they won’t come at night. They’ll never find it at night.”

  “You’re wrong, Linda. How did you know—”

  “The same way you did. I had to play catch-up, that’s all. I should’ve listened to you before, Tom, and I’m sorry. I didn’t see what was happening—but even if I had, I’m not sure it would have made a difference.”

  “Nobody would have believed it, least of all your boss.”

  “Wang Bin was my case. The last couple of days I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I could have caught on sooner.” She did not tell Stratton about the foreigners’ morgue in Peking. She was afraid he had already figured it out.

  “Are you here alone?” he asked.

  “For now,” she said.

  “Me, too. And I’m staying.”

  He started back up the hill and she followed. “Tom!” she called. “I’m ruining my goddamn stockings. Slow down. Listen to me, they aren’t coming tonight. They think the coffin is in Baltimore—”

  “They’ve beaten me twice already. This is my last chance.”

  “Tom, be serious. I’ll have some people here tomorrow. When the bad guys show up at the gate, we’ll arrest them.”

  “What makes you so sure they’ll use the gate?”

  “Once they realize where the coffin is buried, they’ll give up on it. They’ll never try to dig this one up. Christ, it’s Arlington, Tom. They can’t possibly get away with it.”

  “This way,” Stratton said, leaving the asphalt path and winding through a stand of tall trees. “I’ve got a good view from up here.”

  Linda Greer sat next to him under the oak, tugging the black dress down to cover her knees. She had hoped he would notice, but he didn’t. He offered her a thermos of coffee.

  “This is like summer camp,” she teased. “Are you really going to stay here all night?”

  “Why not?”

  Linda edged closer until her cheek touched his shoulder. “Might as well make the best of it,” she whispered. “It’s a soft night, isn’t it?” Stratton nodded but did not look at her. “Tom, relax—it’s like I’m snuggling up to one of those damn gravestones.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Stratton trained his eyes on Kevin Mitchell’s plot. A lemon moon, nearly full, was rising behind the capital across the river. The silent cemetery became a sprawling theater of shadows; the crosses turned into tiny soldiers with arms extended, whole battalions frozen on the hillsides in calisthenic precision.

  “I stopped at the Kennedy grave this morning,” Stratton said.
<
br />   “Which one?”

  “Both of them. That’s where all the tourists go. I’d never seen them before, only pictures.”

  Linda said, “I took my little sister a couple of years ago. She cried.”

  “Last year some guy fell into the flame and died,” Stratton said. “He got drunk and pitched face down into the Eternal Flame. They found him the next day, burned to death. When I saw the story in the paper, I had to wonder about that guy. What was he thinking about that night? Why did he come here, of all places? I could just see him standing there in front of the President’s grave, after all the goddamn tourists were gone. I could see him crying. Sloppy drunk tears. Staring at the flame and crying like a baby. Then it made sense. If you want to be sad, this is the place. Look out there, Linda. Look at them all. So many you can’t even count them. I think this must be the saddest place of all. I think the guy knew exactly what he was doing.”

  Linda kissed him gently on the neck. Nothing. Stratton was loaded like a spring. She wondered sadly if their night in Peking had left any tender echo. It would make her job so much easier if it had.

  “Can I ask you something?” Stratton said softly. “Are you here to stop them—or me?”

  HAROLD BROOM had had about all he could take from the snotty Chinaman. Being cursed in Mandarin was not so bad, but now Wang Bin had begun to call him “fool” to his face, as if it were part of his name. Broom was not a violent fellow, but now he shook his fist at the man in the passenger seat and said, “Shut up before I punch you in the nose!”

  Wang Bin merely grunted.

  “It’s not my fault,” Broom said for the tenth time. How could he have foreseen that Mrs. Kevin Mitchell would change her mind about the funeral? How could Broom have known that her husband’s coffin would wind up at Arlington instead of the old Mitchell family plot in Baltimore, which would have been just as lovely. It would have been a cinch.

  “Son of a turtle!” Wang Bin snapped.

  “These things happen.”

  “How are we to find Mitchell’s grave?”

  “Simple,” Broom said. “We aren’t. There’s acres of soldiers at Arlington and not all of them are dead, Pop. They’ve got crack Marines with very nasty rifles—not pea-shooters like yours. No way we’re going to try to dig up that coffin.”

  “But this cannot be!”

  “Oh, but it is. Your precious Chinese warrior can rest forever. He’ll be right at home, believe me. I’m not risking a trip to jail.”

  The deputy minister snorted. “I must have the third soldier.”

  “Pop, don’t be greedy. There is no way we can pull it off. You want to get shot in the back? Those Marines are genuine marksmen, Pop, and you’re old and slow.”

  Wang Bin stared straight ahead at the highway. “It can be done,” he said. “And if it cannot, at least I want to see for myself.”

  Broom surrendered. They stopped at a camera store in Crystal City and purchased a couple of cheap 35-mms. This way, the art broker explained, they’d look like everybody else on the blue-and-white trams that chugged through the cemetery. Broom also bought a large canvas shoulder bag to conceal the collapsible shovel and two hand picks. “This is insane,” he grumbled. “And if anything goes wrong, you’re on your own.”

  “Meaning what?” Wang Bin asked.

  “Meaning I never saw you before in my life.”

  It was mid-afternoon when Broom drove down the Jefferson Davis Highway toward the national cemetery. He turned left past Fort Myer, then right again on Arlington Ridge Road. He drove half a mile and pulled the car up on a curb. “Get out now,” he ordered Wang Bin. “Try to be useful.”

  The deputy minister silently followed the art dealer on a long sidewalk up a slope, through the gates of Arlington and onto a motor tram. The Chinese and his canvas shoulder bag sat down with a conspicuous clatter. The tram wound slowly up the hills. Wang Bin gazed in wonderment at the burial markers that seemed to march on forever.

  “All soldiers?” he whispered to Broom.

  “Yes. The Fields of the Dead, they call it.”

  “How many?” Wang Bin asked.

  “Thousands,” Broom said. “I checked with a guide back at the office and our friend is supposed to be resting in Section H. Grave number four-four-five. I got a map, but I’m not sure it’ll help.”

  “We have nothing like this in China,” Wang Bin marveled. “There is no land for such a place. All our dead are cremated.”

  “You build temples, we make graveyards. Each to his own.”

  Wang Bin took a deep breath. “Like Xian, in a way. This is your Imperial Army, is it not, Mr. Broom?”

  STRATTON SPOTTED them without the field glasses.

  They emerged from a copse at the foot of a hill, perhaps one hundred meters from Lt. Kevin P. Mitchell’s white cross. They found the footpath and walked side by side, Mutt-and-Jeff silhouettes. Once they stopped to confer, and Stratton noticed the beam of a small flashlight as they bent over together, pointing. A map, probably. They resumed walking, with Broom leading the way.

  Stratton slipped away from the oak tree where Linda Greer slept, curled on a damp bed of leaves. He moved in a familiar half-crouch, using the trees and the dappled shadows to hide his advance. He stopped only to watch them, pace them, and anticipate their path up the hill to Section H.

  Stratton got there first. He chose a spot slightly downhill, across the footpath from Mitchell’s grave, in an older section of the cemetery. Here a six-foot granite marker paid homage to a four-star general and one of his three wives, and it was here that Stratton easily concealed himself.

  He had already decided against a confrontation among the tombstones. The park police would arrive swiftly, to be sure, but what would they have—a couple of prowlers? No, it was better to let Harold Broom and Wang Bin finish their task. The evidence would be obvious, and afterwards the ghouls would be pegged as criminals.

  Part of Stratton’s decision owed to logic, and part to curiosity. He wanted to see if they would really try it.

  Whispering, Broom and Wang Bin passed above him. The two men shuffled off the footpath and began probing grave markers in Section H. Stratton rose from his knees—dampened by the grass—and peered over the general’s headstone.

  He heard a voice counting: “Four-fifty, four forty-eight…”

  And another: “It is here.”

  The flashlight threw a skittish beam from the ground to the trees to the crosses. Stratton crept out of the tombstones, sliding caterpillar-style along the earth until he reached the paved footpath. From there, braced on his elbows, he studied the grave robbers.

  Wang Bin struggled out of the canvas shoulder bag and turned it upside down. The shovel and picks landed with a sharp clink against one of the white crosses.

  “This is fucking insanity,” Broom muttered.

  “Where are your Marines?” Wang Bin chided. “It appears we are alone. You dig first.”

  “We’re going to wind up in Leavenworth!” Broom said.

  “There is a fortune beneath your feet. Now dig.”

  Grudgingly, Broom assembled the portable shovel. He removed his knit golf shirt and draped it across the arms of Kevin Mitchell’s cross. As Broom poised at the edge of the grave, Wang Bin took one step back and folded his hands at his waist.

  “Keep your eyes open!” Broom instructed. He planted his shoe on the shovel and rammed it into the moist green sod.

  The exhumation went on for two hours. Stratton watched the shadows trade places, and measured their progress by the muffled grunts and curses, some in Chinese, some in English. Otherwise Arlington was perfectly still, save for the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

  Stratton felt himself dozing when the sound of muffled voices arose in Section H. The flashlight snapped on, and he was able to see both of them: Broom, shirtless, sweaty, up to his waist in the pit; and Wang Bin, toweling his own forehead, exhorting Broom from the edge of the grave.

  Then the flashlig
ht went black.

  Stratton squinted, waiting for his eyes to readjust. When he focused again, the two shadows were moving with belabored haste, a blur of pick and shovel, flinging dirt back into the grave. Then Wang Bin himself dropped to his knees and pressed ragged squares of green sod back into place, like so much carpeting.

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

  Wang Bin took the feet of the ancient soldier while Broom cradled its head. They walked without light, an odd and halting procession made easier by the perfect geometry that ruled the Fields of the Dead.

  Fascinated, Tom Stratton did not move at first, but merely watched them recede among the graves.

  Then he was on his feet, padding quietly behind them at a distance of fifty meters. When they reached an iron fence, Stratton dropped to one knee and raised the field glasses. Broom went over first, ripping his golf shirt. Wang Bin followed, grimacing with the exertion. The soldier was brought over on a precarious makeshift pulley, fashioned from two long ropes. Through the binoculars, Stratton noticed that the artifact had been carefully wrapped in a canvas bag.

  Stratton scaled the fence easily, and followed the men along a deserted road. Fearful that they might wheel around and spot him, Stratton clung to the trees and hedges.

  “Faster!” he heard Broom say. “We’re almost there.”

  Ahead, parked on a curb, was a car. Stratton ducked into a grove of young trees. He did not move again until he heard the sound of the car doors.

  Then Stratton stepped to the middle of the road, twenty meters from the car. The trunk was open. Beside it stood Harold Broom and the smaller figure of Wang Bin, their backs toward him. Stratton drew a .45-caliber pistol from his belt and took aim at the base of Wang Bin’s skull.

  It was an easy shot. Even in the dark he’d never miss. David Wang’s murderer would die instantly—die without knowing who had claimed revenge.

  Behind Stratton, something rustled in the trees.

  Wang Bin whirled, his face a fright mask. At the sight of Stratton the fear vanished in a portrait of pure hate.

  Another noise. Wang Bin slowly raised a finger, as if to point. Broom’s arms fell to his side.