I picked up the phone and dialed Sam’s home number. “Did you make that all up – about ‘Sunday afternoons’?”
“Don’t you believe me?” said Sam. “I’m hurt.” I could imagine him sitting up in bed, making his plausible face – and winking at the girl waking up beside him, whom he’d probably picked up in the Captain’s Bar after I left him at the Mandarin. “Go to London and ask around.”
“But, Sam, what if the woman I ask has never heard of this new game? By the time I’ve explained, she will think I’m an idiot.”
“Life is risk,” said Sam. There was a little edge to his voice. Maybe he was getting tired of holding Big Wendy’s hand. Maybe he thought Big Wendy should have been in communication with Julia. She was probably waiting for me to call. I could imagine the conversation: her lovely voice asking reasonable questions to which I had no simple answers.
I needed to stay focused. And of course there was a tap on our phone. Perhaps I could write to her, the same as with Boston grandmother.
Cedric wanted to have lunch at Grissini’s, in the Grand Hyatt. “The tables are far apart,” he explained. We’d never eaten there before. Once I saw its inlaid floor that echoed the Renaissance I got the message. It was time for me to start thinking like a certain famous Florentine.
“Have the police come calling yet?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“My friends have friends.”
We ordered lunch.
“Presumably you know what happened last night,” I said finally.
He didn’t respond, which meant “yes.” Big Wendy decided two could play this game, so I chewed on a breadstick.
“The killer who got killed was from up the coast,” said Cedric.
“Living in Hong Kong?”
“Yes, and he’d learned good English somewhere, but his clothes were made in Fujian. The tags had all been removed, but the Hong Kong police are quite clever about these things, having dealt with so many illegal immigrants who have given parties for the sharks.”
I had never heard Cedric speak in so brutal a way. I made my face inquisitive and subservient.
“My secretary’s husband is a policeman,” he said apologetically, shrinking back to his normal tentative self. “My secretary and the inestimable Catherine are cousins.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Henry and I understand each other. And we have spies in each other’s camps.” He smiled as he said this.
I would have said that Henry and Cedric were allies. Henry had certainly sent me to school with Cedric. I decided not to argue. The lesson seemed to be that allies by definition distrust each other. “And the police have spies as well,” I ventured.
“Which is helpful,” said Cedric.
“Because?”
“It is always a mistake to startle the police.”
“You mean you want the police to know what you and Henry are doing?”
“And they want to know too – up to a point.”
“Plausible deniability, as they said in Nixon’s White House.”
“He was the one who came to China,” said Cedric.
“Ni shr wode laoshr,” I said. You are my teacher.
“A society gets the police force it deserves,” said Cedric. “Hong Kong’s is very good, but they do not like to be out of step with those in power. They are currently uncertain how to proceed, which means those in power are suspending judgment. So long as that is the case, they will not, for example, want to question the young man now staying at the Castle who I believe attended Dartmouth. It would be polite for him to leave reasonably soon, before he becomes an embarrassment for the police.”
I took all that in. “By ‘those in power’ you don’t mean Hong Kong’s government, do you?”
“Certainly not,” said Cedric. He paused and took a sip of water. “I know you are doing your best, Wendy. But it is time for your instincts to become as good as your calligraphy. In Hong Kong, real power has to be implicit – so that it is never a visible challenge to Beijing. And also, since managing Hong Kong is difficult, the government of Hong Kong sometimes has to be rearranged. Real power does not want to be rearranged, so it stands apart from the local government, takes its cue from Beijing, but retains a little independence from Beijing too.”
“‘Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away’?” I asked, quoting the well-known proverb.
“The emperor is not a person but a process,” said Cedric. “The process embraces reform. It is a good process. But the process is managed by the Party, and parties have members whose motivations vary. Parties have factions. Right now it is unclear which faction will prevail, so it is not desirable to back anyone too overtly. Those with real power in Hong Kong on balance probably favor reform but they cultivate friends everywhere. It is in their genes to do so. Evolution has made sure of that.”
“You seem to understand this very well,” I said – by which I meant, Gosh, Cedric, I’ve never heard you talk about this before.
“I am only an observer,” said Cedric – by which he might have meant, I am a player but you will never get me to admit it.
“What observations can you share?”
“Quite obviously, there are people to the north of us who want Mercury to take over Henry’s bank, primarily because they suspect it is more than a bank.” There are also people to the north who want Chao Mu Bai to lose – among other reasons because they know Pearl River is more than a bank. Those holding real power in Hong Kong do not know whether they want him to win or not because they do not know which faction will win.”
“Do they care who wins?”
“Oh, they probably have a preference, though it is not as marked as mine, or Henry’s. People with real power cannot afford marked preferences. As Machiavelli tells us, a prince must be unsentimental.” It occurred to me that having a marked preference, which of course everyone who mattered would know about but would never mention, might have been Cedric’s way of disclaiming real power, which is what anyone who had real power would do. I began to feel very American.
“I should therefore do what?”
“Defeat Mercury. Then everyone will tell themselves how smart they were not to have supported him.” He paused. “One has to feel sorry for Mercury, but that doesn’t mean you can show him any mercy.”
27
The man came out of the bushes as I was partway up the path. Reconstructing the memory later, I must have been midway between the policeman on May Road and the policeman on the front porch. I never did figure out how he got there. I’d come home from the office early and it wasn’t even dusk. My assailant said nothing, made no sound except that of breaking ferns and branches, but that was enough to get my attention.
He had a chopper raised over his head and was obviously planning to turn me into Kung Pao chicken. His face was completely placid, which suggested that he did this sort of thing for a living.
My first thought was to protest that I wasn’t crossing a street, which everyone had warned me about, but I realized I would never get to make those objections if I didn’t find a way to defend myself. The chunks of concrete that had broken off on the edge of the path were all I could think of.
I wound up and threw a fast ball at my attacker, hitting him in the chest. It surprised him more than it hurt him, I assumed, but he stopped for a moment, and the dark shape behind him was able to catch up. A blow to the back of his head brought him down. He disappeared into the deep foliage that had slowed his advance and saved my life. The girl in the ninja outfit – Dartmouth had been right about the hips – gave a sort of shrug as if to say, you might as well know, and pulled off her ski mask. It was Ping.
By this point the policeman who had been posted on the porch was running down the path, yelling in Cantonese. Dartmouth followed behind him. Ping handed the policeman her blackjack, which seemed to satisfy him. He put handcuffs on my dazed assailant. Dartmouth stared at her in amazement.
“I have to go,” she sa
id, and sprinted up the steps toward Barker Road. She stopped and looked back, just for a moment, before she went out of sight.
Dartmouth retrieved the chopper with his handkerchief, handed it carefully to the policeman, and squatting down again, asked in Mandarin, “Who sent you?”
The thug just laughed and muttered a few swear words.
“Teochiu,” said the policeman.
This gave me a tiny chill. The Teochiu come from a particular region that straddles Guangdong and Fujian Provinces. They have their own dialect and their own cuisine. There are restaurants in Hong Kong. Teochiu have emigrated to all parts of Southeast Asia. Many have been enormously successful, and today are leading citizens of their adoptive countries, as they are of Hong Kong. But there was certainly a time when the Teochiu could have been described as the Sicilians of coastal China.
The other policeman had made it up the path from May Road. “We’ll take over from here, Mr. Lee.” They ignored Dartmouth entirely. The two of us went up the hill to the Castle.
“You all right?” said Dartmouth.
“Fine,” I said. “I suppose I’m in shock.”
We turned and watched the two constables and their captive disappear down the path. They seemed quite happy about having a prisoner to question. As a pupil of Cedric, I knew the police hierarchy would be more ambivalent. But then, their prisoner would never tell them anything.
“I know that girl,” said Dartmouth. “We had a blind date once in college. There was a rumor she’d gone back to China and joined the Department of Foreign Affairs.”
“Looks like the rumor was true,” I said.
“I’ll say. And isn’t she something?”
“You were right about the hips,” I said.
“I’ve never seen a member of the opposition before, and the first time I do, we know each other!”
“I guess that’s what ‘globalization’ leads to.”
“Oh, no, listen, sir, I’m really glad she was there, me being inside and the coppers totally useless. I mean, my job is to keep you alive. It’s just, I always kind of…remembered her, if you know what I mean.”
I said I knew what he meant. I also told him it now probably was time for him to melt away, as the police would find it increasingly difficult to act as though he didn’t exist, but that it would be a great favor if he’d stick around for another hour or two, while I ran an errand.
“But people are trying to kill you.”
“Life is risk,” I said. I started to feel embarrassed saying that, but Dartmouth didn’t appear to find my statement odd at all. He was a very sincere lieutenant.
I thought about what a handsome couple he and Ping would have made. Too bad whoever did the making of couples had had other ideas.
“The bad guys probably won’t regroup before I’m back,” I said. “I’ll be fine, but I can’t leave Philip and Tommy alone.”
Dartmouth tried to protest but I cut him off.
“Humor me,” I said, and started up the hill.
Ping was sitting on the concrete steps that disappear into the woods off Lugard Road, almost exactly where Serena and I had been when she and Calvin surprised us and then retreated. I sat down beside her.
“I hoped you’d read my mind,” she said.
“I’ve been taking lessons.”
“I knew your bodyguard.”
“So he told me.”
“I’ll have to report that, and I’ll be considered blown, and limited to desk work, and I will go mad. It is only the exercise, and the risk I suppose, that keeps me sane. I…” She turned away for a moment. “I love him so.”
“Calvin,” I said, to assure her that I understood.
“He is such a hopeless puppy, and he wanted to help me, and he really is a diplomat – or mostly an interpreter – so he counted on the fact that Henry’s office probably wouldn’t be bugged. I just about fainted when I heard him talking. The only way I could save him was to report him to people who didn’t want the tapes to fall into the wrong hands, and would put him in a…facility where he has a hope of surviving, and I doubt he even understands what’s happened, and if I screw up, or if the people who did me a favor stumble politically, it will be easy to reassign him to a real prison, you know, with no heating, and…unpleasant companions. It suits everyone so well to keep me in limbo.”
It occurred to me that it seemed to suit God to keep most of us dangling, but I figured Ping wouldn’t be in the mood for theology.
“Have you screwed up?” I asked.
“No. My job for now is to keep you alive. So far, so good. If I could take a few scalps, that would be good, but I cannot count on that much luck.”
“Do the people who did you the favor show signs of losing their footing?”
“They are doing fine. The work is going well. We are persistent but cautious. No, really, all I have to do is get through five years of worry and loneliness. When you consider what happened in the Cultural Revolution, that should be easy.”
“Will you ever be able to leave China?”
“Never both at once.”
“No more Bali.”
Ping gave me a sharp look, but I didn’t flinch. We both had bittersweet memories, and I assumed she knew that. “How can I help?” I said finally.
“Defeat Mercury.”
“People keep telling me that.” I waited for her to say more but she didn’t. “So, Comrade Pansy…”
“Oh, don’t be that way.”
“Sorry. Must be my Charleston grandfather talking.”
“I heard about your father. I’m sorry. You were great on television, you know.”
“Really?” I thought I’d done O.K., but it was nice to get objective confirmation.
“Television is your best weapon. Hadn’t you figured that out? You are almost as hopeless as Calvin.”
“I’ll take that as a friendly comment.”
She grabbed my arm, or really my shirtsleeve, and I could see she was about to cry. I gave her, actually I think, a small hug.
“Thank you.” She ran her hands through her hair. “Seeing your bodyguard – I’m trying to remember his name…”
“He hasn’t told me.”
“‘George,’ I think. Never learned his Chinese name. Anyway, the problem is, he reminds me of the life I might have had.”
I said nothing, hoping she’d go on.
“I was eighteen, it was after my first year at Princeton, and a classmate asked me to her lake for the summer. It wasn’t exclusively her lake. Other people lived there too. But they were just like her. I had no place to go in the summer. If I went home I might not have gotten another visa, so I was supposed to, like, hide under the stairs until classes started again in September. I was happy to go to her lake. I was overjoyed, in fact.
“They were equally overjoyed – her parents and her parents’ friends, that is. They thought of me as a ‘catch.’ I was like a rare frog they had found in their garden. And they were…I should explain what I mean by ‘they’? Her father was a professor. The lake was in Vermont. There were quite a few professors with houses on the lake, and also people who would have been professors, only they had enough money not to be, whose opinions were nevertheless taken seriously. Money is quite useful that way.
“There was a famous novel that partly happened at this lake, and my friend’s mother clearly wanted me to read it, so I would understand exactly how lucky I was to be there. So I did. And it described the place exactly, with the board games on the broad porches when it rained, and the people who lived year-round in the town, with their skeptical regard for the professors, and the Monday night concerts, where someone put giant speakers on the porch of their enormous house, and you lay in canoes offshore and listed to Brahms.
“It was useful if there was a boy in the canoe with you, which tended to happen if one was a ‘catch,’ because he would paddle you back across the lake, but also, if you are a girl not sure of herself, because he would let you lean back against his knees – knees t
hat were on fire with the excitement of it – and put a blanket over you, which is nice, especially the part where he tucks it around your shoulders and doesn’t touch your breasts, even though you both know he’s thinking about it.
“Anyway, the thing is, one night I woke up at three a.m., and realized all these nice people with their opinions and canoes and state-of-the-art sound systems were the Party. They just weren’t communists.”
“So you came home to be a communist,” I said.
“So I came home,” she said.
“Listen, Pansy,” I said, “or Ping, I think it is…”
“I don’t know what it is.” She collected herself. “No, it’s ‘Ping.’”
“Well, look, you are clearly a force for good. I hope you have no question about that.” She sat up again. “Do you have any advice?” I said.
“Go on TV again. Tell about the attack – but leave me out of it. Being threatened and surviving is good joss, as the Cantonese say. Surviving is good, full stop, as the English say. Oh, and Zhang may not be your enemy.”
“Is he my friend?”
“At worst he’s neutral,” she said.
“And what else?” The words were hardly out of my mouth when I knew the answer. I told her my plan.
“You’re an angel,” she said when I was finished. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and disappeared up the hill.
It was quite amazing when you thought about it. Ping’s official job, sanctioned by all factions, was to spy on Henry: listen to the tapes, watch the Castle, know what he was up to. Her unofficial job – the one she had from “someone powerful who is not corrupt,” as Calvin put it – was to do exactly the same things, but in order to protect Henry, in order to keep his system functioning. With Henry absent, she protected me. If there was an angel in the picture, it was Ping.
China is like a postmodern novel with an unreliable narrator. Nothing is what it says it is. Or it is like the human psyche, in which behavior is “over-determined,” meaning that everything is what it claims to be but also other, darker things. Foreigners who devote their careers to studying China start out regarding this as sophistication. Later they become cynics. To intelligent Chinese, both attitudes are laughable. It should be obvious to any sentient being that misfortune stalks us all, that life is a sea of cruelty, that angels don’t exist.
The Daughters of Henry Wong Page 22