The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  “I figured as much,” I said, “and I’m not going to tell you.”

  L’Ouverture leaned toward me, with his elbows on his knees. He was wearing a pale-blue oxford-cloth shirt and I could see silver cufflinks. He folded his long black fingers together. “That’s no way to talk, Ben,” he said. He smiled amiably. “If you don’t tell me, you’ll spend the rest of your days in this building.”

  “The Chinese Government…”

  “The Chinese Government doesn’t know where you are, Benjamin, and I don’t think they care. Mourning Dove Soong is a busy woman. She has more to do than keep up with your whereabouts.” He smiled again.

  “What are the charges against me?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, stretching out his long arms from his body. Then he shot his cuffs and set his bony elbows on his knees again. “Oh my my!” he said. “Resisting arrest, twice. Assaulting a police officer, four times. Illicitly importing dangerous drugs. Using same. Telephone fraud. Crossing state lines as an unregistered alien.” He laughed again. “There are friends of mine on the bench who would give you ten years at hard labor just for burning up Aynsley Field.”

  I just looked at him. What was there to say? I knew he was at least partly wrong about Mourning Dove, if only because Lao-tzu needed me for future supplies of endolin; but I wasn’t going to tell Baynes that. I wasn’t going to tell Baynes anything this time.

  “Well, L’Ouverture,” I said, “you seem to have all the cards.”

  He nodded and smiled grimly. “You dealt them to me, Ben.”

  “L’Ouverture,” I said, “I don’t need this. I’ll give you sixty percent of my uranium…”

  He looked at me very coolly. “I don’t want it.”

  “You don’t want it? My God, it’s worth a king’s ransom.”

  He shook his head. “I’m a king already, Benjamin.”

  I looked at him. He was certainly dressed like a king. “It’ll triple your wealth, L’Ouverture. It’ll put America back on top of the heap.”

  He looked at me calmly. “Who are you to talk that way?” he said. “You’re Chinese.”

  “Come off it,” I said. “That’s an expedient, not a political choice. We can be partners. Belson and Baynes.”

  He sat there awhile, looking very collected, very urbane. Finally he spoke. “I like things the way they are. I enjoy my work, Benjamin. The United States is doing very well under its energy laws, and I helped frame them.”

  “And you profit from them.”

  “They are good laws, for the resources we have.”

  I just looked at him, feeling nothing. There was no way to get through to this man, and I knew it. He did not want to be partners with anyone, and the only way I could bargain with him now would be to tell him about Juno and how to get there. But then, thinking about that, I realized something I had missed before: if he really wanted to know where my uranium came from he would have found out from the crew. He could have locked them up as conspirators, or pirates, and pressured them until someone told him. And he hadn’t done that. “You don’t really want to know where I got that uranium,” I said.

  He looked at me and smiled tiredly. “How perceptive you are, Benjamin.”

  “You just want to keep things the way they are.”

  “In a nutshell.”

  I sat there awhile. Finally I said, wearily, “Can you get me some cigars?”

  He smiled. “I’ll have a dozen boxes sent.” He stood up to his full height on the other side of the plastic. What a hugely tall man he was, and how light on his feet and flexible for his age! The goddamned devious son of a bitch.

  “Sacre Fidels,” I said. And then, “Do you ever use Nautilus machines, L’Ouverture?”

  He smiled down at me. “Daily.” He straightened his jacket and patted the pockets with his huge hands, smoothing them. “I have to go now,” he said.

  I stood up. “What will you do with the Isabel?”

  “It can stay where it is. Its hatch has been welded shut. And the portholes are covered. It is under perpetual guard.”

  “Like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And it’ll just stay at Aynsley?”

  “I have no interest in football.” He turned to leave.

  “L’Ouverture,” I said, “when am I going to get out of this place?”

  He turned back to me and shook his head sympathetically. “Benjamin,” he said, “I’d tell you if I knew.”

  I nodded. It all seemed eerily natural, this conversation with the thick transparent plastic between us. “I know I was spotted in Philadelphia,” I said. “But how did you find out I was in Columbus?”

  He stood silent for a minute before speaking. Then he said, “Sue Kranefeld. She called my office.”

  ***

  The Reagan Stir is a wretched place—a kind of flophouse of prisons. I was given a cell with a tiny TV and a cold-water shower. There was a library and, thank God, a gym. I worked out with weights and an LAT machine twice a day and sometimes did pushups in my cell. They had me in Diplomatic Isolation, which meant no visitors and no newspapers and no news shows on my TV. I was in Washington, but I didn’t know if the public at large knew where I was. After a week I quit caring.

  I hate to admit this, but a part of me warmed up to prison. I shifted into the psychic gear I had been in on Belson and all I really missed was my vegetables. I got the complete short stories of Henry James out of the prison library and spent my days between working out, reading and playing chess. At level eight. There was a UV booth in the gym; I added to my Belson suntan, which had faded a good deal. I wasn’t allowed to talk to other prisoners—although I always nodded at a woeful Arab who worked out on the LAT machine next to me—and that suited me fine. Ever since Father’s forget-me-nots I had known the game of spiritual Robinson Crusoe; I found sweet sadness in playing it yet again.

  Sometimes at night I would watch TV, after getting weary with Henry James’s games of ethical chess and of people who responded to moral crises by not finishing sentences. The Chinese TV channel was doing a thirty-part dramatization of European history, shot in Peking, and I got hooked on it. It wasn’t the European history I had been taught and it was amusing to see it from a Chinese perspective. One Sunday night after a supper of frankfurters and beans I sat on my bunk drinking coffee from a plastic cup and idly watching a segment of the sixteenth century in England, when something about Queen Elizabeth caught my attention. Her walk seemed eerily familiar. I stared. It looked like Isabel in a red wig. I sat upright and turned up the volume. It was Isabel, in lace, pearls and heavy silk, looking like an authentic queen, even though it was ludicrous to hear her voice dubbed in high-pitched Chinese.

  The Chinese view of Elizabeth was as a kind of virginal nymphomaniac. She was shown turning on Essex, and Cecil and Raleigh. Drake was trying to get into her pants. All of this was very disturbing, and when a scene came on where she was lying in bed with Essex, both of them naked, and she fending him off with chatter, I nearly choked. I wanted to kick the idiot who was playing Essex, grab Isabel by her lovely waist and demonstrate the folly of coyness. I could have pounded my head against the wall for the waste of my five months’ impotence with her. There I sat in my cell, staring at her electronic image with an erection—the only erection the sight of her body had ever given me and as useless, now, as an airplane on the moon.

  I’d been happy enough with Henry James, chess and weightlifting before that, but it changed everything. I wanted to get out of prison and back to life again. It was toward the end of October; I’d been in stir six weeks, with no trial scheduled and no word from anybody. I stepped out of my Robinson Crusoe daze like stepping out of a pair of dirty socks and found myself in reality. It was awful. I was in prison, horny, angry, and ready to go, but I couldn’t get out. Four walls. Bars on the windows. Guards. Frankfurters, beans and instant coffee.

  This kept up for two weeks and would have been the death of me if they h
adn’t, suddenly and without notice, let me out. The eighth of November. Two guards came into my cell after breakfast and told me to pack. That took three minutes, including brushing my teeth. They took me to a desk where I signed papers, got back my billfold, was admonished to “watch my step” and taken to a coal-gas black Maria. I didn’t know what in hell was going on, but suspected it had something to do with the election. My prison had been well heated if nothing else; it was icy and gray outside. Glad as I was to get out, a part of me was sorry to leave the warmth of jail. We drove past the Washington Monument, looking bleak in the winter air, and then a few blocks later I looked down a side street and saw sticking up proudly into the sky above tall buildings, covered with snow, the Isabel! That cheered me up. I blew her a kiss as we went by.

  They pulled up at the Chinese Embassy and the guards ushered me into a back door, where four Chinese soldiers took me into a room with painted screens and modern furniture. Two Chinese ladies fingerprinted me, in red. A tall, thirtyish one who seemed in charge handed me rice paper forms to sign.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked, in English.

  She pulled a cigarette from her robe, lit it and blew smoke toward me. “I am taking you home, Mr. Kwoo.”

  “Kwoo?” I almost jumped out of my skin. “What the hell is this Kwoo?” I still hadn’t signed the papers. “Let me have one of your cigarettes if you don’t mind, and then explain to me what going home means and about this Mr. Kwoo.”

  She gave me a cigarette and lit it with a little red electronic. “Mr. Kwoo is your Chinese name,” she said.

  “That’s not what’s on my passport,” I said.

  “We have a new passport. It seemed expedient to change your identity.” Her face was hard-looking but the voice pleasant enough. Except for the hardness she was a beautiful woman. “The United States does not want you to leave its shores. Senator Baynes would like to keep you under lock and key until… how do you say it in America?”

  “The cows come home. Hell freezes over.” I began to pace around the room, hands in my jeans pockets. “I wasn’t planning to leave any shores, anyway.” But it had already dawned on me; they were going to take me to China. What the hell; it beat prison. And Isabel might be there. “Is ‘home’ China?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” I said, “okay. I’ll need some clothes.” The prison jeans and dungaree shirt I was wearing were all I had. “Does this have to do with endolin?”

  “Our interest in you, Mr. Kwoo, is not pharmacological. It is your other cargo that occupies our attention. It has caused us to go to some lengths to take you from prison.”

  Shit. They wanted the Juno uranium fields. For a moment I chilled with the image of a Chinese dungeon somewhere. What if they had revived the water torture? Meltdowns were a scandal to the People’s Republic and the old ladies who ran it; there were radioactive villages and ruined rice paddies sprinkled all over that ancient geography. My well-being, in that context, would mean very little.

  “Is Mourning Dove Soong behind this?” I said.

  “Madame Soong is Deputy Chairman for the Honshu District. I do not know her position with respect to your case.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go to China. How do we get there?”

  She took another cigarette and lit it from the butt of the first. “We’ll go by ship, Mr. Kwoo.”

  “All right,” I said. I stubbed my cigarette out in a little jade dish. “But tell me. What does ‘Kwoo’ mean?”

  The shorter woman spoke up, in a quiet voice. “It’s an old Mandarin word. It denotes an ancient coin. You could translate it as ‘cash.’”

  I looked down at her and fingered my beard. “Well,” I said, “you people do know how to name the newborn. I accept Kwoo.” Ben Kwoo.

  ***

  It was a Chinese jet that took us to the Embarcadero in San Francisco. This time my stratosphere suit was crimson. There was a valve in the mask, so I could sip oolong through a straw during the two-hour flight. My cigarette-smoking friend was seated behind me, but had little to say on our intercom. I tried to get her to talk about her family, but she wasn’t interested. I sipped my tea and brooded a bit. Then I did some knee bends just as we were zooming over the Rockies and started figuring out ways of getting back into the search for Isabel from wherever we were going in China.

  A gray Mercedes was waiting for us; we drove in silence from the airfield to a dock. The car pulled up at the gangway to a coal-burner with rusty sides. On the forepeak lettered in red was PRS KEIR HARDIE. It was a Scottish ship! “What the hell?” I said to my chain-smoking companion. She was climbing the gangway alongside me with her short black hair blowing in the offshore wind. “Why aren’t we sailing Chinese?”

  “This was available,” she said, stepping briskly aboard.

  My stateroom was ready and she ushered me right to it. My heart lifted when I walked in. The parlor had a screen painted with blue morning glories; there were walnut tables and blue silk poufs. Along one bulkhead was a galley with a refrigerator, a molecular cooker and a freezer. “How long will the trip take?” I looked at her. “And what’s your name?”

  “My name is White Heron. Many call me Jane. It will take us two weeks to cross the Pacific.”

  There was a bar with relief carvings of birds on its front and two crystal decanters and glasses. I crossed over to it and sniffed one of the decanters. Scotch, sure enough. I started to pour. “Would you like a drink, White Heron?”

  “Jane,” she said. “I’m on duty.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said and made mine larger. I went to the refrigerator, filled my glass with ice and clinked it around. I was still wearing my red stratosphere suit. I took a drink and a ship’s whistle blew, loud, clear and thrilling. Nothing in this world sounds better than a ship’s whistle. “Are we leaving?”

  Jane nodded and the deck beneath our feet began to vibrate. I drank another musty slug of scotch, spreading out my big feet into a seaman’s stance. “Jane,” I said, “who assigned me to these quarters? It wasn’t you, was it?”

  She looked at me coldly. She’d have had me in the bilges if she’d been in charge. Then she shrugged. “It was Mourning Dove Soong,” she said. “Your partner at Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals.”

  “Yes,” I said, and drank off my scotch. “Bless her heart.” I thought of Arabella Kim and her woodlot in Washington. Old Chinese mothers, the two of them, as good as gold. Maybe there was something in matriarchy after all.

  ***

  I played a lot of solo chess during the next few days and then began to suntan myself on deck when we got far enough into the South Pacific. I read a few twenty-first-century Chinese novels, but their vigor wore me out. Everybody was productive and brave in those books, and nobody made love except after a Confucianist wedding, and then they did it solemnly and in the dark. Puritanism is like the wheel; if it ever got lost it would be reinvented fast.

  I was allowed no access to the ship’s communications equipment, which was probably just as well. I wasn’t ready to do business just yet. I managed to borrow some recent Scottish magazines from one of the mates and entertained myself with stories of love among the fens, or brawls on collective farms in the lowlands. Still dull stuff, but better than the Chinese. More balls.

  The ship plowed across the blue Pacific as if in a dream, leaving a wake like a glory in that awe-inspiring surface. At night the stars were magnificent—nearly as bright as from my toilet seat on the Isabel. When we got to our southernmost point I could see Fomalhaut, near the horizon.

  Nobody talked to me much and I didn’t try to make friends. They were probably under orders anyway. There were some other passengers, all well-to-do Chinese families. It seemed the Keir Hardie was used by the higher ranks of the Party. As much as they officially excoriated one another, the Chinese and the Scots could work things out when it came to luxury. There’s nothing new in that.

  I took my meals alone and ate with chopsticks. The officers’ mess supplied wha
t I ordered, and once offered a haggis if I wanted to try one. I declined politely. I had no television and no newspapers and didn’t care. It was shipboard lull and fine with me. But I worked out in the ship’s gym daily and did pushups in between, coiling up for whatever lay ahead.

  ***

  I would see families sometimes standing in a row along the gunwale, wrapped in their heavy overcoats, staring out to sea. The children were touching—so solemn and oriental, with their bangs and quiet black eyes. Sometimes a beautiful child would peek toward me as I stood nearby, in one of my crazy capitalist outfits, but there was never any conversation. I’d like to have adopted about six of those kids. I’d have loved to cook pot roast for a bunch of them and taught them how to play chess.

  Well. Children are hostages to fortune, as Bacon said. But what else is there to do with your time?

  I can see myself dying by coronary in a parlor suite, clutching my throbbing shoulder and mumbling, “Hey! I need time to think about this!” I would be ninety and still in good shape but without a home or family, without a profession. Tycoon is no profession. All I do is make money and chase women. And travel. “I haven’t done anything with my life!” I would say in that hotel suite, thrashing about in the kitchen in terminal anguish, falling dead over the truite fumée.

  ***

  One evening at the beginning of my second week there was a knock on my door. I was at the table, playing king’s gambit against Myra’s board. I got up and opened the door. It was Jane, wearing a pink silk dress. She was lighting a cigarette.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello. I’ve come for that drink.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come in.”

  It was one of those tight traditional dresses with a slit down the side. The amount of leg she displayed coming in the door was alarming; a voice in me immediately said, Watch it.

  “I’m in the middle of a game,” I said.

  She nodded and seated herself on my lavender pouf. Her black hair shone and she wore scarlet lipstick; her face was dead white and Chinese-round with perfect Mongolian eye-folds. She looked like a poster ad for a twentieth-century movie. The Dragon Lady. She watched me silently. I returned to the sofa and lit a cigar. I was in my prison dungarees—comfortably faded now since I washed them at nights and hung them on deck to dry. If they got rained on I wore my red silk stratosphere pants and went barechested, like an Italian trapeze artist. She was looking me over the way Fu Manchu might look over a captive American spy. We have ways of making you talk, Mr. Belson. “I like big men,” she said.