Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Fifty years later, I can still hear myself weave this lie as I am taken into custody. I can see the shafts of sunrise swimming with dust and hear the thickened music of doubt in the policemen’s Indian English accents. I can see Nagu’s and Musai’s sad, bewildered faces, the boys Dilip and Bhanu huddling in the background as the white cloth falls over Lawrence’s body and Simon burrows mutely into his mother’s arms. I can feel her agonized gaze bore into me to this very day.

  The last echo of my childhood died with Lawrence. I had no more time for grief than I had for fantasies of justice. The same declaration that protected Simon would condemn him to a life of torment. I knew this as surely as I knew that it had also destroyed the last bonds of trust between Mem and me. I owed her and Simon and Lawrence so much. This final act was the only way left for me to repay them, but it meant that from this moment on, they must disown me.

  Before my first day in custody ended I succeeded in smuggling a message out through one of the women detention house guards. The following night I was awakened by a hand pressed over my mouth. For an instant I was back at Safe Haven, and Lawrence was breathing in my ear, promising to fly me away. Then the cloud of memory shifted. I smelled fish and onions and the sweat of skin. I was pulled up, shoved, began moving forward through darkness as thick as blood. My captor walked behind me. One door opened, then another. I saw four flat blue-gray strips of sky with a sliver of moon in one corner. Then the hands of the stranger released me. His voice instructed me to keep walking, warned me not to look back.

  I reached the street before I heard the final door slam shut.

  And then another opened.

  A battered white Ambassador stood waiting for me at the corner.

  Epilogue

  April 2001

  Washington, D.C.

  I KEPT MY PROMISE TO LAWRENCE.

  I had chosen my next rescuer well. Shrilal understood that we were engaged in the fairest of trades. Youth for age. Freedom for safety. Comfort for generosity. And ultimately, life for death.

  This was the nature of our marriage. It lasted for more than ten years and left me a wealthy young widow attending university in England. I did my dissertation on the Great Game, and eventually finished the book Lawrence had started. I hand-delivered it to his old mate, Rodney Tynsdale. It was published under my pseudonym in Sydney and London and became a classroom text. I assigned the proceeds to Safe Haven—now run by an all-Indian staff—in memory of Lawrence.

  At Mem’s insistence, after my escape, Lawrence’s death was recorded as an accident. I had read this in the Hindu Times as Shrilal and I were traveling as far from Delhi as that old white Ambassador could carry us. But while in fact his death was an accident, I knew the truth. We had all played a hand in his dying. Through blind faith and bewildered longing, through that craving for some impossible goodness, we had turned against one another, and Lawrence paid the ultimate price.

  What mattered most in the end was not right or wrong. It was not politics or fidelity or even understanding. Certainly it was not the act of rescue. It was simply our mutual ineptitude at love.

  I became a historian. I studied war, making espionage my specialty. Last year, I was putting the finishing touches on a review of American intelligence operations in Asia when I learned that Aidan Shaw had been arrested in Shanghai early in 1952 following a successful U.S. rescue of two captured CIA operatives off the coast of Shandong. He spent the next twenty years in a Chinese prison and died, according to the Chinese, by slashing his throat with an American-made razor in 1973. Joanna Shaw had never been allowed to visit him. Nor had she divorced him.

  This past April a star in Aidan’s name was to be placed on the CIA’s Wall of Honor at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Through the London university where I now teach, I managed to obtain permission to attend the commemoration.

  The day was cold, clammy. I arrived at 11:00 A.M. and was ushered to the upper tier of the enormous marble lobby. The folding chairs in the main hall below were reserved for family members. Those families were just beginning to drift in. They wore gray and black. Some carried lilies or single roses to lay at the base of the engraved wall. My escort, a young African-American man with a honeyed voice, explained that many of these families had waited decades for the agency to recognize the sacrifice of their loved ones. Even now, some of those agents who were honored by stars on the wall could not be publicly named.

  I listened to his talk of secrecy with only half an ear. I did not know whether Mem would come. I did not even know if she was alive. I had made no previous attempt to find her. My own name, my identity, my entire world had changed since last I’d seen her. As the lobby filled with silent mourners, I looked down over the balcony railing and wondered if I would recognize her.

  But then I saw them.

  She entered under her own power, though she leaned on a three-sided walker. Her hands were bare, white-knuckled, and mottled by age, a gold band on her left ring finger. Her hair, now snowy white, was braided into a shining crown on top of her head. She wore a long dark blue dress with simple gold earrings. Her face was tipped down, away from me, but I recognized those mango-shaped ears, the width of her cheekbones, the angle of her nose. The years had scored many lines in her skin, and she wore none of the garish paint so many privileged women use to try to disguise their age. There was, indeed, a softness about her, an air of acquiescence that might have dissuaded me that this was really Mrs. Shaw.

  Except that Simon was by her side. Simon grown to middle age. I almost laughed. He wore a camel hair coat and brown felt hat. When he removed the hat I was stunned to see he’d lost most of his hair, though what remained on the sides of his head and in his scrubby mustache was the same sandy brown color I remembered. And his ears, now veined a purplish pink, still stuck out like teacup handles. He touched his fingers to Mem’s lower back, as if afraid she might topple if he let her go. And he talked across her as they found their seats, to the man who had entered with them.

  This man was tall, lanky, with flowing silver hair. The size and age Lawrence would have been had he survived to this day. With a shock I realized this same man had been with Mem the night Lawrence died. The man I’d briefly mistaken for Lawrence’s ghost.

  Douglas Freeman held a bouquet of blue gladioli and Simon a framed photograph. They seated themselves almost directly below me, so that as Simon laid the picture across his knees the image smiled in full view. Others gathered here had brought single portraits of their dead, but there were two in the picture Simon held. I recognized it from our days on Ratendone Road. This was one of the photographs Mem could never bring herself to put away.

  More than fifty years later, Lawrence and Aidan were still grinning from the back of the elephant they’d ridden across Burma.

  The service began. “We stand together before this sacred wall of stars, united in fellowship to remember…”

  Mem stretched one hand to the son on her left, the other to the man now on her right. Her eyes closed.

  The program was brief. When the roll call came and Aidan Shaw’s name was spoken, I watched Mem and Simon bow their heads. They held the photograph between them. And then Simon did something that set my heart free.

  He lifted his head and stared straight at me as if he had known all along I would be there. Without removing his eyes, he reached a hand to Mem’s arm. She raised her face to follow his gaze, and it seemed to me I was seeing her through a sequence of subtly shifting mirrors. Her brows lifted, erasing the creases of age. Her mouth formed a perfect O, and then her eyes pooled with tears. The tender drone of grief and honor welled around us like a suspension of time.

  But time had not stopped for me. Not in the way that I sensed it had for Mem and Simon. Nor in the way that Lawrence would so ardently have resisted. The irony came as a bittersweet dawning.

  I was the lucky one.

  I waited for the shock to subside from Mem’s eyes. Then I raised my hand and smiled.

  Acknowled
gments

  THIS BOOK HAS GODPARENTS around the globe. First among them are my parents, Jane and Maurice, and my brother, Marc, whom I thank for their enduring love and memories and for making India and China two of my homes of the heart.

  I am also indebted to the following generous individuals whose insights and advice helped to shape this story: In New Delhi, Jacquelin and Ranjit Singh; Bandana, Akash, and Prem Sen; Gopal and Smriti Jain; Som and Suman Benegal; Jahani Wassi; Usha Ramanathan; Jerry Pinto at UNICEF; Ratna Kapur with the Center for Feminist Legal Research; Sudeep Chakravarti; Promilla Kapur; Mohini Giri of the National Commission on Women; and Jyotsna Chatterji of the Joint Women’s Programme. In Chandigarh, G.S. and Minoo Chani. In Mumbai, Dev and Anuradha Parikh Benegal; Priti Patkar at PERANA; Mrs. Vipula Kadri; and Shabana Azmi. And all through India, Shadi Ram Shama. My thanks to Geoffrey and Diane Ward, Tom and Jonathan Keehn, and Sharon Jay for helping to make many of the above connections. And for the acute details of American life in India circa 1951 I could have no richer source than the letters of Martha Keehn. She is deeply missed.

  A number of fellow writers and readers have contributed information, advice, expertise, and invaluable encouragement during the five years it took to complete this novel. I am grateful to Kylie Moloney, Reference Librarian of the National Library of Australia, and Robert Akeroyd for assisting my researches into the birth of Australia’s intelligence services; to Linda Ashour, Wendy Belcher, Deborah Pyper Brault, Susan Chehak, Eric Edson, Mark Lee, Arnold Margolin, and Leslie Monsour for offering critical honesty as well as unwavering friendship; to Erika Steiger, Judy Soo-Hoo, and Sarah Jacobus for their attention to detail; to Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, and Peter Rand for extending their considerable knowledge to a total stranger; and to Michelle Matthews for so gamely adding cartography to her burgeoning repertoire.

  As every author knows, the publication of a book is a team effort. Caryn Karmatz Rudy, Molly Chehak, Fred Chase, Harvey-Jane Kowal, Nancy Wiese, Jamie Raab, Maureen Egen, Laurence Kirshbaum, and the rest of the superlative team at Warner Books—I thank you for your excellence and for believing in me.

  A career in letters, too, is a team effort, and I cannot imagine a better “captain” than my agent of more than twenty years now, Richard Pine. I owe a debt of gratitude also to the other members of the Pine Agency, especially Lori Andiman, Sara Piel, and the late but fondly remembered Arthur Pine.

  Finally, there is that sticky issue of the writer’s “real” life. I am more than lucky and more than grateful to share this life with three magnificent men. Graham, Daniel, Marty—I love you all madly.

  Photo by Charles Drucker

  Aimee Liu’s work includes the novels Cloud Mountain, Face, and Glorious Boy (to be published in 2020), as well as the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a past president of PEN USA and a current member of the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing at Port Townsend, WA. She lives in Los Angeles.