A Certain Smile

by Judith Michael

  The telephone rang, and Wu Yi's maid appeared. "Miss Wu, it is Pan Chao calling. Will you talk to him?"

  "No! I'm very busy! Tell him I will call him later."

  "Pan Chao," said Meiyun thoughtfully, her back to Miranda so their eyes could not meet. "I have heard of him. A well-known businessman, I believe."

  "President of his company," said Wu Yi.

  "A special person?"

  Wu Yi was contemplating her image in the mirror. Her gaze slid to Meiyun's reflection. "Why?"

  "I only wondered. There are so few special men in the world; most are dull or weak. Or taken."

  Wu Yi's Ups almost smiled. "He is incredibly boring. But maybe not. I've talked to him a few times in his club, but we only went out for the fu^t time last night. He is very successful." She shrugged. "You

  have lived a long time; you know what is important. Sweetness and niceness are not; even good sex is not. Money is. It makes life go."

  Meiyun nodded. "You are very strong. Passing over others to find the person who will give you what you want is not always easy."

  Briefly, the hard lines of Wu Yi's lovely face wavered. "Not easy," she repeated. Then, again, she shrugged. "It is how things are. I will buy the dress and the cape and I want to see everything you have for winter. Bring them next week."

  "Ah, next week I cannot come to Beijing. I can send you photographs, or fax drawings to you, but the best way would be for you to come to Xi'an."

  "Xi'an!"

  "I will set aside an entire day for you. You can try everything, at your leisure, and we can make alterations in design or fabrics or fit as we go along. I will provide lunch. At the end of the day, you will have a winter wardrobe that is yours alone."

  "But... in Xi'an!"

  "That is where I live. That is where Miranda Meiyun designs are to be found."

  Wu Yi gave a reflexive glance at Miranda, sitting quietly on a hassock. "I will let you know. You would give me an entire day? You would see no one else?"

  "No one,"

  "Well. Leave your card with my maid." She nodded to Miranda, shook Meiyun's hand, and remmed to her bedroom as the maid appeared to lead the way to the front door.

  "I have not been paid," said Meiyun. "Please inform Miss Wu."

  Scowling, Wu Yi reappeared. "Send me a bill."

  Meiyun gently shook her head. "Miss Graham and I have delivered a dress and a cape designed and made especially for you. Payment is on delivery."

  Their eyes locked for a long moment until Wu Yi strode to a desk and furiously wrote a check. "You have strange rules."

  "They are my rules."

  Outside, Miranda said, "Do you think Sheng told her anything that she could pass on to Pan Chao?"

  "I have no idea. We must ask Sheng."

  "Oh." She shrank. "I can't. He doesn't like me."

  "How do you know?"

  There was a pause. "He was cold when we met one day. Rude, in fact. He didn't like it that I was with Li."

  "Well, perhaps that is understandable. I would imagine it is easily corrected." In the car she had hired for the day Meiyun took out her cellular phone, and called Li. "It seems that Wu Yi has somehow fastened herself to Pan Chao."

  "What? How?"

  "We don't know that. I imagine she shifts from one useful man to another as easily as a driver shifts gears. The problem is, if Sheng has told her anything about turning against his partners—"

  "Yes, I'll ask him. He's out of the office; I'll have to track him down. Will I see you tonight?"

  "I'm flying back in two hours. Unless you need me."

  "I don't think so. Is Miranda with you?"

  "Here she is." She gave the telephone to Miranda, and turned away to look at the passing scene.

  "I have to find Sheng," Li said. "May I call you later? We may have to skip the silk market if I don't find him soon."

  Repeating Meiyun's words to herself— understandable, easily corrected —Miranda closed her eyes and plunged. "Why don't you ask him to come home for dinner tonight? We could cook together and it would be a quiet place for you to talk."

  Home, Li thought. Home. But he did not say it aloud. What he did say was, "You are an extraordinary woman. Do you really want to do this?"

  "The two of you need some quiet time, and maybe Sheng won't hate me so much if we're together for an evening."

  "Extraordinary," Li murmured again. "Thank you; I will ask him. He doesn't hate you, you know; he doesn't know you. But it would please me very much if he did." Because if you stay, if you marry me and bring your children to live with us, we will have a most interesting family.

  When he hung up, he read again the list he had been making. A list of crimes, he reflected. A list I should not be able to make. A list that tells how much I am a part of this system, even though I often feel like an outsider.

  He telephoned the sites where they had buildings under construction, but Sheng was not at any of them. He thought of calling Sheng's other office, but he would not take the chance of Chao or Enli answering the phone. He had nothing to say to either of them, and if he hung up, they might become alarmed.

  That was the danger, anyway. They would become alarmed and furious if Chao learned that Sheng had turned against them. Would

  Sheng have confided that to Wu Yi? He might have. And Wu Yi, protecting her new protector, would pass on the story without a qualm.

  So, they had to act today, before Chao and Enli found a more foolproof way to incriminate Li and, this time, Sheng as well.

  Too restless to sit still, he left the office and roamed the city. He visited his construction sites and observed others; he bought a roasted sweet potato and ate it as he walked. Miranda loves these; Adam and Lisa will, too. He gazed at scarves in a shop window— We may have to give up the silk market tonight —and went in to buy one for Miranda, three feet square, heavy, sensuous silk covered with an abstract painting of birds and flowers in deep pinks and browns and gold. A scarf for winter; winters are so cold in Beijing.

  When he returned to the office, he found Sheng in the conference room, looking at blueprints spread out on the long table. "I've been looking for you; where were you?"

  "At the Great Wall." Sheng's face was sheepish.

  "The Wall? It's jammed with tourists this time of year."

  "Fifteen minutes of walking and you leave them all behind. I go there to think. It's so crazy, you know, this huge wall snaking over the mountains, wide enough for horses and armies, and you walk on it all by yourself, and you can't believe anybody was stupid enough to think it would keep out invaders. And then you think how stupid most people are, anyway, and you are, too, I mean I am, stupid, stupid, stupid." He stood up. "I went to the office last night, dawn, really, and took out some files. The important ones."

  "Will they look to see what is gone?"

  "I don't think so. Not right away, anyway."

  "Wu Yi is now seeing Pan Chao."

  Sheng's head snapped back. "She wouldn't. How do you know?"

  "She told someone. What does she know about your relationship with Chao and Enli?"

  Sheng stared at him through puffy eyes. "I called her last night," he said finally. "I thought, after she had time to think about us, she might have changed her mind." He saw Li shake his head slightly. "She might have!" he cried. Then he added sadly, "If she had been someone else. But she isn't, you told me that."

  "You already knew it."

  Sheng shrugged.

  "What did you say when you called her?" Li asked.

  "At first she wouldn't talk to me, so I had to tell her maid I had some plans to talk to her about, and when she came to the telephone, the

  only plan I had was to get out of Dung Chan and just do construction, so I told her that." He shrugged again. "She was not impressed."

  "You told her you were getting out."

  "Well, how could I know she'd be talking to Pan Chao?"

  "If not Pan Chao, someone else. People talk to people and soon everyone knows
everything. Did you tell her anything else?"

  "No. Only that I was getting out."

  "More than enough. Well, we have very little time; the two of them will clean out your office as soon as Wu Yi talks to Chao. So now we must put this together. Come, hurry."

  "Where are we going?"

  "Home. Miranda and I want you to have dinner with us. We will talk there."

  Sheng collapsed into his chair. ''Miranda and I — ?"

  "We can talk in the car. I told you; I want to leave. Now."

  "You are not in enough trouble already? Now it is Miranda and I? What do you think you are doing?"

  "I hope I am making a life that will be good for all of us. Sheng, I will not wait."

  "All of us," Sheng muttered, but he followed his father out of the conference room, to his office where Li smffed papers into a briefcase, and then to the car. "I will drive tonight," Li told his driver, and when they had pulled away from the curb, he said to Sheng, "First we pick up Miranda at her hotel. You will be polite to her. I am not asking you to like her, not right away, but I am saying that she deserves courtesy."

  "Are you going to America with her?"

  "I do not know what will happen. I want to take care of your partners and then perhaps I will have time to think about it."

  "You've thought about it already."

  "I will not talk about it tonight."

  "I just want to know if—"

  "I said I would not talk about it. Is that clear or must I find another way to say it?"

  "I need you here." The words sounded strangled, but Li was sure he had heard correctly.

  "We will work everything out," he said quietly. They drove in silence, until they mmed into Wangfujing. "One more thing," he said as they approached the Palace Hotel. "We will speak English tonight."

  Sheng nodded. As they stopped in front of the hotel, and saw Miranda waiting, he stepped from the car, shook hands with her, saying "Good evening," in perfect English, and sat in back, so that she could sit with Li.

  Li and Miranda looked at each other, awkward with the strangeness of his son in the car. "I'm glad to see you," Li said, speaking with his eyes on the traffic. "Did you finish your work today?"

  "All but the signing of the contracts, tomorrow morning. Everyone was very friendly."

  "And warm?"

  She laughed, and Li thought. Well, so we have started out with a private joke. That will tell Sheng a great deal.

  "And did that take all day?" he asked.

  "No, we finished at three. I went to the silk market and had a wonderful time. What a marvelous place that is! I found presents for everyone. You would have been proud of me: I actually did some bargaining and it worked."

  "I am always proud of you. Did you buy a gift for yourself?"

  "No, I ran out of time, but it didn't matter because I was having so much fun buying for everyone else."

  "Well, if you will look in my briefcase, there is a flat box, black with silver writing."

  Miranda looked at him in surprise. He knew it was mostly because he was making Sheng a witness to their closeness, and, trapped in gridlock at an intersection near Beihai Park, he turned to smile at her, telling her without words that he loved her. Her answering smile was a little uncertain, as she felt him drawing her ever more deeply into his life, further from her own.

  As she opened the box, Sheng leaned forward, no longer pretending that he could not hear or see what went on in the front seat. He let out a small grunt of admiration when he saw the scarf. Miranda held it up, running the heavy silk through her fingers, letting it fall against her jade bracelet. "How lovely it is. I saw some of these at the market but they're so large and—" She bit off the last word.

  "More expensive than some of the others," Li said casually, and then the traffic began to move, and he drove on.

  Miranda folded the scarf diagonally and put it around her shoulders, knotting it loosely in front. Its autumn colors were bright against the deep burgundy of her blouse; the jade bracelet floated above it like a pale moon. "A painting," Miranda murmured. "Thank you. You bring me so much beauty."

  "As you do me." They fell silent, Li concentrating on the traffic and gripping the steering wheel to contain a growing exhilaration. They were together in his car, the three of them, such a perfect picture of a family that it made its own reality, and consumed him. Whatever else they had to deal with, this feeling, so like the one he had had with his

  daughter and granddaughter, was enough, for the moment, to give him hope.

  At home, he was aware of Sheng's sharp eyes watching Miranda move about with easy familiarity, hanging her jacket behind a screen, setting her briefcase on a bench in the reception room, leading the way to the kitchen. Li waited for him to make some comment, but he said nothing, and Li admired his control. He will not do anything to cause trouble. He is worried, and he needs me.

  "Would you tell me about your son?" Miranda asked Sheng as they worked in the kitchen. The three of them were at the long wooden counter, cutting, chopping, slicing, stirring. They had rolled up their sleeves. They wore white aprons.

  "He is very smart," Sheng said, trying to cut celery slices on an angle; a kitchen was foreign territory to him. "Extraordinary for his age."

  Miranda, making paper-thin slices of pork tenderloin, smiled. "Is he reading now?"

  Sheng talked at length, and the more easily he talked the more clumsy were his slices. But Miranda and Li, with one quick shared glance, said nothing. Sheng was having a fine time; what could be more important than that?

  "And he likes to sit in my lap and have me read to him," Sheng said, concluding a long list of Rongji's admirable qualities. "Some people say I should insist that he read by himself, but—"

  "Nonsense, you should read to him," said Miranda. "He has a lifetime to read by himself; right now it is something you can share: a way of showing love."

  Sheng's eyes rested on her fully for the first time. "You really think that?"

  "Anything you do together is good. A boy needs a father; he needs strength to lean against, and trust and reassurance to carry inside him as he grows up and faces difficult decisions."

  Sheng's face was brooding. "And where is your children's father?"

  "He died many years ago."

  "So they grew up with no father. Are they angry about that?"

  "Angry? At whom?"

  "At him. For leaving them."

  "They were at first; they were very young. But when they understood that he had no choice, they were sad, but not angry."

  Sheng swept the celery slices onto a plate, retrieved those that had fallen to the floor, then began to slice green onions. "What is your house like?"

  Miranda answered his questions, and Li listened, organizing the

  cooking until everything was finished and they sat at the table at the end of the kitchen.

  "This is nice," Sheng said. "I never cook, you know, but I liked it."

  "We enjoy it," Li said, which, he knew, revealed as much of his relationship with Miranda as anything else. He sat at the table and served pea shoots with shiitake mushrooms. "We must talk about Chao and Enh."

  "Would you like me to leave?" Miranda asked.

  "No, why would you?" asked Sheng.

  Li felt a shock of surprise and pleasure, but he said only, "Yes, I promised Miranda that she would know what we plan. But we can't plan anything unless you've definitely decided that you're finished with your partners. Are you? Or have you thought that perhaps you'll stay with them, after all?"

  "Stay—? No, how can I? I would have to betray you, and I won't do that. Besides, they don't trust me anymore; they think I'm not good for anything except times when they can use me, and that isn't... that isn't a partnership."

  "There are others who have more confidence in you," Li said, and he saw Sheng's shoulders straighten. Yes, he thought, give him high expectations to live up to, and he'll do it. "Well, then, I have some ideas about ways to trap Chao and Enli, a
nd keep you clear of them, but first I need—"

  "Is this room bugged?" Sheng asked suddenly.

  Miranda turned pale, looking around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.

  "No," said Li. "I had it checked two days ago."

  "Checked?" Miranda echoed.

  "It seemed like a good idea. Of course the phone is tapped," he said casually to Sheng.

  "Of course. And your mail?"

  "Opened and read; I'm sure they find it boring. Now, I need some information. Who rents the offices you use for. .. what is your company's name?"

  "Dung Chan. And Pan Chao rents them."

  "Good. And where does he do his banking?"

  *The Beijing Bank."

  "In his own name?"

  "No, under Dung Chan."

  "And Meng Enli?"

  "I don't know which bank he uses. And his name isn't on the office rental. Chao did almost everything."

  "Well, if we get Chao with a big enough net, it may trap Enli, too. Now, this is what you must do. You still have a key to your office?"

  "Yes. Unless they've had the locks changed."

  "That is why we must hurry. They will. So, tonight you will go to Pan Chao's office and leave copies of the documents he planted in my office and here at home."

  "But your name is in them, and your signature."

  "I made copies today, replacing my name with his wherever it appeared. Now you will forge his signature; you've seen it often enough, and of course you have letters, documents signed by him."

  "Yes, of course, but—"

  "And when you have signed them all, spread them loosely at the back of one of his desk drawers. The letter calling for a demonstration during the American president's visit should be on top. Make sure that deposit slips from the Beijing Bank are also there. You can do that?"

  Sheng's eyes were wide. "This is not like you, to think of these things. To do them."

  "This is the way my generation runs to keep up with yours. I am not proud of it. You can do it?"

  "Yes, I'll go there about two or two-thirty. No one will be there."

  "Good. Now we need some other people. Miranda, you will help with this?"

  Her eyes were somber, and he wanted to reach out to her, to tell her that he was not like this, that he was doing something he had never done before and wished he did not have to do, now or ever.