by Don Winslow
After a sufficiently awkward silence, Chen said, “This is very good. Warming. Thank you.”
“I can hardly accept gratitude for your hospitality.”
Chen was disconcerted at the thought that the visitor might be under the misapprehension that the hotel stay was complimentary. He got right to it. “But you are paying for your room.”
“Still,” Nicholai said, remembering now how blunt the Chinese could be about business matters. So unlike the Japanese, who would have engaged in ten minutes of circumlocution to subtly inform the guest that he was, after all, a paying guest.
Chen looked relieved. “There is a dinner tonight in your honor.”
“You needn’t go to the trouble and expense.”
“It is already organized.”
“I look forward to it.”
Chen nodded. “Colonel Yu, aide to General Liu himself, will be your host.”
General Liu Dehuai was a national hero, one of the key generals on the Long March and the founder of the legendary 8th Route Army. Until recently the commander of Chinese forces in Korea, he was now minister of defense. Liu would have to approve the deal for the sale of the weapons through “Guibert” to the Viet Minh. The fact that he was sending an apparently key aide to evaluate Guibert on his very first night in the country was significant.
And uncharacteristic of what Nicholai knew of the Chinese way of doing business. Typically, they would let a foreign guest cool his heels — easy to do in Beijing in January — for days if not weeks, occupying him with low-level subordinates and endless sightseeing, before getting down to business.
Liu was in a hurry to do this deal.
“I’m honored,” Nicholai said.
Chen stood up. “I am sure you are tired and would like to rest.”
Nicholai saw him to the door.
He waited five minutes, then put his coat and hat on again and went back out into the cold.
18
ALTHOUGH NICHOLAI HAD PORED over maps and aerial photographs, they could not substitute for on-the-ground knowledge, and he wanted to orient himself to the city. His survival might depend on an immediate decision as to what alley to turn into, what street to avoid, and there would be no time for indecision or hesitation.
Beijing in the early days of 1952 was a city of contradictions, divided between spacious governmental sections and the narrow alleys—hutongs — on which most of the people lived. The heart of Beijing was the Forbidden City — as its name indicated, closed off to the general public for most of its thousand-year existence. Now that the Communist government had moved in and turned many of its buildings into offices and residences, most of it was still “forbidden” most of the time.
The “other” Beijing that surrounded the Forbidden City was — or used to be — a vibrant, active, cosmopolitan city of some two million people, with open-air markets, streets of fashionable shops, small parks and squares where jugglers, magicians, and other buskers performed.
The Beijingren, the natives, had the same tough, jaded, superior attitude of the residents of all major cities. To them, Beijing was its own universe, and they were not entirely wrong. Everyone had come to the imperial city — not only all manners of Chinese, but, for good or ill, the rest of the world as well. So the sophisticated Beijing citizens knew all the varied cultures of China, Japan, and Europe. A well-heeled Beijingren might well have eaten in French restaurants, bought suits from Italian tailors, watches from German craftsmen. Most of the modern Beijingren had worn British suits or French dresses and danced to American music.
Still, any good Beijingren, from the impoverished night-soil collectors to the richest merchant, would proudly proclaim the superiority of Beijing culture itself— its fabled imperial buildings, its bridges and parks and gardens, centuries-old restaurants and teahouses, its theaters and opera houses, its circuses and acrobats, its poets and writers.
Beijing was a sophisticated imperial capital when London and Paris were little more than insect-infested swamps. Of all the European capitals, only Rome could rival Beijing in terms of antiquity, sophistication, and power.
The Beijingren had seen it all. Within the living memory of many of its citizens, Beijing had survived invasions from the French, the Germans, the Nationalists, the Japanese, and now the Communists. It had adjusted, evolved, and survived.
Many observers were surprised that Mao chose the city, with all its imperial associations, for his capital. Nicholai thought he chose Beijing for exactly those associations. No ruler could claim power in China without those trappings — without possession of the Temple of Heaven, no emperor could claim the Mandate of Heaven, and Nicholai knew that Mao, for all his Communist propaganda, saw himself as the new emperor. Indeed, he had quickly shut himself up in the Forbidden City, and was rarely seen outside it.
The Beijingren knew this. They had known many emperors, had seen dynasties rise and fall, watched them build monuments to themselves and then watched them crumble, and they knew that the Communist Dynasty was but one in a long line. Its time would come and its time would pass, but the city would endure.
But in what form, Nicholai wondered as he walked out the front entrance, up the street, and then turned right onto Chang’an. Mao had plans for the city and announced that he was going to transform it from “a city of consumption to a city of production.” Already blocks of old houses had been torn down to make room for new factories, narrow streets were being broadened to allow tanks to roll up and down, and Soviet architects — a perfectly oxymoronic phrase, in Nicholai’s opinion — were now busily designing sterile concrete housing units to replace the old courtyard houses that were the center of Beijing domestic life.
The courtyard walls lined the residential streets and hutongs, with only small doors opening onto the street. The doors opened onto another wall, and a visitor would have to go to the right or the left—a device that outfoxed evil spirits, which can only move in straight lines. Once around that wall, the space opened onto an interior courtyard, usually of pebbles or, in the richer homes, flagstone. The courtyard usually had a shade tree or two, and an open charcoal brazier for cooking during warmer weather. Depending on the wealth or poverty of the family, there was a single dwelling structure of one or two stories, perhaps with separate wings for the families of the sons. The Beijingren lived privately, quietly, and with great autonomy in these extended family units behind the walls.
This would never do for the control-obsessed Mao, who quickly condemned the desire for privacy as an “individualist” antisocial attitude. While waiting for the Soviets to complete their architectural atrocities, he attacked the courtyard houses on an organizational level, establishing “safety-keeping committees,” in which neighbors were encouraged to snoop on neighbors. Black-clad squads of “night people” — mostly erstwhile burglars — used their former skills to prowl around rooftops and listen for the sounds of “bourgeois activities” such as the click of mah-jongg tiles, the trilling of a pet songbird, or for antirevolutionary whisperings and conspiracies.
The assault on urban life was also conducted on public spaces. Theaters and teahouses were closed, street performers harassed for licenses, snack vendors increasingly forced into state-run collectives. Even the rickshaw drivers who once jammed the city’s avenues were being gradually phased out as “imperial relics,” symbolic of “human slavery.” It didn’t happen all at once, but it was happening, and the bustle that gave the city so much of its charm was being muted into fearful stillness, in which every activity was watched and heard.
Indeed, Nicholai discerned the man who instantly fell in behind him before he even left the hotel lobby. China was poor in most resources save population, so the intelligence service could easily afford to leave a man at the hotel with the sole responsibility of keeping an eye on “Guibert.”
It was good to know.
Nicholai wanted to ascertain the amount of surveillance that he would encounter, so in that sense he was “trolling for tails,” as Haverf
ord would put it. Nicholai thought of it differently, of course, and in terms of Go. A basic principle of the game was that motion attracts motion. The movement of a single stone on an area of the board generally provokes a move from the opponent. So it was, he discovered, in the espionage game, at which he realized he was a neophyte.
Pretending not to notice the surveillance, he crossed Chang’an into the old Legation Quarter, past the old Russian Legation building, which the current Soviet delegation had reoccupied. Using only his peripheral vision, he scanned the front of the building, where the security, sitting in Russian sedans, was clearly visible.
He kept his pace up, as if bored with the Legation Quarter and intent on heading west to Tiananmen Square.
He walked around the vast square, chaotic with construction — his watchdog doing a good job of staying with him without getting too close — and then turned north toward the great tiled roofs of the Forbidden City.
His tail backed off then and turned him over to a second man, so Nicholai knew that the surveillance of Guibert was something of a priority. The tall roofline of the Imperial Palace, easily recognizable from a hundred photographs, loomed in front of him as he looked for a place to kill Voroshenin that would offer the requisite time and space as well as offer an avenue of escape.
Nicholai had hoped that the walls of the Forbidden City might offer such a location, but then he realized that the area was of course far too heavily guarded now that Mao had taken up residence there and many of the buildings had been turned into housing for high officials or government offices.
Nicholai went into the palace, now a museum, to get warm and firm up his tourist credentials, and lingered on the grounds (if one could be said to “linger” on this bitterly cold afternoon) before leaving the Forbidden City. Observing that he had now acquired an additional tail, he turned east and walked across a lovely bridge over the southern reaches of Beihai Lake, frozen and silver against the white willow trees along its banks.
It would not do to walk too confidently, so Nicholai assumed the gait and pace of a man who is slightly, albeit unconcernedly, lost. He paused at the corner of Xidan Street, pretended to consider his route, and then “decided” to turn north. His tails switched off, one lingering as he fussed with his scarf, the other coming ahead to pick up the trail.
It was enough for Nicholai to get a good look at their faces without being noticed. He dubbed one of them the Greyhound for his tall, slim build and foot speed, and the other Xiao Smiley, an ironic reference to his dour expression. To be fair, Nicholai thought, no one would be very happy to be pulled from a nice warm hotel lobby onto the freezing streets.
Nicholai upped his pace to see if the Greyhound would keep up with him, or whether there was another agent to turn him over to. The Greyhound quickened his steps, although he was careful to stay far behind Nicholai as he went through the South Gate into Beihai Park.
The park was lovely, Nicholai thought, and represented the very best of Asian landscaping art. Built around the oval of Beihai Lake, its walkways wended through graceful rows of willow trees, impeccable placements of stones, and perfectly located pavilions. Every curve offered a new perspective, and the whole thing came close to achieving the elusive quality that the Japanese called shibumi — understated elegance.
In fact, in winter the park resembled a distinguished elderly lady, spare and yet beautiful, who preserves her posture and dignity even in the knowledge of cold death. A man more verbally talented than I, Nicholai thought, might compose a poem about her.
Walking northward along the eastern edge of the lake, he came to a bridge that spanned the lake onto an island. Nicholai read the small sign that pointed toward the Jade Isle and stepped onto the gracefully arched bridge.
He paused at the apex to look over the lake and see if the Greyhound followed him. The Greyhound was smart and strode right past him, never even glancing as he continued onto the island. It was the smart move, Nicholai thought, anticipating that I will keep going onto the Jade Isle, but still allowing him to double back if I change my mind. Lazily scanning the scenery, he saw Xiao Smiley stop and linger in a pavilion near the base of the bridge.
Nicholai turned and crossed the bridge onto the Jade Isle, which was dominated by a tall white tower on a small rise in the center of the thickly wooded island. A narrow footpath flanked by trees and shrubs led up to the tower, identified by a plaque as, not surprisingly, the White Pagoda, built in 1651 to honor the visit of the Dalai Lama.
Ironic, Nicholai thought, considering that the Chinese had just invaded Tibet.
The tower itself was closed. Nicholai strolled around the base of the tower, which, with its curved lines and additional “steeple” with a gold Buddhist symbol on top, more resembled Tibetan than Chinese architecture.
He finished his circuit of the tower and then took a narrow curving path down through the trees to the southern edge of the Jade Isle, where the Bridge of Perfect Wisdom crossed back onto the main part of the park. From the bridge he noticed small docks on the islands, and others across the pond, and realized that on less inclement days one could hire a boat to access the island.
The Jade Isle has possibilities, Nicholai thought, particularly at night, but luring Voroshenin there would be a problem. Schooled in paranoia by the Stalinist purges, the Russian would not easily be lured anywhere, and if he is the chess player he is reputed to be, he will be quick to sniff out a ploy.
But it was a location to keep in mind, and at least Nicholai had fulfilled the immediate task of allowing himself to be spotted by Haverford’s spies in the White Pagoda.
19
HAVERFORD SAT and watched Solange pack.
It didn’t take long — she actually owned very few things. The rest of it — the books, the art, the fine kitchen equipment, even most of her wardrobe — had been bought and paid for by the Company and would be sold.
The bottom line was, after all, the bottom line.
She’d taken her eviction stoically, only putting up a small argument.
“But where will I go?” she asked when Haverford came to shut down the house.
He shrugged his lack of an answer. The gesture evoked what they both knew — she’d been hired for a certain job, for a certain period of time. The job was over and the time was up, and she should have thought of her future earlier.
And her concern was a bit disingenuous. Certainly she knew that a woman of her beauty, charm, and doubtless sexual talent would always find a man willing to pay for them. She had done it before and would do it again, and the money he had paid would be more than sufficient to tide her over.
“And how will Nicholai find me?”
As a piece of acting it was beautiful. I was almost convinced for a second there, Haverford thought, smiling at himself and recalling what his father had said after rescuing him from a youthful entanglement with a Broadway dolly that he thought he was in love with.
“All actresses are whores,” Haverford Senior had pronounced, “and all whores are actresses.”
This one certainly is, Haverford thought, watching Solange dab at her eyes with a handkerchief. “How will Nicholai find me?” He didn’t enlighten her that, in the unlikely case that her emotions were genuine, she needn’t trouble herself over them.
Now she folded a negligee into her suitcase, paused, and trained her remarkable eyes on Haverford. “Perhaps you and I, we could make an arrangement?”
He had to admit that he was tempted. What man wouldn’t be? She was incredibly beautiful and would no doubt be a revelation in bed, but there was no way that he could justify her continued presence in the house to the cold-blooded Company number-crunchers.
“We have an arrangement, my darling,” he answered. “You performed a service — brilliantly — and I paid you.”
“You treat me like a whore,” Solange said, snapping the suitcase shut.
Haverford saw no need for a response. In any case, he had just received word from his sources in Beijing that Hel h
ad made his rendezvous on the Jade Isle and been duly spotted from the White Pagoda.
20
MEN ARE FOOLS, Solange thought as she left the house in Tokyo.
A few tears, the sparkle of an eye, the twitch of a hip, and their brains are as easily turned off as an electrical switch.
Haverford was smarter than most, but just as blind.
Like the rest, he sees what he wants to see and nothing more.
Nicholai, on the other hand …
Dommage.
What a shame.
21
THE PROBLEM WITH the “new” China, Yuri Voroshenin thought as he sipped a vodka and looked out his window at the Legation Quarter, is that there are no more prostitutes.
Which was damn inconvenient.
The “old” China threw no such obstacles between a man and his needs, to put it mildly. Shanghai, for instance, had some marvelous brothels. But the People’s Republic was ferociously bluestocking when it came to sexual matters, and all the pleasure girls had been swept off to factories or farms.
This was a damn poor allocation of resources and a gross violation of the economic precept of “highest and best use.”
Voroshenin remembered a different Beijing, the halcyon days of the 1920s and ‘30s when the Bada Hutongs of Tiangao, just south of Tiananmen Square, blossomed with “flowers and willows” and the old Xuanwu District’s narrow alleys teemed with teahouses, opium dens, opera theaters, and, of course, brothels.
Those were the nights when a man could go out and get a good dinner and a few drinks, take in an opera, and then attend to his less aesthetic tastes afterward, sometimes with one of the actresses he had seen onstage, or with an expensive courtesan who would serve tea, then sing an aria, and only later get down to business.
He’d even enjoyed the negotiations with the madams, who would have considered it a gross violation of decorum to offer her girls like menu items — instead, she would ask the customer for a “loan” to pay for household maintenance or some particular repair. It was all done with subtlety and style at places like the House of the Golden Flower or Little Fengxian’s.