“Shit,” I said.
Between outcries, Mei said, “Speak Mandarin.”
Tom’s e-mail had told me nothing I didn’t already know. I had noticed that I was being watched months before, or soon after the surveillance began. I assumed it was routine, not worth reporting, because I had been forewarned that Chinese eyes would be watching me as a matter of course. I had been told to keep my tradecraft sharp by exercising its rules at all times, so I did what I could to be the Mr. Goodspy I was being paid to be. I studied faces in the crowd in case I ever saw one of them again. This might seem like a hopeless undertaking in China, but in fact the Chinese look no more alike—and no more unalike—than any other people with the exception of Americans, whose five centuries of interbreeding has produced an almost infinite number of countenances. The French, for example, have eight or nine faces to go around, the Germans, the Italians, the Indians, and the Arabs roughly the same number. The Han have only a few more than that. There are subtle variations, of course, but in order to remember a face you have only to recognize its category and remember a variation or two in order to know whether you are looking at a person you have seen before.
It was soon after Mei and I got together that I noticed men and women whose faces I soon began to recognize had taken up positions outside my apartment building. There were twelve of them who worked two-hour shifts as three-person teams. The group watching me was composed of professionals. Seldom did I see the same three faces on the same team, and when they followed me, or followed Mei and me when we were together, the faces changed as they were replaced every block or two by folks from the other two teams. Like almost everyone else in Shanghai, they talked nonstop on cell phones, presumably to each other or a controller. As I was not engaged in espionage and had nothing to hide except a Han girlfriend who had little interest in hiding, I did not mention the surveillance to Mei and she did not remark on it, though it’s hard to believe that anyone as wide-awake as she was could have failed to notice. If she wasn’t worried, I supposed I had nothing to fear. It was fun in its way.
Headquarters took it more seriously. I heard from Tom again within the week. He told me that the Cardinals were burning up the National League central division, and were in first place with a 7.5-game lead. This hand of wild cards decoded as an instruction to meet a Headquarters man (“first place”) who wore a red necktie (“burning”) at noon (7 + 5 = 12) on Wednesday next (“central division”) at the bar of the Marriott Hotel (“National League”) and to use a certain recognition phrase (“game.”)
I was followed to the rendezvous as usual, but as far as I could see, no one followed me inside the hotel. At 12:17 P.M. on Wednesday, seventeen minutes after the meeting time dictated by the wild card, a man in a wrinkled blue blazer and a red necktie approached me in the bar of the designated hotel. He was fortyish, tall, skinny, balding, bespectacled, unsmiling. He wore a Joe Stalin mustache.
He said, “Ever been to Katmandu?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I’m hoping to get there someday.”
That nonsensical exchange was the recognition code I had been told to use in case of a clandestine meeting with one of our people. The stranger shook hands with me, pressing a fingernail into my wrist. If this too was part of the ritual, nobody had forewarned me, but I responded by squeezing his hand until I saw pain in his eyes. He let go. Dead eyes. The bartender approached. I had already drunk my Coke. The stranger waved him away and said, “Follow me. Don’t walk with me. Follow me.”
He was a fast walker, so I did follow him as he led me through jammed back streets that smelled of sweat and bad breath and rang with shouts to get out of the way. At last we came to a restaurant and went inside. It was almost as noisy and crowded as the streets. He was well known to the host and the waiters, who greeted him with happy grins and bursts of Shanghainese. I was a little shocked by this reception because in my newborn way, I had the idea that seasoned operatives kept themselves to themselves and faithfully practiced tradecraft at all times. For all I knew, that was exactly what this guy thought he was doing.
When we were alone, I said, “What do I call you?”
“Try Steve.”
“I’m—”
“Nameless.”
The host showed us to a table. He hovered for quite a long time while a smiling Steve bantered with him, ordering lunch for both of us. His mood changed as soon as the fellow departed. He looked me over with his unwavering lifeless eyes, which were slightly magnified by the lenses of his glasses. Beer was brought, then an appetizer. The food was very good. Figuring that Steve didn’t care whether I was enjoying my lunch, I didn’t bother to comment. Nor did I ask any questions or otherwise say a word. It was obvious that Steve was not happy to be wasting his time on an Üntermensch like me. Skinny or not, he was an industrious eater, and when the host came by after each course to ask how he had liked it, Steve reverted to his jollier self, smiling through his mustache. He spoke not a word to me.
At last we came to the end of the meal. I expected that we would now retire to a soundproof room hidden inside a safe house and have a serious talk, but instead, Steve decided to have the discussion right where we were. He had a really loud voice, the ear-splitting kind you hear bellowing at the umpire at baseball games. He talked freely, as if we were indeed in an unbuggable bubble in the basement of an American embassy. The adjoining tables were inches away. This didn’t really matter, since everyone else was shouting, too, and maybe because the adage that no one eavesdrops on a loudmouth but strains to hear a whisperer applied in this place. The restaurant was ostentatiously humble but in truth it was upscale, full of sleek, expensively dressed Han who almost certainly went to college in the United States and spoke excellent English.
He said, “So you think you’re being watched.”
“You could say that.”
“It’s your job to say it, kid. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” He spoke with his mouth full.
“Because I see the same twelve faces every time I go out.”
“Twelve?”
“Four rotating teams of three.”
“Wow. You can remember twelve Chinese faces? Describe them.”
I did as he asked. He went back to his fish, all the while staring at me out of that mask. Flecks of carp had lodged in his mustache.
This man was an ass, or for some reason wanted me to think that he was an ass. His behavior, I knew, was meant to discomfit, to intimidate, to gain the upper hand. I had learned about the technique at training camp from a teacher of interrogation and agent-handling methods who took these tricks as seriously as Steve seemed to do. The instructor believed it was a good idea on first contact to let the agent think he was smarter than his case officer. This made it easier to manipulate the agent. I wanted to get out of there, to get myself fired, to go back to Mei. I could teach English like the other Americans did. I was tempted to throw some money disdainfully on the table as my share of the bill and leave with dignity. But even then, green as I was, I had more sense than that. Why would Mei be interested in an English teacher? And even if she was interested, she would be lost to me because her handlers would certainly assign her to another, more productive case.
Finally Steve spoke. “I am instructed to ask you a question and give you a message,” he said. “The question is, Why do you think your dirty dozen are watching you?”
“Who else would they be watching?”
“Very good question,” he said. “You should think about it, turn it over in your mind, see if there’s anyone in your life who’s more interesting than you.”
I said, “I’ll work on that.”
Steve ignored me. I took this as permission to speak. I said, “If that’s the question, what’s the message?”
“Good news,” he said. “CI is interested in you.”
He waited—intent, almost smiling—for my reaction. I probably blanched. CI? Counterintelligence was interested in me? My bravado wavered.
CI was Headquarters’s bad dream. Its job was to know everything about everybody. However, nobody was allowed to know anything about it, including its methods and its success rate. Night and day, in peace and war, the men and women of the counterintelligence division were on the lookout not only for enemy spies, but also for traitors, for sleepers, for the inexplicably nervous, for spendthrifts who couldn’t explain where their money came from. They tailed guys who chase women, women who sleep around, homosexuals, neurotic virgins. Their job was to finger the bad guy inside every good guy and banish the sinner to outer darkness. For CI, no holds were barred, no one was above suspicion except themselves, and nobody had the power to do unto them as they did unto others.
Now Steve was letting me know these demons were after me. Was it because I had committed fornication? Or was it something I had omitted to do? I was unlikely to find out tonight. Steve continued to hold me in his contemptuous gaze.
I said, “Gee, that’s interesting. Did they tell you why they’re interested in some Insignificant McNobody like me?”
“Interested in some what?” Steve said.
“A joke. Forget it.”
“You think this is a joke?”
“No, but you’re making me nervous. When I’m nervous I make jokes.” I thought I owed him that much obsequiousness.
“You should try to overcome that,” Steve said. “Answer the original question. Why do you think it’s you who’s being surveilled?”
“I thought I’d already explained that. Because these people follow me wherever I go.”
“You haven’t gotten beyond that simple explanation?”
“I guess not. What’s the complex explanation?”
“You’ve got a girl, right?”
“Yes.”
“Name?”
“Mei.”
“Mei what, or I guess I should say What Mei. I want her full name, or the name she said was her name.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Have you asked?”
“That’s not the way we work. We ask each other no questions.”
“She doesn’t know your name either?”
“Unless she’s a Guoanbu asset on assignment, no.”
“How did you meet?”
“She crashed her bike into mine.”
“How long ago?”
“Months.”
“You saw no need to report this?”
“I reported the accident to my pen pal and submitted an expense account item for the new bike I bought her.”
“How much?”
“About a thousand, U.S.”
Steve whistled. “But not a word since?”
“No.”
“You really are something, kid. No wonder CI is interested in you.”
He was sneering. The temptation to make things worse was great, but I resisted it. No response from Steve, but I was used to that by now. The silence was heavy, Steve’s manner was disdainful, and Steve such a shit that summary dismissal from the service did not seem to be an unlikely next move.
I said, “So what now?”
“Carry on,” Steve said. “Change nothing. Be your usual harmless self. But be careful, my friend. You’ve got yourself into something you may not be able to get yourself out of.”
“And let me guess. I’ll get no help.”
He pointed a forefinger. “You got it. Lucky you.”
He called for the check, paid it with a big tip, kidded around with the host. Then he stood up as if to go. I stood up too. I was taller than Steve, and angrier.
I said, “Is that the message you said you were instructed to give me?”
“No, that was just me taking pity,” Steve said. “The message is, you may be traveling soon. Your pen pal will provide the details.”
And then he walked out.
3
I had cycled to my meeting with Steve and when I emerged from the hotel garage, wheeling my bike, there they were, well back in the crowd, two men and a woman, ready to leap into the saddle. It was five or six kilometers from the hotel to my place, so they switched riders every click or so. In their clockwork way they always did this just as I turned a corner and they were out of sight for the moment. Then they would pop up again in my mirrors. The bikes were always the same, so a keen-eyed operative like myself was able to keep track of the familiar faces in my wake. Taking advantage of Steve’s expert advice to just be my dim-witted fictitious self, I made no attempt to shake them.
It was almost dark when I reached my building. I was warmed by the thought that Mei would soon be home. It had been a hot day. I was sweaty but Mei liked me that way, or so she said—every once in a while she took one of my smelly T-shirts home with her as a nightgown—so I decided not take a shower. She usually arrived at about seven for my Mandarin lesson, and then we would have supper and a couple of beers, and then Mei would test my Mandarin again, and tonight we would watch a DVD of Destry Rides Again I had bought on the street because, as I planned to tell her, no one can understand U.S. English properly unless she can unscramble the lyrics when Marlene Dietrich sings “See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have.” That was the routine. I liked everything about it. I liked everything about the life that Mei and I were living—even the tiny pre-Mao apartment I had rented as an element of my cover as a poor, feckless if somewhat overage student. The walls bulged, the concrete floor had waves in it so that the furniture tipped, the sputtering plumbing had air pockets, the electricity came and went.
Waiting for Mei, listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing the blues, I fell asleep. I woke at nine. No Mei. This was a disappointment, but I felt no stab of panic. Sometimes, as when her period started or she had an impulse to skip me for a night, she just didn’t show up. I had no phone number for her, no address, no true name, no hope of finding her in a city of twenty-three million in which maybe a million of the females were named Mei and the Mei I knew was almost certainly not named Mei. I waited another hour, spent repeating my memorization for the day (a passage from Laozi’s Daodejing) into a recorder. By now I was hungry. Because I had no refrigerator, Mei always brought supper with her, collecting exactly my half of the cost before we ate, and since I had eaten the leftovers for breakfast, there was no food in the house. I decided to go out. It would serve Mei right if she arrived and found me gone, though I fervently hoped she’d hang around until I got back.
The night was almost as suffocating as the day had been. Chemical odors, so strong that you could almost see their colors, wafted on a sluggish breeze. The endless waves of humanity rolled by more slowly than usual. On this night they looked a little different, smelled a little different, as if wilted after a day in the glare of the sun. Something else was different—there were no familiar faces. I searched the crowd to make sure I had not missed them. They just weren’t there. Why? My watchers had been with me earlier in the day. They had never before deserted me. Had they decided I wasn’t going anywhere tonight, and gone home? Had they been replaced by a new bunch whose faces I would have to learn? Were they shadowing Steve? I felt a certain unease. Breath gathered in my lungs. Life as a spook under cover in a hostile country is nagged by the fear that the other side knows something you don’t know and cannot possibly know no matter how well you speak the language or how much at home you tell yourself you feel. You are an intruder. You can never be a fish swimming in their sea, you are always the pasty-white legs and arms thrashing on the surface with a tiny unheeded cut on your finger. Meanwhile the shark swims toward the scent of blood from miles away. At any moment you can be pulled under, eaten, digested, excreted, eaten by something else and then something else again until there is nothing left of the original you except a single cell suspended in the heaving darkness.
Oh so melancholy, and no Mei to laugh at me. However, the fact remained that I was hungry, so I set off into the night and walked, only half conscious of where I was going, until I found myself in front of a noodle place Mei and I liked. She called it the Dirty Shirt after the pro
prietor’s soup-stained singlet. I ordered a bowl of noodles and slurped them down. One doesn’t savor fast food in China, where everyone except the Westernized elite, seldom seen in this neighborhood, takes care of bodily needs as unceremoniously as possible and gets right back to business. I paid and left and went into another place a few blocks away and gulped a tepid beer. Still no sign of my watchers. When I emerged I saw a face or two I might or might not have seen earlier. I memorized these possibles and decided to take a longer walk to see if they were still with me when I got to where I was going. My plan was to travel in a circle that would bring me back to my building in about an hour. Because there was little elbow room on the street, I had to travel at the same speed as the shouting, spitting multitude in which I was embedded. Nor was there much chance of using shop windows as rear-view mirrors because there were few shop windows and most of them were dark. Now and then I crossed the street so I could look behind me, and sometimes I thought, though I did not really trust my eyes, that I spotted one of the suspects passing through the glow spilling out the door of the open door of an all-night shop. The street lighting on main arteries in this part of Shanghai was dim, and even dimmer in the side streets, which appeared as mere slits of darkness between the gimcrack buildings. I gave them a wide berth. The Chinese plunged into them as if they were wearing miner’s caps.
I was almost home when they—whoever they were—made the move. Two men in front of me slowed their pace, the two on either side moved in and seized my arms. They were big fellows for Chinese, not as tall as me but solid meat. There were four of them until suddenly, as I stepped back, thinking to make a break for it, I realized they were six as the two behind me moved heavily against me. I felt a mild sting in the vicinity of my right kidney, then the heat of an injection. I lurched as if trying to break free. The phalanx squeezed in tighter. I might as well have been nailed in a box and there was as little point in shouting for help as if I really were in a coffin. I began to feel faint as the injection took effect. Would it kill me? It seemed possible. I was losing my senses one by one—first to go was touch, then hearing, then sight, and finally taste as my tongue and lips went numb. I could still smell. How odd, I thought in the instant before I lost contact with my brain. In Afghanistan, the last time I thought I was dead, everything stopped at once. I had never imagined that there might be more than one way to cease to exist.
The Shanghai Factor Page 2