The Shanghai Factor

by Charles McCarry

  I was surprised no one had ever hit him over the head with it, but again I was discreet enough to keep what I hoped was a poker face. Burbank was doing the same, of course, because his masklike mien seemed to be pretty much the only facial expression he had.

  “Now I want you to put cynicism aside for the moment,” he said, “and listen to what I have to say to you.”

  I lifted a hand an inch or so: be my guest. It was a disrespectful gesture. Burbank ignored the lèse-majesté and went on.

  “I want to put an idea into your head,” he said. “What happened to you in Shanghai is significant whether you think so or not or will admit it or not. This is just a proposal for you to consider, no need to say yes or no right now. I have something in mind for you. If you decide to do it, you alone will be the agent of your fate. You will have to be smart enough to get the job done and strong enough, callous enough to live with it. People might die, I will not lie to you. And in a sense you would have to give your life to it also. I don’t mean that it’s likely you’d die like the others, just that this project would take years, almost certainly many years.”

  “May I ask who the ones who are going to die might be?”

  “Enemies of mankind. You may think what happened the other night is trivial, but believe me when I tell you it is the seed of something that can be large indeed.”

  “Like what, exactly?”

  “You’ll know more when you need to know it. Nobody but you and me—nobody—will have knowledge of this operation. Ever. You will work for no one but me, report to no one but me, answer to no one but me.”

  I didn’t know what to say to all that, so for once I wasn’t tempted to say anything.

  For a long moment, neither did Burbank. Then he said, “Do you know what a dangle is?”

  “You bait a hook and hope the adversary takes the lure.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And I’m the lure?”

  “I’ve been looking for a long time for someone I thought could handle this, waiting for the opening,” Burbank said. “I believe you can handle it, and I also think no one else can.”

  He did? Talk about the chance of a lifetime. I said, “Why?”

  “Because you’re a good fit,” Burbank said. “Because you keep interesting company. Because mainly you tell the truth if you know it, you’re brave even if you choose to deny it, you have a good ear for difficult languages, you’re arrogant but you try not to let it show. People trust you—especially a certain kind of woman. Most importantly, if I understand what you’ve half-told me, you seem to have died at least twice, or thought you did, and you didn’t care. That’s a rare thing. There’s one more reason, out of your past.”

  “Namely?”

  “You want to be the starting running back, as you deserve to be.”

  7

  I was out of Burbank’s office in seconds, out of the building in minutes. It was a Friday. Sally had told me as she took me down in the elevator that Burbank had mentioned that I might want to spend the weekend with my mother in Connecticut, then on Tuesday call a different number at a different hour. I called Mother on the way to the airport. Her voice rose by a tone or two when she heard my voice. For her this was the equivalent of a shriek of delight. She collected me at the train station. I was glad of the chance to be back in the country. Summer was coming in, everything was in leaf and color. I breathed more deeply than usual, as if inhaling my native air awakened some earlier self. Mother seemed glad enough to see me. She smiled at me, rose on tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled, as always, of expensive perfume and makeup. In the car she behaved as if I were home from school, asking no questions about where I had been or what I had seen in the last year and a half. She drove her coughing twenty-year-old Mercedes with competence. She talked about her forgetful sister, about the wretched political slough America had become with everyone, even the children, turning into bloody-minded bigots, about a grocery store (“It couldn’t be nicer!”) she had discovered across the state line in Massachusetts that had wonderful produce and excellent fish and very nice cheeses. She was still pretty and slim and dressed by Bergdorf. She had no news. She knew only six people in town by first and last name. Nearly everyone she had known had died or been locked up in a nursing home. She had lived alone since my stepfather died. His name did not arise. Nor did my natural father’s name, but he had been absent from her conversation for many years. It had taken her about three days after the funerals to forget her late husbands—probably even less time in my father’s case. Men died and ceased to be useful, women lived on. Once a protector could no longer protect, though he was still expected to provide, what was the use of thinking about him? As far as I knew she did not have lovers, but how would I know? Remembering the sounds of frolic that issued from the master bedroom when she and my stepfather were together, I reserved judgment.

  I soon fell in with Mother’s routine. By day I went for walks so as to breathe as much of the crystalline air as possible. In the evening we read a lot—companionably, each of us in a favorite chair under a good lamp, Mother with her Kindle, me with a thriller from long ago I found in my room. Since my stepfather’s departure, Mother had had no television set or radio. She disliked the news, abominated sitcoms and cop shows, thought that pop music was noise. The food was excellent. We made our own breakfasts, always the rule in this house, and a taciturn young woman, a recovering crack addict who had been a chef before she crashed, came in and made the other two meals and put the dishes in the dishwasher. A second woman, a cheerful Latina, came in daily, even on Sunday, and did the housework. On Monday, when Mother and I said good-bye, she patted my cheek. Her eyes were misty. This was not exactly a surprise. Though she had never said so, I knew she had affection for me in spite of the fact that I was my father’s child.

  Late Tuesday afternoon, from Reagan National Airport, I made the call I had been instructed to make at the minute I was supposed to make it. Same routine at the other end, but this time in Sally’s voice. She told me exactly where to wait for my ride. The car that came for me was a gleaming black Hyundai, the luxury model. Remembering the battered motorpool Chevy and Sally’s motorized garbage can, I didn’t think this could be my ride, but it was and it was as shipshape inside as out. The driver was Burbank himself, who maneuvered through rush-hour traffic to Arlington National Cemetery without speaking a word and parked in an isolated lot. It was too hot to walk among the headstones on this day in early June. Leaving the engine running so that the air-conditioning would go on working, he cleared his throat and in his rumbling basso asked the question.

  “Yes or no?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  Burbank said, “You understand what you’re getting yourself into?”

  “I know what you told me.”

  He handed me an envelope. I didn’t open it.

  He said, “Go back to Shanghai. Finish your language immersion. Will a year be enough?”

  “A lifetime probably wouldn’t be enough, but my Mandarin should get better if I can keep the teacher I have.”

  “On the basis of the benefits so far, why would you do anything else?”

  From another, larger envelope he handed me a blue-backed contract. “This changes your status from staff agent to contract agent,” he said. “From now on you’ll be working outside, under cover, on your own except for your case officer, me. The contract provides for a one-grade promotion, so you’ll be making a little more money. You’ll still receive overseas pay and the same allowances, so you should be rolling in dough. If you continue to do well, more promotions will follow. You can also be summarily dismissed, but that’s always been so. Read before signing.”

  The contract was addressed to me in my funny name, the one I had been assigned for internal use only after my swearing-in. I asked about retirement and medical benefits.

  “Nothing changes except the title. Contract agents cannot mingle with the people inside. In theory they cannot go inside. It will be as I told you
. No one but me even has a need to know who you are or what you’re up to. You’ll be alone in the world.”

  Just what I always wanted. I said, “One small question. What about the tenor and his friends?”

  “Next time you’ll see them coming.”

  “And?”

  “Evade or kill.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Everyone has a right to defend himself.”

  “I am unarmed and outnumbered.”

  “That may not always be the case. Buy what you need and expense it as taxi fares.”

  I read the contract twice and signed it. We talked a bit more. Burbank told me to stop e-mailing Tom Simpson and write to him, Burbank, instead, on the seventeenth day of every month. His name for this purpose was Bob Baxter—impromptu cover names like this one, don’t ask me why, almost always began with the same first letter of the owner’s true surname. In the envelope I found a list of new wild cards. Also my e-ticket and ATM and credit cards on a bank different from the one I had been using. I was to go back to Shanghai tonight and go on as before, living the life I had lived, playing the amiable dumb shit, hanging out with the Chinese, absorbing as much Mandarin as possible, staying away from other Americans and Europeans, especially Russians and Ukrainians and people like that.

  “Speaking Mandarin as well as you do, with your war experiences and the resentments they’ll assume those experiences generated, you’ll be a natural target, so somebody, even an American, may try to recruit you. Just laugh and tell them to get lost. And let me know in the next e-mail if this happens, with full wild card description of the spotter and his friend who makes the pitch.”

  “Any exceptions?”

  “Listen with an open mind to any Chinese who approaches you.”

  “And?”

  “Let me know immediately. The person who hired the tenor and the acrobats may try to befriend you. Will try, probably.”

  “And I’m supposed to welcome the overture?”

  “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” said Burbank.

  With that Burbank gave me a searching look, our first prolonged eye contact, and backed out of the parking space. It was a silent ride to the nearest Metro station, a silent parting. No wasted handshake, no “Good luck!”

  It wasn’t until Burbank had dropped me off and driven away that I realized I had neglected to ask what happened, what I was supposed to do, if he died before I did. He had transformed himself, I realized, into my only friend.

  8

  When I got back to Shanghai, I found no sign or scent of Mei. A ripple—come on, a tsunami of anxiety passed through me. I could tell she had been in my room after I left. The bed was made and all signs of bachelor disorder had vanished. She had sprayed the room with air freshener, a new touch. Did that mean she’d soon be back or that she had gone a step beyond wiping off her fingerprints and was erasing her own scent and that of the two of us, and this was good-bye forever? The second possibility seemed the more likely. Mei had a talent for exits. After six days without her I was very horny. But maybe she simply had had enough of the hairy ape. These thoughts were uppermost, but also I longed to speak Mandarin and had no one to talk to. My instincts told me she was gone. I’d never see her again. I had always expected this to happen—all those unasked questions, and maybe too much lust, had broken the back of our relationship. There would be no second bicycle crash. We could live in this teeming city for the rest of our lives and never bump into each other again. There was nothing to do but go out for a bowl of noodles and get on with my life. After eating the noodles and passing the time of day with the woman who sold them to me, I went home, read as much of the stoutly Communist Jiefang Daily as a political agnostic could bear, and fell asleep. About an hour after I drifted off, Mei—her old merry wet naked self—woke me up in the friendliest fashion imaginable. It was possible, even probable now that I had begun to see the world as Burbank saw it, that she was just carrying out her assignment as a Guoanbu operative, but if this was the case, ‘twas a consummation, etc.

  I spent the next twelve months in Shanghai unmolested by the tenor or anyone like him, exploring Mei’s body and as much of her mind as she chose to reveal. We still arrived separately at parties, almost never dined in a restaurant or showed ourselves together in public, never sat together at the movies. We saw the local company of the Peking Opera—same performance as usual. I met more of her friends. Always, I was the only American at the party. Only one category of Chinese attended, taizidang as they were called—”princelings,” the children of the most powerful of China’s new rich. Strictly speaking, the title applied to the descendants of a handful of Mao’s closest comrades in China’s civil war, but Mei’s friends, the B-list, children of the new rich, qualified for the honorific, though in quotes.

  It took me a while to figure this out. Most of these people were smart in all senses of the word, brainy and absolutely up-to-the-minute when it came to fashion of any kind—clothes, movies, slang, books, ideas, dangerous opinions, music, dances. They behaved as if freedom of speech was revered and encouraged by the Communist Party of China. How could they feel so invulnerable? Easy—they were the children of the high leadership of the Party who were the new capitalists. As long as their fathers were in favor, they were immune from the police, from informers, even apparently from the most powerful components of Guoanbu, since they were openly living la dolce vita and denouncing the stupidity of the Party instead of building communism in a labor camp. Since Mei was one of them, she too must have a power dad. Like Mei, they had all done well at good schools and universities, in China and abroad. At least half of them were Ivy Leaguers. They all spoke English, often very rapidly, to one another, as if it were a kind of pig Latin that only they could understand. They never spoke English to me—Mei’s rules, I guessed. In their cultishness they reminded me of American elitists, but less narcissistic and romantically paranoid. Unlike their Western counterparts, they did not have to pretend that they lived in a bogey-man, crypto-fascist, totalitarian state whose ruthless apparatus could mercilessly crush them the moment their fathers fell out of favor, or for no apparent reason at all. They understood that the absolute power and the absolute corruption of their rulers was their reality, knew as a birthright that the worst could happen tomorrow or an hour from now. So they ate, drank, and were merry.

  Not that they didn’t have serious moments or hidden agendas. The princelings didn’t address one another by true name in the usual Chinese way, but instead used nicknames. I was called Old Dude, in English. Mei’s nickname was Meimei, or “little sister.” That nickname can also mean “pretty young thing,” but in the next lower stratum of slang it translates as “pussy,” so I didn’t really get the joke or the insult. Just before my last year of living Chinese came to an end, a member of the cohort who was called Da Ge, or “big brother” took me aside. Mei was particularly friendly with Da Ge. He was as handsome as she was beautiful—in fact they looked a little alike. Naturally they paired off. They spent hours together in corners, giggling and confiding and holding hands. This looked a lot like flirtation, though they never danced together or made eyes at each other or nuzzled. In the back of my mind I thought he might be her case officer. Or the lover I suspected she saw when she wasn’t with me.

  One night, out of the blue, Da Ge asked me, while everybody else was dancing to the din of Metallica, if I would like to meet his father, who was CEO of a Chinese corporation that did a lot of business with American and European multinationals.

  I was taken by surprise. I asked Da Ge why his father wanted to meet me. He said, “He is interested in you.” Where had I heard those exact words before? Was Burbank at work here? Was this the first phrase of a recognition code to which I had not been told the response? Not likely. There was only one way to find out what was going on. With as much nonchalance as I could summon, I said, “Sure, why not?”

  After all, I was following orders, because Burbank had told me what to do in a situation li
ke this. Da Ge named a date and time and said a car would come for me. He didn’t have to ask for my address. Next day I ordered a good suit and a couple of white shirts from a one-day tailor and bought a necktie and new shoes. I told Mei nothing about this.

  The car turned out to be a stretch Mercedes shined to mirror brightness, Da Ge in the backseat. We were driven through traffic at a snail’s pace to a grand private house in a posh neighborhood I had never before visited. Da Ge made the introduction—”My father, Chen Qi.”—and disappeared. Chen Qi’s appearance took me aback. I saw in him, to the life, the father who had died a quarter of a century ago. Ethnic characteristics were erased. I did not know how a Chinese could so strongly bring to mind a dead WASP whom I barely remembered, but the resemblance was startling. Chen Qi was the same physical type as my late parent—tall, muscular, handsome as an aging leading man, possessed of a smile that pleased but gave away nothing, abundant dark hair with streaks of gray, skeptical brown eyes projecting wary intelligence, perfect manners, bespoke clothes, an almost theatrical air of being to the manor born. Of course both men were the recent descendants of peasants, so maybe that was the key to their patrician manner. Before dinner Chen Qi and I drank four-ounce martinis—three apiece. These, in larger quantity, had been my father’s favorite cocktail. The gin quickly made me drunk. The dinner itself, served by a drill squad of servants in tuxedos, was not the endless parade of Chinese banquet dishes I had anticipated, but instead the sort of twentieth-century faux French meal one gets, if one is rich enough, in a three-star restaurant in Paris or London or New York—four courses artfully presented, small portions, terrific wines. My host led a conversation that in its good-natured triviality mimicked banter. Again like my departed father, Chen Qi smiled his concocted smile seldom, but to great effect.

  Over espresso and brandy in what I think he called the drawing room—a Matisse on one wall, a Miró on another—he came to the point. “My son speaks highly of you,” he said.