“It doesn’t have to be a real network. The Chinese just have to think it’s real and eliminate it.”
Yes, he was serious. I said, “And how do you propose I create this thing that does not actually exist?”
“The usual methods,” Burbank said. “Befriend, befuddle, betray.”
We studied each other’s faces for a time. Finally I said, “Guoanbu will kill those people.”
“Very likely,” said my new chief. “I told you that from the start. But Guoanbu will never know if they killed everybody. Think about it. They’ll lose face on a catastrophic scale. They’ll be looking over their shoulders till the end of communism, which may be quicker in coming if we pull this off.”
I said, “May I ask what gave you the idea I would go along with something like this?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s what you’re trained to do and paid to do,” Burbank said. “Besides that, you have a chance, a reasonable chance, to slay the dragon. That would be a great service to your country. To China and all its people. To mankind. You will be remembered.”
Remember by whom, I wondered, if only Burbank knew what I had done? I said, “I am at a loss for words.”
After a long pause he said, “So?”
I know, I knew then what I should have said. But a new Faust is born every minute, so what I did say was, “I’ll sleep on it.”
10
I slept for two days in my old bedroom in my mother’s apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. On her sixty-fifth birthday, a summery night, I took her to dinner at the Four Seasons. She had been to the hairdresser that day. She looked lovely. She wore a new dress, her large but not too showy diamond rings, her jewel-encrusted Cartier watch, her ruby and sapphire necklace, her sable coat. My late stepfather had been a generous expense-account tipper, so the maître d’ remembered her and gave us a good table. The waiters fussed over her. She had a lovely time. Oysters, lobster bisque, grilled sea bass, Roederer Cristal throughout, dessert that made the liver thump, not a serious word spoken.
Mother was thinner, much thinner, than she had been the year before—pancreatic cancer, she told me the next morning with her usual absence of affect. The oncologist couldn’t be nicer. I wasn’t to bother about the situation. Her executor, my stepfather’s old partner, would handle arrangements—cremation, no clergy, no eulogy, “just a simple brief sniffle at graveside,” she told me. I needn’t come all the way from China to be present, if that was where I was when it happened. I wept, dumbstruck that she was mortal. Mother watched tears roll down my unshaven cheeks with a faint sympathetic smile, but did not touch me or speak to me. Just like old times.
For a couple more days I walked the streets or wandered through the Metropolitan Museum—thinking of Mother, yes, but mostly grappling with the Chen Qi/Burbank dilemma. It was almost impossible to believe that I was dealing with reality, but the fact is, I was in the grip of temptation, with all the fears and hesitations that go with it. I had felt this way before when, for example, I contemplated seducing the hot new wife of a clueless friend. She had married what she could get, not what she wanted, and reading her signals I knew she wouldn’t say no if I made the move. But what about afterward? What about the tricks of fate, the unpredictability of women? What about remorse? What about death—my death, final and real for a change, at the hands of the man I had betrayed? Then as now, I had no one to talk to. Mother was not a candidate for confessor and wouldn’t have been even if she had been in the best of health. The urge to confide in someone, to spill everything, to make this chimera go away by drawing a picture of it, was very strong. Standing before a Titian in the Met, I felt a compulsion to turn to the stranger beside me, confess my dark secret, and ask for advice. I restrained myself—this poor guy from Iowa, in the city for the weekend, would think, more rightly than he knew, that I was a nut case. A bartender would do—in one ear, out the other, another wacko on his fifth scotch. Nobody could possibly believe the grotesque truth. Passing a Catholic church on Saturday evening, I decided to go inside. People, mostly women, were lined up for confession. I joined the queue. I had seen confessional boxes in the movies but, not being a Catholic, had never entered one. Except for weddings and funerals, I had seldom before been inside any church or even heard prayers spoken aloud, let alone whispered them to the Almighty. As a child I was given no religious instruction. The name of Jesus was unfamiliar to me until I went to school. When I asked questions, Mother advised me to make up my own mind about God. She herself didn’t think there was one. The fairy tales in the Old and New Testaments couldn’t possibly explain the grandeur of the enterprise—just look at the stars, just imagine the infinite and eternal universe rushing across time and space to who knew what destination. (Her exact words: she talked to me like that when I was seven years old.) She hadn’t baptized me, a fact that created misgivings years later in Headquarters when I was being cleared for employment by friends of the Savior. Did this guy have a comsymp for a mother, or what?
Outside the confessional, my turn came. In the dimness on the other side of the box (is that where the nickname of the polygraph came from?) sat a priest with bushy black eyebrows. I cleared my throat, but I didn’t know the drill, so I said nothing. Sounding like a gruff cop near the end of his shift, the priest said, “Speak!” I just couldn’t do it. The safe was locked, there was no key. I said, “Sorry.” The priest said, “No doubt you should be. What have you done?” I said, “I can’t do this. I took an oath.” In a weary voice the priest said, “Then hell is your destination. Beat it.”
On my way out I remembered something helpful. Mother, thinking no doubt of my father’s peccadilloes and maybe of her own, liked to say that people did what they wanted to do. Always. They might say they did what they had to do, or that they had no choice, or that they were helpless in the grip of circumstance. They might even struggle against the inevitable. But the truth was, they did what they wanted to do even knowing that it would end in self-destruction. It was as simple as that. It was in the DNA.
In my case, at least, she was right. On the steps of the church, I called Burbank on my cell phone and said, “The answer is yes.” The next morning, early, I said good-bye to Mother and received the two air kisses I knew would be the last she would ever give me. Smelling her Chanel No. 5 and noting the threadlike wrinkles beside her eyes that she probably would have had fixed by a plastic surgeon if terminal cancer had not intervened, I felt the fond amusement that was her idea of love instead of the pointless grief she would not have forgiven.
11
I went back to Shanghai. No Mei was there to greet me, there was no sign or scent of her in my room. This time her absence was permanent, but I had expected that. Her work was done.
Chen Qi, now the boss, no longer the genial host, welcomed me to my new job with a hard handshake but no smile. When I accepted his offer, his eyes were cold. He had bought me. From now on, like everyone who worked for him, I would address him and speak of him as Chen Zong, or when speaking English, “CEO Chen.” There was no longer any need for him to be charming. I was given an office with glass walls on the same floor as his, a great honor. Thereafter, on the first day of every month, the sum of $8,333.33 was deposited to my account in the Bank of China. As Chen Qi had promised, I moved into a fully furnished apartment a dozen floors below the corporate offices, and commuted by elevator. It was a nifty but sterile place, something like a suite in the Hilton, with maid service and a fine view of the boundless city floating in its pall of smog. Of course the apartment was wired just as my office was wired, and probably equipped with cameras. I didn’t incriminate myself by looking for bugs and lenses. Anyone who wished to do so could observe me to his heart’s content. Why should I mind? It was nice, in a way, to be of interest, to be present in someone else’s imagination, as Mei was in mine. I caught glimpses of her ghost every day.
At first I was given trivial work to do. Pointless though they might have been, these assignments were heavy with importance because t
hey came directly from Chen Qi’s office by hand of messenger. I hardly ever saw Chen Qi himself, and almost never saw him alone. Sometimes when he was receiving an American visitor, he summoned me. The other American was usually disconcerted to see the likes of me working in a place like this for a man like Chen Qi. Though they all smiled and shook hands and repeated my name in hearty tones, few such visitors were friendly. What was an American doing here? It was okay to do business with these greedy Communists, money was money, but work for them? Be their underling? Once or twice a week in the elevator or the corridors I ran into a princeling Mei had introduced me to. It was the same with them, and there were quite a few of them. They averted their eyes. They didn’t speak, nor did I. Needless to say I was no longer invited to their parties. I never had been invited by them, of course, Mei had just brought me along as a curiosity. Without her, I was isolated, of no interest, and besides that, a potential menace because I saw Chen Zong, heard his voice, and if I did not actually touch him, I touched papers that he had touched. Did this bode well or ill for the fictitious network of agents and assets that Burbank imagined? Who knew?
I had expected to be used as an interpreter, but there was no need for my services because Chen Qi spoke serviceable English. Besides, he had a whole corps of interpreters. One of them, a jolie laide named Zhang Jia, worked in the office next to mine. At first she ignored me, then she was indifferent, then sometimes she nodded when we passed in the corridor. Gradually this mock foreplay escalated. Meaningful looks were exchanged through the glass wall that separated us. When I asked her to dinner she accepted without hesitation and spent the evening with me in a restaurant on a lower floor of the tower. Judging by the stares, interracial couples were uncommon in the restaurant. This did not seem to bother Zhang Jia. We spoke English to each other. Hers was flawless and ladylike, something like Mother’s Miss Porter’s elocution with a faint Chinese counterpoint. Unlike Mei, Zhang Jia talked about herself, providing her entire curriculum vitae as if reading from a script. This was regarded in CI circles as the likely sign of an agent regurgitating a cover story. No surprise there. Zhang Jia said she was from Beijing, the daughter of workers who had wanted a son but being kindhearted, refrained from drowning her when she was a baby. When she was twelve and a star pupil, the revolution discovered her and took her to its bosom. She went away to a boarding school in another part of China, where she learned English. She was an alumna of Wellesley College and Beijing Foreign Studies University. We dined alone in her apartment. She was an excellent cook, a pleasant companion. We played tennis on the courts in the basement. She was a fine player. I was out of practice and out of shape. She sometimes beat me and probably could have beaten me more often than she did. She had been good enough to play on the Wellesley varsity. We went to the movies in the tower’s theaters and sat together. We played weiqi. She was unbeatable. Through all this chaste fraternization we mostly spoke English. One night, in her apartment, we got into bed, Jia leading me by the hand, and switched to Mandarin. She was a more decorous lover than Mei, but skilled.
After that first night together, we never spoke English again. As time went by, my Mandarin got better and better. Zhang Jia taught me etiquette, a subject Mei had neglected. For a long time I learned very little besides that and Mandarin and weiqi, but millimeter by millimeter, second by second, that changed. Zhang Jia was like a wife. She dominated, or thought she did, by submitting. Her job, apparently, was to manage me. She was diligent. We began to see Chinese couples socially—encouraging news for Burbank. They all lived in the tower and worked for the corporation. They were different from Mei and her friends—more real, more serious, more sober. Nicer. Clean as whistles politically. Children of the proletariat. They seemed to like me, but they could not possibly have trusted me. In accepting me, or making believe they accepted me, they were almost certainly doing what they were told. How could such behavior be otherwise explained?
Except for Zhang Jia, I was never alone with any of them. But in its way my friendship with her was almost beautiful. So was she, I realized, as her face gradually became as familiar as my own.
Part 2
12
Sluggishly, time passed. Burbank had reminded me more than once that truly great operations took a long time to come to fruition. Espionage was a molasses waterfall, he said, it was brain surgery performed while wearing boxing gloves, it was like really having to urinate while following a subject who was walking on the roofs of cars in a traffic jam. “They’ll watch you for a long time, years probably, they’ll place temptations in your way,” he had warned me. “If you make no false moves, the inevitable will happen.”
At the office, things went well enough. Gradually, CEO Chen gave me more significant work. I saw signs, tiny signs, that he was pleased by the way I did it. At the end of the six-month probation period, my pay increased by 20 percent. I was given a larger office, even nearer to his. I welcomed this perk because it meant that the wifelike Zhang Jia would no longer be next door, watching me day and night. My affection for her was considerable, but it owed something to the Stockholm syndrome, and there were days and nights when I longed for Mei, who used to drop in for noodles, Mandarin, sex that was always new, and movies and chatter, and then vanish for the next twenty-four hours. My sex life with Zhang Jia was adequate—she was nothing if not dutiful and expert—but it was a routine that never varied, first the clever hand, then the clever tongue, then the slippery prize. Her idea of conversation was close interrogation, another sharp change from life with Mei. I fought exasperation and often lost. Zhang Jia throbbed with curiosity. Although our transparent offices no longer adjoined, she found ways to keep me under observation. Who was that on the telephone when I was so animated? Why was I so often away from my desk, and when I was out of sight for ten minutes, what had I been doing at the mystery destination or destinations? I wondered if she had an earpiece concealed beneath her thick gleaming hair so that a hidden interrogator could feed her questions, as a television producer feeds them to the perky blonde with the microphone. Even though there was no such thing as an empty space in Shanghai, I fantasized running into Mei in an elevator where we were alone. She would hit the red emergency STOP button, ignore the cameras, and say hello as only Mei could. The weight would lift from my chest. Empty dreams.
Chen Qi began taking me with him on trips abroad. He traveled in the company jet, I flew commercial, leaving a couple of days earlier to make sure all was as it should be on his arrival and he would not waste a minute. In private he was still distant, chilly, curt. However, in the company of American customers he treated me as an honorary equal. As the money rolled in from Sino-American joint enterprises, I was better accepted by the doubters among my countrymen, who seemed to conclude that I was in it for the bucks, too, and therefore an okay guy. At meetings, Chen Qi would sometimes let me make the presentation. This happened more often if the people we were meeting were new to him. His English was good but not perfect, and he was wary of embarrassment. He understood almost everything the Americans said, of course, but often he would interrupt a conversation and speak to me in Mandarin, as if asking for a clarification. We were always on the up-and-up about what we said in Mandarin in the presence of Americans. Who knew but one of those smart young people sitting against the wall understood the language? Cunning, these ever-smiling Yanks. Half of the along-the-wall crowd were women, and some of them were babes. I had been away from American females for so long that I had become as sexually curious about them as I used to be about Chinese women. I remembered the sulks and the accusations, but couldn’t quite remember how they smelled, how they looked and behaved with their clothes off. The urge to ask one of them to go dancing was strong, but like the asset under discipline that I was, I resisted. My American date would almost certainly be mistaken by Guoanbu for a Headquarters asset, and because the whole world believes that American spies are everywhere, there was no possibility whatsoever of evading observation. Unlike others from the tower who could onl
y go outside in groups of two or more when on foreign soil, I was allowed to walk alone wherever I was. But I was under instructions always to carry a mobile phone so that Chen Qi could always get in touch. The real reason for this protocol, of course, was that the GPS in the phone told CEO Chen’s security people exactly where I was at all times. I was under no illusion that I was ever alone.
American businessmen, I discovered, were just as paranoid as spies. I learned a lot of secrets while traveling with Chen Qi, but they were business secrets, which accounted for the Americans’ suspicions. How did they know that I hadn’t been planted on Chen Qi by some rival U.S. company that was paying me to conduct industrial espionage? They would pour me drinks and interrogate me—all the standard questions, always getting around to how come I spoke such good Chinese. Where had I learned it? “In bed,” I would reply. They would laugh as if they actually believed the lucky dog.
It never occurred to me to report what I learned to Burbank. For one thing, though neither Chen Qi nor the American executives would have believed it, Headquarters was prohibited by law from spying on American citizens, and it took this taboo seriously. For another, reporting anything to Burbank meant being in contact with Burbank—the last thing he or I wanted.
I had last seen him a year before, at Mother’s graveside service. Somehow she managed to live almost a year after our dinner at the Four Seasons. Because she didn’t want anyone who knew her to watch her die, or to look at her wasted body after she died, I never saw her again. Twelve people attended the obsequies, as she called her burial rites—my dotty Aunt Penny, the anorexic recovering addict who had been Mother’s cook and gardener, the Guatemalan cleaning lady, three women Mother played bridge with, an assistant undertaker, my stepfather’s former law partner, me—and, lurking behind the monuments, Burbank. Naturally no clergyman was present. Aunt Penny, in good though quavering voice despite the November cold and the wind and the graveside mud on her shoes, read an Emily Dickinson poem—the one about Death driving his passenger in a carriage to the next world. The law partner spoke about the beauty and grace and unfailing kindness of the deceased, and about her brilliant, almost Olympian horsemanship as a young woman. The gravediggers waited some distance away, hidden, except when they peeked around a corner, by a marble crypt the size of a delivery van. As Mother’s coffin, the urn of ashes inside, was lowered into the grave, Aunt Penny said in a loud voice, “I hope Sis didn’t insist on being buried with her jewels. Those fellows just steal them. Strip them off the corpse’s fingers after the family has left.”
The Shanghai Factor Page 7