14
The next day Chen Qi summoned me to London. He was accompanied by two Chinese in Italian suits. They were about my age. I had never seen either one of them before, but there were sealed floors in the tower, so there was nothing to wonder about except that they were now being revealed to me. Chen Qi always traveled with a couple of bodyguards, but these new types, comfortable in their suits and ties and quick to demonstrate how smart they were, were not members of the bodyguard class. They spoke good English, and to me, nothing but English. For a week, in meetings, they did the talking and the interpreting while I sat by, silent but tempted to raise my hand when something was garbled in translation. Chen Qi would not have noticed had I done so. Not once during the days we were together did he rest his eyes on me for as much as a second. I wondered why I was there.
After the final meeting, Chen Qi satisfied my curiosity. He drew me aside in the lobby of the office building and told me in Mandarin that this was my last day as an employee of the corporation. My return fare to the United States had already been paid. I would receive six months’ severance pay. I could remain in my Washington apartment for one month. He had no criticism to make of me. I had performed my duties in an entirely satisfactory manner, but unfortunately I was a speck in the eye of the corporation. My presence made others uncomfortable. I spoke Mandarin too well. I copulated with a Chinese woman on company property. My ways were not China’s ways. The authorities had noticed me and my unfortunate habits. I should go back to America, work in America, be an American. With my language skills and my experience of China, I should have no trouble finding a job even in these difficult times. He handed me an envelope. Then we were done. He turned on his heel without a word or a change in expression, and walked away. The hotshots followed. They would never give me another thought, and why should they?
There went Burbank’s fictitious network—or so in my innocence I supposed. I felt a rush of relief but also, I confess, a certain sour disappointment. I may have loathed the mission, but I also wanted to accomplish it. All my life I had been given Everests to climb—beat up the bully, make the team, make the girl, get into a college I could mention with nonchalance at a cocktail party, and in the army, take that hill, kill that stranger, hold that position, recover from those wounds. Something was up. Something worse would come next.
Half a day later my flight landed in New York. I took the shuttle to Reagan National Airport, the Metro to Dupont Circle. Walking home, dragging my carry-on suitcase behind me, I passed the restaurant the Chinese American gentleman with whom I bumped heads on a different airplane had recommended. For months I had walked by the place every day without giving it a second glance. It was still open at 11:00 P.M. I stopped, read the menu, and went inside. The host, who spoke monosyllabic English, led me to a booth. I ordered a beer. I wanted noodles. Like my friend on the airplane, the host looked pained and recommended Peking duck. “You will like it,” he said. “Trust me.”
The duck was a long time in coming but finally it appeared, borne on a tray by an almost unbelievably beautiful Chinese girl. Smiling shyly, she showed me the glazed bird. It was whole and nicely displayed. She donned transparent plastic gloves, showed her perfect teeth again, picked up a razor-sharp Chinese knife, and carved the duck. She had a knack for it and she disjointed the bird and sliced its breast in minutes, arranging the pieces on a platter as she went. There was three times as much duck as I could eat, plus the usual mountain of rice.
When she set this feast before me, I spoke to her in Mandarin—a compliment on her deftness. Up to this point she had not looked at me. Now she did, with wide, startled eyes. Then she fled into the kitchen, heels clattering, raven hair flying.
A Chinese man, lean and saturnine, wearing jeans, Nikes, and a plain black T-shirt had just been seated in the opposite booth. He watched the girl go and caught my eye. No smile, but he had an intelligent face. He was unmistakably a native Chinese.
In English I said, “What was all that about?”
He said, “You speak very good Mandarin. Possibly she’s an illegal. She probably thought you were an immigration agent.”
“If I were, I’d certainly never deport her.”
“You’ve lost your chance,” he said. “By now she’s in a car on her way out of town. Bad luck for the restaurant. She was an attraction.”
He ordered a bowl of noodles. He switched to Mandarin. We had a polite conversation about Laozi. We quoted the sage’s famous sayings back and forth. I asked my new friend what his favorite lines were. He said, “The one about a small fish being spoiled by too much handling.” I said I liked the one about water, a soft thing, always overcoming iron, a hard thing. “Laozi is always relevant,” he said. He quoted another passage:
“Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.
Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.”
I said, “You sound like a Republican running for president.”
“No. Laozi sounds like Laozi.”
His noodles were delivered. He stopped talking. I left first. My friend, eating with his bowl under his chin, paid no attention. He had not divulged a single detail about himself except that he seemed to have memorized the whole of Laozi. This told me something—perhaps. Maybe he was a follower of the Dao. Or someone like me.
Trudging up the hill toward bed, I was too tired to care what he was or what that meant. To be worn out is to be renewed, according to Laozi.
15
The entry code at the corporation’s office had been changed, so I had to ring the bell. Sun Huan came to the door and without a word or a smile, handed me a brown grocery bag containing my personal belongings. I gave her the CEO Chen—only mobile phone that had been issued to me in Shanghai. She received it solemnly, wrote a receipt, and shut the door in my face. Back on the street, I checked my bank balance at an ATM. The full six months in severance pay plus the dollar value of unused vacation time had already been deposited. This considerable sum, added to the banked salary I had not spent while I was in China, made me quite prosperous. I wondered how much of the windfall the Headquarters admin types would find ways to pilfer. Until they figured that out, I could afford to pay cash for a Maserati. I didn’t have to look for a job because I already had one, or so I assumed in the absence of information to the contrary. What now? Should I just wait for Burbank to show himself, or should I try again to make contact? Was I under any obligation to report my news? The last time I tried to keep him posted he ignored my letter and stopped answering the telephone. I felt a twinge of resentment. Should I just forget about Burbank, draw out my cash, walk away from my contract, find an American woman to marry, have kids, live an American life as Chen Qi had recommended, and when the end came, be tumbled into the grave with a rattle of dry bones after every last penny and every drop of life had been squeezed out of me by the system and the wife and kids?
Although I had consumed no alcohol since the Chinese beer I drank with my Peking duck the night before, I felt slightly drunk—woozy, reckless, beckoned I knew not where. I decided to go to New York. Now. I had inherited Mother’s apartment there, along with the house in Connecticut, some stocks and bonds, and all her belongings including her jewelry, which she had not worn to her cremation after all. The expense of maintaining the apartment and the house was considerable. I couldn’t sell them because of the slump, so why should I pay rent? I withdrew a thousand dollars from the ATM, went back to the apartment and packed my belongings, which fit into one large suitcase and one carry-on, and took the Metroliner to Penn Station. While still in the station, I bought yet another cheap unregistered cell phone and dialed Burbank’s number. The result was the same as before—a dozen rings, no pickup. Maybe he too had been fired, or been stricken with cancer, or died when a safe fell on him. Everything Burbank said or did was classified, so it made sense that his death would be stamped t
op secret. On the way uptown in a taxi operated by someone from central Asia who was just learning to drive, I sent him a text message, telling him in wild cards what had happened and where I was. Again, silence. I shrugged and went on with my existence. I had done what I could, and thanks again, pal, for wasting five years of my life. I thought about the future. Maybe I could become a banker. Or better because even more uninteresting than banking, get a Ph.D. and become a professor of Chinese.
It was good to be in Manhattan, where I had spent the winters of my boyhood, the summers having been daydreamed away in Connecticut. I immersed myself in the city’s money-gulping culture—museums, concerts, theater, movies, basketball games. I joined a gym. I visited bars I had liked when I was a kid, but they were full of kids and drunks, so I drank at home—four ounces of the Macallan before dinner, seldom more, never less. I didn’t enjoy dining alone at the bar in loud restaurants at one hundred dollars a plate and being treated like a mendicant, so I usually had a mock-gourmet dinner delivered to the apartment. I didn’t want company, and when women struck up a conversation in a public place, I was polite but distant. Nothing had happened to my libido. The problem was, I was looking for a Mei in a world where there was only one Mei. I wanted my Shanghai life, stage-managed though it almost certainly had been, to come back. Maybe I just wanted someone to talk to, certainly I wanted a particular face to look into while making love. My Mandarin, I knew, was flying away. Sometimes in mid-town I overheard phrases on the street that I didn’t really understand. In dreams I saw a Chinese woman in Central Park who usually turned out to be a Mei who didn’t know me from Adam. If it was the real Mei she probably would have told me I should learn another Chinese language. “It’s ridiculous to speak only one Han language,” she would say in her dream-woman voice, which croaked a little, like Jean Arthur’s English. “You should perfect your Shanghainese and learn Yue.”
One night in spring, after seeing a play on Forty-fifth Street, I decided to walk home. The weather was warm, the air was still. As I emerged from the theater, I noticed a young Chinese couple. Half hidden in the crowd, they walked along behind me for a few steps, the woman talking on a cell phone. At Sixth Avenue I turned left. The couple kept on going east. There were few pedestrians on the avenue. The yellow moon, almost full but flattened on one edge, hung overhead between two tall buildings. I gazed at it, my head bent far back. This posture was slightly dizzying. For once I was content, free of exasperation. I had enjoyed the play, I was glad to see the moon in such a beautiful phase. Because of the pollution and the glare of electric light, it was a rare night when you could see any of the lights in the sky over Shanghai or any other city in China or for that matter, anywhere else in the world unless you were in the Sahara Desert.
A man’s voice said, “Be careful. You’re walking into traffic.”
I woke up, and I unbent my neck. He was right. I was inches from the curb. I said, “Thanks.” But I was on my guard. He was smaller than me, but he might have a gun or a knife or maybe Mace, which was as often a robber’s weapon as a victim’s defense. There was enough light to see that he was Chinese, like the young couple that might have been following me outside the theater.
He moved into the light of a store window. He wanted me to see his face. He waited for me to recognize him. I did so immediately. He was dressed as he had been the last time I saw him, in that Washington restaurant, but now he wore a leather jacket over his black T-shirt and a baseball cap. What was he doing here? I didn’t know whether I wanted him to know I remembered him.
He refused to play the game. “I thought it was you,” he said. “The Peking duck. The young lady in distress.”
“And Laozi,” I said. “I remember. How are you?”
“I’m well, thank you. What are we doing in New York?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” I said. “You first.”
“A long story,” he said. “Shall we walk together?”
If nothing else, this was an opportunity to speak Mandarin. I thought I knew what he was, why he was here, whom the Chinese woman had been talking to on her cell phone. I said, “Why not?”
Neither of us mentioned Laozi again. Nor did we exchange names. For two or three blocks we didn’t exchange a word. As before, my companion asked no personal questions, volunteered no personal information. A person who offers no information is the reverse image of one who offers too much—follow the logic? After ten minutes or so, I broke the silence. How did he like New York? It was the greatest city in Christendom, he said. I didn’t think I had ever before heard that particular word spoken aloud. He began to talk. Small talk. My new friend was a basketball fan. He watched the Knicks on television and liked a pickup game. So did I, I said. Then I said, “We haven’t answered your question.”
“What question was that?” he asked.
“‘Why are we in New York?’”
“I live here,” he said.
“So do I.”
“Really? I took you for a man of Washington. A civil servant, perhaps.”
We marched on. He was exercising, not strolling. I asked if he knew a lot of civil servants.
He said, “Far too many. I work at the United Nations.”
“As U.N. staff?”
“No, in China’s delegation,” he said.
“Do you find the work interesting?”
“Not especially,” he said. “The U.N. is an artificial thing. It makes a lot of its great purpose, but in fact it has no purpose except to be the choo-choo toy of Washington.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“Someone must protect the small fish from too much handling,” he said.
At last we reached my building. Though he may have regarded the address as valuable information, he barely glanced at it, as if he already knew where it was.
He said, “Do you play basketball?”
“I used to. But I’m older now and not as nimble as I used to be.”
He handed me his card. “I have access to a gym,” he said. “If you feel like playing a little one-on-one, give me a call.” He didn’t ask for my card. I didn’t offer one. I was pretty sure he already knew who I was, that this encounter was not accidental.
I said, “I’m sure you’d beat me.”
“Who knows?” he said. “Games are in the lap of the gods. I’m shorter and older and not especially interested in winning. We can bet on the outcome—a dollar a game.”
I said, “Maybe we should play weiqi instead. Then you’d be sure to win.”
“That’s an idea,” he said. “Also for money?”
I said, “Now you’re making me worry. Are you a ringer?”
He knew the outdated slang, he caught the double meaning. I could see it in his eyes. He smiled a disarming smile and, without answering, lifted a hand and walked away, moving even more swiftly than when we had been walking together. I looked at his card. The Chinese characters gave his name as Lin Ming. His title was “economics attaché.” Read “Guoanbu.” What next?
I didn’t call him. Making the first move would be the wrong move. There was little doubt in my mind that there would be, in due course, another chance meeting. I made no change in my habits, so as to make things easier. A couple of days later I realized I was being watched—four mixed-gender, all-Han teams of three people each, just like in Shanghai. Here, they stood out a bit more even though they stayed farther back and there was nothing unusual about seeing three Chinese scattered in any New York crowd. I pretended to be oblivious to their company. Since the goal of tradecraft is a natural appearance, why not just be natural? The adversary will watch you whether you know he’s there or not. Let him watch, for who knows who watches the watchman? Just the same, remembering Burbank’s lecture on the right to self-defense, I started carrying a can of pepper spray and a short fighting knife, and was careful not to let anyone get too close to me when I went walking after dark.
One afternoon a month or so after bumping into Lin Ming, I stopped at a sandwich shop
that served excellent meatball sandwiches, then went to the movies. I saw a Woody Allen film, a very enjoyable one set in Barcelona—amusing story, good acting, beautiful ardent women. I wondered if Mr. Allen realized how much better his movies had become since he stopped casting himself. Lin Ming was far from my mind as I walked, still smiling, out of the theater. I had stopped in the men’s room, so the rest of the audience had scuttled away by the time I reached the sidewalk. It was raining—a downpour. Darkness was falling and the cars had their headlights on and their windshield wipers thumping. The rain blurred the scene, you couldn’t read the signs on the buses or make out faces. I waited under the marquee for it to let up. After a moment or two my eyes adjusted. A few feet away, also under the marquee, stood Lin Ming, smoking a cigarette and watching the traffic. When he saw me, he dropped the butt, ground it out with the sole of his shoe, and said, “Hello there.” No smile of delighted surprise. Meeting by chance in a cloudburst in the middle of a city of eight million was the most natural thing in the world, of course it was.
“Hello yourself,” I said.
Lin Ming did not explain himself. In some not so very elusive way he reminded me of Burbank. I imagined telling Burbank this and watching his reaction. The comparison would tell him something about Lin, something about me, something to lock up in a safe.
To Lin Ming I said, “Let me guess. You just happened to be passing by and there I was, coming out of the movies.”
Smiling at last, the winner of the game of wits, Lin Ming said, “Actually, yes. I was just getting out of the rain and you appeared as if beamed down like Captain Kirk.” How did he know these things? He was carrying a gym bag. He said, “Basketball?” Pointing at my Keds, he said, “You’re wearing the right shoes. The gym is right around the corner.” I shook my head and smiled regretfully.
The Shanghai Factor Page 9