Like her mother before her, from whom she learned about men and soils and seeds and fertilizers, Mother had been a keen gardener. Now, with the arrival of spring, her flowerbeds were coming back to life. I visualized them as I drove. I had kept Mother’s cook, the recovering crack addict, on as gardener and caretaker, and when I arrived at the house she was kneeling in the backyard, transplanting seedlings. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman. It was a sunny day—hot, for the hills of New England—and she wore a sensible gray sports bra and denim shorts. She was barefoot. Her fine hair was escaping strand by strand from the rubber band on her ponytail. The knobs along her spine were prominent, but she had a good body, nice legs, pretty breasts. When she recognized the Mercedes she stood up—her bare knees were muddied—and pulled on a T-shirt. This further tousled her hair. She didn’t bother to tuck it in. I waved in a nice-guy way and parked in the driveway. She didn’t move a muscle. I walked across the garden, which was a carpet of jonquils and other early flowers whose names I didn’t know. She tracked me with a sentinel’s eyes as if expecting me to trample something. If she recognized me she gave no sign. She definitely wasn’t the smiley type. For a moment I thought she really might not know who I was—I had hired her at the cemetery, and she had seen me only a couple of times before that and then briefly—so I took off my baseball cap and said something like, “Planting flowers, I see.” One expects such inanities to be understood as gestures of good intentions. No chance of that from this poker-faced militant. I told her I was sorry to arrive unannounced. In the first sign that she had identified me, she said, “It’s your house. You can arrive whenever you feel like it.”
Her message was clear. I could send her a check every two weeks if I wanted, but that didn’t require her to be agreeable. Had I any orders? I told her to go ahead with what she was doing. She nodded, fell to her knees, and went on with the spring planting.
After using the bathroom—I carried no luggage because I had the clothes and razor and toothbrush I needed stowed away in the house—I sat in the sun and read a book in Mandarin about Shanghai between the world wars. It was refreshing because it barely mentioned the hapless foreigners who were the featured characters of most other histories of that time and place. After a while the garden nymph finished what she was doing, stacked her empty flowerpots, and disappeared into the greenhouse. Water pipes howled. Mother had equipped the outbuilding with a shower and required all grimy people to use it to prevent dirt from being tracked into the house.
Soon the young woman emerged with wet hair pasted to her head. She was now dressed in jeans, sandals, and a clean shirt unbuttoned to her cleavage. She walked over and stood beside my chair. She gave off the odor of Ivory soap. I hadn’t smelled it since I made out with Mary Ellen Crowley when I was in the eighth grade. I didn’t speak or look up. After a long silence that was the equivalent of a staring contest, she said, “You read Chinese?” I closed the book, marking my place with a finger, looked into her cold eyes, and said, “Are you calling it a day?”
“That’s your decision,” she said. “If you want dinner I can cook it.”
“Good idea. What’s on the menu?”
“Tell me what you want and I’ll go get it and cook it.”
“Anything?”
“Anything Stop & Shop has.” I knew it had a lobster tank. I said, “Lobster. The rest is up to you. I’ll get the wine from the cellar.”
“Fine.”
She held out her hand, palm up. I gave her an inquiring look.
She said, “Money.”
I gave her two fifties. When she saw my bankroll, the look of proletarian disgust I had noted earlier came back into her eyes. Her upper lip twitched in contempt. The reaction was understandable. Nobody loves the rich, and how could she know that I was okay because Communists had made me rich?
She said, “Do you know how long you’ll be staying?”
I told her I wasn’t sure, but I’d like it if she made supper every night. She nodded, put the money in her pocket, and remained where she was. She seemed to be thinking something over. I thought she would now turn to go, but she hung where she was. She said, “May I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“Are you here because of my message?”
I said, “No. I didn’t know you’d left a message.”
She said, “Then I’d better repeat it. Somebody broke into the house.”
I flinched, as if I had just seen my name in print on the crime page of the Shanghai Daily. I said, “Are you sure?”
She said, “Otherwise there’d be no reason to mention it, would there?”
After a moment I said, “Let me rephrase. How did you become aware of the break-in?”
“A pane of glass in the kitchen door had been broken and replaced.”
“Replaced?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Tell me more.”
Wearily—why hadn’t I listened to her message?—she said, “When I let myself in with the key, I noticed broken glass on the kitchen floor—not much, only a few slivers. They glittered in the sunlight. Then I smelled putty and saw that it was fresh and the glass was new, not wavy like the old glass.”
“You’re a good detective.” No answer. I persevered. “Why would they bother to replace the broken windowpane, but leave broken glass in plain sight?”
“I have no idea.”
“Did you call the police?”
“That never crossed my mind.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I’ve got a criminal record, possession of crack cocaine. I probably would have been booked as a brain-damaged drug addict looking for something to steal and sell.”
“So what did you do?”
“I looked around and saw that the burglars had left other signs of their intrusion.”
“Like what?”
“They’d violated everything—stripped the beds and remade them, opened all the doors and drawers in all the rooms, looked under the rugs, took the telephones apart, opened the pill bottles,” she said. “They tried to put everything back exactly as they found it, but working in the dark, they didn’t always succeed. A lot of things were slightly not where they should be. Also, you could smell them.”
“How did they smell?”
“Male sweat. Drugstore aftershave. Urine and fecal matter in the bathrooms.”
“They didn’t flush the toilets?”
“The stink was in the air, and there were smears in one of the toilet bowls. I also smelled plaster dust, very pungent.”
“Plaster dust?”
“This is an old house. The walls are plaster, not Sheetrock.”
Obviously she had an uncommonly good sense of smell. I kept the thought to myself. By now I had learned to pay this woman no compliments.
“Anything missing?”
“Your mother’s letters and papers,” she said.
“All of them?”
“Everything she kept in boxes in the attic. Also her photo albums. Maybe other things, like keepsakes I didn’t know about.”
“Nothing of value, then.”
“She valued what was in the boxes. She kept an armchair and a lamp in the attic so she could go up and read them. She kept her stocks and bonds and CDs in a safe in her closet. But as far as I know she got rid of everything like that before she went into the hospital for the last time.”
“Got rid of that stuff how?”
“She put it in a safe-deposit box. Maybe some cash, too.”
“Who’s got the key?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she give you anything before she died?”
“An antique topaz brooch set in opals. A thousand dollars in cash. A pat on the cheek.”
“She must have liked you.”
No response.
This was food for thought. This burglary was a curious crime. It might not have sent her mind racing as it did mine, but even to a smart amateur, if that’s what she was, it had to seem pe
culiar. I knew what it meant—a search team, a very clumsy search team, had conducted what they thought was a clandestine sweep of the premises. They had committed a number of basic mistakes—they hadn’t put things back in the exact place where they had found them, they had taken things away instead of photographing them as the rules dictated. These characters apparently assumed that a few old boxes from the attic wouldn’t be missed, which meant they thought they could bring them back into this empty house with impunity another night. They had forgotten that you can’t assume a damn thing, that you have to stick to the rules, that you should never, ever leave behind the slightest trace of your entry.
“One more thing,” the chef said.
“Yes?”
“I found a dozen tiny piles of plaster dust.”
Now we were getting someplace. I said, “Did you sweep them up?”
“No. I watch TV. I didn’t touch anything that might be evidence.”
“Show me.”
She led me to my bedroom, to the living room, to my stepfather’s basement hideaway. Sure enough, tiny heaps of plaster dust—about a quarter-teaspoon each—lay on the parquet next to the baseboard, as if a mouse or an insect had chewed its way through the wall. But no mouse or termite was guilty of making this mess. What I was looking at was the dust left by a small, fast, super-sharp drill—the kind used by technicians who install electronic bugs. I said, “Hmmm. Have you ever seen a mouse in this house? Or a carpenter ant?”
She said, “No.”
I looked at my watch. I said, “You must want to get going to the store.”
She said, “I should. What time do you want dinner?” Her voice was softer now, even borderline friendly.
I said, “Seven-thirty?”
“Every night?”
“Yes.”
She nodded and left without uttering another word. It was quarter after four. It would take her at least an hour to get to the supermarket through rush-hour traffic and do her shopping and get back to the house. That gave me time to do what I had to do next.
Once again I was in no doubt that I was being listened to and watched as I worked, but I had nothing to lose because the team that did this sloppy job almost certainly belonged either to Burbank or Lin Ming and both of them already knew that I was a spy who recognized spyware when I saw it. I dug five itsy-bitsy cameras and seven audio bugs out of the walls. These I ran through the kitchen disposal to send the message that there was a price to be paid for blatant amateurism. Not that I believed that this was truly the work of amateurs. The blunders were a little too obvious. Maybe what I had discovered so far were decoys. The real bugs would be properly concealed. A good technician can drill through a very thick concrete wall, vacuuming up dust like a dentist as he goes, and stop at exactly the point where nothing remains between the drill and the opposite side of the wall except a coat of paint or the wallpaper. Why anyone would go to so much trouble to bug the empty house of a dead widow who had nothing to hide I could not guess. But maybe I was chasing the wrong suspects. Who knew but what the FBI or some other zealous feds had done this work? I called it a day. There would be time enough tomorrow to check it out.
Dinner was fine—just the right amount of grape-seed oil and lemon in the dressing for the lobster salad, excellent sautéed veal, fresh peas, big Peruvian blackberries with the proper crunch and sweetness. From the cellar I had chosen an Alsatian pinot gris—Mother had liked her glass of wine, and what she saved on automobiles she spent on the grape. Also I found out that the chef’s name was Magdalena. She made it plain that no diminutives were allowed. She looked less bony in dimmer light and now that the sun was down smelled faintly of a perfume whose aroma another far more agreeable girl had given me cause to remember.
21
Next morning I arose at first light and resumed my inspection. Sure enough, I spotted the backup bugs and cameras, taking care to look like a guy wandering aimlessly around the house sipping his morning coffee. I let them be. Let my watchers think I had fallen into their trap, that I had mistaken their decoys for the real thing. I had no plans to hold operational meetings in this house or mumble secrets in my sleep. There was no reason why these clowns, whoever they were, or for that matter why the whole world should not watch me shave, cut my toenails, chew my granola, read my books, eat my supper, fix a faucet—even, if there was a merciful and compassionate god, watch me nail the fair Magdalena one moonlit evening after she had done the dishes. Imagine her, imagine mismatched us as infrared images, imagine the moans, the gasps, the rest of the pornography. It had been a long time since Shanghai.
I stayed in the house for a week, and at the end of the week decided to stay a little longer. It would be a good thing, I reasoned, to give Burbank plenty of time to mull the choices offered by my tape of Lin Ming’s recruitment pitch, and for Lin Ming to pile a few more stones on the weiqi board. The change of scene not to mention the sense that I was not, owing to Magdalena’s daily appearances, all by myself, was good for me. Gradually I stopped seeing the frowning gardener she used to be and started noticing the woman she was. There were things about Magdalena—many things—that made me think there was more to her than she thought she was letting me see. As her behavior softened, my curiosity grew. This was not part of the plan. It just happened. Maybe it was my subconscious at work, demanding payback for earlier affronts. One day as I read another book in the garden while she weeded, she asked me where I had learned Chinese. It was a polite gesture. In return I let her have it: “There is no language called ‘Chinese.’ People living in China speak two hundred ninety-two languages, most of them mutually incomprehensible. Characters signify different words in different languages. There is also one dead language, Jurchen, that only scholars understand. The language I am reading is Mandarin.” Absorbing this spurt of bile, Magdalena was transformed. The change was startling. She looked stricken—in danger of tears, even. She darted away. I was not exactly amazed by her reaction. In my experience, people who dish it out seldom can take it. Magdalena came nowhere near me for the remainder of the day. But supper was especially tasty that night: bouillabaisse, no less. She drove all the way to Great Barrington, to Mother’s favorite store across the Massachusetts line, to buy the fish. She spoke no word while serving at table. She wore a skirt and a scoop-neck blouse. Her eyes looked bigger. Mascara? Possibly.
As I ate my chocolate mousse I heard the clatter of china being put into the dishwasher, and also a new sound. Magdalena was humming a tune. Amazed, I rose from the table and went into the kitchen. Her back was turned to me. Even though she could see my reflection in the window above the sink, she went on humming in a pretty but muted soprano voice that sounded trained. She was humming an aria from Madame Butterfly. I couldn’t have been more astonished. Magdalena didn’t sing the whole of it, but she sang enough to let me know she could have sung louder and longer if she chose. When she was done, I stifled an urge to applaud, knowing that she would take it for what it was, sarcasm.
Instead, I said, “Where did you train?”
No reply. After a long moment of silence, however, she spoke. With her back still turned to me, she said, “You’re straight, right?”
Ah. I said, “Right. You, too?”
She said, “In case you’re wondering because of my past, I have no STDs. Not now, not ever.”
I said, “What does that mean, you don’t sleep with Republicans?”
“It means I have no sexually transmitted diseases. Given my background you’ve got a right to ask.”
“Me either.”
“I don’t like condoms.”
“Neither do I.”
What a romantic turn this conversation was taking. Clearly the seduction scenario I’d been putting together in my mind had been a waste of time and imagination. All of a sudden Magdalena turned around, skirt swirling. She could dance, too. She had a little color in her face. She smiled a fleeting little smile. She was a different woman altogether. A certain nervousness—how after all could she know w
hat she was getting herself into?—added to the appeal.
After a small silence and a moment of eye contact, I said, “Where?”
“What about right here?” Magdalena said.
“On the floor, on the center island, up against the sink?”
“Not until we’re married. Go upstairs. I’ll join you.”
I did as I was told, wondering if she would actually follow or if she had sent me to wait upstairs while she slipped out the back door. For long minutes, she did not follow. I took a shower to kill time. When I emerged, Magdalena lay on the bed. With her clothes on she may have looked a bit stringy. Naked, on her back, in this light, she made a different impression. I turned off the bedside lamp, thinking again about infrared images. I really wanted the watchers to watch this, but on my terms. She turned the lamp back on. Expertly she took hold of me. In bed as in kitchen or garden, Magdalena was a no-nonsense woman. She knew everything, and as far as I could tell, she liked everything. In her enthusiasm she reminded me a little of Mei, but only a little, and I shooed the comparison from my head because it didn’t seem proper to my inner puritan to think of Mei while copulating with another woman. Or, strangely enough, vice versa. There was a difference—Magdalena was satiable, whereas Mei was not. Immediately after the third orgasm, she got up and left without saying good-bye or anything else for that matter. She came back the next night and several consecutive nights after that. The routine was the same. She wasn’t impolite about it, but when she had achieved what she wanted to achieve she departed—brusquely, as if she didn’t want to miss her favorite sitcom.
As experience teaches us, all good things come to an end. One night after Magdalena had taken her leave, I lay in bed thinking of a touchdown run the Hessian had made in the mud in the last century. It was the last play of the game. The six points he scored clinched the league championship for our school. Everyone else on the bench rushed onto the field to hug the Hessian. I walked away. The coach kicked me off the team for unsportsmanlike conduct.
The Shanghai Factor Page 12