The Shanghai Factor

by Charles McCarry

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s me.”

  “I know. Why is it you?”

  I really didn’t know. There was nothing more to be said about Ole Olsen. I had my own theory about his death, but Alice was the last person with whom I wanted to share it—or next to last, counting Burbank. I said, “What are you doing?”

  “Shivering,” Alice said. “I’m all wet from the shower.”

  “I’m calling on an impulse,” I said. “In my imagination you are now drying off.”

  Alice said, “Phone sex before dawn? Have you been a pervert all along, or did you just think this was a good moment to let me in on your secret?”

  I said, “I am now going to change the subject.”

  “Good. You’ve got thirty seconds to grow up before I hang up.”

  I said, “I have a question about the woman in your kitchen the other night.”

  “You do?” Alice said. “What, is the chef an old flame?”

  “I just glimpsed her but she looked familiar. Have you used her before?”

  “No. She was part of the caterer’s package. Very efficient, not a talker. She did what she came to do and left.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Skinny but shapely. Thirtysomething. Big ears with her hair tucked under her hat. Maybe five six, not a lot more than a hundred pounds. Light blue eyes. Very capable. Intelligent face, not a beauty but not plain. With makeup, the right hairdresser and the right clothes she’d be quite sexy.”

  “Voice?”

  “Slightly hoarse. Why are you asking all these questions?”

  I said, “Name?”

  “Name, name, name,” Alice said. “Started with a consonant, three or four syllables long. I can’t remember more than that. Anyway it was probably an alias. Those people do that, you know, in case a customer doesn’t like them and warns all her friends not to hire her.”

  “Who was the caterer?”

  “Stella’s Moveable Feast. There’s a Web page. Did you sleep with this woman in the past or what?”

  “Good luck in court today,” I said.

  “Same to you if your day ever comes.”

  Suddenly I knew what came next. I pulled over to the curb and booked a flight to China.

  39

  It was almost as hot and sticky in Shanghai as in Washington, which is to say that Kinshasa could not compete. The immigration and customs inspectors at the airport paid no particular attention to me. My papers were in order—one more entry and exit remained on my visa. They didn’t even ask if I was still a student before stamping my passport. Demonstrative suspicion had long since gone out of style here. If Guoanbu was interested in you it preferred that you remain as relaxed as possible. Long before you landed it would just arrange for you to be put into a bugged hotel room with watchers in the lobby buzzing around you like gnats. I stayed in a cheap hotel in a bad neighborhood because I was paying for this trip out of my own pocket and because the staff here might be a bit less used to keeping tabs on people who interested the security services. I was not difficult to follow, being white and four or five inches taller than almost everyone else, and as usual not really caring whether or not I was followed.

  After a long afternoon nap and a lukewarm shower I got dressed and went into the street. My objective was to find Chen Jianyu. Finding him was possible, I thought, despite the vigilant father and the teeming crowds that screened him from me. However, I was by no means confident I would succeed. I had only two weeks to do what I had to do in a culture that had a very long history of confounding its enemies by wasting their time. However, the situation was not hopeless. “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by,” says Laozi. I had no idea where Chen Jianyu lived and no way of finding out. I would never get through the door if I did find out. But I knew he worked in the tower, where punctuality was an ironclad law. Therefore he would have to get to work on time in the morning and leave at quitting time in the afternoon. I also knew his hangouts and the hours he was likely to be there. I knew the hours he was likely to be at one or another of them—his cohort of princelings might live in what it thought was anarchy, but for all its make-believe their gang ran on a tight schedule. If I visited all the hangouts for fourteen nights I had a reasonable chance of finding him. Interception was my whole plan, catching him on the fly. After that, everything depended on his turning out to be what I hoped he was, and what his social life suggested he was—a secret American. The world was full of them.

  It was about three miles to the tower. No taxis cruised in this part of town. If I walked the whole distance I would be very sweaty by the time I got there. I needed change for a bus so I bought a fried egg embedded in a pancake from a vendor, who held up four fingers for bus No. 4 when I asked him which one went east. I should have known better than to take a bus. I did know better. Passengers, with more getting aboard at every stop, were packed in like, well, sardines. The temperature was well above body temperature. I had an advantage because my head stuck up above the crowd and I had a little more air to breathe than anyone else. Within seconds, however, I was drenched in sweat, my own and that of many strangers. I kept my right hand on my wallet and my left fist balled so that slipping off my WalMart wristwatch would be more difficult. The Chinese eat a lot of cabbage. Gas escaped from the intestines of many passengers and mingled with untold amounts of recycled bad breath. By the time I got off, a block from the tower, no bloodhound could have detected my original scent beneath the rank odors my clothes and skin had absorbed from the many bodies that had been crushed against mine for the last half hour.

  The building, magnificent and vulgar, stood not far from the harbor. A weak breeze from the sea wafted over the crowd, and I cooled off somewhat while I waited for Chen Jianyu to make an appearance. It was rush hour and I was a rock in a flowing stream of humanity, so it was difficult to stand still. Every third person, it seemed, tried to push me out of the way, but I had a weight advantage on most of them, so I was able to hold my ground. After about twenty minutes I spotted Chen Jianyu inside a midnight blue 7 Series BMW sedan that emerged from the tower’s underground garage. The crowd ignored it. Chen Jianyu did not bother to blow the horn or flash the lights. Instead, he inched into the throng. Mostly people got out of his way when nudged by the car’s bumper, but most refused to yield the right-of-way. The car pulsed with rock music playing at very high volume. I pushed my own way to the passenger-side front window. Inside the BMW, Chen Jianyu was smoking a cigarette and seemingly talking to himself as he chatted on the hands-free telephone. I rapped on the window. He paid no attention. Probably he could not hear me over the music, but even if he could, he probably knew no one who traveled on foot, so he just wasn’t curious. I tried the door handle. He saw who I was and unlocked the door. I got in. A woman’s voice came over the speakers. I overheard just a syllable or two before Chen Jianyu disconnected.

  He looked me up and down, betraying no surprise. He turned down the music and said in English, “Nice aftershave.”

  “Can I hitch a ride?”

  “Where to?”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Quite a long way as soon as I run over all these people.”

  Now he blew the horn, he flashed the headlights. Pedestrians shouted, banged on the hood and the roof. Chen Jianyu paid no attention. He sounded, he looked, he dressed—in designer suit and necktie—as if showing up for a photo op.

  I said, “Can I ride along?”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “I can’t promise you a ride back. Where are you staying?”

  “You wouldn’t know the hotel.”

  “Ah, traveling incognito.” He turned up the sound system—the Foo Fighters’ greatest hits. “Let’s observe silence while I’m driving,” he said, putting a finger on his lips.

  It took us two hours on a six-lane superhighway that looked like a mock-up of the Interstate—same signage, same tollbooths, same everything—to drive to Suzh
ou, a city about sixty miles from Shanghai. Not a word passed between us the entire way. We parked by a large lake. By now the sun, hanging behind the city’s perpetual scrim of pollution, was a red blister in the west.

  Once we were out of the car, Chen Jianyu spoke, this time in Mandarin. “Have you been here before?” he said.

  “No. This is Suzhou?”

  “‘Heaven on earth,’ they call it because of its gardens,” Chen Jianyu said. “Birthplace of the Wu culture. The Yangtze flows through the city. But you know all that.”

  “There are a lot of things I don’t know,” I said.

  “A common complaint,” he said, switching back to English. “What specifically do you want to know that you don’t now know?”

  I told him, straight out. All of a sudden he was no longer a lounge lizard. He listened to my questions with what seemed to be keen interest, as if he were learning something interesting—which of course he was.

  When I had finished—I didn’t have all that many questions and they were all short and to the point—he said, switching back to English, “The answer to all your questions except one is, ‘Be patient.’”

  “What about the one you can answer?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Yes, I was approached by some spook who thought he spoke Shanghainese when I was at Purdue. One of my professors set up the meeting. I told the spook to get lost. I’m not crazy, even if hanging out with you would suggest otherwise.”

  “What about the others that professor approached?”

  “How would I know? But they’re not crazy, either.”

  He looked at the sun, which was sinking rapidly, lighting a path across the lake. It would be dark in a matter of minutes. Chen Jianyu said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We strolled along the lake—Taihu Lake, the signs said—and into a park. Thousands of others were taking the evening air, half of them watching the sunset with oohs and ahs and the other half taking pictures of it with their cell phones. One slim woman stood apart with her back to the spectacle and watched us approach. The light was behind her, so it took a moment before I made out her face.

  Mei.

  40

  The sunset had everyone else’s attention, so had that been my impulse I could have swept the love of my life into my arms and kissed her hungrily. It was not my impulse. This had nothing to do with confused emotions. I knew exactly what I felt—astonishment and relief that Mei was alive and free, rage but no surprise that Chen Qi had lied to me about her fate, certainty that Mei had never loved me, resentment that I had never been more to her than a target and possibly, if she hadn’t been faking it, a sexual toy. The facts that I had not loved her until I lost her, that I would have deserted her and never looked back if so ordered by Headquarters, that I had used her with a cold heart as a cheap teacher and a convenient lay, that I was worse than she was, didn’t count. I stood where I was, five steps away from her, rooted to the ground, unsmiling, seething, staring. It was, in short, a very human moment. What right did she have to ambush me like this? What right, what motive did Chen Jianyu, who had her to himself now, have to taunt me in this way? Mei, up to her old tricks, locked eyes with me. I looked away, searching for Chen Jianyu. He was nowhere to be seen.

  With a jerk of her head, Mei beckoned me closer. I took four steps in her direction but remained out of reach. She did not stir. “You’ve got a problem,” she said, “or are you just surprised to see me?”

  I had not heard her speak English since I forbade her to do so on the day we met. She still had the Boston accent. In Mandarin I said, “You’re looking like yourself.”

  This was the truth. She hadn’t aged a day or gained or lost an ounce, her hair was done in the same way as before and was just as lustrous, she had the same belle of Shanghai face and manner. True, some of the mischief had gone out of her eyes, or so it seemed to me in the failing light. She wore trousers, loose white ones, so I had to reimagine her legs. What my brain produced was the image of Mei sprawled in Zhongshan Road, her miniskirt awry, her sweet bottom in its good-girl underwear, her honey-colored thighs and calves. My mind and body responded now as they had responded then.

  “Speak English,” she said. “If we talk in Mandarin we’ll attract even more attention.”

  The sun dropped below the horizon. Show over, everyone turned around. About half the crowd spotted me at once. You could read their questions in their faces. They were all the same. What was this foreigner, this laowai, doing here all alone and not in a tamed group of other foreigners as a laowai was supposed to be? Why was that pretty Chinese girl talking to him? What was the matter with her? The light was fleeing. They squinted in unison. It got darker, then it got dark. Weak lamps switched on along the paths.

  “Walk with me,” Mei said. “I have things for you to hear.”

  Walking away from the already curious, we awakened curiosity in almost everyone else we encountered. Someone would certainly go for a policeman. Within minutes, Mei would have questions to answer in addition to the ones I meant to ask her.

  I said, “Let’s start with this. How come Chen Jianyu brought me to you?”

  “Out of the goodness of his heart,” Mei said. “He phoned me from the car as soon as he saw you knocking on the window.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he thought that the hope of finding me was why you were in Shanghai. He asked if I wanted to see you. I said yes.”

  “So he wanted to help. That seems like a strange motive in his case.”

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t he the lover you left me for?”

  She laughed explosively, arms hanging helplessly, as if the joke had stolen their strength. She stopped walking. So did I. People behind us bumped into us and into one another.

  She said, “My lover? Is that what you think?”

  “You two were lovey-dovey enough.”

  “He’s my brother, you nitwit.”

  The crowd was flowing around us now, rubbernecking, asking one another what ghost-people language this ill-matched couple was speaking, why they were together.

  I said, “Chen Qi is your father?”

  “Jianyu’s, too. Different mothers.”

  “So you’re half siblings?”

  “We never made the distinction,” Mei said. “There were just the two of us, we thought, but who can be sure? Chen Jianyu is two years older than I am. His mother was the official wife. My mother was somebody my father kidnapped. We all lived together in the same house, wives as best friends, sisters in misery, like in the Xia dynasty.”

  “What do you mean, ‘kidnapped?’”

  “Kidnapped. He saw, he lusted, he confiscated. It was the Cultural Revolution. To make things easier, her father and mother were sent to a commune in Yunnan for reeducation. My father was the Red Guard leader who made the arrest, the one who put a dunce cap on my grandfather’s head. In his mind he saved my mother from sharing her father’s humiliation. She was fifteen.”

  “Wasn’t that against the rules?”

  “‘Rules?’ The whole idea of the Cultural Revolution was that there were no rules.”

  “Just days ago someone told me you were Chen Qi’s niece,” I said. “Chen Qi himself said you two were related—distantly, he implied.”

  “He said that to you?” Mei said. “For him that’s the same thing as a full confession.”

  “Why would he tell me, of all people?”

  “He has his reasons. He always does. But he never speaks the whole truth. Ask my mother. He told her that her parents would be well treated on the commune and she would be reunited with them when their reeducation was complete. They both died of hunger and exhaustion. She never saw them again, never had a letter.”

  “You sound like you hate your father,” I said.

  “That’s why this is your lucky night,” Mei said, “so listen to me.”

  I did as she asked. Her English was far better than I had imagined. She sounded like she had been born and brought up in Concord, Massachus
etts. After a moment I stopped being impressed by her fluency, started listening, and realized she was telling me things I desperately wanted to know. As if reading from a checklist, she informed me of matters I realized might save my life—and might very well cost her hers, no matter who her father was, or more likely, because he was who and what he was.

  I didn’t like listening to these revelations in the presence of ten thousand eavesdroppers.

  “Old Chinese proverb,” Mei said when I complained. “There’s safety in numbers. We’re lost in the crowd instead of being in plain sight.”

  But how did we know that one or more of the myriad who were using their cell phone cameras were not taking our pictures in support of their local police? How did we know that the little old lady sitting on a bench, wrinkled and hunched and so short that her feet didn’t touch the ground, wasn’t a Guoanbu informer? I spoke these thoughts aloud.

  “You should remember to take your medication,” Mei said. “Listen, in the right circumstances, everybody in China is an informer, a spy, a danger to everyone else. In the U.S.A., too, except in that country they usually sell their story to the National Enquirer instead of going to the secret police. It’s the same everywhere—the Eskimos, the Khoikhoi of the Kalahari Desert. Remember the Russians, the East Germans. Everyone informed on everyone else—husbands, wives, lovers, best friends, Party comrades. Especially Party comrades or fellow Christians. Or lovers. It’s in our DNA. Get over it.”

  Her upturned face was deadly serious, an expression new to me. God, but she was a beauty. She must look like her mother. She certainly didn’t resemble Chen Qi. Mei resumed talking—more softly, so it was difficult to hear her voice above the babble. I mimed turning up the volume. She shook her head. I slouched, so as to put my ear closer to her mouth. Still, I had to listen so hard that I could think of nothing else. No doubt that was the idea.