The Shadow Knows

by Kenneth Rosen

  ***

  It was not long after this that I received a note from our embassy saying that E. G. Marshall, Eli Wallach, and Ann Jackson would be coming to China on a tour and would be interested in giving a performance at the university, preferably to the participants in our American Studies class. Larry cleared it with Ma, who first had to get it approved by the Party people in the university and the people in the Ministry of Education, and then he told our students. Most of them had never seen an American film or play before and so the names meant little, but the fact that two distinguished actors and a distinguished actress were coming from America to perform in their classroom was enough to generate plenty of excitement. A week before the performance – it was to be a series of individual dramatic readings from the works of relatively popular American writers and a longer skit performed by the three of them without benefit of props or scenery – Lynn Boaz called and asked Larry and Noah and me to come down to his office to work out some of the last-minute details of the visit. The meeting was superfluous – there was nothing of any substance discussed that couldn’t just as easily have been dealt with in a thirty-second telephone call – but about midway through the allotted half hour the Ambassador dropped in to give us a short speech on how grateful we should be to Mr. Boaz and his USIA staff for their arranging this visit and how honored we should feel knowing that our program at Beida was one of the few stops on the tour these people were making through China. When he left all four of us probably felt uncomfortable; I certainly did and Lynn looked as if he wanted to crawl under his desk and hide, but he went through the remaining motions, pointing out that he hoped we wouldn’t mind having some embassy types and their spouses attend our class that day and that we should be prepared to have some ranking members of the Ministry there as well. He was sure that some of them would want to attend as this would be a kind of testing of the waters for them: the first time since Westerners were allowed back into China that professional American performers, excluding athletes, would be allowed access to an audience at the university. The meeting ended with Noah rather dramatically assuring him that neither the visitors nor he nor Larry were likely to embarrass the United States government by flashing in public on the afternoon in question, but he wasn’t so confident about me, given my tendency to drool and babble in the presence of the Hollywood crowd and high-ranking Communist Party officials.

  “That guy’s got a lousy job,” Noah added as the three of us rode back to the university in a taxi. “Playing wet-nurse to every American visitor deemed worthy of attention and sitting around all day listening to patriotic bullshit like that. He seems bright enough – the inanity of it all must drive the poor bastard up a wall sometimes.”

  Larry grunted his agreement and I said nothing.

  Ann Jackson and Eli Wallach were in splendid form the day they performed at Beida and Marshall, although hampered by a bad cold, gave a reading that had our students applauding wildly for more. The three of us sat in the back of the largest lecture hall and after Larry had introduced our guests we just relaxed for an hour and enjoyed the show. The Party officials from the Ministry and the university administration showed up in force and several senior embassy people and their families sat in the front row. By far the most popular performance of the afternoon, as far as the students were concerned, was Wallach’s dramatic reading of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It was a poem many of them had read in a recently published translation and the work’s final and faintly self-satisfied lines seemed to echo what many of them were feeling and thinking about in this period of post-Mao liberalization. The emphasis on self and freedom of choice had a few of the older Party members turning their heads and looking sternly at their younger neighbors, but Wallach’s performance was perfect theater and the ovation he received was long and loud. When the final skit was finished the three of them responded to the applause by bowing once and then applauding the audience vigorously in return.

  As we waited at the back for the dignitaries and the students to finish talking to the actors and to file out, Noah summed up his feelings about the afternoon’s events.

  “It’s a pleasure to get an infusion now and then from the decadent West, especially when the stuff is administered by such experts. It’s a good time for foreigners to visit this country – I only wish the Chinese would treat their own people as well as they treat their guests.”

  In late May the American Ambassador invited us to a reception for a visiting women’s basketball team and after it was over I found myself strolling around a sunny and relatively uncrowded Tien An Men Square with Fred Berenson. He’d been covering the team’s visit as part of his job and his invitation to such embassy affairs just went with the territory. We’d both had more than our share of the Ambassador’s wine and it felt good to walk it off. Fred took off his jacket and loosened his tie and undid the top button of his short-sleeved white shirt as we passed the inevitable line of people waiting in silence to be allowed to enter Mao’s mausoleum and to file past the man’s plastic-topped coffin under the ever-watchful eyes of the fully armed PLA guards. I’d already shed my own Chinese jacket and now I turned my face up to the warmth of the sun as Fred continued talking.

  “------and this friend from Le Monde said that this really distinguished looking gent we’d just seen getting into the Huping Fandian’s freight elevator was the same guy he knew down in Bangkok about six years ago. Seems he’s a Brit who claimed to be looking to make some import-export connections in Thailand in those heady days after we hauled our asses out of Saigon. The Golden Triangle was gearing back up again for full production and this Brit had a habit of being around whenever there was anything really nasty going down that involved the Thai government, which was almost every week. My friend seemed to know quite a bit about this guy and what he was like then. Said he hung out at the Black Jade Club with some very unsavory characters and the foreign press had him tagged as an agent for at least one government and perhaps for two or three. One story that went the rounds among the older hands in the press corps had this guy breaking up a pretty fancy party in a dealer’s house on the edge of the city that involved at least a dozen child prostitutes, both male and female, and some very prominent citizens. Seems he wasted the dealer and two of his cronies and then torched the place for good luck. The dealer was a general’s son and this guy is supposed to have beheaded him just as he was about to have intercourse with a twelve year old girl. Used a ceremonial sword the general had given his son as a present. A lot of heat on the guy from some influential Thais, as you can imagine, but he must have had some powerful friends himself because no charges are ever filed and no reprisals are carried out. The guy, my friend says, becomes something of a legend in the back alleys of Bangkok.”

  We came to the massive restored gate directly behind the mausoleum and turned right to pass in front of the marble steps of the Great Hall of the People. The sun beat down steadily and I could feel the sweat running down my back and under my arms. Things looked a little fuzzy as I shielded my eyes and gazed out across the square at an old man trying to launch an elaborate red and gold kite, but I couldn’t be sure if it was the wine or just the sun’s glare off the white pavement. Fred went on as if we were walking by the cool shore of some lake.

  “At any rate, as I was saying, I saw this guy again a few weeks ago up at the resort town of Beidaihe when I went up there to do a piece and when I came back to Beijing I did some checking on him. Not too many straight answers from anyone, of course, but I did find out that he does odd jobs for us every now and again even though his steady employer is in London. My sources, such as they are around here, say that his services don’t come cheap. They figure he’s one of the last of a breed of old Asia-hands who aren’t too much in demand by anyone these days until an unusually messy job has to be done, and the Brits give him a long lead and look the other way when he earns a little on the side as long as it’s with a friend of Her Majesty’s government.
I asked about him at our own embassy – just might be a good story in all this, if there’s enough material and if any of it is fit to print – but nobody there has yet admitted they know anything about him.”

  We were passing the corner of Chang An and turning right again, walking by the bright red entrance to the Forbidden City. The single huge portrait of Mao still hung in the center of the walled façade, dominating the square, and under the Chairman’s still-watchful gaze the photographers were busy adjusting their tripods and an occasional grey Shanghai would pull up, unload its foreign passengers, and pull away again into the light traffic. The season had unofficially changed so the dark blue Mao jackets and baggy pants had given way to white tops and pants of grey or tan, more in keeping with the weather, but from a distance and with the glare of the sun I still couldn’t help thinking of a society with a thin single-sex veneer, a veneer that barely covered the fact that more than one billion people were walking around out there making believe, much as the

  American Puritans had done, that sexual needs were irrelevant even while the birthrate soared. I was about to ask Fred what the latest population count was for China when he began talking again.

  “Which is why I wanted to talk to you. One of my sources in Harbin told me that you know the man, that the two of you spent some time together in a hotel lobby up there once.”

  I turned at an angle and started to cross the square diagonally, sidestepping the now more numerous kite flyers who were taking advantage of the light wind that had come up, and Fred stayed right beside me.

  “What did you say the man’s name was?”

  “I didn’t, but my French friend knew him as Gareth Llewellyn.”

  “And what did you say your source’s name was?”

  “I didn’t.” He laughed. “And you should know better than that.”

  “Just curious. You seem to be very well informed about what goes on, even in places far from here. As a matter of fact, I don’t really know the man at all. I only met him once, if it’s the same man you’re talking about, and that was only by coincidence. He was in the lobby of my hotel in Harbin one day and we happened to get talking about something or other – I think it was the history of the city, the Russian influence on the place – and we even went for a drink together, if I remember correctly. He did tell me his name was Llewellyn.”

  “Did he tell you anything else about himself, like what he was doing in Harbin or what he did for a living? Anything at all?”

  “Not much. Just that he was there on business for a few days – something to do with importing or exporting, I think he said – and he mentioned at some point that he’d gone to Cambridge in his younger days. Seemed to be a pleasant enough guy – tall, grey-haired, maybe late fifties or early sixties, very knowledgeable about China.”

  “Yes, it’s the same man. Can you remember anything else he said, anything about him that might have impressed you or that might give me some leads to go on?”

  “No, not really. He spoke good Chinese – I heard him speak to a waiter – and I remember now that he seemed to be in pretty good physical shape. If he’s supposed to be the same guy your LeMonde friend told you about then he sure didn’t give me any indication up in Harbin. Sorry – that’s about all I can remember about him.”

  I’d tried to tell the truth, for the most part, and when I thought a lie was in order I’d tried to keep it simple, but I wasn’t exactly sure why I had gone through the whole charade. I finally decided it was because I wanted to keep my own reasons for being up in Harbin as far away from Fred’s investigations as possible, and I wasn’t at all sure that I’d succeeded.

  “Thanks anyway. I guess I’ll just have to dig around a little more and see if anything worthwhile turns up. By the way, how did you like the far north? Did you give a lecture up there?”

  We talked about Harbin, a city Fred had been to several times, as we crisscrossed the square once again and the sun began to go down behind Mao’s tomb. When we said goodbye Fred assured me that he would let me know if anything developed with the Llewellyn business and I told him I’d be curious to hear about it if anything did.