A Death in China

CHAPTER 27

The photo album had a royal blue cover and a gold stripe. It was old and worn, with tape for hinges. The album contained faded black-and-white pictures, a half century old, of wicked, life-giving Shanghai. There were photos of New York in the 1930s as well, of a self-conscious young man in stiff white shirt and broad necktie posed before municipal landmarks: Grant's Tomb, the spanking new Empire State Building.

The album had been David Wang's favorite.

He would sit at his desk in the old farmhouse and turn the well-remembered pages. Before a man can understand where he is going he must first come to terms with where he has been. Sometimes David Wang found refuge in the album when he had a visitor. From it he would extract lessons that matched the problem the visitor brought. Once Thomas Stratton, nerves jangled, memories still too fresh, had sat before the cumbersome old farmer's desk and watched David Wang finger the pages to the accompaniment of a gentle, wise man's monotone.

"Ah, Shanghai, what a city it was, Thomas. A cauldron of the very best and the very worst there is to life. Luxury unbounded. But for most, inconceivable misery. Too much misery. It had to change, but alas, it took the Communists to do it. We are all a bit like Shanghai, aren't we? We all change. Every day we are different. And if we are smart, smarter than the Communists, we do not destroy the good. We destroy the bad, edge it out slowly but surely-ruthlessness, cruelty, injustice, rash behavior. We build on what is good, like the body repairing a wound, forcing out the infection, replacing good for bad. Why, I remember as a boy in Shanghai… "

Through a cotton wool of pain and confusion Thomas Stratton watched David Wang again at his desk, again with the album in his delicate, thinker's fingers.

But it was not David. Not even the dulling ache in his skull would allow Stratton to believe that. There was no cup of jasmine tea at David's elbow.

Instead, a coil of rope, serpentine and menacing, lay on the scarred old desk.

There was no crackle from the old fire or soft glow from a desk lamp, only the rattle of an old-fashioned kerosene lantern perched anachronistically in one corner.

David Wang did not sit at his desk. David Wang was dead.

At David's desk, defiling his memory, his goodness, sat his brother. His murderer.

Stratton would have sprung but for the bonds that held him, hand and foot, to the old Harvard chair.

"He was a fool, my brother," Wang Bin said. "An arrogant, intellectual romantic, a superior being who lived in a cage of his own making-too smug to come to terms with reality. No, reality might have been disordered, unpleasant, and that would never do, would it? Of course not. Best to ignore it, then. A fool… but you do not agree, Professor Stratton?"

"What are you doing here?" A wounded plea. Stratton barely recognized his own voice.

"I could tell you I came for sentimental reasons. David told me about this place, and what it meant to him. And all you see around you in this room, Professor, are the memories of a childhood we shared. I could tell you I came here to see all this, to taste these old memories… but that's not the reason."

Wang Bin eyed Stratton. "There is a more practical reason for me to be here."

"Let's hear it."

"Soon enough, Professor." Wang Bin walked slowly around the desk. Knots bit into Stratton's flesh. He would break the chair. It was only wood.

Stratton saw the punch coming out of the corner of an eye; there was nothing he could do. A knobby fist smashed into his cheekbone. Stratton tasted blood.

"My brother," Wang Bin said calmly, "was a fool who could see the truth but chose to ignore it. Even as a child he was a sanctimonious fraud. One year older he was, that is all. Is that a century? Does one year bestow wisdom? Ah, but how David loved to play the elder, he the superior and I the inferior, the ignorant younger brother. My mother and father, they were fooled by him, like everyone else…

"Once I broke a vase, a beautiful Ming vase. It sat there on a polished wooden table, beautiful and ludicrous. And I broke it, perhaps even intentionally. I smashed it into a million pieces." Wang Bin paused, with a curious smile. "Like all children, I was afraid of what my parents would do. So I told my mother that a deliveryman-an old man who brought fresh crabs to the house-had carelessly broken the vase with his sack. She believed me. But that was not good enough for my brother. He went to Mother and said, 'It was I, your eldest son, who broke the vase, Mother. Bin is only trying to protect me. I take responsibility.' Did they beat him? No, of course not. 'What an honest boy you are,' they said.

"And did David then beat me, or mock me to show me,how much braver he was? No.

He never said a word, nothing, as though by making me wallow in my shame I would drown. Just as he never said a word to me those days when I would skip my piano lessons and come back only to find him playing my exercises, so that downstairs my mother would hear it and think how dedicated I was, just like my elder brother."

Stratton said, "Why are you here?"

Wang Bin sat down once more at the desk. "We have time for that, Professor, plenty of time."

Stratton worked the knots at his wrists. "So you were a jealous little brother," he prodded. "That's your explanation."

"For murder?" Wang Bin seemed amused. "No."

"How could you hate him so much?"

"I am not sure I did. Not at the end." His voice was level, emotionless. "The day finally came for my big brother to leave for the United States. How sad was my mother, how proud my father. All the servants wept, and I wept, too. I wept for the joy of it, Professor Stratton. He was gone and I would be the elder son.

My parents thought I wept from sadness. How I fooled them! My father took me aside and said, 'Bin, do not weep. You must be strong and brave like your brother and in another year, perhaps two, you will join him to study.' I never would have gone. To follow him. In anything. Never. How little my father understood of me, or of China.

"When my mother left for the Revolution I joined her instantly. Here was something my brother could not do, or my father. To fight a revolution. War is very exciting, Professor Stratton. Do you remember how the skin tingles, the senses race? I was barely sixteen-imagine, not yet sixteen!-and I would call my soldiers and say, 'Comrades, we must take that bridge. The people's struggle demands it.' And they would say, 'Yes, Comrade,' and they would march with fifty-year-old rifles into artillery and machine-gun fire. They would die unflinching, uncomplaining, with a mindless zeal that someone like you would admire. I loathed their stupidity. And I loathed the Revolution, too. Loved and loathed it.

"It should have been a bright dream, a dream so great my brother could never have known its like. Instead it was a theater of the absurd. 'Yes, Comrade, we will go off and die because the people demand it.' Is it heroic to roll in the mud like a pig when you can be clean, or to march through snow in bare feet when you can ride? It was a peasant's revolution. The peasants won. And ever since, in their bungling, they have disgraced the heritage of the nation with the most splendid history of all.

"The imperial times! The dynasties! That was when China was great. That is when I should have lived." Wang Bin spoke with a trace of sadness. "In the times of the emperor."

"You'd fit right in," Stratton said. "A greedy old man who murdered his brother for profit."

"My brother. My brother."

The thumb and forefinger of Stratton's left hand were mobile now, and with them he feverishly worried the knots.

" 'Dear elder brother,' " Wang Bin recited in mockery. " 'I think of you often after all these years, so many miles away. I should like to see you before I die. It would be wonderful if you could come to China… ' "

"And so he came, with his cameras and his loud synthetic clothes. 'You must help me, brother,' I said. 'I must leave China for reasons that you would not understand, and I must take with me what is my due.' I showed him my treasures in Xian. He stood beside me and looked at them."

"Clay soldiers, that's all."

Wang Bin stared at Stratton scornfully. Through the heavy drapes a gust of wind rattled the windows and Stratton heard the sudden assault of rain on the glass.

He used the sound to mask his movements, tilting the chair just a fraction to give his feet greater purchase against the ropes.

Wang Bin said, "The soldiers are toys for children, a pittance. In Xian I showed my brother the real treasure. Even he was left speechless by its majesty."

" 'You must help me,' I said to him. 'With the soldiers we will have enough money to live in splendor wherever we choose. I ask but two things of you: That you allow me to hide you here in China so that I may leave the country on your passport. After two weeks you have only to go to your embassy to say that you lost your passport, and they will give you a new one. Then, once we are together in the United States, you can help me recover the soldiers and sell them. Is that too much to ask of a brother, after all these years? Help me, please. I have lived more than once as a peasant. I cannot live like that again. I will not.' "

"You should've known what his answer would be," Stratton said.

Wang Bin nodded. "He said, 'It is wrong what you are doing, it is a crime. I cannot help you.' " The deputy minister shrugged.

"So you killed him." Stratton's thumb was abraded and hurt painfully. He wished he had longer fingernails. Keep him talking. Above all, keep him talking.

"I did not plan to murder him," Wang Bin said. "I had his room searched, and I had him followed because I was afraid he would rush to his embassy like an old woman. In the end I did kill him, but because I had no choice. In his death was the only means of accomplishing my escape and saving my treasure."

Stratton said, "You're a weak old man, Comrade. Even in death your brother intimidates you. Listen to yourself-the lies, the jealousy, the way you pervert his memory."

One of the knots came loose. The pressure on Stratton's right wrist eased; he twisted it back and forth within the growing circle of rope.

"But that's your stock in trade, isn't it, Comrade Deputy Minister? The perversion of history. That's why we're here."

"Ah, yes." Wang Bin smiled a winter's smile. "My artifacts."

"And your coffins!"

"They make excellent shipping crates." Wang Bin folded his hands but looked impatient. "Don't tell me you mourn the tourists, Professor. I did not kill them all. The first, a fat capitalist, died quite naturally. Death by duck, your embassy called it. A clever name for a common occurrence, I learned. And it gave me the idea. His was the first coffin."

The rope rubbed raw against Stratton's wrist. Feeling flooded back into his fingers. Another minute…

"You couldn't have done it all alone."

"Certainly not. I had many trusted associates-a doctor for the lethal poisons, welders for the caskets, diggers, of course. Fortunately they understood that I was directing a secret project for the Party. That lie was necessary, you see, to assure their complete loyalty and their perpetual silence."

"And your buddy, Harold Broom. Was he, too, working for the glory of the Party?"

"Broom was a worm, a drunken cheat. I chose him only because David would not cooperate. Broom cheated me about money, and then he conspired with the Greer woman."

"Poor Harold," Stratton sneered. And poor Linda.

Another twist. Just one more. Make the fist small. Slide the rope over… there!

Stratton's right hand was free. He clawed at the knot on his left wrist, blessing the rain pummeling the house.

"The Greer woman was another worm, wasn't she?" Stratton said harshly. "Well, she was the only one who could have saved you, Comrade."

Wang Bin looked quizzically at Stratton. "It is not my salvation that brings us here, but your death. You must die as Miss Greer had to die. The difference is that you are troublesome and she was dangerous-more dangerous than you because she was smarter. She did not come as you have, thrashing about, making great noise and great threats. She did not care about smuggling or murder. Or morality, Professor. She had only one goal: information. I respected that. She was not like the professor of stupidity who seeks revenge for a pompous friend, or perhaps merely wants to cleanse himself of past sins… "

Wang Bin allowed the phrase to dangle, watching Stratton.

"Did you think that I did not know about the pregnant peasant woman who was slashed from her throat to her belly? It had to be you. You were the only invader who escaped from Man-ling."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh yes, you know. Your face says so. You would have lived longer, Stratton, if you had been less impulsive and more clever. Miss Greer was very clever; she must have been a good spy. The way she dealt with you, for example, quickly and noiselessly, outside the cemetery. Then she rode with us, Broom and I, bought us dinner, talked… and made her proposal. It was very civilized. 'I know everything,' she said, 'about your brother and the soldiers. I know everything and none of it matters. If you come with me and talk to us-tell us what you know-you may keep the money and remain in the United States under our protection.' "

Wang Bin paused for effect, like one of the professional storytellers who nightly enthrall the old men at dank teahouses in provincial China. Stratton was picking up speed; his left hand was nearly free.

When Wang Bin resumed, he had become another person, a canny old grandfather.

"For Harold Broom, who would have sold his mother, it was as though Miss Greer spoke from the heavens. He choked on his chicken dinner. 'Me too?' he asked. 'No prosecution?' "Miss Greer smiled. She had a lovely smile, Stratton. Did you notice that? She smiled at Mr. Broom and said, 'Of course. You, too.' And I said, 'Miss Greer, this is a very fair offer. I can be of great assistance to your government. But please tell me so an old man will know your thoughts: What will happen if I refuse?' Miss Greer looked very sad. 'We would have to arrest you and deport you to China,' she said, 'but I am sure that will not happen… ' "

The rope came free. Stratton bunched it in his left hand so that it didn't fall to the floor. He calculated the distance from chair to desk. It would have been easy, except for his feet, still bound to the chair. If he launched himself pogo-style he might-just might-reach far enough to grab an arm, the shirt, the neck-anything would do.

Wang Bin said, "Of course I gave Miss Greer my consent. 'I realize when I have been defeated,' I said. 'Your terms are very generous and I accept them. Let us leave now.' "Broom could not contain his glee. Miss Greer seemed surprised-it had been so easy. And after that, who could deny a confused and defeated old man the right to sit alone in the back seat with his thoughts? Miss Greer, you see, was not as clever as she thought. She never looked for a gun-and the price of that mistake was death. The world will think she died as Broom's lover, mistress to an international crime."

Wang Bin glowed in self-satisfaction: another victory, among so many.

Now. It had to be now. Stratton tensed to spring.

Too late.

Wang Bin must have had the gun on his lap the whole time. There was no other way he could have leveled it so quickly.

It was a fat, black.45, the kind the United States government issues its agents. Linda Greer's gun.

"Stratton, you have been maneuvering your hands as I spoke," Wang Bin said quietly. "If you move again, I shall shoot. I can do it, believe me. I spent many more years in the army than you did."

Stratton sagged, full of self-disgust.

"It's hard for me to believe you could actually be David's brother, or Kangmei's father," he said. "You have dishonored your country, your ancestors, your family, all in the name of greed."

"Ah, Kangmei, my lovely daughter. She excited you, yes? You were not the first, I assure you. It was probably she who made possible your escape. I should have foreseen such a thing, but it is too late. China's system will deal with her-for that, the system is efficient."

"This country's got a system, too," Stratton said. "You'll get caught, Bin. The spooks-Linda's friends-will snatch you up and turn you inside out. You'll tell them everything, too. You won't be able to help it-drugs, sensory deprivation, shock. When they're finished, you'll be as dead and dusty as your goddamn clay soldiers."

"I don't think so, Professor."

"Believe me." Stratton fought to keep his voice steady. "I'll make you a better offer than Linda Greer did. Go now. Run. Get out of here. I'll give you twenty-four hours before I come looking, and then it'll just be me. Alone. No police."

Wang Bin's response was icy, bemused. "I think not, Stratton. No one is looking for me now, and no one will. I drowned in Peking, you see. Drowned before I could see my ministry dishonored by two thieves-imperialist American running dogs who looted the treasures of the people of China. Harold Broom. And Linda Greer. When she is identified, and the emperor's soldier is found in the car, her superiors will understand where her true loyalties lay: she was a thief. I was very careful, Stratton. I provided all the pieces to the puzzle: the soldier, the suicide note and the list."

"What list?"

"The list of Mr. Broom's buyers, of course. Wrapped up with the soldier, in the trunk of the car. You look surprised."

"No," Stratton said. But he was. Sgt. Gil Beckley hadn't mentioned the list-he was an even better cop than Stratton had thought.

"I had no need for the customers anymore, Professor. The money is quite safe, and so am I. All clues point to Mr. Broom and Miss Greer. There will be no pursuit. But you must accept that on faith, Stratton. I have already anticipated your own quiet removal."

"People will look for me… " But Stratton saw that it was useless.

Wang Bin had won.

Thomas Stratton would be the last sacrifice of an ancient funeral rite.

With the speed and deftness of a snake-a cobra-Wang Bin's hand flicked the coil of rope from the desk. A noose settled over Stratton's head.

Wang Bin hauled Stratton, wheezing, until he was suspended almost horizontally between the desk and the heavy chair which held his feet. He squirmed and grunted, lamely pawing at the rope on his neck.

"Something else I learned in the army," Wang Bin said. "Careful, Stratton. The harder you struggle, the worse it will be."

Stratton felt the rope slacken and instantly he was on the floor, heaving. His shirt was soaked with cold sweat.

"Your original question, Professor Stratton: Why am I here? It's very simple. I am here to borrow some tools." Wang Bin stood up. One hand held the gun. With the other hand he fitted a shapeless, faded hat-David's gardening hat-onto his head. "There is a shovel out on the porch. You will carry it."

Wang Bin wrapped Stratton's tether around his right fist and pulled hard.

"Now we shall go for a walk, Mr. Stratton. There is something you must do for me before you die."