A Death in China

CHAPTER 16

The car was a Shanghai, requisitioned without explanation from the ministry motor pool, and it veered without grace through empty streets, a whining gray shadow. Decades before, in the army, Wang Bin had briefly driven a truck. Since then, it had been beneath him to drive at all. David Wang slumped against the passenger door with the empty gaze of a vexed old man.

"Why?" he asked again.

"I have tried to explain. It was for your own protection, brother, I promise you." The strain of driving overwhelmed Wang Bin's English. He had lapsed into the Shanghai dialect of their childhood. "The radicals… the madmen, they are coming back, grabbing for power. I am one of their victims."

"You caged me like an animal."

"Only to save you… from the madmen."

David Wang shook himself like a dog awakening. He squinted at his brother in the pale reflection of the windshield. Like watching a mirror. A mirror of lies.

"It was not the 'madmen' who drugged me and jailed me. Not the Party, or any radicals. Just you, brother. Only you."

"It was not my choice or my liking, I promise you. I had to make you disappear.

They… they were going to arrest you."

"Nonsense. You invited me to China as a pretext. Somehow my presence was important to your conspiracy. But I still do not see-"

"A wish to see the brother that was robbed from me. That was the only conspiracy, I swear it."

"And I was so glad to see you, at first. Like seeing myself again, seeing what I might have been like, living another life in another country; the product of a totally different society, a revolution. It moved me to see you, my brother, more than I can explain."

"And I, too."

Ahead, the road wound darkly toward the northern hills.

"But how fragile are our illusions, how quickly dispelled. It was in Xian. One single day of joy, discovery. And then, disillusion when I saw what you had done."

"Forget Xian," Wang Bin hissed. "It is not important. It has nothing to do with you."

"At first I imagined you wanted me to help you steal. I photographed what you did not want me to see and you took my camera away. Your carefully sculpted mask slipped then and I realized that you are my brother only in name. It is well that our father is dead."

"You do not understand."

"Oh, yes, brother. I have seen it, and touched it, and tasted its majesty. What you are doing is a crime against China, against all of us. I will not allow it."

Wang Bin spared a glance from the road, expecting to see his brother's hand on the door handle, ready to bolt. It was what he feared most. But David sat with his arms folded, staring straight ahead, a self-righteous plodder chewing on a puzzle. Wang Bin despised him.

"Where are you taking me?" David Wang demanded.

"This road goes to the Great Wall and to the Ming Tombs. I am taking you somewhere you will be safe."

"I would be safe in Peking, except for you."

"You must understand," Wang Bin exclaimed with all the conviction he could muster. "They were going to arrest you… as a spy."

"I? A spy? Can you not invent something less transparent?"

"It's true, I swear it. Hundreds of Chinese return here each year and disappear.

The government believes that once a Chinese always a Chinese. You may carry some other passport, but it doesn't matter. I heard from friends in the Public Security Bureau that you were to be arrested. Perhaps it was only their way of getting at me. But when I heard about it, I became desperate. I could not tell you. Since you have not lived in China, you cannot understand how things are. In desperation, the only thing I could think to do quickly was to hide you; to keep you safe until I could find a way to help you leave the country."

"And that is where we are going now? On an empty road to nowhere in the middle of the night? To keep me safe? To get me out of the country?"

"Yes."

"My brother, we are both old men, but neither of us is stupid. If you tell me the truth, I will try to help you. We can go to the embassy. I have important friends at home. It is not too late. Look, it is nearly dawn. Let it be the first dawn of a new life for you, my brother. I implore you. I will help."

Wang Bin never faltered. Cautiously, he directed the car across a long causeway that breasted a dry river. They entered an avenue lined with giant stone animals in pairs: camels, lions, elephants.

"This is the entrance to the Ming Tombs," Wang Bin said.

"I have seen the pictures."

"Very well, we will talk as brothers. Tell me what you think. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps it is not too late."

They were near now. Wang Bin needed only another few minutes. Of the thirteen tombs, one had been excavated and was open to tourists. The other twelve were in disrepair, their dusty grounds impromptu picnic sites for bored foreign residents of the capital. Wang Bin turned onto a narrow strip of asphalt running to a modern reservoir built in a gentle valley beneath the hillside tombs.

David Wang rambled on, but the words had become irrelevant now, like the memorial chants in the aftermath of battle. Wang Bin stopped the car on a rocky beach at the shore of the reservoir. The half light of false dawn shadowed a half-dozen wooden rowboats lying face down above the high-water mark. There was no sign of life.

Wang Bin shut off the engine. Carefully, he set the hand brake.

"Your words have great impact on me, brother," he said. "I am beginning to see my mistake, an excess of pride. Let us talk further in the fresh air. It is quite beautiful here. It is not often in China that a man can be alone like this."

Wang Bin stood with his back to the car, facing the dark, still water. He fished among the larger rocks for a flat stone and sent it skimming.

"Only two jumps. Do you remember how as boys we would skim stones in the river?

Five jumps, six jumps. Anything seemed possible then."

"I remember," David's voice came from behind.

"Things are more complicated now."

"Yes, they are. Neither of us is as strong as we were once in Shanghai."

"It is true."

They fell silent, watching tiny wavelets lapping at the beach stones.

It was David who spoke at last. A voice of infinite sadness.

"I have thought it through. I understand why you invited me to China, why you held me captive. And why you have brought me here. I know now what it is that only a brother can do for you, no one else. I understand your plan for him."

"Tell me."

"He is to be your essential victim. You must murder him."

Wang Bin never turned. Unseeing, he spoke to the waters.

"Yes. I must murder him."

With a tremendous shove, David Wang pushed his brother into the shallow water.

Then, clumsily, he began running along the beach toward a workman's shack that beckoned from the distance. David had not run far when he lost his footing on the loose stones and pitched forward with a groan.

It was then his brother caught him from behind.

Stratton's forearms ached from steering the hard-sprung truck over what seemed an endless series of unseen hills. The pitted road twisted, like a snake. In the tepid glint of light from the dashboard, the gauge that Stratton had decided was for gas rested on its bottom mark. The one next to it-temperature?-seemed to be rising. He nudged the girl at his side.

"Wake up, Kangmei. It will be dawn soon and the truck will not go much farther."

"I was not sleeping, Thom-as, just resting." She stretched and ran her hands through the mass of tangled black hair. "Have we passed a river?"

"On a very shaky bridge, about ten minutes ago."

"Good. We are almost there."

"Where is there, Kangmei?" She had been coy about that since their escape. A safe place where they would be with friends, she had said.

"It is a commune, Thom-as. We call it Bright Star. It is the home of my mother's family. I lived there during the Cultural Revolution when my father was being punished. My uncles are among the commune leaders. They will protect us."

Stratton nodded. It had to have been something like that. He riffled through the possibilities. A commune in a backward province more than a thousand miles from Peking, and probably a century in terms of control. Once they had taught him a great deal about communes, the central fact of life for eight hundred million Chinese. The instructor's voice came back to Stratton. He had been a Spec/6, dragged from a Ph.D. program to war. Shared reward for shared work, a Marxist replacement for rural villages dominated by landlords. Now there were no more landlords, only work brigades and production teams tilling common land.

What had resisted revolution was the social makeup of the communes. Almost all who lived on a commune in China were descendants of people who had lived there centuries ago. Nearly all the children born there would also die there in toothless old age. The continuity of families remained stronger than the caprice of a distant state.

Kangmei would be safe. The family would close around her, shutting out inquiries from cadres who, knowing the system, would not press too hard. She would be safe, but also empty. What kind of life would it be for an intelligent, vivacious young woman, calf-deep in paddy muck, courted by half-literate bumpkins? Whom would she talk to? Whom would she love? Kangmei deserved better than that. Stratton made himself a private promise: She would have it. Somehow.

One day.

But would the commune shelter him as well? Probably, for a time, anyway.

"Kangmei, we're in Guangdong Province, right? How far from the coast?"

"No, this is Guangxi. And we are many hours from the sea, many hills and many people."

Guangxi. Memories worse than the cobra.

"Look, I think it would be better if-"

She had outthought him.

"You would never make it to the sea without help, Thom-as. And my family will be very proud to hide you, and to help you escape, especially when they see the wonderful gift you are bringing them."

"You?"

She laughed, a mountain stream.

"Oh, they will be glad to see me, too. But it is the truck they will prize most."

"The truck."

"But… how will they account for it?"

"They will hide it while they let all other production teams know that they have saved enough money to buy a used truck. Then one day it will appear. Imagine the celebration; the other teams will be so jealous."

"I see," Stratton said in quiet wonder.

"You will be a hero, Thom-as. My hero." She slid across the seat and kissed him with flashing tongue.

They left the truck in a copse of trees on a hillside capped by an ancient pagoda. Kangmei, bubbling with the excitement of a little girl on Christmas, led him to the hilltop. It was nearly light by the time they reached the top.

"Down there," she said, gesturing to a mist-shrouded valley.

"That is Bright Star. My family lives in the houses near the school. Soon you will see."

With exaggerated care, she installed him on a bed of needles beneath some pine trees, about a hundred yards from the dirt path that wound into the valley.

"No one will see you here. Rest. My uncles and I will come back around lunchtime, when everyone is sleeping. It will be safe then for you to come down.

It's not far." She looked at him through almond eyes without end. "You will wait for me, Thom-as. Please?"

"I will wait." He hugged her. "Here, a gift for your family." He handed her the leather-yoked keys of the truck.

When she had gone, Stratton lay with his head pillowed in his arms and watched the sky turn blue. As the tension drained from him, aches replaced adrenaline.

It had been a long time since he had been this tired. Stratton surrendered to sleep.

When he awoke it was already late morning. The sun, approaching its zenith, oppressed the pine grove. It had brought sapping humidity and a winged holiday for insects of every stinging phylum. Stratton relieved himself against a tree and crawled onto an outcropping of rock that looked onto the valley, trying not to think how hungry he was.

A picturebook scene. The commune was comprised of what had apparently been four separate villages in the space of several square miles. Around each cluster of single-story wood homes well-trod dikes led to paddies of rice. In the northern quadrant lay a bright green field of what could only have been sugarcane. To the east was a well-kept citrus grove. A patchwork of small private plots lay on the fringes of the communal fields. The nearest settlement, the one to which Kangmei must have gone, was arranged around a carp pond. The only building of substance was a low, ramshackle structure with a thatched roof and a fresh coat of whitewash. Stratton decided it must be a combination school and office for the production team.

The fields and earthen streets of the village swarmed with people. Stratton watched a double file of schoolchildren, hand-in-hand, parade in a swatch of color toward a dusty soccer field where some teenagers desultorily kicked a ball.

Stratton counted two trucks and a handful of three-wheeled contraptions that looked like misshapen lawn mowers. "Walking tractors," Kangmei called them.

The scene was peaceful and, by Chinese standards, an advertisement for rural prosperity. Stratton noted the slender cable on thin poles that dropped into the hamlet and spread ancillary arms toward a few of the nearest houses; by rule of thumb in China, if electricity has spilled down to individual production teams, a commune is well off.

At the base of the hillside path there appeared a supple girl and two stocky men in peasants' garb. As they began to climb, the girl waved diffidently, a fleeting, offhand movement, like shooing flies. Kangmei had found refuge.

Stratton decided to wait where he was. Idly, he began to trace the power line out from the settlement, across the fields and back toward its origin.

It was a mistake.

In almost the precise center of the valley, sheathed in trees, lay the administrative headquarters of the commune, the hub of which the four production teams were spokes. Stratton could see a dingy white water tower and, amid shadows, the perimeter walls of what once had been the landlord's house. He made out a strip of macadam and along it some shops, a vegetable market and a fair-sized building with a half-domed roof that might once have been a 1930s movie theater.

Stratton saw without seeing the red-starred flag that hung limply from the building. He saw a chimney thrusting unnaturally from among the trees and knew without knowing that it belonged to a homespun woodworking factory that made grapefruit crates and slatted folding chairs. He saw a glint of water through the trees and knew that, except in the rainy season, the river that flowed there could be safely forded by men five feet ten or taller.

Stratton groaned aloud. In an instant of black despair, he cursed the luck that had forsaken him in rags among Chinese pines.

He rose to run.

Before him stood Kangmei. Smiling at her side were two erect, honey-colored men of late middle age with the same subtle, alluring facial structure that Kangmei had inherited.

"Thom-as," Kangmei said gravely, "these are my uncles. They will help us."

They were Zhuang, members of a race more Thai than Chinese that had settled in the southern hills in the mists of time. The Zhuang survived in modern China as the country's largest minority. Kangmei's mother was Zhuang, her father, Wang Bin, a member of the majority Han. The combination was what made her so striking. Stratton should have realized it before.

I know all about the Zhuang. They taught me that, too, Stratton wanted to yell, and wondered about his sanity.

Kangmei stared in open-mouthed concern.

"Thom-as! What is the matter? There is no danger. These are my uncles. They-"

"What is the name of this fucking place?"

"Thom-as!"

"Goddamn it. Tell me." He took an involuntary step toward the girl and the two peasants closed around her.

"I told you. We live in Bright Star."

"That's not the right name. I know. Tell me in Chinese."

The two peasants began talking angrily. Kangmei interrupted them with a stream of local dialect that seemed to mollify them.

"Thom-as, I have told them that you are feverish and hungry and very tired. But you must be polite to them, please."

"I'm sorry." Stratton grappled for composure. "Tell me the real name, please. I want to hear it."

"We live in Bright Star," she said slowly, as though instructing a slow child.

"Over there is Sweet Water, and there, Good Harvest, and there, Evergreen. Why is it so important?"

"And the place in the middle? Where the factory is, and the water tower?"

"That is where the cadres live, and some soldiers. It is not important. Our people go there only when they must-for Party discussions, to buy shoes and bicycle tires."

"What is it called?"

"It is called Man-ling."

"Man-ling, yes, Man-ling. Oh, sweet Jesus."

Stratton sank to his knees and buried his head in his hands. The peasants' hostility surrendered to concern. Kangmei sprang to his side.

"Thom-as, do not weep. Come, you will be safe. My aunts will cook special food.

There is a warm bed and a doctor for your leg. Yes, a doctor… you can trust him. He is a friend of my uncles'. Come, please. It is not far to walk."

"I can't. I must not."

"Please, Thom-as. Please. Soon there will be too many people. Already there are rumors about things that happened last night… Please."

"No. No. No," Stratton muttered in an anguished litany that was a warrior's penance.

He was too weak to resist when Kangmei and her uncles levered him to his feet and led him blindly down the gentle hillside into yesterday.

The general came late.

He had lunched too long-a farewell banquet for a retiring colleague: sea cucumbers, suckling pig, whitefish, pigeon, shark's fin soup, tree fungus for dessert, and torrents of mao tai. The colleague, eighty-four years old, a Party militant for nearly half a century, had never cracked a smile.

The general rebuffed chastising glances from the two civilian members of the tribunal with a short nod and settled noisily into his padded chair. He spared hardly a. glance for the gray-haired man disintegrating before the prosecutor's tongue-lashing. He thumbed briefly through the docket on the polished wood desk before him. The man was a musician of some sort.

The general did not know him. He ignored the stream of accusation and thought of his own son. The surveillance reports were quite concrete: The boy had been meeting foreign journalists, hanging out at the International Club, perfuming his hair, reading Western magazines. He had even, apparently, bedded a diplomat.

The general would not have minded that, but the omission of the diplomat's name, nationality and sex-certainly a calculated omission-could mean only the worst.

The young fool had been a mistake from the beginning, a winter child by the general's third wife when he was already fifty-seven. The boy had inherited his mother's looks, but not a scrap of common sense. He wanted to study in the United States. In the dawning Chinese political winter he might as well declare his intention of walking on the moon. The general dozed off, deciding that the boy would have to go into the army. If he let the Public Security Bureau have him, the boy's mother-another mistake, she cackled like a chicken-would make the general's life impossible.

"… compose and play unauthorized, bourgeois, decadent and immoral music."

"Twenty-six. You are accused, during the visit of foreign guests, to wit, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, of playing foreigners' instruments without authorization and of demeaning the prestige and honor of the People's Republic by publicly suggesting that they were of a quality superior to those made in the People's Republic… "

The general roused himself for the climax. When the prosecutor asked for life imprisonment, the musician fainted. The general watched expressionless. He had seen that before, and stronger men wet their pants. When guards had roused the musician and the president offered to commute the sentence to self-criticism and twenty years at a state farm in Qinghai Province, the idiot actually seemed grateful.

Qinghai, on the unforgiving Tibetan plateau. One of the loneliest, coldest, most savage places on earth. If he was still alive in six months, it would be a miracle. Soft-handed wretch.

When the president intoned "Qinghai" he looked over at the general with arched eyebrow, as though inviting an objection, a local joke. The prosecutor smothered a smile.

Silently, the general assented. He had never liked musicians.

After the last of that afternoon's accused had been dismissed, the prosecutor summarized the results of the day before.

Normally, while the tribunal members smoked and sipped fresh tea, the prosecutor would report that all of the senior comrades given twenty-four hours to mull their fate had volunteered to accept lesser sentence rather than to contest the charges.

That afternoon was different. Head down, voice muted, almost embarrassed, the prosecutor began reading:

"The following comrades who appeared before the Tribunal yesterday have agreed to self-criticism and reform through labor: Wu Ping, Sun Liu… "

Surprised, the president riffled through the papers before him.

"Wait until I find the list, Comrade," he demanded with raised hand. "Very well, proceed."

When the prosecutor had finished-after repeating some of the names as many as three times to accommodate the president, whose hearing was not what it had once been-he remained standing.

Slowly, lips moving, the president read through the list of names he had checked.

"The list is complete except for Comrade Wang Bin," the president said at last.

"Yes, Comrade President."

"He demands a trial?" The president was incredulous.

"No, Comrade President."

"What then?"

"I do not know, Comrade President."

"What are you saying?"

"Comrade Wang Bin has not reported to the Tribunal within the time afforded him, Comrade President."

The prosecutor was frantic. Such a thing had never happened before.

"Why has he not reported?"

"I do not know, Comrade President."

"Where is Wang Bin, Comrade Prosecutor?"

"I do not know."

"It is your job to know."

"It is the job of the Public Security Bureau. I have asked them."

"What do they say, idiot? What do they say?"

"Comrade Wang Bin is missing. He has not been seen anywhere since last night.

There is no trace of him. The Public Security Bureau-"

The president surged to his feet with the sudden furious energy of a man fifty years younger. He slammed his fist on the desk, scattering papers and upsetting his tea.

"Find him!" the president roared. "Find him and bring him to me, Comrade Prosecutor. Do it now!"

The general belched.