A Death in China

Chapter 1

Peking, August 1983 The high-ceilinged lobby seemed carved in time, socialist testimony to yesterday's barren promises. A wine-red carpet crawled like a stain toward the horizon. Improvident columns that were neither attractive nor altogether round highlighted bile green walls. The furniture was of blond wood and indeterminate proportion. Waist-high counters cluttered every inch of wall space, each chockablock with white-coated workers. Some were accountants, some receptionists, some managers. Most were watchers.

Tom Stratton threaded through a knot of noisy Americans. He skirted a gaggle of Japanese clustered around a guide waving a flag. He neatly sidestepped a functionary listlessly pursuing a fifty-pound steel vacuum cleaner. Reaching the stand where an empty-eyed girl protected trays of almost fresh fruit, Stratton bought two apples. She weighed them on a digital scale and made change of his one yuan note with an abacus.

"Ba lou," Stratton told the elevator operator in phrase-book Mandarin. He was eventually deposited on the eighth floor.

The room was a monstrous little brother to the lobby, but already, after a week, it seemed like home. Stratton kicked off his shoes and padded into the bathroom.

The hot water tap snuffled and growled, barked and hissed. On past experience, the chances that the water would be hot when it finally appeared were exactly one in two.

Stratton ate the apples and fingered leaves of tea into a thin-walled mug.

Tenderly, he added water from a thermos on the night table, then threw back the red velvet drapes to let in the last rays of sunshine and sprawled on the bed.

It was one hell of a place, Peking. Stratton had not decided whether to love it or hate it. The city sprawled in all directions, a flat, dusty, one-story town punctuated by brick chimneys thrusting toward the smog like phallic exclamation marks. Graceless monuments of revolutionary architecture dwelt alongside exquisite, gold-roofed survivors of the city's imperial past. Stratton scissored off the bed to watch the evening rush hour flow past a hundred feet below. He had just calculated the bicycle flow at nearly five hundred per minute when the room door flew open.

"Comrade! The chairman wants to see you right away."

"Hello, Alice." Stratton stifled a grin behind the tea mug. She had become a China groupie, a parody in blue cotton. The pants Chinese women wear with shapeless abandon strained across Alice's ample rump. The jacket was buttoned to the neck and fashionably wrinkled. The flat-brimmed hat bulged in a frustrated attempt to contain a mass of bottle-blond hair. Clinging precariously to the cap was a sheet metal button, red on white. AAAH, it said.

"You could pass for a native," Stratton mocked. Alice Dempsey was not his favorite woman.

"Bought it all at the Friendship Store. Why didn't you come with us?"

"I felt queasy."

"Baloney!" she snorted. "Every chance you get you slip away from us. What have you got against art historians anyway? I'll bet you don't even wear your badge, do you?" She rolled her eyes up toward her own AAAH. American Association of Art Historians.

"It's a fine group, very nice folks," Stratton said with forced politeness.

Alice Dempsey was ugly as sin and as annoying as a rash, but she did have wit and will enough to be a prized member of an excellent faculty in California.

"Fact is, I'd rather walk around than ride on a bus."

"Well, it's rude to our Chinese friends. The guide, little Miss Sun, is always asking about you: 'Where is Professor Stratton?' At least don't forget about the acrobatic show tonight."

"Sure, Alice."

Stratton's heart had not been with the tour since he had bumped into David Wang outside the Summer Palace, just as if they had been on Adams Street in Pittsville, Ohio, or at one of those ad hoc seminars Wang had loved to lead at St. Edward's, stockinged feet curled to the fire in the old library.

It was Stratton's first time in Asia in more than a decade, and he had still not worked out to his own satisfaction why he had come. Asia was a dead letter. Had he come because a two-week package tour of the People's Republic was cheap and exotic? Or because it would spare him dull hours of summer research at the small New England college where he taught? Not that, either. The research would have to be done, sooner or later, one way or the other; long nights followed by a slim volume only initiates would read. The job was waiting when he got back. Say he had come to escape the shards of a divorce that still hurt, a year later. Was that the real reason? Part of it, maybe, but only a lesser part, if Stratton was in the mood to be honest with himself. Carol was gone and he did not really miss her, although sometimes he ached to be with the boy.

Boredom. That was closer to the truth, wasn't it? His friends would know it intuitively. Stratton had worked hard to become a scholar. He was a legitimate historian, an able professor of emerging reputation. And… so what? Passing years that dulled the senses, blank-faced students in vacuous procession. What next, Stratton? Mid-life crisis. Male menopause. Maybe there was no next.

So he had come to China. To throttle the boredom. No, there was something deeper. He was also testing the scar tissue, the way an athlete will gingerly measure the recovery of an injured limb. Something else, too. Thomas Stratton, as he alone knew, had come to weigh the man he had become against the one he had once been.

At Peking Airport, standing before the immigration officer in white jacket and red-starred cap, visions of yesterday had come flooding in with a gush he had battled to control. The man had fingered his passport without interest.

"Is this your first time in China?" the inspector had asked in slow, careful English.

"Yes," Stratton had lied. "Yes, it is."

"You are perspiring. Are you ill?"

"No. It is hot."

The man had stamped his passport and Stratton had sought the refuge of protective coloration in the gaggle of art historians.

Stratton shook his head at the memory and sipped his tea.

That night he skipped the acrobatic performance. Too bad about little Miss Sun.

Once Stratton was sure his tour mates had left in the green-and-white Toyota minibus in which all tourists in China seemed to live, he went looking for dinner. On the way, he conducted prolonged negotiations with the white-jacketed floor attendants. If there was a telephone call for Professor Stratton, could they transfer it to the restaurant? It might work. Even if it didn't, it was not crucial. If punctilious David Wang called once unsuccessfully, he would either leave his number or call again.

The restaurant-foreigners only-was a purely functional place of round tables, soiled tablecloths, spotted silverware and spicy food in the inevitable blue-and-white crockery. The tour group ate three meals a day there, Western for breakfast and Chinese for the other two-a procession of savory dishes that appeared unordered.

Stratton settled into a small table and began leafing through a purple-covered issue of the Peking Review. About two paragraphs into the cover story, a gob of wet white rice caromed off the red plastic sign that proclaimed his table 37.

From two tables away, Stratton's assailant grinned evilly, gap-toothed and green-eyed. He was about seven years old and his chopstick catapult was poised for another round. A second child carefully probed the innards of the sugar bowl with a spoon. There were two, no, three, others in tenuous custody of a pretty woman in her thirties and a great bear of a man with a bushy red beard. Stratton intercepted the next gob with his menu.

"Kevin!" the woman jerked the missile commander around to face his dinner.

"I'm sorry," she told Stratton. It was something she had said before.

The bearded man looked up from a dam of napkins that encircled a lake of spilled soy sauce.

"Somehow it was easier at McDonald's. Sorry," he said.

"No problem. Actually, he's a pretty good shot."

From the waitress, Stratton ordered Sichuan chicken with peanuts, noodles, vegetables and a beer.

"Qingdao beer."

"Qingdao mei you." She pronounced it "may-o."

"What kind do you have?"

"Peking."

"Okay."

"Hey, baby, that's a bad mistake," the bearded man called from his chaos.

"Peking beer tastes like it was passed through a horse. Tell her you want Wu Xing." He wiggled a green bottle in front of him.

"Wu Xing," Stratton told the waitress.

Stratton abandoned the last hope of a quiet meal when something began gnawing his leg. He carried it, squirming and squealing, back to its tribe.

"An escapee, I think," Stratton said, handing it to the woman.

"Oh, Tracey! Again, I'm sorry."

"That's okay. I'm used to kids. My sister has four."

"Spend a lot of time with them?" the bearded man asked.

"Never go near the little bastards."

"Can't imagine why. Why don't you join us, since we've ruined your dinner anyway? I'm Jim McCarthy. This is my wife, Sheila. I've never seen the kids before."

McCarthy, it turned out, was one of about twenty American reporters resident in Peking, a correspondent for a big East Coast newspaper. He had an office in a hotel and an apartment in a compound on the eastern side of the city where foreigners lived in Western-style buildings behind high brick walls erected and patrolled by the Chinese government to keep Chinese out.

"You here for long?" McCarthy asked.

"Another couple of days."

McCarthy rolled his eyes.

"Jim is not a great China fan," his wife explained.

"Yeah, one day I'll write a book. 'Hold the May-o' it'll be called. It's the national sport. If you want something, they haven't got it-beer to interviews.

Mei you."

After dinner, Stratton marveled at the texture of the city as he walked along a broad tree-lined avenue that ran past the Temple of Heaven. The dark summer streets bustled with life. Where puny street lamps cast wan patches of light, people gathered in loose, friendly groups to escape the heat. Almost all were men, in old-fashioned undershirts. They squatted to gossip or to play cards. The few cars rode with parking lights only, wary of the swirling stream of hard-to-see bicyclists, who used no lights at all. A young couple conducted public courtship on the stone steps of a government office building. From one alleyway, Stratton heard the muffled click of mah jongg tiles, and from a window, the beat of Western rock music from a cheap tape deck. Like headlights, mah jongg and rock music were forbidden in Peking that summer; the headlights so that bicyclists would not be blinded, the ancient game and the music because they were decadent. It pleased Stratton to realize that people still pursued their own muses on summer nights, and to hell with the Party and its rules.

The aim of Stratton's walk was a downtown park built on an artificial hill. The park itself was nothing special, but the circumstances of its construction were testimony to the siege mentality of Chinese communism. Perhaps forty feet high and a quarter mile around, the hill had been built entirely by hand, one bucket at a time, by volunteer workers who had scooped it from underneath the foundations of the city. In every shop, every factory, every school, Stratton had read, a well-oiled door led down to a network of tunnels. It was the most elaborate bomb shelter in the world, and it had taken more than thirty years to finish.

Bombshelter Park, as Stratton had silently dubbed it, was closed. As he strolled back toward the hotel, he thought of David Wang.

He owed much to the old professor. Wang had sensed the disillusion, no, the despair, that Stratton had brought with him to the tiny college in rural Ohio.

Stratton had been running from Asia when he arrived at St. Edward's for graduate studies. Despite Wang's considerable reputation, Stratton had avoided his courses. Still, he had found himself attracted to the gentle and patient teacher. They had become friends, then confidants, and on the bright morning when a changed Stratton had strode forward to receive his Ph.D., no one could have missed the fatherly gleam in David Wang's eyes.

They had drifted apart, more by circumstance than design. With Stratton teaching in New England, rural Ohio had seemed increasingly remote. It had been two years since they had seen one another. Until Peking. Stratton, avoiding his brethren art historians for the first time and feeling particularly exultant at being alone, had stood, back arched, head up, to study the magnificent lakeside arcade of the Summer Palace.

The voice had come from behind him.

"They say she was a fool-profligate-the empress dowager, squandering national riches on a marble boat when she should have spent the money to build a modern navy."

Stratton would have known the voice anywhere, and the professorial restatement of conventional wisdom that was meant to be challenged. He had replied without turning around.

"Perhaps she knew more than most people give her credit for."

"How so?" asked the voice.

"She may have understood that, even with modernization, the Imperial Navy would have been no match for the barbarian fleets. She foresaw the end of dynastic China and, instead of sending more young men needlessly to their deaths, decided to create that which would give her pleasure in the realization that the end was coming for her kind." It was, Stratton thought, an inspired improvisation.

"Mmmm, an interesting theory," the voice had conceded, "but in the end, I would think history correct in judging her a foolish spendthrift."

"Me, too," said Stratton, turning around to embrace David Wang.

Together, they had strolled the lake, finding amid the crush of Chinese visitors a seat aboard the ludicrous and beautiful boat the Empress Ci Xi had ordered built a century before.

Wang seemed immune to time, Stratton thought. He had looked fit and every bit the elegant, prosperous tourist in tattersall shirt, gabardine trousers, polished loafers and Japanese camera. As always, Wang looked a trifle owlish behind his thick glasses with gold frames.

"I keep hoping that if I put off everything long enough, the publisher will forget about the book contract," Stratton had joked to explain his presence.

"But how about you, David? Aren't you the man who once told me never to look back, who persuaded me at a tough time in my life to lay the past aside for good and get on with life?"

"I would be distressed if I thought you were really as dogmatic as you sound, Thomas," Wang had chided. "But of course you are teasing, and, yes, I was the one who always said that the United States was my country, China just the place I happened to be born. But then I changed my mind. It is an old man's right, you know, to change his mind."

"Why?"

"Two things, really. For one, I am retired, you know-"

"No, I didn't. If I had known, I would have come to wish you well."

"Well, it was just a quiet leavetaking, no ceremony. Of course, I expect to stay in Pittsville and keep my hand in now and then." David Wang had smiled. Only death would ever take him from the college and the town where he had been an institution for nearly forty years.

"The second reason is that I have a brother. I had not thought much about him all these years and then suddenly there was a letter inviting me to China. In the end, I came. A good idea, I guess."

Stratton had caught an uncertainty in the old man's voice.

"Is something wrong? Anything I can help you with?"

"I'm just a bit bewildered is all. Call it culture shock. You know, when I got off the plane, I was nearly too nervous to speak Chinese."

"I know the feeling."

Wang had touched Stratton's arm then, and they had both remembered the night by the fire in Wang's farmhouse when an angry and confused young man had spilled the bitter dregs of senseless war.

"My problems are nothing compared to the dilemmas you once had, believe me," said Wang. "But it would be nice to talk about them. I'll tell you what: I'm going to Xian to see my brother tomorrow. He's a deputy minister, you know. I'll be back around dark on Wednesday. I'll call you then. If you can break away from your tour, I'll show you the real Peking and we can talk as we walk."

"I wouldn't miss it."

Wednesday night Stratton returned from his walk to Bombshelter Park about nine thirty. David Wang never called.