An American Spy

2

Sung Hui was from Xinyang, a Young Pioneer and then a member of the Youth League whose enlightened proletarian worldview had earned her, at the age of twenty-three, a trip to Beijing for the Fifteenth National Representative Conference in 2003. Delun had met her first, him only twenty-one and full of fire for this beautiful provincial girl with the fierce Party line. Because his mother had been dead more than a decade, he showed off his girl to his father, and sometime during the next few years the lines blurred. Delun shipped off to Sudan to work for Sinopec. A riot of dark-skinned men hacked him up with machetes. That was April 2007. Three months later, Sung Hui moved in with Xin Zhu, and at first theirs was a home of shared mourning. Then, inexplicably, she asked him to marry her.

Since his first wife’s death in 1989, a month before the June Fourth Incident in Tiananmen Square, Zhu had lost track of the nuances of living with a woman. With Sung Hui he found himself hesitating in a way he hadn’t done since he was a teenager, musing over his replies to her simple questions and standing for too long in shops, puzzling over which brand of wristwatch she would prefer. More than this, though, was the protectiveness he felt. Sung Hui was twenty-eight, thirty years his junior, and he inevitably viewed her as a potential victim. Partly, it was the victimization he had seen and taken part in during his fifty-eight years; partly, it was the memory of his son being hacked apart in Africa. So he kept her separated from as many aspects of his work as possible, and to protect her he even lied to Zhang Guo, his oldest friend, about Leticia Jones’s mission.

On Wednesday, two days before he met with Zhang Guo and five days after Leticia Jones, or Rosa Mumu, left China, Sung Hui’s seamstress arrived at their apartment in a state of distress. Sung Hui made her tea and sat her in the kitchen, and after a series of questions learned that the seamstress’s niece had been questioned at length by an acquaintance at the Blim-Blam, a rock-and-roll venue in the university area of Haidian, not so far from Zhu’s office. The questions concerned Sung Hui and her life with her husband, her daily rituals and regular appointments. Sung Hui called Zhu at work, and he immediately returned home, then drove with the seamstress to meet the niece, who gave a description of the young man-Dongfan Beisan, early twenties, “very sexy,” a musician. He played regularly at the Blim-Blam. His home was a mystery, as he had not registered his address with the authorities.

Instead of sharing this with the Ministry of Public Security and requesting a file on Dongfan Beisan, that night he brought Shen An-ling with him to the club, a dirty basement-level cellar on a narrow, grimy hutong choked with parked bicycles. The Blim-Blam was full of children drinking beer from plastic cups and wearing soiled T-shirts and jeans, disheveled hair, and expressions of complete boredom. The Ramones played from fuzzy speakers. The teens’ boredom flickered briefly at the sight of two men in suits entering their lair, one an enormous, balding older man doing his best to touch nothing, the other a nearsighted, soft-skinned man who squinted at everything in surprise. The rock-and-rollers had no idea what this could mean.

On a hand-drawn sign inside the door, they had learned that the two acts of the night were the Pink Undergarments and Dongfan Beisan’s band, Just Teenage Rebels, and they would be playing in memory of the Sichuan dead. Zhu and Shen An-ling approached the bar; a long zinc affair salvaged from the demolition of the Yugong Yishan Bar-another casualty of Olympic grandeur-and asked the bartender for the bands’ dressing room. That provoked a laugh. “Right over there,” he said, waving at the far side of the club, where teenagers were drifting in and out of a ragged opening in the brick wall.

Beyond was a dim corridor that stank of piss and led to a unisex bathroom with girls checking eyeliner in cracked mirrors and boys smoking and kicking each other at the urinals. Shen An-ling looked like he might be sick.

Through an open stall Zhu spotted three skinny young men with long hair, one in tight leather pants, another with drumsticks shoved into his jeans pocket, sharing a joint. By that point, however, the intruders had been spotted, and the girls were packing up their pencils and scooting past them to leave. The boys by the urinals left still zipping up. It was the drummer who first saw Zhu and Shen An-ling, and he nudged the one in leather. The third, in a T-shirt and knee-length shorts, looked over and panicked, dropping the joint into the toilet.

“Just Teenage Rebels?” Zhu asked.

The one in shorts whispered something, and all he caught was the word “producer.”

“Yeah,” said the one in leather. He, like the girls, was wearing eyeliner. “We’re Just Teenage Rebels.”

Shen An-ling clapped his hands together, clearly over his shock. “And you, I’ll bet, are the great Dongfan Beisan.”

A slow-witted, stoned smile. “That’s right, comrade.” He came out of the stall finally, shoving his fingers into his pockets, playing nonchalance. “You guys from Modern Sky?”

Modern Sky was a large, independent record label. “How did you know?” asked Shen An-ling.

“I knew it!” said the one in shorts.

Quietly, the drummer said, “No, they’re not.”

For a couple of seconds, no one filled the silence. Then Zhu said, “Dongfan Beisan, can we have a word in private?”

“Any deal we make is for all of us.”

From behind, Zhu heard a laughing girl approach, see their backs, grow quiet, then turn and leave. Shen An-ling said to Zhu, “They’re not serious enough. I told you this was a bad idea.”

“You’re right,” Zhu answered, then raised a plump finger to point at Dongfan Beisan. “You looked serious, but I’m often wrong.”

The one in shorts nudged Dongfan Beisan. “Go on, it’s cool.”

The drummer said nothing. His face was bleak.

Dongfan Beisan licked his dry lips, then glanced back at his friends. “Tonight, one for all. Trust me,” he said, then high-fived them and approached Zhu and Shen An-ling, fingers back in his pockets. “All right, then. Let’s deal.”

As they retraced their steps through the club and up to the street, watched closely by a hundred young eyes, Dongfan Beisan throwing thumbs-up at friends, the whole thing struck Zhu as too easy. A man asking invasive questions about your wife simply walks out to the street with you, as if there were nothing to fear-a sign of innocence or stupidity? He leaned toward the latter.

The street was rain-streaked, dirty, and busy, people looking in shops and visiting bars, students everywhere in cheap button-up shirts and ironed jeans. At the sight of the black four-door Audi A6 that they had squeezed into this alley, Dongfan Beisan hesitated. Zhu opened the passenger door and sat down, his feet outside the car. He’d walked too much that day.

“So what are we talking about?” asked Dongfan Beisan. “One, two records? Because I think we should discuss the lineup. I’m thinking about going solo. Mister Clean-that’s my new name.”

“Shut up,” said Shen An-ling, his voice not unthreatening.

Zhu said, “Dongfan Beisan, do you know who I am?”

The musician’s mouth worked the air; then he shook his head. “Not from Modern Sky, that’s for fucking sure.”

“I am the husband of Sung Hui.”

He watched Dongfan Beisan’s face as it shut down. The boy was removing all trace of emotion, first from the cheeks, then the eyes, and finally the twitching lips. Everything relaxed into that blank look that had been the salvation of so many Chinese. Finally, “I don’t know her.”

“Why, then, were you interrogating a girl about her?”

Zhu kept his voice light and measured, but Shen An-ling chose a different tact. From behind the boy, he whispered, “Because Dongfan Beisan wants to fuck your wife. That’s why.” He opened the rear door. “Get in.”

“No,” said the boy, still blank-faced. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Zhu exhaled and rubbed his face as a pair of men on bicycles rode by, keeping their eyes directly ahead. Zhu said, “Let’s talk in the office,” and Shen An-ling, taking it the wrong way, grabbed the back of Dongfan Beisan’s shirt collar and pushed hard, so that the boy’s forehead bounced loudly against the roof of the car. Pain ran through Dongfan Beisan’s face; then he removed all expression again and submitted as Shen An-ling stuffed him into the backseat.

That single act of violence proved sufficient, for as they wound north through Haidian District, Shen An-ling taking the long way, sticking to dark streets and doubling back on himself occasionally, Dongfan Beisan abruptly broke the silence with “She’s an American.”

“You better not be talking about his wife,” Shen An-ling said.

“No, no. Mary Caul. She works at the American consulate in Guangzhou.”

Zhu lowered his sun visor to peer into a small mirror at the boy. “Go on.”

“I met her at the New Get Lucky.”

“The what?”

“Chaoyang District,” Shen An-ling said. “They serve German beer.”

“How long ago was this?” Zhu asked.

“When I met her? Five, six months ago. She’s from New York City. Pretty. She liked me.”

“Did you have sex with her?” asked Zhu.

He was surprised to see embarrassment break through the boy’s mask. “When she was in town,” he said, almost a whisper.

“At your place?”

Dongfan Beisan shook his head. “Never. Her hotel.”

“Which one?”

“Crowne Plaza.”

Shen An-ling whistled. “Must’ve thought you’d hit the jackpot.”

The boy frowned but said nothing.

“And she asked you to check on my wife?”

“Last week. Thursday. Mary said that Sung Hui was an old friend of hers. She said she was worried about her, because she had…” He trailed off.

“Don’t stop now,” said Zhu.

“She said that Sung Hui had married a brutal man who kept her imprisoned. She had no way to contact her, unless she could meet her by accident. So she wanted to know what her daily schedule was.”

“Bai chi,” said Shen An-ling.

“He’s not retarded,” Zhu corrected. “He’s just in love. The two are very similar.”

Dongfan Beisan said nothing.

Zhu said, “How did you know to talk to a relative of my wife’s seamstress?”

“Mary told me.”

“She didn’t know how to run casually into my wife, but she knew the name and family of my wife’s seamstress?”

“I… I didn’t think of that,” he said. The kid really was an idiot.

Despite Shen An-ling’s protests, they returned to the Blim-Blam and let Dongfan Beisan, stunned and wobbly, leave. Then they went to the office and learned from the files that Mary Caul was indeed attached to the American consulate in Guangzhou as part of the Foreign Commercial Service-or she had been, until last Friday, when she returned to the United States for good. She had left, Shen An-ling pointed out unnecessarily, the day after asking Dongfan Beisan to collect information on Sung Hui. Also unnecessarily, he reminded Zhu that Leticia Jones’s visit overlapped with Mary Caul’s final days in China.

By then it was after midnight, so Zhu called home to learn from the maid that Sung Hui was asleep, then had Shen An-ling drive him to the Crowne Plaza. He spent the next three hours with the head of security, a round-faced Uighur who kept sending for pots of Long Jing tea as they sorted through audio recordings from rooms and video files from the public areas. Zhu had approximate days, and he knew one name for sure-Mary Caul-and had her file photo. The other-Rosa Mumu, a.k.a. Leticia Jones-had stayed at the Hua Thai, but he had her photo to guide his hunch. On a video file marked Tuesday, May 6, when the time code indicated 3:12 in the morning, they found it. Leticia Jones and Mary Caul sitting close together on a leather sofa in the lobby, talking animatedly, almost intimately.

“You have sound?”

“Apologies, comrade,” said the Uighur.

Despite the extra care he took in making such decisions, Zhu made a mistake when, the next morning, Sung Hui asked what the rock and roller had been up to. After staring at the gray sky through the kitchen window for about four seconds, he decided on honesty and told her that the source of his questions was an American intelligence agent. Sung Hui moved slowly to the table and sank into a chair. She said, “They want to kill me.”

“Why would they want to kill you?” he asked, reaching for her hand.

She didn’t answer, just stared at his large hand enclosing hers.

“Because of your considerable efforts against them?” he asked.

She shook her head, smiling, knowing how funny that sounded. Since their marriage, she had ceased all Party work. She’d become, by her own admission, a capitalist slug, yearning to live in a fashion magazine. Finally, she said, “I don’t know why they want to kill me.”

“Because they don’t.”

She raised her head, the smile gone, clutching at his fingers with her other hand. “Then it’s you they want to kill.”

The problem, he knew, was that she’d lived and breathed radical Party doctrine too fully and for too long. For her, Western intelligence agencies sought only one thing-the destruction of Chinese communism-and would stack up as many Chinese bodies as they believed necessary in order to accomplish this.

“Maybe they don’t want to kill anyone,” Zhu told her, but she didn’t look as if she believed that. He wasn’t sure he did, either.

Zhang Guo had booked a private sea-view room at Yijing Lou, one of the top Qingdao restaurants, and before sitting down they toured the aquariums with the waiter and pointed out their preferences. “That one looks like Wu Liang,” Zhang Guo said, nodding at a tired-looking gray eel on the floor of one tank.

Zhu bent to look closely into its black eyes, then straightened. “Close enough. I’ll have him fried,” he told the waiter, who bowed with exaggerated formality.

It was nine by the time their food arrived, and the table was already littered with four empty beer bottles that the waiter soon swept away. Through the open window they watched ships light the surface of the calm water and, above, the snuffing out of stars as clouds drifted in. “How did it feel?” asked Zhang Guo.

“How did what feel?”

“Wiping out the Department of Tourism,” he said in his heavily accented English. “That’s what they call it?”

“They don’t call it anything now.”

Zhang Guo snorted, then took another bite. “This trout is delicious. Want some?”

Zhu didn’t answer.

“How’s your eel?”

Zhu said, “They were the most terrifying two days of my life. Afterward, I slept for twenty hours.”

Zhang Guo chewed thoughtfully, waiting.

Zhu said, “By the time I woke up, I’d lost my doubt. I’m not a maniac, you know. I knew as I sent out the order that what I was doing would be controversial. I knew why I didn’t ask for permission-I would have been denied it. But we’ve sat back for too long, congratulating ourselves on our economic miracle and not ensuring its future. You well know that we have an agreement with the Chinese people. They will hold their tongues and allow us to do as we please only as long as they see progress. Steady progress in their daily lives. As soon as some agency like the CIA succeeds in its plots to undermine our progress, Chinese citizens will be faced with stagnation or, worse, a reversal of their fortunes. Unlike Jiang Luoke’s deal with al Qaeda, this one is written in blood. A few bad years, and they will be out for ours.”

“So you’re thinking of the future. A young wife will do that to you.”

“You’re damned right I am!” Zhu said, louder than he’d said anything that day. He took a breath. “Think, Zhang Guo. One-child policy. In twenty years the average family structure will be one child caring for two parents and four grandparents. How are we going to support that if the Americans are picking at our economy? Think, too, of the fact that we have sixteen percent more boys than girls. How many millions of unmarried men will that make? Men with unsatisfied libidos, crippled by poverty. That’s the next generation, Zhang Guo. Those are the disaffected men who, in twenty years, will hang us in the streets.”

It had been a long speech, but Zhang Guo didn’t need to spend much time digesting it; he’d heard much of this before. He sipped his beer from the bottle, emptied it, then set the bottle down. He said, “You’ve already lost this argument, Xin Zhu. Twelve years ago Jia Chunwang gave you a public throttling because you were trying to stop him from recalling our undercover agents in the West. You barely survived that. This year, you alienated the entire Ministry of Public Security with your unfounded mole theory. Now you’re ignoring anyone who might oppose you. You’re pretending they don’t even exist. But they do exist, Xin Zhu. And they’ll eat you alive.”

Zhu sighed, reaching for his own bottle. “Did you know that, ever since he took the job, the director of the CIA itself had been lobbying to get rid of the Department of Tourism? They have as many backroom battles as we do. Quentin Ascot may be embarrassed by what I’ve done, but in the end he won’t fight back because I’ve done what he’s been unable to do.”

“I doubt he wanted to actually kill the whole department.”

“I saved him a lot of retirement packages.”

“And now there’s a Tourist poking around Beijing. Think that maybe your calculations were off?”

“How about these calculations, Zhang Guo? Imagine that I’m right about the mole in the Ministry of Public Security, and he reports to the CIA on Monday that Xin Zhu has been sacked. They learn that the only person willing to make them pay for what they did to us in Sudan was fired. Are you with me? Now run the math. How long before they try something like that again?”

Zhang Guo took out a cigarette. “Maybe, knowing you’re not around to shoot them in the face, they’ll try to make friends.”

Zhu considered this, staring down at the remains of his fried eel. It didn’t look like Wu Liang at all. “If someone is looking at me, it’s not Quentin Ascot. I’m convinced of that.”

“Then who is it?”

Zhu rubbed his face and reached for a fresh beer.