Diane sighs.“Jake, you sent me an email two days ago. We’ve spoken about this on the phone several times, right? I booked a flight to Beijing.”
“Yes, but I think it’s going to take more than that to get your brother released,” Jake says.
“Of course it is. I’m not suggesting we stop here.”
“Then what are you suggesting? I think we may be looking at a serious fucking situation. And I’d like to know how you think the PSB will help.”
Then Jake looks at Ben. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Ben, but who are you anyway, apart from some American guy who knows whiskey?”
Ben pauses and then massages his temples.
“I was married to Qiang for five years.”
The comment silences Jake. Diane doesn’t react. This isn’t news to her.
“We may be separated but I still love him. He’s still a huge part of my life, even if the feeling isn’t mutual at the moment, and I’m going to do whatever I can here to help.”
Ben speaks in a steady tone, without blinking. The levity he had brought to the room is gone. Ben is now a completely different person. Unwelcome. Uninvited. Jake takes a gulp of wine to help him swallow the marriage revelation.
“Well, this is a surprise to me,” Jake says as he feels the wine’s tannins dry his throat.
“Jake, do you think I’m the only one who read that email?” Diane asks. “Do you think I was the only person you were talking to on the phone? You’re a foreign journalist here. Of course you’ll know how to get in touch with people in Washington.”
“Diane, just tell me what you’re thinking. We’ve been sitting here a long time and I still don’t have a clue.”
“I’m saying this: they already know that you’re likely to make that move at some point. If they haven’t figured that out from our correspondence and phone calls, I’m sure they know now.”
Diane looks around the room, directing her gaze toward two corners of the ceiling as she says this. Then back at Jake.
Jake has never been sure how far the Foreign Ministry goes in keeping tabs on Western journalists. Working for a financial news network, he had never faced the kind of interference that some of his peers have, those who follow the political stories: Dissidents, Uighur uprisings in Xinjiang, Factory worker riots in Guangdong, Harvesting of organs at secret concentration camps in the northeast where the government puts Falun Gong followers.
The political reporters in Beijing swap stories about their phone calls being cut off. They talk of emails that never reach the intended recipients. One even had a CD mailed to her, a recording of her at a bar talking to someone about her husband and how he no longer satisfied her sexually. How she had started meeting a mutual friend, a man married to one of her other friends, for afternoon trysts. Someone sitting next to her at a bar must have been recording the conversation.
After so many years covering China, he’s never been close to any stories about dissidents so he’s unsure of whether his apartment is bugged.
“You, me and Ben here are all very well connected people,” Diane continues. “We’re all here in Beijing, obviously very concerned about what’s happened to my little brother. And we’re going to give the authorities the distance and time they need to figure out that they’ve made a mistake. They’ve simply misunderstand my brother’s intentions. I know he’d never be unfair in the way he treats his subject matter. I think they will figure that out as they talk to him and investigate whatever it is they’re looking for.”
Bound up in suspicion, Jake can’t formulate an intelligent counter argument. He looks away for a moment, bouncing one leg, and then turns to Ben, hoping that a change in direction will help him regain the upper hand.
“Can I ask what it is you do that makes you so well connected?”
“Well, Diane’s estimation of me and my position might be a bit exaggerated.”
“He’s the program director at the CSAIL lab at MIT,” Diane says, interrupting. “He works with some of the world’s most well-respected computer scientists and researchers.”
“Very impressive,” Jake says. “But I don’t know how that gives us leverage.”
“Ben has many connections in the scientific community,” Diane says. “You have connections in the media and with politicians in Washington. I have connections in the world of finance. I would say the three of our networks, put together, would give us leverage if we needed it. But we’re not going to use this leverage, at least not yet.”
The way she looks at Jake, with sincerity, with focus and without blinking or flinching, signals the end of discussion. Just like Qiang, she directs the scene to a kind of closure that Jake must accept.
“Let’s try being cooperative. There are laws and procedures in this country. It’s in no one’s interest, particularly not ours, to start a conflict over this.”
Jake wants to argue his side but remembers Diane’s quiet reference to the bugs that may or may not be picking up their conversation. So he nods and sips his wine.
“Okay,” he then says. “Let’s not start a fight. Let’s just get this resolved peacefully.”
Diane closes her laptop as though, for the moment, she’s shutting the door that leads to her brother’s predicament.
Ben reaches across the table and grabs Jake’s wrist. “Hey, I know this has been very stressful for you these past few days,” he says just above a whisper. “Let’s just work together on this. I don’t pretend to know what’s right or wrong here but I’m sure that it won’t help Qiang if we’re at odds with each other.”
The contact and the softly spoken words are meant to reassure. But Ben doesn’t know how Jake feels about Qiang.
SATURDAY, March 30, 2007
8:45 a.m.
Diane unclasps her messenger bag, a John Woodbridge made of vegetable- tanned leather, a purchase she made during a trip to her company’s Geneva office. The bag’s natural grain clashes with the cheap veneers and fluorescent light of the police station. She pulls a plastic folder with several papers neatly clipped together from the bag.
“Good morning,” Diane says to a female officer behind the counter.
Getting no response, she places the papers on the counter, in front of the officer who’s filling out a form on a clipboard. On the first sheet, a blurry image of Qiang’s face. A copy of his identification card, which expired three years earlier. Diane spreads the papers out. Underneath, a copy of the deed to the apartment she and Qiang bought for their parents in Chongqing and a copy of the deed to his Beijing apartment.
Diane unbuttons the Burberry raincoat she’s wearing over a pinstriped blouse and olive-coloured slacks while she waits for the officer to acknowledge her and the matter she’s presenting.
“My brother is missing. He lives in this district,” she says in a louder but still respectful tone. “He owns a condo in Progress Park.”
“Just a minute,” says the uniformed woman who doesn’t look up as she transcribes information from a computer printout onto the clipboard sheet. “Please have a seat.”
Another female officer sits at a desk set back a couple of metres from the counter, also processing paperwork. Two male officers button their jackets and make small talk as they come out from a room behind the woman at the desk and leave the station through an exit behind the counter, for PSB staff only.
The room is flooded with white fluorescence. White vinyl floor tiles full of black scuff marks, white vinyl walls marred by the backs of six chairs lined up against the far side of the office. There’s a four-seat bench with cushions, upholstered in rough black polyester, built on a gray metal frame that’s meant to be bolted to the floor. Diane looks at the chairs and notices the blanks on the bottom of the seating frame where there should be bolts holding the set in place. She then looks down at the paperwork that the officer seems intent on finishing before she’ll consider giving Diane any of her attention.
“I believe my brother’s been detained.”
The female officer looks up at Diane, puts
her pen down and then picks up the paper with the blurry image of Qiang’s ID.
“You need to wait a bit,” she says, squinting as she inspects the paper. “Go have a seat.”
“Thank you,” Diane says while she refastens the straps on her bag.
She turns and walks to the set of tandem seats. After taking another glance at the papers, the officer rolls her chair back and converses with her colleague in a voice too low for Diane to hear what’s said. Diane watches as she centres her bag on her lap.
Without looking back at Diane, the officer behind the counter walks through the entrance to a room next to her desk, holding the papers with the blurred image of Qiang.
Diane saves the spreadsheet she’s been working on and glances up at a clock on the station’s wall. It’s 10:17 a.m. She checks her watch: 10:22. Several groups have come and gone, lodging complaints with the female officer who’s taken over for the one who’s disappeared with the documents Diane brought. One married couple reported the loss of some inventory at an electronics store they own. They suspect an employee who hasn’t turned up for work for two days. An elderly man came in to complain about several black Audis that have been parking in the alley behind his building. They have official plates which, he said, shows how municipal officials take their privileges too far. No one else has the right to park there. The old man dictated the numbers to the officer and asked what the PSB will do about it. “We’ll look into it,” said one of the officers. “You said the same thing a week ago,” the old man retorted.
It’s been quiet for the past twenty minutes. Diane shuts her laptop and slides it into her briefcase. She approaches the counter to find the officer tapping out a text message on her Nokia phone.
“Sorry to trouble you,” Diane says. “It’s just that I’ve been waiting here for more than two hours.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I’ve mentioned it already to your colleague. My brother has been missing for nearly a week. I think he’s been detained and I’m here to get this matter sorted out.”
The officer doesn’t look up.
“He owns an apartment in Progress Park,” Diane continues. “That’s part of this station’s district, right?”
“We don’t know anything about this matter. You’ll need to come back tomorrow morning. There may be someone here then who will know something about this.
May, 2005
Zhihong’s workplace lies beyond an immense pedestrian bridge. A giant oval spread out over an intersection with too many lanes and signals to allow anyone to cross on street level. Backed-up traffic on Chang’an Avenue, corralled into order by a uniformed officer on a pedestal, crawls obediently under the sprawling bridge splayed across an area so wide that the access ramps on the opposite corner fade into brown haze. The officer wears a crisp, green uniform with a peaked cap, red insignia over the visor and aviator sunglasses.
At each corner, pedestrians climb the stairs that ascend at an angle low enough to allow those with bicycles to push them up ramps alongside the steps and join the slow-motion circumambulation of people over the steady procession of black sedans, red taxis and blue pick-up trucks.
Zhihong had once described the location of the government department where he works so, keeping the details in mind, Dawei found the building on a tourist map one of the patrons at his restaurant had abandoned along with an empty water bottle and a ferry receipt. Like most of the government buildings in Beijing, the State Administration of Radio, Television and Film is a large compound, contained within a perimeter fence, just southwest of Chang’an Avenue and the Second Ring. Dawei knows the characters for state, television, and of course, for film.
Dawei realizes he may have arrived at the building too late. From the railway station, he asked a passerby to point him to Chang’an Avenue, then toward Tiananmen Square, which he has seen countless times on television. The direction was easy, but the scale of Beijing threw him off. The map made it seem as though the television bureau wasn’t more than 10 or 15 minutes from the railway station. In fact, it took that much time just to traverse the square. After walking for what seemed like more than a half an hour passing monolithic buildings, Dawei had to ask someone for confirmation that he was going the right way.
It’s now sometime past 6:00 p.m., after most people leave their offices and head home. Dawei will wait, if he must, until tomorrow.
A security officer rouses Dawei from sleep by poking him in the side with a baton. Startled, Dawei grasps for bearings on where he is and why. He props himself up with one elbow and the light jacket he had draped over himself falls to the ground. Looking at the officer and remembering the long journey to this bench, Dawei rights himself to a sitting position and then leans down to gather up his jacket.
“Move on,” the officer says.
There’s no sign of daylight. In the silence, Dawei hears his stomach growl. He routes in his bag for the last of four preserved eggs that he pilfered from the restaurant before catching a bus to Zhuhai, where he then boarded a train for the two-day trip to Beijing. The eggs, along with some dried fish and other scraps from the plates he carted back to his washing station, sustained him for the trip. Now he’s down to a few foil packets of preserved vegetables, usually stirred into watery rice. Dawei rips one open and digs out the stringy bits of radish and cabbage. The briny taste whets his appetite for something more. He imagines a steamed pork bun or a plate of fried noodles, which makes him salivate. Even the leftover scraps of Macanese food, with the curry taste that took time for him to find palatable, would be a treat right now. Dawei pulls the foil apart so he can lick the residue.
Noticing a lighter shade of bluish-grey over the buildings he’s facing, Dawei wonders if the glow is coming from the Square or the approaching dawn. He doesn’t want to look for another bench in the same neighbourhood so he wanders toward the light. Back to Chang’an Avenue.
The International Bank of China’s headquarters comes into view. Just the night before leaving Macau, Dawei overheard some of the restaurant patrons talk about how much the bank’s chairman had spent on the building. The executive has been criticized for the high cost and there’s talk of an investigation. The building was designed by the relatives of a Chinese-American architect who is world famous, the one who designed the International Bank of China’s tower in the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district.
Dawei thinks the building looks ordinary. Just a low-slung, boxy structure with a large glass dome cantilevered over an entrance at one corner. He heads closer for a better look into the atrium, which rises to the roofline ten-storeys above, and sees a bamboo grove planted around an angular koi pond made of black marble.
From inside the International Bank of China atrium, a security guard trains his eyes on Dawei who backs away and moves toward the sidewalk.
More new buildings sit across the street. Clad in glass and metal and other reflective surfaces, they glow and Dawei can’t discern whether the illumination comes from inside or out. Just as impressive, maybe more so, than anything he’d seen in TV broadcasts from Hong Kong or Tokyo or New York City.
By the time morning rush hour traffic begins to build, Dawei has positioned himself outside the Ministry’s west security gate, back far enough so that the security guards won’t become suspicious of him. There’s also an entrance on the east side of the complex so Dawei has a fifty-fifty chance of seeing Zhihong go in here.
The procession of people builds. Larger groups descend from the buses stopping across the street. The men all look similar, with their dark jackets and dark slacks, and carrying satchels. Dawei wonders how much money these government workers make as they keep the business of media regulated and running. They file in between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. and then leave sometime well before 6:00 p.m. They only work five days a week, giving them two whole days to rest or visit a park or watch movies. And they probably all make enough to buy an apartment.
As Dawei ponders the privilege of civil servants, he notices that the fl
ow of workers heading into the Television Bureau has started to dwindle and his thoughts darken. Why did he make the trip here? Why did he use all of the cash he’s been stashing away to visit a married man? He had to tell the restaurant manager that his mother is sick and has no assurance that his job will be there when he returns. If he returns.
The day passes slowly. Only a few workers at the bureau file out for lunch. Zhihong is frugal and has probably brought a meal packed by his wife, or maybe he prepared lunch for both of them. He knows nothing about how they order their lives so he fills in the details, always casting Zhihong as an unhappy participant who’s desperate to escape. Dawei starts walking southeast, away from the centre of Beijing with its ministries and embassies and tourist draws, to find cheaper food.
Having settled his growling stomach with two ears of boiled corn that a vendor sold for the price of one, Dawei continues walking around the quieter neighbourhoods outside of the Fourth Ring. He walks slowly to conserve energy and because he’s tired from a lack of sleep, but he must keep walking. If he rests, he might sleep right into evening and miss Zhihong again.
After a few more hours, Dawei positions himself against a steel pedestrian bridge support not far from the east-side security post, watching another procession of civil servants file out. With all of the corn’s energy absorbed by the long walk, Dawei feels pangs of hunger return. But they disappear as soon as he sees someone with a familiar gait. The man’s head is turned toward two others he’s walking with. Dawei remembers one of them from the night he met Zhihong. He went gambling with the rest of the group that left Zhihong, alone and drunk, to settle the bill. Dawei recalls how he felt sorry for Zhihong in that moment. The man with the gait reveals himself as Zhihong as soon as he faces forward, filling Dawei with equal parts hope and dread.
Zhihong stops to check a message on his phone. He nods to the others who continue walking east towards the Second Ring. Most of the other employees head in the same direction. Some climb a pedestrian bridge to the residential blocks across the street where Dawei was evicted from a bench sometime before dawn.
The Wounded Muse Page 10
