Carl Hiaasen & William D. Montalbano

by A Death in China

  “Wang, David T., Pittsville, Ohio.” Her own voice seemed strained.

  “We have already begun on that one.”

  “I am required to see it first.”

  “You were late.”

  “That is procedure.”

  “It is very hot.”

  A Chinese standoff. Linda could insist. They would shout and argue and, finally, with ill grace, they would probably snap the welds and open the lid. Linda had a sudden vision of herself, screaming like a harridan in Mandarin in the foreigners’ morgue in Peking at the deadest hour before dawn. She shivered and surrendered.

  “Very well,” she said.

  Mr. Hu nodded. The welder, a stocky, middle-aged woman, twirled a knob and ignited her torch.

  Then, as procedure dictated, Linda watched in the eerie, smoking blue light of cascading sparks as the welder worked methodically, up one side and down the other. When she had finished, Linda checked to make sure that the labels were correct—that was really the most important part of her night’s work. Neither coffin would be opened again, but it would never do to dispatch heart attack victim Wang—Stratton’s friend—to Florida, or obese Mrs. Friedman, victim of complications of a broken hip on the Great Wall, to Ohio.

  Linda Greer walked with cowlicked Mr. Hu to a small office. There, with a pen and a seal, she testified, in parallel English and Chinese documents that Linda May Greer, consular officer of the United States of America, had witnessed the sealing of two caskets and certified their contents. She drove home in the breaking dawn, trying to think of sex, but the images would not come and the effort left her feeling dry and brittle.

  THE SETTING was exactly as Linda Greer had predicted.

  “It’s a ritual, Tom. All official meetings in all parts of China are staged exactly the same way,” she had said. “Maybe it’s something they borrowed from the Russians early on—or from the emperors—but it is literally a case of ‘See one, you’ve seen them all.’”

  Wang Bin had sent a car to the hotel. A Red Flag, no less, one of those dying-breed hand-tooled lustrous black limousines that are such a conspicuous status symbol in China that they have their own relaxed set of traffic regulations. The driver wore white gloves and had no English. He deposited Stratton at the apex of a circular driveway at the entrance to the museum. A young man with bottle-bottom glasses sprang for the door.

  “Welcome, Professor Stratton. My name is Mr. Zhou. Comrade Wang is waiting for you. Follow me, please.”

  They passed quickly through a marbled lobby bristling with watchers, turned left immediately, and left again at the first doorway.

  The formal reception room was just as Linda had sketched it: long and narrow, filled by two lines of parallel overstuffed chairs and sofas in gray-brown wrapping. Between them ran a set of low coffee tables. Before each seat were a flowered tea mug, an ashtray and an ornate wooden box of tea leaves. On the wall was a large mural of the traditional dwarfed-by-nature theme.

  Inside the doorway stood Wang Bin, a gently rounded ghost of his brother. From a few steps away, the resemblance to David was startling; nonplussed, Stratton faltered at the door. Wang Bin motioned him in kindly.

  As they shook hands, Stratton saw the differences. Wang Bin’s face seemed leaner and older than David’s; the hair was shorter of course, but also thinner, and more liberally dashed with gray at the temples. The deputy minister’s bearing, in a crisp gray Mao suit with a black mourner’s band on one arm, was rock-hard military. But the greatest difference welled in the eyes. To look at David Wang’s almost-almond eyes was to have seen wisdom, humor, compassion. In Wang Bin’s eyes Stratton saw intelligence, strength—and something else. A certain intrepid determination that had no doubt stood him in good stead all these years.

  Stratton and Wang sat at right angles in adjoining chairs and the interpreter took up a priest-at-confession pose to one side. Stratton’s last private meeting with a Chinese official had been with a snarling, saucer-faced man who’d punctuated shouting questions with blows from a rubber truncheon. When the time had come to leave, Stratton had shot him, twice.

  Wang Bin was speaking. Stratton leaned forward attentively, letting the sibilant Mandarin wash over him in uncomprehended waves. A girl in pigtails and a white jacket materialized. Gently, she eased the top off Stratton’s tea cup and added boiling water from a thermos. She soundlessly recovered the cup. Tea leaves had already been placed in the cup.

  “…to meet a distinguished scholar such as yourself and hopes you are enjoying your stay in China,” the interpreter hissed.

  “Please tell Comrade Wang that I am pleased and excited to be in China. It is a fascinating country and my trip has been very educational.”

  A pause for translation. Wang’s response. Then the translation floating back toward Stratton. An agonizing way to communicate, he reflected, about as lively as geriatric shuffleboard.

  “Comrade Wang asks if this is your first trip to China.”

  “Tell Comrade Wang that, yes, this is my first trip. I have always wanted to come before, but it was too expensive.” Stratton had told that same lie dozens of times. He would die proclaiming it. And why not? The first time he had come without a passport.

  “Comrade Wang asks, What cities beside Peking have you visited?”

  The conversation meandered like the Yangtze for nearly fifteen minutes; three offers of cigarettes, two cups of tea and banalities uncounted. Stratton let it wander. It was Wang Bin’s ball park, and if he was in no hurry, neither was Stratton. The art historians had voted unanimously to spend their last morning in Peking—a rare, unprogrammed three hours—on a return visit to the Friendship Store.

  “Comrade Wang says his brother spoke well of you to him. He said you were a treasured former student and a distinguished professor. Comrade Wang says he is pleased.”

  Stratton smiled.

  “Tell Comrade Wang that David had many spiritual children like me and that some of them are truly distinguished. I am not, but I mourn David as I would my own father.”

  When the translation ended, Wang said something to the interpreter that brought him to his feet. Stratton, too, started to rise, thinking the colorless encounter ended. Wang stopped him with a gesture of his mourning-banded arm. When the door closed behind the young interpreter, Wang lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “I would like to speak of my brother, Professor Stratton. I believe we can dispense with protocol,” he said in nearly accentless English. Stratton did not comment on the language shift. Wang had never allowed the interpreter to complete a translation of anything Stratton had said.

  “You will be returning with my brother to the United States, the land he made his nation. Many people will ask about his death. I will tell you, so you may tell them.”

  “I would like to know.”

  “Let me start with life, Professor Stratton. That is where all death begins, does it not? In life? Once we had been close, my brother and I, close in that special way that only brothers know. I can still see the cobblestone courtyard in Shanghai where we would play.

  “We took piano lessons and studied our math and our English and when no one was looking we would sneak away to play by the river. We loved the river. So much life, excitement. Once we saw a knife fight between two sailors. Then came the day for my brother to leave. Back to the river, but this time in rickshas with trunks and my brother in a Western suit. We tried not to cry, but we cried and my father was angry. At first my brother wrote every week. After my parents had done with them, I would take those letters and read them until they entered my memory. But already the Revolution was beginning, Professor Stratton, and the letters became more infrequent. Soon I left with my mother to join the people’s struggle. I heard no more from my American brother for many, many years. Some good years, and a few that were very bad. For several years my job was to collect night soil in a big barrel that I pushed on a cart. Do you know what night soil is?”

  “Human excrement, collected f
or fertilizer.”

  “Yes, I am glad to see that you have done your lessons, Professor. Human excrement, to be collected by leaders in punishment when the Revolution is betrayed by fools. I know you have read of the Cultural Revolution, Professor, but it was worse than anything that is written about it. Much worse. Then came some good years, and now … who knows?” Wang Bin sipped some tea and lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old. “My brother … one may lose touch with a brother, but one never forgets him. Brothers are part of you, like parents. I have heard that when parents go to visit their grown children in America, they are asked to pay for their meals, Professor Stratton. Is that true?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “I thought not. It is a lie then, published in our newspapers to make people less envious of America. Revolutions require many lies, you know.” Wang Bin smiled without mirth.

  “One day, I decided to write my brother. I cannot tell you why, exactly, except that he was my brother and we are—were—old men. That must have been three years ago; a friend in our embassy in Washington got me the address. At first, the letters were respectful, distant, like the opening moves in a game of chess. But, eventually, they became letters between two brothers. I invited David to come for a visit. Hundreds of thousand of overseas Chinese have returned for visits to their families in the past few years, from America, Canada, Europe, everywhere. Did you know that?”

  “It must have been very emotional, your reunion with David.”

  “Oh, yes, it was. A wonderful experience, happy and sad. Last week, when I saw my brother for the first time in nearly fifty years, I wept. So did he, although Chinese do not display their emotions publicly. Americans are much more open about that, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “As David—that was not my brother’s given name, but that is what he asked me to call him—as David may have told you, I was unfortunately not in Peking when he arrived, but in Xian, a city in the west. Do you know it?”

  Stratton shook his head.

  “A beautiful city where the emperors lived when Peking was still just a village. So David flew to Xian and there we reunited. We wept, and laughed, and at night after dinner we would go to his room, drink tea and remember; be little boys again.”

  “Did he show any signs of being sick?” Stratton asked.

  “Only the excitement, at first. But then, perhaps it was the day before we returned to Peking, he complained of pains in his chest. We sat for a while and then continued our walk; we were in the park. He took a little pill, I think, and when I asked him if something was wrong, he laughed and said he had some trouble with his heart, but that it was not serious. His doctor had joked, David said, that the problem was just grave enough for him to take two or three little pills a day for the next forty years.”

  “I hadn’t known that,” Stratton said.

  “Well, he tried to do too much, you see. He was so excited about being in China again and being with me. He tried to do too much, rushing everywhere. I tried to slow him down, but you know how David was. …”

  “Yes. Were you with him the last night?”

  “At the beginning. Some of my colleagues here had arranged a special banquet for us in honor of my brother—a Peking duck banquet. You will forgive my patriotism, Professor Stratton, but I am assured, by men who know, that Peking duck is the single finest dish in the world. It is also, for Chinese people, quite expensive. My brother and I were both moved by my colleagues’ gesture. It was a wonderful meal, one I shall remember always. Afterwards, I went with David back to his hotel, but I did not join him for tea. I had a meeting.”

  Wang Bin’s eyes strayed to the ceiling.

  “Someone came for me there to say that David had been stricken. I rushed to the hospital, but the comrade doctors said he was dead when he arrived. Heart, they said.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Stratton.

  “Your embassy has inquired about David’s passport. The comrades at the hospital told me that intravenous solution had spilled on the passport during the attempt to save David. An apprentice, not knowing what it was, threw it away. He will be punished.”

  Stratton sipped some of his own tea. He had the overwhelming sensation that he was being lied to, fed a carefully contrived script. But what was the lie? And, more important, why?

  “Tell me about America, Professor Stratton.”

  The request caught Stratton off guard.

  “Well, how—I mean—what would you like to know?”

  “I would like to know something of the truth, something between the lies of the Revolution and the lies of the American Embassy. It is not often that a senior Chinese official may speak frankly with an American without someone present to listen.”

  Better natural access than any of us will ever get, Linda Greer had said. Well, why not?

  “I am partial, of course, Comrade Minister, but it is one of the few places on earth where a man is actually free. Think what you like. Do what you like. Which is not to say that it is a nation without problems. Many people never think at all, and even more talk without having anything to say. It is a beautiful and powerful and vigorous and violent country.”

  “Yes, I have always admired the vigor without understanding the violence.”

  “You must come to visit.”

  “I would like that, but my duties here and”—his hand waved at the window, toward the Communist Party headquarters across the massive square—“elsewhere do not permit it. But tell me about my brother’s America. Tell me about the special place he will be buried.”

  “The Arbor,” Stratton said. David’s pride.

  Soon after he had appeared at St. Edward’s as a young assistant professor, David Wang had bought an abandoned dairy farm on the outskirts of Pittsville. When he hadn’t been teaching, he’d begun to work the land. Not to farm it, or forest it exactly, but to manicure it, to build it into a place of beauty according to his own orderly view. David had planted stands of pine and maple, birches and oak, as well as exotic trees he grew from seed. A clear stream bubbled through the Arbor into an exquisite formal lake on the lee side of a gentle hill. David Wang had done most of the work himself, with simple tools. When he hadn’t been in the classroom, he could be found on his land or deep in an armchair in the old white clapboard farmhouse that had no locks on the doors.

  Over the years the town had grown; tract houses now flanked the Arbor on two sides and an interstate lanced through an adjoining ridgetop. But nothing molested the tranquillity and the beauty of David Wang’s oasis, and nothing ever would. Gradually it had become part park, part botanical garden, a place of fierce civic pride. Stratton could remember spring weekends when sixty people, from rough-hewn farmers in bib overalls to shapely college girls in cutoffs, would appear at the Arbor as volunteer gardeners. And how many St. Edward’s coeds, over the years, had surrendered their virginity on an aromatic bed of pine needles? Stratton smiled at his own memories. Anyone was free to wander the land, and no one dared molest it. This was where David Wang wanted to be buried.

  Stratton spoke haltingly at first, and then with a rush of details. The Arbor was a place of both beauty and meaning.

  Wang Bin displayed such lively interest that for an instant Stratton wondered, absurdly, whether the deputy minister believed that his brother had willed him the land. Everybody in Ohio who knew about the Arbor also knew that David Wang had publicly promised it to the college.

  As he talked, Stratton mentally weighed what he knew about David’s death against what Wang Bin had told him. There was something …

  And then he had it.

  “…would like to have enjoyed it at David’s side,” Wang Bin was saying.

  “Yes, of course.” But what did it mean, damn it?

  Wang Bin looked at Stratton sharply, as though he had divined the wandering of a perplexed mind. From the table he took a leather-bound volume that looked like a diary. He handed it to Stratton.

  “Here, this is my bro
ther’s journal. Apparently he was addicted to writing something nearly every day. I was interested in his first impressions of China. I would be grateful if you could take it with you.” Wang Bin rose. “And I am in your debt, Professor Stratton, for agreeing to accompany David’s body. I am sure your presence will smooth the formalities. I am assured that the body has been prepared to the most exacting standards.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I know little of such things, Professor, since corpses are cremated in China, but I believe my brother would have appreciated a simple ceremony as quickly as it can be arranged. For my part, I think it is particularly fitting that he be buried in the Chinese coffin in which he makes his last journey.”

  “That should be no problem. But, look, about my accompanying the body. I’m not sure …” Stratton wanted some fresh air, some room to think.

  “Why?” Wang Bin asked sharply. He made no effort to hide the strength behind the question.

  Stratton improvised.

  “This has been very emotional for me. The thought of David’s body riding in the cargo hold of the same plane … I’m not sure that I’m up to it.”

  “It is all arranged, Professor. My car will call for you in ample time for the flight. Everything is taken care of.”

  “But …”

  “You must.” Stratton could taste the menace.

  Later, Stratton would not remember leaving the museum, or whether he walked back to the hotel or had been driven. What he remembered with clarity was sitting on the bed, staring out the hotel window, puzzling, and the lie—and wondering why.

  If you were a man in your sixties with serious heart trouble, would you go to China, where tourism is rigorous and health facilities are primitive by American standards? Perhaps, if it was to see a long-lost brother.

  But, if you did go, would you remember those life-giving pills that you had to take two or three times a day “for the next forty years”? Of course. And if you took them with you, would you take them for the entire trip and a reserve supply just in case? Again, yes.