“By reporting Calvin?”
“By reporting him for the smallest infraction she could think of, which was disclosing the identity of an intelligence officer. The file was therefore able to be sealed, or whatever they call it in Beijing, so no one gets to know the rest of what he said. And it suits her very very senior secret boss not to have anyone hear what Calvin said.”
Her repeated use of the phrase, “very very senior,” begged to be asked about, but I was damned if I was going to let her tell me again that I didn’t need to know.
“The official Mercury gave the tape to never listened to it?” I asked.
“When he handed it to Ping he said something to the effect that there wasn’t anything important in it. What he said in Chinese was ambiguous. It might have meant, ‘I haven’t bothered to listen to this,’ or it may have meant, ‘I plan to ignore what was on this.’ But he did say, ‘You deal with it.’”
“Pansy has a stressful job,” I said, rather lamely.
“Correct,” said Serena. “Personally, I think she can be optimistic. If he did listen, but handed it to Ping, it sounds like his loyalty is to the same very very senior person as she works for.”
“But what about Mercury? He must have listened to the tape.”
“One has to assume so,” said Serena. “But here’s how Ping and I see it.”
I had a vision of the two of them, sitting side by side on the swings in the little playground on the Peak, only they were ten-year-olds in pigtails, deciding who should be invited to join their club and what its rules should be. Wendy wasn’t to be admitted because he was a boy.
“Mercury had quickly decided to curry favor with Beijing by handing it to the official he did. Perhaps he listened to the whole thing, perhaps he turned it off once he realized it was ‘political.’ In either case, he would have told the senior official he thought it was important. Serious players in Beijing regard people like Mercury as ‘politically immature,’ and in need of careful supervision. The senior official would have had to listen to it, so it is good news that he handed it to Ping. He would have called Mercury and thanked him, but cautioned him that as the tape included state secrets, Mercury should never mention its existence, let alone its contents, to anyone. Ping has to live with uncertainty, but I think she’s O.K.”
“Will Calvin ever get out?” I asked.
“She should be able to wangle it in five years. The fact that one of his parents was a vice minister is helpful. And it’s quite a survivable prison, she says.”
“Couldn’t they have just run away?”
“Where would they run? There are Chinese all over the world – including Bali, obviously. How else did they get the suite next to us?” She paused to let me think about that. “Anyone they want to find, they can find. But the real answer is that she is very dedicated. Very professional and very dedicated.”
“To the Party?” The answer was “yes,” of course, but the idea that Pansy had sent her goofy husband to jail to save herself was troubling me. I suppose I was politically immature myself at that point.
“She’s dedicated to China becoming a progressive society,” said Serena,” by which she means a country with as much freedom as is consistent with social order and economic growth, with less corruption, with many of the bullies weeded out. ‘When Mao came to power, we had land reform,’ she told me. ‘Now we need bureaucracy reform. The stupid ones we can put in quiet offices. But the really evil ones, we must eliminate.’ That’s her mission. We are both of us daughters of Henry Wong.”
“Meaning?”
“Ping and I work for different governments but we want the same thing. And we both want what Henry wants. He escaped from China, and now he’s gone back in. We’re the next generation.”
I had the sudden thought that this must have been the way sensible people turned into fellow travelers in the 1930s. “You do have different masters,” I said.
“For sure,” said Serena. “And she could get in plenty of trouble for having had the conversation we did, so forget everything I told you.”
“Did you tell her anything?”
“You’re learning,” she said, giving me one of her best smiles.
I wasn’t sure in my gut that Henry did have a political agenda. I kept thinking about the simplicity of his bedroom, and the calligraphy under the pistol in his bedside table. There was something very personal going on, even if it served a political purpose. But it didn’t seem the right moment to go into that.
“You think Henry is in China?” I asked.
“Where else?”
“You admire Pansy, don’t you?”
“How could I not? And she needs your help.”
“I think I am helping her. I did make you come. I thought it was important.”
Serena closed her eyes like an exhausted mother reminding herself that she loved her children.
“It is important,” she said, “and you need to know why.” She explained that Henry’s “system” provided an escape not only for closet human rights advocates like the “important painter,” but also for whistle-blowers within the Party structure who’d run out of luck and needed to bolt.
“Knowing there is a chance of escape gives some people courage. Three months ago there was a woman in the Disciplinary Commission who vanished at the last possible moment. She is why that provincial governor you may have read about was arrested. Arresting a provincial governor is a political act, so there will always be people who want to even the score. The person who ordered the arrest is currently untouchable, but the woman in the Disciplinary Commission would not be. She lives somewhere in Britain now. We look out for her – from a discreet distance. We have been told that senior figures in the government of China are happy to have us do so.”
“The senior figures you approve of,” I said, trying to be a good listener. She had set a brisk walking pace, weaving in and out of groups of Chinese children and their adoring parents. There was obviously a plane to London she planned to be on. I wanted to slow down and talk quietly. I wanted her to hold my hand again but that seemed unlikely.
“What Henry does benefits China,” she continued once we got through the sightseers. “As Simon tried to explain at dinner, it benefits us all, because we want the adults in the government of China to remain powerful. We don’t want China to break up into pieces, some of which would have unreliable leadership. What Ping did protected Henry, even at the cost of sending Calvin to jail. The tape could have implicated Henry.”
“Because I’m his son-in-law and Calvin was talking to me?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just trust me. If the wrong people got their hands on that tape, even Ping’s very very senior boss would be unable to protect Henry. Assuming Henry is in China, he’d get arrested fairly quickly.”
“If those ‘wrong people,’ as you call them, know where Henry is, why don’t they arrest him now?”
“As I said before, virtually everyone of serious rank likes it that the system exists. They know they might need to use it themselves some day, so they avoid damaging it if they possibly can. Arresting Henry would damage it severely. Finding another Henry would be hard. The strategy everyone follows is to pretend they know nothing about the system. But they will move against it if they have to, which would be the case if it became obvious that they knew about it and were ignoring it.”
“How do those who use the system get a ticket, so to speak? How do they know about it in the first place?”
“The short answer is ‘whispers.’ Everyone who needs to know about it does. When a person rises to a certain level, someone senior will take him or her aside. ‘There’s this imaginary system,’ they’ll say. ‘It’s bad form to mention it. This is how it’s supposed to work. But it doesn’t exist, you understand.’ That’s the English translation. In China, much can be expressed with well-timed silence.
“As for getting a ticket, as you put it, anyone who needs to escape – and its obvious who they are – will be contacted when
it’s time. The only thing is, they must start their journey at that instant – and accept being passed from hand to hand. We interviewed someone recently who had made the journey. He was standing on one side of a city street, waiting for the traffic to stop so he could join his wife at a restaurant. She’d gotten there ahead of him and was waiting on the other side. She waved. He waved back. A truck stopped in front of him and blocked their view of each other. The door of the truck swung open. He climbed in and the truck pulled away. Sixteen days later he arrived in Montreal.”
“Meanwhile, I suppose his wife is in prison.”
Serena ignored my question. “The general view of people I work with,” she said, “is that it goes back to the Cultural Revolution, when subverting the Red Guards came to be understood as a form of patriotism. The Army played an important role at that time. The Chinese military is like a separate kingdom, as I assume you know. And they have lots of trucks. Some scholars believe the system goes back even farther, that the Jesuits created it, but people love to invent stuff about the Jesuits, and the history doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that there are fine people in China doing things for their country that cannot be disclosed, even if everyone is happy to have them done. That’s why we are devoting so much attention to Henry.”
“What if he’s dead?”
“The system will regenerate, but slowly.”
“When you explained all this to me before, you put emphasis on dissidents getting out. If the government knows about the system, and dissidents are using it, how – institutionally – can they not shut it down?”
“From the perspective of the very very senior people I mentioned, the dissidents are minor. And letting dissidents out is like a tea kettle letting off steam. China calms down a bit.”
“Isn’t cleaning up China China’s problem?” I asked. “I mean, human rights and ending corruption are fine in principle, but why should your government care that much?”
Our seemingly aimless walk had brought us back to the road leading down toward the Castle. We’d escaped the crowds. Serena took another deep breath and changed her tone a little. “Let me put it in its bleakest form. Exposing corruption is a way of fighting battles within the Party, battles that aren’t really about corruption. For practical purposes, everyone doing a powerful job is corrupt, or can be shown to be corrupt. We have been told, by very very senior people we would like to see remain in power – and told very very indirectly, though to those who have spent their lives studying China the message was clear – that the ammunition they require is whistle-blowers. If there are enough whistle-blowers, they will be able to restrain the hot-heads within the Party who have the potential to make trouble for the whole world. We back those people by giving whistle-blowers hope. I doubt that Henry knows how important what he has been doing is, or exactly why it is important, but that is why Her Majesty’s government cares. Yours does too, I believe.”
“America?”
“Yes.”
“How do I help?” I asked, still not seeing what was coming.
“Beat Mercury,” said Serena. “Keep the files out of his hands. Keep the system alive.”
“Can we do that?”
“You can do that.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Anything else I need to know?”
“We won’t be seeing each other any more.”
18
I pretend I am writing for anonymous readers, whose judgment I need not fear, but I am really writing for my sons, so that they may know me. This makes it hard to be wholly truthful, hard to avoid the charitable editing that memory provides. What’s hard is worth doing, I hear Boston grandmother telling me when I was small. I will attempt to give a factual account.
I put my arms around Serena. There wasn’t anyone else in sight. “Wrong,” I said.
“Would it help if I told you I was a lesbian and that’s why I never slept with you?”
“No.”
“Would it help if I told you I was married – to one of my professors at Oxford – that he’s very distinguished so I never talk about him, and that’s why I don’t wear a wedding ring? Would that help?”
“No.”
“Would it help if I told you I am just as dedicated to serving Her Majesty – to quote Simon – as dedicated to my country as Pansy is to the People’s Republic, and that I have work to do?”
“Which I can’t help you with?”
“If you’re going to look after the system, which you may have to if Henry doesn’t come back, you need to look innocent as well as eccentric. You can’t have a girlfriend who’s a spy. A weekend in Bali was the limit.”
In the end, she simply extricated herself from my futile embrace, and ran away. Literally – down the road we were standing on and around the corner out of sight. I knew I couldn’t catch her, so I didn’t try. For me, that moment was the beginning of adulthood, a silent tipping point where reality began to demand respect and making excuses ceased to be a satisfactory strategy. That didn’t mean I suddenly understood myself, or became a better person. That’s come later, if at all. But it was a start.
I walked down the hundred and seventeen moss-covered steps from Barker Road, still feeling the imprint of Serena’s body on my chest. Had she stroked the back of my neck, just for a moment, while I tried to hold onto her? She was full of lovely gestures, even if she didn’t mean them, even if everything that had gone on between us had been designed to motivate and control me.
Whistle-blowers for ammunition! I supposed it was all true, and important enough to justify anything.
Yes, I decided, she had caressed my neck, and she’d meant it as a sweet goodbye. Serena was good at her job.
There were people going in and out of the Castle. Some were policemen. Some were wearing white. I was rude to most of them.
Amanda was on a stretcher in the hall. Or her body was. I wasn’t surprised. She’d been deteriorating ever since Mercury went radio silent. She wasn’t eating. She’d spent most of the weekend in her room and had wandered around the house much of the previous night, singing a nursery song about a spider.
I was angry at Serena, even though I knew someone else had made the decision to remove her. Amanda’s death was more than convenient, but I was awash in sadness.
I went hunting for Song and found her with Philip and Tommy. She made a face that I interpreted as telling me to let her explain things. I was happy to obey. I needed to take charge, but most of all I needed to get away from the Castle. I called for Henry’s Rolls.
“Peninsula,” I told the driver. I was abandoning my sons, but I told myself they would be safe with Song. Julia sat next to me on the back seat and clutched my arm. I called the hotel on her cell phone and booked a ridiculously expensive suite. “In my name, please,” I told the assistant manager who handled big spenders. A plan was taking shape in my mind and it didn’t include being shy.
Julia told me what had happened. “Right after you went out,” she said, “Amanda asked me to join her for a cup of tea. She said she wanted to show me something. It was a teapot she said you’d bought at Sotheby’s. Your ‘collecting bug,’ she called it. She seemed quite cheerful. There was evidently some trick about the teapot.
“We sat in the living room. Song brought in a tray and disappeared. Amanda poured green tea into my cup and then black into her own, both from the same spout. I was suitably impressed. She explained how the teapot worked. She said a good host would serve himself last, so his guest’s tea was not corrupted. I thanked her. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said. She put a spoonful of sugar into her cup and stirred the tea until it dissolved. She said she had to wait until the tea had cooled a bit, and then fell silent, looking down at her cup. It felt like there was some sort of ritual going on, but I dismissed the thought. Mostly I was pleased to see her in a better mood. I didn’t want to force her to talk.
“Finally, she looked up and smiled at me, drained the cup in a single draught, got quite an awful look on her face and fell o
ut of her chair, holding her chest. She did nothing to break her fall. I swear her head bounced when it hit the floor.”
Julia paused and took a moment to collect herself. “She was clearly in agony, but she didn’t die right away. I tried to find Song – I don’t know the emergency number in Hong Kong – but she was down in her room in the basement. In the end I had to shout to find her. When I got back to Amanda she was crumpled up and dead. I checked for the pulse in her neck. Song called an ambulance. The ambulance crew called the police.”
I said nothing. The scene belonged in a movie, not in real life.
“Very dramatic,” said Julia, pulling herself together. “Two kinds of tea from the same pot, but one of them poisoned. Why would anyone kill themselves, Wendy?
“Perhaps she was murdered,” I said.
“The police seem to think otherwise,” she said. I could feel her reacting to my comment. She sat up straighter, held my arm more tightly. “They took the teapot away but they don’t seem to be treating the Castle as a ‘quote’ crime scene – at least if American TV shows are anything to go by.”
I said nothing.
She shifted in her seat, turning to look at me. “But this must be ghastly for you.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
She put her hand on my knee. “I shouldn’t be letting you take me to the hotel,” she said. “You probably want to sleep or cry.”
“No,” I said.
“Or get drunk,” she added.
“I want your company,” I said. I was feeling giddy. An enormous burden had been taken off my shoulders. Amanda was dead. I wasn’t going to lose the bank. The right people would stay in charge in China. There was sex in my future. “Did you do it?” said Julia. It was half a jest, to break the tension, half a question she needed to ask.
The Daughters of Henry Wong Page 15
