A Death in China

by Carl Hiaasen

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Alice scolded. Little Miss Sun, the China Travel International Service guide, implored timidly. Walter Thomas-or was it Thomas Walters?-a foppish Egyptologist from the Midwest, spoke vaguely of "fraternal kinship," whatever that meant.

  Stratton endured. When the atmosphere turned bitchy, he shrugged and walked away. The White Pagoda and a refurbished lamasery were not on his agenda that day. Stratton watched without expression while his colleagues, suitably armed with cameras in black leather cases and sensible shoes, obediently flocked onto their minibus under Miss Sun's set-piece smile. Then he went up to his room and squeezed forty-five minutes of exercise from the cramped patch between the cracking wall and iron bedstead. When, near ten o'clock, David Wang still had not called, he prowled the gloomy hotel corridors until he found the room that Jim McCarthy used as an office.

  Dust blanketed stacks of books and haphazard piles of newspapers that overburdened a loose-jawed table. It carpeted the dials of an expensive radio atop a gray filing cabinet. It lay like virgin snow on the bright yellow shade of a lamp meant more for Sweden than China.

  McCarthy lolled in a swivel chair, desert boots comfortably atop the burnished top of a huge partners' desk that Stratton identified instantly as a valuable antique.

  Mechanically, McCarthy was ripping strips from a newspaper, laying them in a corner of the desk and tossing the discards in the general direction of a big straw basket.

  "Hey, baby," McCarthy lured Stratton from the doorway. "Make yourself a cup of coffee. Or there's some Qingdao, if it's not too early for you." The massive head gestured toward a box-sized refrigerator on the floor.

  "Thanks." Stratton spooned Brazilian instant into a hotel cup identical to the one in his room, then added hot water from an identical pitcher.

  "You teach art history. And karate, right?" McCarthy called.

  "Why karate?" Stratton laughed.

  "Sheila was admiring your whipcord body. I had a whipcord body, too-until I came to China." McCarthy patted his belly. "Is it fun, teaching?"

  "I like it, I really do. It's not as exciting as being a foreign correspondent, but you do get hooked into the research. You find one piece here and another there and pretty soon you don't know where the hours went. Then, too, the vacations are nice and long. Most summers I go out west and help a friend of mine run a wilderness company for tourists-Whitewater rafting, survival hikes, sissy climbing, that kind of thing. I should be out there now, instead of screwin' around here. But I really wanted to see China. Five cities, twenty-one days."

  "Yeah, everybody ought to see it. Once. I wish I had-shh… "

  McCarthy waved for silence and Stratton heard a familiar litany lancing through static.

  "… off the wall into the corner… Remy is in and Evans is around third… throw is to second but Rice is safe with a stand-up double… That'll be all for… "

  "A baseball game?"

  McCarthy laughed "Last night's game. We're thirteen hours ahead of the East Coast, remember.

  There's a game on almost every morning-Armed Forces radio."

  "Pretty nice, if you're a fan."

  "Naw, not me. Only been to one game in my life. My father took me to Briggs Stadium when I was a kid. About the third inning there was this foul ball and I reached up to catch it, you know, like on television. Broke two fingers. Never went back."

  "If you're not a fan, why do you listen?" Stratton teased.

  McCarthy heaved himself upright and planted both feet on the floor. Stratton, from the other side of the desk, imagined without seeing the spurts of dust.

  "It's China, baby. In China, I'm a baseball fan because it helps kill the morning. In China, I read five or six newspapers a day and cut out things I might use six months from now, but probably never will. Savin' bits of string, but never finding the spool. For correspondents, China is purgatory, baby. The thing about this place that drives you crazy is that there are no facts; a billion people and not one goddamned fact. Did you know that everything here is a secret until it is published, even the fucking weather forecast?"

  "Then what do you do for news?"

  "I worry a lot." McCarthy grinned. "Particularly on Thursdays; t
hat's when stories for the weekend paper are due. Today they want a political piece, ugh. I don't understand what's goin' on-that's normal-but I have reached the solemn conclusion that neither do the Chinese."

  "Like how?"

  "Like something big is bubbling beneath the surface. There are lots of little signs: people being suddenly reassigned or demoted, or simply disappearing-they could be forcibly retired, or dead-nobody knows. No one will talk about it."

  "A power struggle," Stratton offered.

  "Don't you know it. This place has been a circus since Mao died; probably before, too. When Deng came in with his pragmatists, the old hard-line Maoists got pushed aside. Now I'd say that the hard-liners were getting their own back."

  "Most of the people who are being knocked down are the ones that Deng made respectable again?"

  "That, for sure. But more than that." McCarthy lit a cigarette. "There's a hard-ass campaign under way right now against Chinese having anything to do with foreigners. You know the old song: 'We welcome your technology, but no blue jeans, please.' The idea that the decadent West will contaminate the heroic masses has been around for a long time, but now it's worse-ten times worse-than I've ever seen it."

  Stratton was surprised.

  "People have certainly been very nice to us. I've seen no hostility at all," he said.

  McCarthy nodded.

  "Right. The average guy is more interested in Western ideas and culture than ever. He hears the Party's antiforeign line and says to hell with it. But the guys who are getting axed are those whose jobs require the most contact with foreigners. They're falling like tenpins." McCarthy threw up his hands in mock despair. "Who's doing it? Does it means some sort of new madness like the Cultural Revolution is brewing? That's what my editors ask. And all I can do is to quote Confucius' greatest line."

  "What's that?"

  " 'It beats the shit out of me, baby.' "

  Stratton laughed.

  "I'll get out of your hair, but let me ask a quick question. I was supposed to meet a friend of mine today, a Chinese-American professor who's here on a personal visit. He never showed up. How do I go about tracking him down?"

  "You sure he's here in Peking?"

  "Almost. He was supposed to come back yesterday from Xian."

  "Plane probably didn't fly. The national airline only flies when the weather is good. No joke."

  "That's probably it. Still, I'd like to try. He's a very old friend of mine and I'd hate to miss connections."

  "I could have the interpreter call the hotels, but it would be a waste of time.

  The one constructive suggestion I can make is that you ask about your friend at the American Embassy. If he's an academic type, they should have some record of him, an itinerary."

  "Who could I ask?"

  "The culture vultures would be most likely to know, but they are turds to a man.

  Try the consul, Steve Powell. He won't know, but he's the kind of guy who could find out."

  "At the consulate?"

  "Never on Thursday mornings. Steve plays tennis every Thursday. Over at the International Club, the courts they call the Rockpit. Do you know where it is?"

  "I've passed it."

  "I have to go out, but you're welcome to use the corporate bicycle."

  "Corporate bicycle?"

  "No correspondent is complete without one," said McCarthy, fishing a small key off a large ring. "Downstairs at the bike rack, license number oh-oh-two-seven-two. It's black, like all the rest of them. Do you know how to get there?"

  "I have a map, thanks. Do you ride much?"

  "Only in the line of duty."

  Seen from a hotel window or a tourist bus, the infinite procession of bicycles is one of China's most impressive sights. On every major street, broad lanes are reserved for bicycles. Even in downtown Peking they outnumber the trucks and cars by a thousand to one. Alice and her friends rhapsodized about the bicycles.

  They could talk for hours, insulated in the air-conditioned bus, of the silent, measured stream, as massive and as unstoppable as the Yangtze. They found in the bicycles a symbol of the progressive New China. At faculty teas it would, no doubt, sound quite profound.

  Stratton learned some different things before he had wobbled two blocks. For one thing, the Chinese bicycle, copy of old English Raleigh though it may be, is more tank than scooter. It weighs a ton, steers hard and pedals harder.

  McCarthy's corporate bike had no gears, and by the time Stratton passed the old imperial observatory he was sweating. What astonished him most, though, was the chaos into which he had plunged. Bicycles, he decided, as a pert young thing nonchalantly cut him off and he swerved to avoid a three-horse cart, were the ultimate bastion of Chinese individualism. To outsiders, the cyclists might look like an army of blue ants. To somebody who pedaled among them, the Chinese all had fangs. They veered without warning. They knifed through lanes of cross traffic with terrifying, expressionless elan. Chinese flirted as they rode. They hawked and spat. They sang and cursed.

  The left turns were worst of all. The first time Stratton tried to make one he found he could not maneuver into the left segment of the bike lane in time. The second time he saw no way of getting across the oncoming flux of trucks and bikes. The third time he tensely negotiated the turn in the protective shadow of an old man who looked only straight ahead and miraculously emerged unscathed.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Stratton pedaled past the iron gates of the International Club. He locked McCarthy's bike near a willow tree and walked to the tennis courts. Two players volleyed steadily on a pocked asphalt surface that looked as if it had not been repaved since Peking's last earthquake.

  Stratton leaned on a chain-link fence and waited for a break in the game. It came on a gorgeous drop shot that brought one of the players, a stocky blond, lunging fruitlessly to the net. His opponent, a sandy-haired man in his early thirties, shouted in a southern accent: "Good try!"

  "Mr. Powell?" Stratton called.

  The sandy-haired player ambled to the fence. Stratton introduced himself. He told the American consul about David Wang.

  "Mr. Stratton, I usually don't hear about American citizens in China unless they get in some sort of trouble. Professor Wang is a man of some distinction, however, and I'll bet the culture folks have his itinerary."

  "Yes, well, Jim McCarthy said-er-suggested… "

  Powell smiled. "He said, 'Those culture vultures are crosseyed, close-minded sonofabitches,' " he drawled in fair imitation. "Well, I suppose he's right.

  Tell you what, soon as I polish off Ingemar here, I'll make a couple calls."

  Powell was an excellent tennis player and he ended the game with a fierce flurry. With a towel around his neck and his racket under one arm, he led Stratton into the main building of the club.

  Stratton waited in the lobby while Powell used the phone in an adjoining booth.

  "They're checking on your friend," he reported when he came out. "Have you read Too Late, the King?"

  "Yes, of course." Stratton was impressed. It was not David Wang's best-known book, but it was his best work.

  "I admired it very much," Powell said. "Clear, sharp, almost lyrical. We've got a copy in the library here."

  "He's a special man. Very talented," Stratton said.

  "Tell me more." Powell spread out the towel and sat down on an old leather chair.

  "God, by the time I met David in the early seventies he'd already been around forever. He was born here in China, of course, but came to the U.S. to study just before World War II broke out. He never went back. By the time I entered graduate school he was famous in academia for his scholarship. I was"-Stratton hesitated-"just getting interested in Asian art. So it was natural to gravitate to Dr. Wang."

  "He was originally from Shanghai, right?"

  Stratton nodded. "An entrepreneurial family of the old sort. It had been making money, from salt or silk, opium or tea, from time immemorial. Toward the end of the nineteenth century both of
David's grandparents, who were business rivals, I guess, got modern. David's father went to Columbia. His mother, who had studied at the Philadelphia Conservatory, was about fifteen years younger. When David's time came to go off to school in the States, he was still a teenager. In the normal course of events, he would have gone home and, as the eldest son, taken over the business."

  "They were hardly normal times, were they?"

  "No. Civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. Invasion by Japan.

  Then the knockdown years until the Communists finally won in forty-nine. I would guess that David's father told him not to come back until it was all over. And then, of course, the wrong people had won-if you were a Shanghai millionaire.

  David bounced around, quietly accumulating degrees; money was never a problem, I gather, and at the end of it all, there was nothing to come back to-the Wang empire was just one more victim of revolution. Whether he was cut off from his family or broke with them I don't know, but he never mentioned them. He settled in at St. Edward's and never left. I suppose he-"

  "Excuse me. That'll be my boys." Powell caught the phone on the second ring.

  Stratton stared out the window at weeping willows in the overgrown courtyard.

  When the consul returned, Stratton sensed there was no news.

  "We've got Dr. Wang listed at the Heping Hotel. The culture officers had invited him to call or come by when he got back from Xian, but so far no one's heard from him. Maybe he just decided to spend an extra day or two at the digs."

  "Maybe so," Stratton said, unconvinced.

  "Our fellas are a little disappointed, too. They're looking forward to meeting your Dr. Wang. You know about his brother?"

  "David told me he was a vice minister or something."

  "A deputy minister, Mr. Stratton. Deputy minister of art and culture. A big gun.

  His name is Wang Bin. He's in charge of new archaeological digs and the big museum here."