The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  David had, of course, made friends at the crematorium; he showed me a picture of grinning workers in the viewer of his digital camera. They were not smiling, David explained, because they liked their jobs. They disliked the unnatural idea of burning corpses. It may have been state policy to cremate the dead, but it was an idea whose time had not come in China. David had brought with him from the States a gym bag filled with small gifts—pens and pencils, cheap watches, cigarettes, miniature bottles of liquor. A new watch, a pack of Camels and two ounces of firewater poured into a cup of tea at nine in the morning seldom renders anyone unfriendly.

  “The fellows at the crematorium say they mostly burn Communists who are trying to make a good impression on their superiors, plus a few foreigners,” David said. “Otherwise it’s slow—so slow that it’s hard to keep in practice.”

  “What about Paul?”

  “They remember cremating two foreigners—one about a year ago and the other in September of this year. The first was a Russian who died of a heart attack. They have a good file on him—medical report, death certificate, photocopy of his passport. He was a fat man. They got a look at him because it’s standard operating procedure to open the coffin to double-check the identity of the deceased before it goes into the flames. Also, I imagine, to harvest any valuables on the corpse.”

  And the other one, the one that was burned in September?

  “It was delivered by the police,” David said. “They didn’t open that coffin because they were told that the body was badly decomposed.”

  “Decomposed?”

  “Yep.”

  This was curious, because even in summer flesh does not quickly decompose in the parched air and weak sunshine of the Xinjiang high desert. Archeologists find mummies that are thousands of years old but still have the lustrous flowing hair and the fresh though tanned and shrunken faces of young men and women.

  4

  One of Captain Zhang’s policeman, wearing plain clothes, awaited us when we returned to the hotel. At his polite invitation I plunged back into the mob and followed him to Zhang’s office.

  Despite his junior rank, Captain Zhang was no longer young— salt-and-pepper hair, office pallor, tired eyes, the slightly slumped posture of a man who has gone through the same motions too many times. However, his intelligence was as apparent as his fatigue. He worked from behind a clean desk, without notes, which told me that he had either mastered the details of Paul’s case or, more likely, had no intention of telling me the truth. It was in his power to throw me out of China, so I was prepared to act out two different roles: elaborate politeness that would give him no reason to expel me, plus an informed curiosity that might give him a reason to let me run so he could keep an eye on me and maybe learn something. Unless Paul had changed all of a sudden, it was a safe bet that Zhang had little or no idea what he had really been up to when he was in these parts.

  After the usual cup of tea and exchange of pleasantries, Captain Zhang was remarkably open and direct. Although we were speaking Mandarin he called Paul by his English name.

  “We remember Mister Paul Christopher quite well,” he said, gesturing with the stained fingers of a heavy smoker. “And you, too, of course, Mister Horace Hubbard.”

  I nodded pleasantly. How kind. Paul was the most notorious American spy ever captured by the Chinese, and in a more modest way I, too, had enjoyed an evil reputation in this country.

  Zhang said, “And now we learn that the two of you are cousins. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is new information.”

  “Is it? We certainly never made a secret of it.”

  “How strange. You spoke to us about him so many times in the past in your official capacity, when you were trying to secure his release from prison. Yet no notation was ever made that you are so closely related.”

  Zhang looked expectant, but I made no response to his remark. It wasn’t my fault if the Chinese counterintelligence service didn’t ask the right questions.

  Finally I said, “On behalf of our family I wish to thank the Chinese authorities for returning the ashes to us, but I am sure you understand how bitterly we regret that our relative’s body could not be buried in the family cemetery. Uncertainty has been created.”

  He made me wait just slightly longer for his reply than my own silence had lasted. Then he said, “Regrettable. But there are no embalmers in Ulugqat. I believe your friend Mister Wong has already ascertained that the body was not in good condition when it reached Urümqui.”

  Zhang knew that David had been poking around the crematorium. Zhang’s eyes and ears were everywhere. He wanted me to know that. But amazingly for a secret policeman, he also wanted me to understand that he was willing to let himself be questioned. Or at least pretend to have a conversation instead of asking all the questions himself.

  I said, “I wonder if you have any idea what my cousin was doing in Ulugqat.”

  Zhang did not exactly answer the question, but he did amaze me again by giving me information. “Mister Paul Christopher was brought down from the mountains by some Tajik herdsmen who found him lying at the bottom of a chasm. He was badly injured with many broken bones and unable to speak. They thought he had fallen off his horse, which was found grazing at the top of the defile.”

  “How far was this from Ulugqat?”

  “A considerable distance, I believe. The Tajik don’t use maps, so it’s difficult to pinpoint.”

  “I see,” I said. “But in any case these herdsmen left their herds and brought Christopher to Ulugqat for medical attention.”

  “Yes,” Zhang said, with a look that told me not to mention how remarkable this was before he had explained the matter. “He was a foreigner and quite old. They thought he might be an important man. Or perhaps a spy. Unfortunately he died before they reached Ulugqat.”

  “They thought he looked old? Why?”

  “He was, I believe, seventy-five years of age.”

  “I see. But they brought his corpse into town anyway?”

  “Obviously. It was their duty to do so. He had been dead for some time when his body was delivered, and then it took several days to bring it into Urümqui.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why not just bury the man in Ulugqat?”

  “Impossible,” Zhang said. “There was no foreign cemetery. He could not be buried in a Muslim graveyard or in one of ours, for that matter. Secondly, the death of any foreigner on Chinese soil is a serious matter. Once we identified this particular foreigner, the matter became even more serious, because of Mister Paul Christopher’s history. An autopsy was ordered. That procedure couldn’t be done in Ulugqat.”

  “And the results of the autopsy were?”

  “As I said, many bone fractures including a serious compression of the skull. A ruptured spleen, a torn liver, internal bleeding.”

  “They brought him down the mountain on horseback?”

  “Yes. The Tajik had no motor vehicles.”

  “So he was alive when they found him?”

  “That is my understanding.”

  “It’s a wonder he could survive—how many days?—lying over a horse like a sack of grain.”

  “Indeed.” Zhang nodded respectfully to Paul’s admirable ghost. “He was a very strong and determined man, as we in China have reason to remember.”

  I said, “I suppose photographs of the corpse were made, fingerprints taken?”

  “Of course, but these are official records that cannot be disclosed.”

  “Then you can show me no proof that the man the Tajik brought in was, in fact, my cousin?”

  “Proof?” Zhang said in real astonishment. In China, proof was not something you asked a policeman for; it was something only a policeman had a right to demand. He said, “You have his ashes.”

  “We have ashes. We don’t know if they are his.”

  Silence. Resentment. Zhang lit a rank cigarette, his fifth since we had started talking half an hour before.


  I said, “I’m sure you wondered why Christopher had come back to Xinjiang.”

  Squinting through the cigarette smoke, Zhang said, “Not at all. He explained at the airport that he wished before he died to see the place where he had been imprisoned.”

  “And this was acceptable to you and your superiors?”

  “Why should it not be? He already knew all about the place, and in any case it’s no longer a secret location. It is now quite empty, abandoned. He went there on his motorcycle.”

  “On his motorcycle?”

  You laugh? So did I.

  “Yes, he bought one, a new Suzuki, soon after he arrived,” Zhang said. “He brought camping gear with him—a tent, a sleeping bag, a small stove, dehydrated food, and so on. He rode around quite freely, chatting with people, asking questions.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “Strange ones. He seemed to be looking for his mother. This was odd behavior for a man his age. I’m afraid we concluded that he was not quite right in his mind.”

  “But you let him ride around asking questions?”

  “They were harmless questions.”

  Zhang let me know by a small gesture and a change in tone of voice that he had answered enough questions, harmless or not. I asked another one anyway.

  “When he was in prison, the political officer in charge of his re-education, the man who questioned him every day for ten years, was a party official known to Christopher as Ze Keli. Have you any idea if Christopher contacted this man, or attempted to contact him?”

  “No,” Zhang said. “And now, Mister Hubbard, I have these for you.”

  Squinting through the smoke of his cigarette, he opened a drawer and removed a package wrapped in cloth. He undid it and placed before me, one by one, Paul Christopher’s passport and wallet, along with the Rolex watch he had been wearing since the 1950s. He had been wearing it when he was captured by the Chinese. They had given it back to him when he was released. It was a self-winding watch. I shook it and it immediately began to run. I wondered if Paul had done the same after all those years in prison where he had no means of measuring time.

  5

  The story Captain Zhang had told me was almost certainly hokum. At the same time, the delivery of Paul’s personal effects was disturbing. On the face of it, they were evidence that my cousin was either dead or in Chinese custody. How else could Zhang be in possession of his watch, his passport, his wallet, his money—the entire contents of his pockets? But this was a hoary trick. By laying these familiar objects before me, Zhang wanted me to abandon hope and believe his story. Therefore I took it with a grain of salt.

  “Christopher could have ditched his identity,” David said.

  This was possible. A switch of this kind was difficult for a white man to make while swimming in a sea of Han, but in his time Paul had done even more improbable things and gotten away with them.

  Reading my thoughts—after all we had both breathed the same paranoid air of tradecraft for half a lifetime—David said, “He couldn’t change names and nationalities while he was still in Xinjiang and under surveillance. But if he crossed a frontier…”

  “What frontier?”

  “Take your pick. But if his destination really was the forbidden zone, he could have crossed into Tajikistan, taken a train to Kazakhstan, and come back into Xinjiang over the Horgas Pass.”

  “Despite dire warnings that he was almost certain to be discovered and arrested.”

  “Correct,” David said. “And looking on the dark side, if in fact Christopher was captured, that would explain how Zhang happened to have his personal belongings in his desk drawer.”

  Yes, it would. It could also mean that Paul was back in a Chinese prison. If that was the case, no one would ever see him again and it would be a far better thing for the Chinese if the family believed that he was dead.

  This conversation took place on the bus to Ulugqat. Captain Zhang’s men were waiting for us at the bus station. They made no effort to be discreet. They wanted us to know that they would be part of our lives as long as we were in China. This was fine by us; we were here for the honest purposes already stated, to find out whatever we could about my cousin and his death. After checking into a hotel, we began asking questions. We never asked about anything but Paul. Evidently Paul had made his usual good impression because people usually smiled when they heard his Mandarin name. A surprising number of people had seen Paul and remembered him, but none had anything interesting to tell us. He had come on a motorcycle, he liked their food. Ulugqat is not exactly a tourist destination, so for most of its citizens a visit by a foreigner was an interesting event.

  David and I took long walks at night. It was our only chance to talk to each other with a reduced chance of being recorded. The streets were hardly less crowded after dark and you could find excellent food in the Tajik quarter—not the usual sticky Han delicacies but fat roast mutton with noodles and fried bread, and delicious yogurt made from sheep’s milk. We found a particularly good restaurant and went back three nights in a row. On the third night, when we were still empty of new information and close to giving up, a Tajik with the butterscotch skin of a man who lives outdoors seated himself at a table facing us. Our minders were behind him, so they could not see his face. He engaged us in a jolly conversation about religion. He had the hearty, self-certain manner of an Episcopalian deacon. If Moses and Jesus Christ were among the Christian prophets, why did Christians call God by the wrong name? Why did they reject Allah’s last messenger? As he got ready to leave, he came over to our table and leaned on it, and while David talked, slowly and distinctly whispered to me two short phrases in Mandarin.

  One of these phrases was the name of a cemetery and the location of a grave. The other was a man’s name, Yang Geng Qi. Paul Christopher.

  On the way back to the hotel I told David what the man had said to me and what I thought it might mean.

  David shrugged. “We can dig up the grave, Horace, but think for a minute. Maybe that’s what they want us to do, so they can grab us in the act and get rid of us forever.”

  It was not impossible that he was right. Robbing graves is a serious offense anywhere in the world. In China, with its ancient reverence for last resting places, the penalty might very well be a bullet in the head. All the same, I wanted to know. David shrugged again and went along with me.

  We set out for the cemetery in the wee hours of the morning. Even gumshoes have to sleep some time, and ours were exceptionally tired after the workout we had given them that day. They were dozing in the lobby. The receptionist was also asleep, but there was no question of tiptoeing past all three of them. We went out a back door, split up, and made our way through empty and silent streets, a strange and unsettling experience in China, where one never expects the crowd to be absent. It was a moonless night, but the stars were brilliant in the black desert sky. They gave off enough light for us to find our way among the markers.

  It took time to find the grave of Yang Geng Qi. We had brought a metal tray from our hotel room and with this clumsy tool we dug through the gritty sand at the head of the grave. I had never before tried to be quiet in China, where noise is as omnipresent as the air itself. At this hour of the night the country was as quiet as sleep itself, and each bite of the tray into the earth sounded like the clash of cymbals.

  At last we found what we were looking for. There was no coffin, just a body wrapped in cloth and trussed with rope. Feeling in the dark, I uncovered the face. Shielding ourselves under my raincoat, we shone flashlights into the grave. We found ourselves looking into the empty eye sockets of a young Han who had been shot through the back of the head. David slit the shroud to the man’s waist. There was a gaping hole in the chest where the heart had been removed and another where his liver used to be. I felt beneath the body. The kidneys were missing, too. This was a criminal whose organs had been harvested immediately after he was executed.

  David took several flash photographs
of the mutilated corpse, which was well on its way to becoming a mummy.

  Clearly Zhang had planned to show us a grave before presenting us with Paul’s belongings. But then someone decided to send us ashes instead. A wise precaution.

  6

  I wanted to make contact with the Episcopalian again. David and I went back to the restaurant where the fellow had whispered his information. We didn’t really expect to find him there—or if we did, that he would be fool enough to talk to us again—but there was no other place to start. Our minders went with us, of course. To all appearances they had not missed us the night before. Both had still been asleep in the lobby when we returned just before first light. Now they drank tea and watched stolidly as David and I once again ate the coarse barbarian food.

  There was no sign of my informant, but David overheard talk among the customers about a buz kashi match. You may have seen this game in the movies or in National Geographic—polo as a blood sport with the carcass of a goat as the ball. The match between Tajik horsemen and some Kyrgyz from the north was planned two days hence somewhere in the mountains. The conversation was so free and easy that you might have thought we were in a free country and the two scowling Han policemen sitting against the wall were members of the family. We asked if it was possible for us to see the match. The owner, who had been leading the discussion, replied that we’d be as welcome as the day is long. As a matter of fact, he had an uncle who owned a Toyota 4Runner, and though he could not say for sure, it was possible that his uncle would be willing to drive us up the mountain. He was in the taxi business.

  The uncle in his 4Runner arrived at our hotel at daybreak. He was a big sunburnt Tajik named Zikkar who somewhat resembled the Episcopalian, which could mean nothing or mean that they were related—or merely that both men possessed one of the halfdozen or so faces that the whole tribe shared after thousands of years of intermarriage. Zikkar asked for the equivalent of two hundred dollars to drive us up the mountain and back down. This was a large sum by local standards. Since we did not want him to carry passengers for whom he had no respect, David bargained him down to one hundred fifty.