San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  The following summer, Michael traveled back to the Midwest to see some old friends and to have his draft physical. He wore a T-shirt with Mao Tse-tung’s face silk-screened on the front and the phrase, “All political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” on the back. He flunked the physical.

  Before he flew back to the Bay Area, he took a detour to see a fellow RU member of high standing.

  Ariel Rabenstein was a former CPUSA member, who now lent RU a certain legitimacy. Like Michael and Francis, he was employed by the post office. Unlike most of the young cadre, he had actual experience with mass organizing mayhem on a grand scale. The rest of RU were in comparison children, working in a vacuum, sealed off from history by McCarthy and the fact that the Soviet Union had stopped being revolutionary. Ariel was hiding in Chicago after having been out of the country for a number of years. He had run afoul of the police in San Francisco when a reporter for the Examiner, acting as an FBI informant, had exposed him, and he had to leave the country. He took a freighter to China and somehow made it into circles that reached as high as Chou En-lai. There had been a handful of Americans in China then, a collection of outright defectors, Korean War deserters, double agents, and old CPUSA and Soviet sympathizers who’d run into bad police situations, all of whom knew each other and did similar things like teach English. The Chinese premier’s group became Ariel’s main contact, and they arranged for Ariel to bring $600,000 back to the States, where he was “to start organizing a new revolutionary group.” This was in 1968. It wasn’t clear what the significance of the six-hundred-thousand figure was, but when Michael first heard the story, he assumed it must have been a round or lucky number in Chinese.

  Ariel’s apartment was located in a weathered brick tenement on the South Side. It was around eight million degrees that day and seemed hotter inside the tortuous hallways. Michael had been told Ariel had something for him, nothing more. It could have been materials or it could have been information. After winding his way through the building’s infernal interior, he was prepared for just about anything, except what greeted him there.

  A beautiful, young black woman with a natural, wearing a wine-colored Chinese silk robe, answered the door. She escorted him in without a word. The apartment looked like the interior of a souvenir store on Grant Avenue, full of things Ariel had brought back with him—lanterns, screens, embroidery, bronzes, scrolls. Ariel, in a black robe, waited for Michael in the inner room, seated with one knee upright on a kang, smoking from a copper water pipe, writing in a notebook. Michael didn’t know how old Ariel was, but he looked a hundred, and not a good hundred. He’d lived a hard, uncompromised life, and he smoked from that water pipe nonstop.

  Ariel and the woman exchanged some words in what must have been Mandarin. She left and then returned with a freshly brewed pot of tea and performed what seemed like a brief ritual involving pouring the tea from the pot into variously sized cups and then repouring them into other cups. When she was done, she left the room.

  “We met in China,” his host explained, going into no further detail. “Drink up. This pot and these cups are made of yi-hsing clay. It’s said to enhance the flavor of the tea. Let me know if you taste anything. My taste buds are shot.” He stuck his tongue out.

  Michael declined because he was dying in the heat, but his host insisted, saying the Chinese believed drinking hot tea actually cooled the body, which sounded like utter madness.

  “You’re to be sent somewhere,” Ariel declared. “You’ll be traveling with me to pick up some money. I can’t say when or where, for now. Everything will be conducted on a ‘need to know’ basis. We don’t want you to lose your job at the post office, where you’re doing good work. So as we get closer to the date, we’ll tell you how long you’ll be gone.”

  “It won’t be that long then?”

  “About a week.”

  “Will it be just you and me?”

  “There will be checkpoints and handoffs. But yes, most of the time it will be just you and me. That’s all I can tell you for now.”

  Michael nodded. Ariel stopped talking. It was very odd, regardless of the bizarre trappings of the apartment, to see this rough-hewn man taking such delicate sips from a teacup the size of a thimble. Ariel didn’t have any materials for him to bring back. Probably the purpose of this visit was just to check Michael out. Michael took a sip of the offered tea, now lukewarm, before he left. It was green and stronger than it looked.

  On his way back, he felt an uneasy sense of elation. When Ariel mentioned money, he immediately thought of the $600,000 the old man had delivered from China. Michael could only assume they were going there for more. That he was being sent to the command center of world revolution at this juncture in his young career, for such a sensitive task, was quite unbelievable. Very little in his life, besides a few trips to Chinatown to discuss tactics with Francis, had prepared him. “China” had always been to him more a revolutionary ideal than an actual place, existing only in cloudy rumors he and the other local cadre, like courtiers stationed in a distant colony, attempted to decode, or else otherwise in those abstract, stiffly translated tracts they were sent, their lifeline to inter-pretation. Very few of them had access to cleaner information—Francis, who could understand some Chinese, and Ariel, with his contacts there, among them—and even their throughlines were questionable, though enough to lend them a certain priestlike authority. But the more Michael thought about it, the more he was convinced his life, so far, had been a preparation for such a trip. What, for instance, had led him that night to the lecture by the former Red Guard, which sent him off on his own trajectory into the revolution? As an advocate of science, Michael didn’t believe in fate, but he trusted the unconscious. His life so far had been defined by great, blind leaps. He had gone from the Midwest to the Ivy League to San Francisco. He had never left the country before. Now he was going to China.

  When he thought of why he had been selected to go, though, the picture grew darker. It was clear he was going, on the one hand, to take care of the money and keep it from capitalists and opportunists, in case Ariel, who was old as shit, had a heart attack or otherwise dropped dead. On the other, and this was the part of his job he was uncomfortable with, he was probably there to keep an eye on his companion. Or rather, they were to keep an eye on each other, in case either person, and the people who backed them, tried to muscle out the other. This was not something he liked to think about. Ariel had built factions within the organization, probably based in the Midwest. Things were lining up, Michael understood though only very vaguely, along the same faults that were fracturing the CPC. Everyone knew Ariel was a Chou En-lai guy, but which way did Chou go? With Liu Hsiao-chi? Lin Piao and the PLA? Or the radicals? Michael had been selected, he believed, because he was trusted on all sides. That had always been his best trait: he got along with everybody. And he could also take care of himself, if he had to. Certainly he could against an old man. But he did not want to think he couldn’t trust Ariel, or the organization. He was sure of his own commitment. He believed the group was sure too and would take the necessary precautions for his safety. One good sign was his receiving only the information he needed to know, which, he understood, was for his own protection.

  On returning to the Bay Area, he ran into Francis. Michael was on his way to the People’s Bookstore on Brenham Street, off Portsmouth Square. Francis was coming out with some books tucked under his arm. On that gray day, he looked uncharacteristically like an ineffably old Chinese scholar, strolling through Tien An Men on his way to the Forbidden City.

  The two of them talked among the pigeons. The square was unusually empty. Droplets of mist condensed in the air. Playing their game of one-upmanship, Michael mentioned the job he was being assigned and that he was traveling with Ariel. His disclosure was strategic as well. He wanted to gauge how much Francis knew.

  “Well, you know the score,” Francis replied, unperturbed. “Don’t let Ariel out of your sight once the two of you pick up the money
.”

  Michael nodded. He couldn’t tell if Francis was playing the same game, talking as if he knew more than he did. All of them did that to some degree, Michael supposed. But maybe Francis did know things about Ariel that Michael didn’t.

  Without having mentioned that China was the place he was being sent, he asked Francis where he might buy a decent Chinese phrasebook and maps. “I came here for that, but I was thinking there are other places in Chinatown I could look.”

  “There are places you could buy maps,” Francis replied, without missing a beat, “but because most of them are printed in Hong Kong or Taiwan, they’re inaccurate.” They depicted nonexistent rail lines and provincial boundaries, he explained, and some still drew the national borders as if it were the height of the Ching Dynasty. “The capital is Nanking, while Peking doesn’t exist at all. It’s called ‘Peiping,’ the Pacified North. You’re better off sticking to our own bookstore.”

  “All right then.”

  Michael went ahead and bought all the maps he could find anyway. When he went home and compared them all, including the one in the World Atlas in his local library, he wasn’t surprised to find the discrepancies Francis had mentioned. He was no stranger to political fictions. In practice, he lived to fight against them, but he had to admit, he was dismayed to encounter such a black-and-white instance of contested reality. On the one hand, there was the version promulgated by the United States, which pretended a government representing one billion people practically did not exist. On the other, there were remote areas in the southwest of China the size of California that he knew could not be considered under Communist control, no matter how cleanly delineated. The maps, far from providing a composite picture of something resembling the truth, only made the place he assumed he was traveling to seem all the more unreal.

  When they arrived in Seattle, having driven up, just the two of them, they stored Michael’s car at the local organization headquarters. He and Ariel moved into the backseat of another car. Two local cadre sat up front to drive them past the border.

  In Vancouver, they made a brief stop. Michael stayed in the car. Ariel entered an apartment building. A few minutes later, he reemerged with two passports with their photographs and new identities. Michael felt a chill. He hadn’t handed a photograph of himself to anybody, and this particular photo he’d had taken in a photo booth at Ocean Beach, with the only prints he knew somewhere in his desk at home. Ariel told him, none too reassuringly, everything was being taken care of “on the other end.” He also had another item with him: a suitcase full of something, clothes presumably.

  “You’re going to check this piece of luggage in under your own name,” one of the Seattle operatives told Michael. “You’ll get a ticket for it, but you won’t need to replace the contents with anything. In fact, once you check it in, you won’t see it again until you get back to Canada.”

  On the long flight across the Pacific Ocean, the two of them didn’t speak much, sleeping most of the way, but for the few hours both of them were awake, Ariel turned surprisingly chatty. He broke into his life’s story, how he once ran off to join a puppet troupe, decided to become a Communist before he turned forty, even going a bit into China. Michael appreciated how friendly he’d become, after the long, tense drive from San Francisco, but grew unsettled the more it went on. Somehow, every time Michael tried to steer the topic of conversation toward actual information, such as going into greater detail over the handoff protocol, Ariel batted it away. It was very subtle, Michael couldn’t say at what precise moment he’d been deflected, but it happened repeatedly. Despite the fact that Ariel’s stories sounded too nutty to be made up, Michael eventually realized that what seemed like casual candor was boldly executed diversion. The more Ariel talked, the less Michael knew.

  Ariel was in a grand mood, though, and, once he got going, went into his theory on why Vietnam was just a prelude to a global war between the U.S. and China.

  “Either the two superpowers are going to enter into an alliance against China or, more likely, the U.S. is going to simply beat the Soviets into reneging on their commitments to international socialist solidarity, to the point, if you ask me, where we’ll see the collapse of the U.S.S.R. as a political entity. At that point, we enter a new phase of the Cold War, where the balance of power isn’t between the U.S. and Soviets, but between the U.S. and China. This will all happen within the next twenty years, by the way. Moreover, everyone knows this already, which is why the real target of U.S. strategy right now the world over isn’t the U.S.S.R., but China. By the time the crucial battleground will have shifted to the Pacific Rim, the Eastern Bloc will be just a memory.”

  Michael couldn’t help feeling excited. Or maybe it was just the straight drive, without stopping, and to finally have got up in the air. Either way, he thought there was a grain of respectability to the scenario Ariel had just painted. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. in twenty years? China as the world’s second superpower? A shift in the global balance of power to the Pacific nations? It seemed unbelievable, and yet here they were, suspended in the stratosphere, somewhere between San Francisco and Tokyo, on a mission to change the world.

  Japan was no different than, say, La Guardia, but once they boarded a Russian passenger jet bound for Shanghai, Michael felt he had entered another world. The cabin looked like the interior of a kids’ clubhouse. There was no crew to speak of. Or passengers, for that matter. Just a few black-haired heads scattered about the narrow cabin, none of them in a seat next to another. He and Ariel sat in the first row, with their interpreter/guide/watchdog, a thin woman in a blue pantsuit with a bob haircut.

  A minor hubbub went up when their guide remarked in fluid Queen’s English that they had entered Chinese airspace. Out the window, Michael could see the coastline of the continent, marked by a few small fires here and there. It was happening. It was one thing to take cues from translated texts that wore the dry air of the exotic and esoteric, another to be confronted with a glimpse of a world of real lives and a landmass that, reaching across impassable stretches of time and space, had bore the near totality of human civilization. The idea of that history, rolling back from the shoreline he was now tracing through the dark, was incomprehensible. All that made such a thought tolerable was the counterforce of the equally impossible fact that the most radical social revolution the world had ever known was taking place here too. Michael had spent a lifetime in exile from everything. For the first time, he felt as if he had come home.

  They touched down at Hung Chiao International Airport in the dead of night. Michael picked up the luggage he’d packed for himself, but not the suitcase he was given in Vancouver. The streets of Shanghai, one of the world’s most populous cities, former Whore of the Orient, Paris of the East, as seen from the backseat of a Chinese government sedan, were pitch dark.

  They were put up in a hotel room. The next day Ariel went out for a few hours, but Michael was forced to stay the whole time in the sparse, narrow room. Most of those hours were spent catching up with his jet lag. A rotation of chain-smoking young men in the same kind of blue jackets Francis wore stood watch outside the door. They didn’t speak English. Every time Michael opened it and asked if he could go out, the response was the same sheepish smile and bout of mute head shaking and hand waving.

  Around 3 in the afternoon, he was staring out the window when he saw, miraculously, three white people walk by. He tried to get their attention by banging on the window and yelling, but they didn’t hear him, or acted as if they didn’t. He tried to see where they were headed, but they quickly disappeared from view.

  That evening they were put on the train and spent the night in an isolated car. They arrived in Peking by morning. They were put in another hotel room.

  They spent most of day two cooped up in the hotel room together, with Ariel being called out for a few hours in midmorning.

  When Ariel came back, he was not any more forthcoming about whatever he was doing, or what was going on, than he was abo
ut anything else. But like almost everyone else they had met on this trip so far, he had a case of nerves.

  It was apparent they were being handled very carefully. So far, every time they had been met by someone, picked up, or taken around, the atmosphere was tense. No one looked directly at anyone or anything. The passing off of the Americans from one handler to another was an especially serious affair. Their sponsors tended to be young men, and occasionally women, dressed in identical blue suits, although there were a few seniors here and there. So far everyone they encountered either spoke fluent English or none at all. They all smoked constantly. People were only grudgingly friendly. They ground their teeth when they smiled and were otherwise businesslike. Too businesslike for Michael’s taste. There was something flinty in their behavior; with any misstep in the complex operation going on, Michael felt he (and Ariel?) would be sacrificed. Michael recognized some of the m.o.: They tended to travel in pairs in which the partners clearly did not like each other. As with Ariel and himself, they were there to keep an eye on each other as much as on their charges.

  Admittedly he hadn’t seen much of China so far besides the interior of cars, trains, and hotel rooms, but the whole country seemed on edge. In September, the Minister of Defense, Lin Piao, had died in a plane crash in Mongolia, while trying to flee the country. Michael didn’t know Lin had failed to execute the “571 Plot,” an attempt on the life of Mao Tse-tung while aboard his special train. Nor could Michael have known—it would have peeved him if he had—that his journey to China was preceded by that of Henry Kissinger, who had made a secret trip in July to prepare the way for Nixon’s planned visit the following year.