A Drop of Chinese Blood

by James Church

I stood. “Actually, I would have bet she was quite a bit younger than fifty.”

  That drew the hint of a frown. “Gambling rots the mind, I’ve told you that. Even as a figure of speech, it’s debilitating.”

  By now I knew enough not to take that barbed hook. He didn’t like my gambling, and he made it a point to say so regularly. “I have to get back to work, so after she’s out the door, I’ll fix you some noodles for lunch and be on my way.”

  “You think you can get rid of her that easily?”

  That should have been warning enough, but I passed it off with a wave of the hand. “I’ll tell her you are indisposed, something to do with your bowels, and to make an appointment for tomorrow or the next day. She won’t be happy, that’s pretty plain. She seems to have an iron will.”

  “More like titanium.” He turned to the pile of tools on his workbench. “Why is there never a file around when you need it?”

  When I returned to the office, the red velvet chair was empty, and Miss Fang was standing near the window. In silhouette, she had the look of a Tang princess wondering whom to poison next. Very tough, I told myself, beneath those pearls. What was she doing here? Why did she need to see my uncle? And nagging atop everything: How did they know each other?

  “Your uncle is on his way?” She turned away from the window, so the light from the back created the hint of a halo around her head. “May I suggest you don’t want to be in the room when he gets here. He and I have a few things to discuss.” She made “a few things” sound like rubies and pearls rolling across the naked backside of a five-hundred-yuan hooker on Dooran Street.

  “Actually, he’s not available.” I sat down at the desk that I used when we had clients and pulled an appointment calendar from the bottom drawer. “He has a full schedule today.” I made a show of studying the pages and then brightened as if I’d found good news. “There is time tomorrow morning, though. Shall we say ten o’clock?”

  “Oh, come now,” she said and fingered her pearls with a hint of annoyance. “Let me be direct.” She glided to the desk and leaned over. “I’m told being direct is one of my most attractive features.”

  Some might quibble over what was her most attractive feature. I shrugged noncommittally.

  “I must see your uncle today, within the hour.” She looked at the watch on her wrist. The watch was expensive; I didn’t think it was a copy of anything. The wrist was beautiful, leading to a graceful hand and long, slim fingers. She waved the fingers in my direction. “It’s not a question of choice. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. This is urgent. So, why don’t you trot back to his workshop, which I’m sure is where he’s sitting at this moment, and tell him to pull his nose out of those boards and get in here.” She smiled at me, a ravishing smile that would paralyze a racehorse heading for the finish line. “You can do that for me, can’t you?”

  3

  My uncle made her wait twenty minutes, in the polite range but on the edge of irritating. When I told him what she had said, he gave me a hard look. “Lucky for you I’m not paying you a salary, or you’d be fired. Never mind, I knew you couldn’t do it. Don’t feel bad. No one could. She’s implacable when she wants to be.” He shook his head. “That and insatiable.”

  I coughed.

  “All right, all right. She says it’s urgent. We’ll accept it is urgent because she’s not one to exaggerate. Don’t call her Miss Fang to her face, though. It will only flatter her. She’s Madame Fang to you.”

  “Are you going to meet her like that?” I pointed at his trousers, which were covered with sawdust, and his shirt, with spots of dried glue down the front.

  “She’s seen me in worse.”

  “Not in less, I hope.”

  He smiled faintly. “Hope crosses many rivers,” he said and brushed the sawdust from his pants. “You go in first and tell her I’ll be right there. Then sit and keep quiet. Don’t engage in chitchat. Don’t hum a happy tune. Just sit.”

  “Is she married?”

  “Why, are you going to propose while you’re waiting? She’d eat you alive and then look around for dessert. Keep your distance. Didn’t you learn anything from your former wife?”

  I winced twice, once at the mention of dessert, and again at the reference to my wife. “That wasn’t called for,” I said. “I’m assuming you won’t drag out this meeting too long.” I looked at the clock on the wall. It was from the Harbin lumberyard my uncle visited occasionally. Two pine trees served as the hands, with the face of the clock a slightly blurry photo of the forests of Changbai Mountain. Fortunately, they hadn’t done anything cute with the numbers or it would have been completely unreadable. “I’ll take notes, but don’t forget, I have to be back at my office by two o’clock. If I’m reading those pine branches right, I don’t have much time.”

  4

  There was no danger of chitchat. While we waited, Madame Fang sat and looked out the window as if I did not exist. Around one forty my uncle came through the door. He had changed his shirt and pants and combed his hair.

  “Fang Mei-lin,” he said and extended his hand. It was scrubbed clean. “No less beautiful than the last time we met.”

  The woman remained seated. “I am less beautiful, but much richer, and I didn’t come here for your honeyed tongue.” She put out her own hand and touched his lightly. I could see her palm was sweating.

  “You said it was urgent?” My uncle cocked his head slightly when he said the last word. It was his way of seeming temporarily to cede ground. “A problem, perhaps? You’ve already met my nephew, Major Bing.”

  “We’ve met.” She glanced in my direction and then focused back on my uncle. “I have a few things to discuss, things that are urgent and extremely private. And don’t cock your head around me.”

  My uncle smiled in an ingratiating way that he hadn’t demonstrated in the nearly two years he’d been in my house. “Whatever you say to me you say to my nephew. He does most of the work, so he has to know all the details. That’s the way we handle things. If you can’t accept it, then I’m afraid we can’t do business.”

  I held my breath while I waited to see how Madame Fang would react to such a direct challenge.

  “Goodness, who said anything about business?” She smiled back, the ravishing one directed at my uncle and then another, less lustrous, at me. “I don’t need a private detective. I need advice, that’s all, another viewpoint. I thought yours might be valuable. If your nephew has learned anything from you, perhaps his views might be interesting, too. Of course, I’ll pay.”

  I looked at the small clock on my desk. I’d won it in a bet with the man who eventually ran away with my wife. Charming fellow, smooth as they come, superb at making desserts with tiny flowered vines made of green sugar climbing walls of chocolate bricks. He made tiny chocolate bricks! What a bastard! Why didn’t I smash the clock with one of my uncle’s hammers, and scatter the pieces up and down the river for a hundred kilometers? Why didn’t I?

  The hands on the clock were climbing toward two o’clock, and my office was near Renmin Road, a half hour away by bicycle. It took less than that by car, but my wife and her brick-making paramour had taken the car with them.

  “I’m sorry to say that I can’t stay to watch this reunion unfurl,” I said. “One of us has to earn steady money.” I put the emphasis on “steady.” “I’m sure we’ll meet again, Madame Fang.” My bow in her direction seemed inadequate; I should have been groveling at her feet. I turned to my uncle. “There’s a pack of instant noodles on the table near the stove. The cabbage is in the sink, if you want to throw some in. You can boil the water yourself?”

  The woman looked out the window and smiled faintly.

  I stopped at the door. “Dinner will be at the usual time, uncle, unless you have other plans.”

  My uncle gazed for a moment at Madame Fang, the tide of memory tugging at him. “No, I’m sure there will be no other plans.”

  Chapter Two

  “Your uncle called.” The officer on
duty pushed aside a magazine he was reading and consulted the logbook as I approached the front desk. “He said to tell you that he wouldn’t be home for dinner.”

  “He called the duty office number to tell me that?”

  “If there’s trouble, I’ll send someone over right away to check on him.” This was a new officer, transferred from Shanghai and already painfully eager not to stay any longer than necessary here in the backwaters of the northeast. After reviewing his personnel file, which had appeared suddenly a few days ago, I had come away with a feeling that he was too close to the chief of the Shanghai office. That put him in a deep hole right from the start as far as I was concerned. I tolerate most human failings, but being close to the Shanghai office chief is a bridge too far, broken in the middle, and burning at both ends.

  “Your name is Jang.” I leaned toward him, lowering my voice in order to give our exchange an air of intrigue.

  He observed me closely.

  “Well, Little Jang, we can’t send someone if we don’t know where to send them, can we? And for your information, my uncle isn’t in trouble. My uncle can take care of himself. He probably just wanted it on the record that he was going out to dinner with a beautiful woman, possibly the most beautiful woman in the world, eh?” I gave him a quick smile.

  Instantly, Jang took on the mien of a tiny palace dog sensing a favored eunuch up to no good. His face twitched; he looked to be calculating whether to bite me or to run barking an alarm to the emperor.

  “I didn’t know, sir,” he said at last, having decided to do nothing. “I’m pleased to learn that everything is all right.”

  “If my uncle happens to call on your line again, put him through to my office right away, will you?”

  Jang made a note in the logbook.

  “How do you like it here in our fair city of Yanji, Jang? Quite a change from the bright lights of Shanghai, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure I’ll get used to it, sir. Part of a well-rounded Ministry career. The Second Bureau has to be ready to serve wherever the need is greatest. That’s what they say.”

  I recoiled slightly. “They say that in Shanghai, do they? It’s the sort of thing that would roll off their silver tongues.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jang looked concerned, worried that he’d said something to set me off.

  “Well, here we’re right on the border, busy guarding the frontier, not spending our time shopping at swank stores.”

  “I’ve noticed, sir.”

  “Good, keep noticing.” I picked up the magazine he’d been reading and threw it into a trash can across the room. “Who are you assigned to work with?”

  Jang looked quickly at the trash can, his eyes smoldering for an instant before he pulled himself under control. “Next week I’m paired with a Lieutenant Fu Bin, according to the roster. I haven’t met him yet. He’s on temporary assignment, apparently; no one knows where.”

  “No one knows where? Has anyone asked? He’s in Changchun. It’s not a secret, for heaven’s sake. Have you been to Changchun?”

  “Once or twice.” I sensed his internal GPS shouting at him to recalculate. “I mean, only briefly, when the train stopped.”

  “Lieutenant Fu goes there to see a girl, maybe two girls. He can do that. You can’t. Don’t forget, Jang.”

  “No, sir, I won’t forget.”

  I waited to see from his eyes if I’d lit a fuse I’d have to worry about later. There was nothing. “And take that call from my uncle out of the logbook.”

  “I can’t, sir.”

  “Sure you can, I just told you to do it.”

  “It’s in pen.”

  2

  On my desk was a folder stamped READ ONLY. This was a new stamp. It had been sprung on us a few weeks ago, and the explanatory instructions still hadn’t made their way here to the outer reaches of the empire. That meant none of us in the office was sure exactly what it meant. Were we not to nibble on the paper? Not to mark on it? No duplicating? Not act on it operationally? Not forward it to anyone else? Not use it as down payment on a car? Not sell it to a foreign service? No one knew. Maybe they had already figured out READ ONLY in Shanghai, but here in the forgotten northeast we remained in the dark. That was normal. Yanji was an afterthought, in a section of the country that hadn’t been part of the ancient core of the central kingdom. In fact, the northeast had joined the empire late in the game and, worse, had for centuries been home to barbarian tribes, one of which had marched into Beijing and stayed for a few hundred years. It wasn’t as if we were being punished for old sins, but Beijing had not forgotten or, I sometimes suspected, forgiven.

  The folder itself consisted of a few pages of anodyne observations by what appeared to be a low-level source based in Tumen. From the summary on the cover sheet, I saw that the source had little credibility and access to even less, but was paid regularly—too much, in my view—in hopes that one day he might stumble onto something worthwhile. Cutting away this flotsam was nearly impossible. No one wanted to authorize letting an agent go in case someday before the sun burned out, it might be discovered that a terminated agent had been connected to someone who knew something.

  This agent was code-named “Handout.” Code names were assigned from a central office, supposedly at random. In this case, it seemed too apt to be random.

  Handout, according to the file, had recently made a trip across the river into North Korea and seen the usual: people here, cars there, thus and such number of trains crawling in this or that direction, the price of shoes at one market below what similar shoes cost at another market. He had made the acquaintance of a certain “K” who was engaged in moving “things” across the border. What these “things” were was not explained in the report. The unstated—but glaringly obvious—subtext was that giving a good deal more money to Handout would help us get in better with K, though why we should want to be in bed with K was left to our imagination.

  I reached for the phone on my desk and punched a button. “Li, I’ve had enough. Get Handout off our rolls. Immediately. Yesterday. I’m going to start trimming the fat.”

  Li Bo-ting was my deputy. He was levelheaded and knew how to get things done. He had spent most of his career in this region, had a map in his head of every back alley in every town in our sector, and could move around without leaving a trace when he had to. As the deputy in the office, Li handled personnel matters, assignments, most of the evaluations, and almost all the annoying instructions from Headquarters. I made final decisions if there were any to be made. Otherwise, I was supposed to supervise from a cloud, watching for dangerous trends along the border. It wasn’t how MSS had always done business, but Headquarters thought it needed a new management style, and someone decided this let-the-banana-peel-itself-approach was just the ticket.

  Li laughed. “You want him off the rolls? I hope your luck is better than mine. We can’t seem to get rid of him. Believe me, it’s been tried. He must be joined at an important body part to someone in Beijing.”

  This was news to me, but then again, Li was aware that I didn’t always want to know everything he learned, at least not right away. In the new management theory this worked the other way, too, though it was rare I knew anything before my deputy did. “There’s a Headquarters reference to Xiang Feng Bao in this file,” I said. “Any idea what that is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, scratch around. Maybe Handout is in trouble. If not, we’ll have to find something, manufacture something, doesn’t matter which. It hints on the cover sheet that he likes to live beyond his means.” I thought of the mountain of bills on my desk at home. “Apparently he floats around sipping nectar from the flowers. He’s waving another one of those worthless sources in front of us, and he’s holding us up for a lot of cash.”

  “Believe me, he’s not alone.” Li paused. “If it’s a he.”

  The possibility hadn’t occurred to me. For some reason, I’d pictured Handout as a short man, sticking to the shadows, quick-footed with a ready, slippe
ry smile.

  “Whichever,” I said, “he or she, a little finesse would be nice occasionally from an agent. We pay them enough, don’t we?” Li knew this was a rhetorical question. He let me continue. “Who’s going out to debrief Handout? Have them take a farewell envelope and a medal of appreciation, shake whatever sort of limp hand it is, and tell the owner of it to get lost. Who is in charge of Handout these days?” I flipped through the pages. “It isn’t in the file. In fact, the entire contact sheet is gone. That leaves an awfully thin record for all the money we’ve probably shoveled out. If there is an audit, how are we supposed to explain the expenses?”

  “Handout has been Fu Bin’s agent for the past four years. It must be noted in the file somewhere.” There was a longish silence.

  “You still there, Li? A problem with these phones again?”

  “No and yes. No, I’m here. Yes, there’s a problem, but it’s not the phones this time. Fu Bin is gone.”

  “He’s not gone. How many times do I have to tell people? Fu Bin is in Changchun visiting a woman. Two women, maybe, if he can afford it. Maybe he’s been dipping into the payments to Handout.”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to think.”

  “That he’s been running around on Handout’s money?”

  “No, that he’s in Changchun with a woman. That’s what you’re supposed to think.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s working for the Third Bureau, actually. I only found out by mistake.”

  Of course by mistake. No one finds out about what the Third Bureau is doing on purpose. Not even the Third Bureau. Their job is to make sure those of us in the lesser sections of the Ministry of State Security are not working for the “other side,” haven’t been bought off by the triads, haven’t fallen into sloughs of chicanery or forms of corruption not officially approved and relabeled as acceptable. If Third Bureau rats cannot find anything, they lure the unsuspecting into traps; if they cannot lure, they embellish whatever might turn up from under long-discarded rocks.

  It would have been better if I’d stumbled on the truth of Fu Bin’s real job by myself and much earlier, of course, but Li knew I hadn’t, which meant there was no sense pretending I was ahead of him on this. Still, I wasn’t trailing that far back. As soon as Li told me, odd pieces tumbled into place, pieces that should have jumped up and pulled my nose long before this. Fu Bin had always walked more softly than anyone else in the office, almost on tiptoe. His desk was always clean, but he was always months behind on his paperwork. He went to the best restaurants and loved to take photographs with the fanciest new camera.