A Drop of Chinese Blood

by James Church

  “Very well, a summary. Man meets woman. Woman disappears. Man turns up dead.” He stopped. I thought he was just taking a breath, but he sat back and looked at his hands.

  “That’s it?”

  “There’s more, but you are in a hurry.”

  “How does Blue Sparrow figure in this?”

  “That’s not part of the summary. For that, you have to listen to part one.”

  I pointed at my watch again. “You have exactly ten minutes.”

  My uncle gave me a tight smile. “So fleet the feet of time. Five minutes extra? The fate of empires can be sealed in five minutes. Less, sometimes.” He closed his eyes as if to convince me he was going into the inner reaches of his memory. “This was a complicated case. It twisted around itself. We never solved it completely.” He held up his hand before I could say anything. “Not every case has a solution. Still, essence can be instructive. This was the most instructive case I ever encountered. Young as I was, it made an impression.” He opened one eye, to make sure that I was listening. Assured, he continued. “Vice Minister J one afternoon—about three o’clock, we later determined—opened his door and found on his doorstep a note attached to a severed ear.”

  “There was no mention of an ear in the summary.”

  “That’s why it was a summary.”

  “How about a basic question?”

  “If you think it can’t wait until the end.”

  “Who was Vice Minister J?”

  This appeared to make him suspicious. “Why do you need to know?”

  “Apart from idle curiosity? Perspective, I suppose. At some point, it had to come up whether the man or the office was the more important in determining the significance of the ear and his connection to it, assuming it wasn’t dropped on the wrong doorstep, which sometimes happens. And if the office is more important than the man, perhaps it is connected to something going back many years. For all anyone could know at the outset, it had nothing to do with the vice minister himself but rather the ministry he represented.”

  “A little off track, but a fair point. A good point.” He sounded pleased. “You have a quick mind, even if you don’t always use it.”

  “Again, who was Vice Minister J?”

  “Railways, the vice minister of railways.”

  “And the ear?”

  “Aha! A woman’s. Delicate, shell-like. Still had attached to it an earring of some beauty. A gold filigree cage in which hung a pearl of perfect luster.”

  A pearl. I thought back. No, Madame Fang had definitely been intact. “Left ear or right?”

  “Very good. You had to ask. It was the right. We thought that would be important, but it turned out not to be. In any case, we were sure the vice minister didn’t take the time to determine that fact. He panicked and called his chief of staff for advice.”

  “He didn’t call the Ministry of People’s Security right away? A little odd, wasn’t it?”

  “In those days we were still the Ministry of Public Security, but never mind. You haven’t asked about the note.”

  “I was about to. I take it there was something in the note that caused him not to want to get mixed up in the whole affair, which is why he went to his chief of staff first.”

  “That could be.” My uncle tapped his fingers on the desk. “Yes, that’s what I wondered, too.”

  “So, what was in the note?”

  “Never found out. Damn thing disappeared. There was some suspicion that the chief of staff destroyed it, though there was no way to prove anything. It was a windy day, might have just blown away. Not having that note hurt us for a while, kept us running in circles, but in the end it wasn’t fatal to our work.”

  What work? The case was never solved. “When did he finally call the police?”

  “He didn’t. As I told you, he died.”

  I realized instinctively that asking the next question was a bad idea, but it could not be avoided. “Died of what?”

  “Ah.” My uncle smiled.

  4

  The next afternoon we were in the library, anxiously digesting after lunch. I was waiting for Li to call with news about the woman who had followed us the previous day to the dumpling restaurant. Maybe Li had been wrong, unlikely as that seemed. It wasn’t impossible that she and her friend had been out for a walk that took them on our exact route. The odds were against it, but they probably weren’t at zero.

  My uncle looked at the clock just as the phone rang. He mimed that if it was for him, I was to say he was out of town. As a rule, detectives make poor mimes, so I was only half sure of what the rest of the excuse was supposed to be.

  “Is this Inspector O?” It was Miss Du, and she didn’t sound happy.

  “No, I’m afraid not. He’s gone away, duck hunting.”

  My uncle shook his head.

  “Is that how he is spending all the money I gave him? I called to find out what sort of progress he’s made in finding my father.”

  I indicated to my uncle that he should pick up the extension and listen in, which he did as standard procedure for phone calls that came when he was “out of town.”

  “I use the term ‘duck hunting’ loosely, Miss Du. In the criminal investigation world, it means that someone is on a case and moving toward a solution. It’s jargon. I hope you’ll understand.”

  “Apparently, someone is listening to the jargon on another extension. I can tell from a little electronic gadget my father had built for me before he disappeared. It turns red when someone is on the line who shouldn’t be.”

  Naturally, MSS didn’t have any such technology. Handy equipment like this always went first to the underworld, though I was loath to put Miss Du in that category.

  “The phone in the kitchen must have been knocked off the hook,” I said. “Sometime maybe you’ll show me your gadget.”

  There was a very long silence.

  “Miss Du? Did you have something you wanted to tell my uncle? I can get him a message.”

  “Tell your uncle that if he doesn’t have a preliminary report to me in a week, he can expect a visit from my solicitor. Whether that is before or after my cousin’s wrecking company’s bulldozers pull up to your door I cannot be sure.”

  “I’m quite positive you’ll have a report in short order. I’ll give him your message.”

  The moment I hung up the phone, there was a knock at the front door.

  “You don’t suppose that’s her cousin, do you?” my uncle asked. “At least they knocked. I was worried they might break down the door with one of those big machines. You want to let them in?”

  “It’s not Miss Du’s cousin. It must be the taxi to the airport. When are we going to have time to send her a report? Have you packed, like I told you?”

  He reached down and retrieved a red suitcase, a small four-wheeler, from beneath his desk. “I have packed, against my better judgment. Where are we going, by the way? Shanghai?”

  “No, I already told you.” It was a little worrisome. He was starting to forget things. “We’re going to Mongolia.”

  “Really? You did tell me, but I was sure you were kidding. Well, I’ll buy more there if I need it. Can you lend me a tie and a razor in the meantime?”

  “We can take turns wearing the tie. As for the razor, get your own.”

  “You’re squeamish, like your father.”

  The knocking became more insistent. “You’d better answer it,” my uncle said. “Taxi drivers don’t like to wait.”

  When I opened the door, two men and a woman looked at me. One of the men was sucking the knuckles on his right hand. “Damn! What is this door made of? Concrete?”

  The woman rolled her eyes. “Give him a lump of sugar, will you, or he’ll complain all afternoon.”

  I took a liking to her instantly. “Have we met?”

  The second man rumbled ominously. “This isn’t a pickup bar. You and your uncle ready? We need to get to the airport or you’ll miss your plane.” He started to push his way in, which left me n
o choice but to shut the door real fast and lock it. Taxis in Yanji were going upscale, but none of them had gotten to the stage of personal valets for each passenger. I didn’t know who these people were, but I was pretty sure we didn’t want to get into a car with them.

  My uncle emerged from the office wearing an old jacket and rolling his red suitcase. “What are we waiting for? If we’re going, let’s go.” For a moment he contemplated the closed front door through which angry shouts were getting louder by the minute. “On second thought, let’s use the side door.” He started off in the other direction. “I have a feeling this driver isn’t in a welcoming mood.”

  We went out the side entrance, which led into a narrow alley with the smell of charred piglet trotters floating from the kitchen of the house next to ours, and emerged onto the street about thirty meters from our front door. The woman I had admired turned her head at that moment and saw us. I braced, waiting for her to give the alarm, but she only nodded toward a brown car parked across the street.

  “Come on, uncle,” I said. “There’s our ride to the airport.”

  5

  The first person we recognized at the air terminal was Jang. He was leaning against a pillar like rich people in Shanghai do in the slick picture magazines, scanning the departure hall. It was obvious he was looking for me. I stepped into a large tour group that from their attire seemed prepared to leave on a vacation to someplace warm, maneuvered my way behind the pillar, and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Little Jang, going on a trip? I didn’t realize you had accumulated enough vacation time already.”

  If his legs had been up to it, he would have hit his head on the ceiling as he leaped like a rat that has suddenly discovered a cobra behind him.

  “Nice surprise,” he said when he could talk.

  “Sure. I’m full of nice surprises. Aren’t you supposed to be at the duty desk? Don’t tell me you’ve left it unmanned again. Or isn’t that where you are supposed to be anymore? Could someone have changed your orders and reassigned you to airport departures? Who would have done that?”

  He gulped, recovered, and gave me a nasty stare. “Why would you think that, sir?”

  “Let me ask you something. In Shanghai, when your splendid chief of office is about to go on a trip, does a mere duty officer scurry out to the airport to bid him farewell? Or is it a family tradition?”

  “You must be mistaken, sir.”

  “Careful, little Jang, don’t make me do what I want to do, which is exceedingly ugly and would attract a crowd. Let’s try something else.”

  “Such as?” He was getting back a touch of verve.

  “Such as, you go back to the office and fire off an immediate cable to whoever sent you here that you didn’t see me. Yes, that would work, it would prevent a lot of needless violence creeping up on us at this very minute.”

  Jang’s mouth opened and shut wordlessly. His verve had a short half-life.

  “Something the matter?” I asked. “Because if you have a problem, you should speak up. Isn’t that how things work in Shanghai? Free expression by all ranks! Let me ask you a mundane question, just to clarify things. Assuming you live that long, who is going to write your fitness report?”

  “You?”

  “Very good. Me. And if I write you a bad report, a very bad one—you know what I mean, subtly bad, nothing blatant, but filled with slow poison and rusty nails—do you think anyone else in the whole country will be interested when you put in for transfer? A young pup such as yourself may not know it, but every bureau in the Ministry lives by personnel evaluations. Trust me, if I put my mind to it, even your relatives will blanch when that report appears under their gilded front door. Veteran bureaucrats in the Headquarters review process will seek shelter lest you file an appeal and they have to soil their hands dealing with such an enormous piece of shit, as you will by then be known throughout the system. The tiniest, poorest village in Gansu will not even consider you fit to feed chemically adulterated grain to their half-crazed chickens. Am I clear, or would you like me to go on?”

  “As it happens, I didn’t see you,” Jang said coolly. Watching him trot away, I wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got back to the office. The odds were slightly against his loyalty to whoever sent him after me outweighing his desire to get out of Yanji as soon as he could. That was the sort of bet Old Gao would never take.

  “He’s a mouse turd.” My uncle appeared from behind the pillar. “Whom does he work for?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Because you don’t know. Are you sure about your number two?”

  “Lieutenant Li?” I laughed. “Sometimes, uncle, you have a lurid sense of reality. No, I don’t think my number two is selling me out.” It was ridiculous even to contemplate. Li and I had worked together for years. “He’s solid, I trust him completely. If I can’t rely on Li Bo-ting, then I can’t rely on anyone.”

  “Good point. Keep it in mind.”

  The loudspeaker called our plane and gate.

  “Can you get through the security scan, uncle? I hope you don’t have anything odd in your suitcase. Maybe you should double-check. You may have something in there, nails or something, from your last trip to Harbin.”

  “If that nice lady with the white gloves gives me a good pat-down, they can confiscate everything in here for all I care. You should have been around when Mei-lin was going through security. She could have been carrying an atom bomb and they wouldn’t have noticed. The boys were stepping on their tongues.”

  “You traveled with her? Someplace nice, I hope, with white sands and warm breezes.”

  He smiled to the woman at the security checkpoint as he passed through the metal detector. “No, I’m not taking off my belt,” he said as she patted him down. “Nor am I going to remove the stainless steel rod in my leg.”

  When we were finally on the plane and safely airborne, I tapped him on the shoulder. “You never told me you had a stainless steel rod in your leg.”

  “I don’t approve of all this probing and rooting around in my luggage.”

  “So you don’t have a steel rod in your leg.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Do you remember what the phony cook said the other day as he left?”

  “That he wanted a cup of tea?”

  “No, that you were the most annoying person in the world.”

  PART II

  Chapter One

  The airport at Ulan Bator had a rough-and-ready feel that I found instantly appealing. On the taxiway in to the terminal, we passed several biplanes sitting in high grass off the tarmac. My uncle nudged me as he looked over my shoulder. “Tell me we aren’t going up in one of those.”

  “I can’t tell you that because I don’t know. It looks like it could be fun.”

  This seemed to fill him with gloom, but as soon as we stepped into the terminal building, he brightened noticeably.

  “Just like home,” he said, meaning the airport in Pyongyang. “It’s what an airport should be, not so busy that you can’t catch up with yourself when you get there.” He looked around. “I like it.”

  Once through the immigration check, I picked up my bag. Then we ambled past a small crowd waiting for arriving passengers and headed out the door. My uncle breathed deeply as soon as he stepped outside.

  “The first breath you take in a new place is the most important.”

  “I didn’t know you were superstitious. Anything else we should do, sacrifice a bullock or something?”

  He gave me a cold smile. “It’s not superstition. It’s ritual. They’re not the same. You have to mark things off in life. Otherwise, every place blurs with every other place. There’s nothing wrong with ritual, nephew. It’s what keeps us sane as a species.”

  At least we were off to a good start.

  2

  As we stood around, searching the parking lot for whoever was supposed to drive us into town, a short man popped out from behind a knot of bushes at the edge of the asp
halt and headed straight toward us. He moved like a torpedo propelled by an erratic engine shifting him slightly from side to side. His shoes were mud caked, trousers filthy, beard unkempt. He wore a hat that looked like a smaller version of what everyone wore in American cowboy movies. It looked so greasy that I was sure it would catch fire if it sat too long in the sun. The man stopped a whisker or two away. My uncle took a step back; the man took a step forward.

  “Buy some postcards?” A packet of cards appeared from somewhere under a leather coat that no cow would want to claim. “Cheaper than in a hotel. Where you staying? Buy several. My house burned down yesterday.”

  “Terrible news,” my uncle said. He seemed to be warming to the man. “Show me the cards.”

  “We’re in a hurry, uncle,” I shook my head. “Sorry about your house,” I said to the man. “Tough luck.”

  “How about a map?” One appeared from somewhere else under the jacket. “Pretty good, 1:20,000 survey map, genuinely left by a Soviet army officer. Mine fields, everything.”

  “How much?” I took the map and started to unfold it.

  “You! Leave them alone!” Another man emerged from the terminal and hurried over. He had a testy exchange with the postcard salesman in a language I took to be Mongolian. He turned to us. “I’ve told him over and over not to bother arriving guests. Are you Mr. O?” He looked from me to my uncle and then back again. “I apologize for being late, but the traffic is terrible. You got your bags already? What luck, not a moment to lose. Come, I’ve got to get you into town. You can talk in the car.”

  As we rode from the airport, I was amazed to see my uncle still enjoying himself. He smiled broadly as we drove along the bumpy, narrow road, past the smooth, low hills that formed one edge of the basin where the city of Ulan Bator had grown up. He smiled at the city’s skyline in the distance, nothing more than a higgledy-piggledy collection of rooftops that barely rose above the dusty earth. He smiled at the round white tents dotting the landscape. Once we entered the city, he grinned at the clotted traffic, at the girls in their miniskirts, at the broken pavement, at anything and everything we passed.