“It could get pretty interesting.”
I said, “What was this daughter’s or niece’s name?”
“You tell me.”
There was no lightness in Olsen’s tone. He wasn’t bantering. On the contrary, judging by the look of moral distaste on his face, he looked as if he was annoyed with me for religious reasons.
I started to turn away. Olsen took hold of my arm. “The story was that when the maiden came to her senses and was out of danger he sent you to the States and then fired you,” he said. “The substitute comfort woman, Zhang Jia—is that name correct?—was given a bonus, a promotion, and a suitable husband. Also a transfer. The rumor was that she was a professional, hired for this one particular job.”
He was enjoying this. I thought it was unlawyerlike. Maybe Martha, Olsen’s wife thought so, too. She touched his hand, a little warning, but he paid her no attention.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone in an apron, a female, peek out the kitchen door. She wore a white Nehru-type chef’s cap, her hair concealed beneath it. Her hand, which held a napkin—she was touching her nose with her thumb—concealed the lower portion of her face. I had seen that gesture before. Catching the signal, Alice announced that dinner was served.
To me Olsen said, “Anything you want to say to all that?”
Alice had been listening. She answered for me. “I think the answer to that question is no,” she said. “But I have a question for you, Ole.”
“Ask it.”
“Are you drunk or is this your idea of small talk?”
“Small talk,” Olsen said. “The white man’s name for avoiding the truth. So the answer to that question is also no. This isn’t small talk.”
Apparently he had more to say. He pointed a forefinger at me and started to speak, but Martha took his hand, smiled brightly, bent Ole’s finger back into place, and said, “Dinnertime, dear.” She led him into the dining room.
Alice took my arm and walked me to the table, as if we were dining in a country house on Masterpiece Theater. She sat at one end of the table, a gleaming expanse of inlay and veneer, and I sat at the other end, as far away from either Olsen as she could put me. The woman on my right immediately began talking about a new Broadway play. Apart from the conversation there was nothing Chinese about the dinner, but it was very good indeed. A waiter in a tuxedo served, assisted by a short plump woman who also wore a tuxedo. He was Chinese. Although he wasn’t the same man, he reminded me of the waiter who had balanced that enormous tray on the night that Lin Ming and I dined together in the safe room upstairs from the Sichuan Delight. Everybody in the world, except maybe Ole Olsen, looked a little like someone else. The figure in the apron, the one who had materialized in the kitchen door, found her way back into my mind. I knew her, but how? With the help of my imagination, this mental image became a little more detailed than the one I had actually seen. Now I put my finger on a clue. She had touched her nose with her thumb. In that small way she resembled Magdalena, who when Mother was alive used the same gesture to signal when dinner was ready. Maybe it was something all chefs did. Chewing sliced duck breast as these thoughts passed through my mind, I wondered if I would die before morning with the lingering taste of this food on my tongue. The woman next to me—I hadn’t caught her name—was telling me more about the Broadway play. It was called The Death of Gershwin, Gershwin was an unhappy woman, not the composer, and death was what she called her marriage to a banker because it had taken the music out of her life.
As the evening wore on the conversation got livelier, more gossipy. Alice made sure I talked to everyone except Ole Olsen. This was the first time since I left Shanghai I had been in a roomful of people who were all speaking Mandarin. I felt contentment, as if I had escaped back into some idyllic parallel existence, as if talk was making sense for a change.
Around ten-thirty, as everyone said their good-byes in the front hall, Olsen smoldered. Martha Olsen held tightly to his arm. I thought he might have something more to say to me—after all, he had never told me whatever it was he wanted to tell me, so I walked over and said good night to Martha.
When I held out a hand to Olsen himself, he ignored it and said, “I’d like a word alone with you before I go.”
He walked back into the empty living room, and placing himself where he could see the door and the people milling about and kissing one another in the hall, he put a hand on my shoulder. He seemed to be a little drunk. His eyes blinked, his speech was slurred, he was having trouble with his balance.
He said, “Sorry the conversation went wrong a little while ago, but this is awkward for me. There’s something I feel I need to tell you.”
“Why? You don’t even know me.”
“I know Alice. I think I know what you really are and that bothers me….” He lost his balance. I grabbed him. Over his shoulder I saw Martha hurrying toward us. “…but I have to break a professional confidence to tell you the facts. That’s hard for me to do.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t tell me. Maybe you should take it to the FBI.”
“You think I haven’t thought of that? You think they’d listen?” He wobbled, took hold of my forearm to steady himself. He said, “You think I’m drunk. I’m not. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me, but listen to me, I’m trying to give you a chance to—what? I can’t think of the fucking word.”
I said, “I hear what you’re saying to me, Ole, but maybe you should sleep on this. We could get together another time for a drink or something.”
“No, Listen to me. The Yangtze was nothing compared to what’s coming. These people are going to destroy you. You’ve got to get away.”
Olsen’s wife took him by elbow. “Time to go, Ole,” she said in loud English.
“Not yet,” Olsen said. “There’s more.”
“That’s enough, Ole,” Martha said.
Olsen really looked sick—addled, as if he didn’t know where he was or who this woman was. Martha dragged him out of the room, Ole loose as a rag doll, Martha saying not a word to me. I followed them into the hall. All the others had left, though voices could be heard in the corridor outside the apartment door. Martha, keeping her grip on Ole, placing herself between him and me, thanked Alice for a lovely evening. Alice patted her on the cheek, then air-kissed both Olsens good night and walked them the five steps to the door.
Alice and I went straight to bed. We were too well mannered to talk about Ole Olsen. I told myself he was drunk, that he had been playing a sick prank. But he knew something, and even if what he knew was a useless crumb of gossip, I’d run him down tomorrow and get it out of him while he was still hungover and vulnerable.
At four in the morning Alice’s phone rang. She felt for her reading glasses (I could hear her doing this in the dark), found them, picked up the phone, read the caller ID, grunted, and answered it.
“Martha,” she said. “What?”
She switched on the lamp, and wearing nothing but her reading glasses, leaped out of bed. She fired the questions into the phone, then said, “I’m on my way to you.”
I knew what she was going to tell me before she uttered the words.
“Ole Olsen died an hour ago,” she said. “He collapsed on the way home in the car. The Wangs were with them. They worked on him on the way to the hospital, but he’s gone. An aneurysm, they think, but they’re not sure.”
As she spoke she pulled clothes out of a closet—underwear, jeans, a sweater, shoes, her Burberry. She was dressed and on her way out before I could get out of bed. “Be sure the door is locked when you leave,” she said, and left. A moment later she was back. “What was Ole trying to tell you?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t finish.”
All I could think about was that female chef, standing in the kitchen door, touching her nose with her thumb.
37
Standing in the mouth of an alley off the Bowery, Lin Ming coughed twice, then once again. Half a dozen derelicts lay o
n the pavement behind him, sleeping or drunk or both—or maybe the tenor and his acrobats or their equivalent. I asked Lin Ming why he had given the all-clear signal despite the presence of all these unknown people strewn on the pavement. “They’re just bums,” Lin Ming said. “Relax. Capitalism’s victims are everywhere.” We walked away and found an empty doorway. Lin Ming stepped into it, hiding himself, as the asset is supposed to do. I stood outside and kept a sharp lookout, as the case officer is trained to do.
Lin Ming immediately switched roles. “I assume you have something for me,” he said. He spoke in tones of authority, as if I were working for him.
“What would that be?” I said.
“The name you promised. My friends are anxious to talk to the person in question.”
“Our arrangement was based on the expectation of a swap of things of equal value,” I said. “You gave us nothing that was remotely equal in value.”
For a long moment Lin Ming was silent. His face was masked by the darkness, not that I had ever been able to read it anyway.
He said, “I am puzzled. Confused.”
“I don’t see why you should be. What you gave us was boilerplate. We might as well have Googled it.” I was not at liberty to tell Lin Ming that we knew that his information had been cribbed from our own files. Never tell the asset what he should not know even if he already knows it.
Lin Ming said, “There seems to be a misunderstanding. You are acting like the case officer and treating me like an agent. You did this the last time, but I thought it was my imagination. I wasn’t feeling well that day.”
“So?”
“So why do you have this delusion?”
“In what way is it a delusion?”
“We made an agreement,” Lin Ming said. “In this city, on a certain day in a certain park.”
Which was recorded by a chess-playing cameraman and soundman. I assumed that Lin Ming was recording this conversation, too. Therefore he was choosing his words carefully. So was I, because I, too, was making a record for the file. In fact there was no particular reason to be careful. There was a good chance that the chip on which our conversation was being recorded would get lost in Guoanbu’s archives. Even the Chinese did not have enough manpower to sort out, in time to do anyone any good, the tens of thousands of aimless conversations in a Babel of languages—any nuggets well buried—between their horde of case officers and their multitude of informants. As for my own recordings, only Burbank knew about them, and even he did not know about all of them. They didn’t exist as far as the rest of Headquarters was concerned. I kept them in a safe place in case I ever needed them.
Breaking the silence, Lin Ming said, “You do remember that day in the park, and other days and nights as well, do you not?”
“Vividly,” I said. “But I remember nothing about agreeing to become the property of whoever or whatever you work for.”
“Then you should reremember. Think carefully. Go carefully.”
“What I remember, Lin Ming, is that we agreed on an exchange of information.”
“That was later,” Lin Ming said. “On the day in question, and on other days, we talked of you as someone who would work for world peace and friendship between our two countries from inside Headquarters, who would receive certain benefits in return for certain information. You even spoke enthusiastically of the importance of winning the confidence of your targets inside your Headquarters. How could all that slip your mind?”
“It seems you have misinterpreted my words, whatever you think they were.”
“And so you renounce our agreement?”
“There is no agreement to renounce. The deal was, you’d give me something that is equal in worth to what I was, and still am, prepared to give you.”
“Why? So you can win and keep the confidence of the reactionary gangsters you work for?”
We weren’t going to be polite? Fine. I said, “You sound like a Maoist, my friend. That’s out of style. You should be careful.”
“And you should be careful who you betray.”
His voice quivered with anger. The usual question arose: was this real or was he just playing a part? More likely the latter, not impossibly the former. After all, his backside was on the line. He remained deep in the doorway, wrapped in shadow. I still could not see his face or for that matter his body. I would not have been able to detect a sudden move. I was surprised by a little involuntary shiver. I was exposed. If Lin Ming was truly angry, if he was convinced that I was of no further use to him, if he was the murderous type, he could easily spray cyanide into my face or shoot me dead with a silenced pistol or even stab me in the heart. Or cough and bring another team of acrobats on the run. I told myself to cool it. Lin Ming wasn’t the murderous type, at least not on foreign soil.
“Betray,” I said. “That’s a strong word.”
“In this case, not too strong,” said Lin. “Believe me when I say that. You’re playing with fire.”
I had never before heard anyone speak that cliché aloud, and certainly not in the language we were speaking. I laughed. While I was still chuckling, Lin Ming said something I did not catch. Between one breath and the next, his voice had regained most of its normal agreeable timbre. What had just gone on between us was out of character for this typecast smoothie. He was playing a role. He was always playing a role, of course. That was his job: shake the foreign devil up.
“All I ask,” Lin Ming said, “is that you acknowledge reality.”
I said, “Same here. I’ll tell you what. Forget the nonsense about my being your creature or ever becoming your creature. I don’t give a rat’s ass”—this, too, was a nice translation problem—“how you describe your relationship to me.”
“I have just described it, exactly as it is,” Lin Ming said.
“If you think that,” I said, “you need therapy. If you keep your end of the bargain, we’ll keep ours. If not, we’ll use the information we have, the information you want and must have, in our own way.”
Lin Ming stepped out into what little light there was on this back-street of a great city that was too broke to turn on all of its streetlamps.
He said, “Is that your last word?”
“Yes.”
Lin Ming smiled. He had remarkably straight teeth for a Chinese who had been a poor kid during the Cultural Revolution. He put a hand on my sleeve.
“If that’s the way you want it, fine,” he said. “But a word of advice. Have your horoscope updated.”
He turned away and walked into the murk in his usual half-stagger, half-quickstep style, as if carrying a load on a pole with the help of the ghost of an ancestor at the other end of it. Despite what had just passed between us, it was difficult not to like him, difficult to take him seriously as a tough customer who would not hesitate to do whatever was necessary to get the job done, even though I knew that was exactly what he was. He made his exit, heading downtown. When he was a block or so away he stopped, turned his back to the light wind that was tumbling papers west to east, and lit a cigarette. I could see his face quite plainly in the flare of his lighter. He was looking at me, too—eyes lifted, hands steady. The flame went out. He faded into the darkness.
Less than a minute afterward I heard men walking in step with me. There were maybe half a dozen of them, marching in quick time, as if stepping off to fast music. When they were right behind me, almost touching me, they stopped moving forward and marched in place for a couple of moments, soles slapping, leather boot heels punching the concrete. Then they split into four groups, two men close behind me, one at each elbow, two close in front, just as the tenor and his acrobats had done in Shanghai. They wore matching black sweats, black caps, black shoes. The two in the lead carried baseball bats at shoulder arms. All were Han. They marched on for a full block with me wedged in among them, then they halted in front of a store window and marched in place again. Two of them broke formation, and batting righty and lefty and on command from the leader, swung at the display window.
The plate glass rang, quivered and turned into huge shards that hung for an instant as if held in place by some giant thumb and finger, then fell like blades. The gang broke formation and scattered, shouting. Had all this meant anything? Were they a Chinatown gang, rented by Min Ling for an hour, or just a bunch of wild and crazy guys out on a lark? They had done me no harm, so what did it matter? Nevertheless—someone could be watching—it seemed important to act as if nothing had happened. I walked on as coolly as I could, though with nothing like the nonchalance with which Harold Lloyd might have played the scene before the introduction of sound.
38
So far it hadn’t been a very pleasant weekend, apart from the abbreviated night with Alice. If what Olsen said to me about the connection between Mei and Chen Qi was true, if she was Chen’s niece or his daughter, then we were not dealing with Guoanbu at all. We were in ancient China. Whatever was about to happen to me was personal revenge. Chen Qi’s plan was to destroy me in the most humiliating way possible. I knew this. To murder me after torturing me was not enough. He wanted me alive and in his power, so that he could remove my bones from my flesh one at a time. That was the message Ole Olsen had delivered.
In the swaying, trash-strewn, all-but-empty club car of the train to Washington I remembered my way back to the beginning—not just the weekend but the complete phantasmagoria right back to the day Mei crashed her bike into mine—and tried to convince myself I was imagining things. When the train pulled into Union Station and squealed to a shuddering stop, I woke from my reverie as if from a long sleep. Had I in fact been asleep all the while without knowing it? As my brain began to function normally again I feared that by waking up when I did, I had just missed discovering something important. When I picked up my car from the parking garage it was 5:30 A.M., the city was still dark and so hushed that I could hear the Civics tires humming on the pavement. Would Alice be awake in Manhattan? Probably. I knew she rose early to get her child ready for school, do her exercises, eat her organic granola, rehearse the questions she was going to ask in court that day. My car had a hands-free telephone that worked through the sound system. I pushed the button and spoke Alice’s number in the voice of an anchorman, or as close as I could come to it. The device understood me for once and placed the call. Alice picked up on the last ring before the answering machine kicked in.
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