“About a month before I went away I missed a period,” Mei said. “This didn’t seem possible because I had always taken two kinds of precautions. Like an idiot I hoped for the best instead of doing something right away. Then I missed another period.”
I started to speak. Mei stopped me. “Don’t ask,” she said. “You were the only suspect. That was the problem. I saw a doctor, someone I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, and had the thing done. But I had to show identification.”
Chen Qi found out about the abortion in a matter of days.
“He already knew about you,” Mei said. “Why he didn’t kidnap me but just let us happen, I don’t know. He knew what and who you were. He knew that the baby was an abomination, half me, half laowai. The worst of it was, now others knew, too—people high in the Party, people who could do him harm, who were already doing him harm by making a joke of his name. These people were being overheard by the lowest people in their offices. Whisperers everywhere. He knew this. He had lost face—lost it as if a chimpanzee had attacked him and chewed it off.”
Apt choice of words.
For a weekend, Mei was left in peace. Then Chen Qi’s assistant called. Mei’s father wished her to join him for dinner that night. A car would come for her at six-thirty. Dinner would be at seven-thirty, the regulation Shanghai time. The car arrived precisely on time. Chen Qi was in the backseat.
“He was in a rage,” Mei said. “He trembled like someone who was totally out of control. His face was bright red, he shouted, spit flew out of his mouth. His eyes were distended, the whites were reddened, as if his anger had ruptured the blood vessels. He was like a crazy talking animal in a cartoon. He told the driver to get out of the car and turn his back to it. As soon as the front door slammed, my father grabbed me—this was the first time he had touched me since I was small—and slapped me, first one cheek then the other very hard, as if he was trying to knock the baby out of me. Probably he would have succeeded if the child had still been inside my body. He’s a strong man. My head snapped this way and that. I thought my neck was going to break. I thought he was going to kill me, then drive to the Yangtze Bridge with my corpse beside him on the leather seat and personally throw it into the river.”
However, Chen Qi did Mei no more violence. He did what he did next in total silence. He rapped on the car window. The driver got back in, put the car in gear, and without being given an order, drove to Suzhou. When Chen Qi and Mei arrived at the house where she now lived, her mother was there to greet her. She bowed to Chen Qi like a woman whose feet were bound. Three other women and two men, Mei’s “chaperones,” stood in a row behind her mother. Without a word, Chen Qi departed. Mei had not seen him since, nor did she expect ever to see him again.
“Suzhou is a place where nothing happens,” Mei said. “I know no one in the whole city except my mother and the watchers who live with us. Two of them are always awake. My father has marooned me. My mother, too. We might as well be in Tibet. Mother is happy. I’m back, I’m a big child now, a Barbie with a heartbeat. We live in a nice house, we have good food and several television sets, but no books and no work to do. We play mahjong. We sew. We talk about my childhood. I can never leave. Unless you rape me in front of all these witnesses I will never again have a sex life that involves another person. I am out of sight, out of memory.”
“You can come with me,” I said.
Mei snorted. “Where to? I have no passport, I have no visa. People watch me.”
“We can marry. The consulate can do it. Then you’d have an American passport.”
“Ha,” said Mei. “I wouldn’t be an American for very long.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’d be a widow instead of just losing a friend. Face the facts. You’ve made an enemy who can do what he likes with you, in China or anywhere else in the world. You will never lose him, you will never overcome him, you can’t prevent him from doing whatever he plans to do to you. Whatever that turns out to be, death would be a better fate.”
“Better than what, specifically?” I said.
“My brother will explain,” Mei said. “He’s waiting where he left you. Can you find the right gate?”
“I think so,” I said. “You won’t reconsider?”
Mei didn’t answer the question. “I’m out of time,” she said. “I have to get on my bike.”
Without another word or gesture, she walked away.
I shouted, “Wait.”
She stopped but did not turn around. The crowd flowed around her in the watery light like a school of fish eddying around coral.
I said, “Before you go I’d like to know your name. The real one.”
She looked over her shoulder.
“Mei,” she said.
One breath later she was absorbed by the crowd.
41
The park was emptying. It was almost eleven o’clock when Chen Jianyu’s BMW arrived. It stopped some distance away, beyond the edge of the crowd, and I wriggled my way to it. Apparently the rule of silence inside the car was still in force, because Chen Jianyu said nothing to me when I got in and buckled my seat belt. I couldn’t have heard him anyway over the deafening music. In the light from the instrument panel I studied his profile. He did resemble Mei—hairline, eyebrows, chin, and when, feeling my gaze, he turned his head and looked at me, his eyes might have been Mei’s, large for a Han, smart, bright, lit by mockery.
We headed out of town. After an hour or so, Chen Jianyu exited the highway and threaded his way among the inevitable rows and rows of high-rise apartment buildings. He turned into a gas station. He parked, got out of the car, and walked briskly toward the men’s room. As we emptied our bladders into adjoining urinals, Chen Jianyu broke his silence. “Do you have anything at your hotel that you can’t afford to leave there?” he asked.
We were still speaking English. “No, not really,” I said.
“Then I think you should go directly to the airport,” Jianyu said. “There’s a flight to Los Angeles in three hours.”
I said, “My ticket is nonrefundable.”
“So is your life. Go.”
My life? As if Jianyu had just uttered a perfectly ordinary remark, I said, “I’d never get aboard on such short notice.”
“They have one business class seat available, but you have to call them before midnight and pay for it.”
I didn’t ask how he knew this. People like him knew such things in his country. I looked at my watch—eleven forty-two. I said, “Business class? How much?”
“Five thousand U.S. and change.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
Chen Jianyu said, “You’ve got a credit card, haven’t you? Call the airline and pay for the ticket now and get on the plane. Get out of China. Tonight.”
He was serious. Yet I knew that what happened to me was a matter of indifference to him. He was urging me to leave, scaring me into leaving, in order to protect Mei—or so I was supposed to believe. And did believe. Still at the urinal, I called the airline, paid for the seat, memorized the confirmation number.
I said, “Chen Jianyu, let me ask you this. You’ve never liked me. Why the sudden concern for my welfare?”
To my surprise, Jianyu answered the question. “Mei asked me to save your skin,” Chen Jianyu said. “What other reason could I have?”
“What about your father?”
“What about him?” Chen Jianyu said.
“You think he’s going to whack me, send me to a labor camp, what?”
“Not yet,” Chen Jianyu said. “But he could be afraid someone else might get to you before he does and deprive him of the pleasure.”
“This someone else being who?”
“Use your imagination. And like you said, you’re not the most popular laowai who ever came to Shanghai.”
“So why are you telling me all this?”
“I just told you why. For my sister.”
“You’re telling me you’re saving me because she
has feelings for me?”
“She didn’t say that, but I think she at least feels responsible for you.”
“Why?”
“Wake up. She slept with you for two years and more. She hates her father and he hates you. He’s a vengeful person. You humiliated him—or rather, Mei humiliated him with your help, which is a lot worse. So he wants to humiliate you right back. Tear the wings off the fly.”
“How, exactly?”
“I have no idea. CEO Chen doesn’t share his plans with me. But this much I do know—whatever he decides to do won’t be proportional to your offense. Daddy doesn’t do proportional.” Jianyu looked at his watch. “If we’re going, we should go now.”
We rode the rest of the way without speaking. The car pulled up in front of the Hongqiao railway station. We got out. Jianyu said, on the sidewalk, “You know how to take the subway to the airport?”
“Yes. All this is very good of you. You have my thanks even if it’s all for Mei.”
“Some of it, not much, is personal,” Jianyu said. “I owe you something for introducing you to my father when he invited you to dinner. I knew he was out to get you. It was a dirty trick.”
“No problem,” I said.
“‘No problem?’” Jianyu looked at me in mild bewilderment. Was I really that stupid?
“Okay,” I said. “If you still feel you owe me something, tell me more.”
“What exactly? Why should I tell you anything?”
“I can’t think of a single reason,” I said.
Chen Jianyu hesitated, bit his lower lip. We moved farther away from the car, sidling out of range of the bugs he thought his father had planted in it. I wasn’t the only paranoiac in the world.
Finally he said, “What do you know about the Dreyfus affair?”
“The bare details,” I said. “What everyone knows.”
“You should study his case, take it to heart. Look for parallels.”
I must have looked skeptical, though I was merely puzzled.
Chen Jianyu said, “I’m serious. Listen to me.” He beckoned me closer and whispered a name in my ear. He stepped away, and still whispering, said, “That man is my father’s friend. They’re old friends, close friends, like-minded friends who have worked together for years. This American has sinned. He thinks the FBI is on his scent. He fears exposure, ruin. He is what Esterhazy the real spy, the actual traitor, was to Dreyfus, the fall guy. You’re Dreyfus. The laowai.”
Of course I was. I saw the connections as if a strip of film had just developed in my brain. I wasn’t crazy after all.
I said, “Thank you.”
“Good luck,” Chen Jianyu said. “You’re going to need it.”
42
When I got back to my town house I checked my balance in the bank I had used when I worked for Chen Qi. In the day and a half I was in China, $250,000 had been deposited to my account. The source of the money was listed as something called Hanyu Consultants Group, otherwise known as Chen Qi. Counting the Chinese money that was already in my account, I now had more than half a million dollars on deposit and I could not account for a penny of it. That meant I could easily afford the five-thousand-dollar business-class ticket I just used. It also meant that I was a dead duck. American banks are required by law to report any single deposit larger than ten thousand dollars to the United States Treasury. Therefore bells were ringing at the IRS, and because Headquarters had a unit embedded in that agency, bells would soon be ringing at Headquarters. And most thought provoking of all, very loud bells would peal at the FBI, which also posted a squad of special agents to the Department of the Treasury.
There is a kind of bullet, jacketed with soft copper, that expands to the size of an eggplant when fired into the entrails. Receiving this windfall was something like being shot with such a bullet. I panicked. The power of this threat overwhelmed thought, reason, breath—everything. My enemy might be a Shanghai tycoon, but thanks to him I was now in the grip of my own country’s system, from which few have ever escaped once caught. I knew my life was over even though my heart might keep on beating for the next fifty years. I went into the bathroom, just making it to the toilet bowl, and fell to my knees.
By the time I rinsed my toothbrush I was on the point of falling asleep. You may think this was a strange reaction to the prospect of life in solitary confinement or worse, but with Chen Jianyu as my astrologer I had had my horoscope updated as Lin Ming had recommended and flown twenty hours without sleep. My bones ached, my head throbbed, my throat was sore. My hands trembled. These were blessings in their way because they distracted me from the feeling that an enormous white-hot bullet was pressing against my heart. I took three aspirin and fell into bed. I went to sleep immediately. If I dreamed, as I must have, I didn’t remember the details when I woke up ten hours later, wondering what was the matter with me.
I needed someone to talk to. There were no obvious candidates. I didn’t have the habit of confession. I had never shared the secrets of my soul with anyone, had never since the onset of puberty asked for advice or another opinion. Would I be able to do so now, when that might well mean throwing away my last and only chance ever to go outdoors again? And if I did suddenly develop the knack for spilling my guts, to whom would I spill them? Everyone I knew by name in the United States or in China was tainted. I was on speaking terms with no one who was clean, no one who could be trusted absolutely to listen to my suspicions—my profound convictions—and keep them secret. Priests had been eliminated. A psychiatrist? No doubt a shrink would find it interesting that I believed I had no friend in the world, but he or she would regard every word I uttered as a code word for the clinical, the real, the hidden truth. I had no one to turn to.
Or did I? I picked up the phone and dialed Alice Song’s cell phone. If anyone on the planet might be sane enough to realize that I wasn’t as crazy as I seemed, it was Alice. Chances were that she was clean. That glimpse of Magdalena (by now I was sure it was Magdalena) in her kitchen notwithstanding, there was no reason to suspect her of playing a double game. No one could use Alice, of that I was certain. Our first meeting in the club bar was clearly pure coincidence. What else could it be? She could not possibly have known that I was there. I had never been there before. She had taken me as I was, she had put up with what she took to be my atrocious manners. She had gone to bed with me. When I remembered her—anything about her brain, body, that voice—I entered into a state of delight. She may have regarded me as a curiosity—who wouldn’t?—but she had taken me as I was. She had never tried to reprogram me. Besides that she was a brilliant lawyer, a formidable courtroom operative, and everything you told her, if you were paying for her services, was stamped top secret the instant it fell from your lips. Just like me, she was under oath to keep her mouth shut no matter what. How much that would be worth in the long run was another question.
Alice’s voice mail picked up. “Please don’t leave a message,” her voice said. “Call me back.”
An hour later I tried Alice’s number again and was told once more not to leave a message. Finally I realized there was no point in calling her again. Sooner or later she would see my number when she checked for missed calls and get back to me. Or not.
With time to squander, I went for a drive, no destination in mind. I needed a new line of thought. I didn’t need to think any more about Albert Dreyfus. I understood the parallel. I knew the reason for my problem, and thanks to Chen Jianyu, I even knew who my Esterhazy was and who his case officer was, and in rough outline, I knew the fate Chen Qi had in mind for me. But how to act on these apprehensions? My situation was like Fermat’s Conjecture—a theorem universally regarded by mathematicians as provable even though its solution eluded them for 358 years. Even if my own conjecture was solved in half that time, assuming that anyone but me was interested in its solution, I would still have ample time to serve the life sentence that was staring me in the face. Who would believe my proof even if I published it? Going to the FBI might make me fe
el better, it might hatch a conspiracy theory that political loonies could ponder for decades if not centuries, but it would not save me. Or cause justice to be done.
In real time I was alone on a long dark road, no headlights in the mirror. Suddenly I knew where I was going and why. Alice could wait.
Around one in the morning I parked on the shoulder of the road half a mile away from Luther Burbank’s barn and sneaked closer to it through swampy woods. As I went, I assumed I was being picked up by motion detectors, even by cameras, but I put my hopes in the possibility that Burbank was meditating and therefore temporarily blind and deaf. After ten minutes or so I came to the last line of trees and the house came into sight. Burbank’s Hyundai and the black Range Rover that had chased me out of the driveway on my last visit were parked side by side on the gravel. Inside the house, the lights were on, though dimmed. Through the windows I could see fragments of the awful paintings. Also two human figures moving in a rhythmic way. I heard, just barely, the sound of music and realized that these people were dancing. I couldn’t make out their faces, so I moved closer. The man was unmistakably Burbank. He wore tuxedo trousers with a scarlet cummerbund and a white silk shirt. The woman, who was as slim as Burbank, was a brunette. She wore a knee-length skirt of shiny material that ballooned and swung prettily when they turned. Her dark shoulder-length hair, cut straight across, swung in synchrony with the skirt. Her face was hidden in the hollow of Burbank’s neck. They were excellent dancers, almost professional—erect as a couple of honor guards, brisk in their movements, attuned to each other. I wondered if Burbank and this woman entered weekend ballroom competitions under assumed names or dreamed of making it on Dancing with the Stars. Obviously they had studied and practiced together. Had Burbank been a little younger—it wasn’t possible to guess the woman’s age because I still couldn’t see her face—they could have been an adagio act on a cruise ship. The music changed. They tangoed—thrusting machismo and sultry femininity, legs entwining. The light by which Burbank and his partner were dancing was only slightly brighter than candlelight. Even though the two of them were farther apart now, I still could not make out the lady’s face.
The Shanghai Factor Page 23
