A Death in China (19 page)

Harold Broom put on his most expensive tailored suit—navy, with a fine ash-gray stripe—and plunged into the muggy Washington afternoon. He flagged a taxi at 14th Street. Six blocks was too damn far to walk on a hot day in your best suit.

The curator was waiting in a private office. It was a Monday, and the museum was closed to the public.

“Hello, Dr. Lambert.”

The curator nodded. “You have the photograph?”

Broom gave it to him.

“I asked for an infantryman,” Lambert remarked with a scowl.

“Not available,” Broom said curtly. He didn’t like Lambert at all; he didn’t like experts in general.

“When was it dusted?”

“Two, three months ago,” Broom answered. “I’m not sure.”

Lambert grunted.

Broom said, “If it’s the quality you’re worried about, don’t bother. It’s been stored in a dry place, safe from the elements.”

The curator unfolded a schematic of the Qin tombs. The drawing illustrated each of the eleven columns under excavation. The location of the archers, the chariots, the spearmen and the armored infantry was noted in pencil.

“Which vault did this one come from?”

“I have no idea,” Broom said. “That’s my partner’s end of things. And what the hell difference does it make? You know exactly what you’re getting, friend. There’s seven thousand of these buggers underground in China, but this is your only chance to get your hands on one.”

“It’s history,” Lambert said stiffly.

“History, my ass. It’s an investment.”

“You’re revolting,” the curator said in a hoarse voice.

“I’m also late for a plane. I want the down payment right now—that is, if you’re still interested.”

“Oh, I’m interested, Mr. Broom. But first: How many of these have you and your partner smuggled in?”

“This is the only one.”

Lambert’s eyes turned to ice. He stood up. “Good day, Mr. Broom. You’re welcome to come back when you’ve sobered up.”

Broom sighed. Lying to the crazy Texan was one thing; he should have known better with Lambert. He signaled the curator to sit down.

“There’s three of them,” Broom said, his voice low.

“And the other buyers?”

“Some junior oil tycoon in Texas who doesn’t know Qin Dynasty from Corningware.”

“Who else?”

“An Oriental restaurant guy down in Florida. I think he’s going to put the soldier next to his salad bar.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes, I swear.”

“I’ll find out if you’re lying,” Lambert promised. “How much?”

“Seven fifty.”

“Six hundred,” Lambert said. “Three hundred now, the rest on delivery. If it’s damaged when I open the crate, you won’t see another penny—so I suggest you wrap it in heavy quilts and pack it in styrofoam. So … we have a deal?”

“Shit.” Broom grimaced.

Lambert smiled. “Good. Now, when can I expect delivery?”

“A week, maybe more. You’re number three on my list.”

“But why?” Lambert cried.

“Because the others already paid us,” Broom said, rising, “and their checks cleared.”

Lao Fu had lived more than eighty years amid the monuments to dead Ming emperors. As a boy, he had witnessed the fall of China’s last dynasty. For Lao Fu, the Communists were newcomers; when he thought about them at all, it was as emperors with different names. What difference did it make? A man lived and worked and, if he was lucky, his children cared for him until he died. At Sunrise Commune, Lao Fu was a man of distinction. There was nothing he had not known about ducks, and little he had forgotten. Had he not three times personally traveled more than fifty li to Peking to hear successive generations of chefs praise his ducks? Didn’t the young men of the commune still come to him for advice when their foolish practice of force-feeding the ducks made the birds sick? Lao Fu was a man who possessed wisdom. So it was that the commune leaders chose not to know of the pastime that had, once a week, occupied Lao Fu for nearly half a century. Who would invoke bureaucratic injunction to an old man who could not read?

On a summer’s afternoon, Lao Fu walked to the reservoir that nestles among the Ming Tombs. He borrowed a rowboat from the caretaker. With a small net, each perfect knot tied by patient hands, Lao Fu went fishing for carp. He fished in secret places.

When he returned that day, Lao Fu left a plump brown fish in the boat where the caretaker would find it and carried two others home to his family. At dinner, everyone praised his skill. They devoured tender white flesh. Lao Fu did not eat, refusing even the eyes and the maw, the most succulent and honored pieces that were his right.

Afterward, his eldest son asked Lao Fu if he was sick.

“I will die soon,” the old man said.

“You are healthy and strong. You will not die for many years.”

“My time is gone. There is too much I cannot understand.”

The eldest son thought of the new commune television set, of the noisy diesel tractors, of the experiment to produce more ducks by keeping the lights burning in their roost. Each of these things he had carefully explained to his father. But it was difficult.

“What troubles you, Father? I will try to help.”

“What lives in the water?”

“Fish.”

“What lives on the land?”

“Man and the other animals.”

“Is it still so?”

“Yes, my father.”

“You are wrong.”

“How am I wrong?”

“Today I fished a man.”

They brought Stratton tea, and a hair-curling local moonshine. They wrapped him in a blanket. A doctor came and, clucking, dressed his leg and gave him a shot of antibiotic with a needle meant for horses. They produced clothes that almost fit, and a pair of rope-soled sandals. People pressed around, all talking at once. They smiled and bowed. They shook his hand and pounded his back. Stratton let it happen.

He had been bundled onto the back of a truck, he and the waterlogged stocky man, peasant women cuddling the two little bodies and, it seemed, half the commune, a tight-pressed gesticulating horde.

Where else would they go but to the seat of power, the headquarters of the commune, the site of the local dispensary?

They had come to Man-ling.

Shivering in the humid tropic night, Stratton viewed himself as though from another dimension. Could it have been inevitable? All this time, all these years? Karma? Fate? What else could account for it? Of all the villages on the planet, he had been returned to the one that had seared him and stained him and left him a man of palpable sadness.

To that village was he led back, bearer of two tiny corpses. Fresh bodies for Man-ling. I am your plague, don’t you see? I have only to come and people die. Forgive me. I am sorry. This time I did my best. I tried. Now, please leave me alone. There are ghosts here who frighten me and of which I shall not speak. I want to leave.

Someone handed him a bowl and a pair of chopsticks. Eat, they gestured. He ate. Face buried in the bowl, he could not see. It was better not to see.

The dispensary was new, single story and freshly whitewashed. It contained six beds, some rudimentary medical equipment and windows that opened onto the village main street. The view was of an old movie house across the street. Weary and sagging. In passing headlights, Stratton could see where bullets had marched up the facade. The movie house was as quiet, as dingy and as terrifying as it had been the first night he saw it. They had not even painted it.

Imagine.

After all these years they had not even painted it. His mind had seen the building thousands of times. And always he had imagined that it was white again, that someone had come, orders had been given, workers had arrived, and paint had covered the scars. White paint.

But his nightmare had deceived him. No paint. No clean-up, fix-up, paper-it-over. It was the wrong country for that. China. Let the scars be seen. The people’s struggle. Stratton wondered if Bobby Ho’s body still lay on the stage.

Kangmei arrived at last and, with her, a measure of sanity.

She hurled herself at him, burying her head in his chest. Stratton’s rice bowl went flying. From the spectators came laughter, nervous and polite. Women in the New China did not embrace foreigners, in private or public.

“Oh, Thom-as, you are so brave. So brave.”

He kissed the top of her head.

“The children?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“The boy is well, Thom-as. The girl … the doctors are still working.”

One for two. It could have been worse.

“Kangmei, can we go now? We have to talk.” She felt so good in his arms.

“No, we cannot. There are very many people. Now you are everyone’s rice expert. They want to express their thanks.”

“I just want to be alone with you.”

“The train will be here in less than one hour.”

He had forgotten.

“An hour?” He had so much to say to her.

The Chinese seized on Kangmei as their link to Stratton. They pushed and shoved and jostled for her attention. She yelled something in her struggle-session voice, and the crowd quieted. The semblance of a line formed.

“They will come individually to greet you. They want to take you across to the old theater where there is more room, but I said you were too weak. Also, I have told them to say only a few words and leave you to rest. Once they have left, so can we, not before.”

“Let’s get it over with.” Stratton fixed a smile on his face.

A ruddy-faced man with iron gray hair appeared, speaking forcefully.

“This is the boy’s grandfather,” said Kangmei. “On behalf of his family, he extends his most grateful thanks and wishes you a speedy recovery. It is his wish that you will be guest of honor for a banquet once you are well.”

“Tell grandfather that I am pleased to have been of assistance and that I would be honored to meet his entire family—when I am recovered.”

An uncle replaced the grandfather. Then cousins and aunts, the boy’s mother, fighting back tears, even neighbors. Stratton thought it would never end.

“Kangmei, let’s get out of here.”

“This is a Zhuang tradition and, for you, a great honor. We cannot offend these people.”

A few minutes later, while a portly man whose relationship to anyone seemed only dimly established spoke at length in a politician’s growl, Kangmei said suddenly:

“You are very handsome.”

“Did he say that?”

“He says all the usual things. Isay that.”

“Come with me, please, to America.”

“I cannot.”

“I love you.”

“This man is the best friend of the boy’s mother’s second sister and he wishes to convey to you … “

Stratton noticed a commotion at the door. Three men came in. Peasants made way for them.

“The leaders of the commune,” Kangmei whispered.

Stratton nodded. Their bearing alone made that clear.

The commune president wore an impeccable white shirt outside his belt. His were the first clean fingernails Stratton had seen all day. The vice-president was a me-tooer, handsome and suave. They were both Han Chinese, their lighter skin and sharper features distinguishing them immediately in the room of Thai-like Zhuang. They came forward smiling, hands outstretched.

“Comrade president explains that he was at a regional meeting and has only just returned. He has heard of your bravery and would like … “

The third man in the delegation was old and fat. He had a cruel saucer face that made smiling a parody. He walked with a cane. The sleeve of his jacket was pinned neatly to his right shoulder. The absence of the arm, and the limp, gave him a sinister, off-balance appearance.

” … regrets that the comrades in Peking had not informed him of the arrival of such a distinguished guest or he would have come personally to Bright Star to welcome you,” Kangmei translated. “Don’t worry about that, Thom-as. After tonight no one will ever ask for your papers and he will be afraid to ask Peking why they did not tell him.”

The saucer-faced man’s smile had vanished. He rocked back and forth on his cane. He shuffled to the left and right to measure Stratton from different angles. Stratton’s eyes never left him.

” … will offer a banquet of welcome and thanksgiving within the next few days and pledges full cooperation of all of the commune work brigades and production teams in your work. You have only to ask—”

“Kuei!” The word can mean either ghost or devil. In this case, it was doubly apt.

Screaming, the old man lunged with the cane, jabbing with it as more than a decade before he had jabbed Stratton with his truncheon.

Time had not been kind to the old man. Stratton easily parried the blow. He wrenched away from the cane, sent it spinning to the far corner of the room, and tried to look aggrieved.

The old man’s voice cracked with fury. His eyes bulged. The muscles in his neck corded. He threw himself on Stratton, splintering the chair. They rolled to the floor, the old man striking repeatedly with the only fist Stratton had left him.

Stratton covered up protectively. He did not fight back. It would not last long. It didn’t. The peasants pulled the old man off and built a human fence between him and Stratton. Stratton didn’t even bother getting to his feet. Instead, he scrambled over to the wall and leaned against it, waiting for what he knew must come.

Quivering, weeping, the old man shouted in a high, reedy voice. Within seconds a hush had fallen over the dispensary waiting room.

Kangmei translated. She needn’t have bothered.

“The old man was the head of the Public Security Bureau in Man-ling for many years—the top policeman. He knows you. He says you are an American spy who came to spy and to kill. Everybody will remember the night, he says. The night of the heroic people’s victory. The old man says he saw you then. He talked to you. You killed cadres. You shot him twice, once in the leg, once in the arm.” Kangmei’s voice jumped an octave, almost falsetto. “He says—”

Stratton had heard enough. He dug his nails into Kangmei’s arm.

“That’s enough, Kangmei. Tell the comrade that I understand his distress, but that he is mistaken. I have never been in China before this month. I have never been in Man-ling before. I have never been in a war. I am a rice expert. Say it calmly. Make it sound true.”