A Death in China (26 page)

The ancient Chinese warrior, too, wore a blue tag around its neck, an incongruous paper medallion.

“What do you think?” Beckley said.

Stratton was overwhelmed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the imperial soldier.

“Well, I’ll tell you what Ithink,” the cop said after a few moments. “I think it’s the damnedest-looking lawn jockey I ever saw.”

Stratton spent the night in Wheeling. He slept turbulently, racked by old dreams and new grief.

First David, and now Linda.

He tried to convince himself that it wasn’t his fault. They had argued under the oaks at Arlington: Stratton for vengeance, Linda for patience. Wang Bin was worth more alive than dead, she had said. “He’s an encyclopedia, Tom. Do you know what he could do for us?”

“Do you know,” Stratton had countered, “what he’s already done?”

But she had been determined, and Stratton had underestimated her.

Now she was dead, and Wang Bin was dust in the wind, a clever phantom. Stratton was sure he’d already grabbed the money, and with the money came boundless freedom—comfort, respectability, anonymity. That’s the way it worked in America. That’s what the deputy minister had counted on. In his mind’s eye, Stratton pictured the cagey old fellow in his new life—where? San Francisco, maybe, or even New York; an investor, perhaps, or the owner of a small neighborhood business. Maybe something more ambitious: his own museum.

Stratton was desolate in his failure. Without clues, without even a scent of the trail, he had nowhere to go.

Nowhere but home, back to doing what he should have been doing all along. And before that, a detour. A couple of hours was all he needed, a moment really. A chance to say goodbye to the man who had meant so much to him, and whose murder he had been unable to prevent. A taste of better times, something enduring and warm for a lifetime of cold dreams.

Stratton got an early start and reached Pittsville by noon. The moment he passed the city limit sign he pulled his foot from the accelerator, a vestigial reflex from his days as a student. Speed trap or not, the town was still gorgeous.

It was green and cool and hilly, a sleepy old friend. Stratton wished he had never left.

He stopped for lunch at the village sundry, not far from St. Edward’s campus. The counter lady, a grand old bird with snowy hair and antique glasses, remembered him instantly and lectured him on his lousy eating habits. Stratton cheered up.

The campus had changed little, and why should it have? The enrollment stayed constant, the endowments generous but not extravagant. Ivy still climbed the red-brick bell tower, and the bells still rang off key. The narrow roads were as pocked as ever, and the college gymnasium—now called an Amphidome—still looked like a B-52 hangar.

Stratton discovered he was in no hurry. He was home. He allowed himself to be led by sights and sounds. On the steps of the cafeteria, a shaggy folksinger strummed a twelve-string and sang—Stratton couldn’t believe it—Dylan. Stratton dropped a dollar into the kid’s guitar case and strolled to the post office to read the campus bulletin board. It was another St. Edward’s tradition.

“Roommate wanted: Any sex, any size. Must have money.”

“Need Melville term paper within ten days. Will pay big bucks, plus bonus for bibliography. Reply confidential.”

“I want my Yamaha handlebars back. $200 firm. No questions.”

Stratton shook his head. Nothing had changed.

“You lookin’ for work, young man?” came a gruff voice from behind. ” ‘Cause we sure don’t need any more liberal agitators on this campus!”

Stratton immediately recognized the voice. “Jeff!”

“Mr. Crocker, to you.” Crocker beamed and threw an arm around Stratton’s shoulders. “How are you, Tom? You look like hell.”

“You too.”

“Editors are supposed to look like hell. It’s in their contract.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been driving all day and I’m beat.”

They walked the campus, making small talk. Crocker had been a reporter for the local newspaper when Stratton had been a student at St. Edward’s. Now he was executive editor.

“They even let me teach a journalism class out here.”

“God help us,” Stratton said with a ghost of a smile. “The National Star comes to Pittsville.”

They gravitated to the beer cellar in the basement of the cafeteria. It was five o’clock, still early for the campus drinkers, so Stratton and Crocker had no trouble finding a quiet booth.

Halfway through his first beer Crocker said, “I kind of expected to see you at the funeral.”

“I couldn’t come, Jeff. I was in China.”

“With David? When it happened?”

Stratton told him what he could.

“It was such a shock,” Crocker said. “The irony. After all those years, to return—only to die.”

“He told me he was writing new lectures.”

“Yes,” Crocker said. “We did a feature story before he left. David always felt there was a thirty-year gap in history, at least for him. By going back he hoped to fill that empty space so he could bring his students up to date. The way he talked, the trip was purely a scholar’s survey … hell, we all knew better, Tom. You should have seen how excited he was.” Crocker polished off the beer. “He was packed two weeks before the plane left. Isn’t that the David Wang we knew?”

“Orderly, to the extreme,” Stratton said fondly.

“Yup. It was so sad. The service was very lovely.”

“I would like to have been here, Jeff. You know that.”

“Have you been up there yet?” Crocker motioned with his head. Stratton knew where he meant.

“No, not yet. I’ll walk up in a little while. Is the house still open?”

“They decided to lock it up after David died. To protect his library as much as anything.” Crocker winked. “The key’s in a flowerpot on the porch.”

“Thanks.”

“On my way back to town I’ll tell Gulley you’re up there, so he won’t get all worked up and send a squad car when he sees the lights.”

Stratton said, “I’ll only stay a little while.”

“Stay as long as you want,” Crocker said. “Don’t cheat yourself.”

Outside, darkness had gathered swiftly under a purple quilt of threatening clouds. Stratton set out for the Arbor with a quick stride, freshened by the cool stirrings of the birch and pine. All around him students lugging books hurried to beat the rain. Past the biology building, which looked and smelled like a morgue, the campus ended and the old trees gave way to a sloping, blue-green valley. All this had once been pasture, part of the old dairy David Wang had purchased after his arrival at St. Edward’s. The valley was narrow and sharply defined, and halfway up the far slope Stratton could see the trees, David’s trees, a lush wall of maple and pine and oak. At the top of that hill was the old farmhouse. Beyond that, on the downslope past another tall grove, was the bluff where David’s coffin lay, near a lone oak. Stratton had no desire to visit the gravesite. An empty place, it mocked him in his nightmares.

The house was something else again—all the hours they had spent together there, the student and his teacher. It was there Stratton had shared his private agony—Man-ling—and tried to explain it over and over until David had gently touched his arm and said, “I understand, Tom. War.”

“Murder.” Stratton had wept. “Murder.”

“I understand, Tom.”

And from the confession had come a silent bond more powerful than any in Stratton’s life. Often in the evening the two of them would sit on the porch, sipping tea, watching the hillside go dark. Stratton learned to talk of other things, and finally the nightmares went away. Because of David, Stratton had left St. Edward’s a man reconciled to his past.

Now the wind came in fits, slapping at the leaves of the trees. Stratton jumped a clear brook and bounded up the hill in a rush toward the old clapboard house. He clomped onto the wooden porch at full tilt.

For a few moments he stood there, facing the Arbor, trying to catch his breath. The cool wind raked through his hair and made him shiver.

It was almost nightfall.

Stratton found the flowerpot on a freshly painted window-sill. The house key lay half buried behind a splendid pink geranium.

The key fit easily, but before Stratton could turn it, the door gave way. Crocker was wrong. It had not been locked.

Stratton groped in the darkness, cursing loudly when his knee cracked against the corner of an unseen table. His hand found a hanging lamp and turned the switch.

He stood in the middle of David Wang’s library. Ranks of books marched from floor to ceiling. There was the burgundy leather chair with the worn and discolored arm rests. There was the giant Webster’s on its movable stand; David would drag it all over the house, wherever he happened to be reading. And there in one corner was the newest thing in the room, a grandfather clock. Never on time, never on key, it had been a recent gift from the faculty club.

Stratton felt warm and safe in this place.

His eyes climbed to a high spot in one of the bookcases where David had tenderly arranged several framed photographs of his family. Stratton moved closer and stood on his toes. One picture in particular intrigued him: two young men at the waterfront, arms around each other’s shoulders. They could have been twins, they looked so much alike. Both young men in the sepia photograph smiled for the camera, but those smiles told Stratton which of them was leaving Shanghai Harbor that day. David’s smile was bright with hope, his brother’s strained with envy.

“Yes, it was a sad farewell.”

The voice cut through Stratton like a blast of arctic air. He had no time to speak, no time to turn around. He heard a grunt, and then his skull seemed to explode, and he felt himself falling slower and slower like ashes from a mountaintop.

The photo album had a royal blue cover and a gold stripe. It was old and worn, with tape for hinges. The album contained faded black-and-white pictures, a half century old, of wicked, life-giving Shanghai. There were photos of New York in the 1930s as well, of a self-conscious young man in stiff white shirt and broad necktie posed before municipal landmarks: Grant’s Tomb, the spanking new Empire State Building.

The album had been David Wang’s favorite.

He would sit at his desk in the old farmhouse and turn the well-remembered pages. Before a man can understand where he is going he must first come to terms with where he has been. Sometimes David Wang found refuge in the album when he had a visitor. From it he would extract lessons that matched the problem the visitor brought. Once Thomas Stratton, nerves jangled, memories still too fresh, had sat before the cumbersome old farmer’s desk and watched David Wang finger the pages to the accompaniment of a gentle, wise man’s monotone.

“Ah, Shanghai, what a city it was, Thomas. A cauldron of the very best and the very worst there is to life. Luxury unbounded. But for most, inconceivable misery. Too much misery. It had to change, but alas, it took the Communists to do it. We are all a bit like Shanghai, aren’t we? We all change. Every day we are different. And if we are smart, smarter than the Communists, we do not destroy the good. We destroy the bad, edge it out slowly but surely—ruthlessness, cruelty, injustice, rash behavior. We build on what is good, like the body repairing a wound, forcing out the infection, replacing good for bad. Why, I remember as a boy in Shanghai … “

Through a cotton wool of pain and confusion Thomas Stratton watched David Wang again at his desk, again with the album in his delicate, thinker’s fingers.

But it was not David. Not even the dulling ache in his skull would allow Stratton to believe that. There was no cup of jasmine tea at David’s elbow. Instead, a coil of rope, serpentine and menacing, lay on the scarred old desk. There was no crackle from the old fire or soft glow from a desk lamp, only the rattle of an old-fashioned kerosene lantern perched anachronistically in one corner.

David Wang did not sit at his desk. David Wang was dead.

At David’s desk, defiling his memory, his goodness, sat his brother. His murderer.

Stratton would have sprung but for the bonds that held him, hand and foot, to the old Harvard chair.

“He was a fool, my brother,” Wang Bin said. “An arrogant, intellectual romantic, a superior being who lived in a cage of his own making—too smug to come to terms with reality. No, reality might have been disordered, unpleasant, and that would never do, would it? Of course not. Best to ignore it, then. A fool … but you do not agree, Professor Stratton?”

“What are you doing here?” A wounded plea. Stratton barely recognized his own voice.

“I could tell you I came for sentimental reasons. David told me about this place, and what it meant to him. And all you see around you in this room, Professor, are the memories of a childhood we shared. I could tell you I came here to see all this, to taste these old memories … but that’s not the reason.” Wang Bin eyed Stratton. “There is a more practical reason for me to be here.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Soon enough, Professor.” Wang Bin walked slowly around the desk. Knots bit into Stratton’s flesh. He would break the chair. It was only wood.

Stratton saw the punch coming out of the corner of an eye; there was nothing he could do. A knobby fist smashed into his cheekbone. Stratton tasted blood.

“My brother,” Wang Bin said calmly, “was a fool who could see the truth but chose to ignore it. Even as a child he was a sanctimonious fraud. One year older he was, that is all. Is that a century? Does one year bestow wisdom? Ah, but how David loved to play the elder, he the superior and I the inferior, the ignorant younger brother. My mother and father, they were fooled by him, like everyone else …

“Once I broke a vase, a beautiful Ming vase. It sat there on a polished wooden table, beautiful and ludicrous. And I broke it, perhaps even intentionally. I smashed it into a million pieces.” Wang Bin paused, with a curious smile. “Like all children, I was afraid of what my parents would do. So I told my mother that a deliveryman—an old man who brought fresh crabs to the house—had carelessly broken the vase with his sack. She believed me. But that was not good enough for my brother. He went to Mother and said, ‘It was I, your eldest son, who broke the vase, Mother. Bin is only trying to protect me. I take responsibility.’ Did they beat him? No, of course not. ‘What an honest boy you are,’ they said.

“And did David then beat me, or mock me to show me ,how much braver he was? No. He never said a word, nothing, as though by making me wallow in my shame I would drown. Just as he never said a word to me those days when I would skip my piano lessons and come back only to find him playing my exercises, so that downstairs my mother would hear it and think how dedicated I was, just like my elder brother.”

Stratton said, “Why are you here?”

Wang Bin sat down once more at the desk. “We have time for that, Professor, plenty of time.”

Stratton worked the knots at his wrists. “So you were a jealous little brother,” he prodded. “That’s your explanation.”

“For murder?” Wang Bin seemed amused. “No.”

“How could you hate him so much?”

“I am not sure I did. Not at the end.” His voice was level, emotionless. “The day finally came for my big brother to leave for the United States. How sad was my mother, how proud my father. All the servants wept, and I wept, too. I wept for the joy of it, Professor Stratton. He was gone and I would be the elder son. My parents thought I wept from sadness. How I fooled them! My father took me aside and said, ‘Bin, do not weep. You must be strong and brave like your brother and in another year, perhaps two, you will join him to study.’ I never would have gone. To follow him. In anything. Never. How little my father understood of me, or of China.

“When my mother left for the Revolution I joined her instantly. Here was something my brother could not do, or my father. To fight a revolution. War is very exciting, Professor Stratton. Do you remember how the skin tingles, the senses race? I was barely sixteen—imagine, not yet sixteen!—and I would call my soldiers and say, ‘Comrades, we must take that bridge. The people’s struggle demands it.’ And they would say, ‘Yes, Comrade,’ and they would march with fifty-year-old rifles into artillery and machine-gun fire. They would die unflinching, uncomplaining, with a mindless zeal that someone like you would admire. I loathed their stupidity. And I loathed the Revolution, too. Loved and loathed it.

“It should have been a bright dream, a dream so great my brother could never have known its like. Instead it was a theater of the absurd. ‘Yes, Comrade, we will go off and die because the people demand it.’ Is it heroic to roll in the mud like a pig when you can be clean, or to march through snow in bare feet when you can ride? It was a peasant’s revolution. The peasants won. And ever since, in their bungling, they have disgraced the heritage of the nation with the most splendid history of all.

“The imperial times! The dynasties! That was when China was great. That is when I should have lived.” Wang Bin spoke with a trace of sadness. “In the times of the emperor.”

“You’d fit right in,” Stratton said. “A greedy old man who murdered his brother for profit.”

“My brother. My brother.”

The thumb and forefinger of Stratton’s left hand were mobile now, and with them he feverishly worried the knots.

” ‘Dear elder brother,’ ” Wang Bin recited in mockery. ” ‘I think of you often after all these years, so many miles away. I should like to see you before I die. It would be wonderful if you could come to China … ‘ “

“And so he came, with his cameras and his loud synthetic clothes. ‘You must help me, brother,’ I said. ‘I must leave China for reasons that you would not understand, and I must take with me what is my due.’ I showed him my treasures in Xian. He stood beside me and looked at them.”

“Clay soldiers, that’s all.”

Wang Bin stared at Stratton scornfully. Through the heavy drapes a gust of wind rattled the windows and Stratton heard the sudden assault of rain on the glass. He used the sound to mask his movements, tilting the chair just a fraction to give his feet greater purchase against the ropes.

Wang Bin said, “The soldiers are toys for children, a pittance. In Xian I showed my brother the real treasure. Even he was left speechless by its majesty.”

” ‘You must help me,’ I said to him. ‘With the soldiers we will have enough money to live in splendor wherever we choose. I ask but two things of you: That you allow me to hide you here in China so that I may leave the country on your passport. After two weeks you have only to go to your embassy to say that you lost your passport, and they will give you a new one. Then, once we are together in the United States, you can help me recover the soldiers and sell them. Is that too much to ask of a brother, after all these years? Help me, please. I have lived more than once as a peasant. I cannot live like that again. I will not.’ “

“You should’ve known what his answer would be,” Stratton said.

Wang Bin nodded. “He said, ‘It is wrong what you are doing, it is a crime. I cannot help you.’ ” The deputy minister shrugged.

“So you killed him.” Stratton’s thumb was abraded and hurt painfully. He wished he had longer fingernails. Keep him talking. Above all, keep him talking.

“I did not plan to murder him,” Wang Bin said. “I had his room searched, and I had him followed because I was afraid he would rush to his embassy like an old woman. In the end I did kill him, but because I had no choice. In his death was the only means of accomplishing my escape and saving my treasure.”

Stratton said, “You’re a weak old man, Comrade. Even in death your brother intimidates you. Listen to yourself—the lies, the jealousy, the way you pervert his memory.”

One of the knots came loose. The pressure on Stratton’s right wrist eased; he twisted it back and forth within the growing circle of rope.

“But that’s your stock in trade, isn’t it, Comrade Deputy Minister? The perversion of history. That’s why we’re here.”

“Ah, yes.” Wang Bin smiled a winter’s smile. “My artifacts.”

“And your coffins!”

“They make excellent shipping crates.” Wang Bin folded his hands but looked impatient. “Don’t tell me you mourn the tourists, Professor. I did not kill them all. The first, a fat capitalist, died quite naturally. Death by duck, your embassy called it. A clever name for a common occurrence, I learned. And it gave me the idea. His was the first coffin.”

The rope rubbed raw against Stratton’s wrist. Feeling flooded back into his fingers. Another minute …

“You couldn’t have done it all alone.”

“Certainly not. I had many trusted associates—a doctor for the lethal poisons, welders for the caskets, diggers, of course. Fortunately they understood that I was directing a secret project for the Party. That lie was necessary, you see, to assure their complete loyalty and their perpetual silence.”

“And your buddy, Harold Broom. Was he, too, working for the glory of the Party?”

“Broom was a worm, a drunken cheat. I chose him only because David would not cooperate. Broom cheated me about money, and then he conspired with the Greer woman.”

“Poor Harold,” Stratton sneered. And poor Linda.

Another twist. Just one more. Make the fist small. Slide the rope over … there! Stratton’s right hand was free. He clawed at the knot on his left wrist, blessing the rain pummeling the house.

“The Greer woman was another worm, wasn’t she?” Stratton said harshly. “Well, she was the only one who could have saved you, Comrade.”

Wang Bin looked quizzically at Stratton. “It is not my salvation that brings us here, but your death. You must die as Miss Greer had to die. The difference is that you are troublesome and she was dangerous—more dangerous than you because she was smarter. She did not come as you have, thrashing about, making great noise and great threats. She did not care about smuggling or murder. Or morality, Professor. She had only one goal: information. I respected that. She was not like the professor of stupidity who seeks revenge for a pompous friend, or perhaps merely wants to cleanse himself of past sins … “

Wang Bin allowed the phrase to dangle, watching Stratton.

“Did you think that I did not know about the pregnant peasant woman who was slashed from her throat to her belly? It had to be you. You were the only invader who escaped from Man-ling.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes, you know. Your face says so. You would have lived longer, Stratton, if you had been less impulsive and more clever. Miss Greer was very clever; she must have been a good spy. The way she dealt with you, for example, quickly and noiselessly, outside the cemetery. Then she rode with us, Broom and I, bought us dinner, talked … and made her proposal. It was very civilized. ‘I know everything,’ she said, ‘about your brother and the soldiers. I know everything and none of it matters. If you come with me and talk to us—tell us what you know—you may keep the money and remain in the United States under our protection.’ “

Wang Bin paused for effect, like one of the professional storytellers who nightly enthrall the old men at dank teahouses in provincial China. Stratton was picking up speed; his left hand was nearly free.

When Wang Bin resumed, he had become another person, a canny old grandfather. “For Harold Broom, who would have sold his mother, it was as though Miss Greer spoke from the heavens. He choked on his chicken dinner. ‘Me too?’ he asked. ‘No prosecution?’

“Miss Greer smiled. She had a lovely smile, Stratton. Did you notice that? She smiled at Mr. Broom and said, ‘Of course. You, too.’ And I said, ‘Miss Greer, this is a very fair offer. I can be of great assistance to your government. But please tell me so an old man will know your thoughts: What will happen if I refuse?’ Miss Greer looked very sad. ‘We would have to arrest you and deport you to China,’ she said, ‘but I am sure that will not happen … ‘ “

The rope came free. Stratton bunched it in his left hand so that it didn’t fall to the floor. He calculated the distance from chair to desk. It would have been easy, except for his feet, still bound to the chair. If he launched himself pogo-style he might—just might—reach far enough to grab an arm, the shirt, the neck—anything would do.