The Mandarin Club (44 page)

“The boys just don’t get it,” Mickey lamented. “I got a bunch of my best cards out of the folks’ attic back home. The memories, the cards, the sense of time and place they brought back—well, it was just overwhelming.”

“What do you mean?”

“I spent hours going through the old cards. Looking at the teams, the statistics, the cartoons on the back, the faces. I had this intense reconnection with the day I’d opened each pack. I could look at a 1964 Topps Dick Ellsworth and remember exactly where I’d been, on the steps of the PX at Fort Ord.”

“Cool.”

“I always thought having a baseball card of yourself was like ensuring your immortality. Remember that guy Ken Hubbs?”

“Cubs’ National League Rookie of the Year. Died in a plane crash that next winter.”

“Right. But Topps had already put out that card of him with the gold trophy on the front. So, no matter what happens, you have a baseball card of yourself that a bunch of kids keep in a shoebox, and some part of you lives on.”

Mickey tried to explain the experience to Amy and their kids—Mickey and the boys visited for supper more than once. The Booth family merely smiled and passed the peas—
crazy Mickey was rambling again
. They welcomed him, though, and Amy in particular gave him some gentle but firm instruction on drawing his boys out about the tumult they had endured.

Booth had recreated a cozy nuclear unit there in their rented home in San Francisco’s gentrified Haight-Ashbury district. He didn’t mind the reverse commute south to Palo Alto, and casually ignored the financial uncertainties of signing a lease.

Booth’s departure had been handled smoothly. Smithson—and even Senator Landle—proved remarkably gracious. After Booth’s resignation, the committee’s leak investigation was quietly halted, and the FBI was taken off the case without any confirmation of their suspicions. Having chosen good etiquette over partisan advantage, Senator Landle helped ensure that the matter ended there. Booth thought it was mighty decent of the man.

Booth slid easily into a Senior Associate’s slot at Serra House, with two Poly Sci 101 sections to work as a teaching assistant, and a book contract from a scholarly publishing house. He was a natural pick-up for the renowned China Studies Program. Stanford welcomed his California industry connections and his ties to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Booth would sit calmly at the small window, looking onto the Serra House quadrangle, with its rock garden and burbling fountain. The work went slowly, but the campus tranquility lent some prescience to his prose as he wrote about the transnational security challenges of the new century.

Mickey pressed him only once about the choice he had made. “How could you just walk away?” he asked.

“I’d ask how could
you
, Mickey, but the boys make your choice rather clear.”

“Don’t you itch to jump back in some days?” Mickey said. “To be out on the campaign trail with the senator?”

“No. I’m surprised, actually. Leaving was a lot easier than I ever suspected.” Booth grew pensive and gazed over Mickey’s shoulder. “Some weird stuff went down those last months—some things that made clear what the right thing was for me to do.”

“Hell, I don’t even have a real job, yet,” Mickey said. “Been thinking about going for a realtor’s license or something. But, hey, what about the campaign? Doesn’t Smithson call and try to rope you back in?”

“I can still make my contributions. Been ghosting a speech or two. Trying to articulate grand visions I’m sure the pollsters and the message mavens will just delete. But, you know, after all those years of politics on the Hill, I needed the clean break.”

“Funny, I had no idea I was ready to turn on a dime until it just came to me one morning in a hotel room,” Mickey said. “I was so goddamn tired of waking up in a strange bed, of trying to keep all my stories straight, of having to keep my adversaries at bay. I was just ready to surrender. I figured the best revenge on them all was to find a way to be happy.”

“That’s a lousy way to live, Mickey. You can’t pursue happiness out of vengeance.”

Mickey had to ponder this unwelcome notion for a moment. “I guess I should just say I was ready for a radical change.”

“Hey, ‘the universe is change. . . our lives are what our thoughts make it. . . ’”

“Plato again?”

“Nope. A guy my new book club’s been reading, Marcus Aurelius Antonius.”

“Shortstop?”

“Right. Cleveland Indians. Hits with power to all fields.”

Mickey did find an opportunity to thank Senator Smithson in person for the risks he had tolerated that harrowing mid-summer day in Beijing. The senator was riding the pre-presidential campaign circuit, doing county picnics in Iowa and New Hampshire, but stopping in California to hit up long-time supporters for campaign cash. After addressing a policy luncheon at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Smithson found time for coffee, making Mickey and Booth feel like players once more, however briefly.

Jake Smithson could not have been kinder. He was a regular guy, deflecting Mickey’s gushing appreciation. The senator asked after Michael and Henry, then shared some Senate gossip until an anxious campaign aide came to hustle Smithson along. Booth and Mickey walked him to the elevator. Once the doors closed, the frenetic road show moved on without them. They were relieved to see it pass.

Mostly, Mickey’s days were spent in a state of suspended animation.

He cut back on the lattés. He started swimming in the morning, and lifting a bit at the gym. He read books at lunch, sitting on the campus grass, taking the sun, watching without a care in the world as the co-eds strolled by.

What good deed have I done?
Mickey wondered, feeling undeserving.
Why have the gods smiled upon me?

He felt like a kid alone in a candy store. He could help himself with glee to all the pleasures about him, untroubled by the inevitable prospect of discovery. He would enjoy himself until his day of reckoning arrived. His punishment would come soon enough.

It was an oblique note in the National Intelligence Digest that shattered his idyll. It surfaced one morning during a seminar with some visiting CIA analysts, held this time on the Stanford campus, and hosted by a couple of the hard-liners at the Hoover Institute. They had been reviewing some analysis of the Chinese satellite launch program, then had broken for coffee. The senior man in town from Langley, a short fellow named Kent, pulled Mickey aside as they walked out the door.

“What do you make of that Chinese guy gone missing?”

“Who’s that?” It seemed to Mickey as if China were some miniature world under glass, as if they were museum curators studying it from afar. For him, it was a world inhabited now only by ghosts and forgotten voices. Still, he didn’t like the sound of “missing.”

“In Singapore,” Kent said. “I guess he used to be some kind of asset.”

“Where’d you pick that up?”

“Something in the NID.”

“I’m not cleared to get the NID.”

“The guys were talking about it on the ride down from the airport. This guy was pretty senior over in the Foreign Ministry.”

“A Foreign Ministry guy?”

“You didn’t know? Damn, I tried to check with the NIO, with Branko. But he’s out on some special assignment or something,” Kent said, his voice growing edgy. “I just thought since he was someone you. . .”

“
Who
are you talking about?”

“It’s like they offed one of their top guys at some international conference. Left a bloody mess. Supposedly, CNN is about to go with a story about the local Chinese Embassy covering it up—paid off the Singapore cops. There’s something about no body that has them all stumped.”

“What is his
name
?” said Mickey, who was nearly shouting. But then, it all became too clear, and Mickey answered his own question.

“Oh, Christ!” Mickey said. “It’s Lee, isn’t it?”

“Lee?”

“Li Jianjun.”

“Yeah, that was the name.”

Mickey felt sick. He veered from the foot-path, staggering toward a bench under a tree behind the Hoover Building.

A group of undergraduates passed by lugging backpacks, talking animatedly about a physics lab. Mickey’s mind raced. He barely saw Kent standing awkwardly nearby, pulling out a cigarette.

‘’They killed him,” Mickey said, mouthing the observation pointlessly. “Those assholes killed him.”

He conjured up visions of Lee’s last moments. Some honey pot bullshit, most likely. A woman at the bar slips something into his drink. Some muscle boys shove him out a high-rise window. A clever ruse by the Second Directorate. It would be just like them to make the killing messy enough to blame on some random act of violence, yet blunt enough to send a message, a warning to all in the know. He flashed on that old Richard Gere movie, where the American businessman is set up in his Beijing hotel room.

Where did I screw up?
Mickey remembered the courtyard where they had talked, recalling Lee’s words of resignation beneath the syrupy disco tunes.
Who betrayed us?

Lee had seen it coming. Mickey knew that much. Lee had warned of the dangers when amateurs got involved.

They should have known Lee would not leave. His sense of duty would not permit it—his obligations to father and country, his eternal stubbornness. God
-
damn bull
-
headed Lee, staggering like a boxer bloodied in the ring, waiting to take their last shot. What for?

Mickey stared angrily into space as he sat on the bench.
Had Lee died just so Langley could steal a glimpse into the Red Dragons’ game? Just to salvage a summit photo op the Chinese were already going to sabotage? It was all a fucking game.

Next came the guilt.
The Interior boys must have fingered Lee for the Departure Lounge ruse. Lee died so my boys could grow up free
.
It was that simple
, Mickey concluded.

Somehow this last thought offered Mickey consolation in his torment. The boys’ freedom. That was Lee’s legacy, the final sacrifice of the godfather. It was a proposition—a gift—Mickey could live with. He touched the St. Christopher encircling his neck, rubbing its smooth surfaces for comfort.

Mickey sat by himself long after the Hoover session resumed. He tried with his cell phone to get Branko, but he was indeed away on some special assignment, and Mickey ended up leaving a garbled message with a secretary. An urgent call to Alexander Bonner proved similarly fruitless.

Then Mickey began to walk, moving very slowly at first, as if he had planned the route before, retracing an altogether familiar path back to Serra House. He nodded at Ginny Clark—same den mother receptionist at the same desk, twenty-seven years after he had left the place. Time seemed to have advanced little here in the musty academic corridors, where dissertation footnotes were still being reworked by earnest scholars. Ginny gazed absent-mindedly as she greeted him, and he walked down past the China Studies Library in search of Booth.

Booth was out. So Mickey sat at Booth’s desk and logged onto the Internet, scrolling through CNN, the
Times
, and Reuters’ web sites. He found nothing—no word of any missing Chinese diplomats. He stared at the lined legal pad he was toting. He briefly caressed the paper, like a father rubbing a baby’s tummy to calm him.

Then he began to scribble notes, beginning some kind of private eulogy. He felt a desperate need to write something, to somehow find a way to memorialize the significance of Lee’s deeds. He needed to honor Lee’s life in words, if only for the boys to read some day, to ensure they would never forget his name.

Mickey was scrawling the old Spender lines, when, abruptly, he stopped. He set the pen down and steepled his fingers, drumming them against each other for several moments of thought.

Then he leapt up, banging Booth’s chair back against the window ledge, and raced down the hallway. Exiting the building, he took off on a brisk jog, long strides heading up Galvez Street towards the Hoover building. His hamstrings were pulling tight. His pace grew more rapid, his breathing labored, yet improved, because of the recent workouts. He caught Kent chatting in a cluster by the door with a couple of guys from Hewlett-Packard.

“Mr. Kent, I need a word, if I might,” Mickey said, out of breath. The man from Langley excused himself, and the two of them walked down the sidewalk.

After they had gone only a few steps, Mickey blurted it out. “Did you say that the report you had was that there was ‘no body’?” He was practically on top of Kent. “They didn’t find a body?”

“That’s right.”

“And you said Singapore, right?” Mickey demanded. “Not Hong Kong? Not in the PRC?”

“Right.”

That was all the hope Mickey needed. The hope carried him up Highway 101 and back across the Bay Bridge. Somehow, he didn’t require the cryptic voicemail from Branko, which he found on his answering machine when he returned to Berkeley. He didn’t need to ask for details on an open line. He could see now why Branko could not reach out to him earlier, and the silence cheered him.

For several days, Mickey awaited a signal. He waited for some confirmation that—to his great surprise—he fervently prayed for. He went about his domestic routines. He remained expectant, though, sleeping lightly, his animal senses aroused.

It came less than a week later, in the form of a note in an unfamiliar hand, passed by an attractive young lady wearing a blue and gold Cal sweatshirt at the end of a seminar he had been auditing. She was gone before he could open the blank white envelope she had handed him. The plain paper inside read simply “Road Trip. Come alone. Golden Hinde Inn. 11:00 AM, tomorrow.”

Then, he knew.