The Old Boys (2 page)

Just before Thanksgiving, Paul Christopher’s ashes were delivered by a Chinese official to the American consulate in Beijing. According to the Chinese, Christopher had died a few weeks before in Ulugqat, a remote mountain village near the border with Tajikistan and Afghanistan in the extreme northwest corner of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. No information about the circumstances or cause of Christopher’s death was provided. Evidently the Chinese regarded Christopher’s age, as recorded on his passport, as reason enough for his demise. Not that they returned his passport or any personal effects. Regrettably, all these items had been burned along with his corpse at the people’s crematorium in Urümqui, a large city not far from Ulugqat.

This news came to me by telephone. The caller, an old China hand named David Wong, half Chinese, half Ashkenazi, just happened to be in Beijing with a satellite phone at his disposal. I did not ask him the source of his information; David knew all the right people in China. He was a walking history of U.S. covert action in East Asia, a fomenter of revolutions and uprisings. He had worked for me when I was chief of station in what was then called Peking. Now he eked out his Outfit pension as a consultant to American corporations doing business in the new China. He looked, gestured, and sounded like a full-blooded Han in Mandarin,
Cantonese and several tribal dialects, but resembled Groucho Marx when speaking English.

In Grouchoesque tones, he apologized for being the bearer of sad tidings.

“No apology necessary,” I said.”I’m grateful. Just ashes, you say?”

“That’s right,” he said. “In a nice red-and-gilt urn.”

“Any idea what Paul was doing in Xinjiang?”

“No. The country around Ulugqat is still a forbidden zone.”

It is a forbidden zone because it contains forced labor camps for enemies of the regime, mostly intellectuals who, because of their education and exceptional intelligence, are useful as workers in prison factories producing high-quality goods for export to the United States. And because it is not far from the places where China manufactures and tests nuclear warheads and missiles.

“And then,” David said, “there’s the curious fact that Christopher served his time in a prison not far from Ulugqat.”

“Did the Chinese delivery boys seem aware of that?”

“Not just aware. Fascinated. As I understand it, they suggested to our people that it explains everything. Nostalgic American, grateful to his wise captors, revisits scene of his self-discovery and redemption.”

“They actually said that?”

“Yes. They think, or say they do, that Christopher found peace and laid him down to sleep in the great Chinese desert, which raises a question: Why didn’t they bury him in his chosen soil instead of cremating him and shipping what purport to be his ashes to Washington?”

Interesting thought, David Wong’s specialty. In the heyday of Maoism, Christopher had been held prisoner in an abandoned Buddhist temple in the middle of a bleak desert—waterless, featureless, unpeopled. He was the only inmate. His sentence expressed a certain Maoist-Confucian ingenuity: “Death with ten years’ observation of the results.” This meant that Paul could have been executed at any moment if he was deemed to lack remorse
for his counterrevolutionary crimes. Or, just as capriciously, could have had his sentence commuted if he showed the right spirit and confessed. At a press conference, of course.

Because he actually was innocent of spying on China (almost alone of all the countries in the Communist world), Paul refused to confess to the crime of espionage. He was interrogated for ten years, himself on his knees on a stone floor, his interrogator asking the same maddeningly stupid questions day after day after day. In the end, after being furnished by sources I shall not name with certain incentives to release him, his interrogators believed him. Or said they did, which was quite enough. They let him go—into my custody because I was then posted to Beijing. Immediately thereafter the Chinese intelligence service noticed a warmer and more fraternal attitude on the part of the Outfit. They received bushels of intercepts of communications of the Soviet high command among other goodies, such as a shipment of not-quite-American tanks, along with not exactly American advisers who told them how to deploy those tanks to kill the latest Russian armor.

I don’t know how they do it nowadays, but during the Cold War the Outfit evaluated intelligence reports as follows: A, B, C, D for the reliability of the source and 1, 2, 3, 4 for the accuracy of the information. A-1 meant that the source was unimpeachable and the information unquestionably true, while D-4 indicated that the source was totally unreliable and the information demonstrably false. Every day, a hive of analysts graded the homework of thousands of sources by comparing raw reports from the field with every other report in the files, plus scholarly knowledge, in order to guess its value. In my long career I never saw an A-1 and only a handful of D-4s. In nine out of ten cases, the designation was C-3, source usually reliable, information possibly true. Logically, this meant that the usually reliable source was sometimes unreliable and that the information described as possibly true could just as possibly be false. It follows that U.S. intelligence spent hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of forty years ferreting out vital information that we did not, as a matter of principle, choose to believe—or for that matter, disbelieve.

Every morning bright and early, we delivered this iffy data to the president of the United States in the form of the Daily Intelligence Briefing. It was up to him to decide for himself what might be true and what might not be, and on occasion, whether to blow up the world on a hunch. No president ever chose to do
that, so I guess you could argue that the perverse ambiguity of the system saved civilization by making certitude impossible for the most powerful man in the world.

To David Wong’s report on Paul’s ashes I assigned a B-3: source reliable, information possibly true. But just as possibly false. Ashes had certainly been delivered, but were they Paul’s? I had received bad news about my cousin many times before, but he had always turned up alive in the end. I am told that I cried bitterly when told, as a child, that he had been wounded on Okinawa, but a few months later he came home in his Marine Corps uniform and gave me a captured Japanese pistol (firing pin removed) as a present. A quarter of a century later, I was the first person in the Saigon station to receive the news that he had been kidnapped into China. As we know, he survived that. The list is long, and the point is that Paul always survived, more or less unchanged physically though always quieter, as if his melancholy fate was gradually turning him to stone.

This time, during the months he had been gone, I naturally assumed that he would come back. One afternoon, the telephone would ring and I would hear his murmuring voice inviting me to dinner, as if there had been no interruption of our habit of dining together once a fortnight. The problem now was to establish whether Paul Christopher was or was not a dry quart of ashes inside a gaudy Chinese urn and, far more difficult than that, to accept that this Prince Valiant of my childhood had at last encountered an ordeal he could not survive. Above all, if I wanted peace of mind, David Wong’s report meant that I had to figure out what Paul had been up to. Whatever drove him to Ulugqat must have been a matter of great significance, at least in his own mind— something he felt he absolutely had to do, had to know, had to find in order to make sense of existence.

Now there was a thought: Paul seated on some dusty rock in the barrens of Xinjiang, waiting for his ancient soul to escape from a body that had served its purpose. In my prosaic way, I had hoped that he would die with a book in his lap, seated in a leather chair
after a light dinner and the aftertaste of, say, a 1973 Château Pétrus lingering on his palate. No last words, no explanations. Everything complete and at peace, picturesque and tidy. I imagined for him a gentle, well-earned and entirely harmonious end to a tumultuous life. And if despite his very strong doubts on the question, there happened to be a heaven, he would be greeted when he opened his eyes by the smiling, ever-young love of his life. Her name was Molly.

As this picture formed in my mind, ten minutes or so after my talk with David, I smiled at Paul in this vision of eternal happiness. And then suddenly I found myself weeping. Such a thing had not happened to me for a long time, apart from sentimental tears shed in a movie house. My emotional shadow, a creature that usually follows tamely behind me, picked me up without warning and shook me—shook a sob out of me, then another. I was astonished, even a little angry. I had been taught from earliest life to keep emotion at bay. As a child, after a tantrum, my father sat me down and played me a game of rummy. He let me win, then said, “Think of feelings as cards, Horace. They’re nothing on their own. It’s how you play them that makes a fellow happy, wealthy, and wise—putting the ones that are alike together, making runs of consecutive numbers, discarding the ones that are no good to you and keeping the ones that are.”

Although, as the Old Man had suggested, life turned out to be a lot like rummy, I had never been dealt a hand of cards quite like this one. Paul, dead or alive, had left unanswered a question on which he had bet his life.

But what was the question? And why did I feel that I had inherited Paul’s quest? I didn’t want the cursed thing.

In darkness, by sense of touch, I put the key that Paul had given me into the front-door lock of the house on O Street. It didn’t fit. Someone had changed the lock. I briefly considered picking it, then reflected that the alarm code probably had been changed as well. Breaking and entering in the nighttime was an unwise course of action for an ex-con when the only person who would go to the trouble of getting him out of jail, Paul Christopher, was either dead or otherwise unreachable by telephone.

It was about five o’clock on a brisk fall morning, a lovely time of day and year. The city, projecting misty streetlight onto low cloud cover, was all but silent. Up and down the block, a few bedroom windows showed yellow lamplight—workaholics getting an early start for the office. Out of the corner of my eye I caught an incandescent flash and saw that a light had come on upstairs in Paul’s house—not the master bedroom but a smaller bedroom across the hall. I knew the floor plan well, having lived in the house during one of Paul’s protracted absences. I walked around the block to kill time. When I came back the kitchen light was on. I rang the bell.

The doorbell is not a sound one expects to hear in the hour before dawn, but as soon as it chimed footsteps approached, quick and confident. The light above the door came on. Paul’s house was equipped with surveillance cameras installed by myself. I was
dressed like a ninja in navy blue sweats and sneakers and a watch cap. I took off the cap, scrooched down, and looked directly at the tiny lens imbedded in the door knocker. A brief pause, then the click of deadbolts. The door opened a crack, chain lock still in place.

“Horace?”

It was Paul’s ex-wife Stephanie, also dressed in running clothes, battered Nikes on her small feet, a cell phone in her hand, her thumb on the SEND button, 911 already dialed, no doubt. Stephanie was a well-organized woman.