The Shanghai Factor (14 page)

Other cops booked me at the police station, strip-searched me, confiscated my belongings, including about five hundred dollars in fifties, a drug dealer denomination, and put me in a cell. I asked if I could keep my book. A desk officer examined it carefully for hidden razor blades or poisonous pellets or explosive pages, and to my surprise, handed it over. The cops told me I was entitled to one phone call. I said not right now. I had no one to call except Lin Ming.

An hour or so later, a jailer told me I had a visitor. He opened my cell and led me down the hall to a small windowless room. A well-nourished sleepy-eyed gray-haired man in yesterday’s rumpled suit sat at a table. He said, “The bail was three hundred dollars. I posted it. Do you have that much with you?”

“I did when I arrived. Who are you?”

“Your lawyer.” He stood up. He was in no mood to be friendly. I asked him what time it was. “It’s three-thirty,” he said.
“A.M.
Let’s go.”

I followed the jailer while my lawyer settled the bill. At the desk, my belongings were returned to me. Everything was there. I signed a receipt.

In the lawyer’s car, a well-broken-in, entry-level BMW, I said, “Now what?”

“Now you owe me three hundred dollars.”

I counted out the money and gave it to him. He stuffed it into the breast pocket of his jacket and started the car. I said, “What about your fee?” He didn’t answer the question.

He said, “The bail money will be returned to you by the police. Eventually. The owner of the house where you committed trespass has decided not to press charges, so you’re a free man, no hearing or trial, except that you now have a rap sheet, a public record under what I presume is your own name, that puts you on his doorstep at a specific time and date, with four police officers as witnesses. I advise you to observe the speed limit in Virginia from now on.”

I said, “Do you want me to get out of the car now or are we going somewhere?”

“I’ll tell you when to get out of the car.”

He drove me to a house in a sleeping suburb. Another digital lock. He punched in the numbers and let me in. He followed me through the door and turned off the alarm system. Did all safe houses have the same entry code so that agents wouldn’t forget them in the same way they used to lose keys? The lawyer said, “Someone will come to see you.” He was still disgruntled. As if I had asked a question, he said, “No, I don’t know when. Until they get here, stay put. Do not answer the phone. Do not
use
the phone. Do not memorize the address. Do not open the door if the doorbell rings. Do not order pizza. You can use a bed, take a shower, jerk off, eat the food if you find any. Do not go outside.”

Where would I go? I had no idea where I was. All suburban housing developments look alike, and besides, every Yankee who ever crossed the Potomac except Ulysses S. Grant got lost as soon as he reached the Virginia side. I couldn’t have found my way to the nearest 7-Eleven.

The lawyer left. I locked the door, turned down the heat, drank a glass of nonfat milk, and microwaved some packaged macaroni and cheese I found in a cupboard.
Busy day,
I said to myself and to the listening devices. I found a puffy recliner chair in the basement television room, sat down, covered up with the Burberry, pulled the handle, and went to sleep.

Burbank arrived after dark the next day. I smelled him coming before he even opened the front door because he was carrying a bag of sandwiches—tofu for him, meatball for me, same as before. How could he remember the meatballs? It had been months. Did he take notes? I was too hungry to ask questions. Apart from the mac and cheese, I had found nothing to eat in the kitchen except a couple of Snickers bars, frozen solid. Burbank brought two bottles of microbrew beer, and this time I drank mine. For fifteen minutes, no noise was heard except the sound of chewing. Burbank had no more small talk than he’d ever had, which was to say, none. He was his original muffled self—no
hello
or
good to see you
or other fake camaraderie, no handshake, not the smallest smile. He was a man who lived without the niceties.
Admirable,
I thought. I wondered if he was the same way at home—silent cocktails with his wife if he had one, mute dinners, wordless copulation. If he was upset by what had happened on his doorstep the night before, he didn’t say so. My visit had been a serious breach of security. Maybe his silence indicated displeasure. Maybe he thought the tongue-lashing could wait until I finished my sandwich. It was even possible that he thought I must have had a good reason for doing what I did. That was no excuse for having done it.

When we finished eating and Burbank had stuffed the sandwich wrappers back in the bag and gone though his routine of wiping our fingerprints off everything we had touched, he took from his pocket a small remote, like the ones used for keyless car ignitions, and clicked it. I thought he must be turning the listening devices off or on, because he now began to talk.

“About last night, my apologies,” he said. “I wasn’t home when you called. The au pair was frightened. She was alone. She’s from Colombia, so she tends to be a bit nervous after dark.”

I said I hoped the girl was all right now. Burbank said, “So what brings you to town? I assume you have something that won’t wait.”

Apparently he hadn’t gotten my text message or had been too busy to read it. I told him what I had written, in detail. As before, he listened intently and seemed to take it for granted that I was leaving nothing out, since he put no questions to me. He took a photograph from his pocket and showed it to me. It was a very good likeness of Lin Ming, taken outdoors on a New York street. Lin Ming was wearing sweats and a Mets cap. Burbank said, “Is this the man?”

If he hadn’t received my texts, how did he guess? I said, “Yes.”

“What contact have you had with him?”

I told him about the “chance” encounter in the Washington restaurant, about bumping into him on Sixth Avenue. “Also, we ran into each other last week….”

“Jehovah at work. Where?”

“In the rain, outside a movie theater, and then we played one-on-one basketball at a gym.”

“Who won?”

“He did.”

“A little guy like that beat you?”

I nodded. “And day before yesterday he tried to recruit me.”

“Details?”

I provided them for the second time.

Burbank said, “I wonder why he gave you so much detail. Usually the Chinese are stingy with information.”

“You know who he really is?”

“
What
he really is, more or less,” Burbank said. “It really doesn’t matter whether the name he was born with was Chang or Wang or Wu or Xu or what benighted village he comes from. He hasn’t been his original self for a long time. We’ve caught glimpses of him. He’s been posted to Tokyo, Paris, London, always under diplomatic cover. He’s cordial, social. It’s easy to take a liking to him, as you found. He’s baptized an impressive number of sinners.”

“Was his method the same as with me?” I asked.

“No. His M.O. is to be quiet, slow, discreet. The question is, why was he not the same as usual with you?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“I’m not asking you.”

“Then let me ask you something. What now?”

“Suspicion,” said Burbank. “Prudence. Deception.”

The three muses of the craft. Burbank was watching me as if he expected me to say something and I was taking too long to say it.

At last he said, “Tell me, what was in your mind when Lin Ming was making his pitch?”

“Self-congratulation because I thought I had read him right. Although I had always assumed that Mei was on duty, I was surprised—startled—when he revealed that he or his friends controlled her.”

“You believed that?”

“I believed he wanted me to believe it.”

“A natural reaction, but watch yourself. What else?”

“Having revealed so much, he was coy about being Guoanbu.”

“Maybe he isn’t Guoanbu. Maybe he’s military intelligence, like Alger Hiss’s Russian case officer. Or something else we’re not aware of.”

“Like what?”

Burbank waived the question away. He said, “I feel that there’s something more. Something you hesitate to put into words. Am I right about that?”

“Okay,” I said. “Yes. What he was offering was so close to what you told me you hoped for from this operation that I wondered if it was a case of great minds, his and yours, running in the same channel.”

Burbank blinked, like an actor on cue. He said, “Why ever would you think a thing like that?”

“Sometimes I have unworthy thoughts.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” Burbank said, getting to his feet. “Interesting mind you have. Keep using it. Go back to New York. Play this fish a little longer. Keep your knickers on. Then we’ll see.”

And that was all I got out of him. He gave me a new phone number to call, a different accommodation address to write to, and a mobile phone to use when I called so the caller ID would be recognized. All this reminded me of CEO Chen. Why did I keep making these comparisons?

19

Two weeks later
I was walking in Riverside Park when I saw Lin Ming on the path ahead, bouncing toward me, arms swinging as though in training for a power-walking marathon. He wore a sweatband with a Knicks logo. I sauntered on. I expected him to thrust out a hand, smile broadly, pause to chat. Instead, eyes front, concentrating on technique, he strode right by me. Snubbed! Would I ever recover? I resisted the temptation to turn around and watch him jounce away into the distance but kept on walking, avoiding designer dogs, trying not to stumble over the shrieking brats in designer rompers who swarmed the path while their nannies gossiped in Spanish and half a dozen other languages.

A week or so after that encounter, I found another invitation-size envelope in the mailbox. It contained a card with a Chinatown address typed upon it in red, along with the following message: “Sorry to be in such a hurry the other day. Nothing personal. Hope Saturday is a good day to play
weiqi.
6 o’clock? Afterward we can have dinner.
Very
good Sichuan chef.” The card was signed, also in red, the color of happiness, in an unreadable scrawl.

The meeting place turned out to be upstairs over a restaurant called Sichuan Delight. A sleek young man with a patch of hair under his lower lip was posted at the door. He said, “Please follow me, sir. When he opened the unlocked door, bright ceiling lights switched on, revealing a steep flight of stairs. I smelled China. The young man told me to knock on door Number 8—one knock only. Because it sounds in Mandarin like the word that means wealth, eight is a very lucky number. I knocked. Lin Ming opened the door. Like me, he wore sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt, his displaying
, the character for “opportunity.” He smoked an unfiltered cigarette—not his first. The room was blue with smoke. Behind me, the hallway lights clicked off. Lin Ming said, “Come in from the dark. The landlord doesn’t like to waste electricity.”

The stage set was complete. The
weiqi
board was already set up. So was the teapot. A large poster of Three Gorges dam hung on the wall—meant perhaps to remind me, unsubtly, of the beautiful Yangtze. We sat down immediately, and after drinking tea, began to play. As I had expected, it was the village idiot versus Bobby Fisher. We played three games in less time than it usually takes to play one. Lin Ming tried hard not to humiliate me, but I was so bad he could not find a way to let me win. There was plenty of chatter, almost entirely Lin Ming’s. He had given up hope for the Knicks, but the baseball season had begun. Maybe the Mets would surprise themselves and make it to the playoffs.

Minutes after we finished our final game of
weiqi,
a waiter arrived from the Sichuan Delight with a staggering load of dishes. Lin Ming had not overstated the chef’s skill. After supper—seconds afterward, Lin Ming must have had some sort of hidden bell under the table or carpet—a busboy came and took away the debris. Lin Ming took out his pack of Camels and offered me one. I shook my head. He drank very little of his maotai, but Chinese host that he was, kept my glass topped up. The genteel American has not yet been born who will not go to almost any lengths to avoid being disrespectful of a foreigner’s culture, no matter how silly it seems, no matter how transparent the foreigner’s contempt for that American’s monkey-see monkey-do behavior might be. Foreigners will spit out our food and drink in disgust, challenge the intelligence of every idea we express, look amazed when we act according to our own etiquette instead of making the hilarious mistake of mimicking what we mistake for their own good manners. In this we are alone among the great powers of history. Ancient China laid its disdain on lesser peoples with a trowel, and modern China does the same. Timur the Lame did not make nice to conquered peoples by acting like a Han or a Turk. When the British or the French in their palmy days Gatling-gunned a few hundred Chinese or other racial inferiors, they didn’t apologize. They just told themselves that the slant-eyed beggars obviously placed no value on human life, and had a drink.