The Shanghai Factor (3 page)

Finally Steve spoke. “I am instructed to ask you a question and give you a message,” he said. “The question is, Why do you think your dirty dozen are watching
you?”

“Who else would they be watching?”

“Very good question,” he said. “You should think about it, turn it over in your mind, see if there’s anyone in your life who’s more interesting than you.”

I said, “I’ll work on that.”

Steve ignored me. I took this as permission to speak. I said, “If that’s the question, what’s the message?”

“Good news,” he said. “CI is interested in you.”

He waited—intent, almost smiling—for my reaction. I probably blanched.
CI?
Counterintelligence was interested in me? My bravado wavered. CI was Headquarters’s bad dream. Its job was to know everything about everybody. However, nobody was allowed to know anything about it, including its methods and its success rate. Night and day, in peace and war, the men and women of the counterintelligence division were on the lookout not only for enemy spies, but also for traitors, for sleepers, for the inexplicably nervous, for spendthrifts who couldn’t explain where their money came from. They tailed guys who chase women, women who sleep around, homosexuals, neurotic virgins. Their job was to finger the bad guy inside every good guy and banish the sinner to outer darkness. For CI, no holds were barred, no one was above suspicion except themselves, and nobody had the power to do unto them as they did unto others.

Now Steve was letting me know these demons were after me. Was it because I had committed fornication? Or was it something I had omitted to do? I was unlikely to find out tonight. Steve continued to hold me in his contemptuous gaze.

I said, “Gee, that’s interesting. Did they tell you why they’re interested in some Insignificant McNobody like me?”

“Interested in some what?” Steve said.

“A joke. Forget it.”

“You think this is a joke?”

“No, but you’re making me nervous. When I’m nervous I make jokes.” I thought I owed him that much obsequiousness.

“You should try to overcome that,” Steve said. “Answer the original question. Why do you think it’s you who’s being surveilled?”

“I thought I’d already explained that. Because these people follow me wherever I go.”

“You haven’t gotten beyond that simple explanation?”

“I guess not. What’s the complex explanation?”

“You’ve got a girl, right?”

“Yes.”

“Name?”

“Mei.”

“Mei what, or I guess I should say What Mei. I want her full name, or the name she said was her name.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Have you asked?”

“That’s not the way we work. We ask each other no questions.”

“She doesn’t know your name either?”

“Unless she’s a Guoanbu asset on assignment, no.”

“How did you meet?”

“She crashed her bike into mine.”

“How long ago?”

“Months.”

“You saw no need to report this?”

“I reported the accident to my pen pal and submitted an expense account item for the new bike I bought her.”

“How much?”

“About a thousand, U.S.”

Steve whistled. “But not a word since?”

“No.”

“You really are something, kid. No wonder CI is interested in you.”

He was sneering. The temptation to make things worse was great, but I resisted it. No response from Steve, but I was used to that by now. The silence was heavy, Steve’s manner was disdainful, and Steve such a shit that summary dismissal from the service did not seem to be an unlikely next move.

I said, “So what now?”

“Carry on,” Steve said. “Change nothing. Be your usual harmless self. But be careful, my friend. You’ve got yourself into something you may not be able to get yourself out of.”

“And let me guess. I’ll get no help.”

He pointed a forefinger. “You got it. Lucky you.”

He called for the check, paid it with a big tip, kidded around with the host. Then he stood up as if to go. I stood up too. I was taller than Steve, and angrier.

I said, “Is that the message you said you were instructed to give me?”

“No, that was just me taking pity,” Steve said. “The message is, you may be traveling soon. Your pen pal will provide the details.”

And then he walked out.

3

I had cycled to my meeting with Steve and when I emerged from the hotel garage, wheeling my bike, there they were, well back in the crowd, two men and a woman, ready to leap into the saddle. It was five or six kilometers from the hotel to my place, so they switched riders every click or so. In their clockwork way they always did this just as I turned a corner and they were out of sight for the moment. Then they would pop up again in my mirrors. The bikes were always the same, so a keen-eyed operative like myself was able to keep track of the familiar faces in my wake. Taking advantage of Steve’s expert advice to just be my dim-witted fictitious self, I made no attempt to shake them.

It was almost dark when I reached my building. I was warmed by the thought that Mei would soon be home. It had been a hot day. I was sweaty but Mei liked me that way, or so she said—every once in a while she took one of my smelly T-shirts home with her as a nightgown—so I decided not take a shower. She usually arrived at about seven for my Mandarin lesson, and then we would have supper and a couple of beers, and then Mei would test my Mandarin again, and tonight we would watch a DVD of
Destry Rides Again
I had bought on the street because, as I planned to tell her, no one can understand U.S. English properly unless she can unscramble the lyrics when Marlene Dietrich sings “See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have.” That was the routine. I liked everything about it. I liked everything about the life that Mei and I were living—even the tiny pre-Mao apartment I had rented as an element of my cover as a poor, feckless if somewhat overage student. The walls bulged, the concrete floor had waves in it so that the furniture tipped, the sputtering plumbing had air pockets, the electricity came and went.

Waiting for Mei, listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing the blues, I fell asleep. I woke at nine. No Mei. This was a disappointment, but I felt no stab of panic. Sometimes, as when her period started or she had an impulse to skip me for a night, she just didn’t show up. I had no phone number for her, no address, no true name, no hope of finding her in a city of twenty-three million in which maybe a million of the females were named Mei and the Mei I knew was almost certainly not named Mei. I waited another hour, spent repeating my memorization for the day (a passage from Laozi’s
Daodejing
)
into a recorder. By now I was hungry. Because I had no refrigerator, Mei always brought supper with her, collecting exactly my half of the cost before we ate, and since I had eaten the leftovers for breakfast, there was no food in the house. I decided to go out. It would serve Mei right if she arrived and found me gone, though I fervently hoped she’d hang around until I got back.

The night was almost as suffocating as the day had been. Chemical odors, so strong that you could almost see their colors, wafted on a sluggish breeze. The endless waves of humanity rolled by more slowly than usual. On this night they looked a little different, smelled a little different, as if wilted after a day in the glare of the sun. Something else was different—there were no familiar faces. I searched the crowd to make sure I had not missed them. They just weren’t there. Why? My watchers had been with me earlier in the day. They had never before deserted me. Had they decided I wasn’t going anywhere tonight, and gone home? Had they been replaced by a new bunch whose faces I would have to learn? Were they shadowing Steve? I felt a certain unease. Breath gathered in my lungs. Life as a spook under cover in a hostile country is nagged by the fear that the other side knows something you don’t know and cannot possibly know no matter how well you speak the language or how much at home you tell yourself you feel. You are an intruder. You can never be a fish swimming in their sea, you are always the pasty-white legs and arms thrashing on the surface with a tiny unheeded cut on your finger. Meanwhile the shark swims toward the scent of blood from miles away. At any moment you can be pulled under, eaten, digested, excreted, eaten by something else and then something else again until there is nothing left of the original you except a single cell suspended in the heaving darkness.

Oh so melancholy, and no Mei to laugh at me. However, the fact remained that I was hungry, so I set off into the night and walked, only half conscious of where I was going, until I found myself in front of a noodle place Mei and I liked. She called it the Dirty Shirt after the proprietor’s soup-stained singlet. I ordered a bowl of noodles and slurped them down. One doesn’t savor fast food in China, where everyone except the Westernized elite, seldom seen in this neighborhood, takes care of bodily needs as unceremoniously as possible and gets right back to business. I paid and left and went into another place a few blocks away and gulped a tepid beer. Still no sign of my watchers. When I emerged I saw a face or two I might or might not have seen earlier. I memorized these possibles and decided to take a longer walk to see if they were still with me when I got to where I was going. My plan was to travel in a circle that would bring me back to my building in about an hour. Because there was little elbow room on the street, I had to travel at the same speed as the shouting, spitting multitude in which I was embedded. Nor was there much chance of using shop windows as rear-view mirrors because there were few shop windows and most of them were dark. Now and then I crossed the street so I could look behind me, and sometimes I thought, though I did not really trust my eyes, that I spotted one of the suspects passing through the glow spilling out the door of the open door of an all-night shop. The street lighting on main arteries in this part of Shanghai was dim, and even dimmer in the side streets, which appeared as mere slits of darkness between the gimcrack buildings. I gave them a wide berth. The Chinese plunged into them as if they were wearing miner’s caps.

I was almost home when they—whoever they were—made the move. Two men in front of me slowed their pace, the two on either side moved in and seized my arms. They were big fellows for Chinese, not as tall as me but solid meat. There were four of them until suddenly, as I stepped back, thinking to make a break for it, I realized they were six as the two behind me moved heavily against me. I felt a mild sting in the vicinity of my right kidney, then the heat of an injection. I lurched as if trying to break free. The phalanx squeezed in tighter. I might as well have been nailed in a box and there was as little point in shouting for help as if I really were in a coffin. I began to feel faint as the injection took effect. Would it kill me? It seemed possible. I was losing my senses one by one—first to go was touch, then hearing, then sight, and finally taste as my tongue and lips went numb. I could still smell.
How odd,
I thought in the instant before I lost contact with my brain. In Afghanistan,
the last time I thought I was dead, everything stopped at once.
I had never imagined that there might be more than one way to cease to exist.

I smelled cigarette smoke. But I was still in darkness, still in silence, still blind. I felt motion, bumps, mild pain as my kidneys jounced. I began to hear—a whining motor, the sound of the bumps coming quickly one after the other, as if water were slapping the bottom of a boat. I was lying on my back. I was conscious but not really awake. Opening my eyes I saw darkness, spotted with moving green lights and red lights, and the stronger glow of small white lights. Finally I smelled water—foul water. I
was
on a boat, the boat was moving, I saw stronger lights sprinkled along the shore, heard tinny faraway music and knew the boat was on the Yangtze. Otherwise my mind slept on. I tried to look at my watch and discovered that my hands were bound. Also my feet. If I was taking inventory in this way I must be alive. I wasn’t sure.

In Shanghainese someone with a tenor voice said, “He’s awake.” The tone, somewhere between
la
and
ti
on the diatonic scale, surprised me—a deeper, gruffer timbre would have suited the situation better. Somebody kicked me in the ribs, not really hard but hard enough to make me grunt. This person bent over me and opened my eyes with his fingers. I smelled his breath, cabbage and tofu. My clothes were wet. They smelled of filth. I wanted to urinate—proof positive that I lived.

In American English the tenor said, “Are you awake?”

I wasn’t sure I could speak, so I didn’t try to answer. My eyes remained open. He said,
“Wide-
awake?”

He and another man stood me on my feet. I fought to keep my knees from buckling but did not succeed. The tenor said, “Oops-a-daisy,” and tightened his grip. I staggered toward the gunwale. They understood I wasn’t trying to escape and helped me. I vomited over the side. Now that I was fully conscious the water smelled even worse. In the thin light of the stern lantern I saw or hallucinated drowned rats and other nasty things churned up by the prop. The Yangtze smelled like something that had been dead for a long time.

The tenor held a bottle of
maotai
to my lips. I took a sip, then spit it out. He said, “Better now?” His voice was pleasant, his manner easy. There was just enough light to identify him by race (Han), but not enough to make out his features. He sounded like he had grown up in Southern California. His family must have been in Orange County a long time if nineteenth-century baby talk like oops-a-daisy came to him so naturally. The boat bucked. I staggered. The tenor grabbed my arm and steadied me. No special effort was made to restrain me. There was no need. The only move possible for me was to topple overboard into this running sewer with my wrists and ankles chained together.

The tenor put the cork back in the
maotai
bottle and handed it to the other man. Then he said, “You’re pretty relaxed. That speaks well for you, given the circumstances.”