We shall see, Singleton thought as he turned the go-kang around.
That is the wonderful thing about playing both sides of the board.
You never lose.
14
DIAMOND SMASHED the wall with his fist.
It hurt.
Examining his scraped knuckles, he cursed again. Two on one, a surprise attack, and the goddamn Chinese screw it up. At least they had the decency to get themselves killed in the process.
A jolt of fear sickened his stomach.
Hel is the real deal. You’ll have to find a better way to get to him.
15
SOLANGE CAME through the door.
Nicholai got up and helped her put the groceries away.
Haverford noticed the little domestic tableau and it worried him. Due to the previous night’s attempted assassination, they had accelerated the schedule for Hel’s departure. He’d mastered the French dialect, absorbed everything they’d given him in an amazingly short time, and recovered his fitness. It was time to move, and he didn’t want his agent balking now because he’d found love. Although, he admitted, what man wouldn’t fall in love with Solange?
“Did I interrupt something?” she asked.
“No,” Nicholai answered quickly. “Haverford is just dropping off a file for me to read.”
He stressed the “read” to let the American know that he didn’t want to be “briefed” anymore and was capable of digesting the file himself.
Haverford smiled. There was always a power struggle between an operative and his handler; it was to be expected and even encouraged. He was glad to see Hel’s emerging assertiveness — confidence was a good thing in an operative. To a point. But the wise handler knew when to negotiate, when to insist, and when to yield.
“I was just leaving,” Haverford said, getting up from the table. “The croissants were, as always, très délicieux.”
“Merci.”
After Haverford left, Solange turned to Nicholai and asked, “Does it bother you?”
“What?”
“That I was a prostitute.”
The question surprised him. “It is an honorable profession in Japan.”
“It isn’t in France.”
“I’m not French,” Nicholai said. “There’s nothing about you that I find to be anything but a delight, a joy, and an honor.”
Solange came into his arms, kissed him lightly on the neck, and said softly, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
“And I with you.” His words surprised him as much as the actual emotion, something he had not felt for years, something he had taught himself never to feel again. It had been his experience that anyone he loved went away, usually through the portal of death.
“Je t’aime; je t’aime; je t’aime.”
“Je t’aime aussi,” Nicholai said, delighted to hear the “tu.” “But what are we going to do about it?”
“Nothing.” She sighed, her breath warm and moist on his skin. “There is nothing to do about it except to love each other while we have each other.”
They went into the bedroom to do just that.
Nicholai got up while she was still sleeping, went into the kitchen, and found a can of green tea hidden in the back of a cupboard. There is no reason, he thought as the water heated, that Michel Guibert could not have developed a taste for excellent green tea during his years in Hong Kong.
When the water boiled he poured it into the pot, waited a minute, then stepped outside and poured it onto the ground. He repeated the process, then poured the water in for the third time and let it sit, recalling the old and wise Chinese adage regarding the steeping of tea: The first time, it’s water; the second time, it’s garbage; the third time, it’s tea.
Nicholai waited impatiently, then poured the tea into a small cup and sipped. Excellent, he thought. Refreshing in a way that coffee, no matter how good, could never be. He took the tea out into the garden, sat on one of the stone benches, and listened to the water gurgle down the rocks.
Just last night, he thought, I killed two men here and now there is not a trace, as if it never happened. And in a sense it didn’t, in a true Buddhist sense this life is just a dream, a samsara of false perceptions that we are somehow separate from any other being or entities. In killing those men I died myself; in my surviving they live in me. I fulfilled their karma, and they mine. It will be the same with Voroshenin.
The Russian’s karmic consequence had been a long time coming.
Over thirty years.
Nicholai wondered if Voroshenin even remembered, or if he did, even cared. Probably not, Nicholai decided.
Do you even want to go through with this? he asked himself.
True, the Americans are offering me a vast sum of money, a passport, and my freedom, but the temptation is to go in and wake Solange, pack a few things, and run where they cannot find us.
But where, he asked himself, would that be?
You have no passport, no papers, no money. Where and how far could you run if you couldn’t get out of Japan? And in this closed, tight society, where could two round-eyes hide? And for how long? A few weeks, at the most optimistic assessment. And then what? Now that you know the identity of the target, the Americans would have to terminate you.
And Solange, too.
They’ll believe you talked to her, told her everything. While it is usually true that what you don’t know can kill you, in the topsy-turvy world in which I now exist, what you do know can kill you just as easily. If Solange knew the identity of my target, she could be in serious danger.
So there you are, he thought. She is a hostage to your actions.
I cannot allow another person I love to die.
I couldn’t bear it.
But can you do it all? he asked himself. Assassinate Voroshenin and still have a life with Solange? Is it too much to ask in this world?
Perhaps, he thought.
But he decided to try.
Solange came out of the bedroom and into the garden. Her hair was charmingly tousled, her eyes heavy and still sleepy.
Nicholai put the file on his lap and closed it.
“We are keeping secrets?” she asked. “Don’t worry, I don’t want to know.”
She lit cigarettes and handed him one. “I don’t care about whatever men’s business you and Haverford are cooking up. In the end, there is only food, wine, sex, and babies. That’s all anyone really cares about. The rest of it? Silly male games. Go play. Come back and give me a baby.”
“I would like that,” Nicholai said. “Very much.”
“Good. I want to get dinner ready.”
She kissed him on the forehead and went inside.
Nicholai went back to studying the file. He couldn’t have cared less about Voroshenin as a human being, assuming a fact not in evidence, but was deeply interested in him as a target. As such, it was necessary to know how his mind worked — his likes, dislikes, his habits.
In addition to a predilection for sadism, the man also drank, perhaps to excess. But all Russians drank. Nicholai doubted there was a vulnerability there.
The file suggested that he also liked his women — no surprise to Nicholai. Could that present an opening? Possibly, but the “new” Beijing was famously puritanical. The Communists had closed the brothels, and most of the professional mistresses had fled with the Kuomintang. If Voroshenin had a woman in the city, he would keep her well hidden — which suggested possibilities — but would also keep the arrangement very secure.
What else?
Voroshenin played chess — again, most Russians did — but apparently quite advanced, as one would expect. He liked to eat well, he knew his wines, and had developed in his years in China a taste for Beijing opera.
That was about it.
Nicholai closed the file.
16
SOLANGE WAS AWAKE when Nicholai came into the bedroom.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” he said.
“I know,” Solange sai
d. “I felt it.”
He lay down beside her. She rolled over, laid her head on his chest, and he put his arm around her. “I’ll come back for you.”
“I hope so.”
“I will.”
When he went out the door in the morning, she had only one word for him.
Survive.
Outside, a maple leaf detached from its branch, flickered beautifully in the sunlight, and then fell.
Part Two
BEIJING, JANUARY 1952
17
BEIJING WAS Freezing.
The north winds swept down from the vast Manchurian plains and coated the willows, their branches already bending under snow, with a sheen of silver ice. The sun was a pale yellow, a thin disk in a pearl sky.
Nicholai stepped out of the train station and took a breath of the freezing air, which bit into his lungs with a burning sensation. He pulled the collar of his Russian coat up around his neck and wrapped the scarf around his neck.
The street was virtually devoid of traffic save for a few military vehicles — Soviet trucks and American Jeeps liberated from the Kuomintang. Most people were on foot, the luckier few struggled to hold bicycles steady on the snow as they bent low over the handlebars to escape the wind. A few rickshaw drivers picked up arriving passengers and pedaled off with them, the back wheels slipping in the snow.
Then a long black sedan, its front fenders festooned with small red flags, emerged out of the snow and pulled up on the curb. A stocky Chinese man in a padded wool overcoat and a PLA cap with a red star on the front got out and walked up to Nicholai.
“Comrade Guibert?”
“Yes.”
“I am Comrade Chen,” the man said. “Welcome to Beijing. Long live the People’s Republic.”
“Wan swei.”
“Yes, we were told you speak fluent Cantonese.” Chen smiled. He gave the slightest emphasis on “Cantonese,” just to let Nicholai know that it was inferior to Mandarin, the preferred dialect of government. “You lived in Guangzhou, was it?”
“Hong Kong.”
“Ah, yes.”
Silly games, Nicholai thought.
Endless, silly games.
“I will be your escort in Beijing,” Chen said.
“Escort,” Nicholai thought, meaning “spy,” “watchdog,” and “informer.”
“I’m appreciative.”
“Shall we get out of the cold?” Chen gave a curt nod back toward the car and the driver got out, took Nicholai’s suitcase, and loaded it into the trunk. Chen opened the back passenger door for Nicholai. “Please.”
Nicholai slid into the back of the sedan and Chen came around and got in on the other side. The car heater was working manfully, if futilely, against the intense cold, and Chen stomped his booted feet on the car floor. “Cold.”
“A bastard.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Nicholai asked, knowing that the answer would be “no,” and also knowing that Chen would appreciate a cigarette. He took a pack of Gauloises from his inside coat pocket and held it out to Chen. “Please.”
“Most kind.”
Chen took the proffered cigarette and then Nicholai leaned over the seat and offered one to the driver. He could see Chen’s annoyed look from the corner of his eye. Even in the “classless” society, there are classes, Nicholai thought.
The driver took the cigarette and, gloating, smiled at Chen in the rearview mirror, so Nicholai knew now that he was not terribly subordinate. A watcher to watch the watcher, he thought. He took out his French lighter, lit both men’s cigarettes, then his own. The car quickly filled with blue smoke.
“Good,” Chen said.
“Take the pack.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I have more.”
Chen took the pack.
Five minutes in the incorruptible People’s Republic, Nicholai thought, and the first bribe had been accepted.
Actually, Mao’s “Three Antis” Campaign to root out corruption among party officials was in full swing, and hundreds of bureaucrats had been summarily executed, shot in public displays, while thousands more had been shipped off to die slow deaths from exhaustion in work camps.
Nicholai noticed that Chen took four cigarettes from the pack and put them on the front seat for the driver. Prudent, he thought.
This was Nicholai’s first time in Beijing. He had been a boy in Shanghai, and that cosmopolitan city had seemed the world to him. The old imperial capital was so different, with its broad boulevards intended for military parades, its vast public spaces so open to the winds that it seemed almost meant as a warning of how quickly and completely things can change and how vulnerable one is to shifts in the wind.
Chen seemed a bit ahead of him. “You have never been to Beijing before?”
“No,” Nicholai said, peering out the window as the car pulled out onto Jianguomen Avenue. “And you, are you a native?”
“Oh, yes,” Chen said, as if surprised by the question. “I’m a Beijingren, born and bred. Outer City.”
In two blocks the street became Chang’an Avenue, the city’s main east-west arterial that flanked the southern edge of the Forbidden City, with its distinctive red walls. Nicholai could see the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao had stood a little over two years ago and declared the People’s Republic of China. He recalled from his briefing that Yuri Voroshenin was there with him that day.
Enormous plaques on either side of the gate read, respectively, “Long Live the People’s Republic of China!” and “Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World!”
“A small detour?” Chen asked.
“Please.”
Chen ordered the driver to take them around Tiananmen Square, which was a mess of construction work as it was being widened for even larger public demonstrations. Buildings were being torn down, the rubble removed or leveled.
“When it is done,” Chen said proudly, “it will hold over a million people.”
Many of whose homes had been torn down, Nicholai thought, to create space for them to publicly gather.
Beijing was an impressive, imposing city, created for the exercise of power. Nicholai preferred Shanghai, although he was sure it had changed as well. The China he had known was a motley of color and style — Shanghai was a center of high fashion — but the residents of Beijing in this time seemed almost cookie-cutter in their uniformity, most of them wearing the standard blue, green, or gray padded coats with baggy trousers and the same “Mao” caps.
Having negotiated Tiananmen, the driver turned north onto Wangfujing Street and pulled up in front of the Beijing Hotel, a turn-of-the-century European-style building, seven stories high, with three arched doorways and a colonnade on the top floor. The driver scurried out, retrieved Nicholai’s bag, and handed it to a hotel porter. The small middle-aged man struggled to heft the bag to the lobby, but spurned Nicholai’s proffered hand.
“He was the deputy mayor,” Chen grunted, ushering Nicholai past the porter. “Lucky to be alive.”
The lobby seemed a house of ghosts. Nicholai knew this had once been the European center of power in Beijing, where the Western barons of commerce lorded it over the Asians, and Chinese waiters scurried with trays of gin and tonics, whiskey and sodas as they endured the careless racism of the French, Germans, English, and Americans. It had been the same in Shanghai, but here — just a short walk from the Imperial Palace — it must have seemed even more insulting.
He was surprised that the Communists hadn’t simply demolished the building, leaving its painful associations in rubble, but he realized that the new regime needed a place to house its foreign guests. The lobby was clean but lifeless, scrubbed of any trace of decadence, devoid of the sense of luxury and privilege that it doubtless once possessed.
As life under capitalism was aggressively gauche, Nicholai thought, life under communism was deliberately drab.
The desk clerk, a young woman clad in the ubiquitous “Lenin suit” — a gray, double-breasted jacket with
a sash belt — asked for his passport and was surprised when Nicholai produced it with a greeting in Chinese, “Have you eaten today?”
“I have, Comrade. And you?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Room 502. The porter will—”
“I’ll take my own bag, thank you,” Nicholai said. He reached into his pocket for a yuan note to give the porter, but Chen stopped him.
“Tipping is not permitted in the People’s Republic,” Chen said.
“Of course not,” Nicholai said.
“Patronizing imperialist anachronism,” Chen added.
Quite a burden to carry, Nicholai thought, for a small gratuity.
The elevator ride was frightening, and Nicholai wondered when was the last time that the creaky lift had seen maintenance. But they made it to the fifth floor alive and Chen led him down the long hallway to his room.
The room was basic but clean. A bed, a wardrobe, two chairs, a side table with a radio, and a thermos of hot water for making tea. The attached bathroom had a toilet and a bathtub, but no shower. French doors in the main room opened onto a small balcony, and Nicholai stepped out and looked down on the front of the hotel and East Chang Street. To his right he could see Tiananmen Square.
“These rooms are reserved for very special guests,” Chen said when Nicholai stepped back inside.
I’ll bet they are, Nicholai thought. He would further bet that these rooms were also wired for sound to record every conversation of said special guests. He took off his coat, gestured for Chen to do the same, and hung both coats up in the wardrobe.
“May I offer you tea?” Nicholai asked.
“Very kind.”
Nicholai took two large pinches of green tea from a canister and put them into the pot. Then he poured the hot water in, waited for a few moments, and then poured the tea into two cups. Normally he would not have served tea made in the first steep, but he knew that fuel for heating water was at a premium and that waste would be considered offensive. He handed Chen the tea and both men sat down in the chairs.