When Rank spoke again, his voice was alert. “We’ll go, then?”
the empty hallway with its tall, transomed doors reminded Lindstrom of school—of sneaking out of it, anyway, in the middle of the day. In the shade of the building’s front porch, Rank paused to remove a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. A man pushed by with a cart full of soil that smelled of animal urine and loam, the spoked wheels crunching softly on the path; Rank acknowledged him as he carefully lit his pipe.
“When Falstaff—” Lindstrom began—“you know, the Brit came to see me, he said I’d be taking the subject through Shanghai. At first I thought . . .”
Rank exhaled a plume of fragrant gray smoke. “Burling’s there,” he said, shaking out the match.
“I thought for some reason I’d be taking the dissident south, out through Canton, or Hong Kong, Macao, maybe even through ’Nam.”
“It bothers you that Burling might be back in Shanghai.”
“Look,” said Lindstrom, “I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I didn’t think I was strong enough to look back. Wanted to, even. But still, he and I have a bad symbiosis. I’ve often noticed it in men who have loved the same woman. We’re like opposite sides of a coin.”
Rank bit down on his pipe and the stem made a fracturing sound. “A bad penny, perhaps.”
“No shit.”
“Well, I assure you that I only know Burling through Charlotte, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I take it she’s involved?”
“Only marginally. In the event of a problem.”
“It could fucking well be a problem for her if Burling gets hip.”
Rank scuffed his toe in the path and moved ahead with a lurch. The people—Quakers, judging from the schoolhouse design—who had built the original compound had planted a boxwood hedge that joined the corner of the building to the compound’s outer wall; its leaves had yellowed in the heat.
“You have to understand,” Rank said, indicating a break in the bushes with his pipe. Lindstrom followed him into a neat, sandy garden, girded by evergreens. Lily pads floated like grease on a tiny, black pool; pocked gray rocks hugged the shore. “The people who run this thing are powerful and very, very careful. They all have other lives.”
“And me with only this one,” Lindstrom said.
Rank’s eyes strayed beyond the stand of trees, caressing the new building where the students still sheltered behind the glass. “When they first approached me, more than ten years ago, they wanted to hide dissidents here at the Center. After Tian An Men, they had more than they could handle.”
“But they’ve gotten others out, right?”
“Dozens, yes. Do you know Wei She?”
“Won some kind of literary prize in England several years ago. It was very controversial.”
“The Chinese wouldn’t let him come, then before they could arrest him, Wei disappeared. Showed up in London three weeks later, protected by MI-5, to accept the award.”
“Then what’s the big deal? Yong hasn’t won any prizes, as far as I know.”
“Indeed not.”
“Tomorrow night, then, after I visit my grandfather’s church, I get into my Mao pajamas and make like a peasant. Keep my eyes peeled and walk this guy out. It can’t be heavier than north of the Parallel.”
Rank cleared his throat deeply and walked away a few steps, as if from a problem. Pale, chameleon-like shadows played between them on the ground. “It isn’t,” he began, turning around in a posture of appeal.
“You know you make a lousy spy,” Lindstrom told him. “You just haven’t got the cool.”
“Did Burling?”
“Burling had something else.”
Rank gave him the sly, quizzical look that had passed for philosophical during the war, then moved toward the high, mildewed wall. Lindstrom was surprised to find that he still believed it—Burling had something that he, Lindstrom, lacked. It wasn’t just April—neither one of them had really had her.
“This dissident is somewhat more difficult than the others, for different reasons,” Rank said, stopping before a bench that was splattered with birdshit. “That’s why they arranged for him to hide in Anhe for a while. Your grandfather’s church is the most important stop on their underground railroad. It’s why I thought of you.”
“What do you mean by difficult, exactly?”
Rank made a show of checking his watch. “I think you should go now,” he said, extending his hand like an usher. “The same cabbie who met you at the airport will drive you, but still the road isn’t good, and it will take you until nightfall to get to Anhe.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Lindstrom said as Rank brushed past him. They were met outside the garden by the sharp smell of marigolds. “What did this dissident do?”
“Oh, the usual things. It’s more where he was that seems a problem.”
“Was?”
“Yong went to the States once,” Rank said, “as a visiting physicist.”
They were almost to the gate, and Lindstrom grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “A physicist, as in bombs?”
“It only means,” Rank added, shrugging him off, “that he had some ties in the government at that time.” He swallowed, and the gray whiskers rippled down his neck.
Lindstrom waited while his heart wound down, poking at the bottom of his throat. “Didn’t it ever occur to you, Alan, that a physicist might have drawn more attention than, say, a poet like yourself?”
“We needed a point man,” Rank said. His hand was reaching in the inside pocket of his jacket, and Lindstrom stifled an urge to defend himself.
“I was the lag man, not point.”
“Speaking of which.” Rank’s hand reappeared with a white linen handkerchief, wrapped around the dark shape of a pistol. “We thought you might need this,” he said, folding back the hemmed corners. In the middle of the grease-stained linen lay a familiar blue-black .45.
The grounds of the Center were as quiet and still as a schoolyard in summertime. After a moment, because Rank didn’t do anything, Lindstrom took the automatic in his hand. The feel of the stubbly grip was like the touch of betrayal, the touch of joining, and he thought that this was how he had always been: the world was there and when no one moved to take it, he did, because something was missing inside him. What does it profit a man? his grandfather had said.
“Couldn’t you have gotten me a Chicom or something?” It was a joke, a communist weapon grunts had coveted in Vietnam, and Rank’s failure to laugh was unnerving. Lindstrom dropped the clip out, checked its spring with a growing recognition, and replaced it; the click of the mechanism threatened to let out the unruly laughter that was flapping like a bird in his chest.
“It’s your own piece,” said Rank. “See?”
Pulling back the slide, Lindstrom peered into the chamber. The bird in his stomach grew calm, as if it had seen the smiling shadow of the hatchet. “What kind of shitty business is this?” he said. The pistol cocked with a grim resignation, and he pointed it at the small white indentation on the tip of Rank’s nose. “Is this some kind of performance incentive, two bullets missing from the clip?”
Rank shrunk back against the gate. Lindstrom sighted on a knot in the splintered wood beside him, and back to Rank’s forehead. “I didn’t know about that.”
“You didn’t know. You damn well knew I wouldn’t agree to this once