“You heard nothing at State? NSC?”
In spite of himself, Burling gulped. He looked for space in the field by the road, in the sky, but found none. The stockade fences of a subdivision crowded his sight. “What about your man in Shanghai? Ryan?”
“A group has been smuggling dissidents off the mainland,” MacAllister said, ignoring the question, “taking them out using drug-smuggling boats and black market export shipments from Shenzhen. Sometimes they’ll throw the poor suckers on tramp steamers headed for New York, give the triads a shot at ’em. It seems to have started as a right-thinking venture, but someone got the idea there might be money in it. We’ve been trying to trace it back to the source for years, thinking it may be a way in, but every time we open the door, no one’s home. Organized crime in Hong Kong, those ancient import-export concerns in Taipei. We’ve even had the Bureau lean on the Chinatown gangs. Nothing. Where we’ve never gotten any help is the White House itself.”
“It’s gossip in Shanghai,” Burling told him, feeling the strength of some authority, “but one thing didn’t change between old George and Clinton and this one: the White House turns a blind eye.”
MacAllister leaned toward him, arm across the back of the gray cloth seat. The car was getting warm, bringing out a smell of cigarette smoke. Beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead. “I’m telling you, Burl, I’ve never seen it quite like this, and it’s worse since last September. They’ll do just about anything for money. I’ve got nothing against banks, but they’re a hell of a place to deposit your conscience.”
“The world is a fire sale,” Burling said, “and the wind seems to be turning in our direction. You don’t think that Rank’s man might walk into something?”
MacAllister arched his back and took a sporran flask from his jacket’s inside pocket. He tipped it back and exhaled. “Yong has disappeared, Lucius, gone from the house where we thought they were keeping him.”
Suddenly Burling felt the need of air. He lowered his window, but a yellow cloud of pollen blew into the car. The airport hovered in the distance like a pair of concrete wings.
“Gone?”
“As of five days ago, according to our man in Beijing.”
The driver offered him a bottle of water. He took a drink and looked away. An artificial lake marked the outskirts of the airport, the curving roadway lined with weak trees trained by guy ropes and stakes: the terminal expanding again. This had once been a magical place for him, the airport named after John Foster Dulles—who, as JFK said, had been secretary to the Chinese delegation to The Hague at the age of nineteen. If other families had homes in those places on the green signs—the suburbs, the cul-de-sacs and split levels, the flat green patches of backyards in northern Virginia—to remember, Burling, Amelia, Betsy, and Luke had this airport, its raw concrete and polished ramps and soaring buttresses, the mobile lounges prowling the runways like something prehistoric and futuristic all at once, dedicated by President Kennedy in a happier time. MacAllister’s driver lowered his window and plucked a ticket from the parking machine.
“Do you think Zu has him, or did he escape?”
“When you get back, pay a visit to Nanjing. Talk to Alan Rank. Or better yet, have your girlfriend do it.”
The car’s engine ground to a terrible idle, and Burling watched an elegant woman cross the asphalt. Sunlight shimmered on the back of her skirt as she gained the near curb in her heels. Something vaguely reptilian stirred in him—lust, love? He was tempted to think that the world ran on these things more than power or money. But he felt a more sinister force—love’s removal, its absence, betrayal—that was closer to him. The beautiful woman had stopped on the sidewalk to dig in her bag.
“Where will I find you if I need you?” Burling asked.
MacAllister was smiling: the look of a shabby operation to be dealt with somewhere else. The driver clicked open the electric locks.
“Don’t you fret,” MacAllister said, massaging Burling’s shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but he seemed to feel through Burling’s diminishing muscle for his bones.
Taking his suitcase, Burling passed behind the woman through the terminal doors.
Li xin pedaled his bike along the boulevard beside Temple Park, his shadow fleeing before him on the plum-colored wall. A bus swayed dangerously close, belching smoke in his face, and Li swore through the windows at the forest of torsos and arms. The traffic was bad for a Saturday, and he had to meet his general at the Beijing Hotel in forty minutes; before that he had to deliver his daughter to the home of his mother-in-law in the city’s older section.
Qing rode in a child seat that was clamped to the handlebars, clutching a puppet resembling a hawk. As they passed the northeast corner of the park, she raised the bird so the breeze, sweet with flowering trees, caught its wings and lifted them gaily. Later that day, she was to take part in the annual puppet production at the Children’s Palace, the hall of culture where the most creative youngsters went after school each day to learn the sublime arts. The hawk was one of two main characters in the play, the other a lowly, scheming turtle. Children all over China would be acting out the same story during the upcoming week, an ancient fairy tale about the resilience of the Middle Kingdom, and Li was proud that his position allowed her to take part. As they entered the dark maze of hutongs, over which the painted rings of the Temple seemed to lean, Qing lowered the head of the bird and pecked playfully at his arm.
When Li had delivered her into the hands of his mother-in-law, the old woman’s slow face at the ready for another day of spoiling her grandchild, he was surprised to find that he still had time for a visit to the Friendship Store. The thought of English cigarettes, aromatic in their coffin of foil, drew him onward through the cooking smoke, the blood running in the gutter from the corner abattoir, past the warehouse of the vegetable collective with its affable white-coated workers lounging behind their cardboard stand. A PLA jeep sprinted past him, honking wildly, soldiers tottering in the back like barrel staves, either drunk or asleep behind their scanty mustaches and shades. Along the boulevard, block upon block of new apartments rose behind the powdered trees, painted balconies rising for story on story to the colorless sky. In a year the general would pull him fully into his circle; a year and they would leave his mother’s house and have their own place. Behind the sliding glass doors that led from the balconies, he imagined Qing’s room with her rows of little dresses in the wardrobe, posters of her beloved Mickey Mouse on the walls. The image buoyed his spirits, even as he passed beyond the apartments and beneath the smug gaze of the foreign hotels.
The day was warming, but his years in poorly heated apartments had accustomed Li to wearing a cardigan; now he felt sweaty, unpressed as he flashed his papers to the guards at the entrance to the Friendship Store and moved politely through the fat, perfumed Westerners and Overseas Chinese to the tobacco counter in back. The counter man, protected by his ranks of dark-leafed Cuban cigars, asked to see Li’s papers again and read them over with a dubious smile. As he handed them back, his expression seemed to indicate some complicity between them. As if he knew what Li had seen: the young people fallen, not like piles of laundry at all but flesh showing, thin stomachs and pelvic bones, skin unbearably modest in death. Among their bodies, the mangled tracery of spokes and chrome. As if the asshole had seen it . . .
Joylessly he paid the cashier and jammed the pack hard, again and again against the heel of his hand, smoking one cigarette after another as he cycled along the Dajie, fingers squeezing the handgrip so hard that his knuckles turned white. At the Beijing Hotel, he guided his bike past the taxis and government drivers, the vents of his tweed jacket flapping and coming to rest. The goat-faced Manchu, Feng, leaned against the general’s beige Toyota Crown, studying the grease beneath his fingernails.
“Where’s the Big Fish?” Li asked.
The driver accepted a Kingston and nodded slyly toward the lobby. When General Zu emerged, he seemed to spring from the revolving door, his short arms flapping at his sides. Feng was up the steps at a sprint, offering help with