The Black Cat Lounge, Rank had said, was like one of those places—three small, thatch-covered rooms of candles, round wooden spool tables, and sweating cement—that the two men had frequented in some of the grislier localities of South Vietnam. Set up in this instance as an exercise in entrepreneurial activity by Rank’s students at the Center for Sino-American Studies, instead of MAC-V, the Black Cat was a mixture of Bangkok and Berlin, dive and cabaret, but its terminal dusk had been startled by the morning. Sharp blades of light cut from the door into the anteroom, which smelled of hemp and rain. Wandering through the requisite beads to the barroom, Lindstrom found a sole American woman in the flush of her early forties, hip on the edge of a stool, discussing a pile of receipts with a Chinese man in a soiled apron and white paper hat. As she slid off the stool, she tried to place Lindstrom’s face with a worried expression.
“I thought word had got around,” she said, slipping her fingers around the bottom of her throat. Her reddish hair was swept up to the back of her head, and the dangling earrings she wore made her neck look unnaturally long. “They shut us down. The police. This morning. For health violations.”
Lindstrom had thought she was talking about his mission, and he swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat. His view of the kitchen did not contradict the police’s decision.
“I just arrived in country today,” Lindstrom told her. “Professor Rank had said I should meet him here.”
“Then you must be his friend, Jack.” She removed her hand from its clutch around her throat and extended it formally to Lindstrom. “I’m Charlotte Brien.”
“Johnny Tan,” Lindstrom said. Her hand was chapped, but strong. “Is Alan here?”
Charlotte Brien looked unhappy for a moment, and Lindstrom wondered if standards of cleanliness were the only reason the bar had been closed. “You must know him from Vietnam,” she said, brightening. “That would explain the ‘in country.’ Alan calls those his ‘Namisms.’ I sometimes think he has too many ‘isms’ mixed together, but then I wasn’t in that terrible war.”
“Neither was Alan.”
Charlotte peered at him sharply through the dimness, like a dog catching a whiff of something bad.
“Alan was with AID,” he explained. “Hearts and minds. Development stuff.”
“I’m with public diplomacy in Shanghai,” Charlotte said.
“At the consulate?”
She nodded—somewhat bitterly, he thought.
“Then I know your boss, Burling.”
“I’m a cultural liaison. I work very little with Lucius.”
“Don’t do the hard stuff, right?”
Her green eyes flashed as the cook reached down beneath the bar.
“No, no,” Lindstrom told him, surprised that he understood English. “It’s a diplomat’s expression. Hard stuff, soft stuff. Still, a drink might be good.”
“It sure would be,” Charlotte said with resignation, feeling her way back onto the stool. She kneaded her temples, and Lindstrom wondered what exactly she was doing here. Her pallor had the desiccated look of a perpetual graduate student, and he considered the possibility that Charlotte Brien was the genuine article, someone who believed you could change a bad country from the inside. In Lindstrom, it sparked a predatory mechanism.
“Sometimes this country makes me nuts,” Charlotte said.
“Did you prefer them as Maoists, rather than—what do they call it now—‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’?”
“That’s what the Party prefers.”
The cook poured something clear from an unlabeled bottle.
“Let me ask you something, then,” Lindstrom said. Accepting the drink, the heel of his hand stuck to the polished veneer of the bar. “We can be honest because we don’t know each other well. Friends of mine back home in California are offended that the Chinese haven’t stayed true to their principles. Since the Soviet Union went down, it’s a slam dunk for capitalism, and that bothers them. For me, I’ve found that being true to your principles can be somewhat . . .”
“Disastrous?” Charlotte looked at him knowingly and held the dirty glass up to the light. “For the young people caught up in the Cultural Revolution, or the Great Leap Forward, or any of Mao’s other lousy schemes, it certainly was.”
“I was going to say self-destructive,” Lindstrom told her, putting his empty glass down on the bar. The cook refilled it immediately. It had tasted like Jameson’s. “But that’s my own lousy trip.”
To her credit, Charlotte let his candor pass. “I’m not sure I understand you.”
“To put it another way, if you stay true to yourself, does it crowd out other people?”
For a moment, Charlotte seemed uncomfortable, as if he had given her a line. Then she started to laugh. Her laugh was musical, uninhibited by scorn. “Of course not, Jack. I mean Johnny. Boy, what a guy!” The drink was warming her, clearly. Maybe even unhinging her a bit. “Which one was it again?”
The sound of her laughter warped in his head; the liquor was turning on him.
“Johnny. Johnny Tan.”
“Johnny.” Charlotte reached out, took his wrist in her hand. “Being true to your nature connects you with other people, with history. Being true to your nature makes room.”
She was smiling, but Lindstrom pulled his arm away with a sniff. The predatory reflex came back hard and strong. “How well do you know Burling, anyway?”
“Lucius has been back in D.C. for the past month,” Charlotte said. She stared at him evenly, but her hand went to her neck again, and between the pale fingers he saw a spreading blotch of red. “I think I’d better point you in the direction of Alan. He must be wondering where you are.”
“I’ll leave you then,” Lindstrom said.
“It’s okay.” She picked up on his note of apology, and he wondered if it was genuine. “It’s just the wrong time for drinking and spilling my guts.” Her unsteady hand was pointing past him toward the door. “Alan’s over at the Center.”
The wedge of light from the door stabbed his eyes, and his head began to throb. The pleasant melancholy feeling he had carried from the airport turned into self-loathing.
“I’m sorry. Sometimes I can barely stand my own company,” he said.
Charlotte smiled across the room, recovering herself. He saw that she couldn’t help listening. That, and her ease in this alien country, reminded him of April, before his suffocating presence had made her compassion turn inward and burn itself out.
“Join the club. Two years ago, this was the center of the universe. Now no one even thinks about China.”
Perched on her stool, she seemed to preside above the waters of his discontent. He needed to leave before he asked her to go to the Jingling with him.
“The entrance to the Center’s just down the alley on the left,” Charlotte told him. “You’ll come to it before you even know it.”
Lindstrom left the bar like a scene from a parallel life.
outside, the hutong was cobbled and dusty; its sand-colored walls dazzled his eyes. Above the ruin of houses, the muggy air hung like a tent, scented with a sweetness that prefigured decay. A hundred yards farther, Lindstrom found the gate to the Center and pushed his way inside.
The compound was refreshing to his eyes: green muddy lawns and walks lined with