An insistent horn snapped the reverie. Stratton levered up off the steps and strode into the parking lot. The passenger door of a tan Toyota opened invitingly. As he slid in, his gloom began to lift.
"I'm glad you changed your mind," he said.
Linda Greer smiled. She had changed into a beige shirtwaist dress, a fetching advertisement for her long, bronzed legs that scissored with a rustle of unseen silk as she expertly maneuvered the car into bike-laden streets.
"Usually when I say 'no,' it's because I mean 'no.' When I say 'no' and mean 'yes,' I am not above confessing my mistake. One look at your face in there, and I could tell you needed someone to talk to. And I am sorry about your friend."
He gave her a curious look, then settled back against the seat. She swung the car quickly around a yellow-and-red bus bursting with empty-faced workers on their way home, then pulled sharply behind a three-wheel motorbike spewing a noxious trail of black smoke.
"Ugh," Linda said. "And the Chinese wonder why the air is so bad."
They drove past the majestic Qianmen, once the front gate of a walled Peking.
Linda turned to enter the gigantic square named after the gate. Stratton's guidebook said it was ninety-eight acres.
"Postcards hardly do the place justice," Linda remarked. "You could land a plane in here."
In the vastness of the square, a handful of Chinese on their haunches nursed kites through the light summer air. The handmade kites-frogs and princes, fat fish, and a clever troop of tiny sparrows suspended from the same string-danced against the backdrop of the Forbidden City, the network of palaces that had housed imperial dynasties for six hundred years. On the left stood the stark white mausoleum where the rubber-looking remains of Chairman Mao lay under glass. Beyond the mausoleum rose the Great Hall of the People, more massive than majestic.
"The museums," Linda said, pointing. "History on the right, the Museum of the Revolution, appropriately, on the left."
"They're huge. You could lose an army in there."
"That's fitting, too. The people across the street"-she waved a cool hand toward the Great Hall-"they're perpetually worried about losing a country."
"Many things are sacred in China, of course, but not history. History is for rewriting. Take poor Emperor Qin. For centuries, history officially shat all over Emperor Qin." Linda pronounced it 'Tsin.' "He was always the example of the most savage dictator, a kind of Chinese anti-Christ. He was the nut who commissioned the sculpture of seven thousand clay soldiers to guard him in the afterlife. And he was the maniac who once ordered four hundred Confucian scholars buried alive because they wouldn't admit that he was smarter. Buried alive, can you imagine? But in the new history, that's all forgiven. Qin is the man who unified China and so he's a hero-rehabilitated two thousand years later.
And his celestial army is a national treasure. What the hell, easy come, easy go … Hey c'mon, Stratton, come back to me, huh?"
Normally, she would have had all his attention. Linda Greer was more than a passably attractive woman. Quick, witty, assured. Stratton had made a fool of himself over that kind of woman more than once. The setting she had chosen for dinner added to her allure, as she undoubtedly knew, as she tossed off crystal-clear Mandarin to a smiling waitress.
They sat on an ancient balcony overlooking a moat at the rear of the Forbidden City. It was, Linda had said, the oldest restaurant in Peking. The food, particularly a kind of shaved beef that was the house specialty, was superb. The fiery mao tai she had ordered when they arrived smelled like distilled sweat socks, but went down smoothly and kicked like a mule. The Great Wall white wine, heavy and a trifle too sweet, had initially doused the mao tai fumes, but, by the second bottle, subtly fanned them. Stratton should have felt mellow, but all he really felt was sadness.
"Tell me about Wang Bin," he said, in an effort to rouse himself.
"A year younger than David," Linda began. "A perplexing man. His pedigree in the Party-and that's what counts in China-is impeccable. Madame Wang, his mother, was one of China's earliest and most vociferous revolutionaries."
Stratton was surprised. "I knew that David's father was a man of substance in Shanghai, but I can't recall that he ever mentioned his mother."
"She was quite a lady. She had the two boys, and then gave herself-physically as well as ideologically-to the Revolution. In the early days, Mao and his friends could always be assured of a warm welcome at the Wang mansion on the Bund in naughty old Shanghai. By the time Papa Wang discovered his wife was more than a salon radical, it was too late. She had left and taken Bin with her. That must have been soon after David went abroad, because in the normal course of events Bin would have followed close behind.
"Madame Wang become the mistress of one of Mao's chief lieutenants. She actually made the famous Long March. And Wang Bin went with her, every step of the way, one of Mao's teenage soldiers. By the time the Communists won control of the country in 1949, Wang Bin was a distinguished veteran, an up-and-coming young man."
"Fascinating," Stratton said, as a mental light clicked on. "In another year, he might have gone off to school with David and none of it would ever have happened. And two years earlier that might have been David's story, too, although I can't imagine David raising his hand to strike even his worst enemy-if he ever had one."
"Like most of Mao's soldiers, Wang Bin's education had been shut off by war-although I guess most of them would never have had much schooling anyway,"
Linda continued. "Bin would probably have stayed in the army and become one of those semiliterate genius-generals that still run the armed forces, but Mama Wang took a hand. He entered the University of Peking and became a major figure in the Party there."
"That must have seemed pretty tame after what he had been through. What'd he study, theology?" It was a pale joke, but a joke nonetheless.
"Fine arts, if you can believe that. Of course, he didn't stay long. During the Korean War somebody remembered that he spoke English-for the past two centuries all Shanghai Wangs have apparently spoken English-and back into the army he went as an interrogator of captured Americans. After that, there were a succession of jobs, mostly Party positions of increasing influence, although he did have an occasional artsy job here and there. I guess that's what did him in."
"Did him in?"
"Yes, sir. In the mid-sixties, along comes the Cultural Revolution-you know, Mao's attempt to revive a revolution that was choking on its own red tape. It was incredibly destructive madness, of course, turned the Chinese universe topsy-turvy for nearly ten years. In the midst of it, Wang Bin just vanished.
Turned out he had been attacked by the Red Guards because he was an intellectual-crime enough in those days. He apparently spent four or five years slopping hogs in a commune out west. Didn't get rehabilitated until the mid-seventies."
"And now he's back on the track again."
"Well, not exactly." Linda Greer chose her words with care. "He is a powerful man. It looks as though his culture job is a kind of front for deeper Communist Party activities. He's rumored to have his own little band of enforcers to patrol his domain. You've heard about the political struggle that's going on around here, I'm sure."
"A little." McCarthy had given him a beginner's lesson. Stratton wished he had paid more attention.
"Well, as far as we can figure out, all the guys Wang Bin has ridden with over the past thirty years are being systematically shot out of the saddle."
"But not him," Stratton anticipated.
"Not him, at least not yet. Maybe not ever, who knows? He should be struggling for his political life and instead, while all sorts of political shit flies, he invites his long-lost brother to come from America-that certainly could be used against him-and spends all his time assembling an archaeological exhibit nobody but us cares much about."