Through a cotton wool of pain and confusion Thomas Stratton watched David Wang again at his desk, again with the album in his delicate, thinker's fingers.

But it was not David. Not even the dulling ache in his skull would allow Stratton to believe that. There was no cup of jasmine tea at David's elbow.

Instead, a coil of rope, serpentine and menacing, lay on the scarred old desk.

There was no crackle from the old fire or soft glow from a desk lamp, only the rattle of an old-fashioned kerosene lantern perched anachronistically in one corner.

David Wang did not sit at his desk. David Wang was dead.

At David's desk, defiling his memory, his goodness, sat his brother. His murderer.

Stratton would have sprung but for the bonds that held him, hand and foot, to the old Harvard chair.

"He was a fool, my brother," Wang Bin said. "An arrogant, intellectual romantic, a superior being who lived in a cage of his own making-too smug to come to terms with reality. No, reality might have been disordered, unpleasant, and that would never do, would it? Of course not. Best to ignore it, then. A fool… but you do not agree, Professor Stratton?"

"What are you doing here?" A wounded plea. Stratton barely recognized his own voice.

"I could tell you I came for sentimental reasons. David told me about this place, and what it meant to him. And all you see around you in this room, Professor, are the memories of a childhood we shared. I could tell you I came here to see all this, to taste these old memories… but that's not the reason."

Wang Bin eyed Stratton. "There is a more practical reason for me to be here."

"Let's hear it."

"Soon enough, Professor." Wang Bin walked slowly around the desk. Knots bit into Stratton's flesh. He would break the chair. It was only wood.

Stratton saw the punch coming out of the corner of an eye; there was nothing he could do. A knobby fist smashed into his cheekbone. Stratton tasted blood.

"My brother," Wang Bin said calmly, "was a fool who could see the truth but chose to ignore it. Even as a child he was a sanctimonious fraud. One year older he was, that is all. Is that a century? Does one year bestow wisdom? Ah, but how David loved to play the elder, he the superior and I the inferior, the ignorant younger brother. My mother and father, they were fooled by him, like everyone else…

"Once I broke a vase, a beautiful Ming vase. It sat there on a polished wooden table, beautiful and ludicrous. And I broke it, perhaps even intentionally. I smashed it into a million pieces." Wang Bin paused, with a curious smile. "Like all children, I was afraid of what my parents would do. So I told my mother that a deliveryman-an old man who brought fresh crabs to the house-had carelessly broken the vase with his sack. She believed me. But that was not good enough for my brother. He went to Mother and said, 'It was I, your eldest son, who broke the vase, Mother. Bin is only trying to protect me. I take responsibility.' Did they beat him? No, of course not. 'What an honest boy you are,' they said.

"And did David then beat me, or mock me to show me,how much braver he was? No.

He never said a word, nothing, as though by making me wallow in my shame I would drown. Just as he never said a word to me those days when I would skip my piano lessons and come back only to find him playing my exercises, so that downstairs my mother would hear it and think how dedicated I was, just like my elder brother."

Stratton said, "Why are you here?"

Wang Bin sat down once more at the desk. "We have time for that, Professor, plenty of time."

Stratton worked the knots at his wrists. "So you were a jealous little brother," he prodded. "That's your explanation."

"For murder?" Wang Bin seemed amused. "No."

"How could you hate him so much?"

"I am not sure I did. Not at the end." His voice was level, emotionless. "The day finally came for my big brother to leave for the United States. How sad was my mother, how proud my father. All the servants wept, and I wept, too. I wept for the joy of it, Professor Stratton. He was gone and I would be the elder son.

My parents thought I wept from sadness. How I fooled them! My father took me aside and said, 'Bin, do not weep. You must be strong and brave like your brother and in another year, perhaps two, you will join him to study.' I never would have gone. To follow him. In anything. Never. How little my father understood of me, or of China.

"When my mother left for the Revolution I joined her instantly. Here was something my brother could not do, or my father. To fight a revolution. War is very exciting, Professor Stratton. Do you remember how the skin tingles, the senses race? I was barely sixteen-imagine, not yet sixteen!-and I would call my soldiers and say, 'Comrades, we must take that bridge. The people's struggle demands it.' And they would say, 'Yes, Comrade,' and they would march with fifty-year-old rifles into artillery and machine-gun fire. They would die unflinching, uncomplaining, with a mindless zeal that someone like you would admire. I loathed their stupidity. And I loathed the Revolution, too. Loved and loathed it.

"It should have been a bright dream, a dream so great my brother could never have known its like. Instead it was a theater of the absurd. 'Yes, Comrade, we will go off and die because the people demand it.' Is it heroic to roll in the mud like a pig when you can be clean, or to march through snow in bare feet when you can ride? It was a peasant's revolution. The peasants won. And ever since, in their bungling, they have disgraced the heritage of the nation with the most splendid history of all.

"The imperial times! The dynasties! That was when China was great. That is when I should have lived." Wang Bin spoke with a trace of sadness. "In the times of the emperor."

"You'd fit right in," Stratton said. "A greedy old man who murdered his brother for profit."

"My brother. My brother."

The thumb and forefinger of Stratton's left hand were mobile now, and with them he feverishly worried the knots.

" 'Dear elder brother,' " Wang Bin recited in mockery. " 'I think of you often after all these years, so many miles away. I should like to see you before I die. It would be wonderful if you could come to China… ' "

"And so he came, with his cameras and his loud synthetic clothes. 'You must help me, brother,' I said. 'I must leave China for reasons that you would not understand, and I must take with me what is my due.' I showed him my treasures in Xian. He stood beside me and looked at them."

"Clay soldiers, that's all."

Wang Bin stared at Stratton scornfully. Through the heavy drapes a gust of wind rattled the windows and Stratton heard the sudden assault of rain on the glass.

He used the sound to mask his movements, tilting the chair just a fraction to give his feet greater purchase against the ropes.

Wang Bin said, "The soldiers are toys for children, a pittance. In Xian I showed my brother the real treasure. Even he was left speechless by its majesty."

" 'You must help me,' I said to him. 'With the soldiers we will have enough money to live in splendor wherever we choose. I ask but two things of you: That you allow me to hide you here in China so that I may leave the country on your passport. After two weeks you have only to go to your embassy to say that you lost your passport, and they will give you a new one. Then, once we are together in the United States, you can help me recover the soldiers and sell them. Is that too much to ask of a brother, after all these years? Help me, please. I have lived more than once as a peasant. I cannot live like that again. I will not.' "

"You should've known what his answer would be," Stratton said.

Wang Bin nodded. "He said, 'It is wrong what you are doing, it is a crime. I cannot help you.' " The deputy minister shrugged.