A Drop of Chinese Blood (9 page)

This was all fabricated on the spot, completely made up. We didn’t have a fee schedule, none, not even close, and we had never charged anything like 135,000 yuan, for anything. It seemed to me to be overreaching—135,000 yuan is a lot of money; maybe not in Beijing or Kunming, but it is in Yanji.

“Very well.” The cherries returned to Miss Du’s lips. “I’ll have the money for you by tomorrow morning. I take it the fifteen thousand in that drawer is a down payment?”

“That will be fine,” my uncle said. “Before you leave, so I can get started with this right away, I need to ask—please don’t be angry—how do you know the body parts belonged to your father?”

“I suppose I don’t,” she said calmly.

“In that case, we’ll have to do some testing. That will cost more than a little, I expect. These laboratories are nothing but crooks. We’ll try fingerprints first. I assume there were fingers.”

Once again the cherries fled with the rest of her color. I felt sorry for her. My uncle stood up and walked around the desk to where she stood gulping deep breaths. He patted her hand gently. “Again, let me say I knew your father. Admired him.”

“A sculptor,” she said between gasps.

“We’ll speak in more detail tomorrow. Meanwhile, go home and get some rest.”

Don’t forget to swing by the bank while you’re at it, I added silently.

“My nephew will see you to the door. Do you have a car waiting?”

“Thank you, yes.”

The chauffeur was leaning against the front bumper. He gave me a sour face as I opened the rear door. As she climbed in the backseat, Miss Du looked into my eyes.

“I’m sure you have a lovely baritone,” she said. “Try not to lose it.”

Chapter Four

“Do you want the long or the short version? They lead in different directions, and I couldn’t tell you at this moment which one ends up in the right place.” We were sitting in the office after Miss Du’s departure. “I didn’t give you the whole story yesterday, but something about what we just heard makes me think there is a bigger fish out there than I first thought.”

My uncle nodded slightly. He was awake, I could tell, though his eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. There was no sense waiting for an answer beyond the nod. There wouldn’t be one.

“Good, go ahead and maintain radio silence,” I said. “I’ll give you the short version, because, frankly, it’s the one I’m more comfortable with for now.”

No change in breathing patterns.

“Since you’ll notice anyway, let me admit at the outset that I’m going to have to blur some of the detail.” Actually, I’d seen dead men breathe more deeply than he was doing now. “To save time, I may also skip over a few secondary points. The essence is as follows: Someone on this side of the river supplied, for a considerable sum of money, a phony state seal, which was somehow transported somewhere. Exactly where, unknown. Purpose? Unknown. But it was definitely forged, and that apparently has Beijing worried. Counterfeit state seals rolling around unchecked are not good for buttressing central authority, apparently.”

This, more or less, was the rest of what Li Bo-ting told me on our rain-battered walk to the tea shop on Dooran Street. Li had apologized deeply that he hadn’t been able to write down verbatim what had been relayed to him, explaining that was because there would be a
READ ONLY/NO FILE
note attached to the official message conveying this information once it arrived. Nevertheless, he’d scribbled down a few notes, and he passed them over furtively once we were in the tea shop. As usual, I didn’t ask how he knew this stuff or whom he talked to. Maybe he rubbed a lamp, I didn’t care.

As our tea brewed, Li said that while waiting for me to arrive at the office, he’d made a few quick, discreet enquiries. He’d been told that the seal was considered extremely important and that it needed to be found at all costs. When he pressed, the answers were sketchy and evasive, but he’d extracted the fact that this was an excellent copy of a specially made seal fabricated with a new casting method meant to ensure it could not be counterfeited. This superseal, as one of his sources called it, was intended to authenticate particularly important documents and agreements. Li told me he had rarely encountered so much difficulty getting details out of his network. When he complained, his sources suddenly remembered they were due in meetings and hung up.

In any case, I now knew that our office would soon be secretly tasked to locate and/or retrieve this phony seal. Locating it would be considered good work, but retrieving it would be looked on with highest regard. Much praise, albeit discreetly bestowed, would come our way. There was a strong suspicion, Li said softly, that one of the seals—whether the real one or the phony one was not clear—was on the North Korean side of the river. This grabbed my attention. Anything the North Koreans had that we wanted and managed to wrest away from them was considered a Class A operation. Whether the North Koreans were witting or their territory was being used as a parking place by another party wasn’t yet known, nor did it seem to matter. Getting the seal out of the North and back to China without an embarrassing incident would be a major undertaking. A successful Class A operation meant more than a vaguely worded plaque on the wall. It meant a bonus and a promotion, almost always to a post in a nice place with good weather and very little crime, or at least not the sort of crime that needed our attention.

I included none of this detail in the version I gave my uncle. These were threads he would pull on later, but he didn’t need to know about them at this point. If I even hinted at these additional angles, he would come to life in his chair and lift off like a firecracker, a state of agitation I couldn’t handle right now.

“That’s it,” I said briskly, “the short version.”

My uncle opened his eyes and raised his head. “Terrifying.”

“How about saving the snappy repartee for your dates with Madame Fang.”

“You related the version you said you’re comfortable with. I just meant I’d hate to hear the one that makes you uncomfortable.”

“In that case, your advice is what?” My uncle, I knew, was risk averse. This was a protective coloring he’d adopted in the course of his career, though it was clear from what he said occasionally and what I’d gleaned from questioning the few high-level North Korean defectors who crossed over in my sector that he wasn’t a coward. My father, who had risen through the ranks of the North Korean Communist Party, had hinted to me on a few occasions that his younger brother was exasperating. I tried but could never get a fuller explanation during the short visits he paid my mother and me once a year when he came to China on some official business he’d concocted in order to see us.

“You want my advice?” My uncle sounded a little surprised. I made a silent bet that he’d tell me to stay away from the whole thing. In his world, crisis avoidance was essential. Shifting your gaze, taking the long way around the park, meant survival. That wasn’t possible here anymore, or was it? Lots of people still thought it was an approach that worked fairly well. That’s how most everyone in Headquarters got there—avoiding trouble. Class A operations were fine for freaks who loved kicking in doors or jumping off cliffs. I didn’t enjoy either. There were plenty of exit ramps out of this problem. With no more than normal concentration, surely I could pass the case off to another district office. If need be, Li and I could choreograph a ballet to dance the whole mess to the Harbin Bureau, or better, maybe even down to Shenyang. The MSS office in Shenyang thought of itself as the queen bee of the northeast. Well, let them make honey out of this piece of paska.

“Nephew! Are you with us?”

“Sorry, uncle, I was thinking.”

“My advice is to stick this problem on someone else, your worst enemy if possible.”

Uncanny! The man had a knack for hitting the bull’s-eye when he wanted to. Forget Shenyang. What I really needed to do was to hang this around Shanghai’s neck. I barely had a moment to savor the notion before a dose of reality slunk into my fantasy.

“All of a sudden I have a sinking feeling,” I said, thinking aloud, “that this purloined, apparently phony government seal is connected somehow to the crackdown on corruption I’m supposed to engineer. It has that you-can’t-have-one-without-the-other feel to it. No evidence, just a hunch.” Actually, it was a little more than a hunch. The seal and the crackdown were part of the same conversation Li Bo-ting had with me, though he hadn’t directly connected the two, and neither had I at the time. “Anyway, let’s face it.” More reality flooded into the fantasy. “I can’t run away from this. Neither can you.”

My uncle looked at me with disbelief. “You have just enough integrity to get yourself killed. Where did that come from? Surely not from your father.”

Where my father was discreet in talking about his brother, my uncle was less so. At first it had bothered me, but gradually I realized he couldn’t help himself. The two of them had had a serious falling-out at some point, over what I didn’t know, and they never reconciled. Quite by accident, I’d first met Uncle O at the gravesite, a year after my father’s death. My uncle hadn’t known of my existence, and in the shock of meeting me, he made an effort to avoid criticizing my father. Even after moving in with me, he generally kept the poison in his heart to himself. From time to time, though, it overflowed.

“Let’s stick to the crisis at hand,” I said. “We can engage in relative bashing any old time.”

“All right.” He seemed momentarily subdued. “Go on, I’m listening.”

“Go on where? That’s all I have, the whole thing, soup to noodles.”

“No names? No clues as to official positions—because officials are surely implicated? Nothing on how much money was involved, how the money was transmitted, what bank it ended up in, and most important, whose account?”

“I’ve already thought of that. You know I couldn’t give you such information even if I had it, which I can say with a straight face because I don’t have any answers yet. A lot of questions, but no answers. It was a considerable sum, that’s all I’ve been told, and I’m willing to bet that’s an accurate estimate. If it hasn’t already been taken out and laundered, it will be soon.” If it was in a Swiss bank, I was determined to refuse to go there to get it back. I had no desire to be on the same continent with the cream puff prince.

“No need to bet how much it’s worth. A state seal like the one you described is worth plenty, even if it’s phony. Especially if it’s phony. And your source?”

“Meaning?”

“You have one, obviously. “

“I don’t know what I have.” The only source I had was Li Bo-ting, and I wasn’t about to give him away, not even to my uncle. Bo-ting did not deal in half-truths or whispered innuendo in dark alleys. Somehow, his information was always good.

“You don’t know the source? Hopeless.” This was just needling to get me mad enough to defend myself. It was standard interrogation procedure, and for once I was ahead of him. I smiled. He looked at his watch. “How about a bite to eat? Have we made progress on getting a new cook? Sooner or later, we need something beside noodles.”

My uncle knows detective work, and he knows his noodles. What the connection is, I have yet to figure out. He knows noodles no matter the shape or size, noodles with chicken, noodles with beef, noodles with pork, and noodles with shrimp although he turns up his nose at the latter. He knows rice noodles, wheat noodles, long noodles, and short noodles. He is particular about noodles and fussy when he is around them, probably because he eats them all the time. He told me once that in his career he had learned a lot of tactical intelligence sitting in noodle shops. People let down their guard around noodles, he said.

“Since when don’t you like my cooking?”

“In a perfect world, I’d turn up my nose at it, but you’ve kept us alive this long, so I’m not complaining. That maid of yours was insufferable, but her noodles were not all bad.”

We had a drawer filled with scraps of paper containing the names and phone numbers of prospective cooks. We had interviewed several, but all had been unsatisfactory. “They cannot cook,” my uncle growled after watching each one walk out the door. “I can tell, just by looking at them, the way they slouch and pick their teeth. They aren’t cooks, I don’t care what they call themselves.”

2

At work the next afternoon, I slouched at my desk and let ideas chase each other around the room. None of them were particularly good, but I had to try something. I picked up the phone.

“Get me all the reports from Handout.”

“They won’t tell you very much.” The woman in charge of the files in the converted billiards room always said that. She had no faith in the vast amount of paper she collected, collated, registered, and found eternal resting places for in the floor-to-ceiling shelves of our Certified Level 1 vault. She had one of the two keys to the special lock on the heavy steel door. I had the other.

“I appreciate your optimism. Bring them in here, and bring a pot of tea from the kitchen, too.”

Half an hour later, Mrs. Zhou wheeled in a basket piled high with folders. “These are everything on Handout in the vault. They go back fifteen years, more or less. The gold leaf from the ceiling is starting to flake onto the files, incidentally. It isn’t good for the paper.”

“Fifteen years. Amazing.” The whole damned building was falling apart. Gold leaf from the ceiling wasn’t so terrible. Maybe we could sweep it up to sell for extra operating funds.

“There should be more folders in this case file. We’re missing six years, something like that. They were checked out and never returned.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know.” Mrs. Zhou was in her late fifties. She was stooped, never smiled, and had speech patterns that set my teeth on edge. Her cadences didn’t help things in that regard, nor did her voice, which crashed against the walls of the big rooms. To top it off, she had a Fujian accent. Even when she was all the way across the office, her voice carried like the ghost of a fishmonger loose in the old hotel. When she spoke, I shuddered.

Mrs. Zhou had been in charge of various MSS file rooms for thirty years. She was in place before I arrived, and would probably be there after I left—after we all left. She was a permanent fixture in the bureaucratic universe. On gloomy days, I concluded that when the world ceased and heaven blew to the other side of nowhere, Mrs. Zhou would make a file marked
THE END,
which she would put on the lowest shelf so she could reach it later.