“Before he . . . left.” She paused, frowning. “He didn’t see you?”
“I never heard from him. Are we talking about the week of April 14?”
She considered that, drinking from her straw. “We are talking about Sunday, April 20, Xin Zhu. That’s the day he shaved his shoulders and went to see you.”
“But he didn’t come back?”
“Yes, he came back. He told me to stay with my mother. That’s in the real countryside. I left the next morning, Monday.”
Monday, April 21. That was the day Wu Liang picked up Bo Gaoli and eighteen others for interrogation. Zhu said, “Why did he tell you to leave?”
“He did that sometimes. He told me to stay with my mother if he had work to do. I’m a good wife, Xin Zhu. I didn’t ask. He was a practical husband; he never shared.” She frowned. “He didn’t see you?”
“No.”
“Then why did he shave his shoulders?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Hua Yuan.”
This seemed to disturb her more than anything else, and Zhu wondered about her sanity, wondered if anything could be taken as fact. Her husband had sent her off to her mother’s, and by the time she returned he was a corpse. Reactions to such a turn of events, he knew, were as varied as the species of fish. She said, “The maid had to clean the bathroom three times just to get all of the hair.”
“Perhaps he tried to get in touch with me, but couldn’t,” he said, then, suddenly remembering Sunday, April 20, nodded and said, “Yes. I wasn’t in Beijing that weekend. I was in Xi’an, and my phone had no reception.” It was a lie, for he had been in Beijing, in bed with his wife, and had allowed his phone’s battery to die. He tried not to think about how things might have turned out had he not been distracted.
But Hua Yuan had started on a particular train of thought, and it would take more than his little lie to derail her. She said, “I wonder how young she is. Could you find out?”
“Hua Yuan, I don’t think this is my business.”
“Don’t tell me what your business is, you ignorant shit,” she said, her steady calm tone making it hard for him to process the actual words. Then her eyes went wide and she pressed a fist against her mouth. “Oh. Comrade Colonel, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Zhu said, hands on his knees. “I only want to help, if I can, to unravel the mystery of your husband’s suicide.”
“A girl might be an explanation,” she said.
“Only if the exposure of an affair would be too much to bear.” He paused. “Would it?”
It was a question that hadn’t occurred to her. She thought about it, again catching the straw with her wrinkled lips. She released it and took a long breath. “Xin Zhu, I once met a man my husband had spent three days interrogating. It was here—our first stay in this place. This man was mad, you understand. I think it was the interrogation that had done it. I was here alone at the time, and he’d somehow gotten past the guards. He threw himself against our window, right there,” she said, motioning toward the large square framed in ivy. “He kept running at it until his nose and lips were bleeding, and when security came I went outside to see. The knuckles of his left hand had been smashed to powder—the fingers flopped uselessly when he waved them at me—and he was missing three toes on his bare feet. He told me, as they were taking him away, that my husband had done this to him, and that he wanted to be killed now. That night, when Bo Gaoli had gotten home from work, I asked him what this terrible man had done. He just sipped at his soup and said,
He did nothing. It was a mistake
. A mistake?” She cleared her throat, staring hard at that clean, clear window. “No, he wouldn’t have killed himself from shame, certainly not over some girl.”
Zhu’s hands felt too large. He pressed them together between his knees, then moved one to the arm of the sofa. “I see,” he said. “Then you don’t know why he would have killed himself.”
She shook her head abruptly, then said, “Of course, there was the money.”
“Money?”
“About three hundred thousand yuan. Kept in a shoebox right here, in this house. I found it when I was throwing out his clothes.”
Nearly fifty thousand dollars in a box. “You have no idea where he got that from?”
She shook her head.
“Did he travel a lot?”
“Certainly.”
“Alone?”
“Sometimes.”
“Within the region, or did he go farther? To the West, perhaps.”
Her gaze drew back from the window, and she focused on Zhu. “You don’t have this information already?”
“It would take time to track down,” he said, though the truth was that it would require requests to other bureaus that, by now, might not be willing to help a drowning man.
“He went to Chicago for a conference in November. We went to Paris together in June. That was the West. He visited Hong Kong a lot, for work.”
It all sounded normal for a man in Bo Gaoli’s position, even conservative. “Did Wu Liang ever talk to you about what happened?”
She smiled sadly. “He said my husband was one of the greatest administrators China has ever known.”
“Perhaps he was.”
She ignored that. “He told me that they found Bo Gaoli on Wednesday. He was hanging in the bathroom of our apartment on Wangfujing. One of his colleagues had come looking for him, and Wu Liang came by soon after—he was the first government official on the scene.”
“Before the police?”
She shook her head irritably. “There was no
police
,” she said. “For a man like my husband, suicide does not exist. In the newspaper, they called it a heart attack. Which now makes me wonder about everyone I’ve ever heard of dying of heart problems. Doesn’t it you?”
“It certainly does,” Zhu said with a sigh.
“They say that wives always want to know,” she said after a moment. “Of course we do. You love your man, or at least you believe you understand him, and if he chooses to kill himself, then you want to know. Guilt settles in. You come to believe that
you
did something wrong. But that’s not me, Xin Zhu. I don’t believe I was ever important enough to Bo Gaoli for him to kill himself because of something I did or did not do. I’m sad that he’s gone, but I’m old enough to remember a time when, in Shanghai, we avoided walking near tall buildings for fear that a suicide would land on us. You’re not old enough to remember those early years of the Chairman, but I do. Back then, simple fear could kill you. People were shockingly fragile, and you didn’t ask why someone stepped off a building. They simply stepped off buildings, and you made sure you didn’t get in their way.”
Zhu chewed the inside of his mouth to avoid replying, for if he began he feared the conversation would never end. He bowed his head to her and slowly rose, wanting to leave without another word, but a few slipped out. “Thank you, Hua Yuan, and I am nearly old enough to remember. However, times have changed, and sometimes asking questions leads, if not to answers, then to better questions.”
“Or to a grave,” Hua Yuan said, then offered her hand, limp, like a Frenchwoman awaiting a kiss on the knuckles. He shook it briefly, then let it go. At the door, she pointed out across the field. “We’re in a city of more than fifteen million people. You see how empty it all is?”
“Yes.”
“Our people have always known the value of a good wall.”
He stopped by the office to find that things were running smoothly, then drove home through the swirling sand of the descending dust storm and parked outside their tower. Most residents used the underground lot, but for the last week, since Monday, he had avoided it, full of the irrational fear of his car getting trapped under all those stories. He turned off the engine, and, instead of getting out, used his encrypted phone to dial a long number. The dust storm was thick now, and he could see very little—which meant that anyone outside the car would see very little of him.
It was just before seven, and, conveniently, Beijing was twelve hours ahead of Washington, D.C., which meant that his man in the embassy would be getting ready for the office. After three rings, he heard a man’s lilting “Wèi.”
“It’s been a while, Comrade Sam Kuo,” he said.
Silence. “Yes, comrade . . .” Sam Kuo faded, perhaps in the company of his wife. “Good to hear from you.”
“I trust you and the family are in good health.”
“Yes, I am, and they are, too. And you—you as well, comrade.”
“Sam Kuo,” Zhu said, “I’m in need of a little help. Do you think you could assist me?”
Later, when Sung Hui was telling him about a cousin on her mother’s side who was pregnant, he got up from the sofa and, taken by a feeling that was all too rare for a man of only fifty-eight years, kissed her neck, and then her lips. She gave him a soft smile and led him to the bedroom. As she crouched on top of him, nails digging into his soft, expansive chest, he wondered if Hua Yuan’s peculiar sadness had provoked this sudden desire, or maybe it had been that last minute of silence for the deaths in Sichuan.
No—it wasn’t either of those things, he realized as his wife’s long hair tickled his face. It was that he was fighting for his life again, sending out agents, plotting moves on the other side of the planet. He was engaged in the one thing he had ever had a talent for, and it filled him with anxiety, anger, sadness, and love—the entirety of human experience.
6
In the morning, he sent word to He Qiang that Liu Xiuxiu should visit a photo booth, then had Shen An-ling personally buy tickets on two separate flights to Washington, D.C., under names connected to passports they kept in their floor safes. For the rest of the morning, they discussed the little that Zhu had learned from Hua Yuan and the information Shen An-ling had collected on Leticia Jones. The story of Jones meeting Abdul Khalik could not be verified by any of their sources, but Wu Liang had helpfully sent the details of their meeting in a barren workers’ bar, originating from a low-level ministry informer: A black woman talking foreign-accented Mandarin to a long-haired man clutching tea, a man the source later ID’d from ministry mugshots.
Although Leticia Jones had evaded surveillance after the meeting in Georgetown, since Friday Zhu’s agents had been tracking the movements of Alan Drummond. There was little to report. On Friday, Drummond had lunch a block away from his Manhattan condo at the Parlor Steakhouse with a man named Hector Garza (that was the name he’d given the restaurant’s maître d’). A single clear photograph had been taken of the man as he exited the restaurant, but no positive match had been made yet.
“On that same evening,” Shen An-ling said, “he and his wife, Penelope, went to 203 Garfield Place.”
Zhu chewed his lower lip unconsciously. The last time he’d heard that address, he’d been in Berlin, saying it aloud to a Moldovan man whose daughter had been killed by the Central Intelligence Agency. “You mean he met with Milo Weaver.”
“It was a couples’ dinner, but the two men went to the roof for a private talk. We have no way of knowing what they discussed.”
“And Weaver?” Zhu asked. “How is he?”
“Remarkably well. Andrei Stanescu is a terrible shot. He damaged Weaver’s small intestine, but not critically. A week in the hospital. He’ll be fine.”
Zhu thought about that a moment before voicing his thoughts aloud. “We can be sure that Alan Drummond is sharing his plans with Milo Weaver, but I don’t think we have to worry about Weaver, at least not yet. If I read him right, he won’t be interested in anything but convalescing in peace. I don’t think he really likes his old employers.”
“Still, we should keep an eye on him.”
“Oh, of course! Not at the expense of Drummond or his coconspirators, though. What occupies him these days?”
Shen An-ling scanned the sheet in front of him. “Looking for a job, apparently.”
“Good man,” said Zhu. “Something quiet.”
A little after ten that morning, Xin Zhu left the office in one of his employee’s cars and took the Fourth Ring Road south to the G106, straight into Daxing District. He followed some basic evasive maneuvers along the way, changing direction by bumping over cracked medians and shuttling over to alternate routes before returning to the main streets, so that what should have been a half-hour journey ran more than an hour. Finally, he reached a street with rows of middle-class apartment blocks six stories high. He Qiang’s apartment was on the top floor of one of the central buildings, and in the elevator, Zhu tried to decipher two thick-marker scribbles on the wall, graffiti tags. It was a relatively new phenomenon in Beijing, something he’d heard complained about at too many parties, but inside this rusting elevator he had the feeling that they brightened up the drab, functional machine.
When He Qiang let him into the apartment, he found the television playing another Bollywood tearjerker, and Liu Xiuxiu at a typewriter, practicing some code He Qiang had been teaching her. All the lighting here was artificial, for He Qiang had closed the blinds.
Liu Xiuxiu ceased her typing and came over with her head bowed, wearing jeans and a thin white blouse. She looked surprised when Zhu reached out to shake her hand. Then she relaxed, going to make tea as He Qiang shut off the television. Zhu, looking at his agent, pointed at the ceiling.
“Our first lesson,” He Qiang said as he handed over four passport photos of Liu Xiuxiu. “We cleaned the whole place.”
“Anything?”
A shake of the head.
“Good.” Zhu settled on the sofa and waited until the tea had arrived, then watched Liu Xiuxiu serve it with the grace of a courtesan. “Please,” he said when he realized she wasn’t going to sit with them, and patted the sofa. She settled down beside him, and he spoke slowly. “Liu Xiuxiu, the first thing you should understand is that you are here because you are, I believe, of equal value to any of my agents. Or as soon as you’ve gained some experience you will be. So, thank you for the tea, but do not feel it’s your role here to serve us. That is not how I run my section.”
Submissively, she nodded.
Zhu turned to He Qiang. “You will follow her to Washington and act as her support. She will have to make decisions on the ground, and unless you know for certain that she’s making a decision based on false information, you will back her up completely. Understood?”