Whispering Shadows (12 page)

Michael announced the closure of the Aurora Metal factory in Wisconsin at a workers' meeting. He spoke calmly and matter-of-factly, like a teacher patiently explaining a math formula to his pupils. What surprised Richard Owen the most was that the workers' reaction was just as measured. No furious protests raged through the halls; no cursing, no shouting was heard. It was as if it had always been clear to them that the gates here would one day be locked, to be opened again ten thousand miles away. The China price was a law
of nature that only fools fought against.

Richard had stood next to his son fighting back his tears. He had not known how good Michael was at giving speeches. The resonant voice, the erect posture, the gaze directed straight over the heads of the workers at the silent machinery. The men had respected him, Richard. He had known many of them by name; they were the second, some even the third, generation of their families to work in this factory. He had not looked over their heads; he did not want to avoid their gazes but to look them in the eyes. He did not succeed. He had stared at the ceiling and the floor and his eyes had rested on the helmets, the blue overalls, and the fire extinguisher on the wall instead. The workers had expected a few words. He ought to have said something; he wanted to. But what? Michael had explained the China price to them. They had stood there silently, listened, and nodded. There had been nothing more to say. Richard had felt ashamed of his helplessness.

———

The noise of the train arriving back in Hong Kong drew him back from his memories. They walked out of the station onto the plaza, and he suddenly had the feeling that the ground beneath his feet was shaking. After identifying his son's body what else could he expect. And then there was the heat and the humidity, which pressed down on him in the open air almost like a physical force. If only he had the feeling that he and Elizabeth were in this together, but she had been so distant. No matter what his wife thought, he did not love Michael any less than she did, even though he and his son had fought often and hard, especially in the last few weeks. What did that matter? He had explained the reasons to Elizabeth, but she did not listen; she did not want to know anything about the dangerous games her son was playing in China. He had tried many times, had pleaded with her to speak to Michael, perhaps he would listen to her rather than to his father, but she had only shaken her head. He ought not to doubt his son and nag him constantly; he had always
done that before, so it was no wonder that Michael was resisting; he, Richard, should simply trust him more. After all, it was Michael who had pushed to invest in China, who had found Victor Tang and handled the negotiations with him, saving Aurora Metal.

Richard Owen felt his eyes growing moist and he swallowed a few times. Might Elizabeth have been right? Had he done his son Michael an injustice with his skepticism? No tears now, he thought, he couldn't let himself go, not in front of his wife and certainly not in public.

If only Tang were by his side now. Why had Elizabeth insisted that he not come? She liked him; she had always claimed to, anyway. Yet this morning, for the first time, she said that Tang made her uneasy, without saying why exactly. They had gotten into a fight about it, for if there was one thing—apart from the numbers, of course, which had showed the increased profits—that had persuaded Richard Owen that the decision to move production entirely to China had been the right one, it was the meeting with Victor Tang.

Their joint venture partner had impressed him greatly since their first meeting in the Regent Hotel in Hong Kong. Tang spoke perfect English, almost entirely without an accent. He had studied for a PhD at Harvard and had traveled a good deal through the States in that time. Over and over again, he impressed Richard Owen with his breadth of knowledge about American history. He was clearly fascinated by America, and knew more about its history than Richard Owen himself, and certainly far more than Michael did. The scheduled two-hour business lunch had turned into nearly a whole day, with a Chinese dinner followed by a visit to a karaoke bar, where they drank whiskey from Tennessee and sang Frank Sinatra's “My Way” together. No one in Wisconsin would have believed it. A Chinese national who could rattle off whole paragraphs from the American Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address by heart, who claimed that there was a spiritual connection between Deng Xiaoping and Ronald Reagan, and was even able to prove it with quotes. “Greed is good,” the American
leader had said, while the Chinese one had declared that “to get rich is glorious.” Both of them, Tang said, meant the same thing. He constantly emphasized that China could learn a great deal from America, and that it was finally prepared to do so, which flattered the Owens. “The American dream, Mr. Owen, is very much alive. It is dreamed and lived by millions of Chinese people, and their numbers are growing every day, believe me.”

And Richard Owen did exactly that from that day onward. He believed Victor Tang. He had looked him in the eye and seen a strength of will and a steeliness that was familiar to him. He had eaten and drunk with him and known that he could do business with this man, that he could trust him.

He missed him today in that cold, dark cave where all eyes were on him, where a man in blood-spattered overalls lifted a dirty cloth, where his wife stood by the entrance and looked at him as though he were the murderer; he had felt as alone as he ever had in his life.

It was Michael. Of course it was Michael. He had guessed, no, known it the whole time. What was wrong with his head? Why was a piece missing? My God, Michael, what have they done to you? You were right, I should have listened to you, but why weren't you satisfied with what we'd achieved? Why wasn't it enough?

For a moment Richard Owen thought he would explode. He wanted to scream and flail around him; he wanted to press his son to him and take him away, carry him out of this miserable tomb. To touch him, at least, stroke him one more time. But he had resolved beforehand not to lose control. No tears. Not there. Not in front of those strangers.

The China price. The words shot into his mind. The China price.

XII

Victor Tang sat in the back of his Mercedes 500, which was so new that neither his driver nor Victor himself, of course, had had the time to familiarize himself with the functions and details of its many buttons, switches, and fittings. Tang heard his chauffeur swear after he had pressed yet another wrong button. With a few brusque words Tang instructed him to turn the music up and to restrain himself; Chinese curse words did not go well with Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. “Louder, I said. And a little louder still.” The slow opening chords played from the four speakers crisply and clearly without the slightest jarring or distortion, and filled every last crevice of the vehicle. The engine could neither be heard nor felt; Tang felt as though he were sitting in a concert hall rather than a car. The interplay of the violin and the piano helped him to concentrate.

Richard Owen was worrying him. He had called him from his hotel in Hong Kong yesterday evening after identifying the body. His voice had grown shaky after a few sentences, and he had started crying, weeping bitterly. Tang's careful attempts to comfort him had been in vain, and Richard had simply hung up after a while.

Tang had not reckoned with this reaction, not after the conversation that he had had with Owen Senior the previous week, not after all the fights between father and son that he had witnessed in the past three years, which had grown more serious and embittered in the past few weeks. He was unsure of how to judge Richard's tears. He was either still suffering from the shock of the sight of his dead
son or old wounds had been opened. The latter, Tang knew from personal experience, would be dangerous.

He looked at the clock. In about an hour the chief of police, the party secretary of the police headquarters, the leader of the homicide division, and a few trusted employees from the mayor's office would be meeting him in his office. He wanted to emphasize to them once again that telling Elizabeth and Richard that the death was an accident was most definitely not an option. Elizabeth would insist on a postmortem in Hong Kong or America. It was murder and the case could not stay unsolved for long. Elizabeth would not let matters rest until the murderer was found and convicted. They needed a suspect with a plausible motive, and as quickly as possible. That shouldn't actually be very difficult after everything that had happened at the factory in the previous weeks. The longer the investigation dragged on, the greater the danger that the media in Hong Kong reported on the case and thereby alerted the Chinese newspapers to it, or the American embassy in Beijing got involved. Diplomatic representatives, possibly including an FBI detective asking awkward questions, were the last thing they needed now. The murder had to be solved today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow at the latest. In Shenzhen and in his home province of Sichuan there were only too many envious people who were just waiting to pin something on him to sully his reputation, who wished for nothing more than for him to make a mistake so that they could pounce on him, tear his little empire apart, and divide it among themselves.

The Mercedes came to a standstill with a gentle jerk. They were stuck in an impossible traffic jam on the Shennan Road. Furious broken chords sounded from the loudspeakers in the car.

Tang looked at the city's skyline, and got the impression, as he did every time whether he wanted to or not, that New York lay before him. Needless to say, he could not group these skyscrapers with those in Manhattan. Of course not. Shenzhen was not Shanghai or Hong Kong, but what they had created here from nothing in the past fifteen years, from a squalid and miserable fishing village, was
more than astounding; it filled him with pride. No one could deny that this skyline had a certain beauty. Especially not at twilight, when the somewhat monotonous buildings disappeared and all that could be seen was the endless sea of light, reminding him of the American big cities that had fascinated him on his earlier travels, like every sighting of something new had.

New York City. Manhattan. Fifty-Third Street, corner of Lexington Avenue. There were two days in Tang's life, which even today, decades later, were so present in his mind that he marveled at his memory over and over again, over its incredible capacity and precision. It made him a time traveler. Whenever he wanted, his memory took him back to that warm, cloudless day in the early summer of 1985, when he first set foot on American ground at the John F. Kennedy airport. He was there on a scholarship to Harvard, and had been chosen from several thousand applicants throughout China, sent by the government of the province of Sichuan. He had studied English, Economics, and Business Studies at Chengdu University, and was to further his studies with a PhD, get much-needed experience, and, after his return, help to turn a socialist planned economy into a free-market economy. Or at least into the Chinese version of one.

Victor Tang saw himself standing in front of Terminal 1 of the airport once more. He was alone and feeling so unsure of himself that he had difficulty setting one foot in front of the other. This uncertainty was more than the brief disorientation of a stranger who first had to get used to a place. It went deeper than that; it filled him with shame and it wounded him. He was a grown man who, at thirty-three years of age, did not want to feel as helpless as a child. Mixed with this feeling of shame was an indistinct rage; he did not know where it came from or what it was directed against at first, but it was to accompany him like a shadow over the next few years.

The provincial government had given him a meager allowance. In his jacket pocket was an envelope with five twenty-dollar bills; they had also provided him with a dark-blue suit, but it did not fit him, unusually tall as he was for a Chinese man from Sichuan. The
sleeves of the jacket did not even reach his wrists, and the trousers did not touch his ankles. They had not provided him with shoes in his size at all. His old footwear was so worn out that he would have preferred to go barefoot. He had barely noticed all this when departing from Beijing, but now he could not fail to see it. In these clothes he cut a ridiculous figure.

Tang had to get to Manhattan from the airport and report to the Chinese consulate there before the journey up to Harvard. He saw an endless line of yellow taxis and politely asked what the trip to the city would cost. At first he thought the man in the turban had not understood him correctly. The driver was asking for more money that his mother in Chengdu earned in a month. He would never pay such an amount for a car ride; he would rather walk into the city. The bus was also too expensive, so Tang did something that the consulate expressly advised its exchange students against: He ignored the warnings about attacks and took the subway to Manhattan.

He felt more confident on the subway. Among the many people with brown and black skin who were themselves unremarkably dressed and did not pay him the slightest bit of notice, his odd costume no longer stood out. The rumbling of the shabby old cars on the worn tracks reminded him of the pathetic condition of the trains in his homeland. At some point they disappeared into a tunnel from which they did not emerge, and Tang felt himself becoming a little dizzy. He clung to the silvery metal pole in front of him and hoped that he would soon feel better again.

The station at Fifty-Third Street was full of people. The confined space and the warm humid air in the underground station made his dizziness worse. The train platform was uncomfortably narrow. Tang made his way up the stairs, walked through a tunnel toward the exit, and pushed himself through a heavy door there. Outside, he took in several deep breaths, one hand holding on tight to the stair railing while the other clutched his suitcase. He walked up the subway stairs one step at a time. Just before the final step, he stopped and looked around him. He could not believe his eyes. His gaze passed
over the sidewalk, the streets, and lighted on a shopwindow full of bags and suitcases, moving up the building floor by floor toward the sky, higher and higher until he had to lean his head back on his neck to see the top of the skyscraper. He had never stood in front of a building anywhere near as high as this one.

Tang turned around in a circle like a child who could not decide which direction to run in. He walked down Lexington Avenue, turning left and right constantly, not knowing where to look first. Sometimes he simply wanted to stand still, but passersby jostled him immediately and their irritation and curses drove him. Aimlessly, he turned into Fifty-First Street and crossed Madison Avenue, then Park Avenue, in the middle of which flowers were blooming, and stumbled many times over fire hydrants and trash cans before finally retreating into the entrance of a building and gaping in amazement. He could not get enough of looking at the canyonlike but dead-straight streets with their traffic lights flickering red, yellow, and green reflected in the glass claddings of the towering buildings, of the many cars, of the shops filled to bursting with goods but with no lines of people outside them.

He felt his understanding of the world, constructed by so many people over so many years, dissolving before his eyes, hissing like a drop of water falling onto a red-hot surface. This was the moment in which his life took a new turn.

Tang understood that he had been lied to. For more than thirty years. Every day. From dawn till dusk. They had told him fairy tales. As a child, as a young man, he had given them the most precious thing he had, his trust, and they had exploited it. Where were they now, the teachers, the party secretaries, the great chairmen, and their many little helpers? What would they say? How would they explain this to him?

He had grown up believing that he was lucky to live in a country that was better than the rest of the world in every way. They did not have a great deal to eat but the teachers had often told him how much worse it was for the children in Europe and America, who
ran through the streets dressed in rags, their stomachs growling with hunger. In school, they had not had lunch for a whole week so that the poor children in America could have enough to eat for once. Sacrifice for America, the campaign was called! Starve for America! And they had done it! Eagerly and enthusiastically. With a secure sense of their own superiority.

He had trusted them when they had arrested his father, a loyal PLA officer, at the beginning of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution. There was surely something justified, thought Tang, about the party's accusations. He had trusted them when they had sent him to the countryside to learn from the farmers, when he had joined the Red Guards and they had to carry out the Revolution against bourgeois elements and outmoded thinking, defend themselves against revisionists and counterrevolutionaries, with violent measures if necessary. He had obeyed every one of their orders, not out of fear, but with the deepest conviction. Because he had believed them. Because he had trusted them. Now he walked through the streets of Manhattan and knew that trusting was for the weak. For people who did not have the courage to seek the truth for themselves. For people who lacked the strength to check things out properly, who were too cowardly to live with the consequences of lies. Those who preferred to believe rather than to strive for certainty. It was no longer for him. Victor Tang had wasted enough trust in his life.

Before he arrived in New York he had, of course, known that China lagged behind the West, the United States in particular, in terms of economic development and the standard of living. The Sichuan provincial government had prepared him for his journey: He knew all the figures and statistics, he had seen photos and read books. Despite that, this first sight of the streets of Manhattan struck him like a blow that he could not defend himself against. He was deeply disturbed by how little numbers were able to tell you about a place. Even words and pictures could not encapsulate the essentials.

The first months at Harvard had been difficult; at times, he had
not known how he would get through the day. The tranquility and the amount of space around made him nervous. The beauty of the old buildings and the elegance of the surroundings made him feel shy. Almost all the students and professors were extremely friendly and helpful to him, but he often found it difficult to accept their generosity. They invited him to dinner in their town houses, and he spent a few weekends in luxurious houses in the country. He told them about China and his audience marveled politely without really taking an interest in or understanding what he was describing. And how could they? Tang always felt uncomfortable at these dinners. He was the poor cousin; their generosity would not change that. On the contrary, it spelled it out anew every time. He was with them but he did not belong.

What saved him was his diligence, his intelligence, and his desire not to waste a minute that he spent there. He studied obsessively hard, as though there would be an exam that decided whether his family lived or died at the end of the period. He wanted to soak up everything to the limit like a sponge.

He had been forced to throw away the first thirty years of his life. Thirty years in which his American contemporaries had attended kindergartens, normal schools, and colleges. In which they had had time to play, to read what they wanted, and to study what was important to them. Thirty years head start.