A Death in China (17 page)

Stratton saw without seeing the red-starred flag that hung limply from the building. He saw a chimney thrusting unnaturally from among the trees and knew without knowing that it belonged to a homespun woodworking factory that made grapefruit crates and slatted folding chairs. He saw a glint of water through the trees and knew that, except in the rainy season, the river that flowed there could be safely forded by men five feet ten or taller.

Stratton groaned aloud. In an instant of black despair, he cursed the luck that had forsaken him in rags among Chinese pines.

He rose to run.

Before him stood Kangmei. Smiling at her side were two erect, honey-colored men of late middle age with the same subtle, alluring facial structure that Kangmei had inherited.

“Thom-as,” Kangmei said gravely, “these are my uncles. They will help us.”

They were Zhuang, members of a race more Thai than Chinese that had settled in the southern hills in the mists of time. The Zhuang survived in modern China as the country’s largest minority. Kangmei’s mother was Zhuang, her father, Wang Bin, a member of the majority Han. The combination was what made her so striking. Stratton should have realized it before.

I know all about the Zhuang. They taught me that, too, Stratton wanted to yell, and wondered about his sanity.

Kangmei stared in open-mouthed concern.

“Thom-as! What is the matter? There is no danger. These are my uncles. They—”

“What is the name of this fucking place?”

“Thom-as!”

“Goddamn it. Tell me.” He took an involuntary step toward the girl and the two peasants closed around her.

“I told you. We live in Bright Star.”

“That’s not the right name. I know. Tell me in Chinese.”

The two peasants began talking angrily. Kangmei interrupted them with a stream of local dialect that seemed to mollify them.

“Thom-as, I have told them that you are feverish and hungry and very tired. But you must be polite to them, please.”

“I’m sorry.” Stratton grappled for composure. “Tell me the real name, please. I want to hear it.”

“We live in Bright Star,” she said slowly, as though instructing a slow child. “Over there is Sweet Water, and there, Good Harvest, and there, Evergreen. Why is it so important?”

“And the place in the middle? Where the factory is, and the water tower?”

“That is where the cadres live, and some soldiers. It is not important. Our people go there only when they must—for Party discussions, to buy shoes and bicycle tires.”

“What is it called?”

“It is called Man-ling.”

“Man-ling, yes, Man-ling. Oh, sweet Jesus.”

Stratton sank to his knees and buried his head in his hands. The peasants’ hostility surrendered to concern. Kangmei sprang to his side.

“Thom-as, do not weep. Come, you will be safe. My aunts will cook special food. There is a warm bed and a doctor for your leg. Yes, a doctor … you can trust him. He is a friend of my uncles’. Come, please. It is not far to walk.”

“I can’t. I must not.”

“Please, Thom-as. Please. Soon there will be too many people. Already there are rumors about things that happened last night … Please.”

“No. No. No,” Stratton muttered in an anguished litany that was a warrior’s penance.

He was too weak to resist when Kangmei and her uncles levered him to his feet and led him blindly down the gentle hillside into yesterday.

The general came late.

He had lunched too long—a farewell banquet for a retiring colleague: sea cucumbers, suckling pig, whitefish, pigeon, shark’s fin soup, tree fungus for dessert, and torrents of mao tai. The colleague, eighty-four years old, a Party militant for nearly half a century, had never cracked a smile.

The general rebuffed chastising glances from the two civilian members of the tribunal with a short nod and settled noisily into his padded chair. He spared hardly a. glance for the gray-haired man disintegrating before the prosecutor’s tongue-lashing. He thumbed briefly through the docket on the polished wood desk before him. The man was a musician of some sort.

The general did not know him. He ignored the stream of accusation and thought of his own son. The surveillance reports were quite concrete: The boy had been meeting foreign journalists, hanging out at the International Club, perfuming his hair, reading Western magazines. He had even, apparently, bedded a diplomat. The general would not have minded that, but the omission of the diplomat’s name, nationality and sex—certainly a calculated omission—could mean only the worst.

The young fool had been a mistake from the beginning, a winter child by the general’s third wife when he was already fifty-seven. The boy had inherited his mother’s looks, but not a scrap of common sense. He wanted to study in the United States. In the dawning Chinese political winter he might as well declare his intention of walking on the moon. The general dozed off, deciding that the boy would have to go into the army. If he let the Public Security Bureau have him, the boy’s mother—another mistake, she cackled like a chicken—would make the general’s life impossible.

” … compose and play unauthorized, bourgeois, decadent and immoral music.”

“Twenty-six. You are accused, during the visit of foreign guests, to wit, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, of playing foreigners’ instruments without authorization and of demeaning the prestige and honor of the People’s Republic by publicly suggesting that they were of a quality superior to those made in the People’s Republic … “

The general roused himself for the climax. When the prosecutor asked for life imprisonment, the musician fainted. The general watched expressionless. He had seen that before, and stronger men wet their pants. When guards had roused the musician and the president offered to commute the sentence to self-criticism and twenty years at a state farm in Qinghai Province, the idiot actually seemed grateful.

Qinghai, on the unforgiving Tibetan plateau. One of the loneliest, coldest, most savage places on earth. If he was still alive in six months, it would be a miracle. Soft-handed wretch.

When the president intoned “Qinghai” he looked over at the general with arched eyebrow, as though inviting an objection, a local joke. The prosecutor smothered a smile.

Silently, the general assented. He had never liked musicians.

After the last of that afternoon’s accused had been dismissed, the prosecutor summarized the results of the day before.

Normally, while the tribunal members smoked and sipped fresh tea, the prosecutor would report that all of the senior comrades given twenty-four hours to mull their fate had volunteered to accept lesser sentence rather than to contest the charges.

That afternoon was different. Head down, voice muted, almost embarrassed, the prosecutor began reading:

“The following comrades who appeared before the Tribunal yesterday have agreed to self-criticism and reform through labor: Wu Ping, Sun Liu … “

Surprised, the president riffled through the papers before him.

“Wait until I find the list, Comrade,” he demanded with raised hand. “Very well, proceed.”

When the prosecutor had finished—after repeating some of the names as many as three times to accommodate the president, whose hearing was not what it had once been—he remained standing.

Slowly, lips moving, the president read through the list of names he had checked.

“The list is complete except for Comrade Wang Bin,” the president said at last.

“Yes, Comrade President.”

“He demands a trial?” The president was incredulous.

“No, Comrade President.”

“What then?”

“I do not know, Comrade President.”

“What are you saying?”

“Comrade Wang Bin has not reported to the Tribunal within the time afforded him, Comrade President.”

The prosecutor was frantic. Such a thing had never happened before.

“Why has he not reported?”

“I do not know, Comrade President.”

“Where is Wang Bin, Comrade Prosecutor?”

“I do not know.”

“It is your job to know.”

“It is the job of the Public Security Bureau. I have asked them.”

“What do they say, idiot? What do they say?”

“Comrade Wang Bin is missing. He has not been seen anywhere since last night. There is no trace of him. The Public Security Bureau—”

The president surged to his feet with the sudden furious energy of a man fifty years younger. He slammed his fist on the desk, scattering papers and upsetting his tea.

“Find him!” the president roared. “Find him and bring him to me, Comrade Prosecutor. Do it now!”

The general belched.

They walked by the river, a nurse and her patient.

Stratton’s confidence was returning with his strength. He had slept for nearly twenty-four hours, a half-life in which he had grayly drifted around reality without ever reaching it: sober-miened women scrubbing him; a middle-aged man probing gently at his leg; wondrous soup, piping hot, that tasted of the earth and scissored through the pain. And the beautiful woman who sat by him, whispering reassurance. That, he would never forget.

When Stratton had at last surfaced, tears of relief belied Kangmei’s fixed smile.

He had reached out for her clenched fist and gently pried open the fingers.

“I’m all right. Really I am,” he had comforted.

“I was afraid, Thom-as. So afraid.”

Later, watching him wolf down a mound of rice with scraps of chicken, she had seemed like a little girl again.

“You must listen, Thom-as. To my mother’s brothers I have said that you are a good man who is being pursued by evil men; nothing more. They are simple peasants, but good, and strong. They will not betray you. To the rest of the people in Bright Star my uncles are saying that you are a foreign expert from Peking who has come to show us new ways to grow better rice. I am your guide.”

“I don’t know anything about rice.” Except what paddy mud feels like, wet, consuming.

“That is not important. When the people of Bright Star learn that you are our rice expert, they will not speak of you to members of the other production teams, or to the cadres at Man-ling. You will be safe then, do you not see?”

“I must not stay here, Kangmei,” Stratton had insisted weakly. “I must try to help David.”

“Yes, Thom-as. My uncles have cousins who work on the railroad. They think it would be possible to get you to Guangzhou.”

Guangzhou in Chinese. In English, Canton, China’s sprawling southern metropolis across the border from Hong Kong. Canton was still China, but from all he had read of it, the city was also a curious East-West hybrid infinitely more relaxed than Peking. In a teeming and sophisticated city where foreigners were no novelty, he had a fighting chance.

“Guangzhou would be fine.”

He slept again, and when he awoke it was midafternoon. Kangmei laughed when he tried on clothes smelling of strong soap that had been neatly stacked alongside the bed. The trousers bottomed out four inches too soon. The shirt went across his shoulders, but only the bottom two buttons would fasten.

“These are the biggest we could find, Thom-as. But you will never be a peasant. Come, let the people see their new rice expert.”

Along the river there was a kind of promenade, a path of beaten earth flanked by shade trees. Stratton smiled at the peasants they met and tried to look knowledgeable.

“This is the end of Bright Star,” said Kangmei. “Over there is Evergreen.”

She gestured to the far side of the brown river, flanked on both sides by steep banks. The water flowed swiftly and looked deep.

“And beyond Evergreen is Man-ling, right?”

“Yes.” She led Stratton to a spot where the promenade had been widened to include a graceful copse of palms. He sat beside her.

“This looks to me like Bright Star’s lovers’ lane,” Stratton remarked.

“I do not understand.”

When he had explained she smiled.

“It is true that many young people come here at night and that they do not always discuss politics.”

They kissed.

And then she asked the question that Stratton had dreaded.

“Why are you afraid of Man-ling, Thom-as?”

It was not so much that she deserved to know. To his surprise, Stratton discovered that he wanted to tell her.

“I was there once. In a war. While you were a child.”

She sat quiet for a time, tracing circles in the dirt with a stick. Stratton stared down at the river.

“Was it very sad, Thom-as?”

“Yes.”

“I would like to know.” She spoke to the stick.

He told her.

March 18, 1971

A black sergeant in plainclothes had brought the summons to the Saigon villa Stratton shared with Bobby Ho. An hour later, they were in a briefing room protected by concentric circles of invisible guards.

A squat, sweat-stained colonel abandoned an uneven struggle with a balky room air conditioner.

“Captain Black,” the colonel said, shaking hands with Stratton.

“Captain White. Congratulations.” The colonel gave Bobby Ho’s hand an extra pump. He had been a captain only for six days, but no one outside the room was even supposed to know that Bobby Ho was in the army. Deniability, they called it. Officially, Stratton and Ho were civilian psychologists on contract to the government: studying stress.

“Rested up? Everybody’s talkin’ about it.”

On the last one they had been close enough to see the lights of Hanoi.

“This one should be even more fun.” He passed across aerial photos. “The Chinks are involved in this little old war, up to their slanty assholes.”

“Who is that, Colonel?” Bobby Ho asked quietly. Stratton stifled a grin. Bobby Ho’s parents ran a pawnshop in San Francisco. They had raised their son to be an American, but there was no way you could tell by looking at him. Vietnam had intercepted Bobby Ho between Stanford and medical school. He wanted to be a pediatrician, and he spent a lot of his time and most of his money working with some French nuns who ran a clinic near the village. When the army made him White for missions that didn’t exist to places that were never named, Bobby Ho hunted with uncommon skill.

The colonel had the grace to color.

“The Chinese. The Chinese are teachin’ the Viets how to brainwash our boys. Remember what they did in Korea? I was there, man. The last thing you wanted to happen was to get captured by the Chin—Chinese. They turned people inside out; tell you Ike was a faggot and make you believe it.”

The colonel poked a pudgy finger at the aerial photos.

“What we hear is that the Chinese are trainin’ Viet interrogators in that building there in the middle of the picture. They got about a dozen of our POWs up there as guinea pigs.”

“Where is it—the village?” Stratton asked.

“Jesus, I just told you. It’s in China.”

“Shit,” said Bobby Ho.

“We supposed to go in and get them?” Stratton asked.

The colonel nodded. “Yeah, go get ‘em out and fuck Chairman Mao. Does that offend you, Captain White?”

“Not a bit, Colonel,” said Bobby Ho.

“What’s the name of this place?” Stratton asked.

“Man-ling it’s called. You guys see Joe and the boys. They got it all worked out, pictures, models, the whole shootin’ match, just like usual.” The colonel’s eyes assumed a faraway cast. “If it was me, I’d take about four gunships and hit ‘em so hard and so fast they wouldn’t have time even to find their little red books. That’s the only way to win this war, hard and fast. That’s how I’d do it, if it was me.”

Hot air. Stratton would write the operational orders and the colonel knew it.

“If it was you, I’d stay home,” said Bobby Ho.

They took one chopper off a quiet carrier high up in the Gulf of Tonkin. Stratton, Ho and four sergeants. Captain Black was traveling light. If he needed help, it was only minutes away in the air behind them.

For a landing zone, Stratton had chosen a paddy about three miles east of the village. He had wanted the farmland and the village between the chopper and the PLA camp that lay a few miles to the west. Intelligence said a regular infantry company used the camp. Intelligence had not said why it believed the nowhere village called Man-ling had been chosen to brainwash POWs.

They landed in driving rain and gusting wind, ankle-deep in water—killers dressed for the country in dark, rough civilian clothes without nationality. In the distance, at night, they might pass for peasants. Close up it would be harder. Stratton’s peasants bore a Russian AK-47, Chinese grenades, a silenced East German pistol, a Thai killing knife and a cyanide capsule. On his back, each man carried a folding bicycle. They looked superficially like Chinese machines, but were half as heavy and twice as fast. Stratton had insisted. A question of image: See a man on a bicycle and you assume he lives nearby and knows where he is going. He belongs.

The same reasoning had ordained the timing. It was midnight, and the helicopter would return one hour before dawn unless Stratton called earlier. They might have come later, but anything moving in the Chinese countryside between midnight and dawn would alarm sentinels accustomed to seeing nothing move at all. Even midnight was cutting it fine, Stratton knew, but he had not dared come until the village was asleep.

They watched in silence as the chopper clawed for the clouds on muffled engines. It was the seventh time Stratton had endured that particular parting. The seven loneliest moments of his life.

Even in the mud, the bicycles worked like a charm.

They were the only thing.

A sentry materialized, wraithlike, from the shelter of a tree about a mile from the village. PLA.

The sentry hollered something that was lost in the wind. Bobby Ho, riding point, head down, waited until he was within ten yards of the man, until the pistol would bear. He answered in Chinese.

Maybe the man had heard the helicopter. Maybe Bobby Ho said the wrong thing. The sentry coiled, unslinging his rifle. From their shelter by the tree, two more wet soldiers emerged. The six Americans slithered off their bikes into the mud like a satanic rank of marionettes.

It ended quickly, but one of the sentries managed a single shot. It ricocheted like flat doom through the blackness.

For five breathless, unbearable minutes, Stratton’s team crouched by the road, safeties off, ears aching, praying. No one came. The sentry had died in vain.

Bobby Ho tried to break the tension.

“These Chinks ain’t even tryin’,” he whispered in jocose mimicry of the fat colonel. It didn’t sound funny.

The single guard at the head of the village main street died in silence for his sloth. He must have felt the blade administered by a saturnine Puerto Rican named Gomez, but he never saw it. Stratton left Gomez and a fireplug Tennessean named Harkness to watch their back door.

They met the boy a few minutes later, creeping through such stillness and total absence of color it gave Stratton the eerie sensation that the entire village was a two-dimensional fantasy.

Bobby Ho flushed the boy from a pile of rags in the imperfect shelter of a shop doorway. Panofsky grabbed him, roughly clamping his jaw. The boy wriggled, a minnow in the maw of a shark. Stratton saw the knife come up and winced.

“Wait!” Bobby Ho hissed. “He can’t be more than twelve, all skin and bones.”

The knife wavered. Panofsky looked over at Stratton. Everybody knew the rules. It wasn’t even a judgment call. Stratton made it one. It was Bobby Ho’s play.

Panofsky’s eyes flashed with anger.

In a sibilant, harsh undertone, Bobby Ho tongue-lashed the boy in Chinese. Stratton watched the boy’s eyes: flat, emotionless. They showed intelligence, but no surprise, no curiosity. And most of all, no fear.

At length, the boy nodded. Bobby Ho stepped back.

“It’s all right.”

Again Panofsky looked at Stratton.

“Let him go,” Stratton said. Sometimes you break the rules.

The rag boy massaged his neck. With arrogance that could only have been inherited, he turned his back and stalked away, vanishing within seconds up an alley on pencil legs that seemed unequal to their sixty-pound burden.

“I told him we are on a secret training exercise with foreign friends, and that if he ever interrupts the PLA again, I will personally shoot him and everybody in his family.”

“I hope he believed you.”

“He believed me.”

Panofsky snorted. Bloomfield grunted. Stratton sent them up to the far end of the main street to share their scorn.

Lights burned inside an old movie house that now featured Mao slogans on its sagging marquee. Bobby Ho prised open a side door. They cached the Kalashnikovs in the shadow outside; assault rifles are useless for close work.

Inside, the building smelled of molding concrete, stale tobacco and rancid bodies. Wooden chairs, neatly arranged, filled the pit of the theater. Empty, every one of them. The stage had been divided into four separate rooms, each with double doors facing the audience. All the doors were closed. From behind one set rose a high-pitched monotone that gave Stratton goose bumps.

” … Delano Roosevelt … Harry S. Truman … Dwight David Eisenhower … John Fitzgerald Kennedy … Lyndon Brains Johnson … Richard—”

“Baines,” a deeper voice interrupted. “Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

The first voice resumed, a record returned to its groove: “Lyndon Baines Johnson … Richard Milhous Nixon … “

The voices were Chinese. Stratton looked at Bobby Ho, who gave an elaborate shrug. A teacher and his student. What else could they be?

Stratton gestured and Bobby Ho nodded. He would check the area around the stage and watch Stratton’s back.

The basement, intelligence had said. The prisoners are held in the basement. They are paraded upstairs for onstage interrogation classes.

Stratton found the stairs without trouble. He went down with a gentle rush until he came to a stout wooden door. He nudged it open with his boot and let the pistol precede him.

Blackness. Absolute. And a terrible smell: fresh soap thinly overlaying the smell of fear and anger. Stratton let a cone of light from his Czech torch play around the room, and came within a heartbeat of firing at a sound in the far corner. Two rats, red-eyed and territorial.

It took Stratton fifteen minutes to explore the basement thoroughly. Six cells. Stratton toured them, one at a time. In the fourth, scratched into the cheap concrete, a lover’s testament had survived its author: “Rick & Connie Houston ‘70.” With the leaden movements of an old man, Stratton visited the remaining two cells. In the last one, he found traces of blood the cleaners had missed. They had come too late. How long? A day? Two? Stratton would never know and never forget. He ran the back of his hand across his lips to moisten them and tasted ashes. He had only another instant to mull his disappointment.