A Death in China (9 page)

Then came small voices. Dozens of them crying; “Buzhen! Buzhen!” Stop. And then Stratton remembered: Bicycling is strictly forbidden inside the great square. Quickly he dismounted. He found himself in a sea of schoolchildren, dressed in blue and white uniforms with brilliant red scarves. They walked in formation, bright-eyed, singing, toward Mao’s tomb, stealing secret glances at the tall foreigner with the Chinese bicycle. The youngsters had stopped shouting the moment Stratton dismounted. He smiled apologetically and set a course for the ornate main gate at the far end of the square. Looking back, he no longer could see the limousine. Perhaps his escorts finally had given up.

“You, mister!” A young Chinese waved at Stratton. A plastic badge identified him as a guide from the China International Travel Service.

“Please no ride bicycle in the Square,” he said firmly.

“I’m very sorry,” Stratton said. “I am late for a train. Can you tell me which way to the railway station?”

The young guide pointed east. “Left at the Tienanmen. About five blocks.”

“Thank you.”

“Where is your suitcase?” the guide asked.

“At the train. I overslept,” Stratton said.

The guide eyed him curiously. “You need a ticket to enter the station.”

“It’s in my luggage.” Stratton waved, moving off. “Thanks again.”

“Is that your bicycle?” the guide called.

Stratton waved again and kept walking. His eyes fanned the crowds for a sign of the two cadres. The square was immense. Still, Stratton knew, he could hardly be invisible.

In the center of Tienanmen, at the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a class of teenaged boys listened to a political speech. Someone had placed a wreath of red and gold paper flowers at the base of the statue. The speaker paused briefly while Stratton passed, then resumed an ardent, high-pitched denunciation.

Finally, Stratton reached the treelined avenue bordering the end of Tienanmen. It had taken twenty minutes to cross the great square. He mounted the bicycle, praying that the train would be late in departing.

Pedaling quietly, he was absorbed quickly into the flow of traffic. The bright sun gave life to the brown buildings, and the trees shimmered green. Stratton’s heart beat cold when the big car roared up behind him. He was incredulous; the resourceful cadres wore their familiar expressions.

Recklessly, Stratton broke from the pack and veered south down a side street. With the limousine close behind, he raced through the Old Legation Quarter, gracious Colonial-styled embassies long since converted to warehouses, clinics, banks—buildings to serve the workers. And, between them, drab and monotonous apartment buildings, sterile and new, lifeless in the shadow of the Forbidden City.

He tucked the bike down an alley so narrow that his knuckles scraped against the flaking walls. The cadres merely circled the block and waited at the other end. Crooked Teeth tried to position the limousine to block Stratton’s path, but the American managed to skitter by, jumping a curb so violently that the basket snapped off the bicycle and clattered to the pavement.

“Stop!” Fat Lips cried in English.

But Stratton heard a train. He was back in the safety of traffic. Ahead, a busload of tourists turned south. Stratton followed. The railway station was but two blocks away. Another whistle blew.

This time it was the cadres who found a propitious side street. The railway-bound minibus passed, with Stratton not far behind. Crooked Teeth punched the accelerator.

By the time Stratton spotted the long black car, it was too late. The Red Flag clipped the bicycle’s rear tire. Stratton spun clockwise. He hit the pavement to the sound of glass tinkling around him. A headlight. Through half-open eyes he watched the twisted bicycle skid away, kicking up sparks as it bounced.

Stratton forced himself to his feet. He had landed brutally hard on his right shoulder. The sleeve was in shreds, and his arm was bloody. His left hand felt for broken bones.

“Now!” said a triumphant voice behind him. “Time for airport.”

Stratton lurched into a run.

“No, no!” Fat Lips scuttled back to the limousine. “Stop!” he yelled as Crooked Teeth started the car.

And Stratton did stop—when he got to the bicycle. The chain had been torn from the sprockets and hung from the hub of the rear wheel. He picked it up.

The limousine pursued with a needless screech of the tires.

Stratton stood motionless, his arms at his side. This time the cadres showed no sign of slowing down.

Stratton’s left arm shot up and windmilled above his head. The steel bicycle chain hit the Red Flag like a shot, and pebbled the glass in the cadres’ faces. The car weaved erratically through the cyclists, hopped the curb and parked itself violently around the trunk of a Chinese elm. The radiator spit a hot geyser into the branches.

Stratton trudged the last leg to the train station in a stinging fog.

“You’re darn lucky the train’s late. What happened to your arm? What was all that fuss back at the hotel?”

“Nice to see you, Alice,” Stratton muttered.

The group was gathered fitfully outside the entrance. There had been the usual delays. Miss Sun had gone inside to make the necessary inquiries. The Americans were outnumbered by large groups of Chinese travelers who waited patiently with cardboard suitcases. A crate of two hundred live chickens perfumed the air.

It was Weatherby who came up with a first-aid kit. Stratton was grateful for the disinfectant and bandages.

“What happened?” Alice repeated.

“I had a little bike accident.”

“You’re lucky it’s just a scrape,” Weatherby said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Stratton.

Miss Sun bounced down the steps. “Okay, we go now,” she said brightly.

Then she saw Stratton. “But you went to the airport.”

“No. I straightened everything out.”

“You come to Xian?”

“Yes,” Stratton replied. He knew it wasn’t what little Miss Sun had wanted to hear. She had pegged him as a troublemaker back at the hotel. “You have my ticket?”

“Yes, Professor,” she said, scanning the promenade for some sign of the diligent cadres.

“Then let’s go,” Stratton said.

Miss Sun led the way. Once inside the railway station, the art historians filed up a long escalator toward the trains. Stratton made it a point to be first.

The train to Xian was half full. As the Americans walked along the platform toward the soft-class cars, Stratton glanced up at the faces of the Chinese who were already aboard.

An old man with an elegant gray beard, squinting at the tourists. A plump matron with a baby on her shoulder and a toddler in her lap. A dour soldier.

And a stunning young woman with long black hair, tapping gently on the dingy window. Stratton smiled.

Kangmei.

From his private office in the national museum, Deputy Minister Wang Bin could gaze at the Forbidden City, a grand horizon, serrated by the gold-tiled rooftops of a dozen ancient temples.

His thoughts were sour. History taunted him. The architecture was inspired, ripe with passion. The city was full of such masterpieces.

But where did they come from? The ages, Wang Bin reflected sadly. The dynasties. Where could one find such imagination now? And, worse, how could it nourish?

The thin man in the stuffed chair waited until the deputy minister turned from the window. “I’m deeply sorry we were not successful,” he said in Chinese. “The cadres were clumsy, and their actions were dangerous. I would punish them but … ” He clasped his hands together.

“Both dead?” Wang Bin asked.

“One, yes. The other is badly injured.”

Wang Bin asked, “Did Stratton leave on the train?”

“Yes,” the thin man said. With nervous hands, he lit a cigarette.

“Liao and Deng are on their way to Xian?”

“The plane leaves in an hour,” the thin man reported. “Their documents are in order. No questions were raised. Officially, they are joining the inventory team at the tombs.”

Wang Bin rigidly walked to the sparse desk and sat down. His voice tightened. “This is very delicate, you understand, Comrade Xi? Stratton has put us in a fragile posture. He is no ordinary tourist, I assure you.”

Xi was soothing. “Deng is a trustworthy man. Have you ever known him to fail? In two days the threat will be gone, I am certain.”

“I hope so,” Wang Bin said, rising. “Now send in my visitor.”

“The embassy has sent Miss Greer. She wants to apologize formally for Mr. Stratton’s inconsiderate change of heart. They have even offered to send an American soldier back with the casket.” Xi grinned. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

“A thoughtful gesture,” Bin said sarcastically.

The deputy minister was halfway to the door when Xi reminded him: “Comrade, your mourning band. Don’t forget.”

“One of history’s most pathetic lines was uttered in this city,” J. Paul Prudoe was explaining. “It occurred in 1911, as the last dynasty, the Qing, was falling. The Qing were Manchu, of course, and the majority of Han people hated them as barbarian invaders. The Manchus imposed their rule in Xian with an army of occupation that occupied its own quarter of the city. When the people rebelled against the Manchus in 1911, there was a fearful slaughter. Many Manchus died. There was an English hospital here then and a few Manchus wound up there with dreadful self-inflicted wounds.

“An English doctor asked one of the wounded soldiers—his name is not recorded, alas—why he had attempted to slit his own throat. The soldier replied: ‘Because the wells were full.’ “

J. Paul Prudoe, erect in a stiffly pressed safari shirt and hair-by-hair perfect Van Dyke with an artful sprinkling of gray, paused for effect. He surveyed the room. Around him, twenty-three art historians waited expectantly.

” ‘The wells were full.’ Starting with the commanding general, an old man who realized that defense was hopeless, the Manchus had thrown themselves down the wells to avoid capture. The wells were thirty-six feet deep, and when they were full, a warrior’s only honorable escape was to slit his throat. Subsequently, of course, the city is famous for the so-called Xian Incident, when the Communists caught Chiang Kai-shek in a farmhouse during the Civil War, but let him go. During the last days of that war, the giant man-made hill—the tumulus of Emperor Qin, dead for more than two thousand years—was literally an armed camp, fortified with machine guns and snipers. How the muse of history must have smiled at that.”

J. Paul Prudoe was the envy of America’s art historians. He spoke with the zeal of a revivalist, the slick, contrived passion of a corrupt politician. His presence on the tour, tramping through museums and riding the buses like any ole AAH, was the celebrity magnet that had drawn so many of his nominal peers to China in the first place.

Stratton, slouched and alone at the rear of a reception room in Xian’s Renmin Daxia Hotel, disliked Prudoe’s showmanship as much as he despised his pop art scholarship.

“Now that I have your attention,” Prudoe went on, preening, “let me talk about the Xian that really interests us, or Changan, as it was called then.”

Stratton slurped his tea loudly enough to draw annoyed glances and an unspoken reprimand from Prudoe himself. Pompous ass. Stratton tuned out.

They had arrived before dawn, twenty hours from Peking. Twice Stratton had walked through the train looking for Kangmei. Twice guards had turned him back from the hard-class section of the train reserved for Chinese only.

But she had found him on the platform at Xian. They had shared a few quiet minutes in a corner of the terminal as the train disgorged its passengers with billowing steam and a slumbering pace.

“I have come to help,” Kangmei had said.

“But … “

“You want to know what happened to make my father fight with my American uncle. So do I. Alone you will never find out. I can help.”

“How? How can you even be here? Don’t you need a special pass?”

“Listen to me, Thom-as,” she said with sober, almost childlike earnestness. “In China, many things are possible for Chinese. Not for foreigners”—she tapped him lightly on the chest—”but for Chinese.”

Stratton smiled. She was proud of herself.

“China is the most wonderful land on earth, Thom-as, but it has been betrayed too many times. Everywhere there are old men who rule only because they are old, or cruel, or because they are friends of other stupid old men.”

The crowd on the platform was beginning to thin. From somewhere near the terminal entrance, Stratton heard a petulant woman—it could only be Alice Dempsey—in full bay. “Now where can he have gotten himself to?”

“The old men sit on the young,” Kangmei continued. “They are jealous because we have studied and they have not. They cling to power, betraying China and their own Communist ideals. These tired old men are everywhere, Thom-as. And everywhere there are also angry young people who believe in the New China. There are millions of us. We talk not to the stupid old men, not to the government, or the Party. We talk to one another. In Peking, in Shanghai, in Canton, here in Xian—everywhere. My friends and the friends of my friends. They will help me to help you.”

“Stratton? Ah, there you are. Will you come on, please? Everyone is waiting. How can you be so rude?” Alice Dempsey’s bray carried across half a hundred Chinese heads and echoed off the vaulted terminal roof.

Kangmei grabbed his arm.

“Go, Thom-as. In two hours, I will come to your hotel. Be ready.”

With an empty smile for Alice, Stratton had docilely ridden the bus to the tourist hotel.

” … at Ban Po, a few miles out of town, we will see a well-preserved village belonging to the Yang Shao culture from about 6000 b.c. Xian did not come into its own, though, until the third century before Christ. The famous Emperor Qin, who unified China and built the Great Wall, had his capital here. We’ll visit the new digs around his tomb east of the city … “

It certainly was something to think about, Stratton reflected. If anybody could actually harness the energies of the educated Chinese young people … no, “harness” was a bad word. “Unfetter” would be better. Unfetter the young millions, let them think and act and build without the constraints of a revolution grown old before its time. Would they yank China headlong, breathless and excited, into the twenty-first century, or would they produce some monstrous new revolution? The last time the young had been mobilized, it had been by Mao, and that little adventure—the Cultural Revolution—had cost China a decade of development and a generation of young people who discovered too late that being revolutionary too often meant being uneducated as well.

Two thoughts occurred to Stratton simultaneously. The first was that if Kangmei was willing to help him, then she was openly at odds with her own father. The second was more chilling than revealing: If Kangmei’s network of disaffected young people was any more than a nebulous and idealistic dream, if it had any form at all, any organization that posed the slightest threat to the state or to the Party, then it was only a question of time until authority in all its multi-bludgeoned wonder fell on it like a ton of bricks. Such was the historic international lesson of communism. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Democracy Wall, Solidarity …

” … successive dynasties built successive capitals in and around present-day Xian. At the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, Changan was a metropolis of over one million people, six miles square and girded by stout walls breeched by eight gates. The Tang palace was nearly a mile square inside the city and protected by a wall nearly sixty feet thick at its base. Enough remains to keep us more than busy for the two days we have.” An avuncular smile.

Stratton knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish in Xian. It had been his reason for not flying home with David’s body: He wanted to know what had happened between the two brothers and if, by any means, it could have led to David’s death.

Stratton must have sighed aloud, for it drew J. Paul Prudoe’s ire.

” … forest of steles, pagodas, pottery and a celestial army. Professor Stratton?”

Stratton stood up. “May I be excused, please, Mr. Prudoe? I have to go to the bathroom.”

He left the art historians to mutter at his insolence and walked out into the early morning sunshine. In the courtyard of the hotel, draped around the open door of a gray Shanghai saloon, stood Kangmei.

“Are you Professor Stratton?” The smile was dazzling. “Good morning, and welcome to Xian. I am Miss Wang and this is Mr. Xia. We are your guides. Please get in.”

The rail-thin Mr. Xia, it turned out, was a legitimate China Travel Service guide. That he was one of Kangmei’s young allies went without saying, for she too wore the same guide’s red identification pin on her white cotton blouse. Kangmei’s friend smiled a lot and spoke little, although his English proved to be quite good. Xiao-Xia, she called him.

Leaving the hotel, they drove through handsome, wide streets with little traffic. At one clutter of shops, Stratton did a double take. There on the sidewalk, in English, was a sandwich board announcing “Xian’s First Exhibition of Abstract Art.”

“I never saw anything like that in Peking,” Stratton said. Kangmei and the guide laughed. The third Chinese, the driver, was a lugubrious soul with sharp features. He gave no sign of understanding, no English.

“And you never will,” chirped Kangmei, radiant with excitement. “Abstract art—what would the old men say to that? That it was counterrevolutionary, of course. Here it is different. Remember, Thom-as, that the farther you get from Peking, the more relaxed are the people and the easier the rules. I would like to show you the south someday, where my mother’s family lives. You would think Peking was in another country.”

“There are fewer police here,” confirmed Mr. Xia, the guide.

They drove toward what seemed to be the center of the city, a giant tower that stood as a high-hatted civic sentinel.

“Where are we going?” Stratton asked.

“That is for you to decide,” Kangmei replied. “But you must see the Bell Tower. It is very old, very famous.” She gestured ahead.

“Once it was the center of the Tang imperial city, in about the ninth century,” said Mr. Xia in reflexive patter-for-tourists. “It was restored again after Liberation. From the second story, there is a fine view of the city—”

Stratton cut him off. “Kangmei, what I really want to know is what your father and your uncle fought about. I want to go to some of the places they might have gone together; someone might have heard something. I will see the sites of Xian some other time.”

“I see,” she said doubtfully, and lapsed into a lengthy exchange of Chinese with Mr. Xia.

“It will be difficult, Thom-as. There are so many places. And what do we say?”

“We say that I am a friend of the distinguished American brother of Deputy Minister Wang. Anything like that will do, and there can’t be all that many places. What exactly is your father’s responsibility here?”

She thought about that one.

“He is everything and he is nothing. There are many cultural places in China, and they are usually controlled by local authorities. Until the old men in Peking get interested in one of them. Then it is my father’s job to carry out their wishes. At least, I think that is how it works. My father does not confide in young daughters.”

“All right. Between you and Mr. Xia, you must be able to think of some things special here that have interested the old men in Peking. That is where we go.”

“It is a good plan, Thom-as,” she said. There followed another Mandarin interlude. “There are five or six such places.”

They visited the historical museum, a fourteenth-century temple, a thirteenth-century drum tower and Big Goose Pagoda south of the city, originally built early in the seventh century by the Tang, or was it the Sui? They walked the Ming city walls, and visited the neolithic site at Ban Po. Dynasties and centuries began to run together for Stratton. At each stop, Stratton and Mr. Xia would do a quick tourist round and Mr. Xia would ask to see the comrade in charge so that a distinguished American visitor could pay his respects. None of the comrades seemed overworked. To a man, they all poured gracious tea and exchanged compliments interminably. Three of them knew of Comrade Wang from Peking. None had ever met his distinguished brother. By midafternoon, Stratton wondered whether his patience or his bladder would burst first. Kangmei attended none of the interviews. Instead, she wandered around, “talking to the young people,” as she put it. It was hard for Stratton to know whether she was devoted more to seeking information or to recruiting for her cause.

“So much for the Taoist Temple of the Eight Immortals.” Stratton sighed as he sank back into seat cushions already dank with his sweat. “Now what?”

“The Qin ruins to the east of the city. It will take us about thirty minutes to get there, Thom-as.” She ran light fingers across his cheek. “Do not be discouraged.”

They drove through an intensely cultivated valley, past communes that seemed rich by Chinese standards. Suddenly, the car turned sharply onto a narrow strip of asphalt that looked as if it had been laid as an afterthought. Through gaps in the fields of chest-high corn, Stratton could see a large cone-shaped hill off to the right.

“That is Mount Qin, the tumulus,” said Mr. Xia. “It was looted three years after the emperor’s death, when the dynasty fell. It took an army three days and three nights to carry away treasure from the tomb. The new excavations have not reached it yet, so it is not known what the grave robbers may have left. The current excavations are all here, to the west of the tumulus.”

“What’s that?” Stratton nodded toward a squat, two-story building with a big chimney about a quarter mile off to the left.

“That is a factory belonging to the commune. They make Tiger Brand sewing machines.” Mr. Xia smiled. “The factory wants to expand, but the local authorities will not allow it because it is not known what is buried around the factory, or even under it. The factory owners say they do not care about old things: It is the commune’s land and the commune has an obligation to provide a good life for its people.”

“Sounds like the kind of squabble we have at home between environmentalists and developers,” Stratton said. “What happened?”

“The dispute went all the way to Peking. There is no decision yet,” said Mr. Xia.

Stratton turned to Kangmei. “By ‘Peking’ does he mean your father?”

She nodded.

To honor a cruel emperor reviled for two thousand years, but latterly proclaimed a hero, the Chinese had created an instant museum.

Kangmei vanished in search of young co-conspirators. Mr. Xia led Stratton into a large building with a vaulted roof that looked like an airplane hangar. Once inside, the guide went off to look for an official with whom Stratton could drink tea. Alone, Stratton pushed through two polished doors and into the main chamber.

It was like changing centuries.