A Map of Betrayal (36 page)

“Thank you, Aunt Lilian! This means a great deal to me. With your help I’ll have my rear base covered. I will figure out a way.”

He didn’t go to sleep for a long time after I switched off the lights. He tossed and twisted in the bed close to the window, now and again letting out a faint sigh. My promise must have set his mind racing.

We checked out of the motel the next morning and drove into the city. It took just fifteen minutes to get to Chinatown. I liked Montreal for its easy traffic. After parking in an outside lot, we headed to Saint-Urbain Street, where Kam Fung was. No sooner had we sat down at a corner table than Suzie appeared, using a cane that had a thin leather strap attached to it. She was much frailer and more bent than ten months before and might have suffered from rheumatism and osteoporosis. Ben and I stood, he drew up a chair, and we sat her down. I hung her cane on the back of the chair. She took out a Kleenex and blew her nose. She tried to smile, but her effort only made her face look sickly. Her eyes were watery, the lower lids a little swollen.

I said, “Are you under the weather, Suzie?”

“No, it’s just the withdrawal symptoms.”

“Withdrawal from what?” I asked.

“Caffeine. I just quit coffee.”

“Why did you do that?” The thought came to me that she might not have many years to live.

“I want to put my life together again.”

“Have you been dating someone?” I asked in earnest.

“Get out of here!” She cackled. “I quit sex long ago. I just want to live longer. When I was young, I thought I’d die before sixty, and
I wouldn’t mind that as long as I was happy when I was alive. But since I turned sixty, somehow the older I get, the longer I want to live. Guess I’ve got greedy.”

“That’s natural,” I said. “Life has become more precious to you.”

“What a smart girl. That’s why I like you much more than your mom.”

Ben poured her a cup of jasmine tea and said, “Here, drink this, Grandaunt, and you’ll feel better.”

Indeed, a few swallows later she returned to normal, relaxed with her legs folded under her. She grinned, and her face creased, showing a coating of makeup. She glanced sideways at Ben, blinking her eyes, which had lost their almond shape and were almost triangular now. “He’s handsome like your dad,” she said about Ben.

“You bet,” I agreed. “He’s also smart like him.”

We ordered lunch. Suzie wanted only a bowl of wontons, saying she wasn’t hungry and was happy just to see us. Indeed, she’d been beaming nonstop. We resumed making small talk.

When our food had come, I said to Suzie, “One question has been on my mind since we last met. How come my dad left his diary with you?”

“Gary had a feeling that something bad might happen to him. He told me to say nothing about his secret profession to the investigators. Just play the fool and deny knowing anything. He wanted me to keep the diary and let nobody know of its existence. He had a sixth sense for danger.”

“He wanted you to pass it on to me?”

“He said nothing like that, but I assumed that could be his intention. Also, the diary could have become criminal evidence, so he wouldn’t want the FBI to get hold of it.”

“Grandaunt Suzie,” Ben joined in, “one thing I can’t figure out about my granddad—why did he commit suicide? There must have been ways China could rescue him.”

“Baloney! China dumped him,” she said, twisting her mouth a
little. “I got a note from Gary after he was in custody. He asked me to go to Beijing and beg Deng Xiaoping to swap some imprisoned U.S. spies for him.”

“You received a letter from him?” I was so surprised that I put down my soup spoon.

“Yes, it came to me through the mail.”

“How could he send you the letter from prison?” Ben asked.

“It’s beyond me too. Guess there must’ve been a secret agent who smuggled the letter out of jail and dropped it into the mailbox. Or someone who visited Gary might have brought it out for him. In any event, the letter reached me without a glitch. So I went to Hong Kong right away and got in touch with Bingwen Chu, Gary’s handler, who helped me cross the border into China. In Beijing I asked some officials to let me speak to Deng Xiaoping personally.”

“Did you get to?” Again I was taken aback.

“Of course not. There was this man named Ding, a big shot in the Ministry of National Security. He received me in his office, but no matter how I begged, they wouldn’t try to rescue Gary.”

Ben put in, “That must have been Hao Ding, the minister of national security. He was in charge of China’s intelligence service in the eighties. What did he tell you, Grandaunt?”

“He said his country had nothing to do with Gary Shang anymore. To them, Gary was a traitor, a blackmailer. Ding told me, ‘He just extorted seventy thousand dollars from our country. What kind of money is that? Let me give you an idea: I make only two hundred dollars a month. That’s thirty years’ salary for me.’ Another man jumped in, ‘Gary Shang got rich in the U.S. He was rolling in cash and always drove a Buick, but he was corrupted by capitalism, greedy like a snake that wants to swallow an elephant.’ The same man went on to say that Gary even had a bourgeois disease, because anyone who ate coarse grains and vegetables every day wouldn’t suffer from diabetes. I realized there was no way I could reason with them, so again I asked to see Deng Xiaoping in
person. They laughed in my face, saying I was out of my senses and that Chairman Deng had no time for such a trifle. I got furious and yelled at them.

“Seeing me distraught, Ding revealed to me, ‘To tell you the truth, there’s no need to make such a futile attempt. Chairman Deng was well informed of Gary Shang’s case and already gave instructions: “Let that selfish man rot in an American prison together with his silly dream of being loyal to both countries.” So Gary Shang blew his chance and the case is closed. Nobody can help him anymore.’ Those were the final words I got from them.”

“Then you came back and told my father that?” I asked.

“No, I wasn’t a family member and couldn’t go to the jailhouse to see him. Someone else must have passed the message on to him.”

“I cannot believe this,” Ben said, stupefied. “He held the rank of major general.”

“A general is also a soldier,” I told him. “Soldiers are all expendable.”

“Everybody is,” Suzie agreed.

“I have another question for you, Suzie,” I said.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“This might be personal and embarrassing, but I need to ask. Why was my dad so fond of you? Was it because of your common racial, cultural background? Or simply because you were good in bed? Or something else? To be honest, I don’t think you were superior to my mother in every way.”

Suzie smirked complacently. “Well, domesticity was never my thing, and I wasn’t good at keeping a man happy at all. In the beginning it was mostly mutual attraction, but bit by bit Gary and I began to get along. When we were together we could talk endlessly, about everything, so after many years an affair grew into a friendship in spite of all the quarrels we had. Besides, compared to Nellie, I was more useful to him.”

“In what way?” I asked, despite knowing of her secret trip to Hong Kong and her failed attempt to look for Yufeng.

Suzie said, “My uncle used to be a senior officer in Taiwan’s intelligence service. That meant Gary could work for the Nationalists at any time. I advised him to do that, because if he was caught by the U.S. government, he could identify himself as a spy working for Taipei. That would make his crime a lot less serious because Taiwan was not an enemy country to the United States. In other words, I could be Gary’s safety net.”

“Did he ever work for the Nationalists?”

“No, never. He wasn’t a triple agent. He would not betray the mainland because he didn’t want to endanger his family there, also because he wouldn’t get me embroiled in the espionage business. For that I was grateful. He never took advantage of me and just remained a good friend. A real gentleman.”

“Did you tell your uncle about Gary’s true identity?”

“Of course not. If the Nationalists had known of that, they could have tipped off the CIA. So Gary and I were faithful to each other to the very end. Wasn’t that remarkable?”

I nodded while she broke down sobbing. I glanced at Ben, who was teary too. “Aunt Suzie,” I murmured, “thank you for loving and helping my father. You allowed us to understand him better—he was at least loyal and decent in his own way.”

“I still miss him,” she mumbled, wiping her wrinkled face with a red napkin, her cheeks streaked with makeup.

After lunch we sent Suzie back to her apartment building, a kind of senior home. Then we hit Expressway 10, headed east. Ben was pensive and reticent while I was driving. When we’d begun cruising along with little traffic on the road, I asked him, “Do you think Minister Hao Ding had a point? I mean, as he said, your grandfather was a blackmailer?”

“No. That was just an excuse.”

“How come? Seventy thousand dollars was a ton of money by Chinese standards then.”

“It was a mere pittance in my grandfather’s case. Remember what Mao said about him? ‘This man is worth four armored divisions.’
An armored division had more than two hundred tanks. A single tank was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“But that was when Gary was still useful to them.”

“True, they squeezed everything they could out of him. His case was a textbook example of stupidity and misjudgment. In a way, you can say it was his love for your mother that did him in.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He got the money for her fucking bakery! That was like blowing his identity on purpose—no professional spy would make such a dangerous move. How could he have got that lax?”

“I’m not sure if he loved Nellie, but he must have meant to do right by her. After twenty-five years’ living together, he must have developed some feelings for her. Now that he was going to leave America for good, he wanted to make sure she’d be able to survive without him around. We can call that love or honor or a sense of responsibility, whichever name it doesn’t matter. What’s essential is that he finally did something he felt right on his own, and was willing to pay the price.”

Ben looked at me in astonishment. I added, “Don’t you think my mother was also a victim?”

“I can see that. Let me say this then: it was his decency that ruined him.”

“Also because he was ignorant of the nefarious nature of the power that used and manipulated him.”

“You mean China?”

“Yes, what it did to your grandfather is evil. On the other hand, he allowed the country to take the moral high ground and to dictate how he lived his life. That’s also a source of his tragedy.”

“It wasn’t that simple. How could he have separated himself from China, where he still had a good part of his family?”

“That’s another source of his tragedy—he couldn’t exist alone.”

A lull followed. I kept driving in silence. Ben seemed to be dozing off in the reclined passenger seat, but I suspected he was
just deep in thought trying to figure a way out of his plight, so I remained wordless.

It started sprinkling, the beads of rain rattling on the windshield, and I flipped on the wipers, which began swishing monotonously. I’d been driving sixty miles an hour, following a tanker truck at a distance of about five hundred feet.

As we were approaching Magog, Ben sat up, pulled a notepad out of his hip pocket, and scribbled on it. He ripped off the page and handed it to me. “Keep this, Aunt Lilian,” he said.

“What is it?”

“An email address and a password. From now on we should communicate only through this account. I’ve already set it up. You just leave a message for me in the draft folder whenever you want to reach me. After I read it, I will delete every word. You must do the same. We must leave nothing in the account after we have read a message.”

“Why should we do that?”

“This is a way to communicate without leaving any trace online. Email exchanges might not be safe. We just share the same account, known only to the two of us. Every time after you’ve read my message, delete the whole thing.”

“Is this how you send intelligence to China?”

He chuckled. “It’s one of the methods. There’re more complex ways too, like classified codes and encrypted fax. For you and me this should be private enough.”

Evidently he’d begun making arrangements. Whatever action he might take, it would be better than sitting tight with apprehension, so I didn’t press him for details.

Back in College Park, I checked our shared email account a few times a day but found no words. I wrote Ben a note, saying I hoped everything was well. The message disappeared overnight, which meant he had read it. That put my mind somewhat at ease.

Henry and I dined out on Wednesday evening, September 21, to celebrate his birthday—he was sixty-two now. Again he talked about Ben, hoping he could get out of his trouble with the FBI soon and quit his shady computer business so he might work for us someday, and so we could live together like a family. Henry knew I would love that. Indeed, if that happened, I’d feel blessed. I always admired immigrant families that had parents and children, even grandchildren, living under the same roof, although I could see that it might be hard for the younger generation, who needed more space for themselves. But I said nothing to Henry about Ben’s current situation, which must have been volatile. Longing for an early retirement, my husband wanted to collect his Social Security without delay. He was not afraid of losing some of his benefits since my employment at the university could cover him. I made no comment but wondered whether it would be good for him to be entirely unoccupied. His job wasn’t that demanding and gave him a lot of free time. Still, he suggested we contract a handyman to lighten his maintenance work. I wouldn’t mind if that was what he wanted, yet I told him that he should keep himself busy so that he could live longer. He laughed and said, “I prefer comfort to longevity—quality but not quantity of life.”