A Drop of Chinese Blood (4 page)

This made me sit up in my chair. First of all, I didn’t like Li’s casual reference to things “blowing over.” What things? What’s more, I hadn’t run agents in a long time. Agents are often odd people, a little too psychologically needy for my taste. Besides which, it struck me as a bad idea to handle an agent who had been run by Fu Bin, especially one Fu Bin had supervised for so many years. Maybe working with Lieutenant Fu for that long explained why Handout was so annoying. Third Bureau traits could easily rub off on people; someone like Handout would soak up quirks like a sponge. Anyway, who could understand what the Third Bureau was up to half the time? Handout could be a Third Bureau–directed psychopath, a trained assassin for all I knew. Which raised another question. Since when did Headquarters assign local agents? Those of us on the scene were supposed to be the ones who knew the details of our local sea and the fish that swam in it. OK, maybe I didn’t know a few details. Fu Bin had handled Handout and I hadn’t known. So what? I was the office chief, wasn’t I? There was always a delicate balance between knowing enough about operations and knowing too much, especially if something went wrong. My job was to stay on this tightrope and not fall off. So far, the annual inspection teams from Headquarters had been satisfied with my performance. Once in a while there was a little comment about the need for tighter supervision, but these sorts of complaints were always balanced in the next inspection by praise for the way operations were allowed to run “without excessive interference.” I had long ago decided I couldn’t please everyone, so I just kept doing what I did best. If they didn’t like it, they’d pull me out and put me somewhere I could snooze with my feet on the desk.

Li Bo-ting waited, as always, while I mulled things over. Li was patient and efficient. Without him and his “sources” in Headquarters, I would constantly be hopping on hot coals.

“Fine,” I said at last. “Good. You know how pleased I am when Headquarters sends me orders.”

Now there was a new coal in the fire in the form of our latest arrival from Shanghai. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that Jang appeared almost the same day that Fu Bin vanished. Come to think of it, Jang’s use of the term “Second Bureau” in his conversation with me was very odd. The Second Bureau was where we sat on the MSS organization chart, but we never referred to ourselves that way. To top it off, why would anyone be so shifty about whether or not he had ever been to Changchun? When the question came up, Jang had changed directions like a cockroach on a noodle shop’s steam table.

The thought that the Third Bureau had shuffled in a replacement so soon, right under my nose, was infuriating. Already Jang had shown he wasn’t going to be as smooth as Fu Bin, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t as dangerous. Maybe the new officer was all the more dangerous for being so distasteful. It must be a deliberate effort to rattle me. I reined myself in. The Third Bureau loves paranoia; it bottles the stuff and hands it out for its operatives to sprinkle around. The best way to combat this is to stay calm. All right, I could be calm and rational. Jang had trotted up to us from Shanghai? That was reason enough to put ground glass in his food.

Li’s patience finally ran out. “Talk to you later? I have a meeting outside.”

“Hold it, Lieutenant, one more thing. There is still a formal complaint channel, isn’t there?” It wouldn’t do much good to file a complaint, more like spitting into a funeral pyre, but at least it would show the Third Bureau I knew their game. “Can’t we use it? The forms are around somewhere. In the vault, I think.”

“No.”

“How about a tiny, informal complaint next time I’m in Beijing?”

Silence.

“Anyone know about this but you?”

“You mean in our office? No, of course not.”

“Well, keep it that way.” I hung up the phone.

3

It was early the next morning, right before dawn, when my uncle came back to the house.

“Everything all right?” I called out as he passed our client office, treading as softly as a seventy-year-old knew how. On nights I stayed up late, reading the newspaper or going over bills, I often fell asleep in my chair. It wasn’t that comfortable, and I wasn’t that asleep.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “You have problems of your own.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means we’ll talk later. Go back to sleep.”

Around ten o’clock, my uncle was in his workshop, eyes bright, humming a Korean folk song, not so much carrying the tune as pushing it in a wheelbarrow over rocky ground. He didn’t look up when I came through the door.

“Good morning, uncle. That’s a song my mother used to sing to me, if I’m not mistaken. Rather melancholy verses about two lovers who become distant stars. Have you eaten?”

“Don’t be coy, nephew. It never pays off. You’re not interested in folk songs or astronomy. You want to know what happened last night.”

“In that case, what happened last night?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. Disappointing, isn’t it?”

“Madame Fang didn’t have anything to say?”

“Perhaps she did, but I don’t know what it was. We had arranged to meet at some bar she said was very swank and discreet. She never showed up. I sat around until all hours. The bar girls in this town seem to be all Koreans and Russians, have you noticed?”

Instantly, foreboding slapped me on the back of the head. Madame Fang had appeared in my sector. Worse than that, she’d been in my house. Not the general vicinity, not a few streets over, not even just passing by outside, but within my flimsy four walls. As far as Headquarters was concerned, that made her my personal responsibility. I didn’t like the idea of her going to a lot of trouble to arrange a rendezvous with my uncle and then not showing up. Headquarters wouldn’t like it either. You didn’t have to be very suspicious to smell a problem here.

“Did she leave a note? Give a reason?” I was hoping there was still a net that might break my fall. “And if she didn’t show up, why were you so late getting home?”

“My goodness, aren’t you the concerned one.”

“Not at all.” I feigned unconcern, but it was useless, not much better than being coy. My uncle could read me like a banner headline in the newspaper. It was uncanny, and ever since he moved in, it had been getting to be more annoying.

He shook his head. “It can’t be genetic. It must be something in your upbringing. That my nephew should be the sole completely scrutable Chinese official in the long history of this peacock-strutting empire is unbelievable. The fact that you are half—more than half—Korean makes it all the more bizarre. Maybe it’s something to do with the schools, I don’t know.” He picked up his favorite screwdriver from the workbench and started to twirl it in his fingers. “What’s your worry? Do you have instructions to keep an eye on Mei-lin?”

“I’ll be blunt. If anything happens to her, my next duty station will be checking zombie caravans on the Silk Route. It isn’t the transfer I’ve been hoping for. You’ll be with me, incidentally, and there’s hardly any wood in that part of the country. People cook with dried cow dung.”

“Charming. In that case, better pack your bags. Apparently, she did leave a note.”

“Nothing good, I take it.”

“The note apparently said she had gone across the river, planned to stay for a week or so, and promised to be in contact when she got back.”

Normally, I would have picked up right away that he said “apparently” twice, but I was too busy mentally bracing for the flaming rocket that would arrive any minute from Headquarters ordering my immediate transfer to the toughest, ugliest, most remote post they could find.

“Sichuan is pleasant in the spring.” I sat down on the chair with the bad back. “That’s assuming they don’t shoot me first.” Fang Mei-lin had gone across the river—probably on that damned narrow stupid excuse for a bridge in Tumen. The most beautiful woman in the world, the subject of numerous twin-stripe envelopes with special tape, had walked out of my house and into North Korea. I looked around the workshop for the dense, dark wood. Maybe I could brain myself with it.

“Don’t worry.” My uncle’s voice poked through the despair. “She’ll show up again. She’s more than a match for any of them.” He flipped the screwdriver once in the air and caught it right before it hit the workbench. “Besides, she’s been there before.”

This snagged my attention. “You dealt with her in Pyongyang?”

“Who I dealt with and who I didn’t is off-limits to you, and anyway it isn’t the question. The question is, what is she doing there now? Maybe there’s a second question, too: Why was she in such a crashing hurry to get over the border? None of it matters to me, since none of this is my problem. But you might want to consider such questions, because they seem about to fall onto your desk.”

“Thank you. I know what I might want to consider, and I know what’s on my desk. I am, you sometimes seem to forget, director of a special bureau in charge of the border, part of it, anyway. I flatter myself into believing that means there is a certain competence I am judged to have, even if you don’t happen to think so. The border is considered a sensitive area, and I’m considered tough enough to handle it.” I held out my hand. “The note. I need it.”

I was met with a blank look, tinged with the innocence of babes and old men.

“She left a note, those were your words. Let me see it.”

“Yes, those were my words. They still are. She left a note. I didn’t say she left it with me.”

Even in the morning, or maybe especially in the morning, he could be infuriating. I looked around more intently for that piece of hard, dark wood.

“I’m not playing games with you on this, uncle. Beijing will demand to know what happened to her, and the inquiry won’t arrive wrapped in a silk kerchief. The dragons at Headquarters will roar; they will breathe fire and lash their tails. They’ll find out about the note within twenty-four hours, assuming they haven’t already received a report from one of their informants. They’ll want to know if I saw the note, and if not, why the hell not. So, let me ask: Whom did she leave it with if not you? Because if I tell them I don’t have it and can’t get it, they won’t be happy. Believe me on this, it’s not good when MSS Headquarters is unhappy.”

“Whom did she leave it with, you ask? I would imagine with whomever she intends to contact when she gets back.”

“And that would be?” I expected Li Bo-ting to call any minute with news that an urgent message had arrived from Beijing, the motorcycle courier waiting impatiently in the reception room for me to show up and sign for the package personally, allowing the motorcycle to roar back into life and unsettle things at the next stop. Little Jang’s suspicious eyes would take in the whole show. I slowed my breathing and said to my uncle very carefully so as not to be misunderstood either in tone or in purpose, “Whom is she going to contact? Whom is she going to contact, and why?”

My uncle looked at me, half amused, his look of innocence put away for another day. “Very good. Exactly what I’d ask. That’s the first thing—or rather, the first and second things—you want to figure out after you get us some breakfast. By the way”—he started arranging the tools on his workbench—“doesn’t that crook Gao still owe us money?”

4

After a breakfast of noodles and dried fish, I left my uncle in his workshop. He was examining a long, twisted mulberry board. “Useless,” he muttered as I closed the door to head off to work. “Might as well be a piece of crap pine in a Chinese whorehouse.”

It was raining hard, making the traffic worse than usual. I arrived at the office late, soaked to the skin. The special branch occupies the first floor of a ramshackle former Imperial Japanese Army General Staff hotel off Hailan Road. For the past ten years, it has been wedged behind a new high-rise containing the Bank of China, a drugstore, and the corporate offices of a number of crooked trading companies. Originally, the hotel was considered an ideal location for the special branch because of its setback from the street and the screen of trees in front. When the new high-rise was built, it occupied every square centimeter of the lot in front of ours, blocking our main entrance. To compensate, a side door leading through the hotel’s former kitchen was pressed into service. The kitchen was in the same state it had been in when the Japanese left hurriedly in the summer of 1945. The duty desk sat behind the big woodstove. The duty map, which showed our area of responsibility, shared a wall with a variety of old, wicked-looking Japanese kitchen implements. A special secure vault for files had been installed in the billiards room. Two of the high-ceilinged parlors where officers entertained guests and wrote letters home had been converted into interrogation rooms. It wasn’t very effective, trying to interrogate suspects in rooms with elaborate woodwork and chandeliers; we needed people to feel intimidated, and instead they put on airs like they had been invited to a ball. We had three bathrooms, all with cracked, elaborate fixtures; two of them had deep bathtubs with ornate French taps. Overall, we had more space than we needed, so the broad, curved stairway to the second-floor rooms was sealed off.

Our entrance was always locked, and the storm had knocked out our new, highly secure entry system. I pressed the buzzer that was attached at the other end to the duty officer’s desk. There was no response. Waving my arms in front of the security camera got me nowhere. The alternative was going through the bank and out a fire exit facing what had once been the hotel’s front door. This door could be opened with a special key that I kept with me for emergencies. The bank didn’t like it when we utilized this route, but by now I was too wet to care.

I kept a change of clothes at the office for just such emergencies. After I put on a dry pair of trousers and a shirt, I went through the overnight mail folder. There was nothing waiting from Headquarters, but under the folder was a lightly penciled message from Li Bo-ting saying he needed urgently to see me as soon as I got in.

Li’s office was on the opposite side of the building from mine, with a large, high window that looked out on a pond surrounded by maple trees and filled with carp. Why the second in command had an office with such a lovely view while I had no windows at all, not even a small one, was a mystery. Some people said it had to do with security, but I didn’t think so. The simple solution—trade offices—was impossible because mine had “special wiring” that only the chief of the special branch was supposed to know about. Getting the wires moved was a major undertaking involving high-paid cable technicians sent from Beijing. None of them liked the food in this part of the country, and they all had a list of excuses for never showing up.