The Mandarin Club (22 page)

He was less than impressed with the whole Kwan performance. True, there was an echo there of something Senator Landle had said about an item in the NID suggesting Taiwan might again be exploring a nuclear option. It would be easy enough to ferret out if Customs had something about krytrons moving to Taipei. Still, he was loathe to take it to Branko. And both the State Department and the Pentagon were too squirrelly on Taiwan Strait stuff lately, buddying up to the Taiwan military while trying to smooth China trade deals for the Fortune 500 companies. It was a clumsy balancing act. Just look at how the administration was fudging on the whole question of the Chinese missile build-up.

Everybody is speaking with a forked tongue
, Booth concluded in disgust.

It was almost midnight as he pulled into his driveway on Irving Street in Chevy Chase. He shut the motor off and sat a long moment, listening in the stillness as the engine crackled and the hood contracted. The release seemed to have its own rhythm, its own sequence for letting go of residual heat and energy.

He entered the kitchen from the side door. The breakfast table had been set, fresh flowers in a mason jar by the window bordering the nook. His oldest, Aaron, age ten, had left a science test—a “96!”—for his inspection along with a tiny Tootsie Roll. There was a new painting clipped on the busy refrigerator, a complicated piece of space equipment with “NASA” printed on the side and the signature of Sarah with a smiley face on the bottom. He touched it with his fingertips, pausing.

He sat at the table, chewing the candy, pondering his Kwan problem. He gazed at a stack of mail Amy had left. Out the window, he could see strong shafts of moonlight.

In the den, he stripped to his boxers, trying hard not to wake anyone. On tip-toe, he checked the kids, lingering over the youngest to press his hand on a dreaming forehead. The dizzying images of the day scrolled before him. He didn’t need this Taiwan business now, and neither did Jake Smithson.

There, in Sarah’s bedroom with the Harry Potter poster, he arrived at a solution. He would pass the buck to Alexander. Let it be
Alexander’s
problem. Let Alexander use his journalist’s hunting license to separate fact from fiction. Then let the chips fall where they might, without Smithson’s fingerprints. Booth could justify taking a pass on this one. He was taking a State Department authorization bill to conference with the House majority. He had a bunch of campaign speeches to draft. His plate was full.

He felt relieved as he slipped into the master bedroom and sank into his pillow. On his back, he pulled the comforter over him like a calming shroud. As he closed his eyes, he held that image of sleeping children. Amy’s peaceful breathing beside him triggered thoughts of domestic tranquility smoothing the rough edges of his long day until, finally, he slept.

When his dreams came, though, they were bitter and twisted. Dark apparitions leapt up in the night. He saw small Asian figures, rifles in hand, scrambling over a landscape at dusk. High foreign voices of an enemy, calling signals. He saw the bamboo hats of the Viet Cong. They had returned, back from a childhood nightmare, darting from behind one tree to the next.

Then the sky flashed phosphorescent red and yellow, a nuclear fireball. He saw faces, grotesque and deformed, their skin slumping away like ice cream drooping down a cone. The fire continued to burn, a warning beacon on the horizon, a tower silhouetted in a yellow sky like the upright of the Cross. The Great Plains of his youth were aflame, silos glowing with fire. Then he could hear the voice of his father calling out his Old Testament admonition: “Be ye a seeker of truth.”

Booth was swirling and thrashing, snarled in his sheets, when Amy awoke. Wordlessly, she reached out to him, caressing him, once again the healer. Her fingers soothed his temples. She whispered to him, indistinct words that had little meaning save for the human contact.

Gently, in an old ritual, she began to rake her nails across his chest. Then she rose up and kissed him, sloppy and soft, on the lips. He was alert now, responsive to her touch. He was released from his black vision, no longer burdened by his worldly concerns. That was his blessing, finally, at the end of a tumultuous day—to find a simple kindness in the dark, to receive the unexpected pleasure of making love at home, in his own bed, with his wife, wide awake once more.

M
ickey Dooley awoke at peace with God. It was a peculiar sensation, one he had not known for years. A childhood of smacking gum and telling dirty jokes with his fellow altar boys had been followed by an adulthood passed as a recovering Catholic. Today, however, he felt refreshed, the beneficiary of a visitation. He was born again to some new purpose: all was before him now.

It is Tuesday
, Mickey recalled after some effort.
Tuesday in America.

He lay quite still, admiring the finish on the crown molding, following the carpenter’s lines to the smooth intersection in the corners of the ceiling. He sat up, took several slow, deep breaths in an unfamiliar hotel room painted powder blue and gray, then tried to remember where he was.

As he stretched his calves gingerly and reached to touch his toes, he recovered a piece of his calming dreams. Something about a long lunch with his kid brother and a hot fudge sundae. The morning fears of previous days had lifted, as if lifted by an unseen hand. Today, he was on a mission. It was about the boys, about escaping, about starting over. Now, with that special clarity of dawn, he had a plan.

Mickey stood and walked to the corner window. The oddball protesters who made their home in Washington’s Lafayette Square amidst cardboard signage had yet to stir. The White House and its north gates were still, two uniformed guards standing in front of the high fence. The Sixteenth Street traffic was light, a Saturday-like calm that confused him until he remembered it was still before seven a.m. Across the way, he saw the warm yellow paint of Saint John’s, the church of presidents.

On a whim, he considered joining the few souls who would gather there for morning services, Episcopalians all. He was feeling nondenominational today, prepared to cover his bets. He had prayed there before, one day at noon. He had spontaneously taken a pew in back and beseeched the Lord to intervene after his mom’s heart attack. Mom recovered, and Mickey, not yet fully prepared to repent and reform, was glad he hadn’t made any deals with God.

Mickey drank from a bottle of Perrier as he stood gazing at the church, the cool drink refreshing him. He turned about in his undershirt, half expecting to find a witness. He had pondered the problem for weeks before approaching Branko. He had wrestled with thoughts about his boys’ future, the fate of his marriage, and his China business. He had scrolled through the names in his palm pilot, searching for an idea, weighing various plans for extricating himself from his dilemma.

Mickey’s quandary was simple. He could no longer tolerate his bleak existence in Beijing, staggering on in a life of infinite compromise. He could neither stay in Beijing with the frosty Mei Mei, nor leave freely without the boys. His spouse had evolved into a caricature of a daddy’s girl, a woman who so loved gambling she was out to all hours playing mahjong, and who, it seemed, lived also to shop. As the boys matured and came each day to more resemble Mickey, admiring his Western ways, she came to vent her fury on them as well. The children, he readily convinced himself, were better off with him in the States, where they used to live every summer. Already, she was using them as pawns in her marital war, taking them away to her father’s country place, barring them from trips overseas with Mickey.

Mickey’s path to hope and revival seemed open and his vision clear:
Branko would save them
. Mickey was sure of it.

Upon later reflection, it seemed inevitable that his search for a savior would lead to his longtime critic. For too long, he had feared the disdain of his old friend. Branko had been the most selfless of the Mandarins, the one who had fully led the life he had planned. Branko was the straight man. From the day of their first seminar together, Mickey had been the risk taker. Branko had every right to judge him harshly, a fact that for some time had scared Dooley off his proposition.

Mickey had floated a trial balloon with Branko before, with no success. He had been saving tidbits of information in his files, gleaned from years of double-dealing, with which to trade. Between courses at Mr. K’s, he had dropped hints—even followed Branko to the men’s room, muttering a few choice asides and looking for a private meeting, before Branko cut him off. Yet, there at the end of the supper was a passed note, with blunt instructions to call this morning. A name, a number, a beachhead that Mickey wanted desperately to believe could be widened.

When he called just after nine, a young woman’s voice proposed a Friday evening meeting. Branko was prepared to talk. Directions for the rendezvous were simple, and encouraging. They were to meet in the minor league baseball park in Frederick, Maryland, a concession to Mickey’s old sporting tastes.

Thus, at week’s end, Mickey found himself sitting in the bleachers at Harry Grove Stadium, home of the Class A Frederick Keys. They were hosting the Wilmington Blue Rocks, rookies from the New York Mets’ farm team in Delaware. Mickey and Branko were both in polo shirts and chinos, studiously dressed down amidst the suburban crowd.

“I’m trapped, old buddy,” Mickey said when the right moment arrived. “I need an escape hatch.”

“I see,” Branko replied, though he didn’t—yet.

“I mean it. I’ve worked it every way I can. I’ve pleaded with Mei Mei to try the U.S. I even promised a house on the hill in Sausalito. She won’t budge. Now that we may be heading for divorce court, she won’t even let me bring the boys to New Mexico for summer vacation.”

“Have you proposed shared custody?” said Branko, sipping a soda.

“She rejects the idea out of hand. And she’s got all the cards. With her father working the judge, I’m going to get slammed in court.”

“I can see where that might be a very brief hearing.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but when I’m in Beijing, I’m their primary caregiver, not the nanny she leaves them with. I drive them to the American School, take them to music lessons. I play ball with them—I help them do their homework. I mean, I’ll get affidavits from schoolteachers, even a psychologist in Albuquerque. They all support my position that the boys need to be multicultural, to live with their dad. But the whole court process is stacked against a foreigner.”

“The Chinese have not developed an appreciation for the rule of law yet,” Branko observed. “But Mickey, what if you just took the boys and left?”

“God, Branko, I thought hard about it last winter in Hong Kong, even before things got so bad. We were there with her parents. I had my ticket for LAX, and I went ahead and bought two more for the kids—just in case I could see my way clear. Then she found their passports in my stuff and went ballistic on me. Now she’s brainwashing them that I’m some heathen from the West.”

“Sounds ugly.”

“The worst thing is, it’s like she’s blackmailing me. The shit I’m into with Telstar, the satellite telemetry stuff, is getting hairier and hairier. I don’t produce for Pops and she’s all over me. She ditches the boys out at his country place, and then she flies off to some fucking fashion show.”

The crowd cheered as the third baseman speared a one-hop liner headed down the line and turned a neat 5-4-3 double play from his knees, a big league ease to his side-arm toss.

As the crowd settled, Mickey pressed the issue. “Branko,” he pleaded, “I need your help, man.” He barreled ahead shamelessly, reaching into his wallet and passing photos of the two boys—half cowboy, half Confucius—smiling in baseball uniforms. Pre-game eye black accentuated their almond-shaped eyes, but the smiles and the teeth were unmistakably Mickey’s.

For several moments, Branko was silent. The sun was falling behind the grandstand, the last rays reaching toward the ballplayers on the field, their white uniforms set off by red piping. Splotches of pure sunlight were scattered randomly about the diamond.