Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (7 page)

           
Kwan borrowed a bicycle from Tan Sun
for his trip across the city to the neighborhood of the big hotels. She wheeled
it out from the cool shady storage area under the house and handed it over to
him, along with the chain to lock it up while he was with the reporter. Her
expression was fretful and worried. “Be sure to look for police,” she said,
“before you go into the hotel. You know what their unmarked cars look like.”

           
Kwan laughed, because he’d been
through much worse than
this,
an
interview with a reporter. “Everyone knows what their cars look like,” he said.
“Clean, for one thing, and with no toys hanging from the inside mirror. And
everyone knows what
they
look like,
too. They all go to the same tailor, and he gives them the material the British
won’t buy, the shiny grays and light blues. And then he cuts their jackets a
little too short in the back.”

           
“Don’t act as though it’s a
holiday,” she snapped, getting angry with him because she had no way to release
her tension.

           
Why did girls always have to become
so possessive? Kwan had been hiding with the Tan family for almost two months
now, more than enough time to fall in love with their beautiful daughter,
explore with her the petals of romance, and grow bored. He couldn’t simply
tell
her the affair was over, lest her
family kick him out on the unfriendly streets, but why couldn’t she see it for
herself? Did she want to conceal him under her skirt forever?

           
Oh, well. Knowing her concern for
his safety was real—and the dangers were real—he sobered and said, “It isn’t a
holiday. There aren’t any holidays any more. It is an interview with a reporter
for a very important American newsmagazine.” He smiled, to reassure her. “Don’t
worry, I’ll bring back the bicycle.”

           
“The
bicycled
she cried, outraged, and stormed into the house. Which was
just as well.

           
The first time Li Kwan had seen
Hong Kong
, from the forbidden city of Shenzhen on the
Chinese mainland, it had seemed to him like a city in a fairy tale, risen out
of the sea just long enough to tease him with its possibility. That had been
the occasion of his first failed effort to get out of
China
and across that narrow strait to the free
world, as exemplified by
Hong Kong
.
Traveling south away from Beijing through the vastness of his homeland, a
fugitive from the ancient murderers’ injustice, he had been helped along the
way by friends of friends, by parents of schoolmates, by people with whom he
was barely linked, and of course by women (women had always been very helpful
to Li Kwan), and along the way he had learned that the iron grip of the ancient
murderers grew increasingly slack the farther one traveled from the center of
their web.

           
In the farthest south, in
Guangdong
Province
, and particularly in the coastal city of
Shenzhen
, central government authority counted for
very litde at all. Here, most power centered on the rich traders and the
Triads, the criminal gangs whose strength came from gambling and smuggling and
prostitution and a variety of protection rackets.

           
Shenzhen, established as a special
economic zone in the late seventies in imitation of Hong Kong, before the
ancient murderers learned they would be getting the original back, had become
almost a parody, a distorting mirror image of that bubbling cauldron of
capitalism. A wide-open city in the sense that everything was for sale there,
from Western clothing to forged identity papers, it was a closed and forbidden
city in the sense that no Chinese national was permitted inside the perimeter
without a special certificate from the central government.
Hong Kong
businessmen in search of cheap labor had
moved many of their small factories and assembly plants across the border, and
by the early nineties two million mainland Chinese worked for
Hong Kong
employers in the city of
Shenzhen
.

           
It had seemed to Kwan that in such a
boiling cauldron of greed and political ambiguity and fevered ambition it
should be easy to slip through Shenzhen and into
Hong Kong
, but in fact at that cliff-edge of
China
’s influence the guards were everywhere.
Kwan’s forged special certificate, allowing him into Shenzhen, was a poor
imitation not meant for close study. Chinese police and soldiers were
everywhere along the razor margin between the two realities. Kwan was hailed,
challenged; he ducked away, lost pursuit in the crowd of shoppers in the
free-port streets, blended into a shuffling throng of homebound factory
workers, and made his way out of the forbidden city, frustrated, frightened,
not knowing what to do.

           
The family he was staying with,
twenty miles northeast along the coast from Shenzhen, were distant relatives of
a student who had died in the square. Kwan had not known that student, but it
didn’t matter. Nevertheless, after his first failed escape those people became
increasingly nervous, particularly since the man of the house, named Djang, was
a local official in the China Bank with much to lose. The face of the infamous
counterrevolutionary, Li Kwan, was very well known, after all, despite the
bullhorn he’d been holding to his mouth when that news photo was taken. So
Djang it was who worked out Kwan’s next escape route, and drove him to the
rendezvous in his private car, a perk of his job at the bank.

           
This time, Kwan saw
Hong Kong
at night, across a mile of black water, the
city a frozen firework never quite sinking into the sea.
^cc
The boat
will be down there,” Djang said, braking to a stop along the narrow dark road,
they the only traffic, the rocky weedy brush-dotted slope leading down on the
right side of the car to the water’s edge.

           
They both got out onto the
packed-stone road, looking around in the darkness of the night, afraid of
patrols: by land, by sea, by air. They scrambled together down the steep slope,
holding to the tough shrubbery for balance, then made their way crabwise along
the water’s edge.

           
The boat was there, as promised, old
and battered but watertight, with the oars hidden under brush nearby. Kwan and
Djang shook hands formally, bowed, and separated, Djang to return to the
relative safety of his normal life, Kwan to begin the final leg of his trip,
across the water to
Hong
Kong
.

           
Steadily he rowed through the dark,
and every time he looked over his shoulder, the city was still there, a million
white lights painted on the black velvet of the ocean’s night. And every time
he pulled on the oars, facing the stern of the boat, the deeper and more
dangerous darkness of
China
was also still there.

           
Kwan’s enemy then had been the army,
and the old guard, and two thousand years of unquestioning obedience. His enemy
now traveled under the name “normalization,” and that was why Kwan had to come
out of hiding, had to cross the city in the full hot light of day to meet with
the reporter from America. Normalization meant that Japanese aid to
China
was in place as before, that American
businessmen had gone back to
China
to “protect their investments,” that
politicians all over the world were prepared once again to raise delicate small
bowls of rice wine to toast the ancient murderers. Normalization meant that a
little time had gone by, a year or two, and it was enough for memories to
bleach away. Normalization meant that it was possible after just this little
time to
forget
a tank driving
ponderously over a dozen unarmed human beings. And finally, normalization meant
that last year’s hero of
Tiananmen Square
was this year’s fugitive, hiding from the
Hong Kong
police.

           
Kwan locked the bicycle to a lamp
standard a block from the hotel, and as he walked he checked his appearance in
the tourist shop windows along the way. Small and slender, looking younger than
his twenty-six years, with prominent round cheekbones that he’d always thought
detracted from his looks (and which made him distinctive, a litde too
distinctive, even among a billion), he was dressed neady in pale shirt and
chinos, and still walked with an optimistic bounce, forward-moving, like waves
on a shore.

           
There was no obvious police presence
around the hotel; good. The fact is,
Hong Kong
was a decent city full of decent people, with a government as decent as most;
but
Hong Kong
had to bear in mind 1997, just around the
corner. In 1997 the British lease would end, and
Hong Kong
would revert to the authority and control
of the mainland Chinese government. The quickly receding events in
Tiananmen Square
were to be deplored, but for the
politicians reality had to be faced. (Some reality, of course, had to be faced
rather more squarely than other reality: 1997, for instance, was relatively
easy to face. The image of the tanks on top of the bodies of the people was a
bit more difficult to face. Once again, the tough-minded and the pragmatic had
found it possible to be just a little lenient with themselves.)

           
The “counterrevolutionaries” of that
Beijing
spring had dispersed after the crackdown by
the ancient murderers; those who had not been captured and executed, that is.
Some had come together in
France
, and still issued their press releases to
an increasingly indifferent world. Three or four groups had settled in
different parts of the
United States
, to bicker among themselves and continue
their educations in American universities and eventually, no doubt, become
employees of major hospitals and insurance corporations. Those who had stayed
in
China
emerged only rarely from their hiding places to post declarations on
walls that hardly anyone ever saw. Li Kwan was among the few who had chosen to
stay in
Hong Kong
, to that city’s increasing discomfort,
where they had been until recendy relatively safe and yet still close to
China
, where their presence could still be a
significant reminder, much more so than anywhere else on Earth.

           
But now normalization had come also
to
Hong Kong
. And now Li Kwan, illegally in the city,
would if captured be returned to the ancient murderers of
Beijing
. But of course
Hong Kong
was a civilized and democratic city. It
would certainly not deport Li Kwan without absolute assurances from the Chinese
government that Li Kwan would receive a fair and open trial; assurances already
given.

           
And, too, there’s 1997.

*
 
*
 
*

           
The entire hotel was
air-conditioned, everywhere from the huge ornate dark gold lobby to the tiniest
shop. Kwan paused briefly inside the revolving doors, body adapting to the
chill as he looked warily left and right, and still everything seemed safe. He
walked forward, slowly, and waited to be recognized. (“I’ll know you from your
picture,” the reporter had said on the telephone, when the intermediaries set
up the call, and he hadn’t had to explain which picture he meant.)

           
Midway across the lobby, a large
shambling man heaved himself out of one of the low armchairs and moved toward
Kwan. He looked to be about fifty, in an open-collared shirt and brown suede
jacket and rumpled chinos. Three leather camera cases dangled from him. For
some reason, Americans, when far from home, always look as though they’ve
recently fallen from a motorcycle: clothing a bit disarrayed, manner a bit
harried and nervous, but somehow optimistic and relieved because no real damage
had been done. The reporter was like that. He had a pepper-and-salt beard,
thinning curly hair, dark-rimmed spectacles, amiable smile. “Mr. Li?”