Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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СКАЧАТЬ general’s lips clamped together, and Li realized that he must have used the patronizing tone his wife had cautioned him against. “Her name?” the general asked mockingly.

      The car pulled to a stop, and Feng hurried from his seat to open the general’s door.

      “I apologize,” said Li. “Charlotte Brien.”

      “That’s the one.” The general heaved himself out of the car, and together they started down the sandy path. The compound had once been an imperial residence, and later one of Mao’s homes. Seeds from willow blossoms filled the gentle air. The water in the pond was milky with them. “I haven’t told you this but the smuggler apprehended off Fujian last week had it written in his logbook when he died.”

      “That’s a connection, then,” said Li, taking out another cigarette. “After getting into Nanjing by train, she visited an American professor called Rank at the Center for Sino-American studies. She spent two-and-a-half hours with him yesterday afternoon.”

      The general stopped on the fringe of the path. “He is a Borodin?”

      “Pardon?”

      “Rank, you idiot!” The general made a spitting noise with his lips. “Your generation doesn’t even know its own history.”

      Li shook out the match. “With all due respect, sir, we were schooled to stamp out history of that sort.”

      “Borodin was a Russian Jew, an organizer for Lenin and finally here. What I want to know is if this Rank is an American agent, or simply a man with a need to act out his enthusiasms.”

      “There’s nothing strange on his visa application. He’s been here before.”

      Frowning, the general walked again. “That in itself is cause for worry. Tell me more about the woman.”

      “Yesterday evening, she visited a café run by students. It is partially funded by the U.S. Department of State, for which she works, so that in itself is not suspicious, but local cadres did inform me that this place has offered undue intercourse between Americans and our own students at university. When they received the recent directive, the cadres believed that the place should be shut down. As a preliminary precaution, they installed one of their men as a cook.”

      “A wise measure,” the general agreed.

      “Charlotte Brien stayed late at this Black Cat Lounge, drinking alchohol. She was overheard telling the manager that she would be back in the morning to look at accounts.”

      “The Black Cat.” The general had veered off the path onto the still-damp grass, stopping halfway down the slope to the pond. Li saw that he was losing him. The general’s move to the Ministry had been accompanied by a slipping of his mind, and it was often Li’s function to bring him into the present again. “That is named after something.”

      Li waited, but after a minute or so the general had still failed to remember what it was. He reached up and tugged at a branch of weeping willow, flicking the buds off the wood with his thumbnail. Li continued to wait for instructions.

      “Is there anything else i can get for you, sir?”

      The stewardess was standing over Burling, offering another tiny bottle of vodka, cradled in her palm. He politely refused, but her presence, the soft skin and warm perfume, the full breasts in her uniform blouse produced a dull ache that made him feel sick of himself.

      “You just looked a bit uncomfortable. Something else to drink?”

      He picked up the plastic cup that had held his first screwdriver and was surprised to find nothing but ice. Already, the navigation screen showed the plane crossing the Tetons. “You won’t take this the wrong way?”

      “Of course not,” she said, bending nearer with her hands on the back of the neighboring seat. A tiny gold cross fell out of her blouse and hung between them on a chain.

      “My wife has passed away . . .”

      “I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling kindly and touching him briefly on the shoulder. He couldn’t make out her accent—Ohio, or Michigan perhaps, vowels trapped in her mouth, where they resounded as if in a small cave.

      “It’s been many years,” Burling told her, “so it’s no longer fresh. Lately I’ve been trying to establish a . . . relationship, you know, but I’m of an older generation.”

      “You’re not old, Mr. Burling.”

      “Well, you’re kind, but in any event . . .”

      “You want to know what a woman my age is looking for?”

      “Exactly.”

      “Well, for me,” she said, standing up and throwing out her hip, “I just want to travel, that’s all. I’ve lived in London, in Singapore, now I’m based in Seattle. Next year I’m hoping for Tokyo. If a man can’t deal with my wanderlust, too bad. I never wanted any kids.”

      “They keep you guessing, that’s for sure.”

      “You look like a father.”

      Burling laughed. “I don’t know what that means.”

      “Take it as a compliment.”

      “I have a son and daughter, both grown now,” he told her. “When I was their age, I was like you, I wanted to see the world. As a result they grew up mostly overseas.”

      “Lucky them.”

      “I thought so, too, but they didn’t see it that way. My daughter wrote her graduate thesis on the trauma of being uprooted all the time.”

      “I guess the grass is always greener.” She looked over her shoulder at the steward, who was manning the service cart. “Looks like we’re out of ice again. Excuse me.”

      Just like that, she was gone, and Burling realized it had only been her job, to entertain his questions. He was ashamed of having kept her so long. As he ate, he wondered about her forthright nature, which he equated with independence, whether that was the kind of woman he should have chosen as a wife. In a way, he and Amelia were prisoners of their own generation, which had not allowed them much room to decide: the summer they met, 1956, all the children of their class in Philadelphia had the same script to follow. The dances and doubles matches and fumbling in the backseats of Chryslers each were scenes in a larger passion play, the final act of which was meant to unite the prominent families of Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy. Even if it was in his, and Amelia’s, nature to critique that play, wonder about what Betty Wilson and Whit Greene could possibly have in common beyond the fact that her father’s bank held the paper on the Greene’s family business—“What can they possibly talk about?”—Burling and the lively girl whose father called her Amie performed the scenes like everyone else. He was twenty, home from Princeton, working at the Evening Bulletin as a sports reporter. He professed to want to be a journalist, a war reporter or a foreign correspondent or, less likely given his earnest tendencies, a sportswriter, complete with cigar and newsprint staining his fingers. The way he talked about writers attracted her to him. Evenings on the terrace at the Cricket Club, or in the dimly lit study of her parents’ big stone house, discussing Hawthorne and Melville, his favorites, or Wharton and F. Scott СКАЧАТЬ