Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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СКАЧАТЬ knife raised above Breeden’s head.

      book

       one

      Lindstrom’s plane picked up speed as it sliced through the clouds; below the cover, fires burned on the ground. Smoke rose from the crossing of twin brown tracks, and he saw red-brick communes surrounded by fields. The man in the seat beside him—a tall, stiff German with muttonchop sideburns and rectangular glasses that turned an odd purple shade in the sunlight—stirred at the abrupt drop in altitude and slapped himself sharply on the knees.

      “Well, now, Jack,” he said, angling an elbow between Lindstrom’s ribs. The German’s use of his first name seemed vaguely insinuating, maybe even coercive. “You are coming to see me, yes?”

      The plane settled after floating on a deep breath of air. The German was director of a joint venture power company in Shanghai: earlier in the flight he had invited Lindstrom to his plant, to show him how energy was revolutionizing China.

      “I’d like to,” Lindstrom answered, and wondered if he would. It was his tendency to view industry with suspicion. “But I have these plans in Nanjing.”

      “Right, right,” the German said heartily. “The missionary business.” He dismissed it with a chop of his hand.

      The plane crossed the Yangzi River, its lumbering surface flashing bronze in the hazy spring sun. From a dock along this river, almost seventy years ago now, Lindstrom’s grandfather had embarked with other missionaries up into the gorges in Hubei for a summer retreat, the whole junket paid for by a brewer from Tsingtao. A man of obvious and violent contradictions, Lindstrom’s grandfather hadn’t had any scruples about accepting the invitation, although by that time he was temperate to the point of fanaticism. The gorges they’d visited were about to be dynamited by the German and his indigenous partners for a dam.

      “I’m really not a religious man,” Lindstrom said, “but I’ve never been able to resist the possibility of revelation.”

      “And that is why you are coming to China?”

      “To see the church that my grandfather built.”

      “This will be the occasion for your revelation.”

      Lindstrom was about to reply, but explaining his motives would only draw attention to himself.

      “As a businessman,” the German said, “one cannot be concerned with such things. Nevertheless, power can be—what is the word?”

      “Corrupting?”

      The German accepted Lindstrom’s trope with a ruthless sort of calm. The plane was cutting through frayed wisps of cloud, and the sun gave off a soiled and monotonous glare. The German’s lenses grew darker. “I’m not speaking in metaphors,” he said. “In China whoever controls the generation of power can be a force for reform. I must believe this.”

      Lindstrom let the subject lie. A geopolitical discussion with a power company executive, no matter how endless the potential store of puns, would probably not be that illuminating. Since September 11, everyone possessed a theory about world historical order: doomsday philosophy was epidemic even compared with the 1960s. It rivaled the paranoid epic of the late Cold War. Outside the window, the cruciform shadow of the plane stretched and rippled across the towers and cables of a bridge. The plane moved faster above the water. The fence around the airport approached, and he experienced a pleasurable rush of fear. Beyond the concertina wire stretched a dry landscape of yellow-green grasses and flame-like trees that reminded him of Vietnam.

      “You come to my plant,” the German told him as the plane jammed down on the tarmac. He sighed like a man who has just made a lot of money from some defect in human nature. “You will see.”

      As the plane slowed to taxiing speed, the Chinese passengers began to get up and trip over each other in the aisle. Outside, a stairway was wheeled across the slabs. Stooping under the bulkhead, the German pulled on a corduroy blazer that had gone out of style in the seventies but was coming back in now. The new global capitalists were adopting a retrograde camouflage, several sizes too small.

      Lindstrom slid from his seat and moved forward past studious men and bantering elderly couples, Taiwanese businessmen in clashing Hawaiian shirts, all silenced by the German’s unusual height. Lindstrom shadowed him, grateful for the cover. As he emerged behind the German from the hatch of the plane, heat met them like a curtain, and they flailed for a moment in the new, thicker element. Lindstrom felt himself awakening slowly in an old, familiar place, at once comfortable and frightening. Backstage again, behind the ancient drama of the East, where each person, object, strand of phrase you caught above the diminishing whistle of the engines might be trotted out for use under the great proscenium of communist government.

      “You come to see us,” the German said pointedly, “when you are done with the church.”

      They were hurrying now across the tarmac, through the greetings and luggage; every face they passed looked amazed. Beyond a low chain-link fence, a BMW waited, with the license plate letters signifying foreigners, followed by the regional number for Shanghai. Lindstrom felt a wave of paranoia. Behind the Bimmer was a tiny, ornamented cab.

      “You’re not flying on to Shanghai?” he asked.

      The German’s shaggy hair lifted in the wind. “Ever since the Chinese government deregulated the airlines, it is impossible to get a flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai. Impossible,” he yelled above the sound of a plane taking off, as if the word could explain the whole country.

      the taxi was cramped, and its dashboard was covered with talismans. From the homemade bodywork, Lindstrom could tell that it was an unregulated cab. The driver squeezed them onto the road between two stinking trucks, and the diesel burned the back of his throat as the driver, playing with the knobs on the radio and steering with one hand, overtook the frontmost truck in a torrent of blue exhaust. The truck was filled with reed baskets and great chunks of Styrofoam; its pilot grimaced through the windshield at the pale disk of sun.

      The road lay straight as a canal between fields. As the taxi gained momentum, moist air funneled through the windows, thinning the fumes and the odor of hot vinyl seats and painted metal. Bicycles pumping against a flickering background of trees. In the paddies, workers with pants rolled up to their knees spread floods of blue water. Lindstrom checked the pulse in his neck to gauge his excitement and found that his skin had a cold, clammy feel. The air wept huge, grimy drops on the windshield, then held the rest in.

      As they neared Nanjing, the spindly poplars of the windbreak gave way to giant Himalaya trees, their peeling branches trained upward like arthritic fingers around the wires. Long strips of bark lay curled in the dust at their feet. Caustic smoke hung thickly above the city, and Lindstrom realized he had not given the driver an address. The taxi pressed into the crowd, buses and bicycles everywhere, ringing their bells. The driver turned and showed him a rictus of rotting teeth.

      “Jingling,” he said. “Jingling Hotel.”

      Of course, Lindstrom thought. Where else would a Westerner be going? Still, the prescience wasn’t encouraging. In Saigon, if you weren’t in uniform, the drivers would take you to where a bomb was about to go off, thinking you were a journalist, or a missionary priest. With his shaved head and quarter-Asian eyes, Lindstrom had often been mistaken for a priest.

      The taxi rounded a rotary, hazy with neon. The radiating streets showed wet treads from the watering truck. On the far side, some citizens loitered, staring up through the gates at СКАЧАТЬ