Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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СКАЧАТЬ cabbie couldn’t pull onto its driveway, so Lindstrom gave him some yuan he had traded for in Tokyo and asked him to wait.

      The lobby was filled with garment designers and Overseas Chinese. Security cameras bristled from the capitals of marble columns, and all the porters and check-in attendants had been given English names. Lindstrom held a small argument with a porter for show, then allowed the man to disappear with his suitcase while he checked in under the name on his passport, John Tan, and went up in the glass-sided elevator. Looking down on the lobby, at the double-breasted businessmen checking their watches, he thought of the lobby of the Hotel Nikko San Francisco, where his own desk sat empty now, his brass nameplate removed to the closet where the manager kept the names of all the wayward concierges who had gone out in the world to find themselves, only to return less sure of who they were but much more broke and in need of a job. Lindstrom had been on duty there, eight months ago now, listening to an Indonesian salesman explain, in the code of Asian businessmen, that he wanted a girl, when Alan Rank had appeared in the queue. At first Lindstrom hadn’t recognized him, but when they faced each other two hours later across a table in the Nikko’s sushi bar, Lindstrom had seen behind the dry tucks of skin around Rank’s eyes, through the salt-and-pepper beard, and there was the gangly kid from Flatbush whom he had known on the Batangan Peninsula more than thirty years before. When the pretty Cantonese waitress brought their drinks, Rank had already told him that he wanted Lindstrom to smuggle a dissident out of mainland China.

      “Would you believe,” Rank said, holding his sake under his nose when they had consummated the deal, “that there are Americans living in China, old communists from Brooklyn like my parents, living in Beijing as citizens? Been there for fifty years.”

      It wasn’t clear if Rank admired them or not.

      “What do they do there?” Lindstrom asked. Suddenly the five-star Hotel Nikko, where the rehab gurus placed him years before, had begun to look like a smack bar in Saigon, all mirrors and hustlers and promised games of chance. “Are they happy?”

      Rank signaled for the waitress to bring them more sake. “Happy? Why would they be happy? Everything they went there for has gone up in smoke. The girls in Beijing wear the same platform sneakers they do in New York.”

      “Why do they stay, then?”

      Rank looked at him strangely, slightly turning his head. “You know, you haven’t changed a bit, Jack. Not many people would ask that.”

      “But I am asking. Why don’t they just go home to Brooklyn, where they can get a decent bagel, or Florida?”

      “Because they have lives, Jack. Friends, a system of being.”

      “Yeah, I wonder what that would be like.”

      Rank watched the rising bubbles in the fish tank uncomfortably. Whenever Lindstrom tried to broach the subject of his discontent, people looked as if they needed to use the bathroom. Even the shrink the rehab gurus had sent him to had only wanted to talk about the present. All behavioral, he said. What about the past?

      “There’s this British guy, Jack, I swear he looks like an overweight golden retriever. Got a crease in his forehead from an accidental discharge, says it happened on a transport in Burma. He’s the one who got in touch with me, not long after I accepted the position at the Center in Nanjing.”

      Lindstrom swallowed with alacrity in spite of himself. When you didn’t have a “system of being,” you needed a rush to fill the empty space. It was not unlike going back on the spike, he thought. “You’re saying he’s Six?”

      “I don’t know what that means.”

      “MI-6, Alan. As in Military Intelligence. James fucking Bond. Don’t play virgin with me.”

      Rank shrugged. “All I know is he likes to quote Shakespeare. Seems to think he’s Falstaff, complete with a giant chip on his shoulder for being rejected by the king.”

      The flutter had quickened underneath Lindstrom’s ribs, and he took a swig from the fresh drink to quell it. “This is beautiful,” he said, looking around in the aqueous blue light of the bar. Already, it didn’t feel like home. “Spooks who’ve been privatized. I need to know more, Alan. Such as it is, I’d be giving up my life.”

      Rank’s head swiveled back and his gray eyes were sharp. “In our current state of post-9/11 madness, the group feels that human rights have been buried. They feel that China is as good a place as any to bring those issues to light.”

      “You might tell that to the Afghans,” Lindstrom said.

      Rank looked at him quizzically. People tended to forget about April, perhaps willfully, about that chapter in his, in their country’s, collective life. Al-Qaeda had forced them to remember, and in that sense, Lindstrom felt connected to the world for the first time in years.

      “Are they professional?” he asked.

      “Very,” Rank said, eyes following the waitress as she lay down their sushi on black plates. On Sunday afternoons, she and Lindstrom sometimes met for dim sum and a karate movie—a sad, platonic date. “They say to be ready to go on a day’s notice, but no later than June 1. Someone, Falstaff I imagine, will be in touch.”

      lindstrom’s room at the jingling was a sterile affair, looking out across the cowering town. He turned on and off all the lights and the television. At the minibar, he recorded his presence with the room service office by fixing himself a glass of Glenfiddich from an airline bottle. Trying to steady his hand, he realized too late that the ice might be bad. A small lapse of instinct, but it worried him. When his suitcase showed up—attended by Frank, Joe, and Miles—he tipped them all way too much, messed up his bedclothes, took his daypack, and went down to the street.

      The driver had moved on beyond the hotel, and Lindstrom had a hard time convincing the gatekeeper that he wanted to go out unaccompanied. Then he had to fight off the black marketeers and the other gypsy cabs. His driver was reading a newspaper and drinking a Coke, and this time Lindstrom told him, “Black Cat.”

      The Black Cat Lounge, Rank had said, was like one of those places—three small, thatch-covered rooms of candles, round wooden spool tables, and sweating cement—that the two men had frequented in some of the grislier localities of South Vietnam. Set up in this instance as an exercise in entrepreneurial activity by Rank’s students at the Center for Sino-American Studies, instead of MAC-V, the Black Cat was a mixture of Bangkok and Berlin, dive and cabaret, but its terminal dusk had been startled by the morning. Sharp blades of light cut from the door into the anteroom, which smelled of hemp and rain. Wandering through the requisite beads to the barroom, Lindstrom found a sole American woman in the flush of her early forties, hip on the edge of a stool, discussing a pile of receipts with a Chinese man in a soiled apron and white paper hat. As she slid off the stool, she tried to place Lindstrom’s face with a worried expression.

      “I thought word had got around,” she said, slipping her fingers around the bottom of her throat. Her reddish hair was swept up to the back of her head, and the dangling earrings she wore made her neck look unnaturally long. “They shut us down. The police. This morning. For health violations.”

      Lindstrom had thought she was talking about his mission, and he swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat. His view of the kitchen did not contradict the police’s decision.

      “I just arrived in country today,” Lindstrom told her. “Professor Rank had said I should meet him here.”

      “Then you must be his friend, Jack.” СКАЧАТЬ