The Ghost Shift (41 page)

“I’m sorry.”

That was what the whole affair had been about, Lockhart realized. The Wolf had taken his stupid bet because it had struck a nerve. He’d sent Lizzie to America to prove something that he doubted himself.

The Wolf lit another cigarette.

“Two days later, Chen called. He said they were asking questions about me at the Ministry of Civil Affairs
—Did Lang Xiaobo share her views? Should he be investigated?
‘You don’t, do you?’ he said. ‘No,’ I told him. Xiaoli had been dead two days, and I betrayed her to save myself. He said he would deal with it. It was like being back at school with him again. I didn’t realize that he was a traitor.”

“Was he?” Lockhart said.

“You recruited him.”

“Not exactly. He volunteered.”

The Wolf walked back to the table, took a blank sheet of paper from the file, and inscribed the characters of Chen’s name at the top. “Would you mind if I took notes?” he said.

“This is classified information.” Lockhart leaned across and took one of the Wolf’s cigarettes. The aroma of the smoke was like being back in Beijing with him, in the
siheyuan
with Chen’s dead mistress.

“You must want justice.”

Lockhart nodded. It was a fair bargain. An old piece of information on a single discredited agent in return for revenge. “I knew Chen. He found me at a reception in the Great Hall of the People, after a trade mission. It was a year before June Fourth, and he was my easiest recruit. He said he’d give us information in return for a passport. I thought he was a Party hack without a conscience—he was less of a Communist than I was. But you don’t pick your friends in that business,
and Langley loved him. I was a hero—Beijing was in chaos, and I had a source in Zhongnanhai. He had expensive tastes, and I did what I needed to keep him happy. We set up a Hong Kong account for him. We found a place for his mistress.”

“It was a beautiful
siheyuan.
”

“She liked it, he liked it. We were happy.” Lockhart inhaled the tobacco. “Until he got her pregnant. Then it fell apart.”

The Wolf nodded. “That’s when Chen called me. He sounded panicky, which wasn’t like him. Even when he was beating people until they bled, he was calm. He said he had a woman who had been causing trouble. Things had gotten out of control, and he needed me to deal with it. He had known that he would need a favor—his mistress for my wife. I didn’t understand how he could keep a mistress in Gulou Xi Dajie on his salary, so I did some digging. I turned up the accounts and the link to you. I should have reported him as a traitor, but I was in his grip. So I did what he asked.”

The Wolf passed his palm across the table, wiping an invisible layer of dust. His fingertips were yellow, but his hands were mottled.
Bad circulation
, Lockhart thought. Years of sitting in meetings, drinking toasts at Party banquets, biding his time to make amends.

“Twin girls, in a basket by the bed. They were hungry and crying, but so small that no one heard. He’d killed their mother and left them there. That was his last act as a father. If I’d smothered them in their baskets, he wouldn’t have cared. He disgusted me, and I hated the Party for producing him. But I convinced myself that you were the villain—it was easier that way. I wanted to teach you a lesson, but I should have learned one myself. No one had ever stopped Chen, so he thought he couldn’t be stopped. If I had kept my temper, those girls would have gone to an orphanage together. That would have been better.”

“It wouldn’t have,” Lockhart said. “We loved Lizzie, although it was for a short time. I’ve often thought about us in that
siheyuan.
We fought over the twins like objects. We didn’t know how precious they were.”

The Wolf shrugged. “We were young men.”

“How did you find Lizzie?”

“I followed them, over the years, I knew where they were, what they were doing. It wasn’t difficult.”

“You wanted to win the bet?”

The Wolf grimaced. “It started out like that. But as they grew, it changed. I visited Guilin when Mei was six years old. She won’t remember. I was in a party of officials and I saw her, playing in the courtyard. Xiaoli had wanted children, but she died too young. I asked myself what she would have done. I got Sun Yat-sen University to take her and, when she graduated, I recruited her.”

“And Lizzie?”

“I knew when she came to Hong Kong, and when you followed. I wondered what had brought you back, and it led me to Long Tan. You may not believe it, but I respected you. I had seen what you could do, and I believed that if you were interested in something, it had to be interesting. I read the files, and I started to ask myself why so many of them were dying. I knew I was putting myself at risk by inquiring, but I didn’t care. I was too old, too tired to keep on protecting him. When I saw your daughter, I knew. It had his mark.”

“Why did you show Mei? Wasn’t that cruel?”

“She had to fight. I gave her a reason to.”

Feng held Mei’s
hand as she sat on a narrow utility bed in a room painted a drab olive green. Lockhart had told her who her father was after she had woken up. The Wolf had come with him to talk about the past, and they had taken her to a PLA officer’s room with a mahogany desk and a fading map of Guangdong pinned on the wall. She had noticed their shame as they talked about their past.

When Mei was young, she’d imagined her parents. Villagers, she thought, who were too poor to bring up more than one child. Maybe, she’d even admitted to herself, they had wanted a boy. It wasn’t such a terrible crime. She looked around the orphanage at all the girls, left on the street. But she dreamed that they had loved her, that they had wanted to keep her, if it had been possible. It had been a difficult time, tough enough for peasants to feed themselves, without an extra mouth. That was what she’d told herself when she was small.

“I want to see Chen,” she said.

“Are you sure about that, treasured one?”

“He should know what he did.”

“He won’t care. It makes no difference to him if he had his daughter killed. He stabbed your mother and left you behind.” Feng knelt and stroked her arm. “You know what he is. Forget him.”

“I want to go.”

A Jeep was waiting, but Mei set off across the tarmac on foot, walking past the landing lights with Feng beside her. Two fighters had left at dawn with a roar, but since then the only activity had come from the detention center. Vehicles crossed back and forth, and a parade of officials had entered and left the building—Chen was already a Party attraction. They waited outside for half an hour before the Wolf emerged to take them through.

The Wolf led them to a room with a two-way mirror, where Mei stood with her face so close to the glass that it misted with her breath. Chen was in a padded room, reading the
People’s Daily.
It had nothing about his arrest and wouldn’t for several days, while Zhongnanhai pondered what signal to send. But one story had made it to Weibo—a few paragraphs about an arrest in Macau—and the social network was buzzing with the news.

She stared at him, scanning for a likeness. They’d taken his suit, and he hadn’t shaved. His hair was unkempt, and his stubble was gray. He already looked older, face crumpled by his fall. She remembered him in Revolutionary Martyrs Park, bursting with the power of high office. Now, he looked like a petty gangster, plucked off the streets of Kowloon.

Mei turned and stood with her back to him and her palms against the cold glass. Feng was still glued to the view.

“I don’t want to talk to him. Let him rot.”

“You’re so right, baby.”

“He’s not my father,” she said as she left.

“Are these limes fresh-squeezed? Like, this evening?”

Reassured by the waiter, Henry Martin relaxed in his bucket armchair and sipped his drink. He was sitting with Lockhart in the Atrium bar of the Four Seasons, seventy stories above Guangzhou, with a floor-to-ceiling view of the Pearl River. The curved roof and sides of the Haixinsha Island stadium were lit in white bars, making it grin like a shark, and the Canton TV Tower was pulsing through a light show, turning blue, red, green, orange, and finally multicolored in stripes and bars.

“You should see the Zaha Hadid opera house. It’s over that side,” Martin said, twisting his body to point across the bar. “Man, she’s a genius—she’s got vision. She didn’t get anything built until she was forty-five, and it was a fire station in Germany. Nobody wanted her stuff. Can you believe it? If you try to make something original, idiots get in your way.”

Martin was in a three-piece lilac-colored linen suit that matched the carpet of the bar perfectly. Lockhart wondered if he’d chosen it intentionally and would change again to fit with his dinner reservation. Martin put down his vodka and lime and waved his arm across the city, taking in the perfect needle arch of the Liede Bridge, lit up in yellow and orange.

“These guys don’t mess around, do they? Don’t get me wrong—I’m a capitalist. But they’ve got something going here. As an American, doesn’t it scare you? Six hundred million people taken out of poverty. Whatever you say, they get stuff done. They built the
Shanghai-to-Nanjing bullet train in the time it took to fix the broken elevator in the Delta terminal at JFK. I checked every time I went through there. I told the president the other day. He was really pissed.”

“They’ve got problems, too. Corruption, one-party rule, human rights,” Lockhart said.

“For sure. But sometimes I wonder about moving over here. California’s finished. It’s got a terminal case of democracy. We’re allowed to vote on everything, so nothing gets done.”

“
This
hasn’t put you off?”

“I’m glad it’s over. Cao was hard to deal with. He wouldn’t let us inside, and now I know why. He said the workers were happy, the media was exaggerating. He didn’t mention that he’d been killing them. We’re lucky most of the story didn’t get out. That’s another thing they do well—control the flow of information. They’d be great at product launches. Anyway, I don’t have to deal with Cao anymore. They’ve put him in a labor camp, I heard.”

“Will you stay in Guangdong?”

“I’m not going to lie. I thought hard about leaving. There are plenty of other places we could go—Bangladesh, Indonesia. China’s not as cheap as it used to be, and Chen screwed me. I didn’t know whom to trust. But here’s the thing. I went to Beijing to thrash it out. Those guys talk a lot of bullshit for public consumption, but they don’t smoke their own dope. They want Poppy to stay, and they said they’d fix it so I don’t face any trouble. I’ll be a friend of China. Having seen what they do to their enemies, I prefer that.”

Martin drained his vodka and lime and popped a rice cracker into his mouth as he stood.

“They offered me a new partner. Old-school good technology, here to stay. The People’s Liberation Army of Guangdong. Their commercial operation needs an upgrade, and we can learn from each other. I’m having dinner with the guy who fixed the deal—Major General Sun.”

Lizzie’s procession set
out late the next morning. Wing had resisted Mei’s efforts to tone it down, and it stretched down the Li River promenade by the Jiefang Bridge. Two marshals lined them up under
the palm trees—a snake of children from the Social Welfare Institute with banners, mourners for hire in white suits, pallbearers carrying a scarlet papier-mâché house for the ghosts of the dead, a marching band.

The limestone hills were circled in mist, and Guilin was going about its business. Under the promenade, two women stood up to their ankles in the river, washing clothes. Lockhart and Margot took the lead, wearing sashes and carrying incense sticks, with Mei and Wing behind, holding photos of Lizzie. As they crossed the promenade, heading up Yiren Road, the band’s cymbals clashing, bicycles swerved and the women at the Milk Tea One stand offered drinks. It was a fine procession, and it lengthened as passersby joined the throng.

It had been Wing’s idea, and Lockhart had wondered if it wasn’t a mistake, on top of Lizzie’s funeral at a Unitarian church in Chevy Chase. Margot had been somber on the flight and hadn’t spoken as they drove through Guilin to the orphanage. But Wing waited for them in the courtyard as they passed through the barrier, and Margot had leapt out of the car to hold her close. She had even asked him to photograph the two of them in the same place as before.