The aim of Stratton's walk was a downtown park built on an artificial hill. The park itself was nothing special, but the circumstances of its construction were testimony to the siege mentality of Chinese communism. Perhaps forty feet high and a quarter mile around, the hill had been built entirely by hand, one bucket at a time, by volunteer workers who had scooped it from underneath the foundations of the city. In every shop, every factory, every school, Stratton had read, a well-oiled door led down to a network of tunnels. It was the most elaborate bomb shelter in the world, and it had taken more than thirty years to finish.
Bombshelter Park, as Stratton had silently dubbed it, was closed. As he strolled back toward the hotel, he thought of David Wang.
He owed much to the old professor. Wang had sensed the disillusion, no, the despair, that Stratton had brought with him to the tiny college in rural Ohio.
Stratton had been running from Asia when he arrived at St. Edward's for graduate studies. Despite Wang's considerable reputation, Stratton had avoided his courses. Still, he had found himself attracted to the gentle and patient teacher. They had become friends, then confidants, and on the bright morning when a changed Stratton had strode forward to receive his Ph.D., no one could have missed the fatherly gleam in David Wang's eyes.
They had drifted apart, more by circumstance than design. With Stratton teaching in New England, rural Ohio had seemed increasingly remote. It had been two years since they had seen one another. Until Peking. Stratton, avoiding his brethren art historians for the first time and feeling particularly exultant at being alone, had stood, back arched, head up, to study the magnificent lakeside arcade of the Summer Palace.
The voice had come from behind him.
"They say she was a fool-profligate-the empress dowager, squandering national riches on a marble boat when she should have spent the money to build a modern navy."
Stratton would have known the voice anywhere, and the professorial restatement of conventional wisdom that was meant to be challenged. He had replied without turning around.
"Perhaps she knew more than most people give her credit for."
"How so?" asked the voice.
"She may have understood that, even with modernization, the Imperial Navy would have been no match for the barbarian fleets. She foresaw the end of dynastic China and, instead of sending more young men needlessly to their deaths, decided to create that which would give her pleasure in the realization that the end was coming for her kind." It was, Stratton thought, an inspired improvisation.
"Mmmm, an interesting theory," the voice had conceded, "but in the end, I would think history correct in judging her a foolish spendthrift."
"Me, too," said Stratton, turning around to embrace David Wang.
Together, they had strolled the lake, finding amid the crush of Chinese visitors a seat aboard the ludicrous and beautiful boat the Empress Ci Xi had ordered built a century before.
Wang seemed immune to time, Stratton thought. He had looked fit and every bit the elegant, prosperous tourist in tattersall shirt, gabardine trousers, polished loafers and Japanese camera. As always, Wang looked a trifle owlish behind his thick glasses with gold frames.
"I keep hoping that if I put off everything long enough, the publisher will forget about the book contract," Stratton had joked to explain his presence.
"But how about you, David? Aren't you the man who once told me never to look back, who persuaded me at a tough time in my life to lay the past aside for good and get on with life?"
"I would be distressed if I thought you were really as dogmatic as you sound, Thomas," Wang had chided. "But of course you are teasing, and, yes, I was the one who always said that the United States was my country, China just the place I happened to be born. But then I changed my mind. It is an old man's right, you know, to change his mind."
"Why?"
"Two things, really. For one, I am retired, you know-"
"No, I didn't. If I had known, I would have come to wish you well."
"Well, it was just a quiet leavetaking, no ceremony. Of course, I expect to stay in Pittsville and keep my hand in now and then." David Wang had smiled. Only death would ever take him from the college and the town where he had been an institution for nearly forty years.
"The second reason is that I have a brother. I had not thought much about him all these years and then suddenly there was a letter inviting me to China. In the end, I came. A good idea, I guess."
Stratton had caught an uncertainty in the old man's voice.
"Is something wrong? Anything I can help you with?"
"I'm just a bit bewildered is all. Call it culture shock. You know, when I got off the plane, I was nearly too nervous to speak Chinese."
"I know the feeling."
Wang had touched Stratton's arm then, and they had both remembered the night by the fire in Wang's farmhouse when an angry and confused young man had spilled the bitter dregs of senseless war.
"My problems are nothing compared to the dilemmas you once had, believe me," said Wang. "But it would be nice to talk about them. I'll tell you what: I'm going to Xian to see my brother tomorrow. He's a deputy minister, you know. I'll be back around dark on Wednesday. I'll call you then. If you can break away from your tour, I'll show you the real Peking and we can talk as we walk."
"I wouldn't miss it."
Wednesday night Stratton returned from his walk to Bombshelter Park about nine thirty. David Wang never called.
CHAPTER 2
Alice scolded. Little Miss Sun, the China Travel International Service guide, implored timidly. Walter Thomas-or was it Thomas Walters?-a foppish Egyptologist from the Midwest, spoke vaguely of "fraternal kinship," whatever that meant.
Stratton endured. When the atmosphere turned bitchy, he shrugged and walked away. The White Pagoda and a refurbished lamasery were not on his agenda that day. Stratton watched without expression while his colleagues, suitably armed with cameras in black leather cases and sensible shoes, obediently flocked onto their minibus under Miss Sun's set-piece smile. Then he went up to his room and squeezed forty-five minutes of exercise from the cramped patch between the cracking wall and iron bedstead. When, near ten o'clock, David Wang still had not called, he prowled the gloomy hotel corridors until he found the room that Jim McCarthy used as an office.
Dust blanketed stacks of books and haphazard piles of newspapers that overburdened a loose-jawed table. It carpeted the dials of an expensive radio atop a gray filing cabinet. It lay like virgin snow on the bright yellow shade of a lamp meant more for Sweden than China.
McCarthy lolled in a swivel chair, desert boots comfortably atop the burnished top of a huge partners' desk that Stratton identified instantly as a valuable antique.
Mechanically, McCarthy was ripping strips from a newspaper, laying them in a corner of the desk and tossing the discards in the general direction of a big straw basket.
"Hey, baby," McCarthy lured Stratton from the doorway. "Make yourself a cup of coffee. Or there's some Qingdao, if it's not too early for you." The massive head gestured toward a box-sized refrigerator on the floor.
"Thanks." Stratton spooned Brazilian instant into a hotel cup identical to the one in his room, then added hot water from an identical pitcher.
"You teach art history. And karate, right?" McCarthy called.
"Why karate?" Stratton laughed.
"Sheila was admiring your whipcord body. I had a whipcord body, too-until I came to China." McCarthy patted his belly. "Is it fun, teaching?"
"I like it, I really do. It's not as exciting as being a foreign correspondent, but you do get hooked into the research. You find one piece here and another there and pretty soon you don't know where the hours went. Then, too, the vacations are nice and long. Most summers I go out west and help a friend of mine run a wilderness company for tourists-Whitewater rafting, survival hikes, sissy climbing, that kind of thing. I should be out there now, instead of screwin' around here. But I really wanted to see China. Five cities, twenty-one days."