"Murder." Stratton had wept. "Murder."
"I understand, Tom."
And from the confession had come a silent bond more powerful than any in Stratton's life. Often in the evening the two of them would sit on the porch, sipping tea, watching the hillside go dark. Stratton learned to talk of other things, and finally the nightmares went away. Because of David, Stratton had left St. Edward's a man reconciled to his past.
Now the wind came in fits, slapping at the leaves of the trees. Stratton jumped a clear brook and bounded up the hill in a rush toward the old clapboard house.
He clomped onto the wooden porch at full tilt.
For a few moments he stood there, facing the Arbor, trying to catch his breath.
The cool wind raked through his hair and made him shiver.
It was almost nightfall.
Stratton found the flowerpot on a freshly painted window-sill. The house key lay half buried behind a splendid pink geranium.
The key fit easily, but before Stratton could turn it, the door gave way.
Crocker was wrong. It had not been locked.
Stratton groped in the darkness, cursing loudly when his knee cracked against the corner of an unseen table. His hand found a hanging lamp and turned the switch.
He stood in the middle of David Wang's library. Ranks of books marched from floor to ceiling. There was the burgundy leather chair with the worn and discolored arm rests. There was the giant Webster's on its movable stand; David would drag it all over the house, wherever he happened to be reading. And there in one corner was the newest thing in the room, a grandfather clock. Never on time, never on key, it had been a recent gift from the faculty club.
Stratton felt warm and safe in this place.
His eyes climbed to a high spot in one of the bookcases where David had tenderly arranged several framed photographs of his family. Stratton moved closer and stood on his toes. One picture in particular intrigued him: two young men at the waterfront, arms around each other's shoulders. They could have been twins, they looked so much alike. Both young men in the sepia photograph smiled for the camera, but those smiles told Stratton which of them was leaving Shanghai Harbor that day. David's smile was bright with hope, his brother's strained with envy.
"Yes, it was a sad farewell."
The voice cut through Stratton like a blast of arctic air. He had no time to speak, no time to turn around. He heard a grunt, and then his skull seemed to explode, and he felt himself falling slower and slower like ashes from a mountaintop.
CHAPTER 27
The photo album had a royal blue cover and a gold stripe. It was old and worn, with tape for hinges. The album contained faded black-and-white pictures, a half century old, of wicked, life-giving Shanghai. There were photos of New York in the 1930s as well, of a self-conscious young man in stiff white shirt and broad necktie posed before municipal landmarks: Grant's Tomb, the spanking new Empire State Building.
The album had been David Wang's favorite.
He would sit at his desk in the old farmhouse and turn the well-remembered pages. Before a man can understand where he is going he must first come to terms with where he has been. Sometimes David Wang found refuge in the album when he had a visitor. From it he would extract lessons that matched the problem the visitor brought. Once Thomas Stratton, nerves jangled, memories still too fresh, had sat before the cumbersome old farmer's desk and watched David Wang finger the pages to the accompaniment of a gentle, wise man's monotone.
"Ah, Shanghai, what a city it was, Thomas. A cauldron of the very best and the very worst there is to life. Luxury unbounded. But for most, inconceivable misery. Too much misery. It had to change, but alas, it took the Communists to do it. We are all a bit like Shanghai, aren't we? We all change. Every day we are different. And if we are smart, smarter than the Communists, we do not destroy the good. We destroy the bad, edge it out slowly but surely-ruthlessness, cruelty, injustice, rash behavior. We build on what is good, like the body repairing a wound, forcing out the infection, replacing good for bad. Why, I remember as a boy in Shanghai… "
Through a cotton wool of pain and confusion Thomas Stratton watched David Wang again at his desk, again with the album in his delicate, thinker's fingers.
But it was not David. Not even the dulling ache in his skull would allow Stratton to believe that. There was no cup of jasmine tea at David's elbow.
Instead, a coil of rope, serpentine and menacing, lay on the scarred old desk.
There was no crackle from the old fire or soft glow from a desk lamp, only the rattle of an old-fashioned kerosene lantern perched anachronistically in one corner.
David Wang did not sit at his desk. David Wang was dead.
At David's desk, defiling his memory, his goodness, sat his brother. His murderer.
Stratton would have sprung but for the bonds that held him, hand and foot, to the old Harvard chair.
"He was a fool, my brother," Wang Bin said. "An arrogant, intellectual romantic, a superior being who lived in a cage of his own making-too smug to come to terms with reality. No, reality might have been disordered, unpleasant, and that would never do, would it? Of course not. Best to ignore it, then. A fool… but you do not agree, Professor Stratton?"
"What are you doing here?" A wounded plea. Stratton barely recognized his own voice.
"I could tell you I came for sentimental reasons. David told me about this place, and what it meant to him. And all you see around you in this room, Professor, are the memories of a childhood we shared. I could tell you I came here to see all this, to taste these old memories… but that's not the reason."
Wang Bin eyed Stratton. "There is a more practical reason for me to be here."
"Let's hear it."
"Soon enough, Professor." Wang Bin walked slowly around the desk. Knots bit into Stratton's flesh. He would break the chair. It was only wood.
Stratton saw the punch coming out of the corner of an eye; there was nothing he could do. A knobby fist smashed into his cheekbone. Stratton tasted blood.
"My brother," Wang Bin said calmly, "was a fool who could see the truth but chose to ignore it. Even as a child he was a sanctimonious fraud. One year older he was, that is all. Is that a century? Does one year bestow wisdom? Ah, but how David loved to play the elder, he the superior and I the inferior, the ignorant younger brother. My mother and father, they were fooled by him, like everyone else…
"Once I broke a vase, a beautiful Ming vase. It sat there on a polished wooden table, beautiful and ludicrous. And I broke it, perhaps even intentionally. I smashed it into a million pieces." Wang Bin paused, with a curious smile. "Like all children, I was afraid of what my parents would do. So I told my mother that a deliveryman-an old man who brought fresh crabs to the house-had carelessly broken the vase with his sack. She believed me. But that was not good enough for my brother. He went to Mother and said, 'It was I, your eldest son, who broke the vase, Mother. Bin is only trying to protect me. I take responsibility.' Did they beat him? No, of course not. 'What an honest boy you are,' they said.
"And did David then beat me, or mock me to show me,how much braver he was? No.
He never said a word, nothing, as though by making me wallow in my shame I would drown. Just as he never said a word to me those days when I would skip my piano lessons and come back only to find him playing my exercises, so that downstairs my mother would hear it and think how dedicated I was, just like my elder brother."
Stratton said, "Why are you here?"
Wang Bin sat down once more at the desk. "We have time for that, Professor, plenty of time."