Lin sighed. He reached into the pocket inside his broad left sleeve and retrieved three copper cash, which he flung at the man. “She is now.”
The imbalance of currencies was so great that such a meager tip made the man bow three times. “Certainly, certainly, mister, miss.”
But, as he walked with the girl towards the elevators at the far end of the lobby, past the potted plants and strangely granitic sofas, Lin could feel the man’s eyes on the back of his skull, analyzing him, wondering what a well-dressed, up and coming Chinese businessman could want with a scruffy, dirty piece of baggage such as that.
Lin wondered too.
It was the newspaper, he decided later.
Had she asked for soap, or money, or offered herself, Lin would not have given her a second thought. But her odd blue eyes—Lin still couldn’t think of blue eyes but as being odd full of greedy speculation, while she asked for the newspaper that he carried folded atop his briefcase. That had disturbed his thoughts.
Later he sat in the restaurant of the hotel, across a grease-smeared table from the Englishwoman and watched her greedily turn the pages of the newspaper, while the steak he’d bought her lay forgotten in its chipped plate, at the side of the table.
“You’re not eating,” he said.
He himself had scant appetite. Beef in England always smelled spoiled and was a color only slightly lighter than gunmetal grey. The result of being imported over who knew what distances.
But he knew how scant meat of any kind was in England and what a treat the locals considered it.
Strange, he thought. He’d come in with Dragon Clouds Unlimited, a cigarette factory. Unable to sell cigarettes in the free world where doctors had made the ill effects of tobacco too well known, Chinese cigarette companies preyed on Europeans and, instead of the many things Europe needed, exported this one vice, this one bad habit, this added bit of pollution.
She looked up at him, glanced at her steak, cut a piece of it and ate it quickly, then returned to the paper.
“It says here,” she said. “It says here that students have rebelled in France. That the government conceded and agreed to the right to free elections.”
Lin nodded, fascinated at her reaction. “You didn’t know?”
“One hears….” She shook her head. “Rumors. But one can’t be sure. Can never be sure. The news never mention it.”
“But” Lin started. Oh, sure, Europe had been in the grip of communism for almost fifty years, and communications had been severely restricted. But now things were different. It was the 1990s, as the Europeans counted time, from the death of their crucified God. “It’s been happening everywhere. Surely you know that? France, and Iberia, and Germany. One after the other, their governments have collapsed, and free elections….”
“Free elections!” She looked like a child hearing mention of a forbidden sweet. Her eyes sparkled, and her mouth opened in wishful desire.
Her eyes looked the color of the sky over Hangchow, his native town, he thought. He smiled at her, though he fancied that at her words there had been a lull in the conversations around them, a stop in the chatter of businessmen and hookers at the other too-close together tables.
She laughed at his smile. “My name is Emily Dorset,” she said. “I probably should have told you that before.” She looked down at her steak, smiled at him. “Since you bought me dinner and everything. My friends call me Emma.”
“Mine is Yu Lin,” he said. “I come from Hangchow, a provincial city in central China.”
Just the thought of home, the thought of houses not pressed together, the thought of houses that weren’t rabbit warrens in the monolithic cement of totalitarian countries, brought with it a wave of longing. He thought of sailing on the reservoir of Hangchow, and sighed.
He’d given it all up to come to England. It had seemed such a good idea. Go to England. Introduce them to free enterprise.
Instead, he was working for a monolithic corporation in exile amid the barbarians.
And he smiled at that, because that was exactly what his ancestors had called the rest of the world. Barbarians. And Yu Lin who’d thought himself so modern had, over the last year, come to think of them just that way.
He’d thought Englishmen were just like Chinese, only with different customs, religion and politics. Now he wasn’t so sure.
He wasn’t so sure there wasn’t something wrong, servile, subservient, at the bottom of the European soul.
Emma was smiling into his abstracted expression. “You’re thinking of home, aren’t you?”
He felt himself blush, a heat on his cheeks.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I often feel that way too, only I have no home to return to, except….”
“Except?” Lin prompted. Her sky-blue eyes had darkened, as though a cloud passed over them.
“Nothing. I was going to say if I had a home, it would be a home more like China, with human rights, with vote, with freedom.”
Now Lin was sure of it, an almost palpable listening silence in the hotel.
England was supposed to be freer now. England couldn’t touch him. But what would they do to Emma?
“What do you do?” he asked. “For a living.” And immediately upon it, he kicked himself. Most English didn’t do much for a living. A sentence often heard floated up through his mind: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
But she grinned brightly up at him. “I’m a student,” she said. “Art. Something other than the stiff icons of communism, which are no better than the stiff icons of Christianity before. I’d like to draw people as they really are.” Her hands moved in the air, making drawing motions, and the clouds lifted from her sky-blue eyes.
At the door to the hotel, she handed him back his newspaper. “My family…. We could get in trouble if they found this in our house.”
Under the watchful eyes of the doorman, he bent closer to her and spoke in her ear, as if whispering sweet nothings, “I thought it was better now. I thought the BSS were”
But she shook her head. “Sometimes it is the bear’s dying moments that are most dangerous,” she said. She grinned brightly up at him.
She still smelled of rancid sweat, of unwashed flesh constricted within artificial clothes. But her eyes reminded him of the sky over his hometown, and when she smiled it was easy to forget how crooked her teeth were.
“Listen,” she said. “Thanks for the newspaper.”
She stepped away from him, turned to go.
“Wait,” he called. “Wait. Tomorrow. For dinner. Same time.”
Emma turned around, looking surprised, then grinned and nodded once.
Walking down the steps of the hotel, she broke into a little run. She wore ballerina shoes that appeared to be made of cardboard and falling apart.
Not looking either way, she crossed the street chances of any traffic were minimal and the all-plastic Morris suffered a greater chance of injury than any pedestrian they might strike.
On the other side, Emma turned again, and waved at him.
Lin watched her walk away, along the corrosion and pollution stained opposing wall. At one point the wall had been painted with a big, heroic socialist mural.
The words Iron Maggie were still visible and, from amid the grime and the dirt, stared the mock-heroic figure of Britain’s former general secretary. A horse-faced woman, she’d come into the party echelons via the union of iron workers. Hence the name.
She’d been the most draconian of all the previous secretaries. While allowing foreign companies like the one Yu Lin worked for into the country, she’d cracked down on all and any political unrest or religious dissension.