“Go right ahead.”
“So when?”
“I don’t know that my wife or mother-in-law will ever leave, Dad. This is their place. These are their people.”
“No, Rip. You are their people. You are the husband and son-in-law, and in China that counts for just about everything. You make the decision and they will go along with it. You know that.”
“What about the Post?”
“I’ll send someone else to run it. Maybe put it up for sale.”
“Nobody is going to pay you serious money for a newspaper in Communist China, Dad. Not here, not now.”
“We’ll see. You never had a head for business, Rip. You are a damned good newspaperman, though, a rare talent. You come to Sydney, I’ll give you any editorial job in the company except mine, which you’ll get anyway in a few years.”
“I’ll think it over.”
“The thought of you in one of those prisons, eating rats… Oh, well.” Without waiting for a response, his father hung up.
The massacre in front of the Bank of the Orient was the hot topic of conversation among the American Culture conference attendees during the afternoon break. One of Callie Grafton’s fellow faculty members told her about it as she watched the attendees whispering furiously and gesturing angrily. Three or four of them were trying to whisper into cell phones. Callie didn’t tell her informant that Jake had been in the crowd in front of the bank and had given her an eyewitness account at lunch.
At least twenty people were killed, the faculty member said, a figure that stunned Callie. Jake hadn’t mentioned that people were killed, only that there had been some shooting. Obviously he didn’t want her to worry. “Ridiculous to worry, after the fact,” he would say, and grin that grin he always grinned when the danger was past.
Through the years Jake had wound up in more than his share of dangerous situations. She had thought those days behind her when he was promoted to flag rank. An admiral might go down with his ship, it was true, in a really big war, but who was having really big wars these days? In today’s world admirals sat in offices and pushed paper. And yet… somehow this morning Jake wound up in the middle of a shooting riot!
Perhaps we should go home, Callie mused, and then remembered with a jolt that Jake was here for a reason and couldn’t leave.
She tried to forget riots and bodies and her husband’s nose for trouble and concentrate on the conference.
Unfortunately, one of the attendees was a government official, a political officer sent to take notes of the questions and answers and jot down the names of any Chinese who might be “undermining the implementation of the laws,” in the phrase the official used to explain his presence to the faculty.
This official was a bald, middle-aged party apparatchik, a generation removed from most of the attendees, who were students in their early to mid-twenties. The first day Callie Grafton found herself fixating on the man’s facial expressions when any student stood to ask a question.
Angry at herself for feeling intimidated, she still had to carefully phrase her comments. While she could not be prosecuted for political deviancy, her participation in the conference could be terminated by this official on the spot. That sanction was used the very first day against a political science professor from Cornell. Callie was ready to pick up her notebook and follow him out the door, then decided a precipitous leave-taking would not be fair to the students, who came to hear her comments on American culture.
That first evening Callie remarked to Jake, “Maybe taking part in this conference was a mistake.”
“Maybe,” he agreed, “but neither of us thought so when the State Department came up with the invitation.” State had procured a conference faculty invitation for Callie as a cover for the Graftons’ presence in Hong Kong. “Don’t be intimidated,” Jake continued. “Answer the students’ questions as best you can, and if the organizers give you the boot we’ll see the sights for the rest of our stay. No big deal.”
Today after the break, the questions concerned the American banking system. Hu Chiang had asked questions often during the last three days, and he was ready when the room fell silent.
“Mrs. Grafton,” he asked in Chinese, the only language in use during the conference, “who decides to whom an American bank will lend its money?”
Hu was tall, more muscular than the average Chinese youth, Callie thought, which made him a fairly typical Hong Kong young adult, most of whom had enjoyed better nutrition while growing up than their mainland Chinese peers.
“The bank lending committee,” Callie answered.
“The government gives the committee guidance?”
“No. Government sets the financial standards the banks must adhere to, but with only minor exceptions, the banks loan money to people and enterprises that are most capable of paying back the loan with interest, thereby earning profits for the owners of the bank.”
This colloquy continued for several minutes as the party boss grew more and more uncomfortable. Finally, without even glancing at the listening official, Hu asked, “In your opinion, Mrs. Grafton, can capitalism exist in a society that lacks political freedom?”
The official sprang from his seat, turned to face Hu, and pointed his finger. “I can sit silently no longer. That question is a provocation, an insult to the state. You attempt to destroy that which you do not understand. We have the weapons to smash those who plot evil.” He turned toward Callie. “Ignore the provocations of the criminal elements,” he ordered peremptorily, closing the discussion. Then he sat heavily and used a cloth to wipe his face.
Callie was trembling. Although she could speak the language, she felt the strangeness of the culture acutely. She was also worried that she might somehow say something to jeopardize the conference or the people who had invited her.
“Mr. Hu merely asked my opinion,” Callie said, trying to hold her voice steady. “I will answer the question.”
The official’s face reddened and his jowls quivered. “Go,” he roared at her, half rising from his seat and pointing toward the door. “You insult China with your disrespectful attitude.”
Callie gathered her purse and headed for the door. As she walked she addressed her questioner, Hu Chiang, who was still standing in the audience. “The answer to your question, Mr. Hu, is no. Political freedom and economic freedom are sides of the same coin; they cannot exist independently of each other.”
“I got thrown out,” she told Jake when she unlocked the hotel room door and found him on the balcony reading.
“I thought you would, sooner or later,” he said and grinned broadly. “Still glad we came?”
She slumped on the side of the bed and held her head in her hands.
Jake put his arms around her. “Hey, I called the consulate. Tiger Cole wants us to come to dinner tomorrow night.”
“I told you so,” Callie Grafton said through her tears, then tried to smile.
Removing the tape player that would play the miniature tape he had taken from China Bob’s library from the tech shop in the basement of the consulate presented Tommy Carmellini with several problems, the most intractable of which was that the device could not be in two places at once. Kerry Kent had access to the office. Carmellini thought that if she chose to look for the player while it was missing, she would realize that Carmellini had lied to her, that he didn’t trust her. She might even conclude that she was a possible suspect in China Bob’s murder.
The problem was that the tape player was a unique device that played a nonstandard small tape that held up to eight hours of recording, so Carmellini couldn’t hope to buy one over the counter at a gadget shop.