As the train sped for Madrid, however, Alex’s mind flickered from the distant past to her own personal events of a more recent coinage. Her fiancé, a member of the United State Secret Service, had been killed recently in the line of duty. She remained angry and unsettled with God at the events that had befallen her. Deep down, she had not yet learned how to forgive the people or forces that had caused Robert’s death. In terms of what she now wanted from life, she remained undecided.
Like this very mission. Why accept it? Then again, why not?
Soft route, indeed.
Outside in the distance, she saw a small church and churchyard and for a fleeting half a minute, she could see a funeral in progress. She was somehow touched by the feelings of sympathy, empathy, and sorrow for the people gathered there.
It was a rural ceremony. It brought to mind a memory of her own, when she was a little girl, visiting her mother’s childhood home in Mexico. Her grandmother’s health had been failing for two or three years. But during this summer, when Alex was nine, her grandmother had suddenly started to run a high fever. Overnight, her breathing became difficult. The family wanted to move her to the hospital, but the nearest facility was a hundred miles away.
“Tu abuela se está murienda,” her mother explained. Your grandmother is dying.
“No. Ella no puede,” Alex answered, in denial. No! She can’t!
Alex went to her grandmother’s bedside. She placed her hand on the old woman’s, then upon her forehead as her eyes welled with tears.
“Por favor,” Alex cried. “Don’t leave us.”
Her abuela managed a weak smile. Across three generations, they spoke to each other in Spanish, in the accents of Oxipalta, where the old woman had lived as a girl.
“Remember, Alex, there is a purpose to everything, a time for everything. The Creator has seen to that. Many years ago, I was young and strong. But now I am tired. I must rest. It’s what God intended.”
By her bedside was a small white paper bag with sand in it. The sand supported a small candle.
“Be my little angel,” Alex’s grandmother had said. “Light the luminaria for me. Through the light of the luminaria, my Lord Jesus will find me.”
Alex sobbed and kissed her grandmother. She told her how much she loved her. She fumbled with some matches and lit the luminaria. Her grandmother smiled, closed her eyes, and never spoke again.
Alex’s mother sat by the bed. A few hours later, the old woman passed away.
The next day, Alex sat by the open coffin. A young priest from the local parish said Mass in Spanish. Afterward, the family and the priest buried abuela in the camposanto by the churchyard. They laid her to rest next to her husband, who had died ten years earlier.
It was Alex’s first brush with death, the first time she had tried to comprehend it. But in Alex’s mind and in her heart, another luminaria had been lit, one of faith, and it still burned.
It was like that with Robert, her late fiancé, too, Alex realized. The luminaria, the simple candle, still burned. But it hadn’t receded in memory as much as her grandmother’s, and the flame had been lit much more recently. And yet, in the same way, Alex had moved on.
What alternative was there, really?
The final two hours of the trip passed uneventfully. Her seat companion was a gray-haired Spanish woman twice her age who was deeply engrossed in a novella. For a while, Alex gamed on her iPod, with only a casual eye on the scenery. Eventually, the train passed a glorious castle about forty minutes outside of Madrid, then through the surprisingly third world shanties of gypsies that ringed the city. Then it pulled into Madrid Atocha at quarter to three. She disembarked. Here too the station was surprisingly modern, the original nineteenth-century one serving as a kind of trainless winter garden. Gradually the familiar faces from the train disappeared into the crowds at the station and ceased to be a part of her day.
She took a taxi to the hotel, which was only about fifteen minutes away. “The Prado,” the driver said as they passed the famous museum, although she had visited it many times on previous visits. As they approached a fountain with a figure of Neptune, they turned onto a crescent with a little park in the middle called the Plaza de la Lealtad and pulled up in front of the Ritz, a building that looked to be straight out of Paris.
“The stock exchange is on the other side of the square,” the taxi driver said. “Maybe not a coincidence,” he added with a laugh. “No poor people here.”
The Ritz had been Madrid’s most prestigious hotel since it opened at the beginning of the twentieth century. King Alphonso XIII, grandfather of the current King Juan Carlos II, invested his personal money into its construction. Alex had stayed there once before, about five years earlier.
The lobby was grand and immaculate. A fortuitous error had taken place in booking, and she was bumped up from a single room to a small suite. The suite not lacking for comfort, from king-sized beds to plush carpets, to reading chairs, two phones, Internet connection, and an antique desk. She opened a pair of twin windows to view the city, even though the air-conditioning was humming quietly and efficiently.
Okay. She was in Madrid. Now what?
SEVEN
ZURICH, SEPTEMBER 6
The autopsy had just concluded in Zurich when a representative of the Consulate of the Republic of China arrived at the headquarters of the cantonal police. The man entered the building and approached the receptionist at the front desk very quietly. She only knew he was there when she looked up and jumped slightly, seeing a handsome but unsmiling face and dark eyes looking down at her.
“Hello,” he said, with great courtesy. “I’m John Sun. I’m here to visit the body of the unfortunate Lee Yuan.” He was immaculately dressed and infinitely polite. He spoke enough German to get by. He also spoke excellent English. And, with a big gracious smile, he exuded more charm in a minute than most men can muster in a lifetime. All the women in the office noticed. He was there, he said, to identify and claim the body. He had his Swiss government issued ID, standard issue for foreign diplomats in the country. No one looked at it too carefully.
The receptionist passed him along to a policeman who worked the records room. The policeman had studied in England for a year, so the language was a convenient fit. Sun got on well with his Swiss contact.
The visitor had a business card in English, Chinese, and German, as well as his consular ID. His documents confirmed his name as John Sun.
Sun joined some of the ladies for their lunch break. He hung around the police installation waiting for the release of the corpse. One of the younger women, a single blonde girl named Hana, remarked-blurted out, actually, in Sun’s presence-that Sun looked very much like the sexy Chinese movie star Jet Li, who had killed about a hundred guys. Li had also, she said, bedded many beautiful ladies in dozens of films from Hong Kong to Hollywood.
The visitor expressed embarrassment over such flattery. He insisted that his own life was much more prosaic. Back home in China, before joining his nation’s foreign service, he said, he had been a teacher and a gymnast.
That afternoon, Hana brought up a picture of Jet Li on her workstation computer via the Internet. She said she’d love to take him home, cook for him, and “seduce him with European culture and keep him all to myself.”
The other women crowded around, admired the picture, and agreed. After that, they referred to Johnny Sun as their “movie star.”
As a movie star in Zurich, however, he had a short run. He appeared only one more time, early that same evening to manage the shipping of Yuan’s remains “back to his family in China.” Sun was again infinitely courteous and thanked everyone at police headquarters. He wore a black suit and a funereal black tie for the pickup of the deceased. He arrived with his own vehicle and two Chinese helpers for the occasion.