“And now?”
“I think not much.”
“But that’s not the point, is it, Fong?” asked Lily. “Isn’t the issue how they got word of the story in the first place?”
“It sure is Lily, which is why I think maybe you ought to conduct these interviews.”
“Me?”
“Who else knows CNN and that other Western stuff better than you?”
Lily thought about that for a moment. “True. But I can’t meet them looking like this.”
“What’s wrong with the clothes you’re wearing. They look fine to me. Right, Chen?”
Chen blushed. “Maybe Lily has different standards than we do, sir.”
It had never occurred to Fong that Chen would be attracted to Lily. Well, why not? The young man’s marriage was falling apart. And Chen was a lot closer to Lily’s age than he was.
“Turn here, Chen,” Lily said, indicating a street at the right. It led to an area of high-class restaurants and fashionable shops.
“There.” Lily said, pointing at a large, Western-style store. “Stop the car, Chen. That looks promising.” She hopped out and leaned in the window. “What’s my budget?”
Fong had no idea if they even had a budget. Chen reached into his wallet and withdrew a credit card. “It’s got about four hundred American dollars left on it.” As Lily took the card, Fong stared at Chen. “Left on it?”
“It’s a smart card, sir.”
Fong nodded as if he understood what was said to him. But he didn’t. He’d been on the wrong side of the Wall for a long time. How could a credit card be smart – or dumb for that matter?
The store spread out before Lily like a cave freshly opened to the light. She stood on the entry dais some six feet above floor level. The Western influence was evident everywhere. This was a place for the privileged. There seemed to be more shopgirls than buyers in the store. To one side a few Western women were speaking too loudly as their bored husbands tried their best to be interested in more than just the price of their wives’ selections.
Two Chinese women moved with cool precision through the aisles, careful not to catch each other’s eyes. Each knew the compromises necessary to have the money to shop in such a store. Neither was anxious to broach the subject. Both were beautiful. Both were young. Both made Lily feel ugly and old for a moment. But only for a moment.
A shopgirl approached Lily and bowed slightly. Lily put on her best I’m-a-ranking-party-member look and moved past the girl who obediently followed in her wake.
Lily didn’t look back. She liked the unobstructed view. She liked shopping, especially on someone else’s budget – no, not someone, the government’s.
The selection was not as varied as in her favourite shops in Shanghai, but the quality of the merchandise was extremely high. The prices were shocking.
“Good,” she thought, “Beijing owes me something for my trouble.”
She paused by a display of eyeglass frames made in Paris. Such things were still extremely hard to find, even in Shanghai. A small sign indicated that these glass frames were for display purposes only but the frames could be ordered and that delivery would take between three and five months. “Probably closer to a year,” Lily thought.
At the end of the next aisle she saw one of the Chinese women looking at an array of mannequin torsos displaying lacy bras from Los Angeles. The woman’s beautiful figure hardly needed the accents offered by the expensive lingerie.
“Would you like to look, also?” asked the salesgirl from behind her.
“I’ll call for you when I need you,” Lily announced contemptuously. But the moment she’d spoken, she wished she could take back her words. This was a country girl. Pretty. Trained, but a country girl. Not a hardened Shanghai store clerk. Lily turned around. “Perhaps you can help me.”
The girl’s eyes lit up.
Lily came down the stairs of the store like a queen descending from her throne. The two shopping bags dangling from her arms swayed to the rhythm of her hips.
The men were standing by the car. Chen stared openly at her, his mouth a little too agape. Fong examined her as he would a work of art. His eyes were not easily deceived. The black silk shirtwaist was delicately embroidered with silver threads. The garment accentuated her narrow waist and the length of her slender upper body. The leather skirt just peeked out enough to announce its presence. Her long elegant legs were silvery grey in sheer stockings that led the eye to black pumps with high heels. She was a corporate vision in black and grey. Her always-deep eyes were now alive and bright.
She raised her hands and executed a half-turn while keeping her eyes on the men. “So?” She looked at Chen, whose mouth had opened even a little more than before. “Good,” she murmured, “You may comment if you wish.”
“What’s in the bags?”
“My old clothes, Chen,” she snapped. Then in her sweetest voice she said, “I take it that you approve of my choices.”
“I do.” Chen did his best to collect himself.
“And the older member of our team?”
For a moment Fong thought she was referring to the coroner, then he remembered that the old man was at the morgue. He did his best to hide his disappointment. “Your choices are excellent for our purposes.”
“You sound like a Russian.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah.” Then in English she pleaded, “Tell you me like it. Please.”
Fong was touched – and relieved. In English he replied, “I like it Lily. I really do.”
She smiled and handed the bill and the card to Chen. “I wouldn’t try using that thing until it’s refuelled. Oh, by the way, in case you didn’t know, you have overdraft protection on the card. Had overdraft protection,” she corrected herself. “I used that up too.”
Fong’s decision to have Lily lead the interrogation at the China news agency was a good one. The three Westerners were charmed by her and answered her questions without a moment’s hesitation. On occasion her Shanghanese accent puzzled the men, so Fong translated into English.
“On the night of December 28 you were contacted?”
The eldest reporter, the one from Reuters, brushed at the coffee stains on his expansive white shirt, as he answered for the others. “Two of us were. Me and him.” He pointed at the handsome CNN reporter. “We were the only ones here then.”
“Who contacted you?”
“Beijing.”
“Beijing’s a big place.”
“It was a woman. An older woman. She called and told us that there had been a massacre of foreigners on Lake Ching.”
“Did you go to the lake?”
“We tried, but our usual drivers had been told not to take us out of Xian. Even our gypsies had been grounded.”
Lily spoke in highly colloquial Shanghanese so the Westerners couldn’t follow, “So someone called them to tell them about the murders then someone else made sure they couldn’t get to the lake?”
“That would be my guess. Parallel lines again.” Fong turned to the reporters. “When did you finally get to the lake?” Fong asked in English.
“Late January. And there was nothing to see.”
After the specialist came and the boat sank.
“Except that incredible model.”
“Very fancy, but who could tell dick from that?”
Lily wore a puzzled look, “What means who could tell dick?”
“Richard. Dick. Remember?”
“Oh,” Lily blushed. Fong thought she looked lovely when she was a little off-balance.
Chen tapped the elaborate display on the telephone on the reporter’s desk. “Did the call come to this phone?”
“Yeah,” said the Reuters man.
“This has call display, doesn’t it?”
“Sure.”
Chen flipped over the phone and read the Chinese inscription on the bottom. “It has memory.”
“So?” demanded Fong.
“So maybe it still has the number that called you from Beijing.”
The new world. It was as if he’d been asleep for a hundred years on the west side of the Wall.