“I really don’t know.” Joe was surprised that he had been so frank. “Which makes it all the more necessary that we go inside as soon as possible.”
Wang looked quickly to his left and, for an instant, Joe was concerned that he was going to try to run for it, to lose himself in the labyrinth of the hutong. Instead, he took a further step forward, frowning as he struggled to throw his memory back into a forgotten past.
“Let me put you out of your misery,” Joe said. An insect flew into his face and he waved it away. “You knew me as John Richards, a representative from Governor Patten’s office in Hong Kong. I interviewed you at a safe-”
“How extraordinary.” There was no artifice in Wang’s interruption, nor in the portrait of surprise painted on his face. He removed the towel from his neck and studied Joe’s eyes. “Why are you here?” he said, as if talking to an apparition. “I thought it was over.”
“Well, you see, that’s exactly what we need to talk about.”
Wang shook his head and turned. There was a certain fatalism in his movements. A woman carrying fresh cherries and lychees in baskets braced across her shoulders passed them and greeted Wang with a singing hello. This was clearly his neighbourhood, a place where he was known to the locals. Joe followed the professor to the end of a second narrow alley, perpendicular to the first, where he stopped and pulled out a key. His house appeared to be little more than a single-storey shack. The front door was made of rotting wood which clung to a rusty hinge. A blue shirt, frayed at the collar, hung on a coat hanger from a stretch of electric cable outside. Joe accidentally kicked an old tin of paint as he ducked to pass into the living room. It was dark inside until Wang switched on a bare lightbulb and closed the door behind them. The ceiling was less than six feet high and Joe lowered himself onto a hard wooden sofa to avoid banging his head.
“This is your home?” he said. He wasn’t feeling sentimental about their reunion and was not concerned if he caused any offence with the question. The room was barely larger than his bathroom in Shanghai.
“I am shortly to be relocated,” Wang replied, and said something about the entire hutong being razed at the end of the summer. Ahead of them was a tiny bedroom with a bare mattress, boxer shorts and books on the floor. There was a faint, possibly ineradicable odour of vermin. Wang went into a small kitchen where he lit a gas stove and filled a pan with water. “Tea?” he said and Joe accepted the offer, setting each of his phones to vibrate. While the water boiled, Wang went into the bedroom and put on a thin brown cardigan and a pair of trousers. His feet, Joe noticed, were unwashed and black and he wondered what had brought Wang to such lowly circumstances.
“So what do you want?” the professor asked. There were no pleasantries, no gentle probings to establish the other man’s character and credentials. Wang Kaixuan had spent eight years dealing with spies: they were all the same to him now. “I have told your people I have nothing left to say. I have abandoned the struggle. I wish to live my life in peace.”
Joe had calculated that it was safe to talk in Wang’s home, on the simple basis that he had survived undetected by the MSS for more than a decade. “And who are my people?” he asked, mesmerized that the charming, confident crusader of his memory had become little more than a paranoid loner hiding himself away in the depths of old Beijing.
“MI6. CIA. Does it make any difference? Why have they sent you this time? Why did I never see you again after our conversation in 1997?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” Joe replied. Wang caught his eye and there was a flicker of confusion. The water was boiling on the stove and he went back into the kitchen, returning with tea.
“I cannot help you,” he said, sitting on a rickety wooden chair. Wang looked like an old man waiting in line to see a doctor. “You have risked my life coming here. I am not interested in any more of your propositions. You have lied to me before and you will lie to me again.”
“When have I lied to you?”
Wang looked as if he was about to spit on the floor. “You were actually the first of them, Mr. Richards,” he laughed. “You have that unique distinction. You presented yourself to me as a representative from Government House, did you not? And you would have carried on lying if only the others had given you the chance.”
“We both lied that night,” Joe said.
“Did I? Did I mislead you?” Wang’s contemplative eyes appeared to concede that he had been playing a complicated game, but there was no sense of regret or apology in them. He tried to sip his tea but found that it was too hot. “What is your real name?”
“My real name is of no concern to you.” A motorbike gunned in a lane behind the house. “You told me that you were not permitted to leave China. You told me that you had lost your job at the university, that you were a political undesirable regarded as a threat to the Motherland. You made a song and dance about human rights abuses in Xinjiang when all you were concerned about was encouraging young Uighurs to commit acts of terror.”
He had gone too far, but he had done so deliberately. Joe was convinced that beneath the complex layers of Wang’s personality, hidden behind the vanity and the lies and the self-delusion, lurked a decent man. He wanted that man to emerge again, to engage with him, to see that Joe Lennox was somebody whom he could trust.
“You may say anything you like about me,” Wang replied quietly. “You may say that I was responsible for the deaths of innocent people. That is probably true. You may say that I used what talents I was given to trick and to confuse my own people. But do not ever say that I did not care about what I was doing. Never say that. It is others who did not care and others who betrayed me. Did you leave that night and resolve to do something about what was happening in Xinjiang? Did you use your powers to investigate the abuses which were being carried out every day in cities across Eastern Turkestan? Did you, Mr. John Richards? Or were you just like everybody else in the West? You heard that a terrible thing was going on in a land far away and you did nothing.”
The speech had been heartfelt and powerfully delivered, and Joe had to remind himself that he was dealing with an actor of considerable gifts. He felt the dull pulse of his conscience, of his own moral shortcomings, but the feeling was not new. He looked at the wall nearest the kitchen where Wang had taped a photograph of a young Chinese man.
“Who is that?” he asked.
Wang turned slowly and looked at the picture. His eyes narrowed to a confused frown and he shook his head. “Excuse me?”
“Who is that man in the photograph?”
Wang produced a hollow laugh. “What is happening?” he said, speaking now in Mandarin. “Why are you here? I thought you were one of them. Have they not explained to you?” He was talking as if Joe were a child who had been protected from the truth.
“Explained what? One of whom?”
“One of the Americans. Did they not tell you about my son? Do you not know about him?”
“Nobody has sent me,” Joe replied. “I am not with the Americans. I have come here of my own volition. Nobody has told me anything.”
Wang had not expected this. The professor buttoned his cardigan to the neck and crossed to the front door. He opened it, peered outside, and came in again like a neighbour with a piece of gossip. Sitting down in his chair, he continued to stare at Joe, almost as if he had misjudged him.
“This young man was the reason for everything. Did you not work it out? This boy was my son.”
“I don’t understand.” Up to this moment Joe had felt that everything had been within his control. Now there was a new factor in play. He looked down at the cold concrete floor, craving a cigarette.
“My son, Wang Bin, was shot dead during a riot in Xinjiang. He was starting to become active in the independence movement. I was a grieving father when you met me. I was crazed with anger and the desire for revenge. I wanted to bring about change in my country. I wanted to bring back Wang Bin. I thought in my madness that my salvation lay in England.”