Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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of it was all that he had; Luke had never shared the details, or his feelings, with his father. The day after Burling left, Amelia swallowed a bottle of pills that her doctor had prescribed to help her sleep, chasing them with scotch. Her bedroom was locked, and Luke could feel the wind from an open window slipping beneath her door. He stood there in his bare feet, not ready for swim practice, imagining the white room beyond. He put his ear to the keyhole, but all he could hear was a car going by outside, birdsong. The firemen had to kick the door in, and Luke stared at his mother’s curled-up body, her buttocks slender and slack where the white sheet had fallen away. A paramedic was yelling into her ear, lifting and slapping her limp hand, the soles of her feet. Luke had to step aside as the man’s partner, her pockets heavy with equipment, pushed by with the stretcher.
He moved aside until he was standing in front of the bookshelves that lined the upper hall. A strange collection of spines: popular novels adapted for movies, a marriage manual and a few self-help books, an Encyclopaedia Britannica with an entry for the Austro-Hungarian Empire that he had plagiarized for school, a Riverside Shakespeare, gilt and bound in red leather—a gift from Simon Bell. The stretcher passed with his mother on it, her hair thick and wild on the pillow, a pencil line of blood drawn from her nose. The bulky woman held aloft a plastic bag.
“We’re losing her, Willie,” she said.
“Where’s your father, son?” A black policeman had come up the stairs. He had taken off his hat and was looking at Luke with kind, gold eyes.
“It’s sure as hell not him,” Luke said, looking down at Simon, who had come to stand in his bathrobe in the hallway below, gazing up with his hand on his forehead, above his melancholy face.
“No, he’s your tenant,” said the cop, reaching out a soft hand. “He called 9-1-1. Your dad is Lucius Burling Jr. What happened here?”
The cop was looking at the burned-up chair in the corner.
“My mother smokes,” Luke told him.
The cop reached out gently. “Why not we put this away now?”
Luke felt the pages close on his thumb, the heavy red volume being removed from his hands.
when the stewardess came to clear his tray, burling felt the plane descending. Beneath the engines spread the slate-colored surface of Puget Sound. The sky was draped with low curtains of thin, leaden cloud, and as the wings dipped below them the water flashed like metal. The plane leveled across a neighborhood of boarded-up bungalows, and the wheels gained the runway in a clamor of rubber. When the pilot had parked at the gate, Burling elected to stretch his legs in the terminal and try to reach his consulate in Shanghai.
The airport was an antiseptic, transient place, and all the kitsch in the world couldn’t hide it. There was take-out sushi because this was supposed to be a gateway to the East, and souvenirs of the type sold in every airport terminal: T-shirts and key chains and life trapped in pieces of plastic. By an escalator a cube of glass held the ribs of a giant prehistoric animal and its fossilized scat.
“You wanted us to act all the time like we were in some kind of traveling exhibit,” Luke had said to him once, home from college. His long hair was dirty blond and his eyes were like rivets, set in liquid irises that were startlingly blue. He was taking a course on the history of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, which his father had apparently caused. It was a phase during which Burling wondered just how far his son’s experiment with drugs had taken him, into what realm of madness and bogus chautauqua, and before he discovered photography, the medium that would channel his watchfulness into something around which he could arrange a kind of life. “Like an American family behind glass. Here you have Elizabeth, holed up in her room with Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. Here you have Mother, drinking, writing O’Neill plays about the ambassador’s murder by communist thugs. And here you have Father . . . but wait a minute, where is Father? That, boys and girls, is the most interesting aspect of our exhibit. No Father.”
Burling found a quiet corner behind a Wolfgang Puck cart and took out his mobile phone, newly purchased during his leave. A few steps away he could hear a businessman, also on a cell, telling his secretary what a hectic day it had been. Some people lived to display themselves, others wanted to hide. As he punched in the number, he tried to remember how he’d wanted to approach the call. His mind felt poorly arranged. Punching in the number of the consulate, he thought of asking for Mike Ryan, MacAllister’s young station chief, but he wouldn’t know anything about Yong anyway, and if he did, Burling would have a hard time not arousing his suspicion. The whole business made him slightly dizzy—he wasn’t used to Beltway intrigue anymore—and taking MacAllister at his word made him feel like a fool. In the end, he decided on asking for Charlotte, more than anything because he wanted to hear her voice, but she wasn’t at her desk.
“She has been out in Nanjing all week, Mr. Burling,” the native receptionist told him. “She is supposed to return here today.”
“Is Ryan in?”
“A moment, sir, please.”
The line hung somewhere in space. He must remember how easy it would be to listen in.
“Ryan.”
“Mike, hi, it’s Lucius. Anything happening there?”
Ryan’s chair squeaked in the background, and Burling wondered if he’d sounded alarmed.
“The dam project, what else?” Ryan had on his serious tone of complaint. “I got so many environmentalists sending me letters, I feel like a freaking congressman.” The Bronx slipped into Ryan’s voice. “You on your way back?”
“A third of the way. I have a night in Tokyo at the Imperial, then a stop in Beijing to meet with Ambassador Wardlow. Dennis gets about as nervous as the Chinese every time June 4th rolls around.”
Ryan’s murmur sounded vaguely affirmative, and Burling wondered for the hundredth time what Ryan did in the way of intelligence work. Every week, Burling saw him heading out for his lunches or racquetball with movers and shakers from the growing number of joint ventures in town—the Volkswagen factory, the German power conglomerate, McDonnell-Douglas—but all things considered, China was still a developing country, with the Bomb and a million-man army but little in the way of intelligence-gathering services. Without its nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union had been like Brazil, but at least the Soviets had been good at the game. The People’s Republic was just a barnyard of bureaucrats showing their plumage. Burling didn’t believe in industrial espionage.
“He wants to tap your expertise,” Ryan told him.
“Uh-uh. Speaking of experts, I ran into an old friend of yours in Washington yesterday. Chuck Byrd,” said Burling, using MacAllister’s work name. “He asked after you.”
Ryan must have known Burling was fishing, but he didn’t miss a beat. These second-generation believers in America didn’t harbor any doubts. “I haven’t spoken to Chuck directly in a while. He must be nearing retirement.”
“I don’t think the word is in his vocabulary, frankly. He wanted me to play tennis, but I told him my elbow was bad. Maybe you and I could have a warm-up game so next time that I’m home . . .”
“You know what somebody told me about Chuck, Lucius?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“That you saved his life in Africa. Went over a few heads to do it.”
“That’s true,” Burling said. If saving him meant revealing the extent of their operations in Angola, the Agency had been willing to leave MacAllister to die. “It wasn’t really my thing, but I went over there and found the village and brought him home.”
“He should take it easy on you, then.”
“Huh! You don’t know the man. He was always brutally competitive, and Africa didn’t change him a bit. If anything, as soon as he recovered, it made him more of a terror on the court.”
“Charlotte doesn’t play, does she?”
Burling