Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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“You’re not flying on to Shanghai?” he asked.
The German’s shaggy hair lifted in the wind. “Ever since the Chinese government deregulated the airlines, it is impossible to get a flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai. Impossible,” he yelled above the sound of a plane taking off, as if the word could explain the whole country.
the taxi was cramped, and its dashboard was covered with talismans. From the homemade bodywork, Lindstrom could tell that it was an unregulated cab. The driver squeezed them onto the road between two stinking trucks, and the diesel burned the back of his throat as the driver, playing with the knobs on the radio and steering with one hand, overtook the frontmost truck in a torrent of blue exhaust. The truck was filled with reed baskets and great chunks of Styrofoam; its pilot grimaced through the windshield at the pale disk of sun.
The road lay straight as a canal between fields. As the taxi gained momentum, moist air funneled through the windows, thinning the fumes and the odor of hot vinyl seats and painted metal. Bicycles pumping against a flickering background of trees. In the paddies, workers with pants rolled up to their knees spread floods of blue water. Lindstrom checked the pulse in his neck to gauge his excitement and found that his skin had a cold, clammy feel. The air wept huge, grimy drops on the windshield, then held the rest in.
As they neared Nanjing, the spindly poplars of the windbreak gave way to giant Himalaya trees, their peeling branches trained upward like arthritic fingers around the wires. Long strips of bark lay curled in the dust at their feet. Caustic smoke hung thickly above the city, and Lindstrom realized he had not given the driver an address. The taxi pressed into the crowd, buses and bicycles everywhere, ringing their bells. The driver turned and showed him a rictus of rotting teeth.
“Jingling,” he said. “Jingling Hotel.”
Of course, Lindstrom thought. Where else would a Westerner be going? Still, the prescience wasn’t encouraging. In Saigon, if you weren’t in uniform, the drivers would take you to where a bomb was about to go off, thinking you were a journalist, or a missionary priest. With his shaved head and quarter-Asian eyes, Lindstrom had often been mistaken for a priest.
The taxi rounded a rotary, hazy with neon. The radiating streets showed wet treads from the watering truck. On the far side, some citizens loitered, staring up through the gates at the Jingling Hotel. A recent joint venture between the Chinese and a Scandinavian hospitality chain, its slick white concrete and gray glass belonged in Helsinki. The unlicensed cabbie couldn’t pull onto its driveway, so Lindstrom gave him some yuan he had traded for in Tokyo and asked him to wait.
The lobby was filled with garment designers and Overseas Chinese. Security cameras bristled from the capitals of marble columns, and all the porters and check-in attendants had been given English names. Lindstrom held a small argument with a porter for show, then allowed the man to disappear with his suitcase while he checked in under the name on his passport, John Tan, and went up in the glass-sided elevator. Looking down on the lobby, at the double-breasted businessmen checking their watches, he thought of the lobby of the Hotel Nikko San Francisco, where his own desk sat empty now, his brass nameplate removed to the closet where the manager kept the names of all the wayward concierges who had gone out in the world to find themselves, only to return less sure of who they were but much more broke and in need of a job. Lindstrom had been on duty there, eight months ago now, listening to an Indonesian salesman explain, in the code of Asian businessmen, that he wanted a girl, when Alan Rank had appeared in the queue. At first Lindstrom hadn’t recognized him, but when they faced each other two hours later across a table in the Nikko’s sushi bar, Lindstrom had seen behind the dry tucks of skin around Rank’s eyes, through the salt-and-pepper beard, and there was the gangly kid from Flatbush whom he had known on the Batangan Peninsula more than thirty years before. When the pretty Cantonese waitress brought their drinks, Rank had already told him that he wanted Lindstrom to smuggle a dissident out of mainland China.
“Would you believe,” Rank said, holding his sake under his nose when they had consummated the deal, “that there are Americans living in China, old communists from Brooklyn like my parents, living in Beijing as citizens? Been there for fifty years.”
It wasn’t clear if Rank admired them or not.
“What do they do there?” Lindstrom asked. Suddenly the five-star Hotel Nikko, where the rehab gurus placed him years before, had begun to look like a smack bar in Saigon, all mirrors and hustlers and promised games of chance. “Are they happy?”
Rank signaled for the waitress to bring them more sake. “Happy? Why would they be happy? Everything they went there for has gone up in smoke. The girls in Beijing wear the same platform sneakers they do in New York.”
“Why do they stay, then?”
Rank looked at him strangely, slightly turning his head. “You know, you haven’t changed a bit, Jack. Not many people would ask that.”
“But I am asking. Why don’t they just go home to Brooklyn, where they can get a decent bagel, or Florida?”
“Because they have lives, Jack. Friends, a system of being.”
“Yeah, I wonder what that would be like.”
Rank watched the rising bubbles in the fish tank uncomfortably. Whenever Lindstrom tried to broach the subject of his discontent, people looked as if they needed to use the bathroom. Even the shrink the rehab gurus had sent him to had only wanted to talk about the present. All behavioral, he said. What about the past?
“There’s this British guy, Jack, I swear he looks like an overweight golden retriever. Got a crease in his forehead from an accidental discharge, says it happened on a transport in Burma. He’s the one who got in touch with me, not long after I accepted the position at the Center in Nanjing.”
Lindstrom swallowed with alacrity in spite of himself. When you didn’t have a “system of being,” you needed a rush to fill the empty space. It was not unlike going back on the spike, he thought. “You’re saying he’s Six?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“MI-6, Alan. As in Military Intelligence. James fucking Bond. Don’t play virgin with me.”
Rank shrugged. “All I know is he likes to quote Shakespeare. Seems to think he’s Falstaff, complete with a giant chip on his shoulder for being rejected by the king.”
The flutter had quickened underneath Lindstrom’s ribs, and he took a swig from the fresh drink to quell it. “This is beautiful,” he said, looking around in the aqueous blue light of the bar. Already, it didn’t feel like home. “Spooks who’ve been privatized. I need to know more, Alan. Such as it is, I’d be giving up my life.”
Rank’s head swiveled back and his gray eyes were sharp. “In our current state of post-9/11 madness, the group feels that human rights have been buried. They feel that China is as good a place as any to bring those issues to light.”
“You might tell that to the Afghans,” Lindstrom said.
Rank looked at him quizzically. People tended to forget about April, perhaps willfully, about that chapter in his, in their country’s, collective life. Al-Qaeda had forced them to remember, and in that sense, Lindstrom felt connected to the world for the first time in years.
“Are they professional?” he asked.
“Very,” Rank said, eyes following the waitress as she lay down their sushi on black plates. On Sunday afternoons, she and Lindstrom sometimes met for dim sum and a karate movie—a sad, platonic date. “They say to be ready to go on a day’s notice, but no later than June 1. Someone, Falstaff I imagine, will be in touch.”
lindstrom’s room at the jingling was a sterile affair, looking out across the cowering town. He turned on and off all the lights and the television. At the minibar, he recorded his presence with the room service office by fixing himself a glass of Glenfiddich from an airline bottle. Trying to steady his hand, he realized too late that the ice might be bad. A small lapse of instinct, but it worried him. When his suitcase showed up—attended