Last Days in Shanghai. Casey Walker
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took them, and I came out half-faced.
AT THE MAIN entrance, a phalanx of suited men stood in a red-roped receiving line. Li-Li hurried us toward a side exit, but not before I saw the guest of honor. “El Presidente,” we called him, the latest fist-rattling Latin American head of state to become beatifically popular among the equatorial poor. He was built like a keg of beer, dressed in military epaulets and heavy black boots. Applause for El Presidente—thin-skinned petrotyrant, self-appointed heir to Simón Bolívar—turned to uproar. The congressman’s face soured in a way that made me smile. “That motherfucker,” Leo said.
Li-Li left us in a side parking lot where we waited for our Buick to come around. Still smog, no breeze. Disappearing at the edge of my sight line were two buildings under construction that looked to be falling into one another.
“I saw him in the bathroom,” the congressman said.
“El Presidente?”
“I’ve never seen a man who needs three bodyguards just to take a piss.”
“Just now?”
“I’m at the far pisser, but he pulls up to the middle one. Right fucking next to me,” Leo said. “I look over, and of course I know it’s him straight off, the fucking faker. Thinks he’s been to hell and back because he can put on a goddamn military Halloween costume.”
“Do you think he recognized you?” I asked. Leo hadn’t been in the military, either, though he had awkward lapses where he seemed to forget that.
“He thinks we were behind that horseshit excuse for a coup last summer,” Leo said.
“He thinks it was the CIA.”
“White men in suits,” my boss said. “We’re all alike to him.”
“You did sort of suggest you’d like him killed . . .”
“That was taken out of context,” he said.
“I’m not sure he reads the corrections in the Washington Post.”
Leo snorted. “I could feel him looking at me.”
“Did you say anything?” I asked.
“Longest piss of my life. He finished first and just stood there at the sink. I was racking my brain for something to say. Needle him, you know?”
“Was he really a general?”
“They don’t have an army, they have criminals with Kalashnikovs.”
“I didn’t know he even spoke English,” I said.
“Heavy accent.”
“He always uses that translator in interviews.”
“Translator. Right. It’s a good ploy,” Leo said. “What he said to me was, ‘You Yankees will never have me swinging by the neck.’”
“He meant us?”
“He didn’t mean the baseball team.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And he said, ‘Your government won’t hang me by the throat. That’s a promise.’ I told him not to go thinking his dick was so big, because if the United States wanted him by the balls, he’d squeal just like anyone else.”
“You said that?” I said. If some version of this story got out, I wouldn’t sleep for weeks from the volume of press phone calls. I’d go hoarse with adamant denials.
“Squirmy motherfucker. He smirks again. Says something in Spanish that I didn’t catch. Then he really starts letting it fly, about my mother and all the rest. Not that I understood all of it, but I’m not a fucking idiot. So then his guards hear the yelling and come busting in like I was going to cut him. They all line up and glare at me. I said to them, ‘The second we decide to, and this is a promise, we’ll have a big dick up your fucking ass.’ I gave him a good look at it. Then I zipped up and walked out.”
Our car slid up, and I opened the door for Leo. You hear about grown men, in government, behaving like children, but you’re never prepared for how much they have at their disposal that a playground kid could never dream of: swinging your dick around really can make embassies close and bombs fall, if you swing it right. I couldn’t always protect Leo from himself—my job was only to prevent, as much as I could, full public knowledge of the crooked timber he was made from. That meant I was the voice of the thinker after he spoke without thinking and the face of the family man when his family should have disowned him. I was hired as an adjunct to the congressman’s memory, but I found myself cast to play his conscience, too. I knew the next time I saw El Presidente railing from the floor of the United Nations I would think of the old raisiny dick of my American congressman, trying to shake menacingly at a Latin American head of state in a Chinese bathroom.
WE SPENT THE afternoon pawned off on a guide who called himself “Snow.” Snow was instructed to show us the entirety of official Beijing in about two hours, before our dinner with men from Bund International. In the Mao Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, a waxen copy of the chairman lay under glass, his actual body preserved somewhere in the bowels of the building. He’d been pumped so full of formaldehyde at death that he’d swelled to nearly twice his living size.
We entered the Forbidden City. Most of its buildings were under construction, part of the city’s facelift for the next year’s Olympics. I knew that by the time of the Opening Ceremonies, Leo hoped to be standing tall on his own world stage: at the Republican National Convention, as their next nominee for president. His would be a dark-horse bid—a pitch-fucking-black horse, honestly—but no one had asked my opinion. Leo’s intentions were publicly revealed only in the form of an “exploratory committee,” an event with press coverage limited to our town’s local newspaper.
The Forbidden City was a corpse of its former power, its anatomy forcibly preserved from ruin, like Mao’s. The open squares were hot and shadeless, white and blinding. The fresh-red buildings and yellow roof tiles looked brighter still against the background of gray sky. Squint your eyes, and it was all on fire—the tiny bands of blue around the entryway doors like the hottest part of the flame and the concrete walkways the color of ash. It was easy now to walk through the center of an empire, open to anyone, now that there was no longer an emperor. What was truly forbidden, the secrets of power these courtyards once held, was still forbidden of course—it had just been relocated to office buildings and conference rooms.
We crossed marble bridges and walked quickly through gardens built for the recitation of poetry, and Leo told me, as we hurried, that this morning’s meeting was just as he suspected: Beijing promised an erratic officialdom, tense and sensitive to slight. He read their wariness as a general trait of “the Chinese.” I was willing to trust the research I’d assembled and say that official Beijing’s suspicion of foreigners was not paranoid invention—two hundred years of British trading companies and gunboat diplomacy; of French concessions and Portuguese merchant cities; of Japanese adventuring and Western opium; of Chinese coastal cities built for the profit of financial capitals that were oceans away. And the internal distress: In just a hundred years, an empire had fallen, nationalist reign gave way to a Communist insurgency and a civil war; a victorious Mao proclaimed a republic from the back gate of the Forbidden City in which we stood. United States policy for most of Mao’s rule was that he didn’t exist, that the “real” China was the tiny island one hundred miles off the coast occupied by a defeated army turned political kleptocracy. A quarter century of Mao’s rule marked time by peasant starvation and burned temples, with anyone vaguely bookish or otherwise politically suspect sent to rural labor camps to be reeducated by the working peasantry. And Leo complained the officials seemed tense?
The congressman rushed through the Forbidden City as quickly as he had skimmed my briefing book. He showed no interest in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, massed above us on its terrace, with a double-hipped roof that looked like it floated on air. Leo claimed he knew plenty about China already, but I found he was often sloppy with that kind of knowledge, too prone to trust his dimly rendered