Last Days in Shanghai Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Casey Walker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher,

  except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walker, Casey, 1980–

  Last Days in Shanghai : a novel / Casey Walker.

  pages cm

  1. Americans—China—Fiction. 2. Corruption—Fiction. 3. Political fiction. 4. Suspense fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.A35886L37 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2014014419

  ISBN 978-1-61902-411-3

  Cover design by Jason Snyder

  Interior Design by E. J. Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Counterpoint Press

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Mom, Dad, Karen & Hazel—

  Contents

  DAY 1: BEIJING

  DAY 2: KAIFENG

  DAY 3: BEIJING

  DAY 4: SHANGHAI

  I.

  II.

  III.

  ONE YEAR EARLIER: VENICE

  DAY 5: SHANGHAI

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  DAY 6: SHANGHAI

  DAY 7: NEW YORK CITY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for inarticulate gurgling.

  Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears.

  Similarly I often cannot discern the humanity in a man.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

  DAY 1

  BEIJING

  WE FLEW BUSINESS class for nearly a day on a packed and pork-smelling China Eastern Airlines jet, chasing back the sunset. Ambien and all the in-flight Harry Potter movies, my companions. When I fell asleep, I was pursued by wizards and schoolchildren with the powers of the devil. Strange how much of life you spend wishing it would only pass, faster, even faster.

  Our driver from the Beijing airport wore white gloves and a bellhop’s cap. A drifting April haze gave the city a gray tint, with dark and shapeless buildings that blurred out on the horizon even as we approached them. My first city view was from our Buick, at a stoplight: fifteen construction cranes strapped to naked three-quarter buildings, many of which looked too tall already to support themselves. I followed one up as far as I could see until the smog and sunshine swallowed it.

  “See it, Luke?” my boss said, pointing. “The national bird of China.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “The construction crane,” he said.

  I’d heard him try this joke around the office in the days before we left. I’d heard all his bits. I made a laugh anyway. Congressman Leonard Fillmore—Republican, California, Fifty-First Congressional District—self-styled Asia hand, now embarked on his first visit to mainland China. He was a presidential hopeful with a familial claim to the office: Leo Fillmore was a distant relation of the thirteenth president of the United States, one of the least distinguished in our history. Nearing sixty, Leo looked to me much older, probably from carrying twice his body weight in grudge and grievance. To his friends he was sometimes known as “Leo the Lion.” But the nickname had spread far and wide among his enemies, too—you could hear it whispered up and down the Rayburn Building corridors: “Leo the Lyin’.”

  “Who do we see at the whatever the fuck? Trade people, right?” the congressman said. “I’m fucking starving.”

  I reached into my messenger bag for our schedule. The bag, the nicest thing I owned, was a beautiful dark leather piece of work my ex-girlfriend Alex had given me on my twenty-third birthday. I never gave her, in our whole relationship, anything half as thoughtful. Two weeks ago, I’d turned twenty-four, but we hadn’t spoken. I pulled out every piece of paper, sorting through shape-shifting documents, looking for a schedule I was certain I had. Apparently, no. The congressman turned, as much as he could in his seat belt, to give me a shriveling stare. I didn’t acknowledge it. I’d once been more afraid of Leo. I had once been more respectful. Now we just bickered, like he did with his wife—except that she still loved him, possibly.

  “You’ve lost the schedule, Mr. Slade?”

  He called me “Mr.” only when he was being condescending.

  “Everything got scattered when I came through customs,” I said. I’d had to dig deep to find my passport, detained for additional questioning while Leo had already scampered to the bathroom.

  “Unbelievable,” he said.

  I pulled out my loaner phone and was alarmed to find it had no working signal. Our phones, like the trip, had been provided to us by a real estate firm called Bund International, a Chinese-American joint venture whose American face was a benefactor of Leo’s named Armand Lightborn. We had a five-day itinerary. The pace would be a horse race, and our ever-changing appointments were basically written in water. To be uncontactable was a piss-poor beginning. I shoved my phone and papers back into my bag and found a handwritten note on stationary someone had filched from the Savoy Hotel in London. When I recognized the scrawl, I felt it in my gums, like a dentist’s needle. It belonged to Leo’s wife.

  Luke—

  Make sure he takes his meds.

  No booze.

  No whores.

  I’m serious.

  xx,

  Theresa

  P.S. Daily updates.

  MEN IN ORANGE vests—in groups of ten, and there were tens of these groups—were planting weeping willows and begonias by the road. The congressman watched from behind our tinted glass, and at the pivotal moment when workers balanced a hulking tree and began to tilt it into a pit big enough for its roots, I lost his attention. I was spared his annoyance.

  “Hardworking,” the Congressman said. “It’s funny, I don’t see Communists. I don’t see people expecting the state will do everything for them. You have to give them credit.”

  I waited to respond. It was a safe bet more was coming.

  “Of course, it’s all for naught, isn’t it?” he said.

  The “naught” hit my ear flatly—such a false note, as though to be deliberately antiquated was the lone prerequisite to seriousness.

  “China could be a superpower, and who could compete?” he said. “But right now it’s all built on sand.”

  He weighed his words for another second. He could sometimes be caught in the act of thinking, which is a rarer quality among the elected than one hopes. But it was the ruts and certainties where his thinking left him that disappointed me. Leo was a Republican cul-de-sac on which there stood three churches: anti-tax, business-anything, and Jesus Christ.

  “It profits little, you know, to gain the world and lose the soul,” he said. He reached into a corner of his eye and flicked out an invisible crust.

  “Christ,” he added. Whether he meant that as an endorsement of the Messiah or a curse, I couldn’t say. We spent so much time with each other that he sometimes talked to himself like he was alone. He’d get annoyed when I answered his rhetorical questions, but he’d snap at me, too, if I ignored some pearl of wisdom for which he awaited praise.

  “You�
��re absolutely right,” I said.

  Leo turned his back to me and hunched over, bulging his shoulder blades out into the space of the middle seat between us. I cracked his neck then started kneading my knuckles into his back.

  I’d worked for him nearly two years. Leo gave me my first job out of college, my first paid work anywhere, if you didn’t count summers at my dad’s office reorganizing the law library. My second day in Congress, Leo took a call from a legislator who’d won a few presidential primaries, and for all I knew I was sitting at the center of the world. It stirred all my aspirational feelings. Still, I was under no illusions about my hiring. My father had arranged the interview, only weeks before he’d died.

  My father and Leo had been five years apart in school, nodding acquaintances in a small town. The passing years, and their professional lives, had slowly entwined the two men, though my father’s political interests always remained strictly bounded. The national squabbles bored him, but he’d staked a tribal claim to our corner of California, the deep southeast where the state turned from coastal cities to lettuce and feedlots. The way our district was drawn, all our previous congressional representatives were from the suburbs of San Diego, so my father had seen Leo in a simple light: a local, and good for our desert town. Every year in the blistering heat of Fourth of July, my father’s law firm hosted a huge fundraiser for the congressman. He’d turned out to be right about the benefits. Our town rejoiced in the jobs when Leo steered us prisons and slaughterhouses. Even before I’d worked for our congressman, I’d spent more time around him than I had with some of my cousins and uncles, and I knew him at least as well as I had ever known my grandparents.

  I don’t know what ends my father envisioned for my nascent political life—we were never able to discuss it—but I did know it was his name that gave me a start. Soon after, he’d been sapped by a cancer that was assumed to be slow and unthreatening but was not. Leo, to his credit, had helped me adjust to the long shadow of loss. To me, it wasn’t a question of my emerging from the shadow. What was perhaps possible was adaptation to a life with dampened colors, where every object felt cooler to the touch. More than once, in those first months, Leo had paid for a plane ticket, or arranged work for me in the district office, so I could be closer to home. I owed him that much.

  But for a long time now, I’d been creeping toward pessimism about my work. Perhaps it was still just missing my father—a pessimism about the world at large. I’d told Leo it was time for me to move on. I did not tell him his office was a constant reminder of death. In response, Leo promised that if I would stay just one more year, he could find me a position with one of his foundation contacts, something gentle and gloriously funded. “Arts outreach. Or humanitarian shit. Twice the pay,” he’d said. “How happy would that make you?” I wasn’t sure that happiness was on the table, but I wasn’t opposed to the amelioration of suffering.

  Among my current duties—unmentioned when I’d been hired—was to loosen up the pinched muscles near Leo’s spine and work out the painful bended kink in what the doctor called his “frozen shoulder.” When this first started, I’d emailed friends (other assistants, all of us) about this mission creep from legislative aide to part-time masseuse. They had no sympathy. They’d all done worse. One aide had written, uncredited, her boss’s entire book on leadership and the importance of integrity in public life. Another was required every morning to prick his boss’s finger and run the diabetes blood check, and when it was time for the shot of insulin to be administered, it was an assistant—it was one of us—with untrained hands planted on the furry lower back of the member of Congress. We retrieved enema kits and scheduled colonoscopies. We were next to our bosses when their doctors delivered the results of biopsies. We lied to their wives. We flattered their children. We made airport pickups at Dulles and brought along ice chests stocked with their favorite sodas and snacks. And we had, some of us, driven to Baltimore in Thanksgiving traffic to pick up a senator’s granddaughter from Johns Hopkins. We traded these stories, exacting what we could of revenge through exposure of our bosses’ privacies. This did not preserve any of our dignity.

  I rubbed the knot out of Leo’s neck. It occurred to me to strangle him, for a passing second. I noticed the collar on his shirt was looser. He’d been losing weight on doctor’s orders.

  “You heard the story about Kissinger?” he said.

  “His consulting firm? Is Polk talking to them?”

  “No, no,” Leo waved me off. “Early Kissinger. Kissinger and Nixon. China, in ’71.”

  “’72, I think.”

  “In ’71 they had Kissinger sneak in through Pakistan,” Leo said. “Before meeting Mao.”

  He loved old stories of cloak and dagger, admired the exquisite details like an art historian talking about Vermeer.

  “They can’t risk blowback in the States before any meeting even happens,” Leo said. “So they want Kissinger to get to China undercover. Set it all up with Zhou. You know Zhou?”

  “Not personally, no.”

  “Mao’s right hand. Whole burden on Kissinger is to read Zhou close, make sure Mao is really game.”

  “I guess I hadn’t heard this,” I said. I was waiting for the part where Leo would claim he was the young pilot flying Kissinger’s plane, or the advisor whispering strategy in his ear.

  “I love it,” Leo said. “They get Kissinger to Pakistan for all the usual bullshit. They’ve got press around, but they make it look pretty dull. Kissinger goes to a dinner one night, and the next morning his people start passing it around, ‘Oh, he’s got Delhi belly. He’ll have to spend a few days resting up.’ They send him to some villa up in the hills.”

  “They got away with that?” I said.

  “Probably harder then than it is now,” Leo said. “They didn’t have all this Internet shit, but in those days there was still a US foreign press. Anyway, they dress Kissinger up in a big old droopy hat and sunglasses and fly him out of Rawalpindi at three o’clock in the morning. They don’t tell the State Department—they don’t tell anyone. Kissinger twists the screws, and then, boom, all of a sudden Nixon’s going to China. They scare the piss out of the Soviets, push the Chinese on Vietnam. Two guys did it—two fucking guys.”

  He wagged two fingers in my face.

  “Look at me,” Leo said. “I’m getting wistful.” He laughed. I was happy he’d forgotten about our lost schedule. Only what Leo forgot could be forgiven.

  Compared to Kissinger in China, Bund International’s plan for Leo, at least what there was of one, sounded prosaic. Boosterish commerce talks bound to be vague because Leo had no power to make them binding or specific; stultifying infrastructure surveys of the latest in agricultural projects or hi-tech districts. Leo would probably be photographed in a hard hat or a lab coat, looking like an asshole. We’d eat dinner with provincial officials inside some newly built business park in the gutted center of an ancient city. I braced for it: Leo sour and glowering, none of the meetings up to the level of his ambitions, and so heaping his frustrations on me, stone after stone. It was Wednesday. I’d suffer him without respite through Sunday. We’d fly home out of Shanghai, but even as I longed for that flight, I knew it wouldn’t mean reprieve—just more business-class hours of Leo elbowing me awake to share his ailments. I’d brought two suits in one small suitcase, but I was starting to think that packing light wasn’t smart when you were going to be eating all your meals with unfamiliar utensils. On the plane, I’d spilled sauce from gingered pork on the sleeve of one of my dress shirts. The hardened stain already looked permanent.

  THE ASIA HOTEL on Workers’ Stadium Road had floors of what looked like—though, really, who could tell?—marble. It was polished slick until it was actually dangerous. The lobby wasn’t busy, and while Leo checked in I gave my suitcase a kick to see how far it would glide to the elevator. Most of the way, it turned out.

  A young man intercepted us. He held a sign: Congressman Mr. Leonard Filmore.

  “I am CCP
IT driver,” he said. “For meeting?”

  “There are two Ls in ‘Fillmore,’” Leo said.

  The elevator pinged, and Leo stepped in. He stood with his legs apart in the middle of the tight space and punched at his phone like force would scare it into compliance. He let the doors close onto my shoulder. I pushed in next to Leo, and the driver held his sign out toward us. “Give us ten minutes,” I said, as the elevator closed in his face. Leo pounded the lit key for the top floor and groaned when we slowed to let me out five stories below him.

  I turned every switch in my hotel room, but the lights never came on. I couldn’t get the automated curtains to open, so I changed clothes in the half dark. The room phone rang, and because I was sure it was Leo, and I knew he was angry, I made him wait ten rings.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I’m calling to tell you that you’re a fucking liar,” Leo said.

  “Does your room not have electricity, either?”

  “I’m on a lobby phone,” Leo said. “You’re late.”

  They told me at the front desk, once it was too late to matter, that I had to put my room key into a slot near the door to activate the power.

  BEIJING TRAFFIC WAS abysmal, and it took nearly an hour to get to the meeting—a drive that would take fifteen minutes, the driver said, “in middle night.” Hundreds of bicycles passed our tinted windows. I took a few pictures through the glass, most of which came out showing Beijingers in mid-pedal with the ghostly reflection of my face superimposed on them. One of our constituents had called the office only last week to complain about an article she’d read alleging China was slaughtering stray dogs by the tens of thousands. I’d thanked her for her concern and promised to look into it. That wasn’t enough. She wanted the congressman to introduce an International Bill of Canine Rights. She had drafted one herself. She wouldn’t let me off the phone until I promised I would give it “serious time.” It arrived two days later, handwritten, on yellow legal paper—so clearly loved and so deeply felt that I had nothing but sadness for the woman’s effort. It stunk with amateurism, and no one would give it a moment’s thought.