Last Days in Shanghai Read online

  Beijing was so dug up, I imagined rats in swarms. Two townhouses on my block in DC were under renovation—so minor, compared to this—and for weeks now I slept and woke to scratching mice. I’d decided to be ecumenical, thinking the mice had as much right to scramble and thrive as I did. But then I saw their shit in the pan I scrambled eggs in. After that, I set traps—broke their necks, one by one.

  “You know what’s different about this skyline?” Leo said. “No churches. How long you think they’ll last without God?”

  “Without our God?”

  “Without Jesus.”

  “I think they’ll last awhile,” I said.

  He grabbed me by the back of the neck and shook me. I think it was meant to be playful.

  “You’re lukewarm, Luke,” Leo said. “Spiritually, there isn’t a worse place to be.”

  Like many latecomers to religion, the congressman had a past that didn’t square with this current revival of faith. He said he’d spent years looking for love in a drink—“My genetic affliction,” he called it. Sober Leo was supposed to be the new skyline of the man. But where others saw renovation, I saw scurrying rats. I didn’t think he’d read much of the Bible outside of some red-letter verses of Matthew, and I could more than match him just from remembered Sunday school. To me, his salvation by Christ sounded scripted. But then again, part of my job was writing his scripts. It was hard to discern where my failures ended and his began.

  THE BUND INTERNATIONAL translator who met us at the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade was a young woman—around my age, I imagined—with impeccable, professional English, crisp as the pleat in her skirt. Her name was Li-Li. My first words to her were an apology.

  She led us to a conference room set with lidded porcelain teacups. Framed letters of praise from leaders around the world hung six to a wall, including one from a nasty despot whose removal the congressman had very publicly supported. The letters reminded me of schoolchildren’s valentines: To Beijing, in eternal friendship.

  The men we were supposed to meet, though I had lost the papers telling me exactly who they were, kept us waiting. The congressman reached obsessively into his pocket, not because his phone was ringing, but because it wasn’t, and it made him feel marooned. I stared at a winding scene of the Yellow River done in a sparkling mosaic on the facing wall. Finally, three men appeared. We stood, they bowed. They were solemn, early forties, ranged from slim to paunchy. Bureaucrats I imagined you could purchase by the pound in an office supply store. Li-Li sat at the distant head of the table, as though translation were a work of umpiring, and she wasn’t partial to either side.

  My notes from that day reflect a circular conversation of platitudes and vague promises. China and the United States could work together “for mutual benefit”—a “win-win situation.” We prepared to sign some nonbinding documents of mutual praise. The pens they gave us were exquisite, worth far more than the pledges.

  Leo, who never took a note himself, scribbled something on the back of a receipt. He had me announce that we were taking “a short recess,” our code for “emergency bathroom break.” I looked at Li-Li and waited for her to filter my English into Mandarin. Leo left the room, walking gingerly.

  With Leo gone, the officials began to speak among themselves in staccato bursts, and I waited for them to acknowledge me. Li-Li clicked her fingernails against one another, and their polish shined in the light. I caught her eye and was about to say something to her when I saw her breathe in sharply and redden. Her eyes flicked toward the men, then back to me, and I wondered what kind of insult she’d understood that I hadn’t. I took Leo to be the target of the men’s mockery, if only because I was too insignificant to be worth denigrating.

  When the congressman grumbled back into the room, the trade officials stood.

  “This has been most productive,” one said, “and now we must adjourn for urgent matters.”

  Whether this meeting would bring even a single shoelace out of their country and into ours was doubtful, even if we talked for three more hours, but Leo clearly felt that if they’d ended the meeting first, even if he was ready to leave, then he had lost their respect.

  “We should have left half an hour ago,” he told the officials.

  With every man in the room now annoyed or offended, we nevertheless posed for photographs. I took paired grip-and-grin shots and more inclusive group ones. The men who I suspected had just sat mocking the congressman clustered around him. The most important officials stood at the center, and a deteriorating line of nonentities were pushed out to the edges, a ghostly shoulder of the translator hovering barely into the frame. In the two shots where I wasn’t taking the pictures myself, Li-Li 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 un
derstood 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 general picture. He was pleased, though, to have diagnosed our frosty reception as part of some Chinese national personality disorder. He liked ice to crack. There’s no charm without resistance.

  I lagged behind him. I peeked into closed-off sections of the complex. The side courts were in disrepair and the interior buildings almost entirely off-limits to my prying. Here is where the Empress Dowager Cixi made her extravagant demands. Here is where Puyi took the throne, lost it.

  AT DINNER AT Beijing Da Dong Roast Duck restaurant, the congressman got drunk with businessmen from Bund International who slurped their noodles and instructed us to dip our Peking duck skin in the sugar bowl next to each place setting.

  I reached out once to stay the hand of the waitress pouring Leo’s wine. It was fatal to my boss, what she kept dumping into his glass. The congressman struck my hand out of the way, hard enough that other guests heard the slap. He screwed his face up tight and hung a tough look on me. He was going to sit here with the other men and take his drink, and I had no right to stop him. Leo saw himself as a man of great soul beset, like all great men, by fierce demons—but his only proof of the great soul was the existence of the demons.

  I watched him empty his wine. He dissolved into a clutter of symbols. He had an American flag pin he wore on his lapel the way someone superstitious might clutch an amulet. He had hardened hair, thin, combed sideways across his head and screaming insincerity. He was nothing like my own father, but he was a fatherly archetype—big-voiced, impatient, ever vigilant of his status in the room. Whenever he tried to expand his emotive range beyond gloating or annoyance, it was without exception uncomfortable.

  Through dinner, the congressman did most of the talking. He was interrupted only when someone thought it necessary to announce the name of a particular delicacy being set before us or to relate a historical fact about our surroundings: “Here is the Cantonese chicken dish that Richard Nixon declared his favorite during the visit in 1972.” Something was said about Chairman Mao that I didn’t catch. And did we know the restaurant was once a granary for the Forbidden City?

  Contrary to the custom of our hosts, who made these pleasantries and discussed nothing else specifically, the more Leo drank, the more eager he became to defend the intricacies of America’s global military positioning. He drank himself presidential, as though offering a realpolitik address behind closed doors to reluctant allies. The men from Bund International—with Li-Li along to translate—listened politely.

  “Think of it as poker,” Leo said. “Saddam was representing aces.”

  We sat at the table fifteen strong, as though in a well-catered committee meeting. I was served an architecturally plated dish of lotus root and crab. The low light was flattering, the windows at dusk even more inviting as decorative lanterns came lit in the street below. I focused just beyond Leo’s head, at the waiter boning out a duck, slivering the meat onto a serving dish.

  “Fine, Saddam was bluffing. But it was still the right play, on the percentages,” Leo said. Our private dining room invited and prolonged his diatribe. “We made him show.”

  The men nodded like veterans of Macau poker tables. The highest ranked among them, a vice president of some sort, eventually raised a question. He went by Charles, for our benefit.

  “There is always a duty,” he said. “To know the tendencies of your opponent. To know how he bets.”

  Charles was the only man who wore a tie I liked, checkered black and silver, sealed at the collar with an impeccable
Windsor knot. He had matted cheeks, among many that glistened red around him, and two tiny eyes in his chinless, oval face.

  “Let me tell you a story about our ‘opponent,’” Leo said. “Spring, 1990.” I stifled a groan. Leo continued: “We had this woman testify before Congress—a girl, really, not even eighteen. She worked in a Kuwaiti hospital. Saddam’s army bashed their way into the ward where she worked with newborns. The soldiers ripped three-pound babies out of their incubators, left them to die on the concrete floor of the hospital.”

  “No one would dispute this is inexcusable . . .” Charles said.

  Leo, at the time, had taken the nurse’s story personally. He pled for weeks after, to whoever would listen, begged we deploy our vast military for humanity’s sake. Pundits joked that the shortest distance between any two points was the straight line between Leo Fillmore and a television camera.

  “It was truly awful,” Leo said. “And you know what else? None of it was true.”

  Charles looked to me for clarification. I only scribbled in my small black notebook. On its title page I had written: The Congressman’s Memory. It started as a joke between Alex and me and afterward turned into a piece of our ritual banter. Once when I was running late in the morning, gathering my things, I asked her, “Have you seen The Congressman’s Memory?” and she’d said, “No, and I haven’t seen his conscience, either.”

  “She was a setup,” Leo went on. “Her father was a Kuwaiti diplomat. They hired a goddamn advertising firm to coach her.”

  “So what is the reason for this story?” Charles asked. He looked to Li-Li, perplexed, as though there must be context she was omitting.

  “My point is this time it was pure calculation,” Leo said. “I don’t have anymore fucking illusions about saving the world.”