was conducted in public and drawn out over a year to intimidate government opposition in the countryside.
“No plan yet,” Faith said, “but I’m thinking that she’ll have to persuade the workers that the two are worth more alive than dead. Not financially, but in terms of propaganda-but she first has to convince the mob that they don’t have the moral authority to set up a provisional court and start executing people.”
“They’ve already killed-”
More honking, a crash, then a screech of tires.
“What happened?” Gage asked.
“Hold on. Let me look into the cab.”
Gage heard rustling as Faith crawled forward and then conversation in Mandarin.
“Some kid by a school gate threw a rock at the windshield. We’re moving again.”
More rustling as she returned to her seat.
“The problem is that once they believe that the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn, authority is up for grabs. Their view at this point may be that they have as much right as anyone else to run things. The Chinese constitution just becomes a relic of a dead era.”
“Do they already believe that it’s happened?”
“I don’t know, but people are saying the words aloud. One more earthquake. One more riot. One more firestorm. And everything may disintegrate.”
“Then don’t stay too long.”
“I only want to be here long enough to help Ayi Zhao through this, then I’ll gather up the kids and get out.”
Gage thought again of the trial and the defendant being led head down, wearing a prisoner’s blue striped shirt, into the yard day after day to be displayed and humiliated. He also remembered why Faith despised Ringling Brothers, whose bears were forced to dance and whose tigers were forced to leap through rings of fire, kept alive in captivity solely for the purpose of spectacle.
“Maybe she needs to divert them with a circus,” Gage said.
“A what?”
“Nobody wants to kill the clown while he’s performing under the big top. Like the impromptu trials during the Cultural Revolution, it’ll be familiar to everyone. Maybe they’ll be seduced by the symmetry or maybe they’ll find some comfort in history repeating itself. If she’s lucky, maybe she can keep dragging out the interrogations until the rebellion is suppressed.”
“Gotcha. I’ll pitch it to her.” Faith paused for a moment, then said. “I think Ayi Zhao feels horribly guilty, for not saving China from her son and for not saving her son from himself. Now the only hope she has left, and only as his mother, is that maybe she can save his life.”
Benaroun was smiling when Gage disconnected. “I thought there was only one crime stopper in the family.”
“It’s more like applied anthropology,” Gage said.
“That’s kind of what we all do,” Benaroun said. He turned his smile toward Tabari. “You may want to get out your pad and take notes, voices of wisdom are about to speak.” Then back at Gage. “I never met a good detective who wasn’t part psychologist and part anthropologist, especially in this part of the world.”
“And in South Africa,” Gage said.
Benaroun’s smile faded. He gave Tabari a sour look, a way of saying that he had suspected the kid had betrayed a confidence.
“He didn’t warn me off,” Gage said. “Just repeated that you wanted to talk to me about something.”
“No. It was him wanting you to talk me out of something.”
Gage smiled. “Are we going to keep circling, or are we about to land?”
Benaroun cast another glance at Tabari, then said, “I’m starting to suspect that the platinum is being smuggled out of South Africa by air.” He pushed his wineglass aside. “The interesting thing is that there are records of the flights arriving in Johannesburg, but no records of them leaving.”
“Do you know which planes?”
“My informant promises to tell me when I get there. If Transparency Watch authorizes the onetime payment that I want, I’ll deliver it to him in person next week and he’ll give me the details.”
“That’s a hell of a risk to take based on what could be a fantasy or-”
“Or an outright lie,” Tabari said.
“Except that he told me a few things that I’ve been able to verify.” Benaroun held up a finger: “First, there’s now an artificially induced platinum shortage.” He held up another: “Second, buyers are purchasing an enormous volume of futures, placing bets that the price will be rising in the next few months.”
Benaroun lowered his hand and leaned forward.
“The contradiction is third: The companies offering the futures contracts are apparently not increasing the reserves of platinum they keep in their bank vaults to secure the paper.”
“What do you mean by ‘apparently'?”
“My informant is telling me that they’re buying on the black market from the stocks stolen by the president-so the reserves are actually there-but they’re not reporting them publicly.”
“How would he know?”
Benaroun glanced at his nephew, then back at Gage. “He’s the deputy director of the South African Secret Service.”
Gage thought for a moment. He wasn’t sure how someone in South Africa would know what was occurring inside a Swiss vault thousands of miles away.
“There’s an alternative,” Gage finally said. “Maybe the whole thing is a fraud and the sponsors are simply lying about their reserves.”
Benaroun shook his head. “Someone I know who used to be with the Swiss Federal Banking Commission is now the compliance officer at Exchange Traded Metals. He’s the one who counts their coins and bars. And he noticed the same anomaly as my informant did.”
“Then I think he has an obligation to turn his company in to Swiss authorities instead of in to Transparency Watch and-”
“And get himself killed?”
Gage drew back. “Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”
“If there is such a thing as economic war, then there is such a thing as economic terrorism,” Benaroun said. “It has to be prevented, and if it’s too late to be prevented, people have to be punished.” Benaroun gestured toward Tabari. “It isn’t just a coincidence that I asked him to come out here from Marseilles to meet you.”
Gage looked at Tabari. “Did you work on Hennessy’s case?”
Tabari shrugged. “Not directly. There was nothing to work on. It was determined to be a suicide.”
“Or someone was determined to make it a suicide,” Gage said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Tabari said. “There was no relevant evidence to the contrary.”
Gage smiled at Benaroun. “Your nephew may have a career in politics. His every answer is loaded and invites a follow-up question.”
Benaroun raised his arm and then rotated his forefinger downward as if telling Tabari to put whatever he knew on the table.
Tabari leaned forward and stared down at the grained wood surface. Gage guessed at the choices he was weighing as he sat motionless except for his flicking eyelashes. They were the existential ones with which second generation immigrants, especially those who have achieved conventional success, are confronted. He was a French Algerian. A Jew. An outsider striving for acceptance. His uncle’s asking him to betray official confidences and secrets was more than simply a matter of morality and of integrity, it was a matter of identity.
In Tabari, Gage saw himself thirty years earlier, moving up from Southern Arizona to join the San Francisco Police Department. Everyone in his academy class knew of a local applicant who they’d assumed had been the one pushed aside to make room for Gage, an outsider. The difference was that Gage knew that, unlike Tabari, he wouldn’t spend his career as a police officer and the department wouldn’t be his world.
Gage also grasped that in this conflict of loyalties, Tabari understood that helping him would be a political act requiring enormous courage. They both knew what Benaroun would have done, but Benaroun accepted his position as a pariah, a near untouchable in French society, and rebelled against it, while Tabari hoped to escape it someday
