the operation of the market-but you wouldn’t know that. Would you? Of course not.”
Harris’s fists clenched by his sides.
“You have no scientific basis for anything you believe. You’ve simply absorbed the ideas you’ve lived your life by in the same way a paper towel absorbs a spill.”
Minsky watched Harris’s fists twitch. He waited for Harris to pull one back, but realized that he’d never swing, for Harris wouldn’t want to be remembered in history for a misdemeanor assault and battery.
“The smooth functioning of the market-is there a more stupid phrase ever uttered? Wealth is created when the market breaks down. That’s when there are great winners and great losers. Wealth is created not by greasing the wheels of the market, making it more efficient, but by sabotaging it.”
“The great computer hardware and software companies are proof that you’re wrong. The founders became the richest guys in the world by doing it the old-fashioned way.”
“It’s proof that I’m right and that you’re as deluded as I said you were,” Minsky said. “They’ve all paid out more in civil settlements and fines for monopolistic practices, antitrust violations, market manipulation, and patent violations than the entire net worth of General Motors at its peak. It’s called sabotage. And before they became benevolent philanthropists, they were master saboteurs.”
CHAPTER 32
Faith spread the curtains that separated the back of the ambulance from the cab and looked through the cracked windshield to determine how close they’d gotten to Chengdu. The open highway that had bisected rice, wheat, and rapeseed fields had now cut into a grid of suburbs composed of silent factories, dark apartment towers, and streets devoid of the cars and trucks and bicycles that had jammed them just days earlier. It seemed as though the city center had become a magnet drawing toward it anything and everyone not anchored in place Almost anything and almost everyone.
A quivering speck of color appeared in the distant haze. A vehicle coming toward them on the highway. It seemed to float above the gray pavement. Seconds later, it separated into three, and then resolved from specks into squares, and then from squares into open-bed trucks, their beds crowded, three men standing at the rear of each one, the man in the middle tied to a stake with a painted sign above his head.
A queasy feeling waved through Faith as she read the characters:
Enemy of the People.
Predator.
Traitor.
And she recognized who the bracketed men were: condemned government officials on their way to the killing fields, the execution grounds to which they or others like them had sent not only fraudsters and murderers, but workers who’d protested working conditions with their bodies and writers who’d fought censorship with their keyboards.
Faith looked down, afraid to see their terrified eyes, afraid their eyes would see hers, and even more afraid that one of them might be the son of Ayi Zhao.
Even the ambulance driver, a rock-faced man hardened by a career among the dying and the dead, looked away and stared down at the white lane lines ticking by.
Faith kept her thoughts to herself and returned to her seat. If it hadn’t been Ayi Zhao’s son in one of the trucks, by turning back and trying to catch up to find out, they might arrive in Chengdu too late to save him.
Just after the trucks passed, the ambulance cut off the freeway and drove north, heading toward the economic development zone and the incinerated Meinhard plant.
As they neared, the bite of particulate smoke made them tear up and the acridity of burning chemical waste choked their throats.
Ayi Zhao handed Faith a tissue to breathe through, and then covered her own mouth.
Five minutes later, the ambulance slowed to a stop. When the noise of the rumbling motor died, murmuring voices and yelled orders rose up.
The rear doors swung open. Faith tensed as she looked out at a semicircle of faces staring in, men and women bundled against the frozen air in wool coats and down parkas, with gray swirling clouds of moist breath rising in a mass.
The crowd was so transfixed on the impossible presence of a white ghost that at first they didn’t notice Ayi Zhao sitting behind her.
Layered behind the first row were hundreds of other peering faces and stretching necks.
Faith’s eyes caught a North Face logo on one and Nike shoes on another and Levi’s on another, followed by a bitter thought: The new Chinese Revolution will be carried out by an army dressed to kill in tennis shoes and knockoffs.
She leaned forward to make her way out, but Ayi Zhao grabbed her arm.
“Let me go before you,” Ayi Zhao said. “Uncertainty is our enemy.”
Ayi Zhao pushed herself up from the bench seat and stooped her way past Faith. As two men rushed forward to help her down, those standing behind them bowed one after another as they recognized her. Others murmured her name. The whispered words “Ayi Zhao, Ayi Zhao” swept through the crowd like a rustling breeze.
Bodies shifted like stalks of wheat as someone maneuvered through the mass. The front row held firm, phalanxlike, unwilling to give up their places and surrender the moment. They were transfixed, for none of them had viewed Ayi Zhao since her trial after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the crushing of the revolt.
Hands reached up and grabbed the shoulders of two women standing next to each other in the front row. They lost their balance and cried out. Jian-jun burst through the sudden gap between them. In one motion, the men who’d guided Ayi Zhao down from the ambulance spun back and threw him to the bare ground, and then knelt on his back.
“Stop,” Ayi Zhao yelled.
The men jumped to their feet, as if they were soldiers given orders by a commanding officer. They looked from her to Jian-jun and back.
Faith stiffened, stunned by their unthinking obedience and the authority in Ayi Zhao’s voice. Faith hadn’t seen that kind of personal power exercised since she observed a tribal jirga in Balochistan decades earlier, its unelected elders exercising absolute control, the wave of a hand or the nod of a head signifying an unappealable decision.
“He’s my grandson,” Ayi Zhao said.
The men reached down and helped Jian-jun to his feet and brushed the twigs and soil off his clothes.
But then Faith thought back on the three prisoners driven to slaughter on the killing fields and realized that even the solidity of Ayi Zhao’s stature might not be a defense against the force of events.
Jian-jun reached for Faith’s hand to help her down, not because she needed it, but because his gesture would be seen as that of a proxy for his grandmother, and Faith would step out of the ambulance and under the umbrella of her protection.
“Are your parents okay?” Faith whispered, as first one foot, then the other touched down on the frozen ground.
“For now.”
The front of the crowd separated as though it was fabric being unzipped, and kept opening as Ayi Zhao and Faith and Jian-jun walked toward the generator building. It closed behind them until it had formed again into a single piece by the time they’d reached the entrance to the provisional concrete prison.
Guards with peasant faces and ragged coats lowered their AK-47s, then opened the doors. Jian-jun led them down a hallway, past looted offices and silent turbines, toward a storage room, passing more guards with each step.
The leader stepped forward and removed his wool cap. His skull seemed stark against the soot that masked his fifty-year-old face and etched crevices around his eyes and mouth. He nodded to Ayi Zhao as if they’d once been comrades for whom no spoken greeting was required, and then narrowed his eyes and looked at Faith.
“You’re the anthropologist? “ he asked in Mandarin.
