His offense was so long ago that neither the guards nor the farm’s governor remembered what it was. This ignorance left them nothing specific to condemn him for, nothing easy to cause hate or fear, nothing longstanding to punish and feel righteous about. Because of this and his advanced age, they often treated him like a grandfather. He was given treats and a hot plate, books and newspapers, pens and writing paper.
All illicit, but known to and ignored by the usually stern governor, a former PLA colonel.
This made it more disconcerting to the prisoner when very early in the morning, even before breakfast, his Chinese cell mate vanished to be replaced by a younger, non-Chinese man. He had been brought in at dawn, and since then he had been lying on his sleeping pallet. His eyes were usually closed. Occasionally, he stared up at the unpainted barrack ceiling. He said nothing.
Frowning, the old man went about his activities, refusing to let this abnormality interfere with his routine. He was tall and rangy, although on the thin side. He had a rugged face that was once handsome. Now it was heavily lined, the cheeks sunken, the eyes set in hollows. The eyes were intelligent, so he kept them downcast. It was safer that way.
That morning, he went to his clerical assignment in the governor’s office as usual, and, when lunchtime arrived, he returned to his cell and opened a can of Western lentil soup, heated it on the hot plate, and sat alone at his plank table to eat.
The new prisoner, who was perhaps fifty, had apparently not moved from his pallet. His eyes were closed. Still, there was nothing restful about him. He had a tough-looking, muscular body that never seemed completely at rest.
Suddenly he jumped lightly to his feet and seemed to flow to the door.
His face had a gray stubble that matched his iron-gray hair. He opened the door and scanned the barrack, which was empty because most of the inmates ate beside the fields. He closed the door, returned to his pallet, and lay down again as if he had never moved.
The old man had watched with a kind of envy mixed with admiration and regret, as if he had once been as athletic as that and knew he could never be again.
“Your son can’t believe you’re alive. He wants to see you.”
The longtime prisoner dropped his spoon into his soup. The younger man’s voice had been soft and low, yet somehow carried clearly to his ears.
The newcomer stared calmly up at the ceiling. His lips had not moved.
“Wha … what?” “Keep eating,” the motionless man said. “He wants you to come home.”
David Thayer remembered his training. He bent to his soup, lifted a spoonful, and spoke with his head down. “Who are you?”
“An emissary.”
He sipped. “How do I know that? I’ve been tricked before. They do it every time they want to add to my sentence. They’ll keep me here until I die. Then they can pretend nothing ever happened … I never existed.”
“The last gift you gave him was a stuffed dog with floppy ears named Paddy.”
Thayer felt tears well up in his eyes. But it had been so long now, and they had lied to him so many times. “The dog had a last name.” “Reilly,” the man on the pallet said Thayer laid down his dented soup spoon. Rubbed his sleeve across his face. Sat for a moment.
The man on the floor remained silent.
Thayer bent his head again, hiding his lips from anyone who might be watching. “How did you get in here? Do you have a name?”
“Money works miracles. I’m Captain Dennis Chiavelli. Call me Dennis.”
He forced himself to resume eating. “Would you like some soup?”
“Soon. Tell me the situation. They’re still not aware of who you are?”
“How could they be? I didn’t know Marian had remarried. I didn’t even know whether she and Sam were alive. Now I understand she’s dead.
Terrible.”
“How did you find out?”
“Sam’s visit to Beijing last year. I get the newspapers here. I … ”
“You read Mandarin?”
“Washington wouldn’t have sent me if I weren’t fluent.” Thayer smiled thinly. “In nearly sixty years, I’ve become expert. In many of the dialects, too, especially Cantonese.”
“Sorry, Dr. Thayer,” Captain Chiavelli said.
“When I read about Sam’s visit, his name jumped out, because Serge Castilla had been my closest friend at State. I knew he’d been helping in the search for me, too. So I did some calculations. President Castilla was exactly the right age, and the paper said his father was Serge and his mother Marian. He had to be my son.”
Chiavelli gave an almost invisible shake of his head. “No, he didn’t. It could’ve been a coincidence.”
“What did I have to lose?”
The Covert-One agent thought about that. “So why did you keep quiet until now? You’ve waited a full year.”
“There was no chance I’d ever get out, so why embarrass him? And why risk Beijing’s finding out and vanishing me completely?”
“Then you read about the human-rights treaty.”
“No. It won’t be announced in the Chinese papers until it’s signed. The Uigher political prisoners told me.” Thayer pushed the soup bowl away.
“At that point, I allowed myself to hope. Maybe there was a chance I’d be overlooked among the crush of releases and accidentally let go.” He stood up and walked to his hot plate.
Chiavelli watched with half-closed eyes. Despite Thayer’s advanced age— he had to be at least eighty-two, according to Klein — he walked energetically, steady and firm. His posture was erect but relaxed. There was a spring to his step, now, too, as if he had shed years in the fifteen minutes they had been talking. All of this was important.
Routine had saved Thayer’s sanity. He picked up a chipped enamel kettle, carried it to the scarred sink, filled it, and put it on the hot plate.
From a little cupboard, he brought out two chipped cups and a tin canister of black tea. His method of making tea was an unusual mixture of traditional English and traditional Chinese. He poured the boiling water into the earthenware pot, rinsed it, poured it away, then measured in four teaspoons of tea. He immediately poured more boiling water onto it and let it steep less than a minute. The result was a pale, golden-brown liquid. The pungent aroma filled the cell.
“We drink this without milk or sugar.” He gave Chiavelli a cup.
The undercover agent sat up and leaned back against the wall, cradling it.
Thayer sat at the table with his. He sighed. “Now I’m beginning to believe getting out because of the treaty is just the pipe dream of a man at the end of his years. They’ve held me in secret far too long to admit that they’ve held me at all. It’d make their human-rights record look even more despicable.” Chiavelli drank. The tea was light- bodied and mild for his Italian-American palate, but it was hot, a welcome improvement to the underheated barrack. “Tell me what happened, Dr. Thayer. Why were you arrested in the first place?”
Thayer set down his cup and stared into it as if he could see the past.
When he looked up, he said, “I was working as a liaison with Chiang Kaishek’s organization. My job supposedly was to bring about some kind of detente between his Nationalists and Mao’s Communists, so I thought it’d help the process along if I personally went to Mao and reasoned with him.” He gave a smile that was half grimace. “How ludicrous. How naive. Of course, what I didn’t see was that my real mission was to keep Chiang in power. I was supposed to make deals, hold talks, and stall until Chiang could destroy Mao and the Communists. Going to Mao was the quixotic notion of an inexperienced intellectual who believed people could talk rationally together even when power, values, cultures, ideas, classes, haves, have-nots, and geopolitical spheres of influence were in conflict.”
“So you really did it? You actually went to see Mao alone?” He sounded both amazed and horrified.
Thayer gave a thin smile. “I tried. Never got to him. His army decided I was an agent of the West, or of Chiang, or both. Of course, they arrested me. I would’ve been shot by the soldiers, if Mao’s politicians hadn’t intervened because I had diplomatic status. Over the years, I often wished I had been shot on the spot.”
