to process the actual words. Then her eyes went wide and she pressed a fist against her mouth. “Oh. Comrade Colonel, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Zhu said, hands on his knees. “I only want to help, if I can, to unravel the mystery of your husband’s suicide.”
“A girl might be an explanation,” she said.
“Only if the exposure of an affair would be too much to bear.” He paused. “Would it?”
It was a question that hadn’t occurred to her. She thought about it, again catching the straw with her wrinkled lips. She released it and took a long breath. “Xin Zhu, I once met a man my husband had spent three days interrogating. It was here-our first stay in this place. This man was mad, you understand. I think it was the interrogation that had done it. I was here alone at the time, and he’d somehow gotten past the guards. He threw himself against our window, right there,” she said, motioning toward the large square framed in ivy. “He kept running at it until his nose and lips were bleeding, and when security came I went outside to see. The knuckles of his left hand had been smashed to powder-the fingers flopped uselessly when he waved them at me-and he was missing three toes on his bare feet. He told me, as they were taking him away, that my husband had done this to him, and that he wanted to be killed now. That night, when Bo Gaoli had gotten home from work, I asked him what this terrible man had done. He just sipped at his soup and said, He did nothing. It was a mistake. A mistake?” She cleared her throat, staring hard at that clean, clear window. “No, he wouldn’t have killed himself from shame, certainly not over some girl.”
Zhu’s hands felt too large. He pressed them together between his knees, then moved one to the arm of the sofa. “I see,” he said. “Then you don’t know why he would have killed himself.”
She shook her head abruptly, then said, “Of course, there was the money.”
“Money?”
“About three hundred thousand yuan. Kept in a shoebox right here, in this house. I found it when I was throwing out his clothes.”
Nearly fifty thousand dollars in a box. “You have no idea where he got that from?”
She shook her head.
“Did he travel a lot?”
“Certainly.”
“Alone?”
“Sometimes.”
“Within the region, or did he go farther? To the West, perhaps.”
Her gaze drew back from the window, and she focused on Zhu. “You don’t have this information already?”
“It would take time to track down,” he said, though the truth was that it would require requests to other bureaus that, by now, might not be willing to help a drowning man.
“He went to Chicago for a conference in November. We went to Paris together in June. That was the West. He visited Hong Kong a lot, for work.”
It all sounded normal for a man in Bo Gaoli’s position, even conservative. “Did Wu Liang ever talk to you about what happened?”
She smiled sadly. “He said my husband was one of the greatest administrators China has ever known.”
“Perhaps he was.”
She ignored that. “He told me that they found Bo Gaoli on Wednesday. He was hanging in the bathroom of our apartment on Wangfujing. One of his colleagues had come looking for him, and Wu Liang came by soon after-he was the first government official on the scene.”
“Before the police?”
She shook her head irritably. “There was no police,” she said. “For a man like my husband, suicide does not exist. In the newspaper, they called it a heart attack. Which now makes me wonder about everyone I’ve ever heard of dying of heart problems. Doesn’t it you?”
“It certainly does,” Zhu said with a sigh.
“They say that wives always want to know,” she said after a moment. “Of course we do. You love your man, or at least you believe you understand him, and if he chooses to kill himself, then you want to know. Guilt settles in. You come to believe that you did something wrong. But that’s not me, Xin Zhu. I don’t believe I was ever important enough to Bo Gaoli for him to kill himself because of something I did or did not do. I’m sad that he’s gone, but I’m old enough to remember a time when, in Shanghai, we avoided walking near tall buildings for fear that a suicide would land on us. You’re not old enough to remember those early years of the Chairman, but I do. Back then, simple fear could kill you. People were shockingly fragile, and you didn’t ask why someone stepped off a building. They simply stepped off buildings, and you made sure you didn’t get in their way.”
Zhu chewed the inside of his mouth to avoid replying, for if he began he feared the conversation would never end. He bowed his head to her and slowly rose, wanting to leave without another word, but a few slipped out. “Thank you, Hua Yuan, and I am nearly old enough to remember. However, times have changed, and sometimes asking questions leads, if not to answers, then to better questions.”
“Or to a grave,” Hua Yuan said, then offered her hand, limp, like a Frenchwoman awaiting a kiss on the knuckles. He shook it briefly, then let it go. At the door, she pointed out across the field. “We’re in a city of more than fifteen million people. You see how empty it all is?”
“Yes.”
“Our people have always known the value of a good wall.”
He stopped by the office to find that things were running smoothly, then drove home through the swirling sand of the descending dust storm and parked outside their tower. Most residents used the underground lot, but for the last week, since Monday, he had avoided it, full of the irrational fear of his car getting trapped under all those stories. He turned off the engine, and, instead of getting out, used his encrypted phone to dial a long number. The dust storm was thick now, and he could see very little-which meant that anyone outside the car would see very little of him.
It was just before seven, and, conveniently, Beijing was twelve hours ahead of Washington, D.C., which meant that his man in the embassy would be getting ready for the office. After three rings, he heard a man’s lilting “Wei.”
“It’s been a while, Comrade Sam Kuo,” he said.
Silence. “Yes, comrade…” Sam Kuo faded, perhaps in the company of his wife. “Good to hear from you.”
“I trust you and the family are in good health.”
“Yes, I am, and they are, too. And you-you as well, comrade.”
“Sam Kuo,” Zhu said, “I’m in need of a little help. Do you think you could assist me?”
Later, when Sung Hui was telling him about a cousin on her mother’s side who was pregnant, he got up from the sofa and, taken by a feeling that was all too rare for a man of only fifty-eight years, kissed her neck, and then her lips. She gave him a soft smile and led him to the bedroom. As she crouched on top of him, nails digging into his soft, expansive chest, he wondered if Hua Yuan’s peculiar sadness had provoked this sudden desire, or maybe it had been that last minute of silence for the deaths in Sichuan.
No-it wasn’t either of those things, he realized as his wife’s long hair tickled his face. It was that he was fighting for his life again, sending out agents, plotting moves on the other side of the planet. He was engaged in the one thing he had ever had a talent for, and it filled him with anxiety, anger, sadness, and love-the entirety of human experience.
6
In the morning, he sent word to He Qiang that Liu Xiuxiu should visit a photo booth, then had Shen An-ling personally buy tickets on two separate flights to Washington, D.C., under names connected to passports they kept in their floor safes. For the rest of the morning, they discussed the little that Zhu had learned from Hua Yuan and the information Shen An-ling had collected on Leticia Jones. The story of Jones meeting Abdul Khalik could not be verified by any of their sources, but Wu Liang had helpfully sent the details of their meeting in a barren workers’ bar,
