Satori

Japanese, who would have engaged in ten minutes of circumlocution to subtly inform the guest that he was, after all, a paying guest.

Chen looked relieved. “There is a dinner tonight in your honor.”

“You needn’t go to the trouble and expense.”

“It is already organized.”

“I look forward to it.”

Chen nodded. “Colonel Yu, aide to General Liu himself, will be your host.”

General Liu Dehuai was a national hero, one of the key generals on the Long March and the founder of the legendary 8th Route Army. Until recently the commander of Chinese forces in Korea, he was now minister of defense. Liu would have to approve the deal for the sale of the weapons through “Guibert” to the Viet Minh. The fact that he was sending an apparently key aide to evaluate Guibert on his very first night in the country was significant.

And uncharacteristic of what Nicholai knew of the Chinese way of doing business. Typically, they would let a foreign guest cool his heels – easy to do in Beijing in January – for days if not weeks, occupying him with low-level subordinates and endless sightseeing, before getting down to business.

Liu was in a hurry to do this deal.

“I’m honored,” Nicholai said.

Chen stood up. “I am sure you are tired and would like to rest.”

Nicholai saw him to the door.

He waited five minutes, then put his coat and hat on again and went back out into the cold.

18

ALTHOUGH NICHOLAI HAD PORED over maps and aerial photographs, they could not substitute for on-the- ground knowledge, and he wanted to orient himself to the city. His survival might depend on an immediate decision as to what alley to turn into, what street to avoid, and there would be no time for indecision or hesitation.

Beijing in the early days of 1952 was a city of contradictions, divided between spacious governmental sections and the narrow alleys-hutongs – on which most of the people lived. The heart of Beijing was the Forbidden City – as its name indicated, closed off to the general public for most of its thousand-year existence. Now that the Communist government had moved in and turned many of its buildings into offices and residences, most of it was still “forbidden” most of the time.

The “other” Beijing that surrounded the Forbidden City was – or used to be – a vibrant, active, cosmopolitan city of some two million people, with open-air markets, streets of fashionable shops, small parks and squares where jugglers, magicians, and other buskers performed.

The Beijingren, the natives, had the same tough, jaded, superior attitude of the residents of all major cities. To them, Beijing was its own universe, and they were not entirely wrong. Everyone had come to the imperial city – not only all manners of Chinese, but, for good or ill, the rest of the world as well. So the sophisticated Beijing citizens knew all the varied cultures of China, Japan, and Europe. A well-heeled Beijingren might well have eaten in French restaurants, bought suits from Italian tailors, watches from German craftsmen. Most of the modern Beijingren had worn British suits or French dresses and danced to American music.

Still, any good Beijingren, from the impoverished night-soil collectors to the richest merchant, would proudly proclaim the superiority of Beijing culture itself- its fabled imperial buildings, its bridges and parks and gardens, centuries-old restaurants and teahouses, its theaters and opera houses, its circuses and acrobats, its poets and writers.

Beijing was a sophisticated imperial capital when London and Paris were little more than insect-infested swamps. Of all the European capitals, only Rome could rival Beijing in terms of antiquity, sophistication, and power.

The Beijingren had seen it all. Within the living memory of many of its citizens, Beijing had survived invasions from the French, the Germans, the Nationalists, the Japanese, and now the Communists. It had adjusted, evolved, and survived.

Many observers were surprised that Mao chose the city, with all its imperial associations, for his capital. Nicholai thought he chose Beijing for exactly those associations. No ruler could claim power in China without those trappings – without possession of the Temple of Heaven, no emperor could claim the Mandate of Heaven, and Nicholai knew that Mao, for all his Communist propaganda, saw himself as the new emperor. Indeed, he had quickly shut himself up in the Forbidden City, and was rarely seen outside it.

The Beijingren knew this. They had known many emperors, had seen dynasties rise and fall, watched them build monuments to themselves and then watched them crumble, and they knew that the Communist Dynasty was but one in a long line. Its time would come and its time would pass, but the city would endure.

But in what form, Nicholai wondered as he walked out the front entrance, up the street, and then turned right onto Chang’an. Mao had plans for the city and announced that he was going to transform it from “a city of consumption to a city of production.” Already blocks of old houses had been torn down to make room for new factories, narrow streets were being broadened to allow tanks to roll up and down, and Soviet architects – a perfectly oxymoronic phrase, in Nicholai’s opinion – were now busily designing sterile concrete housing units to replace the old courtyard houses that were the center of Beijing domestic life.

The courtyard walls lined the residential streets and hutongs, with only small doors opening onto the street. The doors opened onto another wall, and a visitor would have to go to the right or the left-a device that outfoxed evil spirits, which can only move in straight lines. Once around that wall, the space opened onto an interior courtyard, usually of pebbles or, in the richer homes, flagstone. The courtyard usually had a shade tree or two, and an open charcoal brazier for cooking during warmer weather. Depending on the wealth or poverty of the family, there was a single dwelling structure of one or two stories, perhaps with separate wings for the families of the sons. The Beijingren lived privately, quietly, and with great autonomy in these extended family units behind the walls.

This would never do for the control-obsessed Mao, who quickly condemned the desire for privacy as an “individualist” antisocial attitude. While waiting for the Soviets to complete their architectural atrocities, he attacked the courtyard houses on an organizational level, establishing “safety-keeping committees,” in which neighbors were encouraged to snoop on neighbors. Black-clad squads of “night people” – mostly erstwhile burglars – used their former skills to prowl around rooftops and listen for the sounds of “bourgeois activities” such as the click of mah- jongg tiles, the trilling of a pet songbird, or for antirevolutionary whisperings and conspiracies.

The assault on urban life was also conducted on public spaces. Theaters and teahouses were closed, street performers harassed for licenses, snack vendors increasingly forced into state-run collectives. Even the rickshaw drivers who once jammed the city’s avenues were being gradually phased out as “imperial relics,” symbolic of “human slavery.” It didn’t happen all at once, but it was happening, and the bustle that gave the city so much of its charm was being muted into fearful stillness, in which every activity was watched and heard.

Indeed, Nicholai discerned the man who instantly fell in behind him before he even left the hotel lobby. China was poor in most resources save population, so the intelligence service could easily afford to leave a man at the hotel with the sole responsibility of keeping an eye on “Guibert.”

It was good to know.

Nicholai wanted to ascertain the amount of surveillance that he would encounter, so in that sense he was “trolling for tails,” as Haverford would put it. Nicholai thought of it differently, of course, and in terms of Go. A basic principle of the game was that motion attracts motion. The movement of a single stone on an area of the board generally provokes a move from the opponent. So it was, he discovered, in the espionage game, at which he realized he was a neophyte.

Pretending not to notice the surveillance, he crossed Chang’an into the old Legation Quarter, past the old Russian Legation building, which the current Soviet delegation had reoccupied. Using only his peripheral vision, he scanned the front of the building, where the security, sitting in Russian sedans, was clearly visible.

He kept his pace up, as if bored with the Legation Quarter and intent on heading west to Tiananmen Square.