Nicholai, on the other hand…
What a shame.
21
THE PROBLEM WITH the “new” China, Yuri Voroshenin thought as he sipped a vodka and looked out his window at the Legation Quarter, is that there are no more prostitutes.
Which was damn inconvenient.
The “old” China threw no such obstacles between a man and his needs, to put it mildly. Shanghai, for instance, had some marvelous brothels. But the People’s Republic was ferociously bluestocking when it came to sexual matters, and all the pleasure girls had been swept off to factories or farms.
This was a damn poor allocation of resources and a gross violation of the economic precept of “highest and best use.”
Voroshenin remembered a different Beijing, the halcyon days of the 1920s and ‘30s when the Bada Hutongs of Tiangao, just south of Tiananmen Square, blossomed with “flowers and willows” and the old Xuanwu District’s narrow alleys teemed with teahouses, opium dens, opera theaters, and, of course, brothels.
Those were the nights when a man could go out and get a good dinner and a few drinks, take in an opera, and then attend to his less aesthetic tastes afterward, sometimes with one of the actresses he had seen onstage, or with an expensive courtesan who would serve tea, then sing an aria, and only later get down to business.
He’d even enjoyed the negotiations with the madams, who would have considered it a gross violation of decorum to offer her girls like menu items – instead, she would ask the customer for a “loan” to pay for household maintenance or some particular repair. It was all done with subtlety and style at places like the House of the Golden Flower or Little Fengxian’s.
But that was before the damn “reformers” came along-first the persnickety Chiang and then Mao, and now Beijing was a city as desexualized as the eunuchs who once ran it. Sure, there were a few “black gate women,” independent prostitutes who risked arrest on the street, but a man would have to have access to far better pharmacists than were available in present-day Beijing to resort to that.
The only person getting any illicit sex in the new China was the chief puritan himself, the Chairman. Soviet intelligence had confirmed that Mao had a personal battalion of “actresses” from the National People’s Opera at his beck and call. But it was just like that son of a bitch to feast while everyone else starved.
Even by Stalinist standards, Mao’s China was a cloud-cuckoo land of epic proportions. It would be easy to say that the lunatic was in charge of the asylum, but Mao was crazy like the proverbial fox. All of his mad proclamations were ultimately self-serving and brought him yet more power and control.
The Three Antis Campaign was rapidly stripping the country of its bourgeois middle management, and the recently launched Five Antis Campaign (I’ll see your Three Antis and raise you two, Voroshenin thought with a chuckle) – tax evasion, larceny, cheating, bribery, and stealing economic information – would soon rid China of most of its private businessmen.
And Mao had used the Korean War to conduct a witch hunt for “spies” and “foreign agents” that was reminiscent of the Red Terror in Russia thirty years ago. Neighbor was encouraged to inform on neighbor, suicides and executions were daily events, and the atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and paranoia in the city was palpable.
No wonder Uncle Joe was jealous.
Voroshenin tipped back the rest of his vodka and then heard Leotov’s distinctive knock. The man taps on a door like a mouse, Voroshenin thought – timid and tentative. As the months in this frigid open-air prison went by, Voroshenin found his chief assistant more and more annoying.
Then again, he thought, Beijing is making us all crazy.
“Come in.”
Leotov opened the door and stuck only his head through, as if making doubly sure he’d received permission to enter. “It’s time for the three o’clock briefing.”
“Yes, it’s three o’clock.”
Leotov minced his slight frame over to the desk and stood there until Voroshenin said, “Sit down.”
We do this every afternoon, Voroshenin thought. Every damn afternoon at three o’clock you stand in front of my desk and every damn afternoon at three o’clock I tell you to sit down. Could you not just once come in and plant your skinny ass down in the chair without an invitation?
I’m going stir crazy, he thought.
I need a woman.
“So, what’s new in the asylum today?” he asked.
Leotov blinked, then hesitated. Was this some sort of rhetorical trap that would get him denounced and then purged?
“The briefing?” Voroshenin prodded.
Leotov sighed with relief. He ran down the usual goings-on, the reports from moles in the endless Chinese committee meetings, the Chinese Defense Ministry’s thoughts on the stalemate in Korea, the latest round of executions of corrupt officials and counterrevolutionaries, then added, “And a new Westerner arrived in the city.”
Voroshenin was bored out of his mind. “Indeed. Who?”
“One Michel Guibert.”
“Only one?”
“Yes.”
Leotov was devoid of humor. A literal-minded drone of the sort we seem to crank out like tractor gears, Voroshenin thought. And completely useless as a chess opponent – plodding, unimaginative, and tediously predictable. Maybe I should have him arrested and interrogated just for amusement. “Go on.”
“A French national. The son of an arms dealer with ties to the French Communist Party. The father was apparently quite useful to the Resistance.”
“Weren’t they all, after the fact?” Voroshenin said. “That was a rhetorical question, Leotov, it doesn’t call for you to come up with a correct response. I couldn’t bear watching you attempt it. What’s this Guibert doing in Beijing?”
“We don’t exactly know,” Leotov answered. “But we do know he’s having dinner with General Liu’s aide, a certain Colonel Yu, tonight.”
Well, that’s interesting, Voroshenin thought. A French fellow-traveler, an arms dealer, being received by a high-ranking officer in the Defense Ministry. Surely the Chinese aren’t looking to buy weapons from the French. But it must be a matter of some urgency, otherwise the Chinese would make this Guibert sit on his hands for weeks, just to improve their bargaining position. They would make him work his way up through multiple levels of bureaucracy before getting to an important general like Liu, if he ever got there at all. So, for a high-level officer like Yu to host Guibert on the first day…
“Where is this dinner?” Voroshenin asked.
“In the banquet room of the Beijing Hotel.”
“A banquet, is it?”
“Apparently.”
Voroshenin stared at him. “Do I detect irony, Vasili?”
“Certainly not.”
Voroshenin frowned until little dots of sweat emerged on Leotov’s upper lip. Satisfied, he said, “Get on the phone to Liu’s secretary and tell him that my invitation was apparently lost and I need to know what time I should show up.”
“Do you think he will -”
“We pay him enough, don’t we?” Voroshenin snapped. “He can come up with an invitation to a lousy dinner. Just tell him to strangle another chicken or press another duck, or whatever the hell it is these people do.”
