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© 2012 by Mark Harril Saunders

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Saunders, Mark Harril.

Ministers of fire : a novel / Mark Harril Saunders.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8040-1140-2 (hc : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4048-8 (electronic)

1. International relations—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.A8248M56 2012

813'.6—dc23

2011053333

R.A.S.

In love we are incapable of honor—the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American

prologue

When april was gone, disappeared into the center of the world, her voice in his head would still insist that he had planned everything—not just the night in Samarkand but all that surrounded it. It was in the Burling character, she said, using his name as she did in the third person, to engineer things according to his own mind, to will them into existence while keeping his distance at the same time. The problem, Burling thought, was people. He was never any good with them. Whether that failure was due to a flaw in his makeup, or just a hedge in case things went to hell, April—the tall, abundant woman with the narrowing gaze that seemed to hide a sly yearning that Burling, in the short time given them, had not been able to fulfill—never had a chance to tell him.

February 14, 1979: to this day no one marks it as significant. November 9, 1989, September 11, 2001, but not the last troubled months of the seventies, when the world we know was born. On that Wednesday, Wes Godwin, survivor of the Philippines, Korea, and the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, left the Embassy Residence in Kabul by the rear gate to attend a practice of the Afghan national basketball team, of which April’s husband, Jack, was coach. Lucius Burling, deputy chief of mission and the Agency station chief, rode with Ambassador Godwin in his dusty black car. Plush seats, smell of cigarette smoke, milky sun smeared across the glass. Their route took them through an unpaved lane along walls the color of sand, punctuated at intervals by ancient wooden doors that opened onto courtyards shaded by fruit trees, where dark-eyed children with café-au-lait faces played solemnly in the dust. Burling had been a starting forward at Princeton, at a time when that meant something, but in retrospect he had to admit that his success at basketball had more to do with his natural size and a determined drive than with any great skill as an athlete. Slow-footed but strong, Burling would wait for the quick ones to feed him the ball, then lower his head, make a halting feint one way or the other, and take it to the hole.

Bull, they called him, which was ridiculous and probably in fun.

“More like Ferdinand,” Amelia had teased him.

“I worked harder than they did, that’s all,” Burling said, a bit stung. At that time in their courtship, he was still getting used to her and couldn’t really tell if her tone was affectionate or cutting.

“It’s your big blond head, darling,” Amelia said, reaching up to touch his hair, “with all those big thoughts inside it. The thinking man’s bull.”

He was not much interested in basketball now, not in the kind they had going at home, anyway. He had taken his son to see Georgetown play, but John Thompson’s game had not appealed to him, partly because he knew he wouldn’t have lasted a season in that frenetic kind of scheme. The game in Kabul was not for him either, but some of Jack’s players had ties to the northern tribes, and Burling had a plan to go up there that was lately gaining traction at Langley.

“Going through with this, are you?” Godwin said, face still turned to the world outside the car. At noon the alley was deserted except for a street dog that lapped at the gutter and perked up warily at the sound of the Cadillac, springs complaining as it shouldered through the ruts.

“I don’t look at it that way,” Burling told him.

The ambassador faced him, lips the color of bricks. He still wore his white hair in a military cut, in spite of his civilian appointment.

“We need friends up there,” Burling said.

“He-ell.” Godwin drew two syllables out of the word. “The tribes aren’t anyone’s ‘friend.’ They know Taraki is weak and the Russians are just waiting for an excuse to come across.”

Burling watched him quietly, acknowledging the obvious. Godwin was southern military royalty and therefore, in Burling’s estimation, lacked nuance in the extreme.

“You’re not thinking far enough ahead, Lucius. What about the Chinese? You don’t think they aren’t already in there? Deng Xiaoping’s got his own Moslem problem, and this is his backyard. Mark my words, this’ll blow back, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for twenty years.”

“By then I hope we’re all in a better place,” Burling said.

The Cadillac reached a crossing ten blocks from the compound. Across the intersection, wires hung from a rusted box mounted on a pole. The place seemed unnaturally quiet under the white sky, and Burling had a vague foreboding, like waking in the morning and not remembering what you’d done—something not in your character, apparently—the night before. Perhaps it was just a case of misplaced respect for a superior. Godwin was only ten years his senior, but the Second World War made the space between them feel wider. In spite of the ambassador’s greater experience, Burling was convinced that he, the younger man, was right.

“How’s your bride feeling?” Godwin asked.

“Better, thanks.”

The ambassador rearranged himself uncomfortably and chuckled deep in his chest. “Some women aren’t made for this life. Doesn’t appeal to them.”

Burling’s heart had begun to flutter. He was aware that he was about to reveal more than he should. “Sometimes I think I wasn’t meant to be married, Wes. I seem to enjoy isolation more than . . .” Lately Burling had begun to leave sentences undone, as if his own thoughts could be read aloud. The habit worried him. “More than the alternative, I guess. At one time Amelia thought she wanted this.”

“Women are changeable. Worst mistake you can make is try to stand in their way.”

“You take Jack’s wife,” Burling began.

Godwin laughed aloud. “No, you take her, man. Too much trouble for me.”

Burling smiled involuntarily, and a deep flush came to his face. Two nights before, in the Residence garden after drinking red wine at a dinner, he had done just that. Or not taken her, exactly, in the way that Godwin meant. The logistics of that he could not imagine. But he had kissed her, surprising himself if not, apparently, April. At first he had stammered an apology, but she had smiled at him as if he were a boy, then kissed him back, one palm placed tenderly against his chest. He couldn’t tell if she was stroking him or pushing him away, and he was trembling slightly as she drew toward him, lips parting on his; he could feel the cleft of her lower back beneath his hand.

“It’s almost as if this country makes sense to her,” he said.

Godwin’s face compressed in a wolfish expression, concentrated around the eyes. A lot of things seemed clear to April, dimensions of how people lived in the world that for Burling were surrounded by a haze of uncertainty. That seemingly amused capacity for taking things as they came was what had drawn him to her. And he was, he realized now, deeply attracted, on a level and in a way that had been working in him since she and Jack had arrived in Afghanistan more than a year ago. “She’s a hippie anthropologist, Lucius. The Wretched of the Earth, all that. I’ve seen her type before in Vietnam. Comes over for the soft stuff, but what she really wants is to get in the shit.”

The prospect thrilled and terrified him.

“You should take her up north, Lucius. Involve her in your little scheme. She’s the one who speaks the languages.”

A sound like a rock hitting glass caused both men to strain forward into the deep space between the seats. A star had formed on the windshield, and Godwin’s driver—a thin, graceful Afghan with delicate fingers that could palm a basketball—slumped against the wheel. Slowly, with a smooth motion, the car rolled across the intersection, and its hood rose up, the radiator exploding behind it, emitting a wicked hiss of steam.

“Holy shit,” Godwin said, sounding deeply perturbed.

Men in police uniforms were grabbing at the handles, and Burling fumbled with the strap of white vinyl on his own door, fighting to keep it shut. Behind him they pulled Wes Godwin from the car. Burling heard the singsong of Pashto or Dari—he couldn’t tell which. The man at his window was gone, and he whipped around, expecting a blow from behind. Through the opposite door he could see Godwin’s midsection, the starched white shirt and navy tie too short on his belly, his naked arms grappling with the men. His sleeves were rolled at the cuffs, and his hands tried to keep his assailants away from him, bobbing like a fighter, grasping at anything. The street outside was bright.

“We’re going to the Serena,” one said in heavily accented English, referring to the Kabul Hotel. “You are going to give us the mujahedin.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Godwin told them, breathing hard now, still fighting. “We’re not holding any soldiers of God.”

“Wes,” said Burling. “It’s a kidnapping, an exchange.”

“Hell with that.” Bullets began to hit the car again.

In spite of his position, Lucius Burling was a peaceful man. An intelligence analyst, not an ex-soldier like Godwin, or Jack Lindstrom, spoiling for a fight. He had come to this country, as he had more than a dozen years before to Vietnam, to assess the situation and to offer help, a way forward. A man had a few things to lean on or comfort him in life, and the integrity of this position was one of Burling’s.

“Get down, Wes!”

Burling ducked, and the back window shattered. One of the kidnappers’ bodies was flung against the trunk. Automatic fire came from three sides, and the men dressed as police crouched down and returned it with pistols and shotguns. Burling began to crawl across the seat, intending to pull Wes to safety. He was unprepared for how loud the firing was at close range. The man who had struggled with Godwin was hit in the back and thrown against the tufted leather of the door, his chest ripped open like a suitcase.

Wes was unprotected now. Burling watched him trying to push the dead man off his legs, but he couldn’t do it without leaving cover. Godwin turned a quarter of the way toward Burling; his shirt bloomed red, and he fell on his side across the seat. Burling’s ears were plugged. The rattle of gunfire sounded far away. A bearded face in a keffiyeh appeared in the space where the windshield had been. Burling thought briefly of Amelia, and a great, lonely sadness overwhelmed him. That he would die now, could die, with so much silence and distance between them. I really didn’t know this could happen, he thought.

Wes Godwin’s life left his body in a spasm.

Burling swallowed and his hearing returned to him, like a train approaching from far away. The broken car was running with a tick, then a rasp. He closed his eyes to squeeze out the water. When his vision cleared he realized that he was alone.

in the days after the killing, the organism of the city broke down and its hungers were exposed. Kabul came under siege. The city lay in a pale bowl of light, and every movement seemed magnified. April insisted it was a troop of Jack’s basketball players who attacked the compound wall one windy, hot afternoon, but Lindstrom said they’d disappeared.

“Gone up north to fight the Russians, just like they told me they would.”

Jack was sitting in the garden late that night as Burling returned from his office to the Residence, where all remaining personnel had retreated in precaution. Lindstrom spoke up as Burling approached, answering an unasked question from the darkness of the overhanging branches above a bench.

“They killed the American ambassador,” Burling said, “so they ran.”

From the tip of a brass pipe the shape of a cigarette, an ember glowed in front of Lindstrom’s face. “Keeping you up, is it?”

“I’m the guy that’s left behind.”

“Me, too,” Lindstrom said, exhaling a plume of blue smoke. He stood up slowly, a head shorter than Burling but possessed of a taut strength, like a wrestler. Burling saw that he was wearing a sidearm, as if in the aftermath of the attack he had returned to his former life as a marine. He peered up into Burling’s face. “You know what I’m talking about?”

Burling took a step backward on the uneven path. “I need to get back to Amelia.”

“The mujas didn’t kill Wes, your buddies in the government did.”

“I was there, Jack.”

“Then you should have seen it for what it was: a cluster fuck.”

“The mujahedin wanted to grab Godwin. Taraki’s people tried to stop it and shot him by mistake.”

“You don’t wonder how the government forces knew what was about to go down?”

“I wonder about a lot of things. Apparently you have a theory about this one?”

“It’s just stoned thinking, Lucius. You go on back now. Tonight might be your last chance for a while.”

Burling stared uncomprehendingly at him in the dark. Strangely, there was no sound of birds or bugs here at night. The dry air was luminous and still. Far away he heard the pop of gunfire. “Why, what’s happening tomorrow?”

“I’m a married man, too,” Lindstrom said, “so I know how it goes. The mysterious rhythms.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Man, you really don’t, do you? You don’t keep track of that shit at all.”

From an open window of the Residence came the sound of a television, the volume unnaturally loud. An American newsman was talking about hostages. “What are you smoking in that thing?” Burling asked.

“Thai stick. Grass soaked in opium. Very mellow, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you want to make love to your wife.”

Burling tried to hide his astonishment, but the effort made him seem prim. Lindstrom’s vaguely Asiatic eyes held two counterimages of the match, like tiny blazing question marks, as he lit the pipe again.

“We’ve been married for twenty years,” Burling told him. For some reason, the contemplative menace in Lindstrom’s face made Burling want to reach out to him. Or maybe, he thought, it’s because we have April in common. “There’s just not the urgency now.”

“Between the two of you, no.”

“What’s happening tomorrow, Jack? I really want to hear.”

“Half of the staff won’t show up,” Lindstrom told him, squinting as he waved the smoke away with his hand. “The masons you ordered from north of the city won’t come to fix the wall.”

“Your players told you this?”

“A month ago or more.”

“And you neglected to pass it on.”

“You didn’t want to hear it. You were so sure you had this thing nailed.”

A sound of boots on gravel startled them, and a flashlight raked the wall behind the trees: the duty marine checking the perimeter at the beginning of his watch. Above the wall the sky was a dirty yellow from the streetlights that hadn’t been shot out. “So you wouldn’t let April ride in the car with us that day. You made her come to the gym with you and said it was because she was going to show your players her jump shot.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Lindstrom said, but Burling thought he sounded evasive, in the way of a petty informer. “They didn’t think a woman could do it. I said, how do you think she got a scholarship to Georgetown?”

Jack’s pride in his wife was affecting, but it made Burling wonder what still existed between them. “What would make you think they’d understand a thing like that,” he asked, envy stirring, “when you see the women here?”

“You don’t give them any credit, Lucius, that’s your problem. All they wanted was to get their people back, the ones Taraki was torturing.”

“Why won’t the masons come tomorrow, Jack?”

“Because they’ve gone off to fight, man, just like they have since the British—shit, since Genghis Khan was here. If they don’t show up tomorrow, that’ll be our signal to get the hell out.”

the morning after, jack proved to be right. the masons didn’t come, and by afternoon the rats had chewed a tunnel through the wall from the open sewer running outside. Burling and two marines tried to patch it with a rotting bag of mortar they found in a shed, but the rats seemed to like it—for the salt—and made the hole larger than before. Like the siege of Krishnapur, no one in the embassy cared anymore—except Burling.

In the three days it took to get dependents out, he worked with a calm insistence, as if he’d been waiting for this all his life. He felt vaguely guilty at how much he relished it, and how much the work left room for nothing else.

Late on Friday afternoon he left Godwin’s office, which he had taken over, to bring his wife the news. He had kept his own family here while others got out because that only seemed right; now it was their turn. The gift of what Amelia wanted, to leave him, he bore sadly through the Residence gate. The sun was sharp from the west, and marines had taken up positions around the ornamental garden where he had kissed April, then learned that her husband had been perfectly willing to let him be kidnapped or killed. Crossing that threshold, breaking into their lives, had set something real and true in motion inside him. He had begun to believe that he was meant to understand things, about women, about the whirl of borders where he had been sent in his country’s service. He saw more clearly the factions involved in Godwin’s murder, the role of the northern tribes, even the future as it involved the United States, its enemies and allies, perhaps a Third Force, and how these things fit together in the puzzle of nations. Kissing April had even allowed him to set aside his anger at his wife, given him the distance he needed to treat Amelia with compassion, as he should. But even as he thought fondly of pleasing her, longing, hard as a stone, rose up in his throat. It’s all turned around, he thought. I actually want her to go.

Burling found his wife and son on the path near where Lindstrom had predicted the future. Jack had the information, all right, because that was his role, but Burling was meant to parse it, to understand. Godwin’s death, his plan to work with the mujahedin, seemed ordained.

“Mom killed it,” Luke said. They were huddling above a lank brown body, its coarse hair matted with blood. The boy was twelve, and his round eyes and freckled face couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or horrified. He hadn’t known his mother, a savior of birds, would beat a rat to death with a shovel.

“I am finished,” she said.

Her voice seemed unstable, and Burling wondered if she’d been drinking. He could smell something strong but not quite sweet in the air, pungent and headier than alcohol. Then it came to him: the smell of Godwin’s car.

“I know,” he said to his wife. He felt mourning coming on, prematurely: the strength it took to hold up against it steadied him. Being a man entailed equal measures of risk and resignation. He touched her on the shoulder. “It’s all pretty horrible, but you’ll be out of here tomorrow.”

“You’re not coming with us,” she said.

“I can’t, Amie.”

“You don’t want to.”

“We’re going home?” Luke asked, disappointed.

“I am done,” Amelia said.

later that night he was back in the embassy, arranging the journey up north. Sleeves rolled up past his elbows, blue pencil touching the map. Godwin’s office smelled of rugs, books, and furniture polish. The pool of light from the desk lamp ringed a pleasurable solitude. Amelia had changed, or misrepresented herself, while he had simply stayed the same. What had been an adventure when they married, what had drawn her to him, she despised in him now. His sense of purpose was a burden. That was why he’d turned to April. It was not what he had wanted, but he would have to take it on.

“Burling.”

It was as if he had fallen into the map: he wasn’t sure how much time had passed. April, dressed in a white djellabah, was leaning inside the door.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t call you Lucius,” she said, seeing the look on his face. To his surprise, her presence was unwelcome. “It doesn’t fit you somehow.”

“It was my father’s name,” said Burling.

“Where I’m from they’d call you Junior. Something else if you were black.”

No other person in the embassy would dare to affect native dress, but April wore it as a provocation. Like her languages, the robe was almost a weapon, or a camouflage. Inside the open neckline, he could see the low swell of her breast.

“I haven’t seen you since . . . ,” she began, then immediately laughed at herself, collapsing slightly to one side so that her knuckles bore her weight on the credenza. A deceptively strong woman, she tossed her fine blond curtain of hair behind her shoulders, as if its luxuriance annoyed her. Not exactly beautiful, Burling observed. Amelia would have turned more heads at the Chestnut Hill parties where she and Burling had come of age. April’s eyes were a bit too light, the skin across her wide cheekbones sprinkled in places with the pockmarks of a childhood disease. But her neck led gracefully into her muscular shoulders and long, slender arms, wrists cuffed with tight bracelets; and her breasts, while substantial, looked firm. His father could have drawn her in three or four finely arcing strokes, his pencil describing a long thigh and hip, a cheekbone on the opposite side and above, perhaps the hair and slender shoulder to bring the composition into balance. From her waist to her toes, which were painted and bare, she was perfect. Irritation at her presence dissolved into something warmer, desire.

“You meant since Wes was killed.”

“That’s what I was talking about, yes,” she said, coming around to his side of the desk where he could see her whole length. The djellabah rippled across the space between her thighs. “But you were thinking of kissing me in the garden.”

Burling’s words caught deep in his throat. “I can’t stop thinking about it, to be honest.”

“You’re a good man, Lucius Burling,” she said. “One kiss is not that big a deal.”

“Since Wes died, things are not . . . No, I don’t want to put it on that.”

April turned and went to the tray on the windowsill, where a cut-glass bottle of arak, a pitcher of water and glasses, shared space with Burling’s African violets and creeping philodendron. “You brought your tray in here,” she observed.

Weary with lust, Burling rose. “My plants,” he said.

“You’re funny.”

“I’ve kept them alive for a long time,” he told her, picking up the long tendrils of the philodendron in his hands and rubbing his thumb on a waxy leaf.

“Most men don’t keep plants.”

“These are easy to care for.”

April poured them each a measure of the clear liquor. Adding water clouded the liquid to the color of milk. A smell of licorice rose from the glasses.

“My father raised vegetables,” she told him. “He would make them come up out of the ground like a sorcerer. Rocky ground it was, too, but fertile just the same.”

“Did you and Jack have a garden in Berkeley?”

She laughed, somewhat ruefully, and handed him a glass. “Jack is more like one of those bitter weeds that grow out of the cracks in a sidewalk. You have to respect his kind of strength. Hack him down, he just keeps growing back.”

“How did you meet?”

April sighed and lowered herself on the long leather couch, and Burling stood above her, tentatively drinking. “When I entered the program at Cal, I felt very detached. All the other kids were privileged, very stoned and theoretical. I went down to a gym in Oakland to see if I could teach the girls from the neighborhood basketball. And there was Jack, just back from his first tour. His grandfather’s mission had funded the gym.”

“I just realized,” Burling said, feeling his height and sitting down on an ottoman. Their knees were almost touching.

“What did you realize?”

“That I don’t want to talk about Jack.”

April smiled, which narrowed her eyes. “We’re not going to make it here, you know,” she said, watching for his reaction over the rim of the glass, “in Godwin’s office.”

“Was that supposed to be on the agenda tonight?”

“I’m probably not even your type,” she said, bringing the glass again to her lips. They were plump, of a rare shade of pink, defined by clean lines against her pale skin. He thought again how they had felt against his, the slight pressure receiving him, and the hardness of her teeth inside.

He had to take in breath to gather himself. “Why do women always say that to me?”

“That we’re not your type?”

“Yes, but why?”

“Because under most circumstances, you wouldn’t even look at a girl like me.”

“I would find it impossible not to.”

“That’s sweet, and I know you’re not lying, right this minute, but if I had come to your office, the summer I interned at State, you wouldn’t have been any more than polite.”

Burling took a quick gulp of the arak to steady himself. She wouldn’t have found him at the Department of State, of course, but she would certainly be aware of that. Jack would not have been reticent on that score. “Why do you think so?”

“Because you’re a sophisticated man. Worldly. Handsome, but not so good looking that people wonder.”

“No?”

She smiled to acknowledge his feigned disappointment. “You move like you played a sport, football or basketball, maybe had an injury or two, but you’re careful so as not to hurt anyone smaller than you. You went to private schools, and you’re probably rich, or at least well off compared to most people, and now you’re being groomed for one of the top political appointments—deputy national security advisor, or number two at CIA.”

“Shhh,” said Burling, pointing at the ceiling where the microphones would be. Taraki’s government had the benefit of Soviet security expertise. “Who says that?”

“Jack. Besides, you married a debutante.”

“Not quite,” Burling said. “When I met her, Amelia was rebelling against being a society girl. Drinking and going to jazz concerts with men. It’s her money, by the way. My family lost ours long ago.”

“What luxury!” said April. “To reject what others want more than anything.”

“What do people want? Amelia and I are about as conventional as can be. The problem is what goes on in my head. I tend to disappoint people.”

“Are you going to disappoint me?” April asked, pointing to his nearly empty glass.

“I’ll have one more, if that’s what you mean,” he said, draining it.

April got up. She seemed somewhat hardened now, yet still he couldn’t help feeling encouraged. When he envisioned the journey up north, she was already with him in his mind. Up to Samarkand, over the Pass. Translating Dari and Pashto and whatever else they ran across. It was probably a very bad idea to take a woman, but he was making up reasons that it had to be done for the sake of the mission, and he had already begun to believe them.

“I need you to stay with me,” he said.

She looked at him over her shoulder, half-angrily, half-wanting. At least that was what he hoped. “I already told you, I can’t do that.” She said it softly, as if to the glasses she was filling.

“That’s not what I meant,” Burling said, accepting the fresh drink. They stood close, their glasses resting against each other in salute. “When the charter flight leaves tomorrow, I need you to stay. Come over here.”

“Be careful,” she warned. “Jack is probably out in the garden right now. He’s getting high again, and when he does that he likes to talk to the marines.”

“That’s why I can’t take him with me,” he said, setting down his glass on the corner of the desk, “even though he knows the terrain.” On a yellow legal pad, he wrote, I have to go up North, to Mazar-i-Sharif, to talk to the mujahedin. “Things are happening faster than I thought, and I need someone with languages.”

“I came out here to help with girls’ education,” she said, sounding slightly desperate now. “Just because I speak Dari doesn’t mean I understand what these men are up to. And I don’t care what Jack says, killing Godwin didn’t make any sense.”

“Oh, yes, it did,” Burling said, sampling the new, stronger, mixture. “Ever heard of Franz Ferdinand?”

“That’s another problem. I’m not as smart as you are.”

“Now you’re patronizing me,” Burling said. “You know what I think?”

April raised her eyebrows. “I wish I did.”

“You’re perfect for this.”

sunday morning, burling’s family left, boarding the DC-3. Only Luke, young and game enough still for the flight on an airplane to excite him, looked back across his shoulder at his father. Amelia stared resolutely at the seatback in front of her, and their daughter Elizabeth already had her nose in a book about Emily Dickinson. Jack Lindstrom sat in front of them, “headed for an epic druggie meltdown in the States,” as April put it.

As the plane took off, leaving a trail of oddly black exhaust, and tilted across the mountains to the east, Burling thought about his children. Another secret thing he cherished was a potent love for Betsy and Luke, but he had probably lost them, too, if he had ever really had them. They were beautiful, but he had thrown off the delicate balance of that beauty through his failure with their mother. It made what he was about to do all the more important, so that someday they would understand, and the pieces could be put back together into a larger, more beautiful whole.

That afternoon he took April on a different kind of plane, a light Cessna of the type they had used in Vietnam. Its spartan cabin shook as the engines choked to life. In the front seats rode the pilot and a young Afghan man named Abdul Hadi who worked as a liaison to the government, but was run as an asset by Burling. In the narrow seats aft, pushed together by the tapering fuselage, sat April and Burling. As the Cessna climbed above the mountains to the north, April smiled at him quickly from behind her shining hair. She wanted to be a part of his world, but what did he want from her? In his office, sharing the arak, he hadn’t kissed her again, but the possibility had hung between them like a strong magnetic field. It crackled there now, at the margins. The hard stuff—as Godwin had called it—excited her. He knew that he was taking advantage of that, and yet he didn’t, couldn’t seem to, stop himself.

“On the way back—” Burling was talking above the engines to the pilot, pointing his finger at the windshield—“we may have to get in down there.”

A spine of dry, trackless hills hunched up before them, and the pilot nodded, taking a drink from a flask and offering it to Burling, who politely refused it.

“Is this where the ones who killed Godwin went?” April asked.

Abdul Hadi turned to look at her. He was uncomfortable with her presence, and Burling felt it as a judgment on him. The Afghan might be on his payroll, but where Abdul’s ultimate loyalties lay—to the Americans, Taraki, or his clan—was definitely a matter of concern. “She’s merely cover,” Burling had told him. “When we get to Samarkand, she’ll be my wife.”

“Hey, Lucius,” said the pilot, cocking his head to one side. They looked down at the pocked, ochre dirt.

“Mines,” said Burling, nodding. The plane’s feathery shadow blew across the expanse. “That’s the Soviet border down there.”

in samarkand, the minarets were silent. the madrassah with its symmetrical blue-tiled façade was empty of life. In the center of town, an old hotel faced a large, shaded square. Its lobby had the stale, dour feeling of a place for English travelers on the Continent; the old British ladies who played bridge in the cool dusty corner by the stairs seemed right at home. On the roof was a terrace strung with multicolored lights, and on the night following their arrival, Burling boarded the creaky old lift with April, to eat “en plein air,” as he said. He had dressed in khakis and his white linen shirt, as if playing the part of a colonial in a play. His hand spread gently across April’s back as he helped her to her chair.

Children ran through the tables while their parents sat smoking over the wreck of their meals. The night air was blue with their fetid tobacco, which smelled as strong as Jack’s dope, and the savor of herbs and roasted meat. In one corner of the roof a raggedy band sat on the edges of folding chairs, war medals flapping on their chests in time with the swing.

“Dance?” Burling said.

On the floor, the touch of their hands seemed quite harmless, refined.

“I’ve never been asked like that,” she told him when her cheek was close to his. He could feel the slight tremble returning, and he didn’t answer her for fear he would stutter, something he had struggled with as a child. “In southwest Virginia the boys don’t typically ask, they just take you.”

No one else joined them, and the old English ladies nodded their approval; their milky blue eyes tacked from April to Burling as the couple drew more closely together beneath the star-strewn globe of the sky. The ladies said they hadn’t seen a man dance like that since the Blitz, and they fixed April with watery stares that were fond and regretful. The music was flat, an uneasy rendering of the big bands that Burling used to play in the living room at home—his Washington home—in a time that seemed long ago now. The music felt wrong in this dry, spicy air. No scratch of cicadas with their manic crescendo, no scent of honeysuckle sweetening the night. So far from Amelia advancing through the soft, firefly dusk toward the picnic table, flowered apron tied loosely across her hips, leaning over to pick up plates. No Glenn Miller from the open kitchen window behind her. The arid Soviet night had an electric taste of betrayal and he and April glided through it with ease while the people talked about them in Russian and English and the keening of Dari.

“Why did you really bring me up here, Lucius Burling?”

Across the tables, the lift opened and a young Chinese man emerged. Burling knew from the sharp concentration of her eyes that April had seen him. Her body stiffened, which improved their dancing, as if she had taken the lead. Behind the younger Chinese came a short, fat man about Burling’s age, his thin hair combed across his scalp. The thought ran through Burling’s mind that he wanted to spoil this now, to save himself. Bringing the Chinese in complicated the whole thing beyond what he was able to predict.

“I’m serious,” said April. “If you brought me up here just to fuck me, that I can understand. And Jack can’t seem to do that anymore, in case you didn’t know, so I might just be up for it. But if you pretend there’s something else, if you’re just putting on a show . . .”

“I don’t know how to do this properly,” Burling told her, watching the Chinese colonel take his seat. “Even those ladies over there, watching our every move, I don’t know how people think about things like this.”

“I think you do but you like to think otherwise.”

He furrowed his brows to signal that he didn’t understand.

“I think that people like you like to tell yourselves that you don’t understand what people think about in the darkness of their minds, what they do with each other. That way you’re protected from the consequences.”

“People like me?”

“Powerful ones. You can screw up people’s lives and hide behind your ‘properly,’ your discretion.”

“You have me all wrong,” Burling told her. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

Her laugh was thrilling, and warm. “No shit, Chief.”

after dinner, he and april rode the lift to the lobby, agreeing without a word that they would not go to bed, not just yet, if that’s what they were going to do. The old elevator jerked downward, and the drop in Burling’s stomach disoriented him: along with the possibility that he would sleep with April tonight came the thought that his rush to fulfill one desire might be a willed distraction from the enormity of what he was about to set in motion with the Chinese. Working with them to arm the mujahedin against the Russians was a line of attack that had only glancing support at the Agency, if it had any support at all. If Amelia found out about April, or if the deputy director hung him out to dry when the operation backfired, he would be in the wilderness for a very long time.

He and April sat close, her hip touching his thigh, on a hard wooden bench in the square, framed by short, dusty trees. A public security car trolled the streets around for black marketeers. Up the crumbling steps from the bare little park they could see the brown, implacable face of the hotel, its roof bleeding color and music into the sky.

“I wasn’t making it up, when we were dancing,” Burling said. “I don’t think you understand.”

Between her thumbs April broke a pink grapefruit she had taken from the table. The fruit smelled ripe, a bit funky, and her face was sly but reluctant in the shadows. Explain yourself, she seemed to be saying. If you can.

“The first time I saw a Viet Cong dead,” Burling told her, “it was early in the war, before the marines even landed at Da Nang.”

“Where Jack got his ‘million dollar wound,’” April said with fond sarcasm, tearing the peel.

“That was Tet. This was long before that, in the fall of ’62. We were there in an advisory capacity, helicopter support. The ARVN had killed this VC in a village outside Soc Trang, and we went up to look at him, because we’d never seen one before.”

“Like killing a cougar,” April said. She handed him a section of grapefruit, the strands of pink flesh sticking to her fingernails. “When I was a little girl all the cougars, the mountain lions, were supposed to be gone from the hills behind my father’s house, but he and my brothers swore they were there. They wanted to kill one to prove they existed.”

“Did they ever get one?”

“They never did, but that didn’t stop them from believing it. If they ever had killed one, I don’t know what they’d have done.”

The security car moved soundlessly behind the trees, a cigarette glowing inside, showing dark figures slumped against the seats. The Chinese colonel, with whom Burling was to meet next morning, came down the steps and looked this way and that.

“When Wes was murdered,” Burling ventured, “the first thing I remembered was that Viet Cong. Two of the men dressed up as police, or maybe they were police, we don’t know; anyway, they were dead, too, one of them lying there on the ground beside the car. No one had closed his eyes yet. I looked at him, and he had that same sort of meditative look, almost thoughtful, and he was terribly slender, just like the VC, and I thought again that we were in trouble, now—how’d you put it?—now that we know it exists.”

April got up an inch and sat down, the way women do to shake off a subject from themselves. Above the trees to the west the sky was the color of amber, liquid and dirty from the marketplace stalls.

“What exists, Lucius? I ask you why you brought me up here, and you tell me a story about dead Viet Cong, about the soldiers of God. You tell me it’s real. What is real?”

“Sacrifice.”

“For you? For me?”

“Love.”

“Who were the Chinese on the roof?” April asked him.

the next afternoon they took off again, the pilot flying low above the ruinous desert country to the east, shaped by wind, through the jagged peaks and chilly, verdant valleys to the landscape of rocks that was home to the mujahedin. The flat, rocky ground came up to meet them, the pink horizon rocked back and forth, and April grabbed Burling’s hand with a disarming strength that reminded him sharply of the night before. At first she had led him, for which he was grateful, but as soon as he felt her with nothing between them, all the impediments around them ringed like forces held at bay, he’d begun to believe he was truly in love. What a fool I am, he thought.

“What is it?” she asked, drawing back.

The wheels banged across the slabs of the landing strip, jolting him out of his dream. The airfield had been built by the British after the war, part of their own misadventure in this remote, empty place. The plane shimmied as the engines and brakes dragged it down, then choked to a stop before a rusting Quonset hut. A hundred yards along the tarmac sat a Chinese military plane, with a Land Rover parked beside the tail. When the pilot opened the hatch there was no sound but the wind.

A rumpled guard roused himself from his seat against the corrugated steel of the hut, scratched his new coils of beard, and dragged his rifle out to see Burling’s papers of introduction, his bona fides from Jack. Somewhere a piece of metal banged against itself.

“How did the Chinese get here?” April asked.

“Overland,” Burling said. “The borders are pretty porous up here, but they can’t fly that plane into Samarkand.”

“I don’t see them, though.”

“I know. Neither do I.”

April tried to ask the guard in her limited Dari, a language of which she was proud for the very obscurity of it, but the guard was like a man waiting for a storm: as Burling’s papers flapped before him unremarked, he kept looking at the featureless sky. Abdul Hadi climbed from the plane and watched her with dark-eyed contempt.

Where had he been last night? she wondered.

“What on earth possessed you to learn a language like Dari in the first place?” Burling asked as they waited. “Apparently even the natives don’t trust it.”

She could see that Burling was trying to place the guard.

“They didn’t tell me that at Georgetown,” April said. The guard uttered a few rusty, atonal syllables she didn’t understand. “They were more about Pashto, the language of the rulers.”

“Did he say that they were coming?”

Abdul nodded before she could open her mouth, and suddenly her irrelevance coursed through her like a shock. The guard seemed to be suppressing an emotion, although it was unclear if the twitch around his mouth was mirth or rage.

“He speaks the languages, too,” she whispered fiercely to Burling. “Apparently some that I don’t.”

“There are a lot of them,” he said, “but I don’t trust him as far as I can spit. Come on. Roy!”

He hailed the pilot and turned toward the plane, but before he took another step they had begun to hear the sound of a small band of men riding down from the hills—not a sound exactly, but a sudden disturbance in the ceaseless wall of wind, the creak that is made by tack flailing the muscles of lathering horses. The pilot, smoking by the wing of the plane, reached for the holster on his hip, but Burling made a damping motion with his hand. Shapes emerged from the brown pack until each was an individual rider and animal, bearing down across the hardpan in a clatter of hooves and drawing up, veins bulging in necks dark with sweat. April watched them with her mouth half open, her hands raised slightly from her hips as if she were about to appeal to them for something. Mercy was the word in her mind. The air had stopped in her mouth. Saliva seeped from the insides of her cheeks, but her throat was bone dry. This was the first place she had been where she knew that being American didn’t matter.

The leader, who rode a bay stallion two hands taller than the rest of the horses, dismounted in a whipping of cloth. The loose jacket of April’s suit lifted in the wind, chilling her. Her hands were plunged deep in the pockets of her pants, stretching the coarse cotton across her hips and the backs of her thighs. She had always been strong, tough; her physical qualities had served her well while making her different and hiding her mind, her emotions, from men in particular. Burling had seemed to cut through those traits: while he clearly admired her body, wanted her openly like a younger man would, he seemed genuinely moved by her manner, intrigued by her mind. He made love as she’d thought he would, carefully, restraining, controlling a massive emotional and physical force. He moved forward now, a grim smile set on his face. The wind stung April’s cheeks. Slowly, he and the leader looked each other up and down. In a moment they were shaking hands vigorously and nodding, the leader looking to his comrades and flashing his gleaming white teeth, pointing and laughing as if he’d won a bet.

“Abdul!” The leader, an uncle to Jack’s power forward, gave the man a kind of greeting that April had seen in Kabul, grasping both shoulders, shaking him. “Come.”

“You stay here with Roy and the plane,” Burling told her, sotto voce. “If you see Abdul Hadi come out of that Quonset hut without me, he may have sold us up the river.”

“What do we do then?”

His eyes met hers as if to say that no matter what happened, it had been worth it, but she wasn’t so sure. Something told her that his own romantic dream would survive, with her as only a memory.

“I want to come with you.”

“That would be more dangerous than staying here,” he said. “I’m doing this for you, believe me.”

“Burling!” the leader said heartily. “We go?”

Together they started toward the hut.

The other riders drew their mounts together, the smallest man holding the reins of the leader’s incredible horse. April shuffled back toward the wing of the plane, where the pilot was smoking a cigarette. The mujahedin—because that’s what they were, “the soldiers of God” whose names she had taken in vain the night before—were nothing like she’d expected: up close, they were scruffy and rancid, with nervous faces and intense, dark, sorrowful eyes—not mountain lions at all, but scary in the way of stray dogs, unpredictable. They reminded her of hollow boys back home.

April said a few words to them in Dari, and they replied with a slur against women. The pilot, Roy Breeden, raised his eyebrows at her.

“They say they want to rape me,” April told him, although that was not exactly what they’d said. “I think a stake may be involved.”

“Like a Joan of Arc number?” Breeden squinted through his smoke.

“I could go for that maybe, if they didn’t smell so bad.”

The pilot took a pensive drag. A scar cleaved his upper lip, and when he smiled it made his mouth look like a beak. “These boys might not take you up on it,” he said. “They’ll be fed grapes by seven thousand virgins if I shoot them right now.”

April looked at the mujahedin. Suddenly their shifty demeanor seemed more menacing than before. Lucius had used the word “sacrifice” about them, equating it with love.

“What a load of shit,” she said aloud. The horses had moved more closely together, and she couldn’t see the hard desert light between their bodies anymore. Her own bravado went brittle. This might work with the hollow boys in the gravel lot behind the high school, as the vapor lights wore out from the game, but she’d miscalculated here: she’d never been outside of Kabul. Two other riders dismounted, and for the first time she noticed the rifles lashed across the pommels—long, black, shining automatics like Jack’s own M-16. Breeden flipped his cigarette toward the nearest hoof, reached back into the plane, and casually brought out a shotgun—a twelve-gauge like her father’s—holding it as if it were as harmless as a broom. April turned to the men, who had drawn their horses back at the sight of the weapon. “I’m the closest thing to heaven they’ll ever get.”

“You’re a hell of a woman, all right,” the pilot observed. “I can’t decide if I like you or not.”

“Do you think these boys know Jack?”

“Might.”

She couldn’t tell if he was implying that knowing Jack might not be an asset right now. He held out the carved walnut stock for the men to inspect. The one who’d been holding the leader’s reins handed them up to the man beside him, who still sat his horse. Then he came forward and weighed the shotgun like an offering in his palms.

The near proximity of the dismounted men, who gave off a rank odor of horses and sweat, was causing fear, the real thing, to run through her like a current. She was guilty, she realized, not only of coming up here with Burling, but of thinking she could handle this. She had run with the boys all her life, run from her brothers straight to Jack, which had upset her mother and scandalized her graduate student friends at Berkeley, with their stoned existentialist boyfriends who didn’t care what women thought, even whipsmart scholarship girls like April Wheeling, who could drink harder and quote Jean-Paul Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, and Fanon better than they could. When Jack went off to Vietnam for the second time, April had finally realized she could want more than boys could give her, but it was hard to break their grip. Beyond the horses, she could see Lucius Burling and the leader coming back across the runway. No Abdul. What did that mean? Trailing them was the stout Chinese man she had seen on the roof of the hotel. The man who’d been holding the leader’s horse barked something at his clan, in a dialect she could barely understand. He removed a thick knife, about twelve inches long, from his garment. Fear gripped her heart when she realized what the man had said.

“Roy?”

The man on the horse trained his rifle on the pilot.

“They said we’re not leaving,” April told him.

Breeden moved his hand to the holster, but the rifle gestured him to take it away. Breeden didn’t do as he was told. She saw him unsnap the holster, and the rifle went off above her, a quick burst that cut Breeden down. He was on his knees, screaming obscenities, as the horses crowded around her. At first it made her feel safer, their bellies pressing against her, the familiar sweet, sharp smell. She had a flash of her father, his long legs in blue jeans hiked high on his backside, climbing stiffly up the hill toward his broken-backed barn, winter sun in the bare trees behind it. Then she felt herself being lifted; her feet no longer touched the ground. Through the dust she saw the knife raised above Breeden’s head.

book

one

Lindstrom’s plane picked up speed as it sliced through the clouds; below the cover, fires burned on the ground. Smoke rose from the crossing of twin brown tracks, and he saw red-brick communes surrounded by fields. The man in the seat beside him—a tall, stiff German with muttonchop sideburns and rectangular glasses that turned an odd purple shade in the sunlight—stirred at the abrupt drop in altitude and slapped himself sharply on the knees.

“Well, now, Jack,” he said, angling an elbow between Lindstrom’s ribs. The German’s use of his first name seemed vaguely insinuating, maybe even coercive. “You are coming to see me, yes?”

The plane settled after floating on a deep breath of air. The German was director of a joint venture power company in Shanghai: earlier in the flight he had invited Lindstrom to his plant, to show him how energy was revolutionizing China.

“I’d like to,” Lindstrom answered, and wondered if he would. It was his tendency to view industry with suspicion. “But I have these plans in Nanjing.”

“Right, right,” the German said heartily. “The missionary business.” He dismissed it with a chop of his hand.

The plane crossed the Yangzi River, its lumbering surface flashing bronze in the hazy spring sun. From a dock along this river, almost seventy years ago now, Lindstrom’s grandfather had embarked with other missionaries up into the gorges in Hubei for a summer retreat, the whole junket paid for by a brewer from Tsingtao. A man of obvious and violent contradictions, Lindstrom’s grandfather hadn’t had any scruples about accepting the invitation, although by that time he was temperate to the point of fanaticism. The gorges they’d visited were about to be dynamited by the German and his indigenous partners for a dam.

“I’m really not a religious man,” Lindstrom said, “but I’ve never been able to resist the possibility of revelation.”

“And that is why you are coming to China?”

“To see the church that my grandfather built.”

“This will be the occasion for your revelation.”

Lindstrom was about to reply, but explaining his motives would only draw attention to himself.

“As a businessman,” the German said, “one cannot be concerned with such things. Nevertheless, power can be—what is the word?”

“Corrupting?”

The German accepted Lindstrom’s trope with a ruthless sort of calm. The plane was cutting through frayed wisps of cloud, and the sun gave off a soiled and monotonous glare. The German’s lenses grew darker. “I’m not speaking in metaphors,” he said. “In China whoever controls the generation of power can be a force for reform. I must believe this.”

Lindstrom let the subject lie. A geopolitical discussion with a power company executive, no matter how endless the potential store of puns, would probably not be that illuminating. Since September 11, everyone possessed a theory about world historical order: doomsday philosophy was epidemic even compared with the 1960s. It rivaled the paranoid epic of the late Cold War. Outside the window, the cruciform shadow of the plane stretched and rippled across the towers and cables of a bridge. The plane moved faster above the water. The fence around the airport approached, and he experienced a pleasurable rush of fear. Beyond the concertina wire stretched a dry landscape of yellow-green grasses and flame-like trees that reminded him of Vietnam.

“You come to my plant,” the German told him as the plane jammed down on the tarmac. He sighed like a man who has just made a lot of money from some defect in human nature. “You will see.”

As the plane slowed to taxiing speed, the Chinese passengers began to get up and trip over each other in the aisle. Outside, a stairway was wheeled across the slabs. Stooping under the bulkhead, the German pulled on a corduroy blazer that had gone out of style in the seventies but was coming back in now. The new global capitalists were adopting a retrograde camouflage, several sizes too small.

Lindstrom slid from his seat and moved forward past studious men and bantering elderly couples, Taiwanese businessmen in clashing Hawaiian shirts, all silenced by the German’s unusual height. Lindstrom shadowed him, grateful for the cover. As he emerged behind the German from the hatch of the plane, heat met them like a curtain, and they flailed for a moment in the new, thicker element. Lindstrom felt himself awakening slowly in an old, familiar place, at once comfortable and frightening. Backstage again, behind the ancient drama of the East, where each person, object, strand of phrase you caught above the diminishing whistle of the engines might be trotted out for use under the great proscenium of communist government.

“You come to see us,” the German said pointedly, “when you are done with the church.”

They were hurrying now across the tarmac, through the greetings and luggage; every face they passed looked amazed. Beyond a low chain-link fence, a BMW waited, with the license plate letters signifying foreigners, followed by the regional number for Shanghai. Lindstrom felt a wave of paranoia. Behind the Bimmer was a tiny, ornamented cab.

“You’re not flying on to Shanghai?” he asked.

The German’s shaggy hair lifted in the wind. “Ever since the Chinese government deregulated the airlines, it is impossible to get a flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai. Impossible,” he yelled above the sound of a plane taking off, as if the word could explain the whole country.

the taxi was cramped, and its dashboard was covered with talismans. From the homemade bodywork, Lindstrom could tell that it was an unregulated cab. The driver squeezed them onto the road between two stinking trucks, and the diesel burned the back of his throat as the driver, playing with the knobs on the radio and steering with one hand, overtook the frontmost truck in a torrent of blue exhaust. The truck was filled with reed baskets and great chunks of Styrofoam; its pilot grimaced through the windshield at the pale disk of sun.

The road lay straight as a canal between fields. As the taxi gained momentum, moist air funneled through the windows, thinning the fumes and the odor of hot vinyl seats and painted metal. Bicycles pumping against a flickering background of trees. In the paddies, workers with pants rolled up to their knees spread floods of blue water. Lindstrom checked the pulse in his neck to gauge his excitement and found that his skin had a cold, clammy feel. The air wept huge, grimy drops on the windshield, then held the rest in.

As they neared Nanjing, the spindly poplars of the windbreak gave way to giant Himalaya trees, their peeling branches trained upward like arthritic fingers around the wires. Long strips of bark lay curled in the dust at their feet. Caustic smoke hung thickly above the city, and Lindstrom realized he had not given the driver an address. The taxi pressed into the crowd, buses and bicycles everywhere, ringing their bells. The driver turned and showed him a rictus of rotting teeth.

“Jingling,” he said. “Jingling Hotel.”

Of course, Lindstrom thought. Where else would a Westerner be going? Still, the prescience wasn’t encouraging. In Saigon, if you weren’t in uniform, the drivers would take you to where a bomb was about to go off, thinking you were a journalist, or a missionary priest. With his shaved head and quarter-Asian eyes, Lindstrom had often been mistaken for a priest.

The taxi rounded a rotary, hazy with neon. The radiating streets showed wet treads from the watering truck. On the far side, some citizens loitered, staring up through the gates at the Jingling Hotel. A recent joint venture between the Chinese and a Scandinavian hospitality chain, its slick white concrete and gray glass belonged in Helsinki. The unlicensed cabbie couldn’t pull onto its driveway, so Lindstrom gave him some yuan he had traded for in Tokyo and asked him to wait.

The lobby was filled with garment designers and Overseas Chinese. Security cameras bristled from the capitals of marble columns, and all the porters and check-in attendants had been given English names. Lindstrom held a small argument with a porter for show, then allowed the man to disappear with his suitcase while he checked in under the name on his passport, John Tan, and went up in the glass-sided elevator. Looking down on the lobby, at the double-breasted businessmen checking their watches, he thought of the lobby of the Hotel Nikko San Francisco, where his own desk sat empty now, his brass nameplate removed to the closet where the manager kept the names of all the wayward concierges who had gone out in the world to find themselves, only to return less sure of who they were but much more broke and in need of a job. Lindstrom had been on duty there, eight months ago now, listening to an Indonesian salesman explain, in the code of Asian businessmen, that he wanted a girl, when Alan Rank had appeared in the queue. At first Lindstrom hadn’t recognized him, but when they faced each other two hours later across a table in the Nikko’s sushi bar, Lindstrom had seen behind the dry tucks of skin around Rank’s eyes, through the salt-and-pepper beard, and there was the gangly kid from Flatbush whom he had known on the Batangan Peninsula more than thirty years before. When the pretty Cantonese waitress brought their drinks, Rank had already told him that he wanted Lindstrom to smuggle a dissident out of mainland China.

“Would you believe,” Rank said, holding his sake under his nose when they had consummated the deal, “that there are Americans living in China, old communists from Brooklyn like my parents, living in Beijing as citizens? Been there for fifty years.”

It wasn’t clear if Rank admired them or not.

“What do they do there?” Lindstrom asked. Suddenly the five-star Hotel Nikko, where the rehab gurus placed him years before, had begun to look like a smack bar in Saigon, all mirrors and hustlers and promised games of chance. “Are they happy?”

Rank signaled for the waitress to bring them more sake. “Happy? Why would they be happy? Everything they went there for has gone up in smoke. The girls in Beijing wear the same platform sneakers they do in New York.”

“Why do they stay, then?”

Rank looked at him strangely, slightly turning his head. “You know, you haven’t changed a bit, Jack. Not many people would ask that.”

“But I am asking. Why don’t they just go home to Brooklyn, where they can get a decent bagel, or Florida?”

“Because they have lives, Jack. Friends, a system of being.”

“Yeah, I wonder what that would be like.”

Rank watched the rising bubbles in the fish tank uncomfortably. Whenever Lindstrom tried to broach the subject of his discontent, people looked as if they needed to use the bathroom. Even the shrink the rehab gurus had sent him to had only wanted to talk about the present. All behavioral, he said. What about the past?

“There’s this British guy, Jack, I swear he looks like an overweight golden retriever. Got a crease in his forehead from an accidental discharge, says it happened on a transport in Burma. He’s the one who got in touch with me, not long after I accepted the position at the Center in Nanjing.”

Lindstrom swallowed with alacrity in spite of himself. When you didn’t have a “system of being,” you needed a rush to fill the empty space. It was not unlike going back on the spike, he thought. “You’re saying he’s Six?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“MI-6, Alan. As in Military Intelligence. James fucking Bond. Don’t play virgin with me.”

Rank shrugged. “All I know is he likes to quote Shakespeare. Seems to think he’s Falstaff, complete with a giant chip on his shoulder for being rejected by the king.”

The flutter had quickened underneath Lindstrom’s ribs, and he took a swig from the fresh drink to quell it. “This is beautiful,” he said, looking around in the aqueous blue light of the bar. Already, it didn’t feel like home. “Spooks who’ve been privatized. I need to know more, Alan. Such as it is, I’d be giving up my life.”

Rank’s head swiveled back and his gray eyes were sharp. “In our current state of post-9/11 madness, the group feels that human rights have been buried. They feel that China is as good a place as any to bring those issues to light.”

“You might tell that to the Afghans,” Lindstrom said.

Rank looked at him quizzically. People tended to forget about April, perhaps willfully, about that chapter in his, in their country’s, collective life. Al-Qaeda had forced them to remember, and in that sense, Lindstrom felt connected to the world for the first time in years.

“Are they professional?” he asked.

“Very,” Rank said, eyes following the waitress as she lay down their sushi on black plates. On Sunday afternoons, she and Lindstrom sometimes met for dim sum and a karate movie—a sad, platonic date. “They say to be ready to go on a day’s notice, but no later than June 1. Someone, Falstaff I imagine, will be in touch.”

lindstrom’s room at the jingling was a sterile affair, looking out across the cowering town. He turned on and off all the lights and the television. At the minibar, he recorded his presence with the room service office by fixing himself a glass of Glenfiddich from an airline bottle. Trying to steady his hand, he realized too late that the ice might be bad. A small lapse of instinct, but it worried him. When his suitcase showed up—attended by Frank, Joe, and Miles—he tipped them all way too much, messed up his bedclothes, took his daypack, and went down to the street.

The driver had moved on beyond the hotel, and Lindstrom had a hard time convincing the gatekeeper that he wanted to go out unaccompanied. Then he had to fight off the black marketeers and the other gypsy cabs. His driver was reading a newspaper and drinking a Coke, and this time Lindstrom told him, “Black Cat.”

The Black Cat Lounge, Rank had said, was like one of those places—three small, thatch-covered rooms of candles, round wooden spool tables, and sweating cement—that the two men had frequented in some of the grislier localities of South Vietnam. Set up in this instance as an exercise in entrepreneurial activity by Rank’s students at the Center for Sino-American Studies, instead of MAC-V, the Black Cat was a mixture of Bangkok and Berlin, dive and cabaret, but its terminal dusk had been startled by the morning. Sharp blades of light cut from the door into the anteroom, which smelled of hemp and rain. Wandering through the requisite beads to the barroom, Lindstrom found a sole American woman in the flush of her early forties, hip on the edge of a stool, discussing a pile of receipts with a Chinese man in a soiled apron and white paper hat. As she slid off the stool, she tried to place Lindstrom’s face with a worried expression.

“I thought word had got around,” she said, slipping her fingers around the bottom of her throat. Her reddish hair was swept up to the back of her head, and the dangling earrings she wore made her neck look unnaturally long. “They shut us down. The police. This morning. For health violations.”

Lindstrom had thought she was talking about his mission, and he swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat. His view of the kitchen did not contradict the police’s decision.

“I just arrived in country today,” Lindstrom told her. “Professor Rank had said I should meet him here.”

“Then you must be his friend, Jack.” She removed her hand from its clutch around her throat and extended it formally to Lindstrom. “I’m Charlotte Brien.”

“Johnny Tan,” Lindstrom said. Her hand was chapped, but strong. “Is Alan here?”

Charlotte Brien looked unhappy for a moment, and Lindstrom wondered if standards of cleanliness were the only reason the bar had been closed. “You must know him from Vietnam,” she said, brightening. “That would explain the ‘in country.’ Alan calls those his ‘Namisms.’ I sometimes think he has too many ‘isms’ mixed together, but then I wasn’t in that terrible war.”

“Neither was Alan.”

Charlotte peered at him sharply through the dimness, like a dog catching a whiff of something bad.

“Alan was with AID,” he explained. “Hearts and minds. Development stuff.”

“I’m with public diplomacy in Shanghai,” Charlotte said.

“At the consulate?”

She nodded—somewhat bitterly, he thought.

“Then I know your boss, Burling.”

“I’m a cultural liaison. I work very little with Lucius.”

“Don’t do the hard stuff, right?”

Her green eyes flashed as the cook reached down beneath the bar.

“No, no,” Lindstrom told him, surprised that he understood English. “It’s a diplomat’s expression. Hard stuff, soft stuff. Still, a drink might be good.”

“It sure would be,” Charlotte said with resignation, feeling her way back onto the stool. She kneaded her temples, and Lindstrom wondered what exactly she was doing here. Her pallor had the desiccated look of a perpetual graduate student, and he considered the possibility that Charlotte Brien was the genuine article, someone who believed you could change a bad country from the inside. In Lindstrom, it sparked a predatory mechanism.

“Sometimes this country makes me nuts,” Charlotte said.

“Did you prefer them as Maoists, rather than—what do they call it now—‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’?”

“That’s what the Party prefers.”

The cook poured something clear from an unlabeled bottle.

“Let me ask you something, then,” Lindstrom said. Accepting the drink, the heel of his hand stuck to the polished veneer of the bar. “We can be honest because we don’t know each other well. Friends of mine back home in California are offended that the Chinese haven’t stayed true to their principles. Since the Soviet Union went down, it’s a slam dunk for capitalism, and that bothers them. For me, I’ve found that being true to your principles can be somewhat . . .”

“Disastrous?” Charlotte looked at him knowingly and held the dirty glass up to the light. “For the young people caught up in the Cultural Revolution, or the Great Leap Forward, or any of Mao’s other lousy schemes, it certainly was.”

“I was going to say self-destructive,” Lindstrom told her, putting his empty glass down on the bar. The cook refilled it immediately. It had tasted like Jameson’s. “But that’s my own lousy trip.”

To her credit, Charlotte let his candor pass. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

“To put it another way, if you stay true to yourself, does it crowd out other people?”

For a moment, Charlotte seemed uncomfortable, as if he had given her a line. Then she started to laugh. Her laugh was musical, uninhibited by scorn. “Of course not, Jack. I mean Johnny. Boy, what a guy!” The drink was warming her, clearly. Maybe even unhinging her a bit. “Which one was it again?”

The sound of her laughter warped in his head; the liquor was turning on him.

“Johnny. Johnny Tan.”

“Johnny.” Charlotte reached out, took his wrist in her hand. “Being true to your nature connects you with other people, with history. Being true to your nature makes room.”

She was smiling, but Lindstrom pulled his arm away with a sniff. The predatory reflex came back hard and strong. “How well do you know Burling, anyway?”

“Lucius has been back in D.C. for the past month,” Charlotte said. She stared at him evenly, but her hand went to her neck again, and between the pale fingers he saw a spreading blotch of red. “I think I’d better point you in the direction of Alan. He must be wondering where you are.”

“I’ll leave you then,” Lindstrom said.

“It’s okay.” She picked up on his note of apology, and he wondered if it was genuine. “It’s just the wrong time for drinking and spilling my guts.” Her unsteady hand was pointing past him toward the door. “Alan’s over at the Center.”

The wedge of light from the door stabbed his eyes, and his head began to throb. The pleasant melancholy feeling he had carried from the airport turned into self-loathing.

“I’m sorry. Sometimes I can barely stand my own company,” he said.

Charlotte smiled across the room, recovering herself. He saw that she couldn’t help listening. That, and her ease in this alien country, reminded him of April, before his suffocating presence had made her compassion turn inward and burn itself out.

“Join the club. Two years ago, this was the center of the universe. Now no one even thinks about China.”

Perched on her stool, she seemed to preside above the waters of his discontent. He needed to leave before he asked her to go to the Jingling with him.

“The entrance to the Center’s just down the alley on the left,” Charlotte told him. “You’ll come to it before you even know it.”

Lindstrom left the bar like a scene from a parallel life.

outside, the hutong was cobbled and dusty; its sand-colored walls dazzled his eyes. Above the ruin of houses, the muggy air hung like a tent, scented with a sweetness that prefigured decay. A hundred yards farther, Lindstrom found the gate to the Center and pushed his way inside.

The compound was refreshing to his eyes: green muddy lawns and walks lined with bright poppies and marigolds. He sensed a chance for renewal in the fresh, bitter smell of the garden. At one end of the grounds stood an old mission building with a red-tiled roof and walls of porous gray stone. Directly behind it a newer building loomed, and through its windows he could see young American students in sweatshirts and Nikes, in various attitudes of study.

Rank received him in a room full of overstuffed furniture, lace doilies on the arms of the couches and chairs. It had the empty formality of a funeral home. Rank came forward from the window, shrugging his shoulders in a loose-fitting khaki suit. He seemed to have aged in the three months since Lindstrom had seen him—his high, narrow forehead was creased like parchment, his beard had more gray. On his feet he wore black cloth shoes, which struck Lindstrom as an affectation.

“Sergeant,” Rank said absently. He took Lindstrom’s hand in a loose-jointed grip while he checked his friend’s body for damage. “How is it every time I see you, you look just the same, while everyone else keeps getting older?”

“It’s part of an experiment,” Lindstrom said. “The doctors want to see if certain methods of torture perfected by the Viet Cong retard progression through the normal stages of life. So far it’s been successful.”

Rank’s reaction was shy, and yet there was something smooth and practiced about him as he brushed off the joke and showed Lindstrom a chair. Rank was eerily comfortable with what Lindstrom had always taken to be a collective sort of grief. He had first noticed it in Vietnam, where Rank was nicknamed Oracle, a spiritual consultant of sorts for the recon marines. He had made them believe they were all on a pilgrimage, that the East would heal their psychic wounds and they would all go back to the world knowing a purer way to live. Rank himself was ambivalent—that was part of his draw—but after Lindstrom got home he’d started to see something vaguely unsavory about him. He’d begun to think that Rank might not be so pure after all, or that his purity had been a catalyst to violence.

“To be honest,” Rank said, sniffing reflectively, “I was a little surprised when you agreed to come.”

Lindstrom sat down heavily, peering through the curtains at the lawn. “I met your girlfriend at the bar. She reminded me a bit of my wife.”

Rank’s breath made a whistling sound, and he placed a finger under his nostrils to stay it. “You mean Charlotte? She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Well, whoever she is, you can’t tell me she doesn’t remind you of April.”

“Maybe a little bit, physically, but only in an approximate way. You’re not still on that, are you?”

“It just seemed like one of your tests, Alan, to see how human beings react.”

“I can’t arrange a woman’s physical appearance, Jack.”

“That’s not what we thought in Vietnam.”

Rank grinned, and the trimmed, white hairs of his beard parted, revealing the scar beneath his lip. Inflicted by the one grunt who had thought that Oracle was a fake, it became a sort of stigmata when the man who did it was killed the next day. “In Vietnam it was good to believe those things. It kept your mind open and your instincts sharp. But now we’re back in the world.”

“It feels more like ’Nam to me.”

Rank cocked his head and tugged at his beard.

“My instincts, by the way,” Lindstrom told him, “turned out to be better suited to a shithole like Vietnam than to anywhere else. When I got back home I tended to see things that weren’t really there. Then I willed them to be true. You look worried, Professor.”

Leaning forward, Rank parted the curtains with his fingers. Outside, the lawns were misty and dark. He sighed, and Lindstrom felt his own sense of drama overtaking events. “China is a frightened and tragic country, Jack.”

“Isn’t that why you love it so?”

Rank’s fingers bunched the lace as he gazed at the tower of the Jingling Hotel. When he looked back at Lindstrom, his expression was plaintive. “It’s not the same as Vietnam,” he said with a tremor of conviction. “Here we’re dealing with a communism that’s hardened, gotten older, the same way I gather we have.”

“You mean they don’t believe in anything at all?”

Rank let go of the curtain and settled back in his chair. He studied Lindstrom with avuncular concern. “Is that how you are, Jack?”

Lindstrom threw it off with a laugh. The room smelled of mold. “My grandfather made me believe that you couldn’t have a meaningful life unless you gave it away first to some ideal. In his case, God. I didn’t find out what bullshit that is until I lost the one thing that was good for me.”

Rank watched him evenly. On the wall above his wing chair hung a few courtly, hand-colored prints that resembled cartoons. “You’ve got to move beyond her, Jack. You’ve got to take steps.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

Rank’s teeth shone for a moment, before he reacted to the sound of the latch. “Ah,” he said, uncrossing his legs, “here we are.”

The door to the hallway opened silently, and through it came the sounds of typing and hushed, earnest talk, the odor of a men’s room. A woman entered with a tray of porcelain cups and a large jug of tea.

“Thank you, Suki,” Rank said, rising formally. “Jack, this is my wife, Su-ki.” The second time he pronounced her name precisely, as if to emphasize his mastery of the language. “Su-ki, this is John Tan. His grandfather built the church in Anhe.”

“So this is what you mean,” Lindstrom said. As he took in her figure, the blue dragons on the teacups shook just enough to make a musical sound. Suki’s beauty made you search for it, as if you weren’t supposed to see it all at once, but once it entered Lindstrom’s mind it remained there like the sun. She made Rank look ravenous, old.

“You are pals,” she said, staring at the teacups. Her idiom made her seem fey.

“Is that what Oracle told you?”

She nodded unsurely and looked at her husband.

“Oracle is a name the men had for me in Annam,” Rank explained.

Suki took a deep breath as if about to recite. “My husband has told me that the war was a very important time for his life,” she said, looking up as she poured the tea.

Lindstrom blanched his irritation by burning his palm on the side of the cup. “It certainly had an effect on him,” he said. “Alan was observing just before you came in that your country is much different from Vietnam.”

Rank was checking the strength of his tea, and he nodded, his pendulous nose cupped by steam. It was a signal between them, and Suki turned to go.

“Many Chinese people go to Annam,” she said, backing out the door, “but their talent for business is not appreciated there. Good-bye, John. Some time I see you in the States.”

“I hope so,” Lindstrom said, but he doubted it would happen. He couldn’t imagine her in Morningside Heights, serving tea to Rank’s students, another object in the old Orientalist’s collection.

“Jack,” Rank said in a suspended tone of warning. “You’re flirting with my wife.”

“You really married her?”

“I love her,” he said. “We just had a kid.”

Lindstrom couldn’t conceal his astonishment. When he’d returned from Vietnam the second time, he had known what he’d thought was an older man’s wisdom, but it hadn’t progressed at all and everyone else had passed him now. “Good for you, man. I mean that.”

“I recommend it,” Rank said. The steam had moistened his brow. “Since we’ve been married, I’ve constructed a little garden of contemplation. Would you like to see it? You may remember I’m an amateur poet.”

“An amateur something, anyway.”

Rank pointed at the joke.

“When we talked in Frisco, Alan, I didn’t know that . . .”

Slowly, Rank placed a finger against Lindstrom’s mouth. The movement was mesmerizing; it froze the rest of the sentence in his throat. Just as slowly, Rank drew back his hand to a point in the air by his ear. The gesture signaled attention and Lindstrom felt his whole being draw breath.

When Rank spoke again, his voice was alert. “We’ll go, then?”

the empty hallway with its tall, transomed doors reminded Lindstrom of school—of sneaking out of it, anyway, in the middle of the day. In the shade of the building’s front porch, Rank paused to remove a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. A man pushed by with a cart full of soil that smelled of animal urine and loam, the spoked wheels crunching softly on the path; Rank acknowledged him as he carefully lit his pipe.

“When Falstaff—” Lindstrom began—“you know, the Brit came to see me, he said I’d be taking the subject through Shanghai. At first I thought . . .”

Rank exhaled a plume of fragrant gray smoke. “Burling’s there,” he said, shaking out the match.

“I thought for some reason I’d be taking the dissident south, out through Canton, or Hong Kong, Macao, maybe even through ’Nam.”

“It bothers you that Burling might be back in Shanghai.”

“Look,” said Lindstrom, “I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I didn’t think I was strong enough to look back. Wanted to, even. But still, he and I have a bad symbiosis. I’ve often noticed it in men who have loved the same woman. We’re like opposite sides of a coin.”

Rank bit down on his pipe and the stem made a fracturing sound. “A bad penny, perhaps.”

“No shit.”

“Well, I assure you that I only know Burling through Charlotte, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I take it she’s involved?”

“Only marginally. In the event of a problem.”

“It could fucking well be a problem for her if Burling gets hip.”

Rank scuffed his toe in the path and moved ahead with a lurch. The people—Quakers, judging from the schoolhouse design—who had built the original compound had planted a boxwood hedge that joined the corner of the building to the compound’s outer wall; its leaves had yellowed in the heat.

“You have to understand,” Rank said, indicating a break in the bushes with his pipe. Lindstrom followed him into a neat, sandy garden, girded by evergreens. Lily pads floated like grease on a tiny, black pool; pocked gray rocks hugged the shore. “The people who run this thing are powerful and very, very careful. They all have other lives.”

“And me with only this one,” Lindstrom said.

Rank’s eyes strayed beyond the stand of trees, caressing the new building where the students still sheltered behind the glass. “When they first approached me, more than ten years ago, they wanted to hide dissidents here at the Center. After Tian An Men, they had more than they could handle.”

“But they’ve gotten others out, right?”

“Dozens, yes. Do you know Wei She?”

“Won some kind of literary prize in England several years ago. It was very controversial.”

“The Chinese wouldn’t let him come, then before they could arrest him, Wei disappeared. Showed up in London three weeks later, protected by MI-5, to accept the award.”

“Then what’s the big deal? Yong hasn’t won any prizes, as far as I know.”

“Indeed not.”

“Tomorrow night, then, after I visit my grandfather’s church, I get into my Mao pajamas and make like a peasant. Keep my eyes peeled and walk this guy out. It can’t be heavier than north of the Parallel.”

Rank cleared his throat deeply and walked away a few steps, as if from a problem. Pale, chameleon-like shadows played between them on the ground. “It isn’t,” he began, turning around in a posture of appeal.

“You know you make a lousy spy,” Lindstrom told him. “You just haven’t got the cool.”

“Did Burling?”

“Burling had something else.”

Rank gave him the sly, quizzical look that had passed for philosophical during the war, then moved toward the high, mildewed wall. Lindstrom was surprised to find that he still believed it—Burling had something that he, Lindstrom, lacked. It wasn’t just April—neither one of them had really had her.

“This dissident is somewhat more difficult than the others, for different reasons,” Rank said, stopping before a bench that was splattered with birdshit. “That’s why they arranged for him to hide in Anhe for a while. Your grandfather’s church is the most important stop on their underground railroad. It’s why I thought of you.”

“What do you mean by difficult, exactly?”

Rank made a show of checking his watch. “I think you should go now,” he said, extending his hand like an usher. “The same cabbie who met you at the airport will drive you, but still the road isn’t good, and it will take you until nightfall to get to Anhe.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Lindstrom said as Rank brushed past him. They were met outside the garden by the sharp smell of marigolds. “What did this dissident do?”

“Oh, the usual things. It’s more where he was that seems a problem.”

“Was?”

“Yong went to the States once,” Rank said, “as a visiting physicist.”

They were almost to the gate, and Lindstrom grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “A physicist, as in bombs?”

“It only means,” Rank added, shrugging him off, “that he had some ties in the government at that time.” He swallowed, and the gray whiskers rippled down his neck.

Lindstrom waited while his heart wound down, poking at the bottom of his throat. “Didn’t it ever occur to you, Alan, that a physicist might have drawn more attention than, say, a poet like yourself?”

“We needed a point man,” Rank said. His hand was reaching in the inside pocket of his jacket, and Lindstrom stifled an urge to defend himself.

“I was the lag man, not point.”

“Speaking of which.” Rank’s hand reappeared with a white linen handkerchief, wrapped around the dark shape of a pistol. “We thought you might need this,” he said, folding back the hemmed corners. In the middle of the grease-stained linen lay a familiar blue-black .45.

The grounds of the Center were as quiet and still as a schoolyard in summertime. After a moment, because Rank didn’t do anything, Lindstrom took the automatic in his hand. The feel of the stubbly grip was like the touch of betrayal, the touch of joining, and he thought that this was how he had always been: the world was there and when no one moved to take it, he did, because something was missing inside him. What does it profit a man? his grandfather had said.

“Couldn’t you have gotten me a Chicom or something?” It was a joke, a communist weapon grunts had coveted in Vietnam, and Rank’s failure to laugh was unnerving. Lindstrom dropped the clip out, checked its spring with a growing recognition, and replaced it; the click of the mechanism threatened to let out the unruly laughter that was flapping like a bird in his chest.

“It’s your own piece,” said Rank. “See?”

Pulling back the slide, Lindstrom peered into the chamber. The bird in his stomach grew calm, as if it had seen the smiling shadow of the hatchet. “What kind of shitty business is this?” he said. The pistol cocked with a grim resignation, and he pointed it at the small white indentation on the tip of Rank’s nose. “Is this some kind of performance incentive, two bullets missing from the clip?”

Rank shrunk back against the gate. Lindstrom sighted on a knot in the splintered wood beside him, and back to Rank’s forehead. “I didn’t know about that.”

“You didn’t know. You damn well knew I wouldn’t agree to this once I found out Yong’s a physicist. Did he work at Los Alamos too? Did he maybe steal a laptop from there?”

“I just told you,” said Rank. He was almost pleading now.

“You told me what you know,” Lindstrom said. “You’re just a front man.” The .45 had been stolen from his room at the Nikko, not long after Rank had been there to visit. Two days later, the cops had caught the kids who had broken in trying to pass Lindstrom’s cash card, and the kids had started chirping about Asian gangs. They were black, so the cops hadn’t bought it. “I should have seen this coming,” he said.

“To think I once called China the last best hope,” Rank replied, giving the heavy wooden gate a push. Outside, the alley baked mutely in the sun.

Lindstrom shook his head and locked the Colt on safety. “Don’t give me your cut-rate historical theory, Al. Once you dig up a piece of history as nasty as all this . . .” He found he couldn’t finish the thought. Forty-fives were always so much heavier than they looked. As he stowed it in his backpack, he wondered if their design enhanced their tendency to make their own logic. “Living here, you should have learned that by now.”

“Wasn’t it I who always said you were a moralist?”

“You’ve been reading too much Malraux,” Lindstrom told him, slipping out the door and into the cobblestoned gutter. “He ended up working for guys like Burling, too.”

Rank’s gray, tufted eyebrows curled in on themselves, and then the gate groaned shut between them; Lindstrom heard Rank walking heavily away. The walls of the alley zigged and zagged toward the street, and a febrile sensation gripped Lindstrom like the onset of a drug. The noodle shop on the corner gave off a thick white steam. He hugged a brief notion of turning around, but his life seemed like a jungle through which he’d just come. Across the street from the Black Cat, the cabbie leaned against a crooked pole, spooning noodles from a bowl held closely to his chin. His face was tinted sickly green by the fiberglass awning of the shop. Raising his eyes, the cabbie recognized Lindstrom.

On the morning of burling’s departure for china, his building superintendent arrived at the door at five minutes past eight—as if late, Burling thought, for a party. He was a spry, thin black man with dime-store reading glasses riding the end of his nose. Toast crumbs clung to the gray wires of his mustache.

“Morning, Mr. Shepherd,” Burling said, and stood aside by his luggage while the super walked past him, still chewing.

Burling enjoyed their ritual of departure, and he told himself that Shepherd liked it, too. Going through the wide rooms above the park was so familiar to both men that it gave Burling the chance to bid a silent farewell to his possessions—favored things that he’d never had the energy to take overseas since Afghanistan. His yellowed collection of Roberts prints, his mother’s somber and tortured antiques, the 78s of the Big Bands and Gilbert and Sullivan stacked by the stereo, holding their music like strata of anthracite: these things were like an inventory of his life that it was time to reduce. Because of the surfeit of potential emotion, he couldn’t have managed the departure alone, so he was always left feeling he should do more for the super.

When Shepherd had murmured acknowledgment to the final item on his list, Burling hoisted his bags and he and the old man rode the elevator in silence. At the lobby, Burling restrained the door and Shepherd bumped his wash bucket over the gap, using the mop handle as a cane. His stiff legs shuffled across the marble floor. The entrance to the building gave onto Kalorama Road and across it, rows of embassies resembling French chateaux; seeing the figure of Shepherd silhouetted against them, Burling experienced an odd, reassuring sensation he couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was the strength he drew from being alone, his apartment battened down and all crises contained, or from the respectable elegance of a Washington street. For a moment, he imagined that the super sensed it, too, pausing as he did to sniff the scent of blossoms wafting on a mild breeze through the door. Burling set his suitcase down and checked the inside pocket of his jacket for his ticket and the storage voucher for his car. “Mr. Shepherd?”

The super stopped and bent around. “Oh, all right.”

Burling had noticed that Shepherd often replied to salutations with the wrong response; it made him uneasy, as if there were something vaguely subversive about their exchange. “I was just going to offer you my parking space, until I come back. I’m still going to be paying for it, and I thought it would be more convenient for you.”

Shepherd took his palm off the mop handle and pushed his Redskins cap backward, scratching his bald head, which was ringed with tiny coils of white hair. He seemed confused by Burling’s generosity, perhaps even insulted.

“Is something wrong with it?” asked Burling.

The old man’s eyes were steady and yellow. His cheeks worked in and out in folds. “Ain’t nothing wrong with it, nothing at all. Only seeing as there wasn’t a car in it this morning when I come out, I thought you already gone. So I put my car in there.”

In a flurry of denial, Burling jogged out the door and around to the alley. Shepherd’s Buick was there, next to the ripening dumpster, a pool of water beneath it from the morning’s washing.

“For heaven’s sake,” Burling said, looking around at nothing. “These bastards.”

Shepherd was leaning in the doorway that opened off his apartment, watching the pigeons approach his car. “They get your Benz?”

“I don’t even know who would want it. It’s old.”

“It don’t matter,” the super explained. “That car was top of the line in its day.”

“I’ll have to get a taxi,” Burling told him. “Excuse me, please.”

He helped himself through Shepherd’s apartment to the lobby. As he went through the small living room he noticed a picture of a black boy in knickers standing close to the leg of a uniformed man. Pausing to look at the photograph closely, Burling discovered Shepherd watching him from next to the television. The screen replayed the weekend’s news without sound.

“Is that you, Mr. Shepherd?”

The super grumbled as if the question were another item on Burling’s list, and Burling tried to sound less officious. “Where’d you serve?”

“France and the South Pacific . . . almost. I was in San Diego getting drunk when the Bomb saved my ass.” Shepherd’s chuckle turned into a wheeze. “That’s why I keep him up there.”

Burling followed the rheumatoid finger to a framed GI photograph of Truman, which hung on the wall above the set. “Good for you,” he said, thinking. He was about to tell this man . . . what? That he had been too young for the war? It struck him that Shepherd must be only five, six years his senior, while Burling had always thought of him as old.

His eye fell on Shepherd’s breakfast, which lay unfinished on the scuffed pink Formica. Had Shepherd forgotten their meeting? It was so unlike him that he must be slipping, the thought of which filled Burling with sudden, disproportionate grief. He was about to ask Shepherd more about Truman, but he had the police to call and a plane to catch and besides, the super wasn’t much for rebuttals. Sometimes they would have a passing discussion on the elevator about the NBA or some international crisis, on which Shepherd considered him an authority and therefore worthy of criticism, but the super always liked to say his piece and be done. Burling might repeat it later, at the Department of State, as the view of the man in the street.

“I’ll have to call now,” said Burling, and started for the lobby.

“Right you are,” he heard Shepherd say.

For the first two flights of stairs Burling felt surprisingly strong, for the last two he was winded. His legs grew weak, and he thought of his car in the hands of some crackhead or gangster in southeast DC, seat cranked back and speakers thumping that terrible bass. By the time he reached the door to his apartment, his heart was racing at a rhythm that seemed slightly unnatural, as if one of the cylinders were bad. He could feel it beating in the top of his skull. Inside, he paused uncomfortably in the stillness.

The windows were closed, and the rooms had already reached that overheated temperature he recognized from returning after an extended time away. He hated coming back to the apartment after preparing himself to leave. The empty rooms, the closed doors cast an eerie kind of judgment on his life. Already the lonely sunlight seemed to have taken his place. The door to his study made a sticky little pop when he opened it, like a Band-aid tearing off a wound. When he reached the phone on his desk, it was already ringing. As he picked up the receiver he had a flash of premonition, like a flare going off in some perimeter of his mind.

“Lucius? I thought I might catch you.”

His heart raced as if he’d been awakened in the middle of the night. “Mac? Did you steal my car?” The supposition came out of him unrehearsed, and for an instant he thought it ridiculous, but then he knew he was right. “I have a meeting on Monday in Beijing with . . .”

Gordon MacAllister cleared his throat like a scold.

“But why?” Burling asked, and the unsteady sound of his own voice frightened him. The dark blinds of his study seemed to shutter his solitary life.

“Really,” MacAllister cautioned. The phone he was on crackled, passed through a frequency shadow. “This is hardly a secure line. You’re forgetting yourself.”

The blood rose in Burling’s face. If he could only do that, forget himself.

“Burl? You there?”

“Where else would I be?” he said hoarsely. “You stole my car.”

MacAllister’s laugh, slightly breathy and tapering, filled whatever place he was in. Burling wondered who else was there hearing it. “I thought you’d lost your sense of humor for a moment.”

“That’s not the only thing I’ve lost.” He’d meant the words to sound sarcastic, but they took on more weight as his throat closed around them. Pathetic. “At least I hope it’s somewhere safe. You know I’ve had that car since 1973.”

“And it’s like poor Yorick’s horse, Burl, a guide to us all.” A car honked in the background, and Burling thought he heard the same sound outside. “Of course we’ll keep it somewhere safe. It’ll have a damn sight more security than that basement at State.”

Burling parted the blinds, but outside it was morning as usual: orderly traffic, calm sky. In the circle before the Chinese Embassy a tattered demonstration of Asian students and American hippies that seemed to have been there for years urged commuters to honk in denunciation of something the Chinese had done. While Burling was watching them, a motorcade pulled into the circle and the demonstrators ran to surround it. In the middle car he recognized Huang, a reformed academic from Beijing. Huang seemed to have an awful lot of security for a low-level cultural officer. Once you’d been condemned as a heretic, Burling thought, they could summon you any time they chose.

“I’ll meet you halfway, at the Mill,” MacAllister said.

“I think that’s hardly meeting me halfway.”

“I was speaking literally.”

“So was I: it’s right around the corner from Langley.”

“Give me an hour, okay?”

Burling was a man who liked to take a minute to gather his arguments, but MacAllister had hung up the phone before he could speak.

the mill was a squarish stone building huddled under spreading oaks, just off the route by which Dolley Madison had fled the burning city in 1812. Burling directed the cabbie off the divided highway and into the dusty gravel lot, where MacAllister’s Agency Suburban rested against a screen of forsythia in bloom. Through the half-open window of the taxi, Burling could hear the weary groaning and splashing of the wheel as it sluggishly ladled water from the sluiceway and dumped it into the pond, around which waddled mallards and large, vicious swans.

“Come on over here in the shit,” MacAllister called, looking up at the sound of the taxi door slamming.

Burling left his suitcase by the wheel of the Suburban and parted the bushes with his hand. The hogs grunted and hoofed in their sty, their pungency lurking beneath the sweet scent of flowers. As Burling picked his way deliberately through the guano, MacAllister shifted his seersucker over his forearm and a big smile spread like a shield across his face. It wasn’t a trustworthy smile, but Burling found himself warming at the sight of it. He looks like John the damn Baptist, he thought, about to bathe me in blood.

“If you wanted to play on my guilt,” Burling said, drawing closer, “you certainly picked the right place.” An unintended bitterness crept into his voice. “I used to bring my family out here every Sunday after church. Luke and Betsy liked to visit the animals.”

“I didn’t know that,” MacAllister said. “Whole set-up seems like a big, stinking agricultural deduction to me, right in the middle of McLean.”

They shook hands firmly, and his signet ring pinched Burling’s palm.

“You’ll be glad to know they’re tearing it down. It’s a shame,” he added. “Tract mansions for Internet millionaires.”

MacAllister frowned. When his plane had gone down in the African jungle, burning jet fuel had flared up the side of his neck, melting the bottom of his earlobe and leaving a hot red patch where it lapped at his jawline and cheek. It complicated his expression, so that Burling couldn’t tell if it were pity, contempt, or remorse. In a way it was not unlike a birthmark, or a mark of initiation: whatever mixture of leaves the natives had slathered on his burns had saved his life, although the specialists at Walter Reed had never figured out what had made up the salve.

“How are you, Burl?”

“You tell me. I gather I’m being called down this morning.”

MacAllister took a step forward and past him like a feint, a rhetorical gesture Burling remembered very well from the Agency.

“If they’re tapping you for director,” Burling said, “you’d better not be seen with me.”

“There’s a whole lot worse to be seen with these days,” MacAllister said, bending over to flick the birdshit off his bucks. “I just needed to ask a favor, that’s all.”

“You didn’t have to steal my car to do that.”

MacAllister shuffled a toe in the white-gray muck and followed a duck on the pond with his eyes. The scorched folds of his neck seemed to call for reassurance. “Give me your opinion: What do you think about our progress in the War on Terror?”

Burling felt the wind go out of him. Just last night, in his filial call to his son, Luke had asked this very question. The years between them and the trouble with Amelia had not been easy on their relationship, but it had sounded to Burling as if his son actually valued his opinion. He looked across the lot and remembered Luke reaching through the split-rail fence to touch the pig’s whiskered snout. When the animal tilted its nose, the little boy shrieked with glee. “I think what you want me to think, isn’t that how this works?”

“Lucius.” Mac draped a comradely arm around his shoulders, where it hung with a dull, stiff weight like a rod. “I wouldn’t do you like that.” He gave Burling a squeeze and let go.

Burling took a deep breath and felt the tears scurry back behind his eyes. MacAllister took off his bifocals, squinted into the lenses, then let them hang from a bright, braided string around his neck. “You look like you’ve been spending some time on your boat,” Burling said.

“Not enough. Let’s walk.”

The swans fled before his bucks, hissing and flapping their wings. The two men crossed the sluice on a rickety bridge, and the ground began to rise beneath their feet. MacAllister’s limp grew more pronounced.

“Do you remember a Chinese student at Princeton I asked you to talk to, those months when you were home between Kabul and Islamabad?”

“How could I not?” Burling said. He and the young man had walked beside the canal outside Princeton on a gray November day, the air viscous with oncoming winter, sun remote behind the trees. People were cleaning up leaves in the yards of the big Victorian houses on Harrison Street, reminding him sharply of a fantasy he had cherished as an undergraduate walking to the gym, of living in one of those houses with a wife and children, and going up the wide oak stairs at night behind her to bed. The rhythmic sound of the raking rose like wintering birds. “He was fascinated by Einstein, wanted to know where I’d seen him when I was there. Strange fellow, Yong Beihong.”

“I am astounded by your memory.”

“You can have it,” Burling said. Flattering your intellectual capacity was one of Mac’s more obvious ploys.

“Shortly after September 11th,” MacAllister explained, “one of our illegals in the PRC was contacted by a group that runs dissidents out.”

“What kind of group?”

“Religious right, ties to Asian churches.”

“I’m familiar with those people,” Burling said.

“Well, the paper our man got was the work of a physicist. Seemed under stress, a bit rambling, but it referenced Abdul Khan, and the development of a missile sounded very much like Silkworm.”

“The paper was Yong’s?”

MacAllister’s nod was full of bad implications.

“You’re sure it was genuine?”

“Yong’s a strange character. He’s been in jail or under house arrest on and off for a dozen years, but he’s got a long history with the Party. He’d know enough with us back in Afghanistan that things would be touchy with Pakistan. Hell, with Iran.”

Burling couldn’t resist filling in, a tendency that had plagued him since grade school: “So he makes it look like he’s going to pull a Dr. Khan and skip out with China’s technology?”

The downward set of MacAllister’s mouth suggested a tension between distress and strategic enjoyment. “It’s an awful mess, Lucius. As God is my witness, I’m no liberal, but these maroons who are running the Agency now can’t tell the Taliban from the Dalai Lama. I just testified to this fact yesterday before the House Intelligence subcommittee. There’s barely a single Dari speaker at Langley anymore.”

“Dari.” Burling watched a cement truck arrive at the construction site across the highway, its egg-shaped mixer turning gradually in the sun. The last time he himself had testified on the Hill was about April’s death, and he’d had no trouble evading the truth then because he had thought that the subject was personal, none of their goddamned business. The real lie had come months before—before Samarkand, before Wes Godwin died. He and April wound up together at a scrimmage of the Afghan basketball team. The weather surprisingly similar to this: April had just played tennis, and the hollow of muscle along her thigh swelled gradually closer to his against the hard, painted wood of the bleacher. Between them, he’d sensed a looming intimacy, a boundary about to be crossed. As the scrimmage increased in intensity, players loping up and down the wooden court, Burling had realized that he was about to refer to his wife as a third person. Thinking back on it since, he had marked that betrayal of usage as a greater sin than the night he and April had spent in Samarkand. For him, words were important, and after he had pushed his wife out of the first person plural—the “we” that he and Amelia had made, the extension of his Victorian fantasy—his evasions on the Hill seemed allowable, honorable even. “I take it you want Yong out, or do you?”

“Things are just too sticky right now,” MacAllister told him. “I had to go outside the Agency on this one.”

A blade of grass tickled Burling’s ankle above his sock. He smiled with alacrity in spite of himself. “You didn’t answer my question.”

MacAllister started down the slope toward the parking lot.

“I have to confess I can’t pick the angle on this,” Burling said. “Maybe I’m getting old.”

At the bottom of the hill, MacAllister waited, sweating, for him to come up. “Getting? We’re both old, Lucius, which is why we can’t afford to take chances. We’ve got to think of our kids.”

Burling’s smile was arrested by a chill.

“I’m not asking for your involvement,” said MacAllister, starting toward his car, “because I’ve got that end covered. I just wanted to make you aware.”

“Now you’re pissing me off. Aware of what?”

“If this thing enters your sphere, I need someone I can trust.”

“You need someone with a reason to keep the thing quiet.”

“That’s a factor,” MacAllister said across the roof of the Suburban.

The car was driven by a young Jamaican man with tight coils of hair and a tracery of scars on his cheeks. He reminded Burling of the Afro-Caribbean men they had used in Cuba in the early 1960s. In the mirror, his venomous features watched Burling slide onto the seat.

MacAllister held Burling’s eyes for a moment as the tires spun on gravel and caught on the road. “If you remember Yong’s name, you must remember the name of his superior officer?”

Burling watched the signs pass overhead, places—Herndon, Vienna, Front Royal—small towns swallowed by highways and strip malls that might have held memories for him if he had led a more circumscribed life. Such memories, he thought, would have given his children reasons to care for him more.

“You know that I do, Mac.”

MacAllister looked out the window. A paver the size of a battleship moved down the shoulder of the widening road to the airport, flying the flag of the Commonwealth.

“His name was Zu Dongren.”

“Was?”

“Is. He was a PLA colonel.” He could see Zu leave the hotel in Samarkand, look this way and that before walking toward a black Lada, parked on the side of the square behind the bench on which he and April were sitting, talking about the Viet Cong, the mujahedin. Why did Burling equate their kind of fervent commitment with love? “I didn’t know Zu had made it off that runway until I met Yong in Princeton. At the time I thought that might have been why you asked me to talk to him. I was grateful to you for that.”

MacAllister’s face was reflected in the tinted window beside him. Yong had not been able to give him the same, or any, news about April. “You know that if the press got wind of the little deal you had going with Zu then, they’d fry us both for sure.”

“Colonel Zu is General Zu now,” Burling said.

“You keep in touch?”

“I wouldn’t go anywhere near him, but I’m sure he knows I’m there. He’s the head of the Internal Security Service.”

“What about Alan Rank?”

Burling felt the car sinking beneath him, then rising again, leaving his stomach behind. “Name’s familiar. Some kind of academic in Nanjing.”

“You were always a terrible liar.”

“Ironically, yes, but discretion isn’t prevarication, Mac. On this point you and I can disagree.”

“Your girlfriend works with him.”

MacAllister had been married for forty-some years to the same woman, and his use of the term “girlfriend” was derisive, at least it sounded so to Burling.

“Charlotte and I have been seeing each other in Shanghai, it’s true, but I wouldn’t say she works with him. The public diplomacy people have some programs with the center Rank runs.”

“Well she, Charlotte, had better be careful. Programs are not all Rank runs. He just got a visa for a man named John Tan, applied through some sort of fundamentalist outfit in Georgia that’s in with the China Christian Council, the outfit that certifies churches.”

“And spies on them, too.”

“I didn’t know that. To be honest, I was hoping you could help me out with this Tan character.”

“I’m sorry, Mac.” Long ago, Burling had found a proper way to refer to his fallen position. He breathed deeply and explained. “It’s well known in this administration that I don’t happen to agree with engagement. They’d like to get rid of me, but they’re afraid I might squawk if some reporter happened to notice that the consul in Shanghai hasn’t been changed since Bush One. It seems like nepotism. Truth is, I’m out to pasture there.”

“You heard nothing at State? NSC?”

In spite of himself, Burling gulped. He looked for space in the field by the road, in the sky, but found none. The stockade fences of a subdivision crowded his sight. “What about your man in Shanghai? Ryan?”

“A group has been smuggling dissidents off the mainland,” MacAllister said, ignoring the question, “taking them out using drug-smuggling boats and black market export shipments from Shenzhen. Sometimes they’ll throw the poor suckers on tramp steamers headed for New York, give the triads a shot at ’em. It seems to have started as a right-thinking venture, but someone got the idea there might be money in it. We’ve been trying to trace it back to the source for years, thinking it may be a way in, but every time we open the door, no one’s home. Organized crime in Hong Kong, those ancient import-export concerns in Taipei. We’ve even had the Bureau lean on the Chinatown gangs. Nothing. Where we’ve never gotten any help is the White House itself.”

“It’s gossip in Shanghai,” Burling told him, feeling the strength of some authority, “but one thing didn’t change between old George and Clinton and this one: the White House turns a blind eye.”

MacAllister leaned toward him, arm across the back of the gray cloth seat. The car was getting warm, bringing out a smell of cigarette smoke. Beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead. “I’m telling you, Burl, I’ve never seen it quite like this, and it’s worse since last September. They’ll do just about anything for money. I’ve got nothing against banks, but they’re a hell of a place to deposit your conscience.”

“The world is a fire sale,” Burling said, “and the wind seems to be turning in our direction. You don’t think that Rank’s man might walk into something?”

MacAllister arched his back and took a sporran flask from his jacket’s inside pocket. He tipped it back and exhaled. “Yong has disappeared, Lucius, gone from the house where we thought they were keeping him.”

Suddenly Burling felt the need of air. He lowered his window, but a yellow cloud of pollen blew into the car. The airport hovered in the distance like a pair of concrete wings.

“Gone?”

“As of five days ago, according to our man in Beijing.”

The driver offered him a bottle of water. He took a drink and looked away. An artificial lake marked the outskirts of the airport, the curving roadway lined with weak trees trained by guy ropes and stakes: the terminal expanding again. This had once been a magical place for him, the airport named after John Foster Dulles—who, as JFK said, had been secretary to the Chinese delegation to The Hague at the age of nineteen. If other families had homes in those places on the green signs—the suburbs, the cul-de-sacs and split levels, the flat green patches of backyards in northern Virginia—to remember, Burling, Amelia, Betsy, and Luke had this airport, its raw concrete and polished ramps and soaring buttresses, the mobile lounges prowling the runways like something prehistoric and futuristic all at once, dedicated by President Kennedy in a happier time. MacAllister’s driver lowered his window and plucked a ticket from the parking machine.

“Do you think Zu has him, or did he escape?”

“When you get back, pay a visit to Nanjing. Talk to Alan Rank. Or better yet, have your girlfriend do it.”

The car’s engine ground to a terrible idle, and Burling watched an elegant woman cross the asphalt. Sunlight shimmered on the back of her skirt as she gained the near curb in her heels. Something vaguely reptilian stirred in him—lust, love? He was tempted to think that the world ran on these things more than power or money. But he felt a more sinister force—love’s removal, its absence, betrayal—that was closer to him. The beautiful woman had stopped on the sidewalk to dig in her bag.

“Where will I find you if I need you?” Burling asked.

MacAllister was smiling: the look of a shabby operation to be dealt with somewhere else. The driver clicked open the electric locks.

“Don’t you fret,” MacAllister said, massaging Burling’s shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but he seemed to feel through Burling’s diminishing muscle for his bones.

Taking his suitcase, Burling passed behind the woman through the terminal doors.

Li xin pedaled his bike along the boulevard beside Temple Park, his shadow fleeing before him on the plum-colored wall. A bus swayed dangerously close, belching smoke in his face, and Li swore through the windows at the forest of torsos and arms. The traffic was bad for a Saturday, and he had to meet his general at the Beijing Hotel in forty minutes; before that he had to deliver his daughter to the home of his mother-in-law in the city’s older section.

Qing rode in a child seat that was clamped to the handlebars, clutching a puppet resembling a hawk. As they passed the northeast corner of the park, she raised the bird so the breeze, sweet with flowering trees, caught its wings and lifted them gaily. Later that day, she was to take part in the annual puppet production at the Children’s Palace, the hall of culture where the most creative youngsters went after school each day to learn the sublime arts. The hawk was one of two main characters in the play, the other a lowly, scheming turtle. Children all over China would be acting out the same story during the upcoming week, an ancient fairy tale about the resilience of the Middle Kingdom, and Li was proud that his position allowed her to take part. As they entered the dark maze of hutongs, over which the painted rings of the Temple seemed to lean, Qing lowered the head of the bird and pecked playfully at his arm.

When Li had delivered her into the hands of his mother-in-law, the old woman’s slow face at the ready for another day of spoiling her grandchild, he was surprised to find that he still had time for a visit to the Friendship Store. The thought of English cigarettes, aromatic in their coffin of foil, drew him onward through the cooking smoke, the blood running in the gutter from the corner abattoir, past the warehouse of the vegetable collective with its affable white-coated workers lounging behind their cardboard stand. A PLA jeep sprinted past him, honking wildly, soldiers tottering in the back like barrel staves, either drunk or asleep behind their scanty mustaches and shades. Along the boulevard, block upon block of new apartments rose behind the powdered trees, painted balconies rising for story on story to the colorless sky. In a year the general would pull him fully into his circle; a year and they would leave his mother’s house and have their own place. Behind the sliding glass doors that led from the balconies, he imagined Qing’s room with her rows of little dresses in the wardrobe, posters of her beloved Mickey Mouse on the walls. The image buoyed his spirits, even as he passed beyond the apartments and beneath the smug gaze of the foreign hotels.

The day was warming, but his years in poorly heated apartments had accustomed Li to wearing a cardigan; now he felt sweaty, unpressed as he flashed his papers to the guards at the entrance to the Friendship Store and moved politely through the fat, perfumed Westerners and Overseas Chinese to the tobacco counter in back. The counter man, protected by his ranks of dark-leafed Cuban cigars, asked to see Li’s papers again and read them over with a dubious smile. As he handed them back, his expression seemed to indicate some complicity between them. As if he knew what Li had seen: the young people fallen, not like piles of laundry at all but flesh showing, thin stomachs and pelvic bones, skin unbearably modest in death. Among their bodies, the mangled tracery of spokes and chrome. As if the asshole had seen it . . .

Joylessly he paid the cashier and jammed the pack hard, again and again against the heel of his hand, smoking one cigarette after another as he cycled along the Dajie, fingers squeezing the handgrip so hard that his knuckles turned white. At the Beijing Hotel, he guided his bike past the taxis and government drivers, the vents of his tweed jacket flapping and coming to rest. The goat-faced Manchu, Feng, leaned against the general’s beige Toyota Crown, studying the grease beneath his fingernails.

“Where’s the Big Fish?” Li asked.

The driver accepted a Kingston and nodded slyly toward the lobby. When General Zu emerged, he seemed to spring from the revolving door, his short arms flapping at his sides. Feng was up the steps at a sprint, offering help with Zu’s briefcase, but the Big Fish brushed him violently away.

“A perfect example of how stupid, how grossly incompetent and obsequious these fools are,” Zu said as Li reached him.

“Yes, General.”

They hurried down the stairs in quick, shuffling steps.

“You don’t even know what I’m talking about,” the general remarked.

Li helped him into the back of the car and climbed into the front seat next to Feng. He turned to meet the general’s dolorous face. “I assume you are speaking of the reactionaries, who see the corruption in Shenzhen as a far bigger issue than it is.”

“We have bred a generation of pirates and slaves,” sighed the general. The shadow darkened around his mouth. “Some will have to be sacrificed. When the time comes, I must take a stand on corruption.”

“Shenzhen is the future of China,” Li agreed.

“It’s a wasteland,” Zu said.

Feng avoided a donkey cart carrying a refrigerator and moved to the center lane, honking at buses and trucks. They went swiftly across the mouth of Tiananmen Square, under the reviewing stand and onto Quianmen, its broad sidewalk a beach where they had piled the new dead, like fish thrown up from a gray, diseased bay. The calm and heavy-lidded, beatific face of Chairman Mao approved the scene.

“You have gotten me started,” said the general, shifting his short, bulging torso on the pinions of his legs. “You always make me think of my son.”

Li chose not to respond. The general’s son ran a factory in Shenzhen, the so-called Special Economic Zone, and Li had seen him, in his Western suits and German car: he had known from the tender way the son regarded his possessions that he was a thief.

Feng skirted Beihai Park, where the old men sat on stumps, fishing the slimy green water with bamboo poles. The general was silent, and Li wondered if he was thinking of the morning they had mustered in the wet grass on the shore. Li could still feel, still hear the squishy boots as they marched, the burning itch on the balls of his feet. A month later, General Zu had been transferred from the Second Department to the Ministry of State Security, a move in which Li had chosen to accompany him. The wily among Li’s comrades had envied his good fortune, offered congratulations or made snide comments about Li’s ambition under their breath; the jealous were also the ones who had turned down commands at the Square. The duller ones had simply come to Li’s farewell party, gotten drunk, and clapped him on the back, as if they were sending him back to Tibet. Thirteen years and nothing had changed.

“We have a more pressing problem,” the general said, rapping the window with his hand. Sweethearts in rowboats sculled against the grim background of the Forbidden City walls. “Yong Beihong has disappeared from his apartment.”

“Yong? I thought I knew all of their names.”

“This one was rounded up again several years ago and has been under house arrest. He was a university instructor who made a short speech on the second day of the uprising. He was signatory to one of those reactionary letters last year.”

“When did he escape?”

“It has been five days ago now. The officers they had watching him were common city police. When Yong went missing, they looked for him for three days before they informed their superiors.”

“It’s the work of the mayor,” Li said. The general’s bottom lip stuck out. “May I ask how long you’ve known?”

“Do not always think of yourself, Li. I received a call last evening at home. I needed to consider.”

“Then clearly you see some connection between this Yong and the American woman you asked to be followed to Nanjing.”

The general’s mud-colored flesh shifted downward into a frown. The folds of his chin hid his collar from view. “It is only a coincidence. Without coincidence, however, we would be lost. Do you have anything more on this woman?”

The car took a hard turn into a side street, and Li had to brace himself quickly against the door. As they went through the gates of the compound, a group of restoration students trooped into a painted hall. The students’ worship of the past, their leisurely study, caused his anger to rise. “I know one thing,” Li said. “She’s been consorting with evil forces.”

The general’s lips clamped together, and Li realized that he must have used the patronizing tone his wife had cautioned him against. “Her name?” the general asked mockingly.

The car pulled to a stop, and Feng hurried from his seat to open the general’s door.

“I apologize,” said Li. “Charlotte Brien.”

“That’s the one.” The general heaved himself out of the car, and together they started down the sandy path. The compound had once been an imperial residence, and later one of Mao’s homes. Seeds from willow blossoms filled the gentle air. The water in the pond was milky with them. “I haven’t told you this but the smuggler apprehended off Fujian last week had it written in his logbook when he died.”

“That’s a connection, then,” said Li, taking out another cigarette. “After getting into Nanjing by train, she visited an American professor called Rank at the Center for Sino-American studies. She spent two-and-a-half hours with him yesterday afternoon.”

The general stopped on the fringe of the path. “He is a Borodin?”

“Pardon?”

“Rank, you idiot!” The general made a spitting noise with his lips. “Your generation doesn’t even know its own history.”

Li shook out the match. “With all due respect, sir, we were schooled to stamp out history of that sort.”

“Borodin was a Russian Jew, an organizer for Lenin and finally here. What I want to know is if this Rank is an American agent, or simply a man with a need to act out his enthusiasms.”

“There’s nothing strange on his visa application. He’s been here before.”

Frowning, the general walked again. “That in itself is cause for worry. Tell me more about the woman.”

“Yesterday evening, she visited a café run by students. It is partially funded by the U.S. Department of State, for which she works, so that in itself is not suspicious, but local cadres did inform me that this place has offered undue intercourse between Americans and our own students at university. When they received the recent directive, the cadres believed that the place should be shut down. As a preliminary precaution, they installed one of their men as a cook.”

“A wise measure,” the general agreed.

“Charlotte Brien stayed late at this Black Cat Lounge, drinking alchohol. She was overheard telling the manager that she would be back in the morning to look at accounts.”

“The Black Cat.” The general had veered off the path onto the still-damp grass, stopping halfway down the slope to the pond. Li saw that he was losing him. The general’s move to the Ministry had been accompanied by a slipping of his mind, and it was often Li’s function to bring him into the present again. “That is named after something.”

Li waited, but after a minute or so the general had still failed to remember what it was. He reached up and tugged at a branch of weeping willow, flicking the buds off the wood with his thumbnail. Li continued to wait for instructions.

“Is there anything else i can get for you, sir?”

The stewardess was standing over Burling, offering another tiny bottle of vodka, cradled in her palm. He politely refused, but her presence, the soft skin and warm perfume, the full breasts in her uniform blouse produced a dull ache that made him feel sick of himself.

“You just looked a bit uncomfortable. Something else to drink?”

He picked up the plastic cup that had held his first screwdriver and was surprised to find nothing but ice. Already, the navigation screen showed the plane crossing the Tetons. “You won’t take this the wrong way?”

“Of course not,” she said, bending nearer with her hands on the back of the neighboring seat. A tiny gold cross fell out of her blouse and hung between them on a chain.

“My wife has passed away . . .”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling kindly and touching him briefly on the shoulder. He couldn’t make out her accent—Ohio, or Michigan perhaps, vowels trapped in her mouth, where they resounded as if in a small cave.

“It’s been many years,” Burling told her, “so it’s no longer fresh. Lately I’ve been trying to establish a . . . relationship, you know, but I’m of an older generation.”

“You’re not old, Mr. Burling.”

“Well, you’re kind, but in any event . . .”

“You want to know what a woman my age is looking for?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, for me,” she said, standing up and throwing out her hip, “I just want to travel, that’s all. I’ve lived in London, in Singapore, now I’m based in Seattle. Next year I’m hoping for Tokyo. If a man can’t deal with my wanderlust, too bad. I never wanted any kids.”

“They keep you guessing, that’s for sure.”

“You look like a father.”

Burling laughed. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Take it as a compliment.”

“I have a son and daughter, both grown now,” he told her. “When I was their age, I was like you, I wanted to see the world. As a result they grew up mostly overseas.”

“Lucky them.”

“I thought so, too, but they didn’t see it that way. My daughter wrote her graduate thesis on the trauma of being uprooted all the time.”

“I guess the grass is always greener.” She looked over her shoulder at the steward, who was manning the service cart. “Looks like we’re out of ice again. Excuse me.”

Just like that, she was gone, and Burling realized it had only been her job, to entertain his questions. He was ashamed of having kept her so long. As he ate, he wondered about her forthright nature, which he equated with independence, whether that was the kind of woman he should have chosen as a wife. In a way, he and Amelia were prisoners of their own generation, which had not allowed them much room to decide: the summer they met, 1956, all the children of their class in Philadelphia had the same script to follow. The dances and doubles matches and fumbling in the backseats of Chryslers each were scenes in a larger passion play, the final act of which was meant to unite the prominent families of Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy. Even if it was in his, and Amelia’s, nature to critique that play, wonder about what Betty Wilson and Whit Greene could possibly have in common beyond the fact that her father’s bank held the paper on the Greene’s family business—“What can they possibly talk about?”—Burling and the lively girl whose father called her Amie performed the scenes like everyone else. He was twenty, home from Princeton, working at the Evening Bulletin as a sports reporter. He professed to want to be a journalist, a war reporter or a foreign correspondent or, less likely given his earnest tendencies, a sportswriter, complete with cigar and newsprint staining his fingers. The way he talked about writers attracted her to him. Evenings on the terrace at the Cricket Club, or in the dimly lit study of her parents’ big stone house, discussing Hawthorne and Melville, his favorites, or Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, hers, would invariably end in a set piece of double entendres that led his hands inside her blouse. Consumed as he was, like all his contemporaries, with what kind of woman he would marry, what she would say while the dances and exaggerated talk swirled about them, and what she allowed him after, were enough to promise that their life together would take them on an exotic sort of mission, filled with intellect, purpose, and, certainly, sex.

It was agreed among their set that Lucius and Amelia would leave Philadelphia, destined for foreign capitals, Europe, or India. Amelia was a “live wire,” as her friends had it, and “easy to know,” as Burling’s mother said, which was not necessarily a compliment. Already, at seventeen, she had spent a month “away,” under a doctor’s care, and already, like her vastly successful Irish father, she liked to drink, harbingers of things to come. Her love of literature was more therapeutic than intellectual, but he was never very discerning when it came to psychology, any more than he had much taste for alcohol. Still, he liked to be around it, as he liked the clubs she took him to on South Street, downstairs places filled with smoke and trumpets and the steady war beat of traps, and actual blacks. Sometimes Amelia had pills in her handbag, but Burling demurred. He found that being the sober one gave him a reputation for character that people admired, even if they didn’t always seem to like him very much. It was there that he established his demeanor in the presence of alien cultures, and also, gradually, where he understood that he would not play professional basketball. Amelia, who knew nothing of sports, pointed it out to him. His realization that she was right led directly to a proposal, her recognition of his deficiency sealing the deal.

They were married three years later, following his military service, at the church on Germantown Avenue where both their mothers belonged, although the families came from different hemispheres of the same social world, faded blue blood on his side, new money on hers. Amelia’s father, the self-made Irish Catholic from a north Philly family of seven boys, of which he was the only alcoholic functioning enough to offer nominal employment to the other six, put on a reception that caused the mostly Protestant members of the club to mutter as they ate his food and drank more than their fill. He died two years later in the nineteenth hole, telling his foursome about the big house he had bought the couple on Macomb Street in northwest DC, and about his son-in-law’s job in the Kennedy administration, of which he was ignorant but exceedingly proud.

His only daughter took her father’s death to heart. His absence, like the demise of a benevolent despot, exposed the tensions that had always existed between the factions represented by Amelia and her mother, who was scornful and envious of the girl’s wild nature, her freedom, which the father had encouraged, and likely her beauty and sexual charms, of which he was also uncomfortably fond. Outwardly, the daughter railed against her mother’s false piety and weak manipulations, while at the same time she set about decorating the house in Cleveland Park with a near-curatorial fervor and making a baby with her husband, more than one if possible, to outdo the fragile older woman. It might have all worked itself out. The babies came, Elizabeth in 1963 and Lucius III in ’66, but Burling was barely at home anymore. What happened? If you compared the summer of 1956, when the Soviets rolled into Budapest, to 1979, when the same, slightly updated, tanks invaded Afghanistan, what came between was Vietnam.

“You want to make this a history lesson,” Amelia said, when he’d returned to take up residence in the guest room of the cavernous shingle-style house. Two months had passed since rebel soldiers—whether or not they were the tribe who had executed Breeden on the border, or the ones who had killed Wes Godwin before his eyes, no one at the Agency seemed able, or willing, to tell—moved dangerously close to the airport that lay on the plain north of Kabul. Burling himself was forced to go, leaving April, or the rumors of her, behind. “This is not about a war or a revolution. I don’t care about those things.”

“You used to,” he said with genuine remorse, for everything. “I realize I’m not entitled to sympathy.”

“I never cared about history, Lucius, or politics, either. You forget.”

“You cared about books. We used to talk about novels all the time. You loved Madame Bovary.”

“You’re sad,” Amelia said. She was sitting in the corner of their former bedroom, under a standing lamp, her delicate ankles crossed, bare legs folded against the flowery skirt of the slipper chair. “Besides, I can’t read novels anymore. They require a certain level of trust, certain assumptions about people.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said, warming to his idea. “Comparing 1956 to now is like comparing . . . Flaubert to Joyce, or Jane Austen to Faulkner.”

“Nice try, buster,” she said, twisting her mouth in a distorted smile, but in her eyes he saw encouragement. Perhaps his eloquence, which he was aware had mostly to do with the depth of his voice and the scale of his bearing, could save him. That morning his newspaper likeness had appeared above the fold of the Washington Post, with the caption THE NEW FACE OF COVERT OPERATIONS? and a long investigative piece about April’s disappearance, continued deep into the front section. Every story the Post got ahold of was going to be their sequel to Watergate. The next day he had to go up to the Hill to twist at the pleasure of the Agency director in the whipping of partisan winds. While Gordon MacAllister was secretly, triumphantly expanding the operation that Burling had begun, the architect himself had been thrown off scaffolding of his own design.

“It’s like a funhouse mirror,” he said, feeling weirder and more desperate by the minute.

“Only not so fun,” Amelia said. “Why don’t you go downstairs and have a drink? I don’t feel like talking right now. I want to read my stupid magazine.”

“I guess I will,” said Burling. He’d been standing in her doorway and he turned to go, forgetting the narrowness of the landing and nearly falling down the stairs. The house was an empty-feeling ship of a place, with hidden porches and deep, damp verandas, and yet it seemed too small. The stairway turned at two landings, each set with a leaded glass window of craftsman design. At the back of the dark, narrow kitchen between high oak cabinets, he was startled to find Simon Bell, lately tenant of the renovated story of their carriage house, furtively pouring himself a straight scotch from the dresser that served as a bar.

“Join me?”

The reddish hair on Simon’s fat, freckled forearms and the several large rings on his fingers were reflected in the flaking, beveled mirror behind the bottles. Bell had once been a brilliant China hand with MI-6, but in the middle 1970s his superiors had pulled him away from the desk and sent him to Burma. SLORC, the onomatopoeically monikered secret police, had caught him up near the border with China and subjected him to a brutal interrogation, during which a gun had been discharged, grazing his forehead. The groove it left gave him a perpetually thoughtful expression that drew you to his sad-dog eyes, sagging, stippled cheeks and sunburned neck. The purpose of his mission had been disinformation, but in order for Bell to be convincing this fact had been withheld from him. As the interrogation went forward, certain things had not made sense; Bell understood what had happened, and he told his captors so. To show they weren’t stupid, the Burmese let him go, but not before beating him again rather badly, on principle, which had made him, as Simon liked to say, “a bit mental.” After Burma he’d been posted to a Washington desk job, his wife in London awaiting divorce. That’s when Burling had taken him in, to watch over his house. Since Amelia’s return from Afghanistan, Bell had begun to feel he was needed, a slightly dangerous condition for him.

“Is there ice?”

“I don’t use it,” Bell said, carefully shutting the glass door above the bar. He was wearing only boxer shorts and flip-flops. A tiny silver ball suspended by bearings in the jamb snicked shut, and the glassware inside trembled musically. There was already another glass beside his, and next to that, on the gray marble top, a Pelican edition of Shakespeare. “Foreign office chap shouldn’t take ice in his drink. You never know what’s in it.”

“I like ice,” Burling told him. “Besides, we’re in the nation’s capital. You think the water’s poisoned?”

“Absofuckinggoddamlutely. I fancy the water here is drawn from the cesspool that flows directly from the bowels of our, I should say your, elected officials. Nothing but undigested fat from stale red-baiting leftovers and the roughage of lefty post-Vietnam paranoia. Did you see what those jesters had to say about you in the Post?”

“I didn’t read it,” Burling said from inside the freezer door. The ice in his mother’s old, nickel-plated trays, imported from Philadelphia, was covered with fuzzy crystals and specks of food, as if they hadn’t been emptied for years. He wondered what had happened in his house in the months while Amelia had lived there alone with his children.

“How could you resist?”

Burling slammed a tray against the refrigerator door, dislodging shards of schist-like ice that skittered away across the linoleum. “I don’t give a damn what they think.”

“Bravo,” said Bell, raising his glass. Burling retrieved a piece from the ice tray and dropped it into the tumbler, taking a layer of skin from his finger with it.

“Ouch,” he said, tasting blood as he sucked at the tip.

“Honestly, Lucius, I felt a bit sorry. The kids must really have caught it today at school.”

Burling reached for the edge of the kitchen table and collapsed in a straight wooden chair. Betsy and Luke had already been in their bedrooms, asleep according to Amelia, when he got home from the Agency at ten. They were at awkward ages, and since he’d gotten home he’d found their appearances slightly alarming. Elizabeth’s hair was lank and greasy, her eyes unable to focus on him from behind her big pale glasses. Luke’s clothes looked worn out and half a size too small. The possibility that his mistakes would touch them deflated him completely.

“I brought this in for Luke,” Bell explained, sliding the paperback onto the glass-topped table in front of him. “I thought it might take his mind off things.”

Burling opened the book. Henry IV, Part 2. “Enter RUMOUR painted full of tongues.”

“Oh, glory be,” Burling said, putting his head in his hands.

years later, when he had sold the house on macomb and moved to his present apartment, Burling found a story Luke had written for the Sidwell Friends literary journal, about those months before his father came home. Thinly veiled autobiography, it told how Bell and Luke and Elizabeth acted Lear and The Tempest in the living room for Amelia’s entertainment that spring. When the weather turned warmer and Betsy was shipped off to camp, where she would spend eight miserable weeks falling out of canoes, dropping balls, and being tormented by thinner girls, mosquitoes, and poison ivy, Bell and Luke moved the repertory company to the deep porch that curled around the front of the house. In the damp mornings, Bell’s paperbacks were still on the little wicker table beside Amelia’s chaise longue, curling with dew and the dried rings of sweat from her highballs. Sometimes after Luke had gone to bed, his mother and Simon talked on, of Paris where Amelia had gone to the Sorbonne, and the Comédie Française, of which she had been a fan. Simon’s voice rose slowly and distantly, like an old-time announcer on the radio, vaguely corny but filling with a timbre that seemed like a wave from another, more confident world: Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea.

In June, they started the Henry plays, with Bell playing Falstaff. This production Burling saw in the flesh, having returned from Kabul at one of the lowest points of his life. He had done something careless, taken a chance with April; in turn, chance, or fate—thought of now in the upper case, ontological sense of the word, a condition of life on which he’d expended a lot of thought—turned bad and collected a terrible debt. Or maybe the mujahedin just didn’t give a fiddler’s fuck what he or Joseph Conrad thought, a possibility that expelled him from the comfort of his thinking, put him outside of himself.

It was a strange place to be, and yet stranger still was how much the scene he discovered in his house on Macomb, after he had a few weeks to get used to it, seemed to match his internal condition of exile: Amelia cueing the corpulent Simon and the thin, shaggy Luke in the scented summer night, her pale hand flitting up and down like a moth within the baggy silk cuff of her dressing gown. She was vaguely alluring, in a fey sort of way.

“Peace, good pint pot,” Bell declaimed, leaving his Ballantine ale on the windowsill beside her. Bugs popped against the frosted milk-glass globe of the porch light. “Harry!”

Luke, draped in the pose of a dissolute scion on the railing, put one white Adidas sneaker on the floor of the porch and turned to face the beer-bellied Sir John. Since returning to the States he had adopted a punk affect, fraying Izods and olive fatigues, a safety pin stuck through the alligator’s jagged red mouth. The part of Prince Hal—Harry—who drank with John Falstaff and the other braggart soldiers, only to take up his heroic place at their lead, appealed to him.

“That thou art my son,” Simon began.

The wicker of the chaise made a crackling sound, and Amelia whispered, “Chamomile,” and giggled, tipping the ash from her French cigarette onto the floor. Her third glass of white burgundy leaned precariously on the arm of the chair, and her voice was a bit giddy, but not with the breathlessness that came before one of her fugues. Sitting in an upright chair in the shadows, elbows on his knees, Burling could see the bond that had grown between Luke and his mother in his absence: Luke was her pal, her companion, and also a connoisseur of her moods, a hard thing to be. “You forgot,” she said to Simon, “‘The more it is trodden on the faster it grows.’”

“I’m improvising.” Simon bowed, his forehead glazed with perspiration. “Plenty of precedent for it. Boys these days don’t want to hear, ‘Youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.’ They know all about that already, they do.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Amelia. She turned to Burling, but her face was a mystery.

“That thou art my own son,” Simon continued, “I have partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me.”

The wicker squealed beneath Amelia, and Luke forgot his line.

Burling watched from the guest room that night, but Simon padded across the grass to the carriage house alone. Quietly, so as not to wake Luke on the third floor, Burling moved down the hallway to his old room.

“I was wondering when you’d come.” Amelia was sitting in the window seat, blowing the smoke from her cigarette through the corroded screen. “I’d like to talk to you, you know.”

Burling moved closer. The fine features of Amelia’s long face were white from the streetlight. Her cigarette smelled strange.

“What is that you’re smoking?”

“It’s pot. Marijuana,” she giggled. “You want some?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“I got it from Luke,” Amelia said.

“You’ve been smoking marijuana with our son?”

“Oh, he doesn’t know I have it. I think he got it from Simon.”

“Bell smokes dope?”

“Apparently so.”

“That can’t be good,” Burling said, sitting down on the slipper chair. Their room, the canopy bed, the sheer curtains, the pastel Tabriz he had bought in Uzbekistan, struck him as an odd setting for what was taking place.

“Apparently people do a lot of things. We were just such good children we missed out on most of them.”

“We weren’t always so good.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she acknowledged in an open-ended tone. “Once upon a time I was known as the wild one. I was Sylvia Plath. I was going to draw or act or write poems.”

“Just the other night you denied that.”

“That was then, this is now. Are you sure you don’t want some?”

“I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.”

“So many things have changed, Lucius. For once, I wish you’d come down with us mortals. You’ll lower your standards for April Lindstrom, but not for me.”

“All right,” Burling said, standing up. April’s name seared him. A puff of marijuana would not be the worst thing he’d done.

“Here.”

When he drew on the joint, the ember was so close and hot that he burned his fingers. “Shit!” He coughed and dropped the thing.

“Poor Lucius.” Amelia laughed and came toward him, her arms as wide as an angel in her translucent robe. He coughed, and the blue smoke kept coming out of him in clouds. “You make everything so complicated, don’t you?” The robe fell open, and he could see her small round breasts in her nightgown. Whatever his lungs had absorbed had gone straight to his head, and he was aware of only two distinct parts of his body—the top of his skull, which seemed to have disappeared, and a gradually mounting erection, so strong that it almost hurt. He couldn’t help remembering April in the hotel in Samarkand. “Most husbands just screw their secretaries, but you had to make your affair into some kind of idea as big as you are, didn’t you?”

“Amelia, don’t.”

“I wouldn’t sleep with you for a couple of months because I was having a hard time. My medication was all messed up, Lucius, and I didn’t have Dr. Rose there, so I can understand you might want one night of casual fucking, I wouldn’t even begrudge you that, but instead you come up with some kind of grand design, a mission that befits a man of your great intellectual prowess.”

“Please.”

“You find yourself a hippie whore with an impotent husband, a folie à deux of epic proportions, and what happens? You don’t just get laid, you manage to invoke the soldiers of God—of God!” She looked up at the ceiling and laughed in a way that frightened and thrilled him. Maybe this was how it would be now, a world of sensation and vague paranoia. “They sweep down and murder your pilot and knock you on the head and carry your ideal woman away. She’s probably sitting Indian-fashion in their tent right now, like Scheherazade, part of the king’s harem, telling them stories so they won’t cut her throat.”

“Amelia, your imagination.”

“My imagination! It’s always my imagination. Until it isn’t.”

“I was going to say I always loved your imagination. It’s what made me love you in the first place.”

“Oh, Lucius,” she said, clinging to him now. “Your probity and my imagination. How did they turn on us like this?”

“I don’t know. It’s a dangerous time.”

“You mean our age?”

“Ours, the age of the world, if you know what I mean. That was the problem, that I started to think like that again, about bigger things.”

“And all I could think of was little ones. Boring, tiny annoyances and slights.”

“April.” He couldn’t believe he’d uttered her name.

“Yes, but not just her.”

“She and Jack seemed to come from a totally different world.”

Amelia was crying quietly as he held her and now she began to move her hand down his stomach and under his belt. “Is this what she did?”

“No, sweetheart. You don’t have to talk like that.”

“I can tell stories, too. It’s what I’m good at, you know. That’s what the children loved about me, before they grew up and started hating me.”

“Luke and Betsy don’t hate you,” he said.

“Elizabeth does. You run off with a woman, and all she is is ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ She was furious at me for sending her to camp when she found out you were coming home. But I couldn’t stand her for another second in this house.”

“That’s normal, isn’t it, between mothers and daughters?”

But Amelia had already moved on somewhere else. All along, she’d been pulling him upward with her fingers, scratching him slightly with her nails. “I could tell you a story,” she said distantly. “A story of April.”

“Amelia, don’t. It wasn’t like that.”

“Tell me what it was like,” she said.

“I don’t want to hurt you again.”

“You did, you know.”

“I don’t want it to be that way.”

Awkwardly, tenderly, he took her wrist and moved her to the bed. For an hour then, while the fallen joint smoldered on the chair, and for a month of nights after, Burling made love to his wife in a guilty, solicitous way, always aware that their romance was stolen from time. He often thought of April, in the high desert, riding with soldiers of God. He even let Amelia tell him stories about her, making love with the men to stay alive. For a month, chance and fate were suspended, but the king’s knife glinted beneath the pillows.

burling didn’t witness the end of the idyll. he was summoned to London for a meeting on setting up an embassy-in-exile in Pakistan. Luke’s account of it was all that he had; Luke had never shared the details, or his feelings, with his father. The day after Burling left, Amelia swallowed a bottle of pills that her doctor had prescribed to help her sleep, chasing them with scotch. Her bedroom was locked, and Luke could feel the wind from an open window slipping beneath her door. He stood there in his bare feet, not ready for swim practice, imagining the white room beyond. He put his ear to the keyhole, but all he could hear was a car going by outside, birdsong. The firemen had to kick the door in, and Luke stared at his mother’s curled-up body, her buttocks slender and slack where the white sheet had fallen away. A paramedic was yelling into her ear, lifting and slapping her limp hand, the soles of her feet. Luke had to step aside as the man’s partner, her pockets heavy with equipment, pushed by with the stretcher.

He moved aside until he was standing in front of the bookshelves that lined the upper hall. A strange collection of spines: popular novels adapted for movies, a marriage manual and a few self-help books, an Encyclopaedia Britannica with an entry for the Austro-Hungarian Empire that he had plagiarized for school, a Riverside Shakespeare, gilt and bound in red leather—a gift from Simon Bell. The stretcher passed with his mother on it, her hair thick and wild on the pillow, a pencil line of blood drawn from her nose. The bulky woman held aloft a plastic bag.

“We’re losing her, Willie,” she said.

“Where’s your father, son?” A black policeman had come up the stairs. He had taken off his hat and was looking at Luke with kind, gold eyes.

“It’s sure as hell not him,” Luke said, looking down at Simon, who had come to stand in his bathrobe in the hallway below, gazing up with his hand on his forehead, above his melancholy face.

“No, he’s your tenant,” said the cop, reaching out a soft hand. “He called 9-1-1. Your dad is Lucius Burling Jr. What happened here?”

The cop was looking at the burned-up chair in the corner.

“My mother smokes,” Luke told him.

The cop reached out gently. “Why not we put this away now?”

Luke felt the pages close on his thumb, the heavy red volume being removed from his hands.

when the stewardess came to clear his tray, burling felt the plane descending. Beneath the engines spread the slate-colored surface of Puget Sound. The sky was draped with low curtains of thin, leaden cloud, and as the wings dipped below them the water flashed like metal. The plane leveled across a neighborhood of boarded-up bungalows, and the wheels gained the runway in a clamor of rubber. When the pilot had parked at the gate, Burling elected to stretch his legs in the terminal and try to reach his consulate in Shanghai.

The airport was an antiseptic, transient place, and all the kitsch in the world couldn’t hide it. There was take-out sushi because this was supposed to be a gateway to the East, and souvenirs of the type sold in every airport terminal: T-shirts and key chains and life trapped in pieces of plastic. By an escalator a cube of glass held the ribs of a giant prehistoric animal and its fossilized scat.

“You wanted us to act all the time like we were in some kind of traveling exhibit,” Luke had said to him once, home from college. His long hair was dirty blond and his eyes were like rivets, set in liquid irises that were startlingly blue. He was taking a course on the history of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, which his father had apparently caused. It was a phase during which Burling wondered just how far his son’s experiment with drugs had taken him, into what realm of madness and bogus chautauqua, and before he discovered photography, the medium that would channel his watchfulness into something around which he could arrange a kind of life. “Like an American family behind glass. Here you have Elizabeth, holed up in her room with Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. Here you have Mother, drinking, writing O’Neill plays about the ambassador’s murder by communist thugs. And here you have Father . . . but wait a minute, where is Father? That, boys and girls, is the most interesting aspect of our exhibit. No Father.”

Burling found a quiet corner behind a Wolfgang Puck cart and took out his mobile phone, newly purchased during his leave. A few steps away he could hear a businessman, also on a cell, telling his secretary what a hectic day it had been. Some people lived to display themselves, others wanted to hide. As he punched in the number, he tried to remember how he’d wanted to approach the call. His mind felt poorly arranged. Punching in the number of the consulate, he thought of asking for Mike Ryan, MacAllister’s young station chief, but he wouldn’t know anything about Yong anyway, and if he did, Burling would have a hard time not arousing his suspicion. The whole business made him slightly dizzy—he wasn’t used to Beltway intrigue anymore—and taking MacAllister at his word made him feel like a fool. In the end, he decided on asking for Charlotte, more than anything because he wanted to hear her voice, but she wasn’t at her desk.

“She has been out in Nanjing all week, Mr. Burling,” the native receptionist told him. “She is supposed to return here today.”

“Is Ryan in?”

“A moment, sir, please.”

The line hung somewhere in space. He must remember how easy it would be to listen in.

“Ryan.”

“Mike, hi, it’s Lucius. Anything happening there?”

Ryan’s chair squeaked in the background, and Burling wondered if he’d sounded alarmed.

“The dam project, what else?” Ryan had on his serious tone of complaint. “I got so many environmentalists sending me letters, I feel like a freaking congressman.” The Bronx slipped into Ryan’s voice. “You on your way back?”

“A third of the way. I have a night in Tokyo at the Imperial, then a stop in Beijing to meet with Ambassador Wardlow. Dennis gets about as nervous as the Chinese every time June 4th rolls around.”

Ryan’s murmur sounded vaguely affirmative, and Burling wondered for the hundredth time what Ryan did in the way of intelligence work. Every week, Burling saw him heading out for his lunches or racquetball with movers and shakers from the growing number of joint ventures in town—the Volkswagen factory, the German power conglomerate, McDonnell-Douglas—but all things considered, China was still a developing country, with the Bomb and a million-man army but little in the way of intelligence-gathering services. Without its nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union had been like Brazil, but at least the Soviets had been good at the game. The People’s Republic was just a barnyard of bureaucrats showing their plumage. Burling didn’t believe in industrial espionage.

“He wants to tap your expertise,” Ryan told him.

“Uh-uh. Speaking of experts, I ran into an old friend of yours in Washington yesterday. Chuck Byrd,” said Burling, using MacAllister’s work name. “He asked after you.”

Ryan must have known Burling was fishing, but he didn’t miss a beat. These second-generation believers in America didn’t harbor any doubts. “I haven’t spoken to Chuck directly in a while. He must be nearing retirement.”

“I don’t think the word is in his vocabulary, frankly. He wanted me to play tennis, but I told him my elbow was bad. Maybe you and I could have a warm-up game so next time that I’m home . . .”

“You know what somebody told me about Chuck, Lucius?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“That you saved his life in Africa. Went over a few heads to do it.”

“That’s true,” Burling said. If saving him meant revealing the extent of their operations in Angola, the Agency had been willing to leave MacAllister to die. “It wasn’t really my thing, but I went over there and found the village and brought him home.”

“He should take it easy on you, then.”

“Huh! You don’t know the man. He was always brutally competitive, and Africa didn’t change him a bit. If anything, as soon as he recovered, it made him more of a terror on the court.”

“Charlotte doesn’t play, does she?”

Burling swallowed, looking up at the trestles supporting the terminal’s roof. “Yes, she does,” he said to Ryan, “very well, as a matter of fact. There’s a fine clay court at the Residence, you know.”

“She’ll have to tear herself away from her friends in Nanjing.”

“How’s that?”