Ministers of Fire: A Novel

Book Two

book two 123 Y ong and lindstrom had spent a long night in a stable on the edge of Anhe. Attached by a courtyard to a gray mud-brick house, it stood at a place where the narrow lane from town dropped abruptly down a dirt bank to a thin shelf of refuse, then onto the vast, tilting paddy beyond. In the dark, moist air with the sounds of rats coming up out of the water to worry the trash and roosters crowing to a broken clock, Lindstrom began to feel like an impostor. He had spent so much energy escaping Jack Lindstrom that perhaps he’d become Johnny Tan. When the lady of the house withdrew to her family’s side of the courtyard for the night, Yong read aloud from the Gospel of John, how the two disciples had found Mary by the tomb with the stone rolled back, and thought Christ’s body had been stolen. “When I used to quote this passage to the other men in prison, it often had confusing effects,” Yong said, “because the families would come to take the bodies of our fellow inmates who’d been tortured to death in the fields.” A streetlamp high on a pole outside turned his bare arms the color of a bruise; the scars left by rope were dark pink around his wrists. He told stories from the end of imperial times, the proud recruits of Chiang Kai-shek in Canton, trained as well as any army in 124 m a r k h a r r i l s a u n d e r s the world, and the ragged, indomitable soldiers who had followed Mao Zedong to Yan’an, to Beijing. Lindstrom hadn’t slept well for three nights, and at times he would nod off, with Yong saying something about birds—grackles or starlings who arrived in the rigging of opium ships and had no natural predators in Asia. The black birds from the eaves of the church came to roost in his dreams. When he woke, it was as if Yong had never stopped talking. “Just listen,” he said. “‘My hand grasps the killing power in heaven and earth. Behead the evil ones, spare the just, and ease the people’s sorrow.’ Who does that sound like to you?” Lindstrom roused himself to the dry smell of chickens. The empty windows were framed with fragile light. “Chairman Mao?” Or my Papa, he thought. When it comes to fanatics, what’s the difference in creed? He could barely make out a wry shadow around Yong’s sliver of a mouth. “Wrong.” His giggle was small and unsettling in the gauzy false dawn. “Hong Xuiqan. Messianic leader of the Taiping Rebellion. Younger brother to Jesus Christ. But there’s a lesson in your mistake.” The lightness of his tone made Lindstrom angry. “I’m in no mood for parables, if that’s what you’re after.” Yong looked stunned. “Okay, John,” he said quietly. He was silent then, and the sun rose and slanted through the windows into their eyes, and the chickens trotted out among the bikes and jars in the courtyard, pecking between the cobbles. The old woman in the head scarf shooed them away as she came across with a jug of hot water for tea, and her stooped movements oppressed him with a memory he couldn’t pin down. The tea was green and rotten-smelling, but it quenched his thirst surprisingly well. The room was warming, and the hot drink made them sleepy. Lindstrom unfolded the envelope of crank that he had stowed in his case and licked his finger, scooping out a few crystals and chasing them with the cold dregs of tea. His thoughts began to gather in formation under the authority of the drug, and the Bible verses Yong had read scurried about in his head. For years after his mother had left and his father had moved them up from San Diego, then 125 Ministers of Fire gone to sea, he’d been forced to sit and listen to his grandfather in his windowless room before bed. He’d be reading True Confessions or Argosy and suddenly his grandmother would hurry in, shooing the magazines away with her hands, warning him that the men’s meal was done, the big kitchen was swabbed and the door to the alley below, its...