Ministers of Fire: A Novel

Book Three

book three 217 Y ong and lindstrom got to shanghai on an afternoon train, riding in the hard-seat compartment with a nation of grandmothers, babies, and young men in blue shirts and sports jackets, come to the city for work. The passengers shared around pork buns and tea. As they climbed down onto the clean station platform, Lindstrom felt sorry to be parting from them. To pass the time as the crowded car rolled down the swollen river valleys to the coast, he had entertained a fantasy of staying in China forever. From the station, they walked across wide streets and a barren park to the address that Yong had been given, in a neighborhood of buildings that reminded Lindstrom of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The apartment, which belonged to a woman named Mei, had been in her family for many years. She had grown up there during the Cultural Revolution, when her father was denounced as a descendant of landlords, touching off a spiral of trouble at her school. When Yong and Lindstrom arrived, she was starting the dinner fire in the small, dark kitchen off the hall. At first she didn’t seem pleased to have them there, but Lindstrom chalked it up to fear. She made them dinner and told them of three times and places where Lindstrom was supposed to go for further instructions. 218 m a r k h a r r i l s a u n d e r s The first meeting point, where Lindstrom went in the morning, was the No. 1 Department Store. He loitered in Ladies’ Garments for an hour, affecting nervous indecision and a stutter before buying a printed scarf. Mei had said that the woman he was supposed to meet worked at the American consulate, which meant for Burling , and when she failed to show, Lindstrom walked the mile to the old French Concession, where the American compound was. He watched both entrances for several hours—the pedestrian gate to the office building, the vehicle gate to the residence next door, watched over by a black marine. The little house in which the man stood guard was the prefabricated kind, bolted together from aluminum studs and thick plates of smoked glass; the pieces could be brought from the States in a transport plane and carried to location on the back of a truck. An identical one had stood by the entrance to the embassy in Kabul, and Lindstrom, who had befriended the marines there, having just got out of the service, knew the security equipment that the guardhouse employed. In the first three hours that he watched the consulate, only some Chinese staff and a thirtyish man in horn-rims carrying a racquetball bag went in or out. At one o’clock Lindstrom left his place on the bus bench and walked the perimeter of the compound, looking for a breach in the high stone wall. Barbed wire was visible, but there were probably shards of glass too, stuck in the mortar by whatever nervous Frenchman had built the estate. On the street behind, he found an elementary school with some playground equipment placed conveniently close to the parapet. Along the upstairs porch of the school building, a class of young children—he had never been good at their ages—the little boys dressed in sweatpants and white shirts, the girls in frilly, short dresses, werebeingledbytheirteacherinacourseofcalisthenics.Oneboykept leaving the line and doing what looked like a modified break dance to the end of the veranda. A future Yong, Lindstrom thought. As he rounded the block by the loading dock, the familiar construction reminded him of a feature of the embassy in Kabul. When the U.S. built a diplomatic compound, usually adding an office building on the grounds of an existing estate, they often dug 219 Ministers of Fire a tunnel for security between the two, which would allow him to access the Residence simply by getting to the loading dock. The number of deliveries and the attitude of the guard at this end would make infiltration relatively easy. Having satisfied himself that he could make a quiet visit to Burling if that became necessary, Lindstrom reconnoitered the Residence guardhouse once more, glancing through the dark glass at the video monitors, and took a different route back across town. the second meeting point was an outdoor exhibit on the margin of Renmin...