Tell Me No Lies (2 page)

The thin curve of Catlin's smile told Yi that Catlin was well aware of just how dangerous it was to have been an American in China during the first years of the People's Republic.

Yi smiled widely, quickly, a sign of embarrassment rather than amusement. With a curt "Ah!" he dismissed the years when to be an American in China was to be under a death sentence. "New governments are like children. They must learn," continued Yi. "The People's Republic has learned the value of harmony between distant republics. That is why I am here. The harmony is endangered."

Ghostly fingernails traced Catlin's spine and stirred the tiny hairs along the back of his neck. As both part owner and full-time employee of the Pacific Rim Foundation, his job was to project, predict and advise the foundation's powerful clients on the subject of relations with Asia in general and China in particular. Yet he had heard no rumors, no hints, nothing to indicate that the delicate mutual courtship of the US. and the PRC was faltering.

Yi studied Catlin through a curl of blue-gray smoke. Nothing showed on Catlin's face or in the set of his body. There was no physiological clue as to whether one of America's foremost and least-known experts on Asian affairs was surprised by the blunt statement that there could be a rupture in the tenuous fabric of diplomacy that had been woven so carefully between the two countries.

"Where does the woman fit in?" Catlin asked quietly.

"She is the key in the lock."

"Does she know it?"

"No."

Catlin waited. Only silence came to him, and then more silence. Chen Yi was reluctant to part with more information than he had to. Catlin understood the Chinese's discomfort; it was the nature of secrecy to perpetuate itself.

"Keep talking." Catlin smiled grimly. "The string isn't long enough for fishing yet."

"Will it ever be, Rousseau?" Yi's laughter was a short, harsh sound. In the apartment's restrained light, Catlin's eyes were the color of hammered gold. They offered no comfort, simply understanding.

"My name is Catlin."

"Your name is dragon," muttered Yi, puffing savagely at the last burning length of his cigarette before flinging it into the hearth.

"But I'm your dragon," retorted Catlin, flipping the half coin high into the air, watching the flicker of untarnished metal in the wound. "Or as we say in America – I may be a son of a bitch, but I'm your son of a bitch. For now." He caught the ancient bronze coin easily, looked at it and decided that it was time to rattle Yi's cage just a bit in the hope that unexpected information would fall out. "Will you have some tea, Chen Yi, Comrade Minister of Archaeology, Province of Shaanxi, People's Republic of China?''

If Catlin hadn't been looking for the betraying flicker of Yi's eyelids, he would have missed it.

"How long have you known?" asked Yi.

"Since you asked about Qin bronzes. There are millions of Chens in China, thousands with the name of Chen Yi; but only one of them controls access to the richest archaeological find in human history." Catlin caught the half circle for the last time and slipped it into his pocket with the other half coin he had carried for many years. "Tea?" he asked politely.

Yi hesitated, showing his surprise, silently telling Catlin how disturbed the Chinese was.

"Thank you," said Yi.

"Chinese or English?"

"Do you have lemon peel?"

"Yes."

"English, please. It has been many years…"

Catlin gestured toward a chair that was near the fireplace, which Chen Yi had preempted as an ashtray. In a few minutes Catlin returned with an elegant scarlet-and-gold porcelain teapot and matching cups on a lacquer tray. When Catlin lifted the pot to pour fragrant, steaming tea, a dragon was revealed – sinuous, malevolent, powerful. Savage intelligence gleamed from the dragon's hammered gold eyes.

Yi dropped two sugar cubes and a twist of lemon into his tea. He showed no surprise when Catlin did the same. Using lemon peel rather than juice was customary in the part of Indochina where Catlin had once worked. It was the Asian way of coming to terms with the brutally strong tea that the English preferred. Although Catlin didn't brew his tea until it was the color and consistency of tar, the acquired taste for lemon's piquancy remained.

"Your English is very good," Catlin said matter-of-factly. Despite the odd tonality and staccato delivery that were quintessentially Chinese, Yi's words were easily understood. Nor did he employ the euphemisms, honorifics and circumlocutions that many Chinese used when speaking a second language. There was an unusual flavor to Yi's speech, though. He had an elusive accent and a turn of phrase that was more British or Canadian than American. And yet there was definitely an American flavor to Yi's English, too. Perhaps he had had teachers from more than one country. "Did you attend school in Vancouver before the revolution?"

"Your Chinese is very good, I am told," retorted Yi. "Did you attend school in Beijing?"

"No." Catlin smiled slightly at Yi's riposte. "Not even when it was still called Peking."

"Did you kill many Chinese?" asked Yi without warning. It was an interrogator's trick – the unexpected, deadly question dropped in the midst of neutral chatter.

"Did you spend much time torturing English-speaking prisoners in North Korea?" countered Catlin, his tone uninflected.

Yi and Catlin exchanged impassive stares while tea steamed upward between them like dragon's breath.

"An unhappy past," said Yi finally, touching the fragile rim of the teacup with sensitive fingertips. "It is our duty to see that our governments do not repeat past errors of fear and greed.

"Are we on the verge of doing that?" asked Catlin. "Repeating past errors?"

There was a metallic click, the hiss of flame, then another click as Yi closed the lighter. "Yes."

Catlin was silent for a long time, weighing the urgency that must be driving the outwardly calm Chinese official sitting across from him and sipping tea. Yi's bluntness was unusual in the extreme. The Chinese people had lived under gradations of tyranny and despotism for thousands of years. Such governments taught people a hundred ways to say yes and none to say no. Indirection and lying were the very arts of survival, as though the people themselves had to live undercover in their own land. The modern age had been no kinder to the Chinese. First the West humiliated them, then followed the horrors of civil war and a political fervor indistinguishable from religious ecstasy.

Unfortunately, ecstasy made lousy economics. Twenty million Chinese starved while Mao found his feet as a leader.

When his feet began slipping again, millions more Chinese were uprooted, displaced and disgraced in the Cultural Revolution. Ecstasy continued to make lousy economics. When the fervor burned to ash, the survivors blinked and looked around. The specter of fiscal ruin blinked and looked back. Deng Xiaoping stepped into leadership, bringing with him very delicate murmurings of rewards based on work rather than need.

Capitalism, in a word.

The word was never used except by enemies of Deng Xiaoping. The flirtation with capitalist heresy continued, encouraged by the sudden spurt in output from farm plots "owned" by peasant families. The courtship broadened as American and Canadian business advisers were invited to the People's Republic to teach the fine art of making money while paying lip service to the spinning ghost of Mao. With each new factory, with each new commune in which peasants earned profits as well as food for their cooking pots, the relationship between the U.S. and the People's Republic deepened into one that had the potential for becoming a fine and enduring marriage of mutual interests: China's entry into the twentieth century's technological sweepstakes; and the West's entry into a market that comprised one-quarter of the population of earth.

There was no public announcement of connubial bliss between America and China, simply a gradual withdrawal of running-dogs-of-capitalism rhetoric. Chinese Communists sat down to dinner with Western capitalists, and all participants used long spoons, for wise men knew there was no other way to sup with the Devil from a communal pot. It was an interesting meal all around, one that gave promise of fattening the participants.

"Who's pissing in the soup?" asked Catlin.

Yi looked utterly blank. "Please?" he asked, jarred from his nearly perfect command of English.

"An idiom," said Catlin with a hard smile. "It means to ruin things for everyone, including yourself."

"Ah! So! Pissing in the soup." Yi grinned. "Very good. Thank you. That I will remember.''

Catlin had no doubt Yi would remember. At an age when most Americans were embracing the precarious salvation of Social Security, Yi was still expanding his own grasp of the increasingly complex world around him.

"I do not know who is pissing in the soup. Ah! I do know that piss is present in my bowl. The smell is very bright."

"Strong," Catlin said automatically.

"Strong. Ah." Yi murmured an apology. "It has been many years since I speak English with an American. Very difficult."

"You speak better English than nine-tenths of the natives do," said Catlin quietly, "but if it tires you, we could try Mandarin, French or Cantonese instead."

"Or Vietnamese?" asked Yi, his voice bland and his eyes impenetrable.

"Or Vietnamese," agreed Catlin, not bothering to conceal his background for the simple reason that if Yi knew he was Rousseau. Yi knew that Catlin spoke Vietnamese as well as the other languages. It had been his gift for languages that had gotten him into covert operations in the first place. Not for the first time in his life, Catlin was grateful that his mother was French, rather than, say, Russian. Siberia was not a place that intrigued him. He would take Saigon's steamy heat any day.

Catlin took a sip of his tea, giving Yi a chance to gather his thoughts. It was the type of politeness that Chinese expected and rarely received from people raised in Western cultures. Yi noted the gesture and felt himself warming slightly toward the man who had once been China's foe, and might become so again if the Four Modernizations of Deng Xiaoping were undermined by enemies within and without the country.

Yi discarded a glowing stub of tobacco, lit a new cigarette and began to speak in staccato phrases about modern treachery and ancient Chinese bronzes. It was clear that he was once more in control of himself and the English language.

"Did you know that there is buried at Xi'an a bronze army that surpasses in artistry the famous terra cotta army of Emperor Qin Shih-huang-di?" asked Yi.

"I've heard a few rumors." What Catlin didn't say was that even though Rousseau's "death" had forced him to stop collecting bronzes, he still collected information from many of the old sources. "I didn't know that you had started excavations."

"We have not. We sank trial shafts to discover the extent and content of the find, then sealed the shafts."

"Why?"

"We should not gulp knowledge like starving dogs at their first meal," said Yi.

Catlin smiled cynically. "And then there's the fact that when the public tires of one archaeological circus, there will be a new one to take its place," Catlin said. "Handled correctly, the finds at Xi'an will be a balm to China's wounded pride for decades to come. All the world will look at the People's Republic in continually renewed wonder at Qin's accomplishments. China will be seen as the center of the civilized universe." Catlin took a sip of tea and continued, "By the time you've milked the finds at Xi'an, the People's Republic might have managed to pull its science and technology into the twentieth century. With that achieved, you can forget the humiliations of the nineteenth century and take your place as first among equals in the councils of the powerful. Once again, you will have great face in the world."

Yi swallowed smoke and said nothing for a moment. "You should have been born Chinese. Ah! Without doubt, you would have been one of our great Legalists."

Catlin laughed softly at the double-edged compliment. When it came to pragmatism, the Chinese Legalists could have given lessons to Genghis Khan and Machiavelli combined. In silence Catlin waited for Yi to continue, sensing that whatever was said next would cost Yi some of his precious store of face.

"It has come to me that some of Qin's bronze army have found their way from darkness to light," said Yi. "American light. Have you heard this?"

"No, but it wouldn't surprise me. If the bronzes have half the quality of the terra cotta, collectors would quite literally kill for them."

"The bronzes are – " Yi's voice dropped. "There are no words," he said softly. "No words." He drew in smoke sharply. "Xi'an is the soul of China. I believe someone is selling it to America." Yi looked narrowly at the big black-haired man sitting so easily across the hearth from him, like a dragon at rest, confident of his own power. But there was no peace in those amber eyes, only intelligence. "Can you imagine what would happen if Deng's enemies could point to a looted Xi'an and say, 'See what capitalism does? It blackens the face of China! They treat us as lackeys and dogs. We have no face!'''

Catlin set down his cup very carefully. He could imagine all too easily how an illicit traffic in Qin bronzes could be used in the lethal internal propaganda battles that characterized political disputes in the People's Republic of China. Deng's careful, discreet, determined courtship of a non-Communist economy would be the first casualty. Deng himself would be the second. America's hope of peaceful relations with China would be the third. It was extremely doubtful that the next Chinese leader would be open to anything but hostility with the West.

"You said that you thought Qin bronzes were being smuggled out. Aren't you certain?" asked Catlin.

The cigarette burned brightly, then dulled. Yi brushed a fallen ash onto the floor. "No. Grave robbers could be at work even as we speak and we would not know until the time came to excavate and we discovered that thieves had preceded us. Mount Li is huge. It is impossible to guard everywhere against tunnels dug in the night and concealed in the day. Ah!" Yi sucked in smoke with a harsh sound. "I have seen no evidence of stolen bronzes. I have heard only rumors."