Tell Me No Lies (48 page)

"Catlin – " Lindsay said urgently, realizing finally where he was going, what he was trying to say.

"No," said Catlin, slicing across Lindsay's cry. "You don't believe me now, but you will. The truth is that you only think you love me. In a few days or weeks you'll come down off the adrenaline high. You'll remember what we said, how we made love to each other, and you'll blush to the soles of your feet. That's when I want you to remember that I understand. I've been there, I've felt all of it before, known it all to the last bittersweet drop."

"It's not true!"

"Lindsay, I know that you think – "

"No!" she said, overriding his words with her husky, urgent voice. "I know what is real and what isn't. I know what is true and what isn't. I love you!''

Catlin closed his eyes and silently condemned the manipulative Chen Yi to the deepest level of hell.

"In a few months," Catlin said, closing his suitcase, punctuating his words with the cold metal sound of locks taking hold, "you'll get past the aftershocks of adrenaline and emotion. You'll understand that you did the best you could with what you had at the time. And you did one hell of a good job, better than Stone and Yi had any right to expect. I want you to know that, Lindsay. It's the simple truth."

Catlin picked up the suitcase and went to the bedroom door. With his hand on the knob, he turned toward Lindsay. The look in his yellow eyes made pain twist through her until she clenched her hands against it, forcing her nails into her own flesh because that hurt less than the bleakness in her lover's eyes.

"Lindsay." His voice was soft, gentle, as desolate as his eyes. "Don't turn away from me if we stumble across each other in Washington. When you remember me, if you remember me, don't ever be ashamed. You're the most woman I've ever known."

He shut the door behind him, trying to close out the broken cry of her love. But the words were already in his mind, like her voice, haunting him in shades of silver:

"You're wrong, Catlin. My love for you is as real as Qin's charioteer/"

27

Lindsay sat at her desk in the Museum of the Asias, staring at her hands as though if she just looked hard enough she would see through the present to the future and the end of her longing for something she could not have. She knew that the end of pain had to be in the future, somewhere, waiting for her; Catlin had promised she would stop hurting and he had never lied to her.

Maybe it would end today. Maybe today she would run into him on Washington's streets. Maybe he was out there right now, somewhere. Did he feel as she did – one half of a mutilated coin, a bird with one wing beating frantically, futilely?

The pungent smell of a Chinese cigarette sliced through Lindsay's thoughts. Her head snapped up and she saw Chen Yi standing in her office doorway.

"I apologize for the intrusion, Miss Danner," said Yi, bowing, "but I will be leaving soon and wanted to see you alone. If you would rather not speak to me, I will understand, I have caused you much grief."

Lindsay smiled sadly. "I was warned. I volunteered any way. I don't hold grudges, Mr. Chen.''

"You are very generous, daughter," said Yi. "If I may call you that?"

"You honor me," Lindsay said, but her expression tightened as she thought of the other man who had called her daughter. Hsiang Wu, the man she had betrayed. She stood up.

"Please come in. Have you time for tea? With lemon," she added, remembering.

"Tea would be very welcome."

"Excuse me," Lindsay said. "I'll only be a moment."

The first thing Yi saw as he looked around Lindsay's office was a display case holding an ancient bronze rice bowl with a long diagonal scar. He stood before the bronze, absorbed in it, not looking away until Lindsay returned with a pot of fragrant tea and set it on a low table in front of a couch.

"You are a woman of subtlety as well as generosity," Yi said as he turned around.

Startled, Lindsay glanced up from the tea she was pouring.

"The scarred bowl," explained Yi. "It is China. Ah!"

He sat, accepting both the tea and the ashtray she offered him. She settled back into cushions that were covered with an Oriental design of golden bamboo against a black sky.

"I'm glad that you came to see me," Lindsay said. "I wanted to thank you, but I had no way of getting in touch."

"You wished to thank me?" asked Yi, his thin, graying eyebrows raised in surprise.

"For Hsiang Wu," she said simply. "I was his daughter, yet I betrayed him. You could have named him as a conspirator. He is your enemy, yet you protected him."

"You are wondering why."

Lindsay sighed. "I'm wondering about a lot of things, but I don't expect any answers."

"The answer to Mr. Hsiang is both as complex and as simple as that bowl," Yi said, leaving a signature of smoke as he gestured toward the scarred bronze. "If you have the time, I will be honored to explain."

"Oh, I have the time." Lindsay's mouth turned down slightly. "Nothing but time and time and time."

Yi saw the new lines on Lindsay's face, the subtle changes. She was more slender. Her skin was pale, almost translucent against the burnished wheat color of her blouse. Her cheekbones were more pronounced, as were her eyes. Their indigo clarity seemed different, darker than before.

"China has not used you well, daughter." Yi sighed and tossed his cigarette into the ashtray to smolder. "China uses few of her children well, but they endure, anyway. Perhaps that is her gift to them."

"And her curse."

"Ah! I hear your father speaking, but the voice is your mother's."

"You knew my parents?" Lindsay asked, startled.

"Your mother saved my life and the life of my eldest son. You would have been about three at the time."

Lindsay's eyes widened. She wanted to ask questions, but Yi was still talking. His words were unusually quick, as though he had much to say and only moments in which to speak.

"Neither my son nor I was Christian. This mattered not at all to your mother. We were human, and in pain. That was all she saw, all that mattered to her." Yi's head bent as his lighter snapped open. He drew hard on the cigarette, making flame leap.

"You learned your generosity from her," Yi said, exhaling a veil of smoke and watching Lindsay through it. "Your courage is your father's. A formidable combination."

Lindsay shook her head helplessly, feeling about as formidable as a one-winged bird. The past was a turmoil of intrigue and lies and memories as vivid as wind-driven fire. Each new realization changed the shape of the flames, of the past, changed her memories, changed the way she saw the present. She had always thought of the past as static. She knew now that it was not. The past was a fire burning, changing with each breath of new knowledge, each shifting wind of understanding.

There was silence while Yi watched smoke and his own memories writhe, changing. The moment and the memories passed, and Yi's soft, staccato voice picked apart the silence.

"Throughout China's history, one thing has sustained both the people and the country: family. No matter who governed or whether no one governed at all, the generations of Chinese lives were interwoven like silk brocade," Yi said. "Daughters left their families to become part of the continuation of other families. Each son brought home a wife to bear his own family's next generation. The wisdom of the elders instructed the children and grandchildren. The strength of the parents fed and sheltered the generation that bore them and the generation that came after them, and so it was through the thousands of years. The cloth of Chinese history thus created had the strength, resilience and beauty of silk itself. That cloth is no more. Ah!"

Yi exhaled, watching Lindsay. She was motionless, listening, waiting. He nodded curtly, acknowledging her attention.

"Where there were once five children, or ten, there is now only one or sometimes two," Yi continued. "Where sons once lived with parents, now a wife and a husband live alone. A single grandchild is shared among four family-hungry grandparents. A single child grows alone, never sharing, never learning the needs of others.

"The government tries to fill rooms emptied of the extended family. We care for the sick. We feed the poor. We punish the evil. We reward the earnest." Yi sighed a stream of smoke into the air. "It is not enough. When the child's parents die, so does the child's history. There is no fabric of interlocking generations. There is no continuity."

Lindsay remembered how she had felt at her mother's death – all those years lost, no one to ask or answer questions, no one who had survived her own childhood years to share them with her.

"You have filled your emptiness with art," Yi said. "It is your history. It is your continuity. You can weave yourself into art's elaborate, elegant brocade and know yourself to be part of humanity and history. Ah!" Yi's cigarette glowed twice, quickly. "Most people are not like you. They cannot fill their own empty rooms."

He looked at the burning end of tobacco and thought of his own diminished grandchildren, his own history ending. He grunted and continued speaking quickly, almost curtly.

"Yet China has no alternative except to weave a new fabric. If we don't shrink our population, we will spend our greatness scrambling to feed more and more mouths with less and less food. If we are to survive, we Chinese must take from the West the same thing that we have taken from all our conquerors throughout history – that which made the conquerors strong. In the West, it is technology. Technology requires nuclear families. Thus the West has become what it is today, what China must become tomorrow."

Yi looked at Lindsay's dark blue eyes watching him and remembered other eyes, a woman's hair like a golden river, her voice dreaming in shades of silver.

"Mao tried to compensate for industrialization by making government what the family had been – the central fact of Chinese life," Yi continued softly. "He failed. Rigid ideology made us weaker rather than stronger. Yet the Chinese people must have something in which to believe, something which has preceded their births and which will continue after their deaths. The West already had it."

He looked at Lindsay and smiled, seeing her curiosity. "Religion, daughter. China has invented many things, but a religion was not among them. We had our extended family to explain our origin and place in life, to sustain our bodies and to care for our souls in the afterlife. We did not need God, so we did not invent him. Ah!"

Yi tossed his cigarette into the ashtray. Smoke rose in a thin, straight column until Lindsay stirred, creating currents in the air.

"After I realized that religion was necessary in the absence of the extended Chinese family," continued Yi, "I tried to discover which religion would be best suited to China's culture, history and future. I rejected the Eastern religions for the simple reason that they had neither encouraged nor permitted the habits of intellect that led to the development of modern technology. Islam was discarded for the same reason. Atheism has a personal appeal, but it is a luxury China cannot yet afford. Technology permits atheism, rather than vice versa."

Yi drank tea, sighed and set aside his cup. "In the end, there was only Christianity. It has been flexible enough to survive the drastic social dislocations of the modern age without demanding fanaticism in its followers. It can and does coexist with many forms of government and culture. It is capable of rapid change without losing its central reality. It is, in essence, the religion of industrialization."

Yi's lighter clicked open, flame hissed and the lighter snapped shut again. He inhaled sharply. "I saved Hsiang Wu because he is Chinese and Christian and we will need his kind if we are to survive the loss of the extended family and the gain of technology and still retain our identity as Men of Han." Through veils of smoke, Yi smiled. "Does it offend you, daughter, that I support Christianity for reasons of state rather than reasons of spirit?"

"I think Christianity is protean enough to accommodate even you," Lindsay said dryly.

"Protean? Please explain."

"Flexible, resilient, able to shape itself to almost any situation without losing identity."

"Ah! Protean. Exactly. That I will remember."

Yi sipped his tea with enough noise to tell Lindsay that the brew was appreciated, but not enough to offend her Western sensibilities. When he looked up, Lindsay tensed subtly, sensing that the true purpose of his visit was about to be revealed.

"I also saved Hsiang Wu because I owed a debt to the family of Danner, a debt that grew greater when I could not save your other uncle, Mark Danner."

Lindsay froze.

Yi's black eyes narrowed. He nodded curtly. "An unhappy story," he said. "Do you still have nightmares?"

"If I do, I don't awaken." Then Lindsay realized that Yi could only have found out about her nightmares from Catlin. "He told you."

"The dragon and I talked of many things – Christianity and Hsiang Wu, half of a coin and a faithless woman, Qin's charioteer and truth, golden rivers and shades of silver, birds with one wing." Yi sighed. He puffed on his cigarette, coughed dryly, sipped tea and continued. "He protected you well, daughter. He earned back his half of the coin. His debt to the Chen family is fully repaid."

"You hired Catlin to protect me?" Lindsay asked, trying to follow Yi's conversation. "But he said he wasn't your man!"

"That is true. He was not my man. One may strike a bargain with dragons, but one never owns them." The end of Yi's cigarette glowed fiercely. "It is a matter of face. I asked that Catlin protect you until Qin's charioteer was found. He agreed." Yi flicked ash on the edge of the crystal ashtray. "He protected you with the power one expects of a dragon, and with the subtlety. What was unexpected was his compassion. He protected you even from himself. He wanted to keep you, daughter. He wanted that very badly."

Lindsay's only answer was a deepening of the tension in her body as her throat closed around unshed tears.

"Ah!" grunted Yi, seeing the words Lindsay wouldn't speak in the lines of pain bracketing her mouth. He started to say something, then smoked in silence for a time instead.

"Know this," Yi said finally, expelling a stream of smoke. "When you next apply for permission to come to Xi'an, I will take you to an underground room where a magnificent bronze army stands guard over an emperor long dead. You may live amid this army for as long as you like. You may drink China's greatness until your soul overflows and you forget for a time that you are a bird with only one wing, a bird that once knew what it was to join bodies and fly as birds were meant to fly, two wings and two lives soaring."

Lindsay tried to speak, but couldn't. Nor could she bear to remember how it had been to be a bird with two wings. So she thought only of the superb charioteer she had denounced as a fraud. To stand among such bronzes, to touch them, to see China's soul marching across time toward her, surrounding her…

"Thank you," she said, her voice husky. "It's more than I deserve."

"It is far less. I would have given Qin's charioteer to you if I could have," Yi said simply. "The chance of discovery was too great, however. It was shipped back to China within hours, as were Zhu, Pao and their battered but living soldiers." He smiled grimly. "Ah!"

The phone rang, startling Lindsay. Yi came to his feet with a grace surprising in a man his age.

"I have kept you long enough," he said. "I will see you in Xi'an?"

"You don't have to leave," said Lindsay, rising. She ignored the phone. "It's probably just our old friend Bradford Stone with a new round of pictures for me to look at. He still hopes to uncover the Taiwanese intelligence agent. I still refuse to name Hsiang Wu."

The phone rang again.

"Mr. Stone's persistence has finally been rewarded," Yi said blandly. "Just yesterday Catlin identified a photo of a smuggler as the man who had assisted in the sale of the bronzes. Unfortunately for the FBI, the man had already fled to Taiwan. I do not believe Mr. Stone will be questioning you any further."

The phone rang insistently.