The Shanghai Factor (5 page)

“Mr. Polly” turned out to be a homophone, a polygraph operator carrying his magic machine, an Apple laptop. He went through the whole rigmarole of recognition phrase, phony name (“Ed”), all the while semaphoring that he knew things I could never know. He wore a necktie on a Saturday, along with a glen plaid suit that didn’t fit around the neck or shoulders and was too tight across the stomach. He sent me into the next room while he set up his apparatus. When I came back, the window shades had been drawn, the lights extinguished. He sat behind me, so I couldn’t see his face or his gear.

Being polygraphed (“boxed,” in the jargon) is a mixed experience—part Frankenstinian medical exam, part simulated torture, part mesmerism, part fraternity initiation. It bothers most people, which may reflect the truth in the cliché that everybody has something to hide. This was certainly true of me, since I was sure this whole exercise was about Mei, my chief guilty secret. Otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, I was clean. I had never stolen anything or cheated on a wife or sold out to the enemies of my country or felt sexual guilt or believed in God, so they could ask me about anything but my Chinese lover without making the needles jump. I thought that the best thing to do was to think of something besides Mei. I thought about combat—not a good choice, apparently. The polygraph examination went on somewhat longer than usual while Mr. Polly asked his mindless questions.

When the ritual was over, I didn’t remember a single thing he had asked me. After he packed up his equipment—it seemed to be okay for me to look at the forbidden object now that it knew my secrets—he handed me a manila envelope, sealed with a two-inch strip of Scotch tape that an enemy agent could have peeled and then resealed without leaving a trace. “Memorize, burn, and flush,” he said. “You leave first. I’ll lock up.”

I walked for a while through the unpeopled neighborhood, then sat down on a bus-stop bench and opened the envelope. It contained a typed note that gave me a phone number to call at precisely 0743 EDT the next morning, a confirmed reservation in a cover name at a motel in Rosslyn, a Visa card in a name that matched the one on the reservation, a cell phone, and twenty crisp new fifty-dollar bills.

6

At 0743 the next morning I dialed the number. A man answered on the first ring and instead of saying hello, recited the number back to me in regulation style. I knew this was the routine, but wondered,
Now what?
He then gave me the same recognition phrase Sally had used. I supplied the response. He said, “Be out front at eight-thirty reading the
Wall Street Journal.”
Click.

The driver of the mud-splashed Chevy that picked me up took me to Headquarters. The destination surprised me. I was not asked for ID at the gate, a good thing because I had none—no plastic card with photo and hieroglyphics to hang around my neck, no nothing. Undocs—undocumented agents like me—never carry official ID. This absence of proof that they’re up to no good is their protection. Otherwise, they are warned, they’re on their own. If they get themselves into trouble, they’ll get no help. If they do well, they’ll get no thanks. That formula is, of course, catnip to romantics.

I was dropped at a side entrance where Sally the redhead awaited. Unsmiling, wordless, not quite frowning but by no means aglow, she led me to an elevator. There were no numbers on the buttons. She pressed one of them—no wedding band today—and up we went. We debouched into a brightly lit corridor and then turned left, walking past color-coded doors, Sally in the lead. No one had ever told me what the colors indicated. I still don’t know. Sally walked rapidly, heels drumming. I checked her out as a matter of course. She was whippet-thin as was the American style, but after eighteen months of ogling Chinese bottoms, hers seemed broad. She knocked on an unmarked door, opened it, and stepped aside. I walked in and found myself in a space the size of the inside of a small house with the interior walls removed. This vast room was windowless but brightly lighted by buzzing fluorescent ceiling fixtures. Government gray file-cabinet safes lined the walls. Other safes were piled on top of them, smaller ones on top of those. Rolling ladders of the kind used in libraries stood in the narrow aisles. I tried to calculate the collective weight of the safes and failed, but wondered why they had not long since plunged through the concrete floor and onto the heads of the bureaucrats in the offices below. I saw no sign, smelled no odor of human occupancy. The possibility that Sally had locked the door behind me passed through my mind.

Then, as if from very far away, a deep resonant actorish voice—you could imagine it singing “Old Man River” at a class reunion in the old frat house—called out, “This way.”

I stepped farther into the room and saw at its far end a desk at which a man was seated. He was gray of hair and skin. He was bony, even skeletal. His skull was unusually large, with a sloping forehead. He wore horn-rimmed reading glasses with round lenses. He was in his shirtsleeves: red-striped shirt with a white collar and cuffs, bow tie. He wore a steel watch and on his right hand, a class ring. A single thick file folder rested at the exact center of his desk blotter. I assumed that this was my own file, plucked for the occasion from among thousands stored in the safes. Otherwise the desk was bare except for a very bright halogen lamp. No pictures of the wife and kids, no cup of pencils and pens, no appointments pad, no coffee cup—not even the smell of coffee, the signature aroma of American offices. Behind him, on the only segment of wall that was clear of safes, hung portraits in oils of old men I recognized as former directors of the organization.

A single chair stood in front of his desk. In the vestiges of a southern accent, he said, “Please. Sit down.”

I did as commanded and almost slid out of the chair. Gripping the seat, I leaned over and looked at the chair legs. The front legs had been sawed off so they were a couple of inches shorter than the back legs.

The man at the desk noted my scrutiny and said, “You are a student of details, I see. Good.”

I held my tongue. I was finding it surprisingly difficult not to slide out of the chair. The seat seemed to be waxed. You had to think every minute about keeping your backside in place. This made full concentration on anything else difficult. It was petty, a schoolboy prank, ridiculous. But effective. I realized who this man was. He could only be Luther R. Burbank, Headquarters’s head of counterintelligence.

He opened the file, a surprisingly thick one for a small fish like me, and studied it for a long moment, as if absorbed in a novel. At length he looked up—or rather, looked over my left shoulder, and said, “We don’t know much about you—yet.” His voice, so like a tuba, fell strangely on the ear.

After Steve, after Sally, after Mr. Polly, after all the others except the plump, apparently sane Chinese gentleman I met at the safe house, I really had had enough of this nonsense. I said, “Then tell me please what else you want to know. That might save you some time.”

As if a joystick had been manipulated, his eyes swiveled from his mountain of safes to the view over my other shoulder. He said, “I think you misunderstand the situation.”

“In that case I’m eager to be enlightened, sir.”

“No need to call me sir,” Burbank said. “A simple ‘you’ will do. Relax. I’m interested in you, not suspicious of you.”

He lifted his eyes as if to catch my reaction.

Burbank riffled the pages of my file. I expected him to ask me about my swim in the Yangtze, to be hungry for details about this bizarre happening. Instead, he said, “You’re not exactly a stranger to me. I knew your father at school. Fine mind, excellent athlete. Great quarterback. All everything in track, scratch golfer, did you know?”

“I don’t remember him mentioning it.”

A smile. “He wouldn’t, of course. Modesty was his style. Must have kept him busy. Handsome devil, gift of gab. Handy with the girls. His death must have been difficult for you. You were how old?”

“Eight and a half. I hardly knew him.”

“Meaning?”

“I seldom saw him. He worked at the office all day and well into the night and played golf on weekends.”

“You resented that?”

“No. He was the same as everybody else’s father, he took the train before I got up, came home after I was asleep. His death was just another absence. My mother wasn’t broken up about it. She remarried a year and a day afterward.”

“What did you think of that?”

“I was fine with it. My stepfather was a nice guy.”

“You look like your father. Taller.”

“So I’m told. You knew him well?”

“From a distance. We were classmates, but we were in different categories at school—captain of the team, member of the poetry club. There were no Hessians in those days, and even if there had been they’d have been no competition for him.”

Ah, so he knew about my downfall as a starter on the prep school eleven. This was inside dope indeed. He was letting me know he knew a lot more about me than I thought. His school was my school, too, and he was listed as a trustee on the masthead of their begging letters, so he would have been privy to the gossip. My file contained a lot of details. Knowing only the little that I already knew about files, I wondered how much of it was true. By the time our interview was over, I had a better idea. Maybe half of his data were more or less accurate—a surprisingly large proportion, as these rough drafts of reality go. At bottom, a full field investigation is a compendium of gossip, a way of seeing some hapless person as many unnamed others see him. Having heard what they have to say, what to believe? What to doubt? Burbank’s snoops had covered the waterfront—my marks in school and college, eight or nine of the girls I had known as Adam knew Eve and one I had impregnated at sixteen in one of the many scrapes my stepfather got me out of with a last-minute five hundred in cash; my male friends, teachers both hostile and fond (mostly hostile), military service, what I read, what my politics were assumed to be, where I hung out, who I hung out with, what I drank, what I smoked, what I tended to say in the candor of intoxication. This had been a far broader and deeper investigation than the standard background check, which hardly ever turns up anything that is worth spit on the sidewalk. Evidently Burbank
was
interested in me, probably because he was so interested in my dead father. I assumed he had flown me back from Shanghai with the intention of telling me something that would knock my socks off. But what? Fire me, hire me, see what I had to spill? I picked up no hints. He played his cards close to his vest—the effect would have been comical had he been somebody else—under the pretence that he was not Torquemada and all this Q & A was just a conversation between two guys who had everything in common except age and wisdom.

“You went to college on a ROTC scholarship,” Burbank said at one point. “Why was that? How did you do it? There was no ROTC program at your university.”

“I got up early on certain days and put on my uniform and drove to the state university for class and drill.”

“Why go to all that trouble?”

“There was no reason my stepfather should have to pay my tuition.”

“You didn’t really want to be an army officer?”

“Actually, I wanted to go to West Point. Didn’t make it.”

“Interesting. Not many Old Blues go in for the military life. How did your stepfather take your decision?”

“Stoically. It saved him a lot of money, and he had no reason to care where I went to college, so why would he be disappointed?”

“Well, in its way it was a rejection. He’d raised you. He liked you. He had plenty of money. He expected to pay.”

Really? How would Burbank know? He had not asked me a question, so again I did not reply even though clearly he expected a rejoinder. When he didn’t get one, he went on as if nothing had happened. He kept up the pretense that we were two preppy old boys chewing the fat—but in fact this was an interrogation. I wished he’d stop demonstrating his omniscience and come to the point. All my life I have hated to be questioned, hated to confide, hated even more to be euchred into pretending to confide.

Burbank said, “Bad luck, your reserve outfit shipping out so soon after you graduated.”

“That was the understanding. You took the money and if you were deployed you shut up and went where they sent you.”

“Afghanistan in your case.”

Again I sat silent in my trick chair. I was getting a little tired of being told what I was and where and what I had been. At this point in our chat Burbank had assigned any number of admirable qualities to me. Few of them applied. It was like listening to an old queen trying to ingratiate himself with the straight kid sitting next to him at the bar.

He said, “You were wounded.”

“Yes.”

“What were the circumstances?”

“Forgive me,” I said, “but what possible bearing can that have on this discussion?”

Burbank sighed. He was not used to having his patience tried. He said, “I am trying to know you.”

To what purpose? In fact, he was assessing me and we both understood that.

“Then this line of questioning won’t get you home,” I said. “I remember almost nothing about it.”

“I’d be interested in what you do remember.”

“I saw the explosion but didn’t hear it. It was so close I lost consciousness halfway through the first second. My identity dissolved. I went under believing I had been killed. When you wake up in a hospital after a bomb goes off in your face, you think you’re coming back from the dead.”

“You were in the hospital for how long?”

“Seven months.”

“You survived and kept your arms and legs,” Burbank said. “Do you ever wonder why and for what purpose?”

“Blind luck. Zero purpose.”

Burbank looked like he was going to say something, maybe about God’s purposes. He looked the type, and he certainly had the voice for it. He was said to know the Bible by heart. Behind me I heard china rattling. Burbank’s eyes lifted. Sally appeared, carrying a tray on which she balanced two small bowls, a pottery teapot, and a plate covered with a paper napkin. Apparently it was coffee-break time. It was plain that this was not the part of Sally’s job that she enjoyed most, but I didn’t think there was anything sexist about it. No doubt you had to have a top secret code word clearance to enter this room and she was junior, so she was it. She put down the tray and went away.