This Is How It Really Sounds (21 page)

At 8:34 the gate opened and Harrington walked out. Light brown hair a little thinner than his pictures. A high forehead. A little bit heavyset, but he looked like he was in decent shape. Moved fairly well. Have to tell the client that. This might turn out to be interesting after all. He wasn't dressed like a businessman. He was wearing a sweatshirt that said Shanghai University and running shorts, and he was carrying a racquet. Just as Zhang's surveillance had said: played squash every morning at nine thirty. Better not to stage it when he had the racquet with him: he'd have a fairly good chance of breaking the client's face with it if the first blow wasn't decisive. Harrington waited there a few seconds, and then, just as he'd expected, the man's driver got out of a black sedan parked nearby. The driver doubled as his bodyguard, an athletic-looking Chinese man in a sport jacket, midthirties. He already knew the bodyguard practiced Hung Gar and carried an expandable baton in a belt holster. Zhang had told him that. He'd have to figure out how to take him out of the picture for fifteen seconds. Charlie snapped a couple of shots with a telephoto lens as they made their way to the car.

They followed him to the health club, arriving at 8:52. Harrington went inside, carrying his gym bag. Charlie noted it in his book. He told his driver to find a parking space: and they went around the block and double-parked down the street. His driver stepped out of the car and lit up a cigarette, leaning against the hood.

He'd get his client his best shot at him. Fine. But he'd need more than that to complete this job. That's where Zhang's other men came in. He wasn't sure how he was going to make it happen. Like a lot of jobs: you made it up as you went along.

He called Pete Harrington on his cell phone.

“We're going out tonight.”

“Cool! Where?”

“I don't know yet, but don't get your hopes up. You'll be staying in the car. I want you to get a good look at this guy so you know what you're up against.”

Harrington sounded disappointed. “You don't think I can take him?”

“You can take him. But I want you to see him first. I want you to set your mind. Did you work out?”

“An hour and a half.”

“Good. That'll help you stay loose. I'm going to try to get next to him tonight and see what I can set up.”

“Got it.”

“Are you still sure you want to go through with this?”

There was a pause. “Yeah. This has to happen.”

“Why?”

The line went silent for a long time before the musician answered. He sounded tense. “I think you know why.” Charlie could interpret that one a lot of ways. He went on, “Once in a while somebody's got to kick the crap out of greed. It's my turn.”

Now Charlie went silent. He didn't know how pure Harrington's motives were. How much of it was kicking the crap out of greed and how much was just to make himself feel like he was still somebody, or to get a better class of girl? Sixty years in the spy business and he knew all about motives: there was the one you admitted to, and then there was its ugly sister, and you always had to take both sisters along on the date. That other Shanghai was coming back at him again. “Well, okay then,” he said at last. “You'll get your chance.”

He hung up and melted back in the seat as a wave of exhaustion rippled through his chest and head. He let his head loll to the side and his gaze drifted out the window to a long wall of beige plaster and, behind it, the top of a Victorian turret, one of the walled mansions that dotted the residential neighborhoods of the French Concession. Slate roof shingles hung above dark exposed eaves. There were the Tudor beams.
Wasn't it…?
He sat up and studied it, and then it seemed as if a bell started ringing in his head. Christ! It was Abe Benjamin's house! He felt like saying it to the driver:
That was Benjamin's house!
Nineteen forty-six. Benjamin and Sassoon sitting there in their jackets and ties in the hot afternoon parlor. The sweat on a glass of gin and tonic. Benjamin, the guy who owned the racetrack. Sassoon, the real-estate magnate. Jews who'd sat out the war in the Bahamas or under Japanese protection, now liquidating their assets and tying up loose ends.
You're in the import-export business, Charlie. We'd like to buy a load of scrap metal.

Not stupid people. They'd made his cover pretty quickly, then let it be known that they'd be interested in buying all those surplus weapons still hanging around the South Pacific.
Gentlemen, do you honestly expect me to believe you want those weapons as scrap?
Sassoon smiling as he gave a little tilt of his head:
Do you expect us to believe you're in the import-export business?
He didn't have the authority to pull that one off, but he hooked them up with Stanton Rogers, and it got hazy after that. He heard rumors later about a load of dismantled tanks being shipped to Tel Aviv.

He closed his eyes. Lots of side deals available back then, but you had to watch your step. It suited him. As much as he'd hated the war, he'd enjoyed it in a strange way. The comradeship, the excitement. He hadn't been ready to go back to the family farm, and Donovan begged him to stay on, offering him a hundred bucks a week and a flat in Shanghai in the days when Truman was starting to have second thoughts about pulling the plug on America's only intelligence service. He was only twenty-two years old, but they must have seen something they liked. Supposedly an import-export broker, he was really there to check out the Communists and see if there was anything to be done with them if they won. That was the start, anyway, making friends with the Commies who were underground and trying to figure out how much loyalty they still had to Uncle Sam for all the nice weapons and explosives he'd given them during the war, most of which they'd stockpiled to fight against Chiang Kai-shek anyway. After the bit with the surplus armaments, other people started bringing him propositions. Mostly off-kilter business deals that traded on his war connections. Not interested. The French wanted to send him back to Indochina to finger some of his old allies. He gave that a pass, too. But the problem of Hermann Maier and his daughter was different. It wasn't business, and it wasn't his job. It had nothing to do with money or rank or prestige. It was something that nobody but a tiny circle of acquaintances would ever know about, and those people wouldn't talk.

He'd been thinking about the Maiers ever since he'd found out that Peter Harrington was living in Shanghai. People he'd put aside for decades. And though he knew it was useless, some part of him couldn't help expecting to walk the Bund and see Vorster, Richter, and Anna Maier, or hear her piano music streaming through the quiet lanes. He felt a moment of deep loneliness. All that was gone now, covered up by the modern, like those buried pyramids in Mexico City that you saw underground when you rode the subway, except now all of Shanghai was that subway, and he was its only passenger.

He was woken up by the sound of his driver opening the car door. The financier was moving again. He noted the time, 10:37
A.M.
, noting it again when they arrived back at Harrington's house, 10:59. Harrington went in, then came out an hour later wearing a business suit, and they followed him from there across the river to Pudong, a new area crowded with modern-looking office towers and condominium stacks. He went into a small Western-style restaurant beneath one of the buildings, a pricey one, judging by the corner location and the wraparound glass walls. This was all so ridiculously easy: he had his binoculars and he could watch the target sit down right next to the window. Charlie noted the address of the building: it was just out of habit, at this point. He was already coming up with a plan. A second man sat down across from Harrington: short and broad, with a sort of belligerent look about him. Probably his partner. With these binoculars he could practically read the menu. “I'll have a black coffee, boys, while you're at it.” He took a picture with the telephoto lens. It sure was good to work again. He hadn't had this much fun since that trip to Panama. The target stayed there an hour and a half, then came out with the short wide guy and talked all the way to the open door of his car. The bodyguard didn't look too alert. An ex-cop, according to Zhang. A glorified driver. Might be fairly competent once things got going, but from the look of him, he wouldn't be spotting it too far out. Which was good. That's all he needed: a head start. The financier shook hands with his lunch companion and then climbed into his car.

Easy life … Play a little squash, have a cup of coffee with your friends. Tinker away at a business deal. No need to work too hard when you're sitting on six or seven hundred million. He knew the type, had done personal protection for some of them. They got bored. This Harrington would have a handful of expensive restaurants he ate at regularly, his favorite nightclubs, where the doorman knew his name. A string of girlfriends. Tonight was Saturday night. Could be a dinner party, could be a restaurant and a couple of clubs. That seemed to be his routine. Zhang had tailed him for a few days and verified that. He liked the Hyatt and a place on the Bund called the Bar Rouge. Not a care in the world. Except when you walk away with six hundred million of other people's money, someone was liable to punch you in the nose someday. Nothing personal: that was just how it was.

They followed Harrington back to his residence. Charlie hadn't intended to sleep, but the jet lag finally overwhelmed all the coffee and he dozed off in the car with his mouth open. Occasionally he would surface again and catch a glimpse of the modern city: the Huangpu River below them as they crossed the bridge, the anonymous doorway of some modern new building. Also, sometimes, the brown brick of the older city, with its dark, ominous skyscrapers only thirty stories tall but more imposing than the new ones that were twice their height. When they got back to Harrington's place, his driver touched him on the shoulder. He noted the time, then took out a piece of spearmint chewing gum to swab away the taste of sleep. The financier went inside. He probably wouldn't come out until around six, for dinner, and the driver could sit on it until then.

Charlie unlatched the car door. “I'm going to stretch my legs. Call me if his driver comes back. If he moves on foot, stay with him and call me.”

His knees were feeling creaky from sitting in the car so long, but at least his foot was behaving itself. Even his back didn't feel too stiff, considering the flight yesterday. He stood next to the car and surveyed the street, erasing its pedestrians and its automobiles, scrubbing away the neon and the posters and the light posts and the noise. He knew where he was now. He could see through all the shiny new businesses to where he really was, not just geographically, but within all the different Shanghais that had stacked up over the course of his life. He was trying to remember how that music sounded.

He started off past a drugstore, glancing in the window at vitamin supplements and crutches, then past a Bank of China and a bakery and a store that sold Tibetan goods.
This one …
He stopped.
This was the French laundry.
Madame Fortier, with the husband that went back to Vichy to visit family and got conscripted by the government. Poor bastard got killed defending the coast on D-day. He walked another half block to a brown brick storefront with an expensive-looking little café in it.
Hapgood's Stationery Store.
He could still see the black-and-white tiles, the glass cases.
Used to stock Parker pens
.
Dispensed a little opium under the table to foreigners who wanted to stay clear of the Triads.
Charlie felt as if he were walking downhill now, drawn toward the subterranean world of the past, toward something in his memory, a place that existed there so fiercely that it dulled the present-day illusions around him. Past coffee shops and cell phone vendors, past an appliance store and a travel agent. This was it: Rue Lafayette. He burrowed down through the modern street, by a notions shop and a milliner, an auto dealership selling DeSotos, Buicks, Packards. There was the hat shop and Chen's Fine Tailor for Men, the dull interior of the billiards hall and cigar store. The season seemed to have gotten warmer, or maybe it was just the walk. Then he saw the little sign at the entrance to the little alley.
LANE
37.

He turned into the narrow road, and the noise of the avenue disappeared behind him. So peaceful here. High cream-colored walls lined either side of the roadway, a little canyon broken by wooden doors and wrought-iron gates. The smooth bark of the plane trees peeled into greens and grays and tans, as if they'd been painted by numbers, and their roots humped up the sidewalks. He could hear his footsteps. The light was getting yellow now.

He reached number 116 and peered through the bars of the black metal gate. A bougainvillea scratched at the wall of the little garden inside. Overhead, the wind blew and the wide flat leaves rustled against each other. A lone rickshaw hustled past behind him. He could hear the driver panting softly as his feet padded by. Not many of those left these days. He looked at his watch, the little gold hands pointing at the dots of radium, now dull yellow-green in the sunshine: punctual to the dot, a habit he'd honed during the war. He rang the bell and waited. The servant came, a Chinese woman in a blue dress and white apron, with a white cap on her head. It was spring, yes, definitely a warm day in spring. The jasmine was in bloom and the perfume of it damn near made his head swim.

“I'm Charles Pico. I'm here to see Mr. Maier.”

The servant must have known he was coming. She opened the gate and led him along the red tile walkway. The steps to the small porch loomed in front of him, and he mounted them slowly. He glanced in a side window and saw the interior of a room: a slice of credenza, the tops of armchairs, a painting of some sort. The big wooden door swung open, and he found himself looking down a dim hallway lined with flowered wallpaper and a wooden banister leading to an unseen second floor. It was all in dark greens and gray, somber colors that he figured had come into vogue before the war, when he was still on the farm.