He rang the Beijing Culture and Language University. “Our general office is closed for the day and will reopen …” Charles Riser tried to recall her teacher’s name. Damn! He should have paid more attention to what she’d told him whenever she came home to visit on the weekend. Where was she staying in Suzhou? All he remembered was that the students had to take a flight to Hangzhou first because there was no airport in Suzhou. Darn it, what was her teacher’s surname? But then, how would a name help him? As cultural attaché, he was only too aware of the massive problem China had with surnames, there being basically only five, creating a nightmarish problem for bureaucrats and businesses alike. One of the few ways overseas Chinese had overcome this problem, and one Riser had encouraged as cultural attaché to the U.S., was to adopt a variety of Anglicized first names so that they became “Homer Wong” or “Irene Li,” and the like.
At nine-twenty that evening Charles received a visit from a Gong An Bu man who read a note aloud saying that the Suzhou coroner’s office regretted to inform him that his daughter “Amanda”—he pronounced her surname as “Wiser”—“has drowned dead in Suzhou Canal.”
Stunned, Charles could only ask frantically, “Where is she?” If he’d thought about it for a moment, the answer was obvious — the Suzhou morgue — but the shock had hit him like a battering ram.
“I do not know,” answered the Gong An Bu man, who added after a few seconds, “Offices will be closed now in Suzhou.”
Within seconds of the man leaving, Charles was calling the wai shi—the foreign affairs branch of the Gong An Bu — using whatever influence he thought his status as American cultural attaché might exert. The Chinese government, despite all their blather about equality among the people, were, after the Japanese, the most status-conscious crowd Riser had encountered in Asia. While waiting interminably on the phone, he was stressed both by the tension of waiting for the next official up the ladder to respond to him and by the knowledge that someone, maybe one of Mandy’s friends, was trying to get through to him. God Almighty! What was happening to his family?
First, his wife Elizabeth had died just two years before. Why? Charles never found out. Mandy, then seventeen, had been inconsolable. All they were told was that it had been a hit and run at night, on the rain-drenched New Jersey Turnpike. Though running late to meet Charles for Mandy’s high school graduation in Rockville, Elizabeth had apparently seen a car ahead of hers pulling off to the side, taillights flashing, an elderly woman slumped over the wheel. She pulled off to the shoulder, used her cell phone to call 911, then getting out to help was struck by another vehicle. The impact hurled her over the guardrail and thirty feet down an embankment. A witness, another motorist, said it was a Jeep that had hit her, a Jeep with a gun rack attached to the cabin, trying to pass the vehicle in front on the inside, crossing the shoulder’s safety line. In the downpour there’d been no chance for anyone to see the killer’s license number, and given the volume of graduation traffic on the turnpike, there’d been no hope of a trace. All that Charlie Riser, graduate of Yale majoring in Fine Arts, could think of then was that it had been a Jeep with a gun rack. Hunters. Guns. Violence in America. All the high school shootings. It was one of the reasons he’d applied for the Beijing posting after Mandy graduated from college, to give her a year or two abroad in another culture, without guns.
The operator came back on the line — no one from the university could be reached. The whole of China, it seemed, was asleep. The operator, however, perhaps because she felt some empathy for the Big Nose, added, “Suzhou is really under Nanjing Military District’s 12th Army.”
Charles phoned 12th Army’s headquarters and was told its commanding officer, General Chang, would not return till tomorrow. Stymied, he ran the message again. He skipped “Daddy”—it was too painful — and tried to concentrate on what he thought were the key words. “Wu Ling … loaded … as usual … told me … tralize … or … wes … kind of deal … the mill.”
Wu Ling and Chang were no mystery. One of Mandy’s friends, Wu Ling was the mistress of General Chang, a man in current disfavor in the eyes of the Chinese government because of a bungled high-seas attempt by him and rogue Russian cohorts under the Russian General Kornon to hijack the prototype of the U.S. superfast RONE computer. The attempt had been just barely thwarted by U.S. oceanographer Frank Hall and the former Special Forces SALERT buddies of General Freeman.
After Charles had been introduced to Chang during the annual Moon Festival, he discovered that Chang’s mistress, Wu Ling, just happened to be enrolled in the same international relations and language courses at BCLU as Mandy. No surprise — every American official’s kin were routinely targeted by the Gong An Bu, to be befriended in an effort to gather information about American attachés — spies — in Beijing. Riser knew, of course, that the CIA did precisely the same thing to Chinese college students in America whose parents worked in the Chinese Embassy and consulates throughout the U.S. Like his Chinese counterparts in Washington, he also forwarded anything of interest he picked up at unofficial functions. But his daughter — that was out of bounds. Thinking about the message, he wondered if “or” was part of “either or” or was “or … west” northwest? Was “mil” military? It was the first thing he thought of in the post-9/11 world. Or was it a grain “mill,” a meeting where some kind of massive trade fraud deal was about to be consummated?
Ten minutes later his phone rang and he snatched it up. It was General Chang expressing “deepest sympathy for your loss” and promising the assistance of Nanjing’s 12th Army, whose command included Suzhou, in finding the “antisocial elements responsible” for Mandy’s death. There was a terrible silence in Charles’s apartment, the home where he and Mandy had laughed and cried and held each other when, after he’d brought her to China, their loss of wife and mother sometimes overwhelmed them.
“So you believe,” Charles said slowly, “that she was murdered?”
“Of course,” replied Chang, his bluntness at once appreciated and resented by Riser. “This police report from Suzhou,” continued the general, “is — how do you Americans say? — a cover-lift?”
“Cover-up.”
“Yes, a cover-up. The Suzhou police don’t want to admit the murder of a foreigner. Bad for tourists. Suzhou depends heavily on tourists.”
Riser found himself nodding without speaking, a wave of nausea engulfing him.
Chang said, “Forgive me for prying at this time, Mr. Riser, but was your daughter carrying valuables?”
Charlie Riser was about to throw up. “A robbery? I mean, you think it was a robbery gone bad?” Somehow, not that it made any real difference, Charles found it easier to consider a robbery gone wrong than a straight-out murder.
“Suzhou says no,” answered the general, “her xue-sheng zheng”—her green card—“was still on her, but perhaps it was still a murder for money, the thief not knowing what to do with the green card. No matter that there is much more tourism these days, the fact is, Mr. Riser, very few Chinese have ever seen a foreigner in the flesh and they would not know what the green card was. Even if they did, they would have to sell it to a foreigner. This is very dangerous.”
Chang had a point.
“Leave it to me, Mr. Riser. I will investigate further.”