When Wu pushed hard on the door, however, it didn’t budge. It was bolted shut from the inside. He cursed, pulled a grenade from his webbing, and walked down the few steps to the sidewalk. He warned the anxious soldiers inside the vehicle by showing them the hand grenade. The machine gunner protruding through the roof sank inside, and the bullet-proof windows ascended with a hurried electric hum.
Wu pulled the pin and gently tossed the grenade underhanded onto the porch. It landed at the threshold beneath the front door. Wu turned and jogged a few steps along the front wall of the house. The grenade burst with a stunning blast of noise and heat. The explosion echoed with a crackle up and down the street. Wu headed back, waving the smoke from his face as he climbed the three debris-strewn steps.
The door frame was now hollow. Shattered shards of the wood no bigger than his arm lay scattered about the carpet in the foyer.
Wu entered the home.
To the right was a living room with worn chairs that had once been nice. The upholstery was covered with poorly matched covers on the arms. Framed photos, rocked off their perch atop the mantel, lay amid broken glass in front of the fireplace.
Wu stooped to pick up the frames. Behind the jagged glass he found old pictures. Two attractive young women on a ski slope with their arms around each other wearing dark sunglasses and bright, white smiles. Han pulled the photo from the frame and turned it over. At the bottom corner, written in blue ink, he read, “Rachel and Cynthia, Spring Break, 1996.”
There were other photographs as well. Prom pictures. Aging but handsome parents. Wu lingered. Studying the images. But there were no pictures of the life that interested Wu most. The secret life, long forgotten.
“What do you want?” came the quivering question in broken, accented Chinese.
Wu turned to stare at the middle-aged woman, who wore layers of sweaters under arms crossed in a hug.
“My God in heaven!” she whispered in English before gasping in shock and grabbing a chair to keep from falling. Wu took a step toward her, but she stumbled — supporting herself hand over hand along the chair back — and collapsed into the seat. There, she stared at Wu in disbelief. Through the onset of tears, she spluttered, “How did you…? You found me. You found me.”
“Why did you give me away?” Wu asked in English.
“I didn’t!” she screamed, doubling over with the effort and the obvious anguish. Her incipient tears seemed to be aborted by memories that flashed behind a faraway look. In a drained monotone, she began to explain. During her pregnancy in Beijing, she said, they had treated her like royalty. But the moment Wu was born, they had taken her straight to the airport! She protested her blamelessness throughout. Her tone rose from wooden to shrill.
“You could have written me,” Wu responded. His depression leveled his voice to what sounded like calm.
She had been scared, she replied. They had warned her. Terrified her! The secret of her affair with Han Zhemin and of the birth of Wu that resulted from it had been the biggest secret of her entire life. The change in her treatment at the hands of Wu’s family — especially Wu’s father — had been so abrupt. So menacing.
“My entire world came crashing down!” she shouted. “My parents were dead! Rachel was my only family! But do you think, when Han sent me home, that my sister greeted me with open arms? After what I had done? Her life was in shambles because of me! At least that’s what she told herself! Her life was pretty much always messed up. She went from flying around with your father in wide-body jets outfitted like Air Force One, to being married to a redneck engineer in Mobile-Goddamn-Alabama! She hasn’t spoken to me — not one word — since your father…” She didn’t finish.
“Since he what?” Wu asked through squinted eyes.
“You don’t know?” she asked in delicate tones.
“I know you never once tried to get in touch with me!” Wu blurted out. “I know that I have spent the last fourteen years of my life in military schools! No family. No-no-no…!”
“No mother,” she completed for him, stricken. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her approach. She held her hand out, hesitantly, but resisted the impulse to lay it on his shoulder. “Wu, there’s so much that you don’t know.”
“Then tell me!”
She jumped. Frightened of him. He lowered his head, sighed, and wished what he’d said had come out differently. But she riveted him with her story—his story — the sordid history of their branch of the family.
“My sister — Rachel — you know who she is?” Wu nodded. “And you know who her first husband is, right?” Wu nodded again. He knew about the odd lines that strung him together with Stephanie Roberts and the president of the United States. “Your father had an affair with my sister,” Wu’s mother explained. “She left Bill Baker to run off to Hong Kong with Han.”
“Your father broke up their marriage by seducing her.”
“Why?” Wu asked. “They were best friends.”
She shrugged. “Because he could,” she said.
Wu was shocked, but there was more.
“Less than a month after Han set Rachel up in a house over there — a palace is really a better description — I get this call from Rachel. I’ve got to come visit. Right now! She sent me a ticket. First class. I got there and,” she shook her head, “I couldn’t believe it. The cars. The boats. The helicopters and jets. The house! The money, it was, unbelievable.”
Wu nodded to hurry her on.
“Rachel was pregnant,” Wu’s mother said simply. “With Bill’s child. With Stephanie. You’ve got to understand, my sister was desperate. We tried to figure out how to get her an abortion, but we were in Hong Kong. We went to a doctor, we thought anonymously, but it got back to Han that night. He was furious. We didn’t even know why! He left and went to Beijing. Servants started packing up Rachel’s things! She begged me to go to Beijing and talk to Han. She begged me!”
“So you went there and fucked him,” Wu said.
Cynthia was shocked. “How dare you! You’re just a child! You don’t know anything!”
“But it’s true, isn’t it?” Wu said.
She hung her head. She was far away, lost in thought. “He was so…”
Wu waited, then finished her sentence for her. “Powerful? Wealthy? Handsome? Which was it?”
“It was all of those things, and more,” she replied. “He was frightening, Wu. I was scared! And he always gets what he wants, doesn’t he? Don’t you understand? He always gets what he wants.”
“So he got you, and then he got you pregnant. And then you had me, and then he dumped you.”
Again, she was far away, but she shook her head. “No. After I got pregnant, he never laid a hand on me. He treated me nice. Great! The gifts! The luxury! I was the queen of Hong Kong, for nine months. He was always away on some important diplomatic mission in Asia! Signing nonaggression pacts with all those countries that China was about to conquer. But, every once in a while, a photo in the newspapers or on TV would show your father in the background at some reception, or at an official gathering, or at whatever. That’s how I would know that he was in Beijing, never in Hong Kong. I was in Hong Kong.”
“So my father,” Han summarized, chuckling bitterly, “broke up the marriage of Bill Baker and your sister. Then you took your sister’s place as my father’s mistress!”