A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [115]
Linda kissed him gently on the neck. Nothing. Stratton was loaded like a spring. She wondered sadly if their night in Peking had left any tender echo. It would make her job so much easier if it had.
“Can I ask you something?” Stratton said softly. “Are you here to stop them—or me?”
HAROLD BROOM had had about all he could take from the snotty Chinaman. Being cursed in Mandarin was not so bad, but now Wang Bin had begun to call him “fool” to his face, as if it were part of his name. Broom was not a violent fellow, but now he shook his fist at the man in the passenger seat and said, “Shut up before I punch you in the nose!”
Wang Bin merely grunted.
“It’s not my fault,” Broom said for the tenth time. How could he have foreseen that Mrs. Kevin Mitchell would change her mind about the funeral? How could Broom have known that her husband’s coffin would wind up at Arlington instead of the old Mitchell family plot in Baltimore, which would have been just as lovely. It would have been a cinch.
“Son of a turtle!” Wang Bin snapped.
“These things happen.”
“How are we to find Mitchell’s grave?”
“Simple,” Broom said. “We aren’t. There’s acres of soldiers at Arlington and not all of them are dead, Pop. They’ve got crack Marines with very nasty rifles—not pea-shooters like yours. No way we’re going to try to dig up that coffin.”
“But this cannot be!”
“Oh, but it is. Your precious Chinese warrior can rest forever. He’ll be right at home, believe me. I’m not risking a trip to jail.”
The deputy minister snorted. “I must have the third soldier.”
“Pop, don’t be greedy. There is no way we can pull it off. You want to get shot in the back? Those Marines are genuine marksmen, Pop, and you’re old and slow.”
Wang Bin stared straight ahead at the highway. “It can be done,” he said. “And if it cannot, at least I want to see for myself.”
Broom surrendered. They stopped at a camera store in Crystal City and purchased a couple of cheap 35-mms. This way, the art broker explained, they’d look like everybody else on the blue-and-white trams that chugged through the cemetery. Broom also bought a large canvas shoulder bag to conceal the collapsible shovel and two hand picks. “This is insane,” he grumbled. “And if anything goes wrong, you’re on your own.”
“Meaning what?” Wang Bin asked.
“Meaning I never saw you before in my life.”
It was mid-afternoon when Broom drove down the Jefferson Davis Highway toward the national cemetery. He turned left past Fort Myer, then right again on Arlington Ridge Road. He drove half a mile and pulled the car up on a curb. “Get out now,” he ordered Wang Bin. “Try to be useful.”
The deputy minister silently followed the art dealer on a long sidewalk up a slope, through the gates of Arlington and onto a motor tram. The Chinese and his canvas shoulder bag sat down with a conspicuous clatter. The tram wound slowly up the hills. Wang Bin gazed in wonderment at the burial markers that seemed to march on forever.
“All soldiers?” he whispered to Broom.
“Yes. The Fields of the Dead, they call it.”
“How many?” Wang Bin asked.
“Thousands,” Broom said. “I checked with a guide back at the office and our friend is supposed to be resting in Section H. Grave number four-four-five. I got a map, but I’m not sure it’ll help.”
“We have nothing like this in China,” Wang Bin marveled. “There is no land for such a place. All our dead are cremated.”
“You build temples, we make graveyards. Each to his own.”
Wang Bin took a deep breath. “Like Xian, in a way. This is your Imperial Army, is it not, Mr. Broom?”
STRATTON SPOTTED them without the field glasses.
They emerged from a copse at the foot of a hill, perhaps one hundred meters from Lt. Kevin P. Mitchell’s white cross. They found the footpath and walked side by side, Mutt-and-Jeff silhouettes. Once they stopped to confer, and Stratton noticed the beam of a small flashlight as they bent over together, pointing. A map, probably. They resumed walking, with Broom