A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [13]
Chapter 4
ALICE DEMPSEY KNOCKED on the door at eight sharp the next morning. At eight thirty, she knocked again. Stratton grunted.
“Surely, you’re not still in bed!” she said through the door. “We leave for the Great Hall of the People in ten minutes.”
Stratton groped for his watch. “I’ll catch up,” he mumbled.
He dressed and went downstairs to claim a cup of tepid American coffee in the hotel restaurant. Then he set off on foot for the Heping Hotel.
It had occurred to Stratton that David Wang’s belongings would have to be gathered for the sad trip home—clothes, cameras, textbooks, souvenirs, and the ever-present journal. Wang was not a mellifluous writer, nor was he poetic, but he wrote down all he saw. His journals were meticulous, spongelike and even a bit silly; once, he had visited Disney World in Florida and returned, sheepishly, with fifty-seven pages of diary. Tom Stratton felt a duty to recover his old friend’s things.
Everything about Stratton attracted the eyes of the Chinese—his height, his blond hair, his thick reddish mustache. In Vietnam it had been much the same. He remembered the clutter and chaos of Saigon, the heady taste and thrill of war, the horror, the ultimate revulsion: bitter, black fear. Stratton waded like a bushy mutant among hundreds of Chinese in the broad streets, a pale stalk shooting up from blue fields. He thought back to the flippant, soft-life description of academia he had foisted on Jim McCarthy. A self-justification.
“I am an obscure college professor because that is as far as I could get from guns and killing,” Stratton should have said. “I haven’t got the balls to do anything else. I lost my pride, and something more, one terrible night a long time ago.”
At David Wang’s hotel Stratton was greeted by a polite young clerk who spoke poor but passable English.
“I am a friend of the gentleman who got sick here the other night,” Stratton began. “I came for his things.”
Stratton expected a discussion, but the clerk merely smiled and led him upstairs. The door to David Wang’s room was not locked. “No one sleep here for three nights, I think,” the clerk said.
The room was small, the walls white and recently repainted. Chinese tourist hotels are not luxurious by European standards, but they are functional. A blue woolen blanket was smoothed across a single bed, and a chest of drawers had been carefully dusted. Two fresh hand towels hung on a hook near a chipped water basin.
The room was ready for a new guest. There was no sign that David Wang had ever slept there.
“Do you remember Professor Wang, the man who stayed here?” Stratton asked the timid clerk. The man nodded vigorously. “I came for his things. Where are they?”
The clerk shook his head.
“His clothes, his books …”
“Men came and took things. Comrades clean the room, that’s all.”
Stratton checked the closet and found three wire coat hangers on a dowel. Stratton went through the bureau. In one drawer he found two handkerchiefs and a pair of blue cotton socks. One of the handkerchiefs was monogrammed with the initials D.W.
“The men left with suitcase,” the clerk volunteered.
“When?”
“The day after Mr. Wang got sick.”
Somebody tapped on the open door.
A small-shouldered American in khaki walking shorts stood in the hallway. He was gray-haired and pink in the face; around his neck hung a pair of small Nikon binoculars.
“Are you a friend of Dr. Wang’s?” he asked Stratton. “My name is Saul Weinstock. I was here Tuesday night when he got sick after dinner.”
Stratton stood up from the bed and introduced himself. “You were in the restaurant?”
“No, but I was in our room downstairs when I heard the commotion. A cleaning boy found Dr. Wang and shouted for help. That’s when I ran upstairs. I’m a retired physician. Had a general practice in Queens for thirty-one years. My wife and I are on a world tour. We met Dr. Wang on a walk through one of the municipal parks.”
Weinstock told Stratton that he had seen David Wang late Tuesday afternoon, shortly after his return