A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [17]
But Wang had worked too well, had he not? Stratton had slipped away from him, further every year. Two disparate clouds that had met improbably, intermingled and then sailed away to different horizons. Had he been back home teaching, word of David Wang’s death might have provoked a few minutes of sharp but distanced regret, then hurried cancellation of classes and a trip to the funeral, complete, surely, with the trappings of a Catholicism that Wang knew and loved as much as the priests who would recite the final incantation. Here it was different. Was it cruel for Wang to have died in his native China? Or was it poetic? Regardless, Stratton felt grievously hurt by his death and fiercely protective of the body that lay somewhere in Peking, being prepared for a journey home. How banal, yet how true. In their last gossamer encounter, David had seemed so well. …
An insistent horn snapped the reverie. Stratton levered up off the steps and strode into the parking lot. The passenger door of a tan Toyota opened invitingly. As he slid in, his gloom began to lift.
“I’m glad you changed your mind,” he said.
Linda Greer smiled. She had changed into a beige shirtwaist dress, a fetching advertisement for her long, bronzed legs that scissored with a rustle of unseen silk as she expertly maneuvered the car into bike-laden streets.
“Usually when I say ‘no,’ it’s because I mean ‘no.’ When I say ‘no’ and mean ‘yes,’ I am not above confessing my mistake. One look at your face in there, and I could tell you needed someone to talk to. And I am sorry about your friend.”
He gave her a curious look, then settled back against the seat. She swung the car quickly around a yellow-and-red bus bursting with empty-faced workers on their way home, then pulled sharply behind a three-wheel motorbike spewing a noxious trail of black smoke.
“Ugh,” Linda said. “And the Chinese wonder why the air is so bad.”
They drove past the majestic Qianmen, once the front gate of a walled Peking. Linda turned to enter the gigantic square named after the gate. Stratton’s guidebook said it was ninety-eight acres.
“Postcards hardly do the place justice,” Linda remarked. “You could land a plane in here.”
In the vastness of the square, a handful of Chinese on their haunches nursed kites through the light summer air. The handmade kites—frogs and princes, fat fish, and a clever troop of tiny sparrows suspended from the same string—danced against the backdrop of the Forbidden City, the network of palaces that had housed imperial dynasties for six hundred years. On the left stood the stark white mausoleum where the rubber-looking remains of Chairman Mao lay under glass. Beyond the mausoleum rose the Great Hall of the People, more massive than majestic.
“The museums,” Linda said, pointing. “History on the right, the Museum of the Revolution, appropriately, on the left.”
“They’re huge. You could lose an army in there.”
“That’s fitting, too. The people across the street”—she waved a cool hand toward the Great Hall—“they’re perpetually worried about losing a country.”
“MANY THINGS are sacred in China, of course, but not history. History is for rewriting. Take poor Emperor Qin. For centuries, history officially shat all over Emperor Qin.” Linda pronounced it “Tsin.” “He was always the example of the most savage dictator, a kind of Chinese anti-Christ. He was the nut who commissioned the sculpture of seven thousand clay soldiers to guard him in the afterlife. And he was the maniac who once ordered four hundred Confucian scholars buried