A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [2]
“Comrade! The chairman wants to see you right away.”
“Hello, Alice.” Stratton stifled a grin behind the tea mug. She had become a China groupie, a parody in blue cotton. The pants Chinese women wear with shapeless abandon strained across Alice’s ample rump. The jacket was buttoned to the neck and fashionably wrinkled. The flat-brimmed hat bulged in a frustrated attempt to contain a mass of bottle-blond hair. Clinging precariously to the cap was a sheet metal button, red on white. AAAH, it said.
“You could pass for a native,” Stratton mocked. Alice Dempsey was not his favorite woman.
“Bought it all at the Friendship Store. Why didn’t you come with us?”
“I felt queasy.”
“Baloney!” she snorted. “Every chance you get you slip away from us. What have you got against art historians anyway? I’ll bet you don’t even wear your badge, do you?” She rolled her eyes up toward her own AAAH. American Association of Art Historians.
“It’s a fine group, very nice folks,” Stratton said with forced politeness. Alice Dempsey was ugly as sin and as annoying as a rash, but she did have wit and will enough to be a prized member of an excellent faculty in California.
“Fact is, I’d rather walk around than ride on a bus.”
“Well, it’s rude to our Chinese friends. The guide, little Miss Sun, is always asking about you: ‘Where is Professor Stratton?’ At least don’t forget about the acrobatic show tonight.”
“Sure, Alice.”
STRATTON’S HEART had not been with the tour since he had bumped into David Wang outside the Summer Palace, just as if they had been on Adams Street in Pittsville, Ohio, or at one of those ad hoc seminars Wang had loved to lead at St. Edward’s, stockinged feet curled to the fire in the old library.
It was Stratton’s first time in Asia in more than a decade, and he had still not worked out to his own satisfaction why he had come. Asia was a dead letter. Had he come because a two-week package tour of the People’s Republic was cheap and exotic? Or because it would spare him dull hours of summer research at the small New England college where he taught? Not that, either. The research would have to be done, sooner or later, one way or the other; long nights followed by a slim volume only initiates would read. The job was waiting when he got back. Say he had come to escape the shards of a divorce that still hurt, a year later. Was that the real reason? Part of it, maybe, but only a lesser part, if Stratton was in the mood to be honest with himself. Carol was gone and he did not really miss her, although sometimes he ached to be with the boy.
Boredom. That was closer to the truth, wasn’t it? His friends would know it intuitively. Stratton had worked hard to become a scholar. He was a legitimate historian, an able professor of emerging reputation. And … so what? Passing years that dulled the senses, blank-faced students in vacuous procession. What next, Stratton? Midlife crisis. Male menopause. Maybe there was no next.
So he had come to China. To throttle the boredom. No, there was something deeper. He was also testing the scar tissue, the way an athlete will gingerly measure the recovery of an injured limb. Something else, too. Thomas Stratton, as he alone knew, had come to weigh the man he had become against the one he had once been.
At Peking Airport, standing before the immigration officer in white jacket and red-starred cap, visions of yesterday had come flooding in with a gush he had battled to control. The man had fingered his passport without interest.