A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [3]
“Is this your first time in China?” the inspector had asked in slow, careful English.
“Yes,” Stratton had lied. “Yes, it is.”
“You are perspiring. Are you ill?”
“No. It is hot.”
The man had stamped his passport and Stratton had sought the refuge of protective coloration in the gaggle of art historians.
Stratton shook his head at the memory and sipped his tea.
That night he skipped the acrobatic performance. Too bad about little Miss Sun. Once Stratton was sure his tour mates had left in the green-and-white Toyota minibus in which all tourists in China seemed to live, he went looking for dinner. On the way, he conducted prolonged negotiations with the white-jacketed floor attendants. If there was a telephone call for Professor Stratton, could they transfer it to the restaurant? It might work. Even if it didn’t, it was not crucial. If punctilious David Wang called once unsuccessfully, he would either leave his number or call again.
The restaurant—foreigners only—was a purely functional place of round tables, soiled tablecloths, spotted silverware and spicy food in the inevitable blue-and-white crockery. The tour group ate three meals a day there, Western for breakfast and Chinese for the other two—a procession of savory dishes that appeared unordered.
Stratton settled into a small table and began leafing through a purple-covered issue of the Peking Review. About two paragraphs into the cover story, a gob of wet white rice caromed off the red plastic sign that proclaimed his table 37. From two tables away, Stratton’s assailant grinned evilly, gap-toothed and green-eyed. He was about seven years old and his chopstick catapult was poised for another round. A second child carefully probed the innards of the sugar bowl with a spoon. There were two, no three, others in tenuous custody of a pretty woman in her thirties and a great bear of a man with a bushy red beard. Stratton intercepted the next gob with his menu.
“Kevin!” the woman jerked the missile commander around to face his dinner.
“I’m sorry,” she told Stratton. It was something she had said before.
The bearded man looked up from a dam of napkins that encircled a lake of spilled soy sauce.
“Somehow it was easier at McDonald’s. Sorry,” he said.
“No problem. Actually, he’s a pretty good shot.”
From the waitress, Stratton ordered Sichuan chicken with peanuts, noodles, vegetables and a beer.
“Qingdao beer.”
“Qingdao mei you.” She pronounced it “may-o.”
“What kind do you have?”
“Peking.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, baby, that’s a bad mistake,” the bearded man called from his chaos. “Peking beer tastes like it was passed through a horse. Tell her you want Wu Xing.” He wiggled a green bottle in front of him.
“Wu Xing,” Stratton told the waitress.
Stratton abandoned the last hope of a quiet meal when something began gnawing his leg. He carried it, squirming and squealing, back to its tribe.
“An escapee, I think,” Stratton said, handing it to the woman.
“Oh, Tracey! Again, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’m used to kids. My sister has four.”
“Spend a lot of time with them?” the bearded man asked.
“Never go near the little bastards.”
“Can’t imagine why. Why don’t you join us, since we’ve ruined your dinner anyway? I’m Jim McCarthy. This is my wife, Sheila. I’ve never seen the kids before.”
McCarthy, it turned out, was one of about twenty American reporters resident in Peking, a correspondent for a big East Coast newspaper. He had an office in a hotel and an apartment in a compound on the eastern side of the city where foreigners lived in Western-style buildings behind high brick walls erected and patrolled by the Chinese government to keep Chinese out.
“You here for long?” McCarthy asked.
“Another couple of days.”
McCarthy rolled his eyes.
“Jim is not a great China fan,” his wife explained
“Yeah, one day I’ll write a book. ‘Hold the May-o’ it’ll be called. It’s the national sport. If you want something, they haven’t got it—beer to interviews. Mei you.”
After dinner, Stratton marveled at the texture of the city as he walked along a broad tree-lined avenue that ran