A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [53]
McCarthy made sure the driver’s door was unlocked. He trudged up the circular driveway and through the automatic doors that admit foreigners only to Peking’s best hotel. To the left of the lobby lay a broad marble passageway that had been converted with plastic tables and chairs into a brightly lit lounge. The Via Veneto, denizens called it sarcastically. The cafe, a grudging Chinese concession to the influx of foreigners that had accompanied the late ’70s opening to the West, had, perforce, become the center of social life for transient foreigners in Peking. Sooner or later, everyone wound up drinking instant coffee at the ersatz cafe. McCarthy had interviewed a movie star there, an ice skater and a famous novelist, each one of them self-impressed and self-righteous—doing China.
That night there was only a middling crowd. McCarthy nodded to a pair of African diplomats. He chatted briefly with some members of a British lawyers’ tour and watched in amusement while well-heeled businessmen of three nationalities sniffed around a lady banker from New York. She had lived in the hotel for two years and would die there on full expenses, if the Chinese allowed it, having long since discovered one of the secrets of revolutionary Peking: It is nirvana for ugly Western women. In New York, the lady banker would have trouble getting a tumble in the raunchiest singles bar. In puritan Peking, without local competition, she never slept alone. McCarthy ordered a cognac at the bar and watched the circus.
After about ten minutes, he walked back to the car and drove toward the poorly lit northern quarter of the city. On an empty side street, he pulled to the curb.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he called.
From the backseat, a passenger untangled himself from the folds of a car blanket and climbed into the front seat.
McCarthy lit a cigarette, watching in the rearview mirror as the side lights of another car appeared. Things they never teach you in journalism school, he reflected sourly.
As the other car approached, it slowed. Its headlights flashed, bathing the station wagon from behind. McCarthy reacted.
The station wagon surged from the curb with a peel of rubber, dumping McCarthy’s passenger awkwardly between seat and door. McCarthy turned right. The other car followed. For ten tense and silent minutes, he played hide-and-seek until at last he found the main road that tourists took to the Great Wall. His foot went to the floor. The following car, Chinese-made, more for touring than sprinting, dwindled and finally disappeared. McCarthy relaxed.
“It’s nice to see you, Little Joe. How’re things?”
The passenger smiled, dangling a child’s sandal from its strap. In the dashboard half-light, it looked like a dead white hamster.
“I found this in the blanket.”
“Shit, I’ve been looking for that for two weeks. Thanks.” McCarthy passed over the pack of cigarettes. “Sorry for the bumpy start, but we had friends.”
The passenger dragged deeply, opening the window to let the smoke escape.
“It is no surprise.”
He was a slender youth in his twenties with a tousled thatch of black hair and sharp cheek bones. He wore a cheap open-necked white shirt and baggy olive-green trousers. A schoolboy’s satchel sat primly on his knees. Over the past year, since a casual meeting at an art exhibition arranged by the American Embassy, the shy youth had become McCarthy’s best Chinese source.
“Shall we go to my place for a few drinks and some music? The kids are all asleep, Little Joe.” It was a name the boy had assigned himself. McCarthy didn’t know his real name, or where he lived. He knew only about the young man’s dreams and that his information was good.
“Tonight is bad, Lao Jim. The army, the police, the watchers all have instructions to be particularly alert about contacts with foreigners.”
Among foreigners who knew any Chinese willing to risk it, the procedure for getting a guest into the walled diplomatic compound