A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [6]
“Thanks.” Stratton spooned Brazilian instant into a hotel cup identical to the one in his room, then added hot water from an identical pitcher.
“You teach art history. And karate, right?” McCarthy called.
“Why karate?” Stratton laughed.
“Sheila was admiring your whipcord body. I had a whipcord body, too—until I came to China.” McCarthy patted his belly. “Is it fun, teaching?”
“I like it, I really do. It’s not as exciting as being a foreign correspondent, but you do get hooked into the research. You find one piece here and another there and pretty soon you don’t know where the hours went. Then, too, the vacations are nice and long. Most summers I go out west and help a friend of mine run a wilderness company for tourists—whitewater rafting, survival hikes, sissy climbing, that kind of thing. I should be out there now, instead of screwin’ around here. But I really wanted to see China. Five cities, twenty-one days.”
“Yeah, everybody ought to see it. Once. I wish I had—shh …”
McCarthy waved for silence and Stratton heard a familiar litany lancing through static.
“…off the wall into the corner … Remy is in and Evans is around third … throw is to second but Rice is safe with a stand-up double … That’ll be all for …”
“A baseball game?”
McCarthy laughed.
“Last night’s game. We’re thirteen hours ahead of the East Coast, remember. There’s a game on almost every morning—Armed Forces radio.”
“Pretty nice, if you’re a fan.”
“Naw, not me. Only been to one game in my life. My father took me to Briggs Stadium when I was a kid. About the third inning there was this foul ball and I reached up to catch it, you know, like on television. Broke two fingers. Never went back.”
“If you’re not a fan, why do you listen?” Stratton teased.
McCarthy heaved himself upright and planted both feet on the floor. Stratton, from the other side of the desk, imagined without seeing the spurts of dust.
“It’s China, baby. In China, I’m a baseball fan because it helps kill the morning. In China, I read five or six newspapers a day and cut out things I might use six months from now, but probably never will. Savin’ bits of string, but never finding the spool. For correspondents, China is purgatory, baby. The thing about this place that drives you crazy is that there are no facts; a billion people and not one goddamned fact. Did you know that everything here is a secret until it is published, even the fucking weather forecast?”
“Then what do you do for news?”
“I worry a lot.” McCarthy grinned. “Particularly on Thursdays; that’s when stories for the weekend paper are due. Today they want a political piece, ugh. I don’t understand what’s goin’ on—that’s normal—but I have reached the solemn conclusion that neither do the Chinese.”
“Like how?”
“Like something big is bubbling beneath the surface. There are lots of little signs: people being suddenly reassigned or demoted, or simply disappearing—they could be forcibly retired, or dead—nobody knows. No one will talk about it.”
“A power struggle,” Stratton offered.
“Don’t you know it. This place has been a circus since Mao died; probably before, too. When Deng came in with his pragmatists, the old hard-line Maoists got pushed aside. Now I’d say that the hard-liners were getting their own back.”
“Most of the people who are being knocked down are the ones that Deng made respectable again?”
“That, for sure. But more than that.” McCarthy lit a cigarette. “There’s a hard-ass campaign under way right now against Chinese having anything to do with foreigners. You know the old song: ‘We welcome your technology, but no blue jeans, please.’ The idea that the decadent West will contaminate the heroic masses has been around for a long time, but now it’s worse—ten times worse—than I’ve ever seen it.”
Stratton was surprised.
“People have certainly been very nice to us. I’ve seen no hostility at all,” he said.
McCarthy nodded.
“Right. The average guy is more interested in Western ideas and culture than ever. He hears the Party’s antiforeign