A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [8]
Stratton leaned on a chain-link fence and waited for a break in the game. It came on a gorgeous drop shot that brought one of the players, a stocky blond, lunging fruitlessly to the net. His opponent, a sandy-haired man in his early thirties, shouted in a southern accent: “Good try!”
“Mr. Powell?” Stratton called.
The sandy-haired player ambled to the fence. Stratton introduced himself. He told the American consul about David Wang.
“Mr. Stratton, I usually don’t hear about American citizens in China unless they get in some sort of trouble. Professor Wang is a man of some distinction, however, and I’ll bet the culture folks have his itinerary.”
“Yes, well, Jim McCarthy said—er—suggested …”
Powell smiled. “He said, ‘Those culture vultures are cross-eyed, close-minded sonofabitches,’” he drawled in fair imitation. “Well, I suppose he’s right. Tell you what, soon as I polish off Ingemar here, I’ll make a couple calls.”
Powell was an excellent tennis player and he ended the game with a fierce flurry. With a towel around his neck and his racket under one arm, he led Stratton into the main building of the club.
Stratton waited in the lobby while Powell used the phone in an adjoining booth.
“They’re checking on your friend,” he reported when he came out. “Have you read Too Late, the King?”
“Yes, of course.” Stratton was impressed. It was not David Wang’s best-known book, but it was his best work.
“I admired it very much,” Powell said. “Clear, sharp, almost lyrical. We’ve got a copy in the library here.”
“He’s a special man. Very talented,” Stratton said.
“Tell me more.” Powell spread out the towel and sat down on an old leather chair.
“God, by the time I met David in the early seventies he’d already been around forever. He was born here in China, of course, but came to the U.S. to study just before World War II broke out. He never went back. By the time I entered graduate school he was famous in academia for his scholarship. I was”—Stratton hesitated—“just getting interested in Asian art. So it was natural to gravitate to Dr. Wang.”
“He was originally from Shanghai, right?”
Stratton nodded. “An entrepreneurial family of the old sort. It had been making money, from salt or silk, opium or tea, from time immemorial. Toward the end of the nineteenth century both of David’s grandparents, who were business rivals, I guess, got modern. David’s father went to Columbia. His mother, who had studied at the Philadelphia Conservatory, was about fifteen years younger. When David’s time came to go off to school in the States, he was still a teenager. In the normal course of events, he would have gone home and, as the eldest son, taken over the business.”
“They were hardly normal times, were they?”
“No. Civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. Invasion by Japan. Then the knockdown years until the Communists finally won in forty-nine. I would guess that David’s father told him not to come back until it was all over. And then, of course, the wrong people had won—if you were a Shanghai millionaire. David bounced around, quietly accumulating degrees; money was never a problem, I gather, and at the end of it all, there was nothing to come back to—the Wang empire was just one more victim of revolution. Whether he was cut off from his family or broke with them I don’t know, but he never mentioned them. He settled in at St. Edward’s and never left. I suppose he—”
“Excuse me. That’ll be my boys.” Powell caught the phone on the second ring. Stratton stared out the window at weeping willows in the overgrown courtyard.
When the consul returned, Stratton sensed there was no news.
“We’ve got Dr. Wang listed at the Heping Hotel. The culture officers had invited him to call or come by when he got back from Xian, but so far no one’s heard from him. Maybe he just decided to spend an extra day or two at the digs.”
“Maybe so,” Stratton said, unconvinced.
“Our fellas are a little disappointed, too. They