Breakfast was served half an hour later, by which time Rutledge was showered and shaved pink. His staff were all there in the dining room, looking over the papers for the most part, learning what was going on back home. They already knew, or thought they knew, what was going to happen here. A whole lot of nothing. Rutledge agreed with that assessment. He was wrong, too.
C H A P T E R – 30
And the Rights of Men
“Got the address?” Wise asked his driver. He was also the team’s cameraman, and drew the driving duty because of his steady hands and genius for anticipating traffic clogs.
“Got it, Barry,” the man assured him. Better yet, it had been inputted into the satellite-navigation system, and the computer would tell them how to get there. Hertz was going to conquer the world someday, Wise reflected with a chuckle. Just so they didn’t bring back the O.J. commercials.
“Going to rain, looks like,” Barry Wise thought.
“Could be,” his producer agreed.
“What do you suppose happened to the gal who had the baby?” the cameraman asked from the driver’s seat.
“Probably home with her kid now. I bet they don’t keep mothers in the hospital very long here,” Wise speculated. “Trouble is, we don’t know her address. No way to do a follow-up on her and the kid.” And that was too bad, Wise could have added. They had the surname, Yang, on their original tape, but the given names of the husband and wife were both garbled.
“Yeah, I bet there’s a lot of Yangs in the phone book here.”
“Probably,” Wise agreed. He didn’t even know if there was such a thing as a Beijing phone book—or if the Yang family had a phone—and none of his crew could read the ideographic characters that constituted the Chinese written language. All of those factors combined to make a stone wall.
“Two blocks,” the cameraman reported from the front seat. “Just have to turn left. . . here . . .”
The first thing they saw was a crowd of khaki uniforms, the local police, standing there like soldiers on guard duty, which was essentially what they were, of course. They parked the van and hopped out, and were immediately scrutinized as though they were alighting from an alien spacecraft. Pete Nichols had his camera out and up on his shoulder, and that didn’t make the local cops any happier, because they’d all been briefed on this CNN crew at the Longfu hospital and what they’d done to damage the People’s Republic. So the looks they gave the TV crew were poisonous—Wise and his crew could not have asked for anything better for their purposes.
Wise just walked up to the cop with the most rank-stuff on his uniform.
“Good day,” Barry said pleasantly.
The sergeant in command of the group just nodded. His face was entirely neutral, as though he were playing cards for modest stakes.
“Could you help us?” Wise asked.
“Help you do what?” the cop asked in his broken English, suddenly angry at himself for admitting he could speak the language. Better if he’d played dumb, he realized a few seconds too late.
“We are looking for Mrs. Yu, the wife of the Reverend Yu, who used to live here.”
“No here,” the police sergeant replied with a wave of the hands. “No here.”
“Then we will wait,” Wise told him.
“Minister,” Cliff Rutledge said in greeting. Shen was late, which was a surprise to the American delegation. It could have meant that he was delivering a message to his guests, telling them that they were not terribly important in the great scheme of things; or he might have been delayed by new instructions from the Politburo; or maybe his car hadn’t wanted to start this morning. Personally, Rutledge leaned toward option number two. The Politburo would want to have input into these talks. Shen Tang had probably been a moderating influence, explaining to his colleagues that the American position, however unjust, would be difficult to shake in this series of talks, and so the smart long-term move would be to accommodate the American position for now, and make up for the losses in the next go-around the following year—the American sense of fair play, he would have told them, had cost them more negotiations than any other single factor in history, after all.
That’s what Rutledge would have done in his place, and he knew Shen was no fool. In fact, he was a competent diplomatic technician, and pretty good at reading the situation quickly. He had to know—no, Rutledge corrected himself, he should know or ought to know—that the American position was being driven by public opinion at home, and that that public opinion was against the interests of the PRC, because the PRC had fucked up in public. So, if he’d been able to sell his position to the rest of the Politburo, he’d start off with a small concession, one which would show the course the day would take, allowing Rutledge to beat him back a few steps by the close of the afternoon session. Rutledge hoped for that, because it would get him what his country wanted with little further fuss, and would, by the way, make him look pretty good at Foggy Bottom. So he took a final sip of the welcoming tea and settled back in his chair, motioning for Shen to begin the morning’s talks.
“We find it difficult to understand America’s position in this and other matters—”
Uh-oh. . .
“America has chosen to affront our sovereignty in many ways. First, the Taiwan issue…”
Rutledge listened to the earphone which gave him the simultaneous translation. So, Shen hadn’t been able to persuade the Politburo to take a reasonable tack. That meant another unproductive day at these talks, and maybe—possible but not likely as yet—failed talks entirely. If America was unable to get concessions from China, and was therefore forced to impose sanctions, it would be ruinous to both sides, and not calculated to make the world a safer or better place. The tirade lasted twenty-seven minutes by his watch.
“Minister,” Rutledge began when it was his turn, “I find it difficult as well to understand your intransigence—” He went on along his own well-grooved path, varying only slightly when he said, “We put you on notice that unless the PRC allows its markets to be opened to American trade goods, the government of the United States will enact the provisions of the Trade Reform Act—”
Rutledge saw Shen’s face coloring up some. Why? He had to know the rules of the new game. Rutledge had said this half a hundred times in the previous few days. Okay, fine, he’d never said “put on notice,” which was diplo-speak for no shit, Charlie, we’re not fuckin’ kidding anymore, but the import of his earlier statements had been straightforward enough, and Shen was no fool . . . was he? Or had Cliff Rutledge misread this whole session?
Hello,” a female voice said. Wise’s head turned sharply. “Hi. Have we met?”
“You met my husband briefly. I am Yu Chun,” the woman said, as Barry Wise came to his feet. Her English was pretty good, probably from watching a lot of TV, which was teaching English (the American version, anyway) to the entire world.
“Oh.” Wise blinked a few times. “Mrs. Yu, please accept our condolences for the loss of your husband. He was a very courageous man.”
Her head nodded at the good wishes, but they made her choke up a little, remembering what sort of man Fa An had been. “Thank you,” she managed to say, struggling not to show the emotions that welled up within her, held back, however, as though by a sturdy dam.
“Is there going to be a memorial service for your husband? If so, ma’am, we would ask your permission to make a record of it.” Wise had never grown to like the oh-your-loved-one-is-dead, what’s-it-feel-like? school of journalism. He’d seen far more death as a reporter than as a Marine, and it was all the same all over the world. The guy on the pale horse came to visit, always taking away something precious to somebody, most of the time more than one somebody, and the vacuum of feelings it left behind could only be filled by tears, and that language was universal. The good news was that people all over the world understood. The bad news was that getting it out did further harm to the living victims, and Wise had trouble stomaching his occasional obligation to do that, however relevant it was to the all-important story.
“I do not know. We used to worship there in our house, but the police will not let me inside,” she told him.
“Can I help?” Wise offered, truly meaning it. “Sometimes the police will listen to people like us.” He gestured to them, all of twenty meters away. Quietly, to Pete Nichols: “Saddle up.”