“And your leg?” Tinseng asked.
Six days after he’d arrived in Bern, they had blocked him from every avenue of questioning. He was beginning to feel pressed in. And all the time he was being trailed by men who were not trying very hard to hide. When he’d asked the embassy man, Jinzhao was told he was jumping at shadows. He got desperate. He stood outside his parents’ house until he saw someone he recognized, a secretary from the embassy; when she left, he followed her and begged her to help him.
She nearly fled at the sight of him, telling him to stay away, saying she couldn’t be seen with him. That scared him more than anything else. Until then, he had been trying to convince himself his parents were killed by others—the Swiss, the English. The Russians, even. But the way his own comrades were acting, the distance they wanted from him, made him realize he needed to leave.
A block away from the train station, they jumped him. They spoke Swiss German, but they were both Chinese. They tried to drag him into a car. Jinzhao only escaped because of the self-defense lessons his mother had insisted on when he was a boy. The son of diplomats could never be too safe, she’d said.
“And then you came here?”
“Then I came here. After ensuring I wasn’t followed, to the best of my ability.”
“You used all of Raymond Chandler’s tricks?” Tinseng made a joke of it, but he needed to know. Jinzhao nodded, wry; he had switched trains and tried to memorize all the faces of the other passengers. But he had been distracted hiding his injuries, too, and wasn’t sure of his results.
“I’ve put you in danger,” he said, looking out the bedroom window. They had moved from the bathroom to the bed during the retelling.
“Don’t worry about that,” Tinseng said, getting up to close the curtain. “I’m just glad you’re here. Though what you thought a mere translator could do . . .”
For the first time that night, Jinzhao looked a little like himself as he stared Tinseng down.
“Wu Tinseng.”
Tinseng laughed awkwardly. “What?”
“Why do you never take any papers from work home? Why does the department you work for have no presence? Why does a translator need a gun?”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Tinseng held up his hands in surrender. “When did you get so inquisitive?”
“I’m hardly able to ignore it.”
Tinseng scratched his nose. He’d always been able to hide from everyone else; he only found it impossible with Mei Jinzhao. The problem, he thought, was that he didn’t want to hide. He was always begging the world to call him on his stories, and there was no one he wanted to see past his bullshit more than Mei Jinzhao. It’d been true back when they were sixteen. By now, it was possibly the only truth Tinseng had left.
“Okay, Jinzhao. Tomorrow. Ask me tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, Jinzhao. I’ll tell you who I am and what I do, and if you don’t reject me completely, I’ll be whatever you need me to be.
Two Years Ago. February 1962. Paris, France.
They’d first recruited him from the physics classrooms of New Asia College in Hong Kong to translate scientific documents. Tinseng hadn’t been persuaded by British politics, not really; their definition of justice didn’t align with his own. But Yukying was always telling him to do good with his life, and he’d once truly believed he would be able to wrench the world away from its corrupt trajectory. Certainly, signing up to work on the nuclear problem would help more than blowing up lab equipment and getting drunk on weekends, so he’d agreed.
His first handler had quickly recognized his potential and flagged him for the higher-ups; increasingly, he’d been pulled into rooms with sources and assets, asked to translate in real time. After only a year and a half, the chief of Hong Kong Station, a man named Weir, had promised him he was on track to become a field agent. They wanted to send him overseas for proper training, then place him somewhere he could begin recruiting a stable of assets; as their handling officer he would be in charge of their safety and see they were well taken care of. His other option was to stay in Hong Kong and keep his desk job, moving up the ranks in scientific intelligence work, perhaps pursuing a teaching position at New Asia College to become a recruiter himself.
In the end, the choice had been made for him: Yukying had cornered him one day about his other secret, and he’d realized just how much social danger he’d put his family in; his secret would break Yukying’s engagement, would send his brother’s patients running. He’d taken the promotion and left for training not long after. He had been trained to pair his paranoia with pattern recognition in order to draw out secrets, from texts as well as flesh.
“Tinseng.” From across the room, Jinzhao called his name. Tinseng ignored him, burying his nose deeper in Li Xifeng’s journal.
“Wu Tinseng.”
“Shh, I’m focusing.”
The package had been in Jinzhao’s mailbox when he’d returned from Bern, full of his mother’s papers and journals. A note on the front read, Keep these safe for me. The package was postmarked December 11. By the 15th, she was dead.
“Let it go, Tinseng.”
“This,” Tinseng said as he tapped Li Xifeng’s journal with a bitten nail, “this means something, I know it.”
Every professional instinct told him this journal held a key. A secret lurked behind Li Xifeng’s beautiful penmanship, something to explain why Li Xifeng had been killed. It wasn’t just hope that made him think so: He was fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and French, and passable in Russian and Korean—he knew language, and there was something about the way Li Xifeng translated some of these poems . . .
Besides, his contacts were getting nowhere, his digging around at work fruitless. They were no closer to knowing who killed Jinzhao’s parents or why. It felt like failure. It was failure: As long as those questions remained unanswered, it wouldn’t be safe for Jinzhao to return to China.
“Tinseng.”
Tinseng looked up. Jinzhao sat across the table now, looking at him with concern.
“She sent it to you for a reason,” Tinseng insisted weakly, but Jinzhao wasn’t letting that persuade him this time.
“We will continue trying,” Jinzhao promised, “but not tonight.” He gently pulled the journal from underneath Tinseng’s hand; Tinseng let it go.
“I’ll work harder,” he began, but Jinzhao was there, leaning over him, surrounding him, pulling him up into an embrace. Ever since that night two months ago, Jinzhao had stopped keeping his distance. Now, and with increasing frequency, there would be fingers wrapped around Tinseng’s wrist, a hand on his back when Jinzhao read something over his shoulder, and even, when Jinzhao was feeling particularly distressed, hugs like this one that enveloped them both. Tinseng knew it had nothing to do with him, not really, but that didn’t stop him from enjoying it. Tinseng closed his eyes and rested his cheek against Jinzhao’s shoulder. He felt his chest move against Jinzhao’s as they both breathed. When he inhaled, the scent of Jinzhao’s familiar cologne traveled through his veins. On his exhale, his shoulders dropped—how long had he been so tense? His neck twinged. He took another deep breath and returned the embrace, properly relaxing for the first time in hours.
“You’re right,” he murmured, though Jinzhao hadn’t said anything. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”
On the street, Tinseng’s head cleared of its fog. “I’m sorry, Jinzhao. It’s just that, as long as we don’t have answers, you can’t go back to China, and that’s the goal.”
Jinzhao looked down at his shoes. “It is what I should do,” he agreed.
“I know, I know.” Tinseng could hardly think of anything else. “When we’re done with this, I promise I’ll get you on the plane to Beijing myself. Everything will be cleared up, and you’ll be able to go whatever you want.”
