On the sixth-month anniversary of the murder, Wu Tinseng and Mei Jinzhao traveled to Bern to pay their respects. Tinseng left work early, and they took the Friday afternoon train. When they arrived, they wasted no time, only stopping to buy some flowers before joining the rush-hour traffic in a taxi to the house.
The street was quiet. Its perfectly spaced trees swayed gently, beckoning them closer to the neat little brownstone. It was a sign of the CCP’s favor—a sign that Mei Hankong was on his way up and that Li Xifeng’s translation work was seen favorably by the Ministry of Culture. At some point, they had lost that favor. Tinseng still didn’t know why, though he hadn’t given up the search.
Today wasn’t the day to think about that. Today was for Mei Jinzhao, who stood next to him still as a jade statue. Tinseng knew better than to speak. He couldn’t hold Jinzhao’s hand in this country, couldn’t lean against him for comfort, wouldn’t even risk a hand on his back. He settled for passing over the flowers. Jinzhao took them, and they stood in front of the house in silence.
Later, in the hotel room, Tinseng watched Jinzhao’s spiraling mood until he couldn’t anymore.
“Hey, Jinzhao? My lips are cold.” He pouted to show how needy they were. The shadow behind Jinzhao’s eyes darkened as he stared. He wanted to be distracted, just as much as Tinseng wanted to distract him. A few seconds later, Tinseng was on his back.
“We’ll have to be quieter here,” Tinseng warned. “The walls are thin.”
“They’re thin in Paris too.”
“That was Paris. This is—ah! This is . . . Jinzhao.” He let his head fall back; if he watched, he wouldn’t be able to stop talking. It hadn’t been surprising to discover Jinzhao was incessant and unyielding in bed and never seemed to tire of torturing Tinseng. Long after Tinseng would have wandered to other things, Jinzhao was still teasing him, sometimes gently, sometimes so cruelly it felt like a heel against his throat.
“Please,” he let himself whimper. “Jinzhao, please.”
He knew how to stay quiet these days, which was possibly the most drastic change from when Jinzhao had known him before. Tinseng was silent the way doors could be opened and shut without the rest of the house hearing. It wasn’t natural for him, but he’d been told he wore it well. It’d become so second-nature, this unnatural stillness, that he’d forgotten, a little, what he’d been like before. No one knew him in Paris, so no one knew to wonder until Mei Jinzhao had shown up and cracked him open—like he was doing now, his attention agitating Tinseng in the best-worst way.
“Jinzhao, god, will you . . . just . . . like that, keep going like that . . .”
In the silent room, his voice was the giveaway creak of a floorboard. It knocked them both askew. His ears might have been ringing. He said the words again, just to hear his own voice the way it used to sound.
“Jinzhao. Please. Please.”
He didn’t know what he was begging for—perhaps nothing. Perhaps simply for the joy of saying the word, asking the way a spoiled child asked. Over the past few months with Jinzhao, he’d learned to ask without reserve, arms outstretched, expecting everything, denied nothing.
“Please,” he said to Jinzhao, and Jinzhao gave him everything.
After, he could only lie still a few minutes before the need to ruin the moment overtook his better sense.
“I see why they call it le petit mort. Someday, you’re going to actually kill me.”
Torn between smugness and exasperation, Jinzhao chose to ignore Tinseng’s obnoxious smile and lavished Tinseng’s collarbone with long, lingering kisses. Quietly, deep in the back of his mind, Tinseng congratulated himself on the successful distraction and tried not to feel too guilty. Was it manipulation if he was distracting himself too?
Walking from the hotel to the train the next morning, they passed a newsstand with the first edition papers. Jinzhao’s eyes were downcast as he walked past, but Tinseng kept an eye on license plates and corners, and his eyes swept over the headlines. One read:
SCOOP: CHINESISCHE DIPLOMATEN WAREN USSR SPIONE
Tinseng couldn’t read Swiss German, but he didn’t need to. Ominous dread built in his stomach.
“Jinzhao.” He pointed to the paper. “I think there’s trouble.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Ten Months Ago. August 1962. Paris, France.
What happened next was mayhem.
Desperate for scandal, the world descended on Mei Hankong’s sons. The eldest in Beijing gave an official statement condemning his parents’ actions but had otherwise been unreachable by Western reporters. The youngest, a translator living in Paris since January of ’61, should have been easier to harass. But Mei Jinzhao was like a ghost and had been since he’d graduated from university. The most recent official picture anyone could find was from his passport, taken when he was eighteen. At twenty-five, Jinzhao looked much different. People looking to make a few francs sold other photos to the papers, but Jinzhao was always a pale figure in the background, usually blurry; unlike Tinseng, he never attended the kind of parties where rolls of film were wasted.
Jinzhao’s lack of presence had been a deliberate tactic encouraged by his mother; previously, Jinzhao had believed she’d merely been concerned over his privacy. Now, like the rest of her advice, the lesson had been warped. Tinseng, for one, felt grateful for her foresight. His solitude made it easy for Tinseng to move Jinzhao across the city to a predominantly Senegalese neighborhood where none of their old acquaintances would come looking for either of them. From there, he set up a new identity for Jinzhao. And then they started their hunt again.
Well . . . he said they, but really Jinzhao was there only in body. In spirit he was far away, absorbing the double betrayal. His mother’s activities as a spy for Russia were a shock, but it was his father’s collaboration that hurt Jinzhao most. His father, who was supposed to have embodied all the Chinese Communist Party stood for, all Mao stood for. To betray the Party like this was unthinkable, a nightmare for Jinzhao who simply could not understand why his father hadn’t immediately turned his mother in, or at least refused to participate in her illegal activity. Why hadn’t he tried harder to turn her from the wrong path?
The press, the nightly news, the headlines—the Mei Affair became unavoidable as reporters combed through the leaked files someone had stolen from the house in Bern. Suddenly the disheveled dresser next to Li Xifeng made sense. Tinseng’s money was on one of the assassins, but the embassy man they’d sent to clean up was high on the list too, and there had been a lot of people in and out of that house that night.
Tinseng tried to shield him from the worst of it. He preferred avoidance anyway, so he simply stopped taking newspapers home and only listened to the evening news at cafés. It didn’t help. Jinzhao sat in their new flat, a book in his lap, staring at the wall with a blank expression Tinseng would do anything to fix.
In the meantime, Tinseng kept his head down. Now, suddenly, Paris Station was too interested in Tinseng’s known acquaintance Mei Jinzhao. Tinseng bought them time by promising to keep Jinzhao from going to ground and to relate back any information he could wring from him. That was a lie, but they hadn’t known Tinseng had already been working on Li Xifeng’s journal for months; it was easy to mislead them with scraps he knew led nowhere, as he scrambled to stay ahead. For once, he held all the cards. He just had to figure out what to do with them.
“Do you still want to go back to Beijing?” he’d asked Jinzhao, but Jinzhao had no answers for him.
In some ways, the scandal was helpful. It had given Tinseng what he’d been lacking: information. This time, he wasn’t looking for the murderers—it was fairly clear now why the CCP had killed them. It even made sense why they’d left Jinzhao out in the cold: they couldn’t trust that Jinzhao wasn’t in on it too. What Tinseng needed, now, was to clear Jinzhao’s name as much as he could so that when Jinzhao’s head cleared, he could return to Beijing. His real home, Tinseng kept reminding himself. His real family.
So, what work had Li Xifeng been doing for the Russians? And was Jinzhao implicated in any way? That night, sitting at the foldaway desk they’d attached to the wall next to the front door, Tinseng pulled out Li Xifeng’s journal and flipped to the poem that matched with the translation of “Solitude” by Chou Meng-tieh the paper had printed. He looked down at the journal’s version again, reading:
缺月孤懸天中
又返照於筕藻交橫的溪底
溪面如鏡晶澈
紙偶爾有幾瓣白雲冉冉
