“Hmm. A big man, is he?” Mrs. Lanzette asked archly. “Talks a lot, never seems to actually say anything? My dear, I’m from Chicago, we’re a city defined by men too big for their britches. They flock around the radio in the smoke room to squawk about politics—as if they have anything to do with it, hah! I saw my fair share of that at the university, believe me.”
Yukying leaned in. “Laurence often hosts large dinner parties at our apartment. His father has big contracts with the government. That’s why he wanted Laurence to go into that work.”
“So you know, then. To hear them tell it, they should’ve been the one giving the orders to MacArthur, not the other way around. Who was your MacArthur? I’m afraid I never followed much outside of headlines.”
There was no easy way to sum up the complicated web of opposing internal and external forces during the Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Between the KMT, CCP, and interlopers like Stilwell, Yukying chose the least offensive option to an American, and the only name one was likely to recognize: “Chiang Kai-shek.”
Mrs. Lanzette nodded amiably. “And I just bet when you’re sitting there listening to them around the dinner table, they sound like Chiang should’ve been wiring them for every troop movement.”
Yukying could recall a dozen instances of this exact sentiment. “Yes, the war would have ended years earlier if only they’d been in charge.”
“Or never begun at all, if you’d let ’em at Hitler and Hirohito from the start, right?” Mrs. Lanzette speared a potato. “Sometimes, when you walk past, doesn’t it sound exactly like a bunch of old biddies gossiping over their knitting?”
Yukying held her hand over her mouth to hide her laugh. Mrs. Lanzette sipped her whiskey victoriously.
“I like you, Li Yukying; you’re the first clever girl I’ve met on this ship. Do you sew? Of course you do, I see your work on this dress—it’s flawless. Why don’t you join my sewing circle tomorrow? How I’ve already been dragooned into one, I couldn’t tell you, but I’d just adore some good company.”
“Well . . .” Yukying considered the effort it would take to navigate a group of unknown women. On the other hand, the boys had already discussed how much tennis they wanted to get in on this trip, an activity she couldn’t participate in. She had planned to sit on the sidelines with Lim Chiboon, but she’d also brought a thorny knitting project in the hopes of making some progress. “That’s very kind of you to offer. Thank you, I will.”
She ate one last cucumber coin to assuage her guilt for how much she couldn’t finish as the waiters swept away their plates for the fourth course.
“Are you looking forward to our first port?” she asked.
“Lisbon? Afraid I don’t have even the start of a plan. I have my Frommer’s, of course, but nothing beyond that.”
“Oh, well, may I introduce you to my friend?” Yukying grabbed Chiboon’s attention. “Mrs. Richard Lanzette, Denise, this is Mr. Chiboon Lim, but you might know him by his nom de plume Hughland Nash.”
Mrs. Lanzette goggled. “Hugh Nash? No. You did that tell-all interview with Debby Walley in last month’s Photoplay!”
“Yukying . . .” Chiboon was all false modesty behind his glass. “Stop . . .”
“He’s syndicated in over two-dozen newspapers,” Yukying boasted, trying not to grin at his antics. “And he’s planned this whole trip for us, so we’re quite in his debt.”
“It was nothing much,” Chiboon said with the same pleased smile she remembered from muggy afternoons staying inside together, when she would praise his sketches or his rearrangement of the shelves so the knickknacks looked less cluttered.
“We were wondering what there is to do in Lisbon, Hugh,” Yukying prompted.
“Well, there’s the Museu Nacional dos Coches, which has a remarkable collection of historic carriages, and an artillery museum for the fellows. But all that’s a little pedestrian. The real point of interest are the casinos.” He leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “They were riddled with spies back in the war.”
“Now we’re talkin’!” Mrs. Lanzette nodded enthusiastically. “I adore spy stories. I’ve read every Bond novel, can’t get enough.”
“Oh, then you must go. It’s all rumor, of course, but they say the Palácio and Casino Estoril were the refuges for the Allies, and the Atlântico was for the Reich. They even say Ian Fleming frequented Casino Estoril while he was a spy.”
“Really.”
“I’m just repeating what I’ve heard, of course,” Chiboon winked at Mrs. Lanzette. “But the source was very good.”
“Mr. Nash, you should write a guide,” Mrs. Lanzette gushed. “I’ll certainly take your advice. Have you read that new man on the scene, le Carré? He writes better than Fleming, though I can’t say I enjoyed his realism; the ending was so bleak. If I wanted that, I’d read the headlines. Who do you prefer, Mr. Nash, as a writer?”
“I think I prefer writing the stories to reading them.”
Mrs. Lanzette agreed, praising his coverage of the Mei Affair especially, a scandal that had intrigued and shocked the world a year ago when the story had first broke. Mei Hankong had been a cultural attaché to the Chinese Embassy in Switzerland, a longtime post. He had been cleared as far as anyone knew, as had his wife, Li Xifeng, a translator of poetry and a private tutor. In December 1961, it had been quietly reported that both had died in a tragic accident. Speculation had flown behind closed doors, but hardly anything was written; the press, Chiboon explained, had a strict embargo on writing about spies—at least, he added, in every civilized country.
Which was why it had come as a shock when a Swiss rag had broken an unbelievable story: they claimed Li Xifeng had been spying for Russia for years, right under the embassy’s nose. That would have been more than enough for scandal. But the rag went on to claim that her husband had known; instead of loyalty to his country, he’d hidden her secret instead.
“How could I resist? Everyone else was writing about it.” It was the spy story of the century, even better than the Rosenbergs. Where most columnists had used the scandal to moralize, Chiboon had instead analyzed Li Xifeng’s poetry translations. “It was a hard sell to my editor, but I promised him I wouldn’t linger on the stuffy parts.”
Cheuk-Kwan’s harsh chuckle made them all look his way. “You’ve spent too much time in America. You’re able to swallow the official reports without choking.”
Chiboon didn’t acknowledge Cheuk-Kwan. He smiled at Mrs. Lanzette instead. “You see, that’s why Yukying and I are such fast friends: I loathe talking politics, unlike most of my companions here. There’s nothing Yukying’s husband and brothers love more than boring us to tears with their debates. Me, I wonder what the point of all that is. I’m far more interested in art.”
“Scandal isn’t art.” Cheuk-Kwan’s voice rose, then fell as he caught Yukying’s glare. “And there’s no such thing as art for art’s sake, you know that.”
“But what is scandal but the gutter version of a tragic play?” Chiboon asked. “When Joan Bennett’s husband shot her agent out of jealousy just for talking to her, what was that but Othello jealous over a handkerchief? And when Mei Hankong covered up his wife’s espionage, choosing her over his beloved People’s Republic, that’s just Faust choosing the earthly over the spiritual. Whether we call it gossip or tragedy, it’s all the same muck.”
“And you the muckraker?” Mrs. Lanzette asked playfully.
“Where else do you find the best stories but the mud?” Chiboon smirked. Cheuk-Kwan made a noise of disgust and gave up. The waiters were circling again. Yukying looked down at her plate. Someone had pushed extra broccoli onto it, but when she looked around no one would meet her eye.
Yukying hoped the conversation would move on, but the other woman finished her whiskey and asked, “Do you think Hankong Mei killed her, Mr. Nash? Or was it assassination, like the bolder papers say?”
“Is it really so obvious they were killed?” Yukying asked before she could help herself. She had, secretly, been holding on to the hope that it had been just a robbery gone wrong. She hated to think that Mei Hankong had killed his wife and himself in shame and, though she tried not to be naïve , she also hated the idea that governments went around killing their citizens. She never wanted to assume the worst.
“Ah, jie,” Lim Chiboon said, “Robbery, heart attack, or suicide—that’s always the excuse. There’s a reason all the retired spies write those into their novels. No, I don’t think he killed her.”
Chiboon’s reasoning, he told them while the waiter brought them fresh drinks, was that Mei Hankong had already hidden his wife’s activities for so long. Why suddenly change his mind to such a degree? And if he had decided he’d had enough, why not turn her in instead? He would have been a national hero, albeit a secret one, for catching such an important Russian spy. Given a medal, or probably two since it was his wife.
