A Death in China

"Comrade! The chairman wants to see you right away."

"Hello, Alice." Stratton stifled a grin behind the tea mug. She had become a China groupie, a parody in blue cotton. The pants Chinese women wear with shapeless abandon strained across Alice's ample rump. The jacket was buttoned to the neck and fashionably wrinkled. The flat-brimmed hat bulged in a frustrated attempt to contain a mass of bottle-blond hair. Clinging precariously to the cap was a sheet metal button, red on white. AAAH, it said.

"You could pass for a native," Stratton mocked. Alice Dempsey was not his favorite woman.

"Bought it all at the Friendship Store. Why didn't you come with us?"

"I felt queasy."

"Baloney!" she snorted. "Every chance you get you slip away from us. What have you got against art historians anyway? I'll bet you don't even wear your badge, do you?" She rolled her eyes up toward her own AAAH. American Association of Art Historians.

"It's a fine group, very nice folks," Stratton said with forced politeness.

Alice Dempsey was ugly as sin and as a

"Fact is, I'd rather walk around than ride on a bus."

"Well, it's rude to our Chinese friends. The guide, little Miss Sun, is always asking about you: 'Where is Professor Stratton?' At least don't forget about the acrobatic show tonight."

"Sure, Alice."

Stratton's heart had not been with the tour since he had bumped into David Wang outside the Summer Palace, just as if they had been on Adams Street in Pittsville, Ohio, or at one of those ad hoc seminars Wang had loved to lead at St. Edward's, stockinged feet curled to the fire in the old library.

It was Stratton's first time in Asia in more than a decade, and he had still not worked out to his own satisfaction why he had come. Asia was a dead letter. Had he come because a two-week package tour of the People's Republic was cheap and exotic? Or because it would spare him dull hours of summer research at the small New England college where he taught? Not that, either. The research would have to be done, sooner or later, one way or the other; long nights followed by a slim volume only initiates would read. The job was waiting when he got back. Say he had come to escape the shards of a divorce that still hurt, a year later. Was that the real reason? Part of it, maybe, but only a lesser part, if Stratton was in the mood to be honest with himself. Carol was gone and he did not really miss her, although sometimes he ached to be with the boy.

Boredom. That was closer to the truth, wasn't it? His friends would know it intuitively. Stratton had worked hard to become a scholar. He was a legitimate historian, an able professor of emerging reputation. And… so what? Passing years that dulled the senses, blank-faced students in vacuous procession. What next, Stratton? Mid-life crisis. Male menopause. Maybe there was no next.

So he had come to China. To throttle the boredom. No, there was something deeper. He was also testing the scar tissue, the way an athlete will gingerly measure the recovery of an injured limb. Something else, too. Thomas Stratton, as he alone knew, had come to weigh the man he had become against the one he had once been.

At Peking Airport, standing before the immigration officer in white jacket and red-starred cap, visions of yesterday had come flooding in with a gush he had battled to control. The man had fingered his passport without interest.

"Is this your first time in China?" the inspector had asked in slow, careful English.

"Yes," Stratton had lied. "Yes, it is."

"You are perspiring. Are you ill?"

"No. It is hot."

The man had stamped his passport and Stratton had sought the refuge of protective coloration in the gaggle of art historians.

Stratton shook his head at the memory and sipped his tea.

That night he skipped the acrobatic performance. Too bad about little Miss Sun.

Once Stratton was sure his tour mates had left in the green-and-white Toyota minibus in which all tourists in China seemed to live, he went looking for di

The restaurant-foreigners only-was a purely functional place of round tables, soiled tablecloths, spotted silverware and spicy food in the inevitable blue-and-white crockery. The tour group ate three meals a day there, Western for breakfast and Chinese for the other two-a procession of savory dishes that appeared unordered.

Stratton settled into a small table and began leafing through a purple-covered issue of the Peking Review. About two paragraphs into the cover story, a gob of wet white rice caromed off the red plastic sign that proclaimed his table 37.

From two tables away, Stratton's assailant gri

"Kevin!" the woman jerked the missile commander around to face his di

"I'm sorry," she told Stratton. It was something she had said before.

The bearded man looked up from a dam of napkins that encircled a lake of spilled soy sauce.

"Somehow it was easier at McDonald's. Sorry," he said.

"No problem. Actually, he's a pretty good shot."

From the waitress, Stratton ordered Sichuan chicken with peanuts, noodles, vegetables and a beer.

"Qingdao beer."

"Qingdao mei you." She pronounced it "may-o."

"What kind do you have?"

"Peking."

"Okay."

"Hey, baby, that's a bad mistake," the bearded man called from his chaos.

"Peking beer tastes like it was passed through a horse. Tell her you want Wu Xing." He wiggled a green bottle in front of him.

"Wu Xing," Stratton told the waitress.

Stratton abandoned the last hope of a quiet meal when something began gnawing his leg. He carried it, squirming and squealing, back to its tribe.

"An escapee, I think," Stratton said, handing it to the woman.

"Oh, Tracey! Again, I'm sorry."

"That's okay. I'm used to kids. My sister has four."

"Spend a lot of time with them?" the bearded man asked.

"Never go near the little bastards."

"Can't imagine why. Why don't you join us, since we've ruined your di

McCarthy, it turned out, was one of about twenty American reporters resident in Peking, a correspondent for a big East Coast newspaper. He had an office in a hotel and an apartment in a compound on the eastern side of the city where foreigners lived in Western-style buildings behind high brick walls erected and patrolled by the Chinese government to keep Chinese out.

"You here for long?" McCarthy asked.

"Another couple of days."

McCarthy rolled his eyes.

"Jim is not a great China fan," his wife explained.

"Yeah, one day I'll write a book. 'Hold the May-o' it'll be called. It's the national sport. If you want something, they haven't got it-beer to interviews.

Mei you."

After di