Lisa See - The Interior

The guard glanced over the roof of the car at his companion. What impertinence was this? his look seemed to say.

"Don't dawdle!" Henry blasted. He hit the side of the car with his fist. "Come here!" The guard swaggered over. Henry pointed right at the guard's chest, an insult of the highest order. "You! See that plane over there?" Henry dragged his finger away from the guard to the direction of his plane. "That's my baby. Let me pass!"

The guard bent down to see who else was in the car. Henry pressed a button and the tinted window rolled up. The guard banged on the window and started yelling. Lo kept his eyes forward. David and Hulan pretended they didn't hear a thing. After a moment Henry cracked the window an inch or so.

"Get out of the car," the guard said in Mandarin. To emphasize his point, he tapped the muzzle of his machine gun on the glass.

"No speakee Chinese!" Henry yapped. David groaned. "Now look, buddy," Henry went on. Somewhere along the way he seemed to have added a broad Southern accent. "I'm a personal friend of President Jiang Zemin. Jiang Zemin! Get it?" Henry snapped his fingers in the guard's face, each time rapping out, "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!"

The guard, flummoxed by this spectacle, motioned to the other guard. The gate rose, and Lo stepped on the gas.

Henry sank back into the leather seat. "You wanted bluster. I blustered."

"You did a good job," Hulan said.

"I acted like a total asshole and thoroughly insulted your countrymen."

"It worked," she replied.

The car stopped next to the plane. The pilot and copilot stood at the bottom of the stairs, sweating in the sun. "We're ready to go, sir," the pilot said.

"Just get us out of here as soon as you can," Henry said, and with that they boarded the plane.

AS THE PILOT STARTED THE ENGINES, HENRY QUICKLY checked to see if the fax had come through. It hadn't. They belted in, the plane taxied out to the runway, and after a short, though agonizing wait, they were given permission to take off. When the plane reached cruising altitude, Henry unbuckled his seat belt and said ironically, "I haven't had this much excitement since the war. And I want you to know right now, I'm not enjoying it any better."

David smiled. It took a special person to deal with this kind of danger with humor. He looked over to see if Hulan had had the same reaction, but she'd fallen asleep. He knew that sleep was a way to escape tough circumstances, but he'd been in life-threatening situations with Hulan before and he'd never seen her shut down like this. He reached over and touched her cheek. It was burning hot.

"Hulan? Honey? Are you okay?"

Her eyes blinked open. She straightened in the seat and smoothed her hair. "I must have dozed off."

"You're burning up," David said.

Hulan shook her head. "Of course. It's about forty degrees centigrade and ninety-nine percent humidity."

Outside, David thought. In the jet it was a comfortable seventy-two.

"If I could have a little water," she continued, "I'm sure I'll be fine. I'm probably just dehydrated."

Henry got up and pulled a bottle of Evian out of the refrigerator. Hulan unscrewed the top and drank straight from the bottle. She looked over at David and said in a voice that made it clear she wanted no argument, "Really, I'm fine."

What could he do but take her word for it? David glanced over at Henry, who only shrugged. His look seemed to say there wasn't much you could do if a woman wasn't going to be square with you.

"Mr. Knight," Hulan said, "you're going to a lot of trouble for Sun. Are you ready to tell us why?"

Henry stared pensively out the window, then, without looking at David or Hulan, he plunged in. "As you know, I was sent to China during World War II. I flew in over the Hump-the Himalayas. You always hoped you'd make it over, but you wore your parachute just in case. Then you'd get to Kunming in Yunnan Province. We had all kinds of names for that place-City of Rats, Black Market Town. First we stayed in these thatched huts. Rats lived up in the straw thatching, and when you woke up you'd see their beady little eyes staring down at you. There were so many rats that the army announced a rat-tail redemption campaign. In three months the locals turned in over a million tails, but that still didn't put a dent in the number of rats. The army did an investigation and found over a hundred rat farms that had been started just to cash in on the campaign. That's what Kunming was like."

Anne's fax still hadn't come through, but David was anxious for Henry to get to the point. "How did Sun get over to Kunming? I thought he was from Shanxi Province."

"I never said I met him in Kunming," Henry responded. For a moment it seemed he wouldn't continue. Then he sighed and said, "I told you before that I wanted to spend my life in China. What I didn't say was that I'd had that desire long before I ever got here. As a kid, I was fascinated with the place. I was particularly interested in old religious sites. I know it sounds crazy and maybe it was. You can imagine what my father thought! Things were different back then. I was only the third generation in my family to be in America and only the first to be born here. My father expected me to go into the family business and I did, but that didn't stop me from studying on my own or finding a Mandarin tutor. When the war broke out, everything changed, especially after the army found out about my interests. It's surprising what an armchair archeologist knows. I'd spent years studying the early Buddhist cave sculptures of Yungang, Luoyang, and Gansu. But I'd also researched the lesser-known cave sculptures of Tianlong Shan, which lay in the mountains to the south of Taiyuan. I wasn't the only person interested in those caves. A few years before, the Japanese had sent a team of art historians to Tianlong. They documented everything and published several books which were very popular in Japan."

"So in 1937, when the Japanese invaded, they knew exactly what to look for," Hulan concluded.

"The Japanese chopped off the heads of the Buddhas and carved out the relief sculptures from the walls. They were systematic and thorough. But as the war progressed, those caves offered something besides art."

"Protection," David said.

"That's right. They fortified themselves up there, and it seemed there was no way to rout them out. Even today the caves aren't that easy to reach, but back then the only way up was by foot across the mountains. It wasn't that the altitude was so bad-the 'mountains' are really just large hills on an already high plateau-but that the terrain was rocky, steep, and unstable. The Japanese looked to be up there for good. The Joint Intelligence Collection Agency thought I was the perfect person to go and take a look-see."

Japanese-Occupied China had covered a huge area. The Japanese were able to control strategic garrisons, but vast areas inhabited only by peasants and missionaries were left alone. It was through these areas that intelligence operatives traveled. "I flew into Xian, where we had other intelligence people," Henry continued. "Bishop Thomas Meeghan had an orphanage there for Chinese boys, who were trained to be totally reliable. A couple of those kids took me east. We rode on-I don't know what you call it-one of those things you pump up and down on a railroad track? We traveled at night, stopping for food and shelter at American, French, or Norwegian missions."

"How did you know where to go?"

"It was a network," Henry said. "The missionaries and the peasants didn't want the Japanese there. They were sympathetic to what we were doing. If a B-29 ran out of fuel flying back from a bombing raid on

Japanese-Occupied China and the crew had to bail out, all they had to do was show the Allied patch they wore inside their jackets and they were passed west through the network. We wore those same patches. They were like a passport. Anyway, we kept to the main railway line which divides the country between north and south and eventually runs through Taiyuan."