Ha Jin - A Map of Betrayal - A Novel

A Dunkin’ Donuts had opened recently on a nearby street and attracted droves of customers, most of whom went to work early in the morning. Both Nellie and Peggy noticed the thriving shop and wondered what made it so popular. Sometimes cars would form a line stretching from the parking lot onto the street. Nellie went there one afternoon and bought a muffin and a bagel, which didn’t taste at all better than those sold by their own bakery. Peggy and Nellie were both confident that they offered better baked goods. Then, what made that shop so successful?

Peggy wasn’t terribly bothered, saying the donut shop was similar to McDonald’s or Burger King, which couldn’t compete with real restaurants and drew in only junk-food lovers. But Nellie wanted to figure out what made the coffee shop thrive. She mentioned this to Gary at breakfast one day. He said, “David Shuman stops by Dunkin’ Donuts every morning too. He told me he was hooked.”

“Is the shop on his way to work?” Nellie asked.

“That’s part of it. David also said Dunkin’ Donuts has the best coffee.”

“Really? Then it must be the coffee that makes it tick.”

“Maybe. Why not go try it and see if it’s true?”

She looked at her big wristwatch. “My, I’ve got to run. Peggy’s face will drop a mile if I’m too late.”

On her way Nellie stopped by the Dunkin’ Donuts and bought a cup of coffee, the original blend, which was indeed strong and fragrant. She let Peggy taste it too.

After a swallow, the old woman said, “Oh my, this could keep a grizzly awake for a whole day.”

“We should offer better coffee too,” Nellie suggested.

“We don’t need to follow Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“But it could bring in more customers.”

“We’re a bakery, not a coffee shop. Don’t be troubled by this. We can sell more bread instead of donuts and muffins. We don’t need lots of bagel eaters for customers anyway.”

“Peggy, you’re a bad businesswoman,” Nellie said with a straight face, which had been getting pretty in a gaunt way as she grew older, even her eyes more vivid than a decade before. “We can’t let them take away our customers. I won’t just sit tight doing nothing. Why not offer an extra few kinds of coffee and make them all strong? Just see what will happen.”

Peggy shook her head. “A coffee bar will cost a pretty penny.”

“But we must do our best to keep our business.”

“All right, I’ll grab some coffeemakers and put them there.” Peggy pointed at the corner in the small dining area.

So the “coffee bar” was set up the following week, offering French vanilla, Colombian, hazelnut, and house blend, all twice as strong as before. To go with the coffees were whole milk, half-and-half, cinnamon powder, sugar, its substitutes, and bits of bread and pastry for sampling. The corner indeed looked like a tiny bar. Morning after morning Peggy and Nellie could see that more people were now dropping by on their way to work.

Soon Peggy hired another full-timer, and the bakery continued thriving.

By the summer of 1975, Gary had grown tired of sourdough and developed a taste for Irish soda bread, so Nellie would bring one home every evening. He had quit relishing raw garlic long ago and was no longer a lusty meat eater; rarely would he have sausage. Like a senior general who needn’t go to the front line anymore, he would no longer travel to Hong Kong in person (in part because he dreaded jet lag).

When on vacation, he would stay home, reading and writing. Lately he’d been translating Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five . He knew this might infringe the copyright, but at the time no written works were covered by any rights in China, where foreign books were just translated and brought out without notifying the authors and the original publishers, so it might be possible for Gary to get his translation of the small novel published when he was back in his homeland. Ideally it would be a bilingual edition, with the original words and the Chinese characters printed on facing pages so that English majors could use it as a textbook for learning current American idioms. (Gary didn’t feel comfortable with Briticisms, which sounded mannered to him but were still taught throughout China.) He kept reminding himself that the translation was just a pastime, and proceeded at his leisure, three or four paragraphs a day.

He wouldn’t dig for intelligence anymore and preferred to just pick up whatever came through his hands. Of that there was plenty, because all the CIA’s reports on China would be checked by him for accuracy and stylistic consistency before they were dispatched to the White House. At long last he could afford to take it easy, like an old angler who didn’t care how many fish he caught and only settled in a beach chair, holding a rod while drifting in and out of sleep.

Nevertheless, every once in a while important information would come his way and he’d photograph the pages and provide his analyses. By now Gary’s views and assessments were highly valued in Beijing — he had become China’s ear to the heartbeat of the United States. He knew he was indispensable to the Chinese leaders thanks to the position he occupied. Whenever he had something to deliver, he’d drive to Father Murray’s church in downtown Baltimore. Even in the absence of urgent business, he’d go out with the priest for lunch or dinner once a month. Neither of them bothered about the rule that prohibited such a no-delivery meeting. Having gone through so many years’ fear and danger together, the two had become friends. Murray wouldn’t eat red meat but loved seafood and cheese. He often told Gary stories of his childhood in the Philippines. He was estranged from his father, a burly white man, captain of a British ocean liner, who’d taken Kevin’s mother as a “local wife” and had his legal family back in Manchester. The man provided for his Chinese-Filipina mistress, though; he also sent their son and daughter to an English school and then to an American college in Manila. “I hate my father,” Kevin said, munching on a soft-shell crab sandwich. “He’s a selfish asshole.”

Gary chuckled. He listened to Murray attentively but didn’t say anything about his own past, afraid that once he started, he might not be able to hold back the flood of emotions and memories.

Ben came to College Park on the pretext of picking up the microchips that had just arrived. Again he paid Henry a one hundred percent profit, $3,920, which thrilled my husband. But Ben didn’t look well; his eyes were slightly puffy and his face drawn, as though he were sleep-deprived. He told me that he had finished the book on his grandfather and then read more about Gary to figure out what actually happened to him. He came to see me because he’d been stonewalled in his investigation. He’d gone to the Boston Public Library and got hold of the microfilms of The New York Times and The Washington Post from the fall of 1980, and he had read all the articles on Gary’s arrest and his espionage activities. But the deeper Ben delved into the case, the more misgivings he had about his grandfather, who was very different from the figure Ben had pictured.

We were seated in my study, just the two of us. Ben, his eyelids a little tremulous, asked about my father, “Do you think he missed his family back home?”

“He did,” I said.

“Did he love my grandmother?”

“Of course. He missed her a lot, especially during the first years of their separation. He was always remote from things around him, and his heart was elsewhere. In his diary he mentioned that he dreamed of your grandmother every once in a while.”