Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“You’re telling me you took a revolver to bar mitzvahs and weddings?”

“No, you misheard me.”

“Good! For a minute I thought you said-”

“I said I took my Beretta to bar mitzvahs and weddings. My revolver I reserved for brises.”

Picturing Larry in a yarmulke and semiautomatic…

Then: Ow my God, yarmulke, it’s Friday, I forgot I’m supposed to go to Friday-night Shabbat services. I make my good-byes while I hurriedly gather my stuff.

“I didn’t bother making a reservation for you, assuming you wouldn’t be interested in going,” I tell him.

“Why the hell are you going, you don’t mind my asking.”

“I’m meeting my one contact from home-friend of a friend at the embassy here named Izzy somebody.”

“Have you already told me who he is? I can’t think of it right now.”

“Do you remember the first season of Survivor?” I ask him. “That sleazebag Richard Hatch who walked off with a mil?”

“No, but that’s okay. I don’t do popular culture.”

“Anyway, my friend is the federal prosecutor who convicted Hatch afterward for not paying taxes on his winnings,” I tell him. “I went to the case. Did a brilliant job. Nailed the guy for procuring a second passport and plotting to skip the country with his Argentine boyfriend.”

“And this prosecutor’s friend at the embassy can help us how?”

“Not sure yet,” I say. “I’m just following any leads I have.”

“And how do you happen to be friends with this particular prosecutor?”

I decide not to tell him that it was his connection, in a way. After Larry tried and failed to get me in hot water with the FBI years ago, I bumped into a guy at a party who would have been the one to prosecute me, if the FBI had found me suspicious in any way. The guy and I bonded over dinner, joking about it the rest of the evening, and now we go kayaking together. But why should I bother Larry with details? I can play mysterious, too. I look over his white shoulders and chest, innocent as heavy cream.

“You might want to consider using some kind of sunscreen,” I reply.

I hand the cabbie the Chinese directions Izzy faxed me and soon am weaving crosstown. Four dollars or forty-five minutes later, I’m let out in front of an old-fashioned student union-more cement than glass-but the receptionist in the rotunda indicates that the makeshift synagogue is at the other end of campus. Rather than give me directions in Chinese, she takes me by the sleeve and tugs me along through about a hundred yards of corridors into a courtyard, around some statuary, and up three floors of another building. Okay, this is more like it for an expat Jewish service-a couple of threadbare rooms off a college library.

Three senses immediately tell me it’s the right place: 1. Sound. “You had your baby!” says an Australian-accented, glamorous older woman in leopard-print scarf who’s bear-hugging another woman. 2. Sight. A couple of well-dressed gentlemen are pointing at the sky outside the window, quarreling about whether the sun has officially set. 3. Smell. Burning toast. Who overdid the bagels?

Yes, it’s my people, all right. I feel like Yuh-vonne throwing her arms wide and saying, I love you, Jewish!

I’ve never gone to services in sandals and panama hat before, but what the hell. No one stands on ceremony when you’re on the road. At least I operate as if no one does. If I were going to be self-conscious, I might as well have stayed home.

Izzy is apparently not here yet, but as people trickle in, I mill around making friends among clusters of Western Jews, mostly Americans and English, stationed in Beijing: a short, elegant gent from Baltimore, wearing bow tie and owlish glasses, who turns out to be the dean at this institute; his opera-singer boyfriend, who’s on sabbatical here from the Sorbonne; the Beijing bureau chief for an international news service; plus architects, bankers, and so forth. Everyone is witty, affable, competitive. It’s like old home week except with an edge, the sort of edge cultivated by brainy people who’ve cut their teeth in combative academies, sparring for fun but not entirely for fun. I travel from cluster to cluster, meeting an attractive young New York reporter who sizes me up to see if I’m a threat, and a Chicago judge passing through town who knows my lawyer brother-in-law and says to tell him “no hard feelings,” which I pretend not to hear, deciding it’s the kind of message that will do no one any good. I’m either going to have to tread these shoals very carefully or just shoot the moon.

“A nondenominational service, I take it?” I ask. “Hopefully, not too much responsive reading?”

This line helps me pass muster. The dean with bow tie smiles at me complicatedly.

“Where are you from originally?” I ask a man with the American Foreign Service who wears a black yarmulke with gold Chinese characters.

“I’ve been away so long I’m not from anywhere anymore,” he says-a boast that contains a bit of one-upmanship, I feel. “No one who comes to Beijing now has any idea how it used to be before the reforms,” he adds.

“So true,” I say, meeting his challenge. “When I was here last in ’84, I could never stop and talk to ordinary people in Tiananmen the way I did yesterday.”

“You trying to get yourself thrown in jail?” he pursues belligerently.

Another man in steel wire-rims comes to my defense. “He’d have to try harder than that to get thrown in jail; he’d have to unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ banner or something.”

“Speaking of Tibet, do any of you ever find yourself swayed by the Chinese case for dominion?” I ask.

“I was once shown a three-hundred-year-old document from some Chinese functionary or other,” the man in wire-rims replies, “in which he extended sovereignty over Tibet, but that’s a little like the governor of Texas saying he extends sovereignty over Mexico. Do they have a case?” he asks rhetorically, adjusting his spectacles. “On the basis of various particulars, you could say so, but it doesn’t add up to any compelling narrative.”

“Harvard or Princeton?” I ask him.

He adjusts his wire-rims again, too briskly to be nonchalant. “Harvard,” he admits sheepishly. “What was the telltale sign?”

“The terminology of that last clause,” I say. “The giveaway was the word ‘narrative.’”

“It couldn’t have been Yale?” he asks.

“Certainly not!” I exclaim, using a mock-aghast tone.

A chuckle circles the group. That clinches it. We’re meshpuchah, all but a few holdouts. I feel like Schindler at that banquet early in the movie, working the room so that by the time he left he was a pal of all the bigwigs. But I’m still wondering how to make my move. I decide to go for broke.

“So does anyone happen to have a spare kidney lying around?” I ask.

Expressions of amusement and surprise.

“I beg your pardon?” says the black-and-gold-yarmulke man, who still needs warming up.

“I’m in town scoping out a kidney for my cousin,” I say. “That’s why I’ve been eyeing your midsection somewhat lasciviously, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had noticed,” he says a little icily. “You’re kind of cavalier about this, aren’t you?”

“The riskier the situation, the more cavalier I try to be,” I say. “Keeps me from clutching.”

“Maybe clutching’s not such a bad thing under the circumstances,” he rejoins.

“I don’t know, haven’t you ever heard the ancient Chinese saying ‘When skating on thin ice, flash those blades’?”

“Which dynasty would that be from?” he pursues with tightened lips.

Time for others to step in. “Lighten up, Saul,” says the dean with bow tie. “Just because you have the best-looking yarmulke in the room, that doesn’t give you the right to foist your opinions on everyone.”