The Shanghai Factor (16 page)

21

Next morning I arose
at first light and resumed my inspection. Sure enough, I spotted the backup bugs and cameras, taking care to look like a guy wandering aimlessly around the house sipping his morning coffee. I let them be. Let my watchers think I had fallen into their trap, that I had mistaken their decoys for the real thing. I had no plans to hold operational meetings in this house or mumble secrets in my sleep. There was no reason why these clowns, whoever they were, or for that matter why the whole world should not watch me shave, cut my toenails, chew my granola, read my books, eat my supper, fix a faucet—even, if there was a merciful and compassionate god, watch me nail the fair Magdalena one moonlit evening after she had done the dishes. Imagine her, imagine mismatched us as infrared images, imagine the moans, the gasps, the rest of the pornography. It had been a long time since Shanghai.

I stayed in the house for a week, and at the end of the week decided to stay a little longer. It would be a good thing, I reasoned, to give Burbank plenty of time to mull the choices offered by my tape of Lin Ming’s recruitment pitch, and for Lin Ming to pile a few more stones on the
weiqi
board. The change of scene not to mention the sense that I was not, owing to Magdalena’s daily appearances, all by myself, was good for me. Gradually I stopped seeing the frowning gardener she used to be and started noticing the woman she was. There were things about Magdalena—many things—that made me think there was more to her than she thought she was letting me see. As her behavior softened, my curiosity grew. This was not part of the plan. It just happened. Maybe it was my subconscious at work, demanding payback for earlier affronts. One day as I read another book in the garden while she weeded, she asked me where I had learned Chinese. It was a polite gesture. In return I let her have it: “There is no language called ‘Chinese.’ People living in China speak two hundred ninety-two languages, most of them mutually incomprehensible. Characters signify different words in different languages. There is also one dead language, Jurchen, that only scholars understand. The language I am reading is Mandarin.” Absorbing this spurt of bile, Magdalena was transformed. The change was startling. She looked stricken—in danger of tears, even. She darted away. I was not exactly amazed by her reaction. In my experience, people who dish it out seldom can take it. Magdalena came nowhere near me for the remainder of the day. But supper was especially tasty that night: bouillabaisse, no less. She drove all the way to Great Barrington, to Mother’s favorite store across the Massachusetts line, to buy the fish. She spoke no word while serving at table. She wore a skirt and a scoop-neck blouse. Her eyes looked bigger. Mascara? Possibly.

As I ate my chocolate mousse I heard the clatter of china being put into the dishwasher, and also a new sound. Magdalena was humming a tune. Amazed, I rose from the table and went into the kitchen. Her back was turned to me. Even though she could see my reflection in the window above the sink, she went on humming in a pretty but muted soprano voice that sounded trained. She was humming an aria from
Madame Butterfly.
I couldn’t have been more astonished. Magdalena didn’t sing the whole of it, but she sang enough to let me know she could have sung louder and longer if she chose. When she was done, I stifled an urge to applaud, knowing that she would take it for what it was, sarcasm.

Instead, I said, “Where did you train?”

No reply. After a long moment of silence, however, she spoke. With her back still turned to me, she said, “You’re straight, right?”

Ah.
I said, “Right. You, too?”

She said, “In case you’re wondering because of my past, I have no STDs. Not now, not ever.”

I said, “What does that mean, you don’t sleep with Republicans?”

“It means I have no sexually transmitted diseases. Given my background you’ve got a right to ask.”

“Me either.”

“I don’t like condoms.”

“Neither do I.”

What a romantic turn this conversation was taking. Clearly the seduction scenario I’d been putting together in my mind had been a waste of time and imagination. All of a sudden Magdalena turned around, skirt swirling. She could dance, too. She had a little color in her face. She smiled a fleeting little smile. She was a different woman altogether. A certain nervousness—how after all could she know what she was getting herself into?—added to the appeal.

After a small silence and a moment of eye contact, I said, “Where?”

“What about right here?” Magdalena said.

“On the floor, on the center island, up against the sink?”

“Not until we’re married. Go upstairs. I’ll join you.”

I did as I was told, wondering if she would actually follow or if she had sent me to wait upstairs while she slipped out the back door. For long minutes, she did not follow. I took a shower to kill time. When I emerged, Magdalena lay on the bed. With her clothes on she may have looked a bit stringy. Naked, on her back, in this light, she made a different impression. I turned off the bedside lamp, thinking again about infrared images. I really wanted the watchers to watch this, but on my terms. She turned the lamp back on. Expertly she took hold of me. In bed as in kitchen or garden, Magdalena was a no-nonsense woman. She knew everything, and as far as I could tell, she liked everything. In her enthusiasm she reminded me a little of Mei, but only a little, and I shooed the comparison from my head because it didn’t seem proper to my inner puritan to think of Mei while copulating with another woman. Or, strangely enough, vice versa. There was a difference—Magdalena was satiable, whereas Mei was not. Immediately after the third orgasm, she got up and left without saying good-bye or anything else for that matter. She came back the next night and several consecutive nights after that. The routine was the same. She wasn’t impolite about it, but when she had achieved what she wanted to achieve she departed—brusquely, as if she didn’t want to miss her favorite sitcom.

As experience teaches us, all good things come to an end. One night after Magdalena had taken her leave, I lay in bed thinking of a touchdown run the Hessian had made in the mud in the last century. It was the last play of the game. The six points he scored clinched the league championship for our school. Everyone else on the bench rushed onto the field to hug the Hessian. I walked away. The coach kicked me off the team for unsportsmanlike conduct.

In this place and time it was midnight, the weather was warm. The windows were wide open. The curtains stirred. I heard a telephone ringing—not the one in the front hall, but a phone outside the house. It had a novelty ring, like the horn of a Jazz Age car: Ah-
OO
-ga! Ah-
OO
-ga! I had left the special cell phone Burbank had given me in Mother’s Mercedes, which was parked in the driveway and had never before heard it ring. In bare feet and pants and a T-shirt I walked to the car, started it up, and drove about five miles north—out of range of the gizmos in the walls. I parked, got out of the car, and dialed the number of the missed call. Naturally Burbank didn’t answer. After the fifth ring I switched off.

Burbank replied almost instantly with a text message composed entirely of wild cards that translated as: “Report to Washington immediately. Do not repeat do not go back to the house or the apartment. Make contact when you get here.”

It is a greater bother than you might think to travel in bare feet. For one thing, your feet get very dirty very quickly. For another you keep stubbing your toes and stepping on sharp or unclean things (it’s no fun to pump gas or enter a public restroom). For yet another, going barefoot in public is frowned upon in bourgeois America. It is no easy matter for the unshod to buy shoes. Most stores post signs forbidding the barefoot to enter. Stores don’t open until ten in the morning. When I got Burbank’s message it was about half past midnight. You cannot get on a train or a bus, let alone an airplane, without shoes. I stopped at the first rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike. The convenience shop didn’t even carry flip-flops. I bought a roll of paper towels and a bottle of soap and washed my feet in the restroom. This drew disgusted glances, but by then I didn’t care.

The Mercedes’s top speed was about fifty miles an hour, so I heard lots of horns on the turnpike. I regarded this as an advantage, because I figured that few drivers, whether under Guoanbu discipline or not, would be so foolhardy as to drive slow enough to tail me in this bat-out-of-hell traffic. To my surprise the car made it all the way to the Metro station in Vienna, Virginia. I parked it in the lot, wiped it for fingerprints, and abandoned it. Whoever towed it away would trace it to my late mother, whose last name was different from mine. I sent an encrypted text message to Burbank. Rigmarole intervened, but at last Burbank himself picked me up in his Hyundai at the third Metro station to which he directed me. How like the movies was the world I had wandered into.

I hadn’t stopped to eat. I was very hungry. This time Burbank had brought no sandwiches. I was tired. Driving a clunker for four hundred miles, thinking every minute that the wheels were going to fall off, had been a fatiguing business. Even with all the windows and the roof open, I had inhaled enough carbon monoxide to euthanize a horse.

I said, “I can’t stay awake. Let me know when we get there.”

Later—how much later I don’t know because I had left my father’s Rolex on the bedside table in Connecticut—I was awakened by Burbank pinching my lower lip. We were in the countryside, at the same converted barn we had visited before. Crickets chirped. We went inside, me limping slightly more than usual. The god-awful paintings were still there. The caretaker-painter was still absent, so Burbank must have had the same housekeeper. I tried to picture her, but the woman I saw in my mind’s eye was Magdalena. I wondered what she would make of my sudden departure—$20,000 watch left on the table, shoes on the floor, socks and underwear strewn on the rag rug made by my grandmother and her sisters, razor and toothbrush in the bathroom.

Burbank brewed tea. He said, “You’re quite informally dressed tonight.”

“Your fault,” I said.

He said, “Meaning what?”

I told him. I told him about the break-in and the bugs. I told him about Magdalena in her many guises mean and mellow. I described the seduction scene. Taken together, this made her sound like a suspicious character—a simple accomplishment, as any character assassin knows. Burbank listened impatiently, obviously controlling his face with an effort.

He cleared his throat and said, “You do seem to have a way with the ladies.”

“With a little help from my friends.”

“Well, let’s hope this Magdalena is still a friend.”

“She’s not the type.”

“Oh?” Burbank said. “What type would you say she is?”

“Hard to tell,” I said.

“She’s good at what she does? Apart from the sex.”

“No end to her skills. Terrific cook, frugal housekeeper, world-class gardener, very smart. I wouldn’t be surprised if she can make pottery or fly a helicopter or read Sanskrit. She was very observant, almost like a trained investigator, in picking up clues about the break-in. I told her she was a born detective, and meant it.”

“That also fits.”

“Fits what?”

“Our files,” Burbank said. “But you left something out. Magdalena, as she told you to call her, is a professional assassin.”

Oh, was
that
all? I had to suppress a laugh. At the same time I felt a little sick. I was supposed to believe this? I said, “Are you serious?”

He said, “She has seven kills we know about. Just as you say, she cooks like Escoffier, she leaps from scorn to lust, she screws the target regardless of gender, she crawls on her belly like a snake. She does her thing. The target dies. She disappears. We don’t even have a picture of her.”

“What’s her method?’”

“Poison. Untraceable poison. That’s why she’s never been caught. That and her all-around talent.”

“Which talent?”

“What better profession for a poisoner than chef? What better way to build trust than sex?”

Now I was the one who meditated. Burbank wouldn’t kid around about something like this—unless he had an operational reason—or, most unlikely, a personal one—in which case he might very well make up whatever fairy story suited the purpose. I made room in my mind for doubt even though I was under oath to believe anything he might say.

This didn’t fool Burbank. He said, “You’re skeptical. Good. I wouldn’t think much of you if you weren’t. But you’d better believe what I’m saying to you. Magdalena always gets her man. Others have tried to escape. In the end she always made the kill.”

I said, “Who does she work for?”

“If you’ve got the money, she’s got the poison.”

“You think she’s been paid to do me in?”

“In the context, it’s not such a wild surmise.”

“The next line in the script is, ‘Who put out the contract?’”

“If we knew that,” Burbank said, “we’d know who wants you dead, wouldn’t we?”

He seemed to savor his words.

22

By the time
federal agents got to the house in Connecticut the following morning, Magdalena was long gone. There was nothing Burbank or anyone else at Headquarters could do about this. Bogeyman fantasies notwithstanding, the U.S. intelligence service has no power of arrest or police authority of any kind, and it is prohibited by law from running operations on American soil against American citizens. It has to rely on other feds who carry guns and badges, like the FBI, to apprehend people like Magdalena. I could imagine her springing into action on finding me gone when she arrived at break of day. She would have seen the signs that I had got wind of her—the abandoned heirloom Rolex on the bedside table, the dirty clothes and all the other telltale signs of a sudden departure. She would immediately have done the professional thing and dematerialized. Sooner or later, somewhere else on the planet, she would pull her molecules together again and continue the hunt. If Burbank could be believed, she took her work seriously. She was under contract. Her reputation, her future, her business prospects, even her sex life, depended on fulfilling the contract. I would see her again—or more likely,
not
see her again. One evening I would come home from the office, microwave a leftover, swallow a mouthful of it and suddenly the world would go dark, this time for real. Or maybe I’d feel a pinprick through the seat of my pants while standing at a urinal at the movies, and then in the mirror see the last thing I would ever see—Magdalena’s face over her shoulder as she walked out, disguised as an undersized male. As I drew my last breath would she wink and smile that decimal of a Magdalena smile?