Chapter 6
Alice stared out the window as the SUV made its way back to Vivien’s home. But DC was lost to her. All she could see was Liam on the Star Ferry.
Calm, funny, luminous Liam.
Was he just about to be thrown into the water? But no, he’d had time to send her the selfie and that email. Apparently the very last thing he sent. He could not possibly have known what was going to happen to him, or he’d have contacted someone else. Someone useful.
At the very least, he’d have said something.
He was a spy. But for whom? The US or China?
If he was working for China, why would he take a selfie with members of the Chinese secret police? It made no sense. And yet it must make sense. Somehow.
“Who was Liam working for?” She turned to her mother. “You know, don’t you?”
Vivien just shook her head and stared out the window.
“For fuck’s sake,” shouted Alice. “At least look at me. My friend is dead. Murdered. Those men think his email to me, and the selfie, is some sort of code. It’s about fish balls, for Chrissake!”
“That’s just their latent bigotry,” said Vivien, as though she were describing a comfortable, slightly worn old sweater. “Consciously or unconsciously, they think all Asians are shifty. Hiding something. What’s the word? ‘Inscrutable.’ It means nothing.”
“What? Bigotry means nothing? And what are you talking about? None of this is okay. Not those alarms this morning, and sure as hell not Liam’s death. Somehow they’re connected, and I’m beginning to think you know how.”
She was almost screaming now, trying to penetrate her mother’s calm. Even to her own ears, she was sounding like a child on the verge of a tantrum. Which just moved her even closer to the verge.
Vivien reached for her hand. When Alice went to yank it away, Vivien’s grip tightened until the nails dug in.
“The men in that room might not be likeable, but they’re the professionals. We’ve said our piece. I’ll contact my people in China and try to get more information, but I’m afraid they’ve given me all they can.”
Her voice had remained calm, placid even. As though trying to coax a skittish colt into the halter. But her face held a warning, her eyes widening even as her hand tightened.
And Alice got the message.
They were listening.
Who “they” might be, Alice had no idea. Could be the CIA. Could be the Chinese. Could be aliens, for all the sense any of this was making. All Alice knew was that she herself needed to start listening. To what was being said. And not said.
“You’re right about Liam. It’s a tragedy,” her mother was saying. “It would be nice if, once news got out, you contacted his family. Passed along your condolences. Is his mother still alive?”
“I don’t know.” Alice continued to stare at her own mother.
She was trying, Alice could see, to tell her something.
But what? “I could do an online search…” But that wasn’t it.
The nails dug in deeper. Threatening to break the skin.
What? What did her mother want her to do?
“I guess I could go to the funeral…” Tighter still.
Alice grimaced. What? What?
“But I’d like to send a note before that. Not an email, but something more personal, of course. Handwritten.” The grip loosened, just a little. “I wonder if Columbia might have an address.”
The hand released a little more.
“I know he lives in Akron. Works for Garnett Foods. But I’m not sure if that’s where his family is. I could call the registrar.” Alice winced as the nails bit in again. “But best if I went there in person. They probably won’t give me that information over the phone. I can prove I’m an alumni.”
“Alumna,” Vivien automatically corrected. But the grip had released. “Do whatever you want. I have my own problems.”
She turned away again.
Alice massaged her hand. It was sticky. Her mother had drawn blood.
“So, what happened?” demanded Kevin.
Tall and slender, her brother definitely took after their mother’s side of the family. No one would ever think them siblings. He was her younger brother, but somehow everyone treated him as though he was the firstborn.
“That was a government vehicle,” said Paul. “A Cadillac Escalade. I recognize it.”
Oh God, here it comes, thought Alice, too weary to head it off.
While Kevin was a lawyer in private practice, Paul worked in the Office of Supply Chain Services at the Commerce Department. Alice’s one goal when they were together was to avoid triggering a discussion of Paul’s job.
“Why did they want to talk to you?” Kevin interrupted as his husband opened his mouth to continue. “Why did Vivien take you along?”
And not me? was the unsaid question.
“Do they know what the alarms were about? The President didn’t have much to say in his address. Social media is blowing up.”
“He looked pretty spooked. Not his usual self.” Paul liked to imply he knew the President personally. Which he did not.
“What?” Kevin looked at his sister as her face dissolved. “Here.”
He took her in his arms and held her tight while she sobbed.
The dam had burst. Everything she’d held in during that meeting, during the car ride back, came rushing out. Her hopes, her fantasies, her dreams of a relationship, maybe even a life with Liam, were wrenched out of her in whoops and gasps and gulps.
Liam was dead. There would be no reunion. No rekindling. No relationship that would lead to marriage. To children. To a life together. To him holding her hand as she died, at ninety.
She’d allowed her imagination, her fantasies, her hopes, to go that far. Until they seemed real. A certainty.
But none of that was real. The only reality, the only fact, was that Liam was dead. Drowned, far from home. If she was going to help find out what happened, Alice knew she needed to trade feelings for facts.
She pulled away from her brother’s embrace and rubbed her runny nose.
“What is it?” Kevin led her to the kitchen table. As they sat, he took her hand, trying not to notice how slimy it was.
“Liam’s dead.”
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.” Pause. “Who’s Liam?”
“A man I knew at Columbia. Fellow student.”
“And…?” asked Paul, taking a seat on the other side of her.
“We had a relationship.”
“Oh, him.” Kevin glanced toward the swinging door. “The one she…”
They rarely called Vivien “Mom” or “Mother.” She was Vivien or simply “she.”
“Yes. I came here to DC”—gasp—“to … meet…” She looked at her brother, and her chin dimpled. “… him.”
Seemed trading feelings for facts wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded.
“Liam was in Hong Kong, and he drowned.” She almost told them the rest but remembered not to. “That was why they wanted to see me as well as Vivien. To tell me. They knew we were friends.”
Paul seemed to accept that, becoming far less interested, but Kevin continued to study his sister. Why, he was about to ask, would they need to take her to the White House to tell her? And why even tell her? She wasn’t next of kin.
He was about to say something when she spoke, he suspected to head off his question. And he’d be right.
“Do you know anything about Vivien’s early life?”
“In China?”
She nodded.
“Only what you do. Why do you want to know?”
“Something she said in the meeting, about ‘her people in China.’ I don’t know what that meant. Do you?”
“I know she keeps in touch with people there. Covert dissidents who feed her information. But she hasn’t been back herself since she escaped years ago. She’s not Chen’s favorite person.”
“Yes.” That much Alice knew.
There was nothing they knew about their mother’s life that everyone else did not. She was both an open book and a puzzle box.
What they did know was that most of their mother’s contacts were in the diaspora. The wealthy and educated Chinese who now made the West their home. It was a vast and powerful network, with Vivien Li at the center.
Their aim was to undermine the Communist regime and bring back the “old world order.” One that celebrated and protected and valued the culture and history of their nation. One that did not punish its citizens for having minds and opinions of their own.
That was the goal, the future. But Vivien’s early life in China, her past, was shrouded in mist. Vivien Li was, after all, a weathermaker. And the weather she made was fog.
The implication was that to reveal anything about her upbringing was to invite trouble. From whom, and for whom, was, like everything else in Vivien Li’s life, never clear.
But some details had escaped the dense shroud.
“Her parents were arrested in the Cultural Revolution,” said Paul. “Right? I read that in an interview she gave to Dissent magazine. The article was called ‘The Last Mandarin.’”
Both Kevin and Alice raised their brows. Paul read? They knew he flipped through People magazine in the bath, but Dissent?
Still, they both had realized early on that he was fascinated by, almost obsessed with, his mother-in-law.
The greater the secrets, the greater the interest. And Vivien Li was one juicy cipher.
Paul was also scared stiff of her, but that only added to the fascination.
Like someone afraid of flying endlessly googling plane disasters.
Alice picked up her phone and googled the article as Kevin and Paul leaned in. Up popped her mother in a white silk Shanghai Tang blouse, looking straight into the camera. Almost like she was staring right through the three of them.
“Well, that was brutal,” said one of the analysts who’d been in the meeting. He was leaning against the doorway. “You okay?”
They were back in their offices in CIA headquarters.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” asked Zhou, turning to shield the screen of his computer.
“Because she pretty much eviscerated you. In front of the President. In front of McAllister. In front of everyone.”
It was not, Alan Zhou realized, said to be supportive. It was meant to twist the knife.