The Interior (Red Princess 2)

At six-thirty exactly, the party began moving to the other room. Governor Sun sidled up to David and, slowing his pace so that the others would pass them, asked in a low voice, “Have you had a chance to look at the papers I sent over?”

“Yes,” David answered stiffly. As much as he tried to believe in his client’s innocence, he was becoming increasingly convinced of his guilt.

“We need to talk—”

“I tried to see you yesterday. I was told you were unavailable.”

A frown creased Sun’s face, then instantly smoothed away. “I’m sorry if it was an inconvenience. Tomorrow I will come to your office at ten. Is that okay?” But Sun didn’t wait for a response. Instead he raised his voice and said affably, “David, tonight you are in for a treat. The Beijing Hotel always provides a fine banquet.” He gestured with his arm into the dining room, and David entered.

The room had been set up with three tables of ten place settings apiece. Name cards marked each seat, so that decorum would be maintained. David and Hulan were seated at the head table with Governor Sun, Randall Craig, Miles Stout, Doug and Henry Knight, one of Randall’s minions, and a vice minister from COSCO, the largest shipper of merchandise out of China. Nixon Chen had also made the cut.

Unlike Chinese restaurants in other parts of the world where the food was served family-style in the middle of the table, banquets in China were presented course by course on individual plates. The first dish offered three cold selections—shredded jellyfish, cold steamed chicken, and a few thin slices of barbecued pork. Accompanying this was a glass of mao tai, a fiery and fierce liquor. Almost immediately the sense of conviviality rose in the room.

Within minutes, David could understand why Nixon Chen had been placed at this table. Nixon was jovial and irreverent. He led the toasts. He yammered on in flowery terms about his law firm (“The best and most profitable in all of China”), about David’s return to China (“You think I’m joking when I say you will steal my business! Everywhere I go people say to me, I only want that new American lawyer. Isn’t that right, Governor Sun?”), about David and Hulan’s true love (“A love that has spanned two continents, two decades, and an ocean”). He entertained the table with his recent dining exploits. He still frequented the Black Earth Inn, where other former Phillips, MacKenzie associates met once a week for a meal and to network, but he’d also found a new place that he was quite fond of. “Like the Black Earth, the Autumn Jade Western-style Food Restaurant is also a nostalgia restaurant. I’m not talking about one of those nightclub places like they have in Shanghai—all gangsters and beautiful femmes fatales. No, this one is from my parents’ generation. The Autumn Jade celebrates the fifties and our relationship with the Soviet Union. I tell you, until I went there I had never had food like that. It is nice if you want a retreat from the luxury life. You understand my meaning?”

Nixon’s main interest was Governor Sun. It turned out they had met before, and they bantered easily about mutual friends and business acquaintances. But Nixon never let well enough alone.

“Every day I go to my office building I think to myself, no one can believe I have climbed so high. Every day I remember back to the Cultural Revolution and my years on the Red Soil Farm with Liu Hulan. Are you familiar with that place, Governor Sun? It is in your home province of Shanxi, not too far from Taiyuan.”

“Attorney Chen, many people remember the Red Soil Farm. It was a model in our province and a place where I took many visitors.”

Nixon snorted. “We never saw you, right, Hulan?”

“And I don’t recall meeting you either, Attorney Chen,” Sun said.

“How could you?” Nixon queried. “You were one and we were one thousand. Besides, we were too busy working in the fields under that sun of yours.”

“That sun, as you call it, belongs to all of us,” Sun responded smoothly. “And, as much as I like Beijing, I find the heat as harsh here as in the countryside. Only here you see no blue sky, only haze, coal dust, and Mongolian dust.” Sun turned his attention to Hulan. “Now I understand who you are, Miss Liu, or should I say Inspector Liu?” Sun addressed the table. “Did you know that our beautiful companion tonight is the daughter of a very famous man in China and Miss Liu herself is a notable person in her own right?”

Doug asked the question that some of the Americans were wondering about. “What are you, then? A policewoman?”

Nixon Chen laughed. “Policewoman? Ha! She is with the Ministry of Public Security. Do you know what that is?” When Doug didn’t answer, Nixon elaborated in his oddly colloquial English. “You don’t want to know! It’s like the FBI or KGB. Liu Hulan is one of our best investigators. Little fish, big fish, they are the same to her. She reels them in, slits them open, and sets them on the steamer. With Liu Hulan you are cooked!”

As Nixon spoke, David casually observed the others’ reactions. Sun seemed indifferent, as did Randall Craig. Henry stared at his son, while Doug tried to look everywhere but at his father. In fact, it seemed to David that Doug had tried to catch someone’s eye at the next table, but David couldn’t see whose. Miles’s fair complexion looked sunburned, but his expression was the same one he presented in the courtroom—coolly unconcerned. And Hulan, well, she looked amused.

“I’ll tell you where she learned that,” Nixon continued as a second course of sautéed squid arrived. “On the Red Soil Farm. There was no forgiveness there.”

“Those were dark days for all of us,” Sun said.

Hulan, who’d read Sun’s dangan, knew that this wasn’t the case. “But you were only a visitor to the Red Soil Farm, while we—and others like us—had to live and work there or at places like that,” she said.

“Or places that were worse, like hard labor camps,” Sun said knowingly.

“Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches television knows that my father spent time at the Pitao Reform Camp in Sichuan Province,” Hulan said. “For some people, like my father and myself, personal stories of misdeeds and good works, of sacrifice and punishment, are very public. For others…” She let her voice drift off, hoping that Sun would accept the challenge.

But Sun was a politician. In his career, success w

as tied to the ability to deflect difficult questions. “The media is a game we must play, Inspector. I think many of your problems have stemmed from your inexperience. You let them say what they want about you. You never fight back. You do not wear a smile on your face. You don’t work behind the scenes to build friendships. And so you react when you should be ruling what is said.”

“That’s a Western view,” Hulan observed. “I think you’ve seen too many western movies!”

“You’re absolutely right,” Sun agreed cheerfully. “You want to know when I saw those movies? It was at the end of the war with Japan. They had them for the American soldiers who came to help us. Remember that, Henry?”

Henry barely nodded.

Sun continued. “Later I saw other western movies, and I’ll always remember them for the way that people stood strong for what they believed in. Such an American trait, don’t you think? To be unafraid to speak your mind, to believe in the human right to grow and change and be free?”

“It is words like that that make you very popular in China,” Nixon said.