“It took a lot of blind faith to get me out again tonight,” I informed him.
“I appreciate that. Dr. Edwards called me right before I called you. He’s a busy guy, but he has time tonight after his evening class. You okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Something about your face meeting a brick wall.”
“I’m fine. Just a little furious. This Dr. Edwards is who?”
“Remember I said I was calling a friend? One of the handball regulars is a Columbia prof.”
“This is him?”
“A friend of his. The go-to guy on modern Chinese history.”
A lamplit brick walk, a security guard, and an elevator later, Bill and I poked our heads into a book-lined office. Book-paved, and pretty much book-furnished, too, except for the computer on the desk and the Manchu ancestor painting on the wall. Though if the rangy sixtyish man whose cowboy boots rested on the desk was Bill’s friend’s friend, they weren’t his ancestors. Unless black Africans had come farther along the Silk Road than I knew. Admittedly, they weren’t my ancestors either: The eyes and hair were the same, but the pale skins and formal silks marked these people as aristocrats, from a time when my ocher-faced forebears would have been lucky to find burlap to tuck around themselves while they worked the fields.
At the rap of Bill’s knuckles the man lifted his eyes from a lapfull of papers. “Hey! You Smith? This your partner?” He swung his boots off the desk and shook hands with us both. “William Edwards.” He bustled around, shifting books to the floor. “Go on, sit. They’ll behave.”
“The books?” Bill asked.
“They like chairs better, but they’re adaptable. So you’re a friend of Larry’s?”
“Handball.”
“Is he as cutthroat there as here?”
“He kills me.”
“And then stands over your corpse and cackles, right? So. Larry the molecular biologist tells me you’re interested in a minor CCP official from the early years of the People’s Republic. Like he knows what that means. He doesn’t know what any sentence means that doesn’t include the words ‘electron microscope.’ ”
“He says you’re the expert.”
“Wonder what that’s gonna cost me? But hey, a call for book-larnin’! Let’s get it done before Google digitizes everything and I’m obsolete.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “A minor CCP official?”
Professor Edwards tapped the pile of books at his elbow. Some had English titles, some Chinese. From what I could see they were summaries of reports on this, minutes of meetings of that, and proceedings of plenary sessions about the other. “When Larry speaks, I jump. Reason I didn’t call until tonight, I was busy looking your boy up.”
“Our boy?”
“Chen Kai-rong.”
“He’s in there?” I was surprised.
“References to him. Sketchy, but better than a poke in the eye. You guys are really detectives? How come you’re interested in stuff I can’t even get my students to care about, and if they don’t care they don’t pass?”
Bill looked to me to take the lead, so I said, “We have a case. Everything about it seems to point to what went on back then, but we don’t know much about then. I didn’t even know Chen Kai-rong was a Communist Party member, much less an official.”
Dr. Edwards nodded. “Intelligence Services. Though even with that, his background would’ve made him a shooting gallery duck during the Cultural Revolution. Reading between the lines, he was in for some serious reeducation in the countryside, and he’d have been wiped from the historical record. But he was lucky, he died.”
I wasn’t sure that meant Chen Kai-rong was lucky, but if it meant there was information on him, maybe we were.
“When did he die?”
Professor Edwards consulted a sheet of scribbled notes. Like the books, some were in English, some in Chinese. I guessed it had to do with the text he was taking them from. “In 1966. Just as the Red Guards picked up steam. According to the Party press release, ‘he struggled heroically against a short, powerful illness.’ That wording would’ve meant heart disease or cancer.”
“Any reason to think otherwise?” Bill asked.
“Hah! You mean foul play?”
“I’m not sure what I mean. Just wondering.”
“I don’t think so. They had other press releases for that. Worded one way, they did it; another way, someone else did. I’d say this fellow died of natural causes.”
“What in his background would have brought the Red Guards down on him?” I asked. “His European wife?”
“That wouldn’t have helped, though it looks like she was long dead by then. You know about her? Rosalie Gilder? I didn’t find much on her, besides letters