flask, from which he poured daintily. The CIA officer nearly gasped with his first sip, and it went down hot, but it certainly warmed the stomach. Ming’s skin, he saw, flushed from it, and there came the fleeting impression that a gate had just been opened and passed ... and that it probably led in the right direction.
“Not everything can be socialist,” Nomuri judged, with another tiny sip. “This restaurant is a private concern, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes. And the food is better than what I cook. That is a skill I do not have.”
“Truly? Then perhaps you will allow me to cook for you sometime,” Chet suggested.
“Oh?”
“Certainly.” He smiled. “I can cook American style, and I am able to shop at a closed store to get the correct ingredients.” Not that the ingredients would be worth a damn, shipped in as they were, but a damned sight better than the garbage you got here in the public markets, and a steak dinner was probably something she’d never had. Could he justify getting CIA to put a few Kobe beef steaks on his expense account? Nomuri wondered. Probably. The bean-counters at Langley didn’t bother the field spooks all that much.
“Really?”
“Of course. There are some advantages to being a foreign barbarian,” he told her with a sly smile. The giggling response was just right, he thought. Yeah. Nomuri took another careful sip of this rocket fuel. She’d just told him what she wanted to wear. Sensible, too, for this culture. However comfy it might be, it would also be quite discreet.
“So, what else can you tell me about yourself?” he asked next.
“There is little to tell. My job is beneath my education, but it carries prestige for ... well, for political reasons. I am a highly educated secretary. My employer—well, technically I work for the state, as do most of us, but in fact I work for my minister as if he were in the capitalist sector and paid me from his own pocket.” She shrugged. “I suppose it has always been so. I see and hear interesting things.”
Don’t want to ask about them now, Nomuri knew. Later, sure, but not now.
“It is the same with me, industrial secrets and such. Ahh,” he snorted. “Better to leave such things at my official desk. No, Ming, tell me about you.”
“Again, there is little to tell. I am twenty-four. I am educated. I suppose I am lucky to be alive. You know what happens to many girl babies here ...”
Nomuri nodded. “I have heard the stories. They are distasteful,” he agreed with her. It was more than that. It was not unknown for the father of a female toddler to drop her down a well in the hope that his wife would bear him a son on the next try. One-baby-per-family was almost a law in the PRC, and like most laws in a communist state, that one was ruthlessly enforced. An unauthorized baby was often allowed to come to term, but then as birth took place, when the baby “crowned,” the top of the head appearing, the very moment of birth, the attending physician or nurse would take a syringe loaded with formaldehyde, and stab it into the soft spot at the crown of the almost-newborn’s head, push the plunger, and extinguish its life at the moment of its beginning. It wasn’t something the government of the PRC advertised as government policy, but government policy it was. Nomuri’s one sister, Alice, was a physician, an obstetrician /gynecologist trained at UCLA, and he knew that his sister would take poison herself before performing such a barbarous act, or take a pistol to use on whoever demanded that she do it. Even so, some surplus girl babies somehow managed to be born, and these were often abandoned, and then given up for adoption, mainly to Westerners, because the Chinese themselves had no use for them at all. Had it been done to Jews, it would have been called genocide, but there were a lot of Chinese to go around. Carried to extremes, it could lead to racial extinction, but here it was just called population control. “In due course Chinese culture will again recognize the value of women, Ming. That is certain.”
“I suppose it is,” she allowed. “How are women treated in Japan?”
Nomuri allowed himself a laugh. “The real question is how well they treat us, and how well they permit us to treat them!”
“Truly?”
“Oh, yes. My mother ruled the house until she died.”
“Interesting. Are