minister?”
“He is an old man with what he thinks is a young penis. He uses the office staff as his personal bordello. Well, it could be worse,” Ming admitted. “It’s been a long time since I was his favorite. Lately he’s fixed on Chai, and she is engaged, and Fang knows it. That is not a civilized act on the part of a senior minister.”
“The laws do not apply to him?”
She snorted with borderline disgust. “The laws apply to none of them. Nomuri-san, these are government ministers. They are the law in this country, and they care little for what others think of them or their habits—few enough find out in any case. They are corrupt on a scale that shames the emperors of old, and they say they are the guardians of the common people, the peasants and workers they claim to love as their own children. Well, I suppose sometimes I am one of those peasants, eh?”
“And I thought you liked your minister,” Nomuri responded, goading her on. “So, what does he talk about?”
“What do you mean?”
“The late work that kept you away from here,” he answered, waving at the bedclothes with a smile.
“Oh, talk between the ministers. He keeps an extensive personal political diary—in case the president might want to oust him, that is his defense, you see, something he could present to his peers. Fang doesn’t want to lose his official residence and all the privileges that come along with it. So, he keeps records of all he does, and I am his secretary, and I transcribe all his notes. Sometimes it can take forever.”
“On your computer, of course.”
“Yes, the new one, in perfect Mandarin ideographs now that you’ve given us the new software.”
“You keep it on your computer?”
“On the hard drive, yes. Oh, it’s encrypted,” she assured him. “We learned that from the Americans, when we broke into their weapons records. It’s called a robust encryption system, whatever that means. I select the file I wish to open and type in the decryption key, and the file opens. Do you want to know what key I use?” She giggled. “YELLOW SUBMARINE. In English because of the keyboard—it was before your new software—and it’s from a Beatles song I heard on the radio once. ‘We all live in a yellow submarine,’ something like that. I listened to the radio a lot back then, when I was first studying English. I spent half an hour looking up submarines in the dictionary and then the encyclopedia, trying to find out why a ship was painted yellow. Ahh!” Her hands flew up in the air.
The encryption key! Nomuri tried to hide his excitement. “Well, it must be a lot of folders. You’ve been his secretary for a lot of time,” he said casually.
“Over four hundred documents. I keep them by number instead of making up new names for them. Today was number four hundred eighty-seven, as a matter of fact.”
Holy shit, Nomuri thought, four hundred eighty-seven computer documents of inside-the-Politburo conversations. This makes a gold mine look like a toxic waste dump.
“What exactly do they talk about? I’ve never met a senior government functionary,” Nomuri explained.
“Everything!” she answered, finishing her own cigarette. “Who’s got ideas in the Politburo, who wants to be nice to America, who wants to hurt them—everything you can imagine. Defense policy. Economic policy. The big one lately is how to deal with Hong Kong. ‘One Country, Two Systems’ has developed problems with some industrialists around Beijing and Shanghai. They feel they are treated with less respect than they deserve—less than they get in Hong Kong, that is—and they are unhappy about it. Fang’s one of the people trying to find a compromise to make them happy. He might. He’s very clever at such things.”
“It must be fascinating to see such information—to really know what’s going on in your country!” Nomuri gushed. “In Japan, we never know what the zaibatsu and the MITI people are doing—ruining the economy, for the most part, the fools. But because nobody knows, no action is ever taken to fix things. Is it the same here?”
“Of course!” She lit another smoke, getting into the conversation, and hardly noticing that it wasn’t about love anymore. “Once I studied my Marx and my Mao. Once I believed in it all. Once I even trusted the senior ministers to be men of honor and integrity, and totally believed the things they taught me in school. But then I saw how the army has its