before our dinner with men from Bund International. In the Mao Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, a waxen copy of the chairman lay under glass, his actual body preserved somewhere in the bowels of the building. He’d been pumped so full of formaldehyde at death that he’d swelled to nearly twice his living size.
We entered the Forbidden City. Most of its buildings were under construction, part of the city’s facelift for the next year’s Olympics. I knew that by the time of the Opening Ceremonies, Leo hoped to be standing tall on his own world stage: at the Republican National Convention, as their next nominee for president. His would be a dark-horse bid—a pitch-fucking-black horse, honestly—but no one had asked my opinion. Leo’s intentions were publicly revealed only in the form of an “exploratory committee,” an event with press coverage limited to our town’s local newspaper.
The Forbidden City was a corpse of its former power, its anatomy forcibly preserved from ruin, like Mao’s. The open squares were hot and shadeless, white and blinding. The fresh-red buildings and yellow roof tiles looked brighter still against the background of gray sky. Squint your eyes, and it was all on fire—the tiny bands of blue around the entryway doors like the hottest part of the flame and the concrete walkways the color of ash. It was easy now to walk through the center of an empire, open to anyone, now that there was no longer an emperor. What was truly forbidden, the secrets of power these courtyards once held, was still forbidden of course—it had just been relocated to office buildings and conference rooms.
We crossed marble bridges and walked quickly through gardens built for the recitation of poetry, and Leo told me, as we hurried, that this morning’s meeting was just as he suspected: Beijing promised an erratic officialdom, tense and sensitive to slight. He read their wariness as a general trait of “the Chinese.” I was willing to trust the research I’d assembled and say that official Beijing’s suspicion of foreigners was not paranoid invention—two hundred years of British trading companies and gunboat diplomacy; of French concessions and Portuguese merchant cities; of Japanese adventuring and Western opium; of Chinese coastal cities built for the profit of financial capitals that were oceans away. And the internal distress: In just a hundred years, an empire had fallen, nationalist reign gave way to a Communist insurgency and a civil war; a victorious Mao proclaimed a republic from the back gate of the Forbidden City in which we stood. United States policy for most of Mao’s rule was that he didn’t exist, that the “real” China was the tiny island one hundred miles off the coast occupied by a defeated army turned political kleptocracy. A quarter century of Mao’s rule marked time by peasant starvation and burned temples, with anyone vaguely bookish or otherwise politically suspect sent to rural labor camps to be reeducated by the working peasantry. And Leo complained the officials seemed tense?
The congressman rushed through the Forbidden City as quickly as he had skimmed my briefing book. He showed no interest in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, massed above us on its terrace, with a double-hipped roof that looked like it floated on air. Leo claimed he knew plenty about China already, but I found he was often sloppy with that kind of knowledge, too prone to trust his dimly rendered general picture. He was pleased, though, to have diagnosed our frosty reception as part of some Chinese national personality disorder. He liked ice to crack. There’s no charm without resistance.
I lagged behind him. I peeked into closed-off sections of the complex. The side courts were in disrepair and the interior buildings almost entirely off-limits to my prying. Here is where the Empress Dowager Cixi made her extravagant demands. Here is where Puyi took the throne, lost it.
AT DINNER AT Beijing Da Dong Roast Duck restaurant, the congressman got drunk with businessmen from Bund International who slurped their noodles and instructed us to dip our Peking duck skin in the sugar bowl next to each place setting.
I reached out once to stay the hand of the waitress pouring Leo’s wine. It was fatal to my boss, what she kept dumping into his glass. The congressman struck my hand out of the way, hard enough that other guests heard the slap. He screwed his face up tight and hung a tough look on me. He was going to sit here with the other men and take his drink, and I had no right to stop him. Leo saw himself as a man of great soul beset, like all great men, by fierce demons—but his only proof of the great soul was the existence of the demons.
I watched him empty his wine. He dissolved into a clutter of symbols. He had an American flag pin he wore on his lapel the way someone superstitious might clutch an amulet. He had hardened hair, thin, combed sideways across his head and screaming insincerity. He was nothing like my own father, but he was a fatherly archetype—big-voiced, impatient, ever vigilant of his status in the room. Whenever he tried to expand his emotive range beyond gloating or annoyance, it was without exception uncomfortable.
Through dinner, the congressman did most of the talking. He was interrupted only when someone thought it necessary to announce the name of a particular delicacy being set before us or to relate a historical fact about our surroundings: “Here is the Cantonese chicken dish that Richard Nixon declared his favorite during the visit in 1972.” Something was said about Chairman Mao that I didn’t catch. And did we know the restaurant was once a granary for the Forbidden City?
Contrary to the custom of our hosts, who made these pleasantries and discussed nothing else specifically, the more Leo drank, the more eager he became to defend the intricacies of America’s global military positioning. He drank himself presidential, as though offering a realpolitik address behind closed doors to reluctant allies. The men from Bund International—with Li-Li along to translate—listened politely.
“Think of it as poker,” Leo said. “Saddam was representing aces.”
We sat at the table fifteen strong, as though in a well-catered committee meeting. I was served an architecturally plated dish of lotus root and crab. The low light was flattering, the windows at dusk even more inviting as decorative lanterns came lit in the street below. I focused just beyond Leo’s head, at the waiter boning out a duck, slivering the meat onto a serving dish.
“Fine, Saddam was bluffing. But it was still the right play, on the percentages,” Leo said. Our private dining room invited and prolonged his diatribe. “We made him show.”
The men nodded like veterans of Macau poker tables. The highest ranked among them, a vice president of some sort, eventually raised a question. He went by Charles, for our benefit.
“There is always a duty,” he said. “To know the tendencies of your opponent. To know how he bets.”
Charles was the only man who wore a tie I liked, checkered black and silver, sealed at the collar with an impeccable Windsor knot. He had matted cheeks, among many that glistened red around him, and two tiny eyes in his chinless, oval face.
“Let me tell you a story about our ‘opponent,’” Leo said. “Spring, 1990.” I stifled a groan. Leo continued: “We had this woman testify before Congress—a girl, really, not even eighteen. She worked in a Kuwaiti hospital. Saddam’s army bashed their way into the ward where she worked with newborns. The soldiers ripped three-pound babies out of their incubators, left them to die on the concrete floor of the hospital.”
“No one would dispute this is inexcusable . . .” Charles said.
Leo, at the time, had taken the nurse’s story personally. He pled for weeks after, to whoever would listen, begged we deploy our vast military for humanity’s sake. Pundits joked that the shortest distance between any two points was the straight line between Leo Fillmore and a television camera.
“It was truly awful,” Leo said. “And you know what else? None of it was true.”
Charles looked to me for clarification. I only scribbled in my small black notebook. On its title page I had written: The Congressman’s Memory. It started as a joke between
