Free Satori by Don Winslow Page B

got in on the other side. The car heater was working manfully, if futilely, against the intense cold, and Chen stomped his booted feet on the car floor. “Cold.”
    “A bastard.”
    “Do you mind if I smoke?” Nicholai asked, knowing that the answer would be “no,” and also knowing that Chen would appreciate a cigarette. He took a pack of Gauloises from his inside coat pocket and held it out to Chen. “Please.”
    “Most kind.”
    Chen took the proffered cigarette and then Nicholai leaned over the seat and offered one to the driver. He could see Chen’s annoyed look from the corner of his eye. Even in the “classless” society, there are classes, Nicholai thought.
    The driver took the cigarette and, gloating, smiled at Chen in the rearview mirror, so Nicholai knew now that he was not terribly subordinate. A watcher to watch the watcher, he thought. He took out his French lighter, lit both men’s cigarettes, then his own. The car quickly filled with blue smoke.
    “Good,” Chen said.
    “Take the pack.”
    “I couldn’t.”
    “I have more.”
    Chen took the pack.
    Five minutes in the incorruptible People’s Republic, Nicholai thought, and the first bribe had been accepted.
    Actually, Mao’s “Three Antis” Campaign to root out corruption among party officials was in full swing, and hundreds of bureaucrats had been summarily executed, shot in public displays, while thousands more had been shipped off to die slow deaths from exhaustion in work camps.
    Nicholai noticed that Chen took four cigarettes from the pack and put them on the front seat for the driver. Prudent, he thought.
    This was Nicholai’s first time in Beijing. He had been a boy in Shanghai, and that cosmopolitan city had seemed the world to him. The old imperial capital was so different, with its broad boulevards intended for military parades, its vast public spaces so open to the winds that it seemed almost meant as a warning of how quickly and completely things can change and how vulnerable one is to shifts in the wind.
    Chen seemed a bit ahead of him. “You have never been to Beijing before?”
    “No,” Nicholai said, peering out the window as the car pulled out onto Jianguomen Avenue. “And you, are you a native?”
    “Oh, yes,” Chen said, as if surprised by the question. “I’m a Beijingren, born and bred. Outer City.”
    In two blocks the street became Chang’an Avenue, the city’s main east-west arterial that flanked the southern edge of the Forbidden City, with its distinctive red walls. Nicholai could see the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao had stood a little over two years ago and declared the People’s Republic of China. He recalled from his briefing that Yuri Voroshenin was there with him that day.
    Enormous plaques on either side of the gate read, respectively, “Long Live the People’s Republic of China!” and “Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World!”
    “A small detour?” Chen asked.
    “Please.”
    Chen ordered the driver to take them around Tiananmen Square, which was a mess of construction work as it was being widened for even larger public demonstrations. Buildings were being torn down, the rubble removed or leveled.
    “When it is done,” Chen said proudly, “it will hold over a million people.”
    Many of whose homes had been torn down, Nicholai thought, to create space for them to publicly gather.
    Beijing was an impressive, imposing city, created for the exercise of power. Nicholai preferred Shanghai, although he was sure it had changed as well. The China he had known was a motley of color and style — Shanghai was a center of high fashion — but the residents of Beijing in this time seemed almost cookie-cutter in their uniformity, most of them wearing the standard blue, green, or gray padded coats with baggy trousers and the same “Mao” caps.
    Having negotiated Tiananmen, the driver turned north onto Wangfujing Street and pulled up in front of the Beijing Hotel, a turn-of-the-century