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autopsy.”
    Stratton motioned toward Powell’s file. “The autopsy results?”
    “Oh no. The stuff on the heart attack I got by phone this morning. Through official channels … Anyway, the body will be taken to the Peking Airport Monday morning.”
    “Fine,” Stratton said. At the door, he turned again to Powell. “I’m curious, though. Is Wang Bin certain that his brother wished to be buried in the United States? Perhaps, after all these years, he wanted to be buried here, in China.”
    Powell was a little perturbed. “I really couldn’t say. I assume his brother would know. And besides, nobody is buried in China anymore. Nearly everyone is cremated. It’s a helluva thing, Mr. Stratton, but it’s true. Apparently there’s no more room for any bodies—especially in Peking.”
     
    The important man rode in the back seat of the black limousine. At each side sat a trusted comrade whose function, simply put, was to do as he was told.
    “The train is late,” said the limousine driver, who wore thick eyeglasses and gripped the wheel tightly with bony hands.
    “As long as everything is safe, I don’t mind,” said the important man.
    “I talked to the workers in Xian this morning,” volunteered the man at his left side. “They assure me that, as before, the crate was placed in a separate boxcar.”
    “With a guard?”
    “Several guards, Comrade.”
    The driver steered the limousine along the special lanes used on Peking streets by privileged travelers. The bicyclists gave wide berth to the long black car.
    “You have done well.”
    “Thank you, Comrade.”
    Then, in a voice so low the driver could not hear, the man said, “Has anyone asked questions?”
    “No,” replied one of the escorts, whispering. “No one.”
    “Excellent.” The important man gazed out the window of the speeding car and thought how fortunate he was, in these times, to have someone he could trust.

CHAPTER 4
    Alice Dempsey knocked on the door at eight sharp the next morning. At eight thirty, she knocked again. Stratton grunted.
    “Surely, you’re not still in bed!” she said through the door. “We leave for the Great Hall of the People in ten minutes.”
    Stratton groped for his watch. “I’ll catch up,” he mumbled.
    He dressed and went downstairs to claim a cup of tepid American coffee in the hotel restaurant. Then he set off on foot for the Heping Hotel.
    It had occurred to Stratton that David Wang’s belongings would have to be gathered for the sad trip home—clothes, cameras, textbooks, souvenirs, and the ever-present journal. Wang was not a mellifluous writer, nor was he poetic, but he wrote down all he saw. His journals were meticulous, sponge-like and even a bit silly; once he had visited Disney World in Florida and returned, sheepishly, with fifty-seven pages of diary. Tom Stratton felt a duty to recover his old friend’s things.
    Everything about Stratton attracted the eyes of the Chinese—his height, his blond hair, his thick reddish mustache. In Vietnam it had been much the same. He remembered the clutter and chaos of Saigon, the heady taste and thrill of war, the horror, the ultimate revulsion: bitter, black fear. Stratton waded like a bushy mutant among hundreds of Chinese in the broad streets, a pale stalk shooting up from blue fields. He thought back to the flippant, soft-life description of academia he had foisted on Jim McCarthy. A self-justification.
    “I am an obscure college professor because that is as far as I could get from guns and killing,” Stratton should have said. “I haven’t got the balls to do anything else. I lost my pride, and something more, one terrible night a long time ago.”
    At David Wang’s hotel Stratton was greeted by a polite young clerk who spoke poor but passable English.
    “I am a friend of the gentleman who got sick here the other night,” Stratton began. “I came for his things.”
    Stratton expected a discussion, but the clerk merely smiled and led him