Flower Net Page 36

  “We were pawns,” David said bitterly.

  “You wanted the truth. There it is.”

  “Hulan?”

  Campbell tried a nod, but David was right there with his cast.

  “Remember getting the security clearance for your AUSA job?” Campbell asked. “We knew about your involvement with a known Communist.”

  At this, David released the agent in disgust and strode away. He turned back in anger. “How long did you know?”

  “What does that matter now?”

  “It matters to me. How long did you personally know about me and Hulan?”

  “I guess from our first case. The Bureau gave me a file. You looked like a good guy, but one never can tell.”

  “You played with our lives,” David said in anguish.

  “It was for a greater good, Stark. We’ve picked the right side for once. You’re a part of that.”

  There was a time when an argument like that would have worked on David, but no longer. He took one last look at the man he had once called his friend, turned, and continued his run alone.

  Hulan stood at her kitchen window, waiting for the water to boil and looking out on the innermost courtyard of her old family home. Spring was just beginning and the temperature had finally started to rise. In the garden, the wisteria vine that an ancestor had planted more than one hundred years ago had begun to bud. Glossy green leaves were gradually opening on the jujube.

  The kettle whistled. Hulan poured the hot water into a teapot. While it steeped, she set some peanuts, watermelon seeds, and a few salted plums in little dishes. With her tray ready, Hulan stepped out into the garden. She lingered for a moment under the colonnade and savored the tableau before her. Sitting under the twisting branches of the jujube were her mother and Uncle Zai. The man who had stood by Hulan’s family through good times and bad perched just opposite Jinli on a porcelain stool. The tilt of his head as he spoke to Jinli implied deep intimacy. Hulan crossed to them now. As she did, Uncle Zai self-consciously pulled his hand away from Jinli’s. Hulan set her tray on a low stone table and poured the tea. The three of them sat in companionable silence, enjoying the warmth of the sun.

  After David’s departure, Hulan had moved her mother and her nurse back to the hutong, where the two of them had taken up residence in one of the bungalows that faced onto the garden. Jinli seemed unaware of her husband’s absence, let alone his death. Rather, she had experienced increasing moments of coherence, sometimes even engaging Hulan in conversation for five or more minutes at a time. Mostly her talk was of childhood memories—of the time she hid from her amah behind the spinning room, of the gardenias that her mother liked to float in bowls of water throughout the house, how her uncles had practiced their juggling and tumbling right here in this courtyard until their mother chased them out. At those moments, Jinli’s voice, although soft and unaccustomed to speech, was as beautiful as Hulan remembered.

  There was so much Hulan could do for her mother now. Hulan had her own money, of course, but her father had left behind an estate appropriate to a patriarch of one of the Hundred Families. No land or buildings or stock, just cash. That some of it was profit from her father’s scheme troubled Hulan, but the Ministry of Public Security—under the advisement of Vice Minister Zai—had refused to confiscate any of it. This left Hulan with more than enough money to provide for her mother’s care, to begin restoring the buildings of the compound, and to put some aside for—

  “Eeeah,” a voice called out. “Ni hao ma?” Neighborhood Committee director Zhang Junying stepped out onto the veranda.

  “Huanying, huanying,” Hulan said in welcome, moving to meet her neighbor before she came all the way into the courtyard. “Come inside the house, auntie. Have you eaten? Do you drink tea?”

  Madame Zhang looked longingly over Hulan’s shoulder to where the other two were sitting. “Your mother is looking very well.”

  “Oh, she is very tired.” This traditional answer, though untrue, showed Hulan’s respect for her mother’s life of devotion, duty, and hard work.

  Hulan took the Neighborhood Committee director’s elbow and led her back into the kitchen. “Sit here, auntie, where you can still see the garden and we can talk without disturbing the others.”

  “Very well,” the old woman said coolly, understanding that she was not wanted.

  “Come, come, auntie, this is not a day for hard feelings. This is still new to Mama. We must give her time.”

  “She shouldn’t get too comfortable here, you know. Pretty soon they’ll come through and mark our homes ‘to be demolished.’ Then the bulldozers will arrive and we’ll all move away. I say, Let’s go before they kick us out like old dogs! We’ll go someplace modern. Get a dishwasher.”

  “We won’t have to do that, auntie. They won’t demolish our hutong. Our paramount leader lived only a few blocks away. No one will destroy his neighborhood.”

  “But Deng’s dead.”

  “His home will become a pilgrimage site. The government will want to keep everything just as it was during his lifetime.”

  “Um,” the old woman said thoughtfully. Then she clapped her palms on her widespread knees to signal a change in subject. “No matter what happens I must continue my duties as Neighborhood Committee director.”

  “Of course,” Hulan agreed.

  “And as such I have come to visit you today.” She hesitated, hoping Hulan would confess of her own accord and save her from this accusation, but the young woman only sat there, her hands folded calmly in her lap, her eyes focused on her mother in the garden. Madame Zhang cleared her throat. “I have not seen you bring home female products in many weeks, nor have I seen their remains in your trash.” Hulan did not deny this. “You know our one-child policy,” the older woman continued. “You have not applied for a pregnancy permit. You also know how our government feels about children outside of marriage…”

  Without shifting her gaze from her mother and Uncle Zai as they sat under the jujube, their heads together as they recalled some happy memory, Liu Hulan reached out and patted the old woman’s hand. “You worry too much,” Hulan said. “It is almost spring and the harshness of winter is over. It is time for us all to begin new lives in China.”

  LISA SEE is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, as well as Peony in Love, The Interior, Dragon Bones, and the widely acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles.

  ALSO BY LISA SEE

  Peony in Love

  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

  Dragon Bones

  The Interior

  On Gold Mountain

  Praise for

  Flower Net

  "An impressive and welcome debut…It has been sixteen years since Gorky Park raised the ante in the game of international thriller novels. Now, Lisa See comes to the table to raise the stakes even higher."

  —Mostly Murder

  "If you have…an appreciation for atmospheric, tightly plotted suspense stories, Flower Net is a treat. Lisa See begins to do for Beijing what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did for turn-of-the-century London or Dashiell Hammett did for 1920s San Francisco: She discerns the hidden city lurking beneath the public façade."

  —The Washington Post Book World

  "Finish Flower Net and you want to book a flight overseas…. A wonderful lesson about the changes going on in China as it emerges as a global economic power."

  —USA Today

  "An unusual and highly successful thriller…In this, her first novel, Lisa See brings a cool, knowing eye to Chinese-American relations while crafting a nifty tale of suspense."

  —Chicago Tribune

  "An ambitious and engaging mystery…expertly plotted and enriched with rare social, political and historical complication…. See has crafted an exceptional narrative, one that tweaks the reader into long hours under the lamp."

>   —The Oregonian

  "Fascinating…that rare thriller that enlightens as well as it entertains…a penetrating examination of modern Chinese culture, the forces that have shaped it and the ways in which it differs so greatly from our own. A good one."

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Colorful…[See] has done her homework…Hulan is a provocative mix of vulnerability, bitterness and hardheaded practicality.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “This page-turner is peopled with an incredibly evil array of villains and jam-packed with both expected and unexpected plot twists.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A graceful rendering of two different and complex cultures, within a highly intricate plot…The starkly beautiful landscapes of Beijing and its surrounding countryside are depicted with a lyrical precision that…[comes] from a deeply abiding connection to the land and its peoples. Also vivid, exact, without any cloying traces of exoticism are See’s descriptions of the strangely lit neon shops and streets of L.A.’s Chinatown.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “This debut thriller is a standout.…Exciting…See adds an understanding of subtle and complex Sino-American political and social differences, typifies these qualities in a range of well-crafted characters and tops it all with a suspenseful plot.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “High voltage sexual sparks…murder and intrigue splash across the canvas of modern Chinese life…a vivid portrait of a vast Communist nation in the painful throes of a sea change.”

  —People

  “Compelling…proclaims See’s considerable talent as a novelist, skillfully blending suspenseful storytelling, romantic intrigue, and stirring plot twists.”

  —Booklist

  Flower Net is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1997 by Lisa See

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. in 1997.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  See, Lisa.

  Flower net: a novel/Lisa See.—Random House trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm

  1. Women detectives—China—Beijing—Fiction. 2. Government attorneys—United States—Fiction. 3. Americans—China—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 5. Organized crime—China—Fiction. 6. Conspiracies—Fiction. 7. China—Relations—United States—Fiction. 8. United States—Relations—China—Fiction. 9. Beijing (China)—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3569.E3334F58 2008

  813'.54—dc22 2007014492

  www.atrandom.com

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-667-2

  v3.0