Zhao Yifan's Father

The lunch was on a Friday.

Zhao Yifan announced it on Wednesday morning — drifting up to Lin's desk with a paper cup of coffee in his hand, leaning against the corner of it with the easy familiarity of a man who had decided, at some point that morning, that the next move was generosity.

"Xiao Lin. Friday lunch. A few of us are taking you out."

"Oh — that's not necessary."

"Of course it's necessary. You've been here almost four weeks. Nobody has welcomed you properly. We've been bad colleagues."

Section Member Ye, at her desk three meters away, looked up briefly. She did not say anything. She returned to her work.

"It's at *Jiangnan Hall.* Twelve-thirty. Five or six of us. My treat. You must come."

He said *my treat* the way another man might have said *the air is free.* He smiled. He waited.

Lin understood, with the small flat clarity that had become familiar in the past month, that the lunch was not a welcome. He also understood that he could not refuse.

"Thank you, Brother Yifan," he said. "I'll be there."

"Good man."

Zhao went back to his own desk.

Lao Wei, that afternoon, looked at Lin once with a particular sidelong glance — half a second, no more — and said nothing.

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*Jiangnan Hall* was a midrange restaurant on People's Avenue, three blocks from the Municipal Government building. It was the kind of restaurant where junior cadres took their parents when their parents visited, and where senior cadres took their visiting subordinates when they wanted to give the impression of generosity without committing to extravagance. The private rooms were named after rivers. Lin was directed to the *Yellow River* room on the second floor.

He arrived at twelve twenty-five. He had walked in the cool autumn air from the office, and his cheeks were faintly flushed. He had spent the morning carefully reviewing the personnel file he had built, in his head, on Zhao Yifan's father.

*Zhao Hongdao. Deputy Bureau Chief, Provincial Department of Land Resources. Native of Jiangbei capital, Jianghai. Age fifty-three. In post for nine years. Two children — Yifan, the older; a younger daughter, name unknown. Wife: a senior accountant at a state-owned construction company. Faction affiliation: ambiguous; reportedly friendly with both the Cao and Han camps in the city level, though more often seen at Cao-aligned banquets. No public scandals. Two reported financial corruption inquiries against subordinates in his bureau during the past five years; both inquiries dropped without findings.*

It was a thin file. He understood that he was about to add to it, in person, before lunch was over.

The room held five men besides himself.

Zhao Yifan was at the head of the table — *not* the seat of honor, which was the chair facing the door across the table from him, currently empty. Beside Zhao sat a young man Lin recognized vaguely from the third floor; beside him, an older man Lin did not recognize; across from them, a man Lin recognized from his index cards as a Section Chief from the Bureau of Commerce; and at the lower end of the table, in the seat where a junior was expected to sit, an older woman — perhaps in her early forties — with sharp clever eyes and a black silk blouse, who Lin did not recognize at all.

Zhao stood up as Lin came in. "Xiao Lin! There he is. Sit, sit."

He pointed to a chair midway down the table — not at the foot, where the woman was, but slightly above it. It was the seat of *the guest*, in a fashion: above the lowest, well below the head, in the position where a junior who was being honored, but not too much, would sit.

Lin understood that the seating had been chosen for a reason. He sat.

"Everyone," Zhao said, with the easy expansiveness of a man whose afternoon had been planned for days, "this is Lin Zhaoxu. Yanjing University. First in the prefecture exam. Pang's office. He's the new one."

Around the table the men inclined their heads.

"This is Brother Wang, from the third floor," Zhao said, indicating the young man beside him. "And Section Chief Liu, from Commerce. And — *ah, finally* — let me introduce you, Xiao Lin: this is my father's old friend, Old Cao. From the provincial level."

Old Cao — the older man Lin did not know — nodded solemnly. He was perhaps fifty-five, broad-shouldered, with the slightly puffy face of a man who drank baijiu several nights a week. He wore a polo shirt with a collar that was just slightly too tight. There was nothing distinctive about him at all.

"And this," Zhao said — and his tone shifted very slightly — "is my older sister. Zhao Yifei."

The woman at the foot of the table inclined her head very slightly.

Lin returned the nod with the proper degree of deference to a senior — deeper than to a peer, less deep than to an obvious superior. He did not stare at her. He understood, however, that she was the most important person in the room, and that her presence at the foot of the table — in the *junior's* seat — was deliberate. She had come to look at him.

Old Cao raised his glass. The waitress appeared with bottles. The lunch began.

It moved, for the first twenty minutes, as such lunches always moved. Polite questions about Lin's hometown. Polite questions about his family. Polite questions about his impressions of Qingyuan. Polite questions about university. Lin answered each one with careful courtesy, neither boastful nor falsely modest, the way Lao Wei would have answered them — though Lao Wei would never have been at this table.

The toasts began at the twenty-five-minute mark. The first toast was Old Cao's, for the table; the second was Section Chief Liu's, for the host. Lin drank the small required cups. He did not drink quickly.

At thirty-two minutes Zhao Yifan stood up.

"To Xiao Lin," he said, raising his cup to the table, beaming. "Welcome to our office. Welcome to our family."

He drank.

He sat down. He looked at Lin.

He poured Lin's cup full again. He poured it past the standard measure — not quite to the brim, but close. He did not look down as he poured.

Lin understood.

He had been waiting for the move since he had walked into the room. He had run through, in his head over the past two days, the four or five different ways the move might come; this was one of the more obvious ones. The poured-too-full cup, in a Chinese banquet, was not a cup. It was a question. The question was: *Are you a man who knows when he is being tested?*

He stood.

"Brother Yifan," he said, with the appropriate degree of warmth, "thank you. I am honored to be welcomed. You honor me too much."

He drank the cup.

He did not flinch. He set the empty cup down, exactly upright.

Around the table, no one moved. Old Cao made a small sound of approval. Section Chief Liu nodded slowly.

Zhao Yifei — the sister — was watching Lin's face. Not his hand on the cup. His face.

Zhao Yifan refilled Lin's cup, without asking, to the same level.

"Once more," he said cheerfully. "For the welcome."

Lin understood that the second cup, in Zhao Yifan's mind, was the test. The first had been the courtesy. The second was the power play. A junior who could be made to drink three cups in a row in his first month would, in this man's understanding, be a junior who could be moved in any other way for the rest of his career.

He stood.

He drank the second cup. He did not flinch.

He set it down upright.

"Once more!" Zhao Yifan said, laughing now, his face slightly redder.

Lin did not stand.

He looked at Zhao Yifan, his face carefully open, faintly apologetic. "Brother Yifan, you are too generous. I have a small head, and the third cup in our office tradition is reserved for the senior at the table. Old Cao should drink the third. I will drink to him afterward. Or — if you wish — I can drink the third when we have all eaten, so I do not embarrass myself in front of your sister."

It was a careful sentence.

The second clause — *the third cup is reserved for the senior* — was a lie. There was no such tradition. But it was the kind of lie that referred to a tradition vague enough that no one in the room could be quite certain it didn't exist. And it deferred the cup not to Zhao Yifan — who would have refused — but to *Old Cao*, who had been quietly testing the table from the moment he had walked in.

Old Cao laughed.

"The boy has manners, Yifan! Let him eat. There is plenty of time for drinking."

Zhao Yifan held the cup in his hand for a moment longer than necessary. Then he set it down. He smiled.

"Of course, of course. I forgot. Old Cao — please."

He poured Old Cao's cup.

Old Cao raised it. Lin and the others raised theirs. They drank.

Lin sat down.

He had not used the rewind. He did not need to. The third cup had been the trap, and he had stepped past it.

The lunch continued.

Across the table, Zhao Yifei watched him for the rest of the meal with the same flat unreadable interest she had shown when he walked in. She did not speak to him directly. She spoke twice — once to Old Cao, on a topic Lin did not catch; once to her brother, in a low tone of mild correction, after he laughed too loudly at one of Section Chief Liu's stories.

When the bill came, Zhao Yifan paid with a flick of a card he did not look at.

When the table broke up at one forty, Old Cao took Lin aside in the corridor outside the room. He clapped him on the shoulder.

"Xiao Lin. A boy with a clever tongue. Don't let it cut you on the way out."

"Thank you, Old Cao."

"My old comrade Hongdao — Yifan's father — has heard about you, I believe. From the boy. I'm sure he would be pleased to meet you sometime."

"It would be my honor, Old Cao."

Old Cao nodded. He patted Lin's shoulder again, less firmly.

"Take care, Xiao Lin."

He turned and walked off down the corridor. Zhao Yifei was already at the bottom of the stairs by the time Lin reached it. She did not look back.

Lin walked the three blocks back to the office in the cool autumn afternoon. The baijiu sat warmly in his stomach. His mind was very clear.

He did not return directly to the small office. He went, instead, to the stairwell, two floors down, and stood for a moment in the cool concrete-smelling air.

He took out the work notebook. He wrote, in his small careful hand:

*The lunch was about Zhao Yifei. The men were the audience. She was the watcher. The third cup was an honest test that had a dishonest setup; the dishonest setup was Y.F.'s, not hers.*

*Old Cao is a province-level patron. He came at H.D.'s request. The conclusion: H.D. has now opened a file on me. Whether the file has a positive or a negative cover, I do not yet know. The next move will not come from Y.F. It will come from above him.*

*Y.F. is not the danger. The danger is whatever Y.F. does not yet know about himself.*

He underlined the last line.

He closed the notebook. He went back upstairs to the small office. Lao Wei looked up from his desk. He looked at Lin's face. He looked at his hand, which was steady. He looked back down at his document.

He said nothing.

But late that afternoon, when Lin returned from a small errand, there was a fresh cup of tea on his desk. It was not the Tieguanyin. It was something darker — a heavily roasted oolong with a thick warm scent that Lin recognized vaguely from his university days.

It was, he understood, the kind of tea men drank to settle their stomachs after baijiu lunches.

He did not look at Lao Wei. Lao Wei did not look at him.

He drank the tea.

It helped.

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