An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer

explanation,” she said.
    “Only if the exposure of an affair would be too much to bear.” He paused. “Would it?”
    It was a question that hadn’t occurred to her. She thought about it, again catching the straw with her wrinkled lips. She released it and took a long breath. “Xin Zhu, I once met a man my husband had spent three days interrogating. It was here—our first stay in this place. This man was mad, you understand. I think it was the interrogation that had done it. I was here alone at the time, and he’d somehow gotten past the guards. He threw himself against our window, right there,” she said, motioning toward the large square framed in ivy. “He kept running at it until his nose and lips were bleeding, and when security came I went outside to see. The knuckles of his left hand had been smashed to powder—the fingers flopped uselessly when he waved them at me—and he was missing three toes on his bare feet. He told me, as they were taking him away, that my husband had done this to him, and that he wanted to be killed now. That night, when Bo Gaoli had gotten home from work, I asked him what this terrible man had done. He just sipped at his soup and said, He did nothing. It was a mistake . A mistake?” She cleared her throat, staring hard at that clean, clear window. “No, he wouldn’t have killed himself from shame, certainly not over some girl.”
    Zhu’s hands felt too large. He pressed them together between his knees, then moved one to the arm of the sofa. “I see,” he said. “Then you don’t know why he would have killed himself.”
    She shook her head abruptly, then said, “Of course, there was the money.”
    “Money?”
    “About three hundred thousand yuan. Kept in a shoebox right here, in this house. I found it when I was throwing out his clothes.”
    Nearly fifty thousand dollars in a box. “You have no idea where he got that from?”
    She shook her head.
    “Did he travel a lot?”
    “Certainly.”
    “Alone?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Within the region, or did he go farther? To the West, perhaps.”
    Her gaze drew back from the window, and she focused on Zhu. “You don’t have this information already?”
    “It would take time to track down,” he said, though the truth was that it would require requests to other bureaus that, by now, might not be willing to help a drowning man.
    “He went to Chicago for a conference in November. We went to Paris together in June. That was the West. He visited Hong Kong a lot, for work.”
    It all sounded normal for a man in Bo Gaoli’s position, even conservative. “Did Wu Liang ever talk to you about what happened?”
    She smiled sadly. “He said my husband was one of the greatest administrators China has ever known.”
    “Perhaps he was.”
    She ignored that. “He told me that they found Bo Gaoli on Wednesday. He was hanging in the bathroom of our apartment on Wangfujing. One of his colleagues had come looking for him, and Wu Liang came by soon after—he was the first government official on the scene.”
    “Before the police?”
    She shook her head irritably. “There was no police ,” she said. “For a man like my husband, suicide does not exist. In the newspaper, they called it a heart attack. Which now makes me wonder about everyone I’ve ever heard of dying of heart problems. Doesn’t it you?”
    “It certainly does,” Zhu said with a sigh.
    “They say that wives always want to know,” she said after a moment. “Of course we do. You love your man, or at least you believe you understand him, and if he chooses to kill himself, then you want to know. Guilt settles in. You come to believe that you did something wrong. But that’s not me, Xin Zhu. I don’t believe I was ever important enough to Bo Gaoli for him to kill himself because of something I did or did not do. I’m sad that he’s gone, but I’m old enough to remember a time when, in Shanghai, we avoided walking near tall buildings for fear that a suicide would