The Chinese informed the embassy later that night that Bowman’s death had been an accident. The driver of the truck had been drinking, they said. He had been arrested and charged with the killing. It was a great tragedy. The embassy duty officer asked me if the Chinese account was right. I said I didn’t know. That first night I wasn’t ready to tell the story. It was too strange, leading outward in too many directions, hurting too many people. So I concealed the essential elements of what had happened.

After fencing for an hour with the duty officer and giving a brief statement to the Chinese police, I asked to talk to the ambassador. I might have blurted everything out then. But he was such a dolt—a well-meaning but vacuous political appointee—that I decided it would be smarter not to tell him anything. He kept telling me how painful this was for him personally, how Arthur had been a close friend. They had probably met at a cocktail party. I thought of asking to see the station chief but decided against it. I was a public actor that night. I was writing a script I would have to live with. I had to be careful which doors I opened.

Then a kind of journalistic autopilot took over. I called Ed Weiss, the executive editor, who had just seen the story on the wires and broken the news to Arthur’s wife, Mara. I called Philip Sellinger, the publisher and Arthur’s closest friend. Sellinger began to cry on the phone. It was after midnight when I sat down to write a story for the Mirror about the tragic death of our diplomatic correspondent in a road accident in Beijing. Unetat issued its own statement that night, calling Arthur “the greatest American journalist of his generation” and expressing sorrow at his death.

IV: WASHINGTON–BOSTON–MONTREAL (MAY–JULY 1996)

IV

WASHINGTON–BOSTON–MONTREAL

MAY–JULY 1996

31

31

I brought Arthur’s body back to Washington on the airplane the day after he died. Before leaving Beijing, I went to his hotel and gathered up his fine suits and shirts, French silk ties, socks and underwear and packed them into his suitcase. I also collected the few papers lying on his desk, along with his laptop computer. The Public Security Bureau took a formal statement from me that morning. I described what had happened the night before in that narrow lane. The truck had killed him, I said. That was a fact. They knew the rest. The Chinese seemed relieved that I wasn’t making trouble. They cleared the normal bureaucratic hurdles so that Arthur’s body could leave on the United flight back to the United States. They wanted us both out of the country.