by Adam Hall
‘Joyce, who’s going to take her back to Hong Kong, then, if we can’t stop her going?’
‘Could ask Harry.’
‘God, not Harry.’
‘She’s not in the mood for anything like that.’
‘Harry wouldn’t care.’
Presenting his papers, our little messiah, the only hope for a billion people out there in the rice fields and the factories and the universities, living their daily lives in the shadow of the tanks. The only hope.
Shepley must have had a brainstorm when he’d set this thing up, instructing us to take a man like Xingyu through three airports, Hong Kong and Chengdu and Gonggar, under the eyes of the Kuo Chi Ching Pao Chu, gone clean out of his mind, and not much better ourselves, Pepperidge and I, we should have rehearsed this poor little bugger, told him what it was going to be like when he landed back inside his beloved country, what they would ask him at the immigration desk, what he should tell them, rehearsed him until he could have gone through this checkpoint word-perfect, but in fact we couldn’t, I suppose, have done that to him, he would have told us we were playing spies, being melodramatic, knew his galaxies, didn’t know his codes, no go, my good friend, it’s going to be no go, because the officer at the desk is beckoning the man over there, the plainclothes supervisor, and he is going over to the desk, his steps measured.
‘What’s holding us up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look, go and help Kate with Majorie. I’ll keep your place.’
‘You can’t do that here. You—’
‘Wait a minute. Excuse me, but do you mind if my friend just went to the toilet?’
‘Shen me shi?’
‘My friend here, oh God, he doesn’t—’
‘Let me help. Zheiwei nushi xiang qu cheshud, ramhou huldao queue.’
‘Xing.’
‘Oh, I’m much obliged. Go on, Doris, get her back here so I can talk to her, for God’s sake. We’re going to miss that plane.’
The air cold in in here, with the harsh reek of the factory smoke creeping in under the doors, the lights clouded, some of the tubes flickering, some of them dark, they don’t run a good ship here, my friend, they do not run a good ship, their methods are crude and their thinking is proscribed, conditioned, and they will throw him into the van like a common criminal while I go on shuffling forward like a puppet, not daring to leave the queue and follow him, follow them, hoping to do something miraculous and get him away, get him to ground, not daring to do anything except shuffle forward and go through the charade and get out of here, because this was no place for miracles.
Get out of here and signal London, let the hand pick up the piece of chalk and change the board. Executive reports subject lost to KCCPC, Chengdu airport, 12:16 l.t.
The man from the Bureau was watching the desk, his dead stare fixed now. I couldn’t see much of Xingyu because he was shorter than the three girls in front of me and they were moving around, anxious for Marjorie.
I watched the man over there instead: we had, in this instant, established signals. He would swing his head and look at me when anything important happened there under the immigration board, under the flickering lights, would let a smile touch his mouth if all were well, or leave his stare on me and move his head to and fro by the smallest degree if all were not well, if the trap slammed shut, finito.
‘She’s got no need to be frightened of them, for God’s sake, they’re only people. It’s just the air trip getting to her stomach, that’s all.’
‘This is all we needed.’
‘It’s what we’ve got. We’ll muddle through somehow, we’re British.’
The stink of the smoke in here was enough to make anyone sick, it wasn’t the air trip, but you’re wrong, my little love, you’re wrong, you know, there is every need to be frightened of these people, there is every need. They are the people with the tanks.
Movement suddenly at the desk as the officer got to his feet and another one came up and the plainclothes supervisor nodded and turned away and the man from the Bureau swung his head and looked at me with his mouth relaxed and I saw Dr. Xingyu Baibing leave the desk and pick up his bag and walk slowly away, folding his papers and putting them into the pocket of his sheepskin coat. I went forward and passed through the checkpoint and then customs and joined our charter group.
‘How is your toothache?’
‘Much better.’
But he was reading a newspaper.
CAAC Charter Flight No. 4401 to Gonggar will depart from Gate 6 at 12:15. All passengers must report to Gate 6 for embarkation.
They were already lined up, windbreakers and sheepskin jackets and woolen hats and skiing gloves or red hands rubbing together, heavy boots, combat boots, a whole line of boots with the people tethered by them to the littered concrete, swaying in the stream of cold filthy air from the ventilators, all of them except Xingyu Baibing.
He was reading a newspaper, standing near the poster on the wall, Mitsubishi, holding the paper quite still and concentrating on a certain page, a certain column, and as I walked over to him I knew I’d blown Bamboo.
I shouldn’t have let him buy a paper.
They hadn’t set a trap for him here in Chengdu, specifically. They’d set a trap for him everywhere, wherever he might go, once he’d got out of Hong Kong. They’d been prepared even for the impossible, that somehow, despite their agents there, he’d get clear of Hong Kong, and they’d set a supertrap that couldn’t fail.
He was in it now and it had sprung.
‘We’re boarding,’ I said, as if nothing had changed, as if by one chance in a thousand I was wrong.
He looked at me, his eyes smoldering, the newspaper trembling between his hands.
Passengers for Flight No. 4401 for Gonggar are now boarding. All passengers for Gonggar must report immediately to Gate 6 for departure.
Xingyu pushed the newspaper towards me.
‘Dead.’
Top of page two.
WIFE OF DISSIDENT IN PRISON. Dr. Xingyu Chen, wife of the exiled scientist Xingyu Baibing, who left the People’s Republic yesterday in disgrace, was arrested late last night in their apartment in Beijing and taken to Bambu Qiao Prison, where she is now undergoing intensive interrogation, in the hope that she can be persuaded to inform the authorities on the whereabouts of certain friends and colleagues also wanted for questioning, and to offer information particularly on her husband’s subversive activities at the university.
Though nothing official has been announced, a source requesting anonymity has declared that if the exiled dissident Xingyu Baibing were to return voluntarily to Beijing for interrogation, his wife would in all likelihood be released immediately.
I folded the paper.
‘Hey, come on! You’re with our lot, aren’t you?’
Xingyu stood facing me.
‘I must go to Beijing.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you can’t do that.’
‘You cannot stop me.’
Chapter 10
Su-May
She came floating toward me, big eyes in a small pinched face, her body swathed in the folds of a hooded fur jacket too big for her, the hide torn and patched and stained, floating toward me looking rather like an Eskimo child, though she wasn’t a child, more like a grown-up china doll.
‘They have asked me to assist them,’ she said.
I tried to relax, and she stopped floating. On our way from Gonggar to the city the tour guide had told us that at eleven thousand feet we might hallucinate sometimes; there was oxygen, he said, at most of the hotels.
‘Assist them?’
I didn’t know why it was anything to do with me that they’d asked her to assist them; the people in uniform behind the long cluttered counter, Chinese Public Security officers, one of them watching me steadily, would have worried me if it weren’t for the fact that he’d never seen me before, hadn’t been outside the airport in Hong Kong when we’d done the Xingyu thing. On the other hand I wasn’t
totally at ease: they’d picked me up in a military jeep and brought me here for questioning and my passport and visa and Alien Travel Permit were spread all over the counter and the PSB officer would certainly recognize me again if we crossed paths.
‘With your case,’ she said.
I hadn’t got a case. I’d left it in my cell at the monastery with Xingyu looking after it.
‘I see,’ I said.
She meant my case, of course, criminal charges, so forth. I suppose if the Bureau knew I’d got arrested within an hour of entering Lhasa on a strictly zero-zero clandestine operation they’d call me in straight away, wouldn’t blame them. But that wasn’t all I’d done since we’d flown out of Chengdu, it was not all, my good friend, that I had done. But I don’t want to think about that now, I want to listen to this little china doll and find out if I can rescue anything from the wreckage.
Xingyu is safe.
Yes, concentrate on that. He is safe and among friends at the monastery and you can say, if you want to be charitable, that I’ve completed the mission, the objective of which was to get Dr. Xingyu Baibing out of Hong Kong. But we remember, don’t we, that Bamboo has a new objective now: I have to get him back into Beijing when the time is right, and I’m not sure how I can do that if these people throw me into jail.
I think she was waiting for me to say something.
‘What exactly is my case?”
‘You were out of bounds.’
‘Ah. I didn’t know.’
In fact when the military jeep had pulled up and the soldier had shouted something to me above the noise of the engine I’d thought he was offering me a lift.
I told her this.
The throttle had got stuck, I suppose, with the engine roaring like that; or he was having to keep it running somehow with the windchill at minus forty degrees. She was telling them what I’d said, in very fast Mandarin, her tiny porcelain teeth flashing their way through the syllables. Mandarin has got something like four hundred syllables and they’ve all got several tones and if you don’t get them exactly right you might as well speak Dutch, it’s a real bitch.
‘They say there are signs posted.’
‘I don’t read Chinese.’
‘There are signs in English: Military road. Out of bounds.’
‘I didn’t see anything in the kind of English anyone would recognize.’
‘I must not tell them that.’
‘I know.’
I’d said it to find out which side she was on, though it already seemed fairly clear: she was one of a dozen or so people in here lined up along the counter with their papers or arguing with their hands, Chinese, Tibetans, Nepalis, Muslims, Kashmiris, a couple of round-eyes, tourists, traders, yak herders, women with braided hair, men with high boots and sashes and daggers, all of them wrapped in shawls and hides and furs against the cold outside. In here it was close to eighty, with two enormous yak-dung stoves burning, smoking the place out. I assumed they’d all been hauled in on some kind of charge: this was a PSB office, where the people on the other side of the counter in Beijing and Shanghai and Chengdu had got their clubs out on that June night and gone to work. There would be a basement under this place, underground cells.
‘What will you tell them, then?’ I asked the girl.
‘It is difficult. You were on a military road. But I think perhaps that if you made profuse apologies, they might listen. Especially if you behave contritely.’
One of the officers pushed a flap open at the end of the counter and beckoned a man through and took him to one of the doors at the back, with two other officers closing in. Everyone stopped talking while this happened, then the noise started up again.
‘Then of course I apologize,’ began using my hands, ‘I apologize profusely,’ shooting the officer looks of penitence, ‘and I shall certainly make sure I read the signs in the future.’
He didn’t turn to look at the girl as she translated, but went on looking at me. He’d been seventeen, once, seventeen, eighteen, top of his class and fond of sports, taken his mum and dad out sometimes, given them a treat, told them he wanted to go into something he could be proud of, something that’d make them proud of him, say the police force, and this afternoon he was standing here with the gun and the truncheon on his belt and hoping for the chance of pushing the flap open at the end there and throwing me into a cell and beating me up if I wouldn’t answer questions.
This wasn’t Beijing, this was the Holy City, but last year there’d been troops brought in by the thousand to quell the uprising, and more monasteries burned and more corpses dumped into military trucks and taken away for mass burial in the gaping earth with the bulldozers standing by.
‘He says it is not enough.’
I hadn’t thought it would be.
‘Then I’d be happy to pay a fine.’
I meant it to sound naive, to let them know I didn’t really understand the gravity of the charge. The least I was going to get away with was a night in the cells, and that was no big deal in itself, but it meant that I would become more familiar to them over the hours, more recognizable. That could be fatal, later, for me or for Xingyu Baibing or both.
The girl turned back to me and went on speaking in Chinese and corrected herself. ‘Yes, you must pay a fine of fifty yen and write a confession.’
‘That’s very generous.’
‘You have money to pay?’
I got my wallet and put down a Y 100 note and she pushed it across the worn, paint-chipped counter. The young officer looked at it as if it were a piece of yak dung but in a moment pushed my passport and the other stuff over to me and I put them away.
‘You will receive fifty yen change,’ the girl said. ‘Now we will go over there.’
Rickety desk, one of the dozen in here, with a cheap ballpoint tied to a nail with a bit of dirty string, some kind of stool to sit on, though I didn’t trust it.
‘Write, please.’ She pointed to the block of schoolroom paper and took her hand away quickly when she noticed it was trembling. ‘In transgressing the laws of this city, I have shamed my ancestors.’ The ballpoint ripped a gash in the gray thin paper and she tore off the sheet and I started again. ‘Certain roads here are strictly out of bounds, and they are adequately provided with signs to this effect, in Chinese, English, and French. In failing to take notice of the signs I am guilty of a grave lack of attention.’
The door banged open and someone came in with a chicken underneath each arm and one of them let out a piercing squawk and flew into the air and sent a streak of white droppings across the counter and one of the PSB men shouted and someone else caught the poor bloody bird by one wing and bashed it against the wall.
‘My ancestors are disturbed in their honorable sleep by my fall from grace on this sorry occasion, and my esteem in their eyes has grievously diminished.’
The pen dried up and she got me another one from the next desk, pulling the looped string carefully off the nail in a show of deep respect for PSB property in case she was being watched.
‘Finally, I wish—’
‘Are you cold?’
Her eyes widened as she looked up at me. ‘It is not cold in here.’
Then it was fear, making her hands shake. It was also in her eyes, fear of committing even the tiniest breach of protocol, damaging their bit of string, interrupting the written confessional by normal conversation. She looked down at the pad.
‘Write, please, and do not interrupt. Finally, I wish to apologize sincerely for the trouble I have caused the officers of the Public Service Bureau, and vow that such a transgression will not occur again.’
They were pushing the man with the chickens out of the door and a gust of freezing air blew in again. A wind had got up soon after we’d landed in Gonggar today.
‘Do you wish to add anything?’ the girl asked me.
My late Aunt Ermyntrude would also be shocked clean out of her celestial corsets by my lamentable fall from grace, but we’d better not put that, we h
ad better, my good friend, not put anything like that, I am simply feeling a touch lighthearted, you’ll understand, because they’re going to settle for fifty yen and this bit of bullshit and I could well have got their goat in some trivial way and finished up in the basement chained to the wall. Far better to take all possible notice of my little Eskimo here and walk on eggshells.
‘I’d like to thank them for their leniency,’ I told her.
‘No. They might decide to double the fine, one must understand. Please sign what you have written.’
She tore it carefully off the pad and took it over to the counter, and we had to wait until they’d dealt with a youth in a smart leather jacket and sunglasses, chewing gum as if he were starving while he showed his papers and they told him to take off his sunglasses and he didn’t want to and they snatched them off for him and flung them across the floor. Then the girl went forward and read my confession in Chinese while the PSB man watched me the whole time and I looked penitent and hoped to God we’d got it right, because I’d got quite enough worries already with Xingyu Baibing sitting up there in his cell on the top floor of the monastery, sitting there like a time bomb because there’d been nothing else I could have done, there’d been nothing.
The PSB man put out his hand and the girl gave him the sheet of paper and he scanned it for long enough to make it look as if he could read a bit of English and then tore it in half and jerked his head toward the door.
‘We can go,’ she told me.
‘Do you know this place well?’
‘This restaurant?’
‘Lhasa.’
‘Yes. I have been here often. I am an air stewardess with CAAC.’ She looked down quickly, perhaps because in the torn, patched coat that was too big for her she knew she looked more like a vagrant.
‘When are you flying out?’ I didn’t imagine she was flying anywhere but I wanted to keep her talking. The minute we’d left the PSB office she’d told me she’d show me a cheap place to eat and when we’d got here she’d asked if we could sit together and I realized she was starving and hadn’t any money.
