Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  ‘He sleeps,’ he whispered to me.

  ‘I won’t disturb him. Did he ask for anything?’

  ‘For paper, to write. And must buy drug.’

  ‘What drug?’ He couldn’t mean insulin.

  ‘For the sickness that he has.’

  ‘For his diabetes? He needs more insulin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean there’s none left?’

  ‘Must buy tomorrow, he say.’

  He could have warned me, Xingyu, for God’s sake, that he was getting low.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Peace be with you,’ the monk whispered. We exchanged bows, and he moved along the gallery, a rufous shadow in his robes, picking his way across the gapped timbers to the ladder.

  He’d been upset, Xingyu, by the fuss in Hong Kong, the airport snatch and the mask and having to go back through the terminal for the flight to Chengdu; it could have made him forget he was running low on insulin. But that might be his way, to forget things, and I’d have to watch it: he could be living half his life on the edge of the galaxies, the absentminded-professor syndrome, it could be dangerous, could be dangerous now - how easy would it be to get hold of insulin in a place like Lhasa?

  I opened the door of the cell as carefully as I could, but the wooden hinge still creaked. It wasn’t a cell exactly, though Jiang the abbot had called it that; it had once been three or four cells, but the shifting of the building during the fire had brought down some of the flimsy plaster walls, and we had the luxury of space here, you could call it a guest room, almost, a royal suite, with glass in every window and straw on the floorboards, a pipe from a cistern on the roof bringing water to the metal trough in the corner where the midday sun thawed the ice and you turned the tap on with a wrench. It had been used, Jiang had told me, to accommodate a visiting dignitary on a secret mission for His Holiness during the 1959 rebellion; hence the glass in the windows and the water basin, and of course the unlikelihood of our ever being found here on the fifth floor of a ruined hulk.

  I couldn’t tell if Xingyu was awake, as I opened my sleeping bag. He didn’t speak, or even stir, as far as I could tell with the noise the wind was making, and I found myself worrying, as I believe young mothers do, whether my precious charge was sleeping quietly or lying there in the silence of untimely death: the insulin thing was on my mind, and I didn’t know how fast a coma could set in, with a change of diet.

  I lay on my side, with dust sometimes settling on my face and making the skin itch as the wind fretted at the cracks in the ceiling, worrying also that I had crept in here to lie in the dark beside this man, his watchful guardian and defender of his faith, but if things went terribly wrong, his executioner.

  So what it comes down to is this - Pepperidge - I need to know whether, in order to protect the mission, you yourself would be prepared to take this life.

  I hadn’t said anything.

  Sand blowing across the window. Took another step, Pepperidge, head down, looking at the floor. ‘Let me spell out the situation for you. Memory is fallible. The situation I’m talking about is one in which for some reason Dr. Xingyu were found and seized and you were unable to save him, but were able to take his life before it was too late, before there was any time for the KCCPC to put him under interrogation. I hope that’s clear.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It wasn’t likely that a situation like that would come up: it was more liable to be one thing or another -either I’d succeed in protecting Xingyu and bringing him home safely to the plane for Beijing, or something would go wrong and the KCCPC would infiltrate our operation and catch Xingyu and break him and send him to Beijing for the puppet show. But I could think of a hundred situations, a thousand, where I could be right in the middle of a last-ditch action to save the protégé and indeed have the option of seeing him taken away or protecting the mission by taking his life. The most obvious scenario would be that we were both found and seized and taken for interrogation, giving me the chance of seeing to Xingyu somewhere along the way and then popping my capsule. We were both replaceable, and Bamboo could survive.

  Seeing to Xingyu, oh for Christ’s sake who’s been bitching about the use of precious euphemisms, killing him, yes, killing Xingyu, I take your point.

  ‘You didn’t draw a gun,’ Pepperidge asked me, ‘this time out?’

  ‘I never do.’

  We’re given one or two options on our way through Clearance, draw a weapon if we feel like it, draw a capsule; but I don’t like guns; the hands are quieter and I prefer going in close.

  ‘I know,’ Pepperidge said, ‘but I just wondered, you know, this time. In the kind of situation we’re talking about you might not get a chance of staying near him, near enough. Question of distance, timing, chance of pulling off a shot.’

  My hands had gone cold around the mug, the tea was cold, my spirit was cold, and I got off the bed and put the thing down on the chest of drawers and told him, ‘You can’t insist. You cannot insist.’

  Touching my arm, ‘Of course not. I’ve just got to sound you out, you see, find some sort of compromise. Got to remember, though, haven’t we, that there’s rather more at stake than the disinclination of one single executive to take a life. There’s the future, isn’t there, of China and Hong Kong.’

  Beginning to feel light-headed, you’ve got to avoid stress, the guide had told us, or you’ll make things worse, the altitude sickness, take it easy, walking. I was walking about now, Pepperidge moving over the wall to give me room, that bloody cockroach crawling across the wainscoting, looking for a way out, felt like, I felt like putting my foot on the thing, Ferris would have done that, he’s always looking for beetles to tread on, makes me sick because where do you stop, putting my foot on a cockroach, on Xingyu, said, I said— ‘They must have provided for an accident, in their original planning in London, an accident to Xingyu, I mean they—’

  ‘Oh yes.’ His voice gentle, reasonable. He knew I was looking for a way out and he wasn’t going to let me have one. He couldn’t. ‘There are several known dissidents in Beijing available, top intellectuals much admired by the people. London would certainly have gone to one of them, through the embassy, and put things to him.’

  ‘You think someone’s been briefed to take Xingyu’s place, if he gets killed?’

  ‘We can be certain. Most of the planning was made by Bureau One, with Sojourner as his adviser. But we don’t want to see Dr. Xingyu as in any way … expendable. We would hope, if anything happened to him, that his replacement could rally the people under the protection of the tanks; but we are certain that Dr. Xingyu could do it. He is our highest priority. But if there were any risk of his exposing the mission …’

  Walking about, I walked about, cold all over now, deathly cold, logical thought not coming easily but it didn’t take a lot of working out, Xingyu Baibing was the messiah, with the future of all those people in his hands, but also with a bomb in his head they were asking me to detonate if he became a danger to them.

  Pepperidge, watching me, the naked bulb in the ceiling reflected in his yellow eyes, waiting for me to understand that I hadn’t got a chance. The objective for Bamboo was to protect Xingyu Baibing, but that objective would automatically be overidden - if something went wrong - by the highest priority of all: to protect the mission itself.

  This hadn’t been part of the planning, specifically; it had been built into the very bones of the Bureau in its conception, a commandment carved in stone: Protect the mission.

  In the end I said, ‘No gun.’

  ‘Very well.’ He had to accept that much and he knew it. I’ve got my commandments too. ‘But you accept the need to avoid any risk to the mission?’

  Said yes.

  I had said yes.

  Lying here in the padded sleeping bag with the dust settling onto my face, making it itch, lying not far from him, from the messiah, watchful guardian and defender of his fate, but if things went wrong, the means implement of his crucifixi
on.

  Blood on the floor.

  I was sitting against the wall on a slatted bench, head down, chin on my hands, looking across at the counter some times and then looking down, ill, depressed, abandoned to my fate, appropriate cover for a place like this.

  Streaks of blood across the floor, he’d been brought in a minute ago, a young Khampa horseman, I would have said, in his brigand’s garb, they ride as if into the teeth of hell and sometimes come a cropper. A woman in a stained white smock came with a mop and bucket, shaking her motherly head. There were a dozen people in here, most of them at the counter, some with an arm in a sling, one carrying an infant with his face red with rage, its cries piercing. The monk was at the other end, at his dispensary.

  His name was Bian. The abbot had assigned him to me, telling him that he would do what I wanted better than anyone, more discreetly. I’d been surprised at first how ready the abbot had been to help me, but Xingyu had explained things: the monastery, like a hundred others, had been half destroyed by the Chinese forces in 1959, and the monks were still painstakingly restoring it; their hate for the Chinese had burned on when the fire was put out, and they would help anyone who could free Tibet and leave them in peace.

  Yelling the place down, the infant, as the mother shuffled forward in the queue. Bian, the monk, was talking to someone now across the counter, a man in a white coat, the dispenser, giving him the prescription. It had become grubby in Xingyu’s wallet and had been much handled, and I’d improved on that, making a smudge across his name that had left it unreadable.

  This was simply an exercise in caution. Quite apart from the world-media photograph of Dr. Xingyu Baibing in London, the Chinese weren’t likely to suspect that he was already back on the mainland. It’s the last place they’d expect me to go, he’d told me on the boat in Hong Kong, and that was why Pepperidge and London had agreed to let him come to Lhasa. But I’d asked Bian to buy the insulin for me to cover the thousandth chance that we were wrong, or that one of the KCCPC agents who’d seen me making the snatch at Hong Kong airport was now here in Lhasa, and that they suspected I was still looking after him. So this was just routine, straight out of the book.

  ‘I shall require another injection,’ Xingyu had told me, ‘by noon.’

  He hadn’t apologized for the trouble involved, hadn’t realized there was a risk, however slight. He’d been squatting on the floor when I’d left him, writing busily, some kind of diary perhaps, that he’d have to leave behind him when we made our final move; if so, the abbot would look after it for him.

  The monk, Bian, was nodding, putting money on the counter, hitching the red robe higher on his shoulder, taking a packet from the dispenser, coming away.

  I left the clinic five minutes after him and cut him off in a cobbled street behind one of the temples, deserted except for a huddle of mendicants sheltering from the wind.

  ‘I did not bring it,’ Bian told me.

  ‘The insulin?’

  ‘This is aspirin. I bought it in case I was watched. The dispenser said he would give me insulin but warned me, saying he had orders to report it.’

  Mother of God.

  ‘To report any sale of insulin?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked along the street, then back to me, the stubble on his face catching the light from the flat gray sky where the sun made a hazy disk, his eyes watering in the freezing wind. ‘He was a Tibetan, and was sorry, but said he would lose his license, perhaps be arrested for disobedience.’

  Perhaps I was just paranoid, losing my grip. There could be other explanations. ‘Bian,’ I said, ‘how many places are there in Lhasa where you can get insulin?’

  ‘Very few. Very few places.’

  So they wouldn’t have to put a standing watch all over the town, the KCCPC, though of course if they had to, they would do that. They’d got limitless manpower.

  Put a final question, to see if it was just paranoia: let him tell me. ‘Bian, can you think why they would watch for anyone asking for insulin?’

  He seemed a little surprised. ‘I would think because they know our guest has need.’

  Had need. And was somewhere in Lhasa.

  He stood there, Bian, holding the small brown-paper packet of aspirin and some money, the change; he watched me with pain in his eyes: it was perhaps his ‘guest’s’ karma to be found and taken away. The wind whipped at his worn soiled robes.

  ‘Where else,’ I asked him, ‘could I find insulin? Not the hospital or the clinics - would an apothecary stock it?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll try—’

  ‘No.’

  It was too dangerous now; it needed professional handling. I asked him for the prescription and told him to offer the money at one of the altars at the monastery and add the aspirin to their medical supplies; then I walked with my back to the wind and sat on a broken bench in a little park and worked on things and came up with the essentials: that unless there was another diabetic on the run the KCCPC either knew or suspected that Xingyu Baibing was here in Lhasa and were closing in; that it would take time to signal Pepperidge because the telephones here weren’t very good and you had to go through an operator and I didn’t know Mandarin or Tibetan; and that Xingyu had got to have insulin before noon and there was only one way I could get it for him and the risk was appalling.

  Chapter 13

  Apothecary

  The snakes were alive. I think.

  It doesn’t need saying, surely, that in any mission, whatever the objective, whatever the target, the one primordial requirement is to stay clear of the opposition, particularly if the opposition is not a private cell but the entire security network of the host country: police, secret police, civil and military intelligence. The one primordial requirement is to stay clear of them and get back across the frontier with a whole skin and the documents or the tapes or the defector or the blown spook who’s going to die out there if you don’t, die out there or finish up under the five-hundred-watt bulb without a capsule and blowing the roof off London.

  They weren’t moving. They were just a lot of coloured spirals curving around the inside of the big glass jar, their little black eyes open, but that didn’t mean anything, we go on watching life after death, don’t we, until someone closes the lids. But in any case I was disgusted. I can’t stand those bloody things.

  The apothecary peered at the grubby bit of paper. The light was bad.

  Of course there are times when we can’t for some reason stay clear of the opposition and then all we can do is to pop it and protect the mission or get clear again, bloodied but unbowed, so forth. Then there’s third situation that comes up sometimes but thank God not very often: it’s where the only way to keep the mission going and hope to survive and reach the objective is to set yourself up as a target and wait for them to shoot and that was what I was doing now.

  One of them was moving, its small head dropping and swinging around inside the jar with the black forked tongue flickering, and I looked away, the flesh creeping, they’ve got no bloody feet anywhere, those things, all they can do is writhe.

  ‘Insulin,’ the old man nodded, peering at the bit of paper.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The decorated canopy cracked above the shopfront in the wind, and the man behind me fell prone again onto the flat of his hands, facing toward the temple farther along. A dog sniffed at his rags.

  I’d tried two other apothecaries but at the first one the girl had just looked at the prescription for a long time and finally shaken her head and flashed all her gold teeth and at the second one the man said in quite good English that he was disappointed at not being able to oblige me but that I should try the one around the corner, toward the Barkhor plaza. I was there now.

  There were other things, apart from the snakes: rows of bottles and bowls of herbs and a huge dried starfish and an armadillo; but there was a shelf of phials and flagons with typed labels, and a small poster with Bayer at the top. I’d been trying apothecaries in the hope of making a deal; they
owned their own places and could break the rules if they wanted to, and I put the price of their wanting to at about one hundred yen.

  The old man was raising his head slowly, looking up from the prescription and bringing his eyes to focus directly on mine with his face close; and in his eye there was a warning. Then their focus shifted, and it was quite clear that he was looking behind me, through me, at something else.

  I said softly, ‘Police?’

  He nodded, pleased that I’d understood. ‘If sell you this, must tell them. It is order.’ Below his bald pate his brows made furrows as many as the armadillo’s ‘Perhaps it better you leave now.’

  I heard the man outside fall flat on his hands again in obeisance to the gods of the temple; he’d moved another few yards. I could hear other sounds, mostly voices from the people at the vegetable stalls opposite and the rumbling of ironbound wheels and the dragging of harness. The dog that had sniffed at the pilgrim’s rags now sniffed at my combat boots. Farther along the street there were prayer bells ringing, tuneless but with a steady rhythm. I listened carefully, analyzing the environment, because in a moment I was going to cross the line and present myself to the opposition, because I had no choice.

  ‘I must have the insulin,’ I told the apothecary ‘It’s urgent.’ He watched me steadily, his eyes bright with intelligence, but it was obviously beyond him to understand me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him, ‘about the police.’

  There was no point in pushing money at him as a bribe. In the last few minutes I’d come to know him well enough; he was an apothecary, a man of high standing in his community, a man, by his art, of great responsibility, and if he decided to report me to the police he would do it as a point of honor, the police being his enemy here; his goodwill would not be for sale.

  ‘You understand,’ he asked me, his eyes grave, ‘you understand what is the truth of this thing?’