by Adam Hall
Argot. The opposite of street level is going to ground, losing yourself, burying yourself. ‘Unless someone saw me at the temple,’ I said. I didn’t think anyone had, just wanted to make the point.
‘What are the chances?’ He watched me with his yellow eyes, trusting me not to lie.
‘How do I know, for Christ’s sake? Anyone could have seen me go in there, or come out.’
Not precisely a lie. Call it an exaggeration, playing it safe, playing it too safe, because I didn’t want any action, I was still healing, uncertain of my strength if there were demands made on it, out there at street level.
‘I think,’ Pepperidge said, ‘the chances are slight. But I won’t push you.’
I looked away. We were getting awfully close to the unthinkable. Signal for Bureau One, his eyes only. Executive’s injury has left him less fully active. Suggest bringing replacement to stand by.
The unthinkable.
‘Push me,’ I said. ‘Push me as hard as you need to.’
‘Perhaps, then, a compromise. Take every chance you can find of normal cover. Don’t reinforce the image.’
Show my face, in other words, as little as possible. That was all right.
‘What I’ll do,” Pepperidge said, ‘is bring in the Jeifang. The truck, I’ll use the same man, Chong.’
The man you sent to the temple?’
‘Yes.’ He got out a scrap of paper and a ballpoint. ‘The Jeifang is green. Most of them are, in Lhasa. This is the number plate. He’ll be at the rendezvous after dark, at twenty hundred hours, and he’ll take you and the subject to Gonggar, where you’ll sleep for the night in the truck. The CAAC plane normally leaves between ten hundred and ten-thirty in the morning. I want you to fit the mask on the subject and see him as far as the departure gate, but don’t keep close; you’ll be there simply in case of any trouble. Then you’ll go back to the truck. He’ll be met in Beijing and taken off the street immediately.’
‘Chong stays with the truck?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s his cover, if we’re stopped?’
‘I’m going to ask for my fucking money back! They can’t do this!’
Bottle smashing, then very quiet. I suppose the man on the staff had gone darting out just now to fetch the police.
‘Chong’s cover,’ Pepperidge said, ‘is just what it looks like: he’s the driver for a transport company.’
‘Will he be armed?’
‘No.’ Pepperidge watched me thoughtfully. ‘Do you want him armed?’
‘No.’
Then the door opened again and Su-May came in and caught sight of me by chance and edged her way between the tables and passed close to us, whispering, ‘You shouldn’t be in here - the police are looking for you,’ and I saw them in the doorway, fur hats, red stars, bolstered guns.
Chapter 16
Shiatsu
Skull of a dog.
‘How do you know?”
Freezing in here. The window was open.
‘I have to report back there,’ she said, ‘twice every day.’
The Public Service Bureau, where she’d helped me this morning.
Skull of a dog on the wall. Narrow bed in a corner and a few bits of rough wood furniture and one or two oil lamps, the window blind with a bracket loose at one end, hanging at an angle, no telephone need I tell you, cut off, I was cut off from my director in the field, cut off from London and going to ground, I would have to go to ground, lose myself, bury myself, don’t think about it, Dr. Xingyu Baibing stuck up there on the third floor of a monastery and the man who was meant to get him to the airport stuck in a tenth-rate hotel and freezing to death while the police scoured the town for him, think about anything but that.
‘Why?’
Why did she have to report back to the PSB station twice a day? She didn’t volunteer very much; I had to keep asking questions.
‘I broke the curfew last night.’ Her teeth were chattering. She was freezing too, or frightened, or both.
‘So you have to report back? Can’t we shut the window?’
She went across to it, but it was stuck and I helped her. She’d had trouble with the stove by the look of it, the front was raised and there was ash on the floor, the cheap linoleum had burned patches, why, I suppose, she’d had to leave the window open, smoke, stank in here, it wasn’t wood smoke, it was yak dung, having to make an effort, I was having to make an effort to think straight, get things in order, because the mission was like a sinking ship now, rolling in midocean in the dark, the decks awash and wallowing and the stern down, sliding to the cold vast bosom of the deep, must get perspective, yes.
‘You are not well,’ Su-May said.
‘So what happened when you reported back?’
‘The officer who dealt with you this morning was still there. He asked me about you.’
She went across to the stove and got some dung out of a torn brown-paper bag.
‘What did he ask?’
‘If I knew where you were staying. I said no.’ She lit some paper and put the stuff on top and began blowing at it.
‘Why did they want to know where I was staying?’ I suppose it was just her way, didn’t talk much.
‘They are looking for a man who was seen near a temple. They say someone was found dead there, an agent of the KCCPC.’
I moved nearer the stove. It wasn’t giving out any heat yet but there was a flame to watch. ‘What did you tell them, about me?’
‘I told them we parted,’ she said, ‘as soon as we left the PSB station. I said I had not seen you since then.’ She was squatting by the stove, the box of matches still in her hand, her eyes lifted to watch me with the question in them quite clear: Did you kill him!
‘What else did they ask? What else did they say? Give it to me all at once, will you, everything you can think of.’
She looked down, ashamed: I’d criticized her. ‘They said that I should look out for you wherever I went, and tell them immediately if I saw you again.’ The small flame growing in the stove, its yellow light reflected in the sheen of her thick black hair, the matches still in her long ivory fingers, forgotten, ‘I told them I would look out for you, and tell them if I saw you. What else could I say?’
I got down beside her, sat on the gritty linoleum, standing made me tired, you are not well, she’d said, did I look that bad? ‘There was nothing else,’ I said, ‘you could tell them. When you came into the cafe, you didn’t expect to see me there?’
‘Of course not.’ She brought her head up and looked at me. ‘If I had known you were in the cafe, I would have gone there sooner, to warn you.’
‘Thank you.’
There is hot water here, for the shower.’ She put the matches down on the plank of wood fixed to the wall with bent wire supports, a shelf. Other things on the shelf: incense, a torn glove, a half-burned votive candle on a spike in a rusty bowl. ‘Not really hot,’ a shy smile, put on, acted, because that too was shameful: she was my host and could offer me hospitality but it wasn’t as it should be, not really hot. ‘But it is not cold, either. Please use the shower, if you wish.’
Do not think it strange, my good friend: in Lhasa in wintertime a shower that is not freezing cold is a luxury beyond all the perfumes of Araby, and I probably smelled, most people here did, lived in their clothes, and I’d soaked these with sweat in the temple when he’d come for me. Her invitation must be counted as grand hospitality.
‘I’d like that,’ I told her. She got up quickly and I said, ‘Su-May, do you think the PSB officers followed you away from the station?’
She looked confused.
‘Would you know,’ I asked her, ‘if anyone was following you?’
‘I have never thought of it.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
They could have followed her, or they could have passed my description on to the police, for what it was worth. The police had come into the cafe, but that had been because of the drunk.
She�
�d gone straight to an empty table and sat down facing me, holding her eyes on me, a warning in them.
‘I’m going to fucking sue them!’ On his feet now, swaying between two friends, a woman trying to quieten him.
Pepperidge watching me: he’d caught her whisper.
I had said: ‘I’ll be at the small hotel two blocks from here, in Xingfu Donglu; it’s called the Sichuan. Get Chong to pick me up there at eighteen hundred hours. Tell him to wait outside.’
‘Understood.’
‘You the police? I want to talk to you! I’ve been ripped off by a bloody travel agency!’
I passed close to her table. ‘Can I go to your hotel?’
‘Of course.’
Through the back way past the toilets and stacked crates and some bicycles and a hen in a cage, slipping on broken eggs and finding the door and the yard and the alley; she came behind me but vanished soon afterward and got there before I did, to the hotel. We weren’t tagged, didn’t have to lose anyone.
It was the only place I could go, the only rendezvous I could give Pepperidge for Chong, and if I walked any farther than two or three blocks I’d run into a police patrol.
‘Towel not very big,’ Su-May said, dissembling. CAAC insignia.
I took it into the shower, a cramped corner of the bathroom lined with sheets of plastic, flakes of plaster from the ceiling embedded in the grime on the floor, a streak of rust down the wall under the tap, but the water was warm as she’d promised, and as I stood under the thin sputtering jets I was conscious of the benison not only of the healing water but of the grace of womanhood that had offered me this much comfort at a time when I badly needed it, more in point of fact than comfort, a kind of sanity regained, a renewal of the heart, the means, even, by which I could conceivably do what I had to do, after all. When dark came it would be easier; the dark has so often been my shelter, the ultimate safe house when all other doors are shut.
I found my clothes and Su-May said, ‘Leave your coat off. I will give you shiatsu.’ She’d pulled the bed away from the corner so that she could move around it. ‘Cold now, but you will soon be warm.”
There were hours before dark came, and I lay down and she began working on me.
‘You’re an air hostess, an interpreter, and you practice shiatsu. You’re very accomplished.’
‘I have a license as therapist. Must understand, many people in China do two or three different jobs if they can, to afford anywhere nice to live, nice food. I earned more than my father, and he is university professor.’ Her fingers moved over the tsubo points. ‘Tell me where there is pain.’
‘All right. The message will have reached him by now, the one I told you I’d send.’
Her hands paused. ‘So quick?’
‘By telephone.’
‘From here?’
She meant from Lhasa. It worried her. ‘From here to London,’ I said, ‘and from there to Beijing.’ I’d asked Pepperidge, told him she’d been helpful to me at the PSB station.
My eyes were closed, but I felt her attention in the stillness of her hands. If I could reach Beijing so easily, who was I, what other powers did I have? ‘Thank you,’ she said at last. ‘It means very much to me. My mother is dead; I have only my father. My brother was killed in Tiananmen Square. My father will have worried about me; I vanished from out of his life when I came here. Now there is the message.’ She cupped her hands against my, face for a moment, very gently, then went on with her work. ‘Please relax. Your muscles are so tight everywhere.’ In a moment: ‘It hurts just there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well.’ She worked on the tsubo point, and warmth flowed, and hope flowed with it. I would have, yes, to go to ground, but the Jeifang, the big green truck, would offer me safety, and there might still be a last chance of getting Xingyu to the airport, sometime in the night.
‘And there,’ I said.
‘Very well. Your head is in pain, because of this?’
‘Bit sore, yes. I tripped and fell, hit the edge of a door.”
Even the partial truth is uttered seldom in our trade; I felt saintly.
The dung in the stove was glowing now; I could see it at the edges of my lids. It seemed less freezing in here, because of the stove and her hands and what they were doing to me, easing away some of the fear that always dogs the footsteps of a creature that knows it’s hunted.
‘You have pain also in your heart,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘I do not mean in your heart, exactly. In your spirit. There is a ghost there.’
Immediate gooseflesh: I felt the hair lifting on my arms. It’s always haunted me, this business of taking a life in the course of a mission. It’s nothing to do with guilt: the man in the temple would have taken mine if it had suited him. It’s that the closeness to death, your own or another’s, brings you to the edge of the unknown, where quantum forces play among the infinite reaches of the universe, and souls drift like leaves on the cosmic wind, seeking their new incarnation. It awes me, in a word, but then of course there’s the physical thing, the sweat and the muscle burn and the mechanics of force and leverage as one body tears the life out of another, there’s that too, and it leaves a taste in the mouth, and in the heart a feeling of despair. Post mortem, also, animal triste est.
I said to her, ‘I’ve got quite a few ghosts. One more won’t hurt.’
Her hands moved over me, tracing the meridians, and in the stove a pocket of trapped air popped.
‘Did you kill him?’
That thing,’ I said, ‘on the wall. What is it?’ The skull of the dog, set in a pattern of straw and colored wool.
Bloody thing had been worrying me ever since I’d come into the room.
‘It is a spirit trap. When enough bad spirits have been caught in it, someone will take it down for burning.’
‘How will they know when it’s full?’
‘I think they just leave it for a time, knowing what it will do.’
Spiritual Airwick, traps bad karma, replace as necessary, so forth. I’d given her an answer, in any case, by not answering; she knew anyway: she could feel his ghost in my spirit.
‘Why a dog?’
‘Because they are sacred. Please turn over, and relax more if you can.’
‘Did you go into that cafe for something to eat?”
‘Yes.’ Her fingers moved along my spine, seeking the knotted tsubo points, pressing.
‘You’re still hungry, then.’
‘No. It was for comfort. The world is very frightening.’
In a moment I said, ‘It won’t be long before they change the regime in Beijing, and then your father’s going to be safe, and a hero. It happened all over Europe.’
‘Yes, I very much hope. But until it is real, I am frightened. If the Public Service Bureau here in Lhasa finds my name in the records and sees who my father is, they will send me straight to Beijing, and use me as a hostage to bring him from hiding. So I am afraid every hour, every minute. Hurt here?’
‘No.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
Her finger pressed, kneading. Against my closed lids the light was fading over the minutes; before long now it would be dark, and I would have a cloak for my clandestine purposes.
‘There’s nowhere else,” I asked her, ‘that you can stay? Where they can’t find you?’
She pressed again, and a nerve flared. ‘I have one or two friends in Lhasa, yes, but I cannot go to them. It would mean danger for them. I know some other people, but not well. They might turn me over to the police; it happens a lot. Everyone is frightened. Everyone.’
‘It won’t last long,’ I said. ‘The leaders are old, and the people are enraged.’
I turned my wrist and looked at my new watch, a cheap digital thing, the best I could find; I’d bought it from a stall on my way to the cafe. The time was now 5.41, and we lacked nineteen minutes to the rendezvous.
‘The people are enraged,’ Su-May said, ‘ye
s, but the soldiers have guns. It is always the same.’ She worked in silence for a time, and I watched the shadows darken across the floor, and heard the sounds from the street below diminishing; a man shouted and a dog yelped; bells had begun tolling, two, then three, then many, their carillon summoning the night.
‘That is all,’ Su-May said, and took her hands away. I didn’t move for a minute or two; my whole body was tingling.
‘You’re gifted,’ I said. ‘I feel well again.’
‘I am glad.’
I got off the bed and found my coat. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Nothing. I earn a little here and there, translating for the tourists, acting as a guide.’ In the shadowed room the expression in her long dark eyes was hidden. ‘What happened in the temple has great value for us, for the Chinese people. We rejoice in the downfall of even one of the enemy.’ The glow from the stove touched her face on one side, bringing a spark of light into her eye. ‘You are going now?’
‘Yes.’
‘But where? You are like me; everywhere is dangerous for you.”
A siren had started up somewhere, its undulating sound threading through the tolling of the bells.
‘If the police are looking for me,’ I said, ‘I can’t stay here.’ I wanted to check my watch again, but couldn’t now; I didn’t want her to know I had any kind of appointment. The rendezvous must be close, but the timing wasn’t critical. Chong was Bureau, Pepperidge had said; I could therefore expect routine procedures from him: if I weren’t down there in the street at 1800 hours he’d wait for me to make circuits.
Su-May moved closer to me in the shadows. I think she wanted to say something important; I could feel it. The siren was louder, coming toward the building.
‘Think of a friend,’ I said, ‘someone you can trust, and shelter there. It might not be for long.’
In a moment she put her hand on my arm. ‘It is difficult. Everything is very difficult for me to understand. There are things I would like to tell you, but I cannot.’ I waited, not interrupting. There was no warmth from her hand on my arm; she was still cold, still frightened. Then she said quietly, ‘You must be careful. When you go down to the street, make sure you are not followed.’
