by Anthony Grey
The note tucked inside on top of a khaki cotton jacket instructed him to go immediately to the lavatory compartment at the rear of the aircraft before the seat-belt sign was switched on. He looked up to find the thin stewardess watching him impatiently from the front of the cabin. He rose from his seat immediately and hurried to the rear of the aircraft. As the door closed behind him the stewardess gave a signal to the pilot behind her and straight away the illuminated seat belt signs came on above each seat to the accompaniment of a single warning chime from the airliner’s intercom system.
Inside the lavatory Scholefield bolted the door and took out the white card. The unsigned note had been handwritten in English. On the back, a further message instructed him to dress in the clothes contained in the bag and put his own suit and shoes inside. He was then to wait where he was, the note said, until his name was called in English through the door.
From the curtained rear seat of a dun-coloured Public Security Bureau Warszawa, Tan Sui-ling watched the Boeing float slowly down, stretching its undercarriage with a blind man’s caution towards that first invisible moment of contact with the ground. She wore an official dark blue tunic suit now and her long hair had been cut and scraped close to her head beneath a soft-peaked worker’s cap. Opaque green curtains of elasticated nylon were stretched across the rear and side windows of the car so that she and the two men sitting on either side of her in Public Security cadre’s uniforms could watch the plane’s arrival from an impenetrable, submarine gloom.
The hollow-chested croupier from the Soho cellar, sitting on her left, shot a quick sideways glance at her as the airliner’s undercarriage brushed the runway, then settled and took weight ‘Hao, hen hao,’ she said softly and gave a little nod of satisfaction as the now earthbound Boeing rushed smoothly towards where they were parked on the taxiing apron.
The man on her other ‘side was taller than the average Chinese. He stared straight ahead through the windscreen, watching the plane slow down, the top of his cap brushing the plastic-lined roof of the Warszawa. When he moved, his heavily muscled arms and shoulders bulged under the thin jacket, stretching it tight across his broad back.
The driver of the ten year-old Warszawa started the engine and moved the car dose to the bottom of the disembarkation steps as they were rolled up against the stationary Boeing. But nobody got out. From the shadowy interior they watched the Japanese delegation descend to be met by half a dozen Peking officials of the foreign trade ministry. The Japanese bowed and giggled and pumped hands for several minutes before letting the Chinese whisk them away in shiny black official Hung Chi cars. By then the last of the foreign diplomats and their families had disappeared inside the single terminal building and the pilots of the Boeing and their cabin crew had departed on a rickety transport bus
Tan Sui-ling watched the baggage gang emptying the aft hold. When she saw the last piece of luggage thrown onto the open truck she nudged the hollow-chested man beside her. He climbed out quickly and without hesitation plucked a brown leather suitcase tagged with Scholefield’s name from the rear tailboard. When he had stowed it in the boot of the Warszawa she nodded to the big man beside her and he got out and followed the smaller man briskly up the steps into the fuselage of the Boeing.
During the two minutes which elapsed between their disappearance and the re-emergence of the hollow-chested cadre at the top of the steps, her eyes never left the open doorway. She watched him glance once round the airport then start quickly down the steps, followed by the bigger man, who now carried a blue canvas holdall. both kept their heads bent forward so that only the tops of their khaki caps were visible. They got into the car quickly from different sides and the driver had the Warszawa moving before the doors had closed.
In the sickly green gloom of the rear seat Scholefield stared out at her from under the khaki peak of the Public Security Bureau cap. His face was gaunt with tension. He opened his mouth to speak but she motioned him to silence with a quick gesture as the car sped across the airport towards a side exit.
HONG KONG, ‘Thursday—Since the death of Premier Chou En-lai in January, events in Peking have unfolded like a plot from a Ming dynasty court intrigue.
New York Times, 18 June 1976
23
Scholefield knew that the twenty-foot, single-character signboards spaced at fifty yard intervals along the airport approach road spelled out one of Mao Tse-tung’s thoughts on the inevitability of international revolution. But they flashed by him now in an unreadable red and white blur as the driver accelerated the rattling Warszawa rapidly towards its maximum speed of eighty miles an hour.
Once out on the wide, arrow-straight forty-kilometre highway leading into Peking the driver kept his foot on the accelerator and his hand on the horn and rushed headlong down the centre of the dusty, tree-lined road. Oncoming cyclists swerved from their path screaming abuse and sweating mule drivers hauling commune produce into the city on tottering, net-covered carts took off their straw hats and waved them in fury in the thick dust clouds thrown up in the wake of the speeding car.
The driver didn’t slow until they reached the outer suburbs of the city. By then the lights was beginning to fade and Tan Sui-ling, after checking the road behind them, leaned forward and tapped him once on the shoulder. He throttled back immediately and drove more carefully among the cyclists pedalling unlit machines several abreast on both sides of the broad street.
Because of the clammy heat, occupants of the apartment blocks that stretched like red brick cliffs along both sides of the street were squatting in the dust on the unpaved sidewalks. Many of the men were stripped to the waist and the women and girls had rolled their baggy trousers up above their knees in an effort to keep cool.
Scholefield took off the khaki cap and mopped his sweating face. He could feel the cotton jacket sticking to his back but when he wound down the window on his side the fetid air that entered through the nylon curtain carried the sickly reek of drains. Suddenly the oppressive heat, the press of sweating bodies around him in the cramped car, and the fatigue of eighteen hours flying sent a surge of anger through him. ‘Do all Chairman Mao’s guests in Peking get this cloak and dagger welcome?’ He spoke the words fiercely in Chinese and swung round to face Tan Sui-ling.
She ignored the question completely and they drove for several minutes more in. a brittle silence.
‘You were selected quite arbitrarily, by the socialist imperialists in Moscow, to propagate lies about China.’ She spoke quietly at last without turning her gaze from the road ahead. ‘Because of this Chairman Mao took the unprecedented step of inviting you to Peking—on my recommendation—to hear the truth.’ She turned her head slowly to look at him. ‘But these are unsettled tunes. The leadership of China is not united. You will perhaps be surprised to find Chairman Mao, ‘when you meet him at midnight in a mood of apprehension.’
Scholefield stared at her. ‘Were you following his instructions in offering me disguise before I left the aircraft?’
She looked away into the gathering dusk and nodded. ‘It was commanded by Chairman Mao himself that for your own safety your movements in China should be conducted under conditions of maximum security. Such meetings are not unprecedented. There has been trouble before.’
The Warszawa was’ passing through Wai Chiao Ta Lou, Peking’s foreign diplomatic quarter, and Scholefield watched a British Ford Escort with diplomatic plates driven by a young haughty-looking man swing across in front of them. The Warszawa had to brake sharply to avoid the car and the driver shook his fist after the Escort as it sped away towards the British embassy, now fully restored after its destruction by Red Guards at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
‘The American journalist, Snow, came several times to Peking to talk with Chairman Mao. But always there was opposition— although he had penetrated the Nationalist blockade in the Thirties to reach Yenan.’ She shrugged. ‘Chairman Mao’s wife spent sixty hours with an American woman sinologist in 1972 revealing her life s
tory. This too was opposed by her enemies and therefore had to be conducted in secret.’ She paused and smiled a brittle humourless smile. ‘Because of our historical experience at the hands of foreign exploiters there is a deeply- ingrained suspicion in China of intimate contact with outsiders. Such things can be magnified as serious political misjudgements, indiscretions which may be used as a basis for all-out attacks by political opponents.’ She smiled bitterly again. ‘My own experience with your friend Harvey Ketterman leads me to share that suspicion.’
‘Harvey Ketterman is dead.’
For a fraction of a second she was unable to disguise her surprise. Then she looked quickly away. ‘He deserved to die,’ she said in a barely audible voice.
‘The Russians killed him.’
She nodded once more. ‘It is right.’ She made no further attempt to explain herself:
The Warszawa swung onto Chang An, the ten-lane Boulevard of Eternal Peace which bisects Peking east to west, and immediately the driver began leaning heavily on his horn again. But its voice was immediately lost in the already deafening symphony of noise coming from the red and cream trolley-buses as they nosed through the rapidly-failing light, honking furiously at the undisciplined droves of cyclists all around them. The thick crowds thronging the wide pavements under the trees on either side of the boulevard were barely moving, as if the stilling humidity of the approaching night had already sapped their last dregs of energy.
With a muttered curse the driver of the Warszawa swung out towards the centre of the highway to find a clear passage. As he accelerated Scholefield saw through the windscreen a great ragged mass of purple-black cloud spreading like spilled ink across the evening sky behind the Great Hall of the People. It snuffed out the last flicker of light with a surprising suddenness, and in the brief moment before the trolley-buses switched on their headlights a deep, breathless darkness gripped the city. Then the street lamps began coming on, and Scholefield caught a glimpse of the giant floodlit portrait of Mao high on the vermilion walls of the Gate of Heavenly Peace just before the Warszawa swung into Nan Chitze and began running north beside the moated east wall of the old Forbidden City.
‘Where are we going?’
Instead of replying she unbuttoned one of the breast pockets of her tunic and handed him a plastic-covered document. She switched on an interior light and he saw that the green security pass was inscribed with his name written in both Latin and Chinese characters above one of the photographs taken at the Soho market. in the bottom right-hand corner it bore the signature and photograph of Wang Tung-hsing, Deputy Minister of Public Security and head of Unit 8341, the elite army group responsible for guarding Chung Nanhai and the person of Mao Tse-tung.
‘That and your letter from the Chairman should ensure your safety here in Peking—if your presence is not too widely advertised’ She reached out and switched off the light. ‘You will remain only a few hours. Your departure has been arranged at dawn on the first flight to Tokyo—for your own sake.’ He tucked the pass into his pocket and glanced anxiously out of the window again. The car was threading through one of the narrow, cluttered streets of drab grey-roofed houses huddled beneath the high walls of the Forbidden City. ‘It was an imperial edict that ensured that the common people of Peking paid architectural as well as physical obeisance to the golden roofs of the emperor’s palaces from these bumble homes of no more than a single storey.’
Puzzled by the heavy irony in her voice, Scholefield turned back from the window to look at her. Her features were barely visible in the suffused glow of the dim street lights. ‘But since liberation we have allowed the building of higher walls— especially to contain the enemies of the Party.’ She was staring past him through the front windscreen.
He looked out in time to see the street sign at the entrance to a narrow rutted alley between two rows of single-storey houses. He read it aloud to himself and turned back quickly to look at her. ‘Tsao Lan Tse Hutung—Grass Mist Lane. Your notorious prison for foreigners!’
She laughed shortly. ‘The detention centre of the Peking Bureau of Public Security, if we are to be perfectly correct, built on the site of a poetically-named Buddhist monastery. But it is not just for foreign spies—it is for counter-revolutionaries of all kinds.’
The headlights of the Warszawa flared into two large yellow circles on a massive iron gate in a twenty-five foot wall and a uniformed guard stepped out of the shadows holding a rifle. He inspected the driver’s pass then held his arm in through the window for Scholefield’s. He returned it without comment after reading it in the light of headlamps, then checked those of Tan Sui-ling and the hollow-chested cadre. The guard walked slowly back to a sentry box at the side of the gate and there was a rattle of chains as the gate was wound up precisely to a height that would allow the Warszawa to enter.
Immediately the car had passed underneath, the iron gate thumped back into its beaten earth base and Scholefield watched as the headlights searched across an inner compound. Another gate in another twenty-foot wall swung open as they drove towards it and Scholefield caught a glimpse of two more armed guards in khaki jackets standing in the shadows on either side as they went through. Inside they stopped at a third gate, which eventually parted in the middle and swung slowly open after another inspection of their passes. The Warszawa bumped through across rutted mud and halted in the inner courtyard of the prison.
Scholefield’s door was immediately wrenched open from outside. As he stepped out into the shadowy compound the fierce saturated heat of the night flooded into his throat, making him gasp. A long, low growl of thunder rumbled slowly across the sky to the north and as he looked up towards the sound he noticed for the first time the electrified barbed wire strung round the top of the high walls. Four dimly-lit machine-gun emplacements had been built into the corners and the silhouetted head and shoulders of the four men manning them were clearly visible, gazing watchfully down into the yard. There was a damp, sour smell of rotting vegetation in the compound and when the thunder died away, the distant night screech of cicadas was the only sound that penetrated inside the walls.
‘You will act precisely in accordance with my instructions!’
Scholefield felt a hand seize his right arm and he was swung bodily round. He found himself staring into the face of a heavily built Security Bureau man. He released his arm and snapped his fingers in Scholefield’s face. ‘Your identification document!’
Four or five guards armed with rifles stood grouped behind the man who had spoken. Scholefield noticed as he handed over the green pass that he wore an officer’s jacket with four pockets. One of the guards shone a torch so that the senior man could make the inspection while two others moved quietly round to take up station on either side of Scholefield. The document was subjected to a minute scrutiny lasting two full minutes. Then the officer looked up at Scholefield. ‘Remove his cap!’
The cap was snatched from his bead from behind and the guard with the torch shone it full on Scholefield’s face. The officer stared at him for a long moment, then looked back at the photograph on the pass. ‘Hao-li,’ he said at last, and put the pass into one of his jacket pockets. Without another word he turned and started off across the compound. The two men at his shoulder grunted and nudged Scholefield with their rifles, indicating that he should follow. He looked quickly round at the Warszawa. The doors were closed and the curtains remained drawn. Neither the driver, Tan Sui-ling nor the hollow-chested cadre had moved from their seats.
The two guards began walking and because they stood shoulder to shoulder behind Scholefield he was forced to start forward across the yard to prevent himself falling. As he walked he heard the Warszawa’s engine start up and the creak of the gates opening to allow it to depart. Ahead of him a square of light appeared at the bottom of the wall on the far side of the compound as the senior officer pulled open a door and stepped into a dimly-lit passage. He waited until Scholefield and the two guards were inside then closed the door and shot heavy bobs i
nto place top and bottom. Scholefield stopped, looking round uncertainly. He saw the senior officer casually unbutton the leather holster on his belt and pull out a heavy Colt 45 revolver. He motioned along the corridor with one flick of its barrel and waited until Scholefield had begun walking, before falling into step behind him. The two guards with rifles followed.
They walked in silence, the scuff of their regulation-issue canvas-and-rubber slippers echoing softly in the empty passages.
Occasionally they splashed through puddles of condensation dripping onto the bare concrete floor from rusting overhead cold-water pipes. The air within the building was hotter and more rancid than in the compound and the choking humidity magnified the mingled stench of human excrement and sweat given off by incarcerated men. Scholefield felt the perspiration begin trickling down the inside of his arms and legs as he walked. They passed a series of heavy, unpainted wood doors with only a spyhole at eye level and he fancied he heard the faint dragging movement of a body shifting behind one of them.
‘They came to a brightly-lit deserted lecture hall with a bare wooden floor and chairs stacked at the sides. A huge coloured portrait of Mao Tse-tung hung above a dais at one end. The officer nudged Scholefield in the back with the barrel of the revolver and all four men crossed the hall at a fast walk.
On the other side, the passage was narrower and lit at infrequent intervals by single naked bulbs. The officer caught the sleeve of Scholefield’s jacket and motioned him to stop beside a plain wooden door without a spyhole. He produced a key and opened it. Scholefield saw a narrow flight of steep red brick steps. One of the two guards produced a torch and flashed it into the darkness. The officer motioned Scholefield ahead of them and the group started downward.