by Mai Jia
THE MESSAGE
Mai Jia
AN APOLLO BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Mai Jia, 2020
English translation copyright © 2020 by Olivia Milburn
The moral right of the author and translator to be identified as the author and translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789543018
ISBN (XTPB): 9781789543025
ISBN (E): 9781789543001
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Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Part One: The Wind from the East
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two: The Wind from the West
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Conclusion Dead Calm
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
A Selective Chronology
About the author
About the Translator
An Invitation from the Publisher
PART ONE
The Wind from the East
ONE
1
My story is set in 1941, during the Japanese occupation, just as spring turned to summer. The location is West Lake in the city of Hangzhou, a famous beauty spot in east China, in the province of Zhejiang.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hangzhou was less than a fifth of its present size, but the heart of the city – West Lake – was no smaller than it is now and had just as many beautiful vistas and historic sites in and around it as it has today. Extending across the lake was the causeway built in the name of the Tang-dynasty poet Bai Juyi and the causeway constructed by the Song-dynasty poet and essayist Su Dongpo; dotted along these were the Broken Bridge, the Bridge of Gazing at the Immortals, Brocade Belt Bridge, Jade Belt Bridge and Linked Waves Bridge. There were also the Three Pools Mirroring the Moon, the famous vista known as the Moon Over Peaceful Lake in Autumn, and at the head of Xiling Bridge the tomb of the lovely but ill-fated fifth-century courtesan Su Xiaoxiao. There was the vista called Orioles Singing in the Willow Trees and the temple commemorating the Qian kings who made Hangzhou their capital in the tenth century. On Gushan Island there was the tomb of the revolutionary martyr and feminist Qiu Jin, executed in 1907, and the famous Louwailou restaurant. Tucked away in the hills surrounding the lake were the White Cloud Nunnery, the seven-storey Baochu Pagoda, Precious Stone Hill Floating in the Rosy Cloud, and the temple commemorating the patriotic Song-dynasty martyr General Yue Fei. And so on. They were all there, as they are still – the hills and the pools, the causeways and the pagodas, the temples and the bridges, the artificial islands and the scenic sites – left quite untouched by the Japanese.
In August 1937 Hangzhou was quite heavily bombed by the Japanese. I am told that, even now, more than seven decades on, unexploded ordnance is regularly uncovered along the Qiantang River, with the manufacturer’s marks fully legible. Bombs fell from the sky, scaring people half to death even when they didn’t explode, and most of them did. Explosions rent the heavens and shook the earth; they opened great chasms in the ground and unleashed infernos that caused countless deaths and injuries. The inhabitants of Hangzhou all fled. West Lake would no doubt have run away too if it could have, but since that was impossible, it had to stay and take what was coming.
As it happened, however, West Lake was amazingly lucky. Several hundred planes flew dozens of sorties and bombed Hangzhou itself into a wasteland, but West Lake and its many vistas and historic sites were entirely unaffected, as if protected by the gods. Only the temple dedicated to General Yue Fei seemed to have fallen outside this charmed circle, sustaining a small amount of bomb damage.
In those days, if you exited the Temple of General Yue Fei and turned in the direction of the Baochu Pagoda, along what is now Beishan Road, you would have seen quite a number of grand houses and estates. Of course, these were the homes of rich and powerful people. The rich and powerful have much better access to information than ordinary people, and so, long before the Japanese began their bombing campaign, they upped sticks and left. Once the Japanese had established their puppet government in Nanjing and the situation in Hangzhou had stabilized, as if by magic they reappeared. In some cases they sent their servants instead, to look after their properties and make sure that no one from the occupying regime requisitioned them.
One such property was a mansion that stood with its back to the mountains and its face to the lake; its owner was a man named Tan, a one-time gangster who’d taken advantage of the chaotic wartime situation to leave his criminal past behind him. He bought the land and built a house, which soon became famous far and wide; people called it the Tan Estate. Maybe it was just too attractive, just too well known, because during the occupation it was swiftly requisitioned and then handed over to the puppet regime’s newly created East China Counter-insurgency Corps, the ECCC. And so its buildings were put to new use.
In the front courtyard was a three-storey building that Mr Tan had designed as a teahouse and restaurant. This was now transformed into an ECCC officers’ club cum pleasure dome where every fleshly desire could be satisfied; anything went, and the place swarmed with prostitutes. Behind it, within a forest of bamboo, stood a C-shaped building that had originally been the servants’ quarters but was now used as office space. If you kept on walking, you reached the rear courtyard, where a pair of small Western-style houses stood facing one another. The one to the west became the private residence of the ECCC’s commander, Qian Huyi, while the one to the east was where he met his visitors and accommodated a handful of his cronies and aides. Since these buildings had once been the residences of Mr Tan and his family, they were beautifully appointed and very luxurious; when Qian Huyi moved in, he realized how right he had been to throw in his lot with the Japanese.
At this time, the political situation in China was extremely complicated. In the north-east there was Manchukuo, while in the south-east there was the Reorganized National Government, based in Nanjing and led by the collaborationist Chinese official Wang Jingwei. Both of these areas were under Japanese control; they were puppet regimes of the Japanese state and were entirely dependent on the Japanese for protection, so naturally they did what they were told.
There were also two anti-Japanese regimes centred elsewhere in the country. The Nationalist Kuomintang or KMT government was based in Chongqing, in the south-west, and was headed by Chiang Kai-shek; while the Communist government was based in Yan’an, in the north-west, and was headed by Mao Zedong. The Nationalists and the Communists both considered resisting Japanese agg
ression to be in the national interest, so they established a united front to fight the enemy together. But they also had their own antithetical preoccupations and aims, and their apparently united front actually concealed deep rifts; in reality, each side acted entirely out of self-interest, cutting the ground from beneath the other’s feet. This complex political situation meant that the whole country was in chaos, and the lives of many of its people became unbearably difficult.
In Hangzhou, Japanese military control was relatively weak at this point, and the city also had good transport links with nearby Shanghai and Nanjing. Both the Nationalists and the Communists exploited this to their advantage and Hangzhou became a focus for underground operations conducted by both sides: the Nationalist agents were providing intelligence for the Bureau of Military Statistics, while the Communist agents were running covert missions on behalf of their Yan’an headquarters. As a result, the city’s anti-Japanese resistance movement had strengthened considerably. Which was why Wang Jingwei’s puppet regime established the East China Counterinsurgency Corps and put Commander Qian Huyi in charge.
Qian Huyi vowed to wipe out these resistance organizations. He had at one time been an officer in the Nationalist Party’s National Revolutionary Army, but his desire for wealth and status had made him easy prey for the Japanese and he became a collaborator, a henchman of the invaders (people called him Qian-the-Dog). He was very much aware of the deep divisions that existed between the Nationalists and the Communists, for all that they appeared to be united in their resistance efforts, and he skilfully drove a wedge between them, causing enormous damage to the underground movements on both sides. For their part, both the Communists and the Nationalists were desperate to infiltrate his anti-insurgency ECCC, to secretly sabotage his efforts and turn the tide against him.
In the summer of 1940, ECCC commander Qian Huyi’s crimes finally caught up with him and he was murdered, along with his entire family. In the middle of the night, someone managed to get into the rear courtyard of the Tan Estate and kill every single person in those two little Western-style buildings. Male and female, young and old – no one was spared.
The two buildings had remained empty ever since; that is, for the past nine months or so.
You might think that any number of people would have jumped at the chance to move into such a beautiful pair of buildings in such a lovely location, or that if no one wanted to live in them, they could at least have been put to some other use. In fact, the sort of people powerful enough to pull the necessary strings to allow them to live there were bothered by the murders and didn’t dare move in, while the sort of people who weren’t bothered were just too insignificant. So the two houses remained empty, right up until one evening nearly a year later, in 1941, just as spring was turning into summer.
Late that evening, on a cloudless night so bright from the moon that the stars were barely visible, two groups of people turned up at the Tan Estate, one shortly after the other, and moved into the two empty buildings.
2
The first of the two groups went into the eastern building. There were a great many of them, a whole truckload, and when they assembled on the terrace in front of the house, they filled it completely. In the dark it was hard to count, but there must have been a couple of dozen people in total. The majority were young soldiers; some of them were shouldering guns and others were carrying various bits of equipment. In charge was a fat little man with a revolver and a short sword stuck in his belt. He was a staff officer in the secret-police unit attached to the military base: his surname was Jiang, but his personal name doesn’t seem to have been recorded. As soon as he’d unlocked the door to the building, those people carrying equipment entered in single file. The others, the soldiers carrying guns, stayed where they were until Staff Officer Jiang came out of the building again, then followed him as he walked off into the darkness.
About an hour later the second group of people arrived, and they went to the west building. There were five of them, three men and two women, all military officers, all of them in the East China Counterinsurgency Corps, all of them formerly under the command of the late ECCC boss Qian Huyi.
Wu Zhiguo was the highest ranking. At the beginning of the year he had commanded a very successful attack against a small guerrilla group of insurgents active in Huzhou, north of Hangzhou, removing them in one fell swoop. He was highly regarded by the new ECCC boss, Commander Zhang Yiting, and had thus been promoted two grades, to the position of Chief of Staff at headquarters. He was now responsible for all training and combat across the entire region; effectively, he was the Chief of Staff. He had just taken office and things were going very well for him; he walked with a spring in his step and his future seemed bright.
The second member of the group was Jin Shenghuo, Section Chief in charge of the office responsible for military security and confidential matters. The third was a woman, the cryptographer Li Ningyu, in charge of the unit that deciphered top-secret documents. Bai Xiaonian was the fourth member of the group, but his name could equally well have been cited first, because he was Commander Zhang’s aide-de-camp and private secretary; this put him right at the heart of whatever was going on. Although his official rank was not very high (he was a mere captain), his powers were almost limitless. Gu Xiaomeng, the second woman, was one of Li Ningyu’s subordinates. She was young and very pretty. With her tall stature and striking good looks, she attracted attention even in the dark.
These five people arrived in a Nissan jeep and under cover of darkness were driven through the secluded Tan Estate to the rear courtyard. The houses that had already seen so much death, so many brutal murders, were about to become a place of terror once again; with the ECCC officers’ arrival, it was like putting a knife into the hands of a murderer.
There was much more to what was going on than met the eye: even the people who were caught up in it had no notion of the conspiracy that had them in its grip. All five had been asleep in their beds when Secretary Bai had been woken by a phone call from Commander Zhang. Following that call, Secretary Bai had roused the other four and they’d all then been brought together as quickly as possible, hurried into the car and whisked off to the Tan Estate. Nobody had any idea why they were there, and that included Secretary Bai.
The person in charge was the local Chief of the Secret Police, Wang Tianxiang. Only once he’d seen each of them settled into their rooms in the west building did he offer the tiniest hint as to what was going on.
‘Commander Zhang asked me to inform you that you have been selected for a special mission,’ he said enigmatically. ‘You won’t be getting much sleep over the next couple of days, so you should make the most of tonight. The Commander will come and see you at the earliest opportunity tomorrow.’
He was obviously relishing the mysterious nature of the whole enterprise and he made it plain that bringing them there was just one of many things he needed to organize that night. So, having given them this message, he said goodbye.
Gu Xiaomeng found this enigmatic high-handedness deeply irritating. Sticking her exquisite little nose in the air, she muttered contemptuously, ‘Pah! That son of a bitch, who does he think he is!’
Though she hadn’t spoken at all loudly, her comments were enough to make her colleagues stare nervously at their feet. As the local Chief of the Secret Police, Wang Tianxiang had special powers, which made him untouchable. Even Commander Zhang tiptoed around him.
The secret police occupy a special position, they are like Janus: there’s the face you can see, but also the one that you can’t. You never know quite whose side they’re on. Officially, Police Chief Wang’s activities came under Commander Zhang’s jurisdiction, but his covert duties included spying on the Commander. Every month Wang Tianxiang had to submit a report to the Shanghai branch of the Japanese secret police, detailing any important activities or conversations on the part of every senior officer in his district, including the Commander.
Under the circumstances, it wasn’t
surprising that he was arrogant. Who would dare say anything about a man like that? Absolutely no way would you criticize him to his face, and even behind his back you’d still have to be careful, because if someone reported it you could find yourself in serious trouble. So to hear Gu Xiaomeng come right out with it like that was a shock. The others therefore acted as if they hadn’t heard her and each went their separate ways.
*
They went their separate ways only to reconvene elsewhere.
They came together in Chief of Staff Wu Zhiguo’s room, all of them with the same question on their lips: why had the Commander dragged them out of bed in the middle of the night?
They’d all been quite sure that someone would know the answer, but it transpired that nobody did. Since nobody knew, all they could do was guess. Everyone proffered at least a couple of ideas, but that merely proved that they didn’t have a clue. Even so, nobody seemed to be prepared to give up; they wanted to continue discussing it. The only exception was Wu Zhiguo: he’d been inspecting the forces under his command that day and there’d been a banquet in the evening – he was tired, he’d drunk a lot of alcohol and now he really wanted to sleep.
‘Go to bed, go to bed.’ He was trying to get everyone out of his room. ‘There’s no point trying to guess what’s going on. Unless you have some special insight into what the boss is up to, you’re just wasting your time.’ Then he changed tack. ‘And talking of bosses, do you know whose bed this was?’ He looked up and grinned. ‘Our old boss’s – Commander Qian Huyi’s. He was murdered in this very bed!’
Gu Xiaomeng leapt off the bed with a screech.
Wu Zhiguo laughed. ‘What are you so scared of, Xiaomeng? If I was as jumpy as you, I’d never be able to sleep at night. Now if Qian Huyi were still alive, you might have cause – everyone says he didn’t take no for an answer where women were concerned.’