by Mai Jia
Colonel Hihara had also stood up but made no move to leave. Instead, he said with an amiable smile, ‘I agree with what Commander Zhang just said. However, there is another point I want to make, which is that you cannot all be Ghost. Some of you are innocent; in fact, the majority of you are innocent. The problem is who? Which of you has done nothing wrong? We don’t know the answer to that, but you do. So, as the saying goes, only the hand that tied the knot can loosen the tiger’s bell.’ His voice was unnervingly soft, his diction refined.
‘Right now we don’t have any choice: we have to keep you all here, under observation and under lock and key. You’re just going to have to put up with the humiliation for a few days. As I am sure you understand, we have to do this – we cannot afford not to. Of course, if you want to leave, all you have to do is tell us who Ghost is. Either confess or make a denunciation, we don’t mind which, and then we can all go home.’
Commander Zhang had been standing by the doorway listening to Colonel Hihara. Now he came back into the room, walked over to the table and rapped on it. ‘Remember, you have until the 29th. You’ve got four days to get yourselves out of this – out of here. After that, you’ll have only yourselves to blame for what happens to you.’
‘Yes,’ Hihara said. ‘After the 29th, it won’t matter what any one of you does or says, innocent or guilty. If Ghost hasn’t been unmasked by then, you’ll all be in the same boat. And what boat is that? What will determine your fate?’
He took out a sealed envelope and patted it.
‘This will. General Matsui gave me this before I set out. As to what instructions it contains, I don’t even know myself.’ He laughed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is a secret message. A secret set of instructions. Depending on what happens, I may simply burn it, in which case the contents will remain a secret forever. Or I may have to open it and carry out General Matsui’s commands. Once you’ve forced me to read it, nothing you can do will change the outcome – neither Commander Zhang nor I will be able to save you. It is entirely up to the four of you whether I burn it or whether I read it. So I want you to take this situation very seriously, because it is your own lives that are at stake.’
He spoke quite calmly, as if he were offering them friendly, heartfelt advice. Afterwards he walked round the table, saying a few polite words to each one of them.
Even so, for Wu Zhiguo, Jin Shenghuo, Li Ningyu and Gu Xiaomeng, it was as if their worlds had come crashing down around their ears. They were in a state of total shock. Their eyes had gone dark, their legs were trembling, and their minds were blank, as if half their heads had been blown away. Their hearts were pounding. They were engulfed in blind, boundless panic.
THREE
1
Who was Ghost?
Who the hell was Ghost?
That afternoon the sky was blue, the flowers were fragrant, and the pretty young whores at the officers’ club in the front courtyard sat in front of their mirrors as usual, getting ready for the men who would visit that night. In other words, time that afternoon passed as usual, minute by minute, tick-tock, tick-tock, on and on, as the hands of the clock moved on relentlessly, towards the coming night. But in the western building, time seemed to have gone backwards, back many months, to the night when all those people had been murdered there: former ECCC commander Qian Huyi, his wife, his children and his many members of staff. Yet again, the fates of those holed up in the west building were in the hands of an unknown individual, a murderer, a demon who was controlling the situation, had its hands around their throats, was squeezing their jugulars.
Commander Zhang had been called back to his office, so Colonel Hihara and Police Chief Wang Tianxiang escorted him to his car. Once he’d gone, Wang Tianxiang began heading back to the west building, but Hihara waved him over. ‘Leave them to stew for a bit. Come with me – there’s something I wanted to ask you.’
Hihara strode purposefully towards the front courtyard and the entrance to the Tan Estate, following in the wake of Commander Zhang’s car. As they walked, Hihara posed his question. ‘Where did that message in the cigarette packet come from?’
‘From a Communist agent code-named Turtle.’
2
Turtle was a poor old man, aged about sixty, very thin and with unusually long legs. As he walked, he kept his upper body upright, but his legs swayed quite noticeably, making him look like a praying mantis. The previous winter, he’d begun collecting rubbish on the military base in Hangzhou. In the daytime, he was one of the cleaners at the main office building on the base, then in the evenings he collected household rubbish from the family quarters.
The previous week, the ECCC had arrested and turned a Nationalist agent, and a couple of days ago that agent had spotted Turtle while he was having lunch in the canteen and recognized him as a known former Communist agent. Although no one was sure of Turtle’s current status, his presence at the base certainly looked suspicious. So suspicious that Police Chief Wang Tianxiang placed him under surveillance.
For two days Turtle made no contact with anyone and did nothing unusual; he just cleaned the main office building as normal, then collected the rubbish from each household. The previous evening he’d left the base at about five and headed off to the dump with his three-wheeled dustcart, making no contact with anyone the whole way there. On his way back, however, he did something odd: he went to Lute Tower Park.
In the evenings, hawkers gathered in the park to sell snacks and knick-knacks. Turtle parked his dustcart next to a girl selling flowers, then hung a portable display case of cigarettes around his neck and started selling them. Very soon, a woman sitting in a rickshaw called him over and bought a packet. She was very young and extremely fashionably dressed in an emerald-green silk qipao – with the cigarette in her mouth, she looked like a whore. There was nothing out of the ordinary about a whore buying cigarettes, but what was strange was that she handed over a large note to pay for them and then didn’t wait for the change. For his part, Turtle just took the money and showed no sign of being pleased at having made such a big profit; in fact, he reacted as if that were normal.
‘How could that possibly be normal?’ Wang Tianxiang said. ‘A whore would care about losing her hard-earned cash. And a guy like that, with a case of cigarettes slung round his neck, ought to be pleased when he gets to keep the change.’
Hihara nodded his agreement and kept on walking, his eyes fixed on a distant point as if he were in a hurry. By this time they had exited the Tan Estate and reached West Lake. They began walking along Su Dongpo’s causeway, which stretched before them as straight as an arrow, extending right the way across the lake. The Su Causeway is famous for its flowering plums and the trees sparkled before their eyes, the blossom set off by the fresh green leaves, the air full of their strong perfume. It was as if the entire length of the causeway were enveloped in a pink mist, and the powerful scent wafted out across the waves. If this had been peacetime, the place would have been packed with tourists come to enjoy the blossom, but as it was there was hardly anyone around, so it was fine for the two men to stroll along discussing military secrets.
Police Chief Wang was coming to the end of his account. ‘So my surveillance team set off in pursuit and arrested the whore. When they searched her, they found that slip of paper in the cigarette packet.’
‘You arrested her?’ Hihara stopped abruptly, as if he had missed his footing. ‘Why did you arrest her so quickly? You should have quietly had her followed. For all you know, she might have led you straight to Tiger.’
‘Exactly.’ Wang Tianxiang seemed as upset about this as Colonel Hihara. ‘I couldn’t agree more, such a wonderful opportunity. But… well, I wasn’t there myself and things got a bit out of control.’
At least they hadn’t arrested Turtle; he was still under surveillance. If Turtle as well as the whore and Ghost had all disappeared at the same time, their comrades would immediately have assumed that their cover had been blown.
‘The arrests of the wh
ore and the ECCC suspects have to be kept completely secret,’ Hihara said. ‘Where there is suspicion, there is fear, and when there is fear, everyone keeps their heads down – just the rippling of the breeze in the grass can be enough to set off alarm bells.’ He shot the Police Chief a stern look. ‘The moment they suspect that Ghost is being held for interrogation, we’re going to come out of this empty-handed. Turtle must be watched carefully. And we need to think of a way to deal with the whore, to make sure her accomplices don’t know that she’s been arrested. After all, Turtle passed her a piece of intelligence and might report that to his superiors. We need to confuse the enemy, so we must begin by plugging any holes in our story.’
Would Ghost be able to let people know he or she was being held? No. However, it was vital that information about what had happened should be closed down: Ghost’s comrades must not know about the incarceration at the Tan Estate, nor even suspect it. Hihara wracked his brains and began sharing his thoughts out loud.
‘We’ll tell everyone that the ECCC officers have been brought here on official duties… to undertake an important mission. Which was why we rounded them up in the middle of the night and so on.’ He nodded as a smile crept across his face. ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s what everyone is to say from now on.’
He came to a standstill beside a cluster of willow trees and gazed absent-mindedly at the flashes of orange carp in the water beneath Crossing the Rainbow Bridge. ‘You need to find a way to pass this disinformation to Turtle as soon as possible. I want everyone to be told it – in fact, the more people, the better – so tell the same thing to their families, their superior officers back on the base, their colleagues and so on. If you can keep all of them in the dark, then you can keep the Communist Party in the dark too: that’s the only way we’re going to be able to net K, and then we’ll haul in all the small fry with him.’
His attention was drawn by the shimmer and swerve of a large mottled carp as it disappeared beneath the bridge. ‘You know, Turtle is going to be crucial here – he’s going to make the difference. Give Turtle the disinformation that Ghost is off working on an important mission for the ECCC and he’ll do all the hard work for you; he’ll report to his organization that Ghost is neither being interrogated nor under house arrest but that he or she is in fact safe and sound.’
‘That’s easily organized.’ Wang Tianxiang patted his chest. ‘I’ll see to it immediately.’
3
Colonel Hihara’s eyes followed Police Chief Wang as he headed off down the causeway and towards the shore. The edge of a red roof atop a buff-coloured wall entered his field of vision: this was West Lake’s famous Louwailou on Gushan Island, his favourite restaurant. He immediately decided to go there for dinner that evening. It was ages since his last visit; he wondered whether Master Jiulong was still working there.
At an earlier stage in his career, Hihara had often come to Hangzhou, and on every occasion he would make a point of going to Louwailou to sample Master Jiulong’s dishes. Now that he’d called fat old Master Jiulong to mind, he was even more determined to go there that evening for dinner. But who would join him? Various special guests came into his head, then suddenly he shouted ‘Hey! Hey!’ to Wang Tianxiang, who by now was already quite a distance away. He told him to get in touch with Commander Zhang and tell him that he would be hosting a banquet that evening at Louwailou and hoped that the Commander would be able to attend.
‘Who are you going to invite?’
Hihara smiled. ‘Their families.’
Wang Tianxiang looked nonplussed.
‘Do their families know that you’ve brought the ECCC officers out here?’ Hihara asked.
Wang Tianxiang shook his head.
‘What on earth were you thinking? You have them all shut up out here, forbidden from going out, not allowed to phone their families – you might as well shout from the rooftops that something’s wrong! So we’re going to rectify that. We’re going to invite their families to a nice meal, to show them that we appreciate the sacrifices they’re making.’ He laughed. ‘Isn’t that the least we could do?’
Police Chief Wang Tianxiang was not a stupid man and he immediately grasped Colonel Hihara’s idea. Everyone said that the Reds were just like rats: they came in nests. Hihara was concerned that Ghost’s family might also be members of the Communist underground, so he wanted to invite them to dinner and feed them the same disinformation. That way, they would report the same message back to K and Tiger. Clever! Very, very clever!
*
Fat old Master Jiulong did them proud: there was his signature West Lake fish in sweet-sour sauce, a dish of locally famous Dongpo pork that had been braised to perfection, and – Hihara’s favourite – fried shrimps with Dragon Well tea.
After dinner, Hihara introduced some little improvisations to his plan, designed to make the whole thing even more convincing. When they left Louwailou, he escorted the various family members up to the officers’ club on the Tan Estate and then had the cars drive round to the rear courtyard. The cars came to a halt in front of the eastern building, from where the families had a clear view of their relatives in a brightly lit conference room in the western building directly opposite; they were all seated around a table and engaged in solemn discussion, as if they were in the middle of an important meeting.
Seeing is believing: how could they fail to believe what was right before their eyes? Everyone was filled with pride at the sight of their own family members sitting there, surrounded by guards because they were undertaking top-secret work of vital importance; they were being treated like kings, and they were completely safe. They were right there in front of them, but they might as well have been on the other side of the world: the relatives couldn’t get close, they were only allowed to look, though that in itself was very flattering.
There was, however, one fly in the ointment. Gu Xiaomeng wasn’t married, didn’t have her own family, and her extremely wealthy father seemed to think Commander Zhang’s invitation beneath him so did not come in person; he just sent the housekeeper. There was some logic to that; the housekeeper had brought up Gu Xiaomeng after her mother died. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem quite right to put the woman in with the others’ families, which might undermine the prestigiousness of the occasion. So, even though she had come all that way specially, they didn’t let her attend the banquet. Instead, there was a private meeting at which the situation was explained, then she was given a few token gifts and sent on her way. Afterwards, Colonel Hihara decided that it didn’t matter: the housekeeper would report what they had told her to her master, and the same disinformation would then be circulated among the other servants. Which was exactly what they wanted. They wanted the Communists to take the shadow for the substance, to find themselves trapped in this web of lies.
In fact, if Colonel Hihara had had to eliminate one person from his enquiries at that point, he would have chosen Gu Xiaomeng, for the simple reason that the wrong person had come from her family. It was too odd. It stood out like a sore thumb. If Gu Xiaomeng were Ghost, there would be other Communist Party members within her family circle and they would never have sent the housekeeper.
Of course, the fact that there were no accomplices in her family didn’t necessarily mean that Gu Xiaomeng wasn’t Ghost. But right now Hihara wasn’t prepared to play a guessing game about who was and was not the enemy agent. They were just setting the scene. The overture – the banquet that evening – had gone very well and he was now looking forward to the next stage. Let the show begin!
4
Police Chief Wang Tianxiang felt the same way. Although it was not appropriate for him to appear at the restaurant, he’d been fully involved in the events of the afternoon. His task had been to go back to headquarters and arrange for Turtle to get the message they’d prepared for him. This was the work of moments – he simply arranged for a few people to discuss the whole episode just where Turtle could hear what they were saying. Covering up the arrest of the prostitute, on the
other hand, was going to be much more difficult; he would have to question her, find out where she lived and who she spent time with, and then think up some way of cobbling together a story to feed them that would explain her disappearance.
As the whore had been arrested the night before, by rights Wang Tianxiang should already have interrogated her. But finding that slip of paper had come as a bolt from the blue and since then he’d been busy dealing with Ghost; he simply hadn’t had time to think about anything else, let alone go back to headquarters and question the woman. However, the moment he clapped eyes on her that afternoon, he felt as though a new planet had come into his orbit. Despite all the changes, despite the fact that the erstwhile refined, upper-class lady was now dressed as a whore, Wang Tianxiang recognized her immediately: it was former ECCC commander Qian Huyi’s concubine who stood before him.
Sometimes the world really is very small and coincidences do happen. The moment the concubine entered the equation, Wang Tianxiang understood exactly whom Qian Huyi had to thank for his horrible fate. His concubine must have fingered him to his killers. He knew that Qian Huyi had fallen in love with her at first sight; who would have imagined that she would turn out to be a Communist? This unexpected discovery meant that Wang Tianxiang spent a very happy, if busy, afternoon. It was a strange kind of joy, too, as if he were a lost mariner and had suddenly spotted land on the distant horizon.
Given that Qian Huyi’s entire family had been killed, how was it that the man’s concubine had survived?