The Message

by Mai Jia

  Mr Pan senior pointed to the grass in the painting and said excitedly, ‘Now you get it, don’t you? This isn’t grass, it’s a message, a message in Morse code. The long blades of grass are the dashes (—) and the short ones are the dots (•).’

  Of course I got it. There was no need for him to spell it out. Besides, with my knowledge of this code, I had already read off a string of numbers perfectly easily from the grass in the painting:

  6643 1032 9976 0523 1801 0648 3194 5028 5391 2585 9982

  As a specialist radio operative engaged in underground activities, old Mr Pan’s professional abilities far outstripped my uncle’s. Apparently, in the past a post-office telegraphist was required to remember the codes for five hundred words in common usage; Mr Pan said that when he was young, he had memorized the codes for two and a half thousand words. Which meant he didn’t need to search his code book at all but immediately recognized what this message said:

  For urgent dispatch!

  Call off the Gathering of Heroes immediately!

  I believe that thirty years ago it cost seven cents per word to send a post-office telegram; punctuation marks were charged at the same rate as a word. To send a message like this, the post office would have charged just over one yuan. But the price Li Ningyu paid to send her message was her life. Of course, to her, the contents were priceless.

  Mr Pan senior could no longer remember with perfect clarity what happened that day, but fortunately he’d been interviewed some years earlier by Professor He Dacao for his book Underground Paradise, which was published in July 1995 by the Qingcheng publishing company, based in Chengdu. According to the account given there, on the evening of 2 May 1941, four days after the original date set, Zhou Enlai’s special Communist Party representative K held a meeting in a house located at 108 Wulin Road in Hangzhou. Before the meeting began, all the comrades present observed a minute’s silence in memory of Li Ningyu, a gesture of respect for a truly brave woman and heroic revolutionary who had died for the cause.

  5

  Now, finally, let us talk about what happened to Hihara and the others.

  Colonel Hihara, of course, knew nothing of this. As you can imagine, when he stood in front of the Agate Belvedere Inn, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His arrest mission had failed! Ghost had succeeded in getting a message out and calling off the Gathering of Heroes that night.

  Who was Ghost? How had the message been transmitted?

  Hihara wracked his brains, but he simply couldn’t work it out.

  Right then, however, he had no interest in pursuing his enquiries – he was too humiliated. He was much more interested in the secret orders General Matsui had given him when he’d left Shanghai. This was yet another top-secret message, and the key to its encryption was time. Before the time was ripe, he’d only been able to guess at its contents, but the moment to read it had now arrived.

  Hihara opened the envelope containing his secret orders and read its lone sentence:

  To have killed an innocent is no great matter, but to allow a single suspect to remain alive would be a terrible mistake.

  In other words, his instructions were to kill every last one of his suspects.

  There is no conclusive evidence to prove that Hihara actually killed anybody. According to testimony provided by Sentry A, one of the soldiers on duty at the Tan Estate that evening, all of the guards were dismissed, and Hihara arranged their immediate return to their original units. None of them were allowed to stay behind. Before they left, Sentry A saw Commander Zhang arriving in a great hurry, because he was supposed to be joining Hihara for a late dinner.

  Back at base, Sentry A discovered that his wallet was missing, so he assumed he must have left it in his room at the estate. First thing the following day, he returned to the Tan Estate to look for it, only to discover that both the eastern and western buildings were now completely empty. As to when everyone left and where they went, nobody knew. Eventually, Gu Xiaomeng and Police Chief Wang Tianxiang both returned to work, but everyone else – Commander Zhang, Section Chief Jin, Secretary Bai, Staff Officer Jiang (the fat staff officer), the operatives who’d been in charge of the wiretapping – all of them vanished, never to be seen again. Sentry A believed that all of them were killed by Hihara, on the principle that allowing a single suspect to remain alive would have been a terrible mistake. He further speculated that when Colonel Hihara was himself murdered, that was the family or subordinates of the dead taking their revenge.

  Old Mr Pan admitted that he didn’t know much about Hihara, but when we spoke of his murder, his eyes glittered. ‘That winter there were a lot of rumours circulating in Hangzhou about Hihara. At first it was said that someone had offered a guerrilla unit one hundred thousand silver dollars to kill him, then it was said to be two hundred thousand. And then one day it was all over the newspapers that Hihara had been murdered at West Lake and that his body and head had been dumped outside the main entrance of the Temple of General Yue Fei. His hands and feet had been chopped off and his eyes gouged out. It was a horrible death, but I’m so glad they got him!’

  As to who killed him, there were all kinds of stories. Some said it was undercover agents sent by Communist headquarters in Yan’an; others maintained it was Nationalist agents sent by their headquarters in Chongqing. There were also theories that it was subordinates of either Commander Zhang or Chief of Staff Wu Zhiguo; or that Gu Xiaomeng had hired a professional assassin. There were many different stories, too many to recount in detail here. The murder of Colonel Hihara was so bizarre that it became a kind of local legend, to be handed down from one generation to the next. Even now, stories about it still circulate in Hangzhou.

  I really regret not being able to get in touch with Gu Xiaomeng. I’m told that she is still alive, living in Taiwan, that she’s done very well for herself and that she has a son who’s an extremely successful businessman in Hong Kong. In the 1990s he was involved in many major business deals with the Mainland and invested heavily in industrial development as well as charitable endeavours. Thanks to that, he was able to establish positive relationships with a number of very senior members of the government. I did ask a friend of mine for help in getting in touch with his private secretary, since I hoped to be able to visit Madame Gu in Taiwan. The secretary hung up on me without even asking why I wanted to meet her, and such an outright rebuttal was very off-putting. According to my information, Madame Gu will be celebrating her eighty-fifth birthday next year, so I take this opportunity to wish her many happy returns. Long may she flourish!

  First draft: 7.11.2006

  Second draft: 3.12.2006

  PART TWO

  The Wind from the West

  ONE

  1

  Gu Xiaomeng…

  The old lady haunted my thoughts just as Ghost had, making it impossible to finish my novel. I did finish it, but then I had to start it all over again.

  *

  This was a very unhappy time in my life. Shortly before Chinese New Year, just as my new book (at that point entitled The Code) was going through the final production stages before being sent to the printers, the editor-in-chief, Abiao, suddenly phoned me one afternoon and informed me crossly that the book wasn’t going to be published after all. I asked why not and he said someone had accused me of maliciously distorting historical facts, making deliberate mistakes and slandering them.

  I thought he was joking. ‘These things are like swearing that you’re going to stop smoking,’ I said. ‘I’ve been through it many times before…’

  That didn’t seem to make him any calmer. In fact, he sounded very worried. ‘This is not the same – these people are serious. If we insist on going ahead with publication, they’re going to take both you and us to court.’

  I asked who ‘they’ were, and Abiao named a Mr X. I pointed out that there was no such person in my book. He explained that Mr X was Gu Xiaomeng’s son. My head felt as if it were exploding because I knew that was the one weak point of my story: I h
adn’t managed to interview Gu Xiaomeng. I had imagined that, living as she did in Taiwan, she would never see my book, wouldn’t even know that it had been published. But she was already off the blocks.

  What on earth was going on?

  It transpired that I had mentioned Gu Xiaomeng to Abiao at one point and I’d also happened to say that she had a son, Mr X, who was a famous businessman in Hong Kong and a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The CEO of the publishing company heard this and became worried; he felt the whole thing was too sensitive, and he demanded that my manuscript be handed over to the relevant departments for review. The people in charge of that review were equally unwilling to bear the consequences of any mistakes, so they cautiously suggested that the manuscript be shown to Gu Xiaomeng herself.

  She decreed that it couldn’t be published; she would see us in court if we tried.

  Everything went black before my eyes… From the very first round of interviews to the completion of my manuscript, writing this book had taken three years. I was put in mind of something people say about track-and-field races, about how tragic it is when an athlete falls at the final hurdle. My fate seemed even worse than that of Li Ningyu! She died, but in doing so she ended up the victor – her death was worth it. I had spent years of my life working on this and all I’d got out of it was the sense that it had been a complete waste of time. I felt the urge to swear like a young person – bugger this!

  2

  Do not be in too much of a hurry, haste is of the Devil. Haste will make you do stupid things; it will make things even worse; it will push you beyond the point of no return. I consoled myself and forced myself to stay calm: I needed to adapt to these new circumstances, be patient and win over the old lady by showing her that my intentions were good. People become kinder and more tolerant with age; if I showed how sorry I was, maybe she would forgive me. So I wrote her a letter expressing my sincere apologies and gave it to the people who’d reviewed my manuscript to pass on to her.

  One month went past.

  A second month went past.

  A third month went past.

  Just when I was feeling that the situation was completely hopeless, I got a phone call from a stranger who introduced herself as Gu Xiaomeng’s daughter. She said that she’d read my book and was hoping to be able to talk to me about it. She had no complaints; in fact, she was very happy with the first half of the manuscript, but she stressed that the second half contained serious inaccuracies. And then she said that her mother would very much like to see me and hoped that I could find time to go to Taiwan.

  Perhaps she was afraid that I wouldn’t go; during our conversation, she mentioned in a tactful way that she’d just been appointed to the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference herself and was actually in Beijing right at that moment – that afternoon she was going to be speaking to various senior people in the government. The underlying message was that she wanted me to take her mother’s request very seriously. What she didn’t know was that this was exactly what I had been hoping for.

  At long last, things were changing for the better.

  I travelled to Taiwan as quickly as I could, to meet Madame Gu.

  3

  More than half a century had passed and I could find no signs of the erstwhile young beauty in the face of the old woman before me. She was now eighty-five: her silver hair had thinned, she wore full dentures, her eyes had dimmed and her gaze wandered. But the moment she opened her mouth, there was no doubting that this was the Gu Xiaomeng people had told me about. She spoke frankly and as if she was unquestionably in the right, and it was quite clear that she would never, ever back down. Indeed, she began by immediately telling me off.

  ‘Why did you distort the truth like that? How could you write up Li Ningyu the way you did while maliciously making me out to be a traitor?’ Her voice was sharp and angry; here was nothing of the kindness and benevolence that an old lady ought to show.

  I tried to explain, but before I’d even started she waved her hand to shut me up. Clearly, she had a great many things she wanted to say, and it seemed as though she’d rehearsed them, because it all came out like a recording, an uninterrupted monologue in which she asked all the questions and gave all the answers. There wasn’t a moment for me to get a word in edgeways. I was amazed by the extraordinary clarity of her diction and the logic of her argument. From the way she spoke and the care she took over her choice of words, it was as if she were at least thirty years younger.

  ‘I know you claim it’s just a work of fiction,’ she began, ‘but everyone will know exactly what you’re talking about. The people, the names, the time and place are all quite transparent, and it’s obvious that the Gu Xiaomeng character is me. It’s me, but it’s not the real me. I was never like that! You’ve got the facts quite wrong. For a start, it wasn’t Li Ningyu who got the message out, not at all. It was me – you hear that?’

  Gu Xiaomeng got the message out!

  Do you believe that?

  I certainly didn’t.

  Although I didn’t voice my doubts, they must have been written all over my face.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ the old lady immediately countered. ‘You think I’m just trying to steal the credit for it, right? If I was trying to take the credit, what am I doing in Taiwan? I should have stayed on the Mainland to be feted as a hero! I don’t care about credit, I want the facts to be known – I took the message out, and there it is. I am not having you messing this about!’

  Now the old lady launched another salvo at me. ‘Tell me, young man, why have you been slandering me like this? Who put you up to it? Let me guess, it was that old bastard Pan!’

  I didn’t dare deny it.

  She snorted. ‘Bastard! I guessed it was him. Everything has to be down to Li Ningyu, because then he can bask in her reflected glory; he’s absolutely shameless! His whole family come out of this as heroes of the Revolution, and everyone else gets painted as traitors and running dogs. I ask you, how odious is that? He really is outrageous.’ She leant forward, visibly agitated. ‘Well, Pan, you old idiot, I’m not dead yet, and if you have the gall to go around lying to people about me, I’m going to see you in hell first! You’re not going to get away with this! How dare you say such things about me?’

  This was followed by a stream of insults and another bout of name-calling. Fortunately, her daughter was present and she now came forward to say a few soothing words, which calmed her down a bit.

  The old lady thrust my manuscript at me.

  ‘Do you really imagine that what you’ve written stands up to close scrutiny? Have you considered, given the circumstances, how Hihara could possibly have allowed Li Ningyu’s corpse off the premises? In the hope of laying his hands on Ghost, he’d had all of us locked up, so why would he have been so kind as to let a body go? Even if he did think Li Ningyu had proved her innocence by dying, even if did then believe that she wasn’t Ghost, he would still never have released her body. Why? Apart from anything else, he didn’t have time! He was going to arrest everyone that evening at the Gathering of Heroes – he didn’t have a moment to think about anything else. It was just a dead body, after all; it could wait a day or two.’ She clacked her dentures impatiently. ‘And you wrote about him searching the body – what would he do that for? It’s quite implausible – you really shouldn’t believe everything people tell you. And why would he send her body back to her family? It wasn’t as if he’d incur any punishment if he didn’t.’

  ‘Well,’ I said carefully, ‘if her body was searched and they discovered there wasn’t any kind of message hidden on it…’

  ‘So they trusted to that?’ The old lady laughed coldly. ‘And how exactly are they supposed to have conducted this search? How you described it in your book? How could that possibly prove there was no message hidden on Li Ningyu’s body? What a joke! There were loads of places where something could have been hi
dden – in her stomach, her womb, her intestines. A proper search would have required a full autopsy, and that would have taken longer than one day. Without a proper search there’s no way they would have thought it safe to release the body.’

  It was a good point, and I had nothing to counter it – nor did I get the opportunity.

  ‘You’re a writer, you ought to be able to think this through logically. If Hihara couldn’t be certain she was innocent, how could he even consider handing over her body to her family? Supposing she was Ghost after all: if her comrades saw Li Ningyu’s body, it wouldn’t matter what the accompanying letter said – infectious disease, car accident, whatever – they would have immediately called off their meeting. In a situation like that, with such an important meeting about to be held, everyone would have been on edge; they would have called the whole thing off if the grass so much as rippled in the breeze. If what you wrote is correct, what on earth was that painting all about? She didn’t need it – if her corpse was delivered to her family, that would have been quite enough. A perfectly healthy person suddenly dying at such a sensitive moment: that was surely going to set alarm bells ringing. Even if it turned out to be a lot of fuss about nothing, the meeting would still have to be called off; that’s how it works with any underground activities.’

  What the old lady said shocked me.

  And the shocks kept on coming.

  *

  Over the course of the next few days, Madame Gu took me to her villa in the countryside (this was located some eighty kilometres from Taipei, and she kept some important evidence there), and we discussed everything that had happened in considerable detail. Time spares no one, and, given her age, it was impossible for her to talk to me for longer than half an hour at a time; sometimes she had to recline on a peach-coloured chaise longue, and at other times she felt strong enough to sit up in a lacquer-red cane chair. Some of the time she spoke with passion and sincerity, and at other times she spoke softly and courteously.