The Message

by Mai Jia

  So I kept trying. For example, if I’d bought some new clothes, I’d go and find her to ask what she thought about the fit and the colour. And I often asked her for help in my work. There would be telegrams that I could perfectly well decrypt by myself but that I’d pretend I didn’t understand. I tried everything I could think of to get close to her, but I wasn’t making any headway – she carried on being an ice cube and paying not the slightest attention to me. She talked to me about essential work matters and that was it. I really had no idea what to do next.

  [Transcription ends]

  This situation changed one day just after Chinese New Year, when Gu Xiaomeng turned into the corridor that led to her office and saw Li Ningyu quarrelling with a man. There was a crowd watching and whispering to each other, but Section Chief Jin was the only one trying to get them to stop fighting. There was nothing he could do, however. The man was absolutely furious; he was jumping up and down, calling Li Ningyu a whore, swearing that he was going to break her legs and would kill her if she ever set foot in his house again. He began beating her up, punching and kicking her until she was screaming in pain. Section Chief Jin was so frightened, he tried to run away and hide.

  Seeing how serious it was getting, some of the onlookers sidled off to their offices, while others went downstairs to get the guards, but no one was actually helping Li Ningyu. Gu Xiaomeng ran forward, grabbed hold of her and refused to let go. She shouted at the man, hurling the worst abuse she could think of at him, until she was making such a racket that he decided to slink away.

  3

  I realized at once that this man must have been Mr Pan senior as a young man; he was pretending to have heard that Li Ningyu had taken a lover and he’d come to her office to kick up a fuss. That was the plan the two of them had come up with, the aim being to show everyone that she’d been thrown out of her home, that she couldn’t possibly go back there every night and that from now on she’d have to stay at her work unit. That would make it much easier for her to keep an eye on what was going on. Later, senior management arranged for her to stay on the base in accommodation set aside for unmarried members of staff, and from then on she acted as if she were indeed a grass widow. She returned home every lunchtime, ostensibly to see the children but in reality so that she could take her intelligence out.

  Naturally, Gu Xiaomeng knew nothing of this at the time, so she felt deeply sorry for Li Ningyu. On that first evening, it was obvious that Li Ningyu couldn’t possibly go home, but she had nowhere else to go, so Gu Xiaomeng told her father’s chauffeur to bring the car round and she took her home with her. Li Ningyu had to make her story as plausible as possible, so she accepted her kind offer.

  Later on, the room her work unit arranged for Li Ningyu on the base turned out to be on the same corridor as Gu Xiaomeng’s room, so they were now spending all their time together both at work and outside it. They would often go out together and they grew much closer; eventually, they seemed as close as sisters.

  [Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]

  In those days I didn’t go home regularly; if I had something to report, I would phone up and the chauffeur would come and collect me. But I did insist on going home every weekend, regardless of whether I had any intelligence to pass on or not, in order to get something decent to eat – the food in our canteen was quite dreadful!

  Daddy had moved back to our Hangzhou house by then, which wasn’t that far from the base and our ECCC office. If I was going home for the weekend, I would invite Li Ningyu too; she didn’t always say yes, but more often than not she came with me. Gradually, she got to know my father as well. Even though she wasn’t at all talkative, Daddy thought she could be very useful to us, so he suggested that I try and get her on our side, to see whether we could recruit her as a subagent. We obviously had no idea that she was a Communist agent working for Yan’an.

  Of course, the reason she was so keen to make friends with us was precisely because she was working for Yan’an. At the beginning, when she’d been so cold to me, that was actually part of her plan to get close to me – she was paying out the line to hook her fish! She was hoping that my father and I would provide her with top-secret information about goings-on in the upper echelons of Wang Jingwei’s puppet government! Working undercover is so exhausting, don’t you think? If we’d known, we could have told her whatever she wanted to know – there was no need to make it all so complicated. After all, the Nationalists and the Communists were of the same view when it came to the Japanese devils and their running dog Wang Jingwei. But that was impossible – we were all desperate to keep our masks in place, desperate not to give anyone even the slightest inkling as to who we really were; the tiniest slip and we’d have been killed.

  As I just said, Daddy suggested trying to recruit her, but when he mentioned his idea to someone high up in the Nationalist Party, I was immediately summoned home and warned that under no circumstances was I to do anything of the kind. I wasn’t to try and recruit anyone! Why not? The Bureau was afraid that its entire plan would be ruined if I failed. Daddy was an important agent and it had cost the Nationalist Party a lot of money to get him into Wang Jingwei’s circle. They weren’t going to risk losing him over such small fry. As for bringing anyone new on board, well, at that time we were surrounded by undercover Nationalist comrades, some of whom were totally reliable, but we were absolutely forbidden from making contact with any of them, and very few of them knew about Daddy and me. That was why so many people voiced their suspicions of us after Dai Li died and tried to bring us down – they didn’t know anything about our mission, they’d never heard of us. They thought that my father must have bought Dai Li in the same way he’d bought Wang Jingwei. Fools! There were plenty among them whose lives Daddy and I had saved.

  To get back to the story: if I’d been allowed to try and recruit Li Ningyu, I might have found out that she was a Communist agent long before I actually did.

  [Transcription ends]

  At this point, I naturally couldn’t stop myself from asking Madame Gu, ‘So when did you find out for sure that she was a Communist agent?’

  ‘After we were taken to the Tan Estate,’ she replied simply.

  ‘So in spite of all the time you’d spent together up till then, you didn’t notice anything at all?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Do you really believe that I was so useless I couldn’t even decrypt one of our own cypher telegrams?’

  She was talking about the top-secret, twice-encrypted message from Nanjing – the one about the Gathering of Heroes.

  ‘As you know perfectly well, I received specialist training in decryption in the United States, and then after I came back I had further training in Nanjing. Handling something like that was perfectly straightforward. Or do you imagine that I completely wasted my time on my training courses? Am I that dumb? If I were that stupid, how on earth do you imagine I’ve managed to survive until now?’

  It was obvious she was irritated and wanted to have a go at me.

  She went on to explain that she’d decrypted the top-secret telegram quite easily and that the description given in my novel of how she’d struggled and then had to ask Li Ningyu for help was quite wrong.

  ‘So if you’d already decrypted it, why did you ask Li Ningyu for assistance?’

  She laughed coldly. ‘Didn’t you ask me why in spite of all the time we’d spent together I hadn’t realized that she was a Communist agent? I’ve already answered your question. Do you think I would have asked her for help if I hadn’t realized that something was wrong?’

  Maybe it was because she’d spent so long working as an undercover agent, but Madame Gu spoke in an unusually discursive manner – she’d begin a sentence and then leave it hanging, or she’d mention something but wouldn’t explain its significance. It was very exhausting to listen to, and I felt as if I were taking some kind of intelligence test. Eventually, though, I discovered that
she’d suspected Li Ningyu’s true identity for a while, and that was why, when she read the top-secret telegram revealing that K and the other members of the Hangzhou underground were to be arrested, she’d pretended she couldn’t decrypt it and asked Li Ningyu for help.

  ‘I had absolutely no need of her assistance, but I was trying my luck – if Li Ningyu was indeed a Communist agent, then I was doing my good deed for the day.’ She sighed. ‘Of course, I was hoping that would prove for sure whether she was a Red or not. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have any evidence for my suspicions at that point, not even a hunch. It was all because of something my father had said.’

  4

  What could Mr Gu have said?

  Madame Gu seemed to be replaying the scene before her eyes.

  By the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1940, Gu Xiaomeng and Li Ningyu had been friends for more than six months. They were now almost as close as sisters – as evidenced by the matter of Mr Jian.

  Mr Jian was a young man, very modern and progressive in his thinking and deeply committed to his career as an actor, but he enjoyed reflected glory too much and he would use people quite ruthlessly to achieve his ends. For example, he’d decided to give up his persona as a sensitive and modern young man in order to perform paeans to the Japanese devils and their puppet regime, appearing in a series of plays for them. The respect he showed the Gu family and his flirtation with Gu Xiaomeng was another manifestation of this – he took the Gus’ apparent allegiance to the puppet regime at face value and had no idea that Gu Xiaomeng had joined the resistance and was secretly committed to a very different path.

  Gu Xiaomeng’s father immediately realized that Mr Jian could be very useful for them. As a famous actor, he was being promoted by the Japanese as a model for the younger generation of collaborators, so allowing him to get close to the family would show that the Gus were just the same – it would be an excellent cover for them. So Gu Xiaomeng started to act out a romance with Mr Jian. There were phone calls and love letters; they went out on dates. Everything was carefully arranged to look perfectly natural. This performance was very helpful as a cover, but it was dangerous for her personally, particularly once they started going out on dates together – she didn’t want to get raped, after all. She needed someone to go with her.

  Who to ask?

  Li Ningyu.

  Whenever she and Mr Jian were due to go out together, she always asked Li Ningyu to come too. That’s how close they were. And given that they were such good friends, was it likely that Gu Xiaomeng would leave Li Ningyu alone on base on public holidays? Of course not. At the Mid-Autumn Festival, which was the very last Mid-Autumn Festival that Li Ningyu lived to see, she joined the Gu family at home.

  Like all the main festivals, the Mid-Autumn Festival is best celebrated with family, and Mr Gu wasn’t one to stint on the traditions. The garden had been hung with strings of red lanterns and Mrs Wu had made mooncakes filled with red-bean paste, which they ate as they gazed up at the full moon. Even though Li Ningyu’s story about not getting on with her husband and not wanting to live with him any more was a pretence, when they all stood there looking up at the moon together, she did miss her children, and she made them an excuse to leave early. Gu Xiaomeng had already decided to spend the night at home with her father, so she didn’t go back to base with Li Ningyu, but she did see her off at the door. When she came back, her father was still looking up at the moon.

  In an expressionless voice, he asked his daughter, ‘Do you think your friend could be a Communist?’

  That was a shock! Gu Xiaomeng was completely taken aback and asked him how he could possibly think such a thing.

  ‘The Communist Party have a lot of their military forces in this region at the moment, so they’ll be needing good access to inside information on the regime’s plans.’

  That made sense, but why would their insider be Li Ningyu?

  ‘I’m not saying it’s definitely Li Ningyu,’ he said. ‘I’m just speculating. But if you think about it logically, the Communist Party will want to have infiltrated the key units, and there are only a few of those: your military division, Wang Tianxiang’s secret police, and the front-line command. I’ve no idea which of them they’ve gone for, but if it turns out that it’s your unit, then I’d have thought Li Ningyu would be the most likely candidate. I’ve met your other colleagues and none of them could possibly do it – they’re just not right for that kind of work.’

  Mr Gu had no real evidence for his theory, but Gu Xiaomeng could see the logic in it. She’d quickly got the measure of everyone else in the unit – you knew exactly where you were with them from the very first glance. The only exception was Li Ningyu: they’d known each other for a long time by then, but she was still a riddle to her. In the light of her father’s analysis, however, it all made sense. Which was why, beginning on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, Gu Xiaomeng started to monitor Li Ningyu’s activities in secret. Regrettably, however, as Madame Gu said, she didn’t unearth anything and was still monitoring her right up to the day they were taken to the Tan Estate.

  That afternoon, Madame Gu made one final comment to me as she looked up at the sky and sighed. ‘She was dug in very deep!’

  FOUR

  1

  Spring rains were falling – torrential rains – clearing the air of the oppressive heat. Out in the countryside, it was even fresher and cleaner. But because of all the rain the roads were slippery, and despite having the same driver and the same car and taking the same route, it was going to take twenty minutes longer to get there. I would be late and that was making me anxious; I was afraid Madame Gu would be angry. Even so, that wasn’t enough to quash the flutter of excitement at what the day might hold. Madame Gu had dealt with the first chapters of my novel yesterday; today she’d be going more deeply into what had happened. I was prickling with anticipation for what I was about to find out, as if the person I was going to meet was not an old woman from the past but an alien who’d flown in from the future.

  *

  The good weather had made Madame Gu more cheerful, and because we’d already covered the basics in our previous interview, we were able to get on to our main subject straight away – the Tan Estate.

  Given that she had actually been held there, and also because she’d grown up in a not dissimilar environment, Madame Gu was able to give a much better and more detailed account than Mr Pan senior and my other interviewees of what the Tan Estate had been like sixty years ago. She was able to describe quite precisely the architectural style of the buildings, the layout, and the trees and plants used in the landscaping of the gardens; she could even recall the stone statues arranged along the courtyard walls, and the pictures and ornaments in the corridors. She gave such a vivid account that it was almost as if the estate were right there before my eyes. If I wanted to, I could simply press play on my recording of that interview and copy exactly what she said into my manuscript. However, I came to feel that this would just be padding, that there was actually no need to include it. In the transcripts of the interviews given below, it’s been necessary to occasionally trim some extraneous material.

  Madame Gu explained that although she was very suspicious when Commander Zhang summoned everyone to the Tan Estate in the middle of the night, she could only guess at what might have happened. It was only once they’d decrypted the Commander’s bit of doggerel that she began to seriously consider that Li Ningyu might be a Communist agent.

  [Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]

  Ah well, although at the time I had no idea what was going on, when I sat with the others – ‘Wu, Jin, Gu and Li, which of you can it be?’ – I suspected it was her. Then when Commander Zhang explained that it was all because of the top-secret telegram from Nanjing, I was even more sure it was her – she’d fallen into my trap. I was feeling quite pleased with myself, because I’d finally got her. But it was also upsetting, because I had a sense that this time she wouldn’t emerge unscathed. />
  To tell you the truth, it was a master stroke by Li Ningyu to get Chief of Staff Wu Zhiguo dragged into the whole thing. At the time I had no idea whether he’d gone into her office or not. I hadn’t seen anything, and I hadn’t been paying attention. But when she said that Wu Zhiguo came to find her because he wanted to know if the telegram concerned members of his staff, I was pretty sure she must be lying. Why? Because everybody knew how quiet and odd she was, and that she didn’t like talking to people – if Wu Zhiguo had really wanted to know what the telegram said, he would have talked to me, not her. That was the first point. The second thing was that even supposing he had gone into her office and asked her about it, from what I knew of her, she would never have told him anything. At that stage, I was still copying out the message, it hadn’t yet gone up to our superiors, so there’s no way she would have said anything to anyone. She would just have said she couldn’t talk about it until it had gone up. Anyway, I was pretty much one hundred per cent convinced she was lying, and that’s why I was quite sure she had to be Ghost.

  How did I feel once I knew that she was Ghost? You really want to know? Well, let me tell you, I didn’t want her to blow her cover – that was for personal reasons and for the sake of the cause we were both devoted to. I wanted to help her. Even though there was very little chance I’d be able to do anything useful, at least I wanted to try – some good might come of it. But what could I do? To tell you the truth, if she’d asked me to denounce Chief of Staff Wu or Section Chief Jin, I wouldn’t have dared. If I’d done that and the accusation didn’t stick and it came out that it was Li Ningyu after all… well, I just couldn’t take the risk. At best, I’d be in serious trouble too, and in the worst-case scenario, my father’s position would be undermined as well. I didn’t have the stomach for it; it was just too dangerous.