by Mai Jia
So what could I do? I did what you described in your book – I threw my weight around like a spoilt brat, I refused to be questioned, I spouted all kinds of rubbish to Secretary Bai. If he asked me something, then either I wouldn’t answer or I flew off the handle – anything to divert attention. That lunchtime on the second day, I refused to eat anything, as you know, and instead chatted to one of the guards because I wanted him to contact Mr Jian for me. My motivation? I was muddying the waters; I wanted Hihara to suspect me. I had nothing to fear from being suspected, because I knew that I wasn’t Ghost – you can’t make something fake look real forever, and you can’t make something real look fake. I just wanted to create a bit of breathing space for Li Ningyu, give her an opportunity to escape.
[Transcription ends]
Since her aim was to help Li Ningyu plot her escape, Gu Xiaomeng needed to discuss the situation with Li Ningyu, so they could lay their plans carefully.
What she was not expecting was that Li Ningyu would turn on her, despite her good intentions.
2
That afternoon, when Li Ningyu came back from lunch, she saw Gu Xiaomeng stretched out on her bed and asked her why she hadn’t gone with the rest of them to eat.
Gu Xiaomeng sat bolt upright and glared at her. ‘I was going to ask you about that! How can you possibly feel like eating in a situation like this?’
‘You’re too sensitive, Xiaomeng,’ Li Ningyu replied. ‘In a situation like this… well, we haven’t done anything wrong, so I don’t see what you’re worried about.’
Gu Xiaomeng laughed coldly. ‘I’ve certainly done nothing wrong!’
Li Ningyu smiled. ‘So you have nothing to be afraid of.’
‘And what about you?’ Gu Xiaomeng stared pointedly at Li Ningyu.
‘What about me?’
Gu Xiaomeng spoke with great sincerity. ‘Ningyu, you don’t need to lie to me, I know all about it…’
Li Ningyu was so furious that she opened her eyes as wide as they would go. ‘What are you talking about? Are you trying to say that you suspect me of…? Are you out of your mind? We’ve known each other for ages, I thought we were like sisters – I must have been completely stupid!’
She stalked off in a rage, but when she got to the door, she turned round and said, ‘Just you wait – we’ll see what you have to say for yourself when the truth comes out!’
[Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]
What was I supposed to think to that? I was so confused, and looking at her angry face, I wondered if I really had got it all wrong. But in my heart of hearts I knew I hadn’t; she was playing a part and doing it very well indeed! I spent years working undercover and I never saw anyone who could hold their nerve the way she could.
It was much later that I found out that there were a number of reasons why she’d behaved so unkindly. One: she was sure that Hihara was going to test our handwriting, and once that happened she would have her scapegoat, so there was nothing to worry about. Two: she’d already realized that we were surrounded by plain-clothes police officers and guards, so there was no way we could escape, which meant the only way to deal with the situation was to deny all knowledge of it and keep on denying it, whatever they did. Plus she’d already discovered that the room was bugged, which was why she’d refused to say anything to me and had pretended to be so angry that she walked off. She was always so careful – impressively so. She could sum up a situation at a glance, and what she couldn’t see, she could guess at.
Anyway, that evening there was indeed a test of our handwriting, and it ended with Hihara arresting Wu Zhiguo. When that happened, I thought I’d got it all wrong, that Chief of Staff Wu was Ghost, so I stopped trying to muddy the waters. In your novel you mention that the first person to be dismissed from Hihara’s enquiries was me, and that’s pretty much true. If it was Wu Zhiguo, I didn’t particularly want to help him. Why should I? You see, a few weeks earlier, he’d killed about two dozen of our top Nationalist agents out in Huzhou. If he was indeed Ghost, that just showed that he didn’t consider us Nationalists to be part of the anti-Japanese resistance; he was obviously using his position in the ECCC to kill us in circumstances where he wasn’t going to get the blame for it. After the Wannan Incident, when the Nationalists killed thousands of Communist soldiers, there was a fundamental split between the Communists and the Nationalists, and there were plenty of examples of that kind of thing. The history of that period is too complicated; there are some things that are very difficult to understand, not just for you young people but also for those of us who were right there on the scene.
[Transcription ends]
I was afraid that she was trying to divert me from my enquiries, so while she was sighing over that, I jumped in with a question. ‘Madame Gu, how did you find out that Li Ningyu was Ghost?’
‘As I said, you can’t make something fake look real forever, and you can’t make something real seem fake.’ She spoke nonchalantly, seemingly unwilling to get back on track.
But I wasn’t going to give up. ‘Indeed. So when did you realize the truth?’
‘Oh, it was pure chance.’ The old lady smiled bitterly. ‘Or perhaps it was all meant to be and I was destined right from the beginning to help her.’
‘So when did this happen?’
‘Oh, it was that day…’ She looked me in the eye and then said simply, ‘The day she got that terrible stomach ache.’
3
Even though more than half a century had gone by, the old lady could remember quite clearly everything that had occurred that day. It was as if she were calling to mind the beginning of a real crisis in her life.
It happened on the way back from the dining hall. Li Ningyu had just had that terrible stomach ache and the pain had not yet entirely abated, so she was walking slowly. Gu Xiaomeng had been helping her along with a hand on her arm, but just before they got to a fork in the path, Li Ningyu moved her hand away with a smile. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I can walk by myself.’ As she said that, she happened to drop two of the plastic capsules that Hu Patented Stomach Pills were sold in. One of them rolled to the side of the path.
Gu Xiaomeng laughed and said, ‘Your stomach medicine obviously really works – you’ve only just taken it and you seem much better already.’
‘Oh yes,’ Li Ningyu replied, ‘I always take this for a stomach ache; it’s very good.’
As the two of them chatted, they followed in the wake of Hihara and the others. They’d all been walking more slowly than normal for Li Ningyu’s sake, but the pair of them still ended up falling behind: two or three metres to begin with, and then three or four.
Madame Gu informed me that Hu Patented Stomach Pills were a traditional Chinese herbal medicine. They came in the form of round pills, and one of the key ingredients was ganlan oil, which made the pills sort of moist. The pills had to stay soft and moist or they wouldn’t work, so originally they were sold in waxed paper wrappings, but that wasn’t very effective and over time they would still dry out. Later on, the Japanese designed a plastic capsule for them and sealed it with wax, which meant that pills could be stored for a year or two. The two halves of the capsule fitted together to form a complete shell and you just peeled off the wax to break it open.
‘See, I have one here.’ Madame Gu reached into the red lacquerware box and took out a plastic medicine capsule. As she waved it at me, she said, ‘In those days it was quite common for people to take the medicine and then keep the capsule. I guess they didn’t like the idea of just throwing the capsules away. But there wasn’t anything you could do with them; people gave them to children to play with. So when she happened to drop the plastic capsules, I didn’t pay the slightest attention.’
In fact, Li Ningyu hadn’t ‘happened to drop’ them at all – she’d picked a spot that every visitor to the building, everyone going into or coming out of it, would have to pass, and she’d dropped them in the most eye-catching place. One capsule had rolled to the side of the path a
nd as if by accident she kicked it into the middle. She had to do that – she had to put them in an obvious place so that if Turtle came again the next day he’d have no trouble spotting them.
Mr Pan senior had already told me that Turtle and Li Ningyu used various signals to communicate – the fountain pen being one of them. The plastic capsules from Hu Patented Stomach Pills were another.
[Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]
Later on, Li Ningyu told me that she used to use three different methods to send intelligence off base. The first method, which was the safest, was that at lunchtimes, when she visited her children, she would take the intelligence home with her. Mr Pan would then transmit it on to Tiger via the radio. That was safe, but it took time; Mr Pan worked at a newspaper and it would be past nine or even ten o’clock at night when he got back to the house.
If a dispatch was urgent or extra-urgent, it was usually Turtle who took it. An urgent dispatch meant it had to be in Tiger’s hands by that evening. In such cases, Li Ningyu would hide the intelligence in a piece of rubbish, which she would then place in the rubbish bin for our office building on the base – she’d put a mark on the bag and then Turtle could see at a glance which was Li Ningyu’s. He would collect the rubbish at around suppertime, six or seven in the evening, and then he’d go to the entrance to Lute Tower Park and pass it on to Qian Huyi’s concubine – that was the agent code-named Warrior – and she’d take it to Tiger. It was an urgent dispatch that Police Chief Wang’s people got hold of that evening – Li Ningyu’s message to call off the Gathering of Heroes. Warrior had collected the message from Turtle, but she was arrested on her way to deliver it to Tiger.
If a dispatch was extra-urgent, it needed to reach Tiger in the shortest possible time. Given that Turtle had a fixed routine for collecting the rubbish, and he and Li Ningyu weren’t able to communicate directly, how did they get round that? They used the plastic capsules from Hu Patented Stomach Pills!
Li Ningyu did actually have serious problems with her stomach. Hu Patented Stomach Pills were a standard treatment in traditional Chinese medicine: there were no side effects, they were produced locally and they were cheap, so she took them regularly. She had medicine capsules coming out of her ears!
As you can see, it’s about the size of a marble, and black in colour; if you dropped it on the pavement, someone looking for it would spot it right away, but to everyone else it would just be rubbish – nobody would give it a second glance. Even if someone did notice, it wouldn’t matter, because there’d be nothing in it – she’d put a bit of mud inside or a tiny pebble, just to give it some weight and stop it from being blown away by the wind. Anyway, the point is that there was no message hidden inside it; it was just a sign to tell Turtle: ‘I have a message for you, you must collect it as soon as possible.’
[Transcription ends]
And where would Turtle find that message?
Inside another medicine capsule. Not in one of the capsules strewn on the path, but in a capsule placed on the rim of the rubbish bin. The medicine capsules out on the path were just there to say: we’re empty, but our fellow on the bin has what you’re looking for.
4
As Madame Gu talked, I inspected the medicine capsules, now more than sixty years old, and I couldn’t help but marvel at the strange and ingenious way Li Ningyu had chosen to pass on intelligence. There was a notch in the capsule to make it easier to open, and it then split into two hemispheres. When you closed it, the two halves fitted together perfectly, making it completely waterproof. It was just right for passing messages, and it would have been easy enough for Turtle to collect.
Every day when he started work, Turtle went first to check certain prearranged locations, and through the course of the day he’d go back and check them again from time to time. If he saw medicine capsules on the path, he’d immediately know to go and remove a message capsule from the bin. Since this was only done in the event of a very urgent piece of intelligence, he would then go straight away to find Warrior, or he might even phone his superiors directly, in order to get the information to Tiger as soon as possible. In a crisis, special measures applied.
When Gu Xiaomeng saw Li Ningyu drop the two capsules onto the path after dinner that day, she didn’t think anything of it. She also didn’t think anything of it when, after they’d walked a bit further, Li Ningyu pretended that her shoelace had come undone and went over to one of the bins and put her foot up on it to retie it.
‘And what was strange about that?’ The old lady answered her own question. ‘She wasn’t feeling very well, so she propped her foot up on the bin so that she didn’t have to bend down. It was a completely natural thing to do.’
Gu Xiaomeng simply walked on. Then she happened to glance back – not because she was suspicious of Li Ningyu; she just chanced to look round. It was that glance that revealed to her what Li Ningyu was really up to.
‘I saw a medicine capsule drop from her hand onto the edge of the bin,’ the old lady told me excitedly. ‘She did it very neatly – it wasn’t like she went and threw it straight inside the bin; she just happened to drop it when she stopped to tie her shoelace. It seemed to be entirely accidental.’
But Gu Xiaomeng wasn’t fooled. In a flash, she lost all faith in Li Ningyu.
‘It was just too odd,’ she said, a look of disdain on her face. ‘It was just a couple of medicine capsules after all; what was she doing strewing them about the place when she could have put them all straight in the bin? And besides, this time she clearly didn’t want me to see what she was doing.’
Which made Gu Xiaomeng all the more eager to find out what was going on. When they got inside the west building, she pretended she’d left their room key in the dining hall and went back to get it; on the way, she picked up the three capsules. She didn’t open them immediately. She went back, unlocked the door to their bedroom, and let Li Ningyu in. She herself went straight to the bathroom. It was getting dark by then, and it was already pitch black inside the toilet, so she switched on the light and used her fingernails to open one capsule after the other.
The first capsule was empty.
The second capsule was also empty.
But inside the third capsule – the one from the rubbish bin – was a scrap of paper, which read:
For urgent dispatch!
K’s movements are known to the enemy.
I am suspected and held under house arrest.
Call off the Gathering of Heroes immediately!
Ghost
Li Ningyu’s secrets lay exposed before her, as bare as a newborn baby.
But that wasn’t all. Even though the light was dim, Gu Xiaomeng was able to unravel yet another mystery. She immediately realized what must have happened with Chief of Staff Wu. Li Ningyu had framed him – it was she who had forged his handwriting on the original message. But now that Wu Zhiguo was apparently dead (Hihara at this point was still pretending that he’d committed suicide), she could no longer use his handwriting, so for this latest message she’d used someone else’s.
Whose writing had she forged this time?
‘Mine! My God, I could hardly believe my eyes – she was trying to use me as a shield!’ The passage of time had done nothing to temper Madame Gu’s shock or anger. She was shouting now, as if caught up in the nightmare of her past.
This was a real bolt from the blue for Gu Xiaomeng. She was stunned. She collapsed in a heap on the floor, unable to move. She remained there, practically comatose, until Li Ningyu came to the bathroom to find her. At which point Gu Xiaomeng regained her self-possession.
She was livid.
‘So she’d been practising your handwriting?’ I asked.
‘Actually, I don’t think so,’ the old lady said. ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment forgery, which is why it took me a little while to realize what she’d done. Of course she was familiar with my handwriting, and she’d studied painting, so it was still a pretty good imitation.’
‘And if
,’ I said, ‘that scrap of paper had ended up in Hihara’s hands…’
‘Then I would have been in serious trouble. Hihara would have suspected me. If she’d managed to produce an exact forgery of my handwriting, it would have been better for me. But it was that similar-but-not-too-similar quality that would have caused the problems, because it would have looked as if I’d tried but failed to alter my writing, cover my tracks.’ Madame Gu’s hands were trembling now, but her gaze was steely. ‘At that moment I truly hated her – she was trying to get me killed! What a bitch. She’d always said she thought of me as a sister, she made much of us being friends. Well, that was over now. I was going straight to the authorities to turn her in.’
Li Ningyu obviously realized something was wrong. She stopped Gu Xiaomeng as she headed for the door and asked where she was going.
Gu Xiaomeng cursed her and told her to go to hell. ‘Don’t touch me!’ She pushed Li Ningyu’s hand away. ‘You’re disgusting, you know that? I hate you! I want you dead!’
By now Li Ningyu must have had a pretty good idea of what the problem was. She held on to Gu Xiaomeng as tightly as she could, to stop her from going anywhere. She knew that the room was bugged and that if Gu Xiaomeng started to scream and shout, the people in the building opposite would discover the truth. She shut the door to the bathroom and locked it, turned the tap on so that the water would mask their voices, then asked Gu Xiaomeng what had happened.
Gu Xiaomeng made a dash for the door, but Li Ningyu held firm and wouldn’t let her past. The two of them pushed and shoved and wrestled each other. Gu Xiaomeng started to scream, but Li Ningyu put a hand over her mouth and pressed hard. Rage had consumed Gu Xiaomeng’s physical strength, and she couldn’t escape. Short of breath, she collapsed to the floor, letting go of the medicine capsule and the scrap of paper she’d been clutching – right in front of Li Ningyu’s eyes.