The Girl From Peking

by George B Mair

  THE GIRL FROM PEKING

  George B. Mair

  © George B. Mair 1967

  George B. Mair has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1967 by JARROLDS PUBLISHERS (LONDON) LTD.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  This tale is dedicated with respect and affection to Grace and Bryan Griffen of Lanarkshire, Scotland, to celebrate twenty-one years of friendship.

  Table of Contents

  Letter from David Grant to the Author

  Chapter One – ‘Miracles which are not magic’

  Chapter Two – ‘I think he will die’

  Chapter Three – ‘Top people carry nothing’

  Chapter Four – ‘It is the small points which add up, you know’

  Chapter Five – ‘The price will be high’

  Chapter Six – ‘Men are like wine’

  Chapter Seven – ‘Tomorrow is going to be one of these days’

  Chapter Eight – ‘A non-stop flow of quality liquor’

  Chapter Nine – ‘Pursue Red-herring . . . bed might end in death’

  Chapter Ten – ‘She looked like a goddess waiting for blood’

  Chapter Eleven – ‘To die was nothing’

  Chapter Twelve – ‘Painted Chinese style . . . with trimmings’

  Chapter Thirteen – ‘A man looks so non-lovable with only his shirt’

  Chapter Fourteen – ‘Paradise can be just round the corner’

  Letter from David Grant to the Author

  Dear George,

  I don’t know why you are so interested in my work.

  And I don’t know why I allow you to write about it.

  But I’ve just read this manuscript, in which, may I say, I do not show up too well, because I really made far too many mistakes and feel entitled to little credit. I do, however, want to thank you for putting me right about the drugs which Miki used to knock out the American President. Though I agree that we shouldn’t mention the item which modifies the effect of ‘methohexitone’.

  The world seems to be full of psychotics, so we certainly must not give them the gen on stuff which might be used exactly as Miki did to compromise a world figure.

  I must also thank you for sending that blurb on toxicology. It should provide even Professor Juin with ideas for the future.

  Tell Trudie that I wish she was with me. She is the only woman I know who can compare with Maya and she’s too damn good for you. We’ll have a night at the opera one of these days, so until then all the best,

  Cheers,

  David.

  P.S. When I say opera I mean AT the opera when Maya is dancing Swan Lake. Be seeing you.

  David.

  Chapter One – ‘Miracles which are not magic’

  The house of a Hundred Eternal Lives has always been exclusive.

  It can be found within twenty minutes’ walk from the Bridge of Nine Turnings and it is only a short taxi ride from Peking’s Summer Palace. It has been renamed State Hospital Number Thirteen and is the most unique nursing home in Yellow Asia. Patients are very top, doctors are drained from the cream of every specialty, and their work compares with anything in Moscow, New York or London. In fact there are several specialties in which it rates an honours first, and no other world team can yet perform the miracles of plastic surgery which have been mastered by Professor Fan Chung-ying.

  The man himself is an unobtrusive person who would pass unnoticed in any street. Yet his patience, his genius for capturing the imagination of his patients, and his flair for handling delicate tissues combine to form a force which produces results. Not just ordinary results! But results which matter. And matter to a state which provides generous funds for certain types of research. In fact it has become the boast of Chung-ying’s pupils that he could alter the features of a monkey and make it look like a film star.

  Methods used have pioneered an entire field of plastic surgery, but operations are carried out only with long term purposes which justify cost to a government short of almost everything except determination.

  Work is top secret and every room is private. Women are housed on upper floors and men in an extension built into the flower garden, while the rest of the building is used for research purposes and one room is a laboratory which stores human organs for grafting on to others.

  The most comfortable suite faces south with a sun porch to the west. It has a sitting room with television, a warm bedroom, and shower with toilet. But it is given only to V.I.P.s destined for sophisticated use by the State, and Professor Fan Chung-ying watched impassively as the girl beside him leaned back against her pillows and stared into a mirror.

  He could read nothing from her expression, but he knew that she was seeing herself for the first time since she had flown home two years earlier with half of her face ruined by second and third degree burns due to an acid sprayed by an imperialist spy against whom she had been fighting in the Sahara.

  Her chiefs had been shocked by the damage done to one of the most beautiful women in their service and had even postponed cross examination until Fan had called in his team, treated her for shock, reassured her about the future and applied dressings which marked the beginning of treatment lasting just over twenty-five months.

  Only after that first session had her Number One Superior made a formal visit and listened to her story.

  A month had then passed before he returned with confirmation of the broad outline, but looking for more detail which might matter, the small point which might have been overlooked, or the clue which might fit into a pattern . . . possibly somewhere else . . . and so help to orientate State policy in its battle for recognition at the conference tables of U.N.O.

  The department was pleased with Jacqueline de Massacré. She had crossed the dangerous bridge from East to West and worked her way into being confidential secretary to an important spy employed by the Western Imperialists. Her wits were razor sharp. Her charm was deadly and her morality nil. But her mastery of languages and weapons combined to make her unique.

  Fan knew her history backwards. Indeed it had been part of his work to take almost every feature of it into consideration when giving her a new face.

  Her mother had been Chinese and her father a Parisian exiled to French Indo China before it became Viet Namh. But his mother had also been Chinese, and so Jacqueline had been brought up under two contrasting influences. She spoke not only pure Parisian French but Mandarin plus eight dialects. She also had a fluent command of English . . . though it had once been heavily accented . . . and she knew enough German, Spanish and Russian to get by.

  As a child she had been emotionally stable until the murder of her father by one of Chiang Kai-shek’s hatchet men during a trip to Macao. But shortly afterwards she had begun to develop character changes which interested Intelligence and eventually she had been told the truth, that her father had been a friend of Mao Tse-tung and chosen for office when the Party took over.

  Two more shocking events had then thrown her right into their hands as pliable material capable of being shaped into an unusual weapon for use almost anywhere in the world.

  Her mother had gone insane and strangled herself slowly, dying with the name of her husband on her lips.

  And in the same week a senior Intelligence agent had shown a horrified child the tongue cut from her father’s head by his murderers. This agent had used her family for years and been employed for cover as their house boy. But after that he became her teacher. Though a teacher of strange arts.

  He had taught her how to seem stupid.

  How to deceive men.

  How to destroy enemies.
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br />   How to become part of the background in which she worked, and how to use her body to tempt men into indiscretions.

  She was also a natural nymphomaniac, and her tutor, Ling Tao, enjoyed her as mistress when she was only sixteen. When he allowed her access to other men she was still only eighteen, and by the time she was twenty she had become an honours graduate in eroticism.

  She had then passed slowly through phases of compromising selected material for eventual blackmail, to the more refined responsibility of playing secretary within a Western security organisation where screening was efficient. Her transfer to Europe had been a very remarkable feat and her eventual posting to David Grant, with all which that implied in ready access to files was a coup which had earned further promotion, while the stream of information which flowed from NATO’s security offices in Paris to Peking had been of incalculable value in formulating day to day policies.

  Then had come the Sahara affair when Grant had located a new mineral for use in insulating space ships against solar and other radiation. It appeared to be part of a meteorite which had landed near an oasis, and Ling Tao together with Jacqueline de Massacré had been put in charge of operation X21. Their terms of reference had been clear cut. Kill Grant. Come to terms with the local tribes and purchase the meteorite. Or failing that massacre the inhabitants of the oasis and fly the mineral back to China.

  Ample forces had been provided, but somewhere along the line Ling Tao had made mistakes, and his death at Grant’s hands had saved him from later punishment. Minutes before the end Jacqueline had been mutilated by a typical Grant device, and acid from his spray had destroyed her face.

  It had been Professor Fan’s task to build up a new beauty and to do it so expertly that no living person would detect the scars while others trained her psychologically to accept all that must lie ahead, using promise of revenge to boost her morale.

  Jacqueline raised her eyes from the mirror and Fan saw that she was smiling. ‘I am very beautiful,’ she said, and the words spoken in soft Chinese sounded reassuring. She had kept her nerve and survived prolonged phases of skin grafting which would have broken many another person.

  Especially during these frightful periods when she had been sewn . . . literally . . . to a girl who knew that she had been chosen to die so that Jacqueline would have a new face and live.

  But it had been the only way, and the Professor half smiled as he asked the question. ‘You are happy with your choice?’

  He saw her hands fold, almost unconsciously, into the lotus position. ‘There were five,’ she said at last. ‘Why not six or seven? Or even ten? Why five?’

  The Professor was still, at heart, a member of the old school and he folded his arms in a way which recalled traditional sagging sleeves from Mandarin robes. And then he eased himself on to a divan as he cleared his throat and tried to explain.

  The State had long ago decided that her training and natural assets made her more than usually valuable. It had therefore been obvious that every effort must be made to preserve her for use by the People. Which had involved building up a completely new face, including even lips and eyelids in a long process needing both time and luck to be effective.

  Skin transplants were usually successful when taken from one part of a human body to cover another and it was easy to take pieces of skin, say from a buttock, and transplant them step by step using the ‘pedicle’ technique until the graft had reached the area to be covered. A ‘take’ was then virtually certain, but results often left bad scarring.

  So—since her body was one of her more dangerous weapons—a decision had been taken that she must not be scarred anywhere until all other possible techniques had been considered.

  Because other methods were open for consideration, but they were not simple, and they had never been used by any other team of surgeons outside the House of a Hundred Eternal Lives. The Professor waved his hands apologetically. ‘Forgive my using the old name. But it has a certain music which appeals.

  ‘I am an artist and the words sound more pleasing than a simple statement of fact like State Hospital Number Thirteen.’

  Jacqueline nodded. She knew what she owed to this man, but one part of her soul hated everything which reminded her of the old days. ‘Tell me more about what you did,’ she said. She saw that he was proud of his work and knew that he had every reason to be.

  His team had often been forced to handle war injuries. And war always drove men towards breaks through in technique which at first seemed impossible.

  So it had been in her own case. Could he literally remove a living person’s face and graft it on to someone else in the same way that Soviet surgeons had grafted a second, and living, head on to a living dog? Or as the Americans were said to have transplanted even the brain from one animal into the skull of another?

  His team had accepted the challenge. There had been tragedies during earlier work, but problems had gradually been solved until now a complete facial transplant was possible under certain circumstances.

  The blood group of the donor had to be the same as that of the subject under treatment and a number of other less well known but extremely important biological assessments had also to match within an 0.068 per cent margin of error.

  Then, clearly, skulls had to have similar shapes, since a set of small bones would not look well under a mass of flopping facial tissue, while a large skeleton would stretch a small graft and give a freak result . . . if it ‘took’ at all.

  Another point was that nerves which controlled expression, the winking of eyelids and the acts of smiling or sniffing, all left the skull through fixed anatomical canals, and the application of a facial graft involved delicate stitching of many nerves and blood vessels if the muscles were to function properly on their new owner.

  So meticulous X-ray photographs had to be taken of possible ‘donors’, and their skull structure compared with that of the patient who was to be treated since experience had shown that best results were achieved where points of exit or entry of nerves coincided as closely as possible.

  Choice was—in the case of a girl like Jacqueline—also narrowed down by an over-riding obligation to preserve sex appeal. So the donor had to be as beautiful as possible. And when angles like the nature of future work or the need to have a face which would be a passport for a certain type of posting were also considered the State had final authority to choose, because only Jacqueline’s own chiefs knew how she was going to be used. And factors had to be weighed, some of which might never be known even to the patient herself.

  Did they want a slant eyed Mongol type or a dusky Creole? Did they want to infiltrate her into Western Europe and make her a pure Caucasian, or did they favour the more heavy features of the Slav? Would she be used against the Americans or turned into a mixed-blood Asiatic like some of the girls in Saigon? These political decisions had to be finalised before suitable subjects for transplant could even be considered. Plus other things, of course!

  Jacqueline smiled inwardly. The ultimate decision had pleased her. She had chosen the face of a Circassian so that she could be used for work either in Western Europe or even within the U.S.S.R., since both Armenians and Circassians had become a political froth which floated all over the world and could always be explained away as the product of refugees from the old days.

  But the old man was still talking, telling her of his search for subjects and why she had eventually been given a selection of close-up portraits of only five women. Five women, and five only out of the hundreds who had been examined met all the requirements! Mostly they had been professional prostitutes from Hanoi, Saigon, Buenos Ayres, Amsterdam and Las Vegas, though a few had been examined in hospital for other purposes and rated as possibles by combined intelligence and radiologists but eventually all had been rejected except five who fitted precise surgical requirements. In addition to one other over-riding long term Intelligence condition! But the State had then been generous in allowing Jacqueline to make her own final choice. ‘Tho
ugh after all,’ smile Professor Fan, ‘that was only reasonable since you were really choosing yourself.’

  Jacqueline’s eyes twinkled as she remembered her problem: to be an ash blonde with voluptuous lips and haughty nasal structure, or have a blue black scalp with magnolia cheeks, long eyelashes and the drama of contrast between pale skin and raven hair which dropped sheer around her shoulders?

  A mousey brown girl with sad tension lines around her mouth had been ruled out as recalling her own colouring, while the freckled red-head with a dimple on her chin had seemed too commonplace. The fifth had a tiny black mole below her left eye, and Jacqueline knew that such beauty spots could be dangerous. Sometimes they turned into malignancies, and Professor Fan had agreed that although risk was small she was probably better left alone.

  And so two women had been invited to drink green tea one late winter afternoon at a house in Peihai Park. The blonde had been flown to Peking from Hanoi, and her name was Suzir Li Kao-teh, which meant ‘Suzie Lie of the High virtues’, but Jacqueline knew that her virtue had long ago been lost to the G.I.s who had then been waging civil war in her own country, and that the first man to have had her was a Texan colonel with a taste for fifteen-year-olds.

  The other was called Tania and her beauty was remarkable. She had been confidential secretary to a junior government official in Suchow, not far from the Gobi, but descended from tribes who had fled east after the October revolution. Her grandparents were Circassian on one side and Armenian on the other but she had been born in China and spoke several dialects in addition to Russian, Turkish and English.

  It was the English angle which interested Jacqueline most. How had it been possible for a child living in the Gobi-Sinkiang-Tibet frontier area to have learned English? And the answer had been simple. Three female Christian missionaries had worked for more than twenty years on or around the Gobi and one of them had taught her English. Another had given her English books, and a passing traveller had even left gramophone records. English had unexpectedly led her to earlier promotion than she might otherwise have expected, because her superior occasionally handled bank business or passports which involved translation problems, and Tania had been the only English speaking person in an area larger than Germany or France. Then again Jacqueline knew that the girl’s character showed on her tranquil face. The blonde was already showing the hall marks of her trade, but Tania remained serene as a full moon in a cloudless sky.