The Girl From Peking

by George B Mair

  That night she had explained her choice both to Professor Fan and to Maksud Wang, the man she believed to be Chief of the Chinese People’s Republic Counter Intelligence. They had then moved quickly and Tania had been transferred to Peking though only to disappear within two days of checking in at the doss house which was her hotel.

  Professor Fan sometimes wondered if he would ever understand women. He had been present when they had been introduced, and Jacqueline had cut down to the core of everything without hesitation. He still remembered her words as she stared at the terrified girl in front of her. ‘I want your face,’ she had said, ‘and this man’ (she had pointed towards the Professor) ‘is going to give it to me. You will live in history, but your body will be burned, while I use your lips to kiss my lovers.’

  Fan still wriggled with embarrassment. There had been no need for brutality. But it was Jacqueline’s unique lack of all sensitivity which helped to make her so useful. That and other things which she had mastered during two years of continuous work. She could make others suffer. But she, herself, would accept anything, even martyrdom, for the State.

  Sometimes other work had been interrupted by the unavoidable need to lie almost immobile for weeks on end while portions of nerves healed, or blood vessels united to preserve the graft. But there had also been months when she had trained like no other patient he had ever known to become perfect in some of the things which her chiefs felt would matter.

  Shooting for example. On many days she had practised with revolver and rifle for as long as five hours, two in the morning and three in the afternoon until now she could hit a silver thimble fired from a sling eight times out of nine using a Ruger automatic. With a 9 mm Smith and Wesson Double Action Automatic Pistol packing a magazine of eight 9 mm shells she could get eight direct hits through a target dropped from five hundred feet before it hit the ground. And with a Ruger Carbine she could now rate a possible five times out of six at 200 yards.

  She had tested every weapon which might reasonably be used by a woman and had finally settled for the Standard ‘first’ Ruger with overall length of 8.75 inches and barrel of only 4.75. It could lie in a handbag and weighed only 36 ounces. The Butaprene grip felt well against her hand and she approved the black gloss finish with sharp diamanté covering.

  Yet she was still not satisfied. The magazine held nine .22 shells and to date she could average only seven certainties out of nine possibles. So practice had been increased to one hour four times daily and Fan guessed that soon she would rate one hundred per cent.

  She had already mastered the 4 inch Browning .25 which weighed only 9.75 ounces and could be worn, even by a woman, in an arm-pit holster, though Fan guessed that she might carry it between her breasts. For close work it was deadly and Jacqueline intended to become really deadly.

  Even with knives.

  She had caused Intelligence to ransack Peking’s Museums and allow her to study a selection of slender bladed weapons made centuries earlier by craftsmen whose skill could not now be equalled. And she had opted for a quartette forged in Kaochang during the reign of King Chue Wen-tai. Apart from anything else it seemed to her a good omen that both Tania and the knives came from the same remote area of China, that they were towards the West and that one day they would both be used to help destroy it.

  The blades varied in size from ten to sixteen centimetres, honed to a perfect edge along both sides. They were only two millimetres thick and expanded slightly, without a cross guard, into hilts carved from unpolished lapis lazuli which guaranteed protection against slipping from a sweaty hand.

  A tiny dot at the top of each hilt showed that the blade could never be displaced and helped to ensure perfection in balance.

  The hilts were short, but Jacqueline’s fingers fitted like a sheath and she had worked out the technique of throwing until now she rated herself as a full blooded professional. She had tried every trick from normal throws holding the point, to a curious forward jerk which catapulted the knife from her palm with machine like precision towards any target less than five metres away. For longer throws she used the point, and could control revolutions from one full spin in every four metres to a flash which rotated the blade one full turn in less than two metres. She could split a silk thread at thirteen paces and had even killed a flying mosquito at around ten.

  Professor Fan marvelled at her endurance.

  In fact only one other person had equalled it: the girl who had sacrificed not only her face, but life itself to forge this new weapon for her people. And again the State had been generous. The operations could have been done using a drugged subject, but it was easier and more efficient to have someone who would co-operate, so ten thousand Hong Kong dollars—supposed insurance after a motor accident—had been sent to her mother in return for Tania’s promise of full co-operation . . . even the giving of her life.

  And the girl had kept her word, even to the keeping of some secrets in her private life, asking for drugs only when pain had become too severe, or when she was too scared to carry on without help.

  Fan knew that he had now made a complete break through, achieving something which no other team in the world had even visualised.

  First both girls had been re-measured, their skulls X-rayed and the plates superimposed to double check that essential orifices and bony prominences coincided to fractions of a degree.

  Then there had been laboratory tests to cross-check that there was no possibility of Tania’s tissue reacting as a foreign body and being rejected through some undetected allergy built into Jacqueline.

  And throughout these weeks the girls had become friends. Tania had been given permission to speak freely . . . except about one part of her life . . . since she was, to all intents and purposes already dead, and guards guaranteed that escape would be impossible even is she had wished. But everyone knew that she would keep her word. She was what the old world had called ‘a good girl’ and Jacqueline explained exactly how she would be able to use the new life which was being made for her not only through Fan and his team but by the co-operation of Tania herself, perhaps the most important person of all during that stage.

  The first phase had been the most challenging for everyone, partly because it had been essential to have the two girls firmly anchored together, but also because, technically, it had been difficult to position them for operation without distorting the graft with all its delicate structures. Special splints and mechanical apparatus had had to be designed to support them in position during certain operations, at the end of which the same position was maintained by plaster casts and duralumin supports, so that not one millimetre of movement was possible.

  But that, of course, had come only after a plastic transplant which had taxed even the genius of Professor Fan.

  Under full anaesthesia he had designed an incision which ran from the top of Tania’s scalp along the edge of sterno mastoid muscle to the mid point of clavicle, until a flap of cheek and neck had been formed including even the parotid salivary gland with all the fragile structures which passed through it. A feat which would have been considered impossible only a few years earlier.

  Jacqueline’s face had then been prepared to receive the graft. Her own parotid had then been excised and Tania’s flap anchored in position after re-embedding the delicate salivary gland and reconstituting nerves, blood vessels and salivary duct with the accuracy of a Canton stitch until, in the end, Tania and Jacqueline were united by the same tissues, by the same arteries, and even by the same nerves. This had involved working ‘from below up’, from bony depths to the surface, and there had been little scope either for error or ease in working. It had also meant the sacrifice of part of Jacqueline’s face while other raw areas on both girls were temporarily protected by thin skin grafts prepared from frozen tissues in the laboratory.

  Discomfort, of course, had been almost intolerable, and for days both had been kept semi-conscious by combinations of pethedene and barbiturate drugs. Then, on the sixteenth day a win
dow had been cut in the plaster to enable study of the circulation in the grafts. Thanks to anti-biotics there had been no sepsis, but Fan still remembered his sense of relief when he had been able to check that the tissues were perfect.

  Some days later he had removed the top half of the plaster and attempted the second stage, literally splitting Tania’s face in half, his incision running from the back of her head over the vertex to include one half of her superb head of hair, but weaving slightly over the forehead and along the left side of nose to the left angle of her lips where it continued to meet his first incision near the middle of her clavicle.

  Blood circulation had been good, and while an assistant covered the emptiness of Tania’s wound with a split skin graft from her thigh he had prepared the rest of Jacqueline’s face to receive final attachment of her face pedicle.

  The whole affair had been tricky (partly due to positioning the subjects and some rotation of the pedicle) but the nine hour operation had ended with Jacqueline’s wound being repaired using methods which would guarantee minimal scarring and prepare a way for later formal plastic repair of the wounds, after which, given luck, there would be virtually no trace of surgical intervention.

  The plaster cast had then been completely cut and the girls separated. Both were entitled to a rest. But apart from anything else months would pass before many structures were functioning normally. And during that time muscles which would otherwise have been paralysed had to be kept in good condition by physiotherapists who had risen to the challenge until results had been so successful that after a year Jacqueline’s cheeks moved smoothly as she smiled, her eyelids flickered with every expression and even her salivary glands continued to function normally.

  The graft had taken! But even more credit was due to the mutilated woman who had made it possible. She had been allowed every privilege except one. Tania was no longer allowed to look in a mirror, because it didn’t take a psychiatrist to understand that the shock might have driven her to suicide. Fan could recall nothing more extraordinary than the face of that woman. One half still beautiful, and the other a withered sheet of parchment-like skin moulded to a skeleton.

  But even the ‘freak’ as some now called her, had required intensive physiotherapy to keep the balance of her face, to counteract the loss of muscles whose actions had preserved the symmetry of others. And there had been days on end while she had lain in bed, heavily doped while Jacqueline had practised with her automatics in a shooting range deep in the basement.

  Fan allowed himself to smile. Some thought Tania a freak. But he found it even more remarkable to study Jacqueline who was now a woman of two faces, her left side rich with Tania’s magnolia complexion and the right sultry under her own tan. The left side of her scalp pouring out a cascade of blue black hair, and the right still brown. Her left eyebrow arching in a thin blue black line and her right thick with short hairs which gave her the sultry look of some French sex symbols. Only her lips remained the same, and Fan had never been able to stop wondering how she would have looked if he had been able to transplant half of Tania’s lips as well.

  But that would have been impossible. Or at best it would have been risky. Problems of feeding: even of talking, would have been too great, and he had had to control his impatience until a year later when Tania had been allowed a full thirty course dinner to celebrate her last night on earth. Everything had been most civilised. Jacqueline had been on her best behaviour. Professor Fan himself had played host and even Maksud Wang had joined them wearing his Shanghai cut blue suit. He had set the mood of the meal by pinning a decoration on Tania’s breast and giving her a personal letter from the President of the People’s Republic thanking her for making the supreme sacrifice. Unknown to herself she had been given powerful anti-depressant drugs to make everything easy and had laughed with the best of them, using that polite titter which had again become fashionable among some of the more traditionally minded youngsters.

  But a powerful sleeping drug had been added to her final cup of tea so that she had never known the agony of waiting for the end. And her end had begun with that sleep, because although she lived for another two weeks she had been kept totally unconscious.

  Jacqueline had submitted to operation on the following morning, and it had followed the same pattern as the first. A nightmare two weeks had then followed while the second graft from Tania attached itself to its new owner, with the two women bound in plaster to prevent movement, but this time with Tania deeply unconscious and unable to control even her most deeply personal needs.

  Fan had been glad when it was over, and when the day came which marked his greatest triumph. He had repeated the second operation. But with a difference. This time lips had also to be included, and with them the lining of part of the mouth, Although, all in all, eyelids had probably given most trouble.

  After the graft had been separated from Tania the girl had been killed by a shot of intravenous morphine and he had concentrated on matching the two sides of Jacqueline’s face until they met along a suture line which was, at that stage, unavoidable, but which he hoped would, in due course, be repaired until it was literally invisible.

  And it had been during this fourth, and final operation, that he had been most glad of the foresight which had made him so particular in choice of subject. It had been almost impossible properly to re-embed the parotid gland on her right side. Repair of certain nerves had also been unexpectedly difficult. Access to some parts of the mouth had been a surgical nightmare, and in particular it had been technically impossible accurately to shape Jacqueline’s nose. But, in the end, and thanks to a tiny graft cut from the dead girl’s still living rib he had been able to make a splint which became, literally, part of Jacqueline’s new nose and gave it a sexy tilt which helped to make her just that bit different from Tania, because it was essential that risk of meeting some of Tania’s old contacts be reduced to zero. And one of these might one day be important! He had finished by cauterising her vocal chords so as to change even her voice, and given luck that might one day be almost as important as the change of face.

  This had marked the beginning of the second year and one more test of endurance for everyone concerned. But the physiotherapists had again done brilliant work, though a scar still ran from the back of Jacqueline’s skull to fork near the hair into these thin lines which still marked the natural creases of her body, while another swung round her left eyebrow and along part of her nose, then down around her lips to end with a right and left fork which met the original scars.

  Fan knew that this scar tissue would have to be excised while a special cellular suspension was used to bathe the wound edges which he would have to reconstitute, and that finally he would have to do a craftman’s job of subcuticular suturing to achieve perfection. The cells had taken several months to prepare, and were based on modifications which had been worked out by Wetheim in Switzerland, but Fan judged that if all went well they would have the effect of making final scars practically invisible, if not, indeed, totally invisible. And as he stared again at the girl in front of him he knew that his technique had succeeded. Even without make up Jacqueline’s face was ninety-nine per cent faultless and a dusting of powder with foundation cream made her perfect.

  The cosmetic result on her scalp was also better than he had expected and a cascade of gleaming blue black hair dropped sheer over cheeks and shoulders.

  He looked at her curiously. ‘How do you feel?’

  She caressed her features like a lover stroking his mistress. ‘I was always beautiful,’ she said, ‘but it was a provocative beauty. Now I am more beautiful and it is the sort of beauty for which men are willing to die. There is a serenity which pleases me very much.’

  ‘Speaking technically,’ said Fan. ‘There is one small point. Your body hair doesn’t match that of your head. How would you explain this?’

  Jacqueline pouted her lips. ‘I could say that I used a rinse.’ And then she smiled. ‘But you worry too much, Professor. When men
get to the stage of seeing the tiny hairs of my body they are not thinking about colours of my scalp. They have tinglings in their own,’ she added sarcastically. ‘So leave that to me.’

  He stood up and she opened her mouth while he made a final inspection of her gums, and of the slightly rough line which still marked the site of some internal stitching. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘We Chinese do not kiss as they do in the West. But the technique of deep kissing, as they call it in America, might make a man wonder, if his tongue were to feel that ridge. It is not ideal . . . just the one defect which prevents me from claiming perfection.’ He hesitated. ‘If they send you to the West are you likely to indulge in deep kissing?’

  Jacqueline shrugged her shoulders. ‘It sometimes pleases me. But the man must be attractive. So don’t worry. If I allow him deeply to kiss me he will be thinking about other things and is not likely to wonder about a little ridge in my mouth. Especially,’ she added coldly, ‘since most Western women wear false teeth. Which must be very uninteresting things to kiss. Imagine a man’s tongue playing over a sheet of pink plastic!’

  She giggled and even Fan tittered politely. The idea of kissing was ludicrous. And most unhygienic. A touch on the cheek possibly! But sucking at one another’s mouths was really uncivilised.

  They were still smiling at the unspoken joke when the door opened and Maksud Wang stepped inside. The man walked like a cat and it was his boast that no man ever heard him either come or go.