Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  ‘I won’t be flying out for a time,’ she said. They’d brought up some bowls of noodles and meat dumplings, and she was using her chopsticks busily.

  ‘You’ve got friends in Lhasa?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked up at me, then down again. ‘I cannot impose upon friends.’

  I began listening between the lines, because that was the way she communicated. I’d seen she was starving and I knew that when we left here I’d be paying the bill and when she told me she’d got friends here I’d wondered why they weren’t looking after her and she’d told me: she couldn’t impose. But she’d helped me with the confession thing and I was in her debt and here we were in this place with smoke creeping out of the seams in the pipe above the stove in the corner and condensation trickling down the windows and the dogs under the table snarling and scuffling in competition for any scraps that might fall.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Su-May Wang,’ she said, putting it the Western way round. ‘What is yours?’

  ‘Victor Locke. I’m just here for a few days. Are you on holdover, or what?’

  I didn’t like asking direct questions, but there wasn’t much time: I had to find the Barkhor Hotel and report to Pepperidge and then get back to the monastery before ten o’clock because of the curfew, and I needed to know exactly how useful this girl could be, exactly how well she knew the town, because I’d found that the local laws and restrictions were like booby traps and I couldn’t afford to be run into another PSB office: they’d throw me into the cells for a week next time just to make me pay attention.

  ‘No,’ Su-May said, ‘I’m not on holdover.’ She stopped eating and for the first time looked at me steadily in the eyes, and her question was clear enough: could she trust me? Then she bent her head again over the bowl of food. ‘Things are bad,’ she said, ‘in China. You are a tourist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think of things in China?’

  ‘I think they’re tragic.’

  ‘The bloodshed that time in Tiananmen?’

  ‘And the crackdown that’s been going on ever since.’

  She finished her bowl. ‘Would you like some more tukpa?’

  ‘Very much.” I got the man over and she ordered in slow, careful Tibetan, then turned back to me. The British are on our side?’

  ‘On the side of the people. You don’t imagine we’d support the primitive thugs you’ve got in your government, I hope.’

  Trade went on,’ she said evenly, ‘between the British and those primitive thugs. Nothing has changed.’

  ‘I realize that. It was disgusting. We’re like any other people - we don’t always agree with what our government does. What’s he asking for?’ There was a young boy waving his hand in front of my face.

  ‘A pen. Don’t give him one.’ She said a sharp word or two in Tibetan and he moved on. ‘My father is missing,’ she said in a moment.

  A man in an ancient fur hat was watching me from the next table, but I didn’t think there was any problem: round-eyes get watched quite a bit in the backwaters of the Orient. There wasn’t any question of checking the environment in this place: it was like a flypaper, with as many people in here for warmth as for the food. I’d done a lot of routine checking on the flight into Gonggar and on the CAAC bus into Lhasa and we’d been absolutely clean, Xingyu and I, and no one would have got on to me here in the city, no one clandestine. But I began looking around me now for anyone who looked as if he could understand English, because she’d started saying things that were potentially dangerous.

  ‘Missing from home?’

  ‘Yes. And from his university. That is why I am worried, as you have noticed. That is why I am here.’

  ‘You’re missing too.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was looking me in the eyes again, losing her unwillingness to trust me. ‘He disappeared a week ago, when the wave of arrests began. He left a note for me, saying I must not worry. They are hunting for him now. He is quite an important man, an important dissident.’ A shrug. ‘Of course - there are many. There are thousands.’

  We stopped talking when the man brought the food she’d ordered, and waited until he’d gone. I asked her why she’d come to Tibet.

  ‘It was the next flight on my schedule. They use relatives, you see, as hostages. It is a well-established practice. They want my father in prison, or perhaps executed, and they would have me arrested on some pretext - anything will suffice, one must understand, suspicion is enough - and then they would have reported it in the media, to bring my father out of hiding to take my place.’

  I must go to Beijing. Xingyu, staring at me in the bleak light of the airport at Chengdu. You cannot stop me.

  ‘You simply got off the plane here,’ I said, ‘and didn’t go back?’

  ‘Yes. Others have done this. Many of us have brothers, sisters who are students, or parents who teach. Some of my friends have gone to Hong Kong, and stayed there. But if they are picked up and sent back, they will be accused of fleeing the country, of evading their responsibilities as citizens. I am perhaps safer here. I have not fled my country.’

  Then what she was saying, what she was feeling bore down on her suddenly, and her eyes took the weight of it, the life going out of them. It’s difficult to tell the age of an Oriental: she had looked, until this moment, no more than twenty, with her clear luminous eyes and her flawless skin, though she was probably more than that; now she had grown suddenly old, though her skin hadn’t changed; the only expression was in her eyes, and they looked out on a frightening world with the despair of middle age, when for so many things, for so many people, it has become too late.

  My father is missing. They would have arrested me. I have not fled my country. Not the burden of the years but of being a young woman in China in this year of such little grace.

  ‘Your mother?’

  She looked down and began eating, but from habit. ‘They do not agree. My mother is against his activities, his protests.’

  If they arrested her mother, then, he’d be unlikely to come out of hiding. ‘Where are you from, Su-May?’

  ‘Beijing. That is where the worst happens, the worst of it all. For me, I am worried now because my father will find out I am missing too, and he may believe I have been arrested. They might even lie, and report it in the media that I have been arrested. But from here, from Lhasa, it is difficult for me to get a message to him, saying I am safe. There are people I could write to, but it is dangerous to send letters. Many are opened. Telephones are monitored. They catch many that way.”

  She looked up as a beggar came and crouched by the table, an empty tin bowl cupped in his hands, his eyes hollowed and demanding, not imploring, as he attacked our indifference. ‘Give him nothing,’ she told me, ‘or we shall have dozens here.’ She waved him away. ‘They have come from remote places to the Holy City, and have no money left.’ She shrugged. ‘I am the same. But they have come here to pray. I have come here—’ On a rueful breath, ‘Maybe it is the same thing.’

  Dark was coming slowly against the windows, and more people were arriving, packing against the bar counter shoulder to shoulder. Two PSB officers came in, their guns silhouetted on their hips, their eyes hidden by the shadow of their caps, and I caught a look on the face of Su-May as she saw them, not fright, something like disgust, as if she’d seen something obscene. They moved between the tables, and the people pressed back to give them room - again, it seemed to me, not from fear or in deference, but as if wanting to distance themselves from lepers. Beijing, she’d said, was where the worst had happened, but the people of Lhasa would disagree, seeing as they had the sky black with the smoke of burning monasteries, hearing as they had the crackle of bullets and the cries of grief.

  I waited until the two officers had left. ‘If you like, Su-May, I can get a message to your father in Beijing, telling him you’re safe.’

  She almost dismissed it. ‘You are a tourist.’

  ‘I can do it,’ I said, ‘if you
like.’

  She brought her hands to her face suddenly, knocking her bowl and spilling some food. ‘How?’

  ‘With great discretion.’

  ‘But how?’ She held her face, staring at me from over her spread fingers.

  ‘By word of mouth.’

  In a moment— ‘You are not a tourist, then.’ A tone of suspicion. Tourists were harmless, a gaggle of gawpers pointing at things strange to them, finding most of them funny. I was not one of them, if I could get a message to her father. I must be something else, not what I seemed, and therefore suspect.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m a tourist, but I’ve got friends in Beijing. Close friends. Think about it, and let me know if you want me to help.’

  ‘But how would you tell them?’ Her hands came away from her face and she leaned across the stained bare-wood table. ‘You must not use the telephone, or—’

  ‘There’s someone leaving here for Beijing tomorrow, by the morning flight from Gonggar. I would tell him.’

  She closed her eyes slowly, compressing her mouth, praying for patience, I think. In a moment, her eyes coming open with nothing in them but fright. ‘You do not understand how dangerous this is. You are just a tourist. People speak. People betray, sometimes without intention. One must understand, my country is full of spies, informers. One does not any longer know one’s friends, trust one’s friends - it is like in Nazi Germany, a child will give away his parents to the police, because he has been indoctrinated. My country is full of fear.’ She didn’t look away, but she hesitated. ‘Do you know what they asked me to do, the PSB men? They asked me to follow you when you left there, and see where you went, and go back and report. I said my mother was very sick, so I had no time to help them. This is how it is, in my—’

  ‘Why are they interested in me?’

  ‘Simply because you are from the West, and might be a journalist. They are most afraid of foreign journalists, because Lhasa is always on the point of rebellion, like most cities now in China, and they don’t want the news to get out. All they can do is expel the journalists in time, and that is almost as bad, an admission that something will happen that must not be seen.’ Hesitation again, and then, ‘Your friend, what does he do?’

  Another man came with a tin bowl, already with scraps of food in it, to show how generous others had been, his hands thinned to the bone under the skin, his face whittled by want.

  ‘Zdukai!’ she said, ‘Zdukai!’ He went off, his bowl clanging against the corner of the table.

  I think she was afraid of being overheard, more than anything; she couldn’t leave it alone, this thing about getting word to her father. I said, ‘My friend is Chinese, a lawyer. He knows as much as you do about the danger of indiscretion.’

  In point of fact the message would go to her father through the mast at Cheltenham and the signals board in London to the British embassy at Beijing and then to one of our sleepers or agents-in-place.

  ‘Why should you help me?’ Her hands had gone to her face again, as if she wanted to hide as best she could from whatever treachery there might be in me.

  ‘In the West,’ I said, ‘we hear the news from China and we feel great sympathy for the people. It’s not often we can really do something to help, and it’s a chance for me. I’ll be envied, when I go home.’

  Not untrue. Harry, the man who looks after things at my flat, had gone out and got drunk after he’d watched the Tiananmen Square thing on the screen that night in June; he can’t stand seeing things in cages, told me he’d screamed his head off the first time his mum took him to a zoo.

  ‘You will be envied?’ I don’t think she believed it, but wanted to, because her eyes were suddenly wet. ‘It is difficult for us to understand that we have friends outside our country. We feel alone, and isolated. So when you say you will help me like this, it—’

  Then she couldn’t stop the tears, and tugged the edges of her mangy fur hood across her face and sat there with her long eyes squeezed shut and her body rocking backward and forward in its shapeless coat while one of those bloody dogs under the table bit my ankle and I gave it a smart kick and got a yelp.

  The boy came around again with the teapot and I showed him some money and he peeled off a couple of notes and went away, not even glancing at the girl, I suppose because it wasn’t unusual for women to weep in this ravaged city.

  ‘I do not feel well, one must understand,’ Su-May said at last, ‘it is the high-altitude sickness. Have you felt any symptoms?’

  ‘Bit light-headed sometimes.’ Our tour guide had warned us on the bus ride from the airport, the best thing was to rest up for the first two or three days, take it easy, and if anyone had any blood-pressure or chest problems he shouldn’t have come here at all, this place was a killer, so forth, he wasn’t joking.

  ‘One must take it seriously,’ Su-May said, refusing to talk any more about the other thing, lost her pride, crying like that, lost face. ‘One must be very careful.’

  ‘So they tell me,’ I said. ‘Now write down the name and address of your father’s friend, the one we have to contact, and give it to me.’

  For a moment she pretended not to know what I was talking about, and then found a bit of paper and went over to the counter for a pen and came back and wrote, looking up at me only once with her eyes deep and with an expression in them that clearly said, If you betray me, I shall lose my trust at last in all humankind, then bent her head again and finished writing and gave me the scrap of paper.

  Professor Hu Zhibo, The Faculty, Department of Economics, Beijing University.

  ‘And can he get the message to your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the message is that you are safe and well, nothing else?’

  In a moment, ‘And that I love him.’

  ‘All right. You can—’

  ‘Perhaps I should put the name of the place where I am staying, in Lhasa?’

  ‘No.’

  We want nothing in your heads, the executives in training are told at Norfolk, that we wouldn’t want anyone to get out.

  ‘I am grateful,’ she said with quiet formality.

  ‘Little enough to do.’ She’d have a bad time, tonight, not getting to sleep because of the thoughts flying at her in the dark that I wasn’t what I seemed, that she’d been out of her mind to trust me; but there wasn’t anything I could do about that: the most fervent protestations of good faith are the most suspect.

  We drank the rest of our tea and went out into the freezing wind and through the streets to her broken-down guesthouse near the market, and I left her there and found a streetlight and got out the CAAC map. Pepperidge had left the name of his hotel in code for me at the monastery, with a cross-street bearing, and I walked on again with my head down against the wind, not looking forward to seeing him, not looking forward to it at all, because I was going to tell him what I’d had to do at Chengdu airport to stop Xingyu from going back to Beijing, and Pepperidge would realize what it was going to do to the mission, if London didn’t abort it straight away and call us in.

  Chapter 11

  Tea

  ‘I left him in charge of a monk.’

  ‘Will that be all right?’ Pepperidge asked.

  He meant was I certain that Xingyu Baibing would still be there when I went back, that he wouldn’t be got at, that he wouldn’t decide to leave the monastery of his own free will.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Security’s the best we can hope for, and we’ve reached an agreement.’

  Slight understatement.

  ‘Well done. Spot of tea?’

  ‘Not just now.’

  ‘If you haven’t got a hot shower where you are, come along here.’ He was squatting in a cowhide chair with his long legs drawn up and his heels on the edge of the seat, watching me with his pale yellow eyes and taking everything in.

  This was the Barkhor Hotel, Chinese, not Tibetan, no sign of luxury but he didn’t want that; all he wanted was a telephone and there was one here.<
br />
  ‘Feel all right? he asked me.

  ‘First-class.’

  ‘Altitude’s not a problem?’

  ‘I’ve hallucinated a couple of times, that’s all. Wouldn’t want to do much running yet.’

  ‘Won’t have to.’

  He wanted to sound reassuring. In our language, running doesn’t mean just around the park.

  ‘You’ll need your pad,’ I told him.

  ‘Debriefing?’

  ‘Call it that.’ I went across to the narrow bed and sat with my back against the wall. ‘Mind?’

  ‘Of course not. Rest all you can.’

  I wasn’t quite sure where I should start, so I looked around the room while he got his pad, cracks in the wall-plaster, the Cantonese rug worn to a hole in the middle, some kind of bleached burlap for the curtains, not totally opaque - I could see a streetlight in the distance - picture of Premier Li Peng over the bamboo chest of drawers, shot of three pretty Chinese girls being photographed against the gates of the Forbidden City, cockroach moving in fits and starts along the bottom of the wall, telephone on the bed table, with its plastic chipped and the cable in knots, was that our lifeline to London?

  He was waiting, Pepperidge.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but you won’t like it much. Just before we got on the plane in Chengdu this morning, Xingyu bought a newspaper, and there was a trap in it.’

  ‘I saw it,’ Pepperidge said.

  ‘Did you?’ For some odd reason it made me feel a bit better. ‘Well, he read that part and told me he was going straight back to Beijing.’

  ‘And you told him he couldn’t.’

  Your director in the field doesn’t normally jolly you along like this; you’re meant to give it to him straight and he just shorthands it or puts it on tape and then he starts asking the questions. But Pepperidge is a kind man, and he knew I was going to tell him something quite appalling - but you won’t like it much - and he was just helping me along, more than you’d get from that bastard Loman.