"If I seem to teach you," said Hao, "one must remember that Confucius said we must not feel ashamed to learn from the people below us. I am at your command, Major Shan. Just as the government sets up these posters, these ta tsebaos, in all places in order to influence the minds of the people, so must we, for Buddha's precious sake, carry on against all handicaps. Excuse me, sir."
The militia officer had halted them. Hao stepped forward and spoke in a rapid jargon of progaganda phrases. His manner, though polite and subservient, was firm, even angry. He spoke of Durell as a distinguished historian they had come to meet and honor at the temple. There was more confusion on the platform as other passengers demanded to go by. The officer was dubious and pointed again at Durell, his manner suddenly furious.
"We must walk on two legs," Hao said sharply. "This is Mao's own slogan for the Chinese people, officer! Education and labor for socialist development, is this not true?"
Hao then produced an astonishing sheaf of documents from under his gray robe and thrust them impatiently at the militiaman. His band of monks swept Durell and Jasmine through the military line before the officer could pore through even a few of the impressive sheets of sealed papers.
In a moment they were out on the city street.
There were some Russian-built and British cars waiting for them. The monks piled in, chattering and laughing like schoolboys on a holiday. Hao's face shone with sweat. He took off his glasses and smiled apologetically as they got into a car.
"That was not difficult, sir, but it could have been uncomfortable. We have only brief respite, I am sure."
"How did you know I was on that train?" Durell asked.
"We were warned," Hao said. "We have—ah—a form of radio communication."
"Who do you work for, then? Is it McFee?"
"I do not know that honorable name. I do not know the true names of any of those for whom I undertook to communicate certain data which seemed important to those who sympathize with the needs of certain elements in China. Not all of us," smiled Hao, "are Communists enchanted by the words of Chairman Mao."
"How long can you hide us?" Jasmine asked.
The little monk's eyes flicked toward her, and it seemed to Durell that he went wary. "My instructions are to forward you on toward Peking at once."
Trains rumbled across the huge double-decker Yangtze River bridge. The day was hot. The sky was a sooty ochre from the steel-mill chimneys. They passed cinemas advertising the latest Chinese musicals, swung around the famous Ming Tombs reservoir and the Great Hall of the People, then to the restored Buddhist temple that Peking had named a national monument.
"This way," Hao said hurriedly.
There were wide steps hollowed shallow by centuries of worshippers ascending into the scented gloom of the entrance hall. Red lamps glowed like dragon's eyes from their chains in the ceiling, weaving patterns of smoke against the carved timbers. On great shelves against the walls were wooden lohans, images of disciples in hundreds of moods. These were golden red—some as tall as twenty feet—standing, kneeling, reading, jumping; and next to them were carved chests, silk scrolls, parchments, screens depicting soldiery at the monastery, flags, and worshippers. Through the shrill intonations of the monks within came the harsh lecture of a government guide leading a group of sightseers about the national monument.
"This way," Hao said. "You must stay until dark."
"But we were seen with you at the station," Jasmine said. "Won't they come here for us? You'll be in trouble "
"Not at all," Hao smiled.
There was a little garden enclosed by stone columns and shaded from the hot sun by wide, upturned eaves that swept gracefully from comer to comer. Hao led the way through a gate and down a dim, scented corridor lined with dragon screens and opened a heavily paneled door to reveal a small, graceful room. "Rest here," he said. His gold-rimmed glasses glinted. "An acolyte will bring refreshments. One must be patient. Do not speak too loudly."
When he left, Durell heard the click of a large, ancient key in the iron lock. He did not know if they were prisoners or guests.
Ten
Three days later they were in Peking. The pride and heart of the ancient Middle Kingdom of old China was adrift under an autumn sun with thousands of Chinese flags, with their five gold stars on a red field. It was late September, and preparations were being made for National Day. If tensions threatened to fragment the incredible vastness of the Chinese nation, no signs were visible here. The major streets, such as the Yungtingmen leading to the old Legation Quarter, the People's Heroes' Monument, the Cultural Palace, and the Forbidden City, were aswarm with banner-waving, shouting, marching Red Guard youths and working-class cadres, singing and shouting slogans in a monolithic, mindless unison that made Durell's scalp crawl. This sea of humanity in China's oldest city, built on the nucleus of famed Cambaluc, Kublai Khan's capital, was too much for a newcomer to accept easily.
Hao was still with them. At the last moment, after the one night in Wuhan, Hao managed to get government permission to come to Peking, ostensibly to pursue further restoration in the Temple of Lute-Playing.
"Our contact for the Lotus Group has—ah—vanished. He was a former monk who became a minor governmental functionary as a cultural expert on antiquities. His speciality was the Ch'ing dynasty and its architectural developments."
"What happened to him?" Durell asked.
"We do not know, Comrade Shan."
"How often do you contact Lotus?"
"We use the radio once weekly, at regular intervals. We have not been detected yet." Hao's eyes glittered behind his round spectacles, and something about him reminded Durell of McFee—perhaps his calm grayness, the sense of power behind a mild facade. Hao said, "We can use the temple quarters just outside the Tatar City, near the wall. Your—ah, wife—will have to be discreet."
Jasmine only smiled tightly at the remark. They passed the enormous new department store and went north on the busy Wangfu Tachien beyond the Capital Theater into the Tungtan district, east of the Forbidden City. There were trolleys and buses, but autos were practically nonexistent. Bicycles formed the chief mode of private transportation, filling the broad boulevards in torrents under a light, cool rain that began to fall. They had passed through a huge gate in the walls that still enclosed the teeming reaches of the Inner City. New workers' apartments, aping Russia's communal concrete blocks, had been recently built around equally new industrial complexes. Everywhere were banners, loudspeakers, the endless propaganda demands to work, to give, to volunteer for the betterment of socialism and the Chinese People's Republic.
"Here we are," Hao said.
They had turned into a less modern area off the main boulevard. The streets were narrower, the housing consisted of remnants of old Manchu tenements, bursting with people. There were small restaurants, noodle stands, mean little shops with poor quality goods, and fewer of the propaganda banners.
"This way," Hao said.
He seemed quite familiar with the area. There was a small, closed temple, ignored by the busy people, and a small park with newly planted trees on one side of the alley they used.
"In the old days," Hao said, "before the Manchus were overthrown, this place was almost entirely populated by palace servants and temple attendants." He looked sad. "So much has been mercilessly destroyed. We Chinese are like a river of time, and part of our source of life has been wiped out."
"But your order has survived," Durell pointed out.
"We monks live only on sufferance, today. It is only a matter of time before the Interior Ministry decides we are no longer needed. The older people would resist if we were destroyed now. But in another ten years we will be gone."
Behind the closed temple was a small, walled area of crumbling brick. Hao had a key to the gate. It was growing dark, and the rain had thickened and felt colder on their thin cotton clothing. Durell recalled the gradual change in the countryside, seen from the train between the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. Rice
had given way to rolling fields of cotton that stretched to a far horizon, broken only by occasional clumps of trees or by clustered villages of mud and straw. Peking, as a metropolis, was a stark contrast to the vast rural areas they had traveled.
In the quarters that Hao led them to, it was as if they had stepped into China's early feudal ages. Dim red lanterns showed highly polished, fretwork furniture, urns, wall scrolls, a richly figured carpet. Incense coiled in the air. There were two bedrooms, separated from the brick kitchen, and Hao led Jasmine to one of them. "You must rest, dear lady. You look exhausted. Shan and I must talk."
He closed the door firmly against her protest, then clapped a hand, and an old woman with her hair skinned back in a bun, wearing white cotton, came in with fragrant tea in a fragile pot. Hao's bushy brows lifted for a moment.
"Do you trust the young woman, Shan?"
"No more than I trust you, Hao," Durell said.
The monk smiled. "Have I not helped you?"
"So far. Do you know my job?"
"You wish to find the Black House and enter it."
"Do you know where it is?"
"Yes. I am a priest of Buddha, and although in times past in my country's history there were many monasteries of fighting monks who devoted themselves to the overthrow of tyrants, I am a man of peace. The problem of entering the Black House, to reach General Chien Y-Wu, who is a prisoner there, must be solved by you and you alone."
"You know my mission, it seems."
"The Lotus Group briefed me, yes."
"And you approve?"
"One must survive. I struggle, in my own way, but my path is peace and I abhor violence."
"How safe are we here?"
"One never knows how much information L-5 may have. Certainly we monks, who have only the most grudging toleration of the State, are under constant surveillance. But this place, so far, has been kept secure."
Durell had to be content. He drank the warm, sweet tea, ate a sugared kumquat from a cloisonn6 tray, and listened to Hao talk of recent years and the slow organization of the Lotus apparatus, while the old Chinese woman served them steamed chicken with hua-tiao wine, fried shrimp paste, and then a soup of noodles, hot pastries, bitter-sweet lotus seeds in syrup, and black tea. Now and then the woman said something about Jasmine, asking if she should be fed, too. Durell nodded, and the door was unlocked and a tray taken in. The girl looked furious.
"Am I a prisoner, Sam? What's the matter? I got you on the train, I helped you here, I saved your life !"
"Take it easy, Jasmine," he said sharply. "And speak in Chinese." She had lapsed into English, in her anger.
"I'm sorry. But Hao seems to be on our side "
"Right now, I don't know whose side I'm on, to tell you the truth," Durell said. "My job is to reach Chien Y-Wu,
right? You're supposed to help me. Be patient, then. Hao won't be rushed into anything."
When he closed the door, he locked her in again.
There was a small garden beyond old wooden doors that led from the temple quarters. It was surrounded by brick walls, although noises from the tenements about them provided an overtone of screeching radios, voices, a dinning of gongs. The rain had slackened, and Hao led him into the dusty darkness of the temple. They went down a flight of steps into a cellar that smelled fragrantly of ancient storage of incense and spices. There was another door, and Hao took a flashlight from under his gray robe, switched it on, and sighed with relief. "All is untouched. The L-5 would not have let this remain, if my co-religionist who has vanished had been made to talk."
He showed Durell a radio transmitter and described how the antenna was carefully concealed in the tiled eaves of the roof high above them. "We use a frequency that the L-5 monitors have not scanned as yet."
"They'll find you, sooner or later, with a mobile search team," Durell said.
The monk shrugged. "It will be as Buddha directs. In this life, one walks the path of rightness, as one sees it, but no man can divine the true will of God."
"They'll shoot you as a traitor and close every temple in the country, if you're caught."
"I have a plan for that. I will not be taken alive," the little man said quietly. "Can you use this equipment?" When Durell nodded, Hao said, "Then we will sleep for a time. Go to the girl and calm her. Your suspicions of her may or may not be right, but she must be comforted. At midnight, I will show you the way to the Black House."
In the dark bedroom, warm and glowing in the huge Chinese bed, Jasmine said: "Are you playing a Jack-and-Jill game with Hao about me, Sam?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"Showing him you don't trust me, so maybe he'll say something about me and let you know which way the balance tips for him? You don't trust him, either, do you?"
"Hao seems all right."
"How can you make love to me when you hate me so?"
"I don't hate you, Jasmine."
"You resent McFee sending me along to spy on you."
"It's all part of the business."
She said suddenly, "But it's a rotten business."
"I've been in it a long time."
"Did you ever want to get out—to be like everybody else?" she whispered. "With a home, children, a commuter schedule?"
"Yes."
"With Deirdre Padgett?"
"Yes."
"Did you ever think that they—McFee—will never let you out of the agency?"
"I know they will never dare let me go," Durell said.
"You could always defect, of course," she whispered. "They would always welcome you."
He began to laugh, softly, making the bed shake in the dark room, and Jasmine cupped his face in her hands and bent over him, her body sliding like warm silk over his, her breasts firm and excited by his touch. He laughed quietly, without making much sound, and she asked him what was so funny, but he shook his head and did not answer her question.
After a time, he forced himself to sleep.
Eleven
It took eight days to find a possible way into the Black House. Ike Greentree had given him three weeks before the pigmentation process would begin to wear off. His contact lenses bothered him, too, and at night he had to take them out to prevent eye inflamma-
tion. Now and then he checked the subcutaneous pads of silicone in his cheeks to insure there was no slippage there. He always felt as if he were walking on the edge of a knife.
On the eighth day, he saw Tai Ma, the fat chief of L-5. Durell sat in a small restaurant, drinking Five Goats beer, and looked down the tree-lined street at the walls surrounding the stronghold where General Chien Y-Wu was secluded. He wondered how much time he had left. Chien could have talked his guts out by now, but it was impossible to know.
Durell wore cheap straw sandals and a worker's blue quilted cotton jacket and pants. He had allowed his moustache to grow longer, and his face was thinner where the silicone did not round him out. He looked gaunt and hungry.
It was plain, from the view he had from the restaurant, that Communist China's policy of encouraging visitors from sympathetic countries was up against the ancient prejudices that that had kept the old Middle Kingdom aloof from "barbarians." What few Afro-Asians, Japanese, and occasional Europeans he saw were lost in the sea of bicycles and pedestrian workers sweeping back and forth in their antlike progress through the days. A cool wind flapped the sprouting banners that proclaimed National Day, which would soon be celebrated. There were floats, groups of dancers in bright costumes, cadres of young marchers from Peking University. The clash of music, gongs, shrill singing, chanted slogans, all challenged the cool whip of the wind that fluttered the propaganda banners. Directly across from the restaurant, the building was swathed in a giant painting depicting Chinese youths fighting against monstrous, ogrelike imperialists. Portraits of Chairman Mao grew bigger and brighter each day. Little ceramic busts of China's aging leader were peddled from stands at almost every street corner. The ta tsebaos —"big character news"—were plastered
on every available wall, giving production figures and the names of model workers and students.
The waiter in the restaurant offered a cup of weak
green tea. Durell shook his head, put down a five yuan note, and walked out into the cool wind. Down the tree-lined street the looming wall of the Black House resisted him for the eighth day. He bought a People's Daily and walked past the one gate in the high compound barrier, and it was then that he saw Tai Ma Cho.
The black Zis limousine swept in from the street and almost brushed his leg as it ignored pedestrians and cyclists. Durell jumped back just in time. The great brass-bound gate swung open and he glimpsed a garden, a shell walk, thick shrubbery, and a black-painted wooden palace structure that might have been built in China's Middle Ages. The area covered several city blocks, and the guarded, lighted walls had blocked his every effort to gain entry for the past week.
The fat Tai Ma looked straight ahead as his Zis carried him into the forbidden area. The intelligence chief of L-5 looked grim, even petulant; his jowls sagged and his lower lip was angry. Durell did not think the fat man had seen him.
He went back to the restaurant where he could watch the gate. The waiter, whom he had told he was on sick leave from his factory, brought him tea and rice. He waited an hour, and Tai Ma did not come out. Dusk was falling. The chanting parades and practicing singers went on and on, in preparation for their massed celebrations. When it was altogether dark, and the fat man had not reappeared, he got up and walked back to the apartment behind the temple.
Jasmine looked pale and distant. "No luck?"
"I saw Tai Ma go in, finally. But not out."
"Hao has to make a radio report tonight, and he says he should go back to Wuhan tomorrow." Suddenly the Chinese girl sank to her knees before him. "Sam, don't keep me a prisoner here. Please let me help you!"
"All right," he said.
She looked up with a start. "You'll trust me now? Just tell me what to do. I'll do anything. I sit here day after day while you're out, and I'm sick with fear that someone will spot you and turn you in."
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