‘Go on,’ urged Robertson, when Snow did not continue after several moments.
It was still some further time before Snow could speak and then, initially, the words were badly chosen and disjointed, sentences half finished, the worst parts of all delivered scarcely beyond a whisper.
But Snow told it all, in every detail. He fought against the wheezing breathlessness to force himself to talk and had a greater, choking struggle to keep Father Robertson listening in the linked cubicle. The older priest positively tried to stop the admission, of everything, protesting he would hear no more and scuffling to his feet, so that Snow had to break the ritual – as Father Robertson was breaking the ritual – and insist, over and over again, his mouth tight against the grille, that Father Robertson’s vows made it impossible for the man to refuse to let him finish.
‘Men have confessed to murder in a confessional and been heard!’
‘Continue.’ Father Robertson’s voice was strained tight, as if he were having as much difficulty to speak as the younger priest.
Snow talked on, but Father Robertson heard the last few minutes in such utter silence that Snow thought at one stage that the man had slipped out anyway. Then, almost imperceptibly, he detected the faintest sound: short, sharp intakes of breath, a man gasping.
The continuing silence, when Snow finished, was absolute. Snow waited a very long time before speaking further. ‘I seek absolution.’
‘No! This is a travesty! Obscene!’
‘I demand absolution.’
‘Absolution is for the repentant. Are you repentant?’
He wasn’t, not at all, Snow accepted: what he’d done was right. What he was doing now was a sin greater than any he had committed outside this dust-swirled box. For this he would be damned. ‘I am repentant.’
‘I will not give you absolution!’
It didn’t matter, accepted Snow, sadly. The old man had been right. What he had done that morning was a travesty and it was obscene, and the point had not been to seek forgiveness. This moment, Snow supposed, marked his failure as a priest. But what about as a Jesuit, a Soldier of Christ? He didn’t think he had the intellect or the theological philosophy to answer that question. That was a question to be put to other priests and other judges far away from Beijing, before whom he accepted he would have to place himself.
He heard the swish of the curtain pulled back in the other stall and smelled the dust driven through the lattice. He followed more slowly, so that Father Robertson was already some way across the nave when Snow emerged. Snow followed, more slowly: only when he neared the end of the walkway connecting the church to their living quarters, coming close to the room in which Father Robertson normally worked, did Snow become concerned that the older man might have gone out into the city.
He hadn’t.
Father Robertson was at his desk, bent slightly forward as he had when he was ill, and tremors were vibrating through him as they had then. Snow’s renewed concern was that the mission chief was suffering another collapse. He remained uncertainly at the door. Finally Father Robertson straightened, looking up at him. The man’s eyes were wet and red-rimmed, like the eyes of a person who had been crying.
‘Do you know what you have done?’
‘What is talked about in the confessional is sacrosanct.’ Snow wanted Father Robertson to know and to think about it, but never to talk about it. Which he couldn’t.
‘You dare lecture me on ritual!’
‘I did not wish – do not wish – to endanger the mission.’
‘You have! You know you have! This Englishman who’s been arrested! He’s all part of it, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t know. I think so.’
A shudder worse than the others went through the old man. ‘Lost. Everything could be lost.’
‘I was told to get out,’ disclosed Snow.
The rheumy eyes came up to him. ‘When?’
‘Soon after Li began taking an interest.’
‘Does he have something incriminating to put against you?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Does he?’ Father Robertson’s voice creaked, so it didn’t come out as the intended shout of anger.
‘Yes.’
‘Terrible. This is absolutely terrible.’
‘I could not have left without permission from the Curia, in Rome.’
Father Robertson looked directly at him again, one hand gripping the other, physically clutching himself for control. ‘That is true,’ he agreed, but doubtfully, more curiosity than anger in his voice.
Snow hesitated. ‘In exceptional circumstances, a head of mission in our Order could grant such dispensation.’
Father Robertson became suddenly and completely still, all the shaking gone, face suffused in livid outrage. ‘You bastard! You absolute and utter bastard!’
Snow hadn’t imagined such an outburst – he hadn’t imagined anything – but he accepted at once that it was true, that he was a bastard. He was surprised Father Robertson was so quickly realizing, in its entirety, what he had done. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re not! There’s no contrition: that’s why I wouldn’t grant you absolution …’ The old man stopped, mouth slightly apart at a further awareness. ‘You weren’t even seeking absolution, were you?’ He paused, momentarily beyond speech. ‘I’ll inform the Curia! See to it that you are dismissed the Order you are disgracing.’
‘What is talked about in the confessional is sacrosanct,’ repeated Snow, quietly.
Father Robertson’s mouth gaped fully, in complete comprehension. ‘You’ve actually abused it, to save yourself! Knowing I can’t bring any complaint against you because of how I learned what you’ve done: what you are! You are beyond belief …’ The priest twisted his own word. ‘You can’t believe, to behave like this!’
‘I am prepared to face the judgement of our superiors. To explain myself, my way. Not have a case presented for me: against me.’ Snow was hating the confrontation: hating himself. Despising what he’d done and how he’d done it, unable to find any vindication, any excuse. A man was suffering unspeakable horrors because of him: the Jesuit mission in Beijing was endangered because of him. And all he could think of doing was to run away, like a coward. But wasn’t that the mitigating factor, the only thing he could do? Without him there would be no corroborated case against the arrested Englishman. Who would have to be released, eventually. And just as the man’s safety depended upon his getting out of the country, so did the continuing existence of Father Robertson’s precious mission. So he was not acting cowardly – he was not ceasing to be a Soldier of Christ- by running. It was an act to save others first, himself very much last.
‘Get out!’ rejected Father Robertson. ‘Out of Beijing as soon as possible! Go to Rome. You need help: a great deal of help. You’re surely going to strain God’s compassion.’
‘You will inform the Curia of my permission to travel?’
‘Go!’ repeated Father Robertson, exasperated.
‘Li is demanding something: some photographs. I do not believe I will be allowed to leave until I pass them over.’
Father Robertson shook his head, a man pummelled with too much, too quickly. ‘Give them to him!’
‘I do not have them, not yet.’
The elderly man shook his head, wearily. ‘I do not understand. Do not want to understand. All I want is for you to go. Please go.’
‘As soon as I find a way,’ promised Snow. But who was there to show him?
‘So he is a spy?’ demanded Patrick Plowright.
‘He came to clear up some sort of mess, after that bloody man Foster. I’ve no idea what,’ confirmed Samuels. The feet of the diminutive embassy lawyer sitting opposite only touched the floor when the man stretched his toes, to make contact. Samuels tried to avoid obviously looking at them.
‘Still nothing on access?’
The political officer shook his head. ‘The ambassador has delivered three Notes, so far. The same number have been give
n to their ambassador in London.’
‘What’s the next step?’
Samuels looked uncomfortable. ‘Someone else is coming in.’
‘What!’
‘I know. It’s appalling, isn’t it?’
‘When’s he arrive?’
Samuels shrugged, realizing he was looking at the tiptoe difficulty of the other man and hurriedly averting his eyes. ‘He wasn’t on the plane we’d been told to expect. We’ve asked London what’s happened.’
‘Surely there’s something else we can do about Gower! Something practical?’
‘As a gesture of protest, Sir Timothy could be recalled to London. But that would blow up badly in our faces if the Chinese proved espionage.’
‘Which still has to be denied?’
‘Emphatically.’
‘It’s ridiculous!’
‘Of course it is. Sir Timothy is privately making the strongest protest imaginable to London.’
‘I thought all this spying nonsense was a thing of the past.’
‘I only wish it had been.’
‘What’s this new person going to do?’
‘God only knows.’
Charlie believed he’d moved around like a blue-assed fly, although making less noise. And achieved some early, possibly useful impressions.
He was pleased with the Hsin Chiao, a hotel reserved for Western tourists among whom he could merge and become lost. The reception desk wouldn’t let him have their only street map, so he had to memorize the position of the British embassy, which was marked, against the district containing the mission, which wasn’t. He studied a separate map, listing in English the numbers and routes of the buses, which looked comparatively convenient but which he guessed wouldn’t be. They weren’t. It meant a lot of walking.
Charlie went close enough to the embassy on Guang Hua Lu to fix it in his mind but not close enough for him to become identified with it. He didn’t try directly to approach the mission, either. Instead he circled where he knew it to be, always keeping a street distance away, until he found the logical main road leading away from it. There was a convenient park, where he remained for an hour, and a stall market in front of several shops, where he immersed himself for slightly longer. He identified two cars that made more than one journey up and down. One stopped within sight of Charlie, so he was able to see the two men who got out. And then he recognized Father Robertson from the photographs he’d studied in London. The priest strode from the direction of the mission remarkably quickly for a man of his age, and with purpose, as if he were keeping an appointment. Charlie was still in the final shop, supposedly looking at bolts of silk, when he saw Father Robertson returning. It was automatic for Charlie to check the timing: the mission chief had been away an hour. Seeing Father Robertson was a plus he hadn’t expected: it was too much to hope that Father Snow might use the approach road. Charlie still lingered, but the younger priest didn’t appear. Charlie wouldn’t have approached him, if he had.
Charlie had to walk much further than he anticipated, to get to the bus-stop. And then had to stand for almost forty-five minutes, because the first bus was filled. By the time he got back to the hotel his feet were on fire. It was just his shitty luck, he thought, to be in the land of The Long March.
Forty-three
With convoluted but personally adjusted logic, Charlie decided early the next day that what he had to do was comparatively simple because it was so difficult. Impossible, in fact, without unacceptable risks. And Charlie Muffin never took unacceptable risks.
Had Gower? There could be a logic to that, too: an over-ambitious officer on his first foreign assignment, taking too few precautions in an eagerness to prove himself. Charlie wouldn’t have thought Gower would do that. But the further, unarguable logic was that John Gower had done something wrong. And was now in jail because of it. Not just Gower’s failure, Charlie corrected. He himself surely had to share in whatever had happened? He’d been the graduation teacher, the supposed expert: Mr Never-Been-Caught, according to Patricia Elder’s well deserved sneer. So why had Gower – his apprentice, according to another sneer – been caught? Maybe easier here to come some way towards an understanding, by examining more inconsistencies. He’d certainly tried to teach Gower never to take unacceptable risks, and he’d preached about over-eagerness, but what else had there been that was applicable here? Bugger-all, decided Charlie, never to know how close his reflections were now to those of John Gower, so very recently. What benefit was learning about vehicle evasion in a city of bicycles? Bugger-all, he thought again. What could a Caucasian do to watch – or to avoid being watched – in a country of such different physiognomy? Once more, bugger-all.
Gower had come to him green and left him green, to come here. It didn’t make operational sense. What did then?
The impossibility of working safely outside the embassy, he recognized, reluctantly conceding that the iron-drawered deputy Director-General had been right. That morning he’d gone back to the main approach road, near the silk shop, and seen the rare and therefore recognizable cars repeat their up-and-down journeys of the previous day. Once more the second vehicle had discharged two men, and one had carried the same brown briefcase and the tightly furled umbrella of yesterday.
If he couldn’t approach Snow, then Snow had to approach him. But how? And where?
Charlie had the mission telephone number and could have dialled from an untraceable outside kiosk or stand, but the intercept would be on the mission line. And Snow anyway would have been followed to any outside rendezvous. So how … Charlie stopped, his mind snagging but unable to recognize upon what. Something else that didn’t make sense. Why? he demanded of himself. Why, trying to work out how to make contact with a sealed off priest in a much watched Jesuit mission, had his train of thought suddenly been derailed by something he couldn’t identify? He ran the reflection he had been having back and forth but still nothing came. It had to remain another question without a proper answer.
So how and where? The second query was easy. It had to be in the unapproachable security of the embassy. But how to get the priest there?
They wouldn’t like it, Charlie knew, when the idea came to him. The man would probably refuse and be quite entitled to do so, and if he did Charlie had no better suggestion at that time. But it was the best he could come up with at the moment and it was a relief to think of something that had a chance of working. It was his partially simple way out of the initially difficult situation. But still with a long way to go. Like how to get a followed and watched suspect priest out of a watched British embassy and on to a plane away from the country, without detection or interception.
One problem at a time, decided Charlie: until he won friends and influenced people he hadn’t solved the first one yet.
The receptionist at the embassy looked up enquiringly when Charlie reached her desk in the vestibule.
‘I think some people are expecting me,’ he said, smiling to ingratiate himself. He usually tried at the beginning.
It wasn’t dysentery but it was bad enough, and instead of throwing most of the water away Gower used it to keep himself as clean as possible. He tried to cleanse his hands as best he could, too. He was still managing to restrict himself to the four sips of water at a time, hovering on the brink of dehydration, and his lips had begun to crack, widening into painful sores risking further infection through their being open. He hadn’t eaten the food.
He hadn’t been taken for any further interrogation, and without being able to count whether it was night or day, from seeing sunlight or darkness, he had completely lost track of time. He guessed he had been in custody for more than a week – it certainly couldn’t have been any less – but it could have easily been longer, nearer two. He was expecting another questioning session soon: the constant noise had erupted again, as well as the perpetual rattle of peep-hole surveys to which he performed. Gower believed he had restored a lot of his sleep bank, and even though the noise had been resumed he still
found it possible to close much of it out, suspending himself into something approaching rest.
It was night when he was taken from his cell again. Gower had tried to exercise, in between door-hole inspections, but out of the restricted cell he had great difficulty walking properly. It seemed impossible for him to retain a straight line, wavering from side to side and twice colliding with the escorting soldiers. It was hard for him to lift his feet, as well; he tried at first but then relapsed back to shuffling, hoping it would help maintain a better direction, but it didn’t.
‘It’s all over!’ announced Chen. He was smiling, triumphant.
Nothing to which he should respond, Gower told himself. Keep everything to the minimum.
‘We’ve arrested him!’
‘Him’, isolated Gower: no longer the mistake of ‘them’. So it could be Snow, picked up at the shrine. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He lisped because of the cracks in his lips.
‘Just a few hours ago. And already he’s confessed. Admitted everything. Hardly worth protecting, was he? You’ve lost.’
Still no response. Worryingly, Gower was hearing the Chinese oddly, the words loud and then receding, although the man was remaining in the same position directly in front of him.
Chen nodded to the waiting note-takers at the side of the room. ‘They’re waiting.’
Something to which he could reply. ‘What for?’
‘Your denials are ridiculous!’
‘Nothing to deny.’
‘Exactly! It’s all written down, elsewhere.’
‘Not guilty of anything.’
‘You’ll be treated better when you confess: give up this nonsense. Be allowed to bathe. Eat better food.’
‘I want contact with my embassy.’
‘They’ve been told.’
Momentarily the reply off-balanced Gower. ‘Why haven’t I seen anybody?’
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