by Anthony Grey
She didn’t reply. The relaxed curve of her slender body in the chair, the wide slow-blinking eyes in a broad high cheek-boned face gave her, he thought, the air of a sleek, watchful cat.
‘You’re going to tell me the Russians are running Yang, are you?’ Scholefield emptied the glass and put it down on the floor with unnecessary care.
‘He was landed at Blakeney on the North Norfolk coast two weeks ago in an inflatable dingy towed ashore from a Russian fishing trawler by two KGB frogmen. Even the CIA know
‘Who are you?’ Scholefield got to his feet again and walked over to her chair.
She tucked an imaginary strand of hair back away behind her ear. ‘My name is Tan Sui-ling. I have come from Peking.’
He bent over suddenly and leaned both hands on the arms of the chair, trapping her in the seat. His breath came out between his clenched teeth in a sudden, sibilant hiss. ‘So it was you who organised the bomb at the World Affairs Institute last night— to silence the Russian imposter!’ He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her bodily in the seat. ‘Two innocent people died in that explosion—’ His voice trailed off suddenly and he stared into her face.
She offered no resistance but waited passively in his grip watching his face patiently until the rage subsided. ‘No Chinese were involved in that incident,’ she said quietly. ‘It was the work of the Russians. Now that he has planted his poisonous propaganda they want him eliminated.’
She winced as the pressure of his grip on both arms suddenly tightened. Then he flung her back in the seat and stepped away. ‘And having failed to blow Yang to pieces your Russians snatched him from the hospital during the night with the help of a gang of Triad hoodlums, I suppose?’
She rose suddenly to her feet, her eyes blazing in turn. ‘Again you are wrong. Your CIA “friend” Ketterman masterminded that treachery. The Americans have got Yang now.’
He stared at her incredulously. ‘Why should Ketterman and the Americans want Yang if they know he’s a fraud?’
Instead of replying she walked straight-backed to where she had left a bamboo-handled handbag on the floor by the chair and bent to pick it up. When she turned round again she was holding the bag in front of her in her right hand. ‘Lin Piao did have an aide by the name of Yang Tsai—chien. But his was one of the bodies positively identified by the Comrades from Peking who visited the scene of the air crash in Mongolia. It was indisputable—they checked’ his fingerprints. This man posing as “Yang” was brought here from the Soviet Union!’
‘The fact that Yang was brought here from Moscow doesn’t prove by itself that he’s a fake.’ Scholefield sank down on the corner of his desk and nursed his injured arm with the other hand. ‘The dead remnants and the wreckage of that air disaster in Mongolia finished up in Moscow—why shouldn’t a living survivor?’
She gave a snort of derision. ‘Why have they waited five years then to produce him, if he is genuine?’
‘Perhaps they were waiting for the moment when they could use him to best advantage. Large parts of the folios seem to me to have a ring of truth, despite some decorative lies to disguise the fact that the Soviets found him in Mongolia, not your comrades. And the report of the dead air accident investigator, Still- man, is standing up to analysis so far by British experts.’
She made another contemptuous noise and moved towards him again. ‘The KGB are expert forgers. They have gone to great pains. The folios and the accident report were designed to stand up to close analysis.’
He looked at her without speaking for several seconds. The only sound in the room was the intermittent buzzing of a dying fly against the window pane. There was a distant hum of traffic from the street far below, but it was muffled and muted as though stifled, like everything else, by the oppressive weight of that unnatural summer heat. She had dropped her eyes and was idly toying with the jade figure of the mandarin on the side of the desk. The silence lengthened.
“A negative example of class exploitation created for China’s ancient rulers by the sweated labour of a working class artisan.”’
She looked up at him frowning, still holding the green jade figure.
‘That’s what Yang called it.’
She stared at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Yang was moved to handle it too when he was here—that’s how he described it.’ Scholefield nodded towards the figurine.
She put it down suddenly as though it had become red hot. Jade should be touched. It is for handling, not simply admiring with the eyes.’
‘That sounds dangerously like an expression of bourgeois sentiment. It wouldn’t come under the heading of socialist realism in your art appreciation.’ Scholefield broke off suddenly and stood up. He stared into the shadows on the far side of the room, then picked up the desk lamp and hurried across the study. He leaned towards the scroll painting of the Ming concubines, and peered at the verses inscribed in Chinese calligraphy by the artist above his signature in the top right hand corner of the picture.
Tan Sui-ling saw him stiffen and lean closer to inspect the vertical column of script. After several seconds he turned to face her, still holding the lamp above his head.
‘Your “Comrade Yang” also had more than a trace of bourgeois sensibility in his love of traditional Chinese art, didn’t he?’ Scholefield nodded towards the painting behind him. ‘He admired this Ming painting as well as the jade-and to my considerable disappointment informed me it was a nineteenth century Chi’ng dynasty “reproduction” in the Ming style. I bought it in Peking thinking it was genuine Ming.’ He watched her begin frowning in irritation. ‘But one of the last things he said to me at the Soho cinema was a reference to this painting.’
Suddenly she was listening intently, her head cocked slightly to one side in concentration.
‘He said the artists signature gave it away.’ He paused, watching her reaction carefully. ‘Now a second signature has been added with a felt tipped pen since I last looked at it.’
She made as if to go to inspect the painting herself but Scholefield lowered the lamp quickly and walked back to replace it on his desk, leaving the wall in deep shadow once more. ‘It was your picking up the jade figure that made me remember. Does the name Li Tai-chu mean anything to you?’
The only sign of reaction to his question was a slight tightening of her knuckles on the bamboo handle of her bag. Before she spoke he noticed she exhaled slowly as though she had previously been holding her breath. ‘The name means absolutely nothing to me. Nothing at all’
She took a sudden quick step towards him. ‘Mr. Scholefield, I have yet to reveal the main purpose of my visit.’ She hesitated for a moment, then hurried on speaking with a new intensity. ‘Chairman Mao Tse-tung is an old man. His health is ailing now, but he is still in touch with day to day events. He has been told of the Russian plot to plant false evidence about China in the minds of the world outside. He knows even that you were chosen tube the focus of this plot by the Kremlin.’
Scholefield sat straighter suddenly on the desk. She had opened the bamboo-handled bag and was fumbling inside it. When she withdrew her hand it held a long white envelope sealed in several places with red sealing wax. ‘For several days he has been asking for all intelligence reports to be submitted to him. He has taken a detailed interest. Now, in view of the vicious nature of the Soviet plot, he has decided to intervene personally.’ She held the sealed envelope towards Scholefield. He looked at it with suspicion for a moment then smiled sarcastically. ‘A personally written folio by Chairman Mao himself; is it? Giving his version. of events?’
Her watchful, cat-like eyes gazed back at him unblinking. ‘It is not a joke, Mr. Scholefield. And it is more than an explanation.’
There was a long silence in the room broken only by the sound of the fly buzzing drowsily on the windowpane in its final death throes.
‘Open the letter. You will see then it is genuine.’ Again she held it towards him.
He took it but had difficulty breaking the
seals. In the end he had to slit two sides of the envelope to extract the single sheet of thick cartridge paper inside. He held it under the desk lamp to study the scrawl of Chinese calligraphy that spread erratically across the page. His name and ‘24 July 1976’ were typed in English in the top right-hand corner. At the foot of the page a large red circular seal embracing China’s national symbol of five stars above the Gate of Heavenly Peace was impressed in the paper, surmounted by a ring of characters that spelled out Office of the Chairman of the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic’.
He leaned close over the paper, his body suddenly alert, his eyes intent on the inscription. Eight vertical lines of four characters had been scribbled seemingly in haste beside the almost illegible three-character signature. With difficulty Scholefield traced each scrawled ideogram with his finger, his lips moving as he went. Then he took a pencil from a jar on the desk top and began jotting down a translation of the inscription on the blotter. When he’d finished, he sat back and re-read what he’d written. It said:
Amid the frowning shades of dusk
Riotous clouds are racing, swift and terrible
The hostile northern bear clambers foolishly upward to his doom.
Let us now ensure his fall from perilous peaks!
He picked up the blotter and stared at the words in silence.
‘Does the distinctive hand and style convince you now of the authenticity of this personal message?’
At the sound of her voice he looked round sharply, almost as if he’d forgotten she was there.
‘If this is another hoax it’s commendably elaborate.’ He shrugged wearily and dropped the blotter back on the desk. ‘Those few lines have all the right ingredients: Mao’s poetic hatred of the Russian “bear”, his reputation for eccentric calligraphy—it even looks like the writing of a tired old man.’
She gesticulated impatiently towards the note once more. ‘Read the back.’
He picked it up and turned it over. On the reverse side the same almost illegible signature and the imposing red seal had again been appended under a block of characters imprinted by a Chinese typewriter. They said: ‘Give assistance and safe passage. The bearer, Richard Scholefield, is invited to Chung Nan Hai to talk with Chairman Mao Tse-tung.’
He was still staring at the message, reading and re-reading it, when he heard the click of the outside door. He looked up then and found the room empty.
SINGAPORE. Saturday—As the imaginative solutions offered to the current Chinese puzzle become more mystifying than the puzzle itself; the time may have come not to answer questions but to question answers.
The Observer, 20 November T7I
17
Harvey Ketterman swung the long nose of his red Chevrolet Malibu sharply to the north at the junction of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue and, because tension was beginning to tighten his reflexes, accelerated too fiercely up the bill towards the heart of Georgetown. A sharp summer shower was giving way to bright evening sunshine again and the tyres of the car skittered dangerously across the impractical cobblestones that Washington’s history-hungry citizens had never been able to bring themselves to tear up from between the iron streetcar tracks.
The tourists thronging the old tobacco port’s boutiques and bistro restaurants, under heavy garlands of red, white and blue bicentennial bunting, glanced indifferently at the skidding car for a moment, then resumed their cow-like window gazing. Other sober-suited escapees from the vast administrative bunkers along the capital’s main avenues mouthed silent obscenities at him from behind their tightly closed windows and pressed on their accelerators with almost as much impatience as they neared the end of the long north-west haul up Pennsylvania to their bijou hilltop dormitory. Ketterman ignored them and eased across to the inside lane as the bow-fronted windows of the Georgetown Inn came in sight.
The moment he swung the Malibu in under the arch, a doorman, top-batted and livened in deference to bygone days of carriages and horse-drawn streetcars, hurried over to park it for him. Ketterman passed him a dollar bill and strode quickly through the tiny lobby into the hotel’s dimly-lit modem American drinking lounge. He made straight for the grand piano which doubled as a coy little leather-rimmed musical bar in the centre of the room. Razduhev was sitting on one of the swivel stools placed round it, his -elbows on the piano, apparently lost in the rapture of the syncopated selections from ‘The Sound of Music.’ He opened his eyes as Ketterman approached and lifted a small glass of clear liquid slowly to his lips. He offered no greeting as the American eased into the swivel seat beside him.
For a moment the two men looked, at each other without speaking. Then Ketterman suddenly grinned broadly and gripped .Razduhev’s forearm in a genial gesture. ‘You know Yuri, if I ever have the offer of reincarnation in the after-life I’m going to grab it and come back as a KGB “overseas”.’ He glanced over his shoulder into the gloom. The faint glow from the pink candles in the over-large crystal chandelier above the piano-gave insufficient light to identify anybody but an immediate neighbour. But he had chosen the bar because he knew the pianist’s roundly struck chords would preclude them from being overheard at least, and he turned back to the Russian, still grinning. ‘You wouldn’t change places with a member of the Kremlin politburo would you? Chief of Mission in London, all your kids’ schooling paid for at home, a dacha at the beach outside Moscow, expensive Persian rugs on the floor of your apartment overlooking Hyde Park, all expenses paid to the best hotels of your choice in the Western world.’ He punched the Russian lightly on the arm. Then turned to signal to a passing waiter who came immediately. ‘Two vodkas. Polish, not Russian. Large ones please.’ He turned back again to Razduhev, still grinning. ‘Never touch Russian vodka, Yuri. You n-might poison a year’s supply just to get me, huh?’ He laughed uproariously at his own joke then leaned away to speak to the piano player.
As the drinks arrived the pianist wound up The Sound of Music with a flourish and went straight into a lachrymose rendering of Midnight in Moscow. Ketterman smiled Broadly at Razduhev and lifted his glass.
Razduhev left the new drink untouched. ‘Washington is like an elephant’s asshole,’ he said in wooden English. ‘Very big and very unattractive.’
Ketterman nodded appreciatively. ‘Only in Washington twenty-four hours, Yuri, and already making with the wisecracks. That’s good. You’ll tell me next you’ve proof that Rock Creek Park isn’t a South Korean intelligence agent.’
‘I didn’t come here to swap wisecracks.’
‘I know Yuri, I know. You want Comrade Yang back—and you’re gonna have him, yes sir.’ He broke off and looked at his watch. ‘I can’t get him to you here this minute, you understand, Yuri, but if you’ll give me an hour I’ll try to have something for you. . . .‘ He looked up with an eager, boyish grin on his face. ‘Will you do that for me, Yuri? Give me an hour?’ Ketterman smiled broadly again but Razduhev continued to stare at him stony-faced.
‘Could you be at the intersection between 34th and P Street in an hour, Yuri, do you think? It’s here in Georgetown, you can walk. It’s just a few blocks northwest of here. I’ll meet you on the corner myself; okay?’ He stood up, dropped two bills on the tray of the waiter as he passed and told him to give the piano player a drink. Then he turned back, still grinning, punched Razduhev on the upper arm again and hurried out.
At the hotel entrance Ketterman hung back until he was sure the doorman who had parked his car wouldn’t notice him leave, then hurried through the arch onto Wisconsin Avenue. He turned north and walked quickly towards the junction with P Street. As he turned west at the intersection he took a guide book from his pocket and, carrying it ostentatiously in his hand, began sauntering slowly along the narrow pavement under the trees looking about him as if admiring the elegant frontages of the town-houses decked with their clusters of bicentennial flags. The unshuttered windows revealed glimpses of brass-stemmed lamps, heavy colonial furnishings, potted rubber plants, gilded mirrors. Cocktail-hou
r drinks were being downed in some of the houses by little knots of neatly dressed men and women. From time to time Ketterman stopped and bent close to peer at the wrought-iron work on gates or railings, turning his head surreptitiously as he did so to look back along the street.
As he approached the junction of P Street and 34th, he stopped and gazed up at a white colonial Georgian villa with black shutters, standing back from the street on high, sloping lawns. Black metal fire-escapes ran down the side of the building from dormer windows in the curved mansard roof and ugly air- conditioning boxes jutted from several of the finely—proportioned windows. On the front steps under a white portico an old rusting bicycle was chained incongruously to the hand railings. Ketterman put the guide book in his pocket and began whistling loudly, as he gazed up at the house, as though appraising its architectural features. Then he turned and set off westward again at a brisk pace.
A hundred yards further along the street he turned abruptly and walked back, stopping once snore opposite the three storeyed villa. The rusty bicycle had now disappeared from the front porch and when he saw this, Ketterman crossed the street and ran lightly up the front steps. The door opened from inside as he reached the top and the black man who had driven the taxi in London closed it quietly behind him. He was no longer wearing the tartan cap or his dark glasses.
Together they went into a small room off the front lobby and peered at a bank of closed-circuit television screens. All of them from different angles showed the junction of the tree-lined streets outside. Ketterman bent over a console and twiddled a knob which panned the cameras individually inside the fake air—conditioning boxes on the outside of the windows. He studied all the screens showing the four approaches to the house in turn but, with the exception of an occasional car passing, the crossing remained empty. Ketterman nodded his approval to the black man and they walked quickly out into the vestibule and entered an elevator that had been tastefully concealed behind a broad, panelled door, opened by a porcelain door handle decorated with roses. When he stepped out on the top floor, a white-coated doctor was waiting for him.