by Ross Thomas
“We can be rather persuasive.”
“I can imagine.”
Tung rose and walked over to the window and looked out. He was silent for a time and I thought that he may have been counting the prisoners. With his back still to me, he said, “We’re going to ask your people for thirty million dollars.”
“You’ll never get it,” I said and helped myself to another cigarette.
“That’s our asking price,” he said, turning from the window. “We’ll settle for ten cents on the dollar. A million each for you and your two colleagues.” He lowered himself into his chair again, reached for one of the cigarettes, and this time he did smile. He had good teeth. “But the money’s not really important, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“What we really want is a letter of apology.”
“From whom?”
“From your Secretary of State. The premier was thinking of going directly to the White House, but he was dissuaded.”
“You won’t get anything,” I said.
“You think not?”
“I think not.”
“Well, let’s see what we have to offer,” Tung said and laid his cigarette in the tin tray so that he could count on the fingers of his right hand. “On the surface, we have the dead body of a Chinese spy; two insurance salesmen from here, and their managing director from Hong Kong. Minneapolis Mutual, isn’t it?”
“Minneapolis Mutual,” I said.
“That’s on the surface. Now beneath the surface we have the following interesting documentation.” He was using his fingers to count on again. “One, we have a tape recording of the conversation that took place last night in the hotel between you and your two colleagues, even that part where one of them was reassuring Li Teh that the lie detector wouldn’t hurt a bit. That’s one. I’ll play it for you, if you like.”
“No need,” I said and swore silently at Shoftstall for not checking the hotel room for bugs.
“Two, we have Peking’s file on you, Mr. Dye. Li Teh graciously provided us with a copy. Three, we have your tape recorder and the polygraph machine as exhibits D and E. You and your two colleagues, of course, are exhibits A, B, and C. The Peking dossier on you is, I suppose, exhibit F, which possibly could stand for failure. You did fail, didn’t you?”
“I don’t think I should count on a Christmas bonus this year.”
“Tell me something, Mr. Dye, does your organization, which I’ll call Minneapolis Mutual, if you insist, really put that much faith in the efficacy of the polygraph?”
“It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”
“And yourself, Mr. Dye?”
I shrugged. “It’s company policy.”
“A rather strange company and a rather strange policy.”
“It’s the new management,” I said.
Tung rose, tugged at his earlobe, and said, “I really have no more questions. I think I know as much about you as I need to, and even if I did have some questions, I’m sure that your answers would be totally unresponsive unless we used tactics which are far more primitive than the lie detector, but also more—oh, I suppose fruitful is as good a word as any.”
I got up, too, and helped myself to another cigarette. “Take the tin,” he said. “And here’re some matches.”
“Thanks,” I said. “How about a call to my embassy?”
“You don’t really expect me to say yes?”
“No, but I thought I’d ask.”
“We’ll be in touch with your embassy and also your ‘company.’” I could almost see the quotation marks around company.
“When?”
“Soon.”
The guards came and took me back to my cell. Four days later, despite what I considered to be strict self-rationing, I ran out of cigarettes and didn’t smoke until eighty-five days later when Carmingler bummed a pack for me from the pilot of the C-130 that flew us to San Francisco.
The only visitors that I had during those three months were the guards who brought me my bowls of soggy rice and doubtful fish each day. Once a photographer came to take my picture with an old 4 by 5 Speed Graphic. But that was all. I had nothing to read, nothing to look at, and no one to talk to other than myself.
Since the forty-watt light never went out I didn’t know whether it was day or night. They seemed to feed me at erratic times, but I wasn’t even sure of that. I came to realize that time indeed is relative and what I thought was an entire day could have been an hour and what I was sure was three hours could have been fifteen minutes. None of the time that I spent in that cell went quickly. Some of it just dragged by more slowly than the rest.
So I talked to myself and tried to remember stories and novels that I’d read. I rewrote them aloud. I exercised a lot, mostly push-ups and toe-touching and knee-bends and sit-ups and running in place. I wasn’t trying to keep in shape. I was trying to grow tired enough to sleep. I slept as much as possible and hoped that I would have nightmares. They gave me something new to think about.
When I wasn’t talking aloud or exercising or just sitting there staring at the wall, I searched for lice. My record kill was 126. I counted the dead ones carefully every day and then dumped them into the pail that served as a toilet. The guards emptied it daily, but I was never sure whether they did it in the morning or the evening. For all I knew, they emptied it promptly at midnight.
I didn’t shave or bathe for ninety days. I stunk. I couldn’t smell it myself, but I could tell that I did from the way that the guards wrinkled their noses when they brought me the food. They seldom looked at me and they never spoke. I tried to remember the Count of Monte Cristo and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, whose title I had never fully appreciated until now. I tried to remember what they did to keep themselves busy and entertained and even amused. Apparently, I wasn’t as resourceful as they. The only thing that really amused me was killing lice.
On the ninetieth day the guards took me back up to Tung’s office. He wore tan slacks this time with another white shirt and a black and brown striped tie. He was down to three ball-point pens. He didn’t offer me a cigarette and he didn’t ask me to sit.
“Except for your beard you look well enough, Mr. Dye. A little ripe perhaps, but fit.”
“Thanks.”
“You’ll be released at midnight.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
“What time is it now?”
Tung glanced at his watch. “Four thirty-five, P.M., in case you’re wondering. They do sometimes, you know.”
“I know.”
“Everything has worked out most satisfactorily since I last spoke with you in June.”
“What month is it now?”
“August. August twenty-fourth to be precise.”
“I’ve been here almost three months.”
“Three months exactly. Ninety days.”
“You run a rotten jail.”
“It’s something we picked up from our Colonial friends. You may be interested to learn that it went much the way I predicted it would when we had our first chat. It went better than I predicted, in fact.”
“They paid up.”
“They did indeed, Mr. Dye. Ten cents on the dollar, just as I said they would. Three million dollars in all. The ramifications are even better than that though—far better. But I think I won’t gloat. It’s not at all becoming and I’m sure that your people are most anxious to tell you about it themselves.”
“They probably can’t wait.”
“Well, I suppose that’s all,” Tung said. “A Mr. Carmingler will meet you just outside the prison at midnight. Do you know him?”
“I know him. What about the other two?”
“Oh, you mean Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland? They were released about an hour ago. I regret that they somehow injured themselves, but photographs of their injuries helped convince your people that they should—uh—cooperate. Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland are now both in hospital, I understand. Would you like to know wh
ich one?”
“Not especially.”
Tung nodded as if he understood that perfectly. Perhaps he did. “Well, I’ve enjoyed our two chats, Mr. Dye; I’m only sorry that we didn’t have more of them.”
“I’m surprised that we didn’t.”
“Yes. However, Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland became most cooperative so we saw no need to disturb you, especially since poor Li Teh had provided us with such extensive documentation on your activities as, shall we say, a China watcher. A felicitous phrase, if ever I heard one. Incidentally, Mr. Dye, while you were our—uh—guest the People’s Republic removed the hyphen from Mao Tsetung’s name in all their official dispatches. It’s now one word. Some seem to place an extraordinary amount of significance on this. Do you?”
“Tremendous. Anything else?”
“No. Nothing I can think of. Is there something that you’d care to mention?”
“I’d like my watch back and I still think you run a rotten jail.”
Tung smiled broadly and his teeth were just as nice as they were before. “Yes,” he said, “we do manage that quite well, don’t we?” He didn’t say anything about the watch.
First of all they deloused me. Then I showered for twenty minutes. Following that, I put on a red hospital bathrobe and was shaved, barbered, and stuffed with a four-egg breakfast. After all that I got to sit across the desk from Carmingler, wearing one of my new suits, and watch him use three matches to get his pipe going. He used the wooden kitchen kind that come in cardboard boxes and used to sell for a nickel. They’re probably a dime now. Everything else has gone up.
We sat in the office that Letterman General had assigned him, the one in the sealed-off suite that was painted a depressing tan and contained a gray desk and four matching chairs and whose lone window offered a gloomy view of the rear of the hospital’s kitchen.
“Okay,” I said. “Now that I’m all tidied up and sweet-smelling, you can start.”
“Well, to begin with,” he said, “it wasn’t my idea.”
“Whose was it?”
“Mugar’s.”
“I don’t know any Mugar.”
“He’s new.“
“I’m sure he is,” I said. “What about the lie detector? Whose idea was that? Mugar’s again?”
“They were dead set against Li Teh,” Carmingler said and dragged on his pipe. “It was all I could think of.”
“Then you’re losing your touch. Five years ago you could have thought of a dozen ways, but five years ago you weren’t in love with a polygraph.”
“They wanted to make sure,” he said. “They had to be positive about Li.”
“All of them?”
“Most of them.”
“How many?” I said.
“There were five of us. Me, Mugar, Reo, Werbin, and Pilalas.”
“What side was the Greek on?”
“He was the only one with me. He’d go along, but the other three wouldn’t. They were following Mugar.”
“How old’s Mugar?”
“I don’t know; twenty-eight, twenty-nine.”
“And he’s this year’s new boy,” I said.
“Very new. But he bought the polygraph.”
I sighed and lit another cigarette. My tenth for the morning. “It doesn’t matter now. Li’s dead. I’m blown all over Asia. I just want to know what happened.”
“It was a mess,” Carmingler said. “A real fuck-up.” Carmingler never swore unless he meant it and when he got through describing what had happened, I could see that he did.
“They thought you were CIA, of course,” he said. “That started it.”
I nodded. Then Carmingler told me the rest of it. On the perfectly sound theory that the United States’ left hand seldom knows what its right big toe is doing, the premier of the island city-state republic decided to make two approaches, one to the State Department and one to the CIA who, they mistakenly thought, employed me. It was their Foreign Minister himself who summoned the local U.S. ambassador and then confronted him with extensive documentation that proved beyond doubt that American agents had been fiddling with his country’s affairs. The Foreign Minister demanded a written apology from the U.S. Secretary of State. The U.S. ambassador promptly dispatched copies of the damaging material to Washington where the Secretary of State, new to his job and anxious to please, went through the usual seventh-floor shilly-shallying and then wrote, or had someone write, the letter of apology (an almost unheard of gesture) which promised that the culprits (meaning Shoftstall, Bourland, and me) would be severely disciplined. The Secretary himself was under the impression that we were with CIA. He didn’t bother to check.
It was my former prison host, Mr. Tung, who approached the CIA. He made the approach in Djakarta, Carmingler said, and when he demanded the thirty million dollar ransom, they just laughed at him. They didn’t check with anyone either; they just laughed. It was the wrong thing to do, of course. Mr. Tung merely smiled back and then hurried across the street (or wherever it was) to the local British MI-6 representative and told him all about how the Americans no longer trusted their English colleagues and were running their own agents on what by gentlemen’s agreement, had been considered the private turf of Perfidious Albion. Actually, Carmingler said, the CIA was thinking about it. They just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
“Well, the British got most upset,” he said. “They accused the CIA of double-dealing and God knows what else. The CIA just kept on denying that any of you belonged to them. They had no choice, of course.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said.
“Name it.”
I could think of a number of things, but I let it pass. Having brought the British in and carefully bruised their already tender sensibilities, Tung then leaked the whole story to the press.
“Made headlines everywhere. Every damned place you could think of, and the British got sore all over again.” His pipe had gone out so Carmingler used four matches to light it. He seemed to have forgotten his Phi Beta Kappa key, which I thought was just as well. “So all CIA could do was to deny again that you were one of them. They didn’t know about the Secretary’s letter. State hadn’t bothered to tell them about that. Then the premier himself called a press conference, distributed Xeroxed copies of the letter, and made a feisty little speech that lasted an hour all about how the United States was trying to dominate Asia through a program of subversion and what have you. He even hinted that he might play those tapes for the press—you know, the ones that they got in your hotel room.”
“Did he?”
“No. But he said—and he was lying, of course—that we had offered him thirty million dollars in foreign aid to release the three of you, and he said that he had evidence to prove it. Well, he did have that fool letter of apology from the Secretary. That was real enough. The British were still fuming and leaking stuff all over the place, so the press went along. Can’t say I blame them really. More headlines, and God, the editorials. The New York Times called it a ‘tragedy of errors.’ The Washington Post said it was ‘inane chicanery.’ And the New York Daily News wanted somebody ‘horsewhipped.’ So the word came down from the White House. Buy them out no matter how much.”
“How much was it?” I said.
Carmingler gave me his need to know look. “Oh, they still asked for thirty million, but it was less than that. Much, much less.”
“Ten cents on the dollar,” I said. “Three million.”
Carmingler glared at me suspiciously. “Only six persons in the country are supposed to know that.”
“Now you can make it seven.”
“Who told you?”
“A wily Oriental.”
The deep flush started at the top of Carmingler’s faultless collar and rose slowly until it reached his temples. It made him look like a traffic light that would never say go again. He sucked away on his pipe and fooled with his Phi Beta Kappa key at the same time, a sure sign that he was upset.
“I assume,” he
said, spitting the words at me from around his pipe, “that the wily Oriental also told you why you were kept in solitary.”
I shrugged. “Standard procedure, I suppose.”
“You suppose wrong. Has it occurred to you that we could debrief you in Hong Kong just as well as we could in San Francisco? After all, Hong Kong’s been your home for the past ten years. You probably have more friends there than you do in the States.”
“It crossed my mind,” I said, “and since it might make you feel better, I’ll ask why—about both the solitary and being hustled back to the States, although I don’t mind that. I left nothing in Hong Kong except some cheap suits in my hotel and some equally cheap books. My car was leased and my bank account wasn’t over two hundred dollars.”
“You were paid enough.”
“I’m a spendthrift.”
The flush in Carmingler’s face had receded. He put his pipe carefully into the ashtray and placed the palms of his hands flat on the table. His elbows jutted out as he leaned toward me. He looked something like a middle-aged turkey who thought he would try to fly just one more time.
“They kept you in solitary and we brought you back here because Li Teh’s people have put a price on your head.” He enjoyed saying that.
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“How much, goddamn it?”
He smiled. “Five thousand dollars. American. At that price you wouldn’t live two hours in Hong Kong.”
“And here?”
“It doesn’t matter here.”
I nodded. “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”
“Where’s that from?”
“From China,” I said. “From Chairman Mao.”
CHAPTER 8
Until I was a little more than eight years old I went to school each afternoon for three hours following lunch. My teachers were prostitutes. I would have liked to have gone to school in the morning, but the ladies were never up.
I learned simple arithmetic (they were all good at that), French, Russian, German, and English—speaking the last, I was told, with a pronounced Australian accent. I also learned a highly garbled version of world history, spiced with tales of high romance and shattered dreams during the impossibly good old days in Berlin, Sydney, Canton, Rome, Marseilles, St. Petersburg, and San Diego. My Chinese also improved, but by the time I was eight I still couldn’t read or write my name in any language.