Charlie’s Apprentice

Twenty-six

Ian Nicholson was an anxiously friendly Scot who, in his eagerness to ingratiate, rarely properly finished a sentence or waited for a reply before beginning another sentence. Gower appreciated the attitude if not the onesided exchanges after the other encounters he’d so far had in Beijing. The housing officer asked twice, phrasing the same query differently both times, if the accommodation was satisfactory. He was bustling on about the purchasing facilities at the embassy commissary (‘everything you’re likely to need, not just food: difficult to shop locally here’) before Gower gave the assurance that his living quarters were more than adequate. On their way to the commissary to stock Gower’s refrigerator Nicholson insisted it was necessary to become a temporary member of the embassy social club (‘sorry the social life here is so restricted: we do get together with other Western embassy people, of course’) and in the same sentence invited Gower to eat with him and his wife (‘whenever you like: just say’). The diplomat warned of the risk of money-changers in the street (‘happens all the time. Don’t deal, whatever you do: the police are damned strict about it and the ambassador doesn’t want any trouble’) and echoed Samuels’ warning about getting lost in the city. Gower was told to register with the embassy doctor (‘name’s Pickering: bark’s worse than his bite’) and advised against initially eating out in restaurants and even then not unless they were recommended by other embassy staff (‘best to let your stomach become acclimatized in the beginning: wonderful when you get used to it but it isn’t your average Golden Palace in the High Street’).

By the time of the conducted tour of the embassy (‘important to get the layout in your mind as quickly as possible, I always think’) Gower had virtually given up trying to make it a two-way conversation.

There were five introductions to other embassy people – four men and a woman – during the tour. Each was as friendly as Nicholson. Gower wondered if they would have been if they had known his true purpose for being in Beijing.

Nicholson tried to press the luncheon invitation in the embassy mess (‘everyone will be there: good time to get to know people’) but Gower declined, pleading continuing tiredness after the flight, which to an extent was true: he’d awoken while it was still dark, unbalanced by jetlag.

He was eager to get out into the city although not, so soon, to start work. He realized that had it not been for those final training sessions he almost surely would have tried to begin at once. But then, until those final sessions, he hadn’t known any better. Now he did. So instead, trying to put into active practice the survival instructions that were supposed to be instinctive, Gower decided that impatient though he was – impatient though the Beijing ambassador and the deputy Director-General in London were – the proper professional action was to orientate himself before even considering anything else.

Although there was to be no encounter beyond the protection of the embassy, he had to venture outside to get the priest to come to him. So he had minimally to know his way around: find the message drops and the signal spot. With his mind on the proper sequence, Gower picked out on the supplied map those designated places, all already memorized in London, recognizing from the plan before him that most were grouped conveniently close around the obvious landmarks, the places where Western visitors would naturally go.

The drops were concentrated around the Forbidden City, with its available labyrinth of alleys and passage-ways, and the tree-shrouded Coal Hill. He could survey them all by going to Tiananmen Square, the site of Mao’s tomb and fronted by the Great Hall of the People: where, in fact, any first-time visitor would go.

He put the map in his pocket and set out forcefully across the embassy courtyard, but recalled at once another warning and slowed to a more sensible pace to prevent the thrusting determination attracting the very attention he always had to avoid.

At the Chinese-guarded gate he actually stopped, gazing around to establish his directions, settling the immediate places and buildings in his mind, against the memorized map. There was the jumbled swirl of people and bicycles and occasionally vehicles all around, as there had been on his way from the airport the previous day. And among it all was the possible surveillance. Gower brought his concentration closer, even looking from face to face, bicyclist to bicyclist. Impossible, he decided: absolutely impossible. The only obvious, identifiable person was himself, taught to merge into a background into which, here of all places, he could never disappear. The sort of man that crowds are made of, he remembered. But not this crowd.

Would he be able properly to reconnoitre everything he wanted, in one day? Perhaps not. If it became impossible, he’d have to spread it over to the following day: set out earlier than this, to give himself more time. Maybe include the Temple of Heaven, to avoid his interest appearing too obvious to anyone watching. Take several days, maybe. Get himself properly established: prepare escape routes, as he’d been instructed to do.

Or should he take so much time? The demand from everyone was that he get out as quickly as possible. Why was he delaying? Fear, of actually committing himself by a clandestine action? Ridiculous! He wasn’t frightened. Just the proper edge of apprehension he’d been told was not only natural but necessary. He was obeying instructions; not the briefing instructions but the guidance he’d got, those last few weeks, sensibly identifying his working area, not making any premature moves that might risk everything. Definitely not frightened.

Consciously, obeying the first taught rule, Gower tried to observe, properly to see, everything and everyone directly around him. He’d already decided facial characteristics were impossible to work from, in identifying any surveillance. Clothes then. He could utilize obvious physical characteristics – fat or thin, tall or short – but his best additional chance of spotting someone staying close to him had to be by isolating peculiarities or tell-tale points of dress. The anxiety, tinged with despair, deepened. There was colour – garishly bright reds and greens and pinks he couldn’t imagine women wearing in the West – but his overall impression was one of uniformity here, too: white shirts, grey trousers, usually grey jackets where jackets were worn at all. When the colour wasn’t grey, it was black or blue. The conformity even extended to shoes. All were black and all appeared steel-tipped and maybe even with steel or studs in the heels. Even with the competition of other street sounds, Gower was conscious of a permanent scuffing, tip-tap beat of metal against concrete.

Sure of his direction, Gower changed and altered his route, remembering to make his first deviation to the left, then left again before switching twice to his right down streets to bring himself back on course. Several times, concentrating for the abrupt confusion it might hopefully cause, he halted halfway along a road, feigning the uncertainty of a stranger realizing he had taken the wrong turning and going back the way he had come, intent upon anyone wheeling around to follow. No one did, at any of his staged performances.

Although he had seen pictures and newsreels, the vastness of Tiananmen Square momentarily overawed him. From where he stood the giant memorial photograph of Mao Tsetung was postage-stamp size, the Great Hall of the People and the walled Forbidden City initially of doll’s house dimensions. He couldn’t guess how many people were there in total – certainly hundreds – but the square still looked comparatively deserted.

Gower set out across it, towards the tomb with its snake of the faithful waiting to make their obeisance. As he walked he was aware for the first time of a fine dust in the air: it was settling on his face and hands and was gritty in his mouth. There was no sun, as there hadn’t been the previous day, but heat seemed trapped beneath the blanket of thick clouds, causing him to sweat. Mingling with the dust, it made his skin irritate. He used the act of taking off his jacket, throwing it over one shoulder, to turn fully to look around him. Nowhere, as far as he could see, was there anyone who appeared to be following or watching.

Perhaps he wasn’t being watched. Despite the warnings there was no guarantee – and certainly no way of finding one – that surveillance was absolute. Perhaps it was a hit-or-miss business: perhaps sometimes it was possible to go out of the legation and move about the streets without any official interest whatsoever. But there was no way of finding that out, either. So the assumption had to be that there was a permanent counter-intelligence attention.

So why was he allowing his mind to drift in a direction it was pointless to follow? A permissible, if naive, reflection. Now dismissed. Back to reality. The reality which said that somewhere, among the swallowed-up clusters of supposed tourists to the massive, historically bloodstained square, there was a man or men – or women – checking everything he did, everywhere he went.

Gower began to walk the full length of the Great Hall facade, mouth tight against the grit, the aching beginning of protest in his legs. The approach came when he was practically halfway along, the whispering arrival beside him so quick and unexpected he physically jerked sideways away from the man, startled.

‘I buy dollars?’

Genuine? Or for the watchers? Working on the just decided assumption of constant attention, Gower stopped, fully to confront the man. As he did so, Gower realized that trying as hard as he had been to pick out people near to him he hadn’t spotted this tout, who had to have been close to have made this sudden approach. ‘I will not exchange money unofficially. Go away.’

‘Best rates.’

Hoping that if there had been an audience the positive refusal would have been witnessed, Gower walked on, refusing to answer the continuing offers ranging through world currencies, almost theatrically ignoring the existence of the man hurrying alongside, steel-protected shoes rattling over the stonework. Despite Nicholson’s forewarning, Gower still hadn’t expected an approach on his first outing. He was practically at the far extreme of the Great Hall facade before the disappointed money-dealer accepted defeat and broke away. Gower stopped again, watching the man go to stalls at the edge of the square, discreetly to approach a four-strong group of Western tourists, from their clothes most likely American or Canadian. Both men instantly shook their heads, but one of the women felt out to her companion’s arm, stopping the rejection. It took about ten minutes to complete the transaction finalized by a conjuror’s flick of hand movements as the money was switched from one to the other. The Chinese split urgently away, without looking back. There was no official challenge or intervention. One of the women took a photograph of the disappearing man. There was a lot of laughing and head-nodding approval.

Gower started walking again towards the Forbidden City, guessing he had not allowed sufficient time later to climb Coal Hill as well as explore in one afternoon the world in which former Chinese emperors spent their entire lives.

The Forbidden City was labyrinthine. And a blaze of squinting colour, glaring oranges and reds on roofs and walls, the pathways and alleys guarded by statues and carvings of real and mythical creatures: doleful, slumped elephants and head-raised, snarling monsters with tortoise armour and spike-haired lions, squatting with teeth bared in ferocity. Gower walked with apparent aimlessness, in reality following the route set out for him in London. He found the empty brick-space on the bridge over a narrow, carp- and goldfish-filled stream: the crevice into which a single sheet of paper could be slipped, by the haunch of a hunched lion: the overhanging, concealing bush that formed a perfect cache by a refuse bin near a raised and tomb-like rectangle, and another hiding place at the back of a huge storage receptacle in what he took to be a former receiving room of the long-ago emperors.

He neither paused nor showed interest in any of the designated places, deciding as he strolled by that on the subsequent, priest-summoning deliveries a camera would give him the necessary excuse to hesitate and conceal his messages. The ever-changing statues and figures and displays and halls gave him a constant excuse to turn and look around him: not once, from one examination to the next, did he isolate anyone paying special attention to him.

Gower cut the visit short when he judged himself to be about halfway around the sprawling enclave, postponing an attempt upon the hill until the following day. Should he think of secreting a message to Jeremy Snow then? He wasn’t sure. Wrong to hurry, came the warning voice in his mind: nothing to be gained by unnecessary haste, everything to lose. His pace, his safety: and the safety, of course, of the priest. Indeed, a positive, professional reason for taking as many additional days as he wanted: watchers would be lulled trailing behind a camera-toting sightseer. He might just carry a message tomorrow. Then again, he might just not.

The eager Nicholson was in ambush when he got back to the embassy and Gower allowed himself to be pressed into their dining together. The wife, whose name was Jane, was a mousy woman who blinked a lot, as if she needed spectacles. She wore a dragon-patterned silk cheong-sam like a banner to prove she had assimilated the local culture. It was too tight, showing the bumps and knobs of her underwear. Gower remembered to ask about laundry and was assured by Nicholson it was excellent: he simply had to hand it to his Chinese houseboy. It reminded Gower to check his room traps.

‘Ian tells me it’s only a fleeting visit?’ said the woman.

‘Just checking the local facilities: seeing if anything could be improved,’ said Gower.

‘Which will throw us together a lot,’ said Nicholson. ‘That’s a big part of my job, knowing what’s available here and what’s not.’

‘I guess it will,’ agreed Gower. On the ambassador’s direct order he had to go through the pretence with the man.

‘So how long will you be here?’ asked Jane.

Gower shrugged, noncommittal. ‘No real time-limit. It’s got to be done properly. But I wouldn’t expect it to be more than a month.’

None of the room snares had been tripped when he got back to his quarters. He still decided to leave what had been pouched to him from London in the embassy security vault.

*

After the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, which Miller dutifully attended with her, Lady Ann announced her intention to tour the French stables on a bloodstock-buying expedition, which allowed Miller and Patricia Elder almost a month to be permanently together. For only the third time since her affair with Miller began, Patricia moved some of her clothes and personal belongings into the mansion penthouse.

It was obviously the most convenient thing to do, to avoid Patricia having daily to commute to her own house in Chiswick to change her clothes, but Miller was apprehensive at the chance it gave her to press the well rehearsed and too often repeated divorce demands.

Their first night together – the day Gower flew to Beijing – Patricia declared she did not want to go out to eat but to cook for him in the apartment, which she did superbly. Afterwards, huddled together on a couch with brandy bowls in hand, Patricia said this was how it should be all the time and didn’t he think so too. He agreed, nervously, waiting for the familiar complaint, but she didn’t say anything more. Neither did she the next night, when they ate in again, and just very slightly Miller began to relax.

Perhaps, he thought hopefully, there wasn’t going to be a scene: perhaps, having made so many protests, Patricia was reconciled to everything staying as it was. That’s what he really wanted: things to go on undisturbed as they were.

‘New shoes?’ queried Julia.

‘And they’re killing me,’ complained Charlie.

‘That’s a new shirt, too, isn’t it?’

‘Needed some new clothes.’

Julia regarded him with her head to one side, which she often did when something particularly caught her curiosity. ‘Maybe I should start dressing up.’

‘You’re fine as you are,’ said Charlie.

‘I thought you were, too,’ she smiled.

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

‘Liar.’