Quiller Bamboo

Chapter 10: Su-May

She came floating toward me, big eyes in a small pinched face, her body swathed in the folds of a hooded fur jacket too big for her, the hide torn and patched and stained, floating toward me looking rather like an Eskimo child, though she wasn't a child, more like a grown-up china doll.

'They have asked me to assist them,' she said.

I tried to relax, and she stopped floating. On our way from Gonggar to the city the tour guide had told us that at eleven thousand feet we might hallucinate sometimes; there was oxygen, he said, at most of the hotels.

'Assist them?'

I didn't know why it was anything to do with me that they'd asked her to assist them; the people in uniform behind the long cluttered counter, Chinese Public Security officers, one of them watching me steadily, would have worried me if it weren't for the fact that he'd never seen me before, hadn't been outside the airport in Hong Kong when we'd done the Xingyu thing. On the other hand I wasn't totally at ease: they'd picked me up in a military jeep and brought me here for questioning and my passport and visa and Alien Travel Permit were spread all over the counter and the PSB officer would certainly recognize me again if we crossed paths.

'With your case,' she said.

I hadn't got a case. I'd left it in my cell at the monastery with Xingyu looking after it.

'I see,' I said.

She meant my case, of course, criminal charges, so forth. I suppose if the Bureau knew I'd got arrested within an hour of entering Lhasa on a strictly zero-zero clandestine operation they'd call me in straight away, wouldn't blame them. But that wasn't all I'd done since we'd flown out of Chengdu, it was not all, my good friend, that I had done. But I don't want to think about that now, I want to listen to this little china doll and find out if I can rescue anything from the wreckage.

Xingyu is safe.

Yes, concentrate on that. He is safe and among friends at the monastery and you can say, if you want to be charitable, that I've completed the mission, the objective of which was to get Dr Xingyu Baibing out of Hong Kong. But we remember, don't we, that Bamboo has a new objective now: I have to get him back into Beijing when the time is right, and I'm not sure how I can do that if these people throw me into jail.

I think she was waiting for me to say something.

'What exactly is my case?"

'You were out of bounds.'

'Ah. I didn't know.'

In fact when the military jeep had pulled up and the soldier had shouted something to me above the noise of the engine I'd thought he was offering me a lift.

I told her this.

The throttle had got stuck, I suppose, with the engine roaring like that; or he was having to keep it running somehow with the windchill at minus forty degrees. She was telling them what I'd said, in very fast Mandarin, her tiny porcelain teeth flashing their way through the syllables. Mandarin has got something like four hundred syllables and they've all got several tones and if you don't get them exactly right you might as well speak Dutch, it's a real bitch.

'They say there are signs posted.'

'I don't read Chinese.'

'There are signs in English: Military road. Out of bounds.'

'I didn't see anything in the kind of English anyone would recognize.'

'I must not tell them that.'

'I know.'

I'd said it to find out which side she was on, though it already seemed fairly clear: she was one of a dozen or so people in here lined up along the counter with their papers or arguing with their hands, Chinese, Tibetans, Nepalis, Muslims, Kashmiris, a couple of round-eyes, tourists, traders, yak herders, women with braided hair, men with high boots and sashes and daggers, all of them wrapped in shawls and hides and furs against the cold outside. In here it was close to eighty, with two enormous yak-dung stoves burning, smoking the place out. I assumed they'd all been hauled in on some kind of charge: this was a PSB office, where the people on the other side of the counter in Beijing and Shanghai and Chengdu had got their clubs out on that June night and gone to work. There would be a basement under this place, underground cells.

'What will you tell them, then?' I asked the girl.

'It is difficult. You were on a military road. But I think perhaps that if you made profuse apologies, they might listen. Especially if you behave contritely.'

One of the officers pushed a flap open at the end of the counter and beckoned a man through and took him to one of the doors at the back, with two other officers closing in. Everyone stopped talking while this happened, then the noise started up again.

'Then of course I apologize,' began using my hands, 'I apologize profusely,' shooting the officer looks of penitence, 'and I shall certainly make sure I read the signs in the future.'

He didn't turn to look at the girl as she translated, but went on looking at me. He'd been seventeen, once, seventeen, eighteen, top of his class and fond of sports, taken his mum and dad out sometimes, given them a treat, told them he wanted to go into something he could be proud of, something that'd make them proud of him, say the police force, and this afternoon he was standing here with the gun and the truncheon on his belt and hoping for the chance of pushing the flap open at the end there and throwing me into a cell and beating me up if I wouldn't answer questions.

This wasn't Beijing, this was the Holy City, but last year there'd been troops brought in by the thousand to quell the uprising, and more monasteries burned and more corpses dumped into military trucks and taken away for mass burial in the gaping earth with the bulldozers standing by.

'He says it is not enough.'

I hadn't thought it would be.

'Then I'd be happy to pay a fine.'

I meant it to sound naive, to let them know I didn't really understand the gravity of the charge. The least I was going to get away with was a night in the cells, and that was no big deal in itself, but it meant that I would become more familiar to them over the hours, more recognizable. That could be fatal, later, for me or for Xingyu Baibing or both.

The girl turned back to me and went on speaking in Chinese and corrected herself. 'Yes, you must pay a fine of fifty yen and write a confession.'

'That's very generous.'

'You have money to pay?'

I got my wallet and put down a Y 100 note and she pushed it across the worn, paint-chipped counter. The young officer looked at it as if it were a piece of yak dung but in a moment pushed my passport and the other stuff over to me and I put them away.

'You will receive fifty yen change,' the girl said. 'Now we will go over there.'

Rickety desk, one of the dozen in here, with a cheap ballpoint tied to a nail with a bit of dirty string, some kind of stool to sit on, though I didn't trust it.

'Write, please.' She pointed to the block of schoolroom paper and took her hand away quickly when she noticed it was trembling. 'In transgressing the laws of this city, I have shamed my ancestors.' The ballpoint ripped a gash in the gray thin paper and she tore off the sheet and I started again. 'Certain roads here are strictly out of bounds, and they are adequately provided with signs to this effect, in Chinese, English, and French. In failing to take notice of the signs I am guilty of a grave lack of attention.'

The door banged open and someone came in with a chicken underneath each arm and one of them let out a piercing squawk and flew into the air and sent a streak of white droppings across the counter and one of the PSB men shouted and someone else caught the poor bloody bird by one wing and bashed it against the wall.

'My ancestors are disturbed in their honourable sleep by my fall from grace on this sorry occasion, and my esteem in their eyes has grievously diminished.'

The pen dried up and she got me another one from the next desk, pulling the looped string carefully off the nail in a show of deep respect for PSB property in case she was being watched.

'Finally, I wish — '

'Are you cold?'

Her eyes widened as she looked up at me. 'It is not cold in here.'

Then it was fear, making her hands shake. It was also in her eyes, fear of committing even the tiniest breach of protocol, damaging their bit of string, interrupting the written confessional by normal conversation. She looked down at the pad.

'Write, please, and do not interrupt. Finally, I wish to apologize sincerely for the trouble I have caused the officers of the Public Service Bureau, and vow that such a transgression will not occur again.'

They were pushing the man with the chickens out of the door and a gust of freezing air blew in again. A wind had got up soon after we'd landed in Gonggar today.

'Do you wish to add anything?' the girl asked me.

My late Aunt Ermyntrude would also be shocked clean out of her celestial corsets by my lamentable fall from grace, but we'd better not put that, we had better, my good friend, not put anything like that, I am simply feeling a touch lighthearted, you'll understand, because they're going to settle for fifty yen and this bit of bullshit and I could well have got their goat in some trivial way and finished up in the basement chained to the wall. Far better to take all possible notice of my little Eskimo here and walk on eggshells.

'I'd like to thank them for their leniency,' I told her.

'No. They might decide to double the fine, one must understand. Please sign what you have written.'

She tore it carefully off the pad and took it over to the counter, and we had to wait until they'd dealt with a youth in a smart leather jacket and sunglasses, chewing gum as if he were starving while he showed his papers and they told him to take off his sunglasses and he didn't want to and they snatched them off for him and flung them across the floor. Then the girl went forward and read my confession in Chinese while the PSB man watched me the whole time and I looked penitent and hoped to God we'd got it right, because I'd got quite enough worries already with Xingyu Baibing sitting up there in his cell on the top floor of the monastery, sitting there like a time bomb because there'd been nothing else I could have done, there'd been nothing.

The PSB man put out his hand and the girl gave him the sheet of paper and he scanned it for long enough to make it look as if he could read a bit of English and then tore it in half and jerked his head toward the door.

'We can go,' she told me.

'Do you know this place well?'

'This restaurant?'

'Lhasa.'

'Yes. I have been here often. I am an air stewardess with CAAC.' She looked down quickly, perhaps because in the torn, patched coat that was too big for her she knew she looked more like a vagrant.

'When are you flying out?' I didn't imagine she was flying anywhere but I wanted to keep her talking. The minute we'd left the PSB office she'd told me she'd show me a cheap place to eat and when we'd got here she'd asked if we could sit together and I realized she was starving and hadn't any money.

'I won't be flying out for a time,' she said. They'd brought up some bowls of noodles and meat dumplings, and she was using her chopsticks busily.

'You've got friends in Lhasa?'

'Yes.' She looked up at me, then down again. 'I cannot impose upon friends.'

I began listening between the lines, because that was the way she communicated. I'd seen she was starving and I knew that when we left here I'd be paying the bill and when she told me she'd got friends here I'd wondered why they weren't looking after her and she'd told me: she couldn't impose. But she'd helped me with the confession thing and I was in her debt and here we were in this place with smoke creeping out of the seams in the pipe above the stove in the corner and condensation trickling down the windows and the dogs under the table snarling and scuffling in competition for any scraps that might fall.

'What's your name?'

'Su-May Wang,' she said, putting it the Western way round. 'What is yours?'

'Victor Locke. I'm just here for a few days. Are you on holdover, or what?'

I didn't like asking direct questions, but there wasn't much time: I had to find the Barkhor Hotel and report to Pepperidge and then get back to the monastery before ten o'clock because of the curfew, and I needed to know exactly how useful this girl could be, exactly how well she knew the town, because I'd found that the local laws and restrictions were like booby traps and I couldn't afford to be run into another PSB office: they'd throw me into the cells for a week next time just to make me pay attention.

'No,' Su-May said, 'I'm not on holdover.' She stopped eating and for the first time looked at me steadily in the eyes, and her question was clear enough: could she trust me? Then she bent her head again over the bowl of food. 'Things are bad,' she said, 'in China. You are a tourist?'

'Yes.'

'What do you think of things in China?'

'I think they're tragic.'

'The bloodshed that time in Tiananmen?'

'And the crackdown that's been going on ever since.'

She finished her bowl. 'Would you like some more tukpa?'

'Very much." I got the man over and she ordered in slow, careful Tibetan, then turned back to me. The British are on our side?'

'On the side of the people. You don't imagine we'd support the primitive thugs you've got in your government, I hope.'

Trade went on,' she said evenly, 'between the British and those primitive thugs. Nothing has changed.'

'I realize that. It was disgusting. We're like any other people — we don't always agree with what our government does. What's he asking for?' There was a young boy waving his hand in front of my face.

'A pen. Don't give him one.' She said a sharp word or two in Tibetan and he moved on. 'My father is missing,' she said in a moment.

A man in an ancient fur hat was watching me from the next table, but I didn't think there was any problem: round-eyes get watched quite a bit in the backwaters of the Orient. There wasn't any question of checking the environment in this place: it was like a flypaper, with as many people in here for warmth as for the food. I'd done a lot of routine checking on the flight into Gonggar and on the CAAC bus into Lhasa and we'd been absolutely clean, Xingyu and I, and no one would have got on to me here in the city, no one clandestine. But I began looking around me now for anyone who looked as if he could understand English, because she'd started saying things that were potentially dangerous.

'Missing from home?'

'Yes. And from his university. That is why I am worried, as you have noticed. That is why I am here.'

'You're missing too.'

'Yes.' She was looking me in the eyes again, losing her unwillingness to trust me. 'He disappeared a week ago, when the wave of arrests began. He left a note for me, saying I must not worry. They are hunting for him now. He is quite an important man, an important dissident.' A shrug. 'Of course — there are many. There are thousands.'

We stopped talking when the man brought the food she'd ordered, and waited until he'd gone. I asked her why she'd come to Tibet.

'It was the next flight on my schedule. They use relatives, you see, as hostages. It is a well-established practice. They want my father in prison, or perhaps executed, and they would have me arrested on some pretext — anything will suffice, one must understand, suspicion is enough — and then they would have reported it in the media, to bring my father out of hiding to take my place.'

I must go to Beijing. Xingyu, staring at me in the bleak light of the airport at Chengdu. You cannot stop me.

'You simply got off the plane here,' I said, 'and didn't go back?'

'Yes. Others have done this. Many of us have brothers, sisters who are students, or parents who teach. Some of my friends have gone to Hong Kong, and stayed there. But if they are picked up and sent back, they will be accused of fleeing the country, of evading their responsibilities as citizens. I am perhaps safer here. I have not fled my country.'

Then what she was saying, what she was feeling bore down on her suddenly, and her eyes took the weight of it, the life going out of them. It's difficult to tell the age of an Oriental: she had looked, until this moment, no more than twenty, with her clear luminous eyes and her flawless skin, though she was probably more than that; now she had grown suddenly old, though her skin hadn't changed; the only expression was in her eyes, and they looked out on a frightening world with the despair of middle age, when for so many things, for so many people, it has become too late.

My father is missing. They would have arrested me. I have not fled my country. Not the burden of the years but of being a young woman in China in this year of such little grace.

'Your mother?'

She looked down and began eating, but from habit. 'They do not agree. My mother is against his activities, his protests.'

If they arrested her mother, then, he'd be unlikely to come out of hiding. 'Where are you from, Su-May?'

'Beijing. That is where the worst happens, the worst of it all. For me, I am worried now because my father will find out I am missing too, and he may believe I have been arrested. They might even lie, and report it in the media that I have been arrested. But from here, from Lhasa, it is difficult for me to get a message to him, saying I am safe. There are people I could write to, but it is dangerous to send letters. Many are opened. Telephones are monitored. They catch many that way."

She looked up as a beggar came and crouched by the table, an empty tin bowl cupped in his hands, his eyes hollowed and demanding, not imploring, as he attacked our indifference. 'Give him nothing,' she told me, 'or we shall have dozens here.' She waved him away. 'They have come from remote places to the Holy City, and have no money left.' She shrugged. 'I am the same. But they have come here to pray. I have come here — ' On a rueful breath, 'Maybe it is the same thing.'

Dark was coming slowly against the windows, and more people were arriving, packing against the bar counter shoulder to shoulder. Two PSB officers came in, their guns silhouetted on their hips, their eyes hidden by the shadow of their caps, and I caught a look on the face of Su-May as she saw them, not fright, something like disgust, as if she'd seen something obscene. They moved between the tables, and the people pressed back to give them room — again, it seemed to me, not from fear or in deference, but as if wanting to distance themselves from lepers. Beijing, she'd said, was where the worst had happened, but the people of Lhasa would disagree, seeing as they had the sky black with the smoke of burning monasteries, hearing as they had the crackle of bullets and the cries of grief.

I waited until the two officers had left. 'If you like, Su-May, I can get a message to your father in Beijing, telling him you're safe.'

She almost dismissed it. 'You are a tourist.'

'I can do it,' I said, 'if you like.'

She brought her hands to her face suddenly, knocking her bowl and spilling some food. 'How?'

'With great discretion.'

'But how?' She held her face, staring at me from over her spread fingers.

'By word of mouth.'

In a moment- 'You are not a tourist, then.' A tone of suspicion. Tourists were harmless, a gaggle of gawpers pointing at things strange to them, finding most of them funny. I was not one of them, if I could get a message to her father. I must be something else, not what I seemed, and therefore suspect.

'Yes,' I said, 'I'm a tourist, but I've got friends in Beijing. Close friends. Think about it, and let me know if you want me to help.'

'But how would you tell them?' Her hands came away from her face and she leaned across the stained bare-wood table. 'You must not use the telephone, or — '

'There's someone leaving here for Beijing tomorrow, by the morning flight from Gonggar. I would tell him.'

She closed her eyes slowly, compressing her mouth, praying for patience, I think. In a moment, her eyes coming open with nothing in them but fright. 'You do not understand how dangerous this is. You are just a tourist. People speak. People betray, sometimes without intention. One must understand, my country is full of spies, informers. One does not any longer know one's friends, trust one's friends — it is like in Nazi Germany, a child will give away his parents to the police, because he has been indoctrinated. My country is full of fear.' She didn't look away, but she hesitated. 'Do you know what they asked me to do, the PSB men? They asked me to follow you when you left there, and see where you went, and go back and report. I said my mother was very sick, so I had no time to help them. This is how it is, in my — '

'Why are they interested in me?'

'Simply because you are from the West, and might be a journalist. They are most afraid of foreign journalists, because Lhasa is always on the point of rebellion, like most cities now in China, and they don't want the news to get out. All they can do is expel the journalists in time, and that is almost as bad, an admission that something will happen that must not be seen.' Hesitation again, and then, 'Your friend, what does he do?'

Another man came with a tin bowl, already with scraps of food in it, to show how generous others had been, his hands thinned to the bone under the skin, his face whittled by want.

'Zoukai!' she said, 'Zoukai!' He went off, his bowl clanging against the corner of the table.

I think she was afraid of being overheard, more than anything; she couldn't leave it alone, this thing about getting word to her father. I said, 'My friend is Chinese, a lawyer. He knows as much as you do about the danger of indiscretion.'

In point of fact the message would go to her father through the mast at Cheltenham and the signals board in London to the British embassy at Beijing and then to one of our sleepers or agents-in-place.

'Why should you help me?' Her hands had gone to her face again, as if she wanted to hide as best she could from whatever treachery there might be in me.

'In the West,' I said, 'we hear the news from China and we feel great sympathy for the people. It's not often we can really do something to help, and it's a chance for me. I'll be envied, when I go home.'

Not untrue. Harry, the man who looks after things at my flat, had gone out and got drunk after he'd watched the Tiananmen Square thing on the screen that night in June; he can't stand seeing things in cages, told me he'd screamed his head off the first time his mum took him to a zoo.

'You will be envied?' I don't think she believed it, but wanted to, because her eyes were suddenly wet. 'It is difficult for us to understand that we have friends outside our country. We feel alone, and isolated. So when you say you will help me like this, it — '

Then she couldn't stop the tears, and tugged the edges of her mangy fur hood across her face and sat there with her long eyes squeezed shut and her body rocking backward and forward in its shapeless coat while one of those bloody dogs under the table bit my ankle and I gave it a smart kick and got a yelp.

The boy came around again with the teapot and I showed him some money and he peeled off a couple of notes and went away, not even glancing at the girl, I suppose because it wasn't unusual for women to weep in this ravaged city.

'I do not feel well, one must understand,' Su-May said at last, 'it is the high-altitude sickness. Have you felt any symptoms?'

'Bit light-headed sometimes.' Our tour guide had warned us on the bus ride from the airport, the best thing was to rest up for the first two or three days, take it easy, and if anyone had any blood-pressure or chest problems he shouldn't have come here at all, this place was a killer, so forth, he wasn't joking.

'One must take it seriously,' Su-May said, refusing to talk any more about the other thing, lost her pride, crying like that, lost face. 'One must be very careful.'

'So they tell me,' I said. 'Now write down the name and address of your father's friend, the one we have to contact, and give it to me.'

For a moment she pretended not to know what I was talking about, and then found a bit of paper and went over to the counter for a pen and came back and wrote, looking up at me only once with her eyes deep and with an expression in them that clearly said, If you betray me, I shall lose my trust at last in all humankind, then bent her head again and finished writing and gave me the scrap of paper.

Professor Hu Zhibo, The Faculty, Department of Economics, Beijing University.

'And can he get the message to your father?'

'Yes.'

'And the message is that you are safe and well, nothing else?'

In a moment, 'And that I love him.'

'All right. You can — '

'Perhaps I should put the name of the place where I am staying, in Lhasa?'

'No.'

We want nothing in your heads, the executives in training are told at Norfolk, that we wouldn't want anyone to get out.

'I am grateful,' she said with quiet formality.

'Little enough to do.' She'd have a bad time, tonight, not getting to sleep because of the thoughts flying at her in the dark that I wasn't what I seemed, that she'd been out of her mind to trust me; but there wasn't anything I could do about that: the most fervent protestations of good faith are the most suspect.

We drank the rest of our tea and went out into the freezing wind and through the streets to her broken-down guesthouse near the market, and I left her there and found a streetlight and got out the CAAC map. Pepperidge had left the name of his hotel in code for me at the monastery, with a cross-street bearing, and I walked on again with my head down against the wind, not looking forward to seeing him, not looking forward to it at all, because I was going to tell him what I'd had to do at Chengdu airport to stop Xingyu from going back to Beijing, and Pepperidge would realize what it was going to do to the mission, if London didn't abort it straight away and call us in.