The Chinese Assassin Read online

  ‘Darling, at last! rye been ringing for simply ages. I couldn’t get through. Are you all tight? Was your plane late? When did you get in? That is you, isn’t it darling?’

  Scholefield closed his eyes and smiled. ‘Yes, sweetheart Yes, three hours late. About ten minutes ago. And yes, sweetheart— in that order.’

  ¶Don’t be so bloody unfeeling Richard. You know I hate it when you fly.’

  ‘Not as much as I do. And I’m not being “unfeeling”. It’s a mixture of jet lag and this heat. The road in from the airport is littered for miles with abandoned, boiled-up cars. It’s like a scene from The Day the Earth Caught Fire. A bit eerie’

  ‘1 know. It’s been terrible.’

  ‘That’s why I can’t match Hedda Gabler’s stream of lively histrionica—it still is Hedda this week, is it?’

  ‘Yes. Nina Murphy—remember her?—has got to be at the un-air-conditioned theatre in an hour to do her twice-nightly impersonation of a disappearing grease-spot. But she might just find tune for a breathless, welcome-home nude sequence at your flat at twice the speed of sound on her way there—if you want, of course.’

  ‘Nina, you know damned well I want,’ he began, ‘but—’

  ‘Then I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Starting from now!’

  The dialling tone resumed abruptly and Scholefield replaced the receiver, grinning broadly to himself: He bent and began picking up the airmail editions of The People’s Daily that had been faithfully forwarded during his absence by the little Communist bookshop behind the British Museum. In his study he threw them on a leather chesterfield by his desk, fetched ice from the kitchen and poured himself a large measure of neat vodka. Then he sank down on the chesterfield and began removing the wrappers and glancing at the heavy black type of the headline ideograms, sipping the vodka as he read. But before he had drunk half of it the telephone began ringing again and he dragged himself reluctantly back to the hall.

  ‘Richard?’

  He took another swallow from the glass in his hand to fortify himself against the calculated hostility of his ex-wife’s voice. ‘Hello, Sarah. How nice to hear from you.’

  ‘I’m only calling to ask when you intend visiting Mathew again.’ Her tone had descended immediately to heavy sarcasm. ‘It’s nearly a month since you saw him. A boy of his age needs a father’s attention. Even if it is only very occasionally.’

  Scholefield felt his anger rising despite himself, but tried to speak slowly. ‘I’ve been very busy, Sarah. There’s been rather a lot going on in China. Mao really may be dying at last. Or have you stopped reading the papers?’

  A snort of contemptuous laughter came down the line. ‘I suppose I should have cited Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in my divorce petition, shouldn’t I, instead of your Shaftesbury Avenue whore! I don’t imagine you’ve missed out on seeing her often in the past month.’

  Scholefield gritted his teeth. ‘I’ve been away in Ottawa at a military symposium on the PLA for the past ten days. I’ve got an important article for one of the monthlies to finish by tomorrow night and the BBC have asked me to script a programme by the weekend on the Peking power struggle—’

  She ignored the explanation as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘All I want to know is whether you want Jo see him on Saturday or Sunday. ‘The court granted you access once a month, unless you’ve forgotten. If you don’t intend seeing him I shall be taking him away for the weekend. That’s all I’m ringing for.’

  A cold silence lengthened between them and threatened to become interminable. ‘I’ll be over at three o’clock on Saturday,’ be said at last, drawing his words out, ‘to take him out for a couple of hours.’

  Thank you. I’m sure Mathew will appreciate that enormously. It’ll be just to the zoo again, will it?’

  Scholefield banged the receiver savagely back on its rest without responding and drained the remaining vodka in his glass at a gulp. He was still standing indecisively in the hall when the sodden ringing of the doorbell startled him. He put down his glass and opened the door. The passageway outside was empty. He leaned out to look up the stairs and found himself staring into the glowing red eyes of a hideous dragon’s head. Blue smoke streamed from its flared nostrils and the grotesque fanged jaws emitted a sudden moaning shriek. He flinched and started back just as Nina’s face appeared from behind the mask, puffing furiously on a cigarette. She snatched the cigarette from her mouth laughing uproariously, then flung an arm around his neck, pulling his face close to hers.

  ‘Did I give you a fright, darling? I’m sorry. It is the year of the dragon, remember. I found him in Gerrard Street. Couldn’t resist him.’

  She pulled away from him suddenly in alarm and stared at his unsmiling face. ‘Richard! Are you all right?’

  He took the dragon’s head from her and placed it carefully on the hall table. He looked expressionlessly into her eyes, now clouded with worry. ‘Of course I’m all right, you crazy bitch.’ He spoke very quietly—then smiled suddenly. ‘Just a little tired, that’s all. Come here.’

  She wore flared blue jeans, a loose cheesecloth smock with nothing beneath it and a square of turquoise silk tied gypsy- fashion round her hair. He wrapped his arms around her and they stood pressed close against each other for a long time in the doorway without speaking or kissing.

  ‘We’d better shut it. I passed your prurient new porter on the stairs.’ She disentangled herself, and closed and locked the door. In the study she refused a drink and took his hand. ‘I have a very good remedy for tenseness and tiredness.’ She smiled and with both hands pressed his fingers gently against the thin stuff covering her breasts. He sighed and kissed her quickly on the ear.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nina, but I’ve got somebody arriving any minute.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘A mysterious Chinese. You didn’t give me a chance to explain on the ‘phone.’

  She dropped his hand abruptly and sat down. ‘Oh shit!’ In the silence that followed she pouted and stared up at him sulkily. ‘You might have waited five minutes after you got home before re-opening your appointments book.’ She flapped her hand in front of her face like a fan, bent over and began-rolling her wide-bottomed jeans up her bare legs to turn them into shorts.

  ‘I don’t know who he is and I wouldn’t have agreed to him coming tonight except he’s been ringing the flat constantly for the past week. He dialled my number last Thursday morning aid sat listening to it ring out for eight whole days until I picked it up twenty minutes ago.’

  She stopped and stared up at him open-mouthed. ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  The doorbell interrupted them and Nina stood up quickly, her face suddenly tense. ‘You don’t think you’re in any danger, do you?’

  Scholefield laughed. ‘From the Chinese—in W.1?’

  She barred his way to the door, and put a hand on his arm, looking at him wide-eyed. ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘Let’s just see, shall we?’ She sank back onto the chesterfield, fanning herself with one hand again, as he walked into the hall and opened the door.

  folio number two

  My senses swam for many days. From the mists of my delirium I remember above all else the giant communal feeding bowls. Fresh milk, salt, butter, green Chinese tea and mutton fat were stirred together in steaming cauldrons that seemed to rise up regularly before my eyes like shapeless, disembodied ghosts. The cloying, tepid liquid was always forced into my open throat but often, writhing with the heat of my fever, my whole body violently rejected this staple nourishment of the nomads.

  My eyes saw only the vague shapes of Toktokho and his wife and daughter. Sometimes booted and wrapped in their long deli with broad belts wound many times round their waists, and sometimes naked, they moved like disembodied wraiths around the open fireplace in the centre of the yurt as they ministered to me they were always careful to pay respect to the high wooden box against the felt wall on which stood their revered images and statues. When the sun went down the yurt
filled gradually with the noise and the stink and the heat of pregnant and new-born animals. All the arats suffered piles from their incessant horse- riding and each night by the light of the fire the family unashamedly tended their discomforts with mutton grease.

  I knew much pain in those first days. But it always seemed far away, as though afflicting somebody else at a great distance outside the wails of my body. Both my thighs and one arm were fractured and my neck and shoulders were severely burned. I could not move my head or upper body for many days and when Toktokho approached to moisten my mouth and lips or dress my injuries, the ornaments on his belt always danced close before my eyes in a gaudy mirage. A silver-mounted flint steel, and a long narrow embroidered tobacco pouch with a silver clasp, hung from a leather strap along with a lacquered tinder box and a small bag of tinder. He was proud still to be able to employ this old art of his forefathers. There was a tinkling silver bell too, attached by a silver chain to a metal knob which he used to knock out his pipe. I came to know every stitch of the prancing blue and gold horses embroidered on these ornaments and later I learned that Toktokho had taken them as the spoils of victory from the body of the leader of a camel train, whom he had fought and killed in a fair fight before liberation. Every night without fail he put them on ceremonially, like battle honours, when he returned from his riding. He also wore two sheaths on the belt— a large one for his dagger and a small one for a steel tooth pick which he used to fork lumps of mutton fat from the feeding bowls.

  In those fevered times while the second sheep-shearing was taking place outside I slipped, without caring, from wakefulness to unconsciousness—and sometimes approached equally carelessly near to death. Each day throughout this period, I learned later, old Tsereng was riding the five miles to the scene of the crashed Trident to watch the flurry of activity taking place there.

  The dried saltmarsh in which the wreckage had come to rest was cordoned off with ropes and guarded by large contingents of armed Soviet troops Toktokho did not approach the cordons but watched discreetly from behind an outcrop of rock on a rise in the ground several hundred yards away. Though he was old, his eyes were still almost as keen as in his youth and when I recovered he reported faithfully to me all that he had seen.

  He was out at dawn on the first morning when they began hauling the blackened and charred bodies of Marshall Lin Piao and the others from the still-smouldering skeleton of the aircraft. ‘They were loaded immediately and without ceremony into a covered military lorry which remained at the scene without moving for several days. A constant stream of vehicles jolted back and forth across the roadless steppe from Ulan Bator in great clouds of dust, bringing high-ranking Soviet military officers and civilians to the site along with frequent groups of Mongolian Party and government leaders. An encampment of military tents was eventually set up dose by.

  By night the area was lit by huge arc-lights. The Russian troops, who had ordered all curious arats away from the cordon ropes in the first few days with much shouting and menaces, fired off their guns indiscriminately into the surrounding darkness every night, laughing loudly as they did so.

  On the third day after the crash, Toktokho saw a sudden and astounding change in the pattern of activity at the site. By then he was watching through binoculars from the rock knoll which rose from the plain quite near to where he had found me. Just before noon, he saw the soldiers begin unloading the nine charred bodies again from the lorry. They removed them from their canvas bags and laid them out carefully on the ground, side by side on white sheets. Then the tented camp, which had grown quite large by this time, was struck in great haste and all the Russian troops on guard were marshalled quickly into transport trucks and driven away. Only four high-ranking officers from the Soviet Union remained talking to the Mongolian officials for a few minutes. Then they, too, drove slowly away across the steppe, but in the opposite direction to that taken by their troops, leaving the Mongolians alone. Through his binoculars Toktokho saw the Russian officers halt their vehicle in a slight depression in the ground about two miles away. They then climbed on top of it and, like him continued to survey the site through their field glasses.

  A few minutes later a contingent of soldiers in uniforms of the army of the Mongolian People’s Republic arrived and took up guard positions around the perimeter of the cordoned-off area and the larger sections of the remaining wreckage A special concentration of troops was stationed shoulder to shoulder in a square around the spot where the row of corpses was laid out. They stood to attention, their weapons held clenched across their chests.

  For an hour nothing happened. Then a convoy of black cars arrived, driving slowly across the grassland in a cloud of dust from the direction of Ulan Bator. The men who alighted were obviously, Toktokho said, from my own country, the People’s Republic of China. They wore the formal tunic suits of official cadres, buttoned high at the neck Toktokho reported that they behaved very nervously. For a long time they stood rooted to the spot, staring apprehensively about them at the blackened wreckage of the Trident and at the soldiers. Then they began walking hesitantly among the debris. They often gazed distractedly at the sky and barely looked at the ground, he said, as though they were anxious to be done with their observations as quickly and with as little trouble as possible.

  From their cars the Mongolian officials brought two boxes of relics apparently recovered from the wreckage. They placed them on the ground and took out partly-charred documents which Toktokho had noticed scattered in the scorched grass at dawn on the first day. The Chinese did not inspect these closely but had them transferred immediately to their own vehicles. Toktokho also saw the leading Mongolian hold up a silver-plated pistol. The head of the Chinese delegation matched this from him, almost with glee, Toktokho said. Because of his love of silver ornaments like those he wore nightly on his belt, he remembered this very vividly. It flashed brightly and pleasingly in the autumn sun, he said. This pistol was in fact a souvenir of Marshall Lin Piao’s stay in Moscow from 1938 to 1942 which he had valued highly. It had been presented to him by Stalin in gratitude for his strategic advice on revising the Soviet plan of national defence. While recovering in a Moscow hospital from grave wounds received fighting the invading Japanese forces in China, Marshall Lin bad time then to apply his brilliant military mind to the Soviet Union’s strategic planning in its great hour of crisis.

  He had concluded that the German attack directed at Leningrad was intended as a turning movement towards Moscow and therefore he advised Stalin to reinforce the defence of his general headquarters, and also to hold a sufficient force in reserve for this purpose. Those in Peking who ruthlessly sent Lin Piao to his well-planned death planted this famous and much loved memento on the plane to help identify his burned body and so compound the ‘irrefutable evidence’ of his intended treachery. I had noticed it lying on a seat, during the last moments of the flight, when I burst into the closed forward compartment in which the unconscious Marshall Lin and his wife Yeh Chun had been transported. But by that time it was too late to do anything about it, or the other false and damning evidence planted against us.

  When this silver pistol had been stowed in their car the Chinese delegation was conducted to the spot where the soldiers were drawn up around the line of dead bodies. On a sudden command the soldiers were marched back several paces but still stood guard at a distance, with their weapons at the ready. The delegation then moved forward and stared down at the corpses, walking quickly back and forth along the line.

  The Chinese, Toktokho said seemed puzzled at first. Gradually they began arguing among themselves, casting occasional angry looks over their shoulders at the Mongolians. Then the two leading Chinese approached the Mongolian government officials and another, more violent argument ensued. The Chinese waved their arms agitatedly in the air and became very irate, pointing repeatedly back at the row of incinerated bodies lying on the ground. Toktokho said he could hear their raised voices clearly from his hiding place among the rocks.
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br />   The Mongolians at first shouted back. But when the visitors refused to calm down they turned their backs, walked away to their cars, wound up their windows and refused to co-operate further. At this point those Chinese who had been carrying shoulder cases took out cameras and began photographing the bodies. Although the sunshine was bright they used flashbulb equipment and took many hundreds of pictures from every angle. While this was being done the leading Chinese called their whole party to a hurried conference at a distance from the troops and the cars.

  Then, after some discussion, they began to spread out around the scene of the crash, scouring the ground minutely with their eyes. This meticulous search went on for an hour, the Chinese pacing carefully back and forth in a long line across an ever widening area of the grassland beyond the rope cordons that marked the limits of the site itself

  Toktokho grew alarmed when it became clear that the line was moving slowly but steadily towards the knoll on which he was hidden. His horse stood tethered a quarter of a mile away and he was afraid it might make a noise as the line of Chinese drew near, and betray his presence. He was struggling in an agony of indecision, unsure whether to make a dash for his horse or remain hidden when the Chinese heading directly for his hiding place stopped at the foot of the knoll and let out a loud cry. He turned and held up something in his hand and the others in the line all ran to him.

  It was my left shoe!

  All the Chinese gathered round and began stamping though the tussocks of coarse grass in the area, jabbering excitedly among themselves. They searched the small area intensively for a further quarter of an hour but found nothing more. Toktokho was relieved when at last they returned to their line of cars.