Typhoon (7 page)

“It’s no trouble at all,” he said. “I’ve very much been looking forward to meeting you.”

Wang was wearing the same blue jeans and black shirt into which he had changed on the beach. His tennis shoes were resting on the floor beside the armchair, a pair of grey socks balled into the heels. He looked to have made himself at home. Sadha, the burly Sikh charged with guarding Wang, nodded at Joe and excused himself, following Lee into the kitchen. In time Joe heard the bedroom door clunk shut. The sweat and the humidity of the hot Asian night had combined in the sitting room to leave a stench of work and men and waiting.

“What do you say we get some fresh air in here?”

Wang nodded and turned to open the window. Joe made his way across the room and parted the curtains to help him. It was as if they understood one another. Outside, the still night air remained stubbornly unmoved: no breeze ventured into the room, only the permanent cacophony of traffic and horns. To preserve the take quality of the microphones installed in the safe house, Joe decided to close the window and to begin again. The return of the heat and the silence seemed to act as an ice breaker.

“You are hot,” Wang said. It was a statement more than a question.

“I am hot,” Joe replied. Wang had the sort of face in which a man would willingly confide: eyes without malice, a smile of seductive benevolence. “Are you comfortable? Have you eaten? Is there anything that I can get you before we begin?”

“Nothing, Mr. Richards.” Wang pronounced the name pointedly, as if he knew that it was not Joe’s true identity and wished that they could dispense with the masquerade. “Your colleagues have looked after me far better than I could ever have anticipated. I have nothing but good things to say about British hospitality.”

“Well that’s wonderful.” Joe gestured Wang back into his chair. There was a bottle of Watson’s water resting on a low coffee table between them and he filled two white plastic cups to the rim. Wang leaned forward and accepted the drink with a nod of thanks. Joe settled back into Sadha’s fake leather sofa and wondered how to kick things off. It seemed to be even hotter in the room at this lower level. Why couldn’t Waterfield stretch to a fan? Who was running the safe house? Us or the Americans?

“So I would say that you are a very lucky man, Mr. Wang.”

The professor frowned and a squint of confusion appeared in his eyes.

“How so?”

“You survive a very dangerous swim. You are surprised on the beach not by Hong Kong immigration, who would almost certainly have turned you back to China, but by a British soldier. You claim to have information about a possible defection. The army believes your story, contacts Government House, we send a nice, air-conditioned car to pick you up and less than twenty-four hours after leaving China here you are sitting in a furnished apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui watching
Lawrence of Arabia
. I’d say that qualifies as luck.”

Wang looked across the room at the small black-and-white television set, now switched off, and his face elasticated into a broad, wise smile. He sipped his water and looked over the cup at Joe. “Seen from that point of view, I of course share your opinion, Mr. Richards. May I ask, what position do you hold within Government House?”

“I am an assistant to Mr. Patten’s senior political adviser.”

“But you are still very young, no? Young enough to have been one of my students, I think.”

“Perhaps,” Joe said. “And you are old enough to have been one of my professors.”

Wang liked that one. The professor’s delighted expression suggested the intense relief of a cultured man who, after a long hiatus, has finally encountered evidence of intelligent conversation.

“I see, I see,” he laughed. “And where did you study, Mr. Richards?”

“Call me John,” Joe said, and felt that there was no harm in adding, “Oxford.”

“Ah, Oxford.” A Super 8 of dreamy spires and pretty girls on bicycles seemed to play behind Wang’s eyes. “Which college, please?”

“I studied Mandarin at Wadham.”

“With Professor Douglas?”

That impressed him. There was no getting round it. For some reason Wang knew the identity of Oxford’s leading authority on imperial Chinese history. “No. Professor Vernon,” he said.

“Oh. I do not know him.”

They paused. Joe shifted his weight on the sofa and his hand slid into a dent the size of a beach ball created by Sadha’s substantial girth. Wang was watching him all the time, trying to assess the hierarchical importance of his interlocutor and wondering whether to reveal something of his terrible secret to a probable agent of the British SIS.

“And you, Professor Wang? What’s your story? Why does a highly educated Chinese intellectual with a position at a prestigious university wish to flee his homeland? Why didn’t you go through the normal channels? Why not just apply for a visa? Surely you have friends in Hong Kong, family you could visit? Why risk your life swimming across Starling Inlet?”

“Because I had no choice.”

“No choice?”

“This was no longer an option for a man like me. I had lost my job. I was no longer permitted to leave China.”

“You’ve lost your job? That’s not what you told Major Barber.”

Wang tilted his head to one side and the poor light in the room momentarily lent his face the granite stillness of a sculpture. “I was concerned that the British army would not take my situation seriously. I had already been very lucky to be captured by a soldier with the Black Watch. I lied in order to increase my chances of remaining in Hong Kong. For this I apologize.”

“Well at least you’re honest,” Joe said, with more candour than he had intended. He felt an odd, almost filial sympathy for Wang, and found his position of power over him oddly disconcerting. “Tell me, why are you no longer permitted to leave China?”

“Because I am regarded as a political undesirable, a threat to the Motherland. My actions as an academic drew me to the attention of the authorities in Xinjiang, who jailed me along with many of my students.”

“What kind of actions?” Joe remembered the line in Barber’s letter—
Has the scars to prove it
—and wondered why a man like Wang would be tipping the British off about a high-level defection. From the start he had doubted this element of the professor’s story: ten-to-one it was just another ruse to win his way past Anderson. More likely, the professor was simply a radicalized intellectual who had fostered anti-Beijing sentiment on campus. That was the sort of thing for which you were flung in jail in China. It happened all the time. “Why was it necessary for you to leave China?” he asked.

“As I have told you and your colleagues many times, I am holding information for the British government which will be of vital importance to the relationship between our two countries. That is why I have to see Governor Patten immediately.”

Joe smiled. He knew now that he was being lied to, in the way that you know when a person is bored by your company. “And where do you want to meet him?” he asked. “Surely not in Government House? Aren’t the Chinese disdainful of our
feng shui
?”

This was intended as a joke, but Wang did not find it funny. Speaking in Mandarin for the first time, he said, “Do not make fun of me, young man.”

“Then tell me the truth.” Joe wasn’t about to be patronized and snapped back his response. He was struck by the sudden fierceness in Wang’s gaze, not because it unsettled him, but because for the first time he could see the force of the professor’s will.

“I am telling you the truth.”

“Well, then I’m sorry to have to inform you that a meeting of that kind is highly unlikely. I am as close to Governor Patten as you are likely to get. And unless I leave here tonight with some firm answers, the Black Watch are under instructions to return you to China without delay. Your presence here contravenes political understandings between our two countries.”

Wang breathed very deeply so that his chin lifted to the ceiling. Joe’s sudden shift in mood had forced his hand and he was now at the edge of his luck. He would have to confide in this Mr. John Richards, whoever he was, and run the risk that his revelation would simply be ignored by an indifferent British spy.

“Why don’t . . .”

Both men had started speaking at the same time. Joe said, “Go ahead.”

“You first, please.”

“Fine.” Joe wanted to light a cigarette but decided against it. The air in the tiny room was already stale and unpleasant enough. “When you were first interrogated by Lance Corporal Anderson, you mentioned an apartment here in Kowloon.” He thought back to Barber’s report and recalled the address from memory. “Number 19, 71 Hoi Wang Road. What was the significance of that?”

“There was no significance. I made it up.”

“Just like that?”

Wang did not understand the idiom and asked for a translation in Mandarin. Joe provided it and the conversation briefly continued in Chinese.

“So Hoi Wang Road is not the address of someone you know here in Hong Kong? It’s not an apartment at which you have stayed on any previous visit to the colony?”

“I have never been to Hong Kong before.”

Joe made a mental note to have the address investigated before reverting to English. “And why now?” he said. “Why do you have to see Governor Patten in person?”

Wang stood up. When he turned towards the window and leaned against the curtains, Joe had a sudden mental image of the popular professor organizing his notes in a packed Urumqi lecture hall, preparing to address a room full of eager students. “Because he is the only man in any Western government who has demonstrated an interest in the preservation of our basic human rights. Because he is the only man who might have the power to do something about this.”

“About what? We’re talking about human rights now? I thought you wanted to talk about a defection?”

Wang turned round and stepped closer to Joe. He looked angry, as if finally exasperated by a long day of pressure and lies. “Mr. Richards, you are clearly an intelligent man. You know as well as I do that I know nothing about any plans for any member of the Chinese state apparatus to defect. You know as well as I do that this was a story I invented to assist my journey to Hong Kong.”

“So what
do
you know?” Joe wasn’t surprised by the sudden confession. It had been coming for some time. “What is this pressing story you want to share with us? What makes you think that the British government is in any sort of position to grant political asylum to a man like you? What makes Professor Wang Kaixuan so special?”

And Wang fixed him hard in the eyes and said, “I will tell you.”

“My father’s name
was Wang Jin Song.” On the surveillance recording you can hear an eerie silence in that cramped, air-starved safe house, as if all of Hong Kong were suddenly listening in. “He was born in Shanghai and worked as a schoolteacher in the Luwan district, close to People’s Square. He married my mother, Liu Dong Mei, in 1948. She was the daughter of a Kuomintang soldier killed during the Japanese invasion. I was born in 1949, Mr. Richards, so at least I share a birthday with the People’s Republic of China, if nothing else. When I was five years old, my parents were obliged to relocate to Xinjiang province as part of Mao’s policy of mass Han immigration. Perhaps you have heard of this? Perhaps it was mentioned in one of your lectures at Oxford?
Sinicization
, I think they call it in English. I apologize if I am not correct in my pronunciation. Based on a Soviet model, the Stalinist idea of diluting a native people with the dominant imperial race, so that this native population is gradually destroyed. My parents were two of perhaps half a million Han who settled in Xinjiang during this period. My father was given a job as a schoolteacher in Kashgar and we lived in a house that had been owned by a Uighur landowner whom my father believed had been executed by the communists. This was part of Mao’s gradual purging of the Muslim elite, the execution of imams and noblemen, the confiscation of Uighur properties and the seizure of lands. All of this is a matter of historical record.”

“Let a hundred flowers bloom,” Joe said, trying to sound clever, but Wang produced a look of reproach which corrected him.

“That came later.” There was an edge of disappointment in the professor’s voice, as if a favourite student had let him down. “Of course, when my family had been living in Kashgar for two or three years, they became aware of the policy that we now know as the hundred flowers bloom. The Party’s seemingly admirable desire to listen to the opinions of its people, of Party members, in this case the Uighur population. But Mao did not like what he heard. He did not like it, for example, that Turkic Muslims resented the presence of millions of Han in their country. He did not like it that Uighurs complained that they were given only nominal positions of power, while their Han deputies were the ones who were trusted and rewarded by Beijing. In short, the people demanded independence from communist China. They demanded the creation of an Eastern Turkestan.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened is what always happens in China when the people confront the government. What happened was a purge.” Wang helped himself to another glass of water. Joe had the feeling that the story had been told many times before, and that it was perhaps best to avoid any further interruptions. “A Party conference was called in Urumqi, but rather than listen to their complaints, the provincial government took the opportunity to arrest hundreds of Uighur officials. Fifty were executed. Without trial, of course. Trials do not exist in my country. This is what became of the flowers that bloomed, this is what became of Mao’s promise to create an independent Uighur republic. Instead, Xinjiang became an ‘autonomous region,’ which it remains to this day, much as Tibet is ‘autonomous,’ and I surely do not need to educate you about that.”