*
From his hotel that night, Lee made a phone call but the operator said she was not in her room. He tried the number at hourly intervals and gave up around dawn. The next morning he was late for his meeting with the man Commissar Hu had described as a warlord. General Lo Tsai-ta got up when Lee was shown in. But instead of making him feel welcome, the general picked up his cigarettes, excused himself and left the room. Some time later an assistant appeared to tell Lee that the general would not be available until later in the day, there was a crisis at the railway terminus that required his presence. Lee left the compound and walked to the end of the street and turned right as if he knew where he was going. There were no buses or taxis but the street was full of people. Uncleared garbage and old newspapers lay on the corner. He kept walking and came to a bridge, the famous bridge known throughout the country as a marvel of modern engineering. At its base, a man was cooking rice for his family. There were people swimming in the river and clothes spread out to dry on the parapets. Lee walked past a lecture group of some sort, a class of five or six who sat in a circle and listened to a woman reciting something. Was it poetry or the words of a song? He caught a few lines:
The world is on fire; time is a bomb.
Ten thousand years are not enough
When so much remains to be done.
Now he could see the entire span of the bridge. He noticed that there were small knots of people sitting throughout the length of it and some kind of obstruction at the other end. He stopped when he saw what it was, stopped, turned around and went back the way he’d come. A bus had been parked crossways and on the far side of the bus was a snaking line of cars and trucks and military transport vehicles, a line that stretched further than he could see. The drivers had disappeared and the vehicles looked like they hadn’t moved in a long time. Below him the muddy Yangtse too was immobile, as if it had turned to cement.
*
It was night when he returned to the general’s office. Lo Tsai-ta was on the couch, a Panama hat worn low over his closed eyes and a cigarette burning in his hand. He wore a white shirt and linen trousers to go with the hat, but the overall effect of the ensemble wasn’t elegance as much as exhaustion. He seemed too tired to speak. There were two other men in the room who greeted Lee as if they knew him well. One, an officer who gave his name only as Tung, took him to a table where a bottle and glasses had been arranged. Lee poured himself a brandy and soda. He took a quick swallow of the drink and carried his glass and stood at the window. Sit here, said Tung, and Lee took a seat on the couch opposite the general. He noticed that General Lo’s eyes had followed his progress from the window to the couch but otherwise the general was inert, like a convalescent. Lee placed his drink on the floor and waited with his elbows on his knees. After a time the general lifted his arm and took a slow sip of his cigarette. Tung and his colleague were having a whispered conversation. Lee couldn’t hear Tung but the other man’s one-word responses were clear enough. Kaolu, he said, whenever Tung stopped for breath.
Eventually, Tung turned to Lee. Wuhan is a test case, he said. Everything happens here: the plague, riots, surplus productivity, famine, tremendous industrial output, the end of everything. We believe Peking is using us as a kind of social experiment. They want to see how much punishment a city can take before it shuts down. They’ve posed an interesting question or set of questions, I will say that much. For example, how much chaos can the human system absorb? What are the uses of insanity? Is there intelligence in negativity? How far can destruction extend before it stops being creative? How useful is chance? Can the individual imagination apprehend the last beach, the last birdsong, the last sunset in the last sky? The inhabitants of Wuhan have thought about all these questions, we’ve thought about and discussed them in great detail. We’ve answered them too, if only to our own satisfaction. There’s only one question we are incapable of answering. Do you know what it is?
Lee thought: Why do you continue to stay here? But he shook his head. No, he said.
Tung said, ‘What are you doing here?’
At this all three men looked at Lee as if he had just then appeared out of thin air.
‘I’ve been sent by the Party to look carefully at what is happening in Wuhan,’ said Lee. ‘I am expected to make a report and that’s as far as my responsibility goes.’
Tung was shaking his head even before Lee finished. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no.’
It was then that Lee chose to make a comment about the Mao Tse-tung Thought Million Fighting Wuhan Revolutionary Heroic Workers Troops, a coalition the general was known to support, though not openly. The Workers Troops was larger than its older rival, the Wuhan Area Proletarian Mao Tse-tung Thought Fighting Workers Centre, which had the support of Peking. Lee said he thought the Workers Troops was the cause of much of the rioting and disorder on the streets.
Tung made a spitting sound. ‘You are ignorant,’ he said. ‘It is the Workers Centre that has caused unrest in Wuhan.’
Lee nodded slowly. Then he said, ‘There’s talk in Peking that the Workers Troops should be disbanded.’
At this the general got to his feet and gestured that Lee should do the same. ‘This meeting is at an end,’ he said. It was the first time he’d spoken in Lee’s presence and it served as a kind of signal to Tung, who threw his cigarette to the floor and shouted a slogan against the Workers Centre. Lee wasn’t sure what he was shouting because Tung was too angry to articulate his words properly. He marched around the room and stopped in front of Lee.
‘I am prepared to sacrifice my life,’ Tung said. ‘We are soldiers. This is what we have trained for, self-sacrifice. You tell them that.’ Then he walked out and let the door bang behind him.
Chapter Seven Twice Abducted
When Lee returned to his hotel and placed a call to Pang Mei it was well past midnight. He heard the phone ring at the engineering college hostel and then he heard a siren and people shouting in the courtyard below. Wei? said the switchboard operator in Peking. The noise in the courtyard became louder and there were announcements on a public address system. Lee hung up and went to the window. A fire truck and a covered transport vehicle were entering the hotel’s gates, and a loudspeaker van and men carrying rifles and choppers and home-made spears. He went to the door and locked it and placed another call. He was talking to the receptionist at the commissariat when they broke open the door and punched him to the floor. He got up and a man who looked somehow familiar slapped him on the side of the head, so hard that his glasses flew off his face and landed on the carpet halfway across the room. There was a ringing in his ears and someone hit him low in the stomach and someone else kicked his feet out from under him. Lee landed on his back. There were flecks of blood on his shirt and his ribs felt bruised. They pulled him to his feet and bound his hands behind his back. Then they marched him out of the building and towards one of the vans. The lobby was in pandemonium. The hotel’s official cars had been overturned and gutted and a tree in the courtyard was ablaze. The staff stood under the portico. As Lee was brought down the steps he saw a man run towards the gate. A small mob set upon him with bare hands and rifle butts and brought him down. The man shouted: Help me, comrades, help me. Who was he talking to? How odd, thought Lee, that fear should make you ask for help from the exact source of your torment. A man with a chopper stepped up and cut off the fallen man’s arms with precise and economical strokes. The man twitched and shivered as he gazed at his severed arms and the ropes of blood that joined them. His lips moved and the words he spoke, if at all he was speaking, were inaudible. Blood pooled around his hips. He sat up and vomited and the crowd stepped back in disgust. Then the man with the chopper cut off his head, though this took some effort because the chopper was no longer sharp and wouldn’t cut through the neck bones.