“Here it is,” said the sexton, pointing to a mound of earth.
The torches gathered round and then were switched off, leaving only the faint light of the lantern on the grave.
“Switch on the headlights of the lorries,’ ordered Tchan, drawing back a pace or two. “Then get cracking!”
They proceeded almost in silence. The headlamps came on quite suddenly., casting a white light tinged with mauve. The workmen spread a tarpaulin by the side of the grave.
Tchan watched the picks and shovels at work, while the sexton leaned over from time to time, presumably to tell the workers when to stop piling the earth at the side of the grave and start putting it on the tarpaulin. They’d decided to sift the earth that might contain, among the dead man’s bones and what remained of his clothes, the lost mike.
Tchan was so obsessed his head was splitting, though he had high hopes of getting his hands on the precious device. He’d show the Zhongnanhai what he was made of! Maybe Mao himself would come to hear about it. Tchan looked up from time to time: he hoped it wasn’t going to rain! Spadefuls of earth were starting to fall on the tarpaulin. Any one of them might hold the treasure. The sexton couldn’t remember Van Mey’s funeral now, but he did tell them that when someone died instantly in an accident and didn’t go into hospital (the bulldozer had practically cut Van Mey in two), they were usually buried in the clothes they were wearing at the time.
“Careful,” someone called. “You’ve reached the skeleton.”
The heap of earth on the tarpaulin went on growing. They were going to sift as much soil as possible to be on the safe side. Heaven knows how long this would have gone on if Tchan hadn’t suddenly called a halt.
“That’ll do,” he said. “No point in digging up the whole cemetery.”
The first drops of rain began to fall, and they hurried to remove the tarpaulin before it got any heavier. As it was it took six of them to lift it on to the lorry.
“Lucky we got away before the storm!” said Tchan as the lorries drew away.
It was raining hard by the time they got back to headquarters. There were lights in the windows of the lab, and the lab assistants were waiting in silence, wearing sinister long rubber gloves. Again it took six men to carry the load upstairs. Then they set about crumbling up the soil.
Tchan stood watching with folded arms. Bits of skeleton and stone were put on one side to be looked at again later if nothing was found in the earth. The skull seemed to be grinding its teeth at them. “Gnash away as much as you like,” Tchan muttered. “You won’t stop me finding your Yoke!”
Every so often a chill ran down his spine, either with unnamed apprehension or because it had been so cold and damp in the cemetery.
It wasn’t yet midnight when one of the lab assistants came on a button belonging to the anorak. That lifted their spirits. Twenty minutes later they found the mike itself. Only then did they notice that they and everything around them, including the floor and the tables, were covered with mud.
13
Was it really on the same night, or did people’s memories run the two horrifying and unforgettable events together and make them coincide? But even if the second spiritualist séance did take place a few days before or a few days after the finding pf the mike, it wasn’t surprising if people thought of the two things as happening together.
Be that as it may, Van Mey’s two friends, together with the medium, had met for another séance to commemorate Van’s death and summon up his spirit. The meeting they’d all planned, at which they were to have invoked Qan Shee, had of course not taken place.
They’d been sitting round the table for some time. The candle flames flickered more lugubriously than ever, and the medium’s face looked more pallid. He’d been in a trance for a long while, but his painful breathing, broken by occasional rattles^ suggested that something was preventing him from making contact with the dead man.
According to later evidence it must have been at exactly this moment that, in the lab not far away at Public Safety headquarters, Tchan and his assistants had started to play the tape taken from Vae Mey’s qietingqi. Their faces were ashen as they listened to the voice from — beyond the grave. It sounded slow and hoilow, like a disc being played at the wrong speed. And like a ghost.
“The tape must be damp,’ said Tchan, bending o?er the machine.
“Not surprising after being in the ground all that time,” said one of his aides.
The voice-was scarcely audible, and interspersed with dull thuds. Tchan wound the tape backwards and forwards to eliminate the blanks. Suddenly they all started. In the midst of the other noises there arose a shriek, abruptly cut off.
“The accident,” said Tchan.
He must have been right, for the sinister cry was followed by a hubbub that might well have been made by a crowd gathering round the dead man. Further on in the tape, thought Tchan, there must be a recording of the corpse being taken from the crematorium to the cemetery — perhaps even of the burial He wound the tape forward, and thought he heard the sound of spadefuls of earth falling on the body. After that there was an ever-deepening hush. My God, thought Tchan: that’s what they mean by silent as the grave …
He listened transfixed until the end of the tape. He must be the first person in the world to possess a sample of the silence of death. Now he could say he had gone down among the shades.
He was roused from his reverie by the click as the machine switched itself off. He wound the tape back again to find Van Mey’s voice, slimy-sounding and decayed after spending so long in the earth. It must have been after midnight now — according to later evidence, the same time as that at which, in a cold room a few hundred yards away, the medium, trying in vain to bring the voice of the dead man back to his two friends, gasped out, “I can’t, he doesn’t want to come — something’s preventing him…” Skinder Bermema stared at the last few lines as if he’d have liked them to go on of their own accord, It seemed to him this last part was written rather carelessly and didn’t fully exploit the possibilities of the subject.
It took him some time to remember what had happened next in that town in central China.
After he’d heard the evidence, Tchan had no difficulty finding out about the séances and the names of the people who’d attended them. Nothing was known about their arrest, but it probably took place without delay. It wasn’t certain whether Tchan had had them nabbed without more ado, or if he’d waited to catch them in the act during a séance. If the latter, he probably did make the macabre speech often attributed to him: after the door was smashed in and the conspirators were captured as they sat around the candles waiting in vain to communicate with the dead, Tchan is supposed to have said mockingly, “Were you waiting for his voice?” Then he burst out laughing. “Well, I’m afraid he’s stood you up, gentlemen! I’ve got both his voice and his soul — in here!” And he showed them the little bugging device.
It was the Albanian ambassador in Peking, an old acquaintance of his, who first told Skënder about the dreaded Zhongnanhai. And when he heard about the business of the microphones he was sure the General Bureau must have been mixed up in it. The same day he asked an embassy official who spoke the language what the ultra-secret mini-mikes were called in Chinese. “Qietingqi” was the word, he was told — pronounced “tchietintchi”.
“Are you going to write something about it?” the ambassador asked Bermema when he spoke to him about the séance. “China is still haunted by ghosts and spirits, despite all the denunciations of the old days.”
Skënder sat down on the bed and. gazed at the white curtains as he revolved all these memories. Various other incidents were now coming back to him …He lay down …A lunch near Tirana with some friends, after a rehearsal of one of his plays, and the maunderings of someone at a nearby table who’d had too much to drink: “In the third millennium, Albania will become Christian again, and if you want to survive you’d better change your name from Skënder to Alexander”, Going into hospital a year ago, the syringe in the nurse’s hand, and his own sudden doubt about it — a doubt that was somehow like the confusion he’d recently felt going into the Hotel Helmhaes in Zurich, because in Albanian the word “helm” meant “fish” …The women he’d loved, a tune, a balcony overlooking the sea, manuscripts and more manuscripts…An ashtray in a café, full of cigarette stubs of which only one had lipstick on it, symbolizing the disproportion between the emotion felt by the unknown man and that felt by the unknown woman…