“What the hell is taking so long?” Harris said. He was standing at the window, staring grimly across the courtyard. It had been nearly an hour since Benjamin had gone.
“Sit tight, Tom,” her father said. “He’ll come back soon. And all this will be over.”
“You think so? I’m beginning to wonder. What day was that officer killed? Early last week, wasn’t it? Wasn’t Benjamin away then, at least one night?”
“I don’t think so,” Francis said. “He was here. He ate supper with us as usual.”
“But he was away a good part of the day, in Changchung, right? And he was away those other days last month?”
“What if he was?” Jane spoke up. “It’s his business what he does.”
Harris checked to see if the sentry outside was within earshot, then said in a lowered voice: “But what if his business is endangering the rest of us? Look at poor Reverend Lum over there. I think we all know Li’s Communist sympathies run pretty deep. Even if he is a British citizen, I’m sure the Japanese didn’t have to do too much snooping around to get wind of him.”
“What did you say about him when you were questioned?” Jane asked.
“Nothing. But it would be no big news to me if he had some involvement in that business. I wouldn’t blame him. Whether he’s with the Communists or Kuomintang, here’s a young Chinese man with patriotic feeling, and he’s going to be fine with the Japanese taking over his country? I’d think he was with the resistance, wouldn’t you? But I’m telling you, I won’t abide the rest of us being imprisoned here because of him, whatever the reason. He can’t use us as some cover or shield. I’ll say that right to Benjamin, when he returns. I think all of us should.”
“He’s not using anyone!” Sylvie stood up and said, the force of her own voice surprising her. But it lifted her, too. She was angry and yet practically on the verge of tears. “He’s just a teacher!”
Harris was about to respond but then kept quiet, clearly deciding not to bother arguing with her. He drifted back toward the window, looking out again for any signs. Her father took her by the shoulders to calm her. “It’s all right, sweetheart. You should try to sleep now, okay? Get some rest.”
“What’s going to happen to Benjamin?”
“I don’t know,” he said, glancing at the Lums. The reverend was in great distress. “We’ll just have to wait. Right now we have to get Reverend Lum out of here, somehow. But nothing’s wrong yet, as far as Benjamin is concerned.”
But as the time kept passing it grew ever clearer that something was indeed going wrong. No one was saying anything, and only Harris was watching the covered window. But there was nothing to see or hear except the winds. Soon the skies clouded over and it began to snow, the flurries flying sideways across the courtyard of the mission. The air had grown damp and heavy and crept inside the dining room, the coal stove burning just hotly enough to keep the temperature inside bearable. The only benefit was that the cold seemed to help blunt Reverend Lum’s pain. Tom Harris also made him drink from the gin he always brought along with him on his travels. Lum at first choked on it, as he didn’t normally drink, but in his tortured delirium and desperation to anesthetize himself he was able to sip down a good quarter of the bottle; he was curled up with it as he lay his head in his wife’s lap, his breathing audible but controlled, only crying out every few minutes or so rather than constantly, which was a mercy to them all.
It was a mercy to Sylvie especially, for even with each small groan her own wrist ached in empathy. She had tried to sit with him and Mrs. Lum but he was so distressed and disassociated that he hardly appeared to recognize her. Then his cries made her picture Benjamin sitting vulnerably before the Japanese officer; what would he do to Benjamin, given the brutality he’d shown Reverend Lum, if he in fact suspected he was part of some resistance group? Despite the possibility, she was still furious at Tom Harris for ever stating it aloud, as if its very airing were somehow accelerating Benjamin toward a similar fate. She resolved that she would not divulge anything about Benjamin or anyone else, including Harris. Never betray a word. It didn’t matter that she knew nothing to betray. She’d flashed with pride when her mother had challenged Harris, and like her mother and father she would display humility and strength of will and undying fidelity to a righteous cause, no matter the duress.
“People are coming out,” Harris said from his position at the window. “It’s a bunch of them.”
“Is Benjamin with them?” Francis said.
“Yes,” Harris said, his voice suddenly grim. “He’s with them.”
Before Sylvie could get to the window the outside door of the vestibule opened and closed and then a rush of freezing air preceded the entrance of armed men. The officer came in after them, followed by several others. They were all bundled for the weather-all but one of them, who wore almost no clothing at all. Clad only in his dull gray undershorts, he was immediately pushed down on his knees before them. It was Benjamin Li. A sharp gasp went up in the room but Sylvie had not cried out, though now it was not from self-control; she simply could not quite breathe. For a long time afterward, for the rest of her years in fact, her grasp of that day would function more as an ill fantasy than a memory, a dark figment she could screen for the purpose of self-torment, letting herself view it over and over until it became a kind of homily, a saying in pictures, until she lost herself within it completely.
His hands were tied behind his back. He seemed only half conscious, barely able to stay kneeling as she shivered with cold. He had been badly beaten, his shoulders and neck lashed with welts. Small angry pocks peppered his chest: he’d been burned with cigarettes. His face was gruesomely battered, one eye swollen completely shut. Blood had flowed and congealed in a branching stream from a gash in his head. He could not, or would not, look up. The soldiers, oddly, now leveled their weapons on the missionaries.
“This man has confessed to his own crimes,” the officer said to them. His English voice was softer than his Japanese, its tone almost decorous, genteel. “Yet he refuses to speak further about his comrades.”
“There’s nothing he can say about us,” Tom Harris told him. “We have nothing to do with what’s happened. We’re innocent.”
“I know this,” the officer said. “I am talking about his comrades in the province. He is not a British subject at all but a Kuomintang agent. Yet no matter what we do to him he won’t answer. So I have brought him here.”
The officer stepped toward the Lums and went down on one knee. He took Reverend Lum’s broken wrist gingerly in his hand and as Mrs. Lum began to titter in fear he asked Benjamin to tell him what he wished to know. Benjamin shook his head, surprising them all that he could even hear anymore. The officer repeated himself and Benjamin once again refused. The officer then barked angrily in Japanese and through his blood-spittled mouth Benjamin gasped, “No!” and the officer stood up abruptly, still gripping the reverend’s wrist.
The shriek from Lum burst like an explosion; for an instant it seemed to rend the room with its flash, and then there was nothing. Sylvie’s father rushed to him after the officer got up but there was nothing to Reverend Lum; his heart had stopped. He was dead. The officer unholstered his revolver and spoke again to Benjamin, asking him to name his compatriots. He was now peering down at Mrs. Lum, who was unable to notice or care; she was wailing and clawing at her own eyes and hair and at her husband’s chest, kissing the back of his lifeless hand. Harris was hollering to Benjamin that he should tell the officer what he knew, but he turned his face away.
“Speak now and I will let the rest of these people go,” the officer told him. “It is my promise.”