Read The Chinese Assassin Online

Authors: Anthony Grey

Tags: #Modern fiction, #General, #Fiction

The Chinese Assassin (10 page)

‘And
do
they really think anyone
in the
world will
believe
that this so-called “survivor” is
genuine?’
Although
her tone
was contemptuous
he
noticed that she was watching his
face closely.

He grinned again. ‘Let’s just say we’re keeping an open
mind.’

‘There can
be no survivor. The Party leadership made a thorough and conclusive investigation!’

Ketterman raised his hands before his face mockingly as though at gun point. ‘Maybe your betters in
Peking have never told all, even to
people like you.’
He
dropped his bands suddenly
on the
table, palms downward, making
a loud slapping sound. ‘What
is
the
reaction
of your comrades
in
Peking to
our information?’

Her
dark
eyes glittered.
‘Those
the Soviet
revisionists
wish to incriminate want this lying imposter brought to Peking to
be
exposed.’

Ketterman
pursed
his lips and
whistled in
wonderment: ‘Is
that
all?’

‘Yes! And
the
degree
of your
assistance
in this will
be
a
test
of your
sincerity.’

He tipped his chair onto
its
back
legs and
grinned at her
through
half-closed
eyes.
‘Hey, this
is
England, remember. They have some old-fashioned notions here
about individual
freedom backed up with
real
live written, laws. The “survivor”, whoever he
is,
might
want
to stay.’

‘Your
agency has
resources
and
manpower wherever it
has the will to use them!’

‘We also have allies
cl
oser to our way of thinking, who we love just a shade more than we love Chairman Mao.’ Ketterman pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. He threw back his head and tipped his chair again, staring reflectively into the spiralling smoke. Suddenly he let the chair crash down
onto its
front legs and
cl
apped his hands together in front of him, staring at her ‘Who runs the Triad protection teams around here, Sui-ling?’

She cocked her head curiously on one side. ‘A man named Johnny Fei. Why?’

‘Where
is
he now?’

‘Outside playing fan tan.’

‘Johnny
the
Fat-boy e
h
?’ said Ketterman softly to himself; translating
the
name
into
English. ‘Can
you get him in?’

She went to the
door and
a moment
later came back
followed slowly by a slender, expensively dressed Chinese man in his
middle thirties. Without waiting
for
an introduction Ketterman stood up.
‘My face is pale, but my
heart is
red,
Johnny.’ He spoke slowly
in Mandarin and
advanced
towards
Fei
grinning broadly
and
holding up his right
hand
with the
middle
finger
extended.

Fe
i
’s
thick dark hair was
slicked
smoothly back
with
oil
in
the fashion of a Thirties film
star.
His narrow body had obviously won him his nickname,
but his loose relaxed stance as
he watched Ketterman approach,
betrayed a
high
degree
of
physical self confidence. His features
were sharp
and regular
but his heavily
lidded eyes gave his hooded face a waxy, watchful expression. A pale
calf 1km jacket
was
thrown loosely
round his elegant
shoulders
over a
floral silk shirt, and
crisply
tailored
check
sports trousers. On his feet
he wore
crocodile skin shoes.

Ketterman
stopped
in
front of him
and
he eyed the American
suspiciously
for a long moment without
speaking.

‘The red rice
of
our army
contains
sand and
stones.
Can
you eat stones?’ Ketterman’s
grin
broadened
and
he held his right
hand
higher
in
front of the
Chinese
man’s face. ‘Can you, Johnny? Huh?’

‘If our
brothers
can eat
them, so can we!’

‘Attaboy, Johnny.’
Ketterman
slapped
him
on the shoulder
with his
left
hand.
‘Come
on,
ask me now where I
was born and
I’ll
say
“under the peach
tree” and
where I live
and
I’ll give
you
that stuff about
the
“topmost summit of Five
F
inger Mountain”.’ He laughed uproariously and waved his extended finger in the air again. ‘In that ho
us
e that is third from the right—and third from the l
eft
’.’ He shook his head. ‘I
like
that.’

The Chinese watched him silently without smiling. Ketterman suddenly stopped laughing and put his hands back in his pockets.

‘You
know Triad ritual well, Mr. Ketterman.’

‘I know a Red
Stick
when I see one, Johnny,’
said
Ketterman quietly,
his
face suddenly
serious.
‘And fools don’t reach that
rank in
the
Triads.
You could be just the man to help me. I might need one of your chop-chop teams to help me on a little job.’

The Chinese rocked back on the balls of his fret and
nodded.
‘They’re very expensive to
outsiders.’

‘Sui-ling will stand
character reference for
me,
Johnny. I don’t know what
or
where
the job will be exactly
yet.’ He took out his wallet and peeled
off five hundred
dollar bills and put them on the table beside Fei’s
right
hand. ‘But
I’
m
prepared to
put down
this non-returnable deposit just
for you
to keep
your top team of; say, half a
dozen
guys standing by ready at five minutes’ notice over
the next
couple
of days.’

Fe
i picked
up the notes
quickly and folded
them away inside
the breast pocket
of his shirt.
He glanced once
more
at Ketterman then sauntered
casually
back to the door. ‘If Su
i
-ling says it’s okay—it’s okay.’ He shrugged his elegant shoulders once
and
swaggered out through the door to join the scrofulous
crowd at
the fan tan table again.

Ketterman picked up the brandy bottle
and slowly
filled his
own
glass. He lifted
it
towards
Tan
Sui-ling and winked. ‘Sino
-
American co-operation—lips and teeth!’ He bared his gums in an exaggerated grimace and tapped his teeth then his top lip with his
forefinger
to
emphasise
their
cl
ose proximity. Then he drank
the brandy straight
down and, still grinning
broadly walked out of the door.

Folio number four

Mongolia in its eastern half is mainly plain, circled about with mountains. But its western half is mainly mountains interspersed only intermittently with flatlands. By November, we had left the eastern plains and entered this western mountainous region. By then my fractured legs had mended sufficiently for
m
e to
si
t
painfully astride a walking horse, and we had begun travelling by day and resting by night. Soon we reached the foothills of the mighty Altai range that provide, in the north-west corner of the country, both a natural barrier and the official border with the Soviet
Union.
In this region the shallow bowls of the
mount
a
in-
ringed flatlands are much smaller
and the
rims
of
the interve
ni
ng heights twist
and
interlock
like
irregular honeycombs.
Here, while the herds grazed on the
plains, we found shelter from the winds in
narrow dales where
patches
of green,
pleasant
woodland stretch clown out
of the dense mountain
forests above.
We rested in this region for the winter
and
gradually I recovered and grew strong again. It was there that I
learned to
live
the simple life of old Tsereng and his family, and began helping
with
the daily domestic
tasks.

It was there too that I began later to take my turn with the herds, holding a long rifle astride a
horse through the night,
guarding the livestock against the marauding bands of wolves that came down swiftly and silently out of the dark mountain forests. I felt at peace
in
that remote land.
It
was not very long before I decided that I wanted no more in life than to repay
through
such service the debt of gratitude to
old
Tsereng
for
delivering
me from
the holocaust of the Trident. After the constant turmoil an4 suspicion
in China,
the harsh, simple life was paradise.

Tser
e
ng’s wife and daughter spoke no Chinese and I
needed
only a very few words to assist them in the simple tasks of sus
tai
ning our lives through the bitter winter. But nevertheless, a warm
unspoken
sympathy grew up
among
us. His daughter, plump,
heavy-
h
ipped
and approaching middle-age, had once lived in the capital, Ulan Bator. But she had lost her
husband
and
children in a terrible fire that gutted the worke
r’s
apartment block where they lived, so she had returned sadly to her family on the grasslands. A silent, inward-looking woman, she carried the tragedy with her always in her eyes. Sometimes at night I caught her unawares, staring at mc over the flickering flames of the hearth, and slowly I came to realise, without he
r
saying, that we shared an instinctive fellowship—because I
t
oo had escaped death by fire.

Nevertheless I was still astonished when,
on
the coldest night of the winter, with Tsereng and his wife and the animals grunting and snorting in their sleep, she crawled naked to
me
across the yurt and slipped silently beneath
my
sheepskin. Without words and with tears
on
her cheeks she offered
me the
comfort
of
her body. On many nights after that as
the
screaming wind whipped
the
bare trees
outside,
and the wolves
bowled higher up the
forested slopes
of the Altai, she came secretly to join me
in
a mute physical
communion that
eased her unbearable
anguish and
brought
warmth and refreshment to
both
our
injured souls.

I
believed then
I would stay
with
old Tsereng forever.
The snows came and went,
spring blossomed early
and
we moved
eastward
once more. When summer
arrived
we shifted dow
n
into the river
valleys and
in May and
June I assisted in the
sheep-shearing and
the
calving
of the cows. At the end of
June I
joined
in the
almost celebratory ritual of
rounding
up
and tethering
the foals
in
lines
alongside their
mothers
so that the milking
of the
mares
could
begin—and with it
of course the ‘vital preparation of the new supply of
kumiss.

It
was only when
the
second
sheep
s
hearing began at
the beginning of September
that
I
realised
suddenly a whole
year had
passed
since
the crash. About the
same time I
began
to
fancy that
old
Tsereng’s
daughter,
whose name
was Kiki, was
gro
w
ing even
plumper than before.
It
was with sudden surge
of
pleasure that I began to suspect she
might
be pregnant with
my child.

But it
was just then that
it all ended, without warning, on a
night
of torrential rain.

The day had
been filled
with
bright autumn
sunshine
under a
sky
of piercing blue, such as I have only ever seen in Mongolia. As we were gathering for
the evening meal
before the
yurt,
however,
clouds
raced up over
the horizon,
darkening
the sky like a hastily drawn curtain.
We moved inside to eat and
soon a monsoon downpour was ham
m
ering loudly on the felt roof. Darkness fell immediately and
a dung
fire was
lit in the open
hearth
to keep out the
damp chill
which
had descended.
I
nside,
crouched around the fire, we
felt secure and warm, and
we
ate in
silence,
listening
to the fierce
beat
of the
rain. I
remember
smiling
happily at Kiki,
and
she
did
a rare thing—she smiled back. I had never seen her smile before. I looked down
directly
at her thickening girth but she looked away
qui
ckl
y into the fire. I felt
sure,
with
a surge of
pride,
that
she was
pregnant.

One of Tsereng’s sons had been helping us
with
the milking
and
was eating with us. When the force of
the
downpour
and a
sudden
wind
began to
shake
the yurt, he got up
with a laugh and
went out to tighten the rope
bands
bound around it
to prevent it
falling
in on us. It was his dying
scream
from outside
that
gave us
our
first warning.

The next moment there was a great rending sound and the felt
wall
beside me
was
slashed
open
from top to bottom. I
stared
in horror at
the figure
of a
man standing
outside in the storm.
Even
though he
was drenched with rain and disguised in
the
clothes
of a nomadic herdsman I recognised Chiao Feng, one of Wang Tung-hsing’s chief lieutenants from Peking. He held a long curved
knife
in one
hand and
a pistol in
the
other. His
lips
were
draw
n
back from his
teeth
in a snarl of
t
r
iu
m
ph—and
his eyes held unwavering on
mine.

Old Tsereng rose slowly to his
feet, his hand
reaching for the hilt of the decorated dagger at his belt. But there
was
a shout from the doorway
behind us and
we turned to
find
another
dripping figure
holding a sub-machine
gun pointing in our direction.
Old Tsereng’s hands fell to his sides
and
for a moment nobody moved or spoke. The rain on the
roof and the
shriek of the rising
wind
were the only
sounds
in the yurt. Tsereng’s
wife and Kiki remained squatting motionle
s
s
on the floor,
their
mouths agape
with
fear.

Chiao waved his
knife
menacingly in
the
air towards old Tsereng
and the
women, then stepped warily up
behind me.
He pinioned my
arms
quickly and
had just
begun to bind my
wrists
when the old man sprang. The long
pointed
dagger that
he’d taken from the dead
body of the
vanquished camel train
leader forty years before
buried itself in Chiao’s chest above his heart.
At
the same
moment the man in the doorway opened
fire with
the machine gun.

He held his finger
curled tight
around the trigger until the
magazine was exhausted, turning
the
muzzle
this way
and
that across
the
yurt, dragging a broken
line
of gaping scarlet
punctures across the
back of old
Tsere
n
g and the
bodies of his
wife and
daughter on the floor. Neither of
them screamed
or
uttered any
sound as they died, Old
Tsereng clung to his adversary
for a moment
then his heavy
bulk toppled slowly
backward to the groun
d
His hand
was
cl
enched
so tight round the hilt of his dagger that he dragged it out of
Chiao’s
lung
and
fell dead
with
the crimson-bladed
weapon still clutched
in his right fist

Chiao’s companion
was
joined
silently in
the doorway by a
third
Chinese
and together they finished binding
my wrists Then they
attended to
Chiao’s wound
and
one of
them
helped
him
outside into his
saddle. I was dragged
outside too
and thrust
onto the back of another horse. The
third man mounted
up behind me
and
turned the
a
n
i
m
a
l’s
head
back towards the yurt. I
could see
now
that
old
Tsereng’s son was lying dead
on the
ground
outside.

The
first of
Chiao’s companions
took a large can of
petrol
and splashed it
around quickly
inside the yurt.
Then
he threw
the can inside, lit a large
rag-bound torch
already
soaked in
petrol and
raced for
his horse. He rode to the
door
and tossed
the
burning
torch
inside. As
we turned to ride into the
driving rain,
the interior of the yurt
exploded with a thump and began
burning fiercely. It continued
blazing despite
the
torrential downpour and
faded only slowly into
the darkness behind us as we rode
away.

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