Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

He waited in the shadows for nearly an hour, watching through the windows before walking in the side door of Baiyun’s little police post. “The German was an agitator for democracy,” he said to Meng’s back as she sat at her desk. “You knew that.”

Meng went very still, then slowly turned to face him. “He was a foreigner,” she replied, as if it were the same thing.

“You knew he was watching the new pacification camp.”

“A foreigner known for making documentary films who is traveling illegally in a district with one of the highest concentrations of detention camps in all of China. It would be a reasonable surmise.”

“For you.”

“And for Major Liang,” she shot back.

Shan hesitated a moment, confused at the flicker of uncertainty he saw in her eyes. “I need to get into that camp.”

“Don’t be a fool. Impossible.”

“Arrest me.”

Meng brushed a strand of hair from her face. Shan noticed for the first time her disheveled, weary appearance. She gestured toward the computer on her desk. “I spent two hours today trying to figure out who you are, Comrade Shan. Public Security has so many secret operations Beijing can’t even keep track of them in any systematic way. And you’re not really the Public Security type, are you?”

Shan did not reply.

“One of the green apes from that new pacification camp came in to run a request about a lao gai registration number. It was yours, Shan.”

He had forgotten that Lung Tso had taken his tattoo number, though not his discovery that the Jade Crows sometimes acted like surrogates for the Armed Police.

“But that’s all there was,” Meng continued. “Just your name, and an admission date over seven years ago. The Four hundred and fourth People’s Construction Brigade. Nothing else. One of Colonel Tan’s most famous prisons. Tan doesn’t lose records. It has to be a legend, the officer said, a deep cover. I didn’t bother to tell the fool that no one creates deep cover with empty files. But on the other hand, no convict would be so clever as to find a way for Tan to destroy his file and then be so foolish as to keep using the same name and stay in Tan’s county.”

“I could draw you a map of all the roads I helped build with the Four hundred and fourth. Arrest me,” he said again.

“Why not change your name?”

He paced along the front of the detention cell that adjoined the office, touching each bar as he passed it. “The Four hundred and fourth People’s Construction Brigade. It’s how they know me there. It’s how I get inside.”

“You’re making no sense.”

Shan gripped the bars of the cell and spoke into its shadows. “I have a son named Ko,” he explained after a long moment, “my only flesh and blood. He has nearly ten years left on his sentence. Former inmates are not allowed back, but Tan and I have an arrangement. He lets me see him on the first Sunday of each month, and lets me send one letter a month.”

In the long silence that followed they could hear the bleating of sheep in the marketplace paddock.

He turned to her. “I have a friend behind the wire of that new camp. His name is Lokesh.”

“There’s talk of setting up a visitation program.”

“How soon?”

She shrugged. “A few months. By the end of the year if the Tibetans stay quiet. They were blowing that damned horn again last night. Someone made a bonfire of Chinese road signs at one of the crossroads. Another monk burned himself in Sichuan.”

“And if they don’t?”

She shrugged again. “Then there will be another six camps just like it. There’s a new policy. For every Tibetan arrested in a strike or protest two family members will also be arrested.”

Shan dropped into the chair across from Meng’s desk. “I need to be in there, Lieutenant. All I have in the world is my son and that old Tibetan inside that camp’s wire. Please.”

Meng grew still again. Somehow the contemplative look on her face unsettled him. “You’re lucky to have a son,” she said quietly. “I never had a child.”

The silence between them took on a strangely awkward air.

“I think I liked it better when you called me a fool. Arrest me,” Shan pressed.

“It’s administered by the Armed Police. They could arrange for you to slip inside for a few hours.”

“Never. The prisoners would smell a plant.”

Meng glanced at him, then away, several times, as if not knowing how to react. Finally she looked out the window. “I’ve been there. It’s no hard-labor camp, but the detainees are treated like livestock. Typhus has started. I was being given a tour when a tractor finished digging a wide trench behind the camp. The guards laughed when I asked if they were putting in a foundation for a new building, laughed again when the first bodies were thrown in, said they ran the best camp in all Tibet, because pacification at their camp was permanent.”

You’re a Public Security officer, Shan almost rejoined, stop pretending you care. But then he saw the way she bit her lower lip. There were times when Meng seemed like just another girl adrift in the bitter sea of China.

“Meng, I know how to survive in such places. I speak Tibetan.”

When she did not respond he rolled up his sleeve and thrust his forearm in front of her. She stared at the gulag registration number.

“They dig the needle in deep when they do it,” he said in a near whisper, “use a scalding needle to cauterize the blood vessels that get severed. I wanted to scream, but I was the only Chinese prisoner and I thought I should set a good example.”

She looked away, out the window, as if she didn’t want to listen.

“I was never sent in to spy, Meng. I went too far in an investigation, into the top ranks of the Party. Certain ministers in Beijing wanted to bury me alive. They sent me to the prison with the highest fatality rate in China. But I survived, because of Lokesh and men like him. Five years, Meng. I was in five years. I know the diseases. I helped dig mass graves.”

When she looked back, her face had hardened. “Do you have any idea how many agencies there are that run secret intelligence agents?” she asked. “At least a dozen that are widely known, as many more that can’t be named. Agents routinely invest years in their cover. There are schools run for the purpose. They are dead to their prior lives. They live their cover every hour, every minute, never confiding in anyone, going for months or even years without surfacing for those who run them. There is no sacrifice too great for the motherland.”

Shan’s mouth went dry.

“An agent could get such a number on his arm, even build a cover no one understands but him and his handlers. The best of those agents could even endure five years in a prison to earn the trust of his targets. If you were such an agent, what would you tell me?”

He looked down into his hands. “That I wasn’t sent to spy. That I was truly in prison to be punished.”

“Exactly.”

Shan opened his mouth to argue but hesitated. He could not fathom why he felt the need to make this woman understand the truth of his life. There was, in the end, no way to refute her. She wanted so badly to believe he was not real, that he was an agent, an informer. In the world she inhabited no one had to be real. There was no truth in her world, only greater and lesser degrees of propaganda. And there was a certain veracity to her words. He did live under cover, he did hide the most important elements of his life, he did keep his most important truths secret.

He rolled his sleeve back over his wrist. “I know how to survive,” he repeated in a tight voice.

“You’re a fool to think so. Survival in such a place is a cast of the dice. Lose the throw and it’s that hole in the ground for you. Not even a shroud. They toss you in the pit and maybe throw some lime on your face. The birds will pick at you until your end of the hole fills and a bulldozer shoves dirt over it. Bodies mean nothing in China,” she added as a bitter afterthought.