John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

Ever since boyhood Chan had recognized in himself a fatal tendency to vibrate at the same frequency as certain tragic souls. On the rare occasions that he and Jenny had gone to the movies he always emerged choked from overidentification with the hero. Jenny was always thrilled by the action; horses, guns and blood cheered her up.

Like a powerful lover, the old man was difficult to resist, but Chan foresaw only pain, embarrassment and failure. Thursday evening he dragged his feet on the way to Wanchai and took time to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the sage’s favorite liquor. When he arrived, the old man was alone and morose.

“What happened to your meeting, your recruits?”

The old man shrugged. “They both have New Zealand passports. What do they care about laogai ? China, a quarter of the world’s population, can go fuck itself. They think.”

“How far did you get?”

“Not to the pictures. Ever since I showed them to you and you freaked out, I’ve been quiet about the photographs.”

“I’m a special case. They killed my mother.”

“Not so special. They killed a million mothers.”

“Want me to go?”

“I wanted you to be on time. You might have made a difference.”

“Sorry.”

The old man was working himself up to an unsagelike fury. “Why does nobody care? The Chinese prison system, the laogaidui , uses slaves, slaves , to produce wine, tea, paper, cars, opium, heroin that it sells to the West. Over fifty million people have been imprisoned in laogai since 1949; that’s almost the population of England. And nobody gives a fuck. Why? When Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet gulag, they practically beatified him.”

“You know why. We’re yellow, Asiatic. The white man can’t relate to us. In the back of his mind we’re basically slave material anyway. Less than a hundred years ago we were selling each other into slavery in the West Indies and Brazil. They don’t care because we don’t care. Have a drink.”

Chan went to the kitchen to fetch glasses. He opened the whiskey and poured two generous slugs. The old man hardly looked at the glass before knocking back half the contents. He breathed out appreciatively.

“You have your uses.” He expelled some of his rage with a sigh. “You’re partly right, the race thing. It’s also the sheer mass: one point four billion! How do you even begin to communicate? I tell myself you’ve got to start somewhere. Hong Kong seemed a good place. But here everyone has other concerns. How to make money or how to escape. Or both. And then I have a credibility problem. I’m too old, too weird and not even Cantonese. I guess I come across as a pompous old fart.” The old man finished the whiskey in one long swallow, smacked his lips and held the glass out for more. “I’m out of sync with the times. Ezra Pound said that. Look, while we’re still sober, would you listen to my presentation? I recorded it. That’s what salesmen do these days, so I’m told.” He fetched a tape recorder from one of the shelves, placed it beside him on the sofa and switched it on. His voice emerged from the machine in a slow, steady and, to Chan, haunting rhythm.

“Slavery is like malaria,” the voice said. “Forty years ago it seemed as if it had been eradicated worldwide except for a few small, isolated pockets. But nothing mutates like evil. The twentieth century will be remembered for many awful things, but who’s predicting that it will be the century when numerically more human beings were enslaved than at any time in history? No one except me.”

Bad start, Chan thought. A shocking and difficult idea delivered pitilessly. On the tape a woman said irritably: “You haven’t told us why you were imprisoned in the first place.”

“Good question. When I was nineteen, my father had saved up enough to send me to study humanities at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States of America. It was 1947. I specialized in English and American literature. After graduation I went back to be part of the great adventure of socialism, the finest challenge and the greatest revolution in the history of mankind.”

There was a long silence while the tape wound on; then the old man finally resumed. “I had about a month teaching English at the University of Beijing before my first purge. See, no true Communist could believe that anyone would be dumb enough to leave the United States to return to China. I had to be a capitalist spy. From then on I was branded socially.”

Chan got up to pause the tape. “Bad mistake.”

The old man rolled his eyes. “I know.”

“Never tell Chinese you’re branded socially. They’ll brand you socially.”

“I know.”

“For God’s sake, it was you who told me that stuff about cultures of shame, cultures of guilt.”

The old man groaned. “You’re a ruthless coach.”

“The Chinese have a culture of shame par excellence. To be branded socially is the ultimate sanction, a kind of death penalty. That’s how we’ve been manipulated by a ruling class for five thousand years.”

The old man switched off the tape recorder. “You’re right, definitely lost them there. Tons too heavy.” He picked up the glass that Chan had replenished. “What the hell. Am I wrong or are they? I worry about human destiny, the obscenity of slavery in the late twentieth century. They think about what kind of washing machine they’ll have in New Zealand, how life will be without a Filipina servant. My soul may be black, but at least I have a soul.”

“You should be more forgiving,” Chan said. “You had forty years to meditate on the human condition. They’re lucky if they get five minutes on the underground on the way home.”

The old man finished the whiskey again and smirked. “Don’t insult my virility. Forty years thinking about the human condition, are you crazy? I spent forty years thinking about women. Why d’you think I live in the red-light district?”

Chan watched the old man laugh. He was free, this old man; behind his outrage he walked with his god. Was that the way to go? In an inverted world, stand on your head and let the gods decide who was right? Did Chan want to end up like that?

At the door the old man held his elbow for a moment.

“Answer me one question. Thirty miles north over the border they’re starving girl orphans to death in state-run orphanages. Why don’t we care?”

When Chan searched his face, the old man held up his hand. “I’m not being self-righteous here; it’s a simple question. The peasants dump little girls down wells; the state exterminates them. You know about it, I know about it, America and Europe know about it, it was on CNN-why don’t we care?”

Chan was still pondering this question the next day when the commissioner of police himself telephoned to invite him to a meeting the following morning.

When Chan was shown into Cuthbert’s suite at Queensway Plaza, Commissioner Tsui was already there with Caxton Smith, the commissioner for security, and Roland Brown, the commissioner for the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Chan sat at the extreme end of the long table that was the main feature of the anteroom annexed to Cuthbert’s office; only the political adviser and his positively vetted English secretary were allowed to enter the office itself. Cuthbert sat at the head of the table with Roland Brown on his left, Tsui and Caxton Smith on his right.

Over the years Chan had learned some of the semaphore that the English use in place of speech. Within seconds he had absorbed signals to the effect that the meeting was informal, that he was no longer in trouble, that indeed the three men staring at him were according him a measure of respect usually reserved for their own ranks; in other words, they wanted his help. Now it was time for someone to say something. Cuthbert coughed.