The Chinese Assassin (12 page)

‘Because
in
the
absence of any evidence really worth
that name
t
h
ere’ve
been contradictions
by the
score.
The Russians got the wreckage
and
the
burned-out corpses—and
may
still
have ‘em in some grisly deep freeze under the Kremlin for all we know. But although they’ve never said
anything official
about their findings, Kosygin told Pierre
Trudeau casually
on a
trip
to Ottawa that they’d
dug bullets
out of some of the barbecued carcasses. Now, unless all the
Chinese
comrades suddenly wanted to read the empty fuel gauge at once and started
taking
pot
shots
at each other for that sole privilege, that makes Peking’s story a bit suspect from the
start,
doesn’t it?’

She reached out a
hand and
stroked his
hair.
‘I’d
believe
anything you said, darling
I’
m sure you’re right.’

He brushed her hand away
impatiently.
‘The Mongolians
and
the Russians
said
the bodies were burned beyond recognition— but Chou
En-lai
told a group of
visiting American
newspaper
editors much
later that
Chinese diplomats had
gone to
the scene and
ide
n
tified Lin
and
the others on the spot.
And
buried ‘em
there,
what’s more. There’s a lot
else
besides, but do you begin to
see
what I mean?’

He leaned across the
bed
to reach for his
bathrobe
but Nina
beat
him to it. She wrapped it round her shoulders, danced
swiftly
out of reach, picked up the tea tray from the
bedside
table
and
moved towards the door. As she passed him Scholefield reached out
and patted
her rump affectionately. ‘And what’s more, my lissom love, whenever all the evidence available in the West is fed into the
big
China-watching
computers in places like
Harvard
and
the American Consulate General in Hong Kong they
just rip their bolts loose and
get up off
their pedestals and rush
round
shaking their
heads
and
chanting, “Lies, lies, all
lies”.’

‘I think I’m beginning to get a
glimmer,
Professor, of why you preferred cuddling those
pink
folios on the kitchen table all night

—though I
can’t say
I admire your choice.’ She waggled her hips provocatively at him and
disappeared
grinning into the kitchen.

He heard her clattering the
cups
in the sink,
then
the door bell rang
and
she went to answer
it.
When
she returned
a moment later she
was
clipping her long
hair
up on
the
top of her head in preparation for a shower. ‘It
was
your
uniformed
voyeur, Moynahan. His eyes nearly fell out of his head. He
said an American
left some books for you while you were away. He’s going to bring them up.’

Scholefield
nodded and
began to get out of bed. ‘Some new American publications from Harvey Ketterman. He’s a State Department Pekinologist. A good chum of
mine.
You’ll meet him, he’s over here for a couple of seminars.’ He padded barefoot
down
the ha
l
l
behind
her to
the
bathroom.

‘The mystery of
Li
n
Piao would make a good plot for an old Hollywood B movie,
w
ouldn’t
it?’ she said over her shoulder. ‘If it wasn’t true.’

‘It gets more like that
the
further you go into it.’ He
soaped his
face and watched her long
body in his
shaving
mirror
as
she tucked her hair inside a shower cap
and
climbed
under
the warm water jet. ‘We know what fantasies
the Chinese
rank
and file
were asked to believe
because facsimiles
of
their
secret
documents leaked
out to Hong Kong and Taiwan. They make it sound as though
Li
n
had a
mixture
of Buster Keaton, the Keystone cops
and
Harold Lloyd as co-conspirators.’ He
fitted
a new blade
carefully
into
his razor
and began to
scrape
creamy lather from
the
side of his
face.

‘A soldier deputed to blow up Mao’s train is supposed to have gone into a blue
funk
at the last moment
and
got his wife, who
was
a doctor, would you believe, to give
him
an injection to blur his vision so he couldn’t see the train when it went by.
Then further
up the
line
they allegedly tried to
kill
Mao by leaking gas into the
train’s heating
system—but found too late the
vents
in the Chairman’s carriage were blocked.
Then
another
would-be assassin fluf
fe
d
a stabbing attack
because
he became totally overawed by Mao’s charisma after
tricking
his way into
the
great man’s presence in the Forbidden City in Peking.’

Nina
drew back the shower
curtains and
poked her head out. ‘A case of first-knife nerves, do you think?’

‘Okay,
I know it
sounds hilarious
now.
And
Chou En-lai
practically admitted
to another foreign
delegation
later that all that
was bunkum.
But we might never know how close China
and
Russia came to the crunch over it. Or what it might have
meant
for the rest of us. Kissinger had
just
made his first secret
visit
to Peking a few
weeks
before—and America
and
China had been sworn enemies for twenty years up to
then,
remember.
The Russians couldn’t
have bee
n
altogether happy about
finding an unidentified
aircraft heading out of China towards their heartland, in
the middle
of
the
night
shortly after that event—if they didn’t
know it
was
coming.’ He put down his
razor and turned to wrap a
large
bath towel round her as she stepped
out of the shower.

‘But how
could
the
Chinese hush
up a
plane crash like that in
a foreign
country
for ten months?’

‘They didn’t hush
up the crash
itself
The
Mongolians and
the
Russians
forced
their hand
by
putting
out a
bald official news agency report
from Ulan Bator.
Tass carried
it
too.
But even that didn’t appear until
seventeen days after the crash—at the
end of
September.
The
Chinese had to
.ad
m
it
then
they’d
lost a Trident.
But
they insisted it was a civilian plane. And they didn’t
come
anywhere near admitting then
they’d lost
Mao’s heir-
apparent.’

Scholefield
stepped
under the shower,
opened the
cold
tap and threw his
head back under the
stinging
spray. He shook the water out of his eyes and shivered, despite t
h
e
heat.
‘We
knew
all hell had broken loose in China in the
m
iddle
of September because military radio
messages
monitored
in
Japan
recalled
all China’s troops urgently from leave. And the messages were going out
en
clair,
n
ot
coded. They
were obviously at panic stations. The American
satellites 4etected a
lot of unusual troop movements,
and all civilian
flights
were
suddenly grounded throughout
the country.
Foreigners
in China were
just stranded
where
they
were. Then to cap it
all
the annual Liberation Day parade in Peking on October
1st
was
cancelled at the eleventh hour without
any explanation.
Whether it
was
civil war, or war
with Russia,
they were worried
about—or both—we
don’t know. But China
was
certainly
standing
rather
unsteadily
on one
ear
at
that time.’

Nina
slipped the
bath
robe on
and stared
thoughtfully
at her
reflection in
the
mirror.
She removed the
shower cap, unpinned
her
hair and began drawing a wire-bristled brush through
it with long slow strokes,
tilt
in
g
her head fro
m
side
to side. Scholefield stayed under
the
cold shower until his
teeth
were
chattering, then
he stepped out
and
towelled
himself
vigorously.

‘How could the
Americans and Israelis
come to get mixed up in all this? That sounds a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?’ She stopped brushing
her hair
and gazed
enqui
rin
gly
at his
reflection in the
mirror. ‘Has that just been thrown in, do you think, so
the Chinese can
be
sure
of
selling the
motion picture rights of your folios to
Hollywood
for hard
western
dollars when it’s all over?’

Scholefield
draped
the towel round his shoulders and moved up
behind
her. He
smiled
at her in the mirror as be
slipped his
hands into the front of
the
bathrobe. ‘You’re a cynical bitch Nina.’ Her
breasts
were still silkily
damp
from the shower and
she
shrugged her shoulders in a
deliberately
provocative movement, her eyes fixed on his in the glass.
‘Mrs.
Chou
En-lai
contributed her
two-pennyworth
of
mystery
by
telling
some
visiting
American
ladies
rather
enigmatically
that the
CIA
had found out about Li
n
’s plotting first. Nobody ever really got out of her what she meant by that.
And
the
CIA
haven’t
exactly been
forthcoming on the subject. Perhaps you should ask
Harvey
K
etterman
about it when you meet him.’