The Chinese Assassin (14 page)
But the great mesmeric power of his
presence
hadn’t
deserted him
even then. His words had
already
produced an electric atmosphere of awe
and
apprehension in the ha
l
l. When his nurse
tried
to persuade him to sit down he pushed her roughly away
and
hunched over the
lectern
once more, clutching with
both
hands at
the slender
stem of
the
microphone for support.
‘They have
said
one sentence from a
genius was
worth ten thousand
sentences.’
He
paused and
his voice, sank
again to a
fierce, growling
whisper.
‘But no provision shall be
made
for state
chairmanship!’
Swaying from side to side and breathing heavily, he stood for a long
time saying nothing
more.
For
a moment he
looked round
again in
our direction.
Then he lifted his
head
and dosed his eyes as though
listening
to some
sound
nobody else in
the
ha
l
l could hear. ‘A tall
thing is easy
to
break, a white thing
is easy to stain.’ He stopped
and
breathed deeply,
still
keeping his eyes
dosed.
‘The
white
snow in spring can
hardly find
its match
.
A high reputation is
difficult
to live up to.’ In
the
total
silence that
followed the
sound
of his laboured breathing
rattled
clearly through the loudspeakers on the walls. He opened his eyes and glared slowly round the ha
l
l again. ‘Li Ku spoke
well
five hundred years ago! I
use his
words now to tell you I will not serve as
state
chairman. I have
said
so six times. If each
time
I spoke one sentence there should have
been
ten thousand sentences
then
there were sixty
thousand refusals!
But still
they
have not listened to me.’
With an
effort
Chairman Mao
straightened
up. Although
his
shoulders sagged
with age and infirmity and
his jowls quivered, the fierce pride that continued burning inside him made him a commanding figure still. The
ha
l
l was
utterly
hushed
and the only
sound
was the
rustle
of the
mountain pines brushing
against the
windows in
the
afternoon wind.
‘On the
surf
ace they
are talking
about
enhancing
my prestige,’
he said, speaking softly now and nodding his head repeatedly. ‘But who knows what is really in their minds? Could
it
not be a clever attempt to enhance another reputation?’ He paused again and turned very slowly in Marshall Lin’s direction. He stared directly at him and spoke this time without taking his eyes from his face. ‘Couldn’t a certain person be anxious to become state chairman in my place?’
At the back of the ha
l
l a cadre in the green uniform of the People’s Liberation Army stood up and shouted something unintelligible and waved his clenched fist in our direction. We learned later this incident bad been carefully stage-managed by our enemies. But Chairman Mao ignored this interruption. He continued, without taking his eyes from Marshall Lin. ‘Couldn’t
it
be that a certain pe
rs
on is anxious to split the Party?’
‘There was an excited buzz of reaction-from the ha
l
l, although the soldier who bad shouted had sat down again. Mao turned back to the microphone and lifted his good arm above his head in a dramatic gesture calling for silence. When the ha
l
l quietened he waited for a moment then raised his voice suddenly in a final quavering shout. ‘Could
it
be that a certain person is really anxious to seize power—’ He stopped, looked round quickly at Lin then turned back to the microphone. ‘—for himself!’
There was complete silence for several seconds. Then Chairman Mao sank down, suddenly exhausted, into his seat. A murmur rose all round the ha
l
l as Chiang Cling stood up from her place to run and bend solicitously over his chair. But he waved her and his nurse away and straightened in his seat to stare out belligerently across the heads of his audience. His eyes burned with a feverish brightness in his crumpled face as he swung his gaze triumphantly round the gathering.
The murmur grew slowly and uncertainly into a muted roar of applause and approval. Then above the growing din the single voice of that same soldier who had interrupted earlier from the rear of the ha
l
l suddenly rang out again. ‘Down with Lin Piao! Down with Yeh Chun!’
Hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, other scattered voices began taking up the chant.
MOSCOW. Saturday—Medical
experts who reconstructed the charred remains
of
nine
bullet-
riddled bodies found in a Chinese aircraft which crashed in, Soviet-dominated Mongolia last September, now feel reasonably certain that two of the bodies were those of Li
n
Piao and
his second wife Yeh Chun—though there
still seem
to be some misgivings that they
could
be doubles planted by Peking.
The
Observer,
1
January
1972
5
The high-gabled, crimson-brick Victorian fortress on Kensington Gore that houses the half—million maps and written archives of the Royal Geographical Society glowed ominously under
th
e fiery glare of the mid-morning sun, giving off the
dull
fl
esh
-
searing radiance of a red-hot poker. As Scholefield’s taxi pulled into the courtyard the taxi driver cursed
the
heat
humourlessly and lifted a rattling thermos flask of iced
water
to his mouth. As Scholefield paid him
off the
breathless voice
of a
Radio
London
newsreader on the driver’s radio was announcing that Parliament had just passed
an Emergency Powers Bill
to deal with
Britain’s
worst
drought
in 250 years—and for the first
time
in
history
MCC members at Lord’s were
being allowed
to watch
the
cricket from the pavilion with
their
jackets of
f
‘They
ought to be in this bloody cab,
that’s
where they ought to be,’
said
the driver sourly.
Already stripped
to the
waist,
he
scowled
at
Scholefield
’s
perfectly
reasonable
tip as
though it
should
have
been
more
because
of
the heat, and
roared away without
thanking
him. Scholefield
stepped
out of the
burning
sun into the shadow of the entrance lobby a moment before a mini-cab
with
a
Gerrard Street
proprietor’s
name
on it
cruised
past
the entrance and
stopped fifty
yards
along the Gore.
The door porter
wrote
out a
visitor’s slip
and Scholefie
ld
carried it
across
the
polished floor,
of the main ha
l
l,
past
huge
antique globes mounted on ornate wooden pedestals, and into the silent,
high-ceilinged
map
room.
A slender, heavy-breasted
girl
wearing
jeans
and a
thin
cotton T-shirt that had ridden up to reveal several inches of bare back, looked down at him from the top of a ladder propped against a high bookcase
and
raised her eyebrows. ‘Mongolia?’ She mouthed
the
word silently, smiling a
warm, conspiratorial smile,
and peered round
among
the
maze
o oaken map
cabinets filling
the room below her. Scholefield smiled back
and
nodded mutely.
The girl climbed nimbly down and brought
him
a roll of
m
aps she’d set on one side. She
looked quickly
over her shoulder then leaned
across the
counter and
whispered
again. ‘What
did
you say the
co-ordinates
were—
111.15
East,
4
7
.42
North?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s
nothing there, nothing at all—what’s it supposed to
be?’
‘I thought there might be an airfield or something.’
The girl giggled prettily. ‘I don’t think there
were many
aeroplanes
around even, when
these
maps were made. Let alone
airfields.’
Her
hand
flew to her mouth
and
she
coloured faintly
as an elderly woman
with
a severe expression emerged suddenly from one of
the
little corridors
between
the map cabinets.
‘May I
help
you?’
‘My name is Scholefield. I rang about large-scale maps of
eastern
Mongolia earlier this
morning.
I spoke to this young lady here. She’s being extremely helpful.’
The older woman shifted her
spectacles
a notch higher up
her
nose, to
enhance
her authority. ‘Miss Pepper is new
and
not qualified yet to
assist in research. If
you
would
care to
proceed
to the adjoining map
consulting
room I will have
the
maps brought in for your
inspection
. If
you have
any queries
I’ll try to help you with them
after luncheon.’
The
girl
tucked her T-shirt in at
the waist
with exaggerated
care and
picked up the maps without looking at hi
m
. Walking
with
a very straight back,
she led
the way to a gloomy brown chamber supported by
black
marble
pillars.
It
was furnished with refectory tables and
tubular metal chairs that had seen better days. She put the maps
down, pulled an
apologetic face
and walked
out.
Scholefield
settled
down in a
tubular chair and pored
over the maps. Prom the shadowy
walls
the
fading images
in oil
and bronze
of David
Livingston,
John
Hanning
Speke,
Captain
James Cook
and
Robert Falcon Scott of the
Antarctic gazed
sightlessly over his
head.
Outside the tall
windows,
the
Society’s neatly-trimmed
lawn had been burned brown and
arid
like
the
bush
grass of Africa
through which
Speke
and Livingston trod in their high
days of glory.
Scholefield
wiped his
sweat
in
g palms
on a handkerchief then began
tracing the coordinates
across the brown
and
orange wastes of Mongolia
with
one finger. He encountered no relevant features of
any kind
on the
first two sheets, and
as he turned to the
third
be
sensed
a presence at his
elbow and looked
up.
The
girl
was standing with one hand on a
jutting hip,
smiling down at him. ‘I told you,
didn’t
I?’
‘I thought you weren’t
qualified
to help me?’
‘She’s gone to
lunch,
so I’m
qualified
now. I’ve got a
damned degree,
you see, but I’m only here fo
r
the holidays.’
She leaned over him and
pointed to a tiny
block of print in the
bottom
right
hand corner
of the first map. ‘But I told you,
look.’
Scholefield
bent
over the
map
until his nose almost
touched
the paper. ‘For
use
by
War
and Navy
Department agencies
only, not for
sale
or
distribution.’
‘No, no, silly, the
next
bit.’ She
picked
up
the sheet and
screwed up her eyes. “Prepared
1943
by
the Army
Mapping Service, Topographic
Centre Washington
D.C.—copied from a USSR map of ‘937.”
Unless
there
was
an airfield there in 1936 for the
Russian
Tiger
Moths,
that’s not
much
help, is it?’
Scholefield
picked up the second
map and
held the bottom corner close to his eyes.
“Army Map
Service, Corps of Engineers, US Army—Washington D.C.
compiled in
1957”—Well, that’s a bit
better, isn’t
it?’