The Old Boys (42 page)

As we climbed it grew colder. We made camp at a point where the river emerged from beneath a sheet of ice. A couple of Askar’s men unsaddled the ponies and disappeared with two of them among huge ice-covered rocks. While they were gone, the remaining men tramped down a circle in the snow, holding onto a rope held by a fellow standing in the center and walking round and round in concentric circles, then spread carpets and lit a fire. The others returned with yurt poles, apparently cached nearby. They pulled thick sheets of felt off a couple of other ponies and in no time at all had erected a squat, round yurt. The dung fire and the heat radiated in close quarters by eight human bodies soon warmed the interior. Our guides had brought cooked meat and other food, carrying it under their clothes to keep it from freezing, and they shared this with us at body temperature. We were paying for all this in gold, of course. That didn’t change the fact that nobody wanted to be here. There were no smiles and no conversation, not even with Askar, the usually affable bandit.

During the night it snowed heavily, and fat flakes of the stuff were still falling as we set off for the pass at first light. If you have never snowshoed up a twenty-degree slope for six or seven hours while swathed in felt and fleece I can assure you it is sweaty work. We arrived at the pass around noon. The hot spring Ze Keli had mentioned in pig latin lay off the trail beyond the summit, on the Xinjiang side of the frontier. Underfoot lay a fresh washboard trail left by a tracked machine. On seeing this, Askar and his men melted into the mountain.

A solitary figure, slender despite the quilted clothes he wore
and tall for a Chinese, waited by the hot spring. He wore a high fur cap, like a Russian.

“That’s our man,” David said.

Ze Keli seemed to be alone. A sweep of the surroundings revealed no Han commandos, only the Honda snowmobile that had made the suspicious corrugated track, parked out of the wind behind a rock.

I said, “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“Not at all,” Ze Keli said. “Its quite warm here, near the spring. That’s why I chose this meeting place.”

Ze spoke David’s name, nodding formally, and stared hard at Zarah from beneath luxuriant white eyebrows.

I said, “Allow me to present Miss Zarah Christopher.”

Ze said, “Christopher?”

“She is Paul’s daughter.”

Remembering his own manners, Ze said, “A great pleasure, Miss Christopher.”

I hadn’t expected to meet the model of Confucian civility that Ze was turning out to be.

Zarah shook hands with him, looking him straight in the eye and saying how-do-you-do as no doubt she had been taught by her mother or whoever her mother had hired to teach her such things. Manners are designed, after all, to see one through awkward moments, and it is not every day that you meet the man who interrogated your imprisoned father for ten years, and in the end saved his life. When you do, formality is the best option.

Ze had brought with him a thermos of tea and another of hot soup. Also genuine Dixie cups that had somehow found their way from the heart of America to this far edge of China. He poured, and for the next few moments we stood in a circle, each with a steaming paper cup of sugared tea in one hand and a paper cup of noodle soup in the other. Both were delicious, and Ze’s small talk—a learned discourse on the geology and history of the Bedel Pass—was pleasantly instructive. He had a Lowell Thomas delivery, mellow and low-key but breathless with the promise of what
was coming next. If he knew, as he must have, that Kyrgyz fighters were pointing guns at him from several different directions, he gave no sign. There was no hurrying him. Whatever he had to tell us, he would tell us in due course. Meanwhile the rituals had to be observed. There is a lot to be said for this method of delivering news. It gives you a chance to prepare yourself for any possibility. At last Ze collected the Dixie cups, screwed the tops onto his thermos bottles, and stowed everything in the storage compartment of his snowmobile.

Then, smiling, he said, “Miss Christopher, I bring you greetings from your father and cousin, and also from your grandmother.”

Zarah said, “They are alive, then.”

“Oh, yes. But they are in custody.”

“In prison, you mean.”

“No, not exactly. In detention. An investigation is being conducted to determine if they have committed a crime.”

“Have they?”

“In my opinion, no. But they were arrested in an area where no unauthorized persons are allowed, especially no foreigners. The local officials have certain suspicions.”

“Suspicions of what?”

“Espionage, perhaps. At the very least, a very serious kind of trespassing. The area is forbidden to outsiders because it is a place where weapons research and other sensitive activities take place. Christopher and his mother were arrested quite close to one of those sites.”

Ze produced an envelope. “I have brought you some pictures,” he said in a bright new voice.

He handed them to us one by one—standard police ID blackand-white flashgun shots of Paul, full-face and profile, and similar photos of a woman who could only be Lori. In these pitiless snapshots she looked old, of course, but not so old as you might expect. What I saw was not only the old woman in the photograph but also the Lori of the legend. Several earlier faces had metamorphosed one after the other into the one she had now. She
was not still beautiful, but the beauty that she had been was still visible. The resemblance to Paul and Zarah was not so obvious to me as it seemed to be to others, but then I was looking at a photograph, not flesh.

Zarah devoured the pictures, her face transformed by emotion. She was looking at pictures of ghosts. Ze watched her with deep interest but no sign of sympathy. He had a practiced eye and he was reading her reaction according to standards of his own. Was her reaction genuine? Ze seemed to think so. Zarah offered the pictures back to him. He waved them away.

“I have some others I took myself,” he said.

He produced a digital camera. On the tiny screen at the back we could see color photos of Paul and Lori, together and separately. In all these shots they stood stiff and unsmiling in front of what looked like ramshackle military barracks.

Ze clicked the camera, replacing one image with another. Zarah saw something in the background of one of the photographs. She asked Ze to stop. He did so and handed her the camera.

“It’s a man,” she said. “But what’s that he’s wearing around his neck?”

Ze did not bother with the pretense of reexamining the picture.

“It’s a collar, a square made of rough lumber, slightly longer than an arm’s length on each side, with a hole in the center for the neck,” he said. “It is built on the man. It is held together by bolts and screws. It cannot be removed by the man because the heads of the screws are on the top and he cannot reach them. The commandant of this camp is a student of the history of punishment. In Imperial China, habitual criminals were sometimes sentenced to wear this device. It was a death sentence, of course, because while you are wearing the thing you not only cannot unscrew the screws, you cannot reach your own mouth. Therefore you cannot eat or drink. You cannot lie down because you would strangle. You cannot go inside for shelter if it rains or snows because the collar is just too large to go through most doors. It is forbidden for others to help a person wearing such a collar in any way. Those who
were sentenced to this punishment in ancient China were released from prison and permitted to wander about as they chose until they died. There was no need to confine them. They carried their prison with them.”

Zarah said, “This practice has been revived?”

“Not officially,” Ze replied, “but as I said, the present commandant of this particular camp believes in learning from the past.”

So far Ze had done ninety percent of the talking, but it was mood music. What he actually said was getting us no nearer to our goal, which was the rescue of Paul and Lori. David Wong had taken no part in the conversation. Now he leaped in. Perhaps he was annoyed by my passivity. I was a little surprised by it myself. Maybe I thought Zarah had the right to ask the tough questions. Maybe it was the altitude. We were not standing on the roof of the world at fourteen thousand feet, but the air was not oxygen-rich and breathing had become to some degree conscious. I felt a bit queasy.

David asked the obvious question. “Why are you telling us all this?”

Ze took a deep breath and held it, then expelled it as speech. “I’m not quite sure you’ll believe the truth,” he said, “but the fact is, I consider myself in Christopher’s debt. He was imprisoned in China once before when he was innocent of any crime against us. Now it has happened again. Because of his age, because of his mother, because he has bad luck, I think he should be released as soon as possible.”

David said, “Do you think he’s going to be released?”

“Not if the camp commandant makes the decision,” Ze said.

“Have you recommended his release?”

“Of course. However, the commandant persists in his belief that Christopher has committed a crime.”

“What crime?”

Ze answered David’s question without hesitation. “Espionage,” he said. “No formal charge has been laid, but in the commandant’s opinion Christopher is guilty, and the commandant is the law in his own camp. The commandant points to the record. Christopher
is a professional American spy. He spied on China before. Now he has come back to do it again.”

I said, “In what, exactly, does this alleged espionage consist?”

It took Ze a moment to untangle this Victorian language. Finally he said, “That is an excellent question. The answer is, there is no espionage. Christopher’s crime is far worse. He has embarrassed the commandant.”

Zarah said, “Please explain.”

“The camp is not a military installation,” Ze said. “There are no military secrets to steal. It is a labor camp. The prisoners are political dissidents, also a few Christians and other such people who have been unhinged by religion. On the whole, however, it is an educated population. The prisoners, who are there for life although not all of them know that, make technical things—parts for computers, scientific instruments, and so on. These products are sold abroad, mainly in the United States. This commerce has made the commandant, not to mention certain high party functionaries, very rich. He and his bosses want to keep the camp secret.”

This was serious. We all understood that, Ze best of all.

“Profits and justice cannot coexist,” he said.

“In other words,” Zarah said, “the commandant and his friends are capitalists?”

“Exactly,” Ze replied.

His face was expressionless. All his life Ze had been an enemy of capitalists. China might be changing, the party’s leaders might have become secret plutocrats, but Ze was the same Marxian idealist he had always been. If he had to commit treason to keep his ideals alive, he would do so. I have known many, many men like him, and all were good men who were capable of anything.

“I have brought you two things,” he said. “A map and something that is made by the prisoners.”

The map showed the exact location of the camp. It was two hundred miles away from the Bedel Pass, north of the Borohoro Shan in the vast, empty highland desert that took up most of the northwest quadrant of Xinjiang. On the back of the map, Ze had
drawn a detailed sketch of the camp itself, with important buildings marked.

The “something made by the prisoners” turned out to be a homing beacon, or rather a transponder that would pick up the beacon’s signal and guide you to it. He placed this in my hand. It was quite small, about the size of a pound of butter, but lighter.

“You must come quickly for the Christophers,” Ze said. “Within the week. After that I will be gone and you will have no one to help you.”

Because Ze had been sent to the camp by the Guoanbu, he had certain powers independent of the commandant. He could, for example, summon the prisoners for interrogation at any hour. His plan was simple. When we were close, we would leave a message for him on the satellite phone David had given him. The phone would be turned off so that it did not ring at an inconvenient moment, but he would check it for messages at midnight every day. On the night he heard my voice or David’s, he would summon the prisoners at 2 AM and turn on the homing device. We could then come in at precisely 2 AM and carry out the rescue.

“There are guards on the perimeter but no fences,” Ze said. “The guards look in, not out. No one has ever tried to escape
into
the camp, not even if they were dying of thirst in the desert.”

Zarah said, “What if formal charges are made against my father and grandmother before then?”

Ze said, “That would complicate the matter, but I don’t think it is likely to happen. As I’ve explained, the commandant prefers picturesque punishments.”

Ze clicked to another picture and handed Zarah the camera. The new image was a close-up of the man in the lumber collar.

“That man is your uncle,” Ze said. “I have been allowed to give him water because he would otherwise die of dehydration. The commandant has told Christopher and their mother that he will remove the collar if they confess. They don’t believe this, of course.”

Zarah stared at the image. So did David and I. Tarik was smiling, though stooped under the weight of the collar.

She
said, “The commandant would do that to people their age?”

“With relish,” Ze said. “It would expand his knowledge of the punishment, provide new data.”

Zarah’s face, like Ze’s, was drained of all expression. She handed the camera back to Ze. He held up a hand in refusal.

“A gift,” he said.