Charlie’s Apprentice (41 page)

So Patricia Elder wasn’t an ogress who used razor-blades for tampons after all. ‘That’s considerate.’

‘Won’t do much to help, though, will it?’

‘Still nothing on Snow? Or access to Gower?’ He supposed he would have been told, but he’d known of worse oversights, in the past.

She shook her head. ‘There was a request to the Foreign Office, to send a lawyer out to help. They refused.’

Drawbridges being raised, portcullises slammed down, recognized Charlie: he always had regarded that message about assistance and protection in the front of his passport as a load of bullshit. ‘There’s probably not a lot he could have done, in any practical sense.’ Except hopefully put up a faint smoke-screen for him.

‘For Christ’s sake be careful, Charlie.’

‘Always.’

‘I mean it!’

‘So do I.’ The early flight the following morning gave him an excuse to leave: he was certainly anxious to get away from the awkwardness. ‘I think I should be going.’

‘If you want …’Julia started, then stopped.

‘What?’ asked Charlie, more unsettled than ever.

‘Nothing.’

He was very glad she hadn’t continued: Charlie didn’t want anything to go beyond the stage of being platonic. He was comfortable at that level. Not at many others.

‘Just don’t take any chances,’ she pleaded.

‘I see them, I avoid them,’ promised Charlie. Or sometimes turn them to my advantage, he thought, when he arrived in Beijing less than twenty-four hours later, although not on the aircraft for which Julia had given him a ticket but on a Pakistani flight to which he’d changed at London airport.

He assimilated himself among the confusion of an organized tour group, staying close through the baggage collection and the straggling exit of overtired, overawed people as they crocodiled across the concourse to the waiting coach. Only then did he detach himself towards the taxis, but the tour guide, who wore an identifying armband and a lapel badge naming him as Peter, said: ‘Visiting by yourself?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie.

‘We’ll give you a lift in, if you like: there’s plenty of room on the coach.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ accepted Charlie. He hoped his luck continued like this: it was long overdue.

Forty-one

The tactics changed, which was predictable, so Gower was able to hold the fear off and retain the disguised resistance to appear an innocent man. The possibility of Chen realizing that he
was
resisting them – and by so doing showing the professional training that would confirm their accusations – became a greater concern than anything they did in their efforts to break him.

Having announced their intention to set the trap at the Taoist shrine, they left him absolutely alone for what Gower estimated to be a full day and a night, broken only once by another delivery of foul and discreetly discarded food by the same bowed old man and his two army guards. And in contrast to his first day of imprisonment, there was absolute and echoing silence, so there was not the slightest distraction or interruption to his imagination conjuring the apprehension of what would happen to him if they did make another arrest. Gower refused himself any false assurances. If Snow was detained, simply by the suspicion of being a Caucasian near the Taoist temple, he
would
be lost. If it happened – if he was confronted by proof that the priest was arrested and had broken and had identified the shrine and the flower signal – then he was in a new and far more dangerous situation which he would have to handle when it arose. But not before. He refused to let his imagination do their job for them.

The silent treatment was actually counter-productive, and while recognizing its intention Gower was surprised by it, seizing the advantage properly to rest and push back as far as he could the effect of sleep deprivation. He did so now stretched full-length on the concrete ledge, for any observation through the Judas-hole, because that was how an innocent man, recovering slightly from the initial shock of detention, would try to sleep. It was still rigidly uncomfortable but he’d largely adjusted to the stink of the lavatory hole and the uniform he was forced to wear. There were occasions when he fully lost consciousness, and for the rest of the time he slept more deeply than when he had squatted, that first day, but there was practically always the vague subconscious awareness of everything around him. He came, for instance, quickly awake at the scratching.

One rat was already out of the toilet hole, easily climbing the table leg to forage along its top where any spilled or dropped food scraps would have been: the second was sniffing its way out, briefly disturbing the irritated flies. It followed the obviously familiar route, scuttling quickly up to join the first.

Gower remained lying as he was, making himself watch and accept, refusing the revulsion at the actual sight of what he’d already known to exist within the hole. The rats were brown and plump and their fur had a sheen of cleanliness he didn’t expect from the imagined slime from which they had emerged. He wondered if these were the only two or whether there were more. Probably more. Probably a whole colony. He distantly remembered hearing or reading that rats always existed in colonies: he’d have to be particularly careful to keep his hands from coming into any contact with the table-top over which they would have trailed their infections.

With his watch taken from him, denied any natural light and having slept for intermittent periods, Gower was unable to judge whether it was day or night when the peep-hole disturbance began again, which worried him, because losing track of time was a footstep on the way to disorientation. His concern was brief because Gower knew he could establish a rough schedule from the moment of his next interrogation.

The next meal was noodles, which were sour and which Gower guessed really did have maggots in them, from the shifting movement under the surface pasta strands that had nothing to do with the mucus-like soup in which they floated. The observation hole scraped open, so again Gower went through the eating and drinking pretence, his back to the person watching. He reset his mental clock to gauge the intervals between the apparently resumed inspections, to dispose of the entire contents of the bowl.

Not eating wasn’t a risk to Gower’s opposition: wouldn’t be for a very long time. He knew the human body could go for weeks without nourishment, before the hallucinations began. And so far he had not felt the slightest hunger.

Water was the problem. The effect of dehydration was far quicker, destabilizing in a matter of days. Already his mouth felt completely dry, very little saliva forming when he tried to generate it, and there was a scratchiness in his throat when he swallowed, which he tried to avoid as much as possible.

Gower supposed it would have been sometime during the third day – or maybe the third night – when he was finally forced to take the fetid water, unable to deprive himself any longer. He did not fully drink it. He took a minimal amount, four sips, flushing it around his mouth before spitting it disgustedly into the hole. The relief was very brief: his throat remained scratchy.

If he did develop diarrhoea he would quickly become even more dehydrated, Gower knew. And need to take even more of the water, which would worsen the infection and tighten the circle of demeaning, eroding illness.

Dear God let something, anything, happen soon! Horrified, Gower checked the thought. That was despair. And despair went with fear. He wasn’t entirely successful in controlling it. Surely, he continued to think, somebody had to be doing something by now!

Snow felt he had exhausted all the prayers of which he was capable, agonized by the immediate blasphemy of a priest ever exhausting the capacity to pray. Finally, as he’d always known he would, which wove thorns into the guilt, Snow went to the mission chief, appalled at his own hypocrisy.

‘Father,’ he said. ‘Would you please hear my confession?’

Forty-two

The dust fell about him when Snow parted the curtains, filling his throat and mouth and banding his chest more tightly. The slide of the dividing grille jammed when Father Robertson initially tried to draw it back, never quite fully opening the space between them.

‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. For these and all my other sins that I cannot remember I humbly ask forgiveness.’ Even the rote of the beginning was difficult. The dust seemed to be blocking the way to his lungs and his chest positively ached, but Snow knew the agony had nothing to do with any of it, solely caused by the enormity of what he was doing.

‘Go on,’ urged Robertson, when Snow did not continue after several moments.

It was still some further time before Snow could speak and then, initially, the words were badly chosen and disjointed, sentences half finished, the worst parts of all delivered scarcely beyond a whisper.

But Snow told it all, in every detail. He fought against the wheezing breathlessness to force himself to talk and had a greater, choking struggle to keep Father Robertson listening in the linked cubicle. The older priest positively tried to stop the admission, of everything, protesting he would hear no more and scuffling to his feet, so that Snow had to break the ritual – as Father Robertson was breaking the ritual – and insist, over and over again, his mouth tight against the grille, that Father Robertson’s vows made it impossible for the man to refuse to let him finish.

‘Men have confessed to murder in a confessional and been heard!’

‘Continue.’ Father Robertson’s voice was strained tight, as if he were having as much difficulty to speak as the younger priest.

Snow talked on, but Father Robertson heard the last few minutes in such utter silence that Snow thought at one stage that the man had slipped out anyway. Then, almost imperceptibly, he detected the faintest sound: short, sharp intakes of breath, a man gasping.

The continuing silence, when Snow finished, was absolute. Snow waited a very long time before speaking further. ‘I seek absolution.’

‘No! This is a travesty! Obscene!’

‘I demand absolution.’

‘Absolution is for the repentant. Are you repentant?’

He wasn’t, not at all, Snow accepted: what he’d done was right. What he was doing now was a sin greater than any he had committed outside this dust-swirled box. For this he would be damned. ‘I am repentant.’

‘I will not give you absolution!’

It didn’t matter, accepted Snow, sadly. The old man had been right. What he had done that morning was a travesty and it
was
obscene, and the point had not been to seek forgiveness. This moment, Snow supposed, marked his failure as a priest. But what about as a Jesuit, a Soldier of Christ? He didn’t think he had the intellect or the theological philosophy to answer that question. That was a question to be put to other priests and other judges far away from Beijing, before whom he accepted he would have to place himself.

He heard the swish of the curtain pulled back in the other stall and smelled the dust driven through the lattice. He followed more slowly, so that Father Robertson was already some way across the nave when Snow emerged. Snow followed, more slowly: only when he neared the end of the walkway connecting the church to their living quarters, coming close to the room in which Father Robertson normally worked, did Snow become concerned that the older man might have gone out into the city.

He hadn’t.

Father Robertson was at his desk, bent slightly forward as he had when he was ill, and tremors were vibrating through him as they had then. Snow’s renewed concern was that the mission chief was suffering another collapse. He remained uncertainly at the door. Finally Father Robertson straightened, looking up at him. The man’s eyes were wet and red-rimmed, like the eyes of a person who had been crying.

‘Do you know what you have done?’

‘What is talked about in the confessional is sacrosanct.’ Snow wanted Father Robertson to know and to think about it, but never to talk about it. Which he couldn’t.

‘You dare lecture me on ritual!’

‘I did not wish –
do
not wish – to endanger the mission.’

‘You have! You know you have! This Englishman who’s been arrested! He’s all part of it, isn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. I think so.’

A shudder worse than the others went through the old man. ‘Lost. Everything could be lost.’

‘I was told to get out,’ disclosed Snow.

The rheumy eyes came up to him. ‘When?’

‘Soon after Li began taking an interest.’

‘Does he have something incriminating to put against you?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Does he?’ Father Robertson’s voice creaked, so it didn’t come out as the intended shout of anger.

‘Yes.’

‘Terrible. This is absolutely terrible.’

‘I could not have left without permission from the Curia, in Rome.’

Father Robertson looked directly at him again, one hand gripping the other, physically clutching himself for control. ‘That is true,’ he agreed, but doubtfully, more curiosity than anger in his voice.

Snow hesitated. ‘In exceptional circumstances, a head of mission in our Order could grant such dispensation.’

Father Robertson became suddenly and completely still, all the shaking gone, face suffused in livid outrage. ‘You
bastard!
You absolute and utter
bastard!
’

Snow hadn’t imagined such an outburst – he hadn’t imagined anything – but he accepted at once that it was true, that he was a bastard. He was surprised Father Robertson was so quickly realizing, in its entirety, what he had done. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re not! There’s no contrition: that’s why I wouldn’t grant you absolution …’ The old man stopped, mouth slightly apart at a further awareness. ‘You weren’t even seeking absolution, were you?’ He paused, momentarily beyond speech. ‘I’ll inform the Curia! See to it that you are dismissed the Order you are disgracing.’

‘What is talked about in the confessional is sacrosanct,’ repeated Snow, quietly.

Father Robertson’s mouth gaped fully, in complete comprehension. ‘You’ve actually
abused
it, to save yourself! Knowing I can’t bring any complaint against you because of how I learned what you’ve done: what you are! You are beyond belief …’ The priest twisted his own word. ‘You can’t believe, to behave like this!’