French Concession (22 page)

Someone undid the piece of rope around his mouth, and tore off the bag around his head. Even so, it took a long time before Lin could make anything out in the dark, narrow room. He had been tied to a chair, and the moldy air made his nose itch. He could tell the room was full of dust and spiderwebs even though he couldn't see them. Light filtered through a small gray rectangle in front of him, probably a louver door with both shutters closed. That was good to know. It meant he was probably in a house, and this dark room must be a storeroom, or perhaps a converted cloakroom.

He knew that some time had passed. But probably less than half a day. He had pissed just before being dragged into the car, and he needed to piss again now, but not urgently. He was in good health, and he had walked quite a way without drinking much water. He guessed that it was probably before sunset, and that he had been abducted about three hours ago.

He remembered what Park had told him about holding piss. In the absence of other information, it's a good way of keeping track of time, Park had said. Lin was testing that out right now. If the darkness and loneliness terrifies you, then say you need to piss—no one will really punish you for that. If they won't let you, they are testing your endurance. The principle is always to do the opposite of what you intuitively want to do. You have two options. If you don't want to give in, and want to keep holding it in, then you should scream
at the top of your lungs. But if you can't hold it any longer and want to scream, you should just piss into your pants, because the greatest test of your ability to withstand pain is yet to come. The more you confuse your opponent, the easier things will be for you. I should scream, Lin thought. The ropes trussing him to the chair made it harder to project his voice, but he did his best. No one opened the door. There was no sound of footsteps, and he hadn't disturbed anyone. Maybe I didn't scream for long enough, he thought. Or is that proof that they want to test my endurance? He had too much self-respect to draw the conclusion that he should just piss into his pants. He stopped to breathe deeply and calm himself down.

As he was panting in the dust, the door opened, and he was dragged out along with his chair into an empty room with white walls. It was dark outside the window. They loosened the ropes and slammed him onto the floor. The cement grazed his cheeks. He was lying facedown, and someone had yanked his arms up and was pushing them forward toward his head as if they were switchblades. He felt as though his shoulder ligaments were being torn apart, and he couldn't breathe. The knobby parts of his face—his nose and lips—were scraping against the cement. He felt his rib cage being pulled taut like a bow, as if his insides were about to burst out. They let go, and then it started again. He couldn't even scream. He was sobbing, bawling, and he despised himself.

Finally, they unbound him and tore his clothes off. He was tied naked onto the chair again, but his ankles were pulled back and tied to the back legs of the chair in an odd position, forcing him to spread his legs. The spotlight in front of him shone up into his face and onto his testicles. He felt like a beaker in which humiliation and rage were two chemicals that had been made to react in predetermined proportions. He didn't even know whom to be angry at. He couldn't see anyone around him, and they all looked like shadows in the light.

Before they left, someone poured a bucket of water over him, and someone else lugged an electric fan over and pointed it at him.

He was cold. His teeth were chattering, and there was a rusty taste between them. His skin burned where the ropes were cutting
into it. His bladder was distended with pain and about to explode, and the rope stretched across it cut into his skin. Before they closed the door, someone said: Want to piss? Piss on the floor.

Before long he could no longer feel the pain, and the feeling of bloatedness disappeared, replaced by a comfortable numbness. He tried to fall asleep, but as soon as he did, he was awakened by a sharp pain.

Maybe he had fallen asleep after all. As soon as the ropes were untied, he felt as though he was being pricked by a thousand needles, as though the air in the room had been compressed and was coming at him through an exceedingly fine mesh.

Someone held him down by the shoulders. Others were busy bringing tables and chairs and more lights. They didn't want to move him, he thought, they wanted to freeze him in this position. He remembered Park telling him that you have to seize any chance to move or shift positions, that change in your environment makes you more alert and helps you feel less like a slab of meat on the chopping block. But Lin simply couldn't move—in fact, there was no need to hold him down. His whole body ached, and he could barely sit up in his chair.

They began to ask him a load of useless questions. His name. Where he was from. They were asking these questions simply to make the interrogation sound official. He was still in the spotlight. Naked, he felt like a frightened, hunted animal. Eventually the pain subsided and his strength began to return. He planned to resist them as soon as he could pull himself together.

The spotlight shone at him from the left. The shadowy man sitting at a table to the right looked like the leader of the group. He listened, rarely asking questions, and smoked a cigarette that glowed red. Lin wanted to express his anger, but he didn't have the energy to put up a fight.

He refused to answer the question. Where on Ming Koo Road had he been going? Which apartment? Lin remained silent, and the man behind him punched him hard on the back of his head. Unable to contain himself any longer, Lin leaped up and rushed at the shadow, his fists clenched—

But someone reached a leg out and tripped him up, giving him a good kick in the ribs and stamping on his arms. The shadow suddenly spoke. His voice was low and gentle.

“Let go of him. Let him sit down.”

“All right. You're not interested in answering this question. Let me tell you a few things we know instead. You were spotted at the scene of both the 181 Avenue Foch bombing and the Kin Lee Yuen Wharf assassination. That makes you a criminal. Someone recognized you.”

That was a lie. He hadn't been on Kin Lee Yuen Wharf—he had not yet been tested and found worthy by the cell, so he had only been an observer at the time.

“I'm a student. I just graduated from Nanyang College, and I'm looking for a job.”

“Don't think you can weasel your way out of this,” the man said, lighting another cigarette. “Your interrogators are all specialists. Who are these people? You must be asking yourself that question. Who are my abductors? The gangs? I can tell you that you have officially been arrested. We're expert interrogators, and we can force the most stubborn suspects to talk. Even Soviet-trained Communists will talk to us, never mind you. You're just a band of ordinary crooks.”

Lin was young, and easily incensed. He had been insulted. “We're not crooks! You're crooks.”

He saw the face taunting him in the red glow of the cigarette, but it was too late to stop. “One day we'll overthrow your system and get rid of you all!”

“Are you telling me you're Communists?” The man returned to the darkness, but kept taunting him. “All you do is kill people and blow things up. You're a bunch of regular crooks. What you're doing is making money off terrorizing people. And you're wrong about us. We're not criminals. We represent the government. I can tell you our real name: officially, we are the Central Organization Department's Investigative Unit for Party Affairs. We often deal with real Communists, and we can make them talk too.”

He was being long-winded on purpose, repeating himself over and over, as if he were casting a dizzying spell.

“You killed Ts'ao to prevent him from going to Canton. Or rather, to prevent his boss from going to Canton. His boss was an important government man who was going to set up a separate government in Canton. His treasonous plans were backed by warlords in the southwest bent on destroying our fragile, hard-won unity, our fledgling state. They even wanted control of the customs at Canton. That drove the speculators here frantic, because they had all bought public debt backed by customs receipts. So they put a price on Ts'ao's head, offering a reward to anyone who would kill him. And they found Ku Fu-kuang, your Ku—isn't that his name? See, we do know a few things.”

“You're making this up! It's not true!”

“Don't get too riled up. I applaud you. We applaud passionate young people.” He was provoking Lin with his smile and the way he lit a match and let it burn in his hand, gazing at it instead of lighting his cigarette.

“As for 181 Avenue Foch, that was an ordinary crime. A simple revenge killing. For a woman, a prostitute. We know the Green Gang engaged hit men to kill Mr. Ku. They were hit men just like Ku, but on the other side, just as there are always speculators who've bought a stock pitted against others who are shorting it. This time they lost. They weren't professionals, they hadn't planned their attack well, and they only managed to shoot a woman. This prostitute was Ku's woman, we've been told. His lover. His whore.”

Lin pounced at the crowd of shadows. He had forgotten his shame, and forgotten that he was naked. He crashed to the ground again.

Tseng knew all about breaking down a man's defenses. That was one of his specialties. He was an ex-Communist who had been trained in Soviet interrogation and counterinterrogation techniques. He had chosen a straightforward method because he judged the subject of interrogation to be a naïve, passionate young man. He had to destroy the foundations of this man's belief, enrage him, confuse him, and make him doubt himself.

He himself was lucky he had seen the light when he did. They had made an exception for him, not because they trusted him, but because they needed him. He and his colleagues had their own snoops inside the French Concession Police, so he was aware that Lieutenant Sarly referred to him and his colleagues as the “Nanking investigators.” He considered the description apt. He didn't like using torture. The human ability to withstand physical pain was limited, and torture was the fastest way to break down those defenses and force a subject to surrender and start talking. But people responded differently to pain, and if you crossed a subject's maximum threshold too quickly, then torture would cease to be effective. In fact, he had heard that in some cases it could actually gratify the victim.

Pain stimulated the production of adrenaline, the source of the fight response, which led to aggression, defiance, and hatred. If your subjects managed to stay calm, this hatred could erect mental barriers that would make it impossible to know whether they were telling
the truth. They could even be clever enough to feed you false information leading to costly blunders later on.

He allowed his people to rough this young man up a little, just to tire him out. Violence could be used to warm up the subject, to stretch his nerves to their breaking point so that anything would set them off. That was his subject of expertise, and it was exactly why Nanking needed him. He was an intelligent man, and he knew what he was doing. He knew that torture was necessary, but only in moderation—torture was a performance, intended to terrify the subject as much as to cause pain.

With him and people like him around, he thought modestly, the Communists' days in Shanghai were numbered. All those anarchists and revolutionaries with their childish demonstrations and protests, holding meetings and writing articles—all that would have to go. They used to walk openly on the streets and go from their meetings to restaurants where they continued their discussions. But now that the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs had developed a deep intelligence network in Shanghai, the photographs of known Communists had been widely disseminated. Many people had memorized these faces.

Nanking was expanding the Greater Shanghai Plan. He had heard that the authorities were exploring the idea of a large-scale patriotic education movement. The investigation reports had been made available to the functionaries in charge of planning this movement. When their plan was put into action, it would make the Communists' lives even harder. Tseng was certain that Ku and his so-called People's Strength had nothing whatsoever to do with the Communists—they weren't even a fringe organization. On this point, he agreed with Cheng Yün-tuan, the secretary posted to their investigative commission by the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs. This man was supposed to be his deputy, but he was really there to keep an eye on him. Tseng had argued his case to both the French Concession Police and the Shanghai Municipal Police, but no one had believed him.

After tossing out those two grenades, he ended the interrogation
abruptly. He wanted to give the young man time to think. He had his subordinates give Lin a meal.

Arresting Lin had been an unexpected piece of luck. The gangs had heard that the cell responsible for the attack on 181 Avenue Foch might have rented an apartment near Boulevard des Deux Républiques. Someone had spotted one of them on the street. He sent an undercover team to investigate the claim and found its source, a gardener at 181 Avenue Foch. On the night of the attack, he had been crouching by the wall, shitting in the shadows behind the trees. He had been so petrified he could barely move, and the faces he had seen in the half-light had made an indelible impression. One of them had come to ask him something about the casino a few days before, and he had recognized the man immediately. Later he had seen that man use a public telephone booth on Boulevard de Montigny before walking in the direction of Boulevard des Deux Républiques, but he hadn't had the guts to follow him. When the news got out, gang leaders sent their foot soldiers to sniff out the area, and they discovered more traces of Ku's cell. The errand boy at a tobacco store on Rue Buissonnet said that an unfamiliar face had started coming in to buy cigarettes, and that he would always buy half a dozen packs of several different brands at once. Someone overheard a suspicious conversation in an adjacent cubicle at Pu-chüan Bathhouse on Rue Voisin. So Tseng had some of his people take the gardener for a drive around Boulevard des Deux Républiques. As luck would have it, they actually ran into the young man, whose identification documents listed him as a student.

He was extremely interested in this case. He thought he liked this man, this Ku Fu-kuang. After comparing a number of different reports, he was convinced that this was the man's real name. People who knew him back when he was a union organizer said that he was a
chi kung
master who could punch through a door or break a brick with his bare hands. He was said to be audacious and extremely intelligent, good at making quick decisions and acting on them even in chaos. Tseng Nan-p'u picked out one incident that seemed to shed light on his character. Apparently Ku had once emptied
a sack of night soil over the head of a factory foreman with ties to the Green Gang. The man lost face in front of hundreds of workers, and Ku himself became a union leader overnight. Then he had worked briefly as a guard at the Soviet consulate before gradually disappearing from public view.

There was some evidence that he had gone on to receive training at Khabarovsk. The Political Section of the British Police had acquired a photograph of a graduation ceremony from somewhere in India, and the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs got hold of a copy via an agreement to exchange intelligence. Someone looked at the photo and recognized a prisoner in the Nanking Military Court Model Prison. The man was immediately questioned, and he testified that Ku had been active in Southeast Asia as a businessman until he was caught up in the Soviet purges. As far as he knew, Ku had already been executed.

Tseng Nan-p'u couldn't tell how Ku had made it back to Shanghai, but he was certain that Ku, like him, had completely abandoned his former beliefs (or perhaps he shouldn't say that of himself, since he had never really had strong beliefs).

The door opened slowly, and Cheng came into the room with a half-eaten apple. He had been standing behind the subject during the interrogation, and had slipped out halfway through. Tseng didn't stop him. He guessed that he was phoning in a report to Nanking.

“Did you read the interrogation notes?”

“I just did. We were right—they're all in the dark about Ku.”

Cheng Yün-tuan was the man posted to their group by the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs, but the two of them got on very well. That was because he, Tseng, was very open. He used to be a university professor, and he knew how to talk to young people.

“It was a heavy blow for him,” Cheng said, commenting as if he were a narrator in a student play. “He's questioning his deepest beliefs. If he is disoriented, we should strike now instead of allowing him to reestablish his defenses.”

“Let's wait a while longer. Give him time to weigh the evidence and have him look at a few newspapers.”

“We're running out of time. Tomorrow we have to notify the French Concession Police, and the day after tomorrow we'll have to hand him over.”

“We'll keep him here for now. I'd like for us to crack this case.” Tseng still couldn't work out why the Concession Police kept insisting Ku's group was a Communist cell. He suspected they had their motives for refusing to believe otherwise.

“Why are they so sure that these people are Communists?” he asked softly, not because he thought Cheng would have an answer.

Cheng's apple squeaked as he bit into it. He threw it, half-eaten, into the wastepaper basket. Tseng thought wasting food like that reflected poorly on how a young man had been brought up. But maybe the bad habit made people feel comfortable around him.

“Easy,” Cheng said. “It merely confirms what they have thought all along, that the fight between the Kuomintang and the Communists is the source of all trouble in the foreign concessions. Maybe Lieutenant Sarly wants to take credit for a major case, or maybe he wants the case to stay within the remit of Political Section. Maybe arresting a Communist cell will look better on his record of colonial service. Relations between France and the Soviet Union have been deteriorating. There've been trade delegations withdrawn and diplomats expelled. The Soviet Union's biggest enemy is Paris rather than London now, or so they say.”

“That sounds reasonable. You could write a report on it. That's all the more reason why we shouldn't hand him over to the Concession Police. It's a conspiracy.”

“An imperialist conspiracy.” Cheng added an adjective that would make their imagined report sound self-evidently true to the typical Nanking politician.

“Maybe you should talk to him. You're young people, you'll get along. The truth is that he's been taken in. As long as he's willing to talk, we can speak up for him, rig things so that other people get the blame. We can teach him how to talk so that the Concession Police will dismiss him as being harmless. If he is truly willing to work for us, we may not even have to turn him over to the police.
We'd send him straight to a training program instead of juvenile detention. These young socialists can be very promising. After all, if a man can't see the injustice in society at twenty, he has no heart.”

Tseng wasn't worried that Cheng Yün-tuan would report him to Nanking. The Party Affairs people were all specialists in communism, from the head of the department down to the typists. You could bet their document archives in Nanking were chock full of Communist pamphlets, whereas the Central Bureau had burned most of theirs in case they were surprised by a search.