Night Heron (3 page)

A nod from the uniform, and Peanut was taken back to the
xiaohao
, where a plate of vegetable soup, still warm, awaited him.

The final act had come a week later. He was led, shackled, across a courtyard. A leathery old woman in a blue tunic splashed water on the concrete to keep the dust down. It was morning, late in the summer. In the air, behind the heat, a whisper of cold to come.

A jaundiced, balding judge asked cursory questions into a microphone, which stood on a table covered with green baize. A prosecutor mumbled.

He stood in the dock. To his left was a woman he had not seen before, with gray hair in a bun, who looked at her notes and said nothing. His defense lawyer, he realized. He leaned over and tried to speak to her. She pursed her lips and shook her head, a tight, definitive movement.
Stay away from me.
There was business about Article 32 of the State Secrets Law, and Article 111 of the Criminal Law, and they added five years to his sentence.

Back in the barracks, they’d showed him something approaching sympathy. 7775 had taken him out for a cigarette and laid a hand on his shoulder. Peanut had to stop himself laughing.

And then he’d walked off by himself, by the wall, as the dark came down. No shadowy celebrity for him, then. He watched a bat dip and flicker against the sky.

So fuck it. Once a spy, always a spy.

Day two, and panic. He had awoken at dawn, parched, to the sound of engines grinding up the track towards the gravel pit.
He lay on his stomach, inched forward and peered from the mouth of the tunnel. Two jeeps, six thunders getting out of them, AKs slung. They spread out. One walked to the water’s edge and kneeled, peering at the ground and looking across the water. Another walked down to join him and seemed to be asking what he was thinking because the first thunder gestured across the water and pointed at the ground. Peanut flattened himself against the rocky tunnel floor. The second thunder appeared to be considering, then walked back towards the jeep and waved the others into the vehicles. The jeeps started up, ground into gear, and turned back down the track. The manner of their departure suggested they were not finished here.

And later in the day they were back, with a dog that bounded from the back of the jeep, a big black and brown thing with pointed ears. Its handler was in military uniform, which Peanut construed as bad news, because military uniforms suggested competence. The handler ran with the dog along the edge of the water as if in play, the dog jumping and pawing at him. And then the handler got the dog’s nose to the ground, and it began to scent. It moved this way and that, excited, turning, and whining, and looking back to its handler. Peanut slowly pushed backwards in the dark, as far as he could go. He heard the whining of the dog, some faint shouts—orders?—then nothing for a while. And then engines, moving off down the track.

The light was weakening at the mouth of the tunnel. He shifted from ham to ham on the damp floor. He was very hungry. Half of his water was gone, but the gravel pit was infested with liver fluke and undrinkable. He sat up and leaned forward, tried to touch his toes. In a little while, he would allow himself a bar of the awful chocolate. There had been no activity around the pit for six hours.

He had started, gingerly, to think about reaching the railway.
In another twenty-four hours he would be getting weak, so it would have to be tonight. Twelve miles over hard ground, and no guarantees, just the freight cars lumbering down from Tibet on their way to Xining.

Who would he be, if he made it to the city, and on?

Over the years China’s bureaucratic minds had imposed many identities upon Peanut. To each a name: student, class traitor, intellectual, dissenter, criminal, prisoner. To each a season, by turns exhilarating and terrifying.

But another identity lived in him, planted and nurtured by a different bureaucracy. Its season was brief and silent and long past. Its name he had never uttered out loud, even in the darkest hours of the
xiaohao
or under the electric baton. Yet the name remained, preserved, he knew, in a file, in a country he’d never seen.

Night heron.

He stripped awkwardly in the confined space, bundled his clothes, reached for the little paper bag and the water bottles, and shuffled up the tunnel towards the night. The water beckoned.

Move.

Beijing

The morning had begun—crisp, tinged with the acrid smell of Beijing’s cold days—with a frenzy of phone calls to London and, for Mangan, a testing of the correspondent’s powers of persuasion.

Mangan had been in the “bureau,” termed more accurately the front room of his Jianguomenwai flat, since six a.m. The bureau featured two chipped and musty desks, exposed phone wires that protruded from holes in the whitewashed walls, and a stained blue sofa. The tiled floor made the room clatter and echo.

When the London duty editor said she was not following the Jiangxi situation, Mangan expressed mild surprise, careful not to let the telephone amplify it into stark disbelief. She’d said wryly, educate me, Philip.

Well, they’re cultists, he explained, and they’ve occupied a town. Thousands of them, apparently. They call themselves Followers. They believe their incantations lend them cosmic awareness and that their master will return and start a new dynasty. The police are blockading them and will soon move in and kick the crap out of them. It’s a great story. We should go.

“Won’t they try to stop you?” the duty editor asked, yawning. Well, yes, but we should go anyway.

Harvey was listening, shaking his head, fiddling with lenses.

Mangan and the duty editor haggled over cost. There were admonitions, and promises, and a dash to the airport. Now Mangan and Harvey sat in the back of a maroon taxi, four hours out of Nanchang in China’s damp south, speeding east down route G316.

Mangan watched the towns slip by, brick factories, whitewashed concrete blocks with orange tiled roofs, a market glossy with rain where a woman in blue sold ducks and young toughs leaned on their bicycles. On the walls the political slogan of the moment:
Wending yadao yiqie
. Stability overrides everything. After the towns, low, rippled green mountains swathed in cloud.

Dusk, and they stopped to eat noodles, steaming and peppery, from a stall by the side of the road. Mangan ate standing, the bowl in one hand, listening to the crickets in the wet air. They forged on, into the night, promising the mystified driver more money if he would keep going.

Mangan tried to remain inconspicuous, but he was six feet, red-haired, green-eyed. They’d picked the taxi for its darkened windows, but if Public Security stopped them, then, well, the usual.

Mangan’s phone rang. The guide was waiting. They’ve set up roadblocks two miles out of town, the guide warned. Before you hit them, look for a torch at a turnoff. Mangan wondered how they would know they were going to hit the roadblocks before they hit them. They drove on in the dark.

Suddenly there it was, the torch, jiggling up and down at every passing car. Harvey spotted it. He pushed his sunglasses up on to his head and reached for the camera bag.

They pulled over, the driver complaining.
Here?

The guide was a stooped, toothless old man in a black
waterproof and rubber boots. Harvey grinned and Mangan did the talking, struggling to understand the old man’s sibilant southern speech. He took out the agreed-upon cash, but the man waved it away. Afterwards.

“Through the fields.” The man gestured. “We’ll skirt the roadblocks, but it’ll be wet.”

The three of them set off in the darkness. Across the fields Mangan saw the flickering lights of police vehicles blocking the road. Their guide moved quickly through the high grass. Mangan stumbled, his trousers soaked and clinging, mud weighing on his shoes.

“Is he one of them?” Harvey’s Australian stage whisper, famously audible from half a mile.

“No. He lives on the edge of the town.”

“How did you find him?”

Mangan had spent hours calling at random, attaching five digits to the area code and hoping. Most of his respondents were indignant. Those people! they’d complained. Sitting in the streets, chanting! Disrupting traffic! But this old man had been intrigued more than angry. They seem harmless enough, he’d said. Mangan asked if he would guide them into the town. Discreetly. For a sum.

The town was called Jinyi. Golden Rill. Mangan had looked at a satellite image. Flat gray sprawl around a cement works, a river. The guide took them to the river’s bank, a path lined by dimly lit brick shanties. A dog barked. The river smelled of garbage and shit.

They went under a bridge and up stone steps into the street, Harvey first. Mangan saw him smoothly pulling off the backpack and reaching in for the little camera. He liked watching Harvey start to work, the sudden tension in him when the image presented itself.

And what an image. Under the light from the streetlamps the
Followers were sitting in rows, hundreds of them, cross-legged, their hands describing graceful arcs in front of them. A cassette player sat on an upturned crate, playing a rhythmic, undulating, repetitive chant punctuated with bells, turned up so loud it was distorting. They mouthed along to it, their eyes closed.

The guide tapped Mangan on the arm, then gestured, his eyes blank.

“That’s her, the organizer. I’ll go now.” He took the cash and disappeared into the dark.

Mangan saw her coming towards him, waving. She was forty years old perhaps, wearing a black jacket with a high collar, jeans and knee-length black boots. She was no more than five feet tall. From behind a fringe, she had a look that contrived at innocence, childishness.

“You must be Mr. Mangan. I didn’t think you would make it in. You must be very good at, well, evading.”

She was speaking English. Her accent was South China, clipped, heavily layered with America, trying for playfulness amid the tension. Mangan shook a minute, limp hand. She introduced herself as Shannon.

“I don’t think we have very long,” he said.

“Well, whoever, you can talk to them. Get your pictures. This is important for us. The police will come in the morning, we think.” They stood outside a shuttered bakery.

“You’re not from here,” Mangan said.

“Originally, yes, but Long Island now. I came back because the movement needs people who can speak for it, help organize.” She gestured to the seated, chanting rows.

Harvey was on one knee, the camera balanced on his thigh, working up a sequence of an elderly woman with a face like parchment, her bird-like hands fluttering and circling. She wore a purple rain jacket and mouthed silently.

“What are they chanting?” Mangan said.

“The Three Principles. Humanity, understanding, rebirth. You could call it a mantra. The Master tells us that to perfect ourselves and enlighten ourselves we must meditate on the Principles.”

“Is the Master coming here?”

“Well, that is why we’re here. He was born here.”

And, Mangan knew, now lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, in a gated community.

“What are you hoping to achieve?”

She looked at him and folded her arms. The chanting had stopped, and now just the occasional chime came from the cassette player. The Followers sat silent and motionless under the streetlights.

“Do not speak to us as if we were some hopeless cause, Mr. Mangan. We are changing China. We are not political, but we are part of an awakening that will see China return to her core beliefs, transmuted for a new era.”

Mangan knew it word for word. He had heard it from them in grimy backrooms in Beijing, on Tiananmen Square as they were dragged away by the buzzcut plainclothes men, in cold villages up north, the condensation running down the windows as whole families sat on the
kang
studying the Master’s texts.

“But you understand why the Party sees you as a political threat, surely?”

“No. We are peaceful. We are not against the Communist Party. Do you know how many of us they have locked up now? Do you?” She looked at him, working up her righteous fury. “Three million of us, at least.”

Mangan doubted the number was anything like that big, but kept silent. There had been, he knew, thousands of them in re-education camps. He’d seen some on a ghoulish press tour outside Shanghai. He remembered the reek of disinfectant as the camp staff waved them through, saying, you see? It’s all
quite humane. They’d entered a dining hall with a concrete floor where a hundred Followers sat on plastic chairs and stared fixedly at a television playing cartoons. When the press corps, cameras, microphones, white people in rustling, garish gear, shuffled in, their eyes didn’t leave the screen. Mangan had been shocked and repulsed.

Harvey looked over his shoulder and winked. Mangan made his way over and Harvey handed him a microphone. The old woman in the purple jacket seemed to be looking past him. Mangan leaned towards her and went into Chinese.

“Can you tell me why you are here?”

“We have come to do the Master’s bidding.” Her hands trembled, Mangan saw.

“And what is that?”

“We must meditate on the Three Principles and resist oppression. My husband was taken away, so I have come here with the others.”

“Is your husband a Follower of the Master?”

“Yes. They took him away. I can’t see him.” Her words began to speed up, her voice turning shrill. “They sent me a letter. He said he renounced his beliefs and that he thanked the state for freeing him. But they tortured him to say that.” Now tears spilled down her cheeks.

Mangan had seen it often, the blankness turning to uncontrolled emotion in seconds. Shannon raised her eyebrows. You see?

The chanting had started up again.

Harvey looked about, exhaled. “I’ve got enough of that. What else?”

They filmed more interviews. Shannon hovered, then brought tea from a red thermos. Harvey paused and sipped from a steaming cup, and, for safety, took the memory card from the camera and backed up all the pictures on a slender laptop.

At three in the morning the first siren sounded, a whoop from a police car starting from the darkness and moving at speed down the main street towards them. Olive-green trucks, five or six of them, lumbered behind. Some of the Followers began to stand up, walking quickly away, ducking down alleyways. Shannon was on her mobile phone. The trucks came to a halt with a compressed air hiss. Green uniforms in riot helmets, with batons, jumped from the tailgates.

Harvey and Mangan ran for a nearby doorway and crouched in shadow. Harvey filmed. The uniforms—they were
wujing
, paramilitary police—jogged down the street and into the crowd in columns. They were, to start with, methodical. A sergeant yelled for everyone to stay where they were, and then walked over to the cassette player, which was still playing the weird, distorted chimes. He looked down at it for a minute, then dealt it an almighty kick, sending it bouncing across the street, broken plastic skittering off it.

Most of the Followers seemed to understand it was all over, and stood sullenly. The
wujing
pinned their arms and walked them to the trucks. They dragged those who refused to walk. Mangan watched them drag the old woman in the purple waterproof. One of her shoes had come off. She was still mouthing her chants. Mangan thought she was crying.

Harvey lowered the camera, shuffled backward into the shadow, and looked about him.

“I think we need to move,” he said.

Mangan gingerly stuck his head out into the street, searching for a way out. Nothing, just uniforms, blinding headlights. He ducked back into the doorway. Harvey ejected a second memory card from the camera, handed it to Mangan.

“That’s the good stuff, so stick it where they won’t find it,” he said.

Mangan worked quickly, tearing off a strip of gaffer tape with his teeth, reaching into his trousers and strapping the memory card to his thigh. He turned to the door behind them. It was wooden; the entrance to an apartment block? He rattled it. It was loose, but on a spring latch. Harvey reached into his pack, pulled out the stiff plastic card he used to white-balance the camera, and jammed it into the crack between door and jamb, jiggling it in and out, looking for the latch. Mangan watched. Implacable, confident Harvey. Then a
snick
and the door swung open. Harvey opened his mouth wide in a clown grin.

“Sometimes you amaze me,” said Mangan.

“I amaze myself.”

Six flights of concrete stairs brought them to a fire door and the roof. They stayed low, crawled to the edge and looked down on the street.

The scene was chaotic.
Wujing
ran at random down the street, grabbing Followers by their clothes and hair. Some worked with their batons, not hard, but not gently either. Mangan saw a young man with a ponytail, kneeling, his forehead split open, wiping blood from his eyes. Mangan tapped Harvey on the shoulder and pointed. Harvey framed and focused just as a
wujing
put his boot in the young man’s back and he went down. Harvey lingered, let it play out. The boy tried to stand, hands raised in submission, but the
wujing
kept on putting him down, then changed his mind, grabbed the boy by his collar and forced him towards the trucks.

Harvey licked his lips, took a breath. “That’s strong.”

Then he stopped, looking over Mangan’s shoulder, and winced. Mangan turned. The door on to the roof had opened and a tall man in a light-gray suit and open-necked shirt was coming through it, with two
wujing
behind him.

“Stop, please.” In English.

Mangan’s stomach turned over.

“You stay, please.”

He was young, with neat parted hair. No buzzcut, this one. Very un-thuggish. Lean, athletic, but slender hands.

“Who are you, please?” The tone not impolite.

Mangan stayed in English. “We are from Beijing.”

The man actually smiled. “I see, from Beijing. And why are you here, please?”

Mangan said, “We are journalists.” A little too fast.

“Journalists!” As if all were clear,
silly me.
“So you must come with us, please.”

Mangan shook his head. “No, we mustn’t. We are entitled to report, to report freely in China.”

The man nodded. “I’m very sorry.”

“Can I see your identification?” Mangan went into Chinese.

“No. Sorry. I am from the State Security Bureau. Please come with us.” Another smile and a shrug.

State Security? Mangan looked at Harvey, who raised his eyebrows.