In the dark, p.13
In the Dark, page 13
Some time later, I set off to find him.
The Party secretary’s office was on the third floor, and on my way up I passed a woman comrade on the stairs. Why do I remember her? When we passed each other, I noticed that she was crying bitterly – she had one hand over her mouth, and the other was clutching at her chest. Her head was hanging down, and she really did look terribly unhappy, as if she had lost all hope. I realized afterwards that the crying woman must just have left the Party secretary’s office, and that was why he was in such a bad mood. When he saw me he was not as polite as he had been at our previous meetings. He asked me what was up, and I said straight out: ‘I want to see the file on Huang Yiyi.’
‘Huang Yiyi? You can’t possibly want her! Are you …’ The Party secretary fell silent, his expression eloquent with suspicion and scorn. This was something quite different from his earlier attitude of caution and unease. ‘I hope you haven’t been misled by the fact I said something good about her?’
I shook my head.
‘Quite honestly, I said what I did because I was quite sure you wouldn’t want her. But if you are thinking of employing her, I can tell you that in my opinion she is unsuitable, completely unsuitable.’ Seeing I wasn’t going to interrupt, he added, ‘Of course, she has her good points. She’s very clever, very erudite, hardworking, successful, and she has done some interesting independent research. But … I really don’t know how to put this … You must believe me, the woman has problems – she really isn’t suitable.’
I asked what problems, and the Party secretary said that it was private and he could not say. I said that as far as Unit 701 was concerned there is no such thing as a private problem. In fact, it wasn’t very clever of him to start talking about something or other being private: it was very disrespectful to us, given that we are ourselves top secret. Besides, who can keep secrets from us? An individual? A country? We investigate other people’s private affairs for a living, and they in return try to discover ours. We don’t like that feeling, we try to keep it to a minimum, and one of the best ways is to remove the word private from our vocabularies. Excise it. Just like you might excise a disgusting tumour.
The Party secretary noticed that I had gone all stiff, and he smiled and said, ‘I can tell you, but you must promise that it won’t go any further.’ Then he laughed. ‘In much the same way as I will not tell anyone about you.’
I didn’t reply but waited for him to continue.
He said, ‘If you’d arrived a couple of minutes earlier, you would have seen the problem. Comrade Huang Yiyi’s problem. About a minute before you came through the door, the woman comrade concerned left here crying.’
‘I met her on the stairs,’ I said. ‘A middle-aged woman, wearing a white dress?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘I noticed she was crying. Why?’
‘Go and ask Comrade Huang. After all, she seduced her husband.’
Huang Yiyi’s provocative gaze and smile, and the sound of her laughter, immediately sprang to mind. I asked stupidly, ‘Are you sure? How do you know who seduced whom?’
The Party secretary said, ‘I don’t need to investigate. I am quite sure that she seduced this other woman’s husband.’
‘If you don’t investigate, how can you be sure?’
‘You don’t understand the situation. I do – only too well.’ As he spoke he pulled a stack of letters out of a drawer and handed them to me to read. I looked through them and they were all complaints, some anonymous, some signed, but the contents were the same: ‘Huang Yiyi’s thinking is tainted by bourgeois corruption and she engages in illicit relationships with members of the opposite sex.’ Some of the letters named names, saying who it was, when and where. As I read through them, I asked the Party secretary what kind of people were involved. He said all kinds, some from the institute, and some from outside.
‘So many? How is that possible?’
‘With her, anything is possible. I’ve asked her about most of the named men, hoping she’d deny it, or at least try to make excuses for herself, but she didn’t. She didn’t.’ He sighed. ‘Quite honestly, this has caused an awful lot of trouble. Every time there’s a meeting of the directors of the institute someone asks us to punish her or get rid of her. She’s very lucky to have a weapon: after all, Zhou Enlai himself invited her to come back. If it weren’t for that she would have been thrown out of here long ago. Huang Yiyi, Huang Yiyi … You know the saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”? Since coming back to China she still behaves in this completely Westernized way. How can we accept that? How can she behave like that?’
‘Does she have a family?’ I asked.
‘What kind of man would want her?’
‘Perhaps she would sort herself out if she was married.’
‘Do you think she hasn’t been married? She’s been married twice, divorced both times.’
‘In the US or in China?’
‘Once in the US and once here. When she got married in the US, her husband was a chemistry professor, an overseas Chinese from Fujian. The two of them got divorced just before she came back. Not long after she arrived in China, she got together with a cameraman working in the film studios in Changchun, but they divorced not long after the wedding because she was having an affair.’
‘So after that divorce she didn’t remarry?’
‘Remarry? Who would be willing to marry someone like her? She told me herself that she is not expecting to get married again, because no one would really want to marry her. Those men are all just for fun. She’s basically given up on herself, and that’s why she behaves in this uncontrolled way. Well, this is a research institute, and we give our people considerable leeway. Lots of our people have had experience of living abroad, and we let her get away with it. In any other work unit, she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. She would have been classified as a poisonous weed and been got rid of long ago. Is this really the kind of person you want? Please don’t give her the job. The crucial thing is that you don’t need her. Let me tell you, Comrades Xie Xingguo and Wu Guping are fine mathematicians; anything she can do, they can do. They don’t have any thought or lifestyle problems, so if you take them, they will work well for you. If she goes, maybe even before she has had time to do anything useful, she will have got herself into trouble. When she gets into trouble, will your work unit have any choice other than to get rid of her? And when things get to that pass, even if she wants to work for you, she won’t be able to. So why put everyone through the misery?’
The Party secretary had no idea that the blacker he painted Huang Yiyi, the more determined I was to give her the job. I understood that in the trap-filled, dangerous, evil and cruel world of cryptography, only someone arrogant, wild and ambitious would survive. I also thought to myself that while Unit 701 was a much more conservative place than the institute, if she cracked RECOVERY, we could make allowances for pretty much anything. So in spite of all Party Secretary Wang’s admonitions, I still wouldn’t give up, and demanded to see their file on her.
The Party secretary was in despair. ‘Do you really want her?’
I tried to cheer him up. ‘I can only decide after I have seen her dossier.’
In fact I had already made up my mind. If there weren’t any other problems, I wanted her!
9
Shortly after I got back to the guest house after my conversation with Party Secretary Wang, I heard someone knock on the door. When I opened it, I found Huang Yiyi. She had taken off her coat, and was wearing a tight dark-blue jumper that moulded every line of her body. Her breasts stuck out like two little cushions. I wasn’t intending to look at them, and I turned my eyes away immediately as if I had received an electric shock.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ I said.
‘Well, this is the second time I have come here to find you,’ she said.
‘Why did you want to see me?’
She handed me a piece of paper. ‘My answer.’
Although she had said that she didn’t want to do it, in fact she had gone home and got on with it. I looked through the workings and found the solution, and she was absolutely correct. I was very pleased, but when I spoke it came out sounding strange. ‘Dr Huang.’
‘Please don’t call me that. Right now I am your student and you are examining me.’
‘So how do you think you have done?’
‘I have made no mistakes.’
‘Well, you are the one with a PhD …’
She stopped me again. ‘I have already told you not to call me Doctor. Do you know what I think about my PhD?’
‘What?’
‘During the day I have a PhD; at night I don’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think? PhDs are only human. At night, they’re out for fun the same as anyone else.’
As she spoke she started laughing really hard, and ended up bent over. As she bent, I unintentionally caught sight of her breasts again, bursting seductively out of her clothes. I thought to myself that Party Secretary Wang was absolutely correct: would it be suitable for me to take her away with me? The minute this idea flashed across my mind, I dismissed it. I decided that this was not a question of personal suitability, because only she could do the job.
When she had finished laughing, she asked me politely, ‘You said that you had been looking for me. What’s up?’
I answered just as politely, ‘I need to ask you a couple of questions, and I hope you will answer them truthfully.’
She looked at me coaxingly, and said, ‘Don’t make them too difficult.’
‘They aren’t difficult at all, but you must tell the truth.’
‘No problem. Ask away.’
‘Question number one. Have you ever done any cryptography before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you be willing to do that kind of work again?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it really is the devil’s work!’
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘I guess you are with the security services, am I right?’
‘You are absolutely correct. Are you willing to join us?’
‘No. And to join a top-secret unit, definitely not.’
‘What is the problem with a top-secret unit?’
‘Is that the place for someone like me?’
‘What do you mean, someone like you?’
‘Independent, romantic, someone who hates having to go by the rules, someone who is happiest when free from ties.’
‘Then why on earth did you insist on taking the test?’ I was getting angry.
She laughed heartily. ‘Do you think that just because I took the test it means that I want to join your unit? I don’t even know what kind of unit it is, so why would I want to do a stupid thing like that?’ Having finished laughing, she said seriously, ‘To tell you the truth, I came to take the test because I wanted to meet you. For the last couple of days my colleagues have done nothing but gossip about you, and I was curious, that’s all.’
I was furious, but I was also secretly pleased. The fury was because I felt she was being silly and disrespectful, but I was pleased because I was sure that I was getting the truth, and because no one could have helped her get the answer. She hadn’t intended to take the test, I hadn’t meant to give it to her: put the two together and what you end up with is the truth, something that will stand up to scrutiny.
Earlier that afternoon I had spoken to Captain Hu on the phone, because I hoped that he would have a look at Xie Xingguo and Xu Guping’s answer papers and help me to decide which of them I should employ (at that time I didn’t think Huang Yiyi was going to finish). He arrived just at that moment. When he came through the door, he looked at Huang Yiyi a couple of times, and then rushed forward and grabbed her hand. He seemed very pleased, and said: ‘Huang Qian! Don’t you remember me? I’m Hu Haibo!’ Then he turned round and said happily to me, ‘This is the woman I told you to find: Huang Qian!’
Later on I found out that she had become suicidal after the painful split from the cameraman. Because of this the Party arranged for her to go as a visiting scholar to the Soviet Union for a year, in the hope that she would cheer up away from home. Perhaps it was in the hope of making a fresh start that she changed her name during her stay in Russia. And again perhaps it was to draw a line under the past that when she finished her time abroad she didn’t go back to Harbin Military Engineering University but came here, to Beijing.
In short, she was Huang Qian.
What else was there to say? I wanted her!
So I told Huang Yiyi: ‘I can announce officially that you are now working for us, and we will begin the formalities for your transfer immediately.’
‘Is this some kind of joke?’ she asked with a laugh.
‘No joke,’ I said. ‘We need someone like you.’
‘No,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘You need me but I don’t need you!’
Captain Hu told her to keep the conversation civil, and not to get excited. She seemed to be trying to force herself to calm down as she walked over to the window. With her back to me, she said quietly, ‘I’m not going with you. You don’t understand, I am a … bad person …’
‘I do understand, and I am sure you will be very successful with us.’
She started getting excited again, and shouted, ‘But I don’t want to do it! I am not going with you!’
‘You have no choice.’
She came right up to me and said threateningly, ‘It is not up to you.’ Then she turned to go.
I grabbed hold of her and asked where she was going, and she said, ‘I am going to talk to the principal. I am not leaving here!’
‘The principal has his orders,’ Captain Hu said.
She stared at me for a while, and then said through gritted teeth: ‘Who the hell are you? I hate you!’
Captain Hu got her to sit down, and then I said, ‘You clearly don’t understand the situation at all, but don’t you want to know what is going on? Since I have already decided that we want you, I can now tell you the truth. I am the Deputy Director of the research institute at the intelligence unit 701, and I have absolute power here. If I want you to join us, you have no right to refuse. You will have to come with me.’
‘If I don’t go?’
‘That is not possible.’
‘I beg you …’
‘No.’
After a short silence, I started to persuade her. ‘Comrade Huang, you’ve said yourself, and I know, that you’re a patriotic intellectual. The country now needs your help on an issue of national security and I believe that you will not refuse. The work we’re asking you to do touches on the sacrosanct issue of the survival of our country. I hope you will not continue showing this antagonistic attitude, but come with me of your own free will.’
She was dead set against it though, and stubbornly refused; there was no way that she would come with me. In the end it was Captain Hu who came up with a trick to make her move. ‘He’s just a middle manager, there’s no point yelling at him. Go with him and tell the senior people what you think. That’s more to the point.’
It worked, and she agreed to go with me.
The captain took me aside and told me what I should tell Director Tie to say to her. ‘When Director Tie sees her, he shouldn’t try and change her mind or appeal to her moral principles: that won’t work for someone like her.’
‘So what should he say?’
‘You must make it clear that she is under your control, that she has to come and there is nothing to discuss. Having made that clear, on that basis you can discuss her conditions. That way it’s clear that you respect her, but also that you are very powerful.’
‘What do we do if she wants to be unreasonable, and sets us some impossible conditions?’
‘Is it possible that she can ask for something that you can’t do? Besides, it’s just a tactic to bring her under psychological control, to make her understand your determination and your power.’
I realized that he was right, and took her to meet Director Tie. While the two of them were talking, I was waiting uneasily in the corridor outside. I knew Director Tie very well: he was always exceptionally vigorous and decisive, and spoke in such a loud and awe-inspiring voice – but this time I wasn’t sure that he could pull it off. Director Tie’s manner worked for people like us, but would it work with Huang Yiyi? She was like a wild horse, used to roaming free across the plains and going wherever she liked: she had never been broken to the bridle! I didn’t know if Director Tie could do what Captain Hu had suggested and bring her under psychological control. I was so tense that my heart was thumping.
About half an hour later, Director Tie came out looking pleased and patted me on the back. ‘Right, she’s yours,’ he said. ‘You can take her away tomorrow.’
I just stood there. I had no idea what Director Tie could have said to make her change her mind, to make her become one of my people. I was amazed, but I also felt a kind of unimaginable happiness spread through my entire body, as though it were being pumped through my veins by the beats of my heart.
When Director Tie noticed me looking so happy, he leaned towards me and whispered in my ear, ‘She made conditions.’
‘What conditions?’
‘When she’s cracked the cipher she can leave, and she can take one person with her.’
‘Who?’
Director Tie looked at me strangely. ‘That’s her secret. How should I know?’
I smiled. ‘If she can really help us crack the cipher, she can take away a whole mountain for all I care!’
The following morning we set off. I was carrying a suitcase I had been given by Director Tie: a very big and very heavy suitcase, with a red thread hanging from it. Director Tie didn’t tell me what was inside it, but when I saw the fuse for the incendiary device (otherwise known as the red thread) I knew that it was top-secret material, probably connected with the cipher that we had to break. I knew that there could be no mistakes. If something happened en route, it was my duty to light the fuse and turn all the secrets inside into ash …
