The Message by Mai Jia

Author:Mai Jia [Jia, Mai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789543001
Google: qkiJDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 7530215981
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2016-07-01T23:00:00+00:00

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In the earlier part of my story, when Li Ningyu herself said that her older brother had been murdered by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, she was talking about Mr Pan senior. As a young man he’d been a Communist agent infiltrated into the circle around Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but then his cover had been blown and he’d been condemned to death. He was lucky: the man charged with shooting him dead was one of his own comrades, and he was able to fake the execution. Mr Pan senior survived. After that he changed his name, went undercover, and moved around a lot.

When the puppet government headed by Wang Jingwei was established, the Communist Party sent Mr Pan senior to Hangzhou, to join his sister, Li Ningyu. She was already working undercover as an anti-Japanese agent at the ECCC. They were to pretend to be husband and wife, but to make it easier for them – so that they didn’t have to do the things expected of a married couple, like going shopping together, going out for walks, taking the children on trips, and the rest – they made sure everyone knew their marriage was an unhappy one. Which was why Mr Pan senior turned up that time at her ECCC work unit on the military base and beat her up in front of everyone. She was then able to tell her colleagues that she’d fallen for someone else and that she wasn’t going to be living with him any more, but at the same time she still had a reason to return to the marital home, to see the children and so forth.

‘That’s what we wanted,’ Mr Pan said. ‘Our house was a station from which a great deal of vital intelligence was transmitted.’

At that time, a lot of intelligence was coming from Li Ningyu. If she picked up something at the ECCC that needed to be urgently communicated back to her comrades, she would use Turtle to take it off base straight away. She and Turtle were able to meet regularly without causing suspicion, and there was a secret signal. If she dropped a piece of rubbish in his presence, that meant he had to go and collect a message immediately. But if Li Ningyu had intelligence that wasn’t so urgent, she would just wait until lunchtime and take it home with her, ready for Mr Pan to transmit later that evening.

When Li Ningyu was being held at the Tan Estate, the cover story put out by Colonel Hihara and Commander Zhang was so plausible that from start to finish her comrades never discovered what was really going on. When he mentioned this, old Mr Pan became upset. ‘The fact is that I was a little worried. It all seemed very strange. She was only going to be gone for a couple of days, but they were making such a fuss about it, inviting us relatives to eat at the Louwailou restaurant and then taking us out to the Tan Estate to look at them.

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