Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [96]
“You’ll definitely die if you do that,” said He Dongsheng.
“We’re done for now, with one foot in the grave already. If we die, though, we’ll have you buried with us; even if we don’t actually kill you, we will ruin your official career.”
“Ha!” laughed He Dongsheng. “So you call that dying together?”
“Exactly,” said Lao Chen. “You could also call it mutual suicide.”
“What about the live-together part?”
“First off, in a minute we’ll ask you some questions, and you will answer every one of them to our satisfaction. If you do, then in the morning we’ll simply let you go.”
“Tomorrow morning, you’ll just let me go? I don’t believe you!”
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not,” said Lao Chen. “What matters is whether or not you’re willing to play this game of live or die together. If you’re not, then you’re choosing for us all to die together. We’re going to die anyway, but first we’ll kill off your official career; later on, we’ll decide if we want to really kill you as well. If you’re willing to play, it will be game over when the sun comes up. You can drive your Land Rover home as usual. At night when you can’t sleep, you can go out and drive all around town, take a nap when you’re tired, and return home when the sun comes up. You know that others also know that this Politburo member regularly stays out all night, so no one will ask any questions.”
“And later on?” asked He Dongsheng.
“Later on? There isn’t any later on. That is, you continue on your glorious road and we continue on our ordinary paths; we keep our lives and you keep your official position. Nobody will say a word about what took place tonight; after tonight, every one of us keeps mum, as though nothing ever happened.”
“How can I believe you won’t talk?”
“Obviously, you don’t believe we won’t talk, but if we said anything we would probably be hunted down and executed; so to save our own lives, we won’t talk. On the other hand, we don’t much believe that you won’t try to take revenge on us. After you go home, you might still worry about us and send someone to kill us to keep us quiet. Killing someone to keep them quiet requires recruiting others to do the killing, and one of us might still escape long enough to broadcast tonight’s events on the Internet for all the world to see. There are dangers either way. You can figure out the odds yourself. You can surely understand that, rationally, the best thing to protect our own interests is for all of us to maintain complete silence and not make any unnecessary moves, or attract any unwanted attention. In other words, both sides should abide strictly by this ‘live or die together’ agreement.”
“Rationally? Agreement?” exclaimed He Dongsheng. “You seem to have too much faith in human nature.”
“I am willing to take a gamble,” said Lao Chen. “Are you?”
“You know the story of the frog who carried a scorpion across the river, don’t you? The scorpion could not help himself from killing the frog, and then it drowned—that was its nature.”
“True enough, true enough. Both sides are taking a risk. I have to admit that this is a dangerous gambit that we are forced to employ. If there was another way, I would not want to risk my life in such a dangerous fashion. Four lives balanced against your official position. I’d have to say that we are risking much more than you are. To tell you the truth, I suggested this plan because I couldn’t think of any other strategy that would meet the demands of both sides in this situation. Brother Dongsheng, can you