Satori - Don Winslow [69]
62
“GO PLAYER acknowledged.”
“Roger that.”
Now all Haverford could do was sit and wait.
Worst part of the job.
63
DIAMOND MADE A POINT not to be in, or even near, the office. But he left word where he could be reached and an order that he be immediately briefed on any developments coming out of Beijing.
Waiting around is the shits, he thought.
64
THE NORTH WIND had picked up again and Nicholai wrapped his scarf around his neck as he stepped out into the cold night air and waited for Chen and the car. Where were they? Chen was usually pathologically prompt.
Across the boulevard the monk walked away, toward the south.
The last check, Nicholai thought with a twinge of sorrow. The last chance to stop this thing literally just walked away.
The car came up the street, its red flags snapping in the stiff breeze. It pulled up in front of the hotel, the back door opened, and Chen got out.
“Sorry to be late,” he said. “Traffic.”
He looked afraid.
Chen ushered Nicholai into the backseat and got in beside him.
Nicholai started to greet Liang, but saw that it was a different driver.
“Where is Liang?” Nicholai asked.
“Sick,” Chen said. The smell of fear came off him. A sheen of greasy sweat shone on his cheeks.
Nicholai took two cigarettes from his pack and offered one to Chen. The escort took it, but his hands shook as Nicholai held the lighter up to the cigarette. He steadied Chen’s wrist and said, “Perhaps it was catching.”
“Maybe.”
“You should go home and take care of yourself.” Nicholai looked into his eyes. “It’s all right.”
“I’m so sorry,” Chen answered, “that I was … late.”
“Truly, it doesn’t matter.” He let go of Chen’s wrist. Nicholai sat back in his seat, smoked, looked out the window, and pretended not to notice when the car turned not for Xuanwu, but toward the Bell and Drum Towers.
65
KANG READIED THE STAGE.
He wanted it perfect, a flawless setting for the drama that he was about to enact, the play that he had already written.
This Nicholai Hel person would speak his intended lines. Maybe not at first, when his masculine pride would force him to resist; but eventually he would give in and pronounce the words. He would come in as a man but leave as a eunuch, enter the stage as a sheng but exit as a dan, shamed and pleading to die.
But the dignity of a private death was not on the page for this Hel. Kang would save what was left of him for another performance, his humiliation played before an audience of thousands at the Bridge of Heaven. Hel would have a placard on his back instead of an embroidered robe, he would be bound with heavy ropes, and he would take a final bow to the bark of rifles and the roar of the crowd.
Kang fingered the exquisitely thin, stiff wire — sharpened at one end, looped at the other — with which he intended to skewer Hel’s masculinity.
“Drawing the Jinghu Bow Across the Strings” is what Kang had titled this new technique, and he could already imagine the notes that Hel would achieve as the wire was pushed and pulled back and forth through his testicles.
Kang had dressed for the occasion — a black jacket with black brocade over black silk pajamas and black slippers. He had slicked his hair back carefully, trimmed his eyebrows, and applied the most subtle, indistinguishable layer of rouge on his cheeks.
He looked forward to matching the rhythms of the mental torture along with the physical — show Hel the agony that was inevitable, then offer to rescind the sentence, and then apply it anyway. Draw the strings back and forth between despair and hope, terror and relief, anguish and cessation, building to a climax in which there was only pain.
As in any worthy opera, the music would be punctuated by passages of speech, as Hel recited his monologues. Yes, he was an American agent, yes he had been sent to pull the strings of the puppet, the traitor Liu, yes they conspired to deliver guns to antirevolutionary elements in Yunnan, yes, they hoped to murder Chairman Mao.
He heard car doors close, and then footsteps