Tung glanced at his watch. “Four thirty-five, P.M., in case you’re wondering. They do sometimes, you know.”
“I know.”
“Everything has worked out most satisfactorily since I last spoke with you in June.”
“What month is it now?”
“August. August twenty-fourth to be precise.”
“I’ve been here almost three months.”
“Three months exactly. Ninety days.”
“You run a rotten jail.”
“It’s something we picked up from our Colonial friends. You may be interested to learn that it went much the way I predicted it would when we had our first chat. It went better than I predicted, in fact.”
“They paid up.”
“They did indeed, Mr. Dye. Ten cents on the dollar, just as I said they would. Three million dollars in all. The ramifications are even better than that though — far better. But I think I won’t gloat. It’s not at all becoming and I’m sure that your people are most anxious to tell you about it themselves.”
“They probably can’t wait.”
“Well, I suppose that’s all,” Tung said. “A Mr. Carmingler will meet you just outside the prison at midnight. Do you know him?”
“I know him. What about the other two?”
“Oh, you mean Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland? They were released about an hour ago. I regret that they somehow injured themselves, but photographs of their injuries helped convince your people that they should — uh — cooperate. Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland are now both in hospital, I understand. Would you like to know which one?”
“Not especially.”
Tung nodded as if he understood that perfectly. Perhaps he did. “Well, I’ve enjoyed our two chats, Mr. Dye; I’m only sorry that we didn’t have more of them.”
“I’m surprised that we didn’t.”
“Yes. However, Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland became most cooperative so we saw no need to disturb you, especially since poor Li Teh had provided us with such extensive documentation on your activities as, shall we say, a China watcher. A felicitous phrase, if ever I heard one. Incidentally, Mr. Dye, while you were our — uh — guest the People’s Republic removed the hyphen from Mao Tsetung’s name in all their official dispatches. It’s now one word. Some seem to place an extraordinary amount of significance on this. Do you?”
“Tremendous. Anything else?”
“No. Nothing I can think of. Is there something that you’d care to mention?”
“I’d like my watch back and I still think you run a rotten jail.”
Tung smiled broadly and his teeth were just as nice as they were before. “Yes,” he said, “we do manage that quite well, don’t we?” He didn’t say anything about the watch.
First of all they deloused me. Then I showered for twenty minutes. Following that, I put on a red hospital bathrobe and was shaved, barbered, and stuffed with a four-egg breakfast. After all that I got to sit across the desk from Carmingler, wearing one of my new suits, and watch him use three matches to get his pipe going. He used the wooden kitchen kind that come in cardboard boxes and used to sell for a nickel. They’re probably a dime now. Everything else has gone up.
We sat in the office that Letterman General had assigned him, the one in the sealed-off suite that was painted a depressing tan and contained a gray desk and four matching chairs and whose lone window offered a gloomy view of the rear of the hospital’s kitchen.
“Okay,” I said. “Now that I’m all tidied up and sweet-smelling, you can start.”
“Well, to begin with,” he said, “it wasn’t my idea.”
“Whose was it?”
“Mugar’s.”
“I don’t know any Mugar.”
“He’s new.”
“I’m sure he is,” I said. “What about the lie detector? Whose idea was that? Mugar’s again?”
“They were dead set against Li Teh,” Carmingler said and dragged on his pipe. “It was all I could think of.”
“Then you’re losing your touch. Five years ago you could have thought of a dozen ways, but five years ago you weren’t in love with a polygraph.”
“They wanted to make sure,” he said. “They had to be positive about Li.”
“All of them?”
“Most of them.”
“How many?” I said.
“There were five of us. Me, Mugar, Reo, Werbin, and Pilalas.”
“What side was the Greek on?”
“He was the only one with me. He’d go along, but the other three wouldn’t. They were following Mugar.”
“How old’s Mugar?”
“I don’t know; twenty-eight, twenty-nine.”
“And he’s this year’s new boy,” I said.
“Very new. But he bought the polygraph.”
I sighed and lit another cigarette. My tenth for the morning. “It doesn’t matter now. Li’s dead. I’m blown all over Asia. I just want to know what happened.”
“It was a mess,” Carmingler said. “A real fuck-up.” Carmingler never swore unless he meant it and when he got through describing what had happened, I could see that he did.
“They thought you were CIA, of course,” he said. “That started it.”
I nodded. Then Carmingler told me the rest of it. On the perfectly sound theory that the United States’ left hand seldom knows what its right big toe is doing, the premier of the island city-state republic decided to make two approaches, one to the State Department and one to the CIA who, they mistakenly thought, employed me. It was their Foreign Minister himself who summoned the local U.S. ambassador and then confronted him with extensive documentation that proved beyond doubt that American agents had been fiddling with his country’s affairs. The Foreign Minister demanded a written apology from the U.S. Secretary of State. The U.S. ambassador promptly dispatched copies of the damaging material to Washington where the Secretary of State, new to his job and anxious to please, went through the usual seventh-floor shilly-shallying and then wrote, or had someone write, the letter of apology (an almost unheard of gesture) which promised that the culprits (meaning Shoftstall, Bourland, and me) would be severely disciplined. The Secretary himself was under the impression that we were with CIA. He didn’t bother to check.
It was my former prison host, Mr. Tung, who approached the CIA. He made the approach in Djakarta, Carmingler said, and when he demanded the thirty million dollar ransom, they just laughed at him. They didn’t check with anyone either; they just laughed. It was the wrong thing to do, of course. Mr. Tung merely smiled back and then hurried across the street (or wherever it was) to the local British MI-6 representative and told him all about how the Americans no longer trusted their English colleagues and were running their own agents on what by gentlemen’s agreement, had been considered the private turf of Perfidious Albion. Actually, Carmingler said, the CIA was thinking about it. They just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
“Well, the British got most upset,” he said. “They accused the CIA of double-dealing and God knows what else. The CIA just kept on denying that any of you belonged to them. They had no choice, of course.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said.
“Name it.”
I could think of a number of things, but I let it pass. Having brought the British in and carefully bruised their already tender sensibilities, Tung then leaked the whole story to the press.
“Made headlines everywhere. Every damned place you could think of, and the British got sore all over again.” His pipe had gone out so Carmingler used four matches to light it. He seemed to have forgotten his Phi Beta Kappa key, which I thought was just as well. “So all CIA could do was to deny again that you were one of them. They didn’t know about the Secretary’s letter. State hadn’t bothered to tell them about that. Then the premier himself called a press conference, distributed Xeroxed copies of the letter, and made a feisty little speech that lasted an hour all about how the United States was trying to dominate Asia through a program of subversion and what have you. He even hinted that he might play those tapes for the press — you know, the ones that they got in your hotel room.”