Chapter 30
And the Rights of Men
Got the address?” Wise asked his driver. He was also the team’s cameraman, and drew the driving duty because of his steady hands and genius for anticipating traffic clogs.
“Got it, Barry,” the man assured him. Better yet, it had been inputted into the satellite-navigation system, and the computer would tell them how to get there. Hertz was going to conquer the world someday, Wise reflected with a chuckle. Just so they didn’t bring back the O.J. commercials.
“Going to rain, looks like,” Barry Wise thought aloud.
“Could be,” his producer agreed.
“What do you suppose happened to the gal who had the baby?” the cameraman asked from the driver’s seat.
“Probably home with her kid now. I bet they don’t keep mothers in the hospital very long here,” Wise speculated. “Trouble is, we don’t know her address. No way to do a follow-up on her and the kid.” And that was too bad, Wise could have added. They had the surname, Yang, on their original tape, but the given names of the husband and wife were both garbled.
“Yeah, I bet there’s a lot of Yangs in the phone book here.”
“Probably,” Wise agreed. He didn’t even know if there was such a thing as a Beijing phone book—or if the Yang family had a phone—and none of his crew could read the ideographic characters that constituted the Chinese written language. All of those factors combined to make a stone wall.
“Two blocks,” the cameraman reported from the front seat. “Just have to turn left ... here...”
The first thing they saw was a crowd of khaki uniforms, the local police, standing there like soldiers on guard duty, which was essentially what they were, of course. They parked the van and hopped out, and were immediately scrutinized as though they were alighting from an alien spacecraft. Pete Nichols had his camera out and up on his shoulder, and that didn’t make the local cops any happier, because they’d all been briefed on this CNN crew at the Longfu hospital and what they’d done to damage the People’s Republic. So the looks they gave the TV crew were poisonous—Wise and his crew could not have asked for anything better for their purposes.
Wise just walked up to the cop with the most rank-stuff on his uniform.
“Good day,” Barry said pleasantly.
The sergeant in command of the group just nodded. His face was entirely neutral, as though he were playing cards for modest stakes.
“Could you help us?” Wise asked.
“Help you do what?” the cop asked in his broken English, suddenly angry at himself for admitting he could speak the language. Better if he’d played dumb, he realized a few seconds too late.
“We are looking for Mrs. Yu, the wife of the Reverend Yu, who used to live here.”
“No here,” the police sergeant replied with a wave of the hands. “No here.”
“Then we will wait,” Wise told him.
Minister,” Cliff Rutledge said in greeting.
Shen was late, which was a surprise to the American delegation. It could have meant that he was delivering a message to his guests, telling them that they were not terribly important in the great scheme of things; or he might have been delayed by new instructions from the Politburo; or maybe his car hadn’t wanted to start this morning. Personally, Rutledge leaned toward option number two. The Politburo would want to have input into these talks. Shen Tang had probably been a moderating influence, explaining to his colleagues that the American position, however unjust, would be difficult to shake in this series of talks, and so the smart long-term move would be to accommodate the American position for now, and make up for the losses in the next go-around the following year—the American sense of fair play, he would have told them, had cost them more negotiations than any other single factor in history, after all.
That’s what Rutledge would have done in his place, and he knew Shen was no fool. In fact, he was a competent diplomatic technician, and pretty good at reading the situation quickly. He had to know—no, Rutledge corrected himself, he should know or ought to know—that the American position was being driven by public opinion at home, and that that public opinion was against the interests of the PRC, because the PRC had f*cked up in public. So, if he’d been able to sell his position to the rest of the Politburo, he’d start off with a small concession, one which would show the course the day would take, allowing Rutledge to beat him back a few steps by the close of the afternoon session. Rutledge hoped for that, because it would get him what his country wanted with little further fuss, and would, by the way, make him look pretty good at Foggy Bottom. So he took a final sip of the welcoming tea and settled back in his chair, motioning for Shen to begin the morning’s talks.
“We find it difficult to understand America’s position in this and other matters—”
Uh-oh ...
“America has chosen to affront our sovereignty in many ways. First, the Taiwan issue ...”
Rutledge listened to the earphone which gave him the simultaneous translation. So, Shen hadn’t been able to persuade the Politburo to take a reasonable tack. That meant another unproductive day at these talks, and maybe—possible but not likely as yet—failed talks entirely. If America was unable to get concessions from China, and was therefore forced to impose sanctions, it would be ruinous to both sides, and not calculated to make the world a safer or better place. The tirade lasted twenty-seven minutes by his watch.
“Minister,” Rutledge began when it was his turn, “I find it difficult as well to understand your intransigence—” He went on along his own well-grooved path, varying only slightly when he said, “We put you on notice that unless the PRC allows its markets to be opened to American trade goods, the government of the United States will enact the provisions of the Trade Reform Act—”
Rutledge saw Shen’s face coloring up some. Why? He had to know the rules of the new game. Rutledge had said this half a hundred times in the previous few days. Okay, fine, he’d never said “put on notice,” which was diplo-speak for no shit, Charlie, we’re not f*ckin’ kidding anymore, but the import of his earlier statements had been straightforward enough, and Shen was no fool ... was he? Or had Cliff Rutledge misread this whole session?
Hello,” a female voice said.
Wise’s head turned sharply. “Hi. Have we met?”
“You met my husband briefly. I am Yu Chun,” the woman said, as Barry Wise came to his feet. Her English was pretty good, probably from watching a lot of TV, which was teaching English (the American version, anyway) to the entire world.
“Oh.” Wise blinked a few times. “Mrs. Yu, please accept our condolences for the loss of your husband. He was a very courageous man.”
Her head nodded at the good wishes, but they made her choke up a little, remembering what sort of man Fa An had been. “Thank you,” she managed to say, struggling not to show the emotions that welled up within her, held back, however, as though by a sturdy dam.
“Is there going to be a memorial service for your husband? If so, ma‘am, we would ask your permission to make a record of it.” Wise had never grown to like the oh-your-loved-one-is-dead, what’s-it-feel-like? school of journalism. He’d seen far more death as a reporter than as a Marine, and it was all the same all over the world. The guy on the pale horse came to visit, always taking away something precious to somebody, most of the time more than one somebody, and the vacuum of feelings it left behind could only be filled by tears, and that language was universal. The good news was that people all over the world understood. The bad news was that getting it out did further harm to the living victims, and Wise had trouble stomaching his occasional obligation to do that, however relevant it was to the all-important story.
“I do not know. We used to worship there in our house, but the police will not let me inside,” she told him.
“Can I help?” Wise offered, truly meaning it. “Sometimes the police will listen to people like us.” He gestured to them, all of twenty meters away. Quietly, to Pete Nichols: “Saddle up.”
How it looked to the cops was hard for the Americans to imagine, but the widow Yu walked toward them with this American black man in attendance and the white one with the camera close behind.
She started talking to the senior cop, with Wise’s microphone between the two of them, speaking calmly and politely, asking permission to enter her home.
The police sergeant shook his head in the universal No, you cannot gesture that needed no translation.
“Wait a minute. Mrs. Yu, could you please translate for me?” She nodded. “Sergeant, you know who I am and you know what I do, correct?” This generated a curt and none too friendly nod. “What is the reason for not allowing this lady to enter her own home?”
“ ‘I have my orders,’ ” Chun translated the reply.
“I see,” Wise responded. “Do you know that this will look bad for your country? People around the world will see this and feel it is improper.” Yu Chun duly translated this for the sergeant.
“ ‘I have my orders,’ ” he said again, through her, and it was plain that further discussion with a statue would have been equally productive.
“Perhaps if you called your superior,” Wise suggested, and to his surprise the Chinese cop leaped on it, lifting his portable radio and calling his station.
“ ‘My lieutenant come,’ ” Yu Chun translated. The sergeant was clearly relieved, now able to dump the situation on someone else, who answered directly to the captain at the station.
“Good, let’s go back to the truck and wait for him,” Wise suggested. Once there, Mrs. Yu lit up an unfiltered Chinese cigarette and tried to retain her composure. Nichols let the camera down, and everyone relaxed for a few minutes.
“How long were you married, ma’am?” Wise asked, with the camera shut off.
“Twenty-four years,” she answered.
“Children?”
“One son. He is away at school in America, University of Oklahoma. He study engineering,” Chun told the American crew.
“Pete,” Wise said quietly, “get the dish up and operating.”
“Right.” The cameraman ducked his head to go inside the van. There he switched on the uplink systems. Atop the van, the mini-dish turned fifty degrees in the horizontal and sixty degrees in the vertical, and saw the communications satellite they usually used in Beijing. When he had the signal on his indicator, he selected Channel Six again and used it to inform Atlanta that he was initiating a live feed from Beijing. With that, a home-office producer started monitoring the feed, and saw nothing. He might have succumbed to immediate boredom, but he knew Barry Wise was usually good for something, and didn’t go live unless there was a good reason for it. So, he leaned back in his comfortable swivel chair and sipped at his coffee, then notified the duty director in Master Control that there was a live signal inbound from Beijing, type and scope of story unknown. But the director, too, knew that Wise and his crew had sent in a possible Emmy-class story just two days earlier, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, none of the majors was doing anything at all in Beijing at the moment—CNN tracked the communications-satellite traffic as assiduously as the National Security Agency, to see what the competition was doing.
More people started showing up at the Wen house/church. Some were startled to see the CNN truck, but when they saw Yu Chun there, they relaxed somewhat, trusting her to know what was happening. Showing up in ones and twos for the most part, there were soon thirty or so people, most of them holding what had to be Bibles, Wise thought, getting Nichols up and operating again, but this time with a live signal going up and down to Atlanta.
“This is Barry Wise in Beijing. We are outside the home of the Reverend Yu Fa An, the Baptist minister who died just two days ago along with Renato Cardinal DiMilo, the Papal Nuncio, or Vatican Ambassador to the People’s Republic. With me now is his widow, Yu Chun. She and the reverend were married for twenty-four years, and they have a son now studying at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. As you can imagine, this is not a pleasant time for Mrs. Yu, but it is all the more unpleasant since the local police will not allow her to enter her own home. The house also served as the church for their small congregation, and as you can see, the congregation has come together to pray for their departed spiritual leader, the Reverend Yu Fa An.
“But it does not appear that the local government is going to allow them to do so in their accustomed place of worship. I’ve spoken personally with the senior police official here. He has orders, he says, not to admit anyone into the house, not even Mrs. Yu, and it appears that he intends to follow those orders.” Wise walked to where the widow was.
“Mrs. Yu, will you be taking your husband’s body back to Taiwan for burial?” It wasn’t often that Wise allowed his face to show emotion, but the answer to this question grabbed him in a tender place.
“There will be no body. My husband—they take his body and burn it, and scatter the ashes in river,” Chun told the reporter, and saying it cracked both her composure and her voice.
“What?” Wise blurted. He hadn’t expected that any more than she had, and it showed on his face. “They cremated his body without your permission?”
“Yes,” Chun gasped.
“And they’re not even giving you the ashes to take home with you?”
“No, they scatter ashes in river, they tell me.”
“Well” was all Wise could manage. He wanted to say something stronger, but as a reporter he was supposed to maintain some degree of objectivity, and so he couldn’t say what he might have preferred to say. Those barbarian cocksuckers. Even the differences in culture didn’t explain this one away.
It was then that the police lieutenant arrived on his bicycle. He walked at once to the sergeant, spoke to him briefly, then walked to where Yu Chun was.
“What is this?” he asked in Mandarin. He recoiled when the TV camera and microphone entered the conversation. What is THIS? his face demanded of the Americans.
“I wish to enter my house, but he won’t let me,” Yu Chun answered, pointing at the sergeant. “Why can’t I go in my house?”
“Excuse me,” Wise put in. “I am Barry Wise. I work for CNN. Do you speak English, sir?” he asked the cop.
“Yes, I do.”
“And you are?”
“I am Lieutenant Rong.”
He could hardly have picked a better name for the moment, Wise thought, not knowing that the literal meaning of this particular surname actually was weapon.
“Lieutenant Rong, I am Barry Wise of CNN. Do you know the reason for your orders?”
“This house is a place of political activity which is ordered closed by the city government.”
“Political activity? But it’s a private residence—a house, is it not?”
“It is a place of political activity,” Rong persisted. “Unauthorized political activity,” he added.
“I see. Thank you, Lieutenant.” Wise backed off and started talking directly to the camera while Mrs. Yu went to her fellow church members. The camera traced her to one particular member, a heavyset person whose face proclaimed resolve of some sort. This one turned to the other parishioners and said something loud. Immediately, they all opened their Bibles. The overweight one flipped his open as well and started reading a passage. He did so loudly, and the other members of the congregation looked intently into their testaments, allowing the first man to take the lead.
Wise counted thirty-four people, about evenly divided between men and women. All had their heads down into their own Bibles, or those next to them. That’s when he turned to see Lieutenant Rong’s face. It twisted into a sort of curiosity at first, then came comprehension and outrage. Clearly, the “political” activity for which the home had been declared off-limits was religious worship, and that the local government called it “political” activity was a further affront to Barry Wise’s sense of right and wrong. He reflected briefly that the news media had largely forgotten what communism really had been, but now it lay right here in front of him. The face of oppression had never been a pretty one. It would soon get uglier.
Wen Zhong, the restaurateur, was leading the ad-hoc service, going through the Bible but doing so in Mandarin, a language which the CNN crew barely comprehended. The thirty or so others flipped the pages in their Bibles when he did, following his scriptural readings very carefully, in the way of Baptist, and Wise started wondering if this corpulent chap might be taking over the congregation right before his eyes. If so, the guy seemed sincere enough, and that above all was the quality a clergyman needed. Yu Chun headed over to him, and he reached out to put his arm around her shoulder in a gesture that didn’t seem Chinese at all. That was when she lost it and started weeping, which hardly seemed shameful. Here was a woman married over twenty years who’d lost her husband in a particularly cruel way, then doubly insulted by a government which had gone so far as to destroy his body, thus denying her even the chance to look upon her beloved’s face one last time, or the chance to have a small plot of ground to visit.
These people are barbarians, Wise thought, knowing he couldn’t say such a thing in front of the camera, and angry for that reason, but his profession had rules and he didn’t break them. But he did have a camera, and the camera showed things that mere words could not convey.
Unknown to the news crew, Atlanta had put their feed on live, with voice-over commentary from CNN headquarters because they hadn’t managed to get Barry Wise’s attention on the side-band audio circuit. The signal went up to the satellite, then down to Atlanta, and back up to a total of four orbiting birds, then it came down all over the world, and one of the places it came to was Beijing.
The members of the Chinese Politburo all had televisions in their offices, and all of them had access to the American CNN, which was for them a prime source of political intelligence. It came down also to the various hotels in the city, crowded as they were with businessmen and other visitors, and even some Chinese citizens had access to it, especially businesspeople who conducted their affairs both within and without the People’s Republic and needed to know what was happening in the outside world.
In his office, Fang Gan looked up from his desk to the TV that was always kept on while he was there. He lifted the controller to get the sound, and heard English, with some Chinese language in the background that he could not quite understand. His English wasn’t very good, and he called Ming into his office to translate.
“Minister, this is coverage of something right here in Beijing,” she told him first of all.
“I can see that, girl!” he snapped back at her. “What is being said?”
“Ah, yes. It is associates of the man Yu who was shot by the police two days ago ... also his widow ... this is evidently a funeral ceremony of some sort—oh, they say that Yu’s body was cremated and scattered, and so his widow has nothing to bury, and that explains her added grief, they say.”
“What lunatic did that?” Fang wondered aloud. He was not by nature a very compassionate man, but a wise man did not go out of his way to be cruel, either. “Go on, girl!”
“They are reading from the Christian Bible, I can’t make out the words, the English speaker is blanking them out ... the narrator is mainly repeating himself, saying ... ah, yes, saying they are trying to establish contact with their reporter Wise here in Beijing but they are having technical difficulties ... just repeating what he has already said, a memorial ceremony for the man Yu, friends ... no, members of his worship group, and that is all, really. They are now repeating what happened before at the Longfu hospital, commenting also on the Italian churchman whose body will soon arrive back in Italy.”
Fang grumbled and lifted his phone, calling for the Interior Minister.
“Turn on your TV!” he told his Politburo colleague at once. “You need to get control of this situation, but do so intelligently! This could be ruinous for us, the worst since those foolish students at Tiananmen Square.”
Ming saw her boss grimace before setting the phone down and mutter, “Fool!” after he did so, then shake his head with a mixture of anger and sorrow.
“That will be all, Ming,” he told her, after another minute.
His secretary went back to her desk and computer, wondering what was happening with the aftermath of the man Yu’s death. Certainly it had seemed sad at the time, a singularly pointless pair of deaths which had upset and offended her minister for their stupidity. He’d even advocated punishing the trigger-happy policemen, but that suggestion had come to nothing, for fear of losing face for their country. With that thought, she shrugged and went back to her daily work.
The word from the Interior Minister went out fast, but Barry Wise couldn’t see that. It took another minute for him to hear the voices from Atlanta on his IFB earphone. Immediately thereafter, he went live on audio and started again to do his own on-the-scene commentary for a global audience. He kept turning his head while Pete Nichols centered the video on this rump religious meeting in a narrow, dirty street. Wise saw the police lieutenant talk into his portable radio—it looked like a Motorola, just like American cops used. He talked, listened, talked again, then got something confirmed. With that, he holstered the radio and came walking directly to the CNN reporter. There was determination on his face, a look Wise didn’t welcome, all the more so that on the way over, this Lieutenant Rong spoke discreetly with his men, who turned in the same direction, staying still but with a similar look of determination on their faces as they flexed their muscles in preparation for something.
“You must turn camera off,” Rong told Wise.
“Excuse me?”
“Camera, turn off,” the police lieutenant repeated.
“Why?” Wise asked, his mind going immediately into race mode.
“Orders,” Rong explained tersely.
“What orders?”
“Orders from police headquarter,” Rong said further.
“Oh, okay,” Wise replied. Then he held out his hand.
“Turn off camera now!” Lieutenant Rong insisted, wondering what the extended hand was all about.
“Where is the order?”
“What?”
“I cannot turn my camera off without a written order. It is a rule for my company. Do you have a written order?”
“No,” Rong said, suddenly nonplussed.
“And the order must be signed by a captain. A major would be better, but it must be a captain at least to sign the order,” Wise went on. “It is a rule of my company.”
“Ah,” Rong managed to say next. It was as if he’d walked headfirst into an invisible wall. He shook his head, as though to shake off the force of a physical impact, and walked five meters away, pulling out his radio again to report to someone elsewhere. The exchange took about a minute, then Rong came back. “Order come soon,” the lieutenant informed the American.
“Thank you,” Wise responded, with a polite smile and half bow. Lieutenant Rong went off again, looking somewhat confused until he grouped his men together. He had instructions to carry out now, and they were instructions he and they understood, which was usually a good feeling for citizens of the PRC, especially those in uniform.
“Trouble, Barry,” Nichols said, turning the camera toward the cops. He’d caught the discussion of the written order, and managed to keep his face straight only by biting his tongue hard. Barry had a way of confounding people. He’d even done it to presidents more than once.
“I see it. Keep rolling,” Wise replied off-mike. Then to Atlanta: “Something’s going to happen here, and I don’t like the looks of it. The police appear to have gotten an order from someone. As you just heard, they asked us to turn our camera off and we managed to refuse the request until we get a written order from a superior police official, in keeping with CNN policy,” Wise went on, knowing that someone in Beijing was watching this. The thing about communists, he knew, was that they were maniacally organized, and found a request in writing to be completely reasonable, however crazy it might appear to an outsider. The only question now, he knew, was whether they’d follow their verbal radioed order before the draft for the CNN crew came. Which priority came first ... ?
The immediate priority, of course, was maintaining order in their own city. The cops took out their batons and started heading toward the Baptists.
“Where do I stand, Barry?” Pete Nichols asked.
“Not too close. Make sure you can sweep the whole playing field,” Wise ordered.
“Gotcha,” the cameraman responded.
They tracked Lieutenant Rong right up to Wen Zhong, where a verbal order was given, and just as quickly rejected. The order was given again. The shotgun mike on the camera just barely caught the reply for the third iteration:
“Diao ren, chou ni ma di be!” the overweight Chinese shouted into the face of the police official. Whatever the imprecation meant, it made a few eyes go wide among the worshippers. It also earned Wen a smashed cheekbone from Rong’s personal baton. He fell to his knees, blood already streaming from the ripped skin, but then Wen struggled back to his feet, turned his back on the cop, and turned to yet another page in his Bible. Nichols changed position so that he could zoom in on the testament, and the blood dripping onto the pages.
Having the man turn his back to him only enraged Lieutenant Rong more. His next swing came down on the back of Wen’s head. That one buckled his knees, but amazingly failed to drop him. This time, Rong grabbed his shoulder with his left hand and spun him about, and the third blow from the baton rammed directly into the man’s solar plexus. That sort of blow will fell a professional boxer, and it did so to this restaurateur. A blink later, he was on his knees, one hand holding his Bible, the other grasping at his upper abdomen.
By this time, the other cops were moving in on the remainder of the crowd, swinging their own nightsticks at people who cringed but didn’t run. Yu Chun was the first of them. Not a tall woman even by Chinese standards, she took the full force of a blow squarely in the face, which broke her nose and shot blood out as though from a garden sprinkler.
It didn’t take long. There were thirty-four parishioners and twelve cops, and the Christians didn’t resist effectively, not so much because of their religious beliefs as because of their societal conditioning not to resist the forces of order in their culture. And so, uniformly they stood, and uniformly they took the blows with no more defense than a cringe, and uniformly they collapsed to the street with bleeding faces. The policemen withdrew almost immediately, as though to display their work to the CNN camera, which duly took the shots and transmitted them around the world in a matter of seconds.
“You getting this?” Wise asked Atlanta.
“Blood and all, Barry,” the director replied, from his swivel chair at CNN headquarters. “Tell Nichols I owe him a beer.”
“Roger that.”
“It seems that the local police had orders to break up this religious meeting, which they regard as something of a political nature, and politically threatening to their government. As you can see, none of these people are armed, and none resisted the attack by the police in any way. Now—” He paused on seeing another bicycle speed its way up the street to where they were. A uniformed cop jumped off and handed something to Lieutenant Rong. This the lieutenant carried to Barry Wise.
“Here order. Turn camera off!” he demanded.
“Please, allow me to look at the order,” Wise replied, so angry at what he’d just seen that he was willing to risk a cracked head of his own, just so Pete got it up to the satellite. He scanned the page and handed it back. “I cannot read this. Please excuse me,” he went on, deliberately baiting the man and wondering exactly where the limits were, “but I cannot read your language.”
It looked as though Rong’s eyes would pop out of his head. “It say here, turn camera off!”
“But I can’t read it, and neither can my company,” Wise responded, keeping his voice entirely reasonable.
Rong saw the camera and microphone were both pointed his way, and now he realized that he was being had, and had badly. But he also knew he had to play the game. “It say here, must turn camera off now.” Rong’s fingers traced the page from one symbol to another.
“Okay, I guess you’re telling me the truth.” Wise stood erect and turned to face the camera. “Well, as you have just seen, we’ve been ordered by the local police to cease transmission from this place. To summarize, the widow of the Reverend Yu Fa An and members of his congregation came here today to pray for their departed pastor. It turns out that Reverend Yu’s body was cremated and his ashes scattered. His widow, Yu Chun, was denied access to her home by the police because of alleged improper ‘political’ activity, by which I guess they mean religious worship, and as you just saw, the local police attacked and clubbed members of the congregation. And now we’re being chased away, too. Atlanta, this is Barry Wise, reporting live from Beijing.” Five seconds later, Nichols dropped the camera off his shoulder and turned to stow it in the truck. Wise looked back down at the police lieutenant and smiled politely, thinking, You can shove this up your skinny little ass, Gomer! But he’d done his job, getting the story out. The rest was in the hands of the world.