The Concert

  “A rocket? But that was the theory everyone agreed to exclude from the outset!”

  “So it was. Nevertheless, he was eliminated by the method that seemed the most unlikely …”

  That’s how I imagined the beginning of the conversation between myself and Gj— D— in the Café Riviera,

  “He wasn’t killed in the sky over China, nor in the Mongolian desert, nor at home, nor in a hangar at the disused airport. He was killed at a dinner party, or rather after it.”

  As soon as I started thinking of the circumstances of the murder, I found myself so fascinated by that dinner party of Mao’s that I soon forgot all about the Café Riviera. The old, already time-worn story itself, with its faded, sometimes almost illegible characters, appealed much more strongly to my imagination, perhaps because

  its origins reached back so far into the past,

  It was all to happen, then, at a banquet, as in a play by Shakespeare (Lin Biao and Mao Zedong had both been passionate advocates of the banning of Shakespeare’s works — was it because they were both hatching a plot based on treachery at a banquet?).

  In other words, both Mao and his marshal based their plots on the plot of Macbeth. The only thing was, in this case, Macbeth wasn’t able to commit his crime because Duncan stole a march on him.

  THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DEATH OF LIN BIAO. SYNOPSIS.

  A

  Lin Biao was liquidated in a way that both corresponds with and differs from the theories put forward on the subject. In a nutshell, one might say he was killed by all those methods put together but by none of them in particular.

  Many factors were invoked in his murder: the sky, the earth, the words “Let him go,” the launching of a rocket, the burning of the bodies, the plane, the crash in the middle of the desert, the words “Welcome to the banquet,” the words “And now I’ll wait for you at my place,” and the after-thought, “Perhaps we’ll meet again in a world where invitation cards have other things written on them …”

  It was ten o’clock in the evening when Mao, his wife, and Zhou Enlai saw their guests to the door. “Goodnight, see you soon,” “We hope you’ll come and see us one evening!” “Certainly, certainly!”

  The marshal’s bullet-proof car glided away along the dark street. The little group at the door stood there for a while, watching their guests disappear. No one said anything until the sound of an explosion was heard in the distance.

  Mao heaved a deep sigh. He turned to his wife and Zhou Enlai, You see to the details,” he told them. Then he led the way back into the house.

  He knew he would sleep deeply. Just as his brain had recently reflected the anxiety of the living Lin Biao, so now, he knew, h§ would learn something from the mortal slumbers of his dead enemy.

  B

  On the main road, at the bend near kilometre 19, the soldiers who had just fired the rocket came out of their look-out post.

  After the blinding explosion everything seemed darker and quieter than it really was. On legs still cramped with waiting (they had been lurking there for a good two hours), they walked over to the remains of the car. They’d only seen it, or rather its headlights,for a second, as it slowed down to take the bend. It had looked large and black then. Now there was nothing in the débris to suggest any shape at all. It would be difficult, too, to identify the corpses in this mass of shattered metal

  They didn’t know who they’d hit. They didn’t know what they were supposed to do now. Fire at the car and then wait, they’d been told.

  After a quarter of an hour they saw another set of headlights approaching. They were astounded when the car stopped and they saw Zhou Enlai and the head of Mao’s personal bodyguard get out. The dead man must be very important for the prime minister himself to take an interest in him.

  The new arrivals went over and began to inspect the débris by the light of an electric torch. No doubt they were looking for the corpses. The prime minister’s face was very pale,

  The soldiers heard someone behind them calling out, “Quick! Quick!” but they were still so numbed they didn’t understand what it. meant. Anyhow, now that their work was done, haste seemed irrelevant. Unless there was some damage to the road that needed to be repaired? Or it could jest be pointless - some officers had got into the habit of shouting “Quick!” at the mere sight of a few ordinary soldiers.

  C

  So he was killed by a rocket. But grotesquely, in a car - not in the sky, aboard a plane, as you might expect. Those responsible did their best to suppress all knowledge of the car’s existence. After that they tried to suppress all reference to the rocket itself, bet when that proved impossible they branded the propagators of any such rumours as traitors.

  And thee there was the treason perpetrated by one of the marshal’s children — by his daughter and future son-in-law, to be precise. Though they were unaware of what they were doing.

  The bugging devices apparently proved their worth. On the strength of a recorded conversation between the girl and her fiancé, Zhou had them detained separately and thee questioned them himself.

  It had been a long day. The marshal didn’t know what was going on. He was just due back after a vacation.

  Zhou Enlai had no difficulty in getting at the truth. The girl and her fiancé had been summoned urgently that morning. A black official car was waiting outside: “Comrade Zhoe Eelai would be glad…” The two young people complied apprehensively. As they were driven along they probably wondered why they’d been sent for. Perhaps they whispered, “Could it be for that?” lven if they dide’t, even if they only exchanged glances and gestures, everything was recorded by a microphone installed inside the black limousine.

  When they reached the Forbidden City they” were left to cool their heels for an hour or two, then separated and sent to different rooms. The reason was obvious: when Zhou Enlai interrogated them one at a time, he could tell each that the other had confessed, so what was the point of denials?

  Mao had had his suspicions for some time. All he needed was final confirmation before giving orders for the axe to fall.

  Meanwhile Lin liao himself was on his way back to Peking, The closer the train got to the capital the more his apprehension increased. What had happened while he was away? His wife couldn’t hide the fact that she was worried too. She and their son were the only members of Lin’s family who knew about his plot, but he suspected that his son had told his daughter. Lie Biao had always been very touched by the closeness between the two, but now it had its drawbacks. He consoled himself with the thought that daughters are usually more attached to their parents than sons are, and he could be sere she wouldn’t do anything to harm him.

  When he got home he found Mao’s invitation to dinner awaiting him. They usually did meet like that after either of them had been away on holiday. The marshal heaved a sigh of relief. Everything was the same as before. In his euphoria he forgot to ask where his daughter was. Someone had said something about her - she would be late home, she was out somewhere with her fiancé…But he’d been too preoccupied with the invitation to take much notice…

  D

  So there was an invitation. But not to Peking. Merely to dinner.

  And the words “Where are we going?” were uttered, bet not by the marshal, and not in his car. They were spoken first in a small van, then on a plane, by someone whose name remained unknown. But that was later.

  Meanwhile the bullet-proof car drove on in silence towards Mao’s house. Night was falling, It was still only early autumn, but the turning leaves had already lost some of their brightness. In a way that made the landscape more beautiful.

  The marshal looked out at it as they went along. This part of the outskirts of the capital was particularly appealing at this time of year. Probably that was why Mao had invited him out here, rather than, as he usually did, to his house in Peking.

  The lamps by the entrance to the villa came into view, it wasn’t quite dark yet, and the light they shed looked chilly.

  E
br />   Ten hours later, at dawn, the plane comes into the story.

  Where from? Was it a hoax, a figment of the imagination?

  That was what people thought at first when they heard the truth, i.e. the current version of the marshal’s death. When it was given out that he had been struck down on the ground, in his car, at kilometre 19 on the road to Mao’s house, it followed automatically that the story about his — or his corpse’s — attempted escape by air, together with the details about his being in a hurry, the shots, the suggestion that the plane be brought down by means of a rocket, the words “Let him go,” the charred corpses in Mongolia, and so on, were only inventions designed to camouflage the truth.

  But if that was the first reaction, the voice of reason whispered, “But a plane really did crash in Mongolia! Here, inside China, we can dress things up in any way we like, but when they happen on the other side of the frontier they’re beyond our control.”

  So a plane really did go up in flames. Shot down on Mongolian territory. With Chinese corpses on board. Was it a mere coincidence, exploited to make people think this was the plane on which Lin Biao had tried to flee? This didn’t seem very likely, as even the most inexperienced investigator would have had no difficulty in seeing that the charred bodies weren’t those of the marshal and his wife.

  So the business of the plane couldn’t have been accidental It really did have something to do with Lin Biao, whether in reality or in some fictional account of it. Was the plane necessary as the only way of proving that Lin Biao had tried to escape to the Soviet Union? That would have been rather expensive. A more plausible explanation was that the plane journey was part of some previous plot that for some reason was abandoned. But rather than waste it — after all, this was in the middle of an economy drive, when every-thing possible was being recycled — the people concerned pressed it into service as a smokescreen.

  The discarded scenario was probably also the source of the rocket, the invitation, and Mao’s “Let him go.” But such details were modified to fit into the new plan: the urgent invitation to Peking became an invitation to dinner, and the rocket was fired at a car instead of a plane. As for the words, “Let him go,” they seem really to have been spoken, bet in different circumstances. Something like this? One of Mao’s personal bodyguards suggested, “Let me kill him after dinner, in the hall,” but Mao said, “Let him go, knowing there was a nice big rocket waiting for him at kilometre 19."

  Thus the rocket and the words “Let him go” figured together both in the reality and in the rumour, though in a different order.

  And the plane still had its place in the story. Whether as an empty shell or a delusion, it was still too early to say. For a good billion Chinese it carried Lin Biao, still alive bet pale with terror, on his attempted escape. For the inner circle around Mao, it carried only his corpse,

  “It was Zhou who saw to the details of this business,” Mao had said the following morning, drinking tea while the plane was still m Chinese airspace. “We shall all be called on some time to say what happened, but I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm., I have good reason to believe he is dead by now.”

  The others didn’t dare ask questions, especially as Mao told them bluntly he himself didn’t know the ins and outs. They just sipped their tea, imagining what had happened. They all saw it differently except for one thing: a bloody corpse in a seat on a plane, with someone trying to fasten the seat-belt to keep it from slipping about.

  But was that what really happened?

  Silence. As they went on drinking tea, each one in his mind’s eye went up the aluminium steps to the plane, stepped inside, and then drew back…

  F

  In the First Rumour about the death of Lin Biao there was always a reference to a drawing back. The marshal felt a sudden chill run down his spine before he stepped into the plane, and then drew back.

  It was never explained. Some said Lin Biao was so frightened he scarcely had the strength to climb up to the door of the plane and had to be practically dragged inside. Later, when it was suggested that the murderers might already have been on board, Lin Biao’s drawing back was explained as a recoil from the sight of those unknown faces. In any case, it was too late. The plane door closed upon him.

  When, in due course, the theory that the killers were already on board the plane collapsed, like so many others, the idea that Lin Biao drew back became absurd. Even so, people still referred to it, whether as some kind of clue or as a sign that the marshal had a mysterious presentiment.

  But the whole thing was incongruous, and those who studied the question could easily guess that it wasn’t the victim who had shrunk back, but the people concerned with his fate, who projected their own reaction on to him. First, thinking he had been alive when on the plane, they’d been shocked at the image of his corpse. Then they’d received a second shock on contemplating the body itself. And then they attributed their recoil to Lin Biao himself, lending him their eyes and making him look at his own image and draw back from that.

  As in all eightmares, these imaginings involved inversions in time and space, and other unnatural concatenations.

  So Lin Biao hurries over to the plane on which he is to escape (in accordance with his own plans, or someone else’s, or merely in somebody’s dream?). Once on board he finds his own bloody corpse sitting there. He recoils in terror; turns away in the hope that it’s only a hallucination; and thee sees his own corpse again, in a different form…

  G

  To understand what really happened you have to go back to kilometre 19 on the main road, jest after the car was hit by the rocket.

  A voice went on calling “Quick! Quick!” and it didn’t take the soldiers long to realize that these were no empty words. But they weren’t being asked to mend the road. Nor to repair the kilometre-marker, which had been so battered and singed that the “I9” was hardly legible any more. The soldiers weren’t being exhorted to clear away the débris, either, No, it was the charred bodies they were to do something about. Someone pointed first at the corpses,then at a small van that had driven up unobserved.

  “Quick, quick — remove the bodies!”

  Zhou Enlai and the chief bodyguard stood at a distance, watching what was going on.

  The soldiers approached the blackened heap, which was still giving off a smell of ashes and burning rubber. A couple of headlights lit up the scene. The remains of the car were all tangled up with bits of the missile and with the arms and legs of the dead. Some of the metal was charred, some — perhaps parts of the rocket - was still shiny. At first sight the heap of débris could have been the remains of a traffic accident or of a plane crash.

  The soldiers extricated the corpses and carried them over to the van. The smell, combined with that of the burnt tyres, was revolting.

  “And now get in the van yourselves!”

  Inside the van the smell was even worse.

  “Where are we going?” asked one of the soldiers.

  No one answered. At their feet lay two formless black masses. Who were these unfortunate wretches?

  The van drove on and on until it came to a lonely landing strip. Dawn was jest breaking. In the distance you could just make out the shape of an aircraft.

  “Quick! Quick!” said a voice again.

  The soldiers dragged the bodies - they left black trails behind them — on to the landing strip. Then on to the plane. Not into the hold. Into the cabin, where they were placed on a couple of seats.

  “Now get on yourselves.”

  The two soldiers climbed on board. The door closed.

  “Where are we going?” one of them asked as the plane rose above the clouds.

  As before, there was no answer.

  The soldiers, who had been up all night, occasionally drowsed off. Their hands and faces bore black traces from where they had handled the corpses^ but they were so worried they didn’t notice.

  “Where are we?”

  Down below there was a flat expanse th
at looked like the Mongolian desert.

  … The plane was found soon after it crashed^ about midday. The Soviet frontier guards examined the débris and the charred bodies with interest. No one, however expert, could have told the difference between one and another. Except for two of them. They had been burned to a cinder twice.

  H

  The likeness between the remains of the car destroyed the previous day and those of the crashed plane was probably the source of the subsequent duplication.

  The plane appeared to have come into being during the night, after everyone had gone to bed. One might say that Mao, Zhou and the burned-out car all created it in their sleep.

  It was as if, after the group of watchers had melted away in the silence of the night near kilometre 19, the blackened mass of metal, rising ep like a Balkan ghost from the grave, re-assembled itself in a shape that suggested an aircraft.

  Perhaps that is how the story will be told two hundred years from now, three hundred, a thousand. If it’s remembered at all.

  After the nightmare, then, the débris awakened. Silent and black as ever, but now thousands of kilometres away.

  That was how the dream mechanism worked, with all its discontinuities, illogicalities and inversions of time and space.

  Much later on, simplified by time, the sad story of the marshal will probably be told as follows: Lin Biao was invited by the Chairman to a dinner at which he was murdered. That night his corpse rose up and went away, far away to the Mongolian desert.

  I

  But what about the bullets in the charred body? And the firing of shots in the plane?

  Oh well, it’s impossible to get to the whole truth in this business.

  You’d have to be inside the heads of each of the two protagonists, Mao and the marshal — preferably both at once — to find out what really happened. And even then…