Chapter 20
NORBU was anxious about Mary Joe's safety. He was keen that she should move out of the Tibetan areas and find lodgings in the Chinese quarter. The town was crawling with spies and stool pigeons, and the level of vigilance had been raised lately. Norbu was aware of the fact that he was known to be a bachelor and a loner, if people got to know of a strange woman staying with him, this story would be carried to the Chinesc sooner or later. He made sure that Mary Joe moved out only through back srteets and alleyways where most people were resistance sympathisers; none of whom would think of talking to the Chinese. But then the Chinese knew this too, and they would therefore concentrate on the area. This made the danger greater.
Mary Joe understood this. She was equally anxious to move out She came back on the second evening, beaming and excited. "I have found lodgings Norbu, I am going to move out tomorrow."
"With whom are you going to stay.?''
"They are poor people, constructions workers from Chengdu. That's supposed to be my home town also. They were very warm and generous and the rent is also affordable."
"I am sorry Mary Joe, but I would not advise you to stay with them."
"Why?"
"Have you ever been to Schezwan ?"
''Never."
"Have you ever seen the city of Chengdu. Are you familiar with its streets and can you speak the local dialect well"
"I have never been to Chengdu but I know the city well from maps. I can speak the dialect well enough, but perhaps not well enough for a native. I see what you mean you are afraid I will be found out. Is that it?"
"Yes, therefore it would be better to find lodgings with a family from the north, say somewhere near Beijing. For them Schezuan would almost be like a foreign country. No one would ever suspect you are not Chinese then."
"I see what you mean." Mary Joe renewed her search. She finally found a family from the northern province of Shensi. The family ran a grocery business in the Chinese quarter on the western edge of the town. The place was quite close to the army camp and the house smelt of vegetables and garlic, but so what. It was as good a place as any that she would ever find and the family were simple, kind-hearted folk without children of their own. They were more than glad to take Mary Joe in as a lodger. Stuffing all her belongings in a small duffel bag which she had purchased from the local market, she moved into her new residence the next morning.
Her hosts had been in Tibet for more than two decades but they still sighed for their home in Shensi. Their house had a makeshift appearance. Everything was made of bamboo or corrugated iron, things which could be easily dismantled and packed away. They still dreamt of earning enough money to go back to the land of their ancestors. But they were hospitable people and Mary Joe could at least count on fresh won-ton soup for dinner every night.
Her main problem was now to find employment with the CITS, the Chinese tourist agency. She went to the CITS office the next day. This office was situated in a double story house that had once belonged to Tsarong, a famous minister in the days of the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Its splendour was somewhat faded, but it was still an elegant dovelling. The Chinese bureaucracy, in contrast to the Chinese emigrants, lived and worked in style. The head of the office was a middle ranking bureaucrat called Yao Bang. He was tall for a Chinese, with a thin beaky face, a wisp of a moustache which drooped over his thin lips, and a rather dandified air. Mary Joe disliked him on sight. But she had no choice but to ingratiate herself with him, if she was to get this job, and she had to get the job at any cost, if she was to get into the Potala.
Yao looked at her disapprovingly over the tops of his gold and steel framed spectacles. He flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the sleeve of his immaculate jacket before deigning to speak to Mary Joe.
"Well, don't stand there gawking woman, I haven't all day, you know."
"Sorry Comarade Yao, I hope you have a had look at my application."
Yao glanced cursorily at a paper lying on his polished rosewood desk and turned to her again. "Yes, indeed, you want a job in the CITS as a guide, but such applications come to us everyday. Why should I consider it seriously."
"Because I speak fluent English Comrade. You can try me."
"Speak English do you. All right then, read this out." He picked up a dog-eared copy of The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, which he had been trying to read for days. Yao was fascinated by American gangsters, stretch limousines, girls in stockings and garters and other symbols of the decadent west.
Mary Joe could hardly repress a smile as she picked up the book. She opened it at random and began to read. Yao looked at her,. Impressed in spite of himself. He noticed the American accent. "Where did you learn to read English like that. You don't sound Chinese."
"I had an American teacher who taught us for two years, in Chengdu."
Yao peered at her suspiciously, unwilling to accept the fact that a young girl with a provincial background could speak English with such astonishing fluency. But such accomplishment was too rare to be ignored. So he said finally, "all right, you are hired. But remember, you owe your job to me as a personal favour. We have quite enough people on our rolls right now, and have no need of extra staff. 1 am taking you on only because of your youth and command of English. But the moment I am displeased you will be fired. Is that clear."
Mary Joe smiled inwardly at this hire and fire version of job security in the last bastion of communism, but she had no choice except to agree. She turned on her charm an smiled ingratiatingly at Yao, "of course Comarade Yao. I understand. You will have no cause for complaint." She had a fair inkling of what Yao expected in return for his favour but told herself that she would cross that bridge when she came to it. There was no other way to get into the Potala and she was going to get there even if it meant gratifying the depraved fancies of Yao.
The Potala is not just a palace. It is also a medieval fortress, a monastery, a treasure house of Tibetan art and a military barrack. But ever since the departure of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the building has lain empty. In the old days when the Dalai Lama lived here it was home to thousands of monks, hundreds of soldiers and scores of bureaucrats, the spiritual and temporal hub of the entire nation, but today it is only a gigantic museum, an empty shell.
The Potala is so vast, no one has probably seen all of it. It has thousands of rooms, halls, audience chambers, shrines and oratories as well as innumerable dungeons, secret passages and hidden chambers. But like most Tibetan buildings, its plan is simple. It is built like a rectangle, in fact several rectangular blocks joined in the middle by the central building which is called the Red Palace at the top of which are the private quarters of the Dalai Lama.
When Mary Joe arrived next morning to take up her new assignment the sun was already high in an intensely blue sky. She felt excited as she walked towards the Potala, dressed in a neat Mao suit that she had bought from a Chinese trader in the Barkhor. The building lost none of its grandeur as she came close. At the base of the Marpori hill was a small ornamental lake that reflected the intensely blue sky and the massive walls of the palace. Once this lake was jewel like in its splendour, swans and cygnets floated on it and the white Himalayan lotus grew abundantly in its still water, but now it was only a dirty little pond, overgrown with weeds.
Mary Joe climbed up the steep steps, marvelling at the terrific scale of the building. The CITS staff who showed foreign tourists around the Potala were all Chinese. It was a sad irony that the crowning glory of Tibetan culture was so completely in the custody of aliens that no native son could be found to show its splendours to visitors who had come from distant lands to see it. She was received at the CITS . counter by Su-Li a young Chinese girl who was said to be Yao's mistress. She was very pretty in a doll like way and heavily made up. She received Mary Joe with a disapproving sneer. "So you are the new recruit. Comrade Yao has told me all about you."
"Has he?"
"Yes he told me that your appointment is purely temporary and its continuation will depend upon how you perform.
"Has he now, I wonder why, because he told me nothing about you." Mary Joe was determined not to concede any ground to Su-Lior to accept her pretensions. If Su-Li wanted to throw her weight around because she was close to Yao, she could do that with the others, not with Mary Joe, because she knew how to handle the likes of Yao. Still she would have to be careful with Su-Li. She didn't want her to make trouble until she had the treaty in her possession.
But Su-Li was not her only problem. She found the entire staff dour and unfriendly. The only person who seemed to welcome her was Wang Dang. Wang was fat, cherubic, and amiable. He kept shuffling around on outsize feet and smiling at people most of the time. But Mary Joe soon found that he was the best informed of the lot and the only one who had a real feeling for the beautiful objects which surrounded them.
It was Wang who took her on her first conducted tour of the Potala, explaining the provenance of the many beautiful-shrines and chapels, as far it was known. Starting from the dungeons in the basement, the Potala has thirteen stories. When it was built it was reputed to be the tallest building in the world. But the tourists are only shown around the Red Palace. This wonderful building, the religious epicentre of the Potala, has scores of richly decorated oratories and private chapels built by the various Dalai Lamas as shrines for their favourite deities. These shrines are crowded with gold and silver-statuary, gorgeous hangings of silk and brocade, intricately and fantastically carved friezes and panels of sandal wood, rosewood and juniper. The sheer exuberance of the art fills the viewer with a sort of exaltation, but the art is more than just decorative, its impact comes from the faith that inspires it, and though the Potala is no longer the thriving hub of Tibet, each of these shrines is still instinct with a mysterious power. Mary Joe looked at the hundreds of images, some serene and beatific in expression, others grotesque and minatory and shivered inwardly, for an invisible spirit seemed to brood in the hushed air of these gorgeous tabernacles.
The chief attraction of the Potala, as far as the tourists were concerned was undoubtedly the long burial chamber, where the Thirteen Dalai Lamas are buried. In keeping with Hindu and Buddhist tradition, which holds that saints should not be cremated but buried in the upright posture, the mortal remains of the thirteen previous Dalai Lamas are here entombed in golden sarcophagi. These sarcophagi are like golden stupas or chortens, huge memorial cairns made entirely out of solid gold. The most impressive monuments are undoubtedly the tombs of the fifth and thirteenth Dalai Lamas, which are so tall that their distant spires project through the roof and can be reached only by a long ladder which leans against the sides of the stupa. The Chinese staff thought all this splendour as a criminal waste of gold, but Wang though otherwise. He appreciated the awesome solemnity of these structures and showed them to Mary Joe with an appropriate sense of wonder.
Mary Joe liked her job. Most of the tourists were American and she had a natural empathy with them. Within the space of a few days, she knew more about the Potala than most of the permanent staff, and soon had the tour parties eating out of her hand. She knew just the right the way to break the ice with the retired company executives, Stetson toting Texan oil men and their overweight wives, after they had climbed up the daunting steps of the palace.
"Sorry folks, no escalators in Tibet, those who can't walk are carried up in palanquins," she would drawl and have the crowd giggling. In fact she had to make an effort to disguise her accent, not to sound too American. She had already aroused the envy and hostility of some of the Chinese staff. If word got around that there was a Chinese girl who spoke English with the authentic American drawl, her cover would be blown higher than the snow on the summits of the N yenchenthagla.
But, it was the White Palace that she wanted to explore, because that was where the treaty was secreted. This however was off limits for tourists. Many of the floors were shuttered off and locked up. When she questioned Wang about this he could give her no help. "Sorry Mai Hoe, the White Palace is out of bound for us, don't ask me why because I just don't know. I don't even know who has the key."
Still Mary Joe went over to the White Palace whenever she could find the time, wandering through the corridors that were still not barred. There were rooms on both sides of the corridor, their monogrammed doors being firmly shut. Mary Joe tried the handle of one door but it was locked. She wasn't going to get her hands on the treaty until she could find a way of forcing entry into these rooms. Especially the rooms on the fifth floor, entrance to which was barred by a massive iron gate, that was bolted and padlocked.
Mary Joe took care to ensure that no one noticed these excursions to the off limit White Palace, but one day, when she was looking at the forbidding padlocks on the iron gate mentioned above, she heard stealthy footsteps behind her. It was Su-Li, who had apparently followed her quietly and now confronted her with a smug grin on her face." So, it is as I had thought. You have no interest in your work but plenty of interest in snooping around in places where you shouldn't be at all. May I ask you what you are doing in the White Palace, you know of course that it is forbidden to come here."
"Is it, I didn't know, honest I didn't, or why else I should have come. I was just curious, that's all."
"I wonder if that is all there is to it. I will bring this to the knowledge of comrade yao. Be ready to receive a call from him tonight," Su Li said with a smirk.
"Sure, I will see Comrade Yao, if he wants me, but for now will you buzz off and let me be. I will be back at work before the lunch break is over. I promise you."
But Su-Li would have none of it. "I am not going to leave you alone and let you go on snooping around."
"Oh all right, let us go then."
Actually it was the old padlock that interested Mary Joe. She had a feeling that she would be able to pick the, lock without too much trouble. This is one of the first things taught to prospective secret agents. In consequence Mary Joe knew all about the internal mechanisms of various kinds of locks. The hardest to pick were combination locks. The easiest were those that employed old .fashioned mechanical levers. The older locks, no matter how large and forbidding they looked were easy to pick, because as a rule they were all mechanical locks using levers. A simple hair-pin could open the smaller locks, if one knew how. The bigger locks needed something more firm, nail files, hair tweezers, any metallic object that was long yet supple could be used. Mary Joe realized that she hadn't much time, she would have to act quickly and if she was to get inside the White Palace and get her hands on the treaty she would have to pick this lock. So she made a mental note of the lock before leaving with Su-Li.
