Toll for the Brave

‘Your confession,’ the young officer cut in. ‘A factual account of your time in Vietnam as an English mercenary lured by the Americans.’

I told him what to do with the paper in an English phrase so vulgar that he obviously didn’t understand. But Madame Ny did.

She smiled faintly. ‘A physical impossibility, I fear, Mr Jackson. You will sign in the end, I assure you, but we have plenty of time. All the time in the world.’

She left again and the young officer told me to follow him. We crossed the compound through the rain and entered the monastery itself, a place of endless passages and worn stone steps although, surprisingly, lit by electricity.

The passage we finally turned into was obviously at the highest level, so long it faded into darkness; and, quite plainly, I heard a guitar.

As we advanced, the sound became even plainer and then someone started to sing a slow blues in a deep, mellow voice that reached out to touch everything around.

‘Now gather round me people, Let me tell you the true facts. That tough luck has struck me And the rats is sleeping in my hat.’

The door had two guards outside and was of heavy black oak. The young officer produced a key about twelve inches long to unlock it and it took both hands to turn.

The room was surprisingly large and lit by a single electric bulb. There was a rush mat on the stone floor and two wooden cots. St Claire sat on one of them a guitar across his knees.

He stopped playing. ‘Welcome to Liberty Hall, Eton. It isn’t much, but it’s the London Hilton compared to most of the accommodation around here.’

I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see anyone in my life.

He produced a pack of American cigarettes. ‘You use these things?’

‘Officer’s stock?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘They’re being nice to me at the moment. They might give me a pack a day for a whole month, or simply cut off the supply from tomorrow morning.’

‘Pavlovian conditioning?’

‘That’s it exactly. They have one set idea and you better get used to it. To drive you to the edge of insanity, to tear you apart, then they’ll put you together again in their image. Even their psychology is Marxian. They believe each of us has his thesis, his positive side and his antithesis, the dark side of his being. If they can find out what that is, they encourage its growth until it becomes the strongest part of your nature. Once that happens, you begin to doubt every moral or decent worthwhile thing you’ve been taught.’

‘They don’t seem to be getting very far with you.’

‘You could say I’m inclined to be set in my ways.’ He smiled. ‘But they’re still trying and my instructor is the best. Chen-Kuen himself. That’s just another name for interrogator, by the way.’

‘I’ve already met mine,’ I said and told him about Madame Ny and what had happened at the medical centre.

He listened intently and shook his head when I was finished. ‘I’ve never come across her myself, but then you won’t have contacts with many people at all. I haven’t met another prisoner face-to-face since I’ve been here. Even the sessions in the Indoctrination Centre, where they feed you Chinese and Marxism by the hour, are all strictly private. You sit in an enclosed booth with headphones and a tape recorder.’

I made the obvious point. ‘If what you’re saying is true, why have they put me in with you?’

‘Search me.’ He shrugged. ‘First I knew was when Chen-Kuen called me in, told me every last damn thing about you there was to know and said you’d be joining me.’

‘But there must be a purpose?’

‘You can bet your sweet life there is. Could be he just wants to observe our reactions. Two rats in a cage. That’s all we are to him.’

I kicked a chair out of the way, walked to one of the tiny windows and stared out into the rain.

St Claire said softly, ‘You’re too up-tight, son. You’ll need to cool it if you’re going to survive round here. The state you’re in now, you’d crack at the first turn of the screw.’

‘But not you,’ I said. ‘Not Black Max.’

He was off the bed and I was nailed to the wall. The face was devoid of all expression, carved from stone, the face of a man who would kill without the slightest qualm, had done so more times than he could probably remember.

He said very slowly in a voice like a cut-throat razor, ‘They have a room down below here they call the Box. I could tell you what it’s like, but you wouldn’t begin to understand. They locked the door on me for three weeks and I walked out. Three weeks of being back in the womb and I walked out.’

He released me and spun around like a kid, arms outstretched, smiling like the sun breaking through after rain.

‘Jesus, boy, but you should have seen their faces.’

‘How?’ I said. ‘How did you do it?’

He tossed me another cigarette. ‘You’ve got to be like the Rock of Gibraltar. So sure of yourself that nothing can touch you.’

‘And how do you get like that?’

He lay back, head pillowed on one arm. ‘I did a little judo at Harvard when I was a student. After the war, when I was posted to Japan with the occupation army, I took it further, mainly for something to do. First I discovered karate, then a lethal little item called aikido. I’m black belt in both.’

It was said casually, a statement of fact, no particular pride in the voice at all.

‘And then a funny thing happened,’ he continued. ‘I was taken to meet an old Zen priest, eighty or ninety years old and all of seven stone. The guy who took me was a judo black belt. In the demonstration that followed, the old man remained seated and he attacked him from the rear.’

‘What happened?’

‘The old man threw him time and time again. He told me afterwards that his power came from the seat of reflex control, what they call the tanden or second brain. Usually developed by long periods of meditation and special breathing exercises. It’s all just a Japanese development of the ancient Chinese art of Shaolin Temple Boxing and even that was imported from India with Zen Buddhism.’

He was beginning to lose me. ‘Just how far did you go with all this stuff yourself?’

‘Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism. I’ve boned up on them all. Studied Chinese Boxing in every minute of my spare time for nearly four years at a Zen monastery about forty miles out of Tokyo in the mountains. I thought I knew it all when I started and found I knew nothing.’

‘And what’s it all come down to?’

‘Ever read the Daw-Der-Jung by Lao Tzu, the Old Master?’ He shrugged. ‘No, I guess you wouldn’t. He says, amongst other things, that when one wishes to expand one must first contract. When one wishes to rise, one must first fall. When one wishes to take, one must first give. Meekness can overcome hardness and weakness can overcome strength.’

‘And what in the hell is all that supposed to add up to?’

‘You’ve got to be able to relax completely, just like a cat. That way you develop ch’i. It’s a kind of intrinsic energy. When it’s accumulated in the tan t’ien, a point just below the navel, it has an elemental force greater than any physical strength can hope to be. There are various breathing exercises which can help you along the way. A kind of self-hypnotism.’

He proceeded to explain one in detail and the whole thing seemed so ridiculous that for the first time it occurred to me that his imprisonment might have affected him for the worst.

I suppose it must have shown on my face for he laughed out loud. ‘You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Well, not yet, boy. Not by a mile and a half. You listen to me and maybe you stand a ten percent chance of getting through this place in one piece. And now I’d get some sleep if I were you while you’ve got the chance.’

He dismissed me by picking up a book, a paperback edition of The Thoughts of MaoTse-tung. By then, I was past caring about anything. Even the short walk to my bed was an effort.

But the straw mattress seemed softer than anything I had ever known, the sensation of easing aching limbs almost masochistic in the pleasure it gave. I closed my eyes, poised on the brink of sleep and started to slither into darkness, all tension draining out of me. A bell started to jangle somewhere inside my head, a hideous frightening clamour that touched the raw nerve endings like a series of electric shocks.

I was aware of St Claire’s warning cry and the door burst open and the young officer who had delivered me re-appeared, a dozen soldiers at his back and three of them with bayonets fixed to their AKs. They pinned St Claire to the wall, roaring like a caged tiger. The others were armed only with truncheons.