The Secret Cardinal (2 page)

The guard punctuated his command by jabbing the end of an electrified baton into Yin's abdomen. Yin exhaled sharply at the explosion of pain and toppled backward, careful not to strike his head against the floor.

“I am awake, my son,” Yin panted softly, regaining his breath.

“I'd rather be the offspring of a pig farmer and his ugliest sow than any son of yours,” the guard spat back. “Get up!”

Yin rubbed his stomach and squinted at the bright light pouring in from the corridor. His tormentor was a dark silhouette, and beyond the doorway stood several more guards.

The Chinese court had sentenced Yin to death for his many crimes against the state—an order not yet carried out for political reasons. The authorities recognized Yin as a man of great charisma and deep personal faith—a combination that could spread his foreign religion like a plague were he placed with the prison's general population. So unlike most prisoners in the
laogai
—the gulags of China—Yin was not permitted the opportunity to reform himself through the state's generous program of hard labor and reeducation. Instead, he was subjected to lengthy periods of isolation, punctuated by beatings and interrogations.

Yin knew it had been weeks, possibly months, since his last interrogation. The same questions were asked every time, and always he provided the same answers. The brutal sessions came far less frequently now than in the early years of his incarceration, more a task on a bureaucratic checklist than any genuine attempt at reform. After years of systematic effort, the Chinese government seemed to accept the fact that the underground bishop of Shanghai would die before renouncing the pope or the Church of Rome.

Yin rose to his feet and awaited the next command.

“Out!” the guard barked.

Yin followed as the guard backed through the door. Compared with the dimness of his cell, the light in the corridor burned his eyes as brightly as the noonday sun. The four guards stared at their charge with disgust.

“Restraints,” the senior guard commanded.

Yin assumed a familiar position with his feet spread shoulder-width apart and his arms extended from his sides. Two guards cinched a wide leather belt tightly around his thin waist. Four chains hung from the belt, each terminating in a steel manacle. Yin showed no outward sign of discomfort as the manacles dug into his wrists and ankles, knowing it would only invite a beating. The arteries in his wrists throbbed, and his hands began to tingle with numbness.

The lead guard inspected the restraints, though he knew they were
unnecessary. Yin had never reacted violently toward a guard in all his years of imprisonment. The only danger the bishop posed was to himself, and that because of his stubbornness. Satisfied that Yin was securely bound, the guard motioned the escort to proceed.

Yin kept his head bowed and his eyes on the floor as he moved down the corridor. The simplest gesture, a nod or glance at anyone, was forbidden and would result in a severe beating, as the badly healed break in his left arm bore testament. Yin's eyes gradually grew accustomed to the light as he shuffled along, taking two short steps for each stride by the guards.

Just up ahead
, Yin thought, counting his steps.

The guards stopped. A buzzer sounded the release of the electronic locks securing the door to the solitary-confinement wing. The heavy steel door slid open, and the small procession continued.

Then he saw it—a glint, a tiny sliver of light on the floor. Yin turned his head a few degrees to the right and gazed upward. A small window, barred and paned with grimy wired glass, but a window nonetheless to the world outside. It was midday, and the sky was clear and blue.

A thin plastic cane lashed across Yin's back, causing him to drop to his knees. The return stroke caught his right shoulder, and Yin toppled to the floor.

“Enough!” the lead guard commanded. “Get him back on his feet.”

The guard who had struck him grabbed Yin's arm and pulled him up so forcefully that the bony shoulder popped. Despite the blinding pain, Yin found his feet, and when the guard released his arm, the traumatized joint slipped back into place.

The march continued through the concrete corridors of the prison, the light rustle of Yin's sandals lost in the guards' heavy boot steps. Yin knew the route by heart, but only one way—rarely did he emerge from an interrogation conscious.

Yin felt a conflicting mixture of relief and dread when the guards walked him past the doorway that led to the corridor of interrogation rooms. Today's journey from his cell was to be different.

Lord
, Yin prayed silently,
whatever is your will, I remain your servant.

The guards escorted Yin through parts of the prison he could not recall. Then a doorway opened, and Yin felt a breeze kiss his face. It was not the prison's fetid air thick with rotting filth and human sweat, processed and recirculated by dilapidated machinery. This breeze was a whisper from the heavens. Yin detected the faint aroma of prairie in summer and the sweetness in the air that follows a cleansing rain.

So they have finally grown weary of me,
Yin thought.

The only reason Yin could fathom for the guards to take him outside was to put a bullet in the back of his head, so he savored each breath of fresh air as if it were his last.

“Stop!” the lead guard barked.

Yin kept his head bowed and focused on his silent prayers. The sound of footsteps crunching on gravel, the measured strides of a long-legged man, intruded on his meditations.

“The prisoner, as ordered,” the lead guard announced respectfully.

Yin heard a rustle of paper and glimpsed a file folder in the hands of a tall man who wore not a uniform but the dark gray suit and polished black leather shoes of a businessman.

“Show me his face,” the man ordered.

One of the guards grabbed a handful of Yin's hair and jerked his head back. Yin's eyes traveled up the elegantly tailored suit past a pair of broad shoulders. The man's face was long and hard, the skin taut over bone and muscle. His jet-black mane swept back from his face, held in place like a glossy veneer so slick that the morning breeze had not dislodged a single hair. The man's mouth was a thin line that betrayed no emotion. Yin guessed his age somewhere between late thirties and mid-forties—only a child when Yin arrived at Chifeng Prison.

When Yin's eyes met those of Liu Shing-Li, the old priest shuddered. Liu was appraising the prisoner with eyes so unnaturally black that it was impossible to discern between iris and pupil. Liu's eyes seemed to absorb everything into their unfathomable darkness while betraying nothing. Yin had always viewed hell not as a sea of unquenchable fire but as a state of being totally removed from God. This was what he saw in Liu's eyes.

“Clean him up,” Liu ordered. “And put him in a new uniform. The rags he's wearing should be burned.”

The lead guard nodded and gave the orders to his men. They marched Yin a short distance to the motor pool, where they stripped him of his threadbare garments and shackled him to a steel post with his arms above his head. Two jets of icy water pounded the bishop's frail body, the guards laughing as they directed the high-pressure streams at his face and genitals. Yin choked, coughing up blood and water, his lungs desperate for air.

With the same brushes used to clean the prison's trucks, the guards attacked Yin's flesh until it was raw. Yin shivered uncontrollably, his body confused by the combination of numbness and the burning of industrial cleansers.

“Hold him still,” a guard barked as he pulled out a knife.

A pair of hands roughly clasped Yin's head, and the sharp blade scraped and tore at his facial hair. Years of growth fell away, and blood-tinged water streaked the bishop's emaciated body. While hacking at Yin's mustache, the guard sliced a narrow strip of skin from Yin's nose, and blood flowed freely from the wound.

After shearing fistfuls of Yin's ragged mane, the guards turned on the hoses once more to finish the job. They then brusquely dried him off and gave him a new prison uniform, its cloth stiff and rough against his skin.

The guards reattached Yin's restraints and again presented him to Liu. At Liu's nod, Yin was handed over to the soldiers accompanying Liu and loaded into the back of an armored military transport. Two benches ran down the sides of the windowless compartment. Yin sat where he was told.

As the soldiers secured Yin's restraints to the steel loop bolted to the floor, Liu signed the paperwork authorizing transfer of the prisoner into his custody and dismissed the prison guards. Liu then donned a pair of sunglasses, slipped into the passenger seat of a dark gray Audi sedan, and signaled his driver to get moving. It would be a long drive to Beijing.

ACCOMPANIED BY FOUR SOLDIERS, Yin moved across the countryside inside the steel box on wheels. The men did not converse with him, or even among themselves, and they acknowledged his existence only once with a meager meal and a scheduled relief stop. Yin knew this was partly due to his status as a prisoner and an enemy of the state, labels that made him less than human in their eyes. Too, the soldiers' masters feared his faith like a contagion—the bishop of Shanghai was hazardous cargo. Yin felt no animosity toward the soldiers but rather sympathy for their predicament. To protect them from risk of punishment, Yin kept his silence and prayed for them.

The two vehicles reached the outskirts of central Beijing shortly after sunset. In a modern metropolis teeming with nearly thirteen million people, the rundown district seemed oddly abandoned. Soldiers manning one of the roadblocks that cordoned off the area scanned Liu's papers and waved him past.

The long journey from Chifeng ended a few blocks farther in an alley behind a modest theater. The brick building dated to the waning days of the imperial era, and the intervening years had not been kind. Armed men clad in riot gear stood guard at the theater doors, which appeared both solid and new. An officer approached the Audi and opened the passenger door.

“Is everything ready?” Liu asked as he stepped from the car, ignoring the soldier's salute.

“Per your orders, sir.”

Liu nodded approval. “Have the prisoner brought inside.”

“Bring the prisoner out,” the officer ordered.

The small pass-through window between the transport's cab and the rear compartment slid open, and the soldiers guarding Yin looked up expectantly. The bishop took no notice and continued his silent prayers.

“Out!” the driver barked through the opening.

The soldiers unlocked the section of chain connected to the floor bolt and lifted Yin to his feet. Two of them stepped out of the truck and assisted in lowering the manacled bishop to the ground. Yin glanced heavenward and saw only a handful of stars through the hazy glow of Beijing's night sky.

After the remaining soldiers exited the transport, they escorted Yin into the backstage area of the theater. The air inside the building was stuffy and spiked with the stink of mold. Yin detected something else in the air—the pungent scent of sweat and fear.

Liu approached Yin. He towered over the bishop.

“Look at me,” Liu demanded.

Yin raised his head to look into Liu's empty eyes.

“Is it true that this man you worship as a god likened himself to a shepherd and his followers to sheep who must be led?”

“Yes.”

“So in this, he was much like Mao Zedong, no?”

“Jesus Christ was a good shepherd, the kind who would lay down his life for his flock. The same cannot be said of Mao.”

“Perhaps, but China has evolved during your time of confinement. Tonight, you have the opportunity to walk out of this building a free man and bishop of Shanghai.”

“And what price must I pay for the freedom you offer?” Yin asked flatly.

“Spoken like a Jesuit. The price is your cooperation. The government has no quarrel with your religion, only the foreign leadership of your church. Publicly renounce your allegiance to the Vatican and proclaim yourself a Chinese Catholic, and you will be free.”

“I am a Roman Catholic bishop. If I denounce the Holy Father, I would no longer be a bishop or a Catholic. You can cut off my head, but you can never take away my duties.”

“But what is a bishop without a flock?”

“I am the good shepherd
,
” Yin quoted, “I know my sheep and my sheep know me.”

“I see. Are you not curious as to why I have brought you here?”

“You have already revealed your purpose. I can only assume that you have assembled an audience for my public declarations.”

“Indeed I have,” Liu said with trace of a smile. “Over five hundred of your sheep are in this theater, awaiting their shepherd. Their lives are in your hands.”

Yin turned his palms up. “My hands are empty. All life comes from God.”

Liu had to acknowledge a grudging respect for the strength of Yin's resolve, but recalled the credo that understanding an adversary is one key to defeating him. He turned from Yin and motioned to the officer in charge. A moment later, a small group of soldiers brought a family of five backstage.

The patriarch of the family recognized Yin and immediately dropped to his knees.

“Your Grace,” the man said reverently before kissing Yin's hand.

A soldier pistol-whipped the man before he could receive Yin's blessing, sending him sprawling to the floor. The granddaughter, a girl no older than ten, pulled away from her parents' arms and rushed to her grandfather's aid. She, too, was brutally struck.

“Enough,” Liu commanded.

The soldier who had beaten the pair stepped back and holstered his pistol. The patriarch cradled his weeping granddaughter as oozing blood matted the girl's long black hair.