Chapter 681 - Five People in the Quarantine Camp

"Once you finish, pack up your things. We're going to Lingao."

"Really, Master?" Dermott said excitedly. "I hear the Australians in Lingao have built many churches and monasteries."

"No, not many—only three or four."

"Will they let me paint murals for the church?"

"Of course. I think they won't refuse." Jin Lige thought: He's really a simple person! Only thinking about painting.

Although Geranzani and Father Comanach had both assured this small mission that the Australians warmly welcomed their evangelization and treated clergy quite cordially—certain to receive them hospitably—Jin Lige's confidence began to waver the moment they entered Australian territory.

The Jesuit ship had barely entered the Qiongzhou Strait when it was intercepted by Australian patrol boats for inspection. Father Trigault noticed that even though the war had ended, the entire strait still simmered with tense military atmosphere. Apparently the Ming government's punitive expedition hadn't been fully concluded.

The Father explained his identity and purpose to the Australian soldiers in Cantonese, presented Jesuit credentials and Superior Geranzani's personal letter—but the Australian officer appeared uninterested in any of it. His attitude was cold. Father Trigault silently recited a prayer. It seemed Father Rodrigues's claims about the Lord's glory already illuminating Lingao were exaggerated. Spreading the Lord's Gospel here would be no easier than anywhere else in China.

"You will proceed with the patrol boat," the officer ordered the ship's sailors. Several soldiers took control of the helm and the ship's key positions.

The ship sailed for Lingao under the patrol boats' escort. The strait remained empty; no other vessels were in sight. Only Australian ships plied these waters, flying blue-and-white flags, asserting dominion with an air of armed authority.

Their vessel was "escorted" by two single-masted patrol boats to Bapu Harbor. What happened next was bewildering—one marvel after another.

Father Trigault and his companions had scarcely begun to recover from their astonishment at the giant iron ships, the trains on the docks, and the steam cranes when a squad of Marine soldiers carrying bayoneted rifles surrounded them. No matter how loudly he proclaimed himself a Jesuit envoy come to serve the local church, the soldiers paid no heed. They pushed and pulled the group into a massive building. There the Father was forcibly separated from his companions and subjected to a lengthy, mind-numbing interrogation.

The interrogator spoke excellent Italian—though with somewhat strange pronunciation and vocabulary. When he learned Father Trigault came from Flanders, he immediately switched to German, apologizing that he only knew High German.

"You needn't accommodate my language. I can speak Italian, and High German is no problem." Father Trigault thought: So the claims about Australians being "learned" and "multi-talented" are indeed true.

Yet the interrogator's courteous manner stood in stark contrast to his questioning. Father Trigault was asked many questions over and over, some repeated multiple times. Even certain private matters he had hoped to avoid were drawn out this way.

By now Father Trigault had lost count of how many times he had crossed himself. His lips silently recited scripture. Though he steadied himself with all the patience a Christian should possess, this treatment exceeded anything he had imagined.

Is this suspicion or a form of torture? he asked himself. He couldn't help worrying about his companions.

The exhausting questioning finally concluded as suddenly as it had begun. Two men wearing belted tunics with strange short pistols at their waists led him out of the room, through a labyrinth of corridors and stairs.

The corridors were gloomy. Light came from glass skylights above. Every door was shut tight, with red numbers written by each entrance.

Though every door was closed, he could still hear something clicking rhythmically, accompanied by muffled dictation. Sharp bells rang incessantly—he didn't know what they were. Not the bells that church priests rang, but a tense, sharp, urgent sound. Passing through one corridor with large windows, he glanced outside and saw the distant bay and the ship that had brought him to Lingao. Coolies were unloading cargo.

Somehow, Father Trigault felt an ominous premonition. He was terrified, thinking he might be taken to some secret chamber for execution.

If so, he hadn't even made Confession! Would they allow a brother to hear his confession? As he began silently reciting the Confiteor, he found he had walked out a rear door into a sunlit square. His companions were there too, every one wearing bewildered expressions. The two pistol-bearing men had vanished like ghosts. Another squad of armed soldiers herded them into an open space enclosed by wire fencing, in whose center rows of low buildings rose. As Father Trigault was pushed into one of these buildings, he barely had time to see the sign above the doorframe reading "Quarantine Camp" in Chinese characters.

A whistled tune echoed through the quarantine camp room. Father Trigault disliked the tune intensely. Though he had never heard of Verdi, this strange music still disturbed him.

The rectangular room was large—judging by the double bunks, it could sleep twelve. The room was clean and orderly, but at the moment only the mission's five members occupied it. Brother Cecilio, whom the Father doted on as a pious, deferential young man, knelt on a straw mat clutching his rosary beads, lips trembling and whitening. John Dermott stood transfixed at the window, gazing at the enormous iron framework across the bay.

"This is truly incredible," he exclaimed. "Such a slender structure, no visible support! Built so high! It shouldn't be able to exist!"

Then there was the black man Weiss Rando had brought, sitting on rotten straw by the door. Even his habitually simple-minded face showed confusion after experiencing the Australians' incredible quarantine procedures. Since arriving in this room, he had searched fruitlessly for quite a while—the Father knew he must be looking for food.

Finally, the source of the whistling: Weiss Rando, the attendant the Jesuits had assigned him. He always tried to affect an aristocratic air but was obviously a common-born, thorough soldier of fortune. The fellow had spread his blanket on a straw mat and half-reclined against the wall in a corner, comfortably whistling tunes, seemingly unconcerned about their situation.

This is a dangerous character, a desperado! Father Trigault told himself. And what frightened him even more: Rando was a highly suspicious heresy suspect. Not just because of the strange behavior and remarks he occasionally displayed in Macao, but when they had been forced to strip and shower earlier, he had glimpsed Weiss's bare back. The bizarre tattoo there had nearly made the Father think he had seen the devil incarnate. He began silently blaming Geranzani for assigning him this attendant—a pagan. He had already passed judgment on Weiss Rando in his heart: a pagan feigning piety, or perhaps worse, a cultist.

This really is insufferably boring, Weiss thought, changing tunes as he whistled. They had been confined in this room for two days already. The four white men had exchanged fewer than five sentences with each other. The Father's chanting voice from across the room had subsided again. If Verdi's Triumphal March had made him restless, The Merry Widow was practically an indecent ditty.

Weiss watched with schadenfreude as the Father struggled to control himself, not letting his irritation show. He's quite frightened, Weiss Rando mused. Everything the Australians—or rather, the Chinese of Lingao—had done had terrified the two missionaries half to death. The red-headed Irishman was coping better by comparison. As for that somewhat neurotic young brother, the mandatory physical examination had scared his soul out of him; he had nearly fainted. Father Trigault had been crossing himself incessantly ever since seeing the so-called "Holy Ship" at Lingao Point—and given his level of understanding, thinking it a product of the devil was unsurprising.

The Father hadn't noticed the smile his attendant had displayed when he saw that tall steamship. Weiss rather liked the feeling of familiarity and intimacy the "Holy Ship" gave him. In another world, in the past few years, he and his companions had several times boarded an equally battered-looking Polish freighter to ship tons of weapons and ammunition to Sierra Leone and the Congo.

A commotion rose outside the window. Someone was shouting loudly. Rando didn't understand Chinese, but he recognized the rhythmic cadence of drill commands. Through the window, beyond the wire fence, on a large open field, he could see a group wearing identical gray homespun clothes—to the brothers, these could hardly be called clothes, just sacks worn over their bodies. Their heads were shaved clean; they wore straw sandals and were drilling in formation under an Australian soldier's baton.

At first he thought these were new recruits, but seeing them old and young, men and women, Rando abandoned that idea. Clearly this was simply daily military drill, its purpose nothing more than forcing these poor wretches to obey discipline and develop conditioned reflexes of absolute obedience to orders.

This is really a textbook example of a totalitarian state, he judged silently, rolling over on the straw mat, trying to find a more comfortable position. Something hard in his pocket dug into his waist—a cigarette case. Weiss badly wanted to pull out an Australian cigarette and enjoy a good smoke. He swallowed the impulse along with his saliva.