Authors: Andy Oakes
Something deep in his eyes, alerting Piao’s anxiety.
“It’s highly irregular, Comrade Officer. Do you have any reasons for treating this case in this special manner, is there anything that I should know?”
Liping, his smile as tight as a clenched fist. If words could melt, but Piao knew that they remained as epitaphs to folly and stupidity. He cursed the western genes that too often failed to control his tongue.
“I want a list of what men you are using. Who has been involved in the case to date? Who has seen the bodies …”
Liping noted everything. He noted the hesitation draw across the Senior Investigator’s eyes.
“… it is for their special protection. They might need it,” he added, pulling a pad from the desk top, a gold pen from his top pocket and handing it to Piao.
Red ink on white paper.
Wenbiao, Cheng, Xin, Shi, Zhiyuan, Wu, Pan Yaobang, Officer Yaobang.
The names flowed. Red ink … Piao had always feared it. It felt dangerous, out of control, as if taking on a life of its own.
“Good, good Investigator …”
Eyes flicking down the list, smiling, folding the paper meticulously. Liping slipping it into an inner pocket of his jacket.
“… if special arrangements are needed, I will see to it. Shi, Zhiyuan, the neighbourhood and Shiqu committee chairmen, they can look after themselves …”
Liping moved closer.
“… they are no friends of yours, Senior Investigator. I have their reports. They speak anything but highly of you. Treason, treachery … strong words. You have a skill of making important enemies …”
It wasn’t true. Important cadre had a skill of making an enemy of him. It was a subtle difference that had escaped Liping, but Piao kept his tongue still.
“… their reports will go no further. A deep filing cabinet awaits them. What is it that the Americans say? ‘The buck stops here …’”
The Comrade Officer laughed. Gold teeth at the back of his cavernous mouth winking dully at Piao.
“… one consideration deserves another, Senior Investigator. My cousin, the Minister, he has been refreshed by your sensible attitude. You took my advice well. I am pleased. Nothing would have been gained by a fuss. You, Kang Zhu … careers wrecked. And in the middle, your wife. A fish being pulled between two cormorants …”
The Senior Investigator bit the inside of his lip, the blood tasting of metal polish.
“… you were wise, Piao, wise. A cadre of Kang Zhu’s magnitude is best traversed. Face is saved. Besides, she was not an honourable wife. ‘A good horse does not accept two saddles …’”
Liping approached the garden, replacing his pen; the shadows moving, playing across his face. His features imprisoned.
“… remember. Daily reports, Senior Investigator. Don’t make me chase you, I want this kept tight. With dead ‘big noses’ involved, especially Americans, there might be outside interest in this case, external pressures. Maybe political questions. I want to be one step ahead. I want to be in the driving seat.”
Piao felt a chord resonate in his chest.
Big noses … wai-guo-ren
.
Westerners … yang-gui-zl … foreign devils.
Words that had a brick wall reality in his own life. Just look in any mirror, Senior Investigator, any fragment of reflection. See the face that is not as ours are. The eyes that can never truly belong.
Wai-guo-ren …
external country person
. Foreigner.
A telephone rang in a distant room. It was quickly answered. The a-yi entered moments later, whispered to Liping, who left for a hushed conversation. While he was absent, Piao picked flakes of rich soil from the sofa cushions and the carpet. Liping was not gone for long.
“Senior Investigator, there has been an incident. You may take the telephone call.”
Piao followed the a-yi to a room that was shady, its smell of secret gardens and guarded conversations. The telephone mouthpiece stank of Liping’s breath, with its undertone of the fine reek of shit.
“Boss, you’d better get the fuck back here. …”
Yaobang, breathless, hot, running on adrenaline.
“… I’m outside the warehouse. There’s a fire, a fucking great fire …”
A pause. In the background, sirens cutting it. And all the time, Piao with a strong sense of what was coming next.
“… I think that Wenbiao is still in there. And your Cousin Cheng …”
The Senior Investigator, eyes closed. Counting to three. The pulse in his ears racing.
“I’m leaving now, I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
“… thanks, Boss, we need you. It’s hell down here …”
“Yaobang, the bodies, what about the bodies?”
“… sorry, Boss, I can’t hear you, there’s more appliances just arriving …”
“THE BODIES, THE EIGHT?”
The Big Man shouting against a sob of sirens, frantic voices, a crack of timbers, bricks … licked by fire.
“… FUCK KNOWS, BOSS. FUCK KNOWS.”
The line died. The silence seemed to fill the world. Piao unclenched his fist; the mud from Liping’s sofa and carpet, was still in his palm staining it reddy-brown. He dropped it to the floor.
*
The Comrade Officer was staring out at the garden from the French windows, his shadow, long. A black smudge cast deeply into the room. He didn’t turn. His back remained to Piao as he spoke.
“Unfortunate. Fire has no preference for the living or the dead. Your eight bodies. Little will be left.”
Liping stepped from the room and into the garden. … it was ablaze from a low and white sun. It seeming to eat him whole. Piao left, his mind racing ahead to a burning warehouse.
*
Beneath Lake Taihu’s waters, suitable rocks are chosen and submerged. For decades they sit, the lake’s pearls, as the waters weather them to the point when they are highly prized for classical garden design.
Hidden and secret, they lay submerged.
*
The limousine started for the city. The engine a purr … the driver silent.
Big noses … Americans. Piao checked his copy of the report, knowing what it would say … knowing what it would not say. No mention of Americans had been made in his report to his Chief, Comrade Officer Liping.
As black as her eyes. As black as her words.
The smoke rose from the docks, striking across the river. A snake shedding its skin until its body was pale, paler. As he neared the warehouse the sky was changing. Black and yellow. Black and orange. Black and red.
The building that he had once recognised was almost gone; in its place the decayed stump of an old tooth. Yaobang’s face was at the window of the Red Flag before it had even come to a halt. A full moon of charcoal smudges and inflamed pink marshmallow flesh.
“They’re still fighting the fire on the roof. The bottom floors are gutted but too dangerous to enter. We’ve been told that we might have to move back. The whole fucking lot could come down at any minute. They’re looking at it now.”
Piao jumped out of the limousine, crossing the assault course of spaghetti hoses and swollen rivulets of black water. The Red Flag gliding out of the courtyard, out of the alley; a stream of fucks aimed at the Senior Investigator by the chauffeur who was already mentally struggling with a chamois leather to recoup the gleam of the paintwork from the fine ash that was drifting down from the sky like snow. Black snow.
“Looks like we’ve got company.”
Piao nodded toward the Shanghai Sedan slumped against the wall of the far alley. Three men … dead eyes and junk breath, littering the gloom of its interior.
“Security shits. Why do they always travel in threes, Boss?”
The Senior Investigator was removing his jacket as they hurried toward the cordon, ducking under it. Toward the warehouse, removing his tie; the heat that it was already giving off burning his nostrils, drying his throat. He swallowed hard, but there was nothing to swallow.
“Don’t you know, it’s a top secret Politburo directive? One to read, one to write … the third to keep an eye on the other two intellectuals.”
The Big Man didn’t understand the joke, but laughed anyway.
Piao soaked his jacket from a fountain of water that cascaded from a holed hose, tying it around his head and face … as three bursts of a siren sliced through the organised mayhem. Everywhere, frantic but organised activity. Ladders being hastily retracted. Tangles of hoses slithering across the puddled backs of the cobbles as they were wound back onto their drums. A stream of fire-fighters, life extinguished in their eyes, washed past them; heading back to their vehicles. Only Piao and Yaobang moving forward towards the warehouse. The Big Man’s eyes, white nervous orbs set into a face of smoky marble, watching the fire appliances back out of the courtyard.
“I think its the other direction we should be heading in, Boss.”
Piao lengthening his stride. Yaobang hurriedly dragging his jacket off and through a filthy puddle … also wrapping it around his head. The dirty water running down his forehead and cheeks, like the melt of wax of a half burnt candle.
“Mother. Mother. Mother,” on his lazy fat lips, pinching them into a tight scar, as the hand of a thickset fire-fighter, a Chief by the size of his epaulettes and the thick braid on his helmet, clasped hold of Piao’s shoulder.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going? It’s coming down. Can’t you see its coming down?”
There was a cataract of fear across the fire-fighter’s eyes. It surprised Piao, also unnerved him … but all the same, he said the words, not giving himself time to think about them.
“Homicide squad, this is official Party business. Out of my way or face the consequences.”
The Fire Chief lifted his hand, a knowing look whittled in the gutter lines of his face.
“It’s your fucking life …” he said. But Piao knew that already.
*
As black as her eyes. As black as her words.
The interior of the warehouse, a cinder … filled with the stench of charcoaled animal carcasses and the constant groan of timbers, bricks, whose own weight had now become too much to bare. Piao pulled his jacket tighter around his face. It was already dry and warm to the touch. The fierce oven door heat turning its attention to his exposed hands. He withdrew them into the flimsy protection of his shirt cuffs, as he and Yaobang bent their backs to meet the scorching heat. It was hard to know exactly where they were in the warehouse, the fire had sculpted its interior into its own image. A nightmare vista of twisted flowing steel, bulging fluid brickwork and blackened cracked wood beams, was all that met them. The concrete floor had also been transformed … now a wild ebony ocean of incinerated timber and debris from the three floors of the warehouse that had collapsed onto it. It was too hot, too urgent to pick a path. The Senior Investigator ploughed through its swollen tide, Yaobang close behind. The swearwords falling into the cracks on his lips. His shoes smoking, their plastic soles slowly melting.
Piao veered toward the area that only twenty-four hours ago had been an office. It was now just another fire pit of charred walls. Further along, the brickwork gave way to a steel frame and a heavy steel door hanging half open from it. The cold store. He trailed his fingers across its torched surface, pulling them back sharply. The metal was red-hot. The tips of his fingers screamed. Ice cubes, cold beer bottles, snow, frost … was all that he could think of. At that moment he would willingly have given a month’s salary for just one chilled bottle of Tsingtao. Yaobang pulled the torch out from beneath his shirt and handed it to Piao. The beam sliced the darkness in half. He was only four steps into the vast store when he slipped, almost falling, the beam wavering sickeningly. He steadied himself and pointed the torch at the floor. A thick lake of animal fat reflected dully back. He raised the torch slowly, illuminating the rows upon rows of animal carcasses hanging on their meat hooks … each one burnt to a crisp charcoal. A pungent clagging smoke pulling from each of them. Long waxy stalactites of fat hanging from them. Some so long that they bridged the gap to the floor, appearing to hold up the mighty bulk of the carcasses like delicate flamingo legs.
And this was where they had stored the eight bodies that they had snatched from the mud of the Huangpu. A cold store turned incinerator …
fire has no preference for the living or the dead. Your eight bodies, little will be left.
Liping’s words fuelling a nausea, deep and acid bitter, in the depths of his gut.
The Senior Investigator felt his skin tightening, his throat closing up, his eyes drying. He tied the jacket more firmly around his head, peering out from the most narrow of slits. He was drowning in the heat. It was everywhere. A part of everything … inescapable. He was dizzy, gasping for breaths that lacerated his throat. And behind him, Yaobang tripping, caught in the teeth of a coughing fit.
They stumbled through the forest of barbecued flesh, barely keeping their feet. The great carcasses swinging lazily as they careered into them. And all the time, the dread of what the beam of the torch would surely illuminate as they made the next turn … or the turn after that.
*
As black as her eyes. As black as her words.
It was at the far end of the store that they found them. Two more carcasses of charcoaled flesh strung up, run through with meat hooks. Now hardly recognisable as humans … yet hideously, clearly the bodies of the young puppy of a policeman, Wenbiao. And Piao’s own cousin, Cheng. Hearing Yaobang retch behind him and the same words, time after time, dribbling from his cracked lips …
“Mother. Mother. Mother.”
And at the same time, wondering how you tell your cousin’s children that their father is no more. Children … with wet kisses, warm breaths and wild strawberry lips.
Somehow Piao managed to haul the Big Man from his knees to his feet, easing back the cowl fashioned from his jacket. Yaobang’s face, flushed, swollen by heat. A red balloon, over inflated and ready to burst. Piao’s voice, a deep tortured croak that was alien to his own ears.
“You’re going to have to help me. I can’t leave them like this.”
The heat drying the Senior Investigator’s tears almost before they formed.