Authors: Andy Oakes
“Shit. Shit …”
He folded the report neatly and stuffed it into an inside pocket. He would give it to Yaobang; it would make very acceptable toilet paper.
“Boss, what do you think, am I getting a little overweight?”
Piao looked up from his teacup, ignoring the ample stomach of Yaobang and the plastic belt that had run out of eyeholes.
“I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s apron.”
He let loose the words and returned to his tea, stirring it vigorously and feeling no guilt. It was that kind of a relationship. The Big Man unwrapping a heavy doughy dumpling from its brown paper shroud, the grease oozing to its surface in flat black oceans.
“You got Pan out of the city?”
Yaobang pushed the paper into his pocket, grease spots blossoming on his shirt front, his eyes focussed on the dumpling which he held at chest height.
“Uh-huhh …”
“To your uncle’s house?”
“Mmm …”
He was slowly, steadily, raising the dumpling to his lips, his eyes fondling the great white pearl.
“He’ll be safe there?”
“Yeah, yeah …”
“You’re sure?”
He could smell it, almost taste it, almost feel its bland texture across his tongue. He lowered the dumpling from his lips, still in one piece.
“Boss, I’m sure. It’s a small village. Any sign of strangers and the alarm goes up. If it’s not fat geese, it’s skinny old women or the chairman’s old Red Guard. They’re the best early warning system in the country. Between them they might not have a fucking tooth in their heads, but, believe me, they could scare the shit out of anyone with those gums.”
The mention of teeth, gums … he thought of his own and drew the dumpling toward his open mouth.
“And you gave your brother the photographs of the bodies?”
“Yes, I gave him all the prints.”
“And you reminded him of when and where we are meeting?”
“Boss!”
Yaobang drew the dumpling away from his lips one last time.
“You already know the answers to these bloody questions. Now can I get on with my meal. I haven’t eaten all day.”
Piao raised his eyes from the cup.
“You haven’t eaten for an hour and a half.”
“Okay, okay. A day, an hour and a half, does it matter? I was a big baby. I need regular feeding.”
He launched into the dumpling, lips glistening grease, a dreamy look washing across his wide face. When he spoke, each word was muffled and punctuated by a peppering of sodden dumpling shreds.
“As fucking good as a fucking orgasm.”
“How would you know?” Piao countered.
The Big Man coughed, spluttered and then swallowed hard. He reached into a trouser pocket retrieving a fistful of crumpled notes.
“The collection money for Wenbiao’s mother, three hundred Yuan so far … not bad, eh? The boys thought that we should get the old woman one of those new barbecue sets; every time she uses it she could think of him.”
Steel on steel … black snow. Piao closed his eyes for an instant and could still feel the knifepoint heat behind his eyelids.
“I know, I know, Boss. Bad joke, bad taste. It was Yantan. You know what animals these Kazakhs are.”
The Senior Investigator stirred his tea once more. It was already cold. He had never had any intention of drinking it; stirring it, watching it … that was enough.
“Yantan’s an imbecile. His mouth writes cheques that his brain can’t cash.”
Yaobang bit into the dumpling once more.
“Whatever you say, Boss. Whatever you say. Shit I nearly forgot! Boss you’re needed at the front desk, Yun is having his balls chewed off by some American woman. Last I saw he was screaming for an interpreter, so was she. I volunteered you.”
Piao pushed his cup across the tabletop.
“Thanks.”
“Had to Boss, Yun had that look on his face, like the time his patrol car was stolen on Yishanlu.”
Piao remembered the look: dog shit all over my new shoes, kind of a look. The Senior Investigator was already leaving his seat.
“What’s the story?”
“Spilt rice, Boss. The word is that she’s a big-wheel politician. They say Liping’s promised her the earth and she doesn’t look the type to be fed on just promises and plain fucking noodles. Not this one. Besides, it’s more than just a lost handbag …”
The Big Man rolled the last of the dumpling into a tight ball and tossed it into his mouth, his palms glistening with grease.
“… they say her son’s gone missing.”
Perfection, the number seven. Perfection, the form and white fragrant flesh of the lychee. And her.
And her.
He hated her the moment that he saw her. She reminded him of how sour his life was, sucked through the tear bitter pith of a lemon. She reminded him of the dirt that sat underneath his fingernails. Also, other things he knew as soon as he saw her … with a certainty. That her son was dead.
Remembering the cascade of crystal water meeting mud and washing it aside. The desperately white skin revealed. The fine feathering of corn dolly hair. The broken lips kissing at a secret agony. Yes, he knew the secret. Her son was dead. There was no turning back now; the rail track home had been ripped up.
“Are you Chinese, the interpreter?”
Piao moved closer. A perfume of expensive flowers laced by steel wire about her.
“Are you American, the client?”
Barbara’s eyes narrowed, reminding the Senior Investigator of ships running lights on the Suzhou Creek in winter.
“Your English is very good for a Chinese.”
“Your English is passable for an American.”
She snapped her head back, her hair flicking as a sharp breeze does when it rolls across a field of heavy corn. Every move she made speaking a thousand words in English and ten thousand signs in Chinese.
“Can you tell the detective that I am Barbara Hayes. Chief Liping has spoken very highly of him and has assured me of his full assistance in attempting to find my son. Can he tell me where his investigation is at present?”
Piao interpreted. Each word adding to the acned fire that blistered across Yun’s face.
The Senior Investigator knew this look also …
The bastard hasn’t even glanced at the report. He’ll stall … in an investigation that hasn’t even started yet. Shit. An investigation that will never start.
Yun’s reply was very well rehearsed. Words that were not his own; practised in the reflection of a mirror as he poked and preened the pucker that was his face. Who was the Lord of Yun’s heaven? Piao knew for sure that he would be a merchant who would not give, if he was not paid.
“I, as representative of the Public Security Bureau, welcome you as our esteemed guest. We are humbled to have an American government official of such magnitude visit us. However, it will be our pleasure to demonstrate to you our efficiency in dealing with your difficulty and bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion. The police force of the People’s Republic of China is known throughout the world for its unwavering thoroughness and ability. You will be in a position to witness this at close quarters and to take this experience back to your own country … our esteemed trading partner, the United States of America.”
It was only after Piao had fully interpreted Yun’s speech that the assembled detectives, with Barbara at their epicentre, had applauded. Applauded politely. Applauded gently. It sounding like the waters of the Huangpu lapping onto its foreshore. As it had done on that night.
*
It was only when Barbara had left the
fen-chu
and was on the street, that she realised that she still had nothing. Just words. Words, as sticky to the plate as caramelised sweet potato fritters and as filling as candy-floss.
‘Stupid … stupid.’
She walked, hands clasped together in a tight cage; knuckles white, shaking her head. Sichuanlu wrapped itself around her, assaulting every single sense. All of life strewn out to view. A garbage of cooking, arguing, selling, shouting. A vast and constantly changing mosaic of darting children, urinating dogs, tight knots of women, and streams of concerned-eyed men. … and through the middle of Sichuanlu the constant roar of a metal river of traffic in a full flood of diesel fumes and cracked windscreens. It was a madhouse. She raised a hand and a taxi veered towards her in a salvo of horn blasts. But with a jolt, she was being propelled away from the kerb, across the sidewalk and toward an alley. A hand, huge, hard, across her mouth … silencing her terror. Large arms around her, making her think of bear paws … almost lifting her under her armpits and thrusting her forward through the crowd. Her arms hanging limp. A wash of faces accelerating past her, none of them lifting up their eyes to hers. The sunlight was gone and suddenly it felt very cold. At the far end of the alley a car clung firmly to the shadow. A limpet of steel, bald tyres, peeling chrome. The door opened and she was levered in. An odour of cheap cigarettes, sweaty groins, filling her nostrils. Danger and bad news, both have a smell … this was it. She clawed for a door handle; her hand parried and then held. Then the words that she knew that she would have to come face to face with. The moment that she heard them, knowing them to be true.
“Your son’s dead.”
The cars engine gargled into life, the driver turning around to face her. Blue eyes set into a soft mask of diluted Chinese.
“I’m sorry,’ Piao said. But the words were lost to her as they pulled out of the alley and into Sichuanlu, the tide of hot metal taking them to its heart.
*
Chinese women are liberated, but unequal. China is a man’s world. Look to the fields. A wife is no longer a
neirer
, an ‘inside person’ … as represented in the ideogram for peace and harmony, a woman sitting under a roof. Women are outside, in the world. They plant beans. Harvest rice. Feed the animals. Cut the corn. They are outside, in the world. But they do not drive the tractors. On CAAC, women will be your air stewardesses; but almost all of the passengers will be men. In restaurants you will be waited on by women; but it will be men who will be eating the dishes of pork and mustard greens. In hospitals, it will be women who will bandage your hand; but men who will direct them how and where to apply that bandage.
No longer the broken arch and curled toes of the ‘Lilly Foot’ … “Obey heaven and follow fate.” But for women, who Mao had drawn to his side by putting words to the promise that they, “held up half the sky” … a disregard, a using.
As a baby girl you will be told that you are “a thousand ounces of gold” … but that a baby boy is “ten thousand ounces of gold.” As a teenage daughter who will eventually be given away in marriage, no longer of any economic benefit to her family, you will be told that you are as “spilled water.” As a bride you will go to your marital bed knowing that, “… if a woman marries a chicken, she should act as a chicken; if she marries a dog, she should act like a dog.”
For women in China, it is the existence of the invisible touch, the silenced word, the lowered eyes, the tiptoed presence. It is an equality that never reaches
gao-chao
… the ‘high tide’ mark.
*
He could see her reflection in the rear-view mirror. Her temple brushing the side window … hair flashing corn yellow. When Chinese women cried it was as if the world would crack, but this woman cried silently. As if each tear had a hefty price attached to it.
Piao knew of no way of handling death other than laying it wide open to view. You vomited it out, as you would overhung duck or sweetly putrid pork. For your own health, you vomited it out.
There was no detail that he left out. She deserved at least that, and so did the spilt life of her child. From beneath the driver’s seat he handed her the heavy brown envelope with the pin-sharp, full frame monochrome prints. Watching her in the rear-view mirror as she studied each ten by eight inch print through the melt of tears. The prints of torn, wasted, discarded flesh. She said only one word …
“Bobby.”
That was enough.
*
The lobby of the Jing Jiang Hotel was full of stripe shirted, check trousered Americans. Round, grizzly shouldered men slung with exotic black cameras, and craggy thin lipped women whose hair never moved, and whose mouths never stopped moving. Piao and Yaobang brushed past them as they followed Barbara to the elevator. Their smell was of syrup sweet candy and dust, of opulent pensions and prescription drugs. Piao crumpled the packet and pocketed it. It was his last Panda brand. Tomorrow would be a bad day, it would be back to the local shit.
“A Senior Investigator in the Homicide Squad, is that good? Are you good?”
They were the first words that she had spoken in thirty minutes. Eyes now dry, but washed out … almost white. Like cold and distant stars that had been plucked from Orion’s Belt. Piao exhaled.
“Good?”
Smoke curling from his nostrils.
“I suppose that it depends on what good means to you. Good in Washington might be shit in Beijing. Shit in Beijing might be acceptable here in Shanghai.”
“Are you good?”
Steel in her voice. Her eyes darkening now to the hue of granite The elevator door jerked open.
“I’m the best you’re going to get.”
She walked into the corridor, Piao’s eyes following her legs.
*
Room 201 was warm, but felt cold, as if sheltering under the wing of some vast and unexplained beast. Barbara sat on the bed, legs folded under her like a graceful gazelle. Head lowered. Hair forming a golden curtain to her eyes, her thoughts. Yaobang stood at the window picking his nose, picking his teeth, scratching his arse. At the desk, Piao read the report on Bobby and the dead son’s letters and cards to his mother. It took forty-five minutes. Two thousand seven hundred seconds without a cigarette. Occasionally he walked to the window, shoulder to shoulder with the Big Man … postcard in hand, lifting his eyes to where cityscape met sky. The sun high, a yellow drawing pin holding up a sheet of colourless sky. When the Senior Investigator closed the report, Barbara raised her head.
“What do you think?”
Piao winced. He hated having to give an instant appraisal. He was a homicide detective. Builders gave instant appraisals, so did tailors. But detectives … their words had to be measured in thousandths, and snipped from heavy gauge steel plate.