Authors: Andy Oakes
“There is nothing that I can tell you. I am a doctor. A scientist. Not a beachcomber.”
Piao moved out of the shadows. Face to face with Wu. The old man smelling of mothballs, of an unreliable bladder. His mouth of pepper sauce and sticky words. Looking deeply into him … seeing the fear treading at depth in the doctor’s eyes. Almost tasting it. Recognising it. And understanding it, but not wanting to. Never wanting to …
“What is it Wu, have you seen this before? What do you know of this?”
A small strained laugh from the doctor; a joyless hilarity closing tight across his face that gave the impression of steel shutters slotting into place.
“Don’t give me this shit, Wu, don’t pull this on me, not me. You know something, don’t you? Don’t you?”
Again, the laugh. A sound only. Edged glass across edged glass. Nothing in his eyes except for a secret and the root of an anonymous fear. Piao made a mistake and placed a hand on the doctor’s bony shoulder, bridging the physical gap of courtesy … making all now possible. Unlocking Wu’s anger. The passions thrown to the mercy of the elements. The old man hissed. His voice low. For the Investigator’s ears only.
“I do not want this case. Not these bodies. I will not examine them here or anywhere. They will not be admitted to my laboratory …”
His eyes narrowed, his voice with them. Words, with the heat of the blowtorch across the Senior Investigator’s cheek.
“… pass it on Piao. Pass this case on as I am doing. You want nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing to do with it? There’s eight bodies out there in the fucking mud. Seven sons and one daughter whom life no longer possesses. You’re the city Senior Police Scientist for fuck sake. It is your job to poke around bodies … but not these bodies? What are you telling me here, Wu, that these are killings that you know about? Official killings, sanctioned murders … down to Security, the State, the Party?”
With a hiccup of shock, Piao realising that his hand was once more on the doctor’s shoulder; grip increasing as his anger blossomed. He left it in place.
“Give me the bad news that’s at the back of your eyes, old man, or there’s a tall building with a long drop waiting for you …”
“You would threaten me, Senior Investiga …”
Cutting in, a sharp knife through fatty pork.
“… tell me, or so help me …”
Cheek to cheek. Mouth to ear. Breath to breath.
“… or you had better start growing a pair of wings.”
Wu’s smile fading to a grimace, as if he had just stepped into a pile of shit.
“You are dangerous, Piao. You cause ripples where there should be none. Watch out Investigator, those who cannot swim can sometimes drown in ripples.”
“Very poetic, doctor, but what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Senior Investigator, that you should walk away. As you have done before. As we have all done before. Walk away. ‘He who hammers out his sword and constantly sharpens it will not keep it long.’”
Wu moved slowly out from the pier, zebra shadows falling across his face as he made his way up the embankment to the Bund. He passed Yaobang as he wearily reached the top of the stairs.
“That was fucking quick, doc. Alright to start loading them into the van?”
The old man raised a hand and waved him away as if dealing with a bothersome fly. A smile fixed across his face. Eyes averted. Looking inward and set upon some obscure horizon. Walking on. Not a single word passing his lips as night folded around him. A car coughing into life. Headlights panning fierce white. Shadows sprinting, shape shifting. A premature dawn. At speed, the old man driving away.
“Fuck, Boss, what’s up with the old bastard? I never thought I’d see the day when he was scared shitless by some stiffs. I thought he’d just about seen everything?”
“He has …”
Piao moved out from underneath the pier. Shadow, light, shadow, light … across his eyes. Retracing the old man’s footsteps.
“So what’s up, Boss?”
“What’s up, is that our esteemed doctor wants nothing to do with our muddy friends out there …”
The Senior Investigator spat into the wind, in the direction on the bodies.
“… won’t touch the job. He knows something and refuses to even examine them.”
“Can he fucking do that, Boss? Refuse to carry out postmortems?”
Deeper mud. Piao leading, the Big Man following. A faint reek of shit assailing their nostrils.
“Well, he has done it. What the hell do we do now? Eight fucking bodies and nowhere to take them. No idea who they are, how they died … and if someone of Wu’s reputation doesn’t want to know, then you can bet that no one else will want to know either.”
“Fuck it. But you don’t mean the Chief, do you?”
Mud over shoes and dragging at trouser bottoms. Black, iced with white arc-light.
“Look, country boy, I don’t want to be the one to disillusion you, let’s just leave that to the job, but Chief Liping is like all other Police Chiefs, a politician before he’s a policeman. He’s got more feet in more camps than a centipede running a marathon. If this stinks to him of the Party, like it stinks to us … or he can’t squeeze a back-hander out of it, he’ll dump it. And us along with it.”
“You’re a cynical bastard, aren’t you, Boss?” Deeper mud. Piao leading, the Big Man following. An oasis of blinding floodlight. Turning to face the squinting detective.
“It helps to keep me alive …”
Again, spitting in the direction of the bodies. The wind in his favour this time, the spittle landing within feet of them.
“… cynicism is good for the health. I wish that I could have given them that advice.”
Seconds of silence, punctuated only by the breath of traffic starting along Shanxilu.
“Dump the fucking case, eh Boss?”
Piao laughed. A throwaway laugh. The kind that seemed to have punctuated his life, his career, at depressingly regular intervals.
“Why not? What’s eight bodies to a city of thirteen million. Besides, there isn’t room in my icebox for eight stiffs.”
“Nor mine …”
Both laughing. Yaobang the loudest. A laughter as free as a junk that had slipped its mooring. The Senior Investigator envied a man who could let loose such a laugh.
“Make it look as if we’ve bothered … get some of the preliminaries fastened down and then get shot of the job. Pass it on to Security. Another one for the back of the filing cabinet …”
The Big Man nodding almost too enthusiastically.
“… get the photographer in to do his stuff and keep them sifting the mud for anything that’s been missed. Also, get on to the hospitals. Try the Number 1 first. The Huangdong on Suzhou Beilu. See if they can take the bodies for the time being. If not, try Jiaotong and also Fudan University. Also the Academy of Science in Xehui. Just find me anywhere that will take the bodies without burying us in fucking questions, got it?”
“Sure, Boss. Anywhere that will take the bodies without burying us in fucking questions.”
Making his way more confidently across the foreshore towards the car. On the Big Man’s lips a constant tremble of half whispered words, repeated, repeated again, like a parrot with a compulsive disorder.
“… take the bodies, no fucking questions … anywhere that will take them, no fucking questions …”
At the bottom of the stairs, stopping, looking back over his shoulder to the Senior Investigator. A figure stranded in a no-man’s-land of mud, debris.
“Don’t worry, Boss, you’re doing the right fucking thing walking away. You don’t want to be investigating this.”
The Senior Investigator made no reply. He had not heard the words that had been stolen by the breeze and dragged off into the night. He had not heard the words, this time, or the many times that similar words had been used in the past. A freighter lumbered by. Came. Went. Noise. Lights. And then silence and darkness, as if it had never passed him. As if it had never cleaved the calm of the river in front of him. Piao walked to the Huangpu’s very edge. The river lapping against the toes of his shoes.
“Shit.”
Kicking at the river. Turning. Making his way back toward the noon of arc-lights; hurrying his pace as he spotted two ununiformed figures, one standing, one kneeling, beside the bodies. The bodies … now fully unearthed from the cloying mud. Partially cleaned up. A string of clay limbs, torsos. Joined, steel link by steel link to each other in a paralysed dance across milky sheets of thick polythene.
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
“Hey, hey! This is a restricted area, can’t you see? There’s a police investigation going on here.”
The men half turned, ignoring the shout from the Bureau’s photographer who had also seen them; their slight frames casting the shadows of giants. The Big Man cut across Piao’s path, intercepting him, a hand braced against his Boss’s chest; moving into the area of foreshore where shadow became flesh and had a smell all of its own.
“Let me introduce you, Boss,” he said with a wink and out of the corner of his mouth, before turning, striking up a more formal pose and tone of voice.
“Senior Investigator Piao of the Public Security Bureau Homicide Squad, may I introduce Comrade Zhiyuan, Chairman of the Shiqu, the urban borough that administers this area. May I also introduce Comrade Shi of the Party’s Neighbourhood Committee.”
“We’ve met before,” Piao replied coldly.
The men smiled at him. Notebooks in hand. Fingers caked in river mud, which was also oozing over the tops of the sandals that they were wearing.
‘Perhaps wet feet would persuade the bastards to piss off quicker?’
Piao moved forward, aware that his hands had already formed into fists. That balls and chains would drag behind every word that he would want to use. The taller man, Zhiyuan, a
tong zhi
, a comrade of the old guard, as gaunt, as stretched as an ancient knotted scar, stood as Piao’s shadow cast across the first of the bodies.
“You are in my way, Senior Investigator. I was just studying these poor unfortunates.”
“The story of my wretched life, Mr Zhiyuan, getting in people’s way. But it can have advantages in my field of work …”
Pausing. Piao mentally cutting adrift the shackles that seemed to tie down every word whenever faced by a tong zhi of Zhiyuan’s breed. It was still unfamiliar territory … dangerous territory.
“… you don’t mind if I call you Mister, do you? Comrade is so very rarely used nowadays. I even read that most of our schoolchildren have never heard of Mao. Imagine. I suppose that times change, don’t they, Mister Zhiyuan?”
“Call me Comrade Zhiyuan …” the Shiqu Chairman corrected. A leer. Deep. Engraved. Teeth like broken headstones, etched in nicotine.
“… some of us are still proud of such a title. We fought for such a title. And you would do well to remember, Investigator, that getting in people’s way can sometimes be bad for your health. I hope that you look both ways before crossing the street?”
Eye contact riveted in place. Piao standing firm, his shadow still eclipsing the corpses. Not sure that he’d heard the comrade correctly. A sudden chill to the air. An edge, glass sharp. What was it that the Shiqu Chairman was saying? Zhiyuan lit a cheroot. The smoke hiding his mouth. A pungent scent of secrets fanning against every question that Piao wanted to ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Investigator, that you are in my way. You are purposely interrupting my investigation … the Party’s investigation into this matter.”
“Oh, the Party’s investigation, I see. I was under the misapprehension that I was the Investigator in this case. I must make a point of checking my wage slip next month. I wouldn’t want the Party to be paying me for work that I wasn’t carrying out!”
“You’ve got a ‘fat job’ and have been paid for doing nothing for years, Investigator Piao. This sort of thing is proof enough of that …”
The comrade turned toward the shadowed bodies.
“… it is up to us, the people, the Party and the Security Services to move upon your role. You police have become lazy and have lost your way. You have not brought the values of the Party into your work and into your dealings with the capitalist driven crime wave that is threatening our people and our glorious way of life.”
The Investigator caged the anger that fled to his temples.
“Nice speech, Chairman. Best to write it down and keep it safe for when your re-election comes up.”
Zhiyuan laughed. A slap of a laugh that left Piao nursing its fine sting.
“You are a little man in a big world, Investigator. Just a little man with gold braid on his shoulders. You buck the system, the Party. You abuse your privileged position, but not for much longer. The people, the committees, they have many eyes, many ears. We are the Party, root and branch. We feed it night and day with all that we see and hear. The Party is thorough, Investigator, and getting more thorough as the days go by. Soon, Investigator, you will feel the Party’s thoroughness.”
“Like they did?”
Piao spat past the comrade and onto the island of polythene where the bodies lay.
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
Words free now. Restraints severed. Wondering what price he might pay for using them?
“Are you suggesting that the Party is involved in this, Investigator Piao?” Zhiyuan seized, the rabid old mongrel.
“No, not really. It’s just that when you mentioned thoroughness, it got my mind ticking over. Homicide Squad Investigators are like that. A nasty little trait that I must have picked up from having this gold braid on my shoulder …”
He brushed a hand across an epaulette.
“… you see, it’s the word thoroughness that comes to mind when I look at these poor bastards. Thoroughness, and patience of course. Haven’t you noticed, Mr Chairman? After all, you are studying these ‘poor unfortunates’ as you call them. I wouldn’t want you to miss any of the more subtle details …”
Moving aside as the photographer got to work. Leaning back, filling the frame of the old black and silver Rolleiflex. An explosion of flash. Harsh. Cold. Mid-tones, subtle hues banished. From the mud, the plastic, the bodies seeming to rise and fall. Clay, patches of skin … alabaster. Wounds as black as the inside of a hound’s mouth.