Authors: Andy Oakes
Piao nodded, stepped out into the corridor and closed the door gently. It was only when he was halfway to Yu Gardens that he knew that it could never all be said.
Every day should be so sharp. Every piece of bone china so white. Every death so dark.
It had been five years since Piao had last visited Yu Gardens; suddenly finding himself dipping into the memories as if they were a box of chocolates. The soft centres … her small hand, cold, fitting neatly into his. Her lips as she drank Xunhuacha … rose petals set in alabaster, and on the flight of her breath, jasmine. The hard centres … the ones that you never choose. The argument. The spilt tea, its stain spreading across the desert of the tablecloth. The words, the name-calling … indelible and still indigestible, even after all this time.
*
Yu Gardens was unnaturally quiet. Too early for locals. Too out of season for tourists whose buses usually crammed Henanlu. The Huxingting Teahouse was close to the Bridge of Nine Turnings, he remembered. The Heart of the Lake Pavilion, set in waters filled with emerald algae and lotus leaves. The Longjing Tea would be expensive here. Cheaper at the Wuxingling … only fifteen fen a pot with as many refills of hot water as you wanted. At the Huxingting you also paid for the view, the bone china cups and the white linen. When you’re in love you don’t mind, it is a part of the foreplay. When you’re not in love, when you’re just chasing the job … such things have no importance. The view, the bone china, the white linen … they aren’t worth the extra fen because they don’t matter a fuck.
Rentang sat in the far corner of the Huxingting, drinking tea and eating quail’s eggs. His face dominated by the large black rimmed spectacles, as if each eye were centre stage on two individual television sets. As he drank, one lens frosted grey with steam. He didn’t look up.
“Who’s the woman?”
“You do not need to know.”
Piao pulled out a chair for Barbara and then seated himself.Rentang peeled a quail’s egg, the fine shell forming another layer of skin to his fingertips. Still not looking up.
“I don’t need to know! I wish I knew nothing about this case of yours. This fucking mess …”
He drank his tea almost to the bottom of his cup; charcoal shredded leaf slicking the snow of the bone china.
“…
Dao-mei
, Piao.
Dao-mei …”
His eyes lifted. Black, nervous, trapped behind glass and the reflections of strips of decapitated dark trees from the window opposite.
“… that’s what they’re calling you at headquarters. ‘Bad luck’. Everyone’s dying around you. It’s that Huangpu case, the one you’ve stuck me with. No one knows about it, but they’re all talking. You can’t get any details, just rumours and names. Names of all those getting fucked around you …”
He leaned forward. Unborn quails on his breath.
“… you’ve got me by the ball’s Sun, but don’t get me involved. You can still leave me out of it. I don’t want to talk to you about this, nobody does.”
Dao-mei
. Piao felt the sting of the words. Dao-mei, the colloquial term for menstruation. And in turn, for ‘bad luck.’ He’d used it a thousand times himself to put a woman in her place. He’d used it to her in this very place. With regret, remembering the single tear in travel down her cheek, behind a fan of jet hair.
“You want details, I will give you them. You want to know why I am pushing so hard, I will tell you.”
“I don’t want to know. I don’t fucking want to know. I shouldn’t be here. If you’ve been followed it’ll be me who ends up.”
He was moving from his chair, a palm raised, warding off the Senior Investigator’s words.
“Sit.”
Piao’s hand firmly on Rentang’s forearm, pulling him back into his chair. Quail’s eggs rolling across the table.
“Is everything okay?”
Barbara concerned, shielding her tea with one hand, chasing the eggs with the other. Piao ignoring her. His face so close to Rentang’s forehead that it touched the frame of his spectacles.
“Details. I am investigating eight bodies found in the river. I know the identities of three. The other five is why you are here. In the process of my investigations another four people have been murdered. One was Wenbiao, a young PSB officer. You heard about that?”
Rentang nodded.
“And Yaobang’s brother?”
Again a nod.
“The other two. One of them was my cousin …”
The Senior Investigator pulled Rentang’s face around with both hands, holding it firmly in front of his. The lenses of the glasses misting with each word.
“… no one has followed us, I was very careful. I should have been as careful before. You are safe from them, they cannot harm you. But I can …”
He tried to pull away, Piao increased his grip; Rentang’s cheeks transforming into ripe apples embraced by too hot a sun.
“… you are right, I have you by the balls and I am about to start squeezing. One letter from me to the Party Secretary of our Danwei and you will be investigated. Using your position, influence, Security Bureau time and hardware, plus highly confidential information for the benefit of a commercial enterprise. These would be regarded as very serious charges …”
The Senior Investigator released his grip. Rentang was safe, tamed. The blanch of his cheeks whispered it. The dullness of his eyes shouted it.
“… there was a similar case in Nanking a year ago. It was a showcase, they made an example of him. He was executed.”
“What the fuck’s happened to you, Sun. You’d really do that to me, over this?”
“What the fuck has happened to me is pulling eight bodies from the river with their eyes gouged out. Their stomachs slit like
Wawayu
. Have you ever heard the noise that the fish make when they are pulled from the waters of their favourite river banks? They cry like human babies …”
The Senior Investigator picked up a quail’s egg, rolling it gently in his palm. Pitching it violently between thumb and forefinger. Letting the debris fall onto the white linen tablecloth.
“… I do not want to, but yes, I would do this to you for the twelve whose deaths are now up to me to put right. They deserve at least that.”
Rentang reached into the deep inside pocket of his coat to retrieve a large folded manila envelope.
“Fuck you too,” he said, as he placed it on the table and slit it open.
*
Monochrome prints spilling onto lace white. Five prints. Full portraits … ten by eight inch. Faces marbled in river mud. Rentang pushing the teapot, the cups, aside. Placing the photographs across the table in some unexplained order. Reaching deep into the envelope. Five photocopied reports. Black trenches of type headed by report numbers. And in bold print at the top of each page.
PUBLIC SECURITY BUREAU … SHANGHAI HUNG AN CHU.
In the bottom right-hand corner of each report was a copy of a photograph, passport size. Faces staring out in harsh black and white. Expressionless. Eyes stolen of light. Vulnerability frozen into prints just a handful of centimetres square. Rentang placing the reports in turn, carefully across the faces of mud. Death given names. The mud washed away. Pulling from the envelope five more prints. Five more faces. Shiny, new, unblemished. Each laced together with faint guidelines, drawstrings … latitudinal, longitudinal, snap-to rulers and guides. Across the top of the page, icons forming a computer programme menu and toolbar. Reconstructed faces. The same faces pulled from the Huangpu, but made new. An exterior complexion of a million computer generated pixels, glowing a healthy steel grey. And in the eye sockets, ball-bearing orbs of matt silver, holding no reflection and no fire of dreams burning in them.
Rentang checked the code at the back of each graphic before placing one at the bottom of each report. Vague in their similarity to the faces of mud. Unmistakably a match to the faces framed in the copied passport size mug-shots. His hand brushed against the first report.
“H2 … the first face that you gave me. Wei Yongshe. Age 25. Born Sichuan. A string of previous convictions. They are all in the report. Nothing serious until the last one. He stabbed another
liu-mang
in a street fight. He was sent to Gongdelin.”
Rentang’s hand moving to the next report, fingers spread across it in a web of pale knuckles and fingernails bitten to the bloodied quick.
“H4 … Hu Feng. Age 43. Born Shanghai. A history of mental health problems and violence. He was also in Gongdelin. He killed his sister with an axe.”
The monochrome eyes passing beneath Rentang’s palm. The next report, the next face, coming alive with a double tap of his index finger.
“H5 … another thug. A long history of petty crime and violence. Liu Qingde. Age 27. Born Shanghai. An-up-and coming little shit. Put away in Gongdelin for threatening behaviour and extortion. And then you have this beauty.”
Piao’s eyes moving from image to image. The passport print … the man that he had been. The face of the body pulled from the Huangpu, slipped in mud … the man that he had become. The computer enhanced image, a face generated by blips of power and pressure on keyboard keys … the man that he now was.
“H6 … Pei Decai. Age 33. Born in the Henan region. Drug trafficker. Caught coming over the border from the New Territories and into Shenzhen with pure heroin. Very tough, but used to money and luxury. He didn’t find them in Gongdelin.”
Rentang’s eyes shifting to the next report.
“H8 … the last of your beauties. Age 27. Born in Shanghai, almost next door to Gongdelin. He didn’t make it very far. Name, Yan Ziyang. Ex-asylum. Totally mad. Cut off the balls of one of his cousins, who died of blood loss. Then he tried to cut his own off. They should have let him. Imprisoned in Gongdelin.”
He rubbed his hands together and then wiped them on the corner of the tablecloth, as if there was shit over his palms rather than sweat.
“You are sure, these are them?”
Rentang looked up. Anger scribbled into the corners of his mouth. The pale yellow yolk of quail’s eggs sitting in the cuts and lines of his teeth.
“I’m sure. This is what you’re threatening me for, isn’t it? Faces made whole. Positive I.D.s.”
Piao poured Barbara and himself tea. Its aroma, of Monday mornings.
“I am making threats because nobody, including you, will do their jobs without them being made.”
“Well, now you’ve got what you want and where the fuck does that leave you? They’re still dead and I’m released from your threats and your friendship.”
The Senior Investigator’s eyes found the window. Beyond the lake, the slow wave of the ginkgoes, the curve of the park’s walls … the city was building to a lunchtime marked by Yellow Dragons, the sulphurous mustard clouds that poured from a hundred thousand factory chimneys. The peace of the garden, the mayhem that stamped just beyond its walls, how could the two opposites ever be reconciled? And something in Rentang’s words, nagging at Piao. Something feeling wrong, out of mesh. Also irreconcilable.
“How did they get to be in the Huangpu? These were serious crimes that they had committed. Four out of the five you have told me about would have been serving lao-gai … life sentences. That is if luck had smiled upon them. Why had they been released from Gongdelin, what were they doing as free men?”
Piao thinking aloud. The words mainly for himself and for a God who never seemed to answer. Rentang stood to leave, pushing the chair back rudely. Fishing deeply into his trouser pocket and throwing some crumpled notes and loose change onto the table.
“I don’t even want you paying for my fucking tea …”
He rounded the corner of the table, his shadow, his head across Piao’s shoulder. A warmth about his smell. A heady mix of streaky pork, expensive tobacco and too much sleep.
“… read the reports, Investigator Piao, who said that they had been released from Gongdelin Prison? Only one was on the outside. Qingde. Your deputy, Yaobang, he should know all about him. He was the one who put him inside in the first place. Perhaps you should be asking those closest to you, why it is that they said nothing when someone they recognised was being pulled from the river?”
Rentang’s voice a needle inserted into the Senior Investigator’s inner ear and beyond.
“The other four, Yongshe, Feng, Decai, Ziyang … they never left Gongdelin prison. ‘Officially’. As you said, their crimes were serious. The State thought so as well. They were executed for these crimes a day before you dragged them out of the Huangpu. Officially, their bodies have not yet been released. Officially, you could never have found them in the river. Officially, you are investigating the murders of men that never could have taken place. Officially, they had already been executed by firing squad …”
He adjusted his spectacles.
“… where does that fucking leave you, my dangerous friend?”
His footsteps made no sound. When the Senior Investigator looked up, Rentang had left. The only sound was in Piao’s head, a thousand questions, each with a busy tongue. And laced through the labyrinth, a single red thread. The name Gongdelin.
‘Virtue Forest.’
The Nanjing Road stretches for six miles. A razor slash of windscreens running west to east and spurning twenty-six side streets … splitting the city into two chunks. Four huge department stores ride its back, including the No.10 store at 635 Nanjing, where the Chinese themselves buy. The No.1 store at 830 Nanjing, on the fringe of the People’s Park … the largest store in the country. Its floor space packed with every item available to the Chinese worker.
Many other shops also vie for the trade that is generated by a million pedestrians a day. At 257 Nanjing, silk. At 428 Nanjing, jewellery. The Xinhua Bookstore at No.345. Porcelain, pottery, at No.550 and 1698 Nanjing. The Yangzhou Restaurant at 308, with its wild duck and tofu. Scrolls, wall hangings, at No.190. The wood panelled dining room of the Cantonese Xinya, at 719 Nanjing. At No.546 the Xin Xin Barber’s Shop. Eighty cutters permanently occupied. Men on the ground floor, women on the first floor. Five yuan buying a traditional massage in the lap of their special vibrating barber’s chair. On the corner of Sichuan Zhonglu, the coffee bar Deda Xicaishe, with its renowned chocolate buns. Or a couple of doors down at No.143, the Donghai Fandian with its minted coffee. Around the corner at 952 Nanjing, the ‘Face Friend’ cosmetics shop. On the counter top, their famous ‘nourishing powder.’ On the back shelf, a central display of their lipsticks. Next to it a large mock-up of a fingertip crafted in shiny plastic. On its long elegant nail, such red, red varnish.