Authors: Andy Oakes
Blood red.
*
The bar was at the wrong end of the Nanjing Road. Away from the most prestigious shops, the most expensive hotels. This was the rump of the horse, the end where the shit poured out. The Nanjing that the tourists stayed away from and which led onto Hongqiao, the road to the airport.
It was easily missed, a door with no sign. It led to a hallway, poorly lit and rich with the stink of piss and the embrace of subtly scented maotai, fifty-three per cent proof. The bar was downstairs. A place to be lost in, in a country that constantly watched each face. It was a place of contagiously fierce drinking. Although still early, the dustbin behind the counter was already full of bottles without labels. Two of the empty bottles were Yaobang’s.
The Big Man bought another bottle from the bar. Piao’s eyes following him. Noticing how shiny his shoes were, as he placed a hand across the top of his glass as Yaobang bowed the bottle in his direction.
“What about you Mrs American, yellow wine, you try some?”
Piao interpreted.
“Is it good?”
The Senior Investigator shrugged.
“Some think so. I do not. It is a clouded wine, old. We bury it in earthenware bottles for many years, then we mix it with a young wine. It is like your western drink, sherry. If you like to drink a sweet syrup, you will find it good. But it is nineteen per cent, it will make your beer seem as water.”
Yaobang smiled, ready to pour. Barbara shook her head, her fingers, an ivory cage across the mouth of her glass.
“I think I’ll have some more water.”
Piao poured some more of the Qingdao beer into her glass, its amber flush seeming to warm her fingers.
“This is very pleasant, Boss. Very pleasant. Even if the New Year is still a few weeks away. We should do this more often …”
The Big Man took his drink down in one, eyes closed, tongue like an over boiled hot dog, set between his teeth. He poured himself another yellow wine.
“… I could always arrange for a Liberation Truck to move our office over here, Boss. I could take the table over there.”
It was the table nearest to the bar. The Senior Investigator smiled on cue.
“Talking about work …”
They weren’t, but he had to introduce it.
“… I need some names checked out. Full reports. I want to know everything, nothing left out.”
“You mean what colour turds they shit, eh Boss?”
“That is not exactly how it is put in the bureau’s training manual, but I think that you have the general idea.”
The Big Man smiled, taking the list of five names and browsing down it. Placing the paper in his pocket. Not a hint of recognition at any of the names. And all of the time, the Senior Investigator’s stomach in a bottomless fall.
“Another drink, Mrs American?”
“Sure, why not. I’m amongst friends, aren’t I.”
“Boss?”
Piao shaking his head. Unable to find any words, as if his tongue was screwed to the roof of his mouth. The bottle’s neck lifted in mid-flow, dripping across the table and stranding a spangle of yellow wine stars on the off-white chipped formica of its surface. The Big Man setting the bottle back down as he strained in his pocket for the list. Eyes marching back down the names.
“Liu Qingde. Boss, I know this fucking little shit. A
liumang
that I put away about a year ago. What’s the story here?”
Piao suddenly feeling that he could breathe again. Find words again.
“Five names. The five who were unidentified from the river.”
“You sure, Qingde was one of them, Boss?”
The Senior Investigator nodded.
“Fuck it. I should have recognised him, shouldn’t I?”
Piao drank his beer, only noticing its sweetness now, not its bitter aftertaste.
“He was mutilated. He had no eyes. Face broken with a clubbing hammer …”
Letting the Big Man off the hook; a sense of exhilaration that there was no cover-up. That Yaobang was still his man.
“… and the mud, and the swelling from the river.”
“But I still should have recognised him, Boss.”
Barbara sensing the tenseness, not understanding it, but wanting to diffuse it.
“A
liu-mang
, what is it?”
The Senior Investigator looked up from his glass.
“A gangster. A heavy …”
Looking back into his glass avoiding eye contact.
“… yes, you should have recognised him. But you did not. It has cost us time. What the cost of that is, who can know? Just get me the reports and we will take it from there. Now tell me about Liu Qingde.”
“You were testing me, weren’t you Boss,? Fucking testing me!”
Piao pushed the glass towards the Big Man’s fist.
“This case is testing all of us. Drink with me and test this new bottle.”
He nudged the glass into Yaobang’s palm, shaping the Big Man’s fingers around its coldness. The warmth of his flesh. How could he ever have thought that of Yaobang?
Fuck it. A case like this will shake anything loose that is not bolted down.
The Big Man thrust his glass against Piao’s, a rain of beer and wine falling to the table.
“Shit. You and me against the fucking world, Boss. Here’s to Pan and to your cousin.”
“And Wenbiao.”
“The young puppy. Yes, Wenbiao.”
“And Bobby.”
Barbara’s glass clinked against the other two. A second’s silence, marking a boundary, almost as if it signposted a rite of passage. Piao’s arm fell around her shoulder.
“Your understanding of Mandarin is improving. We must be more careful about what we say …”
He smiled, Barbara’s smile following in its footsteps.
“… here’s to Bobby …”
The Senior Investigator refilled the glasses.
“… now let us test more of the bottle while you tell me about the tough little shit, Liu Qingde, that you put away.”
Yaobang drank deeply, swallowing hard.
“He was small time, Boss, but with big time dreams. I remember he smelt like a yeh-ji. Sweet perfume around his neck, puke on his tongue.”
“A yeh-ji, a wild pheasant, a hooker.”
Barbara seeking Piao’s nod of affirmation at her interpreting skills. He nodded. The Big Man threw back the rest of the drink. A drip of yellow wine running from his lips, onto his chin, onto the table.
“You know Li Zhen, he owns restaurants and a few clubs? Also pimps and runs the protection rackets in the French quarter … most likely the drugs distribution as well, although we’ve never proved fuck all. Qingde was working for him and at the same time trying to carve out a little of his own territory. Protection mostly. All we could get him on was extortion and threatening behaviour. We thought we’d be able to squeeze the little bastard, get to Li Zhen. I have to hand it to him, tough little fucker, never said a single word …”
The barman wiped the table. The cloth more dirty than the gutter outside. Yaobang remained silent until he was gone.
“… Zhen and Qingde, they’re distant cousins. It’s a family firm. Everyone’s a fucking cousin or a cousin of a cousin. It’s as tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm.”
Piao drank his beer.
“A small fish in a big pond, Zhen. A legend only in his own toilet.”
“They’ve been trying to get him for fucking years, Boss. They say that he moved from pimping and protection to drugs. Now they say he’s always been in drugs. The other things were a front.”
Piao finished his beer and placed the glass on the table, streams of foam racing to the bottom of the glass.
“Zhen, they cannot get hold of him because its not the other activities that are a front, its him, he’s a front.”
“Always the way, Boss. And where does the fucking trail lead back to? Where it always does, some fat, rich shit high up in the Party. Probably the loudest speaker when it comes to complaining about corruption in the government.”
“Slugs. Their trail of slime always leads home.”
“Or to other slugs,” Barbara added.
The Big Man smiled as he tried to wring the last few drops from the bottle. No sense of embarrassment in the lengthy wait for their fall into his glass. He shook his head.
“A voice of experience from our Mrs American, yes?”
She nodded, raising her glass.
“Yeah, Boss, tough little shit that Qingde. Always gave me the feeling that he was overstretching. That he would either end up as the top liu-mang or on a slab in the city morgue …”
Yaobang held the rim of the glass above his tongue, the yellow rain drizzling down onto it.
“… poor little bastard. Missed out twice.”
“Zhen, is he around?”
“Sure Boss, saw him the other day on the Fuzhou Road. He was in a Hong-Qi, can you believe it, a shit like him in a Red Flag?”
“Most of the shit in Shanghai is not in gutters, it is sitting in Red Flags. What is new?”
The Big Man laughed, head tipped back. Nostrils black, round, reminding Piao of the entrance to the vehicular tunnels that passed under the Huangpu near the Longhua Pagoda.
“Where can he be found?”
“Most of the time he’s at his restaurant on the Wenan Road. The street market end. It’s got a stupid name, the Duck something. What the fuck is it? The Roast Duck. The Big Duck. The Sick Duck, that’s it, the Sick Duck …”
Yaobang shook his head in genuine concern.
“… how can someone own a Red Flag and then call their restaurant the Sick Duck? Such persons should be under constant surveillance. They are a threat to decent citizens …”
The Senior Investigator nodded in polite agreement. His own uncle’s restaurant next to Yichuan Park was called the Crying Dumpling. He considered, for an instant, telling Yaobang this, but thought better of it. His uncle was not a man who would appreciate constant surveillance.
“… perhaps we should pay him a little visit Boss, what do you think?”
Piao watched the spilt stars of yellow wine run into each other and dribble off the end of the table.
“It is the very least that we can do for the decent citizens of our city,” he replied.
*
Hours and bottles. Bottles and hours.
“What the hell did Bobby have in common with five Chinese thugs in a prison in Shanghai?”
Barbara’s fingers moved across her eyes, brushing aside a hook of yellow curl.
“It just keeps going around and around my head. What’s the link, Piao?”
His finger traced the edge of the beer glass as he spoke.
“A steel chain binding eight bodies together in death, that is a link. It says that something else, something with much power was shared by these eight …”
Piao looked away. The honesty in her cerulean eyes too much to bear.
“… they had a secret. Your son was a part of this.”
“Bobby had no secrets.”
Her voice louder, but with a broken edge of uncertainty.
“You forget, I am a policeman. The most cynical of professions. Everybody hides something. Everybody has a secret.”
“Not me, Mr Policeman. Politicians haven’t got the time to hide things. We’re too goddamn busy finding out what everybody else is hiding.”
“It is the opposite in China. Our politicians are so busy hiding their own secrets that they do not have the time to discover the secrets that anybody else hides. Is this more honest?”
“Honest?”
She laughed. Her teeth were white. He had never seen teeth so white.
“What the hell has honesty got to do with it? But tell me, Senior Investigator, as we are talking about honesty. Tell me about Bobby’s secret. About the secret that they all shared. I’m sure that a cynic like you has an opinion?”
“I have an opinion about everything.”
“I bet you do, so put it on the table.”
She would not like what he had to say. He drew a breath, holding it in the well of his throat. Pumping up the words with it.
“Drugs, only drugs create such violence. We have a problem with shipments and gangs crossing the border from the New Territories. There has been much violence. Not like this, but still considerable. We have been highly successful. Many arrests, many severe punishments. In most of the cases government officials had been involved, issuing passports, visas, travel permits. Theirs were the most severe punishments.”
“But you’ve no evidence of any drug involvement with Bobby or the others.”
“We know that two of the Chinese found in the river were drug users. A third was working for Li Zhen, a suspected dealer. We know nothing of Ye Yang, yet. We are awaiting reports. Heywood and your son, they do not seem to have been users, but they were in a position to be able to travel in and out of the country at will, from province to province without internal travel documents being issued. This is very unusual, but in the drug’s trade very necessary. Having people in responsible positions, trusted, respected, who can move freely … that is of unimaginable importance.”
A rage in Barbara’s eyes. Blue fading to grey, the colour of knife blades.
“You don’t miss an opportunity do you? I asked you to put your opinion on the table, not chop it up for firewood. Two junkies and one shit who was associated with a pusher does not turn it into drug murders. Christ, if you locked up everyone who mixed with junkies and pushers, half of the American Senate and Congress would be doing time.”
Piao’s eyes narrowed.
“You joke with me, yes?”
She ignored him.
“And just because Bobby and Heywood were in positions of authority and could travel freely, that means diddly. It certainly doesn’t mean that they were in the drug’s trade. You’re wide of the mark, Senior Investigator. Off target completely.”
He looked puzzled.
“Diddly?”
“Diddly. Diddly. It means that it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
She longed for a conversation with words that she didn’t have to simplify; didn’t have to repeat.
The Senior Investigator looked even more confused.
“Anyway, Barbara, my opinion, I have not finished it.”
“You have very long and wild opinions, Senior Investigator.”
“Yes, many say that, and many more are not brave enough to say that. I thank you for your honesty.”
“We seem to keep coming back to honesty. It’s not a subject that politicians like me know a lot about.”
“But it is a subject that an officer like me can recognise when he sees it. In your son’s death, the death of the others, I recognise the honesty of something going very wrong. The cadres who are the shadows behind this, sensing the rifles of the execution at the back of their necks. They panicked. They feared being caught and so destroyed the evidence. Your son, Heywood, Ye Yang, the others … just evidence. Nothing more than evidence. Not sons or daughters. And still they destroy the evidence, trying to cover the path back to them. Pan, Cheng my cousin, the student …”