Authors: Andy Oakes
Carmichael laughing.
“Tough talking. Private arrangements. My area of expertise.”
“Thought you’d like it. And the other little job I left with you … the groundwork and that shopping list?”
“Again, my area of expertise. My Christmas shopping is almost complete now.”
A wash of white noise.
“Down to my loose change. See you soon.”
“Remember, you’re a mother. They will! Are you alright? Are you alri …”
Silence … the line dead. The ocean of static, still.
*
She held the receiver to her ear for sometime after the call was completed, listening for the tell-tale ‘click’ of a tapped line. A ‘click’ that never came. The silence, seeming to swallow her whole. And in her head, the only sounds in the universe, were lyrics from a song whose title she could not remember …
‘… you’re gonna reap just what you sow …
… you’re gonna reap just what you sow …’
Long after you left Gongdelin, ‘Virtue Forest’, it would remain in your mind. Asked to describe it, only one image would you be able to summon up … that of a clenched fist.
A vast and threatening clenched fist.
*
The car approached the great studded gate flanked by video cameras and armed security guards. A slither of light appearing down the centre of its length, both halves sliding open and spewing out a grey light fed by stained skylights and discoloured reflector shades, tethered by wire and dust covered cobwebs. Barbara had a sudden image of Jonah being swallowed by the whale. A sheen of perspiration forcing its way to her forehead, as the gates closed behind them, and the thump of bolts ramming into place. How could you ever get use to a place like this, even in five, ten, or twenty years? The noise of keys, of locks, of doors slamming.
“This is foolish. I should not have been persuaded to bring you. I should not have allowed myself to be …”
The Senior Investigator’s fingers drumming on the steering wheel with each word spoken, with each word unspoken.
“… remember, you are a member of the Washington State Parole Committee …”
Piao tapped the papers clenched in her fingers.
“… it is all in the internal travel documents and permit of authority. It is unlikely that you will be challenged, being seen with me will be enough, but it is best that you should be prepared. Yes, best to be prepared.”
Barriers to the front: red, white, candy stripes. Guards moving out of the office to the sides of the car. The peaks of their hats, like razor blades, slicing across the bridges of noses.
Barbara felt her stomach contract. A taste of oiled steel across her tongue. The colour draining from her face.
“Documents.”
Piao flipped his badge. A brief flicker of the guard’s eyes. A snap of a salute.
“Park your car in Bay 13, Senior Investigator. An officer will take you to the Comrade Chief Warden.”
The barrier rose. Piao drove through. They hadn’t even looked at Barbara’s papers. She dropped them into her bag, a sense of disappointment in her eyes. The Senior Investigator still muttering …
“I should not have allowed myself.”
*
Chief Warden Mai Lin Hua’s office was in a pleasant administration block as far as it could be from the long, beige rabbit warren corridors, the cells that studded them like tumours, and their contents … the crumpled heaps that they referred to as ‘guests’. Guests. A name that bore none of the horror of not being able to leave Gongdelin’s firm grasp.
Hua’s desk was ordered, as was his face. A neutrality about it that would make it instantly forgettable within seconds of leaving his office. On the desk was a large photograph … two children of around eight to ten years old. It was hard to tell their age as they looked exactly like their father. Nothing in their features to hook onto, to use as reference points. They would also be instantly forgettable within seconds.
“Please … sit, sit, sit.”
His English, jerky, bumpy.
“A privilege. A privilege. A colleague from America. Washington. We must get coffee. Yes … coffee. Americans like coffee?”
Barbara nodded.
“And then a tour. A tour. You must have a tour. We have prepared for you. It is not often that we have such an esteemed visitor. A foreign visitor. It was short notice. Very short notice, but we prepared.”
She found herself smiling, like a fool, smiling.
“You have prepared?”
“The orchestra. Our twenty-five piece symphony orchestra. MaYi Ping has them assembled. He is the conductor. He was musician on the outside. Yes, musician … and robber of course. That is how he got to be in here. Seven years. Now he just conducts. He learnt to do it here. Our dance troupe you also see, yes? And our operatic tenor soloist and mixed chorus.”
Barbara felt the smile dying on her face.
“Yes. Yes. We have many plans for our foreign guest Senior Investigator. Go. Go. My Deputy will take you to see the guest that you required. Your Officer Yaobang will meet you there. We will look after our foreign friend. Go. Go.”
He waved his hands at Piao as the door opened, and a man, the Deputy, his face as gaunt as a switch blade, stepped into the room and saluted. Chief Warden Hua beamed, his eyes crumpled tight. Fleshy craters of imploded skin.
“Go. Go.”
Piao smiled at Barbara as he passed her.
“Have fun.”
“She will. She will,” replied Hua, as he ushered the Senior Investigator out, closing the door.
*
From an iron core of gantries and spiral open stairs wrapped in a gossamer of meshed steel, radiated the corridors like the spokes of a wheel. A brightness about them, a cleanliness that seemed to be in a head-on collision with the horror of incarceration. In the corridors, in the cells, the lights burning constantly, day, night … boundaries of time blurred into just one vast stretch of hard white light. The doors to the cells were panelled with reinforced glass. Prisoners were required to sleep facing the glass so that guards could watch over them. If a ‘guest’ turned in his sleep, guards would wake him. A swollen and infected ear was common amongst those who had to sleep on one side for many years; in such cases you might be permitted to turn over. And from the central core, constantly, the salvo of doors slamming. Of screams, of threats. Of lives left to stew in their own juices.
*
Xie was lucky, his cell had a small skylight. Through it he could see the clouds, sliced into even sized portions by the black thickly painted bars. It was a rare privilege … to be allowed to know the day, to be allowed to know the night.
A slither of sunlight had found the far wall. Xie sitting within it. Its sojourn across his face in a yellow edged gash. Elongating his nose. Slicing his lip. Cleaving his chin, neck, chest. His eyes were closed, only opening them when the silence was broken.
“You have visitors.”
The Deputy nodded at Piao and moved toward the door.
“I will be outside.”
The door closing … closed. Eyelids rising lazily across instantly alert eyes, yellow with sun. His movements, his look, reminding the Senior Investigator of a gecko warming itself.
“You’ve been drinking jasmine tea, Senior Investigator Piao. It smells sweet. It suits you …”
His arms slowly unfolding.
“… and a woman. You smell of a woman …”
Eyes half closed, the yellow extinguished as he drew a breath, long and stuttering, through the flare of his nostrils.
“… mmm, also sweet. So sweet. Not a wife smell, onions, flour, pissy knickers, tears …”
His eyes opened fully. Black. As black as midnight puddles.
“… no. This smell is different. Skin lotion, restaurants, lace, pink nipples. What have you been up to Senior Investigator?”
Piao nudged the slop bucket with his foot; it grated against the tiled floor.
“I can only smell shit, Xie, and lots of empty hours.”
The Big Man moved out of Piao’s shadow to within inches of the prisoner … sniffing.
“Yeah, definitely shit, Boss. Almost unbearable.”
Xie’s mouth widened to a smile. Wet lips, shadowed tongue, resembling the deep stripe of a scalpel across taut flesh. The skin opening into an obscene fish-lipped pucker.
“It’s not my shit you can smell. It’s your own lives rotting on the vine …”
The smile remaining as he focussed his attention on the Big Man.
“… a pity detective, but you were never the clever one, were you, or the attractive one? It was always your brother. Your little brother. So much praise, so much attention. And you on the outside always looking in …”
He stood, a taunt in his posture.
“… you got your wish, detective. Now you can get all the attention. He’s dead. Blown away.”
“Bastard. Fucking bastard!”
The Big Man’s head a hammer, forehead slamming down onto Xie’s nose. Piao throwing himself in between them, shoving Yaobang against the door. The prisoner falling hard against the wall, slipping down it, hands across his face. Laughing. Removing the web of fingers. The bruise already storming across his nose and cheek. A slip of scarlet trailing from one nostril. Carving across his mouth, chin, neck. The Senior Investigator’s hand firm against Yaobang’s chest; it rising and falling violently with ripped breaths.
“Enough. No more.”
“But how does he know about my brother, Boss? He must have been involved, the bastard.”
The hand moving up to the Big Man’s shoulder.
“These things get known. Anything that hurts a PSB Officer gets known by shits like this. He’s feeding on you. In here they have nothing else to do. He was not involved, now let’s get down to business.”
Piao knelt beside Xie, the blood blotting into his prison shirt in an unfurling bloom of rust. And the smell … of pepper, of starched cotton, and of anger, hot and parcelled, to be opened up on another day.
“You have a half-brother, Liu Qingde, we want to talk to you about.”
“He’s dead.”
Xie spat the words out as darts.
“How do you know that he is dead?”
“I know.”
“And what else do you know?”
“That is for me to know and for you to have sleepless nights about.”
The flow of blood stemmed, dried, like a cracked and arid riverbed down his lips and chin.
“Your half-brother, Qingde, I don’t give a shit about. But the others who were killed with him and the others who have been killed since, these I do care about …”
Piao lit a Panda Brand, exhaling. The smoke writhing in the space between them. Xie would taste it. He would be thinking of the press of crowds on the Nanjing Road. Late night mah-jongg games. The fire of Dukang. He would be thinking of how great it would be to light his own cigarette.
“… sleepless nights, I already have them and I don’t like them. But the information that you are going to give me will be of help. Great help. If it is of use to you, view your assistance as a form of relaxation therapy. A very profound way of supporting another human being.”
“Fuck off.”
“That’s not a very empathic response. Do I take it that you do not wish to enter into a therapeutic relationship with me?”
Not for an instant, Xie’s smile waning.
“Fuck off.”
Piao moved to the cell door. A shadow on the other side of the glass, the Deputy Warden, reaching for his keys. Holding a brief conversation, its words framed amongst the salvos of slamming cell doors, shouts disfigured in echo. A smell flooding in. … disinfectant edged in a sharp tooth of vomit.
“Everything ready?”
The Deputy entered the cell with two other officers; a nervousness snagging the corners of his eyes.
“I am against this.”
Piao’s cigarette, a warning, burning orange between his lips.
“But your superior, Chief Warden Hua, he is not?”
“No. No, he is not.”
“Then get on with it. Your reluctance will be duly noted.”
The Deputy nodding. The officers moving forward. Xie moving back.
“What’s going on? Where the fuck are you taking me?”
Bare toes screeching across the hard tiled floor, as he was dragged from the cell. Voice swamped in the length of the corridor. Far away, a cell door opening, a cell door slamming shut.
Silence.
Piao lit another Panda Brand from the butt of his and offered it to the Big Man. He would not appreciate the subtlety of the imported tobacco, but what the fuck!
“Twenty minutes,” Yaobang said through smoke.
“Ten,” replied the Senior Investigator.
They shook hands.
*
Mozart’s Symphony No.40 in G minor. Brahms’ Tragic Overture. And a rendition of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ that outpaced itself, laying exhausted across the conductor’s baton before it was half way through.
Barbara’s face ached. Wincing as Ma Yi Ping raised the baton … a breath of relief escaping through her teeth as she realised that it was just to invite the orchestra to take a bow. Another bow, their sixth. She nodded. They nodded. She applauded them. They applauded her. Barbara stood, turning to walk to the door, her fingers already finding the Marlboro wrapper, only to be halted by the barrel chested tenor soloist marching past her toward the podium. She withdrew her hand from the bag, turning back toward her chair, preparing herself. The soloist, she knew, was a convicted con man. A rapist in the baritone section of the mixed chorus. Thieves amongst the sopranos. Ma Yi Ping tapped his baton. She sat, smiling the smile. The conductor smiled. The baton fell. The Mahler began.
*
Nine minutes
.
The Big Man handed Piao a ten yuan note as the guards dragged Xie down the corridor and into the cell. Fresh blood on his face. Prison trousers ripped and trailing from his feet. Pants around his ankles. White pearls of buttocks. A single rose bud of blood blooming at their heart and opening its petals. They laid him on the bed, as he struggled to pull up his clothes. Continuing to hold the broken belt around his waist with both hands. Defiance, humiliation, struggling for supremacy in that one simple act.
“Qingde. Tell us about him?”
Xie pulled his knees to his chest. A dark rust of dampness spattering the arse of his trousers. The stain growing, resembling the outline of Australia. But no words. Yaobang’s shadow fell across the bed, the wall.