Authors: Andy Oakes
“Nine minutes. You lost me ten fucking yuan. I always get really pissed off when I lose a bet, but not as pissed off as the Bear down the corridor must be. That’s what they call him. The Bear. Hairy bastard. Strong too. He’ll be fucking pissed off. Nine minutes isn’t going to satisfy an appetite like his …”
Yaobang lit a cigarette. It was as if everything about not being in a cell, not being in a prison, was summed up in the simplicity of that one action.
“… they say he likes to take his fucking time. His last victim was a ten year old boy over in Pudong. They say he took at least four hours over him …”
Cigarette smoke creeping across Xie’s shoulder. Warm beers, crowds, the perfumed tits of a yeh ji … they were all there in its smell, in its taste.
“… in four hours you can do just about anything you want to someone. He killed the boy by slashing his throat. And then the bastard fucked him again …”
Xie’s knees tightening against his chest. The words coming in a monotone flow.
“He was involved with a
wai-guo-ren
. American. A woman. I saw her once. She looked Chinese, but she wasn’t. There were others, at Fudan. He would go to the university, pick up a parcel and deliver it. Two, three times a month.”
Ye Yang. Heywood. Bobby.
Piao stood against the far wall. The painted stone, cold along the length of his spine. Outside, there was sun, he couldn’t see it, but recognised its reality in the slither of light that slowly passed across his face. And as it did so, acutely aware that it cut him in two. One eye, schoolboy blue … the other, as dark as a hammer’s head.
“Where did he deliver the parcels to?”
“Heilongjian, Harbin. Four hours out of the city in the Chang-Bai Mountains. A farmhouse in the snow fields. They had a workshop there. He had internal travel documents issued to him every month. They arrived by courier …”
He coughed. Snot, blood, tears.
“… the foreigners have friends in high places.”
The Senior Investigator had moved closer; Xie’s smell, now of shit, a fine reek as sharp as a razor.
“A workshop. You said that they had a workshop?”
“Yes.”
“The parcels, drugs?”
“Perhaps. He wouldn’t say. Where there was money to be made, he was secretive. His work with the
wai-guo-ren
. He was silent, dumb. There must have been a lot of money.”
“Or a lot of fear?”
Xie turned to face the Senior Investigator, features drained of skin tones. White on a white pillow, almost fading into it. Only the blood, now as brown as the deep tan of rich old retired men, marking the boundary of where face met linen.
He nodded. His tongue across ripped, salty lips.
“The foreigners at Fudan, you know who they were?”
“No.”
“Have you heard the names Wei Yongshe, Hu Feng, Pei Decai, Yan Ziyang?”
“No.”
“The woman. He talked about her, mentioned her name?”
“No.”
Piao raised an eyebrow.
“No. No names. I asked him many times. I thought that I might get in on their operation, but they were keeping it small. He said nothing. I found out about the woman because I had him followed. It was a pay-off.”
“Where?”
“The Peace Hotel. It must have been a good pay-day. He went straight from there to buy a Volkswagen.”
“New?”
“Nearly new.”
Of course ‘nearly’ new. Wasn’t everything that they bought, everything in their lives ‘nearly’ new?
The Senior Investigator felt for his cigarettes, one left; it was broken in half.
“Detective Yaobang will stay with you for a while. You will give him every detail that you know about this workshop in Harbin. Everything that Qingde said about it, however trivial.”
Xie moved his legs weakly over the side of the bed, sitting up. Beckoning Piao toward him. When within reach, grabbing his jacket collar. His strength surprising. Forcing the Senior Investigator to his level. Face against face. The dry river of blood stranded across his cheek and chin, coursing against Piao’s stubble.
“I won’t be in here much longer, Investigator, then I’ll come looking for you. Or perhaps for those who are dearest to you. Yes. Yes, that is sweeter. Those who are dearest to you.”
The Senior Investigator wrenched the hand from his jacket. Finger by finger. A button spinning to the floor.
Who was there to sew a new one back on?
He could hear Xie’s voice as he walked down the corridor. It’s calm thread of sing-song threats slicing through the madness of slamming doors, barked orders, whispered thoughts. It was only when he reached the central core where the corridors collided in a weave of steel web, that he realised that he could no longer hear Xie’s taunts … that the words were repeating only in the confines of his own head.
*
“How was the tour?”
Barbara didn’t look up from the pack of Marlboro. The cigarette drawn out, the white lifeline held firm between her slender fingers.
“I can’t decide what the high point was. The Brahms, with a tenor soloist who conned a collective farm out of their diesel engines for ten tractors. Or the dance troupe whose choreographer robbed a drinks store with his dog, left the dog behind in the shop, and was later arrested after the PSB followed it back to his house …”
She lit the cigarette and pulled hard on its filter.
“… yes, it was a fascinating tour. Remind me to get it included in next year’s Thomas Cook’s brochure.”
Chief Warden Hua entered the room. He always seemed happy. Such people worried Piao. Happiness, it was a state that he himself had only achieved fleetingly.
“See Piao, see, your foreigner, we looked after her, didn’t we, didn’t we? Chinese hospitality.”
The Chief Warden playfully poked Barbara in the back. She nodded with enthusiasm.
“You have been most generous, Chief Warden Hua. I will be sure to put this all in my report to my colleagues on the Washington State Parole Committee.”
Hua rubbed his hands together frantically.
“Good, good, good. And you, Senior Investigator, you had a satisfactory meeting with our friend I hear, yes, yes?”
“Yes, satisfactory.”
“You see, I told you, Piao, I know these people and you nearly didn’t listen to me, did you? You didn’t want to listen to me. Eh, eh? Put him in with the Bear I said, and hear him sing a pretty song. A canary. Just like a canary I said. I was right, wasn’t I, eh Piao, eh?”
The Senior Investigator’s attention momentarily drifted to the window.
“Yes, Chief Warden Hua, you were right. He did sing. He sang like a canary.”
*
The Chief Warden walked them to the car. The Big Man was already in the driver’s seat, wiping the inside of the windscreen with his jacket cuff.
“All right if I come with you, Boss? My car’s fucking dead. Alternator I think.”
“A hundred and fifty yuan, second-hand.”
Yaobang started the car.
“Don’t I fucking know it!”
The barrier rose. The main gate cranking painfully open beyond it. Outside it was dark … black. The floodlit interior of the bay escaping into the night in a graze of mustard and leggy shadows.
“Chief Warden Hua, four of the murders that I am currently investigating, you might recognise the names. Wei Yongshe, Hu Feng, Pei Decai, Yan Ziyang?”
Hua’s smile uncertain.
“These names, yes, I recognise these names. Of course I do. But murdered, you are investigating their murders? No, no, no, this cannot be true? These men, all four, they were executed. Executed. Shot in the prison grounds and cremated. It is in the records. All in the records.”
“Warden, these men were pulled from the Huangpu, chained together with others. Mutilated. I have positive identifications that this is so.”
The smile on Hua’s face now gone. Piao feeling a deep sense of satisfaction.
“You are wrong, Senior Investigator. Wrong. The bodies you have are not these men. Not these men. They are other men. Others. Be sure of your facts. The names you say have been executed. Executed. They are not your murdered. No, no, no.”
He wagged a fat finger in the Senior Investigator’s face.
“No, no, no Investigator. You cannot kill a man twice. You cannot kill a man twice.”
But they had; the Senior Investigator was tempted to argue, but Hua had already turned away … the barrier in a slow fall behind him.
Barbara saw his shadow before seeing him. Black. Hard edged amongst the winks of spotlights falling across her shoulder and onto the bar, also across the Scotch in her glass, one of many that evening. The trio of musicians lurched into an uncertain interpretation of ‘Fly me to the Moon.’ The shadow darkened; he was going to talk to her, throw her a line. There wasn’t one that she hadn’t heard before, but she couldn’t stop him.
“I raise my cup in salutation to the moon. With my shadow we are three. Yet drinking is unknown to the moon and the shadows follow in my wake in vain. Let us honour moon and shadow nonetheless, for joy will last no longer than the spring.”
The voice was English, neatly, precisely so. Barbara turned, squinting into the lights. He was blond. Most blond men seeming benign, safe. But there was an edge, a razor cut to this man … this blond. Something in the bottomless well of his eyes.
“A man who speaks with another man’s words, ain’t got any useful words of his own. That’s what my ma use to say. And that includes words of poetry.”
He smiled. It slithered with engaging attractiveness across his lips.
“It was not a poem. They were the lyrics from an old Chinese drinking song …”
He sat on a bar stool beside her. His smell of sandalwood in a head to head collision with her neat whisky.
“… I’m Charles, Charles Haven. And you are?”
“I’m someone who likes drinking alone.”
Barbara lifted the heavy glass and swirled the Scotch. The crystal, cold against the bridge of her nose, her forehead … looking through it. The world smelted gold and in flowing distortion.
“You are someone who has spent too long drinking alone.”
One smile seemed to bind all three of the musicians together as they moved flawlessly into their next song; the organist kissing the microphone in an expressionless warble.
“I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China.”
Too long alone. Yes, perhaps. Barbara didn’t know what else to say to the blond man with danger in his face, except,
“I’m drinking Scotch.”
“Then so will I,” he replied.
*
Piao felt naked out of uniform. A sense of something missing. He checked his reflection in the tinted glass of the lobby entrance. A dark, almost unfamiliar figure to his own eyes. It was the first time that he’d worn the suit since his wedding day. He’d almost expected to see her face with every button that he fastened. The smell of her hair on its lapels … her soft words tucked into its top pocket. But they were all gone. Now, just a faint smell of dust and empty wardrobes.
“Ni nar.”
Piao checking his pockets for his badge … finally finding it. The PSB officer nodding him past. Holding it in his hand as he walked across the lobby, has finger tracing the outline of the star at its heart. Red branded into gold. He walked the gauntlet of lights and into the bar. He could see Barbara. A smile on her lips. A glass held against her cheek. Reflections of amber against her skin. Beside her a man, his shadow across hers. Piao could see no features, just his body language. It shouted … you’re already mine, you don’t know it, but I do. The Senior Investigator turned to leave, a rip deep in his chest. But Barbara had seen him, her fingers across the man’s shoulder, leaving her bar stool to greet Piao. His words coming out in a jumble when she was still some distance away.
“I was passing. I thought of you, and it came to me that you would appreciate me calling on you. To drink, to talk, maybe to eat? But I see now that you have a friend who is with you and so it is best that I …”
“You were just passing?”
“Just passing, yes.”
“In your suit?”
Piao’s fingers found his jacket button, fastening and unfastening it.
“My suit. In my best suit, yes.”
She smiled that smile.
“It looks nice, you look nice.”
The Senior Investigator felt the colour rising in his cheeks.
“But I will go now, you are with your friend.”
“My friend? Oh, my friend.”
She laughed. Its complexity indecipherable to Piao.
“No, no. Come and join us. He’s English, an Englishman won’t mind. They have good manners at hand for every occasion.”
Barbara took his hand and led him to the bar. He felt like a child, dressed up and delivered to a birthday party that he didn’t want to go to.
“Charles Haven.”
The Senior Investigator grasped the outstretched hand.
“Sun Piao.”
The Englishman had a firm grip. His nails trimmed, manicured … immaculate. A heavy gold ring, old gold, almost orange. The shirt cuffs pristine white; more gold, heavy cufflinks fastening them. The Senior Investigator sat on a bar stool, a glass already filled with Scotch within reach.
“You get to know each other. I’m off to powder my nose.”
She smiled, a democratic smile to be shared by the two of them. And then she was gone … her glass next to Piao’s, lipstick breathing its rim. A waiter placed a bowl of rice crackers on the bar top beside them. Haven picked one up, placing it in the centre of his palm, examining it minutely.
“So perfect. I cannot eat one. How could anybody ever eat something so perfect.”
He placed it back in the bowl and turned to face Piao; it was the first time that the Senior Investigator had really looked at the Englishman.
“So, Sun Piao, what do you do?”
“I investigate.”
“Investigate. And what do you investigate?”
Piao lifted his glass; the Scotch burning across his tongue.
“I investigate homicides. I am a Senior Investigator with the Public Security Bureau.”
Surprise and a certain caution seeming to fleetingly cross Haven’s eyes.
“I have been to China many times, but you are the first Investigator that I have ever met.”
“That is good, but do not be disappointed. You obviously have done nothing wrong.”