Authors: Andy Oakes
Piao placed the last of the tapes into the box, sealing it. The sound of the adhesive tape pulling from the dispenser, stretching across the rift of cardboard edges, feeling almost comforting. Tomorrow he would write the memo and send it to Liping. It would say, but in the massaged and diplomatic words that he had learnt were the common currency in dealing with cadre like the Chief … ‘where the fuck are the other tapes?’
He expected a less manicured response back from Liping.
*
A single desklight illuminated his office at the arse end of the corridor. If status was determined by the view from an office’s window, Piao should have been cleaning the ashtrays and toilets. The wall of an alley, just metres away. In the daytime, the occasional dog lifting its hind leg. At night, drunks. The vomit hanging from their lips in jewelled gasps. With such a view, why have a window there at all, he had often wondered? But he already knew the answer. There is no status in China. All are equal. If one has a window, all must have a window.
There is no status in China … just office windows with different views.
A note was attached to the telephone receiver. Piao recognised the scrawl. Reading it, leaving it in place … it would look as if he’d never seen it. Yun’s memos were becoming more urgent, the colour of the ink that he used changing with the days. Green to blue … blue to black … black now giving way to red. Red, the colour of anger. Red, the colour of Detective Yun’s acne. He couldn’t wait to get hold of Piao’s cases, poor bastard. He had the insensitivity to wear cast offs without a hint of embarrassment. Such men are dangerous. Such men could cause wars and not even know that they had done so. But the kung an chu was big, three blocks of offices pressed into service, grafted together by endless stairwells and corridors smelling of disinfectant and of paper being chased. The Senior Investigator could avoid Yun for weeks. It would not look like avoidance, it would look like bad timing, bad architecture. At least for the first week. After that there was the Danwei investigation. He would be suspended, sitting at home with a warm bottle of Qingdao beer. The investigation, rolling toward him, unavoidable. He should be preparing his case, defending himself against the tong zhi’s charges. Zhiyuan was coming at him with a cleaver and he was just standing there, frozen in the glare. But it was the way that he operated … had always operated. He would find his murderers. Pull the dirty linen from beneath the bed. Security involvement. Party collusion. All that he had hinted at to Zhiyuan on the foreshore of the river that night. The bodies of the eight, dead and cold at their feet. Everything that he had worked for, his career, his life, riding on it. It was a high risk, but he knew no other way. No other way, not now.
Through the window that looked into the alley, a drunk came alive in the spill of office light. He stopped for an instant, vomited and moved on.
All must have a window. There is no status in China … just office windows with different views.
*
The memo was brief. It was late … Piao had no appetite for words. The Big Man had no appetite for reading. The memo was well suited for both diets.
Charles Haven, English. Full Report.
Visas, entrances, exits, internal travel.
Who is he
…
what is he doing here?
Squeeze the juice from the lychee.
Piao went to Yaobang’s desk, switching on a light, pulling open the large bottom drawer. Piles of paperwork that littered the desktop, toppling, sliding across each other. The contents of the drawer consisting mainly of food in various stages of consumption. It was the first and last place that the Big Man visited every day. And it was safe … a place only for the brave or the stupid. The Senior Investigator placed the memo in amongst a bag of half-eaten caramelised sweet potato fritters. Piao’s stomach rumbled. He was hungry, but not that hungry. He closed the draw and turned off the light, walking down the corridor. Every lonely echo of footstep telling him that no one was waiting for him at home.
‘Squeeze the juice from the lychee.’ The Big Man would know exactly what Piao was after. Haven … the Senior Investigator wanted everything on him. His last thought before he slept. His first thought as he awoke. The size of his shoes. What side of his pants his dick hung on. The Big Man liked jobs of that kind, he was good at them. He liked jobs that he was good at.
*
5 … 3 … 42 … 42
. The numbers coming as easy as breath itself. Knowing them now as well as his own telephone number. Also knowing her smile, her tears, as well as he had known any woman’s. Other lives spilling into your own … it made Piao feel on edge, vulnerable. The receptionist at the Jing Jiang tried Barbara’s room. Somehow he knew that she wouldn’t be there. She wasn’t. He put the receiver back on its cradle. It had been two days now. Unanswered telephone call dovetailing into unanswered telephone call. She was with the Englishman. Days spent with him. And nights? Yesterday Piao had stood opposite the hotel, two hours spent in drizzle that had eaten into his bones, his soul. He’d watched them coming down the steps, a taxi waiting. The Englishman’s arm around her shoulder, his hand resting on her neck. Her hair falling across his skin. Barbara had not seen Piao. The Englishman had. For an instant they had looked at each other in a series of fast strobing snapshots, through the river of angry metal that fled between them in the road. And then he was gone, joining Barbara in the back of the taxi. It pulled into the flow, its horn blaring. Haven’s arm moving around her shoulder once more. Barbara turning to him, smiling. The traffic folded, and they were gone.
The Senior Investigator had walked home, not knowing if he had stood outside the hotel soaked for two hours, to see Barbara … or was it to see the Englishman?
*
Piao didn’t eat, the sheets needed changing, but he went straight to bed. Within minutes, asleep. The night fast, compressed into one dream. A quality to it that stabbed deep into the heart of the next day. He was driving down a street, Nanjing or Fuzhou? Looking through a smeared windscreen toward the pavement, frantically searching for someone. Barbara … even in the pit of sleep, aware of her perfume. Its bouquet, like the sweets that you ate when you were a child. His hand was on the horn. Faces in the pressing crowd, turning … slowly. Faces, their eyes on his. Each face was Haven’s, only Haven’s.
Squeeze the juice from the lychee.
Little Brother, where are your little hands?
My hands are here.
They can grasp guns, they can fire, pow, pow, pow.
Little Sister, where are your little hands?
My hands are here.
They can do physical labour.
When the kerchiefs are dirty, they can wash them.
“It looks like a dragonfly.”
The Chaic Zhi-8 squatted on the pad in a far corner of Hongqiao. Fat bodied. Stressed skin metal fuselage sprayed white. A red hot coal of the Chinese star burning above the windows of the flight deck. And like the petals of a steel flower that had not been watered … the six blades of the rotor drooping. It had the look of an object that could never hope to attain flight.
Piao helped Barbara through the rearward sliding door on the starboard side. The steps were high, her skirt also … his eyes following the curve of her legs into the gloom of the main cabin.
The rotors swung and strengthened, losing their individual form in a blur of grey. The Zhi-8 slowly rising. Piao folding his arms tightly across his stomach. A large breakfast and a large helicopter, not the best of ideas.
“No, it does not look like a dragonfly …’ he said, hand across his mouth.
“… it looks like airsickness.”
He left her, Yaobang smiling, and made his way to the rear of the cabin, the sickbags. The Zhi-8’s smell, that of every other helicopter that he had ever known … fuel, grease, and a thousand previous nervous stomachs.
*
It was a slow train of a journey. A Chaic Zhi-8 has a range of four hundred and ninety-seven miles using standard fuel with no reserve tanks, and cruising at an economy rate of one hundred and forty-four miles per hour. Harbin was a journey of one thousand seven hundred and seventy one miles. It meant re-fuel stops at Xuzhou, Shijiazhuang, Beidaihe, Shenyang. A sleep stopover at Tianjin. The Haihe … the Number 1 Hotel. Cold rooms. Cold food. Warm beer. Drop offs of equipment, sealed bags, an antique French bureau for a high ranking cadre … at Taishan, Chengde, Jinzhuo and Changchun, the town of the Eternal Spring and the home of the Number 1 Automobile Factory, makers of the Red Flag. Changchun reminding him of the saying that local citizens had … ‘that to gaze upon the Number 1 Automobile Factory meant that you would never own a Hong-Qi, a Red Flag, yourself.’
Piao was certain that he never would.
*
Barbara out of earshot, the Big Man’s voice dwarfed, words eroded by the muffled thunder of the rotors.
“You’ll want to read this, Boss …”
He pulled an envelope from his inner pocket; horribly creased, tea stains, grease stains across its front. A Beijing postmark, dated three days ago.
“… it’s from Pan’s old professor. Results of what he sent him from the bodies …”
Piao nodded. The envelope had already been roughly opened. Pulling the sheets, four pages typed and stapled, free from the wreckage.
“… I only got up to the second paragraph. …”
Yaobang raising his voice as the storm of noise escalated.
“… doctors. I couldn’t understand a fucking word.”
The Senior Investigator jammed himself against the bulkhead, stomach turning, twisting. Expecting nothing from the letter. But something about his body, bracing itself, that expected everything.
…
midline incisions were made from the suprasternal notch to the pubis. The sternum was split and there was evidence of bone wax application to minimise bleeding. The pericardium and pleural cavities were open … and the vena cavae, aortic arch, innominate vessels and pulmonary artery showed evidence of having been isolated …
Turning the page …
… the coeliac axis and superior mesenteric arteries had been dissected. The portal vein was also dissected and there were signs of cannulation to the inferior mesenteric vein to permit in situ portal cooling with alactate solution …
Again, pages turned …
… removal of the entire globes of the eyes had been achieved through standard enucleation procedures, with the rectus muscles divided on the globe side of where the sutures would, in normal circumstances, be applied. The oblique muscles were divided near their insertions to the globe. The remaining facial sheath was then dissected from the globe, thus freeing it.
The words, sentences, paragraphs, meaning little to nothing. Jargon. A maze of multi-syllables. Cold cut medical terminology. But still his chest thumping. Turning to the last page … a conclusion, a précis that even he could understand. Understand, but not fit into the shards of a case that seemed to lay in every direction. Piao looked up, lips paralysed. Barbara watching him. He folded the report, on autopilot … placing it in his pocket. Trying to hide the horror that he knew was written across his features. Trying to avoid her eyes. Looking out of the smeared window. In a series of swells, the land below rising. Mountains, their edges smoothed by drifted snow. His ears popping as the Zhi-8 took on more altitude. It was a harsh region. A country of tears and unheard cries. It was used to the sort of word that now screamed its way through his head. One word that was not even on a single page of the report that he had just read, but which should have been.
PINGFANG.
The Zhi-8’s cabin was empty of cargo by the time that they reached Harbin, Manchuria … the Chinese-White Russian half-breed. Below, the Songhua River was frozen, a cleft of bone white embedded in grey city. Winter, unsheathed. Fifteen Celsius and falling. The weather closing tight its fist. The navigation of ships of up to five hundred tons would now be interrupted for the next six months. A winter with never a hint of compromise on its frozen lips.
It was late. The snowfields of Shangzhi, Yanshou, they would have to wait. They would still be there tomorrow … but perhaps the bite of the wind, the clench of the dropping mercury, would not be. Within minutes of landing the Zhi-8 was towed to a hangar, protective sleeves slipped over its rotors. A Liberation truck moved from the terminal, rendezvousing with them on the tarmac; sanctuary from a wind that sliced as viciously as a buzz saw. The International Hotel opposite the Natural History Museum, with rooms for eighty yuan a night, was twenty minutes away. They reached it in fifteen.
It was early, but nearly dark. By the time that it was dark, and still early … they were asleep.
*
Cold hotel. Cold bed. Cold dreams.
The steel interior of the Chaic Zhi-8’s main cabin, ice. Everything stinging to the touch. Barbara sitting crumpled, hands drawn into sleeves. The instrument checks complete, the crew of three on the flight deck shared out the contents of the large cardboard box that Yaobang had brought on board. Reassuringly solid blocks of Marlboro and ‘The Grand Old Drink of the South’ … bottles of Southern Comfort.
“You said two thousand cigarettes and ten bottles.”
The pilot looked impossibly young, growing a moustache in the hope of looking more mature. Clumps of isolated wispy hair, like gorse on a wind barren hilltop. The attempt had failed miserably. Yaobang grinned, meeting the pilot’s gaze halfway. It took a stupid or a very brave man to throw anger at a smile.
“Half now, half when we get back to Hongqiao.” The pilot stowed the cartons and bottles, priming and starting the three Changzhuo W26 turboshafts. Yaobang left the flight deck, still smiling. White horses of breath across his shoulders; strapping himself in, winking at Piao.
“It’s not true what they say flight crews can count.”
Laughing as the Zhi-8 laboured upwards, thrashing wildly at the sky. The pilot looked over his shoulder, smoothing down his moustache.
“Fucking PSB,” he whispered, as he pitched the Zhi-8 to the southeast and the snowfields.
*