Authors: Andy Oakes
White kissing white.
The Zhi-8 was the only moving object in a landscape and sky welded into one. There was no horizon. No references to hint at the curve and throw of the topography.
The pilot lit another Marlboro. Sweet tobacco. Its taste, its aroma … ginger earth, cold coffee and cheesecake. Closing his eyes behind the Polaroid lenses. His hands freed of piloting, fully redundant … the Dong Fang KJ-8 autopilot now his fingers on the controls, now his eyes assessing the flight path ahead. Piao threw a chart across the pilot’s lap.
“These are the areas that I am interested in.”
He removed his sunglasses, squinting. His eyes, two knots tied in a length of string.
“Remote. There’s nothing there.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, just one guest house, three or four private zhao-daisuo ski lodges, plus a few farms off the Shanghai-Yanshou road. Nothing else …”
The pilot threw a glance at Barbara.
“… there are no tourists here. This is an area closed to waiguo-ren.”
Barbara drew deeply on her cigarette, returning the pilot’s gaze. Regaining his composure, he switched off the autopilot, the Zhi-8 lurching momentarily.
“That’s the guest house, it holds three hundred and fifty.”
He pointed to a large black scar, still some distance away; taking them faster, lower, directly over it … powder snow in a frantic dance. The complex reminding the Senior Investigator of a scab on a pallid child’s knee.
“The building that I am looking for will be as much as a thousand metres from any road. Wooden construction. Several outbuildings, but no animals …”
It wasn’t snowing. Too cold. It hadn’t snowed for a week. They were due for a little luck; this was it. The sky brightening, steel burnishing to blue. It would hold up. Piao’s attention returned to the pilot’s face.
“… it is cold, all of the buildings will have fires, smoke from their chimneys. The one that I am looking for will not. There has been no snowfalls for a week … all of the other buildings will have paths cleared or footprints leading up to their doors. Ours will not.”
The pilot shook his head, precisely replacing his sunglasses.
“Needle in a haystack. But it’s your time. Your Marlboros. Your Southern Comfort. Just make sure the rest is there the moment we land back at Hongqiao Airport.”
*
In Shangzhi County and Yanshou County, there is snow for a long time. From November to April the season is in full flood. Ski tracks from each door. Smoke from every chimney.
Three hours searching … but as soon as he saw it, he knew it. The house sitting broken in an endless expanse of untouched snowfield. A vast and dazzlingly bright duvet that had tucked itself up beyond the windows and across the roof, making it almost totally at one with its surroundings. No smoke from the chimney. No footprints or ski tracks to or from the door. One more fall of snow and the farmhouse would have been nothing more than another snow covered hillock, until the gentle thaw in late May. Too late. Too late.
The pilot was anxious. The drift deep. What obstacles might lie beneath its benign face? The Zhi-8 was equipped for a SAR role. He insisted that they use the hydraulic rescue hoist. It had a two hundred and seventy five kilo lifting capacity. Enough, even for the Big Man. The rearward sliding door hauled open. A world of violent noise. Buffeting wind … your breath stolen away. A knife-edge coldness. The outside imploding in upon them. And then Piao was in the air, twisting, dangling, dancing. A smell of grease, burnt electricity, lingering in his nostrils only momentarily. He pulled off the harness, fingers already numb. The drift up to his chest. Powder snow in a storm around him, stinging his skin. Blinding him. A shadow floating down from above him. Yaobang. And then another. Barbara. Tripping, swimming, stumbling, through the drift to the front door. The storm, the envelope of crashing wind and noise, instantly easing as the Zhi-8 pulled up and away. Piao wiped his eyes. He was sweating, but snow was everywhere. Down his neck. Up his sleeves. In his boots. He could feel its melt against the sweaty heat of his skin. Yaobang close behind, hauling Barbara in his wake. The door was not locked, but jammed. Yaobang’s shoulder freeing it; falling inside with the drift. Snow scattered across a bare wooden floor … its timber as dark as black bean sauce. There was no electricity, the Senior Investigator switched on his torch, Yaobang following. Wavering beams crossing a simple room with doors leading off to three other rooms. A bedroom … two beds. Bathroom … washstand and a chipped and discoloured bath. Kitchen … stone sink, storage larder. In the corner of the main room an open trap door led to a full-size cellar, its floor, frozen earth. Its walls, stone … moss covered. The whole building smelling of wood smoke, pepper and honey … and of a winter in full stride. And in every one of the rooms, a deep silence, as if held in check by the tidal wave of snow that blanketed every window.
A long bench table dominated the main room. Across it and littering the floor nearby, a tumble of spilt and broken equipment. Microscopes, high intensity adjustable lamps, fine haired brushes, dental picks, two small vacuum cleaners with a series of small nozzled tools. Piao moved closer, lighting an oil lamp and examining the debris in more detail. Scalpels, enamel bowls, lengths of wire, spatulas. In frozen drips from the table … broken jars of epoxy and polyester resin, soluble nylon, PVA. Small tins of paint still sitting on the bench, a pallet with dried brushes … dried pools of colour. Ochre, black, yellow. In the corner of the room, lengths of planed timber. Jars of preserving fluid, varnish. Large plastic bottles of chemicals. Buckets of plaster of Paris and a thick dough … a grey mixture of alvar, jute, kaolin. And in the deepest shadow that even the light from the oil lamp could not illuminate, four sturdily constructed boxes treated and lined with polythene sheeting and layer after layer of crumpled soft brown paper. Whatever would be housed in them would be comfortable … very, very safe. They pulled on surgical gloves, a smell of latex and talcum powder filling the room.
“It’s got to be fucking drugs, Boss, their own processing lab …”
Yaobang moved around the table prodding an index finger at whatever took his attention.
“… they couldn’t have picked a better place. No chance of anyone stumbling over this fucking place, not out here. And look at the distribution possibilities. Shit, we’re practically in the USSR with Vladivostok just over the border. The coast of Japan’s not much fucking further …”
He winked, shaking his head in admiration.
“… fucking bright boys. They had it made.”
‘Fucking bright boys’. Piao pulled the Big Man’s gloved hand away from the bench, smoothing it firmly to his side. And in a whisper, saying,
“If they were so fucking bright, why are they so fucking dead?”
The Senior Investigator walked around the bench, his eyes doing the probing.
“This is not drugs. I’m not sure what it is yet, but it is not drugs. I will work here, you check the other rooms. Look for the usual. I will look for the unusual.”
Piao turned to Barbara, his voice low, but not knowing why.
“Look around if you wish, but please, touch nothing …”
He pulled the torch up, the beam firing her cheek. Her eyes sapphire.
“… Barbara, I know how hard that this must be.”
She said nothing. He watched her as she turned, moving toward the bedroom, switching on her own torch. The words that he had just fired off, sticking like fishbones in his throat.
‘So fucking bright, so fucking dead.’
*
Four chairs, two now on their sides, sat around the long bench, each at what would have been individual work stations. Individual processes in some anonymous, ritualistic production line. Now just a topple of damaged equipment. The order, the care, the finely honed procedures, swept to the rocks by the struggle that was still indelibly stamped on the scene. On the floor, almost hidden in the crash of glass, two stains had soaked into the runs of roughly nailed flooring. Worn and exhausted stains, the hue of dog shit left to dry and crumble. Blood. There would be more, the Senior Investigator knew it … when he really decided to look for it.
“Sun, in here …”
Barbara’s voice from the bedroom, her back hard against the wall. The tears already in a slow fall down her face.
“… they’re Bobby’s.”
Her eyes looking down, the bed meeting the floor in a deluge of creased sheets and strewn blankets. Nike trainers poking out from underneath them.
“You are sure?”
She looked up, smiling, crying. A strange combination of emotions to outsiders, to those who had not had their lives touched by such things, but not to Piao. The rain of death; the sunshine of at least knowing. He could see that she was sure … he didn’t ask her again.
Piao swept his torch across the floor. Another stain, old blood on old wood, away from the bed beside the window, dark grey with drifted snow. She hadn’t seen it … Piao took her arm leading her into the main room. Rescuing her, always wanting to rescue her. And yet knowing that it was already too late. He could feel the report that he had read, neatly folded in his inside pocket. It burnt. Yes, already too late.
“Home sweet home, Boss …”
The Big Man was sealing a plastic bag, toothbrushes, bristle to bristle, resting at the bottom. Another bag, sealed and labelled in his pocket, cutlery. Another two bags in his other pockets, a comb, a hairbrush.
“… plenty of food in the kitchen. Mostly tins. About two weeks’ worth. I reckon there were three of them …”
He held up the toothbrushes in the bag. Three.
“… unless there were others who never brushed their teeth. Dirty bastards.”
Yaobang grinned, his own teeth proudly clenched. Worn tyres that cried out for retreading.
“What are you doing, Boss?”
The Senior Investigator was kneeling, opening the blade of his penknife. He nodded toward Barbara, waiting for the Big Man to cross the room where she sat, blocking her view, before he gently scraped dried blood from the two stains on the wooden floor into separate polythene bags and sealed them. Broken glass, paper, a microscope, a desklight … Piao removed the debris from the arid brown pools. They were free of blood. The violence, had come first. The act that had thrown the objects from the table, second. A gap of perhaps hours between the two events. Hours … during that span of which the place had been cleaned, carefully laundered of something. The building isolated in its vast snow. The accumulation of equipment, materials … all for what? Cleaned, yes cleaned. The farmhouse now robbed of what they had meticulously set it up for.
Small places … look in small places
.
He didn’t clean in every corner, did others? The Senior Investigator leaned further under the table, focusing the torch beam on the film of fine dust; a buildup that clung to the edges of the large gaps between the floorboards. Across the latex of his fingertip, a dirt as fine as talcum powder. Reddish. The colour of fired clay, stamped under foot. He swept some into a bag, sealing it. Standing, straightening. His shoulders, his back … stiff, as if fixed with red-hot rods of steel. Piao moved toward the stairs that led to the cellar. Purpose in his walk, the Big Man following. The torch beam dancing across the cellar walls in dashes of brown, scarred green … resting on thick joists, the underside of the floorboards, and settling on the black rift of a gap edged in red dust. Moving the beam to the hard packed mud floor, where he could make out a small ridge of fine dust traversing a metre and a half length of the hard earth. Ochre on a rich black peat.
“What you got, Boss?”
The Senior Investigator bent down, removing his gloves, fingers trailing the dirt. Only two generations ago his family had worked the land and yet he couldn’t remember the last time that he himself had run his hands through soil.
The red dirt doesn’t belong here … neither do I.
“The dust was swept from the main room, upstairs …”
His fingers trailed through the dirt in faint waves.
“… it fell through the large gap in the floorboards. There was much of it …”
His fingers smoothing the ochre ridge to a plain, a valley.
“… the one who surprised them was very careful. Very neat …”
His fingers digging deeper into the blood hued dirt.
“… this neatness. This hiding of a cold methodology in the chaos of destruction, does this neatness not remind you of something?”
In the valley of dirt, against his fingertip numbed with cold, the feel of metal. Metal, blue-green with the tarnish of millennia. A small button sized coin, its centre pierced by a square hole. Barbara and the Big Man over his shoulders, torch beams converging. The colour of the soil bleaching to pale grey.
“What the fuck’s that?”
Piao stood, the coin sitting on his fingertip. An emerald blister of aged bronze. Turning it slowly in his fingers.
“That is
Mingqi
, a miniature burial item.”
Barbara moving closer, her hair against the side of Piao’s face.
“What does this all mean, for Christ sake?”
The Senior Investigator turned, the light from his torch across her face … features washed away, just a blank porcelain mask with only her eyes defined by their deep blueness.
“It means, Barbara, that you were correct. That none of this was about drugs. It means that all of this was about smuggling …”
Turning the coin gently between his fingertips. Over and over.
“… your son was a smuggler of rare cultural relics and antiquities.”
She was dreaming … a constant thrash of rotor blades beating air, interwoven into its cityscape. Walking down Nanjing. The sun on her back, as warm as a baby’s mouth. Faces washing around her. Not one that she knew. Not one that she wished to know. A certainty that she would see him, as if she was working her way to a meeting, that had not been pre-arranged. On the corner of Shandong Lu, by the tea shop, Bobby was standing. Naked. Wet. Each footprint a puddle. A darkness spreading from his toes, his heels. Wanting to ask him why? A hundred times, why? But nothing came out, her lips wouldn’t work. Her dream, but not her time to talk. He touched her shoulder, the warmth of the sun instantly dissipating.