Authors: Andy Oakes
“Fuck it …” was all that Piao said again.
Crossing the pontoon of planks to the new telephone box. A brief conversation. Animated, but brief. He was back inside the car before the Big Man had even lit his cigarette. Ten fen poorer, a thousand Yuan happier.
“Your brother …” Piao pausing to light his own China Brand from the Big Man’s battered lighter.
“… still at the Institute isn’t he?”
“Mmm …” Yaobang drawing on the cigarette, his lips kissing at the nicotine clouds.
“… he’s doing a year’s research into the human reproductive system. Probably the closest he’ll ever get to fucking screwing …”
Laughing. A fit of amputated smoke, spit, and tobacco shreds.
“… he’s off to America in three month’s time, some exchange programme with a big hospital in New York. Lucky bastard. I hear that American girls do it with the lights on. Doing it in the same fucking building would be enough for me …”
Laughing again. Piao pulling on his cigarette, it tasting of everything, but cigarette.
“He obviously knows his stuff.”
“Top of the class, a real brainbox. Plenty up there, fuck all down here …”
Yaobang grabbed his crotch with both hands, smiling. Singeing his jacket with the furious tip of his cigarette.
“Not like you, eh?”
The Big Man nodded, laugh stalling in confusion. An insult or flattery? He was never sure with the Boss. Removing his hands from his crotch, examining the scorch mark on his jacket. It standing to attention amongst a parade of similar burns.
“Go, telephone him, now. Tell him that we’ll pick him up at. Where does he live?”
“The Wenan Road. But why, Boss?”
“One hour, on Xizang Lu. The bridge as it crosses the Wusongjiang.”
“But why, what do we want him for?”
The Senior Investigator tossing his half finished cigarette out of the window. Pressing the sweaty five fen aluminium coins into Yaobang’s palm.
“Just phone him. And tell him to bring any equipment that he might need for examining a corpse. Is that clear enough for you?”
“But he’s got no experience in that field, Boss. He wants to be a fucking gynaecologist.”
Piao leant over, pushing open the wagon door. The Big Man asking no more questions. There was no point. He was halfway to the telephone box when the Senior Investigator shouted to him.
“And tell him to keep it to himself. We’ve found enough bodies in the Huangpu for one week.”
Rain was starting to fall. Fine rain, that seemed half-hearted, exhausted, but which somehow managed to drench everything within its reach in a matter of seconds. Yaobang ran the gauntlet of planks, buttocks sluggishly swinging like two drunken sailors slumbering in their hammocks through a storm at sea. He was a large target. By the time that he made it to the telephone box, he was soaked. Mumbling.
“I just hope it’s still pissing down when you have to wait for us by the river, little brother …”
Mumbling, as the drips ran down his neck. As the dampness soaked through the thin material of his jacket. Mumbling, as he dialled the local number.
The rain stopped the instant that Yaobang had finished the call and had got back into the wagon. Mopping his wide brow with his damp cuff. It depositing more water than it soaked up.
“Fuck it …” was all that he said.
*
Yanggao Road skirting the Padong Enterprise Zone, bowed in shadow. The towers, some finished, some not, lining its broken edge. Like dull needles reaching up to full bellied clouds.
“What are your names?”
Piao re-adjusted the rear-view mirror, looking deeply into the interior of the wagon; the question knotted into his eyebrows and aimed at the two PSB officers perched precariously, uncomfortably, on the stacks of caskets. They didn’t answer. It was the first time that the Senior Investigator had addressed them since leaving the foreshore of the Huangpu. The Big Man hated silences, like he hated overcooked noodles. Like he hated women with gold front teeth. He answered for them.
“The old dog’s Xin, the young puppy’s Wenbiao.”
Piao stared back to the road, the main artery of this new city … ablaze with lights, but devoid of the living of life. Feeling himself grimace as the headlights picked out the verdant glare of a rice paddy squeezed between the scraping range of concrete pinnacles. Ancient and newborn, silently arm-wrestling amongst the heavy machinery and the slosh of dollars.
… but workers will always need rice to fuel their labours, to aid us in the Great Leap Forward, to create …’
He wondered if words, like paddy fields, had room to breath in this new age? If they had room to grow from the seed to the fulfilling of their promise? The shadows deepened, and they were in a valley tunnel of darkness.
“You will consider yourselves to be on special assignment. That means that you are answerable to me only. You will discuss nothing that you see. Nothing that you hear. Nothing that you think that relates to this case. Not with anyone. Is that understood?”
He checked the mirror. The PSB officers in the back of the wagon nodding like doggies, signalling their acceptance.
“From now on and until the job is over, I own what you see, what you hear, what you think …”
Again his eyes drifted to the rear-view mirror. Again they nodded. Yaobang had done his job well. They seemed to be a good choice. A grizzled old hound, eyes fixed upon his impending pension. Smelling of pipe tobacco and three day old newspapers. And the puppy dog, his mother’s breast milk barely off of his lips. Too old and too young for the Security Services or Party activists to have bothered recruiting as informers.
“… tell no one about this job. No one. Not even your wives.”
Xin nodded. Wenbiao raising his hand as if in school, as if wanting to go for a pee.
“I’m not married, Comrade Officer, Sir. I don’t even have a girlfriend, well not yet, anyway.”
A smile creeping into the corners of his lips, but Piao cutting it adrift as his foot found the accelerator.
“Just as well,” he said, and adding in a whisper lost in the drown of engine noise … “… a dark continent, women. The darkest continent.”
*
An urban chameleon.
The venetian blinded towers. Harsh neons scrolling across the windscreen and onto the Senior Investigator’s face in a constant shift of primary colours. Piao hated Pudong. He hated Shanghai, but at least you could hate the old whore in a familiar, warm fashion. But this new tart, gaudy lipsticked and spreading her legs across the east bank … she could only be hated ice-cold, in a detached way that mirrored her curves of steel and concrete. She didn’t belong, but she was going to stay … and so fuck you.
He checked his watch, a fake Rolex. The grey base metal peeking out from beneath the worn gold coloured plating, as a nosey neighbour peeks out from the crack between the curtains. Yaobang’s brother would be nearing the bridge over the Wusongjiang and the fruit of his own telephone call would be ripening on the branch. Keeping to the back streets, he turned the wagon north.
*
They picked the student, Pan Yaobang, up on the curve of the bridge. He was not like his brother. Skinny, tall, bespectacled … a lank bean shoot, to the dumpling that was Detective Yaobang. Smelling different also. Not of a few days stale sweat and sloppily eaten
hundun tang
, the ravioli soup that all PSB Officers appeared to be addicted to, especially during those anonymous hours of patrol that never seemed to quite belong to the night … or to the day. No, he smelt only of alien odours. Of fake American trainers. Medical handwash. Freshly laundered jeans. And Coca-Cola lips. On settling into the back of the wagon he had said,
“This is a proper investigation, isn’t it? An official matter?”
Yaobang had nearly puked with laughter when his student brother had leapt from the stack of caskets that he had been sitting on, narrowly avoiding a cracked skull on the steel roof of the wagon. The Boss had looked over his shoulder, pointed at the caskets and had replied, simply and with no ceremony.
“It’s official. They don’t come any more official than this …”
And had added, as he filled up the tank with diesel.
“… we don’t normally drive around the city with eight stiffs in the back of the wagon using them as extra seats, unless it’s very official.”
The student had asked no more questions. The student had insisted on standing … standing for the rest of the meandering journey to the
Patuo
of Yangpu and the festering port that scarred its boundary with the river.
*
A slash in the sky, vivid red … just above the horizon. The orb of the sun moving through it with the stealth of a street cat. The Senior Investigator watching it as he drove. Watching it, darting between the stop-start of stuttering warehouses and derricks that hugged both sides of the Huangpu for seventeen miles, as far as the point of confluence with the Changjiang, the Long River … the mighty Yangtze.
Dark now, Piao taking the wagon once more past the old warehouse. Only when he was certain that the shadows hid no other shadows, darker shadows, did he pull into the cobbled alleyway. A giant lattice of light thrown onto the yellowed brickwork as the headlights swung, piercing the heavy wrought iron gates. Three bursts of full beam, the walls of the warehouse seeming to rush out … a door in the corner of the loading bay opening. A man jumping down, sprinting to the gate, prising open one side of it before running back and leaping onto the apron of the loading bay. Piao drove in, swinging the wagon around, backing into one of the many bays. The man now pulling on a length of chain. Each heave, each arch of his back, the metal wall of the loading bay inching up. A wall of light, blinding white, replacing it. Xin and Wenbiao throwing open the wagon’s back doors. The student bumping his head as he aimlessly wandered from the wagon and into the pool of arc-light. Squinting down at his trainers and weighed down by the two kit-bags that he was carrying. A throaty cough. The reek of spent gas filled the bay; the man now on a forklift, features sharply defined in knife-edge hard light. Narrow lipped. A single dark line of eyes screwed together. Rubber in a scream, as he wheeled the forklift violently around towards the pallet being loaded with caskets.
“Out of the way … out of the way.”
The student, Pan, jumping to the side. The ungainly machine swinging into his path. Lifts slicing, skiing into position under the pallet of four caskets. Breaking the light … stilts of elongated shadow as it plunged into the interior of the warehouse. Piao and Yaobang stood out of the way, by the cab of the wagon.
“Who’s the fucking monkey?”
The Big Man nodded his head toward the forklift, its butt shedding hard form to bruised hues of near white. Climbing onto the bay, the Senior Investigator stared beyond the gate, into the alleyway. Eyes narrowing. Shadows had fled, cobbles glinting dully in the floodlit barrage. Scales of the Dragon lighting a path to their door.
“Might as well place a fucking advertisement,” he breathed.
“Sorry, Boss, what was that?”
Holding out a hand, Piao hauled the Detective onto the loading bay … thinking of carcasses of pork, sides of beef.
“I said that the ‘fucking monkey’ is my cousin …”
“Shit, sorry Boss, I didn’t know, he doesn’t look like you.”
“… my cousin on my mother’s side.”
Deep waters. Difficult waters. Yaobang excused himself, helping the others to load the remaining caskets onto an empty pallet.
The window that was set into the back of the wagon door was caked in dust, distorted, a crack running from the top left-hand corner … still, Piao could make out his features and recognize that they were not Chinese. Clearly, not a full breed. The rounded eyes, irises of beach-ball blue. The slim, sharp nose. The skin that was far too pink, far too white, to be rooted purely in Chinese ancestry. His father’s features. Piao spat on the ground. His father’s … a burst of brash American genes pushing aside a few hundred generations of Chinese. So easily pushed aside. Hardly a trace of his mother. Inherited only, the gifts, the curses of a diplomat on a long and unsecured leash. A sky-blue-eyed horny ‘Yank’, let loose in the candy store of no responsibility. No accountability. Stuffing himself with all that had been denied to him before. Was he, the disjointed reflection in the rear window of the wagon, still the sorry result of the union even after all of these years? Just the trail of vomit from someone who had fed for too long at the table?
Shame, it brands, it eats as a cancer does. Shame, a meal that not even a crow would choose. Piao kicked the wagon’s doors closed, following the second pallet of caskets into the shower of floodlight.
*
The Yangpu Bridge Import Export Meat Corporation.
The vast interior of the warehouse … four rows of stainless steel benches that stretched for almost its full length. Running above each of them, a track, a carousel of meat hooks that would take the freshly slaughtered animal carcasses from man to man. Process to process. Bleeding. Gutting. Cleaning out with high pressure hoses. Boning. Dressing. Portioning. Before entering the packing department at the very rump of the warehouse. Beyond that, the river and the empty refrigerated cargo belly of a waiting ship. Blood and waste, by-products of the butchering, would be sluiced from the narrow gutters that edged each side of the lengthy runs of benches. Also from the floor. Flowing, half liquid, half solid, into the large grates that led into down pipes. It running unimpeded, straight into the Huangpu River below. During a busy period, the New Year, Labour Day, or the Lantern and Dragon Boat Festivals … the waters of the Huangpu around the warehouse would be red. Day and night … red.
*
“There, put them on the centre bench.”
Xin moaning as he eased his back into the work. Wenbiao lifting the bodies. Averted eyes. Trying to hold his breath, clamp his nostrils tight. Across sheets of polythene, smeared blood. Small pools of piss coloured river water. And then the smell as they were unwrapped. A smell that had been lost in the thick mud of the foreshore, the coldness of the river, but which now lived … sweet, bitter, earthy. A smell that sat at each end of a life, like book ends. A smell of birth. A smell of death.