Authors: Andy Oakes
“Who is he? Where are we going?”
“We go back to the hospital and then you will know.”
“Know what, doctor?”
Wu raised a hand to his mouth, shielding his lips.
“Keep your voice down, Senior Investigator. I have said too much already. I will say no more. No more.”
“I want some words from you, Wu. Names. Loud words. Loud names.”
“No. No.”
The old man’s eyes flaring behind his glasses.
“Nothing more, I owe you nothing more.”
The ambulance pulled out of the south gate, into the streets. The New Year. Crowds, lights, voices … laughter from mouths crammed with food. And with it, remembering every New Year that he had spent with her. Every single one. How they had always made love on that night as if it were a ritual, as if it would be for the very last time. And then eating oranges, watching the juice dripping onto her breasts. Oranges. As if it would be the last one that he would ever eat.
Savour the taste … one day it will be.
*
The body prepped, anaesthetised. Its torso held in a vice of blind albino theatre light. Looking down upon it from the viewing gallery. A globe of flesh, white, featureless. Its skin seeming as flat, as hard and barren as an ice floe.
Wu and the Senior Investigator squeezed into the back row, tacked onto the end. Every other seat in the gallery taken by young, bright-eyed medics. Some with pads, pens poised. Others with text books open across their knees. Below, the lights dim. Gowned personnel moving in the theatre in a choreography of precise measured paces and actions. Rehearsed procedures. On the table beside the body, the instruments being laid out in a flawless ballet.
“The prisoner that we brought here, what do they want of him?”
No answer. Just a cough from the old man. The measured response, a shutter to hold in place the fear, the secrets.
“Why him?”
Again, the cough.
“Speak, fuck you. Why him?”
A hiss of words, garlic and ginger on their breath.
“He is young. He is fit. These are the reasons. And he is available. His situation makes him available …”
Looking down, eyes hidden, but in his words, a distinct edge of shame.
“… this I do not like either, as I have said, I also have principles. Principles are not just the property of the PSB, Senior Investigator …”
Pointing at the prisoner. Young. Fit. Available.
“… I am co-operating with you for this reason only. Because I disagree with what we have here, not because I was held from a bridge by my ankles. You understand?”
Piao not able to hide the sarcasm in his tone. And not wanting to.
“I understand. You are a man of principles. Now tell me what is going on here?”
Doctor Wu half standing to go.
“You do not need me here, not now. It is too dangerous. Too stupid. I have brought you to this place, that is enough. I have given you enough.”
“Stay.”
Piao’s hand firmly on the old man’s shoulder, pulling him back down into his seat.
“But.”
“Stay. Fucking stay, man of principles.”
The Senior Investigator’s hand a vice, his stare, like spot welds holding the old man in place. Below, the stage set. No one moving. Green gowned surgical staff standing in position. On hold. Waiting. The double doors to the theatre opened in an exuberant burst. A slap of rubber meeting rubber. Yellow light in a brief spill. And slicing through the space a tall figure, fully gowned in white. Tight hood embracing a full visor. The face, a harvest moon of shifting reflection. A stride rampant with confidence. An instant and all pervading sense that this was a man who could preserve or despatch any life.
On the operating table, the body now masked in tight folds of green canvas. A vulnerable rectangle of flesh running from sternum to lower stomach, from nipple to nipple. Four television monitors in the viewing gallery flicked into life. The conversations amongst the audience of viewing doctors and consultants, falling away. A close-up. Scalpel meeting skin in a firm paced glide. A single tear of blood following its path. The cut becoming a crimson plumb line. Becoming a track. An ugly puckered gape. Beside the surgeon an assistant, a thin wireless microphone across his mouth. A constant commentary relayed through to the gallery. Surgical techniques, cuts, clamps, medical procedures … every pass of the surgeon’s fingers set to a stream of emotionless words. Piao’s eyes moving from the crisp monochrome of the monitors and focussing on the ruddy wound stabbing the torso. Blood in smears and fine droplets across the surgeon’s gloves. One kidney and then a second, eased from the viscous cavity of the clamped incision. Taken gently, as if they were newly born kittens, from the surgeon’s hands and out of the theatre. The words rising like a wave inside Piao; hot, saline. Almost impossible to whisper them … when they needed to be shouted.
“What’s going on here, he’s taken both kidneys. The surgeon’s killing him. Without a kidney he’ll die?”
Wu removed his glasses. Eyes watering.
“The surgeon knows what he is doing, Senior Investigator. He has performed this operation many, many times before. That is why so many of our best medical students and surgeons are attending this demonstration. We desperately need more surgeons skilled in these techniques in the People’s Republic.”
“A demonstration? This isn’t a fucking demonstration, this is cold blooded murder.”
“No, not murder, Piao. You can live for twenty-four hours without a functioning kidney. They will sew the prisoner up and take him back to his cell. Tomorrow he will be executed.”
The words fouled up in a tangle of lost thoughts. Piao’s attention returning to the theatre below, the trolley already being wheeled out of the spotlight to a sterile side room. Silent … rubber across scrubbed white tiles. Another trolley, chrome bright, moving through the double doors past it. Almost touching. Already anaesthetised, a septuagenarian patient.
“What is this?”
The old man wiped his eyes, replacing his glasses. Waving the Senior Investigator’s next question away. Below, the precise dance unfolding. Bodies never touching, paths crossed, but not blocked. Re-sterilised steel. Re-adjusted lighting. The surgeon re-emerging from the sluice room. Monitors in a petit mal of activity. A slow zoom to focus on a blade of surgical steel meeting skin. The cut … the commentary.
‘The iliac vessels exposed retroperitoneally through an oblique incision, ten inches long, in the iliac fossa … the oblique muscles divided in the line of the incision and the peritoneum reflected upwards and medially.’
Parallel lines on a monitor. Incisions in grey. Dissections in grey. Blood in nondescript midtones.
‘The renal vein anastomosed end-to-side to the external iliac vein and the renal artery anastomosed end-to-side to the external iliac artery.’
Chess moves in steel.
‘The ureter is implanted in the bladder, ureteroneocystostomy … through an anterior cystotomy with a submucosal tunnel to prevent reflux. The right kidney being implanted in the left iliac fossa and vice versa, to facilitate the vascular anastomoses.’
Lights fading up. Eyes moving from monitors to the theatre below. Incisions in red … dissections in red … blood in a blazing primary.
‘The wound is now closed, without drainage where possible. An indwelling catheter left in the bladder for up to five days. A ‘living kidney’, unlike the twenty to forty per cent of cadaver kidneys transplanted, will function immediately. Urine output over a twenty-four hour period will be expected to be in the region of five to two hundred and fifty one.’
*
Wu was already standing, moving up the small flight of steps to the exit. Piao at his shoulder, his words, a blow torch across the old man’s cheek.
“Why, for fuck sake, tell me why?”
The doctor turned.
“He is General Zhang De, a Deputy Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.”
The Senior Investigator immediately knowing the name, the reputation, and the series of litmus tests that determines a senior official’s real authority. The time and the place that a man joined the Communist movement. Was it before or after the Long March, the two year trek in 1935 and 1936 that shaped the People’s Republic? Did the cadre serve in Yanan, the Communist wartime cave headquarters, or did he work on a less prestigious assignment as an undercover agent in the Kuomintang or ‘White Area’? Was he a member of the Red Army or just a civilian party official? The ‘tests’. The rites of passage. General Zhang De passed them all.
“His residence is within the shadow of the West Wall of the Forbidden City. He is a grade four cadre. The recipient of many commendations. He owns two Red Flags. A Japanese made colour television set. In his kitchen he has an American refrigerator. He shops at Number 53 Dong Hua Men Street, the ‘Peking City Food Supply Place’. The store is only for the Republic’s highest ranking officials. Members of the Communist Party Central Committee. The heads of the eleven Military Regions which command the People’s Liberation Army …”
Piao had heard of the store. Large yellow croaker fish, big enough to feed a banquet table of twelve. Frozen prawns from the Bohai Gulf. Whole sides of Sichuan pork. Fat wives queuing for fat husbands. Yes, Piao knew of it.
“… such a cadre as this general, when they become unwell they are powerful and insistent in their demands. They get what they require, what they want. They get what you have seen. Fresh ‘living kidneys’, harvested solely for them. Harvested just minutes before they will receive them …”
Wu, silent as the streams of excited, enthusiastic medics clutching their notebooks, passed on their way to the exit. Looking down, ignoring their eyes. His whisper, as hot as crushed chillies.
“… this is why I talk, just this. Not what you and your baboon did to me on the bridge, but what you have seen here.”
The old man’s hand, worn skin, flicking toward the theatre below …
“The prisoner, the boy. He was nineteen years old. His crime was that he stole two tractor tyres from the collective farm that he labours on. But it was not his crime that brought him here, to this. It was his kidneys for harvesting …”
The old man, shifting from foot to foot. As if words were weights. Sentences shackles.
“… his real crime was to be young and healthy with kidneys that cross-matched with a seriously ill high-ranking cadre. And that he was available …”
Silent again, as another group passed, moving through the exit.
“… with such kidneys as his, to steal a grain of rice would have been enough to get him executed. I am a moral man, this I do not agree with.”
The Senior Investigator slumped into the nearest seat. Out of touch with his body, except for the vice slowly being tightened across his temples; his heart riding a tide of palpitations. Wu pulled open the door, his words in a fading trickle as he moved into the corridor beyond it.
The door slowly closing behind him.
“Walk away, Piao. Run away. Or perhaps it will be you who will provide the next harvest.”
*
The last image … an incision’s crimped edges being drawn together by bridges of suture. A furious line, as red as the narrow banded seal around a pack of Marlboro. So neat, the surgeon finishing the work himself in a balletic trip of catgut, needle, tweezers, scissors. Taking his time. An obsessive competence being exerted. To the last, displaying a flamboyance in the skills that he possessed … that were much more about the surgeon’s needs and less and less about the patient’s. Finally, laying aside his instruments, the job finished. Walking to the doors. Already removing his gloves, loosening the gown from around his neck. Pulling the hood from his head; the blond-silver hair, burnished steel in the light. Removing the full-face visor, behind it … Charles Haven.
For an instant, no more, stopping and looking up toward the gallery. No longer the lizard, more a snake … a snake the instant before it strikes. He turned and walked through the theatre doors, its rubber on rubber applauding him. Piao found himself standing; no memory as to when exactly he had left his seat. Legs uncertain, but already moving him toward the steps, the door.
*
A torrent pouring from the tap, scalding hot. The steam in a constant plume across Haven’s face and the mirror … half of his features confused, indistinct in the fogged reflection. His arms parting the cascade, enjoying the burn of the water. Haven half turned, his face speaking of nothing.
“Why am I not surprised to see you, Senior Investigator Piao?”
“Because I am self-destructive, stubborn.”
The Englishman smiled, turning off the tap, facing Piao. His eyes alive, missing nothing. Taking in the door, the windows … assessing if the Senior Investigator was alone. Smiling again, satisfied.
“You received my little gift?”
Piao reached into his inside pocket, removing the box of polished wood … opening it. Black velvet. At its heart, the gold of the cigarette lighter catching the light in its grasp. Sliding it across the work surface towards Haven. The Englishman dried his hands and removed his gown, before allowing himself to take back the box.
“Your investigation …”
“It is over,” Piao cut in, moving to the door that led into the corridor; gently prising it open by half an inch. A crack of strip lighting, polished floor … and two men, thick set, leaning against a beige wall. A joke about a passing nurse’s fat arse, still on their lips. Snorting laughter. The strain and bulge of their market stall jackets over shoulder holsters. Piao let the door slip closed.
The Englishman ran his manicured fingers across the top of his skull, his hair falling perfectly into place.
“You have come to arrest me?”
No fear. Eyes unblinking and the colour of ball bearings.
“No, not arrest you.”
“Then, Investigator, Barbara Hayes and I will be leaving on our flight for New York which leaves in …”
He checked his watch.
“… exactly four hours’ time.”
“No you will not, Mr Haven. Even in China, men who kill four people do not catch aeroplanes and just fly away.”
The Englishman dropped a crumpled ball of used tissues into a bin by his feet.