Authors: Andy Oakes
A clear view of Yaobang now. The bind of ropes around his wrists, around his ankles. Shaking his head as unconsciousness loosened its grip. For an instant, light fading into grey, then the darkness plunged aside … everything, a blinding gold, as sharp as citrus juice. Dropping onto the fierce roll of the last barge. The rain in sheets of gilt. Moving toward the Big Man … words on his wet lips, but nothing coming out. His eyes widening, wild, staring past Piao, across his shoulder. Behind the Senior Investigator, a figure rising up, arms straightening. Piao instinctively diving to the left, the bundles of tarpaulin breaking his fall. Twisting. Both hands already wrapped around the Type 67’s rectangular butt. Letting off two shots, chest height. A squat figure, blood-red in the vermilion light, folding, then falling hard against the iron of the deck. Head in a sickening concussion. Pistol skidding through the shallow puddles. Rain streaming onto his face, eyes open … but dead. A damp blot, almost black, spreading across the front of his jacket and double-holed shirt. A thud … and the sky was white, blazing. Transforming iron into ice. River into glacier. The shadows around the bow uncovered and with it, a grey smudge left stranded, shape shifting. Two, three flashes, as the man knelt, stood, ran … discharging his pistol. Piao picking up his sprint against the scuds of ferry lights, pin-line of the 67’s sight chasing the running man’s torso. Opening up with two bursts. One short, clipping off a mooring point. Its sparks, freezing white. The other shot holing the flapping tail of his coat. Letting loose another two shots … the rimless rounds finding their targets, hip and stomach. Punching him violently into the gap between the barges. The Senior Investigator running to the curled iron lip, about to look over into the slice of river when the hand reached up, as tight as a shackle around his ankle. Falling, losing balance, the iron of the deck racing up in a crunching blow. Piao’s fingers bleeding, scrabbling for a handhold as the weight of the man pulled his legs, almost up to his groin, over the side of the barge. Looking down, the man’s face silver with sweat and rain. The river below, black. Aware of the shrieks of fireworks all around, but seemingly far way. The only noises inside him, heart thumping, and the clatter of memories being assembled like train carriages to parade before him. A smell of gunpowder, raw sewage, and the cheap cologne of the man whom he was about to die with in the Huangpu. But in an instant it happened … seeing the sister barge rear up on the belly of a fat wave, the gap narrow. Rust iron jaws closing around the man’s shoulders in a sickening squeal of metal against metal. His immediate loss of grip on Piao’s ankle and on the welded angle iron that his other hand had been fastened to. The Senior Investigator hauled his legs up and over the barge’s snarling lip. All of the time watching the man’s face, the glaze of surprise in his eyes. Always surprise. Even as the barge’s jaws closed around his skull in an embrace of bleeding rust, flaking paint, and memories, thoughts, life, spilling in a slow plume of scarlet … watching the man’s face.
Piao turned toward Yaobang, nothing in the Big Man’s eyes this time, but raising his bound hands … raising them, three fingers shaking and extended. Just three fingers. Three. There was one more left alive and he would be behind Piao. He had to be behind.
The Senior Investigator spun, keeping low. It was already too late. The noise, the pain, laced with fire. Two shots thudding into his lower back, punching him across the deck; colliding with Yaobang. Watching his pistol jolt from his hand. Watching his own blood, as warm as a summer night, curve and swirl into the rusted puddle around him. Everything … sounds, shapes, the rain against his face, edged in a new reality. Both close and distant, both serrated steel and plush velvet. Piao looked up, a man in front of him, chrome bright, pistol in his hand. Rain and light playing across his skull … Comrade Officer Chief Liping.
The sky crashed to indigo and Liping advanced with purpose, his footsteps making no noise. His words far away, as if being whispered down a long tunnel.
“Stupid Piao. You were my best Investigator. Always so clever. Too clever. To be too clever can be a disadvantage …”
Kneeling in front of Piao. The Chief’s eyes, the warmth of blood flowing from his own back and yet tasting it on his tongue; the total that was the Senior Investigator’s universe. And yet only thinking about Liping’s knee resting in the puddle. It would be wet. It would be as cold as ice.
A man could catch a nasty cold …
“… I saw myself in you. I tried to guide you. Encourage you. Warn you. Like a father with a precocious child …”
Liping placing his pistol on the deck; matt black on a river of reflection. The colours dying from cornflower blue to slate. Reaching into his pocket, pulling the blade of the knife from its body with over-precise care. Its honed edge catching the light.
“… it hurts doesn’t it Senior Investigator, to know a truth, to die for it? To know that it will die with you. Dying, that is what you are doing Piao. Will you do that cleverly as well, Senior Investigator?”
Liping reached forward with both hands, slowly, deliberately, as if to embrace the precocious child. Taking hold of Piao’s right ear, at first gently … the grip increasing to the pinch of a vice. His other hand, the knife moving across the Senior Investigator’s face. Coming to rest with its cold cutting edge hard against the pinch of flesh that joins earlobe to jaw. And with it, blood in a thick tear down the side of Piao’s neck. The blade just at rest for a second or two … before striking violently upward in a sawing action. The knife pulled away across the Senior Investigator’s line of sight. A wash of intense pain and sickening warmth flowing down Piao’s collar to his shoulder. Liping holding the trophy between two smudged, bloody fingers. The ear, smaller, neater than Piao would ever have imagined. And yet knowing that he should be screaming with the horror, clutching with both hands to the side of his burning face. To staunch the pain, to dam the river of blood. But everything was dulled and there was no strength … the Senior Investigator could feel it slipping away from his back, burning hot onto cold iron. And all of the time, the rain drumming against his skull; marking the flight of each second.
Chief Liping spoke, each word remote and separately packaged. Washing the blade of the knife in the puddle. Replacing it in his jacket and standing as he did so.
“You have been a grub in the rice bowl, Senior Investigator Piao. So nearly ruining the banquet …”
Raising his hand, the pistol fisted in it. A single accusing finger of anodised steel.
“… but now it is over.”
The finger tightening, about to spit its venom.
A shot … its crack almost eaten by the anger in the skies overhead. Liping toppling sideways, as if he had been fashioned from an overextended pile of children’s bricks. The pistol and Piao’s ear, falling from his hands. The jaundiced white orbs of his eyes rolling up … dead before he hit the iron deck. Only when he was lying on his face at Yaobang’s feet could you see what had felled him; the wound, the hole as large as a dumpling at the base of his skull. Blacker than his eyes. And the red ribbon flowing from it, across his neck … into the puddle, until the puddle was made up only of blood. Piao watched the flow of blood for some time, it reminding him of a kite’s gentle tail riding the breeze, until the shadow of the man standing in front of him eclipsed it.
Haven knelt, his eyes so dark that they couldn’t be seen. Two smudges holing his face … just like the eight, just like Bobby’s. And all of the time, the rain, falling in the deep crease of shadow between them.
“You do not seem surprised to see me, Senior Investigator?”
The words, like a distant bell, weaving into the punch and slap of waves against the iron hull of the barge. Piao didn’t answer, his attention like flotsam and jetsam … adrift and moving out of reach.
“But you wouldn’t be surprised would you?”
Haven’s fingers trailed through the puddle, the consistency of paint. Picking up the ear and holding it in front of the Senior Investigator’s eyes. Placing the ear on his lap. Blood across his fingers. In the amber light, as brown as shit. Wiping them down the front of Piao’s shirt.
“Failure is a new experience for you, it will take time to sink in. But of course, there will not be time for any new experiences to sink in. You are bleeding to death. In an hour, perhaps less, you will die …”
Just words, so many sounds following each other in a meaningless dribble. Piao adjusted his head slightly, all of his will power taken up and spent. Trying to look past the Englishman’s shoulder to the river. To the pretty pink-coloured waves.
“… you want to know why I killed Liping?”
Haven had taken his hand, carefully unfolding the fingers of his clenched fist.
“I was the loose end that he was supposed to deal with. A pity. He never realised that he was a loose end also. A loose end that I wanted to tie off …”
He smiled.
“… I would say that he’s pretty well tied off now, wouldn’t you, Investigator?”
Haven wiped clean the butt of the rifle, the stock, the scope, with his handkerchief. Taking Piao’s hand. Carefully, so carefully, modelling it around the pampered timber. As soft as the caress on a fat girl’s thigh. Collecting the spent cartridge case and dropping it a few metres from the Senior Investigator’s feet.
“Another loose end, the Minister, my business partner. You want to know why Kang Zhu has turned against me?”
Piao looking down at the rifle before staring into the Englishman’s eyes; feeling their fire melt into his. Speaking the words, but his own voice so unfamiliar to him.
“Not paid.”
Haven laughed, the inside of his mouth as red as over ripe cherries. He patted Piao’s hand closed.
“Oh, he was paid, Senior Investigator …”
Standing, the light clotting ruddy around his head and shoulders.
“… and now he is collecting the interest …”
He lit a cigarette. Smoke lost in smoke … as the stream is swallowed by the river, the river by the sea.
“… so, Senior Investigator, this is how it looks. You were obviously acting out a vendetta towards your Comrade Officer, Chief Liping. It was well known that he was looking into very serious charges against you. You saw it as personal. You lured him here on the pretext of making a full confession. Yes, that sounds promising, we’ll keep that bit in, shall we? But, of course, your Chief was no fool, he brought two men with him. There was a fight. Terrible. Bloody. Violent stuff. Nobody survived. No loose ends …”
The Englishman checked his watch. Still ahead of schedule. The night sky, a confetti of stainless steel sparks.
“… I have a lady to meet. A flight to catch. And you, Senior Investigator, you have a death to die. Just like your fat friend …”
He kicked Yaobang’s feet.
“… as dead as a fucking dog.”
Without looking back, Haven moved across the stagger of barges, the Senior Investigator watching their rise and fall; the hurdles of smoke icing the water, drifting across the rust of iron pontoons. A passage slicing through primary colours. Watching him. Watching until there was nothing left to watch. Piao’s head fell back against the Big Man’s leg, eyes filled with sky and a glimpse of Yaobang’s face. As white as the full moon … unconsciousness smoothing out each feature. And the rain still driving in spears. And the blood … everywhere he looked. The blood.
The New Year was coming to an end. Rockets falling to earth. Crowds dispersing. Beer bottles in the kerb. The odour of sweat and of money spent that couldn’t be afforded. The sky now darker than any other that Piao had ever seen. Looking up, hearing himself say,
“See the stars, they’ve come out tonight …”
The pin-pricks becoming smudges, as his eyesight failed. Only the pictures already in his head illuminating the black desert that reached out towards him. Her eyes. Her smell. Her hair. The way that her lips slumbered in a half smile … the secret that she alone seemed to know and would never give up. And through it all, a silver jet slashing toward a silver life, in a silver city, inhabited by only silver people.
Go and get your flight to New York Mr Haven … before I change my mind.
The palm turned to a fist … Piao at its centre. So dark, so black the night. Fathomless, and with nothing left in it for him. And all of the time the rain falling, a constant stream. As if God was pissing on him.
Can you not see the waters of the Yellow River descending from the Heavens, hurrying irrevocably down to the sea? Can you not see that the high hall’s gleaming mirrors are saddened at the sight of your white hair? Silken dark at dawn, by dusk it is like snow.
Fragments of unconsciousness, blunt, safe edged. Shards of consciousness, honed razors. Words shunting into place, as if snipped by shears from tinplate. Vague images, thoughts. His mind, a butterfly on the breeze, unable to settle on the bloom of any one idea. And then the morphine kicking in; carrying him on its warm roller, further, further out to sea. Away from the rocks of reality and the hard beach that had stranded him.
Looking up at the sky … stars and paramedics faces. Being carried across the buck of barges, the movement seizing his head, entering it in a sickening swirl. A glimpse, like a snapshot, of Yaobang being carried beside him strapped into a steel framed crib; his face, like crumpled paper. Across his forehead, a black crescent moon of a scar … no longer bleeding. And all of the time the rain. On his tongue. On his eyes. A sweetwater baptism. Reaching out to hold the Big Man’s hand, the rain dripping from his knuckles, but the nylon straps denying him.
“Get your arm down, you’ll hurt yourself.”
Everything in degrees of blue. High on the embankment the ambulances, the patrol cars, lights revolving. Sirens opening their mouths. Doors slamming. Body bags zipping. Buildings racing through the smoke grey of the ambulance windows. The paramedic’s face, bone and canvas taut skin, watching over Yaobang. So close that you could smell his life. His attentions turning to Piao. A sting as he put a line into his arm; taping it into position. The Senior Investigator reaching out his hand again, across the Big Man’s forehead. The paramedic forcing it down, tucking it under the nylon straps.