Authors: Andy Oakes
The room was small, dominated by the bulk of the Prosecutor. A mountain of tumbling flesh swathed in a tight black Mao suit. A fine fabric, superbly cut, hand stitched. Only the Paramount on the Nanking Road or Beijing’s Hung Bin, near the old Foreign Legation Quarter, could produce such quality. A suit to appear in most citizens’ dreams, but never to appear in their wardrobes.
Piao sat, a large desk between them. The Prosecutor’s virgin pad, with his fistful of sausage stubbed fingers resting across it. And his smell, lancing … sweat, as sweetly acidic as balsamic vinegar. Weishi swept a hand across his forehead; the perspiration that glazed it constantly, transferred to his palm and onto the pad. Its outline reminding Piao of the shape of a country. Australia, India, England? It didn’t really matter which, they were all so very far away.
“So, Senior Investigator Sun Piao, tell me your story. Everybody charged with murder has a story.”
The Comrade Prosecutor looked uncomfortable, far too fat for the chair that he was perching on; in plump black cotton, buttocks dripping over its edges. Two chairs would have been better … the Prosecutor was not built to sit on a fence. The phrasing of his question, its very tone, it was already clear which side of the fence he was slipping down onto.
“I don’t tell stories. If you want stories, Prosecutor, go to the Xinyihua Opera.”
Weishi bit his fat cherry of a bottom lip.
“This is difficult for the both of us, Sun Piao. Do not make it more difficult than it already is.”
The Senior Investigator laughed, unable to remember when the last time had been.
“Difficult for the both of us; what is it that you really want?”
“The truth. Nothing more, nothing less. Every detail of your investigation. Every shred of evidence that you accumulated and which went towards founding the accusations and charges that you made.”
“It’s all in my reports.”
Prosecutor Weishi reached down, with difficulty, retrieving a slim briefcase from the floor. Dark brown Italian leather; its rich brown smell losing out to Weishi’s odour. Reaching inside. Dropping the thick pile of reports onto the desk.
“Your reports, I have read them. Now I need to believe them. I want you to say the words. Your eyes will tell the tale.”
“The eight that we found in the Huangpu, they had no eyes. They had no tale to tell.”
Prosecutor Weishi picked up his pen and wrote the date on the top of the pad, beside it, a large number one.
“But they have you, Senior Investigator Piao, to find out and speak the tale for them, don’t they? Now tell me with your eyes, what their eyes would have spoken.”
*
The interview lasted four hours. Full of repetition and glasses of warm water. Five other meetings of similar length followed during the next eleven days. And then a gap of over two weeks. No explanation. Every hour of that time spent reviewing each and every answer to every question that had been posed to him.
*
It was a different room, even smaller. Prosecutor Weishi in the corner, dominating it. Sitting. So huge … granite. As if he had always been there. As if the walls of the hospital had been erected around him.
“Liping’s zhau-dai-suo, the garden. We dug it up …”
He halted to light a cigarette, knowing that Piao would want one, but not offering him one.
“… we found nothing.”
The smoke rising across his face.
“… and the tapes and transcripts that you insist were hidden in your flat, they are lost. There was a fire. Nothing was saved.”
A fire. Piao fumbled for the words, but they fell like loose change through his fingers. A fire. The tapes. The transcripts. But only thinking of his wedding pictures. His best suit. Headlights smeared across the room, fanning across Weishi. His stance becoming more formal. His words more framed and gilded with an authority that was usually reserved only for the courtroom.
“The charge, amongst others, of the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Comrade Officer Chief Liping. I have found no evidence to overturn the charge made against you. I do not believe a word of what you have told me, Senior Investigator Piao. The trial will be held on the tenth, a week and a half from now. It will, of course, be followed by your immediate execution …”
The world imploding … everything shunted in with a jolt. The ceiling. His breath. The walls. His words. A feeling, not unfamiliar, of being stuffed into a deep and dark back pocket. Prosecutor Weishi stood, moving to the door, wiping the sweat from his brow with the flab of his palm.
“… Chief Liping was a good friend. A close and personal friend. You understand?”
And he was gone. His smell, a sweet reek, remaining … reminding.
“I understand.”
It took hours until he could sleep. Hours until the Prosecutor’s stink could be driven from his nostrils.
*
The car was a black Shanghai Sedan. Blank plates. Tinted windows. Two men inside, tight eyed and sleepy lipped. They would be the remainder of the CID team; two of their comrades spent on the rust iron of the barge, felled by Piao’s rimless rounds. These would be the men who had killed his cousin and the student. Also Comrade Zhiyuan. These would be the men who had murdered Pan and his brother, the Deputy Investigator. Yaobang, the friend whose burial Piao had been forbidden to attend. He got in the car. The sweat starting its run down the side of his face. Weakness reaching into him, seizing his brain in a lurching carousel. The car smelling of danger and unclean underwear, and of June roses past their best showing. Slowly, it pulled away; Piao doubting that he would ever smell June roses again.
June … the fortnight when the ‘grain is bearded’. The weeks of the ‘plum rains’.
The car moved from Zhejiang and into Jiangxi. A residential area just beyond Jingjiang; high-walled mansions, corralled and tamed woods. A district devoid of ugly government buildings. Neither were there any courthouses in such a place as this. But executions?
Beyond the village hemmed in by the mountains, the road broke like a twig. Paved carriageway into rutted dust. The woods darker and less tame. A window was partially open, but Piao could hear no birdsong. A gravel drive splintered from the track, and at the end of its lazy meander sitting awkward in the olive shadows, a mansion of beige stone and heavily hung trellis work. Hanging from it, roses large and brooding, like blood-red kisses.
The air was rich. Piao’s first steps beyond the corridors of the hospital for three months … the combination nearly intoxicating him. And the smells so complex, washing away the residue of antiseptic and polish. All at once, he could smell the earth, as brown and as bitter as dark chocolate. The grass, freshly rained upon. And the apples, holed and bruised, lying rotting on the ground. An a-yi waited at the door, Piao following the CID across the courtyard towards her beckoning hand. There was no one behind him, he could have run, the tree line thirty, thirty-five metres away. Weighing up the pros, weighing up the cons. He wouldn’t have made ten metres before they caught him. It was painful, but he was the weak one, they the strong. It was reality. Reality, the only commodity there had never been a shortage of in Piao’s life.
The house was dark. His pupils widening to take in the detail. Wood panelled walls. Oil paintings; thick paletted colours stabbed into form. Polished hazel oak floors. Islands of salmon pink, powder blue; Chinese and Persian carpets. And from the leaded windows, a simmer of light.
The elderly a-yi left behind. The CID officers now leading … at the end of the corridor, stopping at heavy double doors. Waiting for ten, fifteen seconds before knocking lightly. Smoothing down their hair. Tightening ties. A voice … bracing themselves before pushing open the doors. Perspiration on the polished brass door plates. Piao entered, the doors being closed behind him. The large room was dark. Heavy drapes across the windows. Rows of books and oak furniture. A smell of dust, old age, money, and piss-stained underpants. A long and ornate desk, leather topped, gold embossed tracery. And behind it, a darker shadow cut into the shadows … a man carefully, intricately peeling an orange. The smell of dust and urine submitting to citrus.
“Sit down, Sun Piao, you must still be very weak. Sit. Although we have never met, I do feel that I know you so very well.”
Piao remained standing, not knowing what to do with his hands.
“You don’t know me. It’s my wife that you know, Minister Kang Zhu.”
Eyes getting use to the gloom, picking out the trace of gold rimmed half glasses. The widow’s peak of hair slicked back into a tight black cap. The crab fingers unfurling the orange from its peel; an unbroken ribbon, lengthening. An umbilical cord linking fruit to desktop.
“Then I should tell you something about your wife that I know, but which you do not know, Sun Piao …”
In the Minister’s hands the orange taking on a secret sensuality; Piao knowing that in his own hands, it would just have been food. The thought making him feel clumsy, half a man, but a whole failure.
“… your congratulations are in order. Last week Lingling had her first ultrasound scan. The baby is healthy. It is a boy. Ten thousand ounces of gold.”
Piao felt his heart sink. Thankful for the darkness of the room, as a flush instantly spread across his face.
It should be my child. My son. Nemma bai – nemma pang. Too painful to remember … too painful to forget.
The orange peel falling from the fruit and onto the desk. Zhu breaking the flesh open, evenly separating the segments. Juice down his fingers.
“A silence is worth a thousand words …”
Juice on his lips.
“… have some, Sun Piao. Come, take an orange, it would be good for you. You must build up your strength.”
He held out a palm, the segments served on its trenched plate. Piao looking past it to the faint reflections on the half-moon lenses of the Minister’s glasses, to his eyes.
“Forty seconds and you’ve proved that I was right to hate you all of this time. Just forty seconds. That must be a record, even for you, Minister?”
“No, no it is not a record …”
He laughed, short and without humour, sounding like a hammer beating on a car panel.
“… but let us not get personal, Sun Piao, this is not the time for such things.”
“Then what is this the time for?”
Zhu leant back in his chair. The juice from the orange, sticky on his fingers. In turn, sucking each one clean.
“Today is the seventh day of the month. Soon it will be the tenth, the day of your trial and of your subsequent execution …”
He removed the last of his fingers from his mouth. It glistened with saliva. Examining it as he spoke.
“… this is the time for the making of deals …”
The folder was already on his desk, the Ministry seal sticking to it like a bloodstain. He nudged it toward Piao.
“… a full pardon on all of the charges against you and any charges that might be pressed in the future relating to your investigation. There is also a letter of authorisation from the Comrade Secretary of your Danwei that will allow for your temporary transfer to the Central Investigation Department. You will note that you have been promoted by several grades, your pay adjusted accordingly. Also included are purchase authority slips for an apartment, furniture, clothes, a new car. A very generous package.”
Behind the glasses, the mercurial brightness of the Minister’s eyes. The prospect of a child could light up even the most weary of eyes when you were,
Ni-ai
… ‘drowning with love.’
“Deals have two tongues, both sharp. What do you want from me, Minister Zhu?”
“Very astute, Sun Piao. From you, yes, we do want a little something from you. The Englishman known as Charles Haven, you will kill him for us.”
“For you Minister, you want him killed for you.”
The smile was slow. A calculated slither bending Zhu’s mouth into a harsh sickle.
“Yes, Senior Investigator, I stand corrected. You will kill him for me, but yourself also. The Englishman murdered your own cousin, your deputy and your friend, Officer Yaobang. The Englishman left you to die on that barge in the middle of the river. And your American government official, how safe is she with such a monster …”
Zhu folded his hands together. Fingers, a sharp weave of thinly veiled bone. Imaging those dry twigs across her breasts. Raking through her hair. Guiding her hands to the shrivel of his cock. Imagining her name called by the old man as he came. Lingling. A cracked bell of tuneful syllables hung with thick spittle and the smell of ammonia.
“… this American, I hear that she is very beautiful, that is, if you like American women. Personally I find their looks similar to a sky in the summer. Bright, but empty. Featureless. But I was told that she had legs like the necks of swans and breasts that you would not get bored with. Tell me Sun Piao, how many times did you fuck her, once, twice, ten times? Whatever it was, it was not enough, was it? You still think of her whenever you smell fresh bed-linen. Whenever you get an erection, do you not?”
Piao moved closer to the desk, at last, something to do with his hands … bracing them on the leather, edged with gold tracery.
“Killing Haven for you, Minister, this is more than just covering tracks, tying up loose ends, isn’t it?”
It was in Zhu’s eyes. Truth. As pale, as indistinct as a cataract. But still truth. And with it, Lingling’s words, as she had talked about the Minister that night in Piao’s flat. The file, the tapes, tight in her hands.
He is already serving a death sentence.
Her breath on the window, fading with the death of each word.
“This is in your blood, isn’t it? Revenge. What could a man like Haven have done to deserve such anger, Minister?”
Pain in a ragged flight across Zhu’s irises. For the first time discomfort seeping into the Minister’s posture. There was a full minute’s silence before he spoke.
“In collaboration with several other Politburo comrades, I was keen to develop an organ transplant service in our country …”
Squirming in his seat, the leather creaking.
“… Charles Haven was brought in to head a team that would do just that. Develop a service. Train our own medical personnel and surgeons in transplant techniques. To produce a network that would cope with our own internal demands and sell our services to foreigners wishing to come here for transplants. Using the organs of prisoners was inspired. Haven is a very brilliant man. He achieved all that we wished, plus more. He became a most favoured foreigner …”