Whispering Shadows (32 page)

“You're making a mistake, Mr. Leibovitz.”

Paul could not think of a suitable reply. He opened the door and disappeared wordlessly into the night.

———

Paul had never walked through such a bleak and disquieting residential area in China before. The broad, newly paved streets were clean but there was no one around and hardly a car to be seen. The multistoried villas were protected by high walls and several rolls of barbed wire. Now and then a Mercedes or a BMW glided by almost silently, stopped before an entrance, and then disappeared behind a large gate that closed once more with a quiet hum.

It was already past eleven
PM
and Paul realized that it would be difficult for him to get a taxi at this hour. At the next crossroad he looked around in all directions to see if he could make out the lights of a main road in the distance. He saw nothing but dimly lit
avenues and walls whose edges melted into the darkness. He carried on walking in a straight line, hoping to get to a main road. He thought about Tang and his threat and looked around to see if a car might be following him, but the road was empty. Paul felt a physical unease, a real revulsion, when he thought about the conversation he had just had. The blithe enthusiasm with which Tang had told the story of the old monk. The satisfaction in his face when he saw how deeply his guest was affected by the tale. Paul could have continued feeling indignant about Tang's cynicism for hours, but his discomfort would not hide the fact that Tang had succeeded. Something that Paul would never have thought possible had happened: A seed of doubt about Zhang's honesty, about their friendship, had been sown.

It doesn't change anything
, he had claimed bravely, but the more Paul thought about it, the less true it seemed. He wanted to fight against feeling suspicious and mistrustful, but he was too weak right now, or the feeling was too strong; yes, it was growing now, feeding on itself like jealousy or paranoia. Zhang had hidden the fact that he knew Tang from before for a long time. What else was he keeping from him? “Trust once lost can never be regained.” This was a Confucian saying that had stayed in Paul's mind.

Suddenly he heard the sound of an engine behind him and turned around. A dark Audi had drawn up a few meters behind him and there were four men in it staring at him. He tried to cross to the other side of the road, but from the other direction a second car drove toward him at high speed. Paul froze with fear. The car made a sharp turn, mounted the sidewalk with a dull thump, and stopped right in front of him. The doors flew open and several young men in suits got out and started running toward him. In a few seconds they had surrounded him. Paul looked to the left and to the right and realized that he could neither run away nor defend himself, and he could not call for help either. One of the men ordered him in crude Mandarin to get into the Audi; he was not to try anything; the more cooperative he was, the less violent they
would have to be.

Paul went over to the car and sat in the rear seat. Two heavyset muscular Chinese men moved to sit on either side of him and the driver started the engine while one of the men blindfolded him quickly. He felt a sharp smell shoot up his nose. Christine was the last thing he remembered thinking about before he lost consciousness.

XXX

It was the piercing pain in his head that woke Paul. A tension pulling from his neck over the back of his head to his forehead and over his face that reminded him of the migraine attacks that had occasionally overcome him while Justin was ill, forcing him to spend a day or two lying down in a darkened room. Justin had often come to lie down beside him after school then, and Paul had not had the heart to tell him that even the sound of his high voice caused him pain. He listened to it until they both fell asleep together.

Paul swallowed. His mouth and his throat were completely dry. He opened his eyes gingerly; bright light would only make the pain worse. The room he was lying in was in a twilight of half darkness. Where was he? It took a while for him to remember the dark avenue, the two cars, the men, and the blindfold, which had stunk of a sweetish scent. Surely only Tang could be behind this. He had not predicted that he would have an extremely uncomfortable walk without ­reason.

What else do you know?
Tang had asked almost casually during the dinner.
Don't expect an answer now,
Paul had replied lightheartedly, almost jokingly, enjoying the thought that his host feared that he, Paul, had more information with which to incriminate him. Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe he should have simply told the truth: Nothing. I don't know anything apart from what I've told you. He had not wanted to admit this yesterday. Would Tang still believe this “Nothing”? Christine had been right to be frightened.
He had been incredibly stupid.

Paul tried to sit up and groaned. With every movement he felt his pulse pounding in his temples. This pain could not be withstood for long without pills. He felt nauseous and he was afraid that he might throw up any second. He looked around him. There was no toilet and no bucket in the room, only a sink. If he vomited in there, the sour smell of the vomit would stink up the whole room. He took a few deep breaths in and out that helped a little with the nausea.

His bed was a kind of pallet with a thin, uncomfortably firm mattress on it that he could barely lie on. Paul stood up slowly with considered movements. He was still wearing the suit he had on yesterday but the pockets were empty. They had taken away his cell phone and his briefcase, his ID, and his belt. The laces had been taken out of his shoes. He saw a plastic bottle of water and a plate of rice on a small wooden table. He went over to the table and drank half the bottle in a few short gulps.

Paul wondered if there was any way of escaping, but the only window in the room was small and had a grille over it; it was at the top of the wall, almost right under the ceiling. The door was secured with a locked metal grille. He got up and shook the grille and shouted “Hello” a few times without getting a reply. Paul carried the only chair in the room over to where the window was and stood on it. He could only see a little through the window; more than half of it was underground and a strip of blue sky as wide as a hand showed through the rest. He was able to open the window slightly, and soon heard a car driving up, car doors slamming, and footsteps. The car drove off again. Was he about to have a visitor? He listened hard. He got down from the chair, walked over to the door, and listened. Nothing.

Where had they brought him? This room was neither a cell—he was certainly not in an official prison—nor a guest bedroom. He was in a kind of basement. He remembered that Zhang had told him about two rooms in the basement of the police headquarters in which confessions were forced out of people. With violence if
necessary.

Strangely, this thought did not make him feel frightened. Fear was nothing more than a function of an overactive imagination, at least with regard to nontraumatic experiences. That was how he had often comforted Justin when he had been frightened of the dark. People imagined everything that
could
happen and felt afraid. So those who had no imaginations could not be afraid.

He thought about Michael Owen. Perhaps he too had not wanted to accept till the very end how far his enemy would go.

Paul kept thinking about Zhang and the death of the old monk. Tang had told the story at such length and in such detail that images of that afternoon rose before Paul's eyes, haunting the half dark of the room. The ruined temple. The scrolls with excrement on them. He saw the Red Guards marching over the fields with their flags, he saw the monk, and how Zhang passed the wooden rod to Tang and how Tang struck the blow. The worst thing was that he was observing these images as a disinterested spectator. He felt nothing now apart from a terrible coldness within him, an indifference to the deed and toward his friend. He had had the same feeling in the months after Justin's death; he remembered it as a kind of numbness of the heart, and the paralysis had been awful. To feel nothing felt like a relief at first, but in the long run it was worse than any pain. It had taken him a long time to free himself from this coma of the feelings. He did not want to return to that state, not at any price, but whenever he thought about Zhang now it seemed to come upon him. He felt nothing. No hatred. No disappointment, not even anger. It was as though there had never been any closeness between them.

Paul sat down on the bed, leaned against the bare gray concrete wall, closed his eyes, and tried to find a position in which his headache would be easier to bear. From time to time he walked up and down below the window hearing the cars that drove past, sometimes voices that quickly died down again.

It was dark by the time he heard a key in the lock. The door
opened, the metal grille was pushed aside, and the light was switched on. Two men came into the room. One of them was carrying a tray with two bottles of water, a big bowl of rice and stir-fried vegetables, and the other was holding a tin bucket and a roll of toilet paper. They did not react when he asked where he was and who they were and merely gave a brief, glum nod when he asked for something for his headache. A few minutes later one of them returned with a packet of aspirin. After that, all was quiet and dark. Paul took four pills immediately, undressed, and lay down. He curled up with the blanket pulled up over his chin and fell asleep shortly after.

He was awakened by the sound of a deep male voice and a hand shaking him roughly by the shoulder. It took Paul some time to realize that he was not dreaming. Three tall powerfully built Chinese men were standing in front of his pallet; they did not look like policemen or like contract killers; in their dark-blue suits, they reminded him more of businessmen. One of them ordered him to get dressed immediately and follow them.

They led him down a long narrow corridor to a small elevator that they had to squeeze into in order to fit the four of them. When the door closed, Paul had the feeling that the entire elevator stank of the same sweetish scent he had smelled in the car. The muscular bodies of the young men were pressed up against him, and he felt their breath on his face, stinking of stale cigarette smoke. He grew more and more uncomfortable. He suddenly realized how defenseless he was among them. The men did not even bother gazing at the ceiling or the floor out of politeness, but stared at him brazenly. Their eyes met several times and the expression in their eyes was unfamiliar to him. He could not fathom what they had in store for him.

They brought him to a room that looked like a junior suite in a rather run-down average Chinese hotel. The light-colored carpet had several stains on it and there were two couches with worn brown covers and a coffee table with a vase of dusty plastic flowers on it in front of a large window. According to the clock on the wall it was just after 5:30
AM
. A man was sitting at a desk bent over a folder of
papers. He looked up briefly when they entered the room and then continued reading. The men motioned to Paul to sit down on a chair in front of the desk, left the room, and locked the door.

The man did not make any move to start a conversation.

After sitting in silence for a few minutes Paul asked, “Who are you? What do you want from me?” He intended to sound indignant and angry, but when he opened his mouth to speak he was short of breath and he sounded tense and strained.

The man did not even look up from his papers.

“Why are you holding me prisoner?”

Now he raised his head and looked at Paul expressionlessly.

“Do you work for Victor Tang?” Paul asked, undeterred.

The man closed the file, pushed it aside, leaned forward a little, and looked Paul directly in the eye. “I'd like to make this clear from the start, Mr. Leibovitz. There is only one person here who asks the questions and that is me. Do you understand me? You can either stay silent or answer the questions. That's up to you. But I would personally recommend that you do the latter in your own best interest.”

Instead of replying, Paul looked out of the window and tried to look as relaxed as possible. He did not want to let himself be intimidated. This man did not look like what Paul imagined a henchman of Tang's to look like, but he did not look like a respectable detective from the police headquarters in Shenzhen either—his attitude to a foreigner was too confident for that. He was in his early forties at most, and was also wearing a suit. He spoke Mandarin without a discernible accent so he was probably from Beijing. His voice was sharp and decided.

Leaning far back in his chair, he said, “You obtained access to Michael Owen's apartment in Hong Kong and stole several items, including a cell phone and a hard drive.”

Paul started in surprise and sank deep into his chair.

“Why did you do that?”

“Who told you that?” Paul blurted out. Only Zhang and Christine knew about that and they would have told neither the police
nor Tang. Would they?

“Did you not understand what I said earlier? Answer the question or say nothing,” the man told him.

“Was it Zhang? Did he tell you about it?” Paul couldn't help asking.

A brief smile flitted over the man's face. “And if he did, does it matter? You committed a theft. Why, Mr. Leibovitz?”

Who was this man? How did he know Zhang?

“What do you live on in Hong Kong?” the stranger asked.

“That has nothing to do . . .”

“What do you live on?” the man interrupted him in an icy tone.

“From the interest on my savings,” Paul replied, immediately feeling annoyed at himself for replying. He was letting himself be intimidated.

“Why are you taking such an interest in the murder of Michael Owen?”

Paul said nothing. If the man did not tell him who he was he would not answer any questions.

“Did you know Mr. Owen before? Who asked you to conduct investigations?”

Paul closed his eyes. He did not want to give the impression that he was about to answer a single question.

“Mr. Leibovitz. You're not doing yourself any favors. You're making a mistake.”

Tang had taken leave of him the previous evening with exactly the same words. The more Paul thought about it, the more convinced he was that only Victor Tang could be behind his abduction. Why did he not interrogate him himself?

He shook his head. “Tell me why you're asking these questions and who you are working for and I may answer them. Until then you'll get nothing from me.”

The man sized him up, as if gauging how serious Paul was. He stood up and walked around the desk. For a moment Paul was afraid that he was about to be violent to him. But he walked past him to
the door, opened it, and called the men waiting in the corridor to take Paul back to the basement. He disappeared into another room without saying anything more.

———

Paul lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. His headache had mostly gone, apart from a slight tugging over his left eye. He tried to get his thoughts in order, not knowing what Tang intended to do with him. Or what Richard Owen's role in this was. If Anyi was not lying it might have been he who had betrayed his son to Tang. But was Anyi telling the truth? He was losing any instinct for whom he could trust or not.

He heard cars driving up in front of the building again. Gravel spattered against the window and brakes squealed. He went over to the window and climbed onto the chair. There seemed to be more cars arriving and he thought he heard not only the voice of the man who had interrogated him today but—he could hardly believe his ears—the voices of Tang and Zhang. They were farther away and he could not hear what they were saying, but that was Zhang's light singsong, his melody. No, he was not mistaken, and the impassioned voice that was answering was Tang's. The voices quickly faded into the distance and nothing could be heard after a few seconds.

Paul pressed his mouth against the crack in the window and shouted his friend's name and thumped his fist against the glass, but no one replied.

Breathless with excitement, he spent the next hour pacing up and down in his room. Every so often he climbed up onto the chair to listen for sounds and rattled the iron grille over the door, and he kicked the narrow gray metal closet that looked like a locker next to the sink until there was a dent in the side. Gradually he started imagining what might happen again and with that came the fear. He was completely defenseless against them. He felt faint all over. He grew dizzy and breathless and a piercing pain stabbed him in
his left breast.