Dragon Bones

by Lisa See

  “A brand.”

  “Yes, a brand! She was branded!” Fong beamed, pleased by the new word. “Now look closely. Look! It’s a symbol. You see it? Three lines like….” Fong’s hands rippled through the air.

  “Like waves,” David said.

  “No, same direction,” Fong corrected himself.

  “A current?”

  “Waves of a current, exactly. Chuan. It is the character for river.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Hulan objected. “The strokes should be straighter.”

  Fong poked an elbow into David’s side. “As a child, our inspector spent too many years abroad. This is why she knows only the polite customs of our country. She asks you to dinner, she puts you in the seat of honor at the north side of the table. But you ask her about our culture and she is as stupid as a water buffalo. I can say this because I’ve known the inspector for many years.”

  Hulan gave the pathologist a disapproving grimace.

  “Three lines all waving in a current,” Fong continued, giving an indebted nod to David. “This is the ancient character for river. We are in the province of four rivers, no? Sichuan means ‘Four Rivers.’”

  “Thank you for the education, Pathologist Fong,” Hulan said tartly. “I shall report your helpful attitude to the vice minister.”

  “Hao, hao, good, good,” Fong replied, absolutely unabashed. “Because this is not the only mark I have seen like this. Your other foreigner, the one named Brian McCarthy, had this same chuan.”

  “Are you sure? His face was a mess, and you said yourself that his flesh was torn on river rocks.”

  Hulan usually did such a good job of hiding her feelings from her colleagues, but Fong’s information was putting chinks in her wall. Once again, David felt deep pain—for himself, for his wife, and for all of the tragedies that had brought them to this room.

  “Yes, I have spent more time with your other foreigner,” Fong continued in the most cheerful tones, “looking at the wounds you speak of for research before he goes back to his homeland. He is in such bad shape, I thought, Who would know what I do to his body now? It is good for our country to study the effects of the river, and here is an opportunity to study them. Perhaps I will write a paper and send it abroad.”

  “You’re telling me that you know for certain that Brian McCarthy was killed by the same person who killed Lily Sinclair?” Hulan queried. “You have hard proof?”

  “Hard proof? Ha! How can I possibly have that after the journey he took? I only know that when he was branded the burning went past his flesh and into the bone, and that this woman here has the same brand on her forehead. It’s up to you, Inspector, to determine if the same person did it!” Fong rubbed his hands together and looked about. “Investigator Lo promised that if I came down here I would be given a tour of the Three Gorges. I have always wanted to see our special heritage.”

  BEFORE THEY LEFT, FONG GAVE HULAN A MANILA ENVELOPE, which she took without opening. Then, while David dropped his satchel in their room, Hulan exchanged a few words with Su Zhangqing and Ge Fei, the policemen who’d interrogated the employees. By the time David returned, the young men had given her their notes and a synopsis of what they’d ascertained.

  “You worked hard today,” she commended them.

  The young men beamed. It wasn’t every day that someone from the Ministry of Public Security praised them, but their pleasure turned out to be short-lived.

  “I hope you’ll go home and have a good meal, but then I’d like you to come back—”

  “To interview the night staff,” Su, the bright one, guessed.

  “It’s a much smaller group,” she explained, “but it may take longer. They were here last night. If you find an eyewitness or suspect that someone knows more than he’s telling, please find me. I’ll be out of the hotel for an hour or so, but I’ll be back.”

  She and David left the officers and went to the dining room. The scholars were grouped together at their customary table, though neither Angela nor Catherine was with them. Hulan ordered a simple meal, telling the waitress to hurry. The food came and they began to eat.

  “Do you think you’ll find anything pertinent?” David asked, pointing with his chopsticks to the stack of employee interviews that lay atop the manila envelope next to Hulan’s plate.

  “I’ll take a look later. You never know.”

  “And Lo’s files?”

  “I haven’t opened them either,” she said, “but they can wait. I don’t think there’ll be any surprises.”

  After dinner, they swung by their room one more time, then stopped at the front desk to speak with the night clerk, who reported that he’d seen Miss Sinclair leave the hotel around 11:30 last night. He also remembered that Miss Miller had gone down to the dock to have dinner with her father. Later she’d come back to the hotel to pick up a few things and had gone out again a few minutes after Miss Sinclair left the hotel.

  “Did Miss Sinclair say where she was going?” Hulan asked.

  “No, but she went for a walk almost every night after the temperature cooled,” the night clerk said. “She didn’t care if it was raining. I think she liked it. Sometimes she would stay out until one or two in the morning.”

  Hulan made a few more inquiries. The clerk hadn’t left his post all night. He hadn’t seen any other foreigners leave or enter the hotel. He hadn’t heard or seen anything that struck him as suspicious. Since this was his primary job—watching over the foreigners and reporting their behavior to the Public Security Bureau—he wanted to emphasize that she could trust his account.

  It would be about a twenty-minute walk to the All-Patriotic Society meeting. David and Hulan put on borrowed plastic jackets, accepted a flashlight and a couple of umbrellas from the night clerk, then stepped outside. It was still light, and families who’d finished their dinners sat in front of their homes under the eaves enjoying the relative coolness of the early evening drizzle. But despite the peaceful domesticity about him, David walked with the same sense of foreboding that he’d felt going into Lily’s room this morning. This wasn’t a good idea. Hulan wouldn’t handle the meeting well, and he wasn’t sure he was up to dealing with the consequences.

  Following the map on the bottom of the flyer Wu had given them, David and Hulan crossed the Bashan Stream bridge and headed out of town toward Site 518. This was the same direction that Lily had walked last night, Hulan told David. They continued for another quarter of a mile before stepping off the road and onto a slippery path which led down to a rocky platform that rested about fifty feet above the Yangzi. They weren’t familiar with the vicissitudes of the river and didn’t know how much higher than usual it was running, but even so they could hear and see its fury. The water swirled and foamed, waves crested and splashed, and pebbles and broken tree branches rolled and collided along this rocky shoulder.

  They followed the path east until they came to a secluded inlet. Like the cove where Brian had gone into the river, this one had a little beach and a cave. But surely this was a false beach, since the true water level was several feet lower. Even above the roar of the river they could hear the sound of chanting emanating from the cave.

  They entered the dark maw. Lanterns lit the way deeper into the earth. With every step the sounds grew louder. They saw no one—no guards, no malingerers, no mothers taking their children back outside for making noise. The deeper they went, the cooler it got. Light from the oil lamps danced on the walls. A dank, musty odor filled their nostrils.

  Suddenly the tunnel opened into a large cavern, where immense stalactites hung down from the ceiling. Close to a hundred people stood together, swaying and chanting, “Subdue the wild tribes in our hearts. Practice the abstinence of alcohol, tobacco, and fornication.” The words were in Chinese, and the tones in which they were chanted sounded beautiful and mesmerizing.

  Perched above the people on a rocky ledge before an alcove stood a man in common peasant clothes. It was Tang Wenting, the All-Patriotic Society lieutenant
who had been in Tiananmen Square three days ago.

  “Do you see who that is?” Hulan whispered excitedly. “Do you believe me now that there’s a connection?”

  Tang Wenting led the chanting, which changed to “Give up material possessions. Cherish the sanctity of life. Advocate peace and peaceful means.”

  “I won’t let him get away tonight,” Hulan said. Her eyes scoured the cave, looking for possible escape routes.

  Tang Wenting held his hands up for silence. “We meet in the dark,” he said, “but we live in the light of Xiao Da’s blessings. Where Xiao Da sends me, I go. I am his sword.”

  Then he moved aside, leaving the alcove completely unobstructed. A strange, melodious voice emanated from the shadows. “You all remember me. I am Xiao Da.”

  “Can it really be him?” Hulan exclaimed over the crowd’s murmurs of “Xiao Da, Xiao Da, Xiao Da.”

  “To the outside world, Xiao Da remains faceless,” Tang Wenting said. “In this way he can represent all the faceless people of China.”

  Hulan whispered in English to David so that those around them wouldn’t understand. “Is that a recording, or is someone actually in that alcove?”

  “I am a part of you and a part of China,” the voice proclaimed. “I see a world where the faceless will become the true voice of China.”

  The voice didn’t sound electronic or distorted by any means other than the natural acoustics of the cave, but it didn’t sound of this world either.

  “If that’s truly Xiao Da,” Hulan whispered again, “I’m going to arrest him.”

  But as David looked around, an arrest seemed impossible. He saw no way to get up to the ledge other than scaling the cliff below it. This had to mean that the man wasn’t in an alcove but in another cave with its own separate exit. Xiao Da and Tang Wenting might not have anticipated that Liu Hulan would show up, but they had planned an escape route nevertheless. Putting that fact aside, the cave was also filled with All-Patriotic Society followers. They weren’t going to allow Hulan up to that higher cave even if she could master the cliff. Finally, and not insignificantly from David’s perspective, Hulan had not brought her weapon. It was tucked in a bag on the top shelf of the closet back at the Panda Guesthouse. There weren’t going to be any arrests tonight no matter how much Hulan wanted to make them. She must have realized this too, because her urgency had been replaced by a calculating stillness.

  “One day—and I tell you it’s coming soon—China will be the dominant power in the world,” Tang Wenting announced. “Xiao Da is leading us to that time. He sees in us the future of our country. We are patriots.”

  As soon as he left off, the voice from the alcove took up a more soothing refrain. “We don’t practice rituals that take advantage of the gullible. Our only ritual is to honor the spirit within. We are pure of heart. We are reverent.”

  Then it was back to Tang Wenting. “Wherever Xiao Da leads us, we will be at his side. We will show the world our faces. We will show the world China’s strength.”

  David understood the sentiment to a degree. Patriotism was a natural outgrowth of China’s newfound prosperity and its emergence after decades of isolation. Nothing was more “patriotic” in China these days than the dam, and nothing was more universally appealing to the downtrodden than the idea of a savior. So it came as little surprise that the men above began to combine these twin concepts, although their take was unique to say the least.

  “They’ve told us to leave our ancestral homes to make way for the dam and its lake,” Tang Wenting declared. “They’ve told us to move up our mountainsides, but how can we do this when Premier Zhu puts a ban on any form of habitation on land steeper than twenty-five degrees?”

  “What he says is true,” someone called out. “All the good land is already occupied.”

  “And what about the fishermen who trawl the river for their livelihoods?” Tang Wenting asked. “What will they do in a city so removed from the life force of the river?”

  “The river brings us life,” Xiao Da sang.

  “The river brings us life,” his followers droned in reply.

  “Nothing can change the great river.”

  “Nothing can change the great river,” the followers repeated.

  “They’ve told us to move to a New Immigrant City or one of the other big cities,” Tang Wenting continued, “but has anyone here received an urban residency permit?”

  Cries of “No” echoed through the cavern.

  “They tell us to leave our land to take jobs in factories, but how can we when they’ve all been shut down for inefficiency, corruption, and pollution?”

  The crowd was right with the lieutenant.

  “These things are an illusion the government uses to trick and entice us. They offer us money to move to other provinces, but what will we find when we get there? When the mud sinks to the bottom, the river becomes clear.”

  “They promised me three thousand yuan a head for me to take my family to Xinjiang,” a man in the audience crackled indignantly. “But when I got there I was told I’d have to drill one hundred meters to get water. I don’t have a drill, and water is abundant here. I came home and I won’t leave again.”

  “They talk about the good life that awaits us somewhere else, but why should we leave when this is our ancestral home?” Tang inquired.

  The voice from the alcove thrummed forth. “Forbearance does not mean tolerating evil beings that no longer have human nature or righteous thoughts.”

  “The fat rats will have to pay for their sins,” Tang interpreted.

  “See how they smoke their expensive cigarettes, how they drive fast cars, how they drink foreign liquor,” Xiao Da intoned. “All of these things are an abomination to those who are reverent.”

  This last caused a break in the sermonizing as the adherents took up the chant of “Be reverent, be reverent, be reverent.” The lieutenant joined in, letting his strong tenor reverberate through the cave. When his voice lowered, so did those of the followers, until finally there was quiet again.

  “We have all heard of the corruption that spoils the purity of our river and its people,” Tang said. “What about the local officials who have added the names of their relatives to the lists of relocatees, making their families eligible for relocation funds? What about the exaggerated reports filed by fat rats to the government about arable land that is being lost? Bashan officials have inflated the size of the town by twenty-five percent. They’ve filled their pockets with the difference between the real value of the land and the reported value of the land. These atrocities are common in all towns to be inundated. The fat rats lie and steal from the government…. and from you.”

  “Why don’t we petition the central government to make amends?” a man brayed out. “Let’s demonstrate so the government will remedy the situation.”

  “What is a piece of paper but a way for the government to hunt you down?” the lieutenant asked. “What is a demonstration but a way for the government to say that you’re causing civil unrest? We all know what happens to troublemakers in our country.”

  “Then what can we do?” For the first time the speaker was a woman.

  Xiao Da answered, “Combine docility with boldness. It is the fifth of the Nine Virtues.”

  “They’ve told us that the dam will be a monument to show the world China’s importance,” Tang Wenting picked up, “but we know it is only a way for a yang guizi with a hydrofoil to get rich and steal our heritage.”

  So far the sermon had been about governmental corruption, but now Tang was bringing Stuart Miller into the equation. The people here may not have known his name, but who in Bashan didn’t know by sight the person who owned the gleaming white hydrofoil tied up at the dock?

  “We do not care for concrete and steel when our hearts and souls are at stake,” Tang Wenting went on. “The fat rats hurt the river people. May we not throw rectitude at them? Should we not inquire about our leaders who show a pious face to the people but in private
enjoy the rotten fruits of foreign decadence? And what about men like Stuart Miller who invade our land like so many ants—greedy, insistent, an army of nuisance that nibbles away at our pride?”

  The crowd grumbled its reaction. The mood had shifted from spiritual to questioning to belligerent.

  “I see tonight that we have visitors,” the lieutenant announced to the crowd. “You!” he called out, pointing to Hulan. “Tell them who you are.”

  “Liu Hulan,” she answered.

  “Inspector Liu Hulan of the Ministry of Public Security, who comes here to frighten us away from our beliefs,” Tang Wenting clarified for the followers.

  The cave suddenly seemed far smaller, and David realized just how precarious a situation they were in.

  “You bring a foreigner, I see.”

  “This is David Stark,” came Hulan’s calm reply.

  David felt a low, simmering hostility push in around him. He smelled human sweat and saw petulant faces staring at him.

  The lieutenant tossed his head in disgust, but from within the darkness the enshrouded voice spoke tranquilly. “His name is of no concern to us. We need to know what kind of man he is. Is he reverent?”

  “He’s a yang guizi,” the lieutenant said. “He’s a big-nose foreigner who has no right to be on our Chinese soil.”

  “You’re wrong.” Hulan matched the even tone of the hidden voice. “Attorney Stark is a Zhongguotong, a friend to China.”

  “Who says this?”

  “Our leaders.”

  “Waaa!”

  An even louder “Waaa” from the crowd echoed the lieutenant’s response.

  “You and I don’t share the same leaders,” the lieutenant said. “We follow Xiao Da.”

  “Xiao Da, Xiao Da, Xiao Da.” The worshipful susurration reverberated through the cave.

  “When a true leader gives repose to the people,” the hidden voice pronounced, “his kindness is felt and the black-haired race cherish him in their hearts.”

  The construction of the sentence had an archaic sound that reminded David of the heightened language of the classical dramas sometimes shown on state television. Could this be a Confucian saying or perhaps a snippet of classical poetry?