by Andy Oakes
Eight murders had to be worth a river full of them.
*
“I’m going, cousin Cheng. I need some sleep and then some time to try and sort out this mess … talk to my Chief. I also need a permanent home for these bodies. You don’t want them cluttering up your warehouse, mixing them up with the pork carcasses.”
The cousin smiled, displaying a grim set of teeth, but a brightness of eye that was enviable.
“I’m glad that you came to me for help, Sun Piao. It has been a long time, Chen and I have not seen you for a year now, not since Lingling left. The children miss you …”
Piao feeling the pain that was always present, press home. The Senior Investigator just two more words away from crying. Not daring to speak. The cousin seeing the hole of pain open up, filling it swiftly with more words.
“… come and see us soon, for dinner. The children would love it, so would Chen. Besides, I have a case load of French wine that swam over from one of the ships. It needs a dent putting in it, and I cannot think of anyone better at denting a case of wine than you.”
“I’d love to, really. I’d love to. But you might not want to invite me for dinner after this investigation bursts open.”
Piao’s eyes moving across in the direction of the bodies. The eight. The cousin’s following; a thousand questions to ask, but knowing that they would be blocked by the Senior Investigator. Frozen out of existence, probably for his own good. Cheng placed his arm around Piao’s shoulder. The comfort almost unbearable.
“Nonsense. Family is family. Politics is politics and should be treated as such and flushed down the lavatory with the other shit …”
The swell of pain had peaked, ebbed. The Senior Investigator smiled.
“… I have friends high up in the local Party machinery. If they can be of any help, Sun? I’ve even got a contact in the Politburo who is partial to a side of beef …”
The Senior Investigator fell silent. But the look, the look … Cheng knew it well, seeing it every day in the slaughterhouse just the instant before the hammer stunned. Just before the gentle stroke of the knife across the warm throat of the animal. Just before the blood flowed.
“… shit. It’s that bad, is it? You think that their death is …”
“Look, I must go, cousin. Send my love to Chen and the children. I’d love to dent that wine with you, but not yet, eh? Let me get the worst of this case out of the way.”
“If you need any help, Sun Piao …”
But the Senior Investigator had already turned, walked … not looking back, not wanting to give any indication that he had heard his cousin’s last words.
The student Pan was still examining the girl. Eyes welded to the gaping wound that now seemed the focus of all that she had been and now was.
“Stay until he’s finished …”
The Big Man nodded as Piao passed, his shadow cast out over the loading bay and across the mosaic of cobbles outside. Yaobang shifted his weight, the fibreglass casket that he was sitting astride, whimpering. Pulling the food bowl tighter to his greasy lips. Fried noodles, slipping into his mouth with chopsticks that never rested.
“… my cousin will show you where the cold store is. Put the bodies in there …”
He nodded again. Chopsticks weaving.
“… and then get off home. Take your brother and Xin with you, drop them off. My cousin and young Wenbiao will stay until I can sort something out with Chief Liping …”
Nodding again. Noodles from his mouth, hanging. Resembling New Year’s decorations after the party has finished.
“… I’ll get a few hours sleep and then try to track Liping down.”
The Big Man nodded again, lowering the bowl from his face. Inside his mouth, a scene of carnage. Open cast mining.
“The Chief’s got a big place out on Taihu, hasn’t he, Boss? Something to do with his cousin, the Minister.”
“Fuck knows. He’s never invited me for tea. He prefers to sip with higher ranking cadres.”
“Only swims with the big fish comrades, eh Boss?”
The Big Man’s words a dagger. Piao’s thoughts flashing to Beijing. To sleek black cars. To a woman lost, a wife … her face, fast receding. And with it the pain. As fast as a songbird for the open door of the cage and as clawingly tenacious as a beggar who has seen the thickness of the wallet.
“The ocean that Liping swims in is full of big fish. Big fish, big shark, big turds.”
Yaobang disgorged a half eaten mouthful of noodle back into his bowl as he laughed. The Senior Investigator could see his tongue, similar to a slab of city paving-stone littered with the detritus of modern day living. Laugh exhausted, the Big Man raised the bowl once more to his lips, continuing to push the noodles into the fleshy crusher of his mouth.
“Good noodles?”
“You fucking bet, Boss.”
“Then I’ll leave you to them, and Yaobang …”
“What’s that, Boss?”
“… don’t forget the ones on your shirtfront and in your top pocket.”
The Big Man pawed at the partially stiff ribbons with his stubby sausage fingers, grinning as he lowered them onto his tongue.
As he walked onto the loading bay, wincing at the light, the Senior Investigator swore that he would never eat another noodle again.
*
The Shanghai Forever Bicycle Company Limited produces three and a half million bicycles a year. A flood of chrome and tinkling bells that tidal wave onto the streets and avenues as the factories call the worshipful to the high altar of the new economic miracle. Gridlocking the city’s arteries. In America they call the very same bicycles Wind Catchers. A romantic, heroic name … one of speed, space, freedom. In Shanghai reality roosts unchallenged, naked, devoid of romance or heroism. In Shanghai they are just called Forever Bicycles.
*
Daytime now … a sun, netted and unstruggling in a gauze of fog. Hauled across a city that seemed unprepared, ill at ease with itself. As if it were waiting for something. As if it wanted to, but couldn’t quite sneeze.
Piao sat in a taxi marooned in amongst a sea of bright wheels and busy bells as the shoals of bicycles swept against the current, stalling all else. He swore … the driver who he was trapped with, ignoring him and continuing to sort out the problems of the People’s Republic right there and then. Talk, incessant. Tinkling bells, incessant. An hour and a half to travel a handful of grubby miles. Stopping briefly to drop off the clutch of one hundred and twenty roll films for an urgent D&P at an out of the way back-street photographer’s.
When the taxi driver woke him with a rough nudge to the shoulder, the bicycles had bled into the day with a shrug of quicksilver; the problems of the People’s Republic still remained; and he was home.
*
A year now, over a year … but still Piao expected to see an envelope waiting for him on the floor. An envelope with a Beijing postmark and bearing the delicate curves and feints of once familiar writing. No letter was there. It happened every time, and every time he failed to learn.
In a city where the average living space for a citizen is little larger than a double bed, the flat was spacious. A living room. A kitchen. A bathroom. Two bedrooms. Too large for one. One … the space, oceans of loneliness. Leaving him with a constant sense of drowning. There was a photograph placed face down on the shelf beside the bed. The Senior Investigator picked it up. His arms encircling a woman. Small, so delicate. Protecting her as if she might break. Pretty? No, pretty was not the word that would come to mind. An edge, a coldness to her face that would banish such a word. But she was beautiful. Beautiful in the same sort of fashion that a cityscape can be said to be beautiful. An almond shaped face set in a frame of shining ebony hair, slightly tilted away from his embrace. Lips of a painted porcelain doll, almost too perfect to expect to kiss. And eyes that took no prisoners. Black, just black … their mid-tones sent running. Strange that he felt no anger. No bitterness. He still loved her. It was the worst and mos
t useless dregs to be left with. He placed the photograph back onto the shelf, face down, and began to make his phone calls. It was Saturday. Everything came with a hefty price attached to it. Eventually tracking down Chief Liping’s private secretary. A woman of few words. Lemon sucking lips. Guarded thoughts. And with breasts as cold, as comforting as anvils. Chief Liping was out of the city, she would attempt to contact him, although it might take some time.
Don’t hurry yourself you bitch … it’s only eight citizens that have been fucking slaughtered in the People’s Republic.
She would call the Senior Investigator back. He walked into the kitchen, pulling a Tsingtao from the refrigerator. The beer, warm to the touch. As warm as tears. How was it that the Shanghai Xin Zhong Hua Machinery Factory could build one hundred and forty foot high Long March rockets that flipped satellites into orbit around the Earth, and yet also build refrigerators that failed miserably when attempting to chill a bottle of beer? The lager bit at the back of his throat. As smooth as razors. It was good. It would have been even better chilled. The beer beckoned tiredness. A wave of exhaustion that would not be denied. Sleep claiming him within minutes. The Tsingtao bottle falling from his grasp and onto the carpet, the remainder of golden lager forming a small puddle that slowly seeped away.
*
The telephone rang. He had slept for two and a half hours, seeming like two and a half minutes. He swivelled off the bed to answer it, instantly awake. Standing on the beer-soaked carpet.
“Shit. Shit.”
Kicking at the spent bottle, sending it spinning into the hallway. Pulling off his sock. Dropping the telephone.
“Senior Investigator Piao, Comrade Officer Chief Liping has re-arranged his schedule and will see you in three hours time. A car will be with you in fifteen minutes.”
The line went dead. Piao dried his foot with the bed sheet.
“And a nice fucking day to you too …” he said.
Chapter 4
She was a shaker, a mover … not used to shitted-up bureaucratic machinery. Rarely, and only rarely, did she come across it in the vast swathe of responsibility that seemed to sit so easily upon her narrow shoulders. When she did come across it, she squirted her own unique brand of freeing oil into the situation. Sometimes laced with the charisma and easy long legged sex appeal that came so naturally to her. Other times, veined with the unstoppable energy and destructive power of a whirlwind.
Dealing with the Chinese Embassy, updating visas and requesting internal travel permits, simple issues … had proved to be a harrowing experience for her. She was powerless. Her last words at the end of her final fruitless assault upon the Chinese Embassy had been simple and to the point. Instead of the ‘… and fuck you too …’ that some of her colleagues might have used, she had simply said … ‘peace with honour and not peace with surrender.’ Feeling quite confident in using Nixon’s famous words of October ‘72. If a President could use them to heave America out of a war in which their butts had been kicked from Saigon to Yonkers, surely she needed no justification in using them to step out of a personal bureaucratic fire fight with some Chinese official who had more regulations in his head than brain cells. She rested her case, but still minus the visas and permits.
*
“Don’t go …”
“I have to.”
“… put it off until the meeting in Beijing. The fuss about Bobby can wait. You know what he’s like, it’s probably nothing.”
Barbara leant across his desk. So close. Her choice of perfume, immaculate. Carmichael would be dizzy with it. His favourite … Opium. And his eyes behind the oversize Yves St Laurent frames, they would be looking down the cream silk vee of her blouse at her tits. It would be a morning of pleasant sensations for him … even if his sexuality was as unpredictable as the Nasdaq.
“I have to go. Till now I’ve always put meetings, primaries, lecture tours, elections first. But this time I can’t wait …”
She leaned even further forward. Her cheek almost bruising his. A whisper.
“… this time I can’t let him wait.”
“But the groundwork for the next round of the Beijing negotiations, they’re critical. The concessions that you want us to make, they’ve only just been approved. And what about the UN position? There will have to be some tough talking and private arrangements made.”
Political words. Diplomatic words. Words for reports. Perfumed, preened words.
The reality. Tough talking … threats, pressure, intimidation, blackmail.
The reality. Private arrangements … bribes, backhanders, hookers, holidays, cars.
She pulled away, smiling that smile.
“And who better when it comes to tough talking, and even better when it comes to private arrangements, than you.”
“Uh-uh … no way. No way.”
Hearing them so often over the years, Carmichael’s ‘noes’. But hearing them now for what they really were … not so much ‘no’, as, ‘so what do I get out of it?’ Raising her hand, pale and crimson tipped. Always reminding him of Five Little Fishes.
“Whoa. Whoa. I’ll owe you big. Very big. Do the groundwork and fixing of the concessions for the next round of talks, plus, cover my arse for me while I’m away, and we’ll talk about it.”
He removed his glasses, cleaning them. Delicately. Precisely. Eyes, a third of the size that they seemed to be when he was actually wearing the thick lenses. Tiny eyes. She had often wondered how he managed to see anything with such tiny eyes.
“You’ll owe me?”
“And you’ll have to fix my travel plans and documentation for Beijing. Their Embassy is giving me a really lousy time …”
“You’ll owe me big?”
“… keep it at a really low level. Call it just a personal trip. Play it down. Preferably, don’t play it at all …”
“And we’ll talk about it?”
“… certainly will, especially if you can get me that shopping list of concessions that have been approved by the Whitehouse.”
Carmichael replaced his glasses. Eyes instantly expanding by two thirds, his gaze averted from hers.
“You realise that this could all be connected, don’t you? The talks. Bobby disappearing …”
She picked up her attaché case, ignoring his words. Forcing her attentions beyond the glazed confines of the office to the concrete and glass horizon melting to apricot.
“… connected. Linked. How can you separate them? If the worst came to the worst, how could you ever separate them? Being a government official. Being a mother …”
The horizon, glinting like smashed safety glass.
“When it comes to it, if it comes to it, I’ll know how to do the right thing …” she replied through cigarette smoke.
“… I’ll always do the right thing …”
She stubbed the butt out in the heavy glass ashtray. A single band of smoke rising, unbroken, like a sword blade across her face.
“… now just do the shopping and leave the balance between politics and motherhood to me.”
Carmichael adjusted his spectacles, his mouth as tight as a crack.
“Consider your shopping done, Barbara.”
He was already dialling an out of state number as she moved to the door. A New York code … a contact at the UN. His next call would be to the People’s Republic’s Embassy for a visa and internal travel documents. The call after that, to fix her flight. He was efficient. She had better start packing her case. She left his office, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol … calling her. None of which would have interested Carmichael; he was only a perrier on the rocks and waldorf salad sort of a guy. Hitting the interstate running, in a full flowing growl of confined and velour caged road rage. Tapping the steering wheel to an anonymous rhythm … its Morse posing her questions that she didn’t want asked and couldn’t answer. Didn’t want to answer.
… I’ll always do the right thing …
The right thing … but for whom?
*
&
nbsp; Within two days she would be in the People’s Republic of China. A visa … a bleeding red-inked sore at the very heart of her passport. On an unofficial visit. A personal visit. The most personal of visits to the only goddamn thing in her life that lay distanced, untouched by slur and backroom dealings. Untainted by the wash from fast-track political careers and dirt-digging. Family. Blood. Her son … Bobby. It was all that she had that was truly hers. Only recently understanding how her own needs and career had robbed Bobby of her for so long. How he had always been secondary to her driving ambition. Second, always coming second. A long way from home, but now he was first. Her son Bobby had her all to himself. At last, she was doing the right thing.
Chapter 5
HONGQIAO AIRPORT, SHANGHAI.
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.
She was surprised, expecting her first nibbles of China to be flavoured with rows of ordered queues and a sea of faded bluey-grey Mao jackets. She was wrong. Hongqiao Airport had the liveliness, the chaotic bustle of Kennedy on a snow-bound Saturday. The terminal throwing wave after wave of faces at her … all seeming to have been peeled from the same mould. Tight-eyed. High cheekboned. She suddenly felt very tall. Very blonde. Very female. Struggling with her cases. Tugging at her too short skirt to lower it. Buttoning her blouse higher. Aware of her legs. Her hair. Her breasts. Her skin. Reminding herself of Marilyn in … ‘Some Like It Hot.’ Lazy glances. Studied stares. Without exception, every eye examining her. In D.C, New York, Dallas … she relished it. But here she felt as if every eye was a pin, and she the pincushion. She moved out of the terminal. A row of taxis jockeying for position in the periphery of her vision. Fat, angry meat-flies staking their portion of the action. She joined the queue, ushered to the front of it by a flurry of flapping hands. The air heavy with the smell of aviation fuel, old people, and rain about to fall. Stuttering into the taxi, manhandling the cases in front of her.
Damn it, I’ve brought too much. I always bring too much.
Skirt riding high above her knees. Lines of eyes with permanent questions riveted to their irises, following her every move as if she were a new and exotic spectator sport. “The Jing Jiang Hotel please.”