Dragon's Eye

by Andy Oakes

  *

  Piao had never ridden in a Red Flag before. He was not a high ranking cadre or an official. Neither was he chicken or dog material. He could not have clucked or barked for some official even if his life had depended upon it.

  Polished rosewood, heavily stitched creaking antique leather, contoured jump-seats, a fine lace antimacassar draped over the back of the rear seat, heavy brown curtains drawn across the rear windows. As a child, as every child, he had dreamt of being cocooned inside the moody, expansive coffin interior of a Red Flag. Less enthralled with the idea as he got older, seeing the blunt nosed missile of the Mercedes – Cadillac mix blood for what it truly was; a mongrel that could call its own tune, carving its unique path through the city. Cars, bicycles, blocking its path, being shunted aside, out of its way. Red lights ignored, flaunted. The Red Flag excluded by special right, from the need to have to brake suddenly … in case the high ranking cadre in the back seat should be jolted or injured; even at the cost of maiming or possibly killing a pedestrian.

  As an adult, Piao’s tempestuous love affair with the Red Flag was over. Now, without even needing to concentrate, he could still see the star white face of his wife, the rear curtain slowly falling across it as the Red Flag pulled her further and further away. The traffic melting, dividing to let it speed ahead … robbing him of her. Her final glance back as an arm encircled her shoulder. A heavily gold-ringed hand bloomed with lines, teasing her face away from his gaze. … eyes looking forward now, towards Beijing and the cold bed of an old man. Without even needing to concentrate, Piao could still feel the rain licking at his face; could still taste the tears, salty and tainted by diesel exhaust.

  The Senior Investigator drew back the curtains as they slid onto Huaihai Lu, brushing aside a red light and waved on by a policeman. The sun falling through the glass in a slow motion arc of amber, catching him full on the side of his face, its breath as warm as a satisfied lover. The ride was perfect. Silent, smooth … perfect. Perhaps he could learn to cluck or bark, he thought, teasing himself. Absentmindedly his hand ran over the leather of the seat … its softness, its smoothness. He remembered her thighs; the milk valley of the inside of her legs.

  “It’s your first time in a Red Flag, isn’t it, Senior Investigator?”

  Piao needed a chirpy, talkative driver, as much as he needed a toothache.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Ah well, there you have it … you see I am a sort of Senior Investigator in my own right. Don’t let this stupid chauffeur’s uniform fool you. It’s the person inside, I always say. The person inside. See, the first thing that anyone ever riding in a Red Flag does, is to draw back the curtains … so that they can be seen I expect. What’s the point in riding in a Red Flag if nobody can see that it is you who is riding in it. Follow my logic?”

  Like one of those toy dogs that you place on the rear shelf of your car, Piao felt himself nodding stupidly.

  “But the real give-away is the leather. First time riders, they always stroke the leather of the seat. You’d think that it was a plump girl’s thigh the way that they stroke it. As I said, a real give-away, if ever there was one …”

  Piao slowly removed his hand from the leather of the seat.

  “… now this is what you call a car, it leaves the Zil streets behind. The Russians are fair enough engineers, but a car is more than that, isn’t it? It’s about style, lines, use of materials. Have you run your fingers over the wood yet? First timers always do that as well. As soft as your wife’s cheek. Another give-away. Go on try it. The best available timber in China.”

  Piao felt obliged, he ran his fingers over the heavily varnished gold grain. It was as smooth as plastic. The driver beamed.

  “Whose Red Flag is this?” Piao casually asked. The drivers eyes narrowed, his gaze moving from the rear-view mirror and onto the traffic scattering on the road ahead, the smile emptying from his features as if someone had pulled a plug. In its place, the passive stock face of the party chauffeur, with an answer to match.

  “The limousine is the property of the State. This one is from the pool allocated to the Danwei of the Public Security Ministry.”

  Piao laughed in mock humour, his eyes not releasing their focus of the rear-view mirror.

  “Very diplomatic, comrade. Your answer is well practised. I can see that you are a real nei-hang. It takes an expert of words to drive these high cadre around. I think that you are the one who should be sitting here in the back stroking the plump girl’s thighs.”

  The driver’s eyes cracked with laughter.

  “Never were truer words spoken, my friend. In my job you can’t take a piss without wrapping it up in a box of tissue with a bow on the top. I can tell that you know how it is?”

  “Yes, I know how it is, comrade …” Piao confided, moving slightly forward on his seat in empathy.

  “… my whole life, like yours, has been spent in making words look pretty. So, come on, tell me, who owns the car? It’s not classified.”

  “In this country my friend, you never know what is nei-bu. They stamp classified on everything that moves and on many things that stopped moving years ago. They even say that some weather forecasts are now classified information.”

  “It’s true comrade, it’s true …” Piao confirmed with a shake of his head.

  “… maybe the Party is worried about us poor peasants finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and realising that they got to it and spent it years ago.”

  The driver laughed in unison with his hand pumping at the horn, sending a flock of Forever bicycles sprinting into the dusty gutters with whirling mercury spokes, angry eyes and hands frantically wrestling handlebars.

  “Yes, you’re right. You’re right. They want it all for themselves. Red Flags, even the fucking weather …”

  He thought for a few seconds before continuing. His foot now hard down, racing for a break in the traffic as they intersected Zhongshanx Lu.

  “… ah screw them, it’s the people that really own these cars anyway, so why shouldn’t we all know who it is that take their wives shopping in them, and whose kids it is that piss on the back seat? This Red Flag is on permanent loan to your boss, Liping. Normally he wouldn’t get his arse on the jump-seat of a Red Flag … not high enough up the ladder. No, it’s his cousin’s limousine, the Minister of Public Security himself … Kang Zhu.”

  Piao guessed as much, but the blunt nosed tones of Zhu’s name still knocked him back against the leather of the seat. Trying to look calm, outwardly calm, the way that you do … but inside his head the cinema had already kicked into life. The images, black and white, parading in soft, slow flickers. Her face … smaller, smaller. The limousine, a shadow jigsaw of street reflections, slipping into the night from which it had been delivered. An arm around her shoulder, as if she had always been his, never Piao’s … always his. And just before the Red Flag was lost to him, the rear window curtain swept aside. A face of chiselled lines sculpted into a smile. Hair slicked and swept back into a tight fitting cap. Ebony keyhole eyes. Kang Zhu … the Minister Kang Zhu. The curtain falling back into place. The Red Flag becoming at one with the ink of night.

  Piao spoke, but only a fractured croak came out. Seeing a reflection of himself in the window opposite. His face frozen into the smile of the imbecile emerging from the institution. … standing on the top steps, not knowing what comes next. So white … so fat, Kang. Only the high cadre can look like that, gorged on milk and meat. So white … so fucking fat.

  “Nemma bai … nemma pang.”

  The driver half glanced over the red and gold of his epaulette, hooked by the words that had squeezed from Piao’s fixed lips.

  “You are acquainted with our Minister Zhu?”

  He asked, a frown of worry eating its way across his forehead.

  “I know him …”

  Piao stared out of the window, it had started to rain, fast slanting spears of rain; the vista melting into identically changing worlds
, all trapped within their own droplets.

  “… you don’t need to worry. The Minister and I have what you might call ‘a passing acquaintance’. I stand on the kerb with the rain pissing down and he passes by in his Red Flag with my fucking wife …”

  The driver glanced around again, his mouth filled with a question. Piao chained it in place with a raise of a hand.

  “… don’t ask. It’s a very long story and it’s classified …”

  There was a slab of silence punctuated only by the wake of ripped air as they passed an old Shanghai Sedan slouching into the rain like a 1950’s Packard, before the driver spoke once more.

  “So, I don’t suppose that a Senior Investigator with the PSB like you knows much about the Red Flag limousine?”

  The driver squeezed his foot on the accelerator. Eyes fixed ahead. His mouth, a knitted scar. He said nothing more until they had arrived; until Piao had left the limousine. It was only one word when he did finally speak. …

  “Bastard,” was all that he said.

  *

  The zhau-dai-suo, the dacha guesthouse of Chief Liping, sat in a compound a flip of a stone from Lake Taihu. Only a slipknot of fishing boats to the south, the vast fertile plains beyond running to the horizon in a glide of easy greens and pinching yellows, fretting its surface.

  Piao stood for a while smoothing down his uniform and watching the young women giggle and splash each other as they bobbed and floated in tar barrels harvesting the water chestnuts. There was no other sound. Above them, the lands of the north-west crumpled into hills. Soft, plump knots … a warm, generous land. Only when the dark darting eyes turned in the Senior Investigator’s direction … the giggling into friendly taunting words, did he leave.

  “Come give us blue-eyed babies, Comrade Policeman.”

  *

  There was no number, no name to indicate that the residence was Chief Liping’s. The zhau-dai-suo had none. Neither did it have an address. No telephone number was officially allocated to it. The road that it stood back from was nameless. That area of Lake Taihu, unchristened. It appearing on no maps. Piao pushed the buzzer. He’d seen it all before. It was the same in Beidaihe, Huang Shan, West Lake. … in all the country’s favourite resorts, where the dachas of the high cadre had sprung up like desert blooms. In a country of deep secrets, the zhau-dai-suo were whispers; a te-quan, a ‘special privilege’ that the high cadre care to afford themselves, that are protected with an unparalleled jealousy. Those of the high cadre who use the dachas, never speak of them, except to those who share the same inner circles of power and influence. To mention of such privilege is severely frowned upon. It is seen as. … White eyebrows over red eyes. A mistake. A glaring and very big mistake.

  *

  “Yes?”

  “Senior Investigator Sun Piao to see Comrade Officer Liping.”

  Silence … and then an angry buzz of a lock automatically snapping free. Piao pushed the gate and walked down the long gravel drive. The architecture of the residence was brash western and seemed to shout out that it wanted to be seen, but the thick verdant gardens around it and the high security walls spoke in whispers … of lives lived apart and different. They also spoke of money. Other people’s money. It all gave oxygen to the current saying about the high cadre, the saying that was tucked under the tongue of every other Chinese …

  Our minds are on the left, but our pockets are on the right.

  The elderly a-yi, who probably had a higher security clearance than he did, led Piao at a shuffle rather than a walk, through a long moody hallway … her mouth prised open by breathlessness. In a country where wood was in such short supply, the rich timber panelled walls were a rarity; the Senior Investigator allowing his fingers to trail against the lacquered, imprisoned grain. They arrived in a bright, large space of sun drenched apricot, the garden spilling in through huge open windows whose fine cream silk curtains gently undulated in the breeze. At the far end of the room French windows were expectantly ajar, alive with a constantly shifting lattice of shadow … all set against a lawn whose greenness made Piao want to shade his eyes. This was a woman’s room. Marshmallow soft modern furniture, sugar-ice coving, delicate objets d’art, paintings of blushed pale strokes. None of it Liping. Even the light that filled the room seemed to be female. He could feel its perfumed fall against the stubble of his chin. He looked across his shoulder, the a-yi had slipped away. When his gaze returned to the French windows, the shadows had stilled and the space was now dominated by Chief Liping.

  He stood in a finely cut black Mao suit, his hands by his sides and stained rich tea leaf brown with soil … some of it falling from his fingers onto the cream carpet. For a Chinese he was tall, powerful. A harshness, a callousness about the bulk of Liping’s body. An unforgiving, unrelenting nonchalance of posture that dominated a room. The way that the Comrade Officer seemed to be thrust forward, as if guarding the very edge of an abyss. His bony head under the close cropped bristle of hair. And the eyes that rested under their hoods of taut flesh; fixed in a permanent questioning look.

  “Piao, so. … circumstances as unsavoury as ever. A trait of the profession.”

  A question, a statement? The Senior Investigator feeling his lips dry instantly.

  “My initial report, Comrade Officer Liping. I regret it is hand written. Time has not allowed for a more formal report to be drafted.”

  The Chief took the papers and seated himself on a sofa. The loosely caked earth on his hands falling across them, onto the pale cushions. He was oblivious to the beauty of the room … the dirt falling from his fingers. The elderly a-yi on her hands and knees would have to clean it up; Piao felt a pulse kick into life in the corner of his mouth. He stood, not knowing what to do with his hands, as Liping read. The report, although consisting mainly of fluff and cotton wool, should satisfy the Chief. Liping loved paper. Put a report in his hand, no matter what crap might drip from its lines, and Liping was like a junk on the Yangtze, ‘all sails set.’

  “Stupid, stupid Senior Investigator …”

  Liping’s hands were crumpling the report into a tight ball as he spoke. He tossed it onto the floor, more soil being scattered. It arrived at Piao’s feet, caught in a crossfire of shadows.

  “… you have a reputation, Investigator. You produce results. You are given the department’s most difficult, most sensitive cases. And still you get results. But this. …”

  Liping’ s head shook. Bubbles of spittle on his meaty lips.

  “… you should know better. No evidence. No facts. Yet you point with a finger that does not waver. You point at the Security Services. The Party. State killings. Stupid. …”

  “Not evidence as such, Comrade Officer Liping, but I do have the behaviour of Doctor Wu who refused to examine the bodies, and the comments that he made to me. And I have seen enough of Security’s methods in the past to recognise their work. And this was their work.”

  Liping brushed some dirt from his lap as he got to his feet. Piao had heard it said of the Chief … ‘that he had ink in his stomach. He was learned but had no courage.’ He now recognised that it was a comment that had been made by officers who did not have Chief Liping walking towards them.

  “I cannot stop you being stupid. I only warn you against it. You have nothing, not even the basis of an investigation yet. No forensics. No autopsies. No details on the victims, their assailants. No why. No how. But you put your job, your life, where it should not be: at the end of a gun barrel. Wu … the old man is as dead as his clients. He breathes on his reputation only. Forget his actions, his comments. He was put out at having to get his shoes muddy. The man is incompetent. He has gone too far. He will be dealt with …”

  Liping looked up from examining his huge muddied hands. Leaning across Piao’s shoulder.

  “… Piao, advice. Take it. Don’t build a case on Wu. Don’t build a case on anyone. Evidence, build it on that. Sculpt your words from steel, not bamboo. Steel, nothing less. It is good advice. My very life has be
en built upon its walls …”

  The Comrade Officer turned away.

  “… you will carry out a full, precise and organised investigation, Piao. More men will be assigned if necessary. I will personally arrange for the proper facilities to be made available for the bodies to be thoroughly examined. I want this case dealt with in a professional manner … no loose talk, no half truths. Facts, just facts. A string of bodies turning up and being left on the foreshore of the Huangpu is not acceptable. Autopsies in a meat processing warehouse, a student doctor poking about. Unacceptable. Our city is to be our window to the west. Opportunity, Senior Investigator, opportunity. Do not forget that. And never forget, that to commit words to paper in a report …”

  Liping looked down at the crumpled ball at Piao’s feet.

  “… is to be the fish that places its self upon the barbed hook.”

  The Comrade Officer turned, leaning forward. His lips uncomfortably close.

  “Cao-mu jie-bing. Cao-mu jie-bing.”

  The Senior Investigator knew the proverb that had been passed down from the late fourth century. Every school child did. It told of the rebel Fu Jian, who had raised an army of a million men to overthrow the State of Jin, which only had an army of eight thousand soldiers to defend it. But Fu Jian’s rebel army had fled in terror, mistaking the moving grass, the swaying trees, as advancing state reinforcements. The four character phrase had become a parable for paranoia, every Chinese knowing it, every Chinese fearing its wisdom … its truth.

  Cao-mu jie-bing … In the grass, the trees, everything seems

  a soldier.

  Liping moved towards the French windows and beyond, the garden. … his hands seeking the malleable quality of earth.

  “Daily reports Piao. You will not use the normal channels. I do not wish the regular procedures to be followed. Everything goes through me. I wish to lead this case from the front. If there are special, shall we say, implications to this investigation, I will deal with them. Not you.”