Dragon's Eye

by Andy Oakes

  ‘Stupid … stupid.’

  She walked, hands clasped together in a tight cage; knuckles white, shaking her head. Sichuanlu wrapped itself around her, assaulting every single sense. All of life strewn out to view. A garbage of cooking, arguing, selling, shouting. A vast and constantly changing mosaic of darting children, urinating dogs, tight knots of women, and streams of concerned-eyed men. … and through the middle of Sichuanlu the constant roar of a metal river of traffic in a full flood of diesel fumes and cracked windscreens. It was a madhouse. She raised a hand and a taxi veered towards her in a salvo of horn blasts. But with a jolt, she was being propelled away from the kerb, across the sidewalk and toward an alley. A hand, huge, hard, across her mouth … silencing her terror. Large arms around her, making her think of bear paws … almost lifting her under her armpits and thrusting her forward through the crowd. Her arms hanging limp. A wash of faces accelerating past her, none of them lifting up their eyes to hers. The sunlight was gone and suddenly it felt very cold. At the far end of the alley a car clung firmly to the shadow. A limpet of steel, bald tyres, peeling chrome. The door opened and she was levered in. An odour of cheap cigarettes, sweaty groins, filling her nostrils. Danger and bad news, both have a smell … this was it. She clawed for a door handle; her hand parried and then held. Then the words that she knew that she would have to come face to face with. The moment that she heard them, knowing them to be true.

  “Your son’s dead.”

  The cars engine gargled into life, the driver turning around to face her. Blue eyes set into a soft mask of diluted Chinese.

  “I’m sorry,’ Piao said. But the words were lost to her as they pulled out of the alley and into Sichuanlu, the tide of hot metal taking them to its heart.

  *

  Chinese women are liberated, but unequal. China is a man’s world. Look to the fields. A wife is no longer a neirer, an ‘inside person’ … as represented in the ideogram for peace and harmony, a woman sitting under a roof. Women are outside, in the world. They plant beans. Harvest rice. Feed the animals. Cut the corn. They are outside, in the world. But they do not drive the tractors. On CAAC, women will be your air stewardesses; but almost all of the passengers will be men. In restaurants you will be waited on by women; but it will be men who will be eating the dishes of pork and mustard greens. In hospitals, it will be women who will bandage your hand; but men who will direct them how and where to apply that bandage.

  No longer the broken arch and curled toes of the ‘Lilly Foot’ … “Obey heaven and follow fate.” But for women, who Mao had drawn to his side by putting words to the promise that they, “held up half the sky” … a disregard, a using.

  As a baby girl you will be told that you are “a thousand ounces of gold” … but that a baby boy is “ten thousand ounces of gold.” As a teenage daughter who will eventually be given away in marriage, no longer of any economic benefit to her family, you will be told that you are as “spilled water.” As a bride you will go to your marital bed knowing that, “… if a woman marries a chicken, she should act as a chicken; if she marries a dog, she should act like a dog.”

  For women in China, it is the existence of the invisible touch, the silenced word, the lowered eyes, the tiptoed presence. It is an equality that never reaches gao-chao … the ‘high tide’ mark.

  *

  He could see her reflection in the rear-view mirror. Her temple brushing the side window … hair flashing corn yellow. When Chinese women cried it was as if the world would crack, but this woman cried silently. As if each tear had a hefty price attached to it.

  Piao knew of no way of handling death other than laying it wide open to view. You vomited it out, as you would overhung duck or sweetly putrid pork. For your own health, you vomited it out.

  There was no detail that he left out. She deserved at least that, and so did the spilt life of her child. From beneath the driver’s seat he handed her the heavy brown envelope with the pin-sharp, full frame monochrome prints. Watching her in the rear-view mirror as she studied each ten by eight inch print through the melt of tears. The prints of torn, wasted, discarded flesh. She said only one word …

  “Bobby.”

  That was enough.

  *

  The lobby of the Jing Jiang Hotel was full of stripe shirted, check trousered Americans. Round, grizzly shouldered men slung with exotic black cameras, and craggy thin lipped women whose hair never moved, and whose mouths never stopped moving. Piao and Yaobang brushed past them as they followed Barbara to the elevator. Their smell was of syrup sweet candy and dust, of opulent pensions and prescription drugs. Piao crumpled the packet and pocketed it. It was his last Panda brand. Tomorrow would be a bad day, it would be back to the local shit.

  “A Senior Investigator in the Homicide Squad, is that good? Are you good?”

  They were the first words that she had spoken in thirty minutes. Eyes now dry, but washed out … almost white. Like cold and distant stars that had been plucked from Orion’s Belt. Piao exhaled.

  “Good?”

  Smoke curling from his nostrils.

  “I suppose that it depends on what good means to you. Good in Washington might be shit in Beijing. Shit in Beijing might be acceptable here in Shanghai.”

  “Are you good?”

  Steel in her voice. Her eyes darkening now to the hue of granite The elevator door jerked open.

  “I’m the best you’re going to get.”

  She walked into the corridor, Piao’s eyes following her legs.

  *

  Room 201 was warm, but felt cold, as if sheltering under the wing of some vast and unexplained beast. Barbara sat on the bed, legs folded under her like a graceful gazelle. Head lowered. Hair forming a golden curtain to her eyes, her thoughts. Yaobang stood at the window picking his nose, picking his teeth, scratching his arse. At the desk, Piao read the report on Bobby and the dead son’s letters and cards to his mother. It took forty-five minutes. Two thousand seven hundred seconds without a cigarette. Occasionally he walked to the window, shoulder to shoulder with the Big Man … postcard in hand, lifting his eyes to where cityscape met sky. The sun high, a yellow drawing pin holding up a sheet of colourless sky. When the Senior Investigator closed the report, Barbara raised her head.

  “What do you think?”

  Piao winced. He hated having to give an instant appraisal. He was a homicide detective. Builders gave instant appraisals, so did tailors. But detectives … their words had to be measured in thousandths, and snipped from heavy gauge steel plate.

  “I think that your son had an enemy with a long shadow and a secret that fell under it. To make someone disappear in this country is not difficult, but to erase a life, to rub out its path as if it never existed, that is another thing. To do that, to influence the Luxingshe, the PSB, the Internal Security Services … now that is another thing. You have to be highly placed, powerful.”

  Piao was on his feet, pacing. The implications of his own words driving him towards the bed.

  “You’re saying that there is a conspiracy … you’re saying that I’ve been screwed since I stepped off the plane, lied to?”

  Yes, you’ve been screwed. When does the screwing ever stop. Whoever assigned Yun to you, with his pretty speech, knew what they were doing. Brush it under the matting. A detective who couldn’t find his dick in his own pants … in a fen-chu that couldn’t arrest a dog on heat. Yes, this is screwing … high cadre screwing.

  Piao nodded. Turning. Moving once more toward the window. Aware that this was a woman who intended to skin the whole snake and not give a shit about the gore left on the kitchen floor. The Senior Investigator felt a headache inching behind his eyes. Enough. This had to be where the screwing stopped. Resting his hand on the window frame, he felt a rash of paint drips hunched under its lip. Sloppy workmanship … he hated sloppy workmanship. Piao pushed a fingernail into one of the plump tears, removing it, leaving a soft edged crescent moon … his nail bleeding sticky white. Fresh paint.

&
nbsp; “Yaobang.”

  The Big Man followed Piao to the door and out into the corridor. A room boy was several doors away. The Senior Investigator nodded in his direction and Yaobang fetched him by the elbow, stifling his complaints with the glimpse of a red and gold badge. Yaobang pulled the long chain of keys from his pocket and nudged the room boy to indicate which ones were to be used for the room doors either side of room 201. With walnut knuckles, the Big Man gently tapped on each door before opening them. The taps were not answered. The rooms empty. Piao spending no more than thirty seconds in each room before leaving, gently closing the doors and retracing his steps back to room 201.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  She moved from the bed. Something in her walk that reminded Piao of the sway of a reed bank. He was no expert … it had been years since he had seen a reed bank. Eighteen months since he had even looked at another woman.

  “I needed to be sure that this room, your son’s room, is the only room that has recently been redecorated.”

  “And?”

  He walked past her toward the bathroom. She followed him straightening her skirt, turning to face him.

  “And?”

  Again she wanted words that he could not measure, did not have time to carve from stone. It left him uncomfortable, almost fighting for breath.

  “I am sure. They have done a thorough job. We will see how thorough.”

  Piao started to pull the side panel of the bath adrift. Yaobang got to his knees to help him, panting … a sweat already pushing its way onto his forehead.

  “It’s almost impossible to remove every detail of evidence …”

  The side panel was off, the Senior Investigator starting to dismantle the piping around the large U-bend.

  “… evidence gets everywhere. Where people have spent time, something always remains …”

  A pipe, rusting steel, flaking paint … fell heavily to the floor. A brief sound of water. A vicious stink of sewers.

  “… people, slugs, they are no different. Both leave a trail of slime wherever they go …”

  Piao carried the pipe to the hand basin as Yaobang straightened, grumbling.

  “… check out the other room.”

  The Big Man nodded, his large hands massaging the base of his spine as he limped from the bathroom. The Senior Investigator rolled up his sleeves and flushed the U-bend out violently with a stream of cold water. A fat slug nosed from the other end of the pipe. Congealed hair, spent matches, nail clippings, cigarette butts. He eased the mass from the pipe with his fingers, fully exposing it. The stench filled the room. Bile rising in Barbara’s throat, her hands automatically seeking her mouth … clamped across it in a grill of white knuckles and pink blush nail paint. But the fascination of what Piao was involved in, holding the sickness at arm’s-length.

  With a pen in each hand he slowly dissected the mass. Teasing it from itself. Exposing its fibrous innards and soft underbelly.

  “Jesus,” he heard Barbara breathe across his shoulder. A thick stratum of long blond hair amongst the black, being teased away and apart. A rich vein of Bobby’s hair, all American golden candy yellow … encased in a mesh, a confusion of oriental ebony black. Piao placed some of the hair in a small polythene bag and sealed it. With tweezers he removed other objects from the hair-ball’s guts and dropped them into another bag.

  “Something always remains,” he breathed.

  He turned and walked into the bedroom to be greeted by Yaobang’s arse squirming from underneath the bed. If arse ever became as expensive as pork, the Big Man would be sitting on a fortune.

  “Anything?”

  Yaobang sat like a Buddha, brushing the fluff from his jacket, the buttons of his flies straining at their buttonholes.

  “One condom, used. Three cockroaches, dead. At least a hundred cigarette butts, but fuck all listening devices. The Sixth Bureau wasn’t interested in this wai-guo-ren, Boss. There’s no signs they’ve ever given this room the treatment. The cleaners weren’t too interested in this room either.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “As sure as my stomach’s telling me it’s lunchtime.”

  You couldn’t get more sure than that. Piao returned to the window. The city was moving. Slow trickles of reflected glass semaphoring in and out of shadow. Once more he searched for Huangpu Park … the embarkation point for river trips, knowing that he would be unable to see it from room 201. Again Piao read two of Bobby’s postcards. Confirming. There was no doubt. You must recognise the sun for what it is when it shines.

  The view written about could not have been glimpsed through 201’s windows. The view written about could not have been seen from the Jing Jiang Hotel. When Bobby Hayes had written these two cards he had been sitting in another room in another part of the city … with another view filling the window. Another view filling his eyes.

  *

  Warm fingers stroking through cold water.

  Piao could not see her eyes but knew that she was crying. A lock of Bobby’s hair held in her fingers, dancing to the flow of the running water.

  “Do you have children?”

  He could only just hear her above the cascade of the water.

  “No. I had a wife, but no children.”

  She turned slightly. A tear on her cheek, followed by another.

  “Don’t. Losing them is too painful to bear. Better not to have had them.”

  “But all the memories you have …”

  Barbara turned the tap off, facing him. Drying her hands and folding the wisp of hair into a handkerchief. The depth of the silence like a knife held to Piao’s throat.

  “Memories …”

  Piao thought that he’d never heard a word, any word, said so sadly.

  “Sorry,” he said, leading her from the bathroom, her hand as cold as frost.

  *

  The hotel restaurant was closed, but the red and gold on Piao’s badge got them in; Barbara’s dollars bought them coffee … bitter and lukewarm.

  “Did you know your son?”

  Barbara lit a cigarette. She was so close that he could taste the smoke, leather and honey. He would have given a middle finger for just one American cigarette.

  “I think so, well …”

  She pulled at its long filter as if it were a lifeline. It’s tip firing to the hue of a ripe tangerine.

  ‘… I know that he always hated wearing diapers … used to pull them off every time. I know that he had an allergy to peanuts when he was six. Put him in hospital twice. When he was eight his dad left. I know that he took it bad, but has never talked about it. I know that from ten years old, when he found a Cherokee arrowhead in his grandpa’s backyard, that he wanted to be an archaeologist …”

  Her lips melted around the cigarette butt. Soft, calm rivers, encircling, embracing a stone island.

  “You know your son as a baby, a boy, perhaps even as a teenager, if you’re lucky. But as a man, who knows men?”

  Smoke across her mouth. Smoke across her eyes.

  “Men tell women nothing of importance. Sons tell mothers only the things that they want them to know. Does your mother know when you are visiting the hospital to have the dressings on your fingers changed? Does your mother even know that you were injured?”

  The Senior Investigator’s hands found his trouser pockets.

  “See what I mean?”

  He buried his hands deeper. Point taken.

  “The telephone calls that you shared, did he ever mention a girl, even once?”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “No, never …”

  “You are sure?”

  “… mmm, positive. He never mentioned a girl.”

  Piao’s gaze wandered, an elusive shadow of a thought passing through his mind. Although the Jing Jiang was Shanghai’s most prestigious hotel, it looked dusty, jaded. A favourite aunt who was slowly fading away in a shrug of washed out red velvet and threadbare salmon and yellow patterned carpet. He watched a group of tou
rists pass the double doors, faces glowing from showers that were too hot, too fierce. Not a single crease on tee shirts or slacks. It would have cost him three months’ salary to afford just one night of luxury at the Jing Jiang. He looked away.

  “You know something. What is it that you’re not telling me, Senior Investigator?”

  He already had the small polythene bag in his hand, its contents falling onto the page of his notebook. Six crescent moon nails bleeding with bright red nail varnish. And with it … the smell of that night on the foreshore, upon him. And the mud … its heavy black veil slipping aside to reveal the albino toes with their red painted toenails. Like overripe cherries.

  “The girl that your son never mentioned.”

  Piao poked the red varnished nail clippings with his pen.

  “A prostitute?”

  The Senior Investigator wondered why a mother should automatically think that the girl who had shared her son’s bath should be a yeh-ji. Perhaps the red of the nail varnish was a little too red? The coating of the varnish a little too thick? Perhaps she thought that only prostitutes trimmed their nails in the bath?

  “No, not a prostitute. Wild pheasants are too busy to spend their time manicuring their nails while they are at work. Yeh-ji are either on their back or in the back of a taxi heading for a tourist hotel to spend more time on their backs. Time is money. Money is fucking.”

  She didn’t blush. Piao felt cheated. Barbara could see the logic. Her hands found her pocket, locating the lock of Bobby’s hair; weaving it between her fingers. Secrets upon secrets. The onion skins peeling away.

  “No, this was a girl relaxed, at home. This was not casual. This was playing at mummies and daddies. This was playing house …”

  The hair intertwined between her fingers felt like razor wire.

  “… there was a girl amongst the eight pulled from the Huangpu. Pretty. Her toenails were painted red. The same colour of red. I remember them, they reminded me of sweet cherries. It has been a long time since I have eaten cherries.”