by Andy Oakes
Fruits that the Homicide Squad feeds off … an unusual phrase to describe such a harvest of tortured, dead bodies. Piao suddenly thought of overripe avocados. Halved and mashed melons. Squashed and pitted lychee.
“A warning. What, a day, a year, ten years?”
Rentang would get nothing from this conversation. He put a peppermint in his mouth. The taste of bile fading slowly from his tongue. Sitting at the workstation, an unbearable urge to rip off his tie, discard it and have a shower.
“So, you want me to give them back their faces. Is that all?”
“And run them through your new toy. I need to know who they are.”
“And who are they, Sun Piao … Politicals, non-conformists, dissidents? There’s no security involvement here, is there?”
The wizard’s eyebrows, a tight slipknot of concern.
“They’re just the fruits that the Homicide Squad feeds off. Can you do it?”
Rentang’s finger traced the outlines of the monochrome faces.
“See the angles of the jaws, the lack of definition, the misalignments … all would suggest severe damage to the skeletal structure. The mandible, body and ramus. Damage to the temporal bone also, as high as the zygomatic frontal process. On some, the noses seem completely unsupported due to crushing or splintering of the maxilla and nasal bone. Some of them have collapsed completely into an enlarged anterior nasal aperture. And damage to the frontal bones of the skulls is quite marked and severe, in some cases as deep as the lesser wing of the sphenoid, the superior orbital fissure and the optic canal. They did a good job on them; their skulls are jigsaw pieces. What was used?”
Through the smoke of a new cigarette … “A club hammer has been suggested.”
Piao remembering the colours in the mud. Hard, harsh in camera flash. Bone, so white. Gash and gouge, so black. The Senior Investigator drew deeply on the butt, forcing the memories away. Rentang turned. The smile on his face, a paper cut.
“You seem surprised at my knowledge of human anatomy, Sun Piao. It’s nice to rock a Senior Investigator back on his heels. I trained as a doctor for three years.”
“Why change, you sound as if you were a promising student?”
“You’re correct, Senior Investigator, I was a very promising student. But a doctor, I ask you, would I have made a doctor? No, no … it was once a ‘fat job’, but not now. But this …”
He stroked his fingers across the VDU screen. A paleness. A stark skeletal quality about them that reminded Piao of a river crab.
“… computers. Now this is a fat job. One of the fattest.”
The Senior Investigator leant forward.
“Remember, I know just how ‘fat’ your job is and how fat you have become in it …”
Closer, closer, the smell of bile on his breath as sweet as toffee apples and Guerlain on a warm summer’s evening.
“… don’t tell me about jigsaw pieces. Can you give them back their faces?”
“Their faces. Yes. I will have to brush up on my anatomy, and there is a professor in the Institute Medical School who has a reputation for rebuilding the fragments of skulls found in archaeological excavations. A strange way to spend your evenings, but it could be of use to us especially in the restoration of the structural damage …”
He must have seen the question in Piao’s eyes.
“… and of course I will be discreet. I know how to be very discreet …”
Rentang smiled, as reassuring as a snake draped around your neck.
“… I do a little freelance work for some of the other Security Bureaus, most of it to do with the preparation of cases against suspected dissidents. Some of it a little more political. Fat cadre jockeying for even fatter jobs. Mostly image manipulation, placing people next to other people in photographs, people who they had rather not be associated with. Putting them in places that they should not be. Putting them in, what should we say … indiscreet situations? Anything can be done to an image nowadays. It’s become rather a speciality of mine …”
Again, the smile.
“… I use a Macintosh PC with a world standard photo design software package. We could use the Layer Mask facility to anatomically reconstruct, to the professor’s instructions, the skull and facial bone damage … and then lay muscle and flesh across this without destroying the original image data. Plus it also has ninety-five special effects filters that I can use to sharpen, style, or remove blemishes from the image.”
“Meaning what?”
Piao almost spat the words … drowning in the sea of technobabble that seemed to be the common denominator among every computer expert that he had ever met.
“Meaning that you will get your faces Senior Investigator.”
The VDU faded grey. Pixels imploding to form a silver star at its heart.
“And what we will get will be realistic, accurate?”
“Yes. But of course we will never know the true colour of their eyes …”
Lazy figures of eight. Rentang’s index finger tracing around the monochrome, empty eye sockets.
“… you can’t have what you never had Sun Piao. And talking about having, what is it that I get out of all of this?”
The Senior Investigator was already making for the exit, the blind-eyed reflection of the monitors tracking his shortening frame.
“What you get is my amnesia. My continued amnesia.”
Rentang shouted …
“Investigator, you’re fucking with me. You’re cutting my legs off.”
His reply was only a whisper as he moved into the corridor, but Piao was sure that the wizard would hear it. He did.
“Every cripple finds his own way of walking.”
*
The car sat on wasteland behind the Nanjing Road, once the spilling rears, the working entrails of restaurants, tailors, bakers; now home to western named shops. Gucci … Pucci. Gold blocked letters growing from marble. Cool neon blues spilling onto pavements. Their backsides wiped clean and as pristine as their grey minimalist shop spaces. Garbage bins with names on. Loading bays whitewashed and swept clean.
*
A shaft of sunlight skewered the car against the far wall. A slither of sharp edged yellow-white slicing against dirty paintwork and across Barbara’s face. She brushed her hair, eyes lightly closed. The sun lazily warm. It could have been California, or Tampa offseason. She opened her eyes as Piao slammed the car door shut, still brushing her hair. But it was Shanghai.
“He’ll help, this computer whiz?”
Her hair was gold. Piao’s gaze returned to the road; a photograph being summoned up from his childhood. The only photograph that he had ever seen of his father. Such golden hair. His father. The stranger. The man who had screwed his mother.
“Golden hair,” he breathed, as a taxi sounded its horn and let him become a part of the swollen wave of traffic moving north up Xixanglu, past the Park of the People.
“Excuse me?”
Barbara’s face tilted gently towards him.
‘Golden hair … a little piece of heaven, a little piece of hell.’
“The Bureau’s computer expert, if he cannot give the dead back their faces, nobody can,” Piao said, as the road tumbled between cliff faces of offices once more. The sun’s edge dulled. The colour of her hair turning from gold to tarnished brass.
*
The buildings that made up Fudan University sat like so many discarded shoe boxes … hemmed in by clipped lawns cut into jigsaw pieces by a web of narrow concrete paths. At the intersections nearest the buildings, policemen stood; olive green uniforms mimicking the grass in shadow. From a distance they could have been mistaken for bushes growing out of the cold concrete base.
“Why so many police?”
Piao reluctantly returned a salute as they neared building Number 4. A banner, red on white, draped above the double doors, stating, in Mao’s own words uttered at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, that …
Youth must be put to the test.
; It had been hurriedly erected, paint still wet and running into drips. The Senior Investigator smiled, reaching up to pull the banner to one side … the gauze on his fingers bleeding red paint. He translated the graffiti that lay underneath it on the brickwork. Red on brown. More words from Mao’s lips, the dictum …
To rebel is justified.
“Mao is elastic, he is used in a similar way to your Bible. His words can be used to support any argument.”
The Senior Investigator said only one more word to Barbara before they were met by a university official, who would escort them to the office and laboratory area that had once been the domain of Professor Lazarus Heywood.
“ Tiananmen.”
Barbara nodded. It explained everything.
*
“I told you. Expect little or nothing.”
The large space was stripped totally bare, cleaned, repainted. It was dark, no windows. Lit only by two gently swaying yellowed bulbs hanging from ceiling cords, giving the room a sense of gentle movement, as if it were adrift on a great and deep swell of ocean. Barbara moved to the centre of the space, her shadows lengthening and shortening on alternate walls.
“Is this it? You said that it was a laboratory and also Heywood’s office.”
“It was.”
Piao joined her, his eyes not leaving hers.
“This was also where your son would have worked.”
She turned away unable to speak, her eyes lost to Piao. The official shuffling forward in shoes that were shiny, but which pinched, as Piao circled and re-circled him.
“I take it that you have no knowledge of an American by the name of Bobby Hayes?”
“I have no knowledge of the person to whom you refer.”
The official, a medium ranked cadre, was controlled, a mask of a smile levered onto his face.
But the calm of the surface of the ocean belies the sharks fighting in its depths.
“But you do have knowledge of Professor Lazarus Heywood whose laboratory this was?”
The official gave a small strained laugh. He was sweating. Piao could smell its garlic taint oozing from his pores.
“This is not a game. Let me explain clearly what I am doing here. Why I am talking to you. I am the Senior Investigator with the Homicide Squad of the Public Security Bureau. I am investigating two fistfulls of murders … and you, Mr University Official, are getting in my way. Now we can do this here, informally … or we can be more conservative about it at the kung an chu. But be warned, if you force me to take you to the city headquarters you will not be out to celebrate the New Year, which is still some time away. So think of your family and answer my questions. Do you understand the point that I am making?”
The cadre was weighing up threats. Plusses and minuses. Which to grasp, which to shrink away from. Piao knew the look, he met it every day, like a sweaty handshake that you could not wipe off.
“Professor Lazarus Heywood, tell me about him?”
“He, he worked here in the university. Professor Heywood lectured in Chinese history. And in um, archaeology. Yes, also in archaeology.”
“Where is Professor Heywood?”
The silence was long, but full. Nothing more valuable than such silence. Experience had taught Piao to allow the fish more line.
“It is not known where the Professor is. The university alerted the Luxingshe as he is an American national. He failed to attend to his university lecturing commitments. We were … we were concerned. This is a very worrying, a very unusual situation. I understand that the Luxingshe are still investigating the matter.”
The official had dull eyes. You saw such eyes on the fish that were left on the market stall long after a full day’s trade had passed. The fish that would never be bought. The Senior Investigator moved closer, his shadow eclipsing the cadre.
“Life no longer possesses Professor Lazarus Heywood. And in the zealous nature in which you have gone about ‘tidying up’ these rooms which once belonged to him, I would suggest that you were fully aware of this fact?”
The cadre’s laugh was grating, like rusty cogs.
“I repeat what I just said. Professor Heywood is dead. I should know, it was me who fished what was left of his body out of the Huangpu …”
The official took a step backwards, the cold wall now against his back.
“… I need to see Heywood’s personal belongings.”
“I, we, do not have them. A team from the Luxingshe took official control of this area. The room was sealed off to university staff while it was searched and cleaned …”
He stopped to clear his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Lowering his voice in false sincerity. Lowering his eyes in honest fear.
“… it is all a question of Professor Heywood’s political activities and his contact with dissident student groups. It is nei-bu, classified information, but the Luxingshe were gracious enough to tell us that much.”
Piao walked to the centre of the room, the light from the bulb directly above him elongating his features. His eyes drained of colour, shadow running down his cheeks.
“I was in contact with the Luxingshe this morning, before coming to your university. The Luxingshe have no record of such an operation ever having taken place. They have no knowledge of any action being taken in regards to Professor Lazarus Heywood. The Luxingshe were not even aware that Professor Heywood was missing.”
“Bu-but I saw the Luxingshe officers myself. I … I examined their documentation. They had full authority. Their paperwork was in order. Th-they had full authority.”
“They might have had full authority, but they were not Luxingshe.”
Spit on the cadre’s lips, reminding Piao of the discoloured foam discharging from the Suzhou at low tide.
“But n-no one impersonates Luxingshe, no one w-would dare to. And who could g-get the documentation that I examined, the au-authority?”
The cadre smelt of cheap aftershave, Hong Kong piss water packaged in gaudy imitation boxes.
“Security? Or the murderers who robbed Professor Heywood of his life?”
Again the whisper into the perfumed ear …
“Perhaps the two are the same. Security and the murderers of Professor Heywood?”
Silence, this time long, empty. Nothing is less valuable than such silence. The official was rallying his defences, Piao would get nothing more. Barbara was already walking toward the door, her eyes too dark to read.
“Is there anything that you need to tell me, Mr University Official? Do you still not know of an American called Bobby Hayes? Do your students not know of an American called Bobby Hayes?”
“I know n-nothing of a Bobby Hayes and now I know n-nothing of a Professor Lazarus Heywood. Neither will the s-students of this university.”
To recognise the thirst must also be sometimes to recognise that the well is empty.
The Senior Investigator pulled on his jacket and fastened it, the top button still missing.
“Go back to your office, Mr University Official. Let me know when the Luxingshe men call again. Let me know when you remember an American boy called Bobby Hayes.”
*
Fudan is large. It took over two hours for Piao to show Barbara its every corridor of beige, its every lecture hall with black heads bent in study. Barbara had never made a good tourist, her feet were tired within twenty minutes. The flooring hard, unforgiving. Her head light with a constant churning of unanswerable questions, untangleable thoughts. Piao, the Senior Investigator from the Homicide Squad, an enthusiastic guide. It had surprised her, he didn’t seem the type. It was only his insistence that had carried her along, when all that she had really wanted was a beer. And to lay under a duvet, as dark as a cave, and give permission to herself to be eight years old again.
*
The central square of Fudan University was empty. They walked its perimeter. The sky undercoat grey, the air ripped with a bitter cold wind. A siren interrupted their footsteps, and then there were students spilling from every
doorway, every corner of the square. The noise of their feet on concrete, swamping the electronic shriek. They were like any other students, perhaps a little neater in appearance. A tide of denim-blue creases. Baseball caps. Hooded sweatshirts. Girls with hair slicked alluringly over one eye. It surprised Barbara. Had she still really expected Mao suits and little red books held at head height?
“Christ, it could be downtown New York …”
She was pointing with one hand, her other hand brought to rest on Piao’s. Its softness, its coldness … at that instant, nothing else in his universe.
“… Coca-Cola tee shirts, Mini Mouse jackets. Look, there’s a Laker’s baseball cap. It’s unbelievable. It really could be the States.”
“Yes, your country has given us the very best that its culture has to offer. We are all enriched by the experience.”
But he was already moving away from her, hands no longer touching. Any PSB Officer would also have sensed it. Incoming danger and the excitement that is its carrier oil. It had a scent, the ashes of roses. It had a feel, gloved finger tips across the nape of the neck. A crowd of students were congregating in the centre of the square, off the pathways. To hold such a gathering was prohibited … counter-revolutionary sabotage. Since June 4th ‘89 … Tiananmen … such an act had been prohibited. Students had now been forced into being nothing more than a generation in waiting for Deng Xiaoping and his high cadre cronies to pass on.
A period of waiting, is not dying, is not living.
A banner unfurled. Yellow on red.
Build once more the Goddess of Democracy.
A violent red bloom in a foliage of baseball caps, Minnie Mouse jackets and the flailing olive green arms of the PSB. More police rushed towards the banner, but another group of students had assembled in a far corner of the square … and then another group. Hoods across their eyes. Caps pulled down. Banners meeting the breeze in lacerations of scarlet. The Senior Investigator had hold of Barbara’s elbow, moving her firmly down an exit, out of the square towards the car.
“This is bad. We cannot be involved. We must go.”