by Andy Oakes
“Tell us about Liu Qingde?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Your cousin, he worked for you.”
“Never heard of him. Take me in if you don’t believe me.”
The Senior Investigator emptied the wastepaper bin and stood it at Zhen’s feet; taking a half full bottle of maotai from the side table he poured a quarter of it into the bin. Alcohol, its pungent aroma filling the small room. Piao took a pile of banknotes from the desk, edges filthy, tattered. A washed red, green, brown, block of ten yuan notes, with the look and feel of dusty moth’s wings … and a smell of old trouser pockets. He dropped them into the bin.
“They say that in the Kaxtax Shan region when it is a bad winter, to keep warm they will burn anything. Nothing is of worth, nothing has value unless it gives out heat.”
The Senior Investigator struck a match. Zhen’s eyes flaring with its burn. Sulphur and alcohol, a smell to fix the memory to a single moment in time. Zhen struggled in the Big Man’s arms.
“What are you doing for shits sake, what are you doing?”
“Qingde. Tell me about him?”
“I told you, I don’t know him. I don’t fucking know him.”
A yellow flame, burning its way up the match. White to black. The Senior Investigator dropping it into the waste bin. A slow tumble as it fell, meeting a fireball of ignited alcohol. A thump of orange … air being sucked in. The smell of old paper and unpurchased dreams, riding on the back of spit drying heat.
“No … no, no, no. You bastard. Bastard.”
Screaming, fists clenched. Eyes, complexion, taking on the fire’s fanning hunger. Yaobang jerking him back into his chair.
“You fucking maniac. That was two thousand yuan. More than you PSB shitheads make in four months.”
Piao picked up another bundle of banknotes.
“Pimping and pushing pays well. Very well. They would be very satisfied in the Kaxtax Shan with your efforts, Mr Restaurant Owner. The result is good fuel, with a brief, but strong heat. …”
The veins in Zhen’s temples, like annealed links of tangled chain.
“… Qingde, your cousin, tell me about him?”
“I’ve already told you, I don’t know him.”
Piao dropping the bundle of notes into the fire.
“Not again you bastard. Not again …”
Edges browning, shrivelling. Orange flame under passive faces of viridian ink.
“… I want your names, your fucking names, you bastards.”
“Tell us about Qingde.”
Picking up another bundle of ten yuan notes. Spreading them across his palm. A fan of aged, paled tattooed colours.
“Okay, okay. He did a little work for me. A bit of this, a bit of that.”
“What sort of work?”
No reply. Piao letting a few notes tumble into the flames.
“A bit of running. Collecting monies. Small stuff. Shit stuff.”
“Nothing else?”
Zhen shaking his head. More bills meeting the blaze. Green, to yellow, to black.
“You bastard. Alright. Alright. He did a bit of heavy stuff. Protection, setting up and collecting. He had a skill for it. Mean little fucker.”
“But you haven’t seen him for a while, have you?”
No reply. The Senior Investigator’s hand moving across the flames.
“He got greedy, fucking greedy. They all do in time. He was ambitious, wanted his own piece of the action. We fell out, you might say. Anyway, what the fuck is this about.”
Piao placed the remaining handful of bills back onto the desktop.
“Liu Qingde was found in the river, minus his life and any identification. Minus his finger tips. Minus his eyes. Sounds like drugs to me. What about you?”
Zhen instantly nervous. The words coming fast. Each syllable underlined by the sweat slicing down both sides of his face.
“We fell out, but it wasn’t like that. Not like that. I had nothing to do with it … I don’t run an operation that kills people. Not even people that cross me. Sure, I shook him up a little. Scared the shit out of him for trying to screw me. But to cut him up like you said you found him, no eyes, no fucking finger tips … forget it, that’s not me, I don’t do those sorts of things. Check my record.”
The fire had died, embers of dull rubies amongst filo pastry layers of black paper. And amongst the shit that Zhen spoke, sparks that Piao recognised as the truth.
“I know your record. It is what we don’t know about you that concerns me. A man like you is capable of anything when it comes to this shit.”
The Senior Investigator scattered a pile of yuan bills. A tabletop full of banknotes sliding in an anaemic inked avalanche. Money … it was both sweet and sour to Piao. It held dreams; it crushed dreams. But always, it brought with its mention, memories. Memories. Remembering her sigh, as her eyes half turned away from him …
Why are we always poor? I can’t spend ten yuan on myself without feeling guilt … worrying that it should have been spent on food. I dream of perfume, new clothes … and babies, fat babies.
And babies … ‘nemma bai, nemma pang.’ So white, so fat.
“You’re not hanging this on me. I haven’t seen Qingde for a month. He wasn’t exactly fucking popular around here. There must have been a thousand who would have liked to have murdered the little shit. But I wasn’t one of them. I have too much to lose …”
He nodded towards the tabletop, the banknotes, smiling. Teeth immaculate, newly capped. A wall of bleach white porcelain.
“… you should talk to some of them. I’ll give you a fucking list. Start with Qingde’s half-brother. He’s probably crossed him as well, which would have put him in the shit. Xie is a powerful man, not the sort to turn a blind eye, half-brother or not.”
“He was working for Xie?”
“I heard rumours.”
“What was he doing for Xie?”
“The usual. Girls. Protection. Xie runs about everything in Hongkou and Pudong. With all those foreign companies coming in across the river, it’s sale time.”
“And drugs?”
Zhen nodded, but with a sudden realisation lighting in the backs of his eyes. Relaxing in the restraint of Yaobang’s arms. A swagger in his expression.
“You didn’t know that Qingde and Xie were half-brothers, did you? Fucking PSB, and you didn’t know.”
Piao felt the anger rise to his neck, his collar a steel band. Needing to rip it open. The case was moving fast. Too fast. Like a lorry ploughing down a hill out of control. He should have known about Xie, about every member of Qingde’s family. He should have known everything about the little shit. What size his underpants were. What his last thought was before he fell asleep; what his first thought was as he awoke. It would all be in the reports, the bottomless pile of buff that was sitting on the table in his flat, next to the half full bottle of Tsingtao. The bottomless pile of buff, that he had not had the time to read. He moved around the desk, past the girl. Her body, a peg to hang dreams upon.
“We are not infallible, we do not need to be. But a shit like you, well, there is another matter. I would be very careful from now on, Mr Restaurant Owner. You see, we now know your weakness.”
The Senior Investigator running a hand across the desktop, two piles of banknotes falling into the wastepaper bin. Zhen straining against the Big Man’s grasp; chair legs stuttering across the floor.
“You bastard. You fucking shit.”
The flames gradually taking hold. White, to yellow, to orange. Piao pushing another pile of notes into the flames.
“Be careful Mr Zhen. For a man to know another man’s weakness is a powerful thing. It is a splinter in the soul.”
The Senior Investigator retrieved the pistol from the floor, removing its nine-shot magazine. Walking to the door. With a nod, Yaobang released his arms and brushed past the secretary.
“You wouldn’t consider joining me for a drink or two one evening?”
He smil
ed. The girl’s eyes dead. His question left stranded like the dried noodle on his jacket lapel.
“I suppose not.”
He opened the door and they walked out onto the landing. Their last view of Zhen, kneeling beside the bin, fingers picking in and out of the embers, trying to retrieve half burnt ten yuan notes.
*
They walked to the cars. The ancestors crying a fine drizzle … inescapable. The Xizang Road lost in a fine gauze of mist. Everything de-burred, smoothed. The cars seeming slower. Words too. Yaobang lit a China Brand, tipping the packet toward Piao. He’d been spoilt. A week of Panda’s, the sweetness of their imported tobacco. He declined.
“This Xie, Boss, shouldn’t be too fucking hard to find. I’ll dig out his files and put a few of his likely hangouts on a list.”
The Senior Investigator could taste the smoke from the cigarette hanging in the damp air. It felt familiar. It felt like home.
“The list, don’t bother. I know where to find Xie …”
Far off, a moan, long, lingering. A freighter slipping blindly down the river. Piao wondering if its crew thought of the sun, hot and fierce, left far behind.
“… he was arrested a month ago. He’s in Gongdelin …”
“Sounds like the right place for the piece of shit. But he couldn’t have been involved in the murder of Qingde and the others if he was fucking banged up in Virtue Forest, Boss.”
“The tentacles of the Octopus can strike beyond the cave in which it is resting.”
Yaobang threw the cigarette butt to the pavement with an anger of sparks. Treading on it as he passed.
“We should visit him, eh, Boss? A busy man like that in Virtue Forest. He probably gets very lonely.”
Virtue Forest. Its name coming up again. Like a toothache, it demanded attention.
Fuck the cough. Fuck the breathlessness. Piao gave in and accepted one of the Big Man’s China Brands, it tasting of every unfulfilled hope.
“Yes, it must get lonely in Gongdelin,” he said through the smoke.
“We will pay Citizen Xie a friendly visit.”
He warmed his hands with his smoke ladened breath. The car was cold. The flat would be even colder. He drove home.
Chapter 16
Reports. Type tripping over pages in a slow parade of dates, serial numbers, informants’ details, internal/external visa authorisations, arrest and imprisonment data. There was little to be gained from the boredom of their reading, punctuated only by China Brands and pots of jasmine tea. Leaving him with a flail of a cough and a mouth that tasted of tea dust and callused leaf pickers’ fingers.
Yongshe. Feng. Decai. Ziyang. It was as Rentang had said. All had been residents at Gongdelin. All had been habitual criminals, malcontents or insane. Strings of arrest details, charge numbers, hospital admissions … flowing from their files in rivers of type. Each life irrevocably leading to that one crime that the State deemed worth dying for. At the bottom of each report a thick red tick, signifying that each execution had taken place. The short walk. Forced into a kneeling position. The rifle discharging its load into the base of the neck. All had been executed by the bullet, a full day before they had been dragged from the Huangpu. Mutilated … every shred of evidence that could have identified them, torn, ripped or gouged from their bodies. Yet the protocols for the treatment of the bodies of executed prisoners were strict and always adhered to. Following execution, whether it was carried out in the grounds of a state prison or a high profile execution in a stadium, the bodies were take for immediate cremation. If the State so wished, relatives of the prisoner could claim the ashes. If the State did not so wish it, the ashes would be dealt with as the high cadre saw fit. The bodies of those executed, after all, were the property of the State. Of this there was no doubt.
Piao gathered the files. The faces, in grainy monochrome, lost in a shuffle of paper. Lives now lived only as serial numbers and as pixels on a VDU. The room was getting cold, the tea also. Piao pulled a blanket across himself, raising the cup to his lips. It’s taste of long summer days, totally at odds with the hour. Also at odds and jarring, four men executed by the State and cremated on the fourth of the month. Four men, the same men, found murdered, mutilated, but pulled from the Huangpu on the fifth day of the month!
The Senior Investigator read one more report before he lay on the bed. To read the report taking minutes. To shackle sleep, longer. Much longer.
Ye Yang. Date and place of birth. USA passport number. Colour of eyes. Colour of hair. Marital status. A few dates of movements in and out of the country. Visa numbers. Gaps. Bare bones. He needed the flesh, muscle, skin. Ye Yang … a key to a lock that Piao could only guess at. Everything that he knew, everything that he didn’t know, seeming to depend ultimately on gut feelings, without the safety net of knowledge or hard evidence. It was familiar territory for him, but it still felt unfamiliar. Dangerous.
*
He couldn’t remember the instant that sleep harnessed him. The transition, stepless, from reading the reports to the papers scattering onto the floor. The cup in his hand tilting. The remainder of the tea, piss yellow, weeping across the rim of the cup and onto the sheet. Sleep was featureless. An expanse of time indented by nothing. When he awoke the tea stain had dried. He gathered the papers. Drank more tea. Washed and dressed. He was thinking of her when Barbara’s phone call came.
“It’s your day off. Why don’t you show me Senior Investigator Sun Piao’s Shanghai?”
His hair was still wet, uncombed, like noodles dyed in octopus ink. He smoothed it down with both palms.
“I will be outside your hotel in thirty minutes.”
*
The day had a shine about it. A blue sky devoid of the bruise and graze of clouds. It was rare at this time of the year. The whole of Shanghai seemed to be taking advantage of the good weather. The Longs alive with people, and washing lines tethered across streets in waves and rolls of white linen.
The morning was spent at Yufosi, the Temple of the Jade Buddha. Further north, the Tomb of Lu Xun. And then down to Zhongshandong Lu, a trip on the river, two hours to where the Huangpu becomes the Yangtze. Piao in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. The sun, a warm kiss across his skin. The city, just a backcloth to his view of her. Not for a second, his eyes leaving her. Missing nothing. The straps of her dress slipping across her shoulder. The lazy upturn of the corners of her lips. The ease with which she crossed her legs. Uncrossing them … the blush of pink on her thigh, fading to white.
They ate at the Xinya on Nanjing Lu. Spring thunder soup, white chicken meat and rice crusts … deposits of rice scraped from cooking pots and then dried in the oven, emitting sharp crackling thunder when served with the broth. Lacquered duck, the aromatic, melt-in-the-mouth exterior, the colour of honey and caramel. Guiyu, the mandarin fish … cut and shaped, cooked, half caramelised to resemble chrysanthemum flowers. Dragon’s beard noodles. And for desert, lychee, kumquat and longan … ‘dragon’s eye’.
After lunch, driving southwest through the former French concession. The Longhua Pagoda, with its seven storeys of brick, wooden balconies and red lacquer pillars … resembling a wood screw being slowly turned into the blue of the day. In the park next to the temple they drank jasmine tea, made from cream flowers and black dancing leaves. A scent that secret words would have. The conversation light, stopping only when in the car on Zhongshanxi Lu, the traffic becoming a solid wall of panting steel. Piao cut down Tianyajiao Lu, moving north … the traffic coming to a complete halt within sight of the covered stadium. A slow-moving block of people on the pavements heading in one direction. A Liberation Truck pulled up beside Piao, a stream of olive green uniforms piling from it. Lean bodied and with shiny black hat peaks cutting across their eyes. Their features carved by the same artist from the same design. The Senior Investigator flipped his badge.
“Trouble?”
The driver stopped picking at his teeth, wiping his finger on the underside of the dashboard; straightening his post
ure.
“Not for us, Comrade Officer.”
“Then for who?”
“Wang, him and two others. Today’s the day they collect their prizes. It’s in an hour’s time in the stadium.”
Piao thumped the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.
“Shit.”
The driver smiled. Investigators … all braid and balls. Awake only when it was pay-day.
“Where have you been Comrade Officer, on the moon? Wang’s is the execution of the year.”
There was no room to turn. They would have to park and walk until they were free of the crowds and could get a taxi or pedicab. He revved the engine in anger, his eyes hard into the driver of the Liberation Truck.
“I have been investigating murders, Comrade Officer … and what have you been doing, investigating the cracks between your teeth?”
The driver smiled and wound up the truck’s window, continuing to pick at his teeth. Piao parked and guided Barbara through the crowds, away from the stadium.
“What’s wrong, where are we going?”
By now they should have been back at the Jing Jiang. Drinking coffee. Drinking Dukang. Her, him, away from everything else. The rest of the world beached and neatly hung on a hook.
“We must go, it is bad to be here.”
“But why, it doesn’t look dangerous. Look around, people seem to be having fun. There’s a real buzz about the place.”
The Senior Investigator increased his pace, pulling her behind him.
“No, no. It is not good. We must leave.”
“But why?”
“We must leave. We must.”
Barbara stopping dead. Wrenching her arm from his grip. A gap between them, the crowd pushing through it.
“What’s going on? You’re blocking me. We’re having a great day and then you pull something like this on me.”
Hurt in her eyes. Piao pushed his way toward her. Lowering her arms, placing them by her sides.
“The covered stadium, that is where they are going …”
His eyes leaving hers and looking over her shoulder at the reflection of his face in a shop window, the carnival passing by behind him.