Dragon's Eye

by Andy Oakes

  *

  Xie was lucky, his cell had a small skylight. Through it he could see the clouds, sliced into even sized portions by the black thickly painted bars. It was a rare privilege … to be allowed to know the day, to be allowed to know the night.

  A slither of sunlight had found the far wall. Xie sitting within it. Its sojourn across his face in a yellow edged gash. Elongating his nose. Slicing his lip. Cleaving his chin, neck, chest. His eyes were closed, only opening them when the silence was broken.

  “You have visitors.”

  The Deputy nodded at Piao and moved toward the door.

  “I will be outside.”

  The door closing … closed. Eyelids rising lazily across instantly alert eyes, yellow with sun. His movements, his look, reminding the Senior Investigator of a gecko warming itself.

  “You’ve been drinking jasmine tea, Senior Investigator Piao. It smells sweet. It suits you …”

  His arms slowly unfolding.

  “… and a woman. You smell of a woman …”

  Eyes half closed, the yellow extinguished as he drew a breath, long and stuttering, through the flare of his nostrils.

  “… mmm, also sweet. So sweet. Not a wife smell, onions, flour, pissy knickers, tears …”

  His eyes opened fully. Black. As black as midnight puddles.

  “… no. This smell is different. Skin lotion, restaurants, lace, pink nipples. What have you been up to Senior Investigator?”

  Piao nudged the slop bucket with his foot; it grated against the tiled floor.

  “I can only smell shit, Xie, and lots of empty hours.”

  The Big Man moved out of Piao’s shadow to within inches of the prisoner … sniffing.

  “Yeah, definitely shit, Boss. Almost unbearable.”

  Xie’s mouth widened to a smile. Wet lips, shadowed tongue, resembling the deep stripe of a scalpel across taut flesh. The skin opening into an obscene fish-lipped pucker.

  “It’s not my shit you can smell. It’s your own lives rotting on the vine …”

  The smile remaining as he focussed his attention on the Big Man.

  “… a pity detective, but you were never the clever one, were you, or the attractive one? It was always your brother. Your little brother. So much praise, so much attention. And you on the outside always looking in …”

  He stood, a taunt in his posture.

  “… you got your wish, detective. Now you can get all the attention. He’s dead. Blown away.”

  “Bastard. Fucking bastard!”

  The Big Man’s head a hammer, forehead slamming down onto Xie’s nose. Piao throwing himself in between them, shoving Yaobang against the door. The prisoner falling hard against the wall, slipping down it, hands across his face. Laughing. Removing the web of fingers. The bruise already storming across his nose and cheek. A slip of scarlet trailing from one nostril. Carving across his mouth, chin, neck. The Senior Investigator’s hand firm against Yaobang’s chest; it rising and falling violently with ripped breaths.

  “Enough. No more.”

  “But how does he know about my brother, Boss? He must have been involved, the bastard.”

  The hand moving up to the Big Man’s shoulder.

  “These things get known. Anything that hurts a PSB Officer gets known by shits like this. He’s feeding on you. In here they have nothing else to do. He was not involved, now let’s get down to business.”

  Piao knelt beside Xie, the blood blotting into his prison shirt in an unfurling bloom of rust. And the smell … of pepper, of starched cotton, and of anger, hot and parcelled, to be opened up on another day.

  “You have a half-brother, Liu Qingde, we want to talk to you about.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Xie spat the words out as darts.

  “How do you know that he is dead?”

  “I know.”

  “And what else do you know?”

  “That is for me to know and for you to have sleepless nights about.”

  The flow of blood stemmed, dried, like a cracked and arid riverbed down his lips and chin.

  “Your half-brother, Qingde, I don’t give a shit about. But the others who were killed with him and the others who have been killed since, these I do care about …”

  Piao lit a Panda Brand, exhaling. The smoke writhing in the space between them. Xie would taste it. He would be thinking of the press of crowds on the Nanjing Road. Late night mah-jongg games. The fire of Dukang. He would be thinking of how great it would be to light his own cigarette.

  “… sleepless nights, I already have them and I don’t like them. But the information that you are going to give me will be of help. Great help. If it is of use to you, view your assistance as a form of relaxation therapy. A very profound way of supporting another human being.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “That’s not a very empathic response. Do I take it that you do not wish to enter into a therapeutic relationship with me?”

  Not for an instant, Xie’s smile waning.

  “Fuck off.”

  Piao moved to the cell door. A shadow on the other side of the glass, the Deputy Warden, reaching for his keys. Holding a brief conversation, its words framed amongst the salvos of slamming cell doors, shouts disfigured in echo. A smell flooding in. … disinfectant edged in a sharp tooth of vomit.

  “Everything ready?”

  The Deputy entered the cell with two other officers; a nervousness snagging the corners of his eyes.

  “I am against this.”

  Piao’s cigarette, a warning, burning orange between his lips.

  “But your superior, Chief Warden Hua, he is not?”

  “No. No, he is not.”

  “Then get on with it. Your reluctance will be duly noted.”

  The Deputy nodding. The officers moving forward. Xie moving back.

  “What’s going on? Where the fuck are you taking me?”

  Bare toes screeching across the hard tiled floor, as he was dragged from the cell. Voice swamped in the length of the corridor. Far away, a cell door opening, a cell door slamming shut.

  Silence.

  Piao lit another Panda Brand from the butt of his and offered it to the Big Man. He would not appreciate the subtlety of the imported tobacco, but what the fuck!

  “Twenty minutes,” Yaobang said through smoke.

  “Ten,” replied the Senior Investigator.

  They shook hands.

  *

  Mozart’s Symphony No.40 in G minor. Brahms’ Tragic Overture. And a rendition of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ that outpaced itself, laying exhausted across the conductor’s baton before it was half way through.

  Barbara’s face ached. Wincing as Ma Yi Ping raised the baton … a breath of relief escaping through her teeth as she realised that it was just to invite the orchestra to take a bow. Another bow, their sixth. She nodded. They nodded. She applauded them. They applauded her. Barbara stood, turning to walk to the door, her fingers already finding the Marlboro wrapper, only to be halted by the barrel chested tenor soloist marching past her toward the podium. She withdrew her hand from the bag, turning back toward her chair, preparing herself. The soloist, she knew, was a convicted con man. A rapist in the baritone section of the mixed chorus. Thieves amongst the sopranos. Ma Yi Ping tapped his baton. She sat, smiling the smile. The conductor smiled. The baton fell. The Mahler began.

  *

  Nine minutes.

  The Big Man handed Piao a ten yuan note as the guards dragged Xie down the corridor and into the cell. Fresh blood on his face. Prison trousers ripped and trailing from his feet. Pants around his ankles. White pearls of buttocks. A single rose bud of blood blooming at their heart and opening its petals. They laid him on the bed, as he struggled to pull up his clothes. Continuing to hold the broken belt around his waist with both hands. Defiance, humiliation, struggling for supremacy in that one simple act.

  “Qingde. Tell us about him?”

  Xie pulled his knees to his chest. A dark rust of dampness
spattering the arse of his trousers. The stain growing, resembling the outline of Australia. But no words. Yaobang’s shadow fell across the bed, the wall.

  “Nine minutes. You lost me ten fucking yuan. I always get really pissed off when I lose a bet, but not as pissed off as the Bear down the corridor must be. That’s what they call him. The Bear. Hairy bastard. Strong too. He’ll be fucking pissed off. Nine minutes isn’t going to satisfy an appetite like his …”

  Yaobang lit a cigarette. It was as if everything about not being in a cell, not being in a prison, was summed up in the simplicity of that one action.

  “… they say he likes to take his fucking time. His last victim was a ten year old boy over in Pudong. They say he took at least four hours over him …”

  Cigarette smoke creeping across Xie’s shoulder. Warm beers, crowds, the perfumed tits of a yeh ji … they were all there in its smell, in its taste.

  “… in four hours you can do just about anything you want to someone. He killed the boy by slashing his throat. And then the bastard fucked him again …”

  Xie’s knees tightening against his chest. The words coming in a monotone flow.

  “He was involved with a wai-guo-ren. American. A woman. I saw her once. She looked Chinese, but she wasn’t. There were others, at Fudan. He would go to the university, pick up a parcel and deliver it. Two, three times a month.”

  Ye Yang. Heywood. Bobby.

  Piao stood against the far wall. The painted stone, cold along the length of his spine. Outside, there was sun, he couldn’t see it, but recognised its reality in the slither of light that slowly passed across his face. And as it did so, acutely aware that it cut him in two. One eye, schoolboy blue … the other, as dark as a hammer’s head.

  “Where did he deliver the parcels to?”

  “Heilongjian, Harbin. Four hours out of the city in the Chang-Bai Mountains. A farmhouse in the snow fields. They had a workshop there. He had internal travel documents issued to him every month. They arrived by courier …”

  He coughed. Snot, blood, tears.

  “… the foreigners have friends in high places.”

  The Senior Investigator had moved closer; Xie’s smell, now of shit, a fine reek as sharp as a razor.

  “A workshop. You said that they had a workshop?”

  “Yes.”

  “The parcels, drugs?”

  “Perhaps. He wouldn’t say. Where there was money to be made, he was secretive. His work with the wai-guo-ren. He was silent, dumb. There must have been a lot of money.”

  “Or a lot of fear?”

  Xie turned to face the Senior Investigator, features drained of skin tones. White on a white pillow, almost fading into it. Only the blood, now as brown as the deep tan of rich old retired men, marking the boundary of where face met linen.

  He nodded. His tongue across ripped, salty lips.

  “The foreigners at Fudan, you know who they were?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard the names Wei Yongshe, Hu Feng, Pei Decai, Yan Ziyang?”

  “No.”

  “The woman. He talked about her, mentioned her name?”

  “No.”

  Piao raised an eyebrow.

  “No. No names. I asked him many times. I thought that I might get in on their operation, but they were keeping it small. He said nothing. I found out about the woman because I had him followed. It was a pay-off.”

  “Where?”

  “The Peace Hotel. It must have been a good pay-day. He went straight from there to buy a Volkswagen.”

  “New?”

  “Nearly new.”

  Of course ‘nearly’ new. Wasn’t everything that they bought, everything in their lives ‘nearly’ new?

  The Senior Investigator felt for his cigarettes, one left; it was broken in half.

  “Detective Yaobang will stay with you for a while. You will give him every detail that you know about this workshop in Harbin. Everything that Qingde said about it, however trivial.”

  Xie moved his legs weakly over the side of the bed, sitting up. Beckoning Piao toward him. When within reach, grabbing his jacket collar. His strength surprising. Forcing the Senior Investigator to his level. Face against face. The dry river of blood stranded across his cheek and chin, coursing against Piao’s stubble.

  “I won’t be in here much longer, Investigator, then I’ll come looking for you. Or perhaps for those who are dearest to you. Yes. Yes, that is sweeter. Those who are dearest to you.”

  The Senior Investigator wrenched the hand from his jacket. Finger by finger. A button spinning to the floor.

  Who was there to sew a new one back on?

  He could hear Xie’s voice as he walked down the corridor. It’s calm thread of sing-song threats slicing through the madness of slamming doors, barked orders, whispered thoughts. It was only when he reached the central core where the corridors collided in a weave of steel web, that he realised that he could no longer hear Xie’s taunts … that the words were repeating only in the confines of his own head.

  *

  “How was the tour?”

  Barbara didn’t look up from the pack of Marlboro. The cigarette drawn out, the white lifeline held firm between her slender fingers.

  “I can’t decide what the high point was. The Brahms, with a tenor soloist who conned a collective farm out of their diesel engines for ten tractors. Or the dance troupe whose choreographer robbed a drinks store with his dog, left the dog behind in the shop, and was later arrested after the PSB followed it back to his house …”

  She lit the cigarette and pulled hard on its filter.

  “… yes, it was a fascinating tour. Remind me to get it included in next year’s Thomas Cook’s brochure.”

  Chief Warden Hua entered the room. He always seemed happy. Such people worried Piao. Happiness, it was a state that he himself had only achieved fleetingly.

  “See Piao, see, your foreigner, we looked after her, didn’t we, didn’t we? Chinese hospitality.”

  The Chief Warden playfully poked Barbara in the back. She nodded with enthusiasm.

  “You have been most generous, Chief Warden Hua. I will be sure to put this all in my report to my colleagues on the Washington State Parole Committee.”

  Hua rubbed his hands together frantically.

  “Good, good, good. And you, Senior Investigator, you had a satisfactory meeting with our friend I hear, yes, yes?”

  “Yes, satisfactory.”

  “You see, I told you, Piao, I know these people and you nearly didn’t listen to me, did you? You didn’t want to listen to me. Eh, eh? Put him in with the Bear I said, and hear him sing a pretty song. A canary. Just like a canary I said. I was right, wasn’t I, eh Piao, eh?”

  The Senior Investigator’s attention momentarily drifted to the window.

  “Yes, Chief Warden Hua, you were right. He did sing. He sang like a canary.”

  *

  The Chief Warden walked them to the car. The Big Man was already in the driver’s seat, wiping the inside of the windscreen with his jacket cuff.

  “All right if I come with you, Boss? My car’s fucking dead. Alternator I think.”

  “A hundred and fifty yuan, second-hand.”

  Yaobang started the car.

  “Don’t I fucking know it!”

  The barrier rose. The main gate cranking painfully open beyond it. Outside it was dark … black. The floodlit interior of the bay escaping into the night in a graze of mustard and leggy shadows.

  “Chief Warden Hua, four of the murders that I am currently investigating, you might recognise the names. Wei Yongshe, Hu Feng, Pei Decai, Yan Ziyang?”

  Hua’s smile uncertain.

  “These names, yes, I recognise these names. Of course I do. But murdered, you are investigating their murders? No, no, no, this cannot be true? These men, all four, they were executed. Executed. Shot in the prison grounds and cremated. It is in the records. All in the records.”

  “Warden, these men were pulled f
rom the Huangpu, chained together with others. Mutilated. I have positive identifications that this is so.”

  The smile on Hua’s face now gone. Piao feeling a deep sense of satisfaction.

  “You are wrong, Senior Investigator. Wrong. The bodies you have are not these men. Not these men. They are other men. Others. Be sure of your facts. The names you say have been executed. Executed. They are not your murdered. No, no, no.”

  He wagged a fat finger in the Senior Investigator’s face.

  “No, no, no Investigator. You cannot kill a man twice. You cannot kill a man twice.”

  But they had; the Senior Investigator was tempted to argue, but Hua had already turned away … the barrier in a slow fall behind him.

  Chapter 18

  Barbara saw his shadow before seeing him. Black. Hard edged amongst the winks of spotlights falling across her shoulder and onto the bar, also across the Scotch in her glass, one of many that evening. The trio of musicians lurched into an uncertain interpretation of ‘Fly me to the Moon.’ The shadow darkened; he was going to talk to her, throw her a line. There wasn’t one that she hadn’t heard before, but she couldn’t stop him.

  “I raise my cup in salutation to the moon. With my shadow we are three. Yet drinking is unknown to the moon and the shadows follow in my wake in vain. Let us honour moon and shadow nonetheless, for joy will last no longer than the spring.”

  The voice was English, neatly, precisely so. Barbara turned, squinting into the lights. He was blond. Most blond men seeming benign, safe. But there was an edge, a razor cut to this man … this blond. Something in the bottomless well of his eyes.

  “A man who speaks with another man’s words, ain’t got any useful words of his own. That’s what my ma use to say. And that includes words of poetry.”