The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I)

by D. L. Kung

  Faint breathing alerted her to be careful. She might be sharing her hiding place with some kind of lab animal safe behind bars, but it might be a guard dog ready to sink its fangs into her ankle. The lab was long and in the darkness, she could just make out a chair, a couple of cots and a side table.

  She couldn’t stay in the clinic for long like a trapped fox. She needed to make a move as soon as the guards had given up their hunt. Now she guessed that the animal was near the cots close to the far door. She crept past slowly, ready to spring for safety out the far door as soon as anything attacked her. But the form, breathing shallowly, didn’t move. She moved a few inches closer and saw it was a person sleeping fitfully, illuminated only by the prison tower searchlights beaming through the row of windows.

  A small cry escaped her lips.

  Cecilia lay stretched out before her, tied by hands and ankles to the iron bed with strips of cotton bandaging. Her hair hung in sticky, dirty strands on a pillow of rough ticking. A crumpled mess of stained sheet covered her ‘Dancing Fun Fun’ sweater from which rose a sour smell of urine and sweat.

  ‘Cecilia!” Claire wasted valuable minutes untying and unwrapping the bandages that shackled Cecilia to the bedframe. Once she’d freed her, she hoped Cecilia would rally but nothing happened. She shook the thin figure almost violently. Cecilia’s eyes stayed closed and her breathing stopped for a second, then started up again. Claire tried again, and then saw that the girl couldn’t be roused. Something was really wrong with her.

  Had someone injured her, drugged her or, God help us, operated on her? The sheet covering her from the chest down was a filthy mess but Claire couldn’t be sure in the pitch darkness what the stains meant. She might be doing more harm than good by disturbing her. If she couldn’t move Cecilia, they were both doomed.

  Where was Vic?

  Claire snuck across the clinic floor below the window line and grabbed the thermos. The water inside was cold but no doubt boiled clean. She lifted Cecilia’s head and, forcing open her mouth, half-splashed, half-poured some down her throat. Cecilia began to choke, then coughed it back. But her eyes stayed half-closed and unfocused.

  The prison tower searchlights suddenly went out. The guards had called off the chase but Claire had lost even the faint light that illuminated the room through the grimy windows. She tried to recap the thermos and store it in her backpack for the journey home but a sound outside the building stopped her hand. She set down the thermos and took Cecilia’s arm, gripping her frail body with the other arm in a protective embrace.

  She waited, hoping the footfall would pass by. Someone’s shoe scraped the steps outside. Then she heard the doorknob turn.

  Their escape was blocked.

  There was a flash of lightening across the sky and for a brief second the entire lab was shot full of steel light, sending the tall, thin silhouette of a man with pointed ears standing in the doorway shooting across the floor to where Claire stooped. A thunderclap followed a few seconds later.

  Claire wasn’t even sure she was visible in that second of sharp illumination. She held her breath, hoping the intruder would move on.

  ‘Stop trying, Miss Raymond, I’m afraid she’s drugged,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten me?’

  ‘What have you done to her?’

  ‘Just a sleeping pill. This clinic’s just a temporary home until she’s moved to the women’s side. The regular patients are inmates who sell their kidneys. We also like to save the corneas when an inmate dies. After Mr D’Amato died, his kidneys brought us $25,000 apiece from Hong Kong and we sent his corneas up to Capitol Hospital in Beijing.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Your colleague’s life wasn’t wasted. The Anglican fathers hadn’t wasted their time with my father. St John’s Gospels stuck with him for life and the sixth miracle was a favorite of his—‘

  ‘What have you done, Chen?’

  ‘How does it go again? For judgment am I come into this world, that they which see not might see and that they which see might be made blind.’

  Chen drew up a stool underneath the little wooden table and sat down. Claire couldn’t make out his face but saw him cross one leg over the other, bouncing the upper foot up and down a little. She heard the scratch of a match, and watched the flame reach his lips as he lit a cigarette. He blew out the flickering light, plunging them back into darkness.

  He chuckled wryly. ‘Ms Raymond, I congratulate you. You must be the first person in the penal history of the Chinese Communist Party to break into a reform-through-labor detention center. It’s a pity that the history of China’s lao gai empire will never be written, because your escapade tonight would make a amusing footnote.’

  ‘The whole history of this camp will make for a very interesting exposé when I get back to Hong Kong. The news that an American and Chinese are partners in a private slave camp is a pretty good story.’

  ‘But you must grasp what we’re trying to do.’ Chen took a drag on his cigarette. All Claire could see in the darkness was the outline of his arm leaning against the table and holding the tiny red spark of ash, and that long, thin foot moving, up and down, up and down.

  ‘Miss Raymond, you know a little of our country’s history. We are an enormous population living on the verge of, shall we say, overload? We reached critical mass in the eighteenth century. Without the firmest of controls at the top, China is virtually ungovernable. Let’s be honest. The Chinese are incapable of being decent to each other—much less fair. Believe me, I know. Respect for a stranger? Equal treatment? Democracy is not part of our tradition.’

  ‘Chen—’

  ‘Please. Hear me out. I think you may actually understand how I reached my conclusion—yes, even after my Christian upbringing and my years in this camp.’

  ‘This—?’

  ‘Yes, this was the penal farm where Mr Huang rescued me.’

  ‘MacGinnes’s partner is the man who saved you from those thugs?’

  ‘Yes.’ The cigarette end flared red again.

  ‘And now you run a labor camp side by side with him?’

  ‘Huang is humane. Think of a monastery, or perhaps, in your case,’ Chen chuckled, ‘a convent. Full of regulations, restrictions, uniforms of a sort, hard work, simple food, free training and education, and’— Chen waved his cigarette in the direction of the wired perimeter—’garden walls.’

  ‘Nobody joins a religious order under force anymore, Chen. Not since the Middle Ages. Anybody trapped here is chained down to make profits for somebody they never heard of. All the time thinking they’re victims of Communism. This is the most perverse rationale of greed and cruelty I’ve ever heard.’

  Claire rose to her feet, picked up her knapsack, and slung it over one shoulder. She knelt down and reached behind Cecilia to prop her up.

  Chen stood up. ‘MacGinnes saw my point. We train our inmates in the latest technology production. From time to time, one of them can’t be reformed, and well, we make use of them, too. Nothing and no one is wasted, you see.’

  Claire started to gag on dry vomiting that weakened her hold on Cecilia.

  Chen wasn’t fazed.

  ‘Too bad, you struck me as slightly more intelligent than our American owner. At least he understands that our private experiment here in Cha Ling takes time. He has the cash, the machinery and the connections to make us a lot of money fast and with those profits we are constantly improving the lifestyle of our residents.’

  ‘Inmates? Residents? Don’t you mean slaves?’

  ‘Please. I am trying to talk to you at a philosophical level you seem unwilling to appreciate. Give us ten years, no, make it twenty, and this will be the happiest, most comfortable and least corrupt place in China. In Beijing, old men are arguing with each other—should we let foreigners into full management, should we let them take profit out of the country, should we tolerate political freedom? What a waste of time. Harness the country, put China�
�s masses to work, bring them into the twenty-first century with technology and order, and talk later. Look at the corruption across the country now. At least we keep straight accounts.’

  Chen stopped a moment for breath.

  ‘And Vic?’

  ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’

  ‘What happened to Vic?’

  ‘He died of natural causes,’ Chen sighed.

  ‘Natural?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t have killed a Chinese, and I speak from personal experience, so we couldn’t even call it manslaughter. I put him into an isolation cell, the kind we use all the time for discipline. Three feet high, five feet wide, no windows, no light. You know people in America actually pay to spend time in so-called sensory-deprivation tanks?’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Claire shouted. Chen’s calm lecture was forcing her to the limits of her control. Nausea was returning as her empty intestines cramped up. Her shoulder blades dripped sweat.

  ‘Well, I told him that some Chinese spent years in such a place. Like that dissident in Beijing, Xu Wenli. Committed in ‘79, released in ‘93. It didn’t kill him.’ Chen sighed again.

  ‘You murdered Vic.’

  Chen’s cigarette waved wearily again as he stretched to his feet and leaned against the doorjamb. ‘I assure you; we never really intended to harm him. He panicked. Wouldn’t eat. Started whimpering. I confess I teased him a little. Told him he wouldn’t be capable of writing his own name when I did release him. Said he could be useful in other respects.’

  Claire gasped. ‘Brainchild Medical Exports, Ltd.’

  ‘Why, yes. I asked him if he’d like to donate a kidney to our medical export subsidiary. We’re the best in the province, known to have the healthiest donors year round. We don’t have to beef them up at the last minute. Vic thought he could keep his kidney by making himself sick and useless to us. He lost consciousness after a week of starving himself. But in the end, I think it was really fear. Had a bit of a fever too, though. Hard to say.’

  ‘I’m going to take Cecilia home now, Chen.’ Claire hoped her voice sounded more confident than she felt. She lifted Cecilia to her feet. The girl stirred, and murmured. Half opening her eyes, she gazed at Claire again, as Claire ordered into her ear, ‘Walk, Cecilia, lean on me. Wake up! Walk!’

  They shuffled awkwardly in Chen’s direction; he gallantly rose to let them pass and then reached for the telephone and spoke quietly into the mouthpiece, ‘Ma shang lai ba, dao i yuan.’

  He had summoned his dog men with their leashes.

  Claire kicked the door open wider and dragged Cecilia out into the first drops of rain. Flashlights crisscrossed the yard in front of them. The towers burst into cones of blinding light trained on the clinic. Icy bullets of rain then pelted them hard, sending silvery streaks through the yellow beam.

  Claire edged back toward the door for valuable seconds while she waited for her sight to recover. Chen followed her outside but made no move to intervene. The lights shifted slightly away from him, so that Claire could now make out a small group of men hundreds of feet from them. Chen flicked his ash in Claire’s direction.

  She strained to hold Cecilia upright at her side. The young woman struggled to keep her unfocused gaze on Claire. She tried to drag her feet, but her ankles were unsteady. The two women stumbled against the side of the clinic that faced back over the open compound just as six guards came closer, their pistols drawn.

  Chen stood to one side.

  Claire watched the guards approach in formation. From ten feet away, Claire saw how young they were—more farm hands than trained security veterans. One appeared to be limping, favoring a false leg. He was wearing Vic’s shoes with the Velcro straps.

  The boys bore no insignia on their shoulders, none of the combinations of rifles, wheel or stars she knew as denoting People’s Armed Police or People’s Liberation Army. She pulled Cecilia’s weight as much against her as possible, and swinging her hand behind the girl, plunged it into her knapsack and pulled out the pistol.

  She released the safety. She aimed the pistol at the tallest guard. The boys halted in their tracks.

  ‘Tell them to let us pass, Chen.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Chen gestured to the guards to advance on the two women. Claire receded back in Chen’s direction. She had two chances. She pointed the gun straight at his mutilated ear.

  ‘I’ll shoot you, Chen.’

  ‘Well, that would keep you here for a very long time, wouldn’t it? Think for a minute. This camp represents over many millions of American dollars in investment.’

  ‘A rogue operation.’

  ‘I prefer to think of it as an unofficial experiment for the country’s future. We’re been a nation of slaves for thousands of years anyway.’ Chen signaled to the guards again.

  ‘What’s your plan? Kill us?’

  ‘ No.’ Chen smiled. ‘You and your friend spend a few years inside that prison. We keep a few hundred workers in there, the difficult cases, but we’re phasing it out of our active operations. The kind of work we’re doing is too high-tech to accommodate malcontents. And you’d be surprised. Many of our residents are very happy to get a small wage in hard currency and steady training. They think they’re lucky to have been assigned to such a modern place when they could be mining salt in Qinghai for life. In time, I’m sure you’ll feel the same way.’

  He waved his cigarette elegantly, ‘Hao ba.’

  Claire thrust the pistol straight towards his stomach. He stared at her too intently for comfort, a slight wisp of smoke easing out of the side of his mouth and brushing her nostrils.

  ‘Beautiful hazel corneas,’ he murmured.

  One of the guards grabbed Cecilia roughly away and dragged her back in the direction of the clinic door.

  Claire instinct drove her now. She grabbed Chen’s sinewy arm through the serge jacket. He put up absolutely no resistance, but smiled a strange, wan smile. Trails of acrid smoke wound in the glare, around the folded edge of one mutilated ear and the sparse black bristles on his chin.

  ‘Chen, tell him to let her go.’

  A rough hand jerked at Claire and another yanked her back by the straps of her knapsack. The guard tried to kick her legs out from under her, but she twisted quickly, pulled the trigger once and turned, firing again. She couldn’t pull the trigger again—they’d realize she’d used up the ammunition left in the gun.

  There was a vicious scuffle of soft-soled shoes on the hard ground as she yanked herself back, fell, and kicked wildly at the open sky. One guard rushed to Chen, another pulled a wounded boy back into their formation. She panted like a trapped wild animal.

  No one shot at her.

  Because there was no one giving orders. The guards were babbling and gesturing, but no one pulled a trigger. The wounded boy was squealing the life out of his chest.

  You’re not soldiers! You’re not police,’ Claire screamed in Chinese. ‘You work for a company. That company is illegal! Who’s your leader?’

  ‘Mei you, mei you lingdao ren,’ said the tallest. No leader, he shouted, while two others dragged the bleeding guard, trailing guts and all, towards the clinic. The boy was clutching his crotch, streaming blood.

  ‘Mei you,’ Claire repeated in disbelief. It was a phrase of comic proportions in Chinese, designed to mean everything from ‘The fish is off today’ to ‘Yes, we have no bananas.’ It was the ultimate cop-out phrase of the mainland, the eternal begging off from responsibility.

  These boys were scared. Shooting the wrong foreigner could mean a bullet in the back of their teenage skulls now that Chen’s body lay limp and gutted a few feet away from them. He wasn’t there to give orders or take the rap.

  Claire said in Chinese, ‘We’re going now.’ She kept the Red Star trained on the oldest of the guards and walked past another guard now kneeling over Chen. In the dark, she could only make out the long thin fingers still holding the burning stub of his cigarette.

  She fetched Cecilia from th
e unresisting grip of another guard. She wrapped the girl once again under her arm and they started clumsily toward the now-abandoned exit gate. Still pointing the gun, she checked behind her and saw them in a frieze bending in confusion around Chen.

  As she neared the main gate, Claire shifted the gun into her other hand and lifted Cecilia into her arms. The tiny Chinese felt weightless and Claire wondered how long it had been since Cecilia had eaten a decent meal. They passed the gatehouse, where suddenly a phone started ringing—an urgent, lonely peal.

  ‘Vic’s dead,’ whispered Cecilia as they passed the barbed-wire barricade.

  ‘I know. Shhhh.’

  She headed back down the small dirt road into the night. Each minute added another pound to Cecilia. After only a hundred feet, Claire wondered where she would find it in her to get them to even the first village.

  Her eyesight started to white out, to no longer see anything but a blinding lightness. She hadn’t eaten since lunch and thrown up more than once. She figured she was fainting from the stress and fatigue and concentrated on only the next step, then the next.

  She wondered if she should ditch the pistol and even her backpack. All she had to do was get them to a main road, safe from suspicion, back into the real world of Punyu’s pulsing daily life.

  The blinding light made her dizzy, but she found she hadn’t fainted; she was still standing when the light passed and she hoped she could hold on for another five minutes. Then she gave herself another five minutes of putting one muddy shoe in front of the other.

  She was sure if she kept going that the fainting spell and the strange flashes of light would pass. But the light hit her again —just another streak of exhaustion.

  She lost her balance and Cecilia started to slip from her arms. She waited to feel herself hitting the ground. She’d stumbled in a pothole, but caught herself and stayed upright. Cecilia was still in her arms, sagging badly.

  She heard the sound of a car engine starting. Someone flashed car headlights right into their pupils.