Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  Wang assumed the girl had been one of the fifteen-odd students on the protest and that’s what she was fighting with her boyfriend over. He’d watched the protest himself, though from a distance. The protesters had been more than outnumbered by plain-clothes security agents, videoing them.

  Wang also knew that what made the Professor so popular was not so much his command of urban planning, which was beyond dreary, but the debates and discussions he allowed after his classes.

  As darkness fell, students would gather in ever-growing numbers in his fourth floor classroom in an older block in the far corner of the campus, and talk about the nature of democracy, free speech and corruption. It was rumoured they openly discussed the 1989 student movement and the Tiananmen Square massacre, though Wang didn’t know for sure, since it wasn’t something he ever went along to.

  To him, politics was best avoided, at least openly. It would only bring trouble. He didn’t think it had anything to do with him. The way he saw it, why should he care when he couldn’t do anything about it anyway? If he thought about it at all, it was as something to poke fun at online, in the relative freedom and anonymity of cyberspace, where nothing seemed particularly real.

  As he saw it, the boyfriend was right.

  He glanced again at the girl, just as she stood, calling the boyfriend a spineless idiot, and spilling what was left of her tea. The boyfriend seemed to shrivel in front of her, keeping his eyes firmly on his smartphone, at which the girl took a swing but missed. Then she stormed to the stairs leading out of the coffee shop, nearly taking out two tables on the way.

  The Professor’s reputation went beyond the University. He also had a popular blog, with almost a quarter of a million followers. He was a lawyer by training, and he argued online and in his after-hours talks that if the Party was serious about ending corruption and upholding the rule of law, as it claimed, then it needed to be accountable to its own laws and its own constitution.

  He always sounded so reasonable, like he was just defending Chinese laws. He was also a member of the Party, and Wang suspected that was why they found him so dangerous and had gone after him, using the catch-all of a corruption investigation as an excuse.

  There’d been an online petition in his defence too, which had been signed by hundreds of students. But not the roommates.

  “What difference can it make?” Zhang said. “And anyway, how do you know it won’t come back to bite you?”

  For once, both Liu and Wang agreed that Zhang, boring and cautious Zhang, did have a point. And Zhang said it wasn’t just the Professor. Something weird was going on, and not just on campus. They should be careful. He said the Professor’s blog had been deleted, and that it wasn’t the only one. Dozens of others had gone too, part of a crackdown on what the authorities called rumour mongering.

  Wang said he’d heard that several bloggers had been arrested for the same reason, including two that he followed.

  “What do you suppose the Professor did wrong?” said Zhang.

  And Wang said, “What does it matter?”

  It seemed to Wang that corruption was part of the job description for any Party official, though he conceded that Professor Huang Guangbi wasn’t like your average Party member. It was hard to think of him doing anything dishonest.

  Then Wang said, “I was seriously thinking about joining the Party.”

  “Seriously? The Party? You?” Liu said.

  “They’d never have you,” said Zhang.

  Wang said he did try, once; sent a letter, but didn’t get a reply.

  “I’ve heard they choose you. You don’t choose them,” Zhang said.

  Wang said that Party membership had seemed a good route to easy money. The others agreed. All Party officials enriched themselves, but things were certainly getting trickier now.

  Zhang said that some local governments had stopped making decisions because officials were terrified they’d be accused of corruption. He said he’d heard it from his father, both his parents having mid-ranking government jobs in a small town near Shanghai.

  “Did you know that half a million officials were punished last year?” Zhang said.

  Wang said he didn’t know, but that was a lot of vacancies.

  “But there’s no point if you can’t make money anymore,” he said.

  Zhang said the Commission, the graft-busters, were trying to improve their image, that they’d been sponsoring concerts, where performers sang and danced and did sketches about corrupt officials. One had been broadcast live on television. That they were trying to be more open.

  “More open about disappearing people?” said Wang.

  Zhang ignored that and said, “They’ve even got a website with a link for reporting corrupt officials. It crashed several times on its first day, there was so much demand.”

  Wang said that was cool.

  Then Liu began to groan. Another of his investments had gone bad and he had his head in his hands. He said this one was a solid investment, or at least it should have been. His dad, the big-shot government official who advised the Prime Minister, had tipped him off that the company was about to do a deal with an American partner, from somewhere called Alabama, who was going to shift most of his production to China.

  “So what happened?” Wang said.

  “The guy, the owner, he just disappeared, so the share price has crashed. Just like that. He was a young guy. Into tech mainly. Nobody at the company can say what’s happened to him, though there are online rumours he’s been arrested.”

  “Bit of a casino that stock market if you ask me,” Zhang said.

  “Nobody asked you,” said Liu, irritated and thinking Zhang was just being smarmy again. He threw a teaspoon at him, which ricocheted off the table and hit the abandoned boyfriend on the leg. The boyfriend looked up, perhaps thinking the girlfriend was back for another round of argument about the Professor. Liu caught his eye and apologised.

  Wang then searched for the website of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption outfit, the one that called itself the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, curious about how they were trying to give a cuddly face to the business of disappearing people.

  The site had all the design flair of a funeral announcement or the menu in the university canteen. You didn’t have to be a computer science student to recognise that.

  He opened it and began to watch a recording of one of their shows, which he thought was so bad it was almost funny. Then a man appeared on screen and said that the Commission would go after what it called “tigers and flies” – high-ranking officials as well as low ones. The man was described as Head of the Commission, its top graft-buster, and he looked uncomfortable, his delivery stilted. Like he hated doing it, being in the limelight like that. Trying to sound reasonable.

  But it was his appearance that was most striking to Wang. He was a short man with a balding head, but a curiously round and child-like face. His most distinct feature was a pair of thick-rimmed and slightly tinted glasses that were so big they dominated his face. He showed no emotion.

  “So this is the guy who does all the disappearing,” Wang said. “What a creep. I don’t suppose he has too many friends.”

  *

  The protests against the Professor’s disappearance quickly died down. Few people had really expected them to make a difference anyway, and the university chat rooms had reverted to their usual torpor.

  Wang could see no further mention of the Professor. It was as if he’d never existed. The old posts had been deleted. Those who’d taken part in the small protest outside the University’s administration building had received a summons by the university authorities. They called it an invitation to tea, where they were reminded of their duty to parents, family and university. That rules were rules. They were told to think of their careers.

  The girl who’d a
rgued with her boyfriend about defending the Professor had continued to come to the coffee shop, though this time alone, taking a seat in the corner, which she had made her own.

  The Party had contacted her father, who owned a small factory on the coast and threatened him with a tax investigation, so she’d promised him she’d concentrate on her studies. For the good of the family. Challenging the authorities does nobody any good, her father had warned her. You can do nothing for the Professor.

  From where Wang and his roommates sat, she looked subdued, like the spirit had been sapped from her, just working the keyboard of her smartphone. They never knew her name, never bothered to find out. That would have been to get involved far more than they wanted. They just called her The Girl In The Corner.

  – 14 –

  Funny Money

  For the most part Tom and Dick preferred to stay at The Facility or else in their five-star hotel further down the Bund. Or in Cyril’s taxi, travelling between the two. Shanghai was just a backdrop, to which they paid little attention. The world that mattered to them lived beyond the screens of their laptops.

  But the dumpling bug, which they had so lovingly nurtured and eventually delivered, seemed to have gone AWOL. At least that’s how it seemed to Drayton.

  “When does the bug start talking?” he asked Tom, and Tom said the bug was a worm and worms were complicated, especially this one; that it needed time to replicate, to spread through their network, learning as it goes, concealing its tracks.

  “Wow,” said Drayton, “that’s some worm. So you’re saying it’s kinda burrowing away, getting familiar. But when does it feel sufficiently at home to start spouting names and stuff?”

  “When it’s ready,” Dick said, without looking up, sounding protective about the worm and irritated with all the questions.

  A bit of irritation was fine by Drayton. As long as it got the message across, that they weren’t on vacation here. As he saw it, he was the one getting all the flak in the Bubble Room, while these guys sat around spouting geek-speak and waiting for their baby to come home leisurely like and say, “Hey guys, look what I’ve got.” At least that’s how Drayton imagined it.

  An investigation that had seemed so promising was getting bogged down.

  And there was a lot of pressure from the Bubble Room. The President’s visit was getting closer. There’s a window here, he kept being told, to put pressure on Beijing over all this cyber stuff. We just need names, they kept telling him. We need to know, who is the guy in the photographs? And who’s he working with?

  He left The Facility, putting on his black Hannibal Lecter pollution mask, and walked towards the river, messaging the word “smog” to Cyril, the signal to meet him with the old taxi at the rendezvous point. He called Morgan as he walked, wanting to press him on the Colonel, see how he was doing and what he’d learned, remind him that it was urgent, but the Englishman didn’t pick up.

  He then messaged Sakura, and was surprised to get a quick reply, saying she was at home and why didn’t he come over. Which made him smile. She’d ignored his messages for a week, and now it was like, get over here now. He checked the time. It was early. He had three hours before the midday conference call in the Bubble Room. He messaged Sakura back saying he’d be there in half an hour.

  Cyril was already pulling up as he reached the alleyway by the abandoned warehouse, two fresh dents in his rear door.

  “Nice one, Cyril. You were serious about blending in, man. You had an accident or did you take a hammer to it?”

  Cyril ignored the question and said the smog was bad, but it was moody. The way it hung over the river. Drayton thought that was so fucking stupid, all that moody bullshit, and that the next person to tell him that deserved to be thrown in the cesspit of a river, along which they were soon driving.

  But he wasn’t about to tell Cyril that, because he needed the guy to drop him near Sakura’s place, in another part of the Concession, which probably wasn’t protocol. So he just said that yeah, the pollution reading was bad, “hazardous” according to a smog app on his iPhone. He held the phone out to Cyril to take a look, since there was a cute little cartoon of a man with a mask and the word “Yuk”.

  “This is a great little app,” he said.

  And Cyril just said, “Oh yeah”, without taking his eyes off the road, like he might get some sort of viral infection just by looking at a Chinese app.

  But Cyril was good about dropping him near Sakura’s place, Drayton saying he needed to deal with some consular business, and turning down Cyril’s offer to wait.

  Her apartment was on the second floor of a small colonial-era shophouse, which he entered through a side door and then climbed the stairs. She opened the door wearing a grey woollen bathrobe, her hair pinned up and cradling the black and white pug she called Bobby, and which Drayton thought was just about the ugliest dog he’d ever seen.

  Sakura lent forward presenting Drayton with one cheek and then the other. He kissed both, and then she held up the dog for him, pushing its permanently creased face right towards his, a dripping pug tongue stretching towards his nose. Just before contact, Sakura’s smartphone rang and she retreated into the apartment to take the call. Drayton followed her in, grateful for the timing of the call and closing the door behind him. He sat on a low sofa in the darkened room, blinds still closed.

  She finished the call and asked how he was, but before he had a chance to answer, she said it was a pain not being able to get to the office, since she had a lot of work on, but there was some sort of protest against Japan, right outside the office. She said it had started the day before, and they’d already burned two Toyotas – a Prius and a Lexus – as well as a Kia SUV. She said the mob, maybe 200 of them, arrived by bus, and the police had just looked on. In fact, she said, it seemed like the police knew the protesters really well.

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Drayton said. “And Kia’s Korean.”

  “And the two Toyotas were owned by Chinese businessmen,” she said.

  He asked what the protest was about and she just shrugged, saying it was something to do with the South China Sea, about Japanese islands that China claimed. There’d been some sort of collision between ships.

  Then she said, “Where’s Alcatraz?”

  “San Francisco Bay. Just off America. Nowhere near Japan.”

  “That’s what I thought. It’s just that some of the placards the protesters were carrying said ‘Hands off Alcatraz’ and things like that.”

  He started to tell her about the nationalist blogs that had gone viral, and that maybe the nationalists were a bit out with their geography, but she’d already gone to the kitchen and Bobby had climbed onto the sofa and had his nose in Drayton’s crotch. He stood up, pushing the pug away, went to the window, and started to open the blinds.

  “Don’t do that,” said Sakura, pushing him back to the sofa, straddling him, saying that she didn’t have long, her hands now pressing where Bobby’s wet nose had been moments before. She kissed him so hard that it felt to Drayton like a suction cap had been fitted around his mouth and his tongue might be torn out at any moment.

  She paused for air, removing her bathrobe. He pushed himself forward and began to kiss her neck, her ear lobes, hands massaging her back, trying to gain the initiative, slowing things down. But she pushed him down again, hands on the belt of his trousers, pulling at it so hard that Drayton yelped. She ignored that, maybe thinking it was the pug, and after a brief struggle with his trouser buttons, he was naked from the waist down.

  Then she was back on top and he was still trying but failing to slow things down, wanting to pace himself. But she was on a sprint to the finish. There was a lot more yelping, a kind of duet between Sakura and the pug, before she lifted herself off him and said, “Oh, you’ve finished.” Sounding disappointed, and looking at his crotch like it was something a little distas
teful that Bobby had dragged home.

  “Well, yeah,” said Drayton. “It’s been a while.”

  Without another word, Sakura went to her bedroom and Drayton heard the whoosh of the shower starting up. He began to get dressed, the pug jumping back onto the sofa and making another lunge for his crotch. This time he pushed the dog away with a bare foot, but it snapped back, biting his toe. Drayton shouted, a pained sort of, “Arrrhh fuck!” and kicked the dog again, which yelped, this time a terrible high-pitched yelp.

  Sakura came rushing back to the living room, a towel wrapped around her, and said, “Baby, darling, what happened?”

  Drayton said, don’t worry, it’s just a scratch. I’ll be alright. But Sakura wasn’t talking to him. She went straight to the dog, saying “Baby, my baby”, and a bunch of other stuff in Japanese, before picking the dog up and taking it to her bedroom, ignoring Drayton.

  She returned to the living room five minutes later, in her work clothes, and talking on her smartphone. She ended the call and told Drayton she had to get to the office because the protesters had gone and there was a ton of work to do. She said to Drayton to let himself out, and then she left, blowing him a kiss.

  Drayton sat for a couple of minutes before he noticed the crumpled face of the pug, eyeing him from the kitchen door. He threw a cushion at it and then left, deciding to walk to the consulate, grabbing a coffee along the way, and thinking about Sakura and how that really hadn’t been his best performance.

  He’d wanted a relationship that was uncomplicated and straightforward, especially after the Berlin mess, but it would be nice if she showed a bit more interest in him, was a bit more engaged. She’d never once asked what he did at the consulate. Not that he could ever tell her, but it was the principle. And she should get rid of that fucking dog.

  After a few blocks he’d developed a sharp pain in his toe, the one bitten by that pug, and soon his entire foot was aching. He’d have to get that checked out. By the time he reached the consulate he was limping, and the first thing he was asked when he arrived in the Bubble Room was whether he was okay.