Whispering Shadows

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  The screen now showed a photo of the Great Wall of China, covered with at least two dozen folders: Letters, Photos, Heavy Metal, Vic, and so on.

  Paul felt his heart begin to thud more heavily. Something deep within him stopped him from clicking on the mouse again, as though there was an invisible barrier that he must not cross. One more click of the mouse and there was no turning back. Paul ran his hands through his hair. Finally, he opened the folder labeled Photos, which opened up a series of subfolders. He clicked on Shanghai. Instead of the travel snapshots and views of the city he expected to find, he found himself looking at photos of a large construction site. Cranes, diggers, a cement foundation. Michael Owen and a short Chinese man wearing hard hats, standing shoulder to shoulder and smiling. In Tang, he found photos of a tall man about his own age who faced the camera rather stiffly every time. Here he was with an arm around a young woman at a dinner, sitting in an office behind a large desk, sitting on a plane. The folder A contained only photos of the woman who Tang had his arm around at dinner. She was a young, very good-looking Chinese woman with a challenging, almost provocative, smile. She was standing with a Prada bag on the Bund in Shanghai, in the Forbidden City in Beijing, in the lounge of a luxury hotel. Here she was in a pink bathrobe at a breakfast table, lying asleep in bed or naked, with legs half spread, on the couch with one hand over her vagina. Paul magnified the photo so that he could see her features more clearly. She had the fair skin, high cheekbones, and oval face of a northern Chinese woman; she was smiling, but something about her gaze disturbed Paul. He felt like an intruder, like a stranger in a world that he really did not want to enter. He clicked through various files and folders randomly. They were all secured with different passwords. All he could open was a letter that was still on the virtual desktop. He read it, once, twice, closed the document, shut his computer, and wished that he had never opened it.

  Paul rang the number that Zhang had left him, but the cell phone was switched off. He wandered aimlessly through the house. It had grown dark outside and a strong wind was blowing, the sign of a possible typhoon. He heard the leaves rustling and the loud cracking and creaking of the bamboo swaying in the wind. It was the first time since he had lived here that he found the place eerie; he wanted to talk to someone, to hear a human voice. He checked the time. If he hurried he could still get the 8:30 PM ferry and meet Christine in Wan Chai for a drink or to have dessert in a coffee shop.

  He left the house and rang her number on the way. She was no longer in the office. She was at home with her son in Hang Hau and would be very happy for him to visit.

  Hang Hau. Paul was not sure if he still had the strength for it.

  XV

  There were days when Zhang felt an almost physical revulsion on entering the police headquarters. The strong smell of disinfectant stung his nostrils after taking only a few steps into the hall, and the constant roar of the air-conditioning hurt his ears; the cool air made him feel cold, and the obligation to spend hours with several people in cramped smoke-filled rooms reading through files or phoning people made him feel like retching. On days like this he withdrew like a snail into its shell; he only spoke when necessary, hid behind mountains of folders, and read reports for hours until he practically knew them off by heart, went for lunch alone, and dragged the lunch hour out into the afternoon.

  Today was such a day. The mere sight of the young men and women in uniform at the entrance made him shiver, as if he were cold. Perhaps, thought Zhang, perhaps Mei was right, and it was time to leave the police force and do something else. In the long term, it was impossible to be a police detective who felt that no punishment was just because punishment and justice bore no relation to each other; what was more, he could not trust the people he worked with. Mei always said he would have been a better lawyer than a police detective; he was much too soft for the work and would always have sympathy for a criminal, however wretched, and try to find an explanation for every crime, no matter how abominable. He did not contradict her; in the last twenty years he had not met a single murderer or person who had committed an act of violence in whom he had not glimpsed at least a shadow of himself. Weren’t all human beings capable of anything? Did we not have to be humble and grateful every day for our destiny, our Karma, our god, for not putting us in situations in which the most destructive forces within us flowered in full force? After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people surely could not have the slightest doubts on this front.

  Three lousy peppercorns.

  ———

  In the office, people were standing around in small groups drinking tea and talking about the Michael Owen case. Zhang’s request for a copy of the interrogation report made them fall silent. Why did he want it? The case was practically closed according to Luo. They were hours away from a confession.

  Was there no signed confession yet?

  No. What made him think so?

  His thoughts turned to Tang. Why had he told Richard Owen that they already had a signed confession? Had Luo or Ye told him they already had one after the first interrogation? Or was it the other way around: Had Tang decided that there had to be a confession and told the Owens it existed, so Luo and Ye were working on getting one now?

  Zhang asked where the suspect was being held.

  In one of the rooms in the basement.

  After a brief exchange, a colleague gave him a few sheets of paper containing a summary of yesterday’s interrogations and the personal details about the suspect.

  It was the typical story of a migrant worker. Zu also came from Sichuan Province, from a small village near Chengdu; he was the son of farmers. Thirty-two years old, married with one child, he had lived in Shenzhen for eight years and had worked in the foundry at Cathay Heavy Metal for a year. The report stated that he was a good friend of the worker who had died there a few weeks ago. Filled with grief and rage at the bad safety conditions in the factory, Zu wanted to take revenge on Michael Owen. He lay in wait for Owen near the factory and blocked his path with a bicycle in order to speak to him. The American did not understand him and responded with shouting and dismissive hand gestures, which made Zu even angrier and gave him the feeling that the foreigner was treating him without the slightest respect. Even though he, Zu, was only a worker, he had his pride. When Zu refused to move out of the way, Michael Owen had grabbed hold of him; there were two eyewitnesses who saw this from a nearby coffee shop. Zu defended himself; he picked up a piece of iron pipe lying by the roadside and struck Michael Owen several times in rage. When Owen was no longer moving, Zu panicked, put his victim in the car, and drove to Datouling Forest Park, where he hid the body in the bushes, stealing the cash and credit cards in order to make it look like the murder was a robbery case.

  The police had found the iron rod and had recorded the witnesses’ statements.

  Everything was there, Zhang thought, after he had read through the report several times: a motive, eyewitnesses, the murder weapon. The only thing missing was the murderer’s signature. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Luo had simply signed it himself.

  How probable was it that this was indeed how the crime had taken place? Would a worker really have the courage to attack the owner of the factory, who was also a foreigner? It wasn’t out of the question, Zhang thought, if there was enough anger. The death of a friend could give rise to it. An iron pipe by the roadside? Also very possible; there was a lot of scrap metal and junk on the roads of Shenzhen. How would the fight have taken place? Was Zu strong enough to fatally wound Michael Owen, who was younger and probably taller and stronger? Zhang imagined the scene: Owen getting out of his car and trying to talk to the Chinese man, getting angry because he was not being understood or was being shouted at, turning away at some point to get back into his car, and being attacked from behind. Possible. But how had Zu gotten the body to the park? Farming people like him could seldom drive, certainly not a Mercedes or a BMW, which Michael Owen ha
d probably driven. And why had Zu taken the body to Datouling Forest Park, of all places? To make it seem like the murder had taken place because of a robbery, the backstreets in Shekou with the bars for foreigners would have sufficed. The autopsy report stated that Michael Owen’s left arm had been broken in several places, his chest had been crushed, and his right shoulder dislocated. Could Zu have done all that alone? Or had he had accomplices who were being protected by this confession?

  No one would be looking for the answers to these questions. For the police, the case would be closed the moment Zu signed a confession. Every court in China would find Zu guilty as a result, and no judge would ask how the confession had come about. And if he really was being held in the basement by Luo and Ye, his signature was only a matter of time.

  Zhang could no longer stand the confines of his office and the voices of his colleagues. He muttered something about his knee hurting and a doctor’s appointment and left the building by a back door.

  He wanted to be alone, to think while walking through the city, but he came to a standstill only two streets away next to a building site. It was the size of two football fields; on one side four skyscrapers with almost complete exteriors towered into the sky and on the other side were the skeletons of four more. Zhang knew this area well; he remembered building work on this spot a few years ago: A dozen eight-story buildings had been built then. They had been demolished last year to make room for these taller, bigger, more modern apartment buildings. He was fascinated by building sites; he loved watching them, how a building was created, grew larger, took shape, and multiplied. He thought of the construction workers as representatives of the millions of people who worked out of sight in the factories producing shoes, shirts, lights, toys, and goodness knows what else for the rest of the world, who no one ever took an interest in. For him, building sites were a glimpse into the heart of this city.

  He watched the workers through the fencing. They were tanned a deep brown, wearing shorts only, chests bare because it was far too hot for a T-shirt, far too hot to do anything, really. Under the burning sun they schlepped iron rods, wooden slats, and doors, mixed concrete, and shoveled sand, sweating away, torturing their young bodies, already so worn out, carrying out their work in silence, concentrating, with a seriousness and dignity that Zhang found moving. These workers he knew would move from building site to building site, working seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, until the day they just couldn’t do it anymore and were packed off home without any notice, or, worse still, until the day they fell from the scaffolding out of sheer exhaustion or, in a moment of inattention, were killed by a falling plank or rod or were run over by a digger.

  He could so easily have been one of them himself. He had scraped through the entrance exams for the police academy with the minimum score. One more wrong answer, one more careless mistake, a small error, and he would have been on a building site. At least that had been his plan if he had failed. He would be back in Sichuan now with a broken body, squatting by the roadside in Chengdu, perhaps, mending bicycle tires or selling lottery tickets. That is, if he were even still alive. Zhang thought about the young man he had once had to pick up from a building site. He had fallen from the thirty-first story of the shiny glass façade of a building in what had at first been mysterious circumstances. Zhang discovered later that the man had initially refused to work so high up because he was afraid of heights and got dizzy; it was only when they had threatened to send him home otherwise that he went up there. He had likely panicked on the bamboo scaffolding and lost his grip.

  Zhang had never passed one of the new skyscrapers without thinking about that man.

  Watching the workers, he knew exactly what he had to do. The voice in him could not be ignored, even if he had wanted to do so. Like Paul, he had ignored it often enough in his life and paid heavily for it. But we don’t have a choice, he thought, as he hailed a taxi.

  ———

  Zhang took the precaution of making a big loop around the Cathay Heavy Metal grounds. Neither Luo nor anyone else from work must know what he planned to do. He directed the taxi to drive to the Old Sichuan and asked to be let off a few blocks away. The factories were clearly having their lunch break at the moment, for the streets were full of young men and women running errands, standing in line outside telephone shops, strolling up and down, or simply relaxing in the shade under trees. Zhang walked past several restaurants, looking for workers wearing Cathay Heavy Metal overalls. At a table at the back of Old Sichuan, he recognized three of the men he had shared a hot pot meal with the day before yesterday.

  Did he greet them a little too enthusiastically? Was he a little too loud? Had they grown suspicious because he had turned up again and sat down with them as if they were old friends? Zhang did not know, but he could feel immediately that something had happened. All of them were distant and silent; they were very clearly not as glad to see him as he was to see them; they ignored his remarks about boring Cantonese food all being the same and the delicious spicy hot pot. His pushy behavior and inappropriately hearty tone soon made him feel uncomfortable too. He grew quiet and tried to make sense of the fragments of conversation he was hearing.

  The men were angry because one of their coworkers had been arrested two days before; they did not know why. The man’s wife and their six-month-old son, with whom he shared a room in the factory quarters, had had to leave the factory grounds the next day, which was just as bad if not worse. A woman friend who worked in a textile factory nearby had secretly given them shelter, but they would not be able to stay with her for long. No one knew where she should go; of course she did not want to go back to Sichuan while her husband was in prison.

  Zhang hesitated. Should he offer to help? Would that awaken more suspicion or would the fact that he came from the same province dispel any doubts? He raised his voice and said something about how he could probably take the woman and her child to stay with a friend from Chengdu who lived in Shenzhen, though of course he would like to meet her first. The men looked at him in amazement. One of the Cathay workers stood up suddenly, as if there was a danger that Zhang could change his mind, and beckoned him to follow.

  They crossed the main road and went down one of the narrow backstreets that led straight to the grounds of a small factory that consisted of a flat-roofed building with white tiled surfaces. In the background, Zhang could hear the monotonous hum of sewing machines. Behind that was a long brick building, the workers’ quarters. They walked up to the first floor, picking their way past buckets and washing lines full of underwear, socks, shirts, trousers, and skirts, to a room at the end of the corridor.

  The door was half open; they entered without knocking.

  Inside were four bunk beds, a small table, and eight red plastic stools, which were stacked on top of each other in a corner. There were several posters of Chinese pop stars on the walls, and there was a metal grille in front of the only window. On each bed lay a thin raffia mat with a big stuffed toy and a bulging plastic bag. It was unbearably hot. Zhang could not see anyone, but he heard breathing behind a curtain that was obscuring one of the lower bunk beds.

  “Don’t be afraid, Liu, it’s me,” said the man who had led Zhang there, as he pushed the rags aside. A delicate young woman with a baby in her arms was hiding behind them. “Here is someone who may be able to help you.”

  The woman did not move, but looked at Zhang with her small narrow eyes. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “My name is Zhang Lin,” Zhang replied.

  “What do you want?”

  “To help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve heard that you need help.” Zhang knew that the woman in front of him would have to be a Buddhist already in order to believe in this reason.

  “Are you a policeman?” she asked suspiciously.

  He had been afraid of this question. He did not want to lie but if he told the truth h
e would endanger both himself and her.

  “I’m also from Chengdu,” he said in a way that implied that someone from that city could never become a policeman in Shenzhen.

  A brief smile flitted across her mouth. “Me too.”

  “I’ve heard that you and your child need a bed for a few days.”

  The fear returned to her face immediately. “Yes, and what about it?”

  “I have a friend who is from Chengdu. He has a restaurant in Shekou and there are two rooms above it for his waitresses. There is often a bed free there. He may even need a worker. I could give him a call.”

  She put her baby down on a pillow carefully and crept out of the bed. How small and delicate Zu’s wife is, he thought, as she stood in front of him. She looked as if she was in her early twenties, and there were dark shadows in the hollows under her eyes. Her lips were stretched thin and her eyes had the look of a person who had never found much reason to trust a stranger.

  Zhang understood why she was frightened. Every year, tens of thousands of young women vanished overnight without a trace, lured into a trap by strangers who promised them a good job. Well-organized gangs smuggled them right across the country to remote provinces and sold them to farmers who often treated them like slaves. The newspapers and the television were full of stories like these. How was she supposed to know that he did not belong to one of these gangs?

  “How long do you need somewhere to stay?”

  She looked at him for a long time, expressionless, as though the time had now come for her to decide whether to believe him or not. Their eyes met. He felt uncomfortable; he hated lying or concealing the truth, and always thought that the person being deceived must see that immediately. But for her this was not a question of trust. As far as he could see from her eyes, she had no other option.