Whispering Shadows

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

“I don’t know,” Zhang said again, tonelessly.

  “Were you dropping hints all those years that I didn’t pick up on?”

  “No.”

  Paul sank down on the pallet. Zhang emitted a series of strange sounds: deep sighs, gasps, and dry sobs in turn. They sat there for a long time without saying anything. Suddenly Zhang sat up and turned toward him. Paul could clearly make out the outline of his narrow frame in the darkness.

  “It had gone,” Zhang said with great care and very quietly. “For years. I had erased it from my memory. As though it had never happened. It always cast a shadow over my life but I did not notice it or did not want to notice it. Then this shadow started whispering. The memories returned in images and in words, even the musty smell of the old temple filled my nostrils again but I could not talk about it. I was too ashamed. Can you understand that?”

  Zhang got up from the chair, took a few steps back and forth, and sat down next to him on the bed. The faint light was enough to see his face. He was a miserable little heap of a human being cowering in front of Paul, and Paul did not know what to say.

  “How could I have done such a thing, Paul?”

  “That’s what I ask myself too.” The sentence had slipped out of him and he regretted it immediately. Who knew how he would have behaved in the same situation? He did not want to judge the deed, he only wanted to know why Zhang had not had the courage to talk about it and if he was hiding anything else.

  But Zhang had clearly not heard him. He continued, as though talking to himself, “How could I have been so easily led astray? Why was there nothing in me that rebelled against it? I used to think we were afraid of other people: the party, our parents, the teachers, the leaders. But we must have been most afraid of ourselves.”

  “Are there other deaths that you haven’t talked about?”

  Zhang nodded. “Old Hu. A cook from our work brigade who added peppercorns to his soup. But the soup was supposed to taste the same to everybody. When the Red Guards caught him they beat him to death.”

  “You did too?”

  “No. I didn’t join in but I stood by without helping him. I’m afraid I thought then that he deserved his punishment. Soup had to taste the same to everyone. I used to believe in this madness.”

  “Killed because of a few peppercorns?”

  “Yes. Since then I’ve never not felt fear when I add seasoning to food. That’s how far the shadows reach.”

  The land of the whispering shadows, Paul thought. One of those shadows had been with him for years, and he had neither seen nor heard it.

  “And I thought all the time that I knew you,” he said quietly.

  “You do know me,” Zhang replied. “As well as anyone can expect to know another person. Everyone has a few secrets.”

  They sat in silence on the bed for a long time. Paul would have liked to hug his friend, but he did not dare to.

  “Shall we get out of this basement, then?” Zhang asked eventually.

  “And go where?”

  “Wherever you want,” Zhang said, taking a deep breath. “You’re free. Go back to Hong Kong. Open the bottle of champagne in your fridge.”

  “And what about Tang?”

  “They arrested him last night, interrogated him overnight, and brought him here this morning. He’s in the basement of the building next door.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “The Ministry of State Security. These buildings belong to them. We’re near Shenzhen airport.”

  “What has state security got to do with this case?”

  “When you set out for the Owens’ yesterday I was on the phone, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was talking to my friend in the Ministry of State Security in Beijing. He confirmed that Lotus Metal had been in negotiations with Michael Owen. When I told him that Michael Owen had been murdered he was shocked. Ten minutes later a colleague of his who was responsible for industry at the ministry rang me up. He was with Wang Ming of Lotus Metal, who just happened to be there. They too had not heard about Michael Owen’s death yet. They had merely been very surprised that he had not been in touch for a few days. You can’t imagine how they reacted to the news of the murder. The project meant a great deal to them. Wang Ming was so angry that he was sitting in the minister’s office only minutes later getting a warrant for the police to take action.”

  “And then?”

  “They asked me to bring everything that you took from Michael’s apartment—the hard drive, the cell phones, the memory chips—to them in Shenzhen.”

  “I thought the ministry was in Beijing?”

  “Yes, but Wang Ming and a dozen officials from the ministry took the next flight to Shenzhen. It all went incredibly quickly. You left the house just after noon to see Christine first. I was on the phone to Beijing until one-thirty, and at three o’clock they were already on the plane. We met shortly after seven-thirty in the evening at the Shangri-La Hotel near the Shenzhen train station. Half of them were IT engineers, experts in computers and cell phones. It barely took them half an hour to gain access to the entire hard drive and all the memory chips.”

  “And was what they found useful?”

  “Useful? It produced almost all the clues and the evidence that we have. I have the feeling that we all made a mistake about Michael Owen. Tang, at least, was completely wrong about him.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “He negotiated the contracts with Lotus Metal very skillfully—they were much more lucrative for the Owens than the ones with Tang. He planned every step carefully, and after Tang discovered the negotiations and started threatening him, or at least trying to, the American documented every communication meticulously. Every e-mail was saved.”

  “Wasn’t it stupid of Tang to put his threats in writing?” Paul asked.

  “Of course it was. He probably felt overly secure because of his contacts with the police, the city administration, and the party in Shenzhen. He couldn’t imagine that anyone would bring charges against him for anything. The memory chips that you found were actually much more useful than the hard drive.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “They were all SIM cards for cell phones. Michael Owen had two cell phones on which he could record conversations. We found at least six conversations from the ten days before the murder, in which Tang made serious threats to Michael Owen and to Anyi.”

  “How did Owen react?”

  “He didn’t take the threats seriously. I listened to the recordings a few times, and they made me feel very anxious. They were constantly at cross-purposes. I don’t know if they didn’t want to understand each other or just couldn’t. Owen kept insisting that the law was on his side. Apparently, there was a clause in the contracts with Tang that gave him a right of cancelation in special circumstances, and he wanted to invoke that clause. Sue me if you will, he challenged Tang several times. He could not have imagined that Tang would turn to violence.”

  “And then you got the police involved?”

  “No.” Zhang shook his head. “All the men here, including the leader of the investigation who interrogated you this morning, flew here yesterday morning from Beijing on a special flight.”

  “Why?”

  “You know how Tang has close contacts in Shenzhen. No one here would have arrested him.”

  “Not even with the evidence?”

  “I suspect we wouldn’t even have gotten as far as showing anyone our evidence. He is too powerful. We’ve been very lucky.”

  “Why is Tang important enough for Beijing to bother with?”

  “I think there are two reasons for it. He chose the wrong enemy in Lotus Metal. No one should cross a company owned by the Ministry of State Security. But even more important is that Tang acts as an example. You know the old Chinese saying, ‘Slaughter a chicken to fri
ghten the monkey.’ Tang and his people are the chicken.”

  “And who are the monkeys?”

  “The many thousands of big and little Tangs all over the country who are doing as they please and thinking that ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.’ That’s a beautiful saying from Confucian times, by the way.”

  “You mean that every now and then, the emperor has to show that he has long arms?”

  “Exactly right. Just wait. I’m sure that we’ll see, read, and hear about this case a great deal in the next few days. Two teams from CCTV and several reporters from Xinhua were already here today. The China Daily, China Youth Daily, Beijing News, and Shanghai Daily, all the big national newspapers will carry detailed reports. This story comes very handy for Beijing. It fits in with the current anticorruption campaign and is a good opportunity to show that the government is clamping down hard. Imagine, they’ve not only arrested Tang but also the entire management of his conglomerate firm. Luo and countless colleagues at police HQ were suspended from duty today, as were two party secretaries and several department heads in the municipal administration that Tang had many dealings with, along with an official who worked closely with the mayor. You know how the political campaigns and propaganda work in China. The purges of today are no longer called by the same name but they haven’t changed a great deal in principle.”

  “And why,” asked Paul, “did they abduct me?”

  “It was a security measure at first. They wanted to make sure that Tang didn’t do anything to you.”

  “If that were the case they should have simply asked me to follow them. Why have they left me in this basement for almost two days and interrogated me like a prisoner?”

  “For the same reason that they interrogated me for one night, even after I had given them all we had and had listened to the recorded conversations with them. Because they wanted to make sure that we were telling the truth and that this was not a trick or one of Tang’s many ruses. Because they didn’t trust us. Because no one trusts anyone here. Ever.”

  XXXI

  The air was uncomfortably warm, but not so hot that it made Elizabeth Owen sweat. The deep-blue sky over the city reminded her of the wonderfully cold and clear winter days in Milwaukee; even the smog that otherwise hung like a brown mist over the skyscrapers and the harbor had disappeared. This was the first day of beautiful weather since she had been in Hong Kong.

  The sea had also taken on a different color. Here, near the Yung Shue Wan harbor, it shone in a light turquoise like she had seen in the Bahamas. Elizabeth was glad that she had made her way here to visit Paul Leibovitz and was only sorry that her husband had not come with her. Why had Richard resisted coming so much? He had made an incredible scene in the hotel; he had gotten all worked up and cursed and sworn, and even warned her that she should not believe everything Leibovitz told her. She had no idea what he was talking about. Everything Paul had suspected and claimed so far had been true. Richard was behaving as if she had gone off to meet a lover; he surely could not be seriously jealous of Paul. Sometimes she got the feeling that her husband was afraid of him, but when she asked Richard this he flew into a terrible rage.

  After a good half hour the ferry docked at the jetty. She was one of the last to leave the rocking vessel; the gangway wobbled dangerously and a ferryman offered her his hand, but she preferred to hold on to the railing.

  What a strange place. There were no skyscrapers, only unremarkable small buildings; no cars and no roads. A couple of fishing boats were bobbing up and down in the bay. The smell of the sea was strong, and white smoke was puffing out of four chimneys that rose up beyond a hill. Elizabeth pulled out of her bag the piece of notepaper on which she had hurriedly scribbled directions this morning. She walked along the pier, past grubby fish tanks full of fish, crabs, and sea cucumbers. On the left was Green Cottage and the ATM, on the right was the rusty container cabin where the police station was. She was to turn off here.

  She saw the small vegetable plots that the old farmers were working on. Right after that came the path uphill, just as Paul had described.

  The path was steep and difficult to climb, and when Elizabeth Owen finally got near the top of the hill she was out of breath and soaked with sweat. She sat down on a bench to rest before turning left again and climbing up a little way more before seeing the house less than a hundred meters away behind a thick bamboo grove. She could tell she was in the right place when she saw it shimmering white behind the green of the thicket.

  The terrace was a gardener’s dream. Paul clearly shared her passion for flowers. Everything was in bloom: roses, hibiscus flowers, geraniums; red, white, and pink bougainvillea; and a beautiful frangipani tree. The plants had been so carefully tended that she did not see a single wilted bloom anywhere or any brown leaves in the pots or on the red and brown tiles.

  He had seen her coming through the kitchen window and opened the door.

  “There you are. I was starting to get worried.”

  “Did I take a long time?”

  “Goodness, no. I was only afraid that you had gotten lost.”

  “No. Your directions were excellent, but the climb up was more difficult than I’d anticipated. You really live far away, as if in exile.”

  “Alone, but not in exile,” he replied, inviting her into the house. “I chose to retreat a little for a while.”

  “A while is fine. How long do you plan your retreat to last, if I may ask?”

  He had to laugh at that. She realized that she had never seen him laugh, and thought the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes suited him.

  “That’s a good question. I don’t know. I think I’ll know when the time comes.”

  “How will you know?”

  He gave her a thoughtful look and took his time with his reply. “How do we know that the time is right for something?”

  Elizabeth was not sure if he was directing the question at her or at himself. It was a strange question, one that she had never asked herself.

  “By thinking it over and deciding that it is time,” she said.

  “Maybe. But it’s never worked like that for me.”

  “What happens instead?”

  “I hear a kind of inner voice instead. Do you know it?”

  “No. What do you mean?”

  “A whisper in your head or your heart, deep down, that tells you what you have to do in difficult times.”

  “No. I wish I would hear that now and then,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

  “It’s difficult to explain. Let’s put it this way: I’m sure that I’ll know when the time comes to engage more with the world.”

  “You’ve already done that in the last few days. More than you wanted to, I suspect.”

  It was meant as a joke but Paul did not laugh. He laid his knife down and looked her so pointedly in the eye that she felt uncomfortable.

  “You may be right. I hadn’t thought about that. Perhaps the time has come.”

  “You’ve made an extraordinarily beautiful place for yourself here,” she said before his gaze disconcerted her any more. “Your terrace is wonderful. May I look around a little? You must forgive me. I’m terribly curious.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll make some tea.”

  She went into the living room and marveled at how beautiful old Chinese furniture could look, and at the fresh flowers on the table and the windowsill. It looked so clean, as if several conscientious cleaners had just cleaned the house top to toe. She saw a pair of small rain boots in the hall. “Do you have children, Mr. Leibovitz?” she called out in amazement.

  “A son,” he replied from the kitchen.

  “You never said anything before,” she said, walking back to him. He was standing at the kitchen counter peeling a knob of ginger and he shrugged, as if it had not been worth mentioning. “What’s his name?”

 
“Justin.”

  “An unusual name. How old is Justin?”

  Paul thought for a moment and looked at her for a long moment as though he could see the age of his son in her face.

  Typical of a man, Elizabeth thought. First he forgets to mention his child, then he doesn’t even remember the year he was born in. Richard had also never known how old Michael was; she had almost always had to revise his reply to this question upward or downward by a year.

  “Eleven,” Paul said at last.

  “Eleven! A good age. Where is he at the moment? In school?”

  “In school?” he repeated wonderingly, as though that was a very odd idea. “No, here.”

  “Here in the house?” Elizabeth had not heard a child’s voice or sounds of any sort. “You mean upstairs in his room?”

  “In a way, yes,” he said, looking past her and smiling gently as if he was amused by her confusion.

  “Why doesn’t he come downstairs? Don’t you want to introduce him to me?” He seemed not to have heard her, even though he was standing right in front of her. “Don’t you want to introduce him to me?” she repeated.

  “No, he’s very reserved, shy even, and when there are strangers in the house he likes to hide away.”

  “What a pity,” she said, disappointed.

  “Maybe he’ll come out of his own accord. Sometimes he makes a surprising appearance.” Paul poured some tea, sniffed at his cup, and took a sip.

  “I don’t really understand what you mean, but it doesn’t matter,” she said somewhat brusquely. “I came here because we’re flying back to America tomorrow and I didn’t want to leave the city without seeing you one more time. I want to thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “My husband and I owe you a huge thank-you. If you and your friend had been happy with the official findings of the police investigation we would still be doing business with our son’s murderer.”

  Paul felt very uncomfortable about what she was saying. He took another sip of tea and looked over her head out of the window. “What’s going to happen to your joint venture now?” he asked, as though he wanted to change the subject quickly.