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Shanghai detective sun Piao battles against the corrupt system
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Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback
DRAGON’S EYE
Andy Oakes was born in 1952 and is the son of a professional football player and an academic. After his ‘A’ levels he worked as an engineer in the defence industry. His work with young people, on a voluntary basis, led to him producing a photographic study of youth in the inner city for the Gulbenkian Foundation and a career as a professional photographer. Having created a photographic retail franchise business with a staff of twelve and a turnover of over one million pounds, he trained to be a Youth Counsellor. He now lives in East Sussex and works with young people, specialising in alcohol and substance abuse.
DEDICATION
In Memory of my late parents Eva and Len Oakes.
This book is dedicated to Jean, Annie Lucy Oakes and Tom Alexander Oakes.
A special thank you goes to my literary agent, Juri Gabriel and to the writer and teacher, Alan Fisher.
Contents
Title
Dedication
Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Copyright
Chapter 1
THE BUND (ZHONGSHAN LU ), SHANGHAI. THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.
A tide so low. A night so dark. A secret so raw.
The bodies of the eight, caked in black river mud and twisted around each other in the strange and silent choreography of death … could not be seen from the Bund, once the most famous street in the East.
Only when down amongst the debris that clogged the Huangpu riverbanks and away from the deep rooted shadows of the grandiose neo-classical edifices that skirted the old commercial heart of Shanghai … could their lifeless limbs be made out. And even more clearly, the dark steel links, the heavy chains that bound the weld of bodies together in death. Leg to leg. Neck to neck. A permanence about the chains, as if they had always rested there between the once living, the once breathing individuals.
*
A dazzle of headlight. A car door slamming.
The Homicide Squad of the PSB. The tall shadow amongst the smaller shadows … the Senior Investigator. Eyes trained into believing that they had seen it all. Still, Sun Piao felt the shiver slide up his spine; wings of nausea flutter in his chest. With difficulty, moving forward. Swearing, cold mud oozing over the top of his shoe. A few more muttered to himself as his eyes fell upon the gaping holes. Black. Bottomless. Cleaving the chests of the corpses closest to him. Splitting them, neck to navel. Finding himself thinking of overripe peaches. Of a melon cut and halved … sticky centre of seeds spooned away.
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
Half turning to Yaobang who was following, and in a whisper,
“What a fucking way to die.”
But the words swallowed whole by a freighter as it ploughed towards its deepwater berth south of the new Yangpu Bridge, the new Golden Gate; the sea-caravans of barges strung with tyres and the clumps of tethered junks, lifting, falling, lifting, across its insistent wake. He hadn’t heard. Just as fucking well. His deputy didn’t have the stomach for this sort of thing. He was, after all, from Kashgar in the north west. They didn’t have murders in Kashgar, at least not like these. All that they had in the oasis city were hot dust driven winds and ice-cold Xinjiang beer. An exquisite embrace of opposites that surely proved that there was a God. Anyway, he would see it all for himself soon enough. There was no hurry, they weren’t going anywhere, not these bodies. The limbs. The chains. The great curving black crescent moons of gashes.
They weren’t going anywhere.
He didn’t envy the Big Man. Better to be from Shanghai or Beijing and be used to such horrors; a civilised upbringing in an oasis town and a job as an Investigator with Homicide were not a complimentary pairing. Yaobang’s passage through his career was not going to be hot desert winds and chilled beers.
The dim beam of the torch wavered. Yaobang was not built for such a balancing act as this. Too plump. Too belly-full. Thinking of dumplings, beer … bed. Moving forward only as Piao’s urgently beckoning hand ordered. Shadows falling over shadows. The Senior Investigator hearing the Big Man retch behind him as the young detective caught a glimpse of the bodies. An instant reek of honey and vinegar invading the anonymous night air. Almost dropping the torch as he clumsily fled back across the broken foreshore to the tide worn stone blocks of the embankment.
“Headless chicken, throw the torch. How am I supposed to do my job with you halfway back to your mama’s lap?”
Rough material of his cuff to his mouth … he threw the torch across to Piao, leaving himself in a deep fold of darkness, the cold stone wall taking his weight. For a few seconds, eyes closed, but still seeing the horrors that the beam had illuminated. Subliminal cuts forming an inerasable film loop in his head. A part of his life now. A terrible part that would always be there. He felt sullied … despoilt.
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
“Boss, dump this fucking job. I mean look at them for shit sake. This has got to be state business. Fucking Party business. These are official …”
Wiping the jewelled cables of spittle from his lips, his chin.
“… look, let me get on the radio, get Security to deal with it. This is their backyard. Let them get their fucking shoes shitty for a change.”
The Senior Investigator stared back hard over his shoulder. The beam from the torch cutting harshly into the side of his slender face. Forehead. Cheek. Chin. Coldly chromed. Yaobang recognised the look etched into the tired features. He’d seen it before. Trouble … spelt with a capital ‘S’. The Big Man’s stomach rumbled again. Hoping that it was from the effects of the Yoe Bing … the large, flaky mooncake that he had hurriedly washed down with tea. But knowing, with regret, that it was not. His stomach, always an accurate barometer as to how much shit was heading his way. And right now the barometer readings were off the fucking scale.
“Get on the radio …”
Piao, almost absentmindedly, muttering the words, his attention nailed to the bodies. The frozen, intertwined arms, that seemed to reach out wanting to embrace a fingernail moon anchored in the crow’s-nest branches of the trees in the neighbouring Huangpu Park.
The Big Man laboured through the rubbish. Up the slippery steps of the embankment. Mouth bitter with bile.
Every breath reminding him …
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
It was only as he stepped onto the road that the Senior Investigators said,
“Tell control that we need more men and floodlights. Lots of floodlights. I also want Wu brought down here right away. The bodies … get them out of the mud and the area combed before the tide comes back in and we lose the fucking lot …”
A pause of seconds. Somewhere in the distance, in the night, a dog barking. A car refusing to start. A tug moaning as it passed down river … running lights in a constant fade to black.
“… and Yaobang, tell them to keep it tight. No flapping mouths. This is police work. My work. I don’t want those Bureau Thirteen security shits climbing all over my back, got it?”
He nodded, even though he knew that Piao wasn’t watching him. His stomach grumbling more furiously than ever.
“Fuck it …” he groaned, loosening his trouser belt as he walked toward the car.
*
A cold, dark hour before the first batch of floodlights and men arrived. An olive green snake of police piling from an assortment of vehicles. Men extruded from the same mould … lean bodied and wide foreheaded. An hour and a half before the floodlights prised the darkness aside with an arc of white … blinding. Shadows, like sentries of razors. Two and a half hours before Doctor Wu arrived bleary-eyed and moaning onto the foreshore of a Huangpu that was beginning to turn. Yawning into life in a blush of palest baby pink. Three hours and ten minutes before Piao pulled the doctor out of the harsh arc-light midday and into the splintered penumbra of the wooden pier for an initial report.
“We have eight who are no longer living.”
The Senior Investigator moved deeper into the shadows where Wu could not read his face.
“You mean that they are dead. You have eight corpses to take back to your freezer doctor.”
The cloak of Wu’s smile slipped slightly; the passions pushed in, the outward impassivity drawn across his eyes … a heavy velvet curtain of constrained discipline.
“We have eight whom life no longer possesses.”
Stupid bastard. A doctor for thirty years and he still can’t use that word. That four letter word. Dead … they’re fucking dead!
But he would get nowhere trying to bait him. Wu, who at one time must have had the looks and physical attributes of a proud and studious orang-utan, but who had since shrunk to resemble a wizened squirrel monkey, was a professional Wenming … a civilised man ruled by the old ways. Guided by the Book of Rites to conform, to meet the needs of life in society.
Piao felt the smile start to freeze on his lips … it laying across them as the dead dog does in the middle of the road, squashed, tongue sticking out. The society that he and other officers in the Homicide Squad moved in had no such restraints. He wished that it had. There were no courtesies in his society. No rules. No boundaries to adhere to. Just a carouselled blur of speed and colour. A head-on collision between the old ways and the new order. A society of guns, where no guns had been before. A society of swift retribution and death, where once the only pain that bled was from a dignity that had been wounded. He was glad that Wu could not see his eyes. They spoke no courtesies, they only said,
Your old ways are dead, old man – and now we’re all fucked.
“Sex?”
The doctor visibly blushed, smile souring.
“What sex were they, doctor, these eight whom life no longer possesses?”
“One woman. Seven men.”
Seven men. Not even the mask of a serene smile could hide the shock, the significance that the number seven bled onto Wu’s face. The Senior Investigator knew the words that would be humming through the old man’s head … the words that were already playing in the corners of his own mouth.
At Xun, there is a cold spring,there, below that stream are your seven sons,mother of pain.
Seven, the symbol of perfect prosperity. Did their murderers also know the very same poem from the Book of Songs? As they ripped their victims asunder, shackling them together and then lowering them into the black waters of the Huangpu, had they also been mouthing the words …
Softly, the wind blows from the south.Softly, the wind blows from the south.
A shiver racking him. Piao folded his arms, cutting it adrift.
“So, what else do you have? Time, cause of death? Any clues to their identities? Astound me, doctor. Astound me.”
Wu shuffled uncomfortably. Cold, the mud. Filling his shoes, his soul. Thinking of the rubber boots back at the office. Thinking of the chains. The bodies … and the black, bloodless holes that spiked them and drew at his recognition, as the eye of the needle draws on the thread.
“There is nothing that I can tell you. I am a doctor. A scientist. Not a beachcomber.”
Piao moved out of the shadows. Face to face with Wu. The old man smelling of mothballs, of an unreliable bladder. His mouth of pepper sauce and sticky words. Looking deeply into him … seeing the fear treading at depth in the doctor’s eyes. Almost tasting it. Recognising it. And understanding it, but not wanting to. Never wanting to …
“What is it Wu, have you seen this before? What do you know of this?”
A small strained laugh from the doctor; a joyless hilarity closing tight across his face that gave the impression of steel shutters slotting into place.
“Don’t give me this shit, Wu, don’t pull this on me, not me. You know something, don’t you? Don’t you?”
Again, the laugh. A sound only. Edged glass across edged glass. Nothing in his eyes except for a secret and the root of an anonymous fear. Piao made a mistake and placed a hand on the doctor’s bony shoulder, bridging the physical gap of courtesy … making all now possible. Unlocking Wu’s anger. The passions thrown to the mercy of the elements. The old man hissed. His voice low. For the Investigator’s ears only.
“I do not want this case. Not these bodies. I will not examine them here or anywhere. They will not be admitted to my laboratory …”
His eyes narrowed, his voice with them. Words, with the heat of the blowtorch across the Senior Investigator’s cheek.
“… pass it on Piao. Pass this case on as I am doing. You want nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing to do with it? There’s eight bodies out there in the fucking mud. Seven sons and one daughter whom life no longer possesses. You’re the city Senior Police Scientist for fuck sake. It is your job to poke around bodies … but not these bodies? What are you telling me here, Wu, that these are killings that you know about? Official killings, sanctioned murders … down to Security, the State, the Party?”
With a hiccup of shock, Piao realising that his hand was once more on the doctor’s shoulder; grip increasing as his anger blossomed. He left it in place.
“Give me the bad news that’s at the back of your eyes, old man, or there’s a tall building with a long drop waiting for you …”
“You would threaten me, Senior Investiga …”
Cutting in, a sharp knife through fatty pork.
“… tell me, or so help me …”
Cheek to cheek. Mouth to ear. Breath to breath.
“… or you had better start growing a pair of wings.”
Wu’s smile fading to a grimace, as if he had just stepped into a pile of shit.
“You are dangerous, Piao. You cause ripples where there should be none. Watch out Investigator, those who cannot swim can sometimes drown in ripples.”
“Very poetic, doctor, but what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Senior Investigator, that you should walk away. As you have done before. As we have all done before. Walk away. ‘He who hammers out his sword and constantly sharpens it will not keep it long.’”
Wu moved slowly out from the pier, zebra shadows falling across his face as he made his way up the embankment to the Bund. He passed Yaobang as he wearily reached the top of the stairs.
“That was fucking quick, doc. Alright to start loading them into the van?”
The old man raised a hand and waved him away as if dealing with a bothersome fly. A smile fixed across his face. Eyes averted. Looking inward and set upon some obscure horizon. Walking on. Not a single word passing his lips as night folded around him. A car coughing into life. Headlights panning fierce white. Shadows sprinting, shape shifting. A premature dawn. At speed, the old man driving away.
“Fuck, Boss, what’s up with the old bastard? I never thought I’d see the day when he was scared shitless by some stiffs. I thought he’d just about seen everything?”
“He has …”
Piao moved out from underneath the pier. Shadow, light, shadow, light … across his eyes. Retracing the old man’s footsteps.
“So what’s up, Boss?”
“What’s up, is that our esteemed doctor wants nothing to do with our muddy friends out there …”
The Senior Investigator spat into the wind, in the direction on the bodies.
“… won’t touch the job. He knows something and refuses to even examine them.”
“Can he fucking do that, Boss? Refuse to carry out postmortems?”
Deeper mud. Piao leading, the Big Man following. A faint reek of shit assailing their nostrils.
“Well, he has done it. What the hell do we do now? Eight fucking bodies and nowhere to take them. No idea who they are, how they died … and if someone of Wu’s reputation doesn’t want to know, then you can bet that no one else will want to know either.”
“Fuck it. But you don’t mean the Chief, do you?”
Mud over shoes and dragging at trouser bottoms. Black, iced with white arc-light.
“Look, country boy, I don’t want to be the one to disillusion you, let’s just leave that to the job, but Chief Liping is like all other Police Chiefs, a politician before he’s a policeman. He’s got more feet in more camps than a centipede running a marathon. If this stinks to him of the Party, like it stinks to us … or he can’t squeeze a back-hander out of it, he’ll dump it. And us along with it.”
“You’re a cynical bastard, aren’t you, Boss?” Deeper mud. Piao leading, the Big Man following. An oasis of blinding floodlight. Turning to face the squinting detective.
“It helps to keep me alive …”
Again, spitting in the direction of the bodies. The wind in his favour this time, the spittle landing within feet of them.
“… cynicism is good for the health. I wish that I could have given them that advice.”
Seconds of silence, punctuated only by the breath of traffic starting along Shanxilu.
“Dump the fucking case, eh Boss?”
Piao laughed. A throwaway laugh. The kind that seemed to have punctuated his life, his career, at depressingly regular intervals.
“Why not? What’s eight bodies to a city of thirteen million. Besides, there isn’t room in my icebox for eight stiffs.”
“Nor mine …”
Both laughing. Yaobang the loudest. A laughter as free as a junk that had slipped its mooring. The Senior Investigator envied a man who could let loose such a laugh.
“Make it look as if we’ve bothered … get some of the preliminaries fastened down and then get shot of the job. Pass it on to Security. Another one for the back of the filing cabinet …”
The Big Man nodding almost too enthusiastically.
“… get the photographer in to do his stuff and keep them sifting the mud for anything that’s been missed. Also, get on to the hospitals. Try the Number 1 first. The Huangdong on Suzhou Beilu. See if they can take the bodies for the time being. If not, try Jiaotong and also Fudan University. Also the Academy of Science in Xehui. Just find me anywhere that will take the bodies without burying us in fucking questions, got it?”
“Sure, Boss. Anywhere that will take the bodies without burying us in fucking questions.”
Making his way more confidently across the foreshore towards the car. On the Big Man’s lips a constant tremble of half whispered words, repeated, repeated again, like a parrot with a compulsive disorder.
“… take the bodies, no fucking questions … anywhere that will take them, no fucking questions …”
At the bottom of the stairs, stopping, looking back over his shoulder to the Senior Investigator. A figure stranded in a no-man’s-land of mud, debris.
“Don’t worry, Boss, you’re doing the right fucking thing walking away. You don’t want to be investigating this.”
The Senior Investigator made no reply. He had not heard the words that had been stolen by the breeze and dragged off into the night. He had not heard the words, this time, or the many times that similar words had been used in the past. A freighter lumbered by. Came. Went. Noise. Lights. And then silence and darkness, as if it had never passed him. As if it had never cleaved the calm of the river in front of him. Piao walked to the Huangpu’s very edge. The river lapping against the toes of his shoes.
“Shit.”
Kicking at the river. Turning. Making his way back toward the noon of arc-lights; hurrying his pace as he spotted two ununiformed figures, one standing, one kneeling, beside the bodies. The bodies … now fully unearthed from the cloying mud. Partially cleaned up. A string of clay limbs, torsos. Joined, steel link by steel link to each other in a paralysed dance across milky sheets of thick polythene.
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
“Hey, hey! This is a restricted area, can’t you see? There’s a police investigation going on here.”
The men half turned, ignoring the shout from the Bureau’s photographer who had also seen them; their slight frames casting the shadows of giants. The Big Man cut across Piao’s path, intercepting him, a hand braced against his Boss’s chest; moving into the area of foreshore where shadow became flesh and had a smell all of its own.
“Let me introduce you, Boss,” he said with a wink and out of the corner of his mouth, before turning, striking up a more formal pose and tone of voice.
“Senior Investigator Piao of the Public Security Bureau Homicide Squad, may I introduce Comrade Zhiyuan, Chairman of the Shiqu, the urban borough that administers this area. May I also introduce Comrade Shi of the Party’s Neighbourhood Committee.”
“We’ve met before,” Piao replied coldly.
The men smiled at him. Notebooks in hand. Fingers caked in river mud, which was also oozing over the tops of the sandals that they were wearing.
‘Perhaps wet feet would persuade the bastards to piss off quicker?’
Piao moved forward, aware that his hands had already formed into fists. That balls and chains would drag behind every word that he would want to use. The taller man, Zhiyuan, a tong zhi, a comrade of the old guard, as gaunt, as stretched as an ancient knotted scar, stood as Piao’s shadow cast across the first of the bodies.
“You are in my way, Senior Investigator. I was just studying these poor unfortunates.”
“The story of my wretched life, Mr Zhiyuan, getting in people’s way. But it can have advantages in my field of work …”
Pausing. Piao mentally cutting adrift the shackles that seemed to tie down every word whenever faced by a tong zhi of Zhiyuan’s breed. It was still unfamiliar territory … dangerous territory.
“… you don’t mind if I call you Mister, do you? Comrade is so very rarely used nowadays. I even read that most of our schoolchildren have never heard of Mao. Imagine. I suppose that times change, don’t they, Mister Zhiyuan?”
“Call me Comrade Zhiyuan …” the Shiqu Chairman corrected. A leer. Deep. Engraved. Teeth like broken headstones, etched in nicotine.
“… some of us are still proud of such a title. We fought for such a title. And you would do well to remember, Investigator, that getting in people’s way can sometimes be bad for your health. I hope that you look both ways before crossing the street?”
Eye contact riveted in place. Piao standing firm, his shadow still eclipsing the corpses. Not sure that he’d heard the comrade correctly. A sudden chill to the air. An edge, glass sharp. What was it that the Shiqu Chairman was saying? Zhiyuan lit a cheroot. The smoke hiding his mouth. A pungent scent of secrets fanning against every question that Piao wanted to ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Investigator, that you are in my way. You are purposely interrupting my investigation … the Party’s investigation into this matter.”
“Oh, the Party’s investigation, I see. I was under the misapprehension that I was the Investigator in this case. I must make a point of checking my wage slip next month. I wouldn’t want the Party to be paying me for work that I wasn’t carrying out!”
“You’ve got a ‘fat job’ and have been paid for doing nothing for years, Investigator Piao. This sort of thing is proof enough of that …”
The comrade turned toward the shadowed bodies.
“… it is up to us, the people, the Party and the Security Services to move upon your role. You police have become lazy and have lost your way. You have not brought the values of the Party into your work and into your dealings with the capitalist driven crime wave that is threatening our people and our glorious way of life.”
The Investigator caged the anger that fled to his temples.
“Nice speech, Chairman. Best to write it down and keep it safe for when your re-election comes up.”
Zhiyuan laughed. A slap of a laugh that left Piao nursing its fine sting.
“You are a little man in a big world, Investigator. Just a little man with gold braid on his shoulders. You buck the system, the Party. You abuse your privileged position, but not for much longer. The people, the committees, they have many eyes, many ears. We are the Party, root and branch. We feed it night and day with all that we see and hear. The Party is thorough, Investigator, and getting more thorough as the days go by. Soon, Investigator, you will feel the Party’s thoroughness.”
“Like they did?”
Piao spat past the comrade and onto the island of polythene where the bodies lay.
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
Words free now. Restraints severed. Wondering what price he might pay for using them?
“Are you suggesting that the Party is involved in this, Investigator Piao?” Zhiyuan seized, the rabid old mongrel.
“No, not really. It’s just that when you mentioned thoroughness, it got my mind ticking over. Homicide Squad Investigators are like that. A nasty little trait that I must have picked up from having this gold braid on my shoulder …”
He brushed a hand across an epaulette.
“… you see, it’s the word thoroughness that comes to mind when I look at these poor bastards. Thoroughness, and patience of course. Haven’t you noticed, Mr Chairman? After all, you are studying these ‘poor unfortunates’ as you call them. I wouldn’t want you to miss any of the more subtle details …”
Moving aside as the photographer got to work. Leaning back, filling the frame of the old black and silver Rolleiflex. An explosion of flash. Harsh. Cold. Mid-tones, subtle hues banished. From the mud, the plastic, the bodies seeming to rise and fall. Clay, patches of skin … alabaster. Wounds as black as the inside of a hound’s mouth.
“… come, Mr Shiqu Chairman, let me show you thoroughness. …”
Roughly, with resistance, guiding, pushing the comrades out of the path of the photographer’s studied dance, to the other side of the bodies. Dead flesh just inches and eternity away from their muddied toes.
“… thoroughness, yes, you’ll appreciate the level of thoroughness that is displayed here. Let me show you what I mean …”
A whine. A click. A blitz. Again, again, the photographer moving in for close-ups. Blue-white flashes squinting, piercing their eyes. Everything with its bright mercury taint. The eight, the bodies, turning to stone with each shot. Removed further and further from a life of flesh, of warmth.
“… we have eight corpses in all, chained together by the legs and by the necks. Note the hands of the victims. A total of sixteen thumbs, sixty-four fingers, the top joints of which are all missing. Snipped off very neatly, wouldn’t you agree? Very thorough …”
Another flash. Another. Illuminating the side of his face. Knowing that he would look as if he was fashioned from stainless steel. Waiting for seconds for an answer that he knew would not come. Thick seconds. Thinking of bolt cutters, cleavers, blunt knives. And wondering if they thought of such things also?
“… the victims faces. Not much left of them, is there? Odontology, dental work, teeth … we can tell a lot from teeth. Age. Diet. Lifestyle. Social category. General health. Even nationality …”
Halting as the photographer knelt in front of him. Viewfinder filled with static heads. The caves of nostrils. Muddied, lank rope hair. Black wells of torn mouths. There can be a listless beauty in death sometimes. Sometimes … but not in these. No, not in these poor unfortunates. The flash of the large format camera. Another. Another. Naked death served as a main course, without the trimmings. Without the garnish.
“… their mouths, their teeth, their jaws, have all been smashed. I would say by a heavy clubbing hammer. Their faces also. Smashed to bits to hamper identification. See, see? Fractured skulls. Cheekbones. Broken noses and jaws …”
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
Sweet mouths at the breast. Piao feeling his anger rise, hot and sour. Its wash creeping in to taint the edges of his words.
“… finally, the eyes. But of course, Mr Chairman, you will have already noticed … they are missing. Sixteen eyes, all removed. Gouged out, by the look of it …”
One, two, three, four, five … seconds. Pausing. But no questions. Not a breath. Lips still. The air still, and the river. As if time itself was waiting to be re-wound.
“… what do you think, were they brown eyes? Or perhaps blue or grey. Maybe even green. I like green eyes … don’t you, Mr Comrade Chairman of the Shiqu …?”
Comrade Shi, Neighbourhood Committee notebook in hand, stumbled from the pool of arc-light. A thick trail of vomit marking his passage. Death and vomit, the two inextricably linked in Piao’s mind. Death. Men think that it can be tamed. That they can become accustomed to its face as they can become accustomed to a strange and exotic foreign food. They see it every day in a city that does not kneel to hide it. Hot flowing blood in the long summer days. Cold and stanched brown in the grey winter hours. And then this … a sight that the rest of your life will be hung upon, pivot from. A sight only ever just a flicker of an eyelid away. Piao felt the bud of nausea unfurl its petals at the back of his throat.
“… is this a brand of thoroughness that you recognise, Chairman Zhiyuan. A thoroughness that robs a man of the colour of his eyes?”
Zhiyuan turned his back to the cold bodies, lighting another cheroot. His fast hand covering the pages of his notebook with scrawl and ash as he talked.
“I am not here to play guessing games, Investigator … and even less to be taught by your kind …”
Smoke from his lips in a constant steel band.
“… you have gone too far, Piao. Too dangerously far with your accusations …”
He drew closer. His lined skin resembling a city centre road map. His breath, its accumulated exhaust fumes.
“… you forget who you are talking to. My words will find the ears of important comrades in the Party. And the Party has ways of dealing with …”
“… what, comrade. Ways of dealing with people like me? And people like them also?” Piao interjected.
A single word piercing the coiled cheroot smoke as it left the old man’s torn lips.
“Perhaps.”
A hiss, and so close that Zhiyuan’s breath intermingled with his own. Piao immediately thinking of meat-flies, puke, fatty pork. He suddenly felt very ill.
“Did you hear that, Detective Yaobang. A threat made to a serving Senior Officer in the police force of the People’s Republic of China?”
“I heard it …” Yaobang replied. A tinge of reluctance plaited into his words. Spit, thick and white on his lips, Zhiyuan exploded.
“My Committee and the Central Committee will hear of your obstructive behaviour, Investigator, and of your vile insinuations that these murders were carried out in the name of the Party and of the State …”
The dark butt falling from his fingers. A hiss as it met mud. Its orange tip dying to grey.
“… expect a knock on your door, Piao.”
“Detective Yaobang, please escort Comrade Zhiyuan and Comrade Shi to their cars, they’re leaving. They have a great deal of report writing to complete.”
Watching their shadows shrink as they walked away. The darkness eating them. Piao chewing on the bit of his anger. Mouth tasting of polished metal. Of danger. He spat, but could not loosen its hold. Squatting, eyes closed for a few seconds … or was it minutes? Longing for sleep, but knowing that it offered no rest. Behind the dark curtains of his eyelids he could still see the policemen relieving their full bladders. The crescent moon now in flight above the river. And the paper white faces, with their smudged, eyeless sockets. They say that the eyes of the murdered retain within them a last burning image of who it was that killed them. Was it the Party that was robbing the bodies of this last old wives’ tale?
The decision made, and made against the grain and every survival instinct that the fifteen thousand days of his life in Shanghai had taught him, Piao stood, shouting to a group of policemen who were smoking, gossiping, pissing onto the mud.
“Let’s get to it, it’s our case …”
A low moan of discontent. China Brand cigarette butts being flicked into the river. Flies being zipped.
“… load them into the wagon and don’t fucking drop them down the embankment, they’ve been through enough.”
The dark figures peeled off from each other, crossing into the island of arc-light. A brief flurry of activity. The sound of bolt cutters meeting steel chain. Polythene sheeting being fashioned around bodies, now separated. Fibreglass caskets flexing, accepting their loads. Grunts as they were lifted. Eight caskets. Eight grunts. Eight bodies. A slow weaving line across soft shadowed broken foreshore. Staggering, stuttering up the steps to the Bund. The wagon doors being opened. Caskets slid in. The wagon doors being closed.
Piao meandered through the lines of waterproof suited policemen on their knees, sifting through the mud. A thankless task. He knew, already knew … these murderers would leave no calling cards. These murderers would leave nothing but their ravaged quarry. He looked up, across the stacked grey graduations of Huangpu Park. Clouds now rolling in against the moon, overtaking it and swallowing it whole. It was going to be a brushed steel grey of a day. He would be waiting for the leach of red rust to seep into it.
Chapter 2
Softly, the wind blows from the south,Caresses the stems of the brambles.Holy mother, good mother,I was not your son.
WASHINGTON D.C., THE UNITED STATES OFAMERICA.
She had known that he was dead at that very moment, in that very instant; beyond her, beyond everything. The scream that filled her head waking her from a deep sleep. Her own voice crying out the name of her only child …
“Bobby.”
As clear, as pure as a crystal sphere splintering onto a marble floor.
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …”
Shaking. Hearing her own words and pleadings, that seemed to pierce the night as the steel pin impales the butterfly. And all of the time his name burning inside her. An indigestion of loss, pain, and disjointed flooding memories. And knowing that it was too late. Already … too late.
*
Calm now. Reaching for the telephone. Counting …
ONE … TWO … THREE …
Brandy in one hand. A letter, his writing, the telephone number … in the other hand. And all of the time, reality and intuition in a fierce grapple for her attention.
“Bobby … Bobby.”
Counting. Slowly …
FOUR … FIVE …
It can’t be true … he can’t be dead.
The telephone number, endless. Halfway through it, she realised that she had misread a digit. A five for a four. His writing had always been so poor, so chaotic; as if his mind was in a constant head-on collision of ideas, schemes. His brain working faster than his hand. A five for a four. The pain pressed harder. She re-dialled, counting …
SIX … SEVEN … EIGHT …
“Come on, come on.”
The connection clicked into life. A ringing tone, replaying.
Be there, for God’s sake be there. Let me be wrong, please. Please God.
A ringing tone, repeating itself.
Stupid. Stupid. He’ll be there. The phone will be answered, the call put through to his room. He’ll be there. ‘Hi Mom, how are you?’ Just like a few days ago … a week ago … a month ago. He’ll be there. He’ll be there, won’t he, God?
A woman’s voice answered. Draped in a Chinese accent, but her English starched rigid and oh so correct.
“Good evening, this is the Shanghai Jing Jiang Hotel. How may I help you?”
“Can you connect me to Mr Hayes in room 201. Thank you.”
Seconds of silence punctuated by her own heartbeat.
“We have no Mr Hayes in room 201.”
Putting down the brandy. Her ear pulsing, sweating against the plastic of the receiver. Again, counting …
ONE … TWO … THREE …
“Are you sure? Room 201 was his room, I’m positive. Maybe he checked out, or perhaps he’s moved rooms. Can you please look again? It is urgent.”
“Sorry, Madam, but we have no Mr Hayes in the hotel.”
“Look, double-check. The name is Hayes.
H—A—Y—E—S. BOBBY HAYES.”
A longer silence. Distant snippets of conversation in Chinese playing peekaboo behind it. With each second, it feeling as if an endless corridor of doors between her and Bobby were being slammed shut. Finishing the brandy. Relishing its burn. Counting …
FOUR … FIVE …
“Madam, we have checked our records thoroughly and we can find no mention of a Mr Bobby Hayes. You must be mistaken. He must have resided at a different hotel.”
“But I telephone him at this hotel at least three times a week for Christ sake. I spoke to him just two days ago. I know the phone number by heart, 53—42—42. I have letters from him written on your hotel notepaper. Does that sound like someone who is residing at another hotel?”
The voice at the other end of the line, the other side of the world, was more insistent this time; almost brutal, slicing in its ice-cold certainty.
“No one by the name of Mr Bobby Hayes has ever stayed at the Shanghai Jing Jiang Hotel, Madam.”
“Jesus, but I know that he’s stayed there. Listen for God’s sake, will you? His room number is 201. Check again. It’s HAYES. BOBBY HAYES. He’s tall, over six feet. And blond, very blond. You can’t miss him. You just can’t miss him …”
It was some time before she realised that she was shouting into a telephone that had been hung up on her. Only a tinnitus of electronic hum and buzz breaking up the featureless silence. Counting …
SIX … SEVEN … EIGHT …
She sat listening to it for a while, cradled in the heavy swell of duvet and sheet. The questions, the doubts, the informed perceptions, already nagging at her. Wondering. Wondering. Sitting, listening to the ocean of sound. The weave of babble, seeming to take on a voice, a faint voice of its own which seemed to be saying …
‘BOBBY’S DEAD – BOBBY’S DEAD – BOBBY’S DEAD.’
Counting …
NINE … TEN.
Chapter 3
They moved south, then east, crossing the Nanpu Bridge … the river, a black and thick cord below. City lights on either side in a firm vice grip. On the Huangpu itself, nothing. No life. No movement. A vast ebony axe blow cleaving Shanghai in two.
Piao drove carefully, slowly, eyes constantly seeking the rear-view mirror for assurance. The Big Man never knowing the Boss to drive himself anywhere, not in four years. He asked no questions, there was no point. There would be no answers. Hitting Padong Avenue. A high spiking steel forest of cranes flanking it. A thousand cranes. A thousand foreign corporations staking their claims in the new market economy zone. Fuelling, being fuelled by the bright economic renaissance. Five billion dollars of investment swilling around in the manic rawness of a frontier town. The Great Leap Forward … the trade and banking centre of the world by 2010. A fairytale town of a thousand promises; dreams rising into the night sky in the form of precast concrete towers, studded and pierced with cold lights. The Senior Investigator shook his head …
The making of money, did it have to look so ugly?
Piao stepped out of the wagon, shoe sinking into a pile of dog shit.
“Fuck it!”
Scraping most of it off against a wire fence that bordered the edge of a construction site that seemed to have no end. A jungle of bamboo scaffolding interlaced with strings of dirty lights. Brown earth gouged to the surface in vast open wounds. A deep flow of fetid mud water, yellow-edged and slicked with rainbow oil spills. So tired, but if he’d closed his eyes he would have still seen their neatly snipped fingers. Their cracked faces. The dark, empty wells that were once their eyes. He didn’t close his eyes.
He pushed his hand inside the top of Yaobang’s passenger window. The fruit of the photographer’s dance placed in his palm. Four rolls of one hundred and twenty film, reassuringly large, solid. He pocketed them, a question on his face. The Big Man shook his head. Seven calls and not a hospital, a university, that would take the poor bastards that they had dug from the mud of the Huangpu.
“Fuck it …” was all that Piao said again.
Crossing the pontoon of planks to the new telephone box. A brief conversation. Animated, but brief. He was back inside the car before the Big Man had even lit his cigarette. Ten fen poorer, a thousand Yuan happier.
“Your brother …” Piao pausing to light his own China Brand from the Big Man’s battered lighter.
“… still at the Institute isn’t he?”
“Mmm …” Yaobang drawing on the cigarette, his lips kissing at the nicotine clouds.
“… he’s doing a year’s research into the human reproductive system. Probably the closest he’ll ever get to fucking screwing …”
Laughing. A fit of amputated smoke, spit, and tobacco shreds.
“… he’s off to America in three month’s time, some exchange programme with a big hospital in New York. Lucky bastard. I hear that American girls do it with the lights on. Doing it in the same fucking building would be enough for me …”
Laughing again. Piao pulling on his cigarette, it tasting of everything, but cigarette.
“He obviously knows his stuff.”
“Top of the class, a real brainbox. Plenty up there, fuck all down here …”
Yaobang grabbed his crotch with both hands, smiling. Singeing his jacket with the furious tip of his cigarette.
“Not like you, eh?”
The Big Man nodded, laugh stalling in confusion. An insult or flattery? He was never sure with the Boss. Removing his hands from his crotch, examining the scorch mark on his jacket. It standing to attention amongst a parade of similar burns.
“Go, telephone him, now. Tell him that we’ll pick him up at. Where does he live?”
“The Wenan Road. But why, Boss?”
“One hour, on Xizang Lu. The bridge as it crosses the Wusongjiang.”
“But why, what do we want him for?”
The Senior Investigator tossing his half finished cigarette out of the window. Pressing the sweaty five fen aluminium coins into Yaobang’s palm.
“Just phone him. And tell him to bring any equipment that he might need for examining a corpse. Is that clear enough for you?”
“But he’s got no experience in that field, Boss. He wants to be a fucking gynaecologist.”
Piao leant over, pushing open the wagon door. The Big Man asking no more questions. There was no point. He was halfway to the telephone box when the Senior Investigator shouted to him.
“And tell him to keep it to himself. We’ve found enough bodies in the Huangpu for one week.”
Rain was starting to fall. Fine rain, that seemed half-hearted, exhausted, but which somehow managed to drench everything within its reach in a matter of seconds. Yaobang ran the gauntlet of planks, buttocks sluggishly swinging like two drunken sailors slumbering in their hammocks through a storm at sea. He was a large target. By the time that he made it to the telephone box, he was soaked. Mumbling.
“I just hope it’s still pissing down when you have to wait for us by the river, little brother …”
Mumbling, as the drips ran down his neck. As the dampness soaked through the thin material of his jacket. Mumbling, as he dialled the local number.
The rain stopped the instant that Yaobang had finished the call and had got back into the wagon. Mopping his wide brow with his damp cuff. It depositing more water than it soaked up.
“Fuck it …” was all that he said.
*
Yanggao Road skirting the Padong Enterprise Zone, bowed in shadow. The towers, some finished, some not, lining its broken edge. Like dull needles reaching up to full bellied clouds.
“What are your names?”
Piao re-adjusted the rear-view mirror, looking deeply into the interior of the wagon; the question knotted into his eyebrows and aimed at the two PSB officers perched precariously, uncomfortably, on the stacks of caskets. They didn’t answer. It was the first time that the Senior Investigator had addressed them since leaving the foreshore of the Huangpu. The Big Man hated silences, like he hated overcooked noodles. Like he hated women with gold front teeth. He answered for them.
“The old dog’s Xin, the young puppy’s Wenbiao.”
Piao stared back to the road, the main artery of this new city … ablaze with lights, but devoid of the living of life. Feeling himself grimace as the headlights picked out the verdant glare of a rice paddy squeezed between the scraping range of concrete pinnacles. Ancient and newborn, silently arm-wrestling amongst the heavy machinery and the slosh of dollars.
… but workers will always need rice to fuel their labours, to aid us in the Great Leap Forward, to create …’
He wondered if words, like paddy fields, had room to breath in this new age? If they had room to grow from the seed to the fulfilling of their promise? The shadows deepened, and they were in a valley tunnel of darkness.
“You will consider yourselves to be on special assignment. That means that you are answerable to me only. You will discuss nothing that you see. Nothing that you hear. Nothing that you think that relates to this case. Not with anyone. Is that understood?”
He checked the mirror. The PSB officers in the back of the wagon nodding like doggies, signalling their acceptance.
“From now on and until the job is over, I own what you see, what you hear, what you think …”
Again his eyes drifted to the rear-view mirror. Again they nodded. Yaobang had done his job well. They seemed to be a good choice. A grizzled old hound, eyes fixed upon his impending pension. Smelling of pipe tobacco and three day old newspapers. And the puppy dog, his mother’s breast milk barely off of his lips. Too old and too young for the Security Services or Party activists to have bothered recruiting as informers.
“… tell no one about this job. No one. Not even your wives.”
Xin nodded. Wenbiao raising his hand as if in school, as if wanting to go for a pee.
“I’m not married, Comrade Officer, Sir. I don’t even have a girlfriend, well not yet, anyway.”
A smile creeping into the corners of his lips, but Piao cutting it adrift as his foot found the accelerator.
“Just as well,” he said, and adding in a whisper lost in the drown of engine noise … “… a dark continent, women. The darkest continent.”
*
An urban chameleon.
The venetian blinded towers. Harsh neons scrolling across the windscreen and onto the Senior Investigator’s face in a constant shift of primary colours. Piao hated Pudong. He hated Shanghai, but at least you could hate the old whore in a familiar, warm fashion. But this new tart, gaudy lipsticked and spreading her legs across the east bank … she could only be hated ice-cold, in a detached way that mirrored her curves of steel and concrete. She didn’t belong, but she was going to stay … and so fuck you.
He checked his watch, a fake Rolex. The grey base metal peeking out from beneath the worn gold coloured plating, as a nosey neighbour peeks out from the crack between the curtains. Yaobang’s brother would be nearing the bridge over the Wusongjiang and the fruit of his own telephone call would be ripening on the branch. Keeping to the back streets, he turned the wagon north.
*
They picked the student, Pan Yaobang, up on the curve of the bridge. He was not like his brother. Skinny, tall, bespectacled … a lank bean shoot, to the dumpling that was Detective Yaobang. Smelling different also. Not of a few days stale sweat and sloppily eaten hundun tang, the ravioli soup that all PSB Officers appeared to be addicted to, especially during those anonymous hours of patrol that never seemed to quite belong to the night … or to the day. No, he smelt only of alien odours. Of fake American trainers. Medical handwash. Freshly laundered jeans. And Coca-Cola lips. On settling into the back of the wagon he had said,
“This is a proper investigation, isn’t it? An official matter?”
Yaobang had nearly puked with laughter when his student brother had leapt from the stack of caskets that he had been sitting on, narrowly avoiding a cracked skull on the steel roof of the wagon. The Boss had looked over his shoulder, pointed at the caskets and had replied, simply and with no ceremony.
“It’s official. They don’t come any more official than this …”
And had added, as he filled up the tank with diesel.
“… we don’t normally drive around the city with eight stiffs in the back of the wagon using them as extra seats, unless it’s very official.”
The student had asked no more questions. The student had insisted on standing … standing for the rest of the meandering journey to the Patuo of Yangpu and the festering port that scarred its boundary with the river.
*
A slash in the sky, vivid red … just above the horizon. The orb of the sun moving through it with the stealth of a street cat. The Senior Investigator watching it as he drove. Watching it, darting between the stop-start of stuttering warehouses and derricks that hugged both sides of the Huangpu for seventeen miles, as far as the point of confluence with the Changjiang, the Long River … the mighty Yangtze.
Dark now, Piao taking the wagon once more past the old warehouse. Only when he was certain that the shadows hid no other shadows, darker shadows, did he pull into the cobbled alleyway. A giant lattice of light thrown onto the yellowed brickwork as the headlights swung, piercing the heavy wrought iron gates. Three bursts of full beam, the walls of the warehouse seeming to rush out … a door in the corner of the loading bay opening. A man jumping down, sprinting to the gate, prising open one side of it before running back and leaping onto the apron of the loading bay. Piao drove in, swinging the wagon around, backing into one of the many bays. The man now pulling on a length of chain. Each heave, each arch of his back, the metal wall of the loading bay inching up. A wall of light, blinding white, replacing it. Xin and Wenbiao throwing open the wagon’s back doors. The student bumping his head as he aimlessly wandered from the wagon and into the pool of arc-light. Squinting down at his trainers and weighed down by the two kit-bags that he was carrying. A throaty cough. The reek of spent gas filled the bay; the man now on a forklift, features sharply defined in knife-edge hard light. Narrow lipped. A single dark line of eyes screwed together. Rubber in a scream, as he wheeled the forklift violently around towards the pallet being loaded with caskets.
“Out of the way … out of the way.”
The student, Pan, jumping to the side. The ungainly machine swinging into his path. Lifts slicing, skiing into position under the pallet of four caskets. Breaking the light … stilts of elongated shadow as it plunged into the interior of the warehouse. Piao and Yaobang stood out of the way, by the cab of the wagon.
“Who’s the fucking monkey?”
The Big Man nodded his head toward the forklift, its butt shedding hard form to bruised hues of near white. Climbing onto the bay, the Senior Investigator stared beyond the gate, into the alleyway. Eyes narrowing. Shadows had fled, cobbles glinting dully in the floodlit barrage. Scales of the Dragon lighting a path to their door.
“Might as well place a fucking advertisement,” he breathed.
“Sorry, Boss, what was that?”
Holding out a hand, Piao hauled the Detective onto the loading bay … thinking of carcasses of pork, sides of beef.
“I said that the ‘fucking monkey’ is my cousin …”
“Shit, sorry Boss, I didn’t know, he doesn’t look like you.”
“… my cousin on my mother’s side.”
Deep waters. Difficult waters. Yaobang excused himself, helping the others to load the remaining caskets onto an empty pallet.
The window that was set into the back of the wagon door was caked in dust, distorted, a crack running from the top left-hand corner … still, Piao could make out his features and recognize that they were not Chinese. Clearly, not a full breed. The rounded eyes, irises of beach-ball blue. The slim, sharp nose. The skin that was far too pink, far too white, to be rooted purely in Chinese ancestry. His father’s features. Piao spat on the ground. His father’s … a burst of brash American genes pushing aside a few hundred generations of Chinese. So easily pushed aside. Hardly a trace of his mother. Inherited only, the gifts, the curses of a diplomat on a long and unsecured leash. A sky-blue-eyed horny ‘Yank’, let loose in the candy store of no responsibility. No accountability. Stuffing himself with all that had been denied to him before. Was he, the disjointed reflection in the rear window of the wagon, still the sorry result of the union even after all of these years? Just the trail of vomit from someone who had fed for too long at the table?
Shame, it brands, it eats as a cancer does. Shame, a meal that not even a crow would choose. Piao kicked the wagon’s doors closed, following the second pallet of caskets into the shower of floodlight.
*
The Yangpu Bridge Import Export Meat Corporation.
The vast interior of the warehouse … four rows of stainless steel benches that stretched for almost its full length. Running above each of them, a track, a carousel of meat hooks that would take the freshly slaughtered animal carcasses from man to man. Process to process. Bleeding. Gutting. Cleaning out with high pressure hoses. Boning. Dressing. Portioning. Before entering the packing department at the very rump of the warehouse. Beyond that, the river and the empty refrigerated cargo belly of a waiting ship. Blood and waste, by-products of the butchering, would be sluiced from the narrow gutters that edged each side of the lengthy runs of benches. Also from the floor. Flowing, half liquid, half solid, into the large grates that led into down pipes. It running unimpeded, straight into the Huangpu River below. During a busy period, the New Year, Labour Day, or the Lantern and Dragon Boat Festivals … the waters of the Huangpu around the warehouse would be red. Day and night … red.
*
“There, put them on the centre bench.”
Xin moaning as he eased his back into the work. Wenbiao lifting the bodies. Averted eyes. Trying to hold his breath, clamp his nostrils tight. Across sheets of polythene, smeared blood. Small pools of piss coloured river water. And then the smell as they were unwrapped. A smell that had been lost in the thick mud of the foreshore, the coldness of the river, but which now lived … sweet, bitter, earthy. A smell that sat at each end of a life, like book ends. A smell of birth. A smell of death.
Laying the polythene over the stainless steel bench. The bodies over the polythene. Toe to head. Toe to head. Toe to head. Eight times. Eight caricatures of the human form. Forty-four feet of humanity holed, laid to waste.
Somebody’s babies. Somebody’s children.
Piao spat into the gutter, taking a breath, deep, long. It had a taste, a reek, a signature of every death that he had ever stood over. There was no escape; the laid out bodies assaulted every single sense. Holding everyone in the warehouse in an almost hypnotic grip. No escape.
A throb of anger purred in the furthest backdrop of his hearing. He couldn’t understand it. Did he really care about these broken bodies or was it just time to lift his head out of the sea of shit that he had been drowning in for all of these years? Time to make a stand? He wasn’t sure. Not knowing, it made it even worse.
At least you should know why you are committing suicide. At least you should know why?
Tea … sweet, strong. Its bouquet brushing death from his nostrils. He reached out for the mug. Mao’s face, scratched, fading, but still beaming, staring back at him from beneath the pin-holed glaze. Piao turned the mug around, his eyes focussing through the veil of steam on the student bracing himself against a worn, bare brick, blood-spattered wall.
“It’s all yours …”
He nudged Mao’s face towards the eight. Tea running down his fingers.
“Now?”
The Senior Investigator could see fear’s brand in the dryness of the student Pan’s lips. The dart of his eyes. The warm, pungent keynotes that now highlighted his smell.
“… within the next week would be convenient. They’re not going anywhere, but we do need to know about them …”
Drinking from the Mao mug, long and deep. The tea was too sweet, far too sweet. This was not a time for tea that was too sweet.
“… and there are murderers to be caught and dealt with.”
Another lick of his lips. Another glance, furtive, rabbit-like, over Piao’s shoulder towards the bodies.
Shit … they’re his first. He’s never seen a stiff before.
“I thought that there was only one. My brother told me one.”
“No, no, there are definitely eight. But just think of it as being one. One, but eight times. So don’t look down the line, just concentrate on the one you’re dealing with at that time. It’s a lesson that I learnt a long time ago …”
“They don’t teach us police psychology and training methods at the University.”
“… they don’t teach us police psychology and training methods in the police. I learnt it when I was a cashier in my uncle’s restaurant near Yichuan Park. Friday nights were fist fights and plates of fried noodles being thrown everywhere. My uncle would drum it into the top of my head with his best bone chopsticks … ‘look at the cash register and the customer’s money. The cash register and the money. Nothing else.’”
The student attempted a smile. It didn’t work.
“But I have no experience. I have never examined someone who is dead before. I’m training to be a gynaecologist.”
“Yes, your brother did mention it in passing. Okay, they’re dead, but it can’t be that different from examining the living. And look on the bright side, at least you won’t get any complaints about your cold hands, will you?”
Piao, one arm around his shoulder, shepherded him toward the run of benches. Rivulets of brown-red water running from flesh to plastic to steel gutter.
