Dragon Bones (30 page)

“Actually, for the last few years my job has been to supervise the removal of people from our village. Premier Zhu wants a half a million river people moved by next year. All of the Public Security Bureaus along the river will have to enforce the rules to meet the quotas. I’m afraid—and so are my colleagues up and down the river—of the resistance that we are facing. Corruption is terrible and affects all of us. Everyone is taking a cut from the monies allocated for resettlement, so little is left for the people who must move. Meanwhile, people like my brother-in-law are getting rich building roads, apartment towers, and bridges with inferior materials. Peasants are mad and rightly so, but we’re no longer living in the past when the masses do just as the Politburo orders.”

He leaned forward through the smoke that lingered about his face and added for emphasis, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I don’t want anyone to leave Bashan with a black mark in his
dangan.
So I look the other way and let people do things perhaps they shouldn’t.”

“Like letting them go to All-Patriotic Society meetings. You are aware that this group is against the law and that attending its gatherings is grounds for detention.”

“Yes, of course.”

“The higher-ups would be more concerned with this lapse than your looking the other way for your brother-in-law.”

“I know, and I’ll accept my punishment, but I hope you’ll hear me out first.”

“Go ahead.”

“The All-Patriotic Society is a peaceful group—”

“They don’t seem peaceful to me. They were quite antagonistic toward us last night.”

“I heard you went to a meeting.” He rubbed a nicotine stain on his middle finger. “I think the people saw you and your foreigner as intruders in the one place they’ve considered safe. Instead of showing their fear, they revealed anger. This reaction is common, is it not, whether in our personal relationships or as a community?”

Hom was overtly breaking the law by allowing the cult to operate in Bashan—and confessing his crime to her—for reasons she had yet to comprehend.

“Usually the All-Patriotic Society promotes harmony,” he continued, “which is what I’ll need in the coming months to control the emotions of the masses. You and I have seen the opposite of that, correct? We’re both old enough to have lived through the Cultural Revolution. We both know what can happen when hate is stirred up.”

“You take on a heavy and dangerous responsibility.”

Hom looked away. “I am one generation away from the land. I know what it is to eat bitterness.”

“But do you know what it means to be a martyr?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered evenly.

Hulan doubted that he did. It was one thing to have a noble cause and quite another to spend ten years in a labor camp.

“Do you recognize my name?” she asked.

“You were named for Liu Hulan, martyr for the revolution.”

“I’ve lived my whole life with the burden of that name,” she confided, “but I’ve been like her in name only. I was given opportunities to save others which I didn’t take, and I saved myself at the expense of people I loved. But I want to tell you something. The real Liu Hulan revealed herself to be a Communist and had her head cut off by the Kuomintang so that others in her village could live. It was a moment of immense bravery for a foolish teenager, and she paid with her life.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because the real Liu Hulan never got a second chance or even a chance to change her mind. She was fifteen. A year earlier, a year later, she might have made a very different choice. You have a chance now to change your position. Follow the rules and you could still save yourself.”

“Inspector, unlike that poor girl, I am a grown man who’s had several years to think about my decision.”

“Do you know what will happen to you?”

“Not much.” He held up his cigarette. “One in every eight male deaths in China is caused by smoking. It seems I’m to be added to those statistics, but I hope I live long enough to see my people safely moved and Bashan underwater.”

He pushed back his chair and stood. The conversational tone he’d just used was replaced by bureaucratic formality. “Thank you for coming by. If there’s anything else I can do to assist you, please let me know.”

Hulan stood for several minutes at the top of the steps leading to the dock, noting that there were far fewer stairs visible than there’d been when she and David arrived three days ago. The water had risen at least six meters, and the floating dock had been repositioned to accommodate the higher level. She took all this in, but her mind was occupied by thoughts of Captain Hom. The people of Bashan believed he was corrupt, but he was one of the most honorable men she’d ever met. She looked up to Hom’s office window and caught him staring down at her. He was a man swimming against the tide. His honesty and his convictions would bring him to a no-good end. She turned and began walking through the rain back up the hill toward the Panda Guesthouse.

She thought about what Hom had said about the people of Bashan and realized that from the moment she’d stepped off the ferry she’d sensed something unsettled about this place. On the surface it seemed like any other little town in the interior of China, with its cafés, dry goods shops, and vegetable stands, but there was an energy that percolated just under the surface. She had initially thought it had to do with the dam—the spirit of the great project infecting the populace with civic pride.

She realized now that this strange vitality boiled out of something far more intimate—fear, anger, and the uncertainty of the unknown. Everything these people had known would be gone soon. Longtime neighbors would be dispersed. All of the alliances, all of the petty arguments, all of the secrets traded, would disappear into the ether as though they’d never existed. Strange sights would replace street corners that had been as familiar as the back of one’s hand. Houses that had been homes for generations would be lost under the lake, and that thought would have to be terribly unsettling because of the joys and sorrows that would be drowned and gone forever. And all the past generations, who’d been laid to rest in places selected for their good
feng shui,
would never again be visited, their graves never again cleaned for Spring Festival, offerings never again brought.

Hulan was jolted out of these ruminations by a voice repeating her name. She turned and saw Michael Quon. He held a hand over his chest, panting, then he smiled and said, “I’ve been running after you, calling you. You obviously were very lost in thought, something I’m afraid I’m always accused of.”

“Dr. Quon.”

“Michael is fine.” He dropped his hand and smiled again.

“Can I help you?”

“Ha!”

It seemed to Hulan that the light and airy syllable reached into the deepest darkness of her heart.

“I was out for a walk. I saw you and you looked”—his forehead knit as he searched for the right word—“pensive. Are you all right?”

“I was thinking.”

“As I said, that’s what I’m always accused of doing. That’s when it’s best to get some fresh air, take a walk, clear the mind. Want to join me?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but when he started up the hill she found herself keeping pace with him.

“Have you walked the Qutang Gorge yet?” he asked, his voice buoyant. When Hulan said she hadn’t, he said, “Take an hour, Inspector, and come with me.”

“I can’t.”

“Take it from a fellow brooder, you’ll think better.”

After everything that had happened today—the tense exchanges with David, the parries with Stuart Miller, the hours with the paperwork, the retracing of what might have happened to Lily, the interview with the gatekeeper, and this last meeting with Hom—she was weary in spirit. She had only one person left on her list, but Angela McCarthy could wait an hour. So Hulan walked with Michael Quon.

They left the main road and joined a path that continued west. The land here was completely different from the scorched earth near Site 518. Pine groves clung to the hills. Waterfalls cascaded from high precipices into deep gullies. Then suddenly she and Quon were on the old towpath cut right into the cliff she’d seen that first day from the ferry. She closed her umbrella, because the path was little more than a meter wide and she could touch the rocky ceiling above her. Below, the swollen river raged past. If the rain continued another day or two, this path would be submerged.

Without speaking, they walked single file until up ahead Hulan could see the two imposing mountains that formed the Kuimen Gate at the entrance to the gorge. For the first time in days the sun broke through the clouds, and Quon abruptly stopped.

“Look!” Rays of sunlight caught on wet outcroppings of rock even as high above them mists still hid the peaks. “When you see something like this,” he said, his voice a respectful whisper, “you know why the landscape painters were inspired to reflect on the insignificance of man in the face of nature.”

“It’s beautiful,” she agreed.

“It’s humbling,” he corrected.

He rested his back against the rock and spoke out into the gorge. “‘In deep, fog-filled gorges, dragons and tigers sleep.’”

She supposed that he was quoting Du Fu, but she wasn’t sure, and she was surprised that Quon, a Chinese American, could recite those words as though he’d known them his entire life.

“Can you imagine what this must have been like in the old days?” he asked. “Men stripped down to loincloths with ropes slung over their shoulders and their bodies bent down so far with the effort of pulling boats upriver through the rapids that their noses nearly touched this stone floor. Imagine it, Inspector, the immense human effort.” He turned to her and smiled again. “For millennia the people followed Yu the Great’s approach to the river. He adhered to nature’s laws and had great respect for the inherent aspects of water. Then Mao came along and dynamited. Both understood that controlling floods was central to their success. But the results weren’t always for the best, were they?”

“Well….”

His laugh floated out into the gorge, and he ran a hand through his straight black hair, ruffling it up from his scalp.

“How do you look at the world, Inspector? I bet you like facts—like how the river has its source in the Tibetan Plateau and how it crashes down through the Himalayas. Or how the river should drain into the Gulf of Tonkin but abruptly changes its course in Yunnan so that it washes through the width of China and empties into the South China Sea. Those are facts, but the legends are so much more romantic.”

“I’m not from this area, so I don’t know them,” she admitted.

“Every child knows the story of Yu the Great—”

“I don’t. Tell me.”

“At dinner,” he said, turning so that their arms touched.

“I have to work.”

“You still have to eat,” he countered.

“It wouldn’t be proper.”

“We won’t be alone. We’ll be in a room with scholars and waitresses. We all know who you are and that you’re a married woman.”

“I meant it wouldn’t be proper for me to have dinner with you while I’m conducting an investigation.”

He turned away from her, laughing again. “And I thought you thought I was making a pass.”

Why did Americans always have to say everything that crossed their minds?

“You’re not afraid, are you?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then have dinner with me. I can hardly be one of your suspects, so your integrity will be safe with me.”

She knew he was daring her, and the only thing she could think of was to call his bluff. “All right. I’ll have dinner with you.”

She knew a lot about human nature, but she couldn’t read his look except that it wasn’t the nervousness she’d hoped for.

“You said you wanted to be gone for only an hour,” he reminded her.

She suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to hold her ground. “If you’d told me the story of Da Yu when I first asked, it would already be over.”

Quon gave in at last. He turned back to look out into the gorge and lifted a hand to take in the sweep of the river. “There was a time of great flooding. Yu used dragons to sculpt China’s hills and valleys and chase away the waters. He worked so hard that the hair fell from his shins.”

“That’s it?”

“The short form.”

“There are no such thing as dragons.”

“Then what about dragon bones?”

“Even I know those are just old turtle and ox bones.”

“You’re very practical, Inspector,” Quon decided.

“I don’t believe in Chinese ghosts or fox spirits either.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if Yu’s dragons did exist?”

“There’s no such thing as a dragon,” she insisted.

“How do you know? There are scholars who believe that China may have had dragons once upon a time. Call them dinosaurs if you prefer, but still huge, powerful creatures that lived in the time before the great climatic change. Look at this slice of river, where almost every hill has a pagoda with a dragon locked under it, where every rock or curve has some story related to how Yu came through with a dragon and saved the people. Where do you think those stories came from, and why are they all so similar?”

“They came from the minds of simple village people.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that those simple village people, as you call them, may know more than you?” His disappointment in her was palpable. “Come on, let’s go back.”