Dragon's Eye (42 page)

Clawed fingers racked the wall of Piao’s stomach, his legs feeling as if they were set in concrete. A sudden realisation that Haven was in the same room as Barbara. Through all of his calls, in the room with her.

“You’re wrong, Sun, he’s not like that. Charles could never hurt anyone. He’s going out on a limb to help me find Bobby’s killer …”

Silence again, snapped by her voice breaking. Eyes filling. Tears … warm, salty. They would taste of good-byes and of the Englishman’s cologne.

“… we’re leaving on Saturday. Please don’t call me again. I don’t think that I could stand it.”

Seconds of silence, and then,

“Sun, I won’t forget you.”

And she was gone, only the electronic pulse in the telephone’s earpiece remaining.

*

It was late. Out of cigarettes. Out of beer.

Piao slept, deep, bottomless. Dreams of broken bodies bleeding mud and airport lounges smelling of disinfectant.

He integrated the sounds into his sleep. A key slipping into a lock. A door opened. A door closed. Footsteps in the hall. A precise and careful footfall. And then the adrenaline thumping in. Hard across his chest. Shifting up the back of his skull. Finding himself instantly awake and slipping out of the bed. Naked. Pulling the shoulder holster out from underneath the bed. Its leather, cold against his thigh … diamond etched pistol butt, colder in his hand. Slipping the safety. Moving to the wall. The footsteps closer. A shadow, cutting its shape across the carpet. In one movement, stepping from behind the door, taking the intruder’s neck with his forearm. Maxim-pattern silencer of the type 67 hard against the bone at the back of the intruder’s ear. Everything in his posture expecting a counter move. Nothing came. A scream only – muffled, cut short. Piao pulling his arm away and up. A figure, dark, slight … toppling, spinning from his grip toward the bed. Perfume in his nostrils. And in his eyes, the familiar curve of lips that he had once kissed. Her hair falling in a curtain against the side of her face, like ink spilt across paper.

“Lingling.”

His wife. One of only a few times that he had been able to say her name since she had left.

“It’s good to see you, Sun.”

A sudden flush of embarrassment, he reached for a towel to cover himself, pulling it around his waist. Hiding himself from her, as if they had never been intimate.

“It’s good to see you. You’re looking well.”

She smiled, reminding him of frost across a window. Taking him and every detail of the room in within a single glance. She would see that he hadn’t shaved. See that he’d been drinking and eating crap. And her, every detail of her … immaculate. He felt miserable in his shabbiness.

“Have you come back?”

She didn’t answer. And suddenly wishing that he could snatch the words back as soon as they had left his mouth. Stupid. So stupid. Replacing the pistol in its holster and pushing it under the bed. Glancing out of the window as he stood. It was raining. Hard, relentless rain. Below, in the street, a Red Flag parked. The rain across the jet of its paintwork. Engine still running. Looking back at Lingling … rain in her hair, just like that night. Of course she hadn’t come back.

“Sorry about being so dramatic. I was going to write and send these by courier …”

Her eyes lowered, for the first time Piao noticing the thick file in her hands. Porcelain white fingers spanning the thick black characters banded down its front.

OFFICE OF THE MINISTRY OF SECURITY.

“… but it was important that I made sure that these were put directly into your hands …”

She halted for a second, raising her head slowly. Her tongue across her lips. Eyes on his. He knew the look so well. So odd to be re-experiencing its icy blast.

“… I wanted to see you and so I used the key. I was surprised that you hadn’t changed the lock.”

He felt like laughing, crying. Both emotions suddenly, confusingly, feeling a hair’s-breadth apart.

“Why change the lock? I have nothing left to steal.”

She passed him the file, her hand brushing his. His wife. So obvious now that she hadn’t come to see him … she had just come to lever him into position. Nothing changes, except for the names of the days. The Senior Investigator broke the file’s seal, pulling back the flap. Inside, two spools of tape. Glancing at the labels; they plugged the gaps in the run of tapes from Ye Yang’s hotel room. Also in the file, a series of papers. Computer printouts, reports. On the top page a passport sized photograph. Photocopied. Grainy. Charles Haven. A smile on his lip, like dog shit on a doorstep.

“These are from the Minister? It was Kang Zhu who sent the other tapes by courier a few days ago?”

She straightened her dress. Raw silk, foreign. A year of his wages could not have purchased for her such a dress.

“I gave you the other tapes. I give you these. The Minister knows nothing of this. The Minister is to know nothing of this. The whole point is that he be kept out of your investigation. Do you understand?”

“I understand, but I can’t guarantee that anyone can be kept out of my investigation. When it comes to murders …”

She moved across to him, taking the file from the tabletop. Pulling it to her breasts … both arms wrapped around it.

“Then I take this back. And the next murder you will not be able to investigate because it will be your own …”

She turned to the window, eyes blocked in the jigsawed light spilling through the fine blinds. Mocha. Black. Mocha. She had always turned when there was a truth. As if her eyes could not stand its glare.

“… I am trying to save two lives here. Kang Zhu’s and your own, Sun.”

“The Minister has an involvement in the case that I am investigating?”

She didn’t answer. Her lips like a child’s, pursed, closed.

“He must realise that any involvement in these murders would mean the death sentence to one in such a position of authority as Kang Zhu.”

She whispered it to the bamboo blind, the window that it shaded catching her breath in slips, dots and dashes of matt grey … fading as quickly as they had formed.

“He is already serving a death sentence.”

She walked to the door, the file still clenched over her breasts. Piao moving to bar her way, an arm across the narrow hallway, his other hand holding the towel around his waist. His wife, yet she smelt of a rich high cadre.

“Give me the file. I will not implicate the Minister in my investigations. This is not to save Kang Zhu’s arse, this is to appease the victims and their families.”

A ghost of a smile haunting the corners of her bud lips.

“And this is not to save your own life, Sun?”

“I don’t know, perhaps it is. Perhaps seeing you has shown me how much I have already died. It is not something that I like.”

She released her grip and he took the file. Walking to the door, she opened it. Her hand falling into his, metal at its heart.

“The key to your door. I will not need it anymore.”

He watched her glide down the flight of stairs. Across the long to the Red Flag, its door being opened for her. Watching it drive away. Rain bleeding across the black desert of its roof. Not once did he see her look back. It was only when the limousine was out of sight, Piao opening the flat’s windows wide to purge the smell of her perfume, the odour of a septuagenarian’s mouth across hers … that he realised that he had not wished her well in her pregnancy. He closed the windows, shaking from the coldness that was inside him. The tears cutting down his face with the intensity of a welder’s neat beading. And with them, the words repeated, like an endless river of pain.

“It should have been my fucking baby … it should have been my fucking baby.”

*

He sat for an hour, still in his towel. Drained, as if a plug had been pulled on him. Unable to move. File on his lap. Key in his palm, piercing the flesh white with a reassuring pain. Calm while she had been there. Only now being washed by a tidal wave of emotion. Finally he moved, with speed, with resolve. Discarding the file on the bed and the towel on the floor. The shower water, as cold as good-byes. Shaving, beard stubble peppering the soap. Scrubbing his face, his body, with unnecessary force. Watching the foam run down his legs to the discoloured plug-hole. It washing away … her with it. His wife.

He dressed, nearly putting on his uniform until he remembered, with a painful nudge of reality, that he was still suspended from the Bureau. For breakfast, four cigarettes and a Tsingtao. Reading the file until he had finished another two. One hundred and four entries and exits in and out of the People’s Republic of China within the last five years. Haven was a busy man with a penchant for airline food and terminal queues, as well as gold lighters. The Senior Investigator’s finger trailed the computer data. Characters … times, dates. Matrix dotted meaningless information … structures built from precarious black specs. His attention drifting to the top of the page; darker print, larger dots.

CENTRAL INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT.

A name that he’d only come across once before. West of Beijing, driving to the Fragrant Hills during a brief secondment to the City Central PSB on Beichizi Dajie. An old colleague pointing with a cigarette, at a drab unmarked building just beyond the old Summer Palace.

“The Institute of International Relations …”

With the words he had spat a shred of tobacco from his lip. It had stuck to the inside of the windscreen. Piao remembering how he had been unable to tear his attention away from it.

“… it belongs to the Central Investigation Department. Top Secret. So secret that most of us Chinese don’t even know that it exists. They spy on foreign countries. Send operatives abroad under the cover of diplomats, journalists, businessmen, attachés. They do special jobs.”

The car had turned, the building pirouetting behind Piao’s shoulder. It had been a summer’s day, the sun cutting across his eyes in a shutter of incandescent white.

“… they say that the Central Investigation Department is so important that it comes directly under the Party Central Committee, not the government. And if they want you they can get you transferred out of any Danwei.”

He had spat more shreds of tobacco, Piao hearing the sound only.

“… it’s obvious that they don’t fucking want us.”

Piao remembered having nodded … and waiting. Waiting for the sound of his colleague’s next spit.

The Senior Investigator’s finger trailed off the side of the page. Moving to the next report … typed. This time prisons, lao gais. Prisoners’ names, numbers, crimes. The dates, times, locations of their executions. Piao’s eyes following his finger back and forth, from the report to the computer data on Haven. Thousands of executions across the whole of the Republic … Haven in China for every one that had occurred in the Shanghai and Beijing city areas. Coincidence. Narrowing it down … finger moving through the lists of internal travel visas extended to Haven. He had been in the city of Shanghai or Beijing as each execution had been carried out. Not one missed. Coincidence?

Last entry in the report. Four executions. Location, Virtue Forest. The prisoners … Yongshe, Feng, Decai, Ziyang. Piao closing his eyes, just an instant as he exhaled. Checking the computer data for an answer that he already knew. The Englishman was in the Republic, in Shanghai when all four had been executed.

*

The reel to reel tapes confirmed only what Piao had already assumed … informing his assumptions. Haven was Ye Yang’s buyer of the Men of Mud. The girl, squeezing the pips and raising the price with every telephone conversation. The Englishman’s silence, a threat that could be cut with a steel wire. But the material from the Minister Kang Zhu’s office, his and the Central Investigation Department’s involvement, Haven’s frequent periods in the Republic slotting into the lists of state sanctioned executions … what of these? What meaning did they hold?

At the bottom of the file a few more papers remaining. Haven’s, passport details. Financial profile, long, anonymous lines of figures. Intimidating. Coldly powerful. More than a hint of how wealthy he was. A single A4 sheet rested, creased, at the base of the file. Computer print. Grey, on almost see-through paper. A list of state hospitals, most of them well known; spread throughout the whole of the People’s Republic. In thick cuts of biro, four firmly underlined. Two in Shanghai. Two in Beijing. Hospitals of excellence, teaching hospitals, whose rigours and skills fed the rest of the People’s Republic. At the bottom of the page, indented in black upper case bold and also underlined. A name. A title that he didn’t recognise, towing it into position, midpage …

CONSULTANT SURGEON CHARLES HAVEN.

Picking up another Tsingtao. Warm to the touch. The concentration seeming to press itself on the inside of his skull.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

Executions. Shanghai, Beijing. Haven’s movements. Teaching hospitals … also in Shanghai and Beijing. The Englishman … a surgeon, a consultant. A jigsaw of important things, only of important things. How he hated jigsaw puzzles. He finished the beer, thinking of refrigerators that would really chill a Tsingtao. Thinking also of what his grandfather had once told him … ‘important things, they only become important when you discover their importance for yourself.’

*

The Senior Investigator’s interview with Detective Yun was harrowing. Pushed and guided by Comrade Officer Chief Liping’s unseen hand. Meticulously, a frame-up being swung and manhandled into place. Piao being shunted to the dark edge of the abyss, in a meeting punctuated by lukewarm tea and snatches of the acned detective’s views on the rumba, the polka … and the tango. It was all very friendly, almost jovial. But it was obvious in which direction the current was flowing. New witnesses had ‘unexpectedly’ come forward from Zhiyuan’s neighbourhood, people of good reputation and fully paid-up Party cards. They placed the Senior Investigator in the vicinity of the old comrade’s flat in the early morning of the day that he was murdered. One even had Piao running to his car and driving off at speed.

The result, for the time being … he was to remain suspended. Not allowed to go beyond the city limits. Serious charges were in the process of being drawn up. Yun ended the interview, standing, his finger snapping down on the tape recorder. Walking to the door. The light reading the Braille of his acne like a barcode.