Night Heron (4 page)

“Are you detaining us?” said Mangan.
Juliu
, meaning: are you prepared to make this official?

“I hope we won’t need to do that, but you will come with us now. Please.”

Mangan, for his own self-respect, held on a bit longer.

“We do not have to come with you.”

“It will get more complicated.” The man’s gaze was quite level, and he had his hands in his pockets now. The two
wujing
—both big ones, Mangan noticed—shifted behind him.

Harvey got up and picked up his pack, signaling: let’s get it over with.

Mangan stood too, relieved Harvey had made the move and not him. Grey Suit cocked his head to one side and gestured to the stairwell. They went back down into the street and to a black car.

The driver was the same species, different genus. Wiry, dark, a mustache, leather jacket. Still, bloodshot eyes. He smiled as he opened the rear door. They got in, holding their packs. The car smelled of cigarette smoke. Mangan tried the window but it wouldn’t open. The driver started the engine, then paused and turned around to look straight at them. Here we all are, then, his look said. Grey Suit touched him on the arm and gestured. The driver faced the front and pulled away.

They sat alone on plastic chairs in the
Anquanju
, the local State Security bureau, a whitewashed office with barred windows, for twenty minutes before anyone spoke to them. Mangan looked for cameras but couldn’t see any. He took the SIM cards out of their mobile phones. Harvey had a pocketknife. Mangan laid the cards on the table and sliced them up, crumbled the plastic and scattered it on the floor. He went through his notebook, tearing out the relevant pages—phone numbers, names—and solemnly put them in his mouth, chewing until the paper was mush. He stuck some more gaffer around the card strapped to his thigh. Harvey smirked and they waited. The sun was coming up.

When the door opened it was Grey Suit. With him was the taxi driver who had driven them to Jinyi, terrified. Grey Suit held the door open, gestured towards Harvey and Mangan, then looked quizzically at the driver.
Them?
The driver nodded.

Mangan stood up.

“He had nothing to do with it. He doesn’t know us.”

Grey Suit looked amused and made a calming gesture with his palms. “I know.”

“Then bloody well let him go.”

Grey Suit raised his eyebrows, then turned and closed the door. A few minutes later he was back, with a uniform, and a large green file.

“Please give me your mobile phones for a moment.” They handed over the phones.

Grey Suit slipped the backs off to find the SIM cards gone. A wry look and a shake of the head. He handed the phones to the uniform, who left the room.

For a while it was just ID, addresses and contact details. But then came a search through the bags. Grey Suit took the camera.

“I’ll need all the footage, I’m afraid.”

Harvey gestured. “Still in the camera.”

“Show me, please.” Harvey turned the machine on and rewound. The digital flicker showed the ponytailed boy with blood in his eyes, then the interviews and the rows of chanting Followers in the shadows.

“Is everything you filmed here?”

Harvey nodded.

“Please give me the memory card.”

“You have no right to confiscate our footage,” said Mangan.

Grey Suit sighed and ran his hands through his neatly parted hair.

“Please,” he said. “I would rather you hand it to me than you force me to take it.”

Harvey sighed and ejected the memory card and handed it to him. Grey Suit regarded him, pursed his lips and nodded. Then, from the green file, he drew out two sheets of paper, on each a few typed sentences. He pushed them across the table towards Mangan.

“You’ll have to sign these.”

Mangan squinted at the characters. It was the usual, a confession of sorts, and a get out of jail card: I, Philip Mangan, freelance journalist, holder of an accreditation from a reputable but crumbling British newspaper, indentured to a small television news agency, was in Jinyi illegally, filmed illegally, interviewed
illegally and in general consorted with people who were entirely illegal. He translated the gist for Harvey. Grey Suit waited, arms folded. They signed. The forms went back into the green folder.

Business done, Grey Suit wanted to talk.

“What do you think of these people?” He appeared interested, his Mandarin deliberately slow and clear, little trace of Jiangxi in it. “You’ve got some experience with them, I think.”

Mangan didn’t know what to say. “It’s important to report what they do.”

“Yes, yes. But, we call them a cult.
Xiejiao
. An evil cult. Are we right, do you think?” Grey Suit appeared capable of earnestness.

“I don’t understand why you—you the Communist Party, I mean—see them as a threat,” said Mangan. “They seem naive, childish.” He could feel Harvey’s eyes on him.

“Naive. I must say I hadn’t thought of them like that.” Grey Suit paused. “I’m sure you’ve read some Chinese history.”

“Yes, some.”

“We’ve seen these movements before, yes? They get dangerous. Demagogues spouting religion. Peasants who think they’re divine, hurling themselves on bayonets. Villages burning.”

Mangan shrugged.

“Those old ladies in the street tonight? I don’t see that, I don’t see some fiery rebellion. This isn’t the nineteenth century.”

Grey Suit looked at him, weighing what he was saying. Then he reached out as if to shake hands, but stopped midway, and in a strange, operatic gesture, quavered his hand from side to side.

“I think, Mr. Mangan, that we don’t know who they are. I think we don’t know.”

Harvey dozed for a while, leaning on the table, arms crossed. Mangan stared out of the window through the bars on to a concrete parking lot. The green
wujing
trucks from the previous night stood in lines. A dark, wiry kid hosed them down,
spray dripping from the canvas, the drab olive metal suddenly gleaming.

And then, in the breezy morning light, Mangan watched uniforms walk a group of Followers—fifteen of them, perhaps—across the concrete. They were cuffed, had their faces down and shuffled. No laces? They were all young men. The uniforms walked them to a truck. A sergeant dropped the tailgate. Two uniforms hoisted each Follower up on to the bed of the truck, which revved its engine, sending a black billow across the lot, pulled out, and was gone.

The wind had picked up and, in the silence, Mangan watched cloud shadow stipple the mountains.

“You can go,” said Grey Suit.

They caught an afternoon flight from Nanchang. Approaching Beijing, Mangan was tight and silent. Harvey drank Five Star beer. Beneath them the north China plain darkened from gray to purple. Beijing glistened in the early night as the aircraft banked and the engines hissed.

They were at Mangan’s flat by ten to look at the pictures. They crashed through the front door, scattering equipment bags, to find Ting, wide-eyed and phone in hand, scolding. Mangan was brought round, her concern breaking his mood and calming him.

“I’ve been on the phone
all evening
,” she said. “Where have you
been
?”

Mangan gestured to himself, as if he were making an entrance in fine attire.

“Here we are,” he said.

“She missed us,” said Harvey.

“She did,” said Mangan.

Ting waved her willowy, bare arms.

“I almost called London.”

She was done up for Beijing society: a slender dress in charcoal-gray silk, very short; Tibetan jewelry in exquisite dull silver. Her skin was Manchurian pale, the color of ivory. She sat down hard, gave an exaggerated sigh and ran her hands through short spiky hair.

“Why didn’t you call? I missed a gallery opening.”

“State Security ate my mobile,” said Harvey.

She put a hand to her mouth.

“Oh, no.”

Mangan smiled.

“We’re okay. Really. It was okay.”

“And… we got the pictures,” said Harvey.

Mangan dropped his trousers and began picking away at the gaffer on his thigh, wincing theatrically, and they all laughed.

Mangan poured glasses of vodka, and Ting turned off the lights and the three of them sat on the shabby sofa and watched it all played back on Mangan’s flatscreen television. The pictures were strong. They had the old woman in the purple rain jacket, with her quavering voice and weird stare. They had the chilling
wujing
images taken from the street, before they made their way to the roof. Harvey had silhouetted the
wujing
against the lights of the trucks, so they became anonymous, threatening shadows. And the arrests were very clear—the old woman dragged down the street, her feet juddering across the wet black asphalt. Mangan could feel the structure of the piece forming. It would tell well in straight chronology. This, then
this.

But they had nothing from the roof. The worst of the violence—the ponytailed boy bleeding into the gutter—was all on the card confiscated by Grey Suit. The intensity, Mangan realized, built and came to not much. It would be a story without an end, he knew, a compromise.

He was bleeding. From where, though?

Peanut kneeled on the clinker, swaying. It was evening, he thought.

He wiped a hand across his mouth and the back of it came away smeared with blood. Was he bleeding from the nose? It seemed so. He was, he supposed, close to unconsciousness. A train passed a few feet from him, but the roar of the diesel, the
clack
of the wheels, seemed far away.

He began to crawl.

Far to his left, he could make out engine yards and beyond them the station. The darkening sky had to it the pale orange wash, not of sunset, but of a city’s lights.

He had damaged himself when he jumped from the freight car, but he couldn’t understand how. He crawled further away from the tracks, towards a low brick building with broken windows, weeds growing at the base of its walls. He was very cold and his tongue was thick in his mouth. For twenty-four hours, clinging to the coupling, he had eaten and drunk nothing. The wind chill had left him stunned.

He reached the brick building and slumped against the wall, from which, he now saw, a faucet protruded. He hauled himself to it and turned the tap. The faucet hissed and shook, and belched an intermittent spray of cold water. Peanut cupped his hands and drank, retched, drank more, and sluiced his face clean of blood.

His head began to clear. He flexed his limbs, rubbed his hands. Then, tentatively, he stood. He looked to the skyline, saw illuminated towers rising in the dark, flickering and silver. He’d never seen the like.

Xining. The city.

He looked up the tracks towards the station and saw flashlights, their beams dancing on the steel rails. He turned, felt in his pocket for the plastic bag cinched at the top with an elastic band, and found it between his fingers. Then he ran.

In an alley off the freight yards he stood and watched from the shadows. A girl sat in a doorway beneath a green neon light. She wore tight pink jeans. A man stood over her, murmuring to her with an expectant look. Or a greedy look, Peanut thought, as if he were contemplating some rich food. The man carried beneath his arm a small black bag with a loop for the wrist. The bag suggested its owner to be a man of business, a man of accoutrements. Peanut had seen such bags carried by visiting officials in the prison and had fixed upon them as the likely location of valuable items.

The man looked extremely valuable. He wore a blue jacket of a soft, slithery material, a striped shirt and cream slacks, and shoes that to Peanut’s eye had the shine of polished wood. The man was balding and bulky and leaning over the girl, and she nodded and picked up a handbag that lay at her feet.

What did the valuable man think he was doing here at night in an alley off the freight yards, talking to girls in doorways?

Peanut stepped from the shadows and walked towards them. The man looked up and frowned. Seeing Peanut, in filthy green trousers, stained tracksuit top, he backed away a little. The girl sat very still and watched Peanut.

“What?” said the man.

Peanut held his hands open and moved closer to them.

“I just need a little help,” said Peanut.

“Piss off,” said the man. He sounded uncertain. Peanut made a regretful face. He stepped quickly to the man’s left side in a feint. The man lashed out ineffectually with both arms. Peanut stepped in close and gripped his jaw and rammed his head against the wall. The man emitted a squeal. Peanut hit him hard on the chin and his knees gave way and down he went. The girl sat staring fixedly ahead, her hands splayed against the wall, as if steadying herself. Peanut said nothing, just leaned down and
placed two fingers in a pinch on her throat. Her skin was very soft. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows in a questioning expression. She gave a tight shake of her head. He let go his grip, bent to pick up the black bag and walked shakily down the alley.

Xining bus station at night had the air of a transit camp, Peanut thought. Muslim families, the women in lace headscarves, sat on the floor amid orange peel and peanut shells cradling rose-cheeked children. Their men clutched mobile phones. Soldiers lounged and smoked. The tannoy clattered around the walls as the buses disappeared into the taut, dry night.

The toilets reeked of chemical perfume and urine. The floor was slippery with spit. Peanut squatted in a toilet stall, shivering, massaging the knuckles of his right hand. He was savagely hungry. Before him, the man’s black bag.

Peanut unzipped the bag. He was dimly aware of the clatter of the paper towel dispenser, running water, a man hacking and spitting. He pulled the bag open carefully. As he did so, it emitted a sharp electronic whine. He flinched. The bag fell on to the slimy floor. The whine resolved into the marching favorite, “
Dang Bing De Ren
,” “Those Who Join The Army.” The valuable man’s mobile phone was ringing. Heart thumping, Peanut took it from the bag. The phone hummed and vibrated between his fingers and blinked blue. On a screen a single character flashed on and off.
Jia.
Home. Peanut stared at the device. He’d never held one before.
So now we’ll turn it off. But how? Does one push a button?
Baffled, he stood up and dropped the phone into the squat toilet’s dark aperture. The noise continued. Peanut flushed, and it stopped.