The Interior (38 page)

“Beast!”

“Murderer!”

“The devil rings his bell when he comes to get your life,” someone else shouted. “Well, it’s ringing now, Tang Dan!”

Hulan had seen crowds like this before, been a part of them. They demanded, insisted upon, blood for blood. Looking at Captain Woo and the other policemen from the local Public Security Bureau, she knew that they would do nothing to stop the crowd. It was so easy to look the other way. It made for less paperwork, and it satisfied the villagers. In fact, Woo and his comrades might even participate themselves. She was glad—if that was the word given the circumstances—that Siang was not here to witness this.

Hulan pushed through the crowd and stood between Tang Dan and Suchee.

“I have something to say,” she announced. She searched for David, found his puzzled face in the crowd, and wished she could speak in English for his benefit. Then she saw Lo edge in next to David and begin to speak softly, explaining what was happening. Hulan looked around her, taking in the faces worn by hard work and hard times. These people had never been given a break. They had known only suffering. Always their joys had been simple—the birth of a child, a good harvest, a suspension of a political campaign. Now two of their neighbors had lost only children—those life-affirming gifts made all the more precious because of China’s daunting childbirth policies.

“You are right when you say that this man is from the landlord class,” she said, “for his problems stem from old ways that we all have tried hard to forget. Some of you here are old enough to remember what the landlords were like. Insidious, cruel, ruthless, but most of all they were greedy. Tang Dan is a greedy man, and although I have no firsthand knowledge of this, I think if you look back you will remember that he has always been greedy.”

Again Hulan sought David’s face in the crowd. She saw Lo translating her words, while already a few people in the crowd murmured their agreement. She observed David’s look of confusion as he realized that her words, instead of calming the heated tempers, were only inflaming them. Aware that his eyes were fixed on her, she turned away.

“I am only a visitor to this county,” Hulan said. “I was here once many, many years ago and then again now. Since coming back I have seen the changes that have happened in Da Shui and all around the countryside. We can all agree that conditions are better. You have electricity, television, some of you even have refrigerators. All this”—her arm took in the expanse around them—“is better, and at first it made me blind, as it has made you blind, to the changes that are so basic to our Chinese life.”

She paused, circling slowly, looking at the faces before her. “Fire, water, air, wood, earth—these are the five elements basic to Chinese life and beliefs. We see the sun and know there’s fire. We stand on the earth, we breathe the air, we use wood in our homes, but what of water? Twenty-seven years ago when I first came to Taiyuan, the Fen River was a huge, roiling beast. Remember when the government built the bridge to unite the two banks no matter what the river’s conditions? Could you have imagined back then that today the Fen would be but a stream? That the riverbed would now be a place to picnic and fly kites? Or that the Three Everlasting Springs so famous in this area would be but one spring in danger of everlasting no more? I saw that and I didn’t think, because all of China, despite our yearly floods, is losing water. Our rivers, our lakes, our springs, our wells are all going dry.”

She spun around to find Tang Dan, who’d raised himself to his knees. Red soil smudged his clothes. Dust had also settled on his face, mixing with his sweat and running in red rivulets down his face.

“Since land reform many of you have abandoned farming,” she continued. “You have gone into brick making or worked at a local factory. I say this not as a reprimand. It is merely fact. And when you or your children or your neighbors have left your farms, you’ve subleased your land or even given it back to the government to redistribute. Much of that land has gone to Tang Dan, and who among us today can say that he has not done a good job with it?”

She gazed at the neighbors, but none could contradict her.

“When Ling Suchee’s daughter died, she asked me to come here and find out what happened. I knew that to find the killer I would have to know the victim. I came to know Miaoshan. I came to understand her value to her murderer. She had access to the one thing he was missing.”

“Water,” the people answered as one. Their eyes had turned to Tang Dan again. Their hate was palpable.

“Water,” Hulan echoed. “You live in Da Shui, Big Water, and yet you were blind to its growing scarcity. But this man wasn’t, and he began to look for land that had access to water.” Here Hulan lowered her voice. “You all know whose wells could be counted on.”

For the first time Hulan looked for and found her friend. “Ling Suchee has such a well. She is a widow and could never work her land as well as a family with a wife, husband, and son, so her farm has never prospered. But under that soil lies something so valuable that Tang Dan was willing to lie and cheat and eventually kill for it.”

Hulan expected to see her friend overcome by grief, but Suchee was a mother who still needed to protect her daughter. She stared hard at Hulan, pleading with her eyes. Hulan answered her friend with a barely discernible nod. The neighbors didn’t need to know the squalid details that would make Suchee and her daughter look like fools for years to come.

“I will say only this,” Hulan went on. “When Tang Dan knew he couldn’t get the water from your neighbor Ling Suchee, he killed her daughter.” She addressed Tang Dan directly. “You hoped that as an end-of-the-liner Suchee would give up her farm and move into the village. When this didn’t work, you unleashed your next plan, for the Tsais’ well was also bountiful.”

Hulan bent her head, and her shoulders trembled. David took a step forward, but Lo held him back. “I blame myself for what happened next. I didn’t see what was right before me.” She hesitated, then said, “I have gotten to know Tang Dan’s daughter. You all know her. You all know that she was in love with this dead boy, even though he had been betrothed to Miaoshan. Once she was dead, however, the path looked clear for Tsai Bing and Tang Siang. They were young and Siang has what we could all agree is a strong personality, but I think they would have been happy together.”

The villagers looked from Tang Dan to Tsai Bing’s lifeless form to his pitiable parents. Yes, all this had been right before their eyes, and yet they hadn’t really seen until now.

“What horrifies me as I stand here today,” Hulan said regretfully, “is that Tang Dan could have gotten his water just by letting his daughter marry Tsai Bing. But here is where his past once again exposed its ugly face. Tang Dan couldn’t and wouldn’t allow his daughter to marry a peasant when he had come from the landlord class and had become a millionaire in his own right. He had other plans for Siang, and they didn’t involve Tsai Bing.”

Hulan raised her voice. “The rest is as Captain Woo told you. Tang Dan enticed the boy to his farm, set his machinery to running, locked the boy inside, and let him die. To cover his tracks, he threw him in the well. Why?” She gestured to the Tsais. “Could this couple now drink from the well where their son died? Never! That, combined with being end-of-the-liners, would leave them no choice but to abandon this land. You all have seen Tang Dan with his sympathetic face. He would have come here. He would have made promises. And soon this land and its well would have gone to him.”

Hulan stared at Tang Dan. His face showed no remorse, but he did look frightened, knowing he might be dead in a few minutes. Hulan, however, thought this outcome too good for him. He deserved to suffer longer as a small repayment for all the misery he’d caused.

“Captain Woo,” she said, once again adopting her most official tone, “please take the prisoner to your jail.”

Tang Dan began to shake as the reality of her words hit him.

“We will let the courts decide his punishment,” she continued. “In the meantime, we all trust you to make sure he’s treated like the low dog he is.”

With a curt signal from Woo the other officers roughly hauled Tang Dan to his feet. On the way to the police car he wordlessly accepted a few blows to his head and a couple of kidney punches. Tang Dan would be dead in a week, but it would be a painful week.

Once the police cars had driven away, David rushed forward to Hulan, who hadn’t moved from her spot in the middle of the courtyard. When he reached her, she sank into his arms. Holding her, he felt her heart fluttering against his chest. Then she pulled away from him, staggered to the side of the Tsais’ house, bent over, and retched.

Not for the first time today David worried about her. She shouldn’t be out in this ghastly heat. She shouldn’t have the stress of flying back and forth to Beijing, of tracking down criminals, of crowd control. But as he stood there with his hand on the small of her back, he couldn’t help but be impressed with what she’d just accomplished. He’d known her for a long time now. First as a young and shy associate at Phillips, MacKenzie, then as his quiet and pensive lover, now as a woman who even still kept her secrets. But God, he’d never seen her like this!

How beautiful she looked standing there under the bleaching rays of the sun as she spoke to the crowd! How powerful she looked with her right arm raised like a revolutionary heroine exhorting the peasants to revolt! Always he’d seen her authority as a professional attribute, something cultivated over many years in a career that demanded and constantly received respect. But her family had also been imperial performers. The actress, the avenger—both of these characteristics were in her blood. He realized that this was how she must have looked all those years ago when she was at the Red Soil Farm, proclaiming, inciting, denouncing, that she had always carried this authority in her, that sometimes it had worked to her advantage but more often to her detriment and that of others. This woman he loved was always willing to pay the physical and emotional price of her nature.

She slowly straightened and rested her head in the crook of her arm against the wall. He leaned in close and whispered, “Are you okay? Is there something I can get you?”

She shook her head. A moment later she asked, her voice weak, “Henry?”

David looked around. Investigator Lo wasn’t taking any chances. He held Henry by the back of the neck.

“Lo’s got him,” David said.

Hulan didn’t respond, just kept her head buried. David waited at her side and watched as the neighbors gradually dispersed. The Tsais resumed their positions next to their son. Suchee knelt beside them, speaking soothingly. Just as the thought that they’d have to get the boy out of the sun crossed David’s mind, the threesome stood. Tsai Bing’s father picked up his son’s shoulders, while the two women each took a leg. As they started for the house, David turned away, uncomfortable at the sight. A year ago he had not seen a dead body. But since January he’d seen nine. What struck him—beyond the horrible and cruel images of what had been done to once living, breathing creatures—was the matter-of-fact way these peasants handled their dead. In America he’d seen policemen and FBI agents and coroners and forensics experts and paramedics and minimum-wage drivers from funeral homes. The physicality of death was something that was kept far away from the surviving loved ones. But here in the Chinese countryside the body was given over to the family to be washed, clothed, and cremated or buried. And David thought if this were Hulan or his own child, he might not have the strength to take that lifeless form into his arms and touch it so intimately, even as a last act of love.

He felt Hulan move. She turned and faced him. Her cheeks were drained of color.

“Let’s go back to Beijing,” she said.

She pushed away from the wall and, while David waited, went inside the Tsais’ house to say good-bye to Suchee. She reemerged quickly, headed across the dirt expanse, and stepped into the cornfield. David, Lo, and Henry followed swiftly. When they reached Suchee’s farm, Hulan took one last look around, then ducked into the front seat of the car Lo had commandeered. Once David and Henry settled in the back, Lo started the engine and they pulled out of the little compound.

Each person seemed lost in his or her thoughts as they bumped across the rutted dirt road leading back to the main highway. Hulan slumped in the front seat, her head resting against the window. She felt hot, sick, exhausted. Next to her, Lo drove with his usual quiet determination, yet his thoughts were very much on the report he would give to his superiors back in Beijing. How would he explain Hulan’s actions at the Tsai farm? In the backseat, Henry stared morosely out the window. David contemplated Henry, thinking.

When they reached the crossroads, Lo asked Hulan where she wanted to go. “Back to Beijing,” she muttered in Mandarin. When his eyes continued to question her, she expanded. “On the expressway. We can’t take Knight’s jet. The man is a criminal of the worst sort. Once we get in the air, we are with his people. We can’t allow that to happen. Just drive, Investigator. We’ll be back home soon enough.” Lo turned right and began to speed along.