Dragon Bones

by Lisa See

  The rotors made a sickly racket as the pilot tried his best to maintain altitude. When the helicopter took a particularly nasty dip in an air current, Pathologist Fong, who yesterday had minced no words in his description of his trip in this same antiquated bird, looked over at Hulan with an expression that said, I told you so. Fong turned his attention back to the river below. The pilot had only two pairs of earphones, so he was giving the pathologist his promised tour. This left David and Hulan to experience the deafening sounds of the rotors and motor, which was probably a good thing. At least they had an excuse not to speak to each other.

  She’d heard him leave their room last night. She’d heard him come back just before dawn. They’d grabbed a quick bite in the dining room with Fong, and at seven the three of them had met the helicopter in a little clearing just west of Bashan. David hadn’t said ten words to her in that time.

  Ahead of them lay the dam site. What had once been the sleepy fishing village of Sandouping was now a vast blight on the landscape. Huge chunks of land had been bitten out of the earth so that part of the site looked like a strip mine. The other part was the massive wall of the dam itself. The river looked wide here, at least two kilometers across. A cofferdam funneled the waters so that the work could continue, but today the river was so high and furious from the accumulation of rain from Tibet to here that no ship could safely pass. So large freighters, open-sided ferries, and gaily painted cruise ships had come to a standstill, while small fishing boats bobbed about them in the turbulent yellow waters.

  The pilot landed in an open space in the far corner of a parking lot jammed with buses. Hulan glanced at Fong. “Ten minutes, okay, Pathologist?”

  “I was promised a scenic tour of the Three Gorges,” he complained. “Now all I get is the visitors’ center?”

  “You’ve also had a helicopter tour. How many people in Beijing can claim that?”

  Everyone got out, and together they entered the visitors’ center—a large room with white lace curtains and numerous display cases. The pathologist, hoping to make the most of his ten minutes, hustled across the room to the introductory display.

  The place was chockablock with baggage and cranky Chinese, Japanese, and American tourists whose boats had been unable to pass through the narrow open channel. Now they would board buses and either go downstream to Wuhan, thus ending what had been advertised as a memorable experience but had concluded as a series of sights unseen, or go to a little port farther west and head upstream against the increasingly difficult current.

  Hulan gave her name to a woman in a bright kelly green uniform who sat behind the front desk. The woman called to the site and said someone would be down for the inspector in a few minutes. Hulan then found David, Fong, and the pilot staring into one of the exhibit cases. She wanted a minute alone with David, but she wouldn’t ask for it and give the pathologist more to gossip about in the MPS hallways other than that she and David hadn’t spoken during breakfast. Hulan stared at David, trying to get his attention, but he deliberately avoided her eyes.

  “I guess we should get going then,” he said.

  Hulan walked them to the exit. When the pilot and Fong went on ahead, she grabbed hold of David’s arm. “I think this is right,” she said, when what she meant was she wished she could relive last night, the past year, the day Chaowen first fell ill. She would do them all differently.

  The hurt on his face lacerated her.

  “You’ll be back tomorrow,” she said, when what she meant was that he hadn’t let her finish her confession last night. She had been ready to acknowledge fully her failure as a mother, not his as a husband and father.

  He stared out to the parking lot. Fong was standing next to the helicopter, apparently waiting for David to take the backseat.

  “Take my cell phone,” she said quietly, when what she meant was that she understood that he could never forgive her. She could never forgive herself either. “It doesn’t work in the gorges, but you might be able to reach me in the hotel.”

  And with that he pushed through the swinging doors.

  “Tell the pilot to come right back after he drops you off,” she called out, when what she wanted to say was that she loved him.

  The chopper revved noisily to life, wobbled uncertainly into the air, hovered for a moment, then swung away downriver and out of view.

  During these last few days Hulan had unraveled in many ways. Coming out here, she’d been skeptical of Vice Minister Zai’s secret romantic plan, but then she’d found herself being drawn in and drawn out by David. It was wonderful to be held again by him, to talk to him, to make love to him, but she saw now that those fleeting moments had weakened her defenses. Last night in the cave, she’d been pushed even further, which aroused a terrifying set of memories going back many years. During the Cultural Revolution she’d experienced what zealotry could do to people. She’d also seen the damage and death that her actions and inactions had caused. She’d accepted responsibility for her mindless obedience and the tragedies that had come as a result. She lived with it every day in the person of her mother. She felt guilty every time she chatted with Neighborhood Committee Director Zhang or saw Vice Minister Zai. She let her day-to-day life become a penance, and she’d become an inspector at the Ministry of Public Security so she could right her past wrongs. But how many times had she failed in that? Her father’s death, more than 150 women at the Knight factory, Lily yesterday….

  None of those came close to the way she had failed her daughter. Last night when she’d tried to confess—after all these months of holding her guilt inside—she heard the words come out of her mouth and magically transform into syllables with very different meanings as they’d reached David’s ears. She hadn’t meant to accuse David; she’d hoped to tell him that she’d made terrible mistakes—hanging on to China and refusing to give up the past—which led ultimately to Chaowen’s death. Even though she had wanted finally to accept responsibility for her failings, she was unprepared for his complete condemnation.

  The pain of that and the knowledge that her punishment could never end forced her to focus her mind just as she had these past months. She collapsed her grief, her loss, her suffering, her guilt, until it was a tiny, manageable speck. Then she tucked it into her heart and opened her brain, letting the All-Patriotic Society’s chants, sermons, exercises, and donations fill it. This coping mechanism didn’t inhibit her ability to intellectualize; she understood that one disturbed Chinese woman didn’t represent everyone in the All-Patriotic Society, just as she knew that a few pedophiles didn’t represent all Catholic priests or that Osama bin Laden didn’t represent all Muslims. She could look at the group from David’s perspective and see that it might even be beneficial to some people.

  Hulan would question Stuart Miller about what she’d heard in the cave last night and warn him that the group was making threatening noises about him. Then she would do something that was nearly unbearable for her to contemplate. She would give up the group as her buttress against her internal torment, dedicate herself to solving this case, and go home. Chaowen would not be waiting for her, and David might eventually leave, but Hulan would finally try to accept the consequences of her life. She felt a wave of doubt, then forcibly shook it from her mind.

  Where was Stuart’s car? She looked up toward the dam site and saw no vehicles on the highway. She turned away and walked to a model of the dam, where she began reading:

  Begun in 1994, the dam is the most ambitious engineering project in the history of the world. The Three Gorges Dam will be the only man-made edifice other than the Great Wall of China to be seen from space.

  That the Great Wall could be seen from space was an exaggeration, but there’d be no getting around national pride here.

  The Three Gorges Dam will be the largest hydroelectric plant in the world, providing one-tenth of the country’s electricity needs. Twenty-six generator sets of turbines will have an installed capability of 18,200 megawatts of electricity….
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br />   She moved to another display, which listed the dam’s vital statistics in Western measurements for the benefit of tourists: 20,000 workers, 953 million cubic feet of concrete, 354,000 tons of rebar, 281,000 tons of other metal. The dam, when completed, would be five times wider than the Hoover Dam. The “Lake Within the Gorges” would be 370 miles long—placid, beautiful, and useful. Gigantic cargo ships and ocean liners—which were now barred above Wuhan because of the Three Gorges’ shallow depths and narrow passages—would be able to navigate up 1,500 miles from the Pacific Ocean, making Chongqing the largest inland seaport in the world.

  The receptionist found Hulan and told her that the car had arrived. She went outside, introduced herself to the driver, and got into a muddy Mercedes. They followed the river back west along a brand-new four-lane highway, stopping occasionally at booths manned by heavily armed guards so that the driver could show his stamped certification documents. Up on the hillsides, she saw military bunkers.

  They passed through one more security checkpoint, then drove onto the sprawling site itself. Huge billboards appealed to the workers’ patriotic duty in large red characters: ASPIRE TO BUILD THE THREE GORGES DAM FOR OUR CHINA and FIRST-CLASS MANAGEMENT, HIGH-QUALITY WORKMANSHIP, FIRST-RATE CONSTRUCTION. Colossal red cranes towered over giant yellow earthmovers. Bulldozers and dump trucks rumbled over the earth down to the water, where they dropped their loads of rocks and boulders into the channel. Workers dressed in blue coveralls and rattan hard hats did much of the labor by hand, chipping at the earth with hammers and shovels. Reddish dust billowed up everywhere and dissipated into the gray sky.

  The driver wended his way past trucks, bamboo scaffolding, and groups of men and women taking breaks. He stopped next to the massive pit and motioned for Hulan to get out. Once she was outside, the noise was deafening and the heat truly astounding. The driver handed her a hard hat and shouted directions in her ear.

  She threaded her way down into the pit until she found Stuart Miller, shirtsleeves rolled up, dripping with sweat and giving instructions to a group of workers. He acknowledged his visitor with a wave, gave a few more directives, patted one of the men on the back, then came up to Hulan with his hand outstretched and his face spread in a proud smile. Only after shaking hands did he glance down, see how dirty his were, grin naughtily, then brush them off on his very dusty pants.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” he shouted. He didn’t wait for an answer but took hold of her elbow and pulled her along the path. He exhibited an almost adolescent delight in showing Hulan this very male accomplishment. He expanded on many of the facts that she’d just read in the visitors’ center, pointing out that his company’s generators would be the first to become operational. Miller Enterprises was providing the first eight, another foreign company was providing the second eight, then the two companies would form a joint venture with a Chinese consortium to teach the Mainlanders how to build, install, and maintain the final ten.

  “We’re just a year away from electrical output,” he boasted. “People talk about how some of the turbines will produce up to eight hundred megawatts. Do you want to know what that means in real terms? By 2009, when the dam is fully operational, the electricity produced will displace the burning of about fifty million tons of raw coal each year. Put another way, each of these turbines will generate electricity equal to one nuclear power station. Personally, I’d take a single dam built to the best specifications in the world over the possibility of twenty-four Chernobyls.”

  When Hulan said something about wanting to talk privately, Stuart’s enthusiasm ebbed. He nodded, gestured back up the hill, and set a brisk pace. He waved to people as he went, and Hulan saw just how many non-Chinese were here.

  “You hear a lot of negatives about the dam, especially from the tree huggers back home,” Stuart yelled over the din. “But those fuckers are talking out of their asses. What’s the loss of a dolphin compared with the health issues that will be helped once the dam is completed? Pulmonary disease is the number-one cause of death in China. Did you know that, Inspector? China’s also the second highest producer of regional acid rain and transglobal greenhouse gases.”

  Neither of these facts surprised Hulan given the quantity of cigarettes that people smoked along with the coal that was used as the primary energy source for the entire country.

  “So you see,” Stuart said, pausing for a moment to stress his point, “the dam will significantly reduce China’s reliance on fossil fuels, help the country move to a low-carbon economy, and give the nation a way to live up to its global obligations to reduce harmful emissions.”

  Men were such strange creatures, Hulan thought. She’d arrived unannounced on Stuart’s doorstep, so to speak, and all he could talk about was the dam in pseudotechnical jargon. On the other hand, what was he supposed to talk about? Brian? Lily? The thefts? They were standing at the site of the “most ambitious engineering project in the history of the world.” Why wouldn’t Stuart brag? And why wouldn’t he do it in the technical language he knew best?

  She needed to look beyond her preconceived notions. She’d lumped Stuart Miller in the same category as David’s father—an international entrepreneur and astute businessman. Yet Stuart, who by all rights should have been behind an executive-size desk in the penthouse suite of a skyscraper somewhere, was literally down in the trenches here at Sandouping. At the same time, the man had money and wasn’t shy about using it for creature comforts. He had his hydrofoil. He had his art collection. Here on the site, he had a luxury far more plebeian: a fleet of nine trailers, each with the Miller Enterprises logo emblazoned on the side, lined up in three rows.

  Stuart took her into his office trailer. The interior was outfitted in the sumptuous materials of a private jet. Nothing could completely block the construction noise, but soundproofing had buffered it down to a dull throb, and an air conditioner had cooled the air by at least thirty degrees to a refreshing seventy-five.

  “I thought you collected guis and ruyis,” Hulan said, tipping her head in the direction of a Ming Dynasty teak étagère filled with exquisite museum-quality porcelains.

  “They’re my special interest, but I have others.” Stuart moved behind his desk and gazed at his collection. “Back home I have some amazing Shang Dynasty bronzes—mostly ritual vessels.”

  “Bronzes? Like Lily’s tripods?”

  “Not Lily’s. Da Yu’s. It’s said he made them with his own hands. If that’s so and if they were bronze, then China’s Bronze Age would have to be pushed back quite a ways.” Seeing her incomprehension, he explained, “The introduction of bronze is by definition the beginning of culture.”

  He turned back to his artifacts. “But why limit yourself to dates and medium when there’s so much beauty to be found? I collect widely myself—jade, ceramics, and some, though not a lot, of Ming Dynasty Buddhist figures. Those kinds of things are very popular right now. I recently let Lily put up one of my Buddhist sculptures for auction. I didn’t love the piece, so I sold it and used the hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to buy some other things that I’ll probably keep forever.”

  She noticed that his voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. It struck her that this must be what he sounded like when he made love. These bits of bronze and porcelain and stone had laid claim to his heart.

  “Do you go to a lot of auctions? Are you going to the one tonight at Cosgrove’s?”

  Stuart ignored the question, and she let it pass for now. It was important to let a man like Stuart believe he was leading the discussion. The more in control he felt, the more he would reveal.

  “You have to surround yourself with things you love,” he said. His hand gently caressed a blue-and-white plate with a stylized white melon pattern. “Of course I’ll have to sell these when the dam is finished and I leave China for good. But as long as I have this trailer as my home base, I get to enjoy them, maybe even more than if I had them back in L.A. or my place in Hong Kong. Outside everything is raw and rough and mechanical.
But in here, I just see the quiet simplicity of the pieces.”

  He clapped his hands, signaling he was done with this. His voice jumped a register as he told her to take a seat. He sank down into a chair covered in soft beige suede, hit the intercom button, and ordered tea. Then he turned his full attention to Hulan. “So why the visit?”

  “Have you or your daughter had any contact with the All-Patriotic Society?”

  “You asked me that yesterday.”

  “And I’m asking again.” She told him how vehemently the All-Patriotic Society opposed the dam and what it would mean to the Three Gorges’ cultural heritage, and that he seemed to embody everything the group despised. Stuart, however, didn’t seem surprised by either the animosity or the fact that he’d been named.

  “My position here at the dam has been publicized across the country. I’m a presence on the river, and my hydrofoil makes me even more so.”

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “I’m concerned for your safety.”

  “Look where I am, Inspector. This place has security up the ying-yang.”

  “Maybe this isn’t about the dam but is about something more personal. Yesterday I learned some new information about how Brian and Lily were killed. It seems likely the same person murdered them. You might be the connection.”

  “Do you think I’m next?” The idea amused him. “Like some murder-on-the-Yangzi Agatha Christie novel?”

  “You financed Brian’s work at Site 518,” Hulan went on, “and you did business with Lily. You could say that they were both at the dig because of you.”

  His chuckling abruptly stopped. “Wait a minute. Are you making me for the next victim or the killer?”

  She gazed at him steadily, curious where he’d go next.