Dragon Bones

by Lisa See

  “You know why I’m here?”

  An amused cackle filled the little room. “Is there anyone in Bashan who does not know why you’re here? Drink your tea. I’ll tell you what you want to know. You want to ask me if I can be trusted to watch the gate. You wouldn’t use those words! You’d be more polite.”

  “Is that so?”

  The old woman nodded somberly. “Everyone says you respect workers, not like Captain Hom. He is as corrupt and corrupting as phlegm-filled spit in a bottle of baby milk.”

  “I guess you know everything, Auntie.”

  “I know who comes in and out of here!”

  “Does anyone else watch this entrance?”

  “Not necessary!” When Hulan didn’t say anything, the caretaker asked, “You think maybe I fall asleep on the job? Not possible!” She didn’t appear insulted, just adamant.

  “What about the gate to the outside?”

  “Let me show you.” The woman hobbled a few steps to the door, stopped, and looked back at Hulan. “Come!” Hulan joined her. “Go ahead. You open it.”

  Hulan tried the handle. The sound was awful, but the door didn’t open.

  “You hear that noise? Terrible! My grandson says he will oil it for me. I tell him he’s a stupid turtle.” She said this with pride and obvious affection. “You can’t open the door without my key, which I keep in my pocket.”

  “And you watch this gate all day and all night,” Hulan verified.

  “We have a changeover between five-fifty and six every morning and every evening. Once that time is past, I lock the gate. If we have a delivery, they knock and I let them in.”

  “Are there any other circumstances that someone could enter or leave through here?”

  The caretaker thought before answering. “Maybe a worker gets sick. Maybe a worker’s child gets sick. But otherwise no. You want to work here, you follow the rules. If you are late, I don’t let you in. You lose a day’s pay. If you try to enter through the lobby, you’re fired on the spot.”

  “Tough rules.”

  “Tough life. Not my fault.”

  “Could you open the door for me?”

  “For you, yes.” She pulled out her key and put it in the lock. The hinges creaked and groaned even worse than the handle.

  Hulan stepped through and looked both ways down the alley. She opened her umbrella and turned back to the woman. “I’ll walk back around to the front.”

  “Just don’t come back here. I won’t let you in!” The old woman cackled again, enjoying herself immensely, then she closed and locked the door.

  No one could get past that old woman unless she let them.

  Hulan turned right, walked to the intersection of another alley, and saw dead ends in both directions. Still, she went right and followed the wall of the compound to the east gate. She examined the rusted keyhole and determined that no one had tried to tamper with this side either. As she retraced her steps, she looked up and saw glass shards embedded on top of the compound’s protective wall. She also studied the places where the interior buildings intersected with the wall. The steep roofs were composed of porcelain tiles glazed to a shiny green finish. Only an expert martial arts practitioner would have been able to scale the wall and the roofs. Three men carrying a dead body and a bucket of blood would have had an impossible time of it.

  Hulan went back to the north gate, continued on to the corner, and turned left to go back around to the front of the hotel. While not a large thoroughfare, this was a busy enough street that Hulan doubted even under cover of darkness three men with their gruesome burdens could have passed unnoticed. And even if they had somehow escaped the eye of a wakeful villager, how could they have come through the alley without leaving behind some forensic evidence? Hulan was back to the question that had prompted her to go on this quest: How did a trio of what she presumed to be men get Lily back into her room without being seen either inside or outside the compound and leaving only the most minimal traces behind?

  DR. MA WAS NEXT ON HULAN’S TO-DO LIST, BUT WHEN SHE ASKED the day clerk to arrange transportation to Site 518, he answered that he’d be honored to find a car and driver, but she wouldn’t find the archaeologist because he’d gone to Hong Kong. Again Hulan cursed herself for being sloppy—first Lily’s papers, now Ma. Hulan had her suspicions about him, but it hadn’t remotely occurred to her that he’d go to Hong Kong.

  She asked for and received directions to the Public Security Bureau. Hulan went back outside and opened her umbrella. It was Saturday afternoon and pouring rain, but people were out and about. On one corner a woman sold fresh bean curd. Nearby a man was having a tooth pulled. On the square above the dock a free market bustled. From its second-floor location, the Public Security Bureau kept an eye on all these activities.

  The bureau was small—a single room with a counter and four desks flanked by two offices set off by glass partitions. The usual posters promoting the one-child policy had been pinned to a bulletin board, while a population resettlement schedule for Bashan covered another wall and was accompanied by encouraging slogans: DEVELOP LAND TO RESETTLE RELOCATEES and GAINING BENEFITS FROM INUNDATION.

  Captain Hom sat behind a desk in one of the private offices. Hulan lifted a section of the counter and made her way to his office. Opening the door, she was engulfed by the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

  “You’ve returned from the dam, I see,” he said.

  “Everyone seems to know everyone’s comings and goings in Bashan.”

  “For VIPers.”

  She put a hand on the back of a chair. “May I?”

  His face visibly fell. She sat down, and he leaned back in his chair with a deep, rattling sigh.

  “I read your report on Brian McCarthy’s death,” she began. “It was very thorough, but I have a couple of questions if you don’t mind.”

  When he said, “Whatever I can do to help,” she knew he was putting a smiling face on a bad situation.

  “I’d like you to go back to the day Dr. Ma contacted you about Brian. What happened exactly?”

  “He came in like you did just now. He said that one of his foreign guests had gone missing.” Hom used the end of his cigarette to light another one, then stubbed out his first in an ashtray overflowing with butts. “I wasn’t worried. We’d gotten numerous reports from peasants back in the hills about McCarthy. Was it all right for him to be there? Would they get in trouble if he slept on their land? All natural concerns because not many foreigners get very far from the river. Tourist boats have never stopped here, so we simply didn’t have foreigners until the Cultural Relics Bureau designated Site 518 as one of the most important digs along the river.”

  “Is it really one of the most important?”

  Hom grunted. “Why do you think people have come here from all over the world and not gone to one of the other digs in the gorges? I go there and I see little pieces of nothing being pulled from the ground. I see my world about to be destroyed, but they see only that patch of barren land and the answers to the Four Mysteries that they think are hidden there.”

  “You speak frankly.”

  “Inspector, I have tried to speak frankly with you before. Perhaps you have not heard me.”

  No, she hadn’t, and even though he seemed to be speaking honestly now, she didn’t trust him. After all, allegations of corruption didn’t spring from nowhere. She would listen to him, but she would remain aware that he was the most powerful man in a remote town operating completely unchecked until now.

  “Dr. Ma and I drove out as far as we could, then walked down to the river,” Hom said, his cigarette bobbing in his lips as he mouthed the words. “Once I saw the boy’s things, I knew something bad had happened. No one—not even a foreigner—would leave a laptop computer sitting on a rock with his lunch. So we hiked back up to the car and I radioed for additional help. Some of my men went up into the hills, but the logical conclusion was that the boy had gone into the river. I came back here to notify the river authorities t
o alert ship captains. At about that time, Stuart Miller came in and offered the use of his hydrofoil in the search.”

  “You didn’t note this in your report.”

  “Dr. Ma said I shouldn’t. I had to obey, because he outranks me.”

  “Ministry of State Security,” Hulan said, finally giving voice to what she’d suspected about Ma from the first day she’d met him.

  Hom nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  Hom’s lips turned down at the corners, and he lifted his shoulders slightly. He didn’t know and knew better than to ask.

  He reached into his pocket for his keys, unlocked a drawer, pulled out a folder, and pushed it across the table. “This is the accurate record of what happened that day.”

  Hulan opened the folder and began to read. The events had unraveled as Hom had just told her. “I assume Angela McCarthy came to you to pick up her brother’s things,” she said.

  Hom blew smoke through his nose. “I brought his belongings back from the river and kept them here until she retrieved them.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  The girl was upset, but then what did the inspector expect? She had lost her last remaining relative.

  “At the time no one suspected any criminal activity,” Hom explained, “but even if I had I still would have turned over his belongings. We’d found a backpack with his lunch, a bottle of water, some pencils, a notebook, and a couple of paperback books—nothing of real value beyond the computer.” Hom frowned. “Did I make a mistake, Inspector?”

  She chose not to respond. Instead she asked, “Did you inquire how Miss McCarthy arrived here so quickly from the U.S.?”

  “She’s a foreigner. She must be rich. People like that can do whatever they want.”

  It was a simple explanation for someone who had probably never been on a plane.

  Hom looked at her as though he hoped she’d be leaving now. When she didn’t move, another series of emotions played out on his face—recognition, a flash of anger, then defeat—and she thought how odd it was for someone in their shared profession to be so transparent. Unless, of course, he was doing it on purpose.

  “I suppose you will you be putting a black mark in my dangan.” He sighed in resignation.

  As he spoke, Hulan thought of the old saying that the fish was the last to know he lived in the water, meaning that you were a creature of the pond until someone pulled you out. Hom knew she could expose his inadequacies by pulling him out of his little pond.

  “I’m not like that,” she said at last.

  “You aren’t?” He sounded skeptical. “You’ve been looking into other business….”

  “It’s true I’d still like to see the files on the other cases that I’ve asked you for.”

  “I’ll tell you anything you’d like to know.”

  “I’d prefer to read the files,” she insisted.

  Hom took another drag on his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. After a long pause he said, “I never created files for those cases.”

  His confession left her speechless.

  “I’ll tell you what I know about them so that they’ll no longer be questions in your mind,” he continued evenly. “The Wu boy drowned. We may live on the river, but that doesn’t prevent accidents from happening. Still, I have my suspicions about what Wu Huadong was up to. A boy like that does not usually travel up and down the river, but if I pursue it, what will I accomplish? The boy is dead, and whatever his misdeeds might have been died with him. I can tell you, however, that Stuart Miller did not volunteer his hydrofoil on that occasion.”

  He glanced at her to see if she had any questions. When she didn’t, he forged ahead. “I don’t know what I can tell you about Yun Re, except that he fell from a ladder and broke his neck. I could blame the Cultural Relics Bureau for having a bad ladder, but again, what would it accomplish?” He hesitated for just a fraction of a second, then said matter-of-factly, “You already know my brother-in-law built the bridge that collapsed.”

  She nodded.

  “Have you ever had to protect a family member or a friend?” he asked.

  In another place this question might have seemed strange, but this was China and who, including herself, had not either protected or turned in a family member sometime in the last fifty years?

  “It doesn’t matter what I say or do,” Hom went on. “People in Bashan believe what they want. If it makes them feel better to believe I’m corrupt, so be it. It may be better than the alternative—”

  “Going after your brother-in-law—”

  “He would deserve his punishment, although I’d feel sorry for my sister and my niece. No, I was thinking of the others—the victims in all of the cases that you’ve asked about. I felt if I didn’t make reports, then the families would never wonder if something wrong had happened. If they had no one to blame, then they wouldn’t seek retribution. I don’t want to see anyone get in trouble. I want to protect the families in case of unrest and a crackdown.” After a pause, he added, “But then that goes for everyone in Bashan.”

  All this confirmed her worst fears about the captain, but before she could speak, he asked, “Do you know what my main job is?”

  “It’s the same as for any captain in the countryside,” she answered staunchly. “Protect the populace, weed out political troublemakers, arrest those who are corrupt or commit criminal acts.”

  “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.