by Andy Oakes
The student looked pleased, allowing himself the seed of a smile.
“And we couldn’t do that in the People’s Republic, little brother, when we launch satellites into fucking outer space?”
The seed blossomed; Pan smiling fully at the Big Man, aware that every double act needed a stooge.
“We could, but we wouldn’t bother. We would let the tooth rot or pull it out. In the People’s Republic we care only for satellites. Take a look in the mirror at your own teeth sometime, big brother.”
Yaobang turned away, running a thumb around his mouth, muttering …
“Nothing wrong with my fucking teeth.”
Piao slapping him on the back.
“Nothing that an American dentist couldn’t put right.”
The student was already continuing, attention welded to the next page, the last page of his report. He seemed to be the sort who would leave the best for last. Eating the rice first, next the dumplings … saving the slices of aromatic duck on the side of the plate.
All had died from trauma and blood loss due to the massive wounds, lacerations and mutilations to their stomachs and chests. Also the lacerations to their lower backs, only visible when the bodies had been further sluiced down. The mud pouring thickly from the wounds, the rips, in dark winking globs and flows. But there were abnormalities, seemingly a pattern to the apparent chaos of lacerations. Procedures to the mutilations. Marks that he could not explain. Trails of hidden techniques that he felt lost in. He was just a student … so much of this beyond him. Text books could only provide so much help. Detailed pictures, sketches, samples, swabs, he had sent to a trustworthy professor he had studied under at the Institute, who was now a government advisor in Beijing. The Senior Investigator felt the air whistle between his teeth.
“That is very risky. I would rather have your analysis or at least your educated guess.”
Pan looked up, for the first time the Senior Investigator really seeing the pain displayed in his eyes.
“No, no. This is beyond me. No analysis, no educated guesses …”
He stopped to drink, pulling off his spectacles. The tears bleeding to the corners of his eyes; wiping them away with his cuff. Just like a boy, just like a little boy.
“… because Senior Investigator, nothing at the Institute trained me for this. Nothing could ever have trained me for this …”
Replacing his glasses. Regaining his self-control. Folding his report neatly and handing it to Piao.
“… you see, none of the eight bodies that you pulled from the river had any kidneys. None of them had any hearts. Someone had taken them.”
Chapter 11
The city morgue and forensic laboratories were housed in a rambling 1920s building a step back from Zaoyanglu. Beside it, the Wusong staggered listlessly; hiding, seeking, beneath the rib cages of bridges. Its surface colour stolen from its surroundings … black, grey, black. Until it decanted its arterial waters into the greater body of the Huangpu in a blossoming cloud of avocado that was on the turn.
The interior of the city morgue had been ripped out and replaced; a bloody autopsy of an excavation that had left a structure that was scarred with an architectural un-adventure that would be meaningless, worthless, within twenty years. A suspended ceiling, plastic veneers, nylon carpets, the hum of an air-conditioning breeze that smelt only of the faintest hint of burnt electricity. Was this design more suited to the handling of death? Perhaps it was.
*
Piao logged in at the new reception area. Within a minute a large Kazakh appeared, a huge bloodhound of a man … eyelids hanging with the certainty of heavy steel shutters. Following him as they spoke.
“I was expecting to see Wu.”
The man coughed politely, a Pekinese snuffled sneeze of a cough from such a huge frame.
“Doctor Wu is on sabbatical at present.”
The Senior Investigator felt the smile slide across his features, at first trying to anchor it in place, and then deciding to allow it free reign.
“Sabbatical. New words come into our vocabulary every day. And are sabbaticals normally as sudden as being run over by a truck?”
Again the cough, the avoidance.
“I am Doctor Shangyin. I have been seconded from Beijing to cover for Doctor Wu.”
Seconded. Another new word. A high cadre word. A word that dripped from the lips of the military, the security forces. Not a word used by doctors. Never doctors. Piao felt the smile start to stall.
“Seconded. Well, let me wish you a very happy secondment with us here in Shanghai. And I hope that it will be a very long time before you too are volunteered for a sabbatical Doctor Shangyin.”
The Kazakh blinked. The steel shutters falling and rising slowly across eyes etched yellow by jaundice. Moving through a doorway, and then another. Arriving in a large space, everything within it moulded from stainless steel, soft cornered, flowing … as if the ritualistic equipment of the autopsy were organic. It was as if a tidal wave of mercury had borne down upon the room; the enamelled autopsy tables with their chipped guttering that had run with laboured rivulets of scarlet, discoloured tiled white walls and open gutters that had taken the fall from the tables and which had criss-crossed their way across the stone floor in deep, brown lacerations … all swept away. Even a different smell haunted the space. Antiseptic, iodine, surgical handwash … replacing the all pervading reek of shit that Piao had always associated with the morgue. The stink that lingered in your nostrils long after you had left the building. Lingering for hours. Sometimes days.
The doctor walked to the door set in a wall of frosted glass bricks, a walk of precision … a measured march that could only have been fashioned on the parade square. As he opened the door the Senior Investigator noticed the Kazakh’s fingers. The inside of the right forefinger, a ring of hard skin. A trigger callous. The results of friction between the flesh of the trigger finger and the metal, that repetitive use a firearm produced. Its braille was not lost on the Senior Investigator.
The door opened, revealing a stainless steel wall of deep drawers containing the bodies of those who life no longer possessed. Piao feeling a shiver deep inside of him, start to move through him to his limbs. Shangyin checked the number on the large drawer before pulling it out from the steel wall. A faint chill of air. The smell of damp earth.
“D-1150,” he said.
“He has a name.”
“We don’t deal in names. Names are for beyond the front door.”
The Kazakh moved away from the drawer, flamboyantly flipping aside the thin cotton shroud, his fingers brushing against a cold cheek … but not even noticing the contact. He retreated to the centre of the room, knuckles trailing the contours of an autopsy table.
“You can make a positive identification, Senior Investigator?”
The woman who lay in the drawer was perhaps sixty years old; her face, pulp, but her body screamed the passing of each year. A railway junction of silver tracked stretch marks, converging and then dispersing to separate destinations. Her breasts milkless, shapeless. Seemingly hollow pancakes that fell between her upper arms and torso.
Piao turned the cardboard tag that was tied to her big toe. L-901.
“You have screwed up doctor. Your own sabbatical draws closer.”
Shangyin’s snatched the tag from Piao’s fingers. No words, just controlled rage.
“A bad day at the office?”
The Kazakh glared at Piao, his forehead flat, shiny. Reaching past the Senior Investigator for the steel drawer behind him. Piao ducked. A sigh of chilled air. The cotton barrier snatched aside. The doctor fumbling for the toe tag.
D-872. Male. Bloated, stinking. A river floater … flesh on the turn like the waters. Age, perhaps forty, forty-five.
The Kazakh reaching for another drawer … and another. His breath coming faster.
L-907. Female, a child, eight years old? Face, torso, limbs … black … swollen with a storm of bruises.
L-740. Femal
e, mid-twenties. Road accident. Red nail varnish and red lacerations to face, torso.
Another drawer wrenched open, almost off its hinges.
D-1101. Male. Fifty year old. Knife wounds to neck, chest, stomach. Black slugs of un-bleeding punctures.
The sixth drawer yanked open, sliding on runners to its stops. Shangyin checking the tag and pulling it adrift for correction; facing Piao, breathing controlled now. Relaxing. The ghost of a smile.
“Now can you make a positive identification, Senior Investigator?”
Piao fought against the desire to close his eyes once more.
How many bodies of the dead can you look at before they mark you, scar your soul?
D-1150. Male. Twenty-two years old. Student. Multiple gunshot wounds. Two to the head. One removing the left side of the jaw and half of the bottom lip. The second shot, dead centre of the forehead … obscenely neat. The entry, a blood blister … the exit, a ragged crater that had robbed the back of the skull of its substance. A hole decanted with blackness and a shock of bone … so white. Two more shots had also found their target, one clipping the right shoulder, just a snip. The last shot taking out the throat in one great red angry bite.
“A positive identification Senior Investigator, we need one. Is this D-1150?”
Piao’s eyes not leaving the corpse’s forehead. The symmetry, the size, the neatness of the hole passing through it, intriguing him.
“What size round was used?”
“I do not know … it is too soon. One was dug our here. Several at the scene. They only went up to the lab this morning.”
“They were 7.65mm, weren’t they? Type 64. Rimless, unique …”
“I said that it is too soon Investigator …”
“… too soon for an experienced eye like yours, doctor?”
Piao grabbed Shangyin’s hand, pinning it to the steel wall, spreading out the fingers and running his thumb across the trigger callus; hard, dead skin, tanned by nicotine and sitting like a discarded segment of juiceless orange.
“… too soon for a good Party member like you who spends so much of his spare time on the firing range?”
The Kazakh pulled his hand away, the sweat from his palm leaving an imprint against the stainless steel skin of the wall.
“7.65mm. They were 7.65mm, type 64 and you fucking know it. Standard issue for security …”
Piao pushed the drawer, it coasted on runners closing flush into the metal wall with a gasp of air. He walked to the door.
“… I will be seeing you again, Comrade Doctor, you can depend upon it. That is, if you are not also sent on a sabbatical.”
The Senior Investigator swung open the door. An urge, sudden and bottomless, to run and not stop … through the streets like when he was a child. Pavements sprinting. Leaving the pain behind.
“D-1150. His name is Yaobang, Comrade Doctor. Pan Yaobang.”
The door closed. He ran
Huangdong, the Number 1 Hospital – Suzhou Beilu.
“We left four hours after you, like you said, Boss. We couldn’t have been seen, not in that darkness. There was fuck all on the road, and we’d seen those bastards leave following you in their Sedan.”
A room stormed with white light. Deep shadows … as if cut with shears. A steel framed bed dominating the small space.
“It was a two hour drive. We were just outside of Tunxi. I know the road. I walked the ‘Back of the Carp’ to the peak of Tiandu once. You know they call it the ‘Capital of Heaven’? I was thinner then. I didn’t see God … and he couldn’t have fucking seen me.”
Shoes, a nurse’s stout legs planted in them … walking in the corridor outside, just beyond the room.
“I stopped the car halfway down the hill, between the hairpins. I needed a piss, I was nearly doing it in my pants. I walked partly down a bank, it was just starting to rain. I remember it on my face. I got my cock out and began to piss. Then lights came on moving past our car, down the hill. Another car, a Shanghai Sedan I think, its engine turned off. There was no sound, except for shots. Silenced shots, like sneezes, a fit of sneezes; and the piss running onto my shoes.”
A saline drip running into a vein. Colourless liquid moving down a colourless tube.
“I don’t know how many shots. The rain was heavy now, the shots were a part of it. Maybe twenty, twenty-five. I got to the road, my cock was still out, my trouser leg was warm with piss. My pistol was already in my hand, but there was nothing to shoot at, just the darkness and the silence. I could see Tunxi below us, all those people … but it was as if I was the only person left in the world.”
The canullas plastic head blooming from flesh. Tethered by plasters, its steel root sticking the vein, pricking like a face that you recognise … a name that you cannot.
“He was dead when I got to him, I knew it … but I still talked to him. I held him. I could feel his blood soaking through my clothes like the piss on my trousers. I felt angry that I couldn’t separate them … his blood, my piss. He was twenty-two years old for fuck sake and I was holding his head together like I was gluing a toy model. And all the time I was thinking what I was going to tell our mother.”
A man so big standing up, so small in the tuck of the bed. Seemingly so fragile in the handshake of starched cotton sheets and medical ritual. The tears cutting down his cheeks … looking as if they might wash him away.
Yaobang’s arm stretched out, straining on the drip. They touched hands … flesh upon flesh.
“Save the bastards for me when you find them, Boss. They’ve killed my brother. The fuckers. They’ve killed my little brother.”
*
It was cold as he left the hospital. A bitterness about it that chilled the soul. Piao reached to his jacket collar to fasten it. The button was missing. Who was there to sew a new one on?
Chapter 12
As if a crumbling tooth had been extracted, the dark gap filled the Kung an chu … taking up most of the second floor. The Computer Centre … now a ransacked hole. Amputated truncking, stripped conduit, sprouting cables bleeding copper. And against each roughly hewn wall, grey cabinet against grey cabinet … dented, chipped tinplate. Each spewing thick plaits of wiring. Gaping innards of vacuum tubes. On the floor surrounding the obsolete main frame computer … a fine dusting of powdered glass. A seedling scatter of delicate filament wire. And through the only window, a light so weak that it died without reflection across the floor in front of the Senior Investigator’s feet.
At the centre of the space that Piao no longer recognised, an island of dark grey workstations spotlit … new, protective plastic sheeting still covering their flanks. A thick umbilical cord of bundled wiring snaking from the innards of the VDUs and keyboards. One disappearing down a roughly chiselled hole in the concrete some metres away. The other, to a two metre high sentry of grey sculptured steel. A single flash of red holed by a chrome lock. A logo picked out in white lines … IBM. The workstations were empty except for one man, his face dominated by over large spectacles. As Piao drew closer, also came the smells. Smells of a thick wallet, filled with illicit yuan notes. Smells of the heat of a man’s body through pure cotton … and the breaths that concentration brings. Short, stale … hardly breathed at all.
“Welcome to my new kingdom Sun Piao.”
Rentang, known to all in the Kung an chu as, ‘The Wizard’, turned slowly in his swivel chair. The man revealed. Pallid. Mean featured. Not a wizard at all … just a man. A man who was good, very good with computers. Piao lit a Panda Brand and, through the smoke, looked around.
“The old main frame was stripped out a month ago. It was a first generation electronic computer … American, Sperry Rand. It weighed over thirty tons and all that it had was the computing capacity of a five hundred dollars personal computer of today …”
He laughed. A laugh as generous as a chicken carcass. And all the time, his fingers across the keyboard in a precise ballet. The VDUs fever across his spectacles.
“… it never worked
anyway. For the last fifteen years we’ve been mainly dependant on manual filing systems for the retrieval of information. A city with modern crime and a basement full of ancient filing cabinets …”
Nodding toward the sentinel of grey steel.
“… now we have a new American baby. An IBM S/390 Parallel Enterprise Server, Generation 3. It weighs just nine hundred and thirty-eight kilos and takes up two square metres. It can feed a console on every desk, in every Pai chu so in the city with the details of any criminal and dissident in the Republic within the time that it takes to say ‘filing cabinet’.”
He stroked the screen of the VDU, almost breathless. Rainbow pixels haemorrhaging blurred across his bitten nails.
“… a sweet, plump American baby. It can do anything that we want it to and won’t shit in its pants”
Piao dropped the cigarette butt to the cold concrete, his foot coming down upon it. Death throes of smoke winding around his shoe.
“Anything?”
Rentang swivelled his chair, removing his glasses and revealing eyes of black with nothing in them.
“You want something of me Investigator. Something that will pay back the favours that I owe to you.”
Piao pulled out the envelope from the inside of his jacket; the five full frame monochrome prints scattered onto the desk. Smashed, broken faces. Bone, blood. And seeming to pin each face … craters that held no eyes, bleeding, weeping mud.
“You’re supposed to be a wizard. Give them back their faces.”
*
The wizard with vomit on his breath returned from the toilet, fingers still dabbing at a stain on his tie. Tears pressed into the corners of his eyes. He stabbed a finger at the prints.
“Give me some warning next time, yes, Investigator? Unlike you, we’re not all used to seeing the fruits that the Homicide Squad feeds off.”
