Dragon's Eye

by Andy Oakes

  *

  In Shangzhi County and Yanshou County, there is snow for a long time. From November to April the season is in full flood. Ski tracks from each door. Smoke from every chimney.

  Three hours searching … but as soon as he saw it, he knew it. The house sitting broken in an endless expanse of untouched snowfield. A vast and dazzlingly bright duvet that had tucked itself up beyond the windows and across the roof, making it almost totally at one with its surroundings. No smoke from the chimney. No footprints or ski tracks to or from the door. One more fall of snow and the farmhouse would have been nothing more than another snow covered hillock, until the gentle thaw in late May. Too late. Too late.

  The pilot was anxious. The drift deep. What obstacles might lie beneath its benign face? The Zhi-8 was equipped for a SAR role. He insisted that they use the hydraulic rescue hoist. It had a two hundred and seventy five kilo lifting capacity. Enough, even for the Big Man. The rearward sliding door hauled open. A world of violent noise. Buffeting wind … your breath stolen away. A knife-edge coldness. The outside imploding in upon them. And then Piao was in the air, twisting, dangling, dancing. A smell of grease, burnt electricity, lingering in his nostrils only momentarily. He pulled off the harness, fingers already numb. The drift up to his chest. Powder snow in a storm around him, stinging his skin. Blinding him. A shadow floating down from above him. Yaobang. And then another. Barbara. Tripping, swimming, stumbling, through the drift to the front door. The storm, the envelope of crashing wind and noise, instantly easing as the Zhi-8 pulled up and away. Piao wiped his eyes. He was sweating, but snow was everywhere. Down his neck. Up his sleeves. In his boots. He could feel its melt against the sweaty heat of his skin. Yaobang close behind, hauling Barbara in his wake. The door was not locked, but jammed. Yaobang’s shoulder freeing it; falling inside with the drift. Snow scattered across a bare wooden floor … its timber as dark as black bean sauce. There was no electricity, the Senior Investigator switched on his torch, Yaobang following. Wavering beams crossing a simple room with doors leading off to three other rooms. A bedroom … two beds. Bathroom … washstand and a chipped and discoloured bath. Kitchen … stone sink, storage larder. In the corner of the main room an open trap door led to a full-size cellar, its floor, frozen earth. Its walls, stone … moss covered. The whole building smelling of wood smoke, pepper and honey … and of a winter in full stride. And in every one of the rooms, a deep silence, as if held in check by the tidal wave of snow that blanketed every window.

  A long bench table dominated the main room. Across it and littering the floor nearby, a tumble of spilt and broken equipment. Microscopes, high intensity adjustable lamps, fine haired brushes, dental picks, two small vacuum cleaners with a series of small nozzled tools. Piao moved closer, lighting an oil lamp and examining the debris in more detail. Scalpels, enamel bowls, lengths of wire, spatulas. In frozen drips from the table … broken jars of epoxy and polyester resin, soluble nylon, PVA. Small tins of paint still sitting on the bench, a pallet with dried brushes … dried pools of colour. Ochre, black, yellow. In the corner of the room, lengths of planed timber. Jars of preserving fluid, varnish. Large plastic bottles of chemicals. Buckets of plaster of Paris and a thick dough … a grey mixture of alvar, jute, kaolin. And in the deepest shadow that even the light from the oil lamp could not illuminate, four sturdily constructed boxes treated and lined with polythene sheeting and layer after layer of crumpled soft brown paper. Whatever would be housed in them would be comfortable … very, very safe. They pulled on surgical gloves, a smell of latex and talcum powder filling the room.

  “It’s got to be fucking drugs, Boss, their own processing lab …”

  Yaobang moved around the table prodding an index finger at whatever took his attention.

  “… they couldn’t have picked a better place. No chance of anyone stumbling over this fucking place, not out here. And look at the distribution possibilities. Shit, we’re practically in the USSR with Vladivostok just over the border. The coast of Japan’s not much fucking further …”

  He winked, shaking his head in admiration.

  “… fucking bright boys. They had it made.”

  ‘Fucking bright boys’. Piao pulled the Big Man’s gloved hand away from the bench, smoothing it firmly to his side. And in a whisper, saying,

  “If they were so fucking bright, why are they so fucking dead?”

  The Senior Investigator walked around the bench, his eyes doing the probing.

  “This is not drugs. I’m not sure what it is yet, but it is not drugs. I will work here, you check the other rooms. Look for the usual. I will look for the unusual.”

  Piao turned to Barbara, his voice low, but not knowing why.

  “Look around if you wish, but please, touch nothing …”

  He pulled the torch up, the beam firing her cheek. Her eyes sapphire.

  “… Barbara, I know how hard that this must be.”

  She said nothing. He watched her as she turned, moving toward the bedroom, switching on her own torch. The words that he had just fired off, sticking like fishbones in his throat.

  ‘So fucking bright, so fucking dead.’

  *

  Four chairs, two now on their sides, sat around the long bench, each at what would have been individual work stations. Individual processes in some anonymous, ritualistic production line. Now just a topple of damaged equipment. The order, the care, the finely honed procedures, swept to the rocks by the struggle that was still indelibly stamped on the scene. On the floor, almost hidden in the crash of glass, two stains had soaked into the runs of roughly nailed flooring. Worn and exhausted stains, the hue of dog shit left to dry and crumble. Blood. There would be more, the Senior Investigator knew it … when he really decided to look for it.

  “Sun, in here …”

  Barbara’s voice from the bedroom, her back hard against the wall. The tears already in a slow fall down her face.

  “… they’re Bobby’s.”

  Her eyes looking down, the bed meeting the floor in a deluge of creased sheets and strewn blankets. Nike trainers poking out from underneath them.

  “You are sure?”

  She looked up, smiling, crying. A strange combination of emotions to outsiders, to those who had not had their lives touched by such things, but not to Piao. The rain of death; the sunshine of at least knowing. He could see that she was sure … he didn’t ask her again.

  Piao swept his torch across the floor. Another stain, old blood on old wood, away from the bed beside the window, dark grey with drifted snow. She hadn’t seen it … Piao took her arm leading her into the main room. Rescuing her, always wanting to rescue her. And yet knowing that it was already too late. He could feel the report that he had read, neatly folded in his inside pocket. It burnt. Yes, already too late.

  “Home sweet home, Boss …”

  The Big Man was sealing a plastic bag, toothbrushes, bristle to bristle, resting at the bottom. Another bag, sealed and labelled in his pocket, cutlery. Another two bags in his other pockets, a comb, a hairbrush.

  “… plenty of food in the kitchen. Mostly tins. About two weeks’ worth. I reckon there were three of them …”

  He held up the toothbrushes in the bag. Three.

  “… unless there were others who never brushed their teeth. Dirty bastards.”

  Yaobang grinned, his own teeth proudly clenched. Worn tyres that cried out for retreading.

  “What are you doing, Boss?”

  The Senior Investigator was kneeling, opening the blade of his penknife. He nodded toward Barbara, waiting for the Big Man to cross the room where she sat, blocking her view, before he gently scraped dried blood from the two stains on the wooden floor into separate polythene bags and sealed them. Broken glass, paper, a microscope, a desklight … Piao removed the debris from the arid brown pools. They were free of blood. The violence, had come first. The act that had thrown the objects from the table, second. A gap of perhaps hours between the two events. Hours … during
that span of which the place had been cleaned, carefully laundered of something. The building isolated in its vast snow. The accumulation of equipment, materials … all for what? Cleaned, yes cleaned. The farmhouse now robbed of what they had meticulously set it up for.

  Small places … look in small places.

  He didn’t clean in every corner, did others? The Senior Investigator leaned further under the table, focusing the torch beam on the film of fine dust; a buildup that clung to the edges of the large gaps between the floorboards. Across the latex of his fingertip, a dirt as fine as talcum powder. Reddish. The colour of fired clay, stamped under foot. He swept some into a bag, sealing it. Standing, straightening. His shoulders, his back … stiff, as if fixed with red-hot rods of steel. Piao moved toward the stairs that led to the cellar. Purpose in his walk, the Big Man following. The torch beam dancing across the cellar walls in dashes of brown, scarred green … resting on thick joists, the underside of the floorboards, and settling on the black rift of a gap edged in red dust. Moving the beam to the hard packed mud floor, where he could make out a small ridge of fine dust traversing a metre and a half length of the hard earth. Ochre on a rich black peat.

  “What you got, Boss?”

  The Senior Investigator bent down, removing his gloves, fingers trailing the dirt. Only two generations ago his family had worked the land and yet he couldn’t remember the last time that he himself had run his hands through soil.

  The red dirt doesn’t belong here … neither do I.

  “The dust was swept from the main room, upstairs …”

  His fingers trailed through the dirt in faint waves.

  “… it fell through the large gap in the floorboards. There was much of it …”

  His fingers smoothing the ochre ridge to a plain, a valley.

  “… the one who surprised them was very careful. Very neat …”

  His fingers digging deeper into the blood hued dirt.

  “… this neatness. This hiding of a cold methodology in the chaos of destruction, does this neatness not remind you of something?”

  In the valley of dirt, against his fingertip numbed with cold, the feel of metal. Metal, blue-green with the tarnish of millennia. A small button sized coin, its centre pierced by a square hole. Barbara and the Big Man over his shoulders, torch beams converging. The colour of the soil bleaching to pale grey.

  “What the fuck’s that?”

  Piao stood, the coin sitting on his fingertip. An emerald blister of aged bronze. Turning it slowly in his fingers.

  “That is Mingqi, a miniature burial item.”

  Barbara moving closer, her hair against the side of Piao’s face.

  “What does this all mean, for Christ sake?”

  The Senior Investigator turned, the light from his torch across her face … features washed away, just a blank porcelain mask with only her eyes defined by their deep blueness.

  “It means, Barbara, that you were correct. That none of this was about drugs. It means that all of this was about smuggling …”

  Turning the coin gently between his fingertips. Over and over.

  “… your son was a smuggler of rare cultural relics and antiquities.”

  She was dreaming … a constant thrash of rotor blades beating air, interwoven into its cityscape. Walking down Nanjing. The sun on her back, as warm as a baby’s mouth. Faces washing around her. Not one that she knew. Not one that she wished to know. A certainty that she would see him, as if she was working her way to a meeting, that had not been pre-arranged. On the corner of Shandong Lu, by the tea shop, Bobby was standing. Naked. Wet. Each footprint a puddle. A darkness spreading from his toes, his heels. Wanting to ask him why? A hundred times, why? But nothing came out, her lips wouldn’t work. Her dream, but not her time to talk. He touched her shoulder, the warmth of the sun instantly dissipating.

  ‘Ask him … ask him,’ saying it to herself in her head. But he was already past her, joining the crowd. Their clothed bodies hiding his nakedness. Shoed feet, blotting, drying his footprints. The endless flow of people passed and he was gone. She walked a little further; the sun still on her back, but not warming her.

  The beat of rotor blades unpicked itself from the background and moved forward, encompassing everything. With each revolution, Bobby moving further away … losing him. Needing the pain as a reminder of him. Needing the pain to still hold onto him, but it couldn’t be found in her dream. She woke herself, wanting to hunt it down and teethe on it.

  *

  The Sea of Bohai falling away. Crossing the Shandong Peninsula, rounding Mount Lao and its wooded hills. Qingdao in its grip … the town’s back pressed hard against the Yellow Sea. Its beaches lost in darkness. Only the electric weave of street lights a witness to a population of one million. They were already losing altitude. Barbara rubbed her eyes, dust and unresolved dreams filling them. The Senior Investigator watching her. She could see him, as a child does, through the gaps between her fingers, just across the main cabin from her.

  Ask him … ask him.

  Acting on a dream for only the second time in her life, and both at her son’s request.

  “Tell me about Bobby?”

  Piao feeling the question jolt him. Something that he recognised in it that was more than a question and more about a premonition.

  “He was in a privileged position, and Heywood, to take many very special cultural relics …”

  The Senior Investigator held out his palm, the button coin at its centre.

  “… I do not know exactly what they could have taken, but Mingqi such as this are found in the Emperors’ tombs and longevity graves. In such places many important artefacts can be found that were buried there to help and defend the Emperor in the life after death. I have a contact in the Bureau for the Preservation of Cultural Relics. Such things they treat most seriously. A team will be sent out on the next plane to investigate …”

  He smiled. A weariness stranding it across his face for longer than seemed justified.

  “… the Bureau for the Preservation of Cultural Relics has a large budget, they will not be dependant on hitching a ride for the price of a few packets of Marlboro and a few bottles of Southern Comfort .”

  Barbara took the coin from his palm, a finger tracing its outline.

  “How old would this be?”

  “Two thousand years. Perhaps more.”

  He hadn’t even blinked. The Senior Investigator took the coin back.

  “The Bureau are very thorough, their investigation will tell us much. I still do not know about the girl, Ye Yang, and the others … the four who have died twice. What the girl’s involvement in the operation was I cannot say, our reports on her are insignificant as yet. The other four are as weeds in the paddy field, they do not appear to be a part of what surrounds them. Time might make their story known.”

  “I’ve got contacts too. I’ll ask the American Ambassador to get me a profile on Ye Yang and her family. I haven’t wanted to do it. I guess I’ve been fooling myself, pretending that Bobby and the girl were innocent of everything. That their deaths were some sort of mistake. That they were drawn into something that was nothing to do with them …”

  She stared out of the porthole, the lights getting closer, taking on more detail. Streets. Houses. Lives being lived.

  “… but the coin says it all, doesn’t it?”

  Still a question. Still an element of denial. Piao wanting to rescue her. He didn’t answer.

  Ask him … ask him.

  Barbara looking across the cabin. The Senior Investigator averting his eyes, the report on fire in his pocket, and with it, a sense of knowing what was coming next.

  Ask him … ask him.

  “But you’re not telling me everything about Bobby, are you?”

  The promise of the dream put to the test. She wouldn’t be able to read the report, but he handed it to her. At moments such as these you didn’t want your hands to be free, you needed something, anything to hold onto.


  “Pan, who examined the bodies, Bobby and the others … there were some points that he needed an expert opinion on. A clarification of some abnormalities. These examinations … what he found was beyond him …”

  She was beginning to feel ill, a fever at the core of her.

  “… he was a professor at Pan’s Institute and is now a government adviser in Beijing …”

  Running out of space, the edge of the abyss, toes over it, looking down. The Senior Investigator’s lips dry.

  “… much of the report is difficult to understand. Our medical professors, I am sure, are like yours, they attempt to explain things in unexplainable ways …”

  He tried to laugh, it came out as a nervous cough.

  “… there are conclusions to his report. The four who were in Gongdelin and who it is said were executed, he found that they had been shot. But the entrance and exits of the bullet holes were disguised by the mutilations that they had received. The paths that led to their deaths, someone has tried to sweep them clean. Pan had missed this, it was not difficult in the circumstances …”

  Her eyes were held firm, her gaze screwed to his. Attempting to prepare for the pain. Piao drew a breath, a tattered edge to it.

  “… these four and the others, including Bobby. Analysis showed that all had been anaesthetised. Opioids. Hypnotics. All had undergone a major medical procedure …”

  The heartbeat in his chest, a thunder. Its echo in his inner-ears, his temples. Each word released to, and finding its way through its salvoes.

  “… Bobby, Ye Yang, Heywood, Qingde, the professor has concluded that their deaths were due to the trauma of these major medical procedures. That they were allowed to die on the operating tables following on from invasive surgical techniques. The mutilations, they were meant to hide this from us and to make our identification of the bodies more difficult.”

  Barbara’s eyes, their hue shifting from turquoise to slate grey, and filled with questions.

  “Medical procedures. Invasive surgical techniques. I don’t get it. What are you saying, what’s this professor saying? Why the hell should they have had operations?”