Dragon's Eye

by Andy Oakes

  The Senior Investigator bit the inside of his lip. Untangling the words. Spitting them out …

  “Their organs, they had been removed. Removed by surgical procedures. Removed systematically.”

  *

  “Fucking helicopters.”

  Piao wiped the vomit from his lips. The rag, oily, causing nausea’s wings to beat more rapidly. A hot hand on his shoulder. A smell of alcohol, candy and cough mixture, cutting through the reek of bile.

  “Here Boss, drink. We thought we’d open a bottle. Check that it’s what it says it is on the label …”

  Grand Old Southern Comfort. The Senior Investigator took the candle ridged neck of the bottle and drank deeply. Slapping the Senior Investigator firmly on the back.

  “… some drinker, that pilot. Half a bottle. Half a fucking bottle in three snorts. The thirst of an Emperor.”

  The Zhi-8 took on more altitude. Shuddering. Piao shuddering. Taking another slug. Sugared Napalm. Wedging himself against the rear bulkhead. The Zhi-8’s heartbeat deep into the small of his back.

  “So Boss, what the fuck was that about?”

  Nodding toward the centre of the cabin, Barbara Hayes … her eyes looking beyond steel and through the years. Piao had no appetite for words. Words. But perhaps they would still the nausea.

  “Telling a mother how her son was slaughtered. Telling a mother that he died on an operating table …”

  Another slug. Its heat expanding in his head.

  “… telling a mother that his organs were surgically removed.”

  Yaobang taking the bottle.

  “That was in the report, Pan’s old professor’s report?”

  “Last page.”

  “Last fucking page?”

  Piao nodded. Head swimming, like a dog in a canal.

  “Shit, sorry Boss. Never read a last page in my life. Always thought they’d be a fucking let down.”

  The Zhi-8 dropped. Piao pushing tighter against the bulkhead. Heartbeat racing the rotor’s metal pulse.

  “Not this last page.”

  Slipping to the plate floor, the Senior Investigator tracing the run of crescent moon welds with his finger.

  “So what’s it about Boss, what the fuck’s going on? Operations. Organs missing. It feels like fucking madness.”

  Piao took the bottle. Finishing the bottle. Staring deeply into the label. Imagining himself in the buggy, passing the grand old house. Passing the grand old riverboat. Steaming just off the banks of the grand old Mississippi.

  It feels like fucking madness.

  Outside, beyond the metal confines of the Zhi-8, a constant flow of land. Formless wilderness, frontier, pecked into by the electric reasoning of villages, towns, cities. A flight from madness to sanity. From madness … the lands of the north east, the far north. The lands of the silent tears. The unheard cries.

  PINGFANG.

  “We flew over it, a tiny village. Thirty kilometres out of Harbin. Hardly noticeable now. Buildings, just buildings. And madness.”

  Letting the bottle slip across the metal deck in an arcing gash of colourless shards.

  “They experimented on human beings there. Injecting them with deadly viruses. Freezing them, slowly. Observing the prolonged effects of frostbite. Dissecting them while they were alive. Conscious. Removing their organs.”

  “Pingfang, the secret Japanese research place during the last war. That’s what you’re fucking talking about, isn’t it Boss?”

  Eye contact enough. The Senior Investigator not needing words. Not needing to nod.

  “You’re saying that the bodies were experimented on, like there? Fucking cut up while they were still alive?”

  Piao laboured to his feet. Across glass, making his way back to the centre of the cabin … to Barbara.

  “Another Pingfang,” was all that he said. Lands of silent tears. Lands of unheard cries.

  *

  She didn’t talk. The rest of the journey to Hongqiao … a constant beat of steel wings through air. Her hand laced in Piao’s. Sometimes tight, knuckles white; sometimes loose. The sole barometer to what she was feeling. That, and the tears. His mother, his wife, and now Barbara. Women, a bottomless well of tears. He had often drunk there.

  *

  The car was waiting on the tarmac. They sat in the back, her hand still in his, not daring to let it go. A feeling that she would be washed away if he did. And every time that her gaze caught his, a flash. Like sun trapped in water.

  The corridor of the Jing Jiang was dark. Silence, except for the city breathing. The sound of the key turning in its lock, a comfort. Inside the room, curtains billowing, tumbling as kites tethered by a fine cord.

  Sometimes, a single thread is all that holds us to where we are and want to be.

  She touched him. Undoing his shirt buttons. Her hands across his chest, down his arms; the shirt released to the floor. Not for a second her eyes leaving his, breathing in every feint of his irises. Breathing in unison. The buckle of his belt. The zip pulled open in a slow purr. Her hands moving down his flanks in a firm stroke; trousers, briefs, shoes, socks, kicked aside. He was naked and not trying to hide himself, his arms by his sides. Kissing him once on the shoulder as she slipped out of her dress, her underwear … silk moving down her skin to the floor. Nothing about her that wasn’t perfect. Piao moved toward her, the pupils of her eyes widening. The breath torn on their lips. A shock … electricity as they held each other. She was heat against his ice. Softness against his hardness. She tasted of flowers and sleep. Tears and toothpaste. Drunk on her feel, her taste, her touch. He entered her before they had laid down on the snowfield of the duvet. Her legs around him in an unfolded whisper, a secret word. Everything that he was, had been, or would ever be … inside of her. The night, a seam of purple velvet and heaven. A catch of disjointed, out of time, memories and images.

  She said only one thing as they had travelled the night together. One thing as her tears silently baptised his chest, as he had come inside her for the first time.

  “Let me steal this moment from you now.”

  He had never heard more honest words in his life. He would have, should have, cried right there and then, but he didn’t know how.

  Chapter 21

  Treat death as life.

  The stink was rampant. Piao held his breath until he was deep inside the building.

  The Headquarters of the Bureau for the Preservation of Cultural Relics straddled uncomfortably the borders of the Putuo District and the Changning District, in the far west of the city. There were no fences, but the district boundaries were there. And with them the disputes that divisions seed. The roads that surrounded the Bureau were clean. The road that it sat on, dirty. Rotting vegetables, paper, oil, shit, two dead dogs in the gutter … jawbones grinning. Which district would meet the bill of cleaning the road that sat exactly where the boundary fell? The argument had been running for two years.

  Things move slowly in the People’s Republic of China.

  *

  “How is your mother?”

  Piao had known that the question would come. How would it not, from a man who had known her for more years than her own son? Fifty years. But still the Senior Investigator felt shame and humiliation. The Director’s eyes fired with memory, and more.

  “She was the most beautiful girl in Songjiang, as beautiful as you, Madam Hayes. And how she sang, like a canary. Did I ever tell you Sun Piao?”

  He had, every time that they had met.

  “She is well, but I do not see her as often as I should …”

  It sounded as pretty as a bouquet of barbed wire; Piao feeling the need to justify himself.

  “… work keeps me very busy. I have important commitments.”

  The Director turned to Barbara, palms to the ceiling.

  “And a mother is not an important commitment in this new world that we live in …”

  The verbal slap across the face only eased as the Director poured the tea, hands shaking, and pas
sed a cup to Barbara. A smile engraved across his face, as seemingly permanent as the words etched onto a pocket watch’s inside case.

  “… you need to look at your life again, young Sun Piao. See what colour its eyes are. Your mother has been through a great deal in her life, all of our generation have been through a great deal. …”

  He sipped the tea, the dainty cup held in fingers that were more bone than flesh.

  “… the Cultural Revolution was a ten year earthquake that people of your generation can never understand, but you should at least try. For your mother to be pregnant with the child of a foreigner. To be in love with a yang-gui-zi …”

  The Director shook his head.

  “… lives split apart like bamboo. These were very difficult times …”

  He swallowed hard …

  “… I would do anything to see my own father again, just to say to him that I understand.”

  To see his father again. The Hundred Flowers, the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard’s hatred of the ‘Four Olds’. Old ideas. Old culture. Old customs. Old habits. There wasn’t one family in the whole of the Republic that didn’t have a tale to tell, that couldn’t drive a tear from the most arid of eyes. Piao knew the Director’s tale, it was worse than most. His father had been one of the country’s most gifted concert pianists. One night the Red Guard had called … had hauled him from his bed. In a street in central Shanghai, not more than three miles from where they now sat drinking tea, his father’s hands had been held firm to the road surface. A line of over two hundred and fifty Red Guards had marched across them in their boots. He had nearly bled to death that night, on the kerbside, but a skilled surgeon, whom the family had known had saved him. But not his hands. Not his mind. He had committed suicide six months later.

  To see his father again. Just to say … I understand.

  The Senior Investigator finished his tea, placing the cup and saucer firmly down on the antique desk. A punctuation mark begging a change of direction.

  “Director, your team, when will they investigate the house near Harbin?”

  The old man smiled, plough lines deepening around his eyes, his mouth. Piao had known him as a man in the spring of middle age. Skin taut. Eyes clear and fixed to the future. Seeing him now, it tugged at his own mortality. Knowing the feeling every time that he looked into a mirror. Every time, except the morning that he had woken with Barbara’s hair splayed across his chest. Her breasts rising, falling, against his arm.

  “A change of subject. You make a good detective Sun Piao. You would make an even better politician …”

  The Director pushed a report across the desk.

  “… this is between you and me, Senior Investigator Piao. Madam Hayes was never here and this report does not exist. I give you this only because your mother is so good looking.”

  “Your team, they have already been to the house, haven’t they?”

  Director Chieh locked his fingers together and placed them on the desktop. A texture of gnarled tree bark resting on walnut veneer.

  “We regard the smuggling of our national heritage, our cultural relics, as a serious problem. The Party and the government do not differ in this view and so our budget allows us to respond swiftly. As it so happens, it was most fortuitous that we already had a team working in the general area of Harbin. They were at the house just hours after you communicated with us … before you had even landed back at Hongqiao.”

  “What was a team doing around Harbin?”

  The Director sipped his tea … a prop only. The tea itself had long grown cold in its cup.

  “Pingfang.”

  Barbara saw Piao’s irises widen, the words strand themselves in his throat.

  “Pingfang, what is it, a place?”

  “Our tragedy …” Piao replied, leaning toward her. She still smelt of that night and of a continent only partly explored.

  “… we have heard of your Dauchaus, your Belsens. You have not heard of our Pingfang. The west that you live in would like to corner the market when it also comes to human suffering …”

  Dust in the room, its smell of old books, pottery fragments and glue.

  “… when the Americans liberated the camp from the Japanese Imperial Army, they guaranteed the freedom of those murderers involved, in return for all of the data that had been collected during the experiments on our citizens. Our experts believe that this made a significant contribution to medical research in the west.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Apologising for a nation. Straws in the wind. It sounded so meaningless as it left Barbara’s lips.

  “Memories fade, Madam Hayes; they were designed that way …”

  Director Chieh’s words, a welcome Band-aid applied over the running sore.

  “… but our case against the Japanese for compensation for what occurred, that does not fade. Our team at Pingfang has been collecting evidence for eighteen months now. It will be integrated into a report and a legal case will be brought against the Japanese government in the new year …”

  He smiled. His face like a crumpled paper bag.

  “… not our usual field of work, but very rewarding to the soul. Very difficult for the soul also. Investigating your house in the Yanshou snowfields was a very welcome interlude.”

  Blood soaked into the wooden floor. A son’s life ripped and spilt of its contents. ‘A welcome interlude’ … he made it sound like a tea dance. The Senior Investigator tapped his knuckles on the buff of the report.

  “I have no time for paper, not with Liping sitting on my shoulder. What does it say, Director?”

  Chieh stood, slowly, carefully. His posture, that of a question mark. His attention focused solely on Barbara. The old man had an eye for the women that time had not diminished. Does the bee ever lose its taste for the honey?

  “Excuse me, my dear, if I slip into my lecturing mode …”

  He smiled, she nodded.

  “… your initial report has been noted, Senior Investigator. And our own investigations, although brief, I can assure you were most thorough. As they always are …”

  He studied his nails. A lifetime as an archaeologist had left its indelible print; the skin as yellow-brown as the soil of the Huang He’s Great Loess Plains. The nails … thick, ridged, as tough as steel trowels.

  “… as you are already aware, Madam Hayes, your son was never officially in our country and I am not in a position to challenge this. Neither would I wish to. Swimming in the sea when you know that it is the season of typhoons, is a dangerous way to relax, if you take my point. And as your son was, officially, never in our country, he could never have officially worked for the Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology under the site director, Wang Xueli …”

  The old man fingers formed a crooked, pointing spire.

  “… but, we know, Madam Hayes, that your son did exactly that …”

  Barbara felt a jolt of focus. Chieh’s words flowing over her.

  “… one of my archaeological inspectors, on several occasions, visited a very important site of a dig near the ancient capital of Changan … twelve miles out of Xian. It is the first extensive excavation of a Han Emperor’s mausoleum in what we like to call ‘the sleeping town of the Emperors and their wives and concubines.’ Eight hundred tombs have been located on this single plain and although none of the royal tombs had been opened, there was a sense that the sleeping town should now be woken. Your son was a part of this process. One of the alarm-clocks. One of the first archaeologists involved. A gifted Han scholar I have been told …”

  The Director turned, truth in his eyes.

  “… my inspector met him on two occasions. My department, this department, was the one to give your son a permit allowing him onto the Jing Di site.”

  She couldn’t talk, tongue riveted in place by the simple truths that he had just spoken. Wanting to ask about Bobby. Mother things. But Piao spoke first … detective things.

  “The coin that we found, was it a miniature buri
al item from the site that you talk about?”

  Chieh took a small box from his desk drawer and opened it. The coin sat cleaned of earth on a bed of white cotton … blue-green bronze.

  “The depth of your knowledge surprised me, Sun Piao. Your mother would complain that you were not the most accomplished student at school. But, yes, you are correct. The coin is a burial item, Mingqi. And, yes, once more, it comes from the site near Changan where the American boy worked. The fired clay dirt that you found at the house also confirms this.”

  “So, Director, do we know what it could be that was being smuggled from this site?”

  The old man pressed a button and spoke overloudly into an intercom, it was answered within seconds by a meek tap on the door. A tall man entered the office, his face instantly forgettable; he placed a sealed wooden box on its end on the desktop and left. A box that was of identical size to the ones that Piao had seen in a corner of the house in the Yanshou snowfields. Chieh took a pair of cutters and snipped the wire that held the boxes sliding front in place. A thick, blood-red seal falling heavily onto the desk. Slowly the old man slid open the front of the lined box to reveal a crumpled padding of soft brown paper; Chieh’s fingers pulling it out with care, laying it on the desk. His torso hiding the dark wood interior of the box. Moving aside … a gasp caught in Barbara’s throat. A statue of a human figure, naked, armless. Slim, as a young boy. Soft muscled. Gently contoured. Terracotta … a fired clay of pale brown, almost pink. Hair, worn lacquer black and tied back into a tight bun. The face, beautiful. Hinting of a secret delight. A smile, generous, honest, across its open features. So different, but it reminded her of Bobby. He would have been around seven, going on eight, in a rush to grow up. Miami, a summer vacation spent on the beach. Hot days, long days, pierced with sighing Coca-Cola cans. Sand on his body. Watching him run toward the water, the surf falling across his shoulders, his back. As sleek, as glistening as a dolphin.

  The Director was also smiling. His teeth as yellow as the sand on that beach in Miami.