Dragon's Eye

by Andy Oakes

  City lights running between the braces of the parapet. Cold, so cold.

  “I want you to talk. To tell me what it is you know.” Wu, one eye on secrets. One eye on truths. Screaming now,

  “They are powerful, too powerful for you. I cannot talk. I am a man of principles. What they are doing has gone too far. I do not agree with it, but I cannot talk.”

  “That is something that I have heard before. Tell me something new, old man.”

  “For me to say will mean my death. Your death.”

  Double barriers marking the edge of the span, a gash in the night … dominating the horizon. Slicing towards them.

  “Sometimes I feel as if I am already dead, don’t you, doctor?”

  Piao pulled the wheel, skewing the car around the first barrier. Blurs, the night cut in long knives. Tortured rubber. A city running distant. A swerve, a skid … violent and set in snatches of Wu’s face, glistening sweat. The second barrier sprinting in elongated whites, extruded, luminous reds. Brakes floored. Headlights finding blackness only, as they thumped to a halt. Engine stalling. A silence that pressed on the ears with a cold and certain firmness; broken only by the rhythmic tears of breath across the old man’s teeth. Fishing in his pocket, throwing the keys to the cuffs onto the Big Man’s lap. Yaobang untangling himself, straightening his uniform. Making his fingers work. Finding the lock in the handcuffs with shaking fingers. Pulling Wu from the car, onto the bridge. It was cold. Breaths from lips. In an instant, sweat drying. The doctor adjusting his tie.

  “A wise decision Senior Investigator. At last, a wise decision on your part. Nothing could have been gained by such a foolhardy act.”

  “Bring him.”

  Piao already rounding the front of the car. His shadow thrown across the rutted span and into darkness. The Big Man tugged on the chain, Wu stumbling after him. Ridged concrete grafted over rusted steel rodding and girders. The edge of the span, its very lip … five metres away. Knowing that the river was far below, but unable to see it. As if it didn’t exist. Just a hole. Deep. Black.

  “His legs.”

  Yaobang pulled the doctor toward him, removing the handcuffs. Picking him up bodily. Cradling him. So light … just a bag of bones. And with it, remembering his own grandfather. Carrying him, bed to toilet. Bed to toilet. The cancer holding him in its grip. Wasting him. Ravaging him. So light … just a bag of bones.

  The edge of the span. Taking one of the doctor’s legs each. Piao, Yaobang, on their knees; the coldness of the concrete running up their thighs. A weak struggle as they held him by his ankles over the edge of the span. His body in a violent swing. Shirt, vest … riding up over his stomach, his chest. Behind his head, jacket flapping. Loose change, in a fall into blackness.

  “That night on the foreshore, what did you recognise, their identities or what had been done to them?”

  Nothing. Just dribble in a long thin spit from his lips, set against the backdrop of city … a necklace of living light.

  “Talk. I will drop you, doctor.”

  Wu, forcing his head up. Eyes locked with Piao’s. Finding the words. The breeze as sharp as a splinter, stealing some of them away.

  “You … a dangerous fool, Senior Investigator. I am old … not drop me. You would not dare … execute you … be finished. Stop. Think. I am … city’s Chief Medical Exami …”

  His head dropped with an exhausted snap. The lights of Padong hurtling, streaking in a violent barcode.

  “Talk. Tell me what you know?”

  A sound. A laugh? Humour in even this, or the escape valve of horror?

  “Nothing to say. Do not … stupid, Senior Investigator … immediately … pull me up.”

  The world in a violent lurch. A half scream, choked, snatched by the wind. Piao letting go of the doctor’s leg and standing. A groan of effort as Yaobang took the full weight of the old man.

  “Boss?”

  But the Senior Investigator ignoring it. Just staring down at Wu. A puppet set against a backcloth of nothing, almost all of its strings cut. A patch slowly expanding around the doctor’s crotch. Darker. Darker. Spreading down to the trouser waistband. The urine in a sheet flow across the heaving stomach. The chest. Coming off the chin, the cheeks, the tip of the nose, the forehead … in a shower fall. Caught against the cityscape like a scatter of jewels. Deep thudding gags of inhaled breaths. But no words. Piao knelt, hands on the Big Man’s hands. Slowly, carefully, strongly, peeling the large fingers, one by one, from the doctor’s ankle.

  “Fuck, Boss, what are you doing? We can’t, he’s the fucking city’s Chief Medical Examiner.”

  The Big Man’s grasp slipping, sliding away from him. In his head, already rehearsing the mannequin’s fall. The plunge … losing focus, losing form as it bit into darker darkness.

  “No, Boss. No …”

  Below, from the old man, coughs, cries, splintered words. Lips bathed in a mixture of piss, sweat, tears, dribble.

  “Talk … talk … I will … talk, tell you.”

  Seconds of silence before Piao spoke. Recognising the words, but not his own voice.

  “So tell me?”

  “Tomorrow … you see, tomorrow. Come … clear. Everything … know everything. God help you.”

  Seconds of silence before Piao spoke again. Recognising the words, and this time the voice also.

  “Haul him up.”

  Walking the doctor back to the car, the old man pulling a cuff across his face.

  “What you did to me back there was not n-necessary, Senior Investigator. I am a man of principles. I am a m-man of moral direction, of p-principles …”

  Across the front of his shirt, a sash of vomit. Trousers pissed. But the words rock calm. The eyes, steady.

  “… what you did was w-wrong. You should have appealed to those qualities in me. I just needed to be c-convinced that I could speak of these things that I have come to loathe and yet remain s-safe. I have a f-family also …”

  His breath becoming even more tattered.

  “… there are many ways to persuade, Senior Investigator. Many w-ways. Many ways to court.”

  Gently, sitting the old man in the Sedan. The Senior Investigator pulling a blanket around his shoulders.

  “Eight are dead, Doctor Wu. I do not have time to court. I want a witness, information. I do not want a wife. I already have one of those.”

  With the words, Piao suddenly and intently aware that the night only smelt of hard things. Things that would not submit. Concrete. Steel. A river that could not be seen. Only hard things … and he now at their hub. Yaobang replaced the handcuffs on the doctor’s wrist, locking him to the inside of the door. Lighting him a cigarette. Turning on Piao. Fire and questions in the Big Man’s eyes. And in a whisper, as sharp as swarf,

  “What the fuck was that about? You wanted to kill him?”

  The Senior Investigator walked to the lip of the span. Words, questions … stranded. Below, the river, lost in darkness. His toes over the edge, balancing on his heels. So easy to die. At that moment, so easy to die. Head filled with the numbness that decants into it when horror has been exorcised. When suicide becomes so easy, one small step. Too easy. Meaningless.

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered to the night, to the river, before turning and walking back to the car.

  “Well doctor, it looks as if you will be my guest tonight. I hope that you like chicken?”

  Wu coughed politely.

  “Then I should tell you that I am a vegetarian, Senior Investigator.”

  A smile on Piao’s face as he drove back down the bridge and onto the slip road. And to the night.

  “I thought that you might fucking be, old man.”

  Chapter 35

  The New Year.

  Debts are paid. Peace made with those with whom relationships have been strained or broken. Sweetness and new life filling your home.

  At the centre of the main room, a table … now an altar. A pig’s head, a chicken, a fish, and a New Year’s cake resti
ng upon it. In the avenues, young children parade their new clothes; bright colours, red, blue, green, but mostly red. Gloves, hats, scarves, little things giving so much pleasure.

  New Year’s Day, and everything is sweet. Tea must be sugared. Lychee and dragon’s eye eaten. As well as lotus fruit seeds, persimmons, grapefruit, crystallised ginger. And flaky cakes, as well as niangao, the traditional ‘rising higher every year cakes.’ On the streets, spanning the longs, lucky characters are pasted up. The promise of sweetness and new life to fill your home.

  And in the hearts of the high cadre and the dahu, the new money people … the fixers, the shunters, the dealers? Business as usual.

  *

  To the minute they arrived on time, two unmarked ambulances. Tinted windows. Pulling into the rear, the business end of the Number 1 Hospital, with its skips and overflowing dustbins.

  “Say nothing,” Wu hissed, as a door slid open and they boarded. Moving off at speed. Headlights fanning into Suzhou Beilu. In the rear of the ambulance, other pale faces. No conversation. No smoking. Attention drawn in.

  The New Year. Eating, dancing, music, hands holding somebody else’s. Bottles of wine, bottles of beer. Faces passing by in long tangled chains. None looking back. It was as if he and the ambulance didn’t exist. Perhaps they didn’t. For the rest of the journey he studied his fingers, his palms … the confusion of road-map lines, none of which led anywhere.

  *

  They skirted the outer wall of the Municipal Prison and entered by the south gate. In its blinding white blaze, diffused shapes of ash metamorphosing into a welcoming party of guards and wardens. Piao kept close to the doctor, through a maze of corridors; bare brick walls and puddled concrete floors. A line of single discoloured light bulbs cutting the darkness … and the sound of footsteps in unison. The sluice room was in the new block, still smelling of paint hurriedly applied, drips frozen in mid-fall. A double bank of olive green lockers ran down the centre of the room. The hospital staff moving toward them, removing their jackets. Opening the lockers in a cacophony of pressed steel onto pressed steel. Wu pulled at the Senior Investigator’s jacket, the corner of his lips twisted in a whisper.

  “Here, do everything that I do.”

  A gown, a hat, starched white. Piao took them from the locker, removing his coat and slipping them on, hiding his shoulder holster with the locker door. Feeling out of place. Feeling stupid … even as a child, hating dressing-up games. Turning to see the green garbed figures pushing through the high rubber double doors into the next room. The Senior Investigator followed, Wu at the line of sinks, hands in a scalding cascade of water. Steam across his spectacle lenses.

  “Wash your hands, do all that I do, exactly.”

  Piao watched and followed, soaking his hands and forearms in the fierce deluge. Pushing the hibiscrub dispenser with his elbows … catching the pink slug of soap in his palms. Working it into a lather. Rinsing it off. Hands dried under the airflow. Helping the doctor on with a pair of surgical gloves; Wu in turn helping him. The last figure moving through the rubber doors. A clap as they swung and met in an eddy of medicated air.

  “The rest of them are wearing green, we’re wearing white?”

  Wu snapped the top of a glove in place and picked up the sterile pack of instruments.

  “Very astute, Senior Investigator. You will, no doubt, also detect that we are about to go through a different door to the one that the others used. Now keep close, do as I do or we will not be able to, to, how do you say it?”

  “Put the shit back up the horse’s arse, doctor?”

  The old man opened the door at the far end of the sluice room and walked into the short corridor alive with chisel-edged shadows.

  “Exactly Senior Investigator. Exactly.”

  *

  At each window of each cell, a face. Hands clenched around bars, black. Fists, white. Piao’s eyes moved down the six-storey block, the lengthy runs of stone, square and precisely cornered, making up three sides of the vast inner compound. A face, fists, at each window. Wincing as his eyes caught the banks of floodlights … tracing the blue-white beams down to the two pools of fierce light that transformed midnight into midday. In one area, the helipad … a fat black blowfly of a Zhishengji-9A ‘Dolphin’ Helicopter in PLA Air Force insignia, at its centre. And then the second area of light pinpointing a group of figures around a low podium … the warden, officials, guards. Papers in the high cadre’s hands. Sawdust, as brown as shit, across their polished toecaps. A cigarette being lit, laughter, loud and jarring from the Zhishengji’s crew … and in its fallout, Piao’s whisper.

  “What is this? What’s going on?”

  Wu standing back, anchored to the penumbra.

  “Wait. See. Investigators are good at that, yes?”

  The doctor was enjoying the power. Piao joined him in the shadows, a sudden sense of the leather shoulder holster that he was wearing and the steel of the pistol that was slumbering within it. Yes, he would wait. See. He was an Investigator, he was good at that.

  A drizzle had started its fall. Fine, but demanding, soaking every exposed area of skin. The crescents between cuffs and gloves. Collar and hairline. The warden barked an order; in no mood to get wet. And then everything accelerated. Four guards followed closely by two others carrying rifles, pulling one prisoner and then another from the darkness, through the shadow and into the blind of arc-light. They looked lethargic, sedated. Feet dragging. Four toe trails through the sawdust. The prisoners propped to attention as the warden read out their crimes. The sentences. Giving the order. The prisoners forced to their knees. Guards advancing. The rifle of one pressed firmly into the back of a prisoner … the rifle of the other stubbed at the base of the second prisoner’s skull. A shot. Another. Muffled sledgehammer blows of decibels volleying between the detention blocks. Twin tongues of smoke licking skyward in a lazy tumble from the ends of the rifles’ barrels. Piao closed his eyes, the colour behind them, maroon … shot through with two silver spikes. When he opened them again the bodies had folded forward. The guards turning them onto their backs. Blood pumping from underneath them in a torrent across the sawdust, threatening to turn the whole compound into a thick black lake. Wu moved into the arc-light. The crumpled bag lines of his face bleached clean. He looked twenty years younger, the Senior Investigator could almost imagine a man in his prime. A husband, a father, a lover … not just a dried up old man.

  “Come, Senior Investigator. Death calls us.”

  The warden and the officials, already walking briskly toward cover. For the first time, Piao noticing the smell that rain has, not unlike tears … cordite on its wing. And also the smell of the warm blood across the sawdust. Stepping forward into the noon, eyes squinting. Following the old man.

  “Come doctor. Death calls us.”

  “Don’t talk, just do everything that I do.”

  Piao knelt in the sawdust. Blood everywhere. Soaking through the gown, through his trousers, to his knees. Already imagining the strawberry stains that he would have to wash from his own skin. Watching every move that Wu made. Watching the instruments that he picked up and wielded. A stethoscope. A small torch. Mimicking his actions in the hunt for any signs of life. A pulse. A pupil dilating. But nothing that showed that life hadn’t fled within an instant of the rifle shots being discharged. Watching as Wu pulled a long needle from the sterile pack. No hesitation … pushing it deep into the prisoner’s temple. Piao feeling a vice of pressure clamp across his skull. Reluctantly drawing a needle from the pack. Its steel in the arc-light, as bright as glass. Hesitating.

  “Do everything that I do.”

  Hesitating. Wu’s eyes, nervous. A glance across his shoulder at the guards looking on. A fierce whisper.

  “Do it. Do it.”

  “Do it yourself, doctor. Death calls you.”

  The guards moving forward. Wu shifting uncomfortably on arthritic knees … hissing.

  “For God’s sake, do it. It’s just a needle. He will not fee
l it, he is dead. Do it, or we will join him.”

  Hesitation, and then the Senior Investigator pushing the needle. At first the skin taut, puckering, pimpling in … and then giving way in a single plump grape of blood. Bile at the back of Piao’s throat. Shining the torch into the prisoner’s eyes. Nothing. Their colour, yellow-brown, fading away … sand through fingers.

  “He’s dead.”

  The Senior Investigator catching the reflection of his own eyes in the blaze of the old man’s glasses.

  “Of course he is dead. The front of his head has been shot off.”

  Wu closed his bag, nodding to the guards. Their hands pulling the bodies up and across the compound. Thin spit trails of blood leading back into the new block.

  *

  Skin on steel. Steel on skin.

  They didn’t waste any time. Two teams, gowned green, drawn from the blank-eyed ambulance passengers, now consummate professionals. Cutting the clothes from the bodies. Bathing them. Applying a wash of iodine yellow antiseptic from sternum to pubis. From forehead to cheek. A team working on one of the dead prisoner’s eyes. Muscle hooks. Curved enucleation scissors. The steel blades inserted along the lateral orbital walls. The tough, rubbery optic nerve between its razor-edges … cutting close to the apex of the orbit. The globes, the eyes removed. Placed in sterile containers, in McCarey-Kaufman tissue culture solution. Extensive endothelial cell death avoided. The sterile containers sealed and packed for transport. The second team working on the remaining body; a scalpel racing in a midline incision from xyphoid notch to pubis. A cruciate abdominal cut, deep, just above the umbilicus, allowing extended exposure. Towel clips applied to each leaf of the abdominal incision, folding the flaps back to the flanks of the torso; skin on skin. Working fast … controlled, but fast. The c-portion of the duodenum dissected by a Kocher manoeuvre. Both kidneys finally removed en bloc. A cylinder of inferior vena cava, attached ureters of fifteen centimetres length included. The kidneys separated, packed … placed in cold storage preservation units.

  Tasks performed, as if they were the cement between the bricks … team members broke away, returning to the sluice room. Lockers opening. Gowns discarded. Some moving back out to the compound in a procession following the organ packs. The Zhishengji thudding into life. Rotors slicing through air and arc-light. Wind, dust, and thunder … it rose out of the grip of the floodlit compound. Wind, dust, thunder … abating. Lost in the night, darkness closing around it in a tight fist. Moving north, over the city. Nothing left of what had occurred except the witness of green tail lights fading by the second.