by Mo Hayder
He nodded.
‘How could you?’
Shi Chongming closed his eyes, a little smile on his face. He was silent for a long time, thinking about this, and I might have thought he had fallen asleep if it wasn’t for the way his hands moved and twitched, like dying birds. ‘How?’ he said eventually, looking up. ‘How, indeed? It would seem impossible, wouldn’t it? But I have had many, many years to think about it – years when I couldn’t move outside my own country, years when I couldn’t move outside my own house. Until you have been pelted in the street, paraded through your own town bearing propaganda…’ He spread his thumb and forefinger across his chest and I thought immediately of Cultural Revolution photographs, men huddled pitifully together, hounded by the Red Guard, slogans like Intellectual Renegade and Anti-Party Element screaming from placards around their necks. ‘… until you have experienced this you don’t have the tools to understand human nature. It took a long time, but I came to understand one simple thing. I understood ignorance. The more I studied it, the more it became clear that their behaviour was all about ignorance. Oh, there were soldiers in Nanking, a handful, who were truly evil. I don’t dispute that. But the others? Their biggest sin was their ignorance. It is that simple.’
Ignorance. That was something I thought I knew a lot about. ‘What they did on your film. Is that what you mean? Was that ignorance?’
Shi Chongming didn’t reply. His face closed and he pretended to be busying himself with some papers. The mention of the film always turned him a little quiet with me.
‘Is that what you meant? Professor Shi?’
He pushed aside his papers, clearing his desk, ready to get to business. ‘Come,’ he said, gesturing to me. ‘Let’s not talk of that now. Come and sit down and tell me why you’re here.’
‘I want to know what you mean. Did you mean that what they did to the-’
‘Please! Please – you haven’t come here today for nothing. You’ve come to me with ideas – I can see them in your face. Sit down.’
Reluctantly, I came to the desk. I sat opposite him, my hands in my lap.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘What is it?’
I sighed. ‘I’ve been reading,’ I said. ‘About Chinese medicine.’
‘Good.’
‘There was a myth. A story about a god, the divine farmer who divided the plants into orders. I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘Taste, temperature and quality. Yes. You’re talking about Shen Nong.’
‘So what I ought to do is decide where Fuyuki’s cure falls in that order. I’ve got to put it in a category?’
Shi Chongming held my eyes.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What have I said?’
He sighed and sat back with his hands on the table, lightly tapping his fingertips together. ‘It’s time I told you a little more about myself.’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t want you to waste your time. You should know that I have some very, very good suspicions about what we are looking for.’
‘Then you don’t need me to-’
‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want to hear what I want to hear. I don’t want a parrot to come back to me, cheeky and obsequious, telling me, “Yes, sir, yes, sir, you were correct all along, O wise one.” No. I want the truth.’ He pulled a battered portfolio out of the pile of books on the desk. ‘I have been working on this for too long to make a mistake at this point. I will tell you everything you need to know. But I will not tell you exactly what I suspect.’
From the portfolio he pulled a handful of yellowing paper tied with a scruffy black ribbon. Out it came, dragging with it pencil shavings, paper-clips, balled tissues.
‘It took me a long time to find Fuyuki, more years than I care to consider. I discovered many, many things about him. Here.’ He pushed the bundle of papers across the table to me. I looked at them, a big untidy pile that threatened to slip off on to the ground. They were in Chinese and Japanese, official letters, photocopied newspapers; one seemed to be a memo on notepaper from a government office. I recognized the kanji for the Land-based Defence Agency.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Years and years of work. Most of it done a long time before I was permitted to travel to Japan. Letters, newspaper articles and – maybe the riskiest thing I did – reports from special investigators. I don’t expect you to understand them, but you do need to know how dangerous Fuyuki is.’
‘You’ve said that already.’
He smiled thoughtfully. ‘Yes. I understand your scepticism. He seems like a very old man. Maybe even kind. Benevolent?’
‘You can’t say what someone’s like until you’ve talked to them for a bit.’
‘Interesting, isn’t it? The most powerful sarakin loan shark in Tokyo, one of the biggest manufacturers and illegal importers of methamphetamine – interesting how innocuous he appears. And yet don’t be fooled.’ Shi Chongming sat forward, looking at me intently. ‘He is ruthless. You cannot imagine how many died in his determination to establish his amphetamine routes between here and any number of poor Korean ports. And maybe the most intriguing thing is the care with which he chooses the people who surround him. He has a unique technique – it’s all in there in those papers, if you know how to look. What a skilled manipulator he is! He scours the newspapers for arrests, carefully selects certain offenders and finances their defence cases. If they escape conviction they are sworn to Fuyuki for life.’
‘Do you know about…’ I leaned closer, my voice lowering instinctively ‘… about his Nurse?’
Shi Chongming nodded seriously. ‘Yes, I do. His Nurse, his bodyguard. Ogawa. Those who are afraid of her are quite right to be cautious.’ He lowered his voice to match mine, as if we might be overheard. ‘You must appreciate that Mr Fuyuki favours sadists. Those with no concept of good or bad. His Nurse is there for her criminal brilliance, her absolute inability to empathize with her victims.’ He indicated the pile of papers. ‘If you spend time looking through these you will find her referred to by the popular press as the Beast of Saitama. For her methods she is a living myth in Japan, a subject of intense speculation.’
‘Her methods?’
He nodded, and squeezed his nose lightly, as if trying to suppress a sneeze or a memory. ‘Naturally,’ he said, dropping his hand and breathing out, ‘violence is a necessary part of life in the yakuza. Maybe it is not surprising, no, considering her sexual confusion, maybe it’s not altogether surprising the way she seems compelled to…’ his eyes wandered briefly to a point just above my head ‘… to embellish her crimes.’
‘Embellish?’
He didn’t answer. Instead he pursed his mouth and said, conversationally, ‘I haven’t seen her but I understand she is unusually tall?’
‘Some of the people in the club think she’s a man.’
‘Nevertheless she is a woman. A woman with a – I don’t know the word in English – a disorder of the skeleton, maybe. But, enough of that. Let us not speculate our morning away.’ He looked at me very carefully. ‘I need to know. Are you quite sure you want to continue?’
I moved my shoulders, a little shudder going down my back. ‘Well,’ I said eventually, rubbing my arms, ‘well, actually, yes. That’s the thing, you see – this is the most important thing in my life. I’ve been doing it for nine years and eight months and twenty-nine days, and I’ve never even once thought about giving it up. Sometimes I think it annoys people.’ I thought about this for a moment, then looked up at him. ‘Yes. It does. It annoys people.’
He laughed and gathered up the papers. While he was returning them to the portfolio he noticed a photograph that had been hiding at the bottom of the pile. ‘Ah,’ he said casually, pulling it free from the stack. ‘Ah, yes. I wonder if you’d be interested in this.’ He slid it across the table, his long brown hand half covering the image. I could see an official stamp in the top right corner, the kanji for ‘Police Departme
nt’, and under his hand a grainy black-and-white image. I saw what I thought looked like police tape, a car with its boot open. There was something in the boot, something I couldn’t recognize, until Shi Chongming lifted his hand and I understood.
‘Oh,’ I said faintly, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand. It felt like having all the blood drained from my head in one sweep. The picture showed an arm – a human arm with an expensive watch on it, hanging lifelessly out of the boot. I’d seen similar pictures of mob victims in the university library, but it was what lay under the exhaust pipe of the car that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. Arranged almost ritualistically, coiled like a boa constrictor, was a pile of… ‘Are they…’ I said faintly ‘… are they what I think they are? Are they human? Are they his?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that what you meant by… embellish?’
‘Yes. It’s one of Ogawa’s crime scenes.’ Calmly he put his finger on the photo and pulled it across the table. ‘One of the crimes attributed to the Beast of Saitama. The rumour is that on first glance at the body, the police could see no clear way that the – the internals had been removed. It is a source of amazement to me, really it is, the level of ingenuity that mankind, or womankind, can reach when dealing in cruelty.’ He pushed the photo back and began tying the portfolio with the battered black ribbon. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t waste time looking at Shen Nong’s classifications if I were you.’
I looked up, blinking at him, my face numb. ‘I’m – I’m sorry?’
‘I said don’t waste time with Shen Nong’s classifications. It’s not a plant you’re looking for.’
23
I had stopped sleeping. The photograph in Shi Chongming’s portfolio kept waking me, infecting my thoughts, making me wonder how far I was prepared to go to please him. And when it wasn’t the Nurse’s ‘embellishments’, it was Jason who agonized me and kept my skin electric and uncomfortable against the sheets at night. Sometimes, on the occasions when he appeared where I least expected him, in the corridor outside my room, or at the bar when I got up to find a clean glass, watching me in silence with his calm eyes, I told myself he was teasing me – performing an elaborate pas de deux for his own amusement, dancing round me in shadowy places in the house, a harlequin slithering down the corridor in the night. But sometimes, particularly when he watched me as we all walked home from the club at night, I had the sense he was trying to look deeper – trying to see under my clothes. Then I’d get the usual horrible sensation in my stomach, and I’d have to belt my coat tighter, turn up the collar, cross my arms and walk faster, so that he fell away behind me, and all I had to think about were the caustic comments coming from the twins.
The house seemed to get lonelier and lonelier. One morning, a few days after I’d visited Shi Chongming, I woke early and lay on my futon listening to the silence, acutely conscious of the rooms stretching away from me in every direction, the clicking floorboards and unswept corners, full of secrets and maybe unexpected deaths. Locked-off rooms that no one alive had ever been inside. The others were still asleep, and suddenly I couldn’t bear the silence any longer. I got up, had breakfast of Chinese duck-pears and strong coffee, then put on a linen dress, gathered up my notepads, my kanji books, and carried everything down into the garden.
It was an unusually warm, motionless day – almost like summer. One of those mid-autumn mornings when the sky was so clear you almost feared to let go of belongings for the chance that they could be whisked straight up into the blue, disappearing for ever. I’d never imagined Japanese skies to be so clear. The steamer chairs were still there, surrounded by soggy mounds of cigarette ends where the Russians had sat gossiping in the summer. I put all my stuff down on one and turned to look round. Next to the old pond I could see the remains of a path – ornamental stepping-stones winding away into the undergrowth towards the closed-off rooms. I took a few steps along it, my arms out as if I was balancing. I followed it round the pond, past the lantern and the stone bench, into the area that Shi Chongming had found so fascinating. I got to the edge of the undergrowth and stopped, looking down at my feet.
The path continued into the trees, but in the centre of the stepping-stone I’d stopped at was a single white stone, fist-sized and tied like a gift in rotting bamboo. In a Japanese garden everything is coded and arcane – a stone placed on a stepping-stone was a clear signal to guests: Do not go any further. This is private. I stood for a while staring at it, wondering what it was hiding. The sun went behind a cloud and I rubbed my arms, suddenly cold. What happens when you break the rules in a place where you don’t belong? I took a breath and stepped over the stone.
I paused, expecting something to happen. A small bird with long trailing wings lifted off the ground and settled in one of the trees above, but otherwise the garden was silent. The bird sat there, seeming to watch me, and for a while I stared back at it. Then, conscious of its gaze on me, I turned and continued through the roots and shadows to the closed-off wing until I found myself at the wall where I could look along the length of the house at all the firmly barricaded windows twined with creepers. I stepped over a fallen branch and stood close to one of the security grilles, the baked metal making my skin warm. I put my nose up to it and I could smell the dust and mould of the closed-off rooms. The basement was supposed to be flooded and dangerous. Jason had been in there once, months ago, he had told us. There were piles of rubbish and things that he didn’t want to look at too closely. Pipes had cracked in earthquakes and some of the rooms were like underground lakes.
I turned back to the garden, thinking of Shi Chongming’s words: Its future is waiting to be uncovered. Its future is waiting to be uncovered. I had the oddest feeling. The feeling that the future of this garden was focused specifically on the area I was standing in: the area around the stone lantern.
24
Nanking, 14 December 1937, midday
The truth is emerging on the radio. It is not good. Yesterday, after the explosion of Zhongshan gate, it seems the IJA poured through two openings in the city wall. I was lucky to escape in time. During the afternoon they moved into the city, bringing their tanks, their flame-throwers, their howitzers. By nightfall the Japanese had captured every government building in Nanking.
When we heard this Shujin and I hung our heads. We didn’t speak for a long time. Eventually I got to my feet, switched off the radio and put my hands on her shoulders.
‘Don’t worry. It will all be over before our b-’ I hesitated, looking down at her head, at the thick dark hair, the vulnerable stripe of white skin along the parting. ‘It will be over before little moon arrives. We’ve enough food and water for more than two weeks. And besides,’ I took a breath and tried to sound reassuring and calm, ‘the Japanese are civilized. It won’t be very long before we are told it is safe to return to the streets.’
‘Our future is our past and our past is our future,’ she whispered. ‘We already know what will happen…’
We already know what will happen?
Maybe she is right. Maybe all truths are in us at birth. Maybe for years all we do is swim away from what we already know, and maybe only old age and death allow us to swim back, back to something that is pure, something unchanged by the act of surviving. What if she is right? What if everything is there already – our fate, and our loves, and our children to be? What if they are all in us from the day we are born? If that is so then I already know what is going to happen in Nanking. I just need to reach for that answer…
Nanking, 15 December 1937, midnight (the thirteenth day of the eleventh month)
Ha! Look at us now. Just one short day later and all my confidence is exhausted. Shujin, my clairvoyant, did not foresee this! The food is gone. At about one o’clock this morning we heard a sound in the front courtyard. When I crept to the shutters to look I saw two boys in shabby clothes dragging the sorghum sack and the strings of meat over the wall. They had thrown down a rope and were clambering up it. I
shouted and ran down the stairs, grabbing up the iron bar and bellowing at them in rage, but by the time I had unbolted the door and raced out into the street, clattering among livestock braces and overturning old water barrels, they had disappeared.
‘What is it?’ Shujin appeared in the doorway, wearing a long nightgown. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and she was holding an oil lamp. ‘Chongming? What’s happened?’
‘Ssssh. Hand me my coat, then go back inside and lock the doors. Don’t open them until I return.’
I slipped between the abandoned houses and scrubland until I reached the Lius’ street. His was the only inhabited house in his alley, and as I turned the corner I saw the three of them outside the house, milling around in the watery moonlight. Liu’s wife was crying, and his son was standing at the head of the alley, facing out into the street, iron-legged, trembling with fury. He was holding a wooden cart shaft straight in front of him as if ready to strike someone. I knew even before I approached that the family had suffered the same fate as us.
They took me into the house. Liu and I lit a pipe and sat near the coal-burning stove to keep warm, with the door to the alley standing open because his son insisted on staying a few feet from it, in the street-squat position the young find so natural, with his knees near his shoulders like bony wings. The shaft lay at his feet, ready to be snatched up. His eyes were intent, as fierce as a tiger’s, fixed on the street at the top of the alley.
‘We should have left the city a long time ago,’ Liu’s wife said bitterly, turning away from us. ‘We’re all going to die here.’
We watched her retreat, and soon we could hear muffled weeping from a room at the back. I shot an embarrassed look at Liu, but he sat, expressionless, looking through the doorway over the roofs to where, in the distance, a grey pall of smoke blotted out the stars. It was only the flickering pulse in his neck that gave away his feelings.
