A Drop of Chinese Blood

by James Church

  After we were settled in the library, my uncle picked up a notebook from his desk, opened to a blank page, and began sketching plans for yet another bookcase. He had notebooks full of those sketches piled on the floor of his workshop, but there was always need for one more. I let him draw for a few minutes without interruption. The silence would do us good.

  “I’m on a journey of discovery,” he said at last. “I’m going to discover the perfect form, pure harmony. This is the sort of bookshelf they might have in Plato’s Republic. Whether it can be built, I don’t know, but at least it needs to be put on paper. Your great-grandfather never made a sketch of anything. Did you know that? Just built things from images in his head. Times were simpler then, not as much crowding the brain, no microwaves or cell phones upsetting the air.”

  “Ah, the peace of the past.” I sighed dramatically. It was bunkum, and he knew it. There was no sense arguing. “Unfortunately, we don’t live in such times anymore. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.” I thought over what he had said. “Where did you hear about Plato?”

  I was at my own desk going through the drawers looking for a pen. There was none in the first drawer. The second drawer was filled with stacks of wood chips. Whenever we got into a case, which hadn’t been in a while, my uncle would call for a wood chip, but not just any chip. He’d want something specific. “Elm,” he’d say. “We need to empty our minds, and this time of year there is nothing more vacuous in the forest than elm.” Later on, he’d call for something else, depending on where he thought things stood. “Oak,” he might say. “Very straightforward tree, nothing devious about it.”

  When we set up the office, a month or so after my uncle arrived, the drawer was a jumble of chips he’d brought in his suitcase. On our very first case together, the maiden voyage, things went badly. He had called for birch; that sticks in my mind for some reason. I handed him the first chip I found. He took it, closed his eyes, and sat back in his chair, swirling the wood with his fingers. Suddenly his eyes popped open. “When I say birch, I mean birch.” He had glared at me, his jaws working furiously. “This is Siberian elm, and I won’t have it.”

  For several nights after that, I sat up late sorting through the pile of wood chips and arranging them in stacks, doing my best to make sure they were labeled as correctly as I could manage, given that I didn’t know one type of tree from another. Trees had branches, and birds sat on them—that much I knew. In the end, there were eight stacks, plus a few exotic loners, gathered from whatever was in his workshop. If something new came in, I made arrangements.

  Now, searching for a pen, it occurred to me that I didn’t have chips from the new hardwood my uncle had brandished when Madame Fang came to call. If I’d had a pen, I would have made myself a note to remember.

  My uncle carefully drew lines on the paper in front of him, ignoring me. Finally he looked up. “I read Plato after I read Kafka. When I was on the mountain, the year after I quit my Ministry job, there was plenty of time to read. A doctor came up to visit occasionally. He brought books sometimes. Nice man. Your father visited once, too. Did you know?”

  “You hadn’t mentioned it.”

  “He did. He seemed distressed by my living arrangements. He thought they were too crude; I had a one-room cabin I built myself. I think he was trying to tell me that he had intervened on my behalf, but we ended up arguing, as we always did. It was the last time I saw him.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  My uncle pushed the paper aside. “Begin at the beginning, or don’t begin at all. I can’t offer advice on how to get out of a box unless I know how you got into it.”

  “Box?” I went on alert, sensing a possible breach in his defenses. “Box? I thought we needed to be consistent. What about the fish?”

  “Flopping at the bottom of the box.” He closed his eyes and sat back in his chair. “I’m listening.”

  7

  I glided through what Li had told me, which I had to admit was moderately fuzzy. Whatever I told my uncle had to be even fuzzier so I couldn’t be accused of leaking sensitive information, even if I really didn’t have much of an idea what it was. The main thing was to put just enough clarity into what I said to indicate where things were headed. My uncle had a finely honed sense of danger; it wouldn’t take much for him to realize how dangerous things were about to become. Everything was complicated by the fact that when I came right down to it, I didn’t know whether my uncle had severed all ties with his former colleagues across the river. Some discreet checking after he moved in led me in that direction, but it still wouldn’t be a surprise to learn he had a few links left. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did, but in that case, I would also have an unpleasant time explaining to Headquarters what I was doing with a still-active North Korean security type living in my house, uncle or no uncle.

  When I finished, my uncle looked up from the bookcase plans he’d been reviewing the whole time. Unusually, he hadn’t interrupted, hadn’t raised something extraneous, hadn’t even cocked an eyebrow.

  “It’s late,” was all he said, before giving me a bland look and going off down the hall to bed.

  I sat in the library for about ten minutes, then got up and went to the kitchen, where I fixed myself a bowl of noodles, read the paper, and tried not to think about fish or threads. The image of the hard strike operation—a lot of doors broken in and people chased down alleyways in their underwear—seemed even worse late at night, when everything was quiet. Two special squads from Headquarters would cause a lot of headaches, but that was nothing compared with what would happen if I pulled in the wrong visiting North Korean. It would help if someone would give us a list of people to stay away from, but no one would do that, not even Li’s sources. If a paper like that got into the wrong hands in Beijing, there would be too many questions about who was on the list and why. I thought about how Madame Fang had materialized at my front door, and then about her perfume. For some reason, that led me straight to tiny chocolate bricks. This was going nowhere good, so I gave up, walked softly to my bedroom, and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  Chapter Three

  The phone rang the next morning, well before seven o’clock. I had climbed out of bed early, as usual, and after a cup of tea was sitting in our office reception room library scrutinizing the newest collection of unpaid bills. In a grim attempt at humor, I was separating them into piles: to be paid soon; to be paid eventually; to be paid if the creditor could figure out how to reach me in the grave. When I picked up the receiver, a woman’s voice, trembling softly and betraying a slight touch of the Yunnan backcountry, inquired whether I was Inspector O.

  “I am not.”

  “May I speak to him?”

  My uncle did not accept calls unless I screened them. “I’m afraid he is unavailable at the moment.” Actually, he was sleeping, and there was no way I was going to wake him. He said he’d been up early his whole life, and that all it ever did was increase the amount of time during the day something could go wrong. When he moved to the mountain, he said, the birds woke him at dawn; there was no way to ignore the chatter of a bird in a pine tree. The only thing worse, he said, was two birds in a pine tree. “If you tell me what this is about, I’ll pass on the message. He’ll call you back later today or tomorrow at the latest.”

  “This is not something that can be discussed over the phone. I need an appointment. It has to be today. I can do it this evening, it doesn’t matter how late.”

  “Today is not good, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll pay. Will fifteen thousand yuan get me in the door?”

  “For fifteen thousand yuan, you get to take the door home. Let’s say two o’clock.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  At ten in the morning, I walked down the hall, out the side door, through the courtyard, and into my uncle’s workshop. By ten o’clock he was always dressed, in his workshop, looking at plans for bookshelves. If there was a chance of catching him in a decent mood, thi
s was it.

  “Good morning, uncle. You have a two o’clock appointment. We’re selling the front door for fifteen thousand yuan.”

  That got his attention. “A client? What do they want? Maybe I won’t take the case. I’m busy these days. Tell them I’m sick of blackmail cases.”

  If he was busy, I was the sultan of Brunei. “No, you’re not busy, and we’re about to starve unless you take this one. Don’t even contemplate passing it up.”

  “Why? You’ve lost your job? I knew it would happen sooner or later.”

  “No, I haven’t lost my job.” The image of Fu Bin tiptoeing into the file room flashed before my eyes. The Third Bureau front office must have told him to try everything possible to get me: malfeasance, dereliction of duty, abuse of office, excessive spitting. It was a matter of pride. The more they looked and couldn’t find anything, the more frustrated they must have become. That explained why Fu Bin kept poking around, treating other officers to drinks, undoubtedly trying to wheedle complaints out of them about me. Why he didn’t get me for spending time at Gao’s was a mystery, now that I thought about it. I never saw him at Gao’s, also a little odd. Everyone drifted there sooner or later. There wasn’t a lot else to do in Yanji.

  “Good,” my uncle said with obvious satisfaction as if he’d won an argument. “You’re still employed. Then tell the client to go away.”

  “Not on your life. We have debts. Our debts have debts. If we don’t start paying them off, we’ll be on the street. Us and all of these tools.”

  Before leaving with the cream puff prince, my wife had run up an enormous phone bill with calls to every capital city in the world, mostly to Bern. We didn’t know anyone in Bern, at least I didn’t. Later I found out that the prince was there at a swank hotel getting refresher training in wedding cake design. The phone bill wouldn’t have been that bad, but she also cleaned out my bank account and sold the house—without access to any sort of legal proof of ownership—to a real estate developer who had plans to knock down all the buildings in the neighborhood and build a condominium complex called Happy Meadows. The sale was illegal, and the developer knew it. He also knew people in high places who didn’t care about legal title or proof of ownership. It was costing me plenty of time and effort to keep the bulldozers at bay. I didn’t have the money to bribe anyone back to my side again. A nice gambling win would have helped, but that was a question of the odds, and my luck was running the wrong way lately.

  My uncle couldn’t understand why MSS Headquarters didn’t weigh in on my side. “All they have to do is send someone over to the developer’s office to break a piece or two of furniture,” he said whenever the subject came up. “Your people have forgotten how to break furniture?”

  He also didn’t understand how my wife had been able to rob me blind, but he knew it was a sensitive issue and rarely raised the subject. As it happened, he chose this moment to do so. “You let her lead you around by the nose, and all the while she was playing with someone else’s pastry?”

  “I was preoccupied.”

  “So it seems,” he said.

  “It’s pointless to talk about that now. What’s done is done. Water down the drain. She’s gone. Good riddance. Anyway, it’s only money.” It was a lot of money, some of it won during a rare lucky streak at Old Gao’s but most of it from a trip to Macau many years ago. I had kept it at home, since laundering it would have raised flags I didn’t want raised. I had thought a lot about what to do with the money; having my wife take it with her hadn’t been on my list of options.

  “Only money.” My uncle ran his fingers across the teeth of his Turkish saw. “Well, it’s your business, you’ll figure it out.” He didn’t think I’d figure it out; that much was obvious by his tone of voice. He cleared his throat. “You’re right. Money brings nothing but unhappiness. The worst cases I ever had to handle were about money. Sex came in a close second.”

  “What about this case?”

  “This case?” He picked up a pencil and prepared to redraw an old set of plans for bookcases with vertical shelves. “I don’t like the sound of it.”

  “What sound? The only sound so far is fifteen thousand yuan rustling in an envelope.”

  “Even so, I might not take it.”

  Take it or I’ll break your arm, I thought. I picked up a crowbar from against the wall and hefted it in my hand. Aloud I said pleasantly, “We’ll see. At least you can give her a hearing.”

  “Her? Where is she from?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t give anything away over the phone. From her voice, I’d say she is from Yunnan.”

  My uncle groaned. “Kunming,” he said more to himself than to me. “A woman from Kunming.” He groaned again.

  “Something happen to you in Kunming?”

  “Another time. Fix up the office so it’s less of a dump. If she has drug money, we’ll know soon enough. Drug people are fussy about room hygiene. Can’t you hang up next time?”

  At two o’clock, there was a knock on the front door. My uncle was at his desk in the office, reviewing drawings for three pairs of rolling bamboo bookshelves. They were part of a contract for an open-air library to be built on Hainan Island. He insisted that he couldn’t work under contract, but I had finally convinced him at least to submit a bid.

  I opened the door to a young woman, fashionably dressed, holding an embroidered handkerchief to her nose.

  “I didn’t realize you lived in an industrial area,” she said. The accent was even lighter in person than it was over the phone. “I hope you keep the windows closed. It smells like there is a rendering plant next door. Surely that’s illegal.”

  “Industrial area? You must mean the neighbors. They are fond of piglets, at least the husband is. He thinks they are good for his vitality. It leads to a lot of squealing.”

  The woman lowered the handkerchief and gave me a determined frown, though it didn’t detract from her many good features. “I’ve heard this neighborhood is up for redevelopment. It can’t happen too soon.” She put the handkerchief back over her nose, which was small, like a button. Her mouth, by contrast, was wide, with the result that the lower half of her face was mostly occupied. Her lips were the color of cherries—I’m no fan of clichés, but that’s what they were, the color of ripe cherries—and full. She was wearing a hat that made her look taller than she was, though I wouldn’t want to call her short even in her bare feet. Not that her feet were bare at the moment. They were in expensive shoes, probably handmade, probably from leather that could double as butter. Though it was a warm afternoon, she had on a long coat that must have cost multiples of what she had agreed to pay just to step into the house. The coat matched the color of her lips. A sudden craving for fruit came over me.

  “Are we going to do this interview on the front step?” This put a bit more of Yunnan in the air, but not much.

  “No, of course not.” For the second time in a week I had nearly left a beautiful woman standing outside. It was a bad habit that needed breaking. “Please, come in. May I take your coat?”

  Underneath she had on a short-sleeve bright yellow sheath, with a small gold brooch pinned on the left. The hemline was slightly above her knees, which were pretty good for knees. I’m trained to observe, and I can’t help doing it even off duty at my front door, looking at a beautiful woman. Other than the brooch, I noticed, she wasn’t wearing jewelry—no earrings, no necklace, no bracelet, and no rings. She didn’t need anything flashy, and she knew it.

  “If you’ll follow me to the office,” I said.

  My uncle was complaining to himself when we appeared at the door. “I doubt they even know how to read on Hainan,” he said, staring at the bid tender. “No one in his right mind makes bookcases out of split bamboo. What the hell sort of book sits on a bamboo shelf?”

  I knocked twice. “This is…” It dawned on me that I didn’t have a name to go with the lips.

  “Du Hwa,” the woman said. “I take it you are Inspector O.” She steppe
d into the room, which instantly improved the color scheme.

  “Please sit.” My uncle smiled at her. In a heartbeat, I was worried. He never smiled at clients right away, especially not women. I was only moderately reassured when he fell back into his regular client face. He once told me he put on that face at the beginning of a client meeting in order to communicate total control of the situation, whatever the situation was. This time, though, I sensed something was missing. The look on his face wasn’t that of a veteran investigator. The effect was more one of resignation, like a sea bass on realizing it has landed on a large plate covered in Kunming black bean sauce and scallions.

  The woman sat in the chair indicated. From outside the window there was a shriek and a brief squeal.

  “Our neighbor.” My uncle smiled again.

  “Was that the wife?” Miss Du looked vaguely alarmed.

  “No, that was the piglets,” I said, hoping to put things back on track. “The wife has a lower register.”

  The woman looked around the cluttered shelves. Her gaze lingered for a moment on the dead flowers. “Let’s dispense with further pleasantries, shall we?” From her purse she took a white envelope. “Here is the fee that we agreed would start the soup simmering.”

  I took this as some quaint Yunnan saying. Either that or she was planning to stay for lunch.

  “Very well, my nephew will count it later.” My uncle flashed me a count-it-twice look. “Now, Miss Du, why don’t you tell me the nature of your problem? Start at the beginning. Just be yourself; don’t try to sound like a police report. We’ll fill in the details once we establish the overall picture.”

  The woman sat demurely in the chair. Her lips held a cherrylike look of satisfaction. I had the feeling she recognized an old sea bass when she saw one.

  2

  “My father is in pieces.”