Water Touching Stone is-2

by Eliot Pattison

  "I don't think so. I think Sui had them himself."

  Xu rose and slowly walked behind him. He braced himself but did not look back. She reappeared holding one of the wooden slats and sat again.

  "I thought Bao might pursue the other theory," Shan suggested impassively. Xu's eyebrows rose in inquiry. "That Lau and Sui ran away together. Secret lovers, maybe. Or perhaps they both drowned, valiantly trying to save a copy of the Chairman's speeches that had fallen into the river."

  Xu's eyes smoldered. She slapped the stick lightly in her palm, as if gauging its balance. "My chief investigator and Lieutenant Sui were friends. Sui would come here and wait for him sometimes by the stairs, at the end of the day." Shan glanced at the door. The bald man would be there, in the lobby, while Sui waited, listening to what Sui said. Perhaps, Shan thought, Xu's real investigator was the quiet, unobtrusive bald man. "Sui boasted a lot. He bought a new television, a new radio, a Japanese vacuum cleaner. He was going to buy a new car soon."

  Shan stared at her. "The streets are paved with gold in Yoktian. You don't even have to be in the Brigade to get rich. But especially the Brigade. Comrade Ko, he's so rich he can give his sports car to Bao."

  "Bao? Impossible. Complete opposites. They barely speak to one another. I've heard them argue in meetings. Ko says Bao is too rooted in the old economy. Bao says Ko does not sufficiently appreciate what the state has done for him."

  "But he did," Shan said. "Should be simple enough to verify. A bright red car in a dull grey town." Xu's eyes stared intensely on the wooden slat, as if it might explain why Ko would do such an unlikely thing.

  "Ko doesn't make enough in five years to buy such a car," she said slowly, speaking to the slat.

  "But now he has announced he will buy another one, to take Loshi for a ride."

  Xu looked up, her face clouded. "Loshi?" Xu asked, then nodded as if she had remembered that Shan had spoken with Loshi when he had visited the first time. Her hands became busy, playing with the slat, shifting it from one hand to the other. Then she abruptly laid it on the table and clasped her hands over it. "It's the bonuses," she said in a low voice.

  "Bonuses?"

  "You saw the memorandum from Ko. Economic incentives. It's the new world, comrade." Xu sounded unconvinced. "The market economy comes to Yoktian. Blend the best of capitalism with the tenets of socialism."

  "Must be the Chinese characteristics that confuse me," Shan said with an exaggerated shrug, completing the slogan. It had been painted, bannered, and chiseled throughout China for years. Build for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. He stared down at his own hands. "But Ko was just talking about disc players for students and teachers."

  "There's more. It's the Brigade. They're so infected with capitalism," she said bitterly. "Bonuses to workers for achieving special goals."

  "Special goals?"

  "Bring in unregistered sheep, fifty renminbi. Bring in unregistered herders to be converted to Brigade employees, five hundred renminbi. Bring in unlicensed religious practitioners to be screened and licensed, three thousand, half in cash, half in Brigade shares."

  "A bounty." Shan spat the word like a curse. Three thousand renminbi was more than a year's wage for many inhabitants of the region.

  "Economic incentives. To help the growth of enterprise," Xu said in a hollow voice.

  Shan placed his face in his hands, elbows on the table. What was it Marco had said that first day at Karachuk? The worker's paradise just keeps getting better and better. "Who," he asked in a taut voice, looking up, "who is eligible for this honor?"

  "Only the Brigade, at first. They're a private company, they can spend their money as they wish."

  "You said, at first."

  "A month ago, it changed. General Rongqi is very influential, expected to be the head of the Brigade in another year. He arranged a telephone call with Ko and me, and Public Security. Bao couldn't attend so he sent Sui. The general asked that key enforcement officials in Yoktian be permitted to participate in his program. I refused. I said Ministry of Justice workers don't accept bribes. It was lucky that Bao was not on the call. Bao would have been furious."

  But Sui had secretly accepted the invitation, Shan realized. And Bao, however angry he might have been at Rongqi's suggestion, had also eventually joined the program. Everyone had their price. Bao had gotten involved, not as Sui's superior, but as Sui's competitor. Bao would never have investigated Sui's murder if he himself were Sui's killer. But that didn't explain why Ko had surrendered his car to Bao.

  Xu sighed. "Rongqi argued that having all of us join would help accelerate the Poverty Eradication Scheme, he said. The government supports the Brigade, and it's all Brigade money anyway."

  "In some places, Comrade Prosecutor, it seems the Brigade is the government. Just without all the rules."

  The comment seemed to wound Xu. Her head bent into her hands. "You know how campaigns work, Comrade Shan," she said sourly. "Two steps forward, one step back."

  She had spoken his name. It confused him.

  "You have no theory," she said. "You think everyone in government is guilty, is that it?" But her voice wasn't accusing, it was resentful. "Because of what the government did to you."

  They were silent a long time. From outside, in the square, came the sound of a harsh voice over a public address system, announcing a curfew.

  "Why have you been here so long, Comrade Prosecutor?" he asked at last. "Twelve years in Yoktian, it's a lifetime."

  "I make a difference here," she said woodenly. "We've made historic progress."

  Xu was a different woman, Shan saw, when the almost constant flame of her anger burned away. The Jade Bitch wasn't made of stone. She was made of gristle, tough, indigestible gristle, that bore the marks of having been chewed on for many years.

  "I want to go upstairs," he said, to see what would happen. "To the records room."

  "No!" she snapped, and stood. The audience was ending. She took a step toward the door, then turned with an unexpected look of regret. "That tape. The videotape I made of you that day. It's missing. Someone took it."

  "Miss Loshi? You mean, the Brigade has it?"

  "I don't know. Ko has asked questions about you. I said that you were a state secret."

  Shan looked into his hands. "What's the bounty on secret videos these days?"

  Xu's frown seemed to grow. She moved out through the door, the bald man ahead of her, checking the lobby. But before she disappeared she spun about to face Shan as he stood in the door of the interrogation cell. "The general expanded the program," she said hurriedly. "Five thousand bonus for those who can bring in orphans. But only if they're brought in by the end of this week."

  "The end of the week?" Shan asked in alarm. It had a macabre sound. A sale on orphan boys.

  "That's when he comes. General Rongqi is coming to Yoktian. For a final banquet, to celebrate the final stage of the Poverty Eradication Scheme." She spun about and had already put one foot in the lobby when he called her name.

  "There is a way," he said with difficulty, not wanting to believe his own words. "A way to understand what's happening."

  She stepped back and let the door close.

  "Ask the general. Call his office to negotiate. Ask what you would get."

  Get?

  "Ask what the bounty is for bringing in a Jade Basket," Shan said, and he explained Rongqi's hunt for the Yakde Lama.

  ***

  Outside, trucks with knobs were moving down the street. Worried faces looked from windows. A dog looked up at a truck and ran away, tail between its legs. Shan walked quickly back to the restaurant, as fast as he dared. The knobs were always interested in people who ran.

  But the back door was locked when he reached the building. He nervously ventured back onto the street and tried the front door. Locked. A black car, perhaps a surveillance unit, turned the corner and approached from two blocks away. He ducked back into the alley. There was a fenced area behind the restaurant, a small yard
of compacted dirt enclosed by a six-foot-high wall of mud bricks. Against the back wall was a pen of chickens and a small shed with a door that hung partially open. He ventured toward it cautiously, remembering the cellar and how the Maos would prefer refuges with hidden escape routes.

  As he swung the door open he heard running footsteps behind him. But as he turned something heavy hit his skull. He fell to his knees as the objects in the yard blurred, then there was blackness.

  Shan regained consciousness in a new blackness, a small dark place that stank of nightsoil. Fighting the throbbing in his head, he explored with his hands and found that he was lying on a slippery cement pad, indented like a bowl, with a four inch hole in the center. A toilet.

  Dim light came up from the hole, meaning, he knew, that it opened to the outside, and under it was a short barrel into which waste dropped, to be hauled away to the fields. He tried to stand but was overcome with dizziness and only made it to his knees. His head throbbed in two places now, where he had just been hit on the back of his skull and from his temple, where he had fallen in the sandstorm. He pushed with his hands on either side of his head, kneeling, bent over, gasping for breath through the filthy stench. Gradually the dizziness faded and, still on his knees, he explored his cell, finding a single faucet in the center of the adjacent wall, a metal bucket below it, and a door in the opposite wall, only five feet away. In a corner by the door was a pile of towels, stinking of mildew. He pushed one against his nose, preferring its odor to the almost overpowering stench of the nightsoil.

  It wasn't a knob cell, at least not an official knob cell. He had been lax, too absorbed with the questions in front of him to pay attention to anything behind him. It could have been certain knobs acting unofficially. It could have been Bao, or even Xu, with second thoughts about their strange relationship. He sat in the darkness, not in fear but in disgust, disgust that he had come so far and still did not know who his real enemy might be.

  But when the door opened it revealed the Maos. Fat Mao and the two others from the cellar, with Jowa hanging behind him in a kitchen. The kitchen. He was in the restaurant. They had thrown him in the toilet of the restaurant.

  A lightbulb switched on, and Shan threw his hands to shield his eyes as the pain flared again. As he did so something hard pushed his hands away, and he fell backward into the toilet again. He looked to see the large Mao, Ox Mao, standing over with him with a short, thick board. Shan wondered absently if he had splinters in his scalp.

  "You went to the prosecutor," Ox Mao grunted. "You sneaked out like a thief, back to your protector. Your Han friend." He slapped the stick lightly against Shan's arm, as if to make sure Shan had noticed it.

  Shan bit his lip as the pain surged through his skull once more. He seemed to be unable to keep his head straight. It kept wanting to tilt and drop down onto his chest.

  They had said he might have had a concussion in the sandstorm. Now there might be two concussions. He had seen men die that way in the gulag, after being beaten repeatedly. Something would build inside their skulls that would just explode. They would squirm on the floor, making animal sounds, holding their heads, and then they would die.

  Ox Mao swung the board toward him but stopped before hitting him. He tossed the board from hand to hand, then swung again, getting closer. When he swung a third time Shan caught it, jerked it out of his hand before he could react, and stuffed it down the toilet hole. "My head," he said, and heard anger in his voice. "My head hurts enough."

  His vision was blurred at the edges. He saw Fat Mao put a hand on Ox Mao's arm. He saw the stout woman step forward. Carrying a pan of dirty dishwater, she squeezed in by Ox Mao and threw it in Shan's face.

  "You Chinese," she said with poison on her tongue. "You killed my two sons."

  Shan licked the water that dropped onto his lips. His throat had become so dry he could not swallow. Ox Mao was in the kitchen now, rummaging through cooking utensils. The Maos, a voice said in the back of his mind, had been trained in interrogation technique by the best. The knobs.

  "Either you're working with Xu," Ox Mao said, reappearing with a heavy wood instrument that looked as if it were used to mash vegetables, "or you're incredibly stupid. Either way you're a danger to us."

  "I came from Tibet," Shan heard some part of him say. His eyes seemed to be rolling about in his skull. He tried to look at Jowa, but the Tibetan seemed unwilling to make eye contact with him. "The lamas."

  Ox Mao seemed not to have heard. "Xu killed Sui," he hissed. "Maybe she killed the others too. It's all about her power. More crimes, more arrests. More arrests, more glory. More glory, more power."

  "I thought they called you Ox because you're so big," another part of Shan said. "Now I see it's because you have the brain of an ox."

  The big Kazakh cursed and raised his new weapon. As if in slow motion Shan raised his arms over head, then another hand appeared and touched Ox Mao's arm.

  "He said that his head hurts." It was Jowa. "Why did you go to Xu?" he asked Shan in a faltering voice.

  Ox Mao uttered a sound like a snarl, but lowered his hand.

  "Xu and Sui," Fat Mao said, looking from the Kazakh to Jowa, then to Shan. "They were riding together in the days before Sui was killed. They were at Glory Camp together. Sui didn't have a car when he died. He was riding with someone. It must have been Xu. She killed him to create a reason to eliminate all of us."

  Shan sat up against the corner of the toilet, folding his knees to his chest. "Xu doesn't kill people," he said in a thin voice, gasping every few seconds. "She disgraces them. She imprisons them. She breaks them. Killing-" he said, and grabbed his stomach as a wave of nausea swept over him. "She doesn't need to."

  "I thought you saw the cemetery at Glory Camp," Fat Mao said with a chill.

  Shan tried to nod but the effort made his head explode with pain. "She doesn't kill people with guns," he conceded. "But Sui," he groaned, "Sui was killed by a competitor." Although he had not even formed the thought in his own mind until that instant, he knew he was right.

  No one seemed to have heard him. Ox Mao was glaring at Jowa, Fat Mao was looking at each of the two men in turn. Jowa seemed to size the two Maos up, and took a step back.

  Ox Mao turned with a satisfied grin. "You're going to tell us, tell us all about you and Xu." But as he took a step forward, a toe of a boot appeared in his groin and an arm suddenly appeared around his throat. The big Kazakh collapsed with a groan, falling back on the floor, and a figure flew past Fat Mao, who stood with his mouth open, as if trying to understand what had happened.

  The figure stood in front of Shan now, shouting, facing the Maos and Jowa. "It's all you know, isn't it? Violence. Fighting. But you never know who your fight is with!" Jakli had returned from making hats. Her fury seemed a tangible thing. Her hands clenched and unclenched, like a tiger extending its claws. The stout woman appeared and pulled Ox Mao back into the kitchen, shaking her head.

  Jakli bent over him, then grabbed one of the towels, moistened it under the faucet and wiped his brow. "I never should have gone," she said with a remorseful tone and helped him to his feet. "The gates were locked."

  She took command. She arranged the Maos on one side of the table in the kitchen, found a coat for Shan to wear, told him to remove his soiled clothes, and dispatched the stout woman with them to be cleaned.

  Jowa brought Shan a cup of fresh water, then found him a mug of hot tea. "I was going to-" he said to Jakli, but left his sentence unfinished. Jakli looked at him, and he hung his head. "How are we supposed to know?" the purba asked her, in a voice taut with pain.

  "Know?" she asked tersely. "You come all this way because of Shan, and you don't know what to do?"

  "No," Shan said. His vision was rapidly clearing. "Jowa came because of the lamas, not because of me. What we have to do is written nowhere. He has reason to be confused. I am confused." He pulled out the chair beside him, inviting the Tibetan to sit. "But not as confused as I was."

  "Wh
at do you mean?" Jakli asked.

  "I had to talk to Xu, I have to understand where she is in this. She told me something that makes me believe Sui was killed by someone over money, a competitor."

  "There is only one lieutenant assigned to Bao," Fat Mao said with a frown. "Sui had no competitor."

  "Not a competitor for rank," Shan said. "For bounty." He swallowed more of the tea and explained what Xu had told him.

  "The bastards," Fat Mao muttered when Shan finished. "They're unaccountable to anyone. It's not even about their socialism anymore. Just money."

  "They can be accountable to us," Ox Mao grunted.

  Jakli seemed to recognize the glint in the big Kazakh's eye and held up her palm as though to stop him. "Nothing. Don't do anything. Not until all the boys are safe."

  "But you heard him," Ox Mao said with a conspiratorial nod toward Shan, as if he had decided to forget the episode in the toilet. "The general comes in a few days."

  Shan looked at Jakli. The general was coming. The boys were being stalked. But the clans were gathering. One last time, the clans were gathering. And Jakli had to get to a new life.

  The stout woman returned with Shan's clothes, still damp, and began cooking a meal for them. When he dressed and reappeared, she inspected him with a matronly air. Seeing dirt on his shoe, she rubbed it with her dish rag. It was her way of apologizing, Shan knew, and he accepted her hospitality with quiet nods as they started the meal, the woman serving Shan first.

  When they had finished Fat Mao rose and pulled folded papers from a jacket hanging on the wall. "That truck driver," he announced, "the one who found Sui." He pushed the papers across the table to Shan. "We realized Sui had no money on him. We had the man's license number, so we tracked him down in Kashgar. After a couple of hours of persuasion he admitted stealing the money, but said he spent it all in a bar in Kotian. About a dozen drinks and a particularly enthusiastic mai chun nu." The phrase meant girl selling spring. A prostitute. "But when he grabbed the cash he grabbed some papers with it. He was glad to get rid of them, said they scared him when he finally read them."