Citizen One (25 page)

“Breathe too loud and it will be the last breath that you fucking take.”

The Senior Investigator into his other ear.

“I would listen to what he is saying. He has been very stressed lately.”

Sweat across the Security Officer’s fat pork face.

“Where is the
a-yi
?”

“In the kitchen.”

Searching him. A knife. A pistol, its butt well worn with violent use.

“Where is the kitchen?”

“Last door on the left down the hallway.”

“Anyone else in the residence?”

Nothing. Another deep, scraping prod.

“I asked if there was anyone else in the residence?”

“No.”

Moving to the woman in shadow. Blind to the CCTV.

“We need to talk, in private, off the record …”

“Off the record? Is anything ever ‘off the record’ with the PSB, with you Sun Piao?”

“You have a basement or a lockable room without windows for these and the
a-yi
.”

“And if I do not tell you, Sun, what will you do, break my arm? Treat me as you have treated him?”

Her eyes, just an instant, moving to the fat Security Officer. Blood across his ear and the collar of his shirt. The barb of her words hitting home. That she should even think of him in that way. But perhaps such violence had always lain at the horizon of his vision? The final refuge from words.

“Just tell me and tell me now.”

In his eyes something that she had not seen before. Something of the street. Some ugly remnant of the
Ankang
.

“There’s a basement at the bottom of the main staircase.”

Yaobang prodding the Security Officers down the double flight of stairs to the windowless basement. A jangle of large keys against thickly-painted wood. The woman and the child with Piao moving down the red-carpeted hallway to the kitchen. Everywhere boxes, packing cases. Negotiating them in silence. Into the kitchen, a scream, muffled, calmed. A pot falling to floor. The woman leading the
a-yi
by her elbow to the Big Man in the basement. For some minutes the child left with Piao in the kitchen. A boy, small, pale, but with his mother’s cold beauty. Not an endearing look, but one that snared the eyes with its perfection. The child regarding the Senior Investigator with a serious unblinking and unsettling gaze, making Piao think of his dirty shoes, the hole in his sock, the black moon crescents of dirt underneath his fingernails. That a child could do this, disconcerting. With haste the woman who was still his wife, returning. A protective arm thrown around the child’s shoulders as if to save him from some un-named but terrible threat. For the Senior Investigator, the pain not diminished.
Nemma bai nemma pang
. He should be my baby, my child. The same thought perhaps striking her?

“We need to talk. I think that you should put the child to bed.”

“His name is Kang, the same name that his father had.”

Piss and pressed suits. The septuagenarian Politburo member whose bed she had warmed. Whose shrivelled cock she had hardened to sculpt a better life for herself, far removed from poverty. Away from a Senior Investigator who could only offer the fickle notions and impracticalities of love.

“I know his father’s name when I hear it. Put the child to bed. Now.”

Stairs of solid hardwood, as dark as bitter chocolate. Silk-hung walls studded with paintings, originals. Flowers by the ‘Jading Intimists’, Wang Shimin and Wang Yuanqi. A landscape by Yun Shouping. Painted using the ‘four treasures of the artist’: ink stone, ink stick, water pourer, brush. On the landings ornate alcoves with treasured items of porcelain. Famille rose, blooms of pink, ‘dusted’ by the craftsman’s very breath. Colour blown onto the object with the aid of a bamboo tube sealed with a piece of gauze. But mainly noticing the boxes filled with tissue wrapped objects. Everywhere boxes as if someone were moving away. Not a panicked move, not a running away, but a planned, organised withdrawal. Care taken, time invested.

On the first floor, the child’s bedroom. Through the window, ink sea and sky, in a continuous wash. Watching as she cared for the child, prepared him for night’s voyage. A kiss. The child watching her shadow decrease as they moved from the room. His universe, and she the only thing within it.

Her bedroom was large. A woman’s room, softly vulnerable. On an antique dressing-table, a cluster of silver and gold framed photographs. Each photograph of her, Lingling, arm-linked with a man. Each man, arm-linked with power; a member of the Politburo, a captain of industry, a provincial leader, a government minister.

Double doors led onto a balcony. The night alive with the sound of sea, invisible waves breaking themselves onto an invisible beach. Curtains billowing in a night-breeze tinged with camphor wood fires and the perfume of jasmine. On the large satin-sheathed bed, beaded Indian pillows, Thai silk pillows. On the wall above the bed, another Yun Shouping original. Its worth enough to keep Piao and the whole of the
fen-chu
in Tsingtaos for the next ten years. But the only thing truly catching his attention, against the far wall, more boxes. More tissue paper waiting to wrap memories in their soft folds. On the top layer of the box, half-wrapped, a small solid antique silver frame containing a photograph of Lingling and the child … the family that could, should have been his. Between them, a striking-looking man, pristine in every way. One arm around Lingling’s shoulders, his other hand on the boy’s head. The long, soft, gold-ringed fingers of a
cadre
through the child’s hair. Even after so long surprised by the deep brand of pain. Pushing it down, as he had always done. Pushing it down.

When he looked up, she had sat on the edge of the bed, her beach sarong falling open showing her legs. Honey-hued grains of sand in static waves across her calves. Hardly able now to remember the times that he had run his hands up the silky smoothness of her legs, his lips following in an eager breathlessness, to where inner thigh met inner thigh in a salt sweet kiss. Hardly able to remember anything about how they had been together, except pain. Yes, pain. Remembering that. The first memory, the last memory.

“
Ankang
.”

She smiled reaching for a bowl of lychees. Scarlet manicured talons plucking from gold, rose, tan. Her other hand fending off the word as if it were disgusting to her.

“I will talk of no such thing.”

“I need to know, and you should tell me because …”

“Why, because I am still your wife?”

“Yes, my wife.”

The lychees soft flesh to her lips.

“In name only, Sun. And marriage is more than just a shared name, or had you not realised that?”

From the inner sanctum of her mouth, the lychee’s stone.

“You will get no answers here. Am I am supposed to thank you, Sun, for scaring me, my child? Waving your pistol around in front of us. To thank you for entering my house on the pretext of asking me questions?”

Dropping the lychee stone to the carpet, knowing that it would anger him. A man, Sun Piao, who would always think of those who would have to labour and clean up the mess of others.

“I thought that you had come to kill us.”

Piao, moving to the window. In pale reflection, his face, a creation of darkness.

“You can think such things of me?”

She did not answer.

“Why I am here, it is not about who we once were. That is in the past …”

“In the past, Sun? You are sure of this, in the past?”

The intense darkness of her gaze piercing him.

“There are many questions that I need answered. I will ask you these here. If you do not answer them, I will ask you them again in Shanghai, in the
fen-chu
.”

“If only you had been so strong when you were truly my husband, Piao. But you overestimate your authority in such a place as this. In Beidaihe you are one investigator in a sea of those who do whatever they wish. You may pass for clever amongst those who you normally investigate, who live in the
longs
and who smell of the gutter, but in my world, with the kind of people with whom I associate and call my friends, you are merely naïve.”

Smiling, but not her eyes. Never her eyes.

“In the
zhau-dai-suo
next door, beyond the trees, is a member of the Central Committee. He walks on the beach with me and talks about how little his wife enjoys sex. Beyond that, the
zhau-dai-suo
near the headland. That belongs to an esteemed government minister. They have three Red Flags and four
a-yis
. I play
mah-jongg
with his wife and she talks with tears running down her face of the young boys that he likes to play more intimate games with. The two
zhau-dai-suo
beyond the hill. The Provincial Head and the home of his Deputy. I shop with their wives and their mistresses. I have influential friends, Sun. You would not get me within 100 miles of a
fen-chu
.”

Piao standing, not knowing what to do with his arms, with his feet. Feeling put in a place stinking of piss and vomit, and knowing that he belonged and would never leave there. Not a life of silks, of views that caress the senses, of painted originals, of the smells that come in gold-topped bottles. No, not a life like this one.

“I will answer only what I want to answer.”

Thinking even as she spoke that, ‘those who sacrifice their conscience for ambition, burn a picture to obtain the ashes’.

“
Ankang
, you had me released?”

Silence.

“The questions that I am asking you are a part of my investigation into murders. Many murders. Friends in important places can provide powerful
guan-xi
. But friends in high places do not wish to be associated with murder.”

A step closer.

“My release from
Ankang
coincided with this investigation. It all dovetailed too neatly for it to be a coincidence. You had me released from
Ankang
which tells me that you are somehow linked to these murders.”

She still smiling, but in her eyes calculations, balances, a weighing-up.

“
Ankang
. Yes, I was influential in your release.”

“Why?”

Silence. Just the sea. Just his heart.

“Why?”

“There was no reason. It was just something that I did.”

“No, Lingling. You are a person who always has an agenda.”

She shrugged.

“It is not like that, Sun.”

“It is not? Look at the facts. Two Comrade Officers crucified and played over with an oxy-acetylene torch. An old comrade, a vagrant, decapitated. Three young women, slashed to death by cut-throat razors. A fourth left for dead in the Wusong. A young woman raped. Her throat cut, as if she were a sow to be roasted. Buried in a hole that was filled with concrete …”

A step closer, his shadow falling across her.

“And into this I am released from
Ankang
. I repeat, what is your involvement?”

Next door a child crying. Instantly it calling her. In her breeze, perfume, sea, secrets. Lychees, shells, stones, falling to the floor. Piao on his knees picking up the debris. Her fingers, lips, across them. His wife, yet the closest that he had been to her in years. And in the act his anger wanting to dissipate. Needing to dilute itself.

Coming back into the bedroom, she smiled, noticing that he had cleared the debris from the floor.

“Always so neat, Sun. Almost compulsive. Obsessive. In your work also.”

And a whisper, an aside, lost to the night. Lost to Piao.

“Such obsession. It will cause the death of you.”

Moving to the balcony. Across his face breezes from Africa, Russia, and India. Places that he would never visit.

“Your
a-yi
has a bent back, I just wanted to help her.”

Not hearing his words, not ever noticing the bend of her
a-yi’s
spine. She moved back into the room from the balcony.

“Why was I released from
Ankang
? The timing, it is too perfect. My first case, a tangle of PLA, state involvement, hidden agendas, and so many who life no longer possesses.”

“I thought that was how you liked your cases, Sun?”

“Do you have knowledge of the
tai zi
, Colonel Zhong Qi?”

Silence.

“Do you know this
cadre
?”

“Be careful my husband. It will not be so easy to resurrect you from
Ankang
next time.”

“What do you mean? Is this a threat, wife?”

Standing, pushing past him to the balcony. Moving with her, Piao into her ear, his whisper mixed with the sea’s voice. As if wanting nobody else in the universe to share it. Just her, just the breezes from far-pitched continents.

“Your dangerous games will bring about dangerous situations wife. This
tai zi
, this PLA, what do you know of him?”

Trying to move away, but his arms braced either side of her, snaring her hard against the balcony and his body. Feeling her ragged, torn breaths against his chest, at odds with the rhythmic exhalations of the sea.

“Just his name and that he is dangerous. Sun, he is very dangerous.”

Struggling against the wall of his body.

“All of these PLA are very dangerous. They care for nothing except their wealth, their power.”

“The same could be said of you wife.”

“No, they are different. They create another country within the People’s Republic. These are difficult times, very difficult times.”

“What do you mean? All of our times are difficult in this People’s Republic. Alive in the bitter sea, that is the fate of most of our comrades.”

Exhausted by the struggle, falling limp against him. Her words as a breeze too weak to hold the kite’s long-tailed flight.

“The Ministry of Security, it is … it is attempting to cut back on the PLA’s power. And also on the influence of the
tai zis
, on levels of corruption, drug trafficking, prostitution, the abduction of children.”

A fleeting dark-eyed glance towards the bedroom next door. A child, her child, so safe.

“But the Ministry is meeting strong resistance. To challenge the PLA in any fashion. To bring into question any actions of a
tai zi
at present. These are dangerous things, Sun.”