Paint It Black (16 page)

Farquier & Sons was one of the more prestigious department stores in London. It began by catering to the carriage trade over a century ago. The store's reputation rested on a royal commission it had landed during the Edwardian era and had yet to be updated - something involving spats. In any case, its clientele included movie stars and rock musicians, not to mention stockbrokers and MPs. Still, if anyone was to ask Mavis, she would tell them that the rich and famous treat public lavatories just like the hoi polloi. You'd be surprised how many couldn't bother to flush.

Still, mopping the jakes of the overprivileged had its definite perks. Like the time she found a pair of mink-lined gloves left next to the sink. Or the time she found close to twenty quid lying on the floor next to the second stall - no doubt it fell out of some rich twit's pocketbook. Most of them were so well off they'd never notice it was gone, or, if they did, would assume they'd dropped it while getting in or out of a taxi, not while they were taking a squat in a public bog.

Mavis wasn't really thinking about anything much that day except whether to warm up a tin of stew when she got home or pop for some takeout vindaloo, as she wheeled her mop and bucket into the ladies' lounge. It was towards the end of the business day and time for the third of the four scheduled daily cleanings. Farquier & Sons prided itself on the cleanliness of its 'lounges'.

At first she thought she was hearing things. It sounded like

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) a baby crying, only muffled. No doubt a child was crying out on the floor. Then she realized that the sound was coming from the litter bin next to the sinks.

Mavis flipped back the little metal hood and stared down into the cylinder. There, nestled amidst wadded-up brown paper towels and discarded tampons was a newborn infant, wrapped in a swaddling of newspaper, just like an order of fish and chips. The baby stopped crying and looked up at Mavis with eyes the color of marigolds and smiled at her.

'Merciful God!' Mavis gasped. 'You poor thing!' She set aside her mop and bucket and removed the top of the litter bin, reaching in to retrieve the child. There was a sound from behind her as the Home Secretary's wife entered the ladies'

lounge.

'Go and get the shopwalker!' Mavis barked.

The Home Secretary's wife looked first startled, then indignant, that she was being ordered about by a simple charwoman. 'I beg your pardon--?' she began to huff.

'I said, go and fetch the shopwalker! Someone's gone an'

left a baby in the bleedin' litter bin!'

The Home Secretary's wife blinked, her face going blank for a moment. 'Oh. Oh dear. Of course. I'll go and find him.'

Mavis chuckled to herself, taking a moment's pleasure in the role reversal, then looked down at the baby she held cradled in her arms. It had been a long time since she'd held a child that small. The baby's dark hair was still damp with birth fluids and his skin was smeared with tacky blood. It was a boy and apparently healthy, although the umbilical cord looked like it had been chewed off. Whoever the mother was, she must have given birth in one of the stalls. Mavis opened each and every one of the doors, looking for signs of blood and placenta. To her surprise, the toilets and the floors were spotless. But that was impossible ...

The shopwalker, an elderly man with a neatly clipped salt and-pepper mustache, opened the door to the ladies' lounge and peered in, mustache twitching. 'What's all this nonsense about there being a baby left in here? And have you gone mad? That was the Home Secretary's wife you yelled at!'

Mavis held up the baby, still wrapped in its receiving blanket of newsprint. 'You call this nonsense, sir?'

The shopwalker's eyes widened at the sight of the child.

'Good Lord!'

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'Did you see a pregnant woman come in here in the last ten or fifteen minutes? The poor thing can't be more than five minutes old himself!'

The shopwalker looked genuinely perplexed. 'I don't understand!

There hasn't been a woman in such a condition on this floor since noon! I could swear it! I'm sure I would have noticed...'

'So where'd this poor tad come from, eh?' Mavis sighed, running her work-roughened hand against the baby's cheek.

'His mum must have been in the store. Surely the fairies didn't leave him. Too bad he can't tell us who he belongs to.'

The nameless son of William Palmer yawned, waved his chubby little fists in the air, and smacked his toothless gums, wondering all the while when he was going to be fed.

Heilongjiang Province,

the People's Republic of China:

The madman's name was Sun Wang Zuocai, and he had spent the last thirty-three of his seventy-seven years locked away in a private sanitarium in the frozen climes of Heilongjiang Province in the People's Republic of China. There are many such sanitariums scattered throughout Communist China where those considered bent on 'criminal insanity against the State' and deemed impossible to reeducate have been banished. What made this particular sanitarium different from the others was that Sun Wang Zuocai was its only inmate.

None of the six staff members assigned to watch over him could understand what was so important - or dangerous about the old man that he had to be kept in isolated confinement and dosed with the most potent of psychoactive drugs.

Thin to the point of being emaciated, his arms and legs withered from decades spent strapped into a straitjacket and manacled to his bed, with a long beard and mustache the color of fresh snow, and a piercing gaze that seemed to look through both time and space, Sun Wang Zuocai looked more like a crazed wizard from the Beijing opera than a senile mental patient. And that, more or less, was the truth.

Although no one save a select handful of Party leaders knew of his existence, at one time Sun Wang Zuocai had served as mystic adviser to Chairman Mao.

Wang Zuocai was born in 1917 in Zhejiang Province, a place renowned for its scenic beauty. His father was a wealthy man, heir to a sizable tea plantation and silkworm concern that stretched back three centuries. His mother, however, was of even nobler stock Her family was descended from a long line of wise men and sorcerers who had advised the emperors since

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) the days of the Ch'in Dynasty. By the time he was five years old, Wang Zuocai's talent as an oracle was already making itself known. But then the Japanese came and things became bad for his family. His parents hoped that he would someday become a member of General Chiang Kai-shek's retinue, but Wang Zuocai's second sight told him that the future lay with Mao Zedong. So, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Chinese Communist Party and found himself on the Long March.

During those hard, torturous years, on the run from both the Nationalists and the occupying Japanese, Wang Zuocai came to be one of Mao's most trusted - and secret - personal advisers. At first his precognitive abilities were limited to a few minutes and those who were physically present, but as time progressed, so did his power to see into the future.

Mao relied on Wang Zuocai's talents a great deal, but he had to be exceptionally careful in screening the exact nature of his confidant's ability. If his Soviet advisers got wind of Wang Zuocai, they would either dismiss Mao as a fool or try to steal Wang for their own uses. It would not help matters amongst his fellow workers if it was discovered he was using the services of an oracle, a habit associated with the Imperial dynasties. Sun Wang Zuocai was one of the most powerful and influential members of the CCP, yet no one knew who he was.

And so it went for twenty-two years.

Until 1958.

Before 1958, there had been the First Five-Year Plan, which emphasized rapid industrial development and expansion. Iron and steel, electric power, heavy engineering, and other sophisticated, highly capital-intensive plants were pushed at the expense of agriculture, which, up until then, had occupied more than eighty percent of the population.

Now Mao proposed the introduction of the Second Five Year Plan, which he called the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward called for the abolition of private plots and the formation of communes, and the increase of agricultural output through greater cooperation and physical effort.

The Chairman called his oracle to him and told him of his plans and asked what great future Wang Zuocai foresaw for China.

What Wang Zuocai saw was crop failure and famine, leading to the starvation of millions and, eventually, to the dissolution of diplomatic ties between China and the Russians and Mao being forced to retire as chairman of the republic.

Mao, already growing accustomed to being worshiped as the wisest of men, took exception with Wang Zuocai's prophecy and denounced him as a reactionary. The very next day, Wang Zuocai-was arrested as he left his house and taken to a 'reeducation facility' in Jiangxi Province.

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) He spent most of his time in solitary confinement, endless tape loops quoting the wisdom of the Chairman haranguing him from hidden speakers day and night. The only time he saw other people was when the guards came in to beat him. Malnourished and forced to sleep on lice-ridden straw, denied anything to read except the writings of the Chairman, Wang Zuocai's talent began feeding on itself, growing stronger and wilder. Soon he was able to predict the guards'

arrival to the minute, even though he had no way of keeping time.

On one occasion, as he was being beaten, he looked up into the face of one of his guards and said: 'Your wife is being untrue behind your back. She takes the village Party official into her bed the moment you leave the house. He is with her now.' The guard called him a liar and struck him with his rifle, breaking Wang's jaw. Two days later, the guard caught his wife in bed with the village Party official and shot them both, then turned the rifle on himself.

Wang Zuocai had seen that part, too, which is why he'd told the guard in the first place.

By 1961 the Great Leap Forward had proven itself to be a disaster. Uncounted millions had starved to death in the outlying provinces, and the Soviets had left in disgust, taking their blueprints with them. Mao, chastised, retired as chairman of the republic, if not the Party. Not long after his resignation, Mao ordered Wang Zuocai's release from prison and had his old adviser brought back to the Forbidden City. But he quickly discovered that the Sun Wang Zuocai who stood before him was not the man he used to know.

Although Wang Zuocai was only forty-four, his ordeal had turned his hair white and cost him most of his teeth. But what Mao found most discomforting were his eyes - they seemed to see into a disturbing distance. Occasionally Wang Zuocai would grimace or shake his head or smirk at something only he could see. After offering his former confidant some rice wine, Mao asked him what it was he saw. Wang Zuocai said he saw many things, but at that moment he was watching the assassination of the Americans' most recent president.

He then went on to forecast, in no real order, the fall of Saigon, the death of a black musician, and Nixon standing on the Great Wall.

Mao did not know if the oracle was, indeed, seeing the future or if he'd gone mad. When Wang Zuocai veered from forecasting the future into claiming to have knowledge of non-human races dwelling unseen amongst humanity, and accusing Mao's own wife, Jiang Qing, of having the head of a vixen, Mao decided Wang Zuocai was indeed insane. As much as it saddened him to realize that he had been instrumental in

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) destroying his friend's mind, part of him couldn't help sigh in relief. That bit about Nixon and the Great Wall had really had him worried for a moment...

So Sun Wang Zuocai was bundled off to the frozen frontiers of Heilongjiang Province, to be tended by nurses and doctors better suited to the treating of farm animals, for the rest of his natural life. Which, it proved, had been considerably longer than Mao's. In the years since his initial commitment, he'd only had one visitor - Deng Xiaoping. He'd asked Wang Zuocai two questions, then never returned. However, Deng did order that Wang be kept in a straitjacket round the clock from that day forward. Now, after fifteen years, he was to receive his second - and final - visitor.

She poured herself through the reinforced window, her skin glowing like light shining through a glass of plum wine. Wang Zuocai watched silently as she moved toward his bed, her feet skimming the cold bare tiles. Everything in Heilongjiang was cold. The winters were fierce and harsh, lasting up to eight months. For someone such as himself, born and bred in the warmer southern climes, nothing was ever warm enough. But that was about to change.

The glowing woman smiled down at him, radiating a heat that sank through his wrinkled skin and into his ancient bones. How long had it been since he'd last known a woman?

Thirty-six years? It had been the better part of a decade since he'd been able to masturbate.

The woman gestured with her hands and the canvas straitjacket that had been Wang Zuocai's one article of clothing since 1979 disintegrated as if made from tissue paper. Freed at last, Wang Zuocai's member rose to greet its liberator. Smiling demurely, the woman climbed onto the bed and straddled the old oracle.

Sun Wang Zuocai had foreseen this night encounter the day he went before Mao and spoke of the American president and of Lady Mao being one of the kitsune. He knew that Mao would dismiss him as mad, but that was the only way to ensure that he would survive the coming years of turmoil, with its Cultural Revolution and Gang of Four and Tiananmen Square. It was the only way to make sure that he somehow managed to live to see the arrival of a beautiful glowing woman, who would make him the father of a new and wondrous race.