“Who’s touching you, Fong?”
He always marvelled how her entire persona shifted beneath the paint.
“Who’s touching you?” she asked again.
“Isabella.” His breath was tight in his chest. Raspy as it hit the air.
Then a smile appeared through the miracle of the classical makeup, a smile he’d never seen before on the wife he adored – the smile of a lascivious nun. Her eyes held his as she guided him into her – into Isabella – the complex leading lady of a white man’s play about justice.
The crack of the rifle report was so loud that Fong smacked his head hard against the wall of the cell. It came from outside. From the courtyard. He looked around him. The boy from Sichuan province was gone.
Fong sprang to his feet and tried to hoist himself up to the barred window. He was desperate to see out. “They couldn’t have,” he told himself. “They couldn’t have executed him.”
Then they were in the cell, checking his hand and foot manacles. He started to resist then stopped himself and bowed his head. A long fingernail scraped beneath his chin and tilted his head upward. The politico’s face was smooth; his eyes had a renewed cruelty. The man canted his head slightly and looked into Fong’s eyes. Without a word the two communicated perfectly. The politico’s silence said, “Do you see, Traitor Zhong, that we completely control you and your life and your hopes?” And Fong’s silent response said, “I see.” But in his heart he said, “Those with real power do not need to use it. A real warrior wins without fighting. And you – you are a running dog who needs my help.” Then the real question rose in Fong. “Needs my help for what?”
CHAPTER FOUR
That day the thug drove. The politico sat beside him. Fong was in the Chaika’s back seat. His leg shackles were tightened, but only one wrist was cuffed. The other manacle was clamped to the handle of the door. It didn’t bother Fong. After a day in the trunk, this was like moving from hard seat to soft sleeper on a train.
The village of his exile was in the flat emptiness beyond the Great Wall. Few animals. Fewer people. Lots of land. More dust than soil. Loess. Fine granules that were always in the wind. Always sifting beneath the door, worming through the cracks in the mud walls and adhering to every orifice of the body. It was hard for Fong to adjust to waking with the taste of sand in his mouth. Even the cup of hot water he drank every night before sleep managed to collect a layer of sand from the time he cleaned it to the time he tilted the warm liquid into his mouth.
But here, out the car window, was a different China. A land of rounded hills. An abundant, verdant China. Fully occupied. Every inch of every hill covered with sculpted mud terrace upon sculpted mud terrace. Each supported by hewn stonewalls. Each with hand-carved stone steps leading up to it and away from it. Wooden sluice gates permitted water from higher terraces to lower ones. Long narrow metal screws, some several yards long, moved water in the other direction. Layer upon layer, paddy upon paddy of green ripening rice shoots. All densely packed, until finally, on the valley floor, flat-bottom land. At last, a field that would support rice cultivation without the back-breaking work of building and maintaining terraces.
“The hills look like giant peach pits,” Fong thought. It struck him as quintessentially Chinese that the peasants in the country turned hills into giant peach pits while artists in the city turned dried peach pits into incredibly detailed carvings of country life.
Fong did not come from farmers, but he appreciated the labour and ingenuity involved in the terraces. The Chineseness of it all.
A nature harnessed although never really subdued, still somehow wild.
The car was thick with the politico’s cigarette smoke. Usually this wouldn’t bother Fong. He’d been smoking since he was ten. But now he wanted to smell the land. The deep, manure-laden land that gave birth to them all. To the black-haired people.
He turned the handle and cracked open the window.
Immediately the thug turned to face him. “Drive,” the politico barked. The thug’s shoulders tightened as if he didn’t take orders from the likes of the politico.
“Odd response,” Fong thought.
The thug turned back to the road. As he did, the politico pivoted in his seat, his left arm draped almost to Fong’s knees, “Close the window, Traitor Zhong.”
Fong looked out the window and turned the handle. The pane squeaked its complaint. He sat back in his seat. The politico was looking out the front window again. But on the seat beside Fong was a stuffed manilla envelope that had not been there before. Fong looked up into the rear-view mirror. The politico kept his eyes on the road as he lit another cigarette. A smirk crossed the man’s lips as he exhaled a line of white smoke.
Fong took his eyes from the mirror and looked at the envelope. It was a standard issue postal item.
He looked from the thug’s still tense shoulders to the politico’s forced casualness. “There’s some division here,” Fong thought. Another quote from The Art of War came to him: “Cause disruption among the enemy ranks and victory is more likely.” He smiled inwardly and said, “You dropped something back here.”
“I didn’t drop anything, Traitor Zhong,” snapped the politico, his casual posture immediately a thing of the past.
The thug’s eyes bored holes in the politico. “This was good,” thought Fong.
“But you did,” he said. “This.” He tossed the envelope onto the front seat. The thug hadn’t taken his eyes from the politico.
“Watch the road, you idiot.” Again the thug didn’t take the order like a man used to obeying commands. And only after a display of pique did he return his eyes to the road. “You’ll get us all killed before we even get to the lake.”
“So we’re going to a lake,” thought Fong. “To take the waters or what?” But he ignored his own question and watched the tension grow between the thug and the politico.
The last four years had taught him to enjoy the small pleasures life has to offer. Enemies at odds with one another was a small pleasure to be savoured.
CHAPTER FIVE
More than three months earlier, a plane without markings prepared to land on a deserted runway on the military side of the Xian airport. The aged specialist on board was accompanied by a small contingent of federal troops, several crime scene officers and a high-ranking party member, although if you looked into the old man’s eyes you would see that he was utterly alone – as all specialists are.
The specialist hadn’t been on a plane for quite some time. During the flight he’d marvelled at the ground passing beneath him, the intense, almost terrifying, beauty of China from the air, the densely packed landscape, the sudden shifts of colour – then, the crystalline ice-coated terrain around Lake Ching.
It was the early morning of January 1.
Captain Chen, all five-foot-four intensely ugly inches of him, stood at the front of the welcoming party of Xian police. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying in vain to keep the frigid cold of dawn out of his bones. Chen had responded to the initial, hysterical call from the lake just over three days ago. Since then the case had “become his.” He might have been nothing much to look at, but he wasn’t stupid. He was aware that the case had fallen to him because everyone above him knew the implicit danger to any officer investigating the murder of seventeen foreigners.
So did he.
The night of the murders had begun with freezing rain that was quickly followed by bitter cold. The icy roads had made the two-hour drive from Xian to Lake Ching take the better part of five. Just outside Ching’s city limits, Chen passed a broken-down Russian-made bus being pushed by the driver and several young, overtly attractive women. Whores. They flagged him down but the best he could do for them was radio for assistance. The night was tough on everyone.