Citizen One (22 page)

Spade by spade, the mourners filling the grave with earth. Only the sound of mud falling onto wood, and prayers, and meditative supplications. Noses would run, clothes would be drenched through, before the monks’ chants, from black and gold toothed mouth, would ever dry up. At the back of the group, under a black brooding cloud of an umbrella, a gaunt man and a plump woman, the parents of the girl now known by the mortuary tag tied to her toe, as
35774341
.

“Forgive me, Comrade. I am Senior Investigator Sun Piao, and this is my Deputy. We are from the Homicide Squad and we are working on your daughter Xia’s case.”

Water across Piao’s cheeks, lips, in a chatteringly cold baptism. He and the Big Man beyond the saving grace of the umbrella’s span. Nothing changing in the relationship between
cadre
and peasant. Through the millennia, nothing ever changing.

“We have come to pay our respects. We have also come to ask you some questions.”

Looks of astonishment. The mother’s hand moving to her face. Tears pushing from her eyes and falling silently down thickly applied make-up.

“Now? You wish to ask your questions now, while our daughter is being laid to rest?”

“I appreciate that this is unusual, but so was the nature of her death, Comrade.”

The word death bringing a sob from the mother. Yaobang pulling a surprisingly clean handkerchief from his trouser pocket and offering it to her. A plump-handed rejection.

“Come mama …”

The Big Man’s arm around her waist, guiding her and the umbrella toward an oasis of other umbrellas.

“Let the big boys talk for a while. I am a good listener, tell me of how beautiful your daughter, Xia, was as a baby. Yes, mama?”

The husband watching his wife’s waddle through the mud towards the graveside. Thinking of the coldness of tombs. Thinking of how slim his wife had been when he had first married her.

“Do I have a choice about answering your questions, Senior Investigator?”

“There are always choices, Comrade Scientist. Even the prisoner in
lao gai
has the choice of being beaten either by the stick or with the leather strap. Is that not an example of good communist principles in action?”

Already wary as all are when they see the shining brass buttons of the PSB tunic, and aware that the investigator had called him Comrade Scientist.

“What is it exactly that you want, Senior Investigator?”

“Exactly. An excellent word. That is what I like about comrades who have undergone the rigours of a science degree at university. Exactness. But let me be exact with you, Comrade Scientist. At least as exact as I can be, in a case where we are like frogs at the bottom of the well looking up at the sky. Four daughters of scientist fathers, attacked, mutilated. Three whom life no longer possesses. Scientist fathers whose files are full of data, crammed with detail, except about the project that they are currently working on. What was required of you, or from you, Comrade Scientist?”

Silence. Only the rain and the monk’s chants.

“Threats were made to you by a
tai zi
, a PLA princeling. His name, Qi. Your daughter would be harmed. Such a beautiful daughter. You go to your superior, he makes assurances to you. He tells you firmly, you are to do nothing, say nothing. Do not fear, he reassures you. Your daughter will be safe. She will be protected. But in the innermost chamber of your heart, you did not believe him, did you, Comrade Scientist? You were right not to believe. Your daughter, she was not protected. This
tai zi
, I have his words on tape. You know how he described your daughter’s callous murder? He called her ‘a casualty of war’.”

Silence, words spent, mourners moving from the graveside, following the monk down the hill. A questioning glance from his wife’s black eyes to her husband.

“She does not know, does she? Comrade Scientist, your wife, she does not know that your daughter died because you would not give this princeling what he wanted, does she?”

“No, she does not know.”

“A heavy cost, Comrade. A heavy secret to bear. But I can lighten this burden for you. These men, the princeling, the
tai zi
, they will not escape justice. By the ancestors, I promise this.”

The comrade turned, his wife’s lingering glance cut adrift.

“The service that you have given to your profession and our masters in the Ministry of Security, the secrets that you have honoured, and the high cost that you have paid in doing so, I cannot promise you that it will ever be recognised. But it will be avenged.”

Silence.

“But for this to come to fruition, you must aid me. I must know what it is that was worth the life of your daughter. I must know what it is that was worth the lives of three other young women. What can be so important? Comrade, we are standing at the side of your only daughter’s grave. She was an innocent. Please help me. You must help me.”

Silence.

“I am here to help you.”

“That is what he said, my
tong zhi
superior. And now I am no more than a
guang guan
.”

“Comrade, ‘bare branches’ do not have the information at their disposal to hurt men such as these PLA. Tell me the secret that you and your Comrade Scientists hold, and I will be your fist in an iron glove.”

Silence. Only the rain and its cyclic journey. The Senior Investigator unbuttoning his coat, rifling through the deep inner pockets, pulling out a small diary.

“This number. Do you know this number?”

Silence. Nervous, the Comrade Scientist’s eyes. Seeking escape. Everything about him balancing on a precipice.

“One of our comrade officers may have died because of this number.”

“I cannot speak of this.”

“You know this number. The fact that you cannot speak of it tells me that you know what it is, Comrade Scientist.”

The Comrade Scientist already moving aside. The pull of the hill drawing his feet back to the older area of the graveyard. Headstone banked against headstone, as dominoes about to tumble. Names now eroded. Pulling him back to the lithe country girl that he had courted; thirty years passed and now a plump wife with expensive tastes.

Piao, soaked through and blinded by the rain, shaking his head. One last appeal shouted against the wind’s rage.

“For the memory of your daughter, give me something. Anything. Anything Comrade.”

Turning from his plump wife’s darkly questioning gaze, the Comrade Scientist. Looking back through rain, through tears, his lips moving. His words, in the strong wind, a breath within a roar.

“Mao Zedong. Southern Kiangsi. 20
^th
August 1933.”

*

Two funerals
.

The Gui Ji Li Bai Tang, the Shanghai Community Church, sat on the Henshang Road. A splinter of Christianity, into the soft thigh of foreign gods and their eastern prophets.

A difficult thing to enter a church, for a faithful member of the Party that describes itself as, ‘more important than God’. Almost an impossibility. The rule still on the Party’s statute books, that citizens who have a religious belief are not permitted to join the Party. Red star of the People’s Republic eclipsing all.

*

A small ante-room, tucked away in the bowels of the church. A small, nervous congregation. Eyes turning as they entered. An instant smell of incense, covered tracks and secret Gods. The priest’s words faltering, stalling. Eyes falling on the stars burning on epaulettes and the brass-buttoned tunic. Piao sitting, nodding, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, continuing. Words veined with unease across a makeshift altar; a white embroidered cloth covering the splintered table.

“This isn’t right, Boss.”

“Try to reshape your foot to fit into a new shoe. It is religion, nothing more than religion.”

A woman dressed completely in black at the very front of the congregation leaving her seat. A hurried walk toward the rear of the room, toward the Senior Investigator and the Big Man. Only raising her face as she was almost upon them; the features of a bird caught up in an almost invisible net. A recognition in each other’s eyes, need and duty, drawing them as opposite poles of magnets. Automatically Piao opening the door. The woman passing between them. Her smell of dried tears and mothballs. Following her. Waiting, the woman, until the doors had swung fully closed before she spat. From the back of her throat with heart and soul. Hot, bitter spittle, across the Senior Investigator’s face in ginger and garlic venom. Yaobang thrusting himself forward between them. Paw of a hand on the woman’s shoulder, breaching the bounds of familiarity. All now possible.

“Enough.”

The Senior Investigator stepping forward, cuff across warm spit, across his face.

“She does not spit at me. She does not know me. She spits at the uniform, the Party, the star of the People’s Republic. She spits at the murderer of her daughter. And these things deserve to be spat at. Is that not so, Madam? You and your husband, the Comrade Scientist, you have been ill-treated, forgotten. No messages of sympathy, no support. Your daughter’s death and now your husband’s ill-health, an embarrassment to those in authority.”

Tears down her wasted cheeks.

“No explanation of why life no longer possesses your beloved daughter. Twenty-one years of caring for her, loving her. It is a lifetime, a lifetime. No explanation of why your husband, the Comrade Scientist, was not protected from the threats that he received regarding your daughter’s wellbeing. And now he also falters, struck down by loss and ill-health.”

The woman, once a mother, falling forward, hands on each of Piao’s shoulders.

“A letter of condolence from his superior officer. But nothing about finding her murderer.”

Her eyes looking up to Piao’s, tears and questions brimming.

“A mother, a wife, she needs to know such things. My husband, he fulfilled his duty and now we have no daughter.”

Her hot tears through his shirt to his skin. So many tears, so many sadnesses. How many more before they diluted him completely?

“A Mass for my daughter. Prayers for my poor, ill husband. Can this be right?”

“No mama, this is not right. But we are here to investigate her death. To avenge her.”

“No, no.”

Her face from the Senior Investigator’s chest.

“I do not wish her death to be avenged. ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord’.”

Soothing strokes, Piao’s hand across her hair. As her husband would have done, if he had been present, and not in medication’s soporific halfway house.

“But what about justice? Surely even your religion recognises justice?”

Bitter tears flowing as if they would never stop.

“Madam, I make a solemn promise to bring to justice those who perpetrated this wanton crime upon your daughter and your family.”

So many questions written across her lips. Piao’s cuff wiping away her tears.

“The questions in your eyes, Madam. Do not ask them now. Do not ask me to cause you pain in the answers that I might give to you. Only ask me when I have found your daughter’s murderers. When there is that balm to heal the wounds. For now, Madam, it is I who need your help. Your husband, he was involved in a special project of some kind. There are no notes, no folders that we have access to. Unusual, very unusual. We do not know what this project was. But we need to know. It is perhaps the nature of this project that brought this sorrow to you. The pressures upon your husband, the threats to your daughter’s life.”

“But there is nothing that I know. Nothing at all. Such a quiet man, my poor husband. Such a conscientious man. He would not speak of such matters. Never did he talk of his work. Never.”

“We would like to see him, Madam. Talk to him. Perhaps he will …”

“No. No. My husband is too ill. He talks of nothing now, nothing. The silence, it came slowly. The doctors say that he has lost his words and with them his sanity. Our daughter, she was his heaven. With her gone there is only hell.”

“He was a biologist?”

A nod of her head.

“Did you meet his colleagues? The others who were involved in his work?”

“A quiet man, a conscientious man. He kept his work and colleagues separate from his life at home.”

The Big Man taking up the questioning.

“Is there anything else that you can tell us, mama?”

A shake of her head.

“Madam, it is important. Please try, even in your deep grief, to think of something that the Comrade Scientist said.”

“But I have already told you there is nothing. There is, is …”

A stumble. Words collapsing to silence. Piao’s hand across her hair. Once black, now grey.

“He would be away for days. Sometimes weeks. I worried about him. I gave him food to take. A fussy eater, my husband. So fussy. But always he would refuse. Always. ‘Why take sand to a desert’, he would say. ‘That’s all they do there, grow food. The best soil in the People’s Republic …’ ”

“Where, Madam? Where was he talking about?”

“Shuihuzhuan.”

“ ‘The Water Margin’, yes, Madam?”

“It was his favourite book. And now …”

Piao to the Big Man.

“The 108 heroes of the ‘Water Margin’ lived in the marshy areas around the great lakes, Dongting and Poyang …”

“The ‘two rice bowls’, Boss. They call it that because the plains around the lakes are so fertile.”

The mother’s tears easing with the giving of something of value.

“Your husband was correct, Madam. There would be no need to take food to such a place as that. Thirty percent of the Republic’s rice comes from there. But the question is, why would such a place as that, take a Comrade Scientist to its bosom for weeks at a time?”

Piao pushing open the ante-room doors. The woman, the mother, escorted to her seat either side by servants of a Party ‘more powerful than God’. Eyes of the small congregation turning from the priest to the gold buttoned tunic to the red starred epaulettes.

“Sit, Madam, gain comfort. There is much comfort in a son of God’s blood. Much in a son of God’s body.”

“You are a Christian, Investigator?”

Piao and the Big Man, already turning back to the half-open door. Sounds of the world beyond at full thrash already in their ears.