Whispering Shadows (10 page)

“The police found a dead body in Shenzhen yesterday,” Paul said.

Elizabeth Owen's mouth fell open but no sound came out.

Richard Owen jumped out of his seat.

“They still don't know who it is. The man did not have any papers on him. But he's from the West and he is the same age as your son.”

“That doesn't mean anything!” Richard Owen shouted at him, raising his hands as though he wanted to protect himself or was about to push Paul away.

“The dead man had three scars on his left knee.”

Paul had hoped never to look into eyes like these again.

———

He would need a good forty-five minutes to get from Harbour View Court to Wan Chai on foot. Paul thought about taking a taxi, but he would not be able to stand being cooped up in a car stuck in a traffic jam. Not to be able to move forward or backward. To be locked in. He would be overcome with claustrophobia. He had to be out, under the open sky. He walked down Robinson Road, getting faster with every step; the movement was doing him good. He took deep breaths and exhaled with such loud sighing sounds that the few passersby turned to look at him. He walked through the Botanic
Gardens, ran down Kennedy Road, and came to the aviary in Hong Kong Park. There, his strength failed him. Drenched with sweat, he sat down on a bench and gasped for air like a sprinter within sight of the finish line. He felt a pounding pain in his head, and heard his blood rushing through his ears. Perhaps Christine would come to see him in the park for half an hour.

———

She brought along two cheese sandwiches, a packet of stuffed rice dumplings, and two half-liter cups of iced tea.

“I don't know anyone else who would be mad enough to sit in the park at lunchtime and have a picnic,” she said, spreading a paper napkin out on the bench and putting the sandwiches down on it.

“It wouldn't be my first choice either,” he replied wearily, “but I can't do anything else.”

“How are the Owens?”

“They wanted to stay on in their son's apartment for a while. They'll go over this afternoon to identify him. I've called Zhang. He'll pick them up at the border.”

“Is there no doubt at all?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Will you go with them?”

He shook his head.

“Did they not ask you to?”

“Yes, but I said no.”

“Are they going on their own?”

“No. I advised them to contact the American Consulate. One of the officials there will surely go with them. I won't. A promise is a promise.”

“You said that yesterday too. A couple of hours later you were over in Shenzhen again.”

“That's true. But it's different now. I can't go on. The whole thing touches on a raw nerve for me.” Realizing that what he was saying still did not reassure her, he added, after a pause, “And I don't want
you to worry about me.”

“I'm sorry. I can't help it.”

He stroked her hair.

“You think I worry too much, don't you?” Christine asked.

Paul thought for a moment. “After everything that has happened to your family, I can understand why you don't trust the authorities in China. But that's over thirty years ago. I don't think that you still have to be frightened of them. It's no longer the same country.”

“No? Is it no longer the People's Republic of China? Have I missed something?” She had wanted to ask this question calmly, almost as a throwaway remark, sounding only a little surprised. But she sounded snappy and aggressive instead.

“I don't know how I would feel if they had my father on their conscience,” he said to appease her.

“And your brother.”

“My brother?” Paul asked, surprised.

“Your brother,” she repeated.

“But you haven't told me anything about that.”

“He was ten years older than me, and when he was still at school, he was sent off to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.”

“Did he starve to death?”

“We don't know. We fled to Hong Kong one year after that, and never heard from him again.”

“Then he's probably still alive.”

“Possibly.”

“Have you not tried to find him since China opened up?”

“How? My uncles and aunts all escaped to Hong Kong and Sydney. No one lives in Guangdong any longer.”

“You can go to your village and look for him. Maybe he went back there, and if not, perhaps someone would know something about . . .”

“Paul,” she interrupted him curtly. “You don't get it. I'm never going to China. Never. We were counterrevolutionaries.”

“Forty years ago!” He regretted his words almost as soon as he spoke them.

X

Zhang stood at the Lo Wu border, a few meters behind the counter for diplomats and VIPs, waiting for the Owens. It was hot and sticky in the hall; the air-conditioning was either not working at all or only very slightly. Zhang wiped the sweat off his brow with a tissue. He was so nervous that the bunch of keys he was fingering agitatedly slipped out of his hands twice. The identification of a dead body by a family member, a task disliked by almost all his coworkers, was for him one of the most unpleasant responsibilities of the homicide division, and the worst scenario was when parents saw the corpses of their children. In moments like that, Zhang felt, the heart of the world stopped, and nothing, absolutely nothing, could make it start beating again. The expressions of pain that death carved on the faces of the living often haunted him through the nights. Even after twenty years, he did not know how he ought to behave in such situations. Look away? Offer help? Cover up his own speechlessness with a torrent of words? In these situations, his coworkers always spoke of punishment, of revenge or justice, and gave assurances, over and over again, that the person who had done this would be hunted down and that they would not give up until that person, and anyone else involved, was caught. As much as Zhang meant whatever he said, he could never shake off the feeling that he was lying. So he preferred to say nothing, which meant that there was often an oppressive silence.

How would the Owens react? Would grief or rage dominate?
Would they ask questions, ones that he had no answers to?

He was tired and worn out and longed to be with Mei. She would be able to calm him down with a few sentences now. Or he would lay his head down on her soft, warm breast, and very soon his thoughts would stop racing around dead people, murderers, and their motives.

Zhang closed his eyes and focused on his breath, trying not to think about anything. He imagined a sunrise in the mountains of Sichuan. He saw a luminous green paddy field, flooded with water, and the yellow-white orb rising behind it, gradually spreading its light over everything. He took a deep breath in and counted to eight, breathed out and counted to ten. After four or five breaths he slowly felt stillness returning to him and he felt his face relaxing, as if he could, for a few seconds, step out of the role of the restless, anxious police detective.

He had started meditating a few years ago. When he began, he had thought that external quiet was needed to meditate, but he had learned that stillness was already within him, and that meditation was merely the path to it. So wherever he was—in the office, buying groceries or at the Lo Wu border crossing—did not matter one bit. He had found it tremendously liberating to be able to soothe himself and not to be helpless in the face of his fears and his inner demons. Since then, he had practiced meditation several times every day, often only for a few minutes. It almost always helped.

Zhang looked around the hall and immediately saw the Owens among the Western business travelers arriving. Paul had described the couple well. She was wearing a dark-blue trouser suit and he was in khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt. Both of them were hiding their eyes behind sunglasses. Hers were so big that they covered half her face. They were accompanied by a young American man from the consulate who spoke incredibly good Mandarin but still stammered slightly at the beginning of every sentence. He was trying to hide his nervousness, which made it even worse. Two dark sweat patches were showing around his underarms, and he clutched
a brown briefcase to his chest with both hands, like a swimmer clinging to a plank of wood in the water. The two men towered over Zhang by much more than a head, giving him the impression even when they were speaking to him that they were looking past him or away from him. Was that what made him feel uncomfortable from the very beginning? Was it the dark glasses that they did not remove, making it impossible for him to see their eyes and giving him the feeling that he was looking at a wall? Or was it the foreign language? His attempts to say a few sentences in English as a gesture of courtesy and respect were met with not a single response or reaction.

Zhang hurriedly switched to Mandarin, introduced himself, and thanked them for coming. The consulate official translated what he said, but the Owens did not even nod in acknowledgment. They walked through the station out onto the plaza, where a black Audi limousine was waiting for them. Elizabeth Owen's movements were sluggish; she had probably taken strong medication for her nerves. Her husband came to a sudden standstill and stretched a hand out as if he was looking for a wall or a tree to hold onto. He swayed slightly and seemed about to fall. Elizabeth did not notice or did not want to notice and walked slowly past him. After a couple of seconds, he gathered himself and followed.

On the way to the police headquarters they were stuck in a traffic jam twice; with every minute that passed in the stationary car, Zhang felt the inside of the vehicle shrink, until he could barely tolerate its confines. In the rearview mirror, he saw Richard Owen reach for his wife's hand several times, but she flinched away every time.

At headquarters, the scene at the train station repeated itself. Luo, the head of the homicide division, and Ye, the powerful party secretary, were standing in front of the side entrance, surrounded by their assistants. They greeted the Owens with a few fragments of English; the Owens said nothing in response. It took the elevator
only a few seconds to travel from the ground floor to the basement, but they seemed like an eternity to Zhang. Elizabeth Owen was trembling all over and the two men were silent, both looking away as if they had nothing to do with each other. In the basement, Luo led them down a long corridor into the small, badly lit morgue. Elizabeth stood still at the doorway. As if she could not take one more step toward the corpse which was laid out and covered with a gray blanket. The consulate official hesitated briefly, wondering whether to stay with her, before he followed her husband into the middle of the room.

Wu, the old pathologist, waited for them in silence. They were standing in a semicircle in front of the body, in almost unbearable silence. Even Wu, who had carried out so many autopsies, seemed to be nervous. He fussed around the blanket before he finally raised it slowly. Zhang did not look. He stood next to Richard Owen and observed the two American men. The blood drained out of the consulate official's face; he turned chalk white and started retching. Richard Owen did not hear him; he looked down at his son's face without any reaction. He nodded and murmured a few words that made Zhang start, but whose meaning he was not sure he had understood correctly. He wanted to ring Paul as soon as the Owens had left and ask him what Richard Owen could have meant.

In the first few years of his job, Zhang had tried to interpret the reactions of family members in such moments; he had thought they would tell him something about their relationship to the dead person, about their pain, about the meaning of loss. This Zhang of years past would have been disconcerted now; he would have started to harbor suspicious thoughts. He would have equated a lack of reaction with indifference. He would have registered every movement, every flicker of the eyelids, every twitch of the mouth exactly and judged it; he would have asked himself why this man did not burst into tears, why he did not want to touch his son, why he did not close his eyes or start trembling.

Zhang had stopped asking himself questions like this at some
point. When parents, siblings, or friends were told of a death or when they identified the body, whether they wept, cried out with grief, broke down, or stayed as calm as if they had barely known the person said nothing, or only very little, about what was really going on inside them or how deeply affected they were by the death.

Grief has as many faces as there are people, Zhang thought. It had that in common with love.

So he felt all the more annoyed with the thoughts that were now whizzing through his mind. There was something not quite right here. He found the Owens increasingly odd. Why was Richard Owen not hurrying back to his wife's side? Why was he not saying anything else? Zhang thought he would see more than pain and despair in his face. As a detective, he had learned to trust in his intuition and his instincts, but he was uncertain in this case. He was dealing with an American, whose culture he did now know.

And something else confused Zhang. Why had Party Secretary Ye come with them to the basement? It had been a matter of protocol for him to greet them at the entrance, but Zhang had never seen him down here all these years. He was a political chief detective superintendent, leader of all the party members at the police headquarters; he organized their meetings, during which they studied the resolutions of the party conferences, the teachings of Deng Xiaoping and of Hu Jintao, the president of the People's Republic of China and the party chairman, and practiced self-criticism and praising improvements. He had nothing to do with police investigative work and therefore had no place down here. What did his presence mean?

The voice of his superior interrupted his thoughts. Zhang heard him say something about a head injury and that they still had no definite answers as to whether it was the result of a fall or an act of violence, but they hoped to have some certainty in the next few hours. They would not bother the family with questions for too long.

So they had not decided yet whether to try to hush up the murder. Most of his fellow policemen secretly hoped they would; Zhang understood that very clearly from their comments. It would save
them a lot of work. But Zhang feared such a solution. Every time external influence was exercised on an investigation, whether for political reasons or because someone had pulled strings, and suspects were released, interrogations were suspended, or innocent people had to be arrested, he reacted with physical symptoms, mostly nausea and vomiting. For a time, he had been called the “retching policeman” by the people at headquarters.

They did not say a word on the way back to the train station. The Owens looked left and right out of the car windows in silence, without seeking support or comfort from each other. The unhappy consulate official sat between them, stiff and unmoving like a mannequin, his eyes fixed straight ahead of him.

Zhang took them to the border. The lines of people in front of the counters snaked through the entire hall and only shortened in length very slowly, for the young border officials took their duties very seriously and performed them with great care. He took the passports from the three Americans and obtained exit stamps for them from the station manager. The consulate official was about to thank him, but the Owens turned away without a word and made their way to the train.

When he was out of the station, he tried to call Paul, but there was no reply.

Oh my God, Michael. I am sorry. I am so sorry.
Zhang was almost positive that he had heard these words. What did Richard Owen mean by them? What was he apologizing for?

It was not a good sign.