Whispering Shadows (33 page)

He lay down on the bed and tried to calm himself, concentrating on the breathing exercises that Zhang had taught him a long time ago. Very slowly, breath by breath, his heart slowly regained its normal rhythm. He lay there for hours and thought about Zhang, trying to banish the thought that he might have betrayed him as he watched twilight and darkness falling outside. Lights came on in front of the building and one of them cast a narrow beam into his room; other than that, everything was dark.

Suddenly, he heard footsteps and voices in the corridor. Someone unlocked the door and the metal grille. Two men he did not know came in, followed by a third, who switched on the light.

It was Zhang.

Paul flinched. Several times in the past few hours he had imagined how he would react when they met again. Now the time had come, and he was speechless at the sight of his friend. Zhang tried a smile, but Paul did not return it. He still felt nothing. He felt as if he was staring at a blank wall. Paul was shocked at himself. Where had this coldness come from?

Zhang took a step toward him. Paul retreated.

“Stay where you are. What do you want?” he asked suspiciously.

“What's wrong with you? I've come to fetch you.” Zhang seemed amazed by Paul's reaction.

“To fetch me! What do you two have in store for me?”

“What do you mean by ‘you two'?”

“You and Tang.”

“Me and Tang? Are you crazy? What makes you think that we . . .”

“What makes me think that?” Paul interrupted brusquely. “Because you were once his henchman, weren't you?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Don't look so surprised. Tang told me everything,” Paul said in a voice full of contempt. “About the temple. The monk. And your readiness to help him.” Paul felt as if he was hearing his own voice
from afar, as though it belonged not to him but to a stranger he did not know and did not like.

Zhang's narrow eyes widened. His mouth fell open, and he clasped his head in both hands. Paul would not forget his look of horror. It was as though he were imploding in front of him, sinking into himself like a building expertly rigged for demolition. Zhang seemed at a loss for a moment. He gasped audibly a couple of times and seemed about to leave the room but turned back, sat down on the chair, and asked the other two men to leave and close the door behind them. He propped his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. It was so quiet that Paul could hear both of them breathing.

“I'm sorry, Paul, that you had to hear it from him.”

“I'm sorry, too.” He heard how self-righteous and annoyed he sounded. “Why did you never tell me about it?”

“I don't know,” Zhang said without looking up.

“You don't know,” Paul echoed, his voice slightly raised. This reply was not only cowardly, it was an insult. “You don't know? How many times did we sit in your kitchen and talk about the Cultural Revolution? I asked you about your experiences, and you told me about them. But you kept the most important one to yourself.”

“I know.”

“We talked about the crimes that were committed then and I still remember exactly what you said about this country and how it was still in the shadow of those times. You talked about how important it was to discuss it and got worked up about nobody having the courage to do so. That's what you said, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Zhang! It's always other people who are the cowards. You looked me in the face with such indignation and I believed you. Every word.” Paul could hear his voice getting louder and louder, how he was losing his composure with every sentence.

“But you yourself were one of them. One of the murderers, one of the people who said nothing.” He was standing right in front of
Zhang, and was practically about to grab him by the shoulders in rage. “Did you even tell Mei about it?”

“No. No one.”

“Not even your wife? How could you live this lie? How could you stand it, sleeping next to her and waking up next to her and hiding a murder from her?” Paul did not wait for a reply to his question, but continued talking. “And your son? How will you explain it to him? And now you expect me to believe that you haven't been sent by Tang to collect me?”

Zhang sat motionless on the chair and said nothing.

“How am I supposed to know that you're telling me the truth? ‘Trust once lost can never be regained.' Isn't that what Confucius said?”

“Yes.”

Paul turned around and kicked the closet door so violently that it came free of its hinges and clattered onto the floor. He kicked it again and again until it was at the other end of the room. He grabbed the footstool in front of the sink by one leg and smashed it with all his might against the wall so splinters of wood flew across the room. He would have liked to destroy the table and the chair too, charge at his friend, and beat him up. He stood in the middle of the room, holding the leg of the stool in his hand, exhaled, and struck the bulb that was hanging from a wire in the ceiling.

At first it seemed there was complete darkness, but when his eyes had gotten used to it he saw that Zhang was still crouched motionless on the chair.

Paul felt as relieved by his outburst as he was shocked by it. The inner paralysis, that terrible numbness, was gone and had given way to this rage that he and Zhang now had to work through. There was no shortcut that he could take back to Zhang.

“Why didn't you say anything?” Paul said. His voice had lost all strength.

“I don't know,” Zhang said again, tonelessly.

“Were you dropping hints all those years that I didn't pick up on?”

“No.”

Paul sank down on the pallet. Zhang emitted a series of strange sounds: deep sighs, gasps, and dry sobs in turn. They sat there for a long time without saying anything. Suddenly Zhang sat up and turned toward him. Paul could clearly make out the outline of his narrow frame in the darkness.

“It had gone,” Zhang said with great care and very quietly. “For years. I had erased it from my memory. As though it had never happened. It always cast a shadow over my life but I did not notice it or did not want to notice it. Then this shadow started whispering. The memories returned in images and in words, even the musty smell of the old temple filled my nostrils again but I could not talk about it. I was too ashamed. Can you understand that?”

Zhang got up from the chair, took a few steps back and forth, and sat down next to him on the bed. The faint light was enough to see his face. He was a miserable little heap of a human being cowering in front of Paul, and Paul did not know what to say.

“How could I have done such a thing, Paul?”

“That's what I ask myself too.” The sentence had slipped out of him and he regretted it immediately. Who knew how he would have behaved in the same situation? He did not want to judge the deed, he only wanted to know why Zhang had not had the courage to talk about it and if he was hiding anything else.

But Zhang had clearly not heard him. He continued, as though talking to himself, “How could I have been so easily led astray? Why was there nothing in me that rebelled against it? I used to think we were afraid of other people: the party, our parents, the teachers, the leaders. But we must have been most afraid of ourselves.”

“Are there other deaths that you haven't talked about?”

Zhang nodded. “Old Hu. A cook from our work brigade who added peppercorns to his soup. But the soup was supposed to taste the same to everybody. When the Red Guards caught him they beat him to death.”

“You did too?”

“No. I didn't join in but I stood by without helping him. I'm afraid I thought then that he deserved his punishment. Soup had to taste the same to everyone. I used to believe in this madness.”

“Killed because of a few peppercorns?”

“Yes. Since then I've never not felt fear when I add seasoning to food. That's how far the shadows reach.”

The land of the whispering shadows, Paul thought. One of those shadows had been with him for years, and he had neither seen nor heard it.

“And I thought all the time that I knew you,” he said quietly.

“You do know me,” Zhang replied. “As well as anyone can expect to know another person. Everyone has a few secrets.”

They sat in silence on the bed for a long time. Paul would have liked to hug his friend, but he did not dare to.

“Shall we get out of this basement, then?” Zhang asked eventually.

“And go where?”

“Wherever you want,” Zhang said, taking a deep breath. “You're free. Go back to Hong Kong. Open the bottle of champagne in your fridge.”

“And what about Tang?”

“They arrested him last night, interrogated him overnight, and brought him here this morning. He's in the basement of the building next door.”

“Who are ‘they'?”

“The Ministry of State Security. These buildings belong to them. We're near Shenzhen airport.”

“What has state security got to do with this case?”

“When you set out for the Owens' yesterday I was on the phone, remember?”

“Yes.”

“I was talking to my friend in the Ministry of State Security in Beijing. He confirmed that Lotus Metal had been in negotiations
with Michael Owen. When I told him that Michael Owen had been murdered he was shocked. Ten minutes later a colleague of his who was responsible for industry at the ministry rang me up. He was with Wang Ming of Lotus Metal, who just happened to be there. They too had not heard about Michael Owen's death yet. They had merely been very surprised that he had not been in touch for a few days. You can't imagine how they reacted to the news of the murder. The project meant a great deal to them. Wang Ming was so angry that he was sitting in the minister's office only minutes later getting a warrant for the police to take action.”

“And then?”

“They asked me to bring everything that you took from Michael's apartment—the hard drive, the cell phones, the memory chips—to them in Shenzhen.”

“I thought the ministry was in Beijing?”

“Yes, but Wang Ming and a dozen officials from the ministry took the next flight to Shenzhen. It all went incredibly quickly. You left the house just after noon to see Christine first. I was on the phone to Beijing until one-thirty, and at three o'clock they were already on the plane. We met shortly after seven-thirty in the evening at the Shangri-La Hotel near the Shenzhen train station. Half of them were IT engineers, experts in computers and cell phones. It barely took them half an hour to gain access to the entire hard drive and all the memory chips.”

“And was what they found useful?”

“Useful? It produced almost all the clues and the evidence that we have. I have the feeling that we all made a mistake about Michael Owen. Tang, at least, was completely wrong about him.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“He negotiated the contracts with Lotus Metal very skillfully—they were much more lucrative for the Owens than the ones with Tang. He planned every step carefully, and after Tang discovered the negotiations and started threatening him, or at least trying to, the
American documented every communication meticulously. Every e-mail was saved.”

“Wasn't it stupid of Tang to put his threats in writing?” Paul asked.

“Of course it was. He probably felt overly secure because of his contacts with the police, the city administration, and the party in Shenzhen. He couldn't imagine that anyone would bring charges against him for anything. The memory chips that you found were actually much more useful than the hard drive.”

“What's in them?”

“They were all SIM cards for cell phones. Michael Owen had two cell phones on which he could record conversations. We found at least six conversations from the ten days before the murder, in which Tang made serious threats to Michael Owen and to Anyi.”

“How did Owen react?”

“He didn't take the threats seriously. I listened to the recordings a few times, and they made me feel very anxious. They were constantly at cross-purposes. I don't know if they didn't want to understand each other or just couldn't. Owen kept insisting that the law was on his side. Apparently, there was a clause in the contracts with Tang that gave him a right of cancelation in special circumstances, and he wanted to invoke that clause. Sue me if you will, he challenged Tang several times. He could not have imagined that Tang would turn to violence.”

“And then you got the police involved?”

“No.” Zhang shook his head. “All the men here, including the leader of the investigation who interrogated you this morning, flew here yesterday morning from Beijing on a special flight.”

“Why?”

“You know how Tang has close contacts in Shenzhen. No one here would have arrested him.”

“Not even with the evidence?”

“I suspect we wouldn't even have gotten as far as showing anyone
our evidence. He is too powerful. We've been very lucky.”

“Why is Tang important enough for Beijing to bother with?”

“I think there are two reasons for it. He chose the wrong enemy in Lotus Metal. No one should cross a company owned by the Ministry of State Security. But even more important is that Tang acts as an example. You know the old Chinese saying, ‘Slaughter a chicken to frighten the monkey.' Tang and his people are the chicken.”

“And who are the monkeys?”

“The many thousands of big and little Tangs all over the country who are doing as they please and thinking that ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.' That's a beautiful saying from Confucian times, by the way.”

“You mean that every now and then, the emperor has to show that he has long arms?”

“Exactly right. Just wait. I'm sure that we'll see, read, and hear about this case a great deal in the next few days. Two teams from CCTV and several reporters from
Xinhua
were already here today. The
China Daily, China Youth Daily, Beijing News,
and
Shanghai Daily
, all the big national newspapers will carry detailed reports. This story comes very handy for Beijing. It fits in with the current anticorruption campaign and is a good opportunity to show that the government is clamping down hard. Imagine, they've not only arrested Tang but also the entire management of his conglomerate firm. Luo and countless colleagues at police HQ were suspended from duty today, as were two party secretaries and several department heads in the municipal administration that Tang had many dealings with, along with an official who worked closely with the mayor. You know how the political campaigns and propaganda work in China. The purges of today are no longer called by the same name but they haven't changed a great deal in principle.”