The Interior Page 39

  Keeping her voice low, she asked, already guessing the answer, “Did you examine the body of Ling Miaoshan?”

  Woo almost imperceptibly shook his head. Hulan sighed. What might have been found on the dead girl’s body if only this policeman had had the courage and/or the experience?

  “I will not go into the physiology of drowning, because Tsai Bing did not drown. Instead I will ask you to look at some other markers. Please note that his eyes are pricked with red. His chest and face too have broken capillaries. This is consistent with suffocation. Hanging, strangulation, garroting.”

  “But wouldn’t that also be consistent with drowning? Don’t you suffocate that way too?”

  Good, Hulan thought. He’s beginning to focus.

  “I have already explained. Tsai Bing didn’t drown.”

  “Then what?”

  “Look at his hands, at his fingernails in particular,” Hulan ordered gently. It was important that this appear as though Woo had made the discovery. “What do you see?”

  “His fingernails are broken and bloody. He must have struggled to get out of the well.”

  “He was dead when he went in the well. I guarantee that,” Hulan said. “What else do you see?”

  “The color under his nails is good. Pink.”

  “Too good, wouldn’t you say?”

  Captain Woo didn’t know. This was only the second body he’d ever had to deal with and only the first that he’d really looked at.

  “Tsai Bing is cyanotic,” she said.

  “Do you mean cyanide poisoning?”

  “Do you smell almonds?” she asked gently.

  Woo shook his head.

  “Neither do I,” Hulan said. “But there is another possibility. Carbon monoxide poisoning mimics these symptoms. If we were somewhere else, I would say that Tsai Bing might have committed suicide by locking himself in his car and rigging the exhaust pipe to come back inside. He would have died quickly and nearly painlessly.”

  “Tsai Bing didn’t have a car—”

  “And wherever he was, he struggled to get out,” Hulan added.

  They were silent for a minute. Other than the cicadas there was dead quiet. Even Madame Tsai had stopped crying. Hulan let the silence drag out, hoping Woo would figure it out for himself. At last he spoke.

  “In Da Shui Village the cars are all government-owned. Our police department has two sedans. The doctor also has a car. We have one other that is shared by a consortium for driving people to other villages for a small fee. Other than this, we have buses and trucks used for transportation of people and merchandise. However, we do have one other category of vehicle that uses gasoline.”

  “Farm equipment,” Hulan said.

  For the first time Woo’s eyes met hers. Suddenly what had been clear to her from the moment she saw the body registered on Woo. His eyes widened and she nodded. Yes, his conclusion was correct, she seemed to say.

  Woo heaved himself to his feet and addressed the assembled neighbors. “We have a saying in our government that I would ask you all to hear again. Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who don’t.”

  The neighbors—all from the poorest class—looked nervously at their feet. Tsai Bing’s mother began to weep again with the realization that her son’s death had not been a horrible accident.

  “Our neighbor and friend, Tsai Bing, was murdered by one of our own,” Woo said. “The murderer has one minute to reveal himself.” Woo looked at his watch, then around at the peasants. “When this minute is over, any leniency that I or the courts or your neighbors would see fit to treat you with will evaporate forever.”

  No one spoke, but instead of staring at their feet, the people had begun to look around the courtyard, checking the familiar faces of those they had known for years. Woo, now emboldened, circulated among the peasants.

  “There is only one person here whom we all hold above reproach,” he said loudly so that all could hear. “He has done much for our community. As his wealth has grown, he has shared his mechanized farm equipment with his neighbors. He is the only man who has the capability of killing Tsai Bing, and I’m sure when we inspect the garage where he keeps his equipment, we will find Tsai Bing’s blood on the door, for this poor boy tried to scratch his way out until he was too weak to fight anymore.”

  The peasants knew of whom Woo was speaking but couldn’t believe what they were hearing.

  “There is only one person here who fits this description, and we all know who he is.” Captain Woo stopped before Tang Dan. “The only remaining question your neighbors have is, why?”

  Madame Tsai screamed in anguish and collapsed into her husband’s arms.

  Tang Dan stared proudly at the policeman.

  “Why!” Woo shouted.

  Tang Dan blinked, then said, “I believe my minute is up, so it doesn’t matter what I say.” He held out his wrists to be handcuffed.

  Woo glanced back at Hulan, unsure of what to do next. She nodded. He brought out his handcuffs, roughly clasped them on Tang Dan, then gave the murderer a shove toward the police car.

  Suddenly Suchee rushed forward and slammed into Tang Dan’s chest with both fists, sending him into the dirt. “Why? Why? Why?”

  The other neighbors circled in closer, now gripping their hoes and other tools as weapons. Even those who were empty-handed crept closer, their bodies taut with anger and the desire for revenge. A boy, an only son, had been murdered by a man who had grown rich while they had remained poor.

  “He comes from the landlord class,” someone spat out.

  “You can’t change a tiger’s stripes,” said another, quoting an almost universal epithet.

  “Pig ass!”

  “Mother of a fart!”

  Chinese villagers had five thousand years of precedence for dealing with such a crime. In the olden days a robber, kidnapper, or vandal was brought before the populace of a village and made to walk among them, where they might scream out his crimes and what they thought of him, where they might throw stones or beat the evildoer with sticks. The criminal might be made to wear a cangue, a huge wooden collar that made it nearly impossible to eat or even to shoo away flies. His wrists and ankles might be locked into a public stock so that everyone in the village might know that this was a bad person.

  According to Confucian tradition, punishment was meted out no less swiftly or brutally for domestic crimes. If a son hit his father, then the father had the right to kill his son. If a father hit his son, there was no punishment. If a landlord stole from the people or raped a daughter, then nothing could be done except to kowtow to that landlord and hope it didn’t happen again. If a peasant dared to do anything against a landlord, then punishment was brutal and final. For five thousand years retribution had been carried out thus; then the Communists had come into power. The forms of crime changed but the punishments very little. Now it was the government that acted swiftly. As the saying went—you sometimes had to kill a chicken to shock the monkeys. And yet the government understood that the masses still needed to have their moment of power, which was why the civil war and the Cultural Revolution had been so cruelly savage.

  “Beast!”

  “Murderer!”

  “The devil rings his bell when he comes to get your life,” someone else shouted. “Well, it’s ringing now, Tang Dan!”

  Hulan had seen crowds like this before, been a part of them. They demanded, insisted upon, blood for blood. Looking at Captain Woo and the other policemen from the local Public Security Bureau, she knew that they would do nothing to stop the crowd. It was so easy to look the other way. It made for less paperwork, and it satisfied the villagers. In fact, Woo and his comrades might even participate themselves. She was glad—if that was the word given the circumstances—that Siang was not here to witness this.

  Hulan pushed through the crowd and stood between Tang Dan and Suchee.

  “I have something to say,” she announced. She searched for David, found his puzzled face in the crowd, and
wished she could speak in English for his benefit. Then she saw Lo edge in next to David and begin to speak softly, explaining what was happening. Hulan looked around her, taking in the faces worn by hard work and hard times. These people had never been given a break. They had known only suffering. Always their joys had been simple—the birth of a child, a good harvest, a suspension of a political campaign. Now two of their neighbors had lost only children—those life-affirming gifts made all the more precious because of China’s daunting childbirth policies.

  “You are right when you say that this man is from the landlord class,” she said, “for his problems stem from old ways that we all have tried hard to forget. Some of you here are old enough to remember what the landlords were like. Insidious, cruel, ruthless, but most of all they were greedy. Tang Dan is a greedy man, and although I have no firsthand knowledge of this, I think if you look back you will remember that he has always been greedy.”

  Again Hulan sought David’s face in the crowd. She saw Lo translating her words, while already a few people in the crowd murmured their agreement. She observed David’s look of confusion as he realized that her words, instead of calming the heated tempers, were only inflaming them. Aware that his eyes were fixed on her, she turned away.

  “I am only a visitor to this county,” Hulan said. “I was here once many, many years ago and then again now. Since coming back I have seen the changes that have happened in Da Shui and all around the countryside. We can all agree that conditions are better. You have electricity, television, some of you even have refrigerators. All this”—her arm took in the expanse around them—“is better, and at first it made me blind, as it has made you blind, to the changes that are so basic to our Chinese life.”

  She paused, circling slowly, looking at the faces before her. “Fire, water, air, wood, earth—these are the five elements basic to Chinese life and beliefs. We see the sun and know there’s fire. We stand on the earth, we breathe the air, we use wood in our homes, but what of water? Twenty-seven years ago when I first came to Taiyuan, the Fen River was a huge, roiling beast. Remember when the government built the bridge to unite the two banks no matter what the river’s conditions? Could you have imagined back then that today the Fen would be but a stream? That the riverbed would now be a place to picnic and fly kites? Or that the Three Everlasting Springs so famous in this area would be but one spring in danger of everlasting no more? I saw that and I didn’t think, because all of China, despite our yearly floods, is losing water. Our rivers, our lakes, our springs, our wells are all going dry.”

  She spun around to find Tang Dan, who’d raised himself to his knees. Red soil smudged his clothes. Dust had also settled on his face, mixing with his sweat and running in red rivulets down his face.

  “Since land reform many of you have abandoned farming,” she continued. “You have gone into brick making or worked at a local factory. I say this not as a reprimand. It is merely fact. And when you or your children or your neighbors have left your farms, you’ve subleased your land or even given it back to the government to redistribute. Much of that land has gone to Tang Dan, and who among us today can say that he has not done a good job with it?”

  She gazed at the neighbors, but none could contradict her.

  “When Ling Suchee’s daughter died, she asked me to come here and find out what happened. I knew that to find the killer I would have to know the victim. I came to know Miaoshan. I came to understand her value to her murderer. She had access to the one thing he was missing.”

  “Water,” the people answered as one. Their eyes had turned to Tang Dan again. Their hate was palpable.

  “Water,” Hulan echoed. “You live in Da Shui, Big Water, and yet you were blind to its growing scarcity. But this man wasn’t, and he began to look for land that had access to water.” Here Hulan lowered her voice. “You all know whose wells could be counted on.”

  For the first time Hulan looked for and found her friend. “Ling Suchee has such a well. She is a widow and could never work her land as well as a family with a wife, husband, and son, so her farm has never prospered. But under that soil lies something so valuable that Tang Dan was willing to lie and cheat and eventually kill for it.”

  Hulan expected to see her friend overcome by grief, but Suchee was a mother who still needed to protect her daughter. She stared hard at Hulan, pleading with her eyes. Hulan answered her friend with a barely discernible nod. The neighbors didn’t need to know the squalid details that would make Suchee and her daughter look like fools for years to come.

  “I will say only this,” Hulan went on. “When Tang Dan knew he couldn’t get the water from your neighbor Ling Suchee, he killed her daughter.” She addressed Tang Dan directly. “You hoped that as an end-of-the-liner Suchee would give up her farm and move into the village. When this didn’t work, you unleashed your next plan, for the Tsais’ well was also bountiful.”

  Hulan bent her head, and her shoulders trembled. David took a step forward, but Lo held him back. “I blame myself for what happened next. I didn’t see what was right before me.” She hesitated, then said, “I have gotten to know Tang Dan’s daughter. You all know her. You all know that she was in love with this dead boy, even though he had been betrothed to Miaoshan. Once she was dead, however, the path looked clear for Tsai Bing and Tang Siang. They were young and Siang has what we could all agree is a strong personality, but I think they would have been happy together.”

  The villagers looked from Tang Dan to Tsai Bing’s lifeless form to his pitiable parents. Yes, all this had been right before their eyes, and yet they hadn’t really seen until now.

  “What horrifies me as I stand here today,” Hulan said regretfully, “is that Tang Dan could have gotten his water just by letting his daughter marry Tsai Bing. But here is where his past once again exposed its ugly face. Tang Dan couldn’t and wouldn’t allow his daughter to marry a peasant when he had come from the landlord class and had become a millionaire in his own right. He had other plans for Siang, and they didn’t involve Tsai Bing.”

  Hulan raised her voice. “The rest is as Captain Woo told you. Tang Dan enticed the boy to his farm, set his machinery to running, locked the boy inside, and let him die. To cover his tracks, he threw him in the well. Why?” She gestured to the Tsais. “Could this couple now drink from the well where their son died? Never! That, combined with being end-of-the-liners, would leave them no choice but to abandon this land. You all have seen Tang Dan with his sympathetic face. He would have come here. He would have made promises. And soon this land and its well would have gone to him.”

  Hulan stared at Tang Dan. His face showed no remorse, but he did look frightened, knowing he might be dead in a few minutes. Hulan, however, thought this outcome too good for him. He deserved to suffer longer as a small repayment for all the misery he’d caused.

  “Captain Woo,” she said, once again adopting her most official tone, “please take the prisoner to your jail.”

  Tang Dan began to shake as the reality of her words hit him.

  “We will let the courts decide his punishment,” she continued. “In the meantime, we all trust you to make sure he’s treated like the low dog he is.”

  With a curt signal from Woo the other officers roughly hauled Tang Dan to his feet. On the way to the police car he wordlessly accepted a few blows to his head and a couple of kidney punches. Tang Dan would be dead in a week, but it would be a painful week.

  Once the police cars had driven away, David rushed forward to Hulan, who hadn’t moved from her spot in the middle of the courtyard. When he reached her, she sank into his arms. Holding her, he felt her heart fluttering against his chest. Then she pulled away from him, staggered to the side of the Tsais’ house, bent over, and retched.

  Not for the first time today David worried about her. She shouldn’t be out in this ghastly heat. She shouldn’t have the stress of flying back and forth to Beijing, of tracking down criminals, of crowd control. But as he stood there with his hand on the s
mall of her back, he couldn’t help but be impressed with what she’d just accomplished. He’d known her for a long time now. First as a young and shy associate at Phillips, MacKenzie, then as his quiet and pensive lover, now as a woman who even still kept her secrets. But God, he’d never seen her like this!

  How beautiful she looked standing there under the bleaching rays of the sun as she spoke to the crowd! How powerful she looked with her right arm raised like a revolutionary heroine exhorting the peasants to revolt! Always he’d seen her authority as a professional attribute, something cultivated over many years in a career that demanded and constantly received respect. But her family had also been imperial performers. The actress, the avenger—both of these characteristics were in her blood. He realized that this was how she must have looked all those years ago when she was at the Red Soil Farm, proclaiming, inciting, denouncing, that she had always carried this authority in her, that sometimes it had worked to her advantage but more often to her detriment and that of others. This woman he loved was always willing to pay the physical and emotional price of her nature.

  She slowly straightened and rested her head in the crook of her arm against the wall. He leaned in close and whispered, “Are you okay? Is there something I can get you?”

  She shook her head. A moment later she asked, her voice weak, “Henry?”

  David looked around. Investigator Lo wasn’t taking any chances. He held Henry by the back of the neck.

  “Lo’s got him,” David said.

  Hulan didn’t respond, just kept her head buried. David waited at her side and watched as the neighbors gradually dispersed. The Tsais resumed their positions next to their son. Suchee knelt beside them, speaking soothingly. Just as the thought that they’d have to get the boy out of the sun crossed David’s mind, the threesome stood. Tsai Bing’s father picked up his son’s shoulders, while the two women each took a leg. As they started for the house, David turned away, uncomfortable at the sight. A year ago he had not seen a dead body. But since January he’d seen nine. What struck him—beyond the horrible and cruel images of what had been done to once living, breathing creatures—was the matter-of-fact way these peasants handled their dead. In America he’d seen policemen and FBI agents and coroners and forensics experts and paramedics and minimum-wage drivers from funeral homes. The physicality of death was something that was kept far away from the surviving loved ones. But here in the Chinese countryside the body was given over to the family to be washed, clothed, and cremated or buried. And David thought if this were Hulan or his own child, he might not have the strength to take that lifeless form into his arms and touch it so intimately, even as a last act of love.