The Lake Ching murders

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.