THE FLENSE: China: (Part 1 of THE FLENSE serial) Read online

  The grandfather clock at the end of the hallway chimed quietly: Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

  She knew the time it showed would be wrong. She always tried to remember to wind and reset it when she was here, but Jacques rarely bothered to do it. When she stepped over to it, she saw that the hands pointed at just past eleven. It felt later than that.

  “I’m going to warm myself up some soup,” she told him, once more passing by his door on her way down. “Feel free to join me.” She paused, then added, “I’ll go shopping in the morning. There’s barely anything here to eat. You haven’t called for a delivery in a while.”

  She was relieved that he had come home again, but not relieved enough to stanch that slow, simmering irritation that always came with worrying about him.

  “You left the front door open and let the rain in.”

  She waited several more seconds, but all she received back was the frantic rattle of his fingertips weaving his muddled thoughts and sending them out into the world for all but her to see.

  * * *

  The bread was dry, as was the cheese, but both softened up readily enough in the hot soup. Angel took the tray from the kitchen, pausing at the base of the stairs in the now-illuminated and mopped entryway and listened for a moment before heading back into the library. She couldn’t hear him writing.

  Dormez-vous?

  If Jacques was awake, he was probably reading.

  Rain was still coming down, though the storm had moved on. The steady drone of it against the roof and running along the gutters was soothing. Through one of the floor-to-ceiling length windows, she watched it for a moment turning the drive into a flat gray sea. Had it not been for the unkempt hedges just beyond, one could easily imagine that the house had been lifted entirely from its foundation and floated away.

  Everything beyond the drive was darkness. Even the town down below was invisible.

  A chill still clung to the air in the library, despite her turning on the heater. It was much cooler after the warmth of the kitchen, and she wrapped the sweater around her again and shivered.

  The loss of her laptop in Shanghai was not a significant blow; she was more irritated with the phone. With all the travel she did, she knew it was a matter of time before something like that would happen. Theft, confiscation, and hacking were constant possibilities. No matter how secure she tried to be, how aware of the risks, it was inevitable that she might find herself without the computer, which is why she always backed everything up into the cloud. And from there, she made sure to keep a separate backup on a server she rented from a company in Seattle.

  The laptop she kept in the Lyon house was only a couple years old, but noticeably clunky by the standards of the day. The operating system and software appeared to have finished updating since she’d turned it on that afternoon.

  She set the tray on the desk, sliding it to the left and out of the way of the auxiliary keyboard, then settled herself back into the overstuffed monstrosity of a chair. As always, it gave out a noisy puff of air and a dusty, slightly moldy odor. She carefully extracted the tiny memory disk from the roll of hygienic cotton and inserted it into the card reader slot in the front of the machine. A spinning hourglass icon appeared on the screen.

  As she waited, scenes from the past few days tripped through her mind. It seemed such a senseless thing, DeBryan’s murder at the hands of some common street thug, not that she believed for a second that’s what he was. Nothing about the break-in felt random at all. So the question was, why had they been targeted? Her instincts told her that the government was hiding something at Huangxia, despite Cheong’s assertions to the contrary.

  Finally, the spinning hourglass icon disappeared and a dialog box popped open asking her if she wished to view the photographs. She did.

  There were only about a dozen picture files, and most appeared to have been taken from the window of DeBryan’s room on the island. The images accurately depicted the destruction which had been wrought on the island, proof of what she’d told the police. Would the Chinese government kill to keep them from being published?

  What lengths would PRC officials go to in order to keep a secret? Would they murder an American journalist? Their failure to respond to the tragedy would have been an embarrassment in the international community, but no more so than so many of the other failures the press reported on year after year after year. What was different about this time?

  She came to the last file and waited for it to open. Finally, it popped up onto her screen, and she realized why it took an inordinately long amount of time. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t a photo but a short video. It showed a sweeping view of the rubble in near-darkness, but according to the time stamp, it had been recorded in the pre-dawn hours the next morning, when the day’s first light was beginning to flush the darkness out of the sky.

  She watched it once through, her chin resting on her hand, before straightening up in surprise. Now she leaned forward and stared hard at the lower left corner of the screen as she replayed it. This time, an icy cold chill passed through her, freezing the blood in her veins.

  Three more times she watched the clip, each time focusing on the same corner. The quality of the video wasn’t great, and given the dim light it was shot in, the image was quite pixelated. But what she saw was unequivocal.

  With shaking fingers, she removed the disk from the laptop and dropped it on the desk as if it were contaminated with some deadly virus. Then, after a very long time had passed, she picked up her cell phone and dialed. The call connected almost immediately.

  “I’ll give you a week,” she said.

  Chapter Eleven

  An icy wind howled across the grasslands and knocked the car from left to right and back again. Between the gusts, the sorry state of the roads, and the inadequate shock absorbers, Angel felt her organs had traveled well beyond the land of the bruised. After Shanghai, they may have started out that way, but they’d since crossed over the border into the realm of the battered and abused, and were now solidly situated somewhere east of tenderized.

  Twice she’d bitten her tongue, once when the right front tire slammed suddenly into an especially deep pothole which then launched her to the car’s roof, and once when the entire vehicle rode a swale that felt as if the tarmac had turned into a marshmallow the size of a swimming pool. After an hour of complaining, she gave up asking Jian, her driver, to slow down and settled back in her seat with her carry-on pack clutched tight against her chest and her teeth clenched until her jaw cramped. The peril to her tongue was too great to risk opening her mouth to speak.

  She had never seen any landscape as monotonous as the eastern steppes, and she knew it was only going to get more desolate and more cold as the day wore on. She was glad she’d packed thermal underwear.

  The temperature upon her arrival in Beijing had been moderate. It was a cloudy day, but without a breeze. Soon after leaving the city behind, however, the air grew chilly and the wind picked up. As the minutes ticked away toward late afternoon, the sun faded to a dull seeping pustule resting low on the skin of an albino sky. Ice formed on the corner of her window. Gray became the predominant color of the landscape.

  “How much longer?”

  “Two hour,” Jian said, holding up three fingers. Precise quantities seemed to defy him. His age was impossible to tell. As far as Angel could guess, he was anywhere from fourteen to forty. “We passing Bairin Zouqi,” he said, and he pointed at some low slung buildings off to the right. “One time was capital Chinese Liao Dynasty.”

  The car skidded briefly on the shoulder, and he wrenched the wheel back until the tires hit pavement once again.

  Angel took in the dismal scenery. They had passed what appeared to be a small town, some brick buildings and maybe more beyond, difficult to tell for sure in this low-contrast gloom. The few structures she saw closer to the road were made of cement and gray stone and appeared to be small shrines. There was also the occasional yurt or ger randomly situated
, but little else. No people, lots of sheep and goats, a few camels. The variety of things to see was severely limited.

  Bairin Zouqi.

  The name whispered to her in her head, sounding vaguely familiar. She had a faint memory of an earthquake happening in the region, maybe ten, fifteen years before. If she remembered correctly, the event might have turned out to be one of those unremarkable things, of no particular interest to people elsewhere in the world, except that the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, had clashed with the government, not outright accusing but rather hinting that it was underreporting the severity of the trembler’s aftereffects. International news sources claimed that some twenty-five thousand homes had been damaged versus the sixty or so Beijing officially stated. The reasons for the discrepancy were never made clear, but it seemed to be yet another example of misrepresentation by the government, as if it were embarrassed by events it could neither have predicted nor prevented.

  Such conduct had become so commonplace that the world had long since stopped taking the “official” reports at face value, which was why it was so important that people like her be granted access.

  Was that the case with Huangxia? Until roughly sixteen hours ago, she had been sure the government was simply engaged in another cover-up of a natural disaster there. After what she’d seen on DeBryan’s video clip, she wasn’t sure it had even been natural, or even that the island had been hit by a rogue wave. By all appearances, it certainly seemed that way, but how could she trust anything now, even her own eyes?

  “Wenbai coming next,” Jian told her. “One hour.”

  “That’s where the factory is?”

  He nodded. “Goh Li Xhia factory.” He slipped a hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a photo and handed it over. Angel unfolded it and held it close to the window for light.

  “This is recent?”

  He nodded.

  The three-story cement structure sat on a small hill. It had been built with modern construction materials. The corners were sharp and precise, almost painfully so. Angel made out a line of solar panels on the roof, their surfaces angled toward the bleak winter sun. The wall facing the camera was smooth and unbroken save for a single small door in the right-hand corner, and a lone window just above it. There was no parking lot, no signage. And the grounds around it had never been finished. Construction rubble and frozen dirt had simply been left in heaps all around.

  “Not very inviting, is it?”

  “Make secret parts for American company.”

  Angel rolled her eyes. It was the same old story. Jacques had even written about it once, in fact, though he’d never actually been out here. He did the bulk of his research online from his room in Lyon.

  Technology companies, he wrote, built their factories in the remote parts of China, exploiting the local cheap labor in their systematic rape of the land by removing rare earth elements, using the uneducated workers to staff their assembly lines. A few years would pass and people would start developing strange health problems or suffer from repetitive injuries. The worksite would be quietly shuttered and a new one would open somewhere else under a different name. No one would report these happenings. In its own drive toward economic superiority the Chinese government would be fully complicit, and so guilty of the abuses. The world simply didn’t seem to care enough to bring such atrocities to light.

  “What kinds of parts?”

  He shrugged. “Machines. Little computers.”

  “Laptops?”

  He shrugged.

  “Will we stop there?”

  Jian shook his head. “Not allow. We go on further to Baoyang village. You spend night with family, stay with Jian. Tomorrow, village have burial ceremony for dead. You stay in house. Then, next day, if okay, you go see train.”

  * * *

  Angel hadn’t realized at first that Jian meant for her to be excluded from the burial ceremony. “I’ll stay out of the way,” she promised, when he refused her request to attend. “No pictures. You won’t even notice me.” But despite her appeals, he was adamant that she remain out of sight during the entire observance. Furthermore, she was not to go anywhere near the makeshift morgue that had been set up on the outskirts of the village, at least until the day after. “Is not allow,” he told her. “Only yaschin allow during preparing bodies.” It was when he told her this last part that she finally understood the cultural significance of his request.

  A couple years back she had traveled to Tibet to investigate an outbreak of pneumonic plague in one of the northern prefectures, and it was during her stay there that she became familiar with the Buddhist practice of sky burial. She had forgotten that many of these customs were shared in some form by the Mongols; indeed, the term yaschin — bone man or bone dealer — was the same one the Tibetan Buddhists had used.

  The lamas taught that the body functions as a vessel for one’s consciousness, which transmigrates into another after death. Having outlasted its usefulness, the remains of the deceased are placed on a hill or mountaintop, where they are typically consumed by carrion-eaters, namely vultures. Thus, the body is recycled back into the earth while providing one final act of generosity to those still living.

  It was the yaschin’s responsibility to prepare the body, sometimes hastening the defleshing of the bones by slicing into it beforehand with special knives, sometimes even going so far as removing the muscle and organs.

  Days later, after they had been picked clean, the bones might be collected, then crushed into powder and mixed with flour to provide further nourishment to the animals. Sometimes this mixture was given to the yaks for feed.

  No one else is allowed near the body during preparation, and even those individuals closest to the deceased are encouraged to keep their distance. This is because it takes a while for the spirit to accept that the body has died, and in such a vulnerable state, it longs to possess another and may attempt to enter a body already occupied. It is the monks’ job to help guide the spirits to their next home.

  She remembered being initially appalled by the whole idea of excarnation, the body left on some exposed rock where it could be picked over by scavengers. The custom ostensibly fulfilled important spiritual functions, teaching that life is impermanent, and that we can still show generosity and compassion for all living creatures, even after death. She did not, however, share the lamas’ sensibilities.

  But folklore and traditional practices oftentimes have their beginnings in worldly considerations, and, as she learned, it turned out that sky burial was no exception. In many areas where it is followed, timber for funeral pyres was scarce, and the presence of permafrost or shallow bedrock made excavating a grave impractical. These were things she could understand and accept.

  Standing at the door of the family’s empty yurt and peering out into the silent village early the next morning, Angel realized that she truly was alone out here, and would be, at least according to what Jian had indicated, for nearly the entire day. The bodies would not be placed on the mountaintop until nightfall, after which there would follow a period of quiet mourning.

  She wondered, had even the youngest, oldest, and most feeble survivors gone to pay their respects? It seemed they had. There wasn’t a soul left in the village.

  But then movement caught her eye. A shadow passed between structures, the darkness rippling over the ground. Soon after, a dog appeared and trotted across the gravel ruts of the village’s main road. It paused a couple times to sniff at something and once to scratch its belly before disappearing further away. The animal was thin but healthy, not starved. She didn’t think she’d find any abused animals here, as it was not the custom of these people. Last night, for example, she had noticed a bowl set on the ground just outside the door. Empty then, it was now filled with a thin, bluish milk.

  It had taken them longer to arrive to the village than Jian had calculated, even assuming he’d meant the full three hours his fingers had indicated. A flat tire and no jack for the spare had added to the drive, and it
was only by incredible good luck that a farmer passed and helped dig a hole deep enough so that the offending wheel could be replaced. Then, another pothole had loosened the sole remaining headlight on the car, which started to wobble. Only then did Jian slow down.

  By the time they saw the first buildings, rectangular mud and stone houses, night was fully upon them, and the headlight was pointing too far to the left to be of much use, like a lazy eye in a face where its twin had gone blind.

  She caught glimpses of the yurts as they materialized out of the darkness, looking like giant squat mushrooms sprouting from a moonscape of scrub and gravel. She realized with a sinking sensation that these would be her accommodations for the next few days. Though she had roughed it before, she hadn’t expected it to be quite this rustic, even though Cheong had warned her as much, adding also that she should expect no cell phone service, no internet, and no espresso machines. In fact, there would be no electricity at all.

  When she asked Jian to confirm all this, he nodded, but added, “All people working at Goh Li Xhia factory have phone given by company. No signal except in factory or city.” He shook his head, as if it were the most absurd thing he’d ever heard. It very well may have been.

  Getting out of the car had not been easy for Angel. She was stiff and sore from the ride and the bruising she’d previously received in Shanghai, but she was grateful to stretch her legs. Her discomfort quickly gave way to wonder as darkness swept in to embrace them once Jian extinguished the headlight. The haze from the day had since dissipated, and the air was sharp and crisp, almost crystalline in its clarity. The wide valley glowed with a ghostly hue from the starlight above. There was something magical about the place which made the long drive almost worth it.

  Jian’s family stayed up just long enough to meet her and answer a few questions, then the central fire was extinguished and everyone retired. Angel was given a spot on a carpet of yak pelts which carried a strong, though not unpleasant, musky odor. And though the ground was hard and the air frigid, she awoke the next morning warm and more refreshed than she had in a very long time. Her dreams had not been troubled. Her abused muscles felt better. And the wonderful aroma of yak milk tea filled the tent and woke her appetite.