Crimson China (23 page)

They take him to the blue hatchback, waiting down a side street. One of the men walks behind him with the knife pressed into his back, the other at his side. The pork bun he was eating has lodged halfway down his gullet. He is still clutching the sack with the other in his hand. As they approach the car, a uniformed parking attendant has just placed a ticket on the windscreen, and is turning away. Little Dog curses him in Mandarin and snatches the ticket, tossing it to the ground. He jumps into the driver’s seat, while one of the other men opens the back door and shoves Wen onto the seat, then climbs in beside him. The third man gets into the passenger seat, and Little Dog starts the engine and drives off. The man next to him pushes him down sideways onto the seat and binds his wrists tightly with a rope, pulling it hard enough to make him wince. Then he pulls a pillowcase over his head. Wen drops the sack of buns onto the floor of the car.

They drive for hours, at first slowly, stopping and starting through London traffic, then eventually much faster. At some point it starts to rain. Wen can hear the steady drizzle on the roof of the car, together with the swishing windscreen wipers. At length he dozes off, and when he wakes the car has stopped. He hears Little Dog get out of the driver’s seat and close the door; the other two men remain behind with him. The one next to him sighs
heavily. Wen hears him stretch his legs.

“Fucking rain,” he says in Mandarin.

“It’s the dark that gets to me,” says the other. “Like living in a cave.”

Wen stirs slightly. He needs the toilet but dares not ask. They sit in silence and a minute later he hears Little Dog return.

“Here,” he says to one of the others as he gets into the car. “It’s all they had.”

Wen hears them passing round drinks and food. He hears the man next to him take a sip of something, then swear.

“Tastes like piss!”

“Give it to
him
if you don’t want it,” says the other.

Little Dog snorts. “Haven’t you heard?” he says. “Dead men don’t drink.”

Now Wen is wide awake, Little Dog’s words echoing in his brain. They carry on driving, and after another hour the traffic slows again. Little Dog swears several times. At length the car comes to a halt and Little Dog shuts off the engine. The man next to him orders Wen to sit up. He can tell that it is already dark outside, perhaps early evening. They take him from the car and propel him forward into a building, pushing him up a set of stairs and into a room where they shove him into a wooden chair. Wen feels them binding him to the chair with rope, his hands still tied in front of him.

“Shut the blinds,” says Little Dog.

Someone turns on a light, he hears the scrape of a chair, and in the next instant, one of them has pulled off the pillowcase. Wen blinks in the glare of the light. Little Dog sits in front of him in a straight-backed chair, beside a small round wooden table. The other two men hover nearby: the one he recognises from before, the smaller of the two, leans back against the edge of the table, his arms folded over his chest. The other man is clearly the muscle: though not tall, he is heavy set, with thick arms and meaty hands.
He stands beside Little Dog, his body twitching slightly. Wen glances quickly around the room. The door to the stairs is now shut. The walls are covered with a dingy pale green paint, and a single bare bulb hangs from a cracked ceiling rose. Against the rear wall is a battered sofa. In front of it is an old television set on an overturned wooden crate. There is only one window, now covered by a set of broken venetian blinds, their slats slightly askew.

“So,” says Little Dog, eyeing him up and down. “You must be a good swimmer.”

“I was lucky,” replies Wen cautiously.

“Not any more,” says Little Dog. He nods to the heavy-set man, and the latter steps forward, raising one arm. Wen is slow to realise what is happening: he shuts his eyes at the last instant, feels the force of the blow against his right cheek and chin. The man’s fist is like a mallet. He feels the skin split slightly; the pain is like a sharp pulse. He opens his eyes and Little Dog cocks his head to one side.

“We want our money,” says Little Dog.

The man hits Wen again, this time from the other side. This punch is harder and it snaps his head backwards. He takes a deep breath, just as he tastes blood inside is mouth.

“I can get your money,” he gasps.

“Really?” says Little Dog, leaning forward. “When?”

“Soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

“A few days,” says Wen. His head is a halo of pain. He squints through the haze at Little Dog and sees him shake his head slowly from side to side.

“Not good enough,” he says, nodding to the other man.

Wen closes his eyes again: this time the punch is to his gut, and he feels a small amount of vomit rise up in his throat. He leans forward, gasping, nearly choking. Black spots dance in front of his eyes.

“Get his phone,” he hears Little Dog say curtly.

The other man leaps up and he feels hands searching his pockets. They remove his wallet and phone and his passport and ticket. The man hands the ticket to Little Dog, who looks at it and raises an eyebrow.

“Going on holiday?” he says to Wen. He leans forward, newly angry. “You little shit! You think you can
hide
from us?”

“No,” murmurs Wen.

He watches as Little Dog tears the ticket in half, then halves it again, and then once more. He throws the scraps into the air and Wen watches them drift to the floor. Little Dog nods to the big man again, who steps forward and hits him again in the gut. This time the vomit comes more easily, all over his knees, his feet and the floor.

“Shit,” says Little Dog, now irritated. “Go get some towels.”

Later, Little Dog stands at the window, peering through the broken blinds. He holds Wen’s phone, scrolling through the contact list. After a moment, he dials one and speaks tersely into the phone.

“
Wei
? Who is this?”

Little Dog listens for a moment. “There’s someone here who wishes to speak to you,” he says into the phone.

He turns and holds the phone out towards Wen, nodding at the thick-set man. For a moment, Wen thinks that they will put the phone up to his ear, but then he sees the lighter in the burly man’s hand. It is small and sleek and made of stainless steel. The man steps closer and holds the lighter up towards his face. Wen pulls backwards with alarm, his guts starting to churn. He watches him flick the lighter with his thumb and the flame flares. The man flicks it once again and brings the flame closer to his face. Wen cranes his neck back as far as he can, his eyes glued to the flame. The burly man smiles and brings the flame right beneath his chin. It takes an instant for the pain to reach him; he smells his own flesh
searing even before he feels it, but when he does he screams in agony. The burly man snaps the lighter shut and nods to Little Dog, who turns away, finishing the call.

Afterwards, they untie him from the chair and handcuff his wrist to the base of a radiator by the window. Wen lies with his face against the floorboard, one eye sealed shut from the force of their blows, the taste of blood in his mouth. The burnt skin on his neck still feels as if it is on fire. At some point he has wet himself; he is not sure when, but he is relieved there is no longer pressure on his bladder. The men leave him lying in the darkness and go out. He hears them start the engine and pull away. Once they are gone, the pain seems to worsen. He could not move even if he wanted to: does not have the will nor the energy to escape.

His thoughts drift to Angie. What happened when she woke to find him gone? Did she understand at once the depth of his deceit? Some part of him crumples then; anguish seeps through him like a stain, more painful than the blows he has endured. Perhaps, he thinks ruefully, his fate has always been to betray.

At length he dozes off, waking only when they return some hours later. The stocky one opens the door, glances in to make certain he hasn’t moved and closes it again. He hears them moving about for the next hour or so, then the small house falls quiet. He sleeps again, and dreams that he is walking on the beach with Angie by his side. He looks out across the water and sees Lili wading towards him, her face stricken. He steps towards her but his feet sink into the sand beneath him, and when he looks up she is gone. He continues sinking until the sand is up to his chest. Angie has carried on walking and does not see, and though he tries to shout, no words come. The dream ends abruptly, just as he is sucked beneath the surface.

In the morning when he wakes, the pain in his head has turned to a dull ache. His cheek and ribs hurt, and one arm is sore, but apart from that he is okay. He sits up slowly and leans back against
the radiator. The house is silent; he has no idea whether Little Dog and his men are asleep or out. He is thirsty and his stomach growls noisily. There is something almost reassuring about the body’s need for food during times of adversity, he decides. When he made the journey overland from China, he lived on nothing but pot noodles for months on end, often raw. At the time he grew to hate them, but each day his hunger outweighed his aversion, and at mealtimes he ate his portion as enthusiastically as the rest.

He has not thought of them in many months, not since before the accident. They had been nine in all: seven men and two women. The oldest was forty-seven, the youngest was just nineteen, and for four months they were his constant companions. Together with a minder, they were given false passports and flown from Beijing to Bulgaria. None of them had ever boarded a plane before, much less been abroad. Some had never even been to Beijing. Once in Bulgaria, they were taken in a van to a safe house in the countryside, where they were forced to remain in a large attic room for nearly three weeks. At first there was an air of camaraderie and joviality among them; but after several days this changed to boredom, restlessness and irritability.

Over the course of those three weeks, he came to know each of them: their likes and dislikes, weaknesses and strengths, what marked them out as individuals. Old Wang was the eldest and assumed a sort of paternal role among them, bargaining with their minders for better food or more blankets when the weather outside turned cold. He told Wen that two years before he had been laid off his factory job in Shanxi Province, after nearly twenty years’ service. Since then he had been unable to find steady work, drifting from one casual job to the next, trying his hand at any number of unsuccessful ventures. His first wife had died many years before; he had one son, now grown, who had recently married and was keen to start a family of his own. Five years earlier, Old Wang had remarried. his new wife was much younger than himself. and
was blind, he told Wen, which explained why she had agreed to the marriage. At the time he had felt very fortunate to find a second wife in a country where young men outnumbered women by far.

But what he had not been prepared for was her shrewish manner. Blind or not, the woman was impossible to satisfy. One year after they were married, she gave birth to a daughter, much to Old Wang’s delight. But his wife had set her heart on a son, and so had badgered him at length for a second child, though having one would incur severe financial penalties that he could ill afford. A year later, a second daughter was born, for which his young wife berated him ceaselessly, having heard an item on the radio about male chromosomes determining gender. Because of her blindness, she was unable to work, having turned up her nose at an opportunity to train as a masseuse, one of the only forms of employment open to blind people. Neither could she care properly for their two children, so he was forced to hire an
aiyi
, a witless girl from the countryside to help out. It was the combination of all these things – the loss of his job, a disabled wife, the need for hired help, and the prospect of educating two young children – that had driven him to go abroad. He missed his two young daughters terribly, but had been happy enough to leave the shrill demands of their mother behind. One day, he intended to build a house big enough for him and his wife to live at opposite ends, he told Wen with a grin. Maybe I will take a mistress, he added with a chuckle. If the house is big enough, my wife need never know.

The youngest member of the group was called Wang, though the others quickly dubbed him Little Professor. He was nineteen, soft-spoken, wore wire-rimmed spectacles and had brought with him a thick, well-thumbed volume of ancient poetry, which he read constantly. Wen remembers the silence that enveloped the room the day Wang first told them he had dropped out of university to go abroad: to forfeit a place at university was almost unthinkable. Wang explained in his quiet way that his father was
very ill and required constant care, thus making it impossible for his mother to work. His treatment and medicine were very expensive, so Wang had little choice but to go abroad. Perhaps one day I will resume my studies in England, he ventured. Maybe I will even go to
Niuqiao
, he added with a grin, the phrase used by mainland Chinese to refer to Oxbridge. The others laughed, but at the time they had also thought
why not
? This young man was surely clever enough for any university.