INCARNATION (18 page)

The clerk, a bleary-eyed Chinese woman with rotten teeth, looked at him as though he was an offence against nature.

‘I need a room,’ he said. All the time, he was thinking about Nabila and what was happening in her room. If she had really killed someone, mustn’t he still be in there?

‘No rooms. Too late for rooms.’

It was tempting to launch into a tirade of fluent Mandarin, but his best bet here was to play the dumb waiguoren and hope he could wear her down. On second thoughts, his best hope was to play the rich dumb waiguoren. That would wear her down a lot faster. And it did.

He slipped a thick wad of hundred-yuan notes from his wallet and asked how much she required. She glanced round and decided that this was as good a chance as any to make a small profit for herself. The price she quoted was almost double the going rate. He handed it over without a quibble.

‘I want a fourth-floor room,’ he said. ‘It’s too noisy lower down, and I get dizzy anywhere higher.’

She was about to protest when he produced another hundred-yuan note. Without a word, she produced the registration form, and he filled it in carefully in English, making several deliberate mistakes.

Upstairs, the furen handed him his key, and he made his way straight to his room, opening and closing the door again before darting round the corner to number 430.

He knocked gently, and the door opened at once. All in all, it had taken him nearly half an hour to make it here, and Nabila’s face showed the strain of waiting.

A man was lying motionless on the bed, face down, his trousers round his ankles.

'Is he dead?’ asked Nabila.

‘You’re a doctor. Haven’t you examined him?’

‘I can’t touch him. I can scarcely bear to look at him.’

David went to the bed and put his finger to the man’s neck.

‘He’s dead.’ He turned and looked at her. Now she was here again with the body, all her defences had collapsed. Her face was empty, her eyes frightened, her movements short and quick and nervous. ‘Suppose you tell me who he is and what it is you want me to do.’

She pointed to a corner in which a crumpled raincoat lay.

‘Plain clothes,’ she said. ‘Just like the ones downstairs. They’ve been all over the city tonight. This one ...’ She made for the room’s only chair and sat in it, breathing quickly, then forced herself to breathe more slowly and more deeply. The dizziness passed. She looked up at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been in a situation like this before. I’m frightened ... I’m afraid they could come knocking on the door any minute now. It must be two hours since he turned up. He … said he wanted to question me. I don’t know if that was true or not ...’

‘Did he say about what? About me? Did he know about me?’

She shook her head.

‘No, nothing about you. He was interested in my paper for the conference. And he asked about my family. My father mostly.’

‘I think you’d better explain.’

‘There isn’t time. We have to do something about him.’

‘He’ll wait. What about your father?’

‘His name is Azad Muhammadju. He’s an ahun, a Muslim holy man. He was involved in a rising a few years ago. It was only his holiness that kept him out of a camp. He’s been under close surveillance ever since. That includes members of his family. Everywhere I go I get calls from the police.’

‘Like tonight.’

‘Yes.’ She looked at the body on the bed. ‘Except that this one was different. He tried to rape me. He told me that if I protested he’d make a lot of trouble for me, a lot of trouble for my father. I tried to fight him off. He ... He pulled down his trousers. He was ... he tried to pull up my nightdress, but I struggled. I reached up for something to hit him with. I thought it was the water flask. But  ...’

Her voice fell away, and her eyes led him to the object she’d picked up in her terror. A plaster model of the city’s mountain, that she’d bought as a souvenir for her mother. She’d taken hold of it and struck him on the temple before she even noticed the weight.

David got up and examined the body. There was no blood, but his temple had been cracked by the blow. He sat down on the bed and tried to think. This was his second night in China, and already things seemed to be running out of his control.

‘We need to get him out of here,’ he said. ‘You can say he left when he should have left.’

‘Yes, but where can we leave him? Once they find him, they’ll examine him. We’ve got no transport. And we can’t call the police.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘You’re in serious trouble. And it looks like I’m in it with you.’

G
etting him out of the hotel was the easy part. They dressed him in his trenchcoat and glasses, and tied his ankles to theirs, one on each side, and smuggled him down the rear stairs. As they passed the furen, Nabila hastily pointed out that their friend had drunk more Maotaijiu than he could handle.

‘We’re taking him down the back way,’ she said, ‘in case his friends at the front see what he’s been up to.’

The furen just nodded and turned her head away. In matters involving the secret police, discretion was always the better part of staying alive and out of prison. By tomorrow, she’d have seen nothing and heard nothing she was not supposed to.

Once they were in the stairwell, it was easy going. As long as they didn’t bump into other wayward guests, their coast was clear. Except that this was always going to be the easy bit. Outside, they got him to a dark corner, between a colony of rubbish bins and the hotel truck. Nabila sank to her haunches. Since bringing David over, her confidence had doubled; but the dark and the cold night air were starting to undermine it again.

‘Tell me about the rape attempt,’ David said.

She shook her head. ‘I’d rather not say anything about it.’

‘You’ll have to. I need to know whether you would have been his first rape, or whether he habitually made advances to his female suspects.’

‘Why’s that important?’

‘If he did it habitually, the chances are he has a reputation among his colleagues. They may know about the rapes, or just that he likes sex a lot.’

She looked off into the darkness, where it collected above the city, squatting like a black toad. Words were redundant. Acceptance was everything. The city was unnaturally silent.

‘Please, Nabila. This could be important.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Trust me.’

She could not trust anyone, she thought. Not even herself.

‘He said ... I was in a lot of trouble. My paper could lead to my arrest. If I wasn’t careful, I’d end up in a prison camp. Unless ...’ Her face froze. She could still see the policeman, his eyes brightening, his voice growing heavy.

‘Unless what?’

‘He said he wanted to be kind to me, that he liked me. He said it would be a pity if a pretty woman like me disappeared into one of those hell-holes; I’d come out a wreck, if I ever came out at all.’

‘So he offered to save you from a fate worse than death if you co-operated. By having sex with him.’

She didn’t answer at once. Day after day she’d sat in her room at the hospital in Kashgar, listening to stories like this. Women raped by their brothers and fathers, women forced to have sex with husbands whom they’d been made to marry, women whose whole existence was compliance with male demands. Nothing could ever be made public. In Sinkiang, as in other Muslim societies, dishonour was the greatest sin. Being raped invited dishonour. A dishonoured woman risked death.

‘He touched me after that. He ran his hand down my cheek. Very gently.’

‘I don’t need to know this, Nabila. I just want to know if it was you in particular, or every woman he could victimize.’

‘He started to stroke my breasts. I tried to stop him, but he was getting excited, I couldn’t hold him back.’

‘Why didn’t you cry out?’

‘Who would they have believed? He pushed me back, but I kept struggling. That made him angry. “Why are you making trouble for yourself?” he said. “Other women are grateful to me for helping them. They know how to show their gratitude".'

‘Then he did this sort of thing regularly.’

‘Not with me.’

‘No, not with you. You have strength of will. All the same, it may be better you killed him. Once you started struggling, you gave him a reason to fight back.’ He paused and looked hard at her. He wanted to comfort her, to stroke her back or head as he might have done with a child. But he sensed that the last thing she wanted was for a man to touch her. That was the beginning of his love for her, though he barely recognized it at the time.

‘How well do you know Urumchi?’ he asked.

‘Reasonably well. I studied at Sinkiang University. What do you want to know?’

‘I’d like to know where I can find a brothel.’

She felt herself go cold. Was he mocking her? She’d barely known him twenty-four hours, knew him little better than she’d known the man who tried to rape her. Had he been asking all those questions just as a pretence? Or as some vile form of self-gratification?

‘A man like this would frequent brothels’ he said. ‘For all we know, he may be a regular visitor at one or two. That’s where his colleagues have to find him. Do you see?’

The cold left her as quickly as it had come. Something in his voice reassured her. From the moment she’d called him, she’d felt safe. He could be trusted, she was growing sure of that. And what he said was right: a brothel could serve as the perfect cover for her crime.

‘I don’t know anywhere,’ she said. ‘But I know someone who might do. He’s a doctor at the Minorities Hospital. His name is Liu Yaobang.’ She paused.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Maybe. I’ll have to be very careful how I approach him. He was ... In his youth he decided to specialize in venereal diseases. He’d found a lot of people going untreated, so he suggested setting up a clinic where they could be referred. A few days after the meeting in which he made his proposal he was arrested. This was just before the Cultural Revolution. He spent the next fifteen years digging potatoes in a labour camp.’

‘What did he do?’

‘I already told you. He suggested setting up a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. The local authorities had already decreed that they had eliminated such disease throughout the province. The workers, peasants, cadres and patriotic health workers had loosened the grip of a centuries-old horror and given the people of Sinkiang health and prosperity.’

‘What does your friend do now?’

‘He runs the venereal diseases clinic here in Urumchi. He’s a new socialist person. VD is a new socialist concept.’

‘Will he help you?’

‘Yes, he’ll tell me what I need. But it’s very late.’

‘This is urgent, Nabila. Your life’s at stake. We don’t have much time.’

‘All right. I’ll go back up to my room and ring him now.’

He shook his head.

‘Not from your room. After what happened at the Shaanshi Mosque today, they’ll be monitoring every call. The police could make a connection. Go through the back entrance to reception. Tell them your phone’s out of order, and say you have an urgent call.’ He paused. 'Where does your friend live?’

‘At the hospital. I don’t know if I can get them to call him at this time.’

‘You’re a doctor. Make something up. When you’ve got full directions, come back here.’

She nodded and turned to go. He called her back.

‘Nabila - can you try to get hold of a pen? A felt-tip would be ideal, otherwise a ballpoint.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

She returned ten minutes later, looking ill at ease. ‘Well?’

'They let me ring, but they weren’t happy about it. I had to make a thing about being a doctor, about it being an emergency. I spoke in Uighur, I don’t think they understood.’

‘Did your friend have the information we want?’

‘He wasn’t too happy about being woken at this time just to be asked where the nearest brothel is.’

‘I’m sure he wasn’t. Did he know?’

She nodded.

'There’s an establishment called
Shie Chu Tian Tang
- the Paradise of Joy and Harmony.’

‘That’s a very nice name.’

‘It’s very popular with policemen and military officers, apparently.’ 

‘Is it far?’

‘It’s in an alleyway between Tuanjie Lu and Yan’an Lu, south of here. How are we getting there?’

He pointed to a small van used by the hotel for bringing food from the markets. ‘Did you get the pen?’ 

She held out a large ballpoint pen. ‘Go easy with it,’ she said. ‘It cost me two yuan.’ 

He had already found some sheets of cardboard in one of the rubbish bins. On the back of the first, he wrote:
Jiuhuche
in large Chinese characters. Ambulance. On a second, he wrote
Az Sanliq Milldtldr Dukhturkhana
in Uighur: Minorities Hospital, with a Chinese translation next to it. These he fixed to the windscreen. A third sheet he likewise inscribed in Chinese and Uighur, and positioned on the door separating the body of the van from the driving compartment. It read: Ganran/Yalluq - Infection. To be on the safe side, he added a very plausible skull and crossbones.

‘You write Chinese very nicely,’ Nabila said. ‘Better than most Chinese.’

‘My father started me on my first characters when I was four. By the time I was ten I wrote it better than English. Not that that’s saying much.’ 

‘Where’s ...?’ she asked. 

‘I’ve put him in the back. You’ll see.’ They drove off five minutes later, slowly and carefully. The moon had appeared, and the sky was crackling with stars. But off in the mountains thunder rolled slowly from peak to unillumined peak, boding storms to come.

G
etting the van to go had been easy, David reflected. Getting to the other side of the city was anything but. The authorities had imposed a curfew on all Uighurs, and had set up checkpoints at almost every corner in order to impose it. Anyone found on the street without a permit would be arrested. Anyone attempting to run would be shot. It was standard policy.

He drove down a maze of back alleys, lights extinguished, foot poised over the brake pedal, ready to slam down at any sign of life ahead. At Renmin Lu, he crossed westwards, keeping away from the area around the Shaanshi Mosque. There was no need to keep his lights off here. Twice, he passed groups of soldiers patrolling, but there was no checkpoint till the next crossroads, south of the main market.