INCARNATION (19 page)

He called into the back, alerting Nabila. At any moment now, they could be arrested, perhaps even shot on the spot.

He drove down to the checkpoint slowly, knowing that too much speed could be deadly. No Chinese soldier was likely to forget the incident, two years earlier, when a young student named Nur Hodja had driven a small delivery truck slowly and directly towards a military post in Turfan. Fifty soldiers had watched him come. He’d smiled at them and stopped and smiled again, then pressed a button detonating two hundred pounds of high explosive in the back.

The checkpoint was made up of two armed jeeps, each furnished with a light machine-gun. They were Chinese versions of the Soviet RPK, capable of firing 660 rounds a minute. David eyed them cautiously. A nervous trigger-finger could turn the van and its occupants into a bloody cheese-grater in seconds. At least two of the occupants would be upset. He put his foot gently on the brake and slid to a halt near a soldier carrying a Type 56 Assault Rifle. It wasn’t as powerful as a machine-gun. But it could leave you just as dead.

‘You! Switch off your lights!
Kuai dianr
! Drive over here!
Zai nar
.’

There were six of them, all young, all on edge. Two sat at the back of each jeep, holding on to their machine-guns as if their lives depended on them. Further back, an officer stood watching languidly with careful, intelligent eyes.

The first soldier held his hand out stiffly, like a schoolboy waiting to be caned. ‘
Gongzuozheng!
’ he barked. David shook his head.

‘I don’t have an ordinary ID,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to take this.’

He reached into his pocket. The soldier watched his hand, as though it might suddenly grow thorns. The officer remained where he was. He seemed mildly amused. David produced a card and held it under the soldier’s nose. He flashed a torch on it and sniffed in puzzlement. David’s ID was a
zhuanjiazheng
, the "expert certificate" issued to foreign experts brought in by the Chinese government. The soldier held it as though it had just bitten him, and thrust it at his superior.

The officer scrutinized the card very carefully.

‘This certificate says you work in Kashgar. What are you doing in Urumchi?’

‘Not understand good. Chinese not speak good’

The officer glanced back at the card. It described David as Australian.

‘Do you speak English?’ he asked.

David nodded, and the officer asked him his first question again in English.

‘I’m attending the conference on traditional medicine.’

‘And what brings you out here so late?’

David pointed at the sign saying "Ambulance".

‘There’s a shortage of ambulances at the military hospital.’

‘I hadn’t heard of it.’

‘Would I be driving this if there was any choice?’

‘I want to see inside. Will you open the back, please?’

‘There’s a very sick man in there.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to divulge that information. He may be very contagious. I’m willing to open the rear door, but I am warning you not to go too close.’

He stepped down and walked slowly to the rear. The officer followed him. Behind them stood the soldier with the assault rifle. David opened the door.

Inside, Nabila sat on the floor of the van. Across her lap, covered in a long blanket, was China’s least promising police officer. She wore a medical mask over her face, improvised from strips torn from the lining of her skirt. With one hand she was raising the dead man’s head, while with the other she was pouring water from a bottle. Some of the water slipped down, the rest came back up, making a catching sound. She lowered the body and removed her mask.

‘He’s deteriorating rapidly’ she said. ‘We have to get him to the Minorities Hospital. Please don’t hold us up longer than you have to.’

‘
Gongzuozheng
,’ snapped the officer.

She pulled out her ID, and David took it and handed it to the captain. Everything seemed in order.

‘We really have to hurry’ said David. ‘He could die before we get him there.’

‘You know there’s a curfew? You know I could have you both shot?’

‘I think,' said David, stepping up very close to the young man, ‘that it would be the last order you ever gave. I think you and your family would regret it every day for the rest of your miserable lives.’

David saw the man’s hand move towards the holster where he kept his side weapon. As he did so, David moved in closer. He heard a bolt being drawn behind him. He froze, then, keeping a smile on his face, he whispered to the officer. The young man’s face lost its composure, and his hand fell from the holster as though suddenly numb. He motioned to the soldier behind David, who dropped back as though stung.

‘Go on,’ he said. 'I’ll say nothing more about this. If he dies ...’

‘Then our lives are even more at risk than yours. I know that.’

He got back into the driving seat and switched on the engine. Slowly, using only side-lights, he began to pull away. Suddenly, a voice from the checkpoint brought them to a halt again. David turned and wound down the window. The captain strode up to the door.

‘You should be careful,’ he said. ‘You look very like a Uighur.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘Then you should take care what company you keep, waiguoren.’

David said nothing and wound the window up. The street stretched ahead of him, empty of traffic, empty of lights.

He drove past his hotel. It was dark. An old man stood outside in defiance of the curfew, smoking a wooden pipe. At the next turning, David swung left and doubled back towards Yan’an Lu.

‘What did you whisper to him?’ called Nabila. She remained in the back in case they were stopped again.

‘The captain? Oh, I just said our friend in the rear is General Wan Yaobang, and that if he died because of a delay there’d be one less captain in the People’s Liberation Army tomorrow.’ He sneezed loudly, swerving the van.

She laughed, the first time since he’d known her. A light, unselfconscious laugh that echoed briefly in the tinny interior of the van. He drove on, cursing the little engine for its roughness.

He turned right on to Yan’an Lu.

‘It’s the second on the left after the New China Bookstore,’ said Nabila from the back.

‘I can hardly make out anything in this light.’

‘Drive more slowly.’

‘How’s our patient?’

‘He’ll live!’

The headlights scraped across a tall painted sign reading Shinhua Shudian. David counted the next two openings, switched off the lights, and turned into the little alleyway.

Ahead of him, the fronts of tiny houses swept away into darkness. A patina of moonlight glazed green tiles and blue doors with a wash of pearl. They were tawdry houses, undistinguished, built by committee, but in the dreamy accents of the new moon they had grown almost beautiful.

David stepped out and started to walk along the house-fronts, wondering how he was supposed to find the brothel among so many identical facades. He walked softly, avoiding the water channel that ran down the centre of the hutong. In the mountains, the thunder still rolled in sullen arrhythmic beats. He shivered with sudden cold.

A house on the left stood out from the rest. Its door was painted bright red, and on it someone had painted in exquisite calligraphy the two characters that make up the word Heaven. Somewhere a small bell chimed. The sound carried a few feet and fell exhausted. He walked back to the van and opened the back door. ‘Found it,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave the van here. I don’t want to make any noise.’

Together, they lifted the body from the van and carried it awkwardly along the alley. The windows on all sides were blank. David didn’t bother checking whether anyone was peering out at them or not. No one would risk their neck by volunteering information. The three wise monkeys were stamped on the forehead of every man or woman born in China.

They laid him down at the door of the brothel. David fumbled inside the man’s jacket and brought out a thin wallet. It contained his ID - his name was Luo Lianying, he was a lieutenant with the Urumchi Gongan Bu, he was thirty-two years old - and photographs of a woman and two children. David replaced the wallet in Lianying’s jacket, but kept the photographs, placing them as well as he could into the dead man’s left hand.

‘Do you think ...?’ Nabila began, then fell silent. ‘Do I think he loved them? I hope so. Feeling guilty won’t make this any better, believe me.’

He took a bottle of whisky from his pocket. He’d found it in his hotel room, and taken it with him. He lifted the dead man’s head with one hand, and with the other poured whisky into the open mouth. Very little went into the throat, but it hardly mattered. What mattered was that whoever found the body should say the dead man had been drinking, that he smelt strongly of alcohol.

David opened the dead man’s coat again and took out a Type 51, Tokarov-style pistol. Bending down, he fired a single round into Lianying’s right temple, then pressed the pistol into his right hand.

‘This is sordid,’ said Nabila, looking down at him. She had seen the photographs, seen what use David made of them.

‘Yes, it is sordid,’ David answered. So much of what he did fitted that category. In his scale of things sordid, brothels scarcely figured.

‘Will it be enough?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘This is all improvisation. My hope is that the whole thing looks embarrassing enough to prompt a cover-up.’

‘And if not?’

‘Come on, let’s get back to the van. I don’t want to hang around here any longer than I need to.’

‘I asked what would happen if they don’t opt for a cover-up.’

‘There’s nothing to tie him to you or your hotel. He’s a policeman shot in an alley by Muslim separatists in retaliation for today’s massacre. Open and closed.’

‘It could provoke another massacre.’

‘Please, Nabila. Once you start thinking that way, it’ll go on until you’re out of your head. They don’t need excuses to kill people.’

They shut the rear door and got into the van.

‘I’ll take you to your hotel, then I’ll walk back to mine. The van has to be left where we found it.’

He drove off. In order to avoid the checkpoint they’d been stopped at, Nabila directed him along rough tracks out on the east of the city, well away from the Shaanshi Mosque.

They were stopped again at the crossroads just above the People’s Theatre. This time they said they were on their way to the Military Hospital to operate on a badly injured hero of the day’s struggle.

‘I’ve been in Daheyan,’ said David. ‘It’s taken until now to get me here. If any more time’s wasted ...’ And he was waved through.

They got into the hotel yard as they’d left, and David parked the van, removing the cardboard signs that had given it its brief legitimacy. 

‘Get to your room as quickly as possible,’ he said. 

‘Aren’t you staying here as well?’ 

‘I’d like to. But I’ve left too much in my hotel. I need to retrieve it. It won’t take me long to walk back there.’

‘What if you run into another checkpoint or a patrol?’ 

‘They won’t shoot a foreigner. You know that. Take care.’ He was on the brink of leaning forward to kiss her on the cheek, as he might have done a Western woman. Then he thought better of it, and moved away from her across the bare concrete of the tiny yard. He saw her walk to the door that led back to the rear staircase. As she reached it, she turned to look for him. Moonlight fell on her, opalescent and strange, and for a long moment her face and hands gleamed in it, like the face and hands of a ghost.

Much later that morning, David stirred from a dreamless sleep. He looked at his watch and saw he was already late. Dressing quickly, he hurried outside and walked at top speed to a shop three streets away. It was a bookshop selling both Uighur and Chinese titles. Taking his time now, he browsed through the shelves until he found a copy of the
Ben cao gang mu
, the classic medical text of the Ming period. As he took it to the counter, he slipped something between the covers, the British passport he had carried in the name of Dr Aziz Khan. The hotel reception had handed it back without objection.

The woman at the counter looked closely at him as he handed the book over.

‘This copy is damaged,’ she said. ‘I’ll just go inside and get you one from stock.’

She disappeared, taking the original copy together with the passport. When she returned a few minutes later, she still held the same copy in her hand, but the passport had gone. David smiled as he took delivery of the book. It would make a fine present for Nabila.

Carstairs, Gloucestershire

T
ursun came awake startled. He’d been sitting in his armchair, reading The Lord of the Rings, and he must have fallen asleep, book in hand. It took a few seconds to realize that another plane had gone by, lower and faster than any so far. They’d been at it all day, hurtling past low enough to be seen from his bedroom window. Mrs H. said they were in the middle of an important training region, and promised him a visit to Brize Norton once his debriefing was over. He’d smiled his thanks, and looked forward to visiting the air base; but he knew it wasn’t routine when they flew after midnight. They were practising to fight in the dark, somewhere thousands of miles from here. Sometimes when he heard them screech past, Tursun entertained a brief fantasy of flying one himself, faster than the fastest thing alive. And then the fantasy would flicker and die, and he’d think about what it would be like to be in such a plane when a missile tore it apart.

He got up and went to the window, pulling aside the curtains to look out. All he saw was blackness wrapped over blackness, night spilled over night. If the plane returned, he wondered if he would see it. Sleep left him, and he sat watching, waiting for the roar of the jets to crash through the darkness again.

He’d started to worry about how long it would be before they called a halt to his debriefing, and what would happen to him and his parents after that. He didn’t really know his mother and father very well, but they were the only family he had, and he’d learned to feel affection for them during their long escape from China. The woman who handled his debriefings had said it might be a while yet before a house could be allocated to them. He’d asked her about starting school, about finding somewhere that could accommodate itself to his peculiar abilities.