What else do you know? Tang had asked almost casually during the dinner. Don’t expect an answer now, Paul had replied lightheartedly, almost jokingly, enjoying the thought that his host feared that he, Paul, had more information with which to incriminate him. Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe he should have simply told the truth: Nothing. I don’t know anything apart from what I’ve told you. He had not wanted to admit this yesterday. Would Tang still believe this “Nothing”? Christine had been right to be frightened. He had been incredibly stupid.
Paul tried to sit up and groaned. With every movement he felt his pulse pounding in his temples. This pain could not be withstood for long without pills. He felt nauseous and he was afraid that he might throw up any second. He looked around him. There was no toilet and no bucket in the room, only a sink. If he vomited in there, the sour smell of the vomit would stink up the whole room. He took a few deep breaths in and out that helped a little with the nausea.
His bed was a kind of pallet with a thin, uncomfortably firm mattress on it that he could barely lie on. Paul stood up slowly with considered movements. He was still wearing the suit he had on yesterday but the pockets were empty. They had taken away his cell phone and his briefcase, his ID, and his belt. The laces had been taken out of his shoes. He saw a plastic bottle of water and a plate of rice on a small wooden table. He went over to the table and drank half the bottle in a few short gulps.
Paul wondered if there was any way of escaping, but the only window in the room was small and had a grille over it; it was at the top of the wall, almost right under the ceiling. The door was secured with a locked metal grille. He got up and shook the grille and shouted “Hello” a few times without getting a reply. Paul carried the only chair in the room over to where the window was and stood on it. He could only see a little through the window; more than half of it was underground and a strip of blue sky as wide as a hand showed through the rest. He was able to open the window slightly, and soon heard a car driving up, car doors slamming, and footsteps. The car drove off again. Was he about to have a visitor? He listened hard. He got down from the chair, walked over to the door, and listened. Nothing.
Where had they brought him? This room was neither a cell—he was certainly not in an official prison—nor a guest bedroom. He was in a kind of basement. He remembered that Zhang had told him about two rooms in the basement of the police headquarters in which confessions were forced out of people. With violence if necessary.
Strangely, this thought did not make him feel frightened. Fear was nothing more than a function of an overactive imagination, at least with regard to nontraumatic experiences. That was how he had often comforted Justin when he had been frightened of the dark. People imagined everything that could happen and felt afraid. So those who had no imaginations could not be afraid.
He thought about Michael Owen. Perhaps he too had not wanted to accept till the very end how far his enemy would go.
Paul kept thinking about Zhang and the death of the old monk. Tang had told the story at such length and in such detail that images of that afternoon rose before Paul’s eyes, haunting the half dark of the room. The ruined temple. The scrolls with excrement on them. He saw the Red Guards marching over the fields with their flags, he saw the monk, and how Zhang passed the wooden rod to Tang and how Tang struck the blow. The worst thing was that he was observing these images as a disinterested spectator. He felt nothing now apart from a terrible coldness within him, an indifference to the deed and toward his friend. He had had the same feeling in the months after Justin’s death; he remembered it as a kind of numbness of the heart, and the paralysis had been awful. To feel nothing felt like a relief at first, but in the long run it was worse than any pain. It had taken him a long time to free himself from this coma of the feelings. He did not want to return to that state, not at any price, but whenever he thought about Zhang now it seemed to come upon him. He felt nothing. No hatred. No disappointment, not even anger. It was as though there had never been any closeness between them.
Paul sat down on the bed, leaned against the bare gray concrete wall, closed his eyes, and tried to find a position in which his headache would be easier to bear. From time to time he walked up and down below the window hearing the cars that drove past, sometimes voices that quickly died down again.
It was dark by the time he heard a key in the lock. The door opened, the metal grille was pushed aside, and the light was switched on. Two men came into the room. One of them was carrying a tray with two bottles of water, a big bowl of rice and stir-fried vegetables, and the other was holding a tin bucket and a roll of toilet paper. They did not react when he asked where he was and who they were and merely gave a brief, glum nod when he asked for something for his headache. A few minutes later one of them returned with a packet of aspirin. After that, all was quiet and dark. Paul took four pills immediately, undressed, and lay down. He curled up with the blanket pulled up over his chin and fell asleep shortly after.
He was awakened by the sound of a deep male voice and a hand shaking him roughly by the shoulder. It took Paul some time to realize that he was not dreaming. Three tall powerfully built Chinese men were standing in front of his pallet; they did not look like policemen or like contract killers; in their dark-blue suits, they reminded him more of businessmen. One of them ordered him to get dressed immediately and follow them.
They led him down a long narrow corridor to a small elevator that they had to squeeze into in order to fit the four of them. When the door closed, Paul had the feeling that the entire elevator stank of the same sweetish scent he had smelled in the car. The muscular bodies of the young men were pressed up against him, and he felt their breath on his face, stinking of stale cigarette smoke. He grew more and more uncomfortable. He suddenly realized how defenseless he was among them. The men did not even bother gazing at the ceiling or the floor out of politeness, but stared at him brazenly. Their eyes met several times and the expression in their eyes was unfamiliar to him. He could not fathom what they had in store for him.
They brought him to a room that looked like a junior suite in a rather run-down average Chinese hotel. The light-colored carpet had several stains on it and there were two couches with worn brown covers and a coffee table with a vase of dusty plastic flowers on it in front of a large window. According to the clock on the wall it was just after 5:30 AM. A man was sitting at a desk bent over a folder of papers. He looked up briefly when they entered the room and then continued reading. The men motioned to Paul to sit down on a chair in front of the desk, left the room, and locked the door.
The man did not make any move to start a conversation.
After sitting in silence for a few minutes Paul asked, “Who are you? What do you want from me?” He intended to sound indignant and angry, but when he opened his mouth to speak he was short of breath and he sounded tense and strained.
The man did not even look up from his papers.
“Why are you holding me prisoner?”
Now he raised his head and looked at Paul expressionlessly.
“Do you work for Victor Tang?” Paul asked, undeterred.
The man closed the file, pushed it aside, leaned forward a little, and looked Paul directly in the eye. “I’d like to make this clear from the start, Mr. Leibovitz. There is only one person here who asks the questions and that is me. Do you understand me? You can either stay silent or answer the questions. That’s up to you. But I would personally recommend that you do the latter in your own best interest.”
Instead of replying, Paul looked out of the window and tried to look as relaxed as possible. He did not want to let himself be intimidated. This man did not look like what Paul imagined a henchman of Tang’s to look like, but he did not look like a respectable detective from the police headquarters in Shenzhen either—his attitude to a foreigner was too confident for that. He was in his early forties at most, and was also wearing a suit. He spoke Mandarin without
a discernible accent so he was probably from Beijing. His voice was sharp and decided.
Leaning far back in his chair, he said, “You obtained access to Michael Owen’s apartment in Hong Kong and stole several items, including a cell phone and a hard drive.”
Paul started in surprise and sank deep into his chair.
“Why did you do that?”
“Who told you that?” Paul blurted out. Only Zhang and Christine knew about that and they would have told neither the police nor Tang. Would they?
“Did you not understand what I said earlier? Answer the question or say nothing,” the man told him.
“Was it Zhang? Did he tell you about it?” Paul couldn’t help asking.
A brief smile flitted over the man’s face. “And if he did, does it matter? You committed a theft. Why, Mr. Leibovitz?”
Who was this man? How did he know Zhang?
“What do you live on in Hong Kong?” the stranger asked.
“That has nothing to do . . .”
“What do you live on?” the man interrupted him in an icy tone.
“From the interest on my savings,” Paul replied, immediately feeling annoyed at himself for replying. He was letting himself be intimidated.
“Why are you taking such an interest in the murder of Michael Owen?”
Paul said nothing. If the man did not tell him who he was he would not answer any questions.
“Did you know Mr. Owen before? Who asked you to conduct investigations?”
Paul closed his eyes. He did not want to give the impression that he was about to answer a single question.
“Mr. Leibovitz. You’re not doing yourself any favors. You’re making a mistake.”
Tang had taken leave of him the previous evening with exactly the same words. The more Paul thought about it, the more convinced he was that only Victor Tang could be behind his abduction. Why did he not interrogate him himself?
He shook his head. “Tell me why you’re asking these questions and who you are working for and I may answer them. Until then you’ll get nothing from me.”
The man sized him up, as if gauging how serious Paul was. He stood up and walked around the desk. For a moment Paul was afraid that he was about to be violent to him. But he walked past him to the door, opened it, and called the men waiting in the corridor to take Paul back to the basement. He disappeared into another room without saying anything more.
———
Paul lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. His headache had mostly gone, apart from a slight tugging over his left eye. He tried to get his thoughts in order, not knowing what Tang intended to do with him. Or what Richard Owen’s role in this was. If Anyi was not lying it might have been he who had betrayed his son to Tang. But was Anyi telling the truth? He was losing any instinct for whom he could trust or not.
He heard cars driving up in front of the building again. Gravel spattered against the window and brakes squealed. He went over to the window and climbed onto the chair. There seemed to be more cars arriving and he thought he heard not only the voice of the man who had interrogated him today but—he could hardly believe his ears—the voices of Tang and Zhang. They were farther away and he could not hear what they were saying, but that was Zhang’s light singsong, his melody. No, he was not mistaken, and the impassioned voice that was answering was Tang’s. The voices quickly faded into the distance and nothing could be heard after a few seconds.
Paul pressed his mouth against the crack in the window and shouted his friend’s name and thumped his fist against the glass, but no one replied.
Breathless with excitement, he spent the next hour pacing up and down in his room. Every so often he climbed up onto the chair to listen for sounds and rattled the iron grille over the door, and he kicked the narrow gray metal closet that looked like a locker next to the sink until there was a dent in the side. Gradually he started imagining what might happen again and with that came the fear. He was completely defenseless against them. He felt faint all over. He grew dizzy and breathless and a piercing pain stabbed him in his left breast.
He lay down on the bed and tried to calm himself, concentrating on the breathing exercises that Zhang had taught him a long time ago. Very slowly, breath by breath, his heart slowly regained its normal rhythm. He lay there for hours and thought about Zhang, trying to banish the thought that he might have betrayed him as he watched twilight and darkness falling outside. Lights came on in front of the building and one of them cast a narrow beam into his room; other than that, everything was dark.
Suddenly, he heard footsteps and voices in the corridor. Someone unlocked the door and the metal grille. Two men he did not know came in, followed by a third, who switched on the light.
It was Zhang.
Paul flinched. Several times in the past few hours he had imagined how he would react when they met again. Now the time had come, and he was speechless at the sight of his friend. Zhang tried a smile, but Paul did not return it. He still felt nothing. He felt as if he was staring at a blank wall. Paul was shocked at himself. Where had this coldness come from?
Zhang took a step toward him. Paul retreated.
“Stay where you are. What do you want?” he asked suspiciously.
“What’s wrong with you? I’ve come to fetch you.” Zhang seemed amazed by Paul’s reaction.
“To fetch me! What do you two have in store for me?”
“What do you mean by ‘you two’?”
“You and Tang.”
“Me and Tang? Are you crazy? What makes you think that we . . .”
“What makes me think that?” Paul interrupted brusquely. “Because you were once his henchman, weren’t you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t look so surprised. Tang told me everything,” Paul said in a voice full of contempt. “About the temple. The monk. And your readiness to help him.” Paul felt as if he was hearing his own voice from afar, as though it belonged not to him but to a stranger he did not know and did not like.
Zhang’s narrow eyes widened. His mouth fell open, and he clasped his head in both hands. Paul would not forget his look of horror. It was as though he were imploding in front of him, sinking into himself like a building expertly rigged for demolition. Zhang seemed at a loss for a moment. He gasped audibly a couple of times and seemed about to leave the room but turned back, sat down on the chair, and asked the other two men to leave and close the door behind them. He propped his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. It was so quiet that Paul could hear both of them breathing.
“I’m sorry, Paul, that you had to hear it from him.”
“I’m sorry, too.” He heard how self-righteous and annoyed he sounded. “Why did you never tell me about it?”
“I don’t know,” Zhang said without looking up.
“You don’t know,” Paul echoed, his voice slightly raised. This reply was not only cowardly, it was an insult. “You don’t know? How many times did we sit in your kitchen and talk about the Cultural Revolution? I asked you about your experiences, and you told me about them. But you kept the most important one to yourself.”
“I know.”
“We talked about the crimes that were committed then and I still remember exactly what you said about this country and how it was still in the shadow of those times. You talked about how important it was to discuss it and got worked up about nobody having the courage to do so. That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Zhang! It’s always other people who are the cowards. You looked me in the face with such indignation and I believed you. Every word.” Paul could hear his voice getting louder and louder, how he was losing his composure with every sentence.
“But you yourself were one of them. One of the murderers, one of the people who said nothing.” He was standing right in front of Zhang, and
was practically about to grab him by the shoulders in rage. “Did you even tell Mei about it?”
“No. No one.”
“Not even your wife? How could you live this lie? How could you stand it, sleeping next to her and waking up next to her and hiding a murder from her?” Paul did not wait for a reply to his question, but continued talking. “And your son? How will you explain it to him? And now you expect me to believe that you haven’t been sent by Tang to collect me?”
Zhang sat motionless on the chair and said nothing.
“How am I supposed to know that you’re telling me the truth? ‘Trust once lost can never be regained.’ Isn’t that what Confucius said?”
“Yes.”
Paul turned around and kicked the closet door so violently that it came free of its hinges and clattered onto the floor. He kicked it again and again until it was at the other end of the room. He grabbed the footstool in front of the sink by one leg and smashed it with all his might against the wall so splinters of wood flew across the room. He would have liked to destroy the table and the chair too, charge at his friend, and beat him up. He stood in the middle of the room, holding the leg of the stool in his hand, exhaled, and struck the bulb that was hanging from a wire in the ceiling.
At first it seemed there was complete darkness, but when his eyes had gotten used to it he saw that Zhang was still crouched motionless on the chair.
Paul felt as relieved by his outburst as he was shocked by it. The inner paralysis, that terrible numbness, was gone and had given way to this rage that he and Zhang now had to work through. There was no shortcut that he could take back to Zhang.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Paul said. His voice had lost all strength.