Dragon's Eye Read Online Free

can become accustomed to its face as they can become accustomed to a strange and exotic foreign food. They see it every day in a city that does not kneel to hide it. Hot flowing blood in the long summer days. Cold and stanched brown in the grey winter hours. And then this … a sight that the rest of your life will be hung upon, pivot from. A sight only ever just a flicker of an eyelid away. Piao felt the bud of nausea unfurl its petals at the back of his throat.
    “… is this a brand of thoroughness that you recognise, Chairman Zhiyuan. A thoroughness that robs a man of the colour of his eyes?”
    Zhiyuan turned his back to the cold bodies, lighting another cheroot. His fast hand covering the pages of his notebook with scrawl and ash as he talked.
    “I am not here to play guessing games, Investigator … and even less to be taught by your kind …”
    Smoke from his lips in a constant steel band.
    “… you have gone too far, Piao. Too dangerously far with your accusations …”
    He drew closer. His lined skin resembling a city centre road map. His breath, its accumulated exhaust fumes.
    “… you forget who you are talking to. My words will find the ears of important comrades in the Party. And the Party has ways of dealing with …”
    “… what, comrade. Ways of dealing with people like me? And people like them also?” Piao interjected.
    A single word piercing the coiled cheroot smoke as it left the old man’s torn lips.
    “Perhaps.”
    A hiss, and so close that Zhiyuan’s breath intermingled with his own. Piao immediately thinking of meat-flies, puke, fatty pork. He suddenly felt very ill.
    “Did you hear that, Detective Yaobang. A threat made to a serving Senior Officer in the police force of the People’s Republic of China?”
    “I heard it …” Yaobang replied. A tinge of reluctance plaited into his words. Spit, thick and white on his lips, Zhiyuan exploded.
    “My Committee and the Central Committee will hear of your obstructive behaviour, Investigator, and of your vile insinuations that these murders were carried out in the name of the Party and of the State …”
    The dark butt falling from his fingers. A hiss as it met mud. Its orange tip dying to grey.
    “… expect a knock on your door, Piao.”
    “Detective Yaobang, please escort Comrade Zhiyuan and Comrade Shi to their cars, they’re leaving. They have a great deal of report writing to complete.”
    Watching their shadows shrink as they walked away. The darkness eating them. Piao chewing on the bit of his anger. Mouth tasting of polished metal. Of danger. He spat, but could not loosen its hold. Squatting, eyes closed for a few seconds … or was it minutes? Longing for sleep, but knowing that it offered no rest. Behind the dark curtains of his eyelids he could still see the policemen relieving their full bladders. The crescent moon now in flight above the river. And the paper white faces, with their smudged, eyeless sockets. They say that the eyes of the murdered retain within them a last burning image of who it was that killed them. Was it the Party that was robbing the bodies of this last old wives’ tale?
    The decision made, and made against the grain and every survival instinct that the fifteen thousand days of his life in Shanghai had taught him, Piao stood, shouting to a group of policemen who were smoking, gossiping, pissing onto the mud.
    “Let’s get to it, it’s our case …”
    A low moan of discontent. China Brand cigarette butts being flicked into the river. Flies being zipped.
    “… load them into the wagon and don’t fucking drop them down the embankment, they’ve been through enough.”
    The dark figures peeled off from each other, crossing into the island of arc-light. A brief flurry of activity. The sound of bolt cutters meeting steel chain. Polythene sheeting being fashioned around bodies, now separated. Fibreglass caskets flexing, accepting their loads. Grunts as they were lifted. Eight caskets.