Dragon's Eye Read Online Free Page B

telephone him at this hotel at least three times a week for Christ sake. I spoke to him just two days ago. I know the phone number by heart, 53—42—42. I have letters from him written on your hotel notepaper. Does that sound like someone who is residing at another hotel?”
    The voice at the other end of the line, the other side of the world, was more insistent this time; almost brutal, slicing in its ice-cold certainty.
    “No one by the name of Mr Bobby Hayes has ever stayed at the Shanghai Jing Jiang Hotel, Madam.”
    “Jesus, but I know that he’s stayed there. Listen for God’s sake, will you? His room number is 201. Check again. It’s HAYES. BOBBY HAYES. He’s tall, over six feet. And blond, very blond. You can’t miss him. You just can’t miss him …”
    It was some time before she realised that she was shouting into a telephone that had been hung up on her. Only a tinnitus of electronic hum and buzz breaking up the featureless silence. Counting …
    SIX … SEVEN … EIGHT …
    She sat listening to it for a while, cradled in the heavy swell of duvet and sheet. The questions, the doubts, the informed perceptions, already nagging at her. Wondering. Wondering. Sitting, listening to the ocean of sound. The weave of babble, seeming to take on a voice, a faint voice of its own which seemed to be saying …
    ‘BOBBY’S DEAD – BOBBY’S DEAD – BOBBY’S DEAD.’

    Counting …
    NINE … TEN.

Chapter 3
    They moved south, then east, crossing the Nanpu Bridge … the river, a black and thick cord below. City lights on either side in a firm vice grip. On the Huangpu itself, nothing. No life. No movement. A vast ebony axe blow cleaving Shanghai in two.
    Piao drove carefully, slowly, eyes constantly seeking the rear-view mirror for assurance. The Big Man never knowing the Boss to drive himself anywhere, not in four years. He asked no questions, there was no point. There would be no answers. Hitting Padong Avenue. A high spiking steel forest of cranes flanking it. A thousand cranes. A thousand foreign corporations staking their claims in the new market economy zone. Fuelling, being fuelled by the bright economic renaissance. Five billion dollars of investment swilling around in the manic rawness of a frontier town. The Great Leap Forward … the trade and banking centre of the world by 2010. A fairytale town of a thousand promises; dreams rising into the night sky in the form of precast concrete towers, studded and pierced with cold lights. The Senior Investigator shook his head …
    The making of money, did it have to look so ugly?
    Piao stepped out of the wagon, shoe sinking into a pile of dog shit.
    “Fuck it!”
    Scraping most of it off against a wire fence that bordered the edge of a construction site that seemed to have no end. A jungle of bamboo scaffolding interlaced with strings of dirty lights. Brown earth gouged to the surface in vast open wounds. A deep flow of fetid mud water, yellow-edged and slicked with rainbow oil spills. So tired, but if he’d closed his eyes he would have still seen their neatly snipped fingers. Their cracked faces. The dark, empty wells that were once their eyes. He didn’t close his eyes.
    He pushed his hand inside the top of Yaobang’s passenger window. The fruit of the photographer’s dance placed in his palm. Four rolls of one hundred and twenty film, reassuringly large, solid. He pocketed them, a question on his face. The Big Man shook his head. Seven calls and not a hospital, a university, that would take the poor bastards that they had dug from the mud of the Huangpu.
    “Fuck it …” was all that Piao said again.
    Crossing the pontoon of planks to the new telephone box. A brief conversation. Animated, but brief. He was back inside the car before the Big Man had even lit his cigarette. Ten fen poorer, a thousand Yuan happier.
    “Your brother …” Piao pausing to light his own China Brand from the Big Man’s battered lighter.
    “… still at