Narcopolis

When Lee returned to his hotel and placed a call to Pang Mei it was well past midnight. He heard the phone ring at the engineering college hostel and then he heard a siren and people shouting in the courtyard below. Wei? said the switchboard operator in Peking. The noise in the courtyard became louder and there were announcements on a public address system. Lee hung up and went to the window. A fire truck and a covered transport vehicle were entering the hotel’s gates, and a loudspeaker van and men carrying rifles and choppers and home-made spears. He went to the door and locked it and placed another call. He was talking to the receptionist at the commissariat when they broke open the door and punched him to the floor. He got up and a man who looked somehow familiar slapped him on the side of the head, so hard that his glasses flew off his face and landed on the carpet halfway across the room. There was a ringing in his ears and someone hit him low in the stomach and someone else kicked his feet out from under him. Lee landed on his back. There were flecks of blood on his shirt and his ribs felt bruised. They pulled him to his feet and bound his hands behind his back. Then they marched him out of the building and towards one of the vans. The lobby was in pandemonium. The hotel’s official cars had been overturned and gutted and a tree in the courtyard was ablaze. The staff stood under the portico. As Lee was brought down the steps he saw a man run towards the gate. A small mob set upon him with bare hands and rifle butts and brought him down. The man shouted: Help me, comrades, help me. Who was he talking to? How odd, thought Lee, that fear should make you ask for help from the exact source of your torment. A man with a chopper stepped up and cut off the fallen man’s arms with precise and economical strokes. The man twitched and shivered as he gazed at his severed arms and the ropes of blood that joined them. His lips moved and the words he spoke, if at all he was speaking, were inaudible. Blood pooled around his hips. He sat up and vomited and the crowd stepped back in disgust. Then the man with the chopper cut off his head, though this took some effort because the chopper was no longer sharp and wouldn’t cut through the neck bones.

Lee was the only prisoner but there were so many men escorting him that the van was cramped and humid. His clothes were soaked through with blood and perspiration and without his glasses he felt crippled, though he was able to see the faces of his abductors clearly enough. He wondered what time it was and then he thought about Pang Mei’s complicated virginity and for some reason the song-like words he had heard earlier that day — or had it been yesterday? — repeated in his head like a prayer, Time is a bomb; the world is on fire. He couldn’t remember the rest of the words, though he heard very clearly the voice of the woman who had recited them. The men in the vehicle spoke as if he was not there, or as if he was already dead. They talked about barbecue pork and home-made rice wine, about how long one could swim comfortably in the summer before the silt of the river weighed you down (no more than an hour), about the comparative advantages of cards over mahjong (less wastage of time, more chances of quick money), about the efficacy of deer penis as an aphrodisiac (excellent), and about Lee’s fate, whether he would be executed publicly or disposed of with minimum fanfare (the consensus: publicly, with a shot to the back of the neck). Kaolu, said one of the men, and it was then that Lee recognized the man who had been in General Lo’s office. His abductors were soldiers. They wore armbands that identified them as members of the Workers Troops but in fact they were soldiers; no, they were mutineers. It was they who were already dead, thought Lee.

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