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“They’re either under water or under mud.”
“The river—”
“It rose another two meters last night. Even the fishermen are staying ashore.”
She had no choice but to wait it out, he told her as he walked her to the door. “I can see you worry too much, Inspector,” Hom said, exhaling twin streams of cigarette smoke from his nostrils.
“It’s my nature,” she admitted.
“Weren’t you the one who told me to beware of my nature?”
He had her there.
“Well,” Hom went on, “even I can change my ways. I thought about what you said the other day about the All-Patriotic Society. Tonight I will see for myself if what you say is true.”
“Be careful,” she cautioned. “They don’t like the uninitiated.”
“I was invited.”
Hulan’s eyebrows rose in surprise and question.
He nodded complacently. “My brother-in-law and I were invited to go together. I think it’s a good opportunity for Zhou to explain what he did to the people.”
“Self-criticism? We both know that didn’t have good results during the Cultural Revolution. We both know a crowd can turn dangerous very quickly.”
He grinned, showing his yellowed teeth. “I don’t think we have to worry about that. We were invited by Officer Su, your favorite. He sees an opportunity to make things better in Bashan Village. I’m putting a note of this in his dangan.”
“He is a Society member?”
“Maybe,” Hom answered, his throat rattling with nicotine, “and maybe he’s serving as a bridge between our office, Bashan’s problems, and the people.”
If this were so, then Su had made another smart move. It was through the recommendations of superiors or through political activities that helped maintain the status quo that junior officers earned promotions. Although the All-Patriotic Society was illegal, the purpose for which Hom and his brother-in-law had been invited sounded as though the outcome could lead to restored tranquillity among the masses.
“This invitation shows an open heart,” Hom remarked. “Do you want to join us? It would make Officer Su happy.”
She shook her head. She walked down two steps, then turned back to Hom. “I still don’t think you should go.”
“My subordinate invited me, Inspector.”
Old customs regarding manners reached deeply, even in the Public Security Bureau. Of course he would go. She waved again and continued down the stairs. She went back to the hotel and asked the desk clerk to find a driver to take her to Site 518.
While in town the dock’s concrete steps, which disappeared each day under the Yangzi’s swelling volume, seemed the focus, at Site 518 the water itself held center stage. The quiet banks were no longer a cradle against which the river eased on its incessant course to the sea. The current had picked up more earth in its travels, turning the waters murkier and more foreboding as they frothed, billowed, chopped, and lurched. The canyon resounded with the roar of gravel and boulders rolling against the riverbed, of trees grating and shredding, of waves smashing against shoals, rocky shoulders, and massive abutments. Hulan knew that up in the hills peasants still worked the terraces, clearing waterways and opening irrigation channels. Here the archaeologists toiled in pits barely protected from the wind and rain under leaky and quivering tarps.
Hulan walked to the cave shared by the five men from the municipal museums. They were awake but barely. Four of them sat together around their little table, wearing grubby undershirts, smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes, and drinking tea. The fifth hovered over a hotplate stirring congee.
“You look like you just washed down from the Tibetan Plateau,” Li Guo, the one she recognized as the most talkative, called out. “Come in out of the rain. We’ll give you warmth.”
The other men thought this mildly risqué comment hilarious. Hulan gave them a look that should have shriveled their balls to the size of peanuts, but the men were unrepentant.
“Are you looking for your husband? We don’t have him in here this time, right, Mr. Hu?”
The man stirring the congee made a great play of scanning the dark recesses of the cave. “No yang guizi here.”
The five chortled, coughed, choked on their tea, spat on the ground. They thought it was all very funny; she thought that in this one regard Ma had been right. These men were vultures.
“Do you know when Dr. Ma will return from Hong Kong?” she inquired as pleasantly as possible.
“No time soon,” Li answered. “He said he went to buy back what Brian and Lily stole, but he’s probably down on Hollywood Road right now selling precious antiquities that should go to our museums. He calls us vultures. We say he is a shark!”
