“Let’s get out of here, O. We can come back tomorrow or the next day, after the place cools down. They must have used gasoline. It’s going to stay hot for a while. You can feel it all the way over here.”
“I’m not leaving until I go through the ashes.”
“That’s what they’re counting on. They’ll be back, and you’d better not be here when they are.”
“Why? You think they can do any worse than this? Look at that tree. They cut it down. Can they do anything worse than that?”
“Yes.”
“Go, if you want. I’m staying. Maybe I can find something that wasn’t completely destroyed.”
Li shook his head. “Have it your way, but first we need something to eat. We’ll have to drive back to the nearest village, that’s almost fifteen kilometers away, unless you know somewhere closer. Even there, they may not have anything to give us.”
“You can drive all over the damned county. I’m staying. If Zhao comes back, I’ll rip him to shreds.”
“Easy, Inspector. You heard what he did to the Great Han. We don’t want that to happen to you.”
I started pulling away burned timbers. The ashes were still hot; in places a flame flared when it found a breath of oxygen. Li stood and watched. Finally, I touched a piece of metal. It scorched my fingers, but I didn’t care, because I knew what it was-the old wood plane that my grandfather had given me fifty, no, sixty years ago.
“Look at this, Li.” I pulled the plane from the wreckage. “My grandfather said it had been his father’s and that he wanted to give it to his son. But that wasn’t to be-he would always say that more to himself than to me. He hated to talk about what happened to his son, my father. Everyone lost someone in the war, so he didn’t want to be seen as complaining. But he felt the loss deeper than anything I could imagine then. Even now, I don’t think I can feel anything that deeply.”
Li didn’t say anything. He was listening the way people do when someone else reaches inside for the story that they never want to tell.
“It wasn’t until I was older, maybe ten or twelve, that he went into any detail about how my parents had died. He had told us right away, my brother and me, that they were dead. The same night he found out, he sat us down and told us, but he hadn’t gone into detail. We were too young, and he didn’t know what words to use. So he waited. When he finally told me, he was sanding a piece of ash. It was from a tree that had crashed through a neighbor’s house in a windstorm a few weeks before. The whole family had died. I still remember that storm.”
Li was looking down the road. He was pale.
“Something wrong?”
“No, just thinking about the wind. I grew up on the coast. When the wind blew hard, the fishing boats couldn’t go out. A few did, but they never came back.” He blinked, and his face seemed to clear. “Before the storms would come in off the sea, I would wake up. Even at three in the morning, I would wake up. Maybe it was something about the air pressure; no one could figure it out. But I always knew when a storm was coming.” He looked back down the road. “Always.”
He seemed to have drifted somewhere else in his mind, so I left him alone and went back to digging through the remains of the house. There was nothing. The green vase with the cranes, the chest made for my grandmother, a small box of old photographs-all gone.
“You said something about an ash tree?” Li had moved so quietly that the sound of his voice startled me.
“I did. You know what one looks like?”
“Not if it smacked me in the face.”
“You wouldn’t want that. It’s very hard wood. I nearly lost my arm once because of it. The pain wouldn’t go away for months. Still hurts sometimes. That’s ash.”
“So your grandfather had a piece of ash, and he was talking to you. That’s where you left off.”
“No, he wasn’t talking to me so much as to the years that lay around us. That’s what he said, sometimes-that the years don’t pass; they don’t disappear. They were still here, he’d say, invisible, infinitely thin piles of them, heaped in the corners of rooms. It was one of those things that he’d say that wasn’t clear to me at the time. In winter, he’d often brood and tell me that the past was never gone; it was inside of us and all around. I wasn’t to believe what people said, that on January first everything was new.”
“You know, if I could come up with a single year that I wanted to keep, it would be nice. But there isn’t one, not even one.” Li pointed at what had been the front entrance to the house. “Every December thirty-first, I open the door at midnight, to let the old year out. Who taught me to do that, do you suppose? I can’t remember.” He looked into the smoking ruins. “Go ahead; keep looking for whatever there is to salvage. I’ll watch the road. If I see a car, I’ll whistle. We’ll need to get out of here fast. Someone will take care of Zhao eventually; don’t worry.”
“I don’t want ‘someone’ to take care of the son of a bitch. I’m going to do it myself.”
“As soon as we get off this mountain, I’ve got to find a phone to call Kim. He won’t be happy to hear about you and Zhao spitting at each other. He’s afraid of Zhao. Everyone seems to be.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when two big guys appeared from nowhere. They each took one of Li’s arms and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. Then they threw him over. One of them watched for a few seconds before they both turned to me. They didn’t say anything. What remained of the house made a sound, a painful sigh as the wood died for the last time. The sun dropped over the next hill, and in the darkness the wind picked up. I turned away and walked back to Li’s car, expecting the whole time that they’d stop me, permanently. Li had left the keys in the ignition. That was how we used to do it, I thought, as I started the car and turned around to drive down the hill. We always left ourselves a way out. Only I was starting to think there wasn’t one left.
Chapter Two
“Let me get this straight. You were standing there. Two husky guys materialized, threw him over the cliff, and watched as you drove away.” Kim swallowed hard but kept writing. “That’s it? He didn’t struggle, or yell? Big guy like Li, you’re telling me when they grabbed him, he went limp?”
“Maybe he did. I think one of them jammed something into his neck. It was getting dark, and it happened pretty fast.”
“You were a policeman for all those years, a trained observer, and you’re not sure what you saw?”
“I was upset. They’d just burned down my house.”
On the drive back, I’d gone over the whole thing ten times. There was no other conclusion. Kim must have known what Zhao was going to do. That’s why he was hesitant to let me go home until he got that phone call. And Li? He didn’t have to assign Li as the driver.