Detained

There was one unexpected bright spot. Movie night. Movie night was a monthly privilege for foreign prisoners. Chinese prisoners got to watch four movies a year. Will was told he could watch a movie of his choice from a narrow catalogue of material approved by the prison authorities. It would cost him five yuan, the equivalent of seventy Australian cents. The movie would screen in a partitioned part of the main dining hall in the presence of the other prisoners on that dinner shift, but only Will would be entitled to watch it.

He considered declining. It was simply asking for trouble to go through such a demonstration of his privilege in front of the prison population, which is why of course it was offered. Until he realised movie night was an opportunity to make friends and influence people.

Instead of choosing a movie from the catalogue for foreigners, he chose one from the local catalogue. Bruce Lee’s classic, Enter the Dragon. Then, through a multilingual round robin, he told his cellmates. All they had to do was see that the partitions didn’t stay up. And that’s how it happened; courtesy of Will Parker, eleven hundred prisoners in the dining hall were treated to a 1970s view of crime lords, opium rings, corruption, and Kung Fu.

Will watched the opening credits roll, saw the consternation on the faces of the guards and heard the cheer go up. He waited long enough to see he hadn’t inadvertently caused a riot and went to his cell. It was the first chance he’d had to be alone since the night he was brought in. He didn’t think opportunities to be alone were going to come along often.

He lay on the sleeping platform and thought about Feng Kee. He’d known Feng was a gangster. He’d known he was a thief and a cheat, but it was only by working amongst the gangsters, cheats and thieves, officially sanctioned and otherwise petty, that a twenty-four year old from Australia with patchy schooling, an untried mechanical engineering certificate and more ambition than sense, could get a start.

He had the tail end of Norman Vessy’s inheritance, the bit they hadn’t used to get Pete through boarding school, uni and on to London, and he had a plan. He needed big balls and luck.

He had the patent for the production of farm machinery parts he’d won in a poker game off a broken down engineer in a pub in Brisbane. He needed steel, factory capacity and introductions. He needed markets, shipping, sales and forecasting.

He lived in a one room hovel to preserve his cash. He hired Bo, who was a taxi driver at the time, to teach him Shanghainese, and discovered he had an ear for language. He read everything about business he could get his hands on. Pete was constantly sending him parcels of books and complaining about the cost of it.

He talked a big game and he chased introductions. He fudged about his experience and hustled for connections. He slept with the daughter of a steel mill manager, and got a fancy office, and a decent suit.

He got his first parts order made and shipped back to Australia. He discovered Confucius. He got his second order made and shipped. He broke up with the girl, but his production contract with her father survived her heartbreak. He picked up new orders based on long stretches of the truth and short memories. He made money, but it was never quite enough. He got more orders. He hired an agent and opened markets. He modified the patent. He worked twenty hour days, and got used to not sleeping much. He told Pete to learn Mandarin and study import export laws, and not to get too attached to England.

And then he had trouble with cash flow and paying the rent. Such a small problem in comparison to the world he was building. So he did a deal with his gangster landlord, so his newly constructed house of enterprise wouldn’t fold down around him like a pack of cards, just when it was all starting to hang together.

And he kept his word on the deal and paid up what was agreed. But he baulked at paying more, and he’d underestimated the prize he’d become and left himself wide open.

Will had never taken Feng’s threats seriously. He didn’t take them seriously that night outside his upgraded hovel with attached bathroom either. He’d watched the knife, heard the kill word and seen red. He didn’t have to think about it. He only had one standard response for physical threats. He’d learned it nineteen years ago, under the heel of Norman Vessy’s boot, under the cut of his belt buckle and the burn of a fence post across his ribs. Neutralise them.

He’d killed Feng Kee with his punches just as sure as he’d watched Norman Vessy die. Both men were weasels, the only difference was Norman deserved his end. Kee just picked on the wrong guy, on the wrong dark night.

By the time his cellmates got back, full of smiles, broken words and pantomimed bits of movie action, he knew what he needed to do.

He could save Parker Corp, save Pete, if he took back control. That meant the next time he was hauled in for interrogation he’d confess. Not that it would be legally binding but it would speed things up. It would force Pete to face the facts, he was a murderer and after years of freedom he was finally where he was supposed to be.

25. Road Trip

“He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.” — Confucius

Bo pulled up in a car that’d seen better days. Much better. It was missing an entire front fender, one rear window wouldn’t close, and the air-conditioning no longer worked. Apparently it was mechanically sound. Darcy had no idea and no option but to take Bo’s word for it. He refused to take Will’s Audi, or any of the other cars in the Parker garage.

After three days planning this, Robert freaked out and very nearly reneged on coming. He kept muttering, “Death trap, how is this car even on the road? Death trap,” until Bo explained the only way they’d get people in Feng’s village to talk to them was if they didn’t blow into town looking like capitalist pigs.

“But I am a capitalist pig,” Robert said, “and she,” he pointed at Darcy, “is a dead giveaway we aren’t ordinary tourists. So what’s the plan, Stan??

?

“We go there. We make a small noise, not a big one. We listen more than we talk and we find out what we need to know to help Will.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” Robert said with mock gravity and rolling eyes, but he got in the car.

To get to Tengtou village they had to drive for two days in this hot, uncomfortable car, but Bo was right, it could do good speed on the open highways out of Shanghai.

They stayed overnight at a modest hotel, ate at roadside stalls and made good time. Still, Darcy felt exhausted by the journey, if not by the task ahead. She was grateful to Bo and Robert; doing this alone wasn’t viable. Not the travel, or the part where she was supposed to look trustworthy, and least of all the part where she understood what was going on.

And what was going on was a fight for Will’s freedom. Perhaps even his life, one his Spiderman brother didn’t seem to understand well enough to accept their help.

The morning they hit the road, Darcy’s first freelance story ran. She’d sold a profile on Will Parker to an international news agency service. It covered his small town Australia origins, his difficult childhood as a foster kid, his struggle to overcome dyslexia. She had paragraphs on his early years in China, his success engineering farm equipment, then car parts, and eventual expansion into steel production and construction. She talked about his cultural and sporting sponsorships, his private charity. She mentioned he was an eligible bachelor, proficient in several languages and enjoyed reading.

She wrote it from what Will had told her, and from Bo’s firsthand descriptions and information he dug up for her. She didn’t mention that he grew up in a shipping container, or his mistress, his temper, his scars or tattoos. She left out the scurrilous details of his first sexual encounter and his preference for Spiderman. There was certainly no detail on how he could tantalise with a touch, and make a person believe she’d found and lost something rare and wonderful in the space of a weekend.

She wrote him real, but she didn’t embarrass him. She’d done that already. The story was fifteen hundred words on the enigma of Will Parker. It asked, without spelling it out, why this man would murder anyone.