A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [128]
The rain had stopped, but it would come again. Such was the promise of distant thunder, alien battalions marching, and of the brusque summer wind that chilled without cooling.
The puppet dug awkwardly, his head erect, the position enforced by the rope that arched from his neck over a limb of a lonely oak, and into the darkness below.
In that darkness stood Wang Bin, a furtive scout.
“Kuai-kuaide!” he barked above the wind. “Faster!”
Wang Bin jerked the rope, yanking the puppet’s head, forcing a fresh sob through lips that begged for air.
Thomas Stratton was dying.
He was dying with cruelty and calculated humiliation that no Western mind could fashion.
He could dig, and die when he finished; a shot from Linda Greer’s revolver.
He could refuse to dig and die now at the end of a rope swinging as lifeless as yesterday’s shirt.
But he could not die with any dignity, any pride. They had been stripped from him by the murderer who supervised his agony.
Professor of stupidity.
Wang Bin had been right. Stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid, muttered the wind through the Arbor.
The solution had been there all the time. In the grave of David Wang. It had been there from the beginning, and Stratton had not realized it.
The puppet did not dig to satisfy Wang Bin’s sadism, nor merely to create his own eternal shroud.
He dug because there was something to recover from David’s grave. Not an empty coffin, as Stratton has assumed, or even another carved soldier.
It was to his brother’s coffin that Wang Bin had consigned his real treasure.
What was it?
Stratton was too dazed even to speculate. He dug mindlessly, an ashen marionette.
“Slack,” he gagged. “More slack … I can’t breathe.”
The rope eased a grudging fraction, and in the next aching instant Stratton’s shovel struck the lid of the coffin. The clunk was unmistakable, and it brought Wang Bin bobbing forward to perch at the lip of the grave.
“Careful!” he commanded excitedly. “Xiao xin, fool!”
Gradually Stratton uncovered the coffin lid, the cheap Chinese metal streaked with the moisture and freckled with incipient rust. Like a teacher bestowing reluctant favor on a backward child, Wang Bin paid out rope to allow Stratton more movement.
Shovel plunging, the puppet dug his way around the coffin from corner to corner.
“Huang di,” Wang Bin said, a reverent whisper.
“What is it?” gasped Stratton.
“Do not stop now, Professor. You are about to have the history lesson of your life.”
Wang Bin positioned himself at the foot of the grave. The barrel of the pistol poked from his shadow, an ominous telescope on Stratton’s midsection.
“Pull it out now,” the deputy minister said. “Be careful.”
Stratton staggered to the gentle slope of soil at the peak of the grave. He squatted in the mud, wrapped both blistered hands around the head of the coffin and pulled it toward him. The metal was slick, and Stratton’s purchase poor.
The coffin edged a few inches from its bed and then slid back as Stratton’s legs flew out from under him. The rope stopped his fall, but left him choking and scrambling in a tortuous pushup pose.
Wang Bin played out the rope and Stratton collapsed, prying with nerveless fingers to loosen the noose.
“Pull, you must pull again,” came the thin, ice-pick voice of his captor. “Pull, donkey. Pull.”
Stratton levered himself to a sitting position, encouraged by a fresh jerk on the rope. “I can’t,” he cried. “I need air.”
Wang Bin fired once. The bullet slapped into the mud between Stratton’s knees.
The puppet lurched back into the grave. Moments later he had dragged the coffin out of the pit onto the muddy slope, bracing it there with a heavy rock.
Wang Bin inched forward along the side of the open grave. “Now break the welds, Professor. Use the point of the shovel.” The rope hung loosely from his left hand now. The time for donkeys was nearly over.
Stratton found the welds soft and accommodating; a child could have fractured them. The lid of the coffin sprang open. Unbidden, Stratton stripped away a