Hanging the Devil, page 14
“You know that old proverb,” said Loh. “‘Failure is the mother of success.’”
“It looks like you’ve had a great deal of success.” Bohai looked at the macaque on the table. It was straining its neck to get a look at the basket. “But what are you hoping to accomplish?”
Loh took one of the heads from the basket and examined it, as if commiserating with an old friend. Hamlet with Yorick set the stage, and now it was Doctor Loh’s turn to perform a soliloquy.
“We began by making them smarter.” Loh took a second head from the basket and hefted it in his left hand. “Splice a few genes, sprinkle in some human DNA, and by the time the stitches are removed, you’ve got a monkey that can beat you at rock-paper-scissors.”
Loh reached into the basket and took a third head, managing to spread the fingers of his left hand enough to hold two at once, with the original still in his right hand.
Turning to Bohai, the doctor gave an embarrassed smile and started juggling.
“The real trick,” Loh continued, warming to his narrative, “was training them. Simple at first, mazes and puzzles. Then came facial recognition, hand signals, and some rudimentary responsibilities.”
For every skill described, Loh tossed a head into the air, its slow arc drawing the eye until he caught it with the opposite hand. Both the captive monkey and Bohai followed the flying skulls with morbid fascination and a growing sense of dread.
Toss-catch. Toss-catch. Toss-catch.
“They are excellent observers,” Loh continued. “Within limits.”
“Limits?” asked Bohai.
“Everyone has limits,” said Loh. “Even monkeys.” He glanced down to verify his proximity to the basket, then raised his eyes to track the rhythm of his throws. “And in the case of macaques, the limits are very primal.”
The doctor timed his next throws carefully as he lobbed the three heads back into the basket, enunciating each word in sync with each toss.
“Male…macaques…masturbate.”
Bohai wondered if the doctor was expecting applause. “And that’s a problem?”
“They do it incessantly.” Loh wiped his hands on his lab coat. “Males are more easily trained than females but also more easily distracted. It turns out their drive cuts both ways.” The doctor stepped back to his side of the examination table. “We use them as ancillary guards, but we discovered their limits in their loins.”
Bohai worried he’d been brought to the lab to contribute gray matter to a monkey. He grimaced at the macaque strapped to the table. “What about this little guy?”
“Ah,” said Loh. “This is Junjie, one of my best students.”
Bohai considered the basket of monkey heads and wondered where the bodies were now. “You said that you began by making them smarter.”
“See, you are too smart for the fences.” said Loh. “Now observe.” He extended his right hand toward the captive macaque and gently ran his hand along the top of its head. As Loh’s hand came down across the forehead, the monkey’s eyes narrowed, its teeth bared, and it lurched against the bonds in a vain attempt to bite the scientist.
Bohai jumped involuntarily.
“You have good reflexes,” said Loh. “So does Junjie. Notice his hostility?”
“You did decapitate quite of a few of his friends.”
“Exactly,” said Loh. “Which means both recognition and remembrance. Higher cognitive functions that might be encoded.”
“Encoded?”
Loh rubbed his hands together. “About two years ago at Harbin University, a Chinese scientist working with an Italian neurosurgeon performed the first successful head transplant on a mammal.”
Bohai glanced at the basket again. The rictus grins clearly found all of this hilarious. He really was trapped inside a Mary Shelley novel.
“Why?”
“Spinal cord injuries,” replied Loh. “They tried it on paralyzed dogs and had some success. The reassembled dogs managed to walk before—”
“—they died.”
Loh nodded. “But the reconstituted dog—with the old dog’s head—recognized its master. The hybrid dog exhibited the old personality. It was the same dog, only with a new body. Remarkable, no?”
A new question occurred to Bohai, but he was afraid to ask. Loh noticed his expression.
“You’re wondering where they got an extra dog’s body.”
Bohai nodded.
“That’s why it’s called an experiment.” Loh shrugged. “Risk is part of the reward.”
“Aren’t you supposed to learn from your mistakes?”
“Oh, but we have,” said Loh. “One theory is that more intelligent mammals have a stronger will to live, can reason their way through trauma. They had some success with primates in Harbin but were working with chimpanzees, not monkeys like Junjie.”
The macaque on the table struggled against his bonds.
“See?” Loh pointed excitedly. “Recognition.”
Bohai wondered how long this macabre hallucination could last before he ended up on that table. “Are there really that many spinal cord injuries?”
Doctor Loh studied him for a minute. “You know your chances of leaving this place?”
The corner of Bohai’s mouth bent sideways. “I’m guessing zero to nil.”
Loh nodded. “You are too smart, articulate, and pertinacious to go free. What might happen if you told the people in Hong Kong what goes on here?”
“You’d be famous.”
“Famous and infamous go hand in hand,” said Loh. “Anonymity lets me do my work.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Bohai had read enough books on psychology to know that Loh was dying to share his secret. All it took was enough air and a well-timed push. “It must be very…important.”
“I am a curator of cultural memory.” Loh’s eyes shone with fervor. “I bring continuity and stability to our society.”
“I thought you were helping injured dogs walk again.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No, I don’t.” Bohai chose his next words carefully. “I don’t believe our government cares about broken dogs.”
“You’re right.” Loh spread his hands as if smoothing a wrinkle in the fabric of time. “Do you know how civilizations fall, why dynasties crumble?”
“Revolution?” Bohai shrugged. “Economic collapse?”
Doctor Loh shook his head. “Change in leadership.”
“That’s a problem?”
“Most certainly,” said Loh emphatically. “Emperors get stabbed, dictators die in their sleep—”
“—people elect a new leader.”
“You spent too much time in Hong Kong,” said Loh. “Democracy is irrelevant.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it’s inherently unstable,” said Loh. “When a leader leaves, stability is lost. Imagine if Alexander the Great had never died, what would have happened.”
“We’d all be speaking Greek.”
“Exactly!” Loh smacked a hand on the table, causing the monkey to flinch. “Continuity is control. Stability is power.”
“‘Ignorance is strength.’”
“Don’t quote Orwell to me,” said Loh. “We read the same books, you and I—we just came to different conclusions.”
Bohai decided to stop pushing his luck. The doctor was a true believer. “You see a world—”
“—imagine if an aging Party official could transfer his consciousness to a newer, younger body.”
“You mean his head.”
“His mind.”
Bohai visualized a man’s head on a monkey’s body, then a dog’s. A Hollywood mash-up, Animal Farm meets Pet Sematary. Maybe a remake of Mars Attacks. His subconscious was going into overdrive, trying to make him laugh so he wouldn’t start screaming. His skin wanted to crawl away from the next question, but he asked it anyway.
“The monkeys are proxies for Party members?”
“Not exactly,” said Loh. “The macaques are stand-ins for prisoners. Better to lose a monkey than a worker.”
“Of course.”
“The prisoners are proxies for Party members.”
Bohai shivered as a cold sweat ran down his spine. He thought of his coworkers who had visited the doctor and never returned. He always considered himself someone who hoped for the best but prepared for the worst, but this was far worse than anything Bohai could have imagined. He gripped the table as his legs buckled.
“Now you see why my work cannot be interrupted.” Loh seemed bemused at Bohai’s reaction. “Our most senior Party members…they are not young men.”
Bohai tried to stand without the support of the table but flinched as he straightened his legs. The pliers he had jammed between his cheeks had slid forward and partially opened when he bent his knees. Now they were nibbling at his nuts like a hungry squirrel.
They were long-nosed pliers with chromium jaws, designed for tightening wire fences. He might have balls of steel, but Bohai’s scrotum was sore. He grimaced as he stepped gingerly around the corner of the table.
“You look faint.” said Loh. “Maybe you’re not up for this kind of work, after all.” The doctor pursed his lips. “Should I call the guard?”
“No, no, it’s fine,” said Bohai. “Haven’t eaten anything…just a little lightheaded.” He stepped to the doctor’s side of the table and gestured at the macaque. “Tell me more about the transplant process…how far down on the neck do you cut?”
Loh brightened at the question, his guest’s well-being never a concern, only an unwanted interruption. He gestured at the monkey’s neck. “A dog’s spinal cord is much simpler than a monkey’s. For the macaque we have to make an incision much lower, past the sixth or seventh vertebrae.”
“How long can the head stay alive,” asked Bohai, “before you reconnect it?”
“Two minutes or less.” The doctor spared a glance at his basket of death. “That’s why you need to have good hands, and why I need you.”
Loh shifted his attention to the pitiful primate named Junjie.
If it has a name, maybe it has a soul.
Bohai met the gaze of the monkey, whose yellow eyes stared back as if reading his mind.
Bohai winked.
Junjie blinked.
“I’ll do it.” Bohai turned to the doctor. “Where do you cut, exactly?”
“I’ll show you.” Loh leaned over the table. “Come closer.”
Bohai stepped sideways, rubbing his right hand against his lower back as if to relieve an ache. He bent over the table to get a closer look.
Loh ran a bony finger along Junjie’s neck just above the collar bone.
Bohai kept rubbing his back. “Show me again.”
As Loh retraced the pattern on the monkey’s torso, Bohai slid his right hand down his pants and gripped the pliers in his sweaty palm.
Loh finished his demonstration with a self-satisfied smile on his face. His eyes were small and wet behind his glasses.
“You need to be quick,” he said. “And precise.”
Bohai pushed against the table with his left hand, pivoting on his heel to build momentum into his swing. He was both quick and precise.
His right hand swung from behind his back in a sweeping downward arc. The chromium pliers caught the lights of the laboratory and sparkled like a vengeful fairy. Doctor Loh saw the glint of metal before his brain deciphered the shape of the long-nosed pliers. He jerked his head sideways, an instinctive lunge that saved his left eye.
Not that it mattered. The move turned his right eye into the bull’s-eye instead.
The pliers shattered the doctor’s glasses and plowed through his cornea. Aqueous humor splashed across Bohai’s hand, but there was nothing funny about it. Bohai gritted his teeth and shoved the pliers deeper into the socket.
Loh clawed at his face and gargled a scream that died in his throat. He fell backward onto the floor, blood streaming from his eye in fitful spurts. His gnarled hands clutched the pliers as if he was trying to operate on himself.
Bohai stared at the prone figure, waiting for nausea to arrive, or an adrenaline crash to bring him to his knees. Bohai had never killed anything bigger than a spider and expected the weight to fall on him like an anvil. He took a deep breath and braced himself.
He felt free.
Guilt didn’t knock on the door of his conscience. Remorse sent its regrets it couldn’t come. Bohai’s moral compass starting spinning like a ballerina. If his knees weren’t so stiff, he would have started to skip.
For the first time since he arrived in this contemptible camp, Bohai wasn’t afraid.
He looked at Doctor Loh’s body. Followed its contours, searching for proof it had once been a human being, but all he saw was a fallen scarecrow in a lab coat.
Bohai wiped his hand on his pants and turned to face the table. Junjie watched him anxiously, like a little boy who just caught Santa leaving a present under the tree.
Bohai smiled and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
He found releases for the collar and the straps holding the monkey’s arms and legs. Bohai unbuckled each in turn, acutely aware that Junjie might tear his face off. Still, he had faith in their man-to-monkey alliance, forged by a common enemy and shared goal of escape.
To test his theory, Bohai offered a hand to the macaque as soon as the bonds were removed. Junjie didn’t hesitate. He extended a furry hand and allowed Bohai to help him stand. The macaque froze for a moment, body tensed as he took in the smells and sounds of the room. Then he leapt from the table, landing next to the sprawled figure of the doctor.
Junjie looked at Bohai and blinked. Then the monkey started to urinate on Doctor Loh.
“No time for that.” Bohai cuffed Junjie gently across the back of his tawny head.
Junjie made a chattering sound and finished his business.
Bohai considered the submarine door of the main entrance, grateful for its thickness. He doubted the guard could hear a thing, but there was no doubt a guard still waited outside. There was a side corridor leading away from the laboratory, its stone walls alive with flashing lights. As he took a tentative step in that direction, Bohai felt a small furry hand slip into his.
He looked at his primate-in-crime.
“You know a way out?”
Junjie gave a sharp-toothed smirk and led Bohai deeper into the tunnel.
31
The ghost moved deeper into the tunnel.
“How much farther?”
The currents of air beneath the streets of San Francisco were breathable but dank. The ghost’s head almost brushed the ceiling, and his white hair floated around his shoulders. In the subterranean gloom it looked as if he was walking underwater.
“Almost there.” Gerry Gao kept pace three steps behind the ghost. He was the tall man who had accompanied the albino on the helicopter in the botched burglary. Now he was the ghost’s guide dog through the service tunnels around city hall. He held a camping lantern high in his left hand as they walked.
Gerry was roughly the same height as the ghost, lean and in shape, but he had no illusions about who was more dangerous. The ghost was also protected by the Triads, while Gerry was merely muscle on Freddie Wang’s payroll. No contest. If things went sideways, Gerry was disposable.
“We should have a third man,” said Gerry, not for the first time. “With Tommy in the hospital, you’ll have to go inside by yourself if I keep watch.”
“I work better alone.”
The ghost ran his right hand along the curved stone walls of the tunnel as he walked. His fingers were skeletal but his hand moved assuredly. When Gerry had offered the lantern, the ghost had refused, even though he walked in front. Gerry also had a small flashlight in his pocket, but that was spurned as well.
Gerry wondered if the man’s eyesight was poor, or better in low light.
That wasn’t the only thing he was wondering. Before heading underground he’d asked Freddie about Tommy Chen’s status at the hospital. All he knew was that Tommy got shot at that kid’s apartment. Gerry had managed to stumble his way out of the alley after that rotten kid kicked him in the balls, so he didn’t know how badly Tommy was wounded.
All Freddie would say was that Tommy was at the hospital. When Gerry asked how bad it was, Freddie said the same thing in that raspy voice of his.
He’s at the hospital.
Badly wounded or barely a scratch? Alive or dead? Nothing, just Freddie’s baleful, unblinking eye, making it clear no more information would be forthcoming. Tommy was disposable, just like Gerry. Get back to work.
“Here.” Gerry jiggled the lantern to shift the glow to a service ladder on their right. “We just walked under the east side of Civic Center Plaza and across Larkin Street.” He pointed at the curved metal rungs of the ladder set into stone. “This leads to a drain behind a monument that sits between the south side of the museum and the library. It’s sort of a pedestrian street, probably packed with homeless at this hour of the morning.”
Gossamer threads of light as frail as the dawn stroked the upper rungs of the ladder.
“Perfect,” said the ghost.
“Not my business, but I think it’s batshit to try this in daylight.”
“I’m on a schedule.”
I don’t think the police care about your schedule, thought Gerry as he said, “Okay.”
“It’s very early,” said the ghost. “And the museum is closed indefinitely. When we come back next time, we will need more men. But today is a one-man job.”
“Come back.” Gerry stopped short of the ladder. “There’s a next time?”
The ghost nodded.
“How many times do you—?”
“—as many as it takes,” said the ghost, pausing. “If all goes to plan, it will take only one more.”
Gerry studied the lines of the other man’s face, obsession etched in alabaster. The red eyes glowed in the lamplight. There was no upside to arguing, and Gerry could think of several spine-chilling downsides. He ran his free hand across his scalp as if trying to dislodge an idea.
All he came up with was a question.
“What do you want me to do?”
