Free Dragon's Eye by Andy Oakes Page A

Her chin. As warm as babies’ fingers.
    It was some time before she could move, stand, walk. Rehearsing in detail every action before it was made. She opened the attaché case, hand still wet. Moving to the thin black diary. Page upon page of names and numbers. With each one, a story. With each one … a debt – a deal – or a favour. Remembering, at all times, the cardinal rule of amassing and retaining power, as her index finger travelled the black lines of digits. Never ask for a favour … only grant them or take them.
    Slowly she dialled the number.
    *
    Debts – deals – favours … in that order. That is the oil of politics and diplomacy. The lubricant that ensures that its engine runs free and easy with no risks of seizing up.
    Debts – deals – favours.
    In the People’s Republic, this lubricant it is known as ‘guan-xi’ . The invisible but powerful threads that bind people. Moves situations along. That opens up back doors. It works well in China; it has to. It constantly oils a system that coheres a nation of one billion people. From the top to the bottom, it works. It can conjure up a dish of Sichuan fried chilli bean curd when every other restaurant diner has been assured that they had sold out of it. It can cut out waiting through three torturous hospital queues to see a frantic doctor …  zhouhou-men , ‘taking the back door’ to his home, after hours, to where the best and more leisurely medical care is given. It will give you access to the ‘Friendship Store’ … the department and grocery store reserved for foreigners and top graded cadre only, where goods not available to the ordinary Chinese abound.
    Guan-xi . It has no rank. It does not know its place. It is there in the peasantry. It is there in the Politburo. It seeps, unimpeded, through the labyrinthine system of grades and ranks … the Chinese puzzle of twenty-four steps of government. The flex of its fingers takes all within its span. There is a joke in China that doctors, drivers and shop clerks are the ‘Fat Jobs’ … the professions that can make the most of guan-xi because of the access that they have to services or commodities that can be traded through the back door. They call these fat jobs the ‘Three Treasures’.
    Washington D.C. also has its three treasures … debts – deals – favours … in that order.
    *
    It was a private number that she dialled. A number that by-passed the bureaucratic regiments of the embassy … the hurdles that were set in place to upend or discourage all but the most persistent; or those with the necessary contacts. It was a private number that was relayed through its own telephone exchange and switching station. It was not foolproof, they were, after all, in China. But it was the best that they could do.
    The name at the end of the line would volunteer his help to her because they were old friends. She had known him from a time when life was a lot less complicated … or so it seemed. A time coloured only by Leonard Cohen and Moroccan Gold. He would also help her because she had great legs.
    With every digit dialled, a memory. Every memory tethered to his room at Harvard. Both students. Both learner lovers for two hours, never to repeat the clumsy episode over the next twenty-years as their lives frequently overlapped. If she closed her eyes tight, very tight ‘like raisins’, as Bobby had described them as a child. … she could still taste the cheap red wine. She could even feel his large hands upon her. The wrestling match with her bra. Her pantyhose. Her knickers. Pulling her reluctant fingers down towards his urgent, impatient crotch.
    The telephone was answered. A measured and sort of sit on the sofa kind of a voice that you would imagine coming from the kind of man who only ever rose at the ‘crack of lunch’. An American voice. Barbara could almost smell the blueberry pie. Could almost hear Cagney singing a chorus of … ‘I’m a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy.’