The Firemaker

I

Monday Afternoon

The world tilted and the sun flashed back at her, reflected in a fractured mosaic like the pieces of a shattered mirror. Her body was telling her it was two in the morning and that she should be asleep. Her brain was informing her that it was mid-afternoon and that sleep was likely to be a distant prospect. Sleep. In twenty-one hours of travelling, it had successfully eluded her every attempt to embrace it. Although in these past weeks even sleep had provided no escape. She was not sure which was worse — the waking regrets and recriminations, or the restless nightmares. The gentle oblivion induced by the vodka tonics she had swallowed gratefully during the early hours of the flight had long since passed, leaving her with a dry mouth and a headache that swam somewhere just beyond consciousness. She glanced at the health declaration she had filled in earlier, still clutched in her hand…

She had drawn a line through the space left for ‘Content of Declaration’. She had nothing to declare, except for a broken heart and a wasted life — and neither of these, as far as she was aware, was infectious, contagious, or carried in the blood.

The world tilted again, and now she saw that the dazzling mosaic of light was in fact a pattern of water divided and subdivided into misshapen squares and oblongs. The reflection of a culture five thousand years old. Green shoots of rice pushing up through the paddies to feed a billion hungry mouths. Beyond the haze, to the north, lay the dusty plains of the Gobi desert.

An air hostess walked through the cabin spraying disinfectant into the atmosphere from an aerosol. Chinese regulations, she told them. And the captain announced that they would be landing at Beijing Capital Airport in just under fifteen minutes. Ground temperature was a sticky 35 degrees. Centigrade. That was 96 degrees Fahrenheit for the uninitiated. One of countless differences she supposed she would have to get used to in the next six weeks. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the landing. Of all the means of escape she might have picked, why had she chosen to fly? She hated airplanes.

The overcrowded shuttle bus, filled with the odour of bodies that had not washed for more than twenty hours, lurched to a halt outside the terminal building and spilled its passengers into the simmering afternoon. She headed quickly indoors in search of air-conditioning. There was none. If anything, it was hotter inside, the air thick and unbreathable. She was assailed by the sights and sounds and smells of China. People everywhere, as if every flight of the day had arrived at once, passengers fighting for places in the long queues forming at lines of immigration desks. Even in this international transit hall, Margaret drew odd looks from strange oriental faces who regarded her as the strange face in their midst. And, indeed, she was. Curling fair hair held back from her face in clasps, and tumbling over her shoulders. Ivory pale skin and clear blue eyes. The contrast with the black-haired, dark-eyed uniformity of the Han Chinese could not have been starker. She felt her stress level rising and took a deep breath.

‘Maggot Cambo! Maggot Cambo!’ A shrill voice pierced the hubbub. She looked to see a square, uniformed woman of indeterminate middle age pushing brusquely through the advancing passengers holding aloft a piece of card with the name MAGRET CAMPELL scrawled upon it in clumsy capital letters. It took Margaret a moment to connect the name she saw, and the one being called out, with herself.

‘Uh… I think you might be looking for me,’ she shouted above the noise, and thought how foolish that sounded. Of course they were looking for her. The square woman swivelled and glared at her through thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

‘Doctah Maggot Cambo?’

‘Margaret,’ Margaret said. ‘Campbell.’

‘Okay, you gimme your passport.’

Margaret fumbled for the blue, eagle-crested passport in her bag, but hesitated in handing it over. ‘And you are…?’

‘Constable Li Li Peng.’ She pronounced it Lily Ping. And she straightened her back, the better to display the senior constable’s three stars on the epaulets of her khaki-green short-sleeve shirt. Her skipped green hat with its yellow braid and its gold, red and blue crest of the Ministry of Public Security was slightly too large and pushed the square cut of her fringe down over the tops of her glasses. ‘Waiban has appointed me to look after you.’

‘Waiban?’

‘Foreign affairs office of your danwei.’

Margaret felt sure she should know these things. No doubt it would be there, somewhere, in all the briefing material they had given her. ‘Danwei?’

Lily’s irritation was ill concealed. ‘Your work unit — at the university.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Margaret felt she had revealed too much ignorance already and handed over her passport.

Lily glanced at it briefly. ‘Okay. I take care of immigration and we get your bags.’

A dark grey BMW stood idling just outside the door of the terminal building. The trunk lid swung up and a waif-like girl in uniform leapt out of the car to load Margaret’s luggage. The two large cases were almost as big as she was, and she struggled to heave them off the trolley. Margaret moved to help her, but was quickly steered into the back seat by Lily. ‘Driver get bags. You keep door shut for air-conditioning.’ And to reinforce the point, she slammed the door firmly closed. Margaret breathed in the almost-chill air and sank back into the seat. Waves of fatigue washed over her. All she wanted now was her bed.

Lily slid into the front passenger seat. ‘Okay, so now we go to headquarters Beijing Municipal Police to pick up Mistah Wade. He send apology for not being here to meet you, but he have business there. Then we go straight to People’s University of Public Security and you meet Professah Jiang. Okay? And tonight we have banquet.’ Margaret almost groaned. The prospect of bed receded into some distant, misty future. That much-quoted line from Frost’s poem came back to her… ‘and miles to go before I sleep’. Then she frowned, replaying Lily’s words. Did she say banquet?

The BMW sped along the airport expressway, bypassing the toll gates and quickly reaching the outskirts of the city. Margaret watched with amazement through the darkened side windows as the city rose up around her. Towering office blocks, new hotels, trade centres, upscale apartments. Everywhere the traditional single-storey tile-roofed siheyuan courtyards in the narrow hutongs were being demolished to make way for the transition from ‘developing’ country to ‘first world’ status. Whatever Margaret had expected — and she was not certain what her expectations had been — it had not been this. The only thing ‘Chinese’ that she could see in any of it were the ornamental curled eaves grafted on to the tops of skyscrapers. Long gone the huge character posters urging comrades to greater effort on behalf of the motherland. In their place gigantic adverts for Sharp, Fuji, Volvo. Capitalism was the spur now. They passed a McDonald’s burger joint, a blur of red and yellow. Her preconceptions of streets thick with cyclists all uniformly dressed in Mao pyjamas were blown away in the clouds of carbon monoxide issuing from the buses, trucks, taxis and private cars that choked the six lanes of the Third Ring Road as it swept round the eastern fringes of the city. Just like Chicago, she thought. Very ‘first world’. Except for the bicycle lanes.

The driver hugged the outside lane as they approached the city centre past the Beijing Hotel and Wangfujing Street. In the distance Margaret could see the ornate towering gate of the Forbidden City, with its huge portrait of Mao gazing down on Tiananmen Square. Heaven’s Gate. It was the backdrop, it seemed, to every CNN report from Beijing. A giant cliché of China. Margaret recalled seeing the pictures on TV of Mao’s portrait defaced with red paint by the democracy demonstrators in the square in ’89. A student herself then, still at medical school, she had been shocked and outraged by the bloody events of that spring. And now here she was, a decade on. She wondered how much things had changed. Or even if they had.

Their car took a sudden left, to the accompaniment of a chorus of horns, and they slipped unexpectedly into a leafy side street with gardens down its centre and locust trees on either side forming a shady canopy. Here they might have been in the old quarter of any European city, elegant Victorian and colonial buildings on either side. Lily half turned, pointing to a high wall on their right.

‘Ministry of Public Security in there. Used to be British embassy compound before Chinese government threw them out. This old legation area.’

Further down, past some older apartment blocks that didn’t look remotely European, they took another left into Dong Jiaominxiang Lane, a narrower street where the light was almost completely obscured by overhanging trees. A couple of bicycle repairmen had set up shop on the sidewalk, making the most of the shade. Cars and bicycles crowded the road. On their right, a gateway opened on to a vast modern white building at the top of a sweep of steps guarded by two lions. High above the entrance hung a huge red-and-gold crest. ‘China Supreme Court,’ Lily said, and Margaret barely had time to look before the car swung left and squealed to a sudden halt. There was a bump and a clatter. Their driver threw her hands in the air with a gasp of incredulity and jumped out of the car.

Margaret craned forward to see what was happening. They had been in the act of turning through an arched gateway into a sprawling compound and had collided with a cyclist. Margaret heard the shrill voice of their driver berating the cyclist, who was getting back to his feet, apparently unhurt. As he stood, she saw that he was a police officer, in his early thirties, his neatly pressed uniform crumpled and dusty. A trickle of blood ran down his forearm from a nasty graze on his elbow. He pulled himself up to his full height and glared down at the little driver, who suddenly stopped shrieking and wilted under his gaze. She bent down timidly to retrieve his cap and held it out like a peace offering. He snatched it from her, but peace was the last thing on his mind. He unleashed, it appeared to Margaret, a mouthful of abusive language at the shrinking waif. Lily, in the front seat, emitted a strange grunting noise and hurriedly climbed out of the car. Margaret, too, thought it was time to interface, and opened the back door.

As she got out, Lily was picking up the bicycle and making apologetic noises. The policeman appeared to turn his wrath on her. More venom issued forth. Margaret approached. ‘What’s the problem here, Lily? This guy got something against women drivers?’ All three stopped and looked at her in amazement.

The young policeman regarded her coldly. ‘American?’

‘Sure.’

And in perfect English, ‘Then why don’t you mind your own business?’ He was almost shaking with anger. ‘You were in the back seat and couldn’t possibly have seen what happened.’

From somewhere deep inside, Margaret felt the first stirrings of her fiery Celtic temper. ‘Oh yeah? Well, maybe if you hadn’t been so busy looking at me in the back seat, you would have been watching where you were going.’

Lily was horrified. ‘Doctah Cambo!’

The young policeman stood for a moment glaring at Margaret. Then he snatched his bicycle from Lily, dusted down his cap and replaced it firmly on his close-cropped head before turning and wheeling his bike away in the direction of a European-style redbrick building just inside the compound.

Lily shook her head, clearly distraught. ‘That’s terrible thing to say, Doctah Cambo.’

‘What?’ Margaret was at a loss.

‘You make him lose mianzi.’

‘Lose what?’

‘Face. You make him lose face.’

Margaret was incredulous. ‘Face?’

‘Chinese have problem with face.’

‘With a face like his, I’m not surprised! And what about you? Your… mianzi? You didn’t have to stand there and take all that. I mean, you outrank him, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Outrank him?’ Lily looked astonished. ‘No.’

‘Well, he only had two stars…’ She patted her shoulder. ‘… and you’ve got three.’

Lily shook her head. ‘Three star, one stripe. He got three stripe. He is Supervisor Li, senior detective Section One, Beijing Municipal Police.’

Margaret was taken aback. ‘A detective? In uniform?’

‘Uniform not normal.’ Lily looked very grave. ‘He must be go some ve-ery important meeting.’

II

Li stormed through the front door of the redbrick building that still housed the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department and made his way quickly to the toilet. The blood on his forearm was congealing with the dirt from the sidewalk. He ran it under the tap and jumped back cursing as water splashed darkly all over the pale green of his shirt. He looked at himself in the mirror above the washbasin. He was dusty and dishevelled, splashed with water, bleeding from the elbow, and had a dirty smudge on his forehead. In addition to which his dignity was severely dented — and in front of two Chinese women of inferior rank he had just lost face to a foreigner. ‘Yangguizi!’ He almost spat the word back at himself in the mirror. Foreign devil! After two hours of sweating over his uncle’s ironing board, neatly pressing every crease and flap of his shirt and trousers; after an uncomfortable hour in the barber’s chair that morning having his hair shorn to a bristling quarter-inch all over; after fifteen minutes in a cool shower to wash away the sweat and dust of the day; he should have looked and felt his best going into the most important interview of his career. Instead, he looked — and felt — awful.

He sluiced his face with water and dabbed away the blood on his arm with paper towels. His anger at the incident at the gate was giving way again to the butterflies that had been fluttering inside his ribcage all morning.

When the position of Deputy Section Chief had become vacant there was an automatic assumption among his peers that Li would get the job. Still only thirty-three, he was one of the most experienced detectives in Section One. He had broken a record number of homicides and armed robberies since his graduation to the section from the University of Public Security, where he had been the top student of his year. Li himself had felt that he was ready for the job, but he was not in a position to apply for it. The decision on his eligibility or otherwise would be made in the Promotions Department, with a final decision being taken by the Chief of Police. Cosy assumptions of promotion from within had, however, been thrown into disarray by rumours that a senior detective of the Shanghai CID was being recommended for the post. It had been impossible to ascertain the veracity of the rumour and, through the long bureaucratic process, Li did not know if he was even being considered. Until his summons to attend an interview with the divisional head of the CID, Commissioner Hu Yisheng. And even now he had no idea what to expect. His immediate boss at Section One, Chen Anming, had been tight-lipped and grim-faced. Li feared the worst. He took a deep breath, straightened his cap, tugged at his shirt, and stepped out of the toilet.

Commissioner Hu Yisheng sat in shirtsleeves behind his desk in a high-backed leather chair, his jacket carefully draped over the back of it. Behind him, rows of hardback books in a glass-fronted bookcase, a red Chinese flag hanging limp in the heat, various photographs and certificates framed on the wall. He leaned over his desk, writing slowly, tight, careful characters in a large open notebook. His mirror image gazed back at him from the highly polished surface. He waved Li to a seat without looking up. Li slowly lowered his hand from an unseen salute and perched uncomfortably on the edge of a seat opposite the Commissioner. The silence was broken only by the gentle whirring of a fan lifting the edges of papers at one side of the desk — and by the heavy scratching of the Commissioner’s fountain pen. Li cleared his throat nervously and the Commissioner glanced up at him for a moment, perhaps suspecting impatience. Then he returned to his writing. It was important, Li decided, that he didn’t clear his throat again. And almost as the thought formed, so the phlegm seemed to gather in his throat, tempting him to clear it. Like an itch you can’t scratch. He swallowed.

After what seemed an eternity, the Commissioner finally placed the top back on his pen and closed the book. He folded his hands in front of him and regarded Li almost speculatively.

‘So,’ he said. ‘How is your uncle?’

‘He is very well, Commissioner. He sends his regards.’

The Commissioner smiled, and there was genuine affection in it. ‘A very great man,’ he said. ‘He suffered more than most, you know, during the Smashing of the Four Olds.’

‘I know.’ Li nodded. He had heard it all before.

‘He was my inspiration when the Cultural Revolution ended. There was no bitterness in him, you see. After everything that happened, Old Yifu would only look forward. “No use worrying over the might-have-beens,” he used to say to me. “It is a happy thing to have a broken mirror reshaped.” It was the spirit of men like your uncle that put this country back on the rails.’

Li smiled his dutiful agreement and felt a sudden foreboding creep over him.

‘Unfortunately, it makes it very difficult,’ said the Commissioner. ‘For you — and us. You understand, of course, it is the policy of the Party to discourage nepotism in all its insidious forms.’

And Li knew then that he hadn’t got the job. He loved his Uncle Yifu dearly. He was the kindest, fairest, wisest man he knew. But he was also a legend in the Beijing police. Even five years after his retirement. And legends cast long shadows.

‘It is incumbent upon you to be better than the rest, and for us to examine your record more critically.’ The Commissioner sat back and took in a long, slow breath through his nose. ‘Just as well we are both good at our jobs, eh?’ A twinkle in his eye. ‘As of eight a.m. tomorrow you are promoted to the rank of Senior Supervisor, Class Three, and to the position of Deputy Section Chief, Section One.’ A broad smile split his face suddenly and he rose to his feet, extending an arm towards the bewildered Li. ‘Congratulations.’

III

The car sat idling in the somnolent shade of a tree just inside the rear entrance to police headquarters, across the compound from the door of the redbrick building that Supervisor Li had passed through more than fifteen minutes earlier.

‘That Mistah Wade now.’

If Margaret had lapsed into gentle snoring in the back seat Lily gave no sign of having heard it. She leaned across and unlocked the door. Bob Wade slipped in beside Margaret. He was incredibly tall and skinny and seemed to have to fold himself up to fit in the car.

‘Hey, you guys, I’m really sorry to keep you waiting.’ He pumped Margaret’s hand enthusiastically. ‘Hi. You must be Dr Campbell.’

‘Margaret,’ she said.

‘Okay, Margaret. Bob Wade. Jeez, it’s hot out there.’ He took a grubby-looking handkerchief and wiped away the beads of sweat forming across a high, receding forehead. ‘Lily looking after you okay?’

‘Sure.’ Margaret nodded slowly. ‘Lily’s a real gem.’

Lily flicked her a look, and Bob was not slow to detect Margaret’s tone. He leaned forward to the driver. ‘How about we hot-tail it to the university, Shimei? We’re running a bit behind schedule.’

Shimei gunned the engine and backed out into the compound before swinging round towards the gate. As they passed under the arch, Margaret noticed Supervisor Li emerging from the redbrick building. His whole demeanour had changed — a spring in his step, a smile on his face. He didn’t even see their car. His shoulders were pushed back and Margaret realised that he was very tall for a Chinese, maybe six feet. He pulled his cap down over his flat-top crew cut. Its peak cast a shadow over his square-jawed high-cheek-boned face and, as he disappeared from view, she thought how unattractive he was.

‘You must be pretty tired.’ She turned to find Bob examining her closely. He would be around fifty-five — the age she felt right now.

She nodded. ‘I’ve been on the go something like twenty-two hours. It seems like one hell of a long day. Only it’s tomorrow already and I’ve still got nearly half of it to go.’

He grinned. ‘Yeah, I know. You’re chasing the day until about halfway across the Pacific and suddenly you jump a day ahead.’ He leaned towards her, lowering his voice. ‘What happened with Lily?’

‘Oh…’ Margaret didn’t want to go through it all again. ‘Just a little misunderstanding.’

‘You mustn’t mind her really. She’s not all bad. Bark’s worse than her bite. You know, she was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. A real old-fashioned comrade. Only her kind of communism’s not really in vogue any more, so she’ll stay at the bottom of the pile. Never be anything more than a three-star constable.’

The Cultural Revolution was something Margaret had always meant to read up on. She’d heard of it often enough without ever really knowing what it was — except that it had been a bad time in China. She decided, however, not to display her ignorance to Bob.

‘So what made you decide to come to China?’ he asked.

The truth wasn’t an option for Margaret. She shrugged vaguely. ‘Oh, you know… I was always kind of interested in the place. The Mysterious East and all that. I was doing some lecturing, part-time, at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and this guy from the Office of International Criminal Justice…’

‘Dick Goldman.’

‘Yeah, that’s him. He said the OICJ were looking for someone to do a six-week stint at the People’s University of Public Security in Beijing, lecturing on forensic pathology, and was I interested. I thought, hell, it beats chasing fire engines for the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office. Lot of fires in Chicago in June.’

Bob smiled. ‘You’ll find they do things a lot differently here than Chicago. I’ve been out here nearly two years and I’m still trying to get my lecture notes photocopied.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘You ever heard of the Three Ps?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, they represent the three things you must have to survive in this country. That’s Patience, Patience and Patience. The Chinese have their own way of doing things. I’m not saying they do them any worse or any better than we do. Just different. And they’ve got a totally different perspective on the world.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, for example, you come here thinking: I’m an American citizen. I live in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And you think that makes you pretty damned superior. But the humblest peasant working fifteen hours a day in the paddy fields will look down his nose at you. Why? Because you’re not Chinese and he is. Because he is a citizen of the Middle Kingdom. That’s their name for China. So called because it is, of course, the centre of the world, and everything beyond its borders is peripheral and inferior, populated by yangguizi — foreign devils like you and me.’

She snorted. ‘That’s just empty arrogance.’

Bob raised an eyebrow. ‘Is it? The Chinese were weaving silk three thousand years ago. They were casting iron eighteen hundred years before the Europeans figured out how to do it. They invented paper, and were printing books hundreds of years before Gutenberg built his first printing press. By comparison, we Americans are just a pimple on the face of history.’

Margaret wondered how often he’d delivered this little homily to visiting American lecturers. He probably thought it made him seem more knowledgeable, and China more daunting. And he was right.

‘Biggest single difference — culturally?’

She shrugged her complete ignorance.

‘The Chinese focus on and reward group efforts, rather than individual ones. They’re team players. And the individual is expected to put the team’s interests way ahead of his own. And that’s a pretty big deal in a country of 1.2 billion people. Guess that’s why they’ve been around for five thousand years.’

Margaret was getting tired of her cultural studies lesson. ‘So what happens now?’

Bob became brisk and businesslike. ‘Okay. We’ll get you settled in at the university, meet the people you’ve got to meet, then you can go and get changed and freshened up for the banquet.’

Lily’s words came back from earlier. ‘Banquet?’

‘Yeah, at the famous Quanjude Beijing Duck restaurant. It’s a traditional welcome. Didn’t you get an OICJ briefing document?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Margaret didn’t like to confess that she hadn’t read it. She had meant to. If she could stay awake long enough she would do it tonight.

‘There’s a lot of etiquette associated with these things. Do’s and don’ts. Chinese can be a bit touchy, you know what I mean? But don’t worry, I’ll be around to keep you right.’

Margaret didn’t know whether to be pleased or pissed. Bob, she thought, could become pretty tiresome.

They were heading due west now along another six-lane highway running through a canyon of modern tower blocks. The sun was dipping lower in the late afternoon, dazzling through the dust and insects that caked the windscreen. Out of the haze, a sweeping flyover rose up from the road ahead. But at the last moment they bore right on to a smaller road thick with cyclists, and then right again into what looked like a building site.

‘Here we are,’ Bob said.

‘We are?’ Margaret looked with some horror.

They bumped across a pot-holed yard, raising a cloud of dust in their wake, and turned through a gate where a policeman stood endlessly to attention in the searing heat. He saluted as they passed. No one bothered to acknowledge him. Then suddenly they were on a private tree-lined road, a large all-weather games pitch behind a high fence on their left. They pulled up outside a tall white building with curled eaves and ornamental brown pillars.

Margaret got stiffly out of the car and was nearly knocked over by the heat. In the cool, cloistered air-conditioning of the BMW, she had forgotten how hot it was out there.

Bob pointed to a twenty-storey building beyond the administration block. ‘Staff live in there.’

‘What?’ Margaret was incredulous. ‘How many staff are there?’

‘Oh, about a thousand.’ He steered her through double doors and up dark marble steps in the cool interior.

‘And how many students?’

‘Around three thousand.’

Margaret gasped. A three-to-one student-teacher ratio was unheard of in the States.

‘It’s kind of like the West Point for police in China. Down here.’ And they set off down a long featureless corridor.

Margaret had had no idea the university was on such a small scale. She was seriously regretting now not having read her briefing material.

‘Of course,’ Bob went on, enjoying his possession of superior knowledge, ‘you’ll be interested in the pathology department and the forensics. That’s all down the far end of the playing fields. The Centre of Material Evidence Determination. They got some pretty sophisticated stuff down there, including a brand-new block with all the latest laboratory testing facilities — DNA, you name it. Stuff from all over China gets sent there. Christ, they even take ear-prints — you know, like fingerprints, only ears. But I got to admit, I can’t see many perps leaving their ear-prints at the scene of a crime, unless they’ve beaten somebody to death with their hearing aid.’ He laughed at his own joke. But Margaret was distracted. His smile faded. ‘Not my field, of course.’

‘What is your field?’

‘Computer profiling. I’ve been helping them set up a system here that’s going to be as good as anything the FBI’ve got back home. In here.’ He opened the door into a tiny office, no bigger than eight feet square, with one small window at ceiling height. There were two desks pushed together, three small plastic chairs of the stacking variety, and a single filing cabinet. Three cardboard boxes stood side by side on one of the desks. ‘This is you.’

Margaret looked at him in consternation. ‘This is me what?’

‘Your office. And think yourself lucky. Space is at a premium.’

She was about to voice an opinion on Bob’s definition of the word ‘lucky’, but was prevented from doing so by the arrival of two middle-aged men and a woman all wearing the uniform of senior police officers. They smiled and bowed and Margaret smiled and bowed back, and then glanced anxiously at Bob for help.

‘These are your colleagues in the Criminal Investigation Department here at the university.’ He rattled off something in Chinese and they all bowed and smiled again. Margaret bowed and smiled back. ‘Professors Tian and Bai, and the delightful Dr Mu,’ Bob introduced them. They all shook hands, and then one by one solemnly produced their business cards and presented them to Margaret, the corners held between thumb and forefinger, the English translations of their names facing towards her. She took them each in turn and fumbled in her bag for her own cards and handed one back to each.

‘Ni hau,’ she said, exercising the only Chinese she knew.

‘You’re supposed to present your cards to them the way they did to you,’ Bob said.

‘Am I?’ She was flustered by this, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

‘Didn’t you read your briefing material?’

‘Sorry, I forgot.’

She smiled at them again and they all smiled back, then one by one lifted a cardboard box from the desk and left.

Margaret looked around in despair. ‘This is hopeless, Bob. I can’t work in this space for six weeks.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Wrong with it? It’s like a cell. I’ll be banging my head off the walls after a week in here.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t mention it to Professors Tian, Bai and Dr Mu.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t think you’d find them very sympathetic. They probably don’t like you very much already.’

Margaret couldn’t believe she was hearing this. ‘Why wouldn’t they like me? They’ve only just met me.’

‘Well, for one thing…’ Bob sat on the edge of one of the desks, ‘… you probably make more in a week than they earn in a year. And for another… they’ve just been moved out of their office to make way for you.’

Margaret’s jaw slackened.

‘Anyway…’ Bob stood up. ‘… time you met Professor Jiang. He’ll be waiting for you.’

Professor Jiang was a thickset man in his late fifties, who looked like he’d been scrubbed and freshly pressed for the meeting. He had a head of beautifully cut thick hair, greying in attractive streaks, and wore the rank-equivalent uniform of a Senior Commissioner. His dark-rimmed glasses seemed a little too large for his face. He rose expectantly as Bob ushered Margaret into the reception room. It was cool in here, blinds drawn to keep the sun at bay, two rows of soft low chairs facing each other across the room, even lower tables in front of each, bottles of chilled water placed before every chair. Also rising to greet them were a younger man in uniform, and a pretty girl in her early twenties wearing a plain cream dress. Bob made the introductions. First in Chinese, then in English.

‘Margaret, this is Professor Jiang, Director of the Criminal Investigation Department — your department head.’ They shook hands and exchanged formal smiles. ‘And his assistant, Mr Cao Min. He’s a graduate of the university who’s been out there doing it in the real world for a while. A real-life detective.’ Mr Cao shook her hand solemnly. ‘And, uh, this is Veronica.’ Bob chuckled. ‘Lots of Chinese girls like to give themselves English names. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I know what your real name is, Veronica.’

‘Veronica do fine,’ Veronica said, shaking Margaret’s hand and smiling sweetly. She was extraordinarily tiny, her childlike hand almost disappearing inside Margaret’s. ‘I translate for you.’

They all took their seats, Professor Jiang, Mr Cao and Bob on one side of the room, Margaret facing them on the other. Veronica sat in neutral territory on a chair by the window. Margaret felt as if she were attending an interview, and sat with a strained smile on her face, waiting for whatever would happen next. After a moment, Professor Jiang composed himself, sat forward and began addressing Margaret directly in Chinese. She found it strangely disconcerting not being able to understand a word he said but being obliged, somehow, to maintain eye contact and listen with interest. Professor Jiang’s voice was very soft, its cadences almost hypnotic, and Margaret caught herself beginning to sway back and forth. She had a sudden, overpowering desire to sleep. She blinked hard. The professor spoke for what seemed like an eternity before finishing with a tiny smile and sitting back in anticipation of her response.

Margaret looked to Veronica for enlightenment. Veronica thought for a long time. Then she said, ‘Ah… Professor Jiang say he welcome you to the Chinese People’s University of Public Security. Very pleased to have you here.’ Margaret waited for more, but Veronica had clearly finished, and all eyes were on Margaret for her reply. She smiled and locked eyes once more with the professor.

‘Uh… It’s a very great honour, Professor, to be invited to lecture at the People’s University of Public Security. I only hope that I can live up to your expectations of me, and that I can bring some enlightenment to your students.’ She caught Bob winking encouragingly at her from across the room, and not for the first time that day felt an urge to punch his smug face.

Professor Jiang leaned forward again and breathed Mandarin across the room for another eternity.

‘Professor Jiang say he sure you bring much light to students.’

The professor watched eagerly for Margaret’s response. She was at a loss, so just smiled and nodded. Which seemed to go down well, for the professor grinned broadly and nodded back. They smiled and nodded back and forth for the next quarter of a minute before Mr Cao suddenly sat forward and said, in a West Coast American accent, ‘You and I will meet tomorrow morning and go over your schedule of lectures. If you require any audiovisual facilities, or access to the pathology labs, then I can arrange this.’

Margaret was almost overwhelmed by relief at the ability to be able to communicate again in plain English. ‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I brought quite a lot of slides, and if it’s possible to arrange it, you know, I think it would be great if we could take the students through a real autopsy.’

‘We can discuss this tomorrow,’ Mr Cao said, his rise to his feet apparently a cue for everyone else to stand. As Margaret shook hands with them all yet again, there was a knock at the door and Lily entered, nodding her acknowledgment to Professor Jiang.

‘Ready to take you to apartment, Doctah Cambo.’

‘Hotel,’ Margaret corrected her.

‘Apartment,’ Lily insisted. ‘Just down street here. We have apartment for unmarried lecturer.’

‘No, no. I’m staying at the Friendship Hotel. I didn’t want an apartment. I made that clear in Chicago. It’s all booked.’

The colour rose high on Lily’s face. ‘People’s University of Public Security cannot afford hotel. We provide apartment for lecturer.’

Almost twenty-four hours without sleep was taking its toll on Margaret’s patience. ‘Look, the hotel is booked, I’m paying for it myself. It was all part of the deal. Okay?’

There was consternation on Professor’s Jiang’s face as he struggled to make sense of this friction between the two women. Bob stepped in quickly, smiling and speaking rapidly in Chinese in an attempt to smooth Lily’s ruffled feathers. Then he turned to Margaret, still smiling. ‘Just a little misunderstanding. We’ll sort it all out.’

Lily looked far from mollified. She glared at Margaret, turned abruptly and marched out of the room. Bob smiled and nodded some more, uttering further soothing words in Chinese to Professor Jiang, and steering Margaret hastily out into the corridor.

‘Jesus, Margaret, what the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

Margaret was beside herself with indignation. ‘What have I done now? The hotel is booked. It was all agreed. I didn’t want to go home at night and have to start making my own bed and cooking my own meals.’

He drew her away from the reception room. ‘Yeah, but Lily didn’t know that. You don’t just go contradicting people here, Margaret.’

‘Don’t tell me. I made her lose “mianzi”.’

‘Oh, so you have read your briefing notes.’ Margaret resisted the temptation to put him straight. ‘The thing is, Margaret, the Chinese have got a thousand ways of saying “no” without ever saying “no”. And you’re going to have to start learning some of them, or your six weeks here are going to seem like six years.’

Margaret sighed theatrically. ‘So what should I have said?’

‘You should have said how grateful you were for the university’s offer of accommodation, but that unfortunately you had already booked a room at the Friendship Hotel.’ Bob stopped her at the top of the stairs. ‘I told you, they do things differently here. And if you want to get anything done, you’re going to have to start getting yourself a little guanxi in the bank.’

‘What the hell’s “gwanshee”?’

‘It’s what makes this whole society work. A kind of old boys’ network — you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. I do you a favour, you do me one in return. And you’re not doing anyone any favours by making them lose face.’

Margaret’s head dropped, and to Bob she suddenly looked very small and very frail. He immediately regretted his impatience with her.

‘Hey, listen… I’m sorry. You’ve had a long day…’

‘Two days,’ she corrected him, a hint of petulance in her tone.

‘And I guess this is all pretty bizarre stuff.’

‘Yeah.’ Now she was fighting an unaccountable urge to burst into tears, and became aware of her foot tapping manically on the top step. Bob was aware of it, too. His voice became soothing.

‘Look, Lily’ll take you to the Friendship. Have a shower, get changed, maybe even grab an hour’s shut-eye, and just let the banquet tonight wash over you. Enjoy it. The food’s great. And as for the other stuff… I’ll keep you right, okay?’

She flicked him a look that verged on the grateful, and a wry smile turned up the corners of her mouth. ‘Sure. Thanks.’

But her reassurance lasted only as long as it took to reach the car and the scowling face of Lily Ping, and Margaret’s heart sank again.

IV

The young security guard nodded to Li as he passed through the staff gate at the rear of the Jingtan joint venture hotel on Jianguomennei Avenue. Li slipped in the back door to the ground-floor kitchen and looked around for Yongli. But there was no sign of him. Sous-chefs were chopping vegetables and preparing marinades, jointing chickens and basting duck for roasting.

Li stopped one of the waitresses. ‘Where’s Ma Yongli?’

She nodded towards the door. ‘Out front.’

Li crossed to the door, opening it a crack, and peeked out. Yongli stood by a hot plate and gas ring behind an ornate counter with a Chinese canopy. His white smock seemed to emphasise his height and his bulk, his round face solemn below his tall white chef’s hat. He gazed out at the early eaters in the twenty-four-hour Café China, his mind somewhere else altogether. He was on front-of-house duty tonight, cooking dishes from the day’s Special Menu in view of the customers who ordered them. But the serious diners were not yet in and, for the moment at least, he was idle, his mind free to wander. Li watched him affectionately for a moment, then issued a short, sharp whistle from between his front teeth. Yongli’s head snapped round and his face lit up when he saw Li. He glanced about quickly to see if any of the managers were watching, then hurried over to the door, pushing Li back into the kitchen with an irresistible force. ‘Well? Well? Come on, tell me. What happened?’

The smiled drained from Li’s face and he lowered his head and shrugged. ‘The Commissioner said it was Party policy to “discourage nepotism in all its insidious forms”.’

All the animation left Yongli’s expression. ‘Aw, come on, you’re shitting me, right?’

Li retained his grave demeanour. ‘It’s what he said.’ He paused, and then a big grin split his face. ‘But it didn’t stop me getting the job.’

‘You bastard!’ Yongli grabbed at him, but Li backed off, grinning stupidly.

‘Hey!’ Yongli shouted out to the kitchen. And heads lifted. ‘Big Li got his promotion!’ And he grabbed a couple of stainless-steel ladles and started working his way up a line of hanging pots and pans, beating out a tattoo on them as he went. A cheer went up from the staff, and there was a spontaneous round of applause. Li flushed and shook his head with embarrassment, still grinning like an idiot. Yongli reached the end of the row. ‘So the next time you get lifted by the cops,’ he shouted, ‘you can just say, hey, don’t you know who I am? I’m a pal of Big Li Yan. And they’ll let you go faster than hot coals.’ He turned a huge, sparkling-eyed, maniacal grin on his friend and stalked down the aisle towards him, taking Li’s face in two giant hands and planting a big wet kiss on his forehead. ‘Congratulations, pal.’ And the two embraced, to further applause from the kitchen staff.

They had been best friends since meeting on their first day at the University of Public Security nearly fifteen years before. Two kindred spirits, each instantly recognising the other. Big daft boys, then and now. It had broken Li’s heart when Yongli had dropped out in their final year. His results had been deteriorating in almost precise correlation to his pursuit of women and karaoke bars and a lifestyle he could not afford. It was the essential difference between them. Li took his career more seriously than his pleasures. But to Yongli the pursuit of pleasure was all. And he had jumped at the chance to train as a chef with a Sino-American joint venture.

‘The money’s fantastic,’ he had told Li. And, compared to the subsistence existence of a Chinese student, it was. Even after his promotion, Li would earn substantially less than his friend. Yongli’s training had also included lessons in English, six months at a hotel in Switzerland learning how to cook and present European food, and three months in the States finding out how Americans liked to eat their steaks. There he had learned how to fully indulge his hedonistic inclinations, returning with a great appetite for all things American and a three-inch addition to his waistline. In many ways Li and Yongli had grown apart, their paths in life taking very different courses, and their friendship now was sustained more by its history than by its present. But the warmth between them was still strong.

‘So.’ Yongli pulled off his hat and threw it to one of the other chefs, who caught it deftly. ‘Tonight you and I are going to celebrate.’

‘But you’re working.’

Yongli twinkled. ‘I made contingency arrangements — just in case the news was good. The boys await my call, and a table is booked at the Quanjude.’

‘The boys?’

‘The old gang. Just like it used to be.’ A thought clouded his smile briefly. ‘And no Lotus. I know you don’t approve.’

Li protested. ‘Hey, listen, Yongli, it’s not that I disapprove—’

Yongli cut him off. ‘Not tonight, pal. Okay?’

The moment of friction between them was past in an instant. An onlooker might barely have been aware of it. Yongli grinned again, warmly. ‘We’re gonna get you drunk.’

V

To Margaret’s surprise, the bar was deserted, except for a balding middle-aged man in the far corner nursing a large Scotch and flipping desultorily through the pages of the International Herald Tribune. She felt better for having showered and changed and soaked up a little of the unexpected luxury of the Friendship Hotel. Built in the fifties to house Russian ‘experts’, this vast granite edifice was a throwback to the days of uneasy co-operation between China and Stalin’s Russia, all polished brass and white marble dragons beneath curling green-tiled eaves supported on rust-red pillars. She had changed into a cool cotton summer dress, and blow-dried her hair. It fell now in natural golden curls across her shoulders. Before leaving the room she had examined her face in the mirror — pale skin dotted with freckles — as she applied a little make-up, and had noticed the beginnings of lines around her eyes and the deep shadows beneath them. And she remembered with a painful stab the events of the last eighteen months and the devastating effect they had had on her life. In all her fatigue, and in all the strangeness and disorientation of China, they had actually slipped from her conscious mind for the first time. Now they came back like the pungent taste of something not quite right eaten some hours earlier. A drink was required.

A barmaid lounged on the customer side of the bar and two young men hovered behind it. Whatever conversation they’d been having ended abruptly when Margaret entered, and as she eased herself into one of the tall bar stools the barmaid thrust a drinks menu into her hand. Margaret handed it back, unopened. ‘Vodka tonic, with ice and lemon.’

The man in the corner looked up, interested for the first time by the sound of her voice. He folded his paper, drained his glass, and headed for the bar. He was short, only a little taller than Margaret, and stockily built. Margaret turned as he approached and saw a man whose face was collapsing, jowls deforming a weak jawline, deep creases running down fleshy cheeks from puffy eyes that were watery and bloodshot. His remaining hair, wiry and unruly, was almost entirely grey and plastered to his head with some kind of scented oil that assaulted Margaret’s olfactory senses. He smiled unpleasantly, and even above the scent of his hair oil, Margaret could smell the alcohol on his breath. ‘Put that on my bill,’ he said in an unmistakably Californian drawl.

‘That’s quite all right,’ Margaret said coolly.

‘No, I insist.’ He tossed a glance at one of the barmen. ‘And gimme another Scotch.’ Then he refocused on Margaret. ‘Makes a change to hear a voice from the old country.’

‘Really? I thought this was where the international set hung out.’ It was what she’d read, and one of the reasons she had chosen to stay there. After relations between Russia and China had become less than warm and the Russian ‘experts’ had departed, the Friendship Hotel had become a haven for ‘experts’ of all nationalities, and more recently a gathering place for expats who preferred English to Chinese.

‘Used to be,’ he said with a hint of bitterness in his voice. ‘But you know how it is. One place is popular this year, another the next. And the beautiful people move on.’ Margaret was aware of an increasing rancour in his tone now. ‘Still, I can’t say I miss them. The aesthetic can become somewhat tedious, don’t you think?’ But he wasn’t really interested in what she thought. He went on without pausing, ‘A steady supply of whisky’s all a man really needs. And from a quiet corner in here the solitary drinker can always watch the ridiculous spectacle of the Chinese nouveaux riches in search of status. My name’s McCord, by the way. J. D. McCord.’ He held out his hand, and she felt compelled to shake it. She had expected it to be limp and damp. Instead, it held her a little too firmly, and there was something almost reptilian in its cold, dry touch. ‘And you are?’

‘Margaret Campbell.’ She felt trapped by his politeness. And the arrival of her vodka tonic, on his bill, slammed the door on immediate escape.

‘Well, Margaret Campbell, what brings you to Beijing?’

There was nothing else for it. She took a long sip of her vodka and almost immediately felt its effect. ‘I’m lecturing for six weeks at the People’s University of Public Security.’

‘Are you indeed?’ McCord seemed impressed. ‘And what’s your subject?’

‘Forensic pathology.’

‘Jeez! You mean you cut people open for a living?’

‘Only when they’re dead.’

He grinned. ‘I’m safe for a while, then.’ And for one malicious, wishful moment, she visualised taking a circular saw round the top of his skull and watching his addled, alcoholic brain plop out into a shiny stainless-steel dish. His Scotch arrived and he took a long slug. ‘So… you just got here?’ She nodded and sucked in more vodka. ‘You’ll be needing someone to show you the ropes, then.’

‘Someone like you?’

‘Sure. I’ve been here nearly six years. Know all the wrinkles.’

‘You’ve stayed here for six years?’ She was astonished at the thought of anyone staying in a hotel for that long.

‘Hell, no, I don’t stay at the Friendship. I only drink here. My company’s got me staying at the Jingtan on the other side of town. Goddamn place is full of Japs. Can’t stomach ’em. But that’s only the last two years. Before that I was in the south.’ He shook his head, remembering personal horrors. ‘Coming here was like dying and going to heaven.’ He put his hand out quickly. ‘But don’t go reaching for that scalpel just yet. I ain’t really dead. That was just a metaphor.’

‘Simile,’ she corrected him.

‘Whatever.’ He drained his glass. ‘So. Can I buy you dinner?’

‘Afraid not.’

He grinned, unabashed. ‘Hey, I don’t mind a woman playing hard to get. I enjoy the chase.’

Margaret finsihed her vodka, its heady warmth making her bold. ‘I’m not playing hard to get. I’m just not available.’

‘Is that tonight? Or ever?’

‘Both.’

He chewed that over for a moment, then pushed his empty glass towards the barman. ‘Fill her up. You want another?’ She shook her head. ‘So, where are you eating tonight — if I may be so bold?’

‘She go eat banquet.’ Lily had entered unnoticed. ‘And we late,’ she said to Margaret. For once Margaret was almost relieved to see her.

‘Banquet, huh? Quanjude Beijing Duck, by any chance?’

Margaret was taken aback. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Because everyone from the President of the United States to even a humble forensic pathologist gets the Beijing Duck treatment. Enjoy.’ He raised his glass then took a long pull at it as Lily steered Margaret down the hall.

‘You know him? ‘she asked disapprovingly.

‘No, I don’t know him. I just met him. Who is he?’

‘McCord. Everyone in Beijing know McCord. He work for Chinese government, got guanxi, big connection. And he like pay Chinese girl for…’ She broke off. Suddenly, uncharacteristically, self-conscious. ‘For… something no one else want give him.’

‘Prostitutes? He goes with prostitutes?’ Margaret was disgusted.

Lily pursed her lips. ‘And we no can touch him.’

VI

The Quanjude Beijing Duck restaurant stood on Qianmen Dajie just south of Tiananmen Square. This was a busy commericial centre, bustling with all manner of shops still open for business. The streets were thick with early evening shoppers, and workers nipping in on their way home for sit-in or carry-out meals in the dozens of Western and Chinese fast-food joints. Off the main street ran a jumble of hutongs, choking with market stands and food stalls hanging with red lanterns, neon-lit Chinese characters projecting from every shopfront. Their BMW edged its way through the traffic, past the fast-food section of the Quanjude — duck-burgers a speciality — and turned into a tunnel lined by glass-framed poster-sized photographs of world leaders stuffing their faces with roast duck. In the carpark, Bob stood anxiously underneath the lanterns at the door, glancing at his watch. He took Margaret’s arm as she emerged from the back of the BMW and guided her hastily in through the revolving door.

‘You’re late,’ he hissed.

‘Well, that’s hardly my fault. The car picks me up, the car drops me off.’

‘Okay, okay.’ He glanced around self-consciously. The ground floor of the restaurant was packed, dozens of tables stretching off to infinity, steaming roast ducks on trolleys being wheeled to tables for carving by chefs in tall hats. ‘Now, listen, before we go up, there’s a few things you should know.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there are.’ Although still tired, she was getting her second wind now, and the vodka was having its effect.

He ignored her tone and steered her away from the door. ‘You’ll be placed on the right hand of your host — that’s Professor Jiang. Don’t sit until he indicates where. He’ll propose a toast welcoming you to Beijing. You reply with a toast thanking the generosity of your host.’ Margaret felt like a naughty child being admonished for earlier indiscretions and briefed to prevent further faux pas. Her attention wandered to a panoramic window giving on to the kitchens, where dripping ducks hung roasting inside great wood-burning ovens. ‘The meal usually comes in four courses. You let him serve you the first couple times then tell him you can manage fine from now on. You can use chopsticks, can’t you?’

She sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. Well, turn them round and use the other end to serve yourself from communal plates. Oh, and it’s not considered good form for women to drink too much. So just take a sip for the toasts and then leave the rest, okay?’

Margaret nodded, but she wasn’t really listening. She was looking in a large glass case mounted on the wall at a signed photograph of George Bush with a mouthful of duck. Asked for his autograph, he had obviously scrawled his name and as an afterthought reckoned he should make some polite comment about the restaurant. ‘A superb meal. Many thanks,’ he had written. Inspirational as always, Margaret thought.

‘Another thing. Don’t talk shop unless they raise the subject. And don’t be surprised if they ask you… well, personal questions.’

She frowned her consternation. ‘What kind of personal questions?’

‘Oh, about how much you earn, how much you paid for your apartment in Chicago.’

‘None of their damned business!’

‘Jesus, Margaret, don’t tell them that. If you really don’t want to answer something, try and make a joke of it. Say something like… “I’ve promised my father to keep it a secret”.’

‘Well, that’ll have them rolling in the aisles.’ She had a peculiar sense of floating now. There was a strange air of unreality about everything.

‘We’d better go up.’

As he led her to the stairs, Margaret noticed a group of seven or eight young men sitting around a table with large half-litre glasses of beer and two ducks being carved simultaneously. There was a great deal of raucous laughter rising with clouds of cigarette smoke from the table. Oddly, Margaret thought she recognised one of the faces. An ugly square-jawed face with a flat-top crew cut. She caught the man’s eye and then remembered. It was the bad-tempered cyclist they’d had the collision with that afternoon. To her astonishment, he smiled and waved. Bob waved back, and she realised the wave hadn’t been meant for her. ‘You know him?’ she asked as they climbed the stairs.

‘Sure. He’s a graduate of the university. Way before my time. But he comes back to give occasional lectures. Li Yan. One of the bright upcoming detectives in Section One.’

‘Section One? What is that?’

‘Oh, it’s a kind of serious crime squad. Part of the Municipal Police, but it deals with the big stuff — homicides, armed robberies, that kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘Why, do you know him?’

‘No. Not really. We sort of bumped into him when we were picking you up earlier.’ She glanced back from the top of the stairs, but Li Yan was engrossed in a story being recounted loudly by a big, round-faced young man sitting next to him. There was an eruption of laughter from the table.

The upstairs of the restaurant formed a gallery overlooking the dining area below. Long green lamps dripped like tears from a high ceiling. At the far side their hosts awaited them by a large circular table. Professors Jiang, Tian and Bai, Dr Mu, Mr Cao and their respective partners, as well as Veronica, wearing the same dress she had worn in the afternoon. They went through the formal and tedious process of introduction and reintroduction. Dr Mu’s husband had long hair swept back over his collar and a wispy beard trained to a point, and seemed out of place in this gathering of clean-cut, clean-shaven faces. He gave Margaret a warm smile and produced a pack of cigarettes. He offered her one.

‘I don’t, thanks,’ she told him.

He shrugged. ‘You don’t mind if I do?’

Bob looked tense. Margaret smiled. ‘Your funeral.’

‘I am sorry?’

‘I’ve seen first hand what it does to the lungs.’

He looked slightly puzzled, but lit up anyway. Professor Jiang spoke and Veronica translated. ‘Professor Jiang say we should sit.’

The professor stood at his place and indicated the seat on his right to Margaret. She sat, he sat, and then the rest sat. So far it was all going to plan. A waitress arrived with small porcelain cups filled with a clear, evil-smelling liquor and placed one by each person. ‘Mao tai,’ Bob told her from the other side of the table. ‘Made from sorghum. It’s one hundred twenty proof, so take it easy.’

Professor Jiang raised his cup and proposed a lengthy toast which the laconic Veronica translated as, ‘Welcome to Beijing, welcome to the People’s University of Public Security.’ They all raised their cups and muttered, ‘Gan bei,’ and sipped at the liquor which was as evil-tasting as it smelled. Margaret had difficulty forcing it over, and felt it burning all the way down. Then she remembered that it was her turn, and told them that she was honoured to be there and would like to drink a toast to the generosity of their host, Professor Jiang. Veronica translated, Professor Jiang nodded, clearly satisfied, and they raised their cups again. ‘Gan bei.’ This time, she saw, the men drained their cups in a single draught, while the women barely wet their lips. Hell, she thought, it was easier to get it over in a oner than to sip and taste the damn stuff. She tipped her head back and poured it over, banging her cup back down on the table. She thought she was going to faint. Then she thought she was going to die of asphyxiation. Her lungs refused to draw breath. All eyes were on her, her face, she was certain, bright puce, before finally she managed to suck in a breath and smile as if everything were normal. The temptation to give expression to the pain that burned all the way down to her stomach was almost, but not quite, irresistible. Dr Mu’s husband grinned wickedly and clapped his hands. ‘Bravo,’ he said. ‘Your funeral.’ Which made her laugh. And everyone else round the table laughed, too. Except for Bob, whose glare she assiduously avoided.

Now that the pain had subsided, the effects of the mao tai, on top of the vodka, on top of the twenty-four hours without sleep, were inducing a positive sense of euphoria. When the drinks order came, she asked for beer, and then the food started to arrive, culminating in the carving of three ducks, pieces of which they dipped in hoi sin before wrapping them in very thin pancakes with strips of spring onion, cucumber and minced raw garlic. It was delicious.

They asked her politely about her journey, her hotel. She asked them about their families, their homes. The more beer and wine they drank, the more informal the proceedings and, eventually, the more personal the questions. Mr Cao leaned across the table and said, ‘Forensic pathologists are quite well paid in the USA, I believe.’

Veronica translated for the others, and Margaret replied, ‘Everything is relative, Mr Cao. I’m sure in terms of Chinese salaries you would think so. But you must remember, the cost of living is so much higher in the United States.’

Mr Cao nodded. ‘And how much do you earn, Dr Campbell?’ In spite of Bob’s warning, Margaret was still taken aback by the direct and personal nature of the question.

Dr Mu passed some comment and everyone around the table laughed. Veronica translated, ‘Dr Mu say, when the wine is in, the truth is out.’

Well, thought Margaret, if they want to know… ‘I make around eighty-five thousand dollars a year,’ she said.

In the silence that followed, she could almost hear the computations going on in their heads. Eyes widened, jaws dropped, and there was no doubting that they were genuinely shocked by the extreme wealth of the yangguizi whose dinner they were paying for. Margaret began to wish she’d told them she’d promised her father to keep it a secret.

A tasty consommé arrived, boiled up from the carcasses of their ducks, and then a huge platter of fried rice. Margaret finished her beer and helped herself to some rice as Dr Mu’s husband asked, ‘So, Dr Campbell, you are forensic pathologist?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And do you have any, ah, special area, ah, expertise?’

‘Sure. Burn victims.’ She looked around their expectant faces. They were waiting for her to continue. ‘People who die in fires. I was just training at the time, but I was an assistant to one of the pathologists they called in to Waco, Texas, to help identify the corpses — you know, all those victims of the fire. That’s where my interest started, I guess. Funny thing is, the first few times you do an autopsy on a burn victim, the smell of charred human flesh stays with you for days. Now I don’t even notice it.’ She took a mouthful of rice and saw that everyone else around the table was putting their chopsticks down.

Veronica, who had been translating, had turned very pale. She rose quickly. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and hurried away in the direction of the toilets.

‘Could I have another beer?’ Margaret asked the waitress.

‘And I’ll have a large Scotch.’ Heads turned as McCord pulled a chair from another table and drew it into theirs. He was quite unsteady on his feet and very flushed. ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ he grinned lecherously at Margaret and sat down. ‘You good folks don’t mind if I join you for a dee-jest-eef?’

Stony faces greeted him around the table. Mr Cao leaned over and whispered something to Professor Jiang, who contained his anger with a curt nod. Bob gave Margaret a long, hard look. She shrugged. McCord leaned towards her. ‘So, Margaret Campbell… how was your Beijing Duck?’

Mr Cao rounded the table and stooped to whisper in McCord’s ear, eliciting an indignant outburst. ‘Well, hell! That’s not very hospitable!’

Bob stood up and took one of his arms. ‘I think maybe you’ve had a little too much to drink, Dr McCord.’

McCord pulled his arm free. ‘How the hell would you know how much I’ve had to drink?’

Margaret tugged at Bob’s sleeve. ‘Who is he?’ she whispered.

‘I thought you knew,’ he said coldly. ‘He seems to know you.’

She shook her head. ‘He tried to pick me up at the hotel.’

‘I’ll tell you who I am.’ McCord pushed his snout between them. ‘I’m the man that’s feeding this goddamn country.’

Mr Cao shrugged helplessly towards Professor Jiang, who nodded and waved at him to sit down. Bob said, ‘Dr McCord was responsible for developing China’s super-rice. You’ve probably heard about it. They introduced it as a crop about three years ago. Since when production has increased by… what… fifty per cent?’

‘A hundred,’ McCord corrected him. ‘Indestructible, you see. Disease-resistant, herbicide-resistant, insect-resistant. You name it. I made it that way.’

‘And no doubt it tastes as good as it always did.’ Margaret couldn’t conceal her scepticism.

‘You tell me. You’re eating it.’ McCord grinned as Margaret took in the bowl of rice in front of her.

‘Perhaps you should have some of it yourself, then — to soak up the alcohol.’

He laughed. ‘Never touch the stuff.’

The waitress arrived with his whisky and Margaret’s beer. She watched him guzzle thirstily and, through her fatigue and a haze of alcohol, a vague and distant memory was beginning to surface, attached to other things she would rather forget. ‘McCord,’ she said. ‘Dr James McCord.’

‘That’s me.’

‘You got kicked out of… where was it… the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University? About six years ago?’

McCord’s complexion darkened. ‘Those fucking people!’

‘Field-testing genetically engineered plants without a permit from the EPA. Something like that, wasn’t it?’

McCord hammered a clenched fist on the table and everyone jumped. ‘Fucking regulations! They got our people so tied up in them they can’t move. Paperwork, bureaucracy, everything takes so goddamn long, by the time we get permission for a field test, the rest of the world’s growing the stuff.’ He grabbed a bowl of rice. ‘This. We could have been growing this. Or wheat. Or corn. Feeding the planet. Instead, it takes a third world country like China to have the vision.’

Those Chinese around the table who understood English bristled at his description of their country as ‘third world’.

‘So it was the Chinese who financed your research?’ Margaret was curious.

‘Hell, no. They just facilitated it. It was my employers, Grogan Industries, put up the money. Good old-fashioned capitalist high-risk investment. They did the deal with China. Strange bedfellows, huh? But, boy, did they both hit the jackpot.’

‘How?’

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? The Chinese got a quarter of the world’s population. And for the first time in their history they can feed themselves. Hell, they’re growing so much rice now they’re exporting the stuff.’

‘And Grogan Industries?’

‘They got the patent on all my work. They’re going to be launching my rice all over Asia and India next year.’

Margaret had heard of Grogan, a multinational US-based biotech company with an unsavoury reputation for ruthlessly exploiting the pharmaceutical market in the third world.

‘And no doubt the poorest countries — those with the greatest need — will be the last to get it. Because I’ll bet your technology doesn’t come cheap, does it, Dr McCord?’

‘Hey!’ He threw his hands up in self-defence. ‘Don’t blame me. The sole purpose of the scientist is to work for the benefit of mankind.’ He grinned. ‘Or something. But it’s money that makes the world go round.’

‘Yeah, and it’s money and vested interests that persuade politicians and governments not to put sensible constraints on the work of people like you.’ Margaret’s passion was born of years of argument and discussion, and it was resurfacing now in a blur of painful memories.

McCord seemed taken aback by her vehemence. Others around the table sat in fascinated silence, initial offence overcome by curiosity at the spectacle of these two yangguizi battling it out. As a puzzled Veronica returned to the table, Bob slipped inconspicuously away.

‘Sensible constraints? What’s sensible about them?’

‘What’s sensible about them is that they stop arrogant scientists with God complexes releasing genetically altered materials into the environment without the least idea of what the long-term effects are likely to be.’

‘I’d have thought the effects were obvious. Long-term or otherwise. A lot of hungry people are getting fed.’

‘But at what cost? How did you develop this “super-rice”, Dr McCord? Built-in insecticide, antifungal, antiviral genes?’

He was genuinely taken aback by the extent of her knowledge. Then he remembered. ‘Of course, you’re a doctor, aren’t you? Well, I’m glad you’re interested.’ He relaxed again. ‘Naturally, I realise genetics isn’t your speciality, so let me explain it to you — in terms that you’ll understand.’ He made a fist and extended his little finger. ‘Think of my little finger as being like a virus,’ he said. Then he smiled salaciously. ‘Or perhaps you’d be more comfortable thinking of the virus as being like something more familiar to you — like a penis.’ Veronica blushed deeply, and Mr Cao and Dr Wu’s husband turned their eyes down to the table.

‘No, let’s stick with your little finger,’ Margaret said, ‘since your penis probably isn’t any bigger.’

He grinned. ‘Bear with me. My little finger represents a penis, representing a virus I’m going to put into the rice. Okay? Now imagine I slip a rubber over my penis.’ And he ran his forefinger and thumb down the length of his little finger. ‘And this represents the protein overcoat of the virus. Because, after all, what is a virus except a gene with a protein overcoat?’

Margaret nodded. ‘Okay.’

McCord said, ‘So, to this overcoat I attach the gene fragments I want to introduce to the rice — the stuff that’s going to make it disease and insect-resistant. We insert the virus into the rice, like the penis into the vagina. Only, once inside the rubber slips off and sends my gene fragments to all the right places, like sperm to the egg.’ He sat back, pleased with himself, and drained his glass.

Margaret was incensed. ‘So, effectively, you’ve contaminated the entire rice crop of China with a virus.’

McCord nodded happily. ‘Sure. But it’s a harmless plant virus. Hell, we eat the damned things all the time. And a virus is the best carrier for the genes. ’Cos, you see, a virus only has one aim in life, and that’s to reproduce. So it carries the genes into every cell, and bingo! We just helped Mother Nature do a better job.’

Margaret shook her head. ‘I can’t believe you’ve actually gone into production with this stuff, that you actually think you’re somewhere up there with “Mother Nature”. Jesus Christ, McCord, you’re tinkering at the edges of a billion years of evolution. You can’t possibly know what kind of monster you’re releasing into the environment.’

‘Dr McCord,’ a friendly voice boomed out, and a big hand slapped down on his shoulder.

Margaret looked up, startled to see Bob with Li Yan and Li’s animated friend from the table downstairs. It was the friend who greeted McCord with such bonhomie. McCord looked up at him, confused.

‘What… Who the hell are you?’

‘Ma Yongli. Chef at the Jingtan. Don’t you remember? Good friend of Lotus. She’s waiting for you back at the hotel.’ He grinned and winked.

‘Is she? I didn’t know that.’

‘She says you made an arrangement.’

‘Really? Jeez, I don’t remember.’

Yongli almost lifted him out of his chair. ‘Come on. We’ll get you a taxi. Don’t want keep Lotus waiting, huh?’

‘Hell, no.’

And Yongli led him off towards the stairs. Bob shook Li’s hand. ‘Thanks, Li Yan. Appreciate it.’

Li smiled. ‘My pleasure.’ He nodded acknowledgment to Professor Jiang and they exchanged a few words. He nodded to the others around the table until his eyes fell on Margaret. The clear contempt they held for her had an almost withering effect and she flushed with embarrassment and lowered her eyes. And she wished with all her heart that she had never come to China. When she looked up again he had gone. A buzz of conversation broke out around the table and Bob pulled up a chair beside her.

‘Not the most auspicious of starts,’ he said through clenched teeth.

‘I didn’t invite him,’ she said.

‘You didn’t have to engage him in open warfare.’

‘I wouldn’t have had to if you people had had the balls to tell him where to go.’

‘We couldn’t!’ Bob was in danger of raising his voice. He stopped himself and lowered it again. ‘McCord has connections in this town. His whole rice project had the backing of Pang Xiaosheng, former Minister of Agriculture, now a member of the Politburo — and a national hero. It was Pang who persuaded the leadership to do the deal with Grogan Industries, and it’s Pang who’s reaped the rewards. He’s the bookie’s favourite to be the next leader of the People’s Republic.’ Bob stopped to draw a grim breath. ‘And you don’t fuck with people like that, Margaret.’

It was dark outside as Li and Yongli escorted the now semiconscious McCord through the tunnel from the restaurant to the street. A sleepy trishaw driver lingering in the carpark raised a hopeful eye, assessed the situation, and relapsed into a semi-slumber. The traffic had not abated, and the street was still crowded, ablaze with the lights of neons and vehicles. Li waved at an air-conditioned taxi, but it was occupied and sailed past. He turned and whispered to Yongli, ‘He’s going to be pretty disappointed when he finds out that Lotus isn’t waiting for him back at the hotel.’

Yongli shrugged. ‘I’ll give her a call. She’ll take care of him.’

Li looked at his friend with complete incomprehension. ‘You’d ask her to do that?’

‘Why not? The guy’s drunk. It’s not as though he’d be any threat. She’s dealt with him before.’

Li shook his head. He knew he would never understand his friend’s relationship with Lotus. He waved down another taxi, but a black Volvo with darkened windows swung into the space at the kerb and blocked it off. The taxi driver honked his horn furiously, but decided against an argument with the Volvo and screeched away in a temper. A large, uniformed chauffeur stepped out and took McCord’s arm from Yongli. ‘I’ll take Dr McCord,’ he said.

‘Back to the hotel?’ Yongli was puzzled by the sudden appearance of the chauffeur-driven limousine.

‘No. He has an appointment elsewhere.’ The chauffeur opened the back door and bundled McCord unceremoniously inside.

‘Hey, I got a rendezvous with Lotus,’ McCord protested, suddenly aware that plans were being changed over his head. The door was slammed shut on him and he disappeared from view behind the tinted windows. The chauffeur slipped behind the wheel, and the car whispered away into the traffic.

‘Government car,’ Yongli said thoughtfully. ‘Wonder where they’re taking him?’

Li knew better than even to think of asking.