The Runner

I

Li knew there was something wrong the moment he saw her. But with everyone else having arrived at the restaurant before him, there was no opportunity to find out what. ‘Oh, you made it tonight?’ she said with that familiar acid tone that he had once known so well, a tone which had mellowed considerably in the years since they first met. Or so he had thought. ‘My mother was thinking perhaps you had gone and got yourself beaten up again just so you wouldn’t have to meet her.’

‘I did not!’ Mrs. Campbell was horrified.

Margaret ignored her. ‘Mom, this is Li Yan. Honest, upstanding officer of the Beijing Municipal Police. He’s not always this ugly. But almost. Apparently some unsavoury members of the Beijing underworld rearranged his features last night. At least, that was his excuse for failing to come and ask me to marry him.’

Li was embarrassed, and blushed as he shook her mother’s hand. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Campbell.’

‘Uncle Yan, what happened to your face?’ Xinxin asked, concerned. Li stooped tentatively to give her a hug, and winced as she squeezed his ribs. ‘Just an accident, little one,’ he said.

‘Nothing that a little plastic surgery wouldn’t put right,’ Margaret said. He flicked her a look, and she smiled an ersatz little smile.

Xiao Ling gave him a kiss and ran her fingers lightly over her brother’s face, concern in her eyes. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Sure.’

Mei Yuan quickly took over. ‘Now we’re all here tonight, because Li Yan and Margaret have announced their intention to get married,’ she said. ‘And in China that means a joining together not only of two people, but of two families.’ And she turned to the presents which she had set out on the lacquer table for the second night running, and asked Mrs. Campbell and Li’s father to take seats at opposite ends of the table while she presented them.

Ninety-nine dollars from Mrs. Campbell.

Dragon and phoenix cake from Mr. Li.

Sweetmeats from the Campbells.

Tobacco from the Lis.

‘A pity none of us smokes,’ Margaret said.

Mei Yuan pressed quickly on, and they exchanged bottles of wine, packs of sugar, a set of brightly painted china hens.

When, finally, a tin of green tea was presented to Mrs. Campbell she said, ‘Ah, yes, to encourage as many little Lis and Campbells as possible.’ She looked pointedly at Margaret’s bump. ‘It’s just a pity they didn’t wait until they were married.’ She paused a moment before she smiled, and then everyone else burst out laughing, a release of tension.

Margaret’s smile was fixed and false. She said, ‘I see Mr. Li is having no trouble with his English tonight.’

The smile faded on the old man’s face, and he glanced at Li who could only shrug, bewildered and angered by Margaret’s behaviour.

But the moment was broken by the arrival of the manageress, who announced that food would now be served, and would they please take their places at the table.

As everyone rose to cross the room, Mrs. Campbell grabbed her daughter’s arm and hissed, ‘What on earth’s got into you, Margaret?’

‘Nothing,’ Margaret said. She pulled free of her mother’s grasp and took her seat, flicking her napkin on to her lap and sitting, then, in sullen silence. She knew she was behaving badly, but could not help herself. She should never have come, she knew that now. It was all a charade. A farce.

Tonight’s fare included fewer ‘delicacies’, following Mei Yuan’s quiet word with the manageress about the sensitivities of the western palate. And so dish after dish of more conventional cuisine was brought to the table and placed on the Lazy Susan. A silence fell over the gathering as the guests picked and ate, and Mrs. Campbell struggled to make her chopsticks convey the food from the plate to her mouth. Beer was poured for everyone, and tiny golden goblets filled with wine for toasting.

Mei Yuan made the first toast, to the health and prosperity of the bride and groom to be. Mrs. Campbell raised her goblet to toast the generosity of her Chinese hosts, and when they had all sipped their wine, cleared her throat and said, ‘And who is it, exactly, who is going to pay for the wedding?’

Li glanced at Margaret, but her eyes were fixed on her lap. He cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘Well, Margaret and I have discussed that,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to be a big wedding. I mean, more or less just those of us who are here tonight, and one or two invited guests. We are going to keep it very simple. A tea ceremony at my apartment, a declaration at the twin altars, and then the banquet. The legal stuff is just a formality. So we thought…well, we thought we’d just pay for it ourselves.’

‘Nonsense!’ Mrs. Campbell said loudly, startling them. ‘It may be a Chinese wedding, but my daughter is an American. And in America it is the tradition that the bride’s family pays for the wedding. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.’

‘I don’t think I could allow you to do that, Mrs. Campbell,’ Li’s father said suddenly, to everyone’s surprise.

But Margaret’s mother put her hand over his. ‘Mr. Li,’ she said, ‘you might speak very good English, but you don’t know much about Americans. Because if you did, you would know that you do not argue with an American lady on her high horse.’

Mr. Li said, ‘Mrs. Campbell, you are right. I do not know much about Americans. But I know plenty about women. And I know just how dangerous it can be to argue with one, regardless of her nationality.’ Which produced a laugh around the table.

‘Good,’ Mrs. Campbell said. ‘Then we understand one another perfectly.’ She turned back to her plate, and fumbled again with her chopsticks. She would have preferred a fork, but would never admit it.

‘No,’ Mr. Li said, and he leaned over to take her chopsticks from her. ‘Like this.’ And he showed her how to anchor the lower of the sticks and keep the top one mobile. ‘You see,’ he said. ‘It’s easy.’

Mrs. Campbell tried out her new grip, flexing the upper chopstick several times before attempting to lift a piece of meat from her plate. To her amazement she picked it up easily. ‘Well, I never,’ she said. ‘I always thought chopsticks were a pretty damned stupid way of eating food.’ She picked up another piece of meat. ‘But I guess a billion Chinese can’t be wrong.’ She turned to smile at Mr. Li and found him looking at her appraisingly.

‘What age are you, Mrs. Campbell?’ he asked.

She was shocked. Margaret had told her that the Chinese were unabashed about asking personal questions. But clearly she had not anticipated anything quite so direct. ‘I’m not sure that is any of your business, Mr. Li. What age are you?’

‘Sixty-seven.’

‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘You have a year or two on me.’

‘Maybe you remember when your president came to visit China?’

‘Our President? You mean George W. Bush?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I can’t stand the little man!’

‘No. Not Bush. President Nixon.’

‘Oh.’ She was faintly embarrassed. Nixon had become something of a presidential pariah in the aftermath of Watergate. ‘Actually, I do.’

‘Nineteen seventy-two,’ the old man said. ‘They had just let me out of prison.’

‘Prison?’ Mrs. Campbell uttered the word as if it made a nasty taste in her mouth.

‘It was during the Cultural Revolution, you understand,’ he said. ‘I was a “dangerous intellectual”. I was going to crush all their heavy weapons with my vocabulary.’ He grinned. ‘So they tried to knock the words out of my head, along with most of my teeth.’ He shrugged. ‘They succeeded a little bit. But when they let me out, it was nineteen seventy-two, and I heard that the President of the United States was going to come to China.’ He paused and sighed, recalling some deeply painful memory. ‘You cannot know, Mrs. Campbell, what that meant then to someone like me, to millions of Chinese who had been starved of any contact with the outside world.’

Li listened, amazed, as his father talked. He had never heard him speak like this. He had never discussed his experiences during the Cultural Revolution with his family, let alone a stranger.

The old man went on, ‘It was to be on television. But hardly anyone had a television then, and even if I knew someone who did, I would not have been allowed to watch it. But I wanted to see the President of America coming to China, so I searched around all the old shops and market stalls where we lived in Sichuan. And over several weeks, I was able to gather together all the bits and pieces to build my own television set. All except for the cathode ray tube. I could not find one anywhere. At least, not one which worked. But I started to build my television anyway, and just three days before your president was due to arrive, I found a working tube in an old set in a junk shop in town. When Nixon took his first steps on Chinese soil, when he shook hands with Mao, I saw it as it happened.’ He shrugged, and smiled at the memory. ‘The picture was green and a little fuzzy. Well, actually, a lot fuzzy. But I saw it anyway. And…’ He seemed suddenly embarrassed. ‘…I wept.’

Margaret saw that her mother’s eyes were moist, and felt an anger growing inside her.

Her mother said, ‘You know, Mr. Li, I saw that broadcast, too. The children were very young then, and my husband and I stayed up late to watch the pictures beamed live from China. It was a big thing in America for people like us, after nearly thirty years of the Cold War. To suddenly get a glimpse of another world, a threatening world, a world which we had been told was so very different from our own. We were scared of China, you know. The Yellow Peril, they called you. And then, suddenly, there was our very own president going there to talk to Mr. Mao Tse Tung, as we called him. Just like it was the most natural thing. And it made us all feel that the world was a safer place.’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘And all these years later, here I am in China talking to a Chinaman who watched those same pictures, and was as moved by them as we were.’

‘Oh, spare me!’ Everyone turned at the sound of Margaret’s breaking voice, and were shocked to see the tears brimming in her eyes.

Her mother said, ‘Margaret, what on earth…?’

But Margaret wasn’t listening. ‘How long is it, Mr. Li? Two days, three, since I wasn’t good enough to marry your son because I wasn’t Chinese?’ She turned her tears on her mother. ‘And you were affronted that your daughter should be marrying one.’

‘Magret, Magret, what’s wrong, Magret?’ Xinxin jumped off her chair and ran around the table to clutch Margaret’s arm, distressed by her tears.

‘I’m sorry, little one,’ Margaret said, and she ran a hand through the child’s hair. ‘It’s just, it seemed like no one wanted your Uncle Yan and me to get married.’ She looked at the faces around the table. ‘And that’s the irony of it. Just when you all decide you’re going to be such big pals, there isn’t going to be a wedding after all.’

She tossed her napkin on the table and kissed Xinxin’s forehead before hurrying out of the Emperor’s Room and running blindly down the royal corridor.

For a moment, they all sat in stunned silence. Then Li laid his napkin on the table and stood up. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and he went out after her.

She was out in the street before she realised that she had no coat. The snow was nearly ankle-deep and the wind cut through her like a blade. Her tears turned icy on her cheeks as they fell, and she hugged her arms around herself for warmth, staring wildly about, confused and uncertain of what to do now. The traffic on Tiananmen Square crept past in long, tentative lines, wheels spinning, headlights catching white flakes as they dropped. One or two pedestrians, heads bowed against the snow and the wind, cast inquisitive glances in her direction. The Gate of Heavenly Peace was floodlit as always, Mao’s eternal gaze falling across the square. A monster to some, a saviour to others. The man whose rendezvous with Nixon all those years before had somehow achieved great mutual significance for her mother and Li’s father.

‘Come back in, Margaret.’ Li’s voice was soft warm breath on her cheek. She felt him slip his jacket around her shoulders and steer her towards the steps.

The girls with the tall black hats and the red pompoms stared at her in wide-eyed wonder as Li led her back into the restaurant. ‘Is there somewhere private we can go?’ he asked. One of the girls nodded towards a room beyond the main restaurant, and Li hurried Margaret past the gaze of curious diners and into a large, semi-darkened room filled with empty banqueting tables. Lights from the square outside fell in through a tall window draped with gossamer-thin nets. While the emperor and empress dined in the room where Li and Margaret had intended to make their betrothal, the emperor’s ministers would have dined here. Now, though, it was deserted. Li and Margaret faced one another beneath a large gilded screen of carved serpents. The silence between them was broken only by the distant chatter of diners and the drone of engines revving in the snow outside.

He wiped the tears from her eyes, but she wouldn’t look at him. He wrapped his arms around her to warm her and stop her from shivering. And they stood like that for a long time, his chin resting lightly on the top of her head.

‘What is it, Margaret? What have I done?’ he asked eventually. He felt her take a deep, quivering breath.

‘It’s what you didn’t do,’ she said.

‘What? What didn’t I do?’

‘You didn’t tell me you would lose your job if we got married.’

And the bottom fell out of a fragile world he had only just been managing to hold together. She felt him go limp.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ She broke free of him and looked into his eyes for the first time, seeing all the pain that was there, and knowing the answer to her question before he even opened his mouth.

He hung his head. ‘You know why.’ He paused. ‘I want to marry you, Margaret.’

‘I want to marry you, too, Li Yan. But not if it’s going to make you unhappy.’

‘It won’t.’

‘Of course it will! For God’s sake, being a cop is all you’ve ever wanted. And you’re good at it. I can’t take that away from you.’

They stood for a long time in silence before he said, ‘What would we do?’

She gave a tiny shrug. ‘I don’t know.’ And she put her arms around him and pushed her cheek into his chest. He grunted involuntarily from the pain of it. She immediately pulled away. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’

‘How did you know?’ he said.

‘Does it matter?’

‘It does to me.’

‘Your deputy told me. Tao Heng.’

Anger bubbled up inside him. ‘That bastard!’

‘Li Yan, he didn’t know that you hadn’t told me.’

‘I’ll kill him!’

‘No you won’t. It’s the message that matters. Not the messenger.’

‘And the message is what?’

‘That it’s over, Li Yan. The dream. Whatever it is we were stupid enough to think the future might hold for us. It’s out of our hands.’

He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that their destiny was their own to make. But the words would have rung hollow, even to him. And if he could not convince himself, how would he ever persuade her? His life, his career, his future, were all spiralling out of control. And he seemed helpless to do anything about it.

He felt the weight of the world descend on him. ‘Will I tell them, or will you?’

It was half an hour before he got them all into taxis. Mei Yuan promised to see Mrs. Campbell back to Margaret’s apartment. None of them asked why the wedding was being called off, and Li made no attempt to explain, except to say that he and Margaret had ‘stuff’ to sort out. Xinxin was in tears.

When they had gone, he returned to the dining room of the emperor’s ministers and found Margaret sitting where he had left her. Her tears had long since dried up, and she sat bleakly staring out across the square. Her mood had changed, and he knew immediately that the ‘stuff’ he had spoken of was not going to be sorted tonight. He drew up a seat and leaned on the back of it, staring down at the floor, listening to the chatter of diners in the restaurant. He could smell their cigarette smoke and wished to God he could have one himself.

After a very long silence, he said finally, ‘Margaret—’ and she cut him off immediately.

‘By the way, I forgot to tell you earlier…’ And he knew from her tone that this was her way of saying she wasn’t going to discuss it further.

‘Forgot to tell me what?’ he said wearily.

‘I found a photograph on your desk this morning. One of the ones taken by Jon Macken at the club where that murdered girl worked.’

Li frowned. ‘Which photograph?’

‘A Westerner, with white hair and a beard. He was with some Chinese.’

Li said, ‘What about him?’

‘I recognised him. Not right away. But I knew I’d seen the face before. Then it came to me this afternoon, and I checked him out on the net.’

‘Who is he?’

She turned to look at him. ‘Doctor Hans Fleischer. Known as Father Fleischer to all the East German athletes he was responsible for doping over nearly twenty years.’

II

As they drove, in careful convoy, past the high walls of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on the eastern flank of Yuyuantan Park, Li dragged his thoughts away from Margaret. It was nearly an hour since he had taken her home and he wondered now what he would accomplish by his search of the club. There was, after all, nothing to link Fleischer with the deaths of the athletes. And Margaret herself had conceded that there was nothing in the pathology or toxicology to suggest that any of them had been taking drugs. But the coincidence was just too much to ignore. And, anyway, he needed something else to think about.

The Deputy Procurator General had been having dinner at the home of a friend and been annoyed by Li’s interruption. His irritation, however, had probably served Li’s cause. Had he examined in more detail the flimsy nature of the grounds with which he had been presented, he might not have signed the warrant.

As if reading Li’s thoughts, Sun took his eyes momentarily from the road, and tossed a glance towards his passenger. ‘What do you think we’re going to find here, Chief?’

Li shrugged. ‘I doubt if this will prove to be anything more than an exercise in harassment, detective. Letting CEO Fan know that we’re watching him. After all, if it’s true that Fan really doesn’t know who Fleischer is, then the link to the club is extremely tenuous.’ He slipped the photograph of Fan and Fleischer and the others out of the folder on his knee and squinted at it by the intermittent glow of the streetlights. ‘But there are other factors we have to take into consideration,’ he said. ‘The break-in at Macken’s studio to steal the film that he took at the club. JoJo’s murder. She was a friend of Macken’s, after all, and it was her who got him the job there in the first place.’

‘You think there’s a connection?’

‘I think there could be a connection between the break-in and the fact that Fleischer features prominently in one of Macken’s pictures.’ He glanced at Sun and waggled the photograph. ‘Think about it. Fleischer is internationally reviled, an outcast. If he went back to Germany he would end up in jail. Not the sort of person an apparently respectable businessman like Fan would want people to know he was connected to. So you’re coming out of a room in your private club. You’re with Fleischer. You think you’re perfectly safe. And flash. There’s a guy with a camera and he’s just caught the two of you together on film. Maybe you’d want that picture back.’

‘But would you kill for it?’

‘That might depend on how deep or unsavoury your connection with Fleischer was.’ Li sighed. ‘On the other hand, I might just be talking through a very big hole in my head.’

The convoy ground to a halt at the Fuchengmenwai intersection, and Li peered again at the photograph in his hand. He frowned and switched on the courtesy light and held the print up to it. ‘Now, there’s something I didn’t notice before,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

Li stabbed at the plaque on the wall beside the door. ‘They’re coming out of the Event Hall.’

Sun shrugged. ‘Is that significant?’

‘It was the one place Fan Zhilong didn’t show me and Qian. He said it was being refurbished.’ He flicked off the courtesy lamp as the traffic lights turned to green and their wheels spun before catching and propelling them slowly around the corner. He peered across the highway, through the falling snow, and saw the twin apartment blocks rising into the dark above the brightly lit entrance to the Beijing OneChina Recreation Club.

Fan Zhilong was less than happy to have his club overrun by Li and a posse of uniformed and plain-clothed officers. He strutted agitatedly behind his desk. ‘It’s an invasion of privacy,’ he railed. ‘Having the place raided by the police is going to do nothing for the reputation of my club. Or for the confidence of my members.’ He stopped and glared at Li. ‘You could be in big trouble for this, Section Chief.’

Li dropped his search warrant on Fan’s desk. ‘Signed by the Deputy Procurator General,’ he said. ‘If you have a problem, take it up with him.’ He paused, then added quietly. ‘And don’t threaten me again.’

Fan reacted as if he had been slapped, although Li’s voice could hardly have been softer. The CEO seemed shocked, and his face reddened.

Li said, ‘A girl has been stabbed to death, Mr. Fan. Your personal assistant.’

‘My ex-personal assistant,’ Fan corrected him.

Li threw the photograph of Fleischer on top of the warrant. ‘And a man wanted in the West for serially abusing young athletes with dangerous drugs was photographed on these premises.’

Fan tutted and sighed and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘I already told you, Section Chief, I never met him before the day that photograph was taken. I couldn’t even tell you his name.’

‘His victims knew him as Father Fleischer.’ Li watched for a reaction but detected none. ‘And I suppose you still don’t remember the name of the member whose guest he was?’

‘You’re right, I don’t.’

‘What’s going on, Mr. Fan?’ The voice coming from the doorway behind them made Li and Sun turn. It was the tracksuited personal trainer with the ponytail, who was also in the Fleischer photograph. ‘The members downstairs are packing up and leaving. They’re not happy.’

‘Neither am I, Hou. But I’m afraid I have very little control over the actions of Section Chief Li and his colleagues.’

Li lifted the photograph from the desk and held it out towards Hou. ‘Who’s the Westerner in the picture?’ he asked.

Hou glanced at his boss, and then advanced towards Li to take a look at the photograph. He shook his head. ‘No idea. One of the members brought him.’

‘Which one?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘How very convenient. I take it he’s not one of the other two in the picture?’

Hou shook his head. ‘Members of staff.’

‘So yourself, and Mr. Fan, and two other members of staff were left on your own, by a member whose name you’ve forgotten, to entertain this Westerner, whose name you don’t remember? Is that right?’

‘That’s right,’ Hou said.

‘How very forgetful.’

Qian appeared in the door leading to JoJo’s office. Along with half a dozen other section detectives, he had been called back on shift to take part in the search. ‘Chief,’ he said. ‘Remember that Event Hall that was being refurbished? Well, I think you should come and take a look at it.’

As they went in, Qian flicked on the overhead fluorescents, and one by one they coughed and flashed and hummed. ‘Sounds like Star Wars,’ he said. The Event Hall was huge, marble walls soaring more than twenty feet, tiled floors stretching off towards distant pillars, a ceiling dotted with tiny lights, like stars in a night sky. Li looked around with a growing sense of unease. Long banners hung from the walls, decorated with Chinese characters which made no sense to him. Between the door by which they had entered, and a platform against a curtained wall at the facing end, were three, free-standing ornamental doorways set at regular intervals. Between the third of these and the platform, several items were laid out on the floor. A bamboo hoop large enough for a man to pass through, serrated pieces of red paper stuck to the top and bottom of it. Pieces of charcoal arranged in a square. Three small circles of paper set out one after the other. Two lengths of string laid side by side. These items were flanked on each side by a row of eight chairs, set out as if for a small audience. And then on the platform itself, a large rectangular table with a long strip of yellow paper pinned to its front edge and left hanging to the floor.

Li walked slowly through each of the ornamental doorways towards the platform, and noticed that there were facing doors on each of the side walls. Fan and the ponytail followed him at a discreet distance, watched from the doorway by Qian and Sun and several other officers. ‘What is this?’ Li said.

‘Nothing really,’ Fan said. ‘At least, nothing to interest you, Section Chief. Some ceremonial fun and games we have here for the members.’

‘You said it was being refurbished.’

‘Did I? I probably just meant it was being rearranged for the ceremony.’

‘And what exactly does this ceremony consist of, Mr. Fan?’

Fan shrugged and smiled. But not enough for his dimples to show. He looked faintly embarrassed. ‘It’s a game, really, Section Chief. A bit like a Masonic initiation ceremony. If you know what that is.’

‘I didn’t know there were Masons in China, Mr. Fan.’

‘There aren’t. It’s just something we made up. The members like it. It makes them feel like they’re part of something, you know, exclusive.’

Li nodded and stepped up on to the platform. The table was strewn with more odd items. He counted five separate pieces of fruit. There was a white paper fan, an oil lamp, a rush sandal, a piece of white cloth with what looked like red ink stains on it, a short-bladed sword, a copper mirror, a pair of scissors, a Chinese writing brush and inkstone. More than a dozen other items were laid out among them, everything from a needle to a rosary. ‘What’s this stuff?’

‘Gifts,’ Fan said. ‘From members. They do not have to be expensive. Just unusual.’

‘They are certainly that,’ Li said. ‘What’s behind the curtain?’

‘Nothing.’

Li stepped forward and drew it aside to reveal a double door. ‘I thought you said there was nothing here.’

‘It’s just a door, Section Chief.’

‘Where does it lead?’

‘Nowhere.’

Li tried the handle and pulled the right-hand door open. There was just marble wall behind it. Both the door and its façade were false.

Li looked at Fan, who returned his stare uneasily. The hum of the lights sounded inordinately loud. Li glanced towards Sun and Qian and the other detectives, and then his eyes fell on the club’s personal trainer, and Li noticed for the first time that although it was gathered behind his head in a ponytail, his hair was allowed to loop down over his ears, hiding them from view. The tip of his right ear was just visible through the hair. But the loop on the left lay flat against his head. It looked odd, somehow. Something came back to Li from his secondment in Hong Kong. Something he had heard, but never seen. He stepped up to Hou and pushed the hair back from the left side of his head to reveal that the left ear was missing, leaving only a half-moon of livid scar tissue around the hole in his head. ‘Nasty accident,’ he said. ‘How did it happen?’

‘Like you said, Section Chief, a nasty accident.’ Hou flicked his head away from Li’s hand. There was something sullen and defiant in Hou’s tone, something like a warning. Li took another good, long look at Fan and saw that same defiance in his eyes, and felt a shiver of apprehension run through him, as if someone had stepped on his grave.

‘I think we’ve seen enough,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Mr. Fan, we’ll not disturb you any longer.’ And he walked back through the ornamental doorways to where his detectives stood waiting. ‘We’re through here,’ he said to Qian. Qian nodded, and called the rest of the team to go as they crossed the entrance hall to the tall glass doors.

‘What is it?’ Sun whispered. He could see the tension in his boss’ face.

‘Outside,’ Li said quietly, and they pushed out into the icy night, large snowflakes slapping cold on hot faces.

Once through the gates, they stopped on the sidewalk. ‘So what was going on in there, Chief?’ Sun asked. ‘The atmosphere was colder than the morgue on a winter’s night.’

‘What direction are we facing?’ Li looked up at the sky as if searching for the stars to guide him. But there were none.

Sun frowned. ‘Fuchengmenwai runs east to west on the grid. We’re on the north side, so we’re facing south.’

Li turned and looked at the building they had just left. ‘That means we entered the Event Hall from a door on its east side,’ he said.

Sun said, ‘I don’t understand.’

Li hobbled around to the passenger side of the Jeep. ‘Let’s get in out of this weather.’

The snow in their hair and on their shoulders quickly melted in the residual warmth of the Jeep. Condensation began forming on the windshield, and Sun started the motor to get the blower going. He turned to Li. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Chief?’

‘These people are Triads,’ Li said.

‘Triads?’

Li looked at him. ‘You know what Triads are, don’t you?’

‘Sure. Organised crime groups in Hong Kong, or Taiwan. But here? In Beijing?’

Li shook his head sadly. ‘There’s always a price to pay, isn’t there? It seems we haven’t only imported Hong Kong’s freedoms and economic reforms. We’ve imported their criminals as well.’ He turned to the young police officer. ‘Triads are like viruses, Sun. They infect everything they touch.’ He nodded towards the floodlit entrance of the club. ‘That wasn’t some ceremonial games hall in there. It was an initiation chamber. And trainer Hou, with the ponytail? He must have transgressed at some point, broken some rule. He didn’t lose his ear by accident. It was cut off. That’s how they punish members for misdemeanours.’

‘Shit, Chief,’ Sun said. ‘I had no idea.’ He lit a cigarette and Li grabbed the packet from him and took one. ‘Give me a light.’

‘Are you sure you want to do this, Chief? They’re dangerous to your health, you know.’

‘Just give me a light.’ Li leaned over to the flickering flame of Sun’s lighter and sucked smoke into his lungs for the first time in nearly a year. It tasted harsh, and burned his throat all the way down. He spluttered and nearly choked, but persevered, and after a few draws felt the nicotine hit his bloodstream and set his nerves on edge. ‘I spent six months in Hong Kong back in the nineties,’ he said. ‘I came across quite a number of Triads then. Mostly they were just groups of small-time gangsters who liked the names and the rituals. They call the leader the Dragon Head. All that shit in there, it’s a kind of recreation of a journey made by the five Shaolin monks who supposedly created the first Triad society, or Hung League as they called it, set up to try to restore the Ming Dynasty.’

‘Sounds like crap to me,’ Sun said.

‘It might be crap, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.’ Li drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘I never came across anything on this scale, though. I mean, these people have serious money. And serious influence.’ He shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe they’re here in Beijing.’

‘Can’t we just shut them down?’ Sun said.

‘On what pretext? That they’re Triads? They’re never going to admit to that, are they? And we don’t have any proof. On the face of it, Fan and his people are running a legitimate business. We have no evidence to the contrary, and after tonight I figure we’ll be hard pushed to find any.’ He lowered his window an inch to flick the half-smoked remains of his cigarette out into the snowy night. ‘We’re going to have to tread very carefully from here on in, Sun. These people are likely to be a lot more dangerous to our health than any cigarette.’

III

Li limped quickly down the corridor on the top floor of Section One, supporting himself on his stick. Thirty hours after his beating outside Dai Lili’s apartment, every muscle in his body had stiffened up. His head was pounding. Concentration was difficult. But he was a man driven. Sun was struggling to keep up with him.

‘Go home,’ Li told him. ‘There’s nothing more you can do till tomorrow.’ He stopped in the doorway of the detectives’ room and looked for Qian.

‘You’re not sending anyone else home,’ Sun protested.

‘No one else has a pregnant wife waiting for them.’ He spotted Qian taking a call at someone else’s desk. ‘Qian!’

‘You do, Chief,’ Sun persisted.

Li looked at him. ‘She’s not my wife,’ he said. And knew that if Margaret had her way now, she never would be.

‘Yes, Chief?’ Qian had hung up his call.

‘Get on to Immigration, Qian. I want everything they’ve got on Fleischer. Is he still in the country? How long has he been here? What address do they have for him?’ He scanned the desks until he saw the bleary face of Wu at his computer. ‘And Wu, run downstairs for me and ask the duty officer in Personnel for the file on Deputy Tao.’

Several heads around the room lifted in surprise. Wu seemed to wake up, and his jaw started chewing rapidly as if he just remembered he still had gum in his mouth. ‘They’ll not give it to me, Chief.’

‘What?’

‘Tao’s a senior ranking officer. They’ll only release his file to someone more senior.’

Li sighed. ‘I was hoping to avoid having to go up and down two flights of stairs. Can’t you use some of that legendary charm of yours?’

‘Sorry, Chief.’

Li turned and almost bumped into Sun. ‘Are you still here?’

‘I’ll ask Personnel if you want.’

‘Go home!’ Li barked at him, and he set off towards the stairs, his mood blackening with every step.

It was after ten by the time Li got back to his office with Tao’s police employment history, all the records from the Royal Hong Kong Police in six box files. He switched out the light and sat in the dark for nearly fifteen minutes, listening to the distant sound of voices and telephones in the detectives’ room. He didn’t really want to think about anything but the investigation, but he could not get Margaret out of his head. She was firmly lodged there, along with the pain that had developed over the past hour. His eyes had grown accustomed now to the faint light of the streetlamps that bled in through the window from the street below, and he opened the top drawer of his desk to take out the painkillers the hospital had given him. He swallowed a couple and closed his eyes. He couldn’t face going back to confront his father tonight, not after everything that had happened. And he needed to talk to Margaret, to lie with her and put his hand on her belly and feel their child kicking inside, to be reassured that they had, at least, some kind of a future.

He made a decision, switched on his desk light and took out a sheet of official Section One stationery. He lifted his pen from its holder and held it poised above the paper for nearly a minute before committing it to scrawl a handful of cryptic characters across the crisp, virgin emptiness of the page. When he had finished, he re-read it, and then signed it. He folded it quickly, slipped it into an envelope and wrote down an address. He got up and hobbled to the door and hollered down the hall for Wu. The detective hadn’t been prepared to run down two flights of stairs to fetch a personnel file for him, but could hardly refuse to take a letter down to the mail room. It was on the ground floor. A small satisfaction.

When a disgruntled Wu headed off with the envelope, Li returned to his desk and pulled the telephone directory towards him. He found the number of the Jinglun Hotel and dialled it. The Jinglun was Japanese owned, he knew. Neutral territory. The receptionist answered the call. ‘Jinglun Fandian.’

‘This is Section Chief Li of the Beijing Municipal Police. I need to book a double room for tonight.’

When he’d made the reservation, he dialled again. Margaret answered her phone almost immediately. ‘It’s me,’ he said. She was silent for a long time at the other end of the line. ‘Hello, are you still there?’

‘I love you,’ is all she said. And he heard the catch in her voice.

‘Is your mother there?’

‘She’s asleep.’

‘I’ve booked us a room at the Jinglun Hotel on Jianguomenwai. Take a taxi. I’ll meet you there in an hour.’

And he hung up. The deed was done, and there would be no going back. He opened the files on Tao.

Much of what was in them he knew already. Tao had been born in Hong Kong. His family had gone there from Canton at the turn of the twentieth century. He had joined the Royal Hong Kong Police, under the British, straight from school. It had been his life, and he had risen through the uniformed branch to the rank of Detective Sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Department. The marriage he had entered into in his early twenties had gone wrong after their baby girl died from typhoid. He had never remarried.

The Hong Kong police had kept meticulous records of his investigations after he moved into the detective branch. He had been involved in several murder investigations, and a huge drugs bust which had netted more than five million dollars’ worth of heroin. He had also taken part in a major investigation into Triad gangs in the colony, including some undercover work. Li searched backwards and forwards through the records, but despite what appeared to have been a major police effort to crack down on the Triads, their success had been limited to a few minor arrests and a handful of prosecutions. Li remembered the campaign from his brief exchange period there in the middle-nineties. He remembered, too, the persistent rumours of a Triad insider within the force itself. Rumours that were never fully investigated, perhaps for fear of what such an investigation might turn up. Triads had been endemic in Hong Kong since the late nineteenth century, extending their tendrils of influence into nearly every corner of society. Dozens of apparently legitimate businesses were fronts for Triad organised crime. Bribery and corruption were rife among ethnic Chinese government officials and the police. All attempts by the British to stamp them out had failed. Originally it was the Communists who had driven the Triads out of mainland China, forcing them to concentrate their efforts in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Now, as freedom of movement and economic reform took hold, the scourge of the Triads was returning to the mainland. Britain’s failure was becoming once again China’s problem.

Li closed each of the box files in turn and stacked them neatly on his desk, doing anything that might stop his mind from focusing on the suspicions that were forming there. He was afraid to examine them in case he found only his own prejudice. He did not like anything about Tao. His personality, his approach to police work, the way he treated his detectives. He knew that Tao was after his job. And Tao had told Margaret about police policy towards officers marrying foreigners.

That tipped the balance. Li sighed and let his head fill up with his worst thoughts. Someone close to their investigation had known enough to be one step ahead of them on the bottles of perfume and aftershave. Why not Tao? And someone had told the thieves who broke in to Macken’s studio to steal the film, that he had made contact prints. Only the investigating officers from the local bureau had known that. And in Section One, only Li and Qian. And Tao.

Li screwed up his eyes and pushed his knotted fist into his forehead. The trouble was, there was not one single reason for him to connect Tao with either breach. The fact that he disliked the man was no justification. Even for the suspicion.

IV

He took the last subway train south on the loop line from Dongzhimen to Jianguomen. There he found himself an almost solitary figure trudging through the snow in the dark past the Friendship Store, and the bottom end of the deserted Silk Street. There were still some late diners in McDonald’s, and the in-crowd was clouding windows at Starbucks, sipping coffees and mochas and hot chocolates that cost more than the average Beijinger earned in a day. At the Dongdoqiao intersection, the lonely figure of a frozen traffic cop stood rigidly inside his long, fur-collared coat, cap pulled down as low over his face as it would go. The traffic was scant, and the pedestrians few and far between. He was ignoring both, and the snow was gathering in ledges on each of his shoulders. A red-faced beggar came scurrying through the snow towards Li, dragging a wailing child in his wake. He turned away, disappointed, when he saw that Li was Chinese, and not some soft-hearted yangguizi. If only he had known, Li never failed to give a beggar the change in his pocket.

Outside the floodlit entrance of the Jianguo Hotel, a group of well-fed foreigners tumbled out of a taxi and hurried, laughing, into the lobby. Water-skiing plastic Santas frolicked around a fountain in an ornamental pool in the forecourt, and fake snow hung from the roof of a Christmas log cabin. The soft strains of Jingle Bells drifted into the night sky. Li ploughed on past the rows of redundant taxis, drivers grouped together inside with engines running, the heating on, playing cards for money. A golden Christmas tree dotted with fairy lights twinkled opposite the revolving door of the Jinglun Hotel. In the lobby, beneath a giant polystyrene effigy of Santa Claus in his reindeer-drawn sleigh, Christmas party-goers fell out of the restaurant past staff in red and white Santa hats. In here the public address system was playing Silent Night.

Beneath the soaring gold pillars and the tall palm trees, Li saw Margaret sitting at a table on her own. Behind her, in the doorway of the twenty-four-hour café, a life-sized animated clown was dancing, and singing The Yellow Rose of Texas in a strange electronic voice which intermittently broke off to scream, ‘Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho.’

She stood up as soon as she saw Li. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said. ‘Another five minutes and you’d have been investigating the death of a clown.’

‘Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho,’ said the clown, and she glared at it. He took her arm. ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs.’

Their room was on the fifth floor, at the far end of a long corridor. Li saw the security camera that pointed along it from the elevators and wondered just who was watching. Although he had asked for a double, they had given him a twin-bedded room. The beds were dressed with garishly patterned quilt covers. He switched out the lights and pulled back the quilt on the bed nearest the window. It was more than big enough for two. He did not draw the curtains, and once their eyes had adjusted there was sufficient ambient light from the avenue below by which to see.

A strange urgency overtook them as they undressed and slipped into bed. The warmth of her skin on his immediately stirred his sexual desire. He kissed her lips and her breasts and her belly, and smelled the sex in her soft, downy triangle of hair. He felt her grip his buttocks and try to pull him into her. But he wanted to wait, to take his time, to savour the moment. ‘Please,’ she whispered to him in the dark. ‘Please, Li Yan.’

He rolled over and knelt between her legs without entering her and cupped her swollen breasts in his hands, feeling the nipples grow hard against his palms, and he ran his tongue up over her belly, squeezing her breasts together so that he could move his lips quickly from one nipple to the other, sucking, teasing, biting. She arched backwards as he moved up to her neck, and his hot breath on her skin made her shiver. He found her lips, and the sweetness of her tongue, and then he slipped inside her, catching her almost unawares, and she gasped.

They moved together in slow, rhythmic waves for fifteen minutes or more, turning one way, then the other, gripped by their passion, but gentle with the knowledge of their baby lying curled between them, the perfect product of a previous encounter. Until finally, he thrust hard and deep, arching backwards so as not to bear down on her, feeling her fingers biting into his back. She screamed at the moment of his release, and he felt her muscular spasm suck him dry, taking his seed this time for love alone.

Afterwards, they lay for more than ten minutes on their backs, side by side, listening to snowflakes brush the window like falling feathers.

‘You’ve been smoking,’ Margaret said suddenly.

‘Just one. Well, really, just half of one.’ He hesitated for a long time, steeling himself for this. ‘Margaret, we need to talk about the wedding.’

‘I’ve done enough talking about that tonight. I had to face my mother, remember, after you dropped me at the apartment.’

‘What did she say?’

‘I think she was relieved that she wasn’t going to have some Chinese as a son-in-law after all.’

He was silent for several minutes then. ‘You seem to be taking it very calmly.’

‘Do I?’ She inclined her head to look at him. ‘Appearances can be deceptive.’

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘You mean apart from hating you for not telling me?’

‘Apart from that.’

‘I’m thinking about how much I just want to hurt you for hurting me,’ she said. ‘For lying to me. For deceiving me.’

‘I still want to marry you,’ he said.

‘Forget it.’ And she tried very hard not to succumb to the self-pity which was welling up inside. After all, hadn’t she spent long enough these last weeks debating with herself whether marriage and motherhood were really what she wanted in life? She made a determined effort to force a change of topic. ‘So how did it go tonight? Did you find Fleischer?’

Li lay back and closed his eyes. He still didn’t have the courage to tell her. So he released his thoughts to run over the night’s events, and shuddered again at the recollection of what he had uncovered at the club. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But if there’s a connection between Fleischer and the dead athletes, then we’re up against something much more powerful than I could ever have imagined.’

For a moment Margaret forgot her own concerns. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The club where Fleischer was photographed is run by Triads.’

She frowned. ‘Triads? That’s like a kind of Chinese mafia, isn’t it?’

‘Bigger, more pervasive, steeped in ritual and tradition.’ He turned to find her watching him intently. ‘The Event Hall at the club is a ceremonial chamber for the induction of new members. It has an east — west orientation, with doors on all four walls, a representation of the lodges where these original inductions took place. Most times I would have walked into it and never have known, but tonight it was all set up for an induction ceremony.’

He described to her the layout of the hall, with its three, freestanding, ornamental doorways representing the entries to the chambers of a traditional lodge; the items laid out on the floor, symbolic of a journey made by the founding monks.

‘The monks came from a Shaolin monastery in Fujian,’ he said. ‘They were supposed to have answered a call by the last Ming emperor to save the dynasty and take up arms against the Ch’ing. But one of their number betrayed them, and most of them were killed when the monastery was set on fire. Five escaped. And they’re what they call the “First Five Ancestors”. According to legend they had a series of extraordinary adventures and miraculous escapes. I mean, literally miraculous. Like a grass sandal turning into a boat so that they could sail across a river and escape the Ch’ing soldiers. During this journey, their numbers grew until they became an army, and they called themselves the “Hung League”. But, then, over the years they became fragmented, dividing into hundreds of different groups or gangs who inducted new members by re-enacting the original legend.’ He snorted. ‘Of course, they never did restore the Ming Dynasty. They turned to crime instead. I guess they were one of the world’s first crime syndicates.’

Margaret listened in horror and fascination. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘I read up on it before I went to Hong Kong. Yifu was a bit of an expert. Our family came from the colony before they moved to Sichuan.’

‘And all that stuff on the floor. What did it mean, exactly?’

‘I think the bamboo hoop with the red serrated paper was supposed to represent a hole through which the founding monks escaped from the burning monastery. I guess new recruits would have to step through it. The pieces of charcoal laid out on the floor would represent the burned-out remains. The monks are then supposed to have escaped across a river on stepping stones. I think that’s what the circles of paper were. The two lengths of string, I think, symbolise a two-planked bridge which also aided their escape. They would be held up and stretched tight for the recruits to duck under during the ceremony.’

Margaret was wide-eyed in amazement. ‘This is bizarre stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to believe that crap like that still goes on in this day and age.’

Li nodded. ‘It would be laughable if these people weren’t so dangerous. And, believe me, they are.’

‘Why are they called Triads?’ Margaret asked.

‘It was the Europeans who called them that,’ Li said. ‘They were known by all sorts of different names over the years. The term “Triads” might have came from one of them — the “Three United Association”. But I don’t know for sure.’

He told her, then, about the table draped with yellow paper and the strange collection of items laid out on top of it. ‘I figure the table was some kind of altar. When the monks were escaping from the monastery, a huge yellow curtain was supposed to have fallen on them and saved them from the flames. I think that’s what the yellow paper was supposed to represent.’

‘What about the stuff on top of the altar?’ She remembered Mei Yuan telling her about the rice bowl and chopsticks placed on a wedding altar to commemorate a death in the family.

‘Everything’s related to the original legend,’ Li said. ‘I don’t know all the details. I mean, the rush sandal is obvious. That’s what was supposed to have turned into a boat. I think the white cloth with the red stains represents a monk’s robe smeared with blood. The sword would be used to execute traitors. The punishment for anyone breaking one of the thirty-six oaths of allegiance is “death by a myriad of swords”.’

Margaret felt goosebumps rise up all along her arms and across her shoulders. ‘That girl you found in the park,’ she whispered. ‘You said she worked at the club.’ Li looked at her, the thought dawning on him for the first time. Margaret said, ‘She died of multiple stab wounds, didn’t she? Laid out on a stone slab like a ritual sacrifice. Or execution.’

‘My God,’ Li said. ‘They killed her.’

‘But why? She wouldn’t have been a member, would she?’

‘No. It’s an all male preserve. But she must have known something, betrayed a confidence, I don’t know…’ He sat up in bed, all fatigue banished from body and mind. ‘They took her up there and stabbed her to death and laid her out for the world to see. Like they were making an example of her. Or issuing a warning.’

‘Who to?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ And then Li remembered something which had got lost in a day of traumas and revelations. Something he had meant to ask Margaret about earlier. He turned to her. ‘Margaret, Wu came up with something at the meeting this morning. It’s maybe nothing at all. But it did seem strange.’

‘What?’

‘All of the athletes, including Jia Jing, had the flu at some point in the five or six weeks before they died.’ He paused. ‘Could that have been the virus that caused their heart trouble?’

Margaret scowled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The flu wouldn’t do that to them.’ She thought about it some more. ‘But it could have done something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘Activated a retrovirus.’

Li screwed up his face. ‘A what?’

Margaret said, ‘We’ve all got them, Li Yan, in our germline DNA. Retroviruses. Organisms that have attacked us at some point in human history, organisms that we have learned to live with because they have become a part of us. Usually harmless. But sometimes, just sometimes, activated by something else that finds its way in there. A virus. Like herpes. Or flu.’

‘You think that’s what happened to these athletes?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. But if they all came down with the flu, and that’s the only common factor we can find, then it’s a possibility.’

Li was struggling to try to understand. ‘And how would that help us?’

Margaret shook her head. ‘I don’t know that it would.’

Li fell back on the pillow. ‘I give up.’

She smiled at him and shook her head. ‘I doubt it. You’re not the type.’

He closed his eyes and they lay side by side in silence, then, for ten minutes or more. Finally she said, ‘So what are you thinking?’

He said, ‘I’m thinking about how I quit the force tonight.’

Margaret raised herself immediately on her elbow. She could barely hear her voice over the pounding of her heart. ‘What?’

‘I want to marry you, Margaret.’ She started to protest, but he forced his voice over her. ‘And if you won’t marry me, then I’ll have to live with that. But it won’t change my mind about quitting.’ He turned his head on the pillow to look at her. ‘I wrote my resignation letter before I left the office tonight. It’s in the mail. So all my bridges are burned. No going back.’

‘Well, you’d better find a way,’ Margaret said brutally. ‘Because I won’t marry you, Li Yan. Not now. I won’t have your unhappiness on my conscience for the rest of my life.’