The Fourth Sacrifice (8 page)

To his annoyance, he found himself choosing his clothes with a little more care than usual, and ended up throwing on his old jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt, angry with himself for even thinking about it. He stuffed his wallet and ID into his back pocket, his cigarettes and lighter into the breast pocket of his shirt, and grabbed Old Yifu’s bike from the hall and carried it down the stairs on his shoulder. He did not notice the letter with the Sichuan postcode that he had dropped on the table, delivered an hour earlier, only three days late.

He cycled east along East Chang’an Avenue, and then turned north, moving with a furious concentration, ringing his bell at errant pedestrians and growling at motorists who seemed to think they had the right of way. The sweat was beading across his brow and sticking his shirt to his back. He still felt like shouting, or throwing something, or kicking someone. Here he was being made to face the two demons he had been trying to exorcise from his life – forced to ride his dead uncle’s bicycle to a meeting with the woman he had been ordered to give up. If he could have brought his uncle back, and fallen into the arms of the woman he loved, he would. But neither of these things was possible, and there was nothing for it but to move forward and face the demons head-on.

Great woks of broth steamed and bubbled on braziers as preparations all along the sidewalk began for lunch. Li smelled dumplings frying in oil and saw women rolling out noodles on flat boards. Charcoal burned and smoked in metal troughs as skewers of spicy lamb and chicken were prepared for barbecue. People ate early on the streets, and for an hour beforehand there was a frenzied activity both by those preparing the food, and those preparing to eat it. Children spilled out of schoolyards in blue tracksuits and yellow baseball caps, and factories spewed their workers out into the sunshine. For a time, Li had been stuck behind a tousled youth toiling over the pedals of his tricycle cart, hauling a huge load of the round coal briquettes that fuelled the winter fires of Beijing. Finally he got past him, squeezing between the cart and an on-coming bus at the Dongsi Shitiao junction. Then he left the sights and smells of food behind as he free-wheeled along the final shaded stretch of road before the corner of Dongzhimennei Street, where he hoped his own lunch would await him in the form of a
jian bing
.

Mei Yuan was busy preparing two
jian bings
for a couple of schoolgirls as Li drew up his bike. It gave him the chance to watch her as she worked the hotplate inside the small glass house with its pitched red roof that perched on the rear of her extended tricycle. Her dark hair was drawn back in its customary bun, her smooth-skinned face a little more lined and showing more strain than usual. She grinned when she saw him, cheeks dimpling, and the life immediately returned to her lovely, dark, slanted eyes. She had, he knew, a soft spot for him. There was an unspoken empathy between them. In some very small way he filled the space left by the son she had lost, and she the hole in his life left by the death of his mother – both victims of the Cultural Revolution. Neither made demands on the other. It was just something that had grown quietly.

She poured some pancake mix on to her hotplate and watched it sizzle and bubble before breaking an egg on to it. He could barely resist the temptation to give her a hug. The previous week she had been missing from her corner for a few days, and finally he had gone to her home to find out why. He had found her in bed, sick and alone. One of the new breed of self-employed, she had no work unit to look after her welfare. He had cooked her a meal himself that night, and paid for a girl to go in every day to feed her and keep the house clean. The previous evening she had told him she would be back at her usual corner today, even although he felt she was not completely recovered. And here she was, pale and strained, and fighting to kick-start her life again.

She flipped the pancake over, smeared it with hoisin and chilli, and sprinkled it with chopped spring onion and coriander, before breaking a square of deep-fried whipped egg white into its centre, folding it in half and in half again, and then handing it, wrapped in brown paper, to the second schoolgirl. ‘Two yuan,’ she said, then turned beaming to Li. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes, I have eaten.’ He made the traditional response to the Beijing greeting, then added, ‘I’m sorry I missed breakfast. Work.’

‘That’s no excuse,’ she chided him. ‘A big lad like you needs feeding.’ She began another
jian bing
. ‘I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding me.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you don’t have an answer to the last riddle I set you?’

He frowned. ‘When did you set me a riddle?’

‘Before I got sick.’

‘Oh,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I don’t remember it.’

‘How very convenient,’ she said. ‘I’ll remind you.’

‘I thought you might.’

She grinned. ‘If a man walks in a straight line without turning his head, how can he continue to see everything he has walked past? And there are no mirrors involved.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Li said. ‘I remember now. It was too easy.’

‘Oh? So tell me.’

Li shrugged. ‘He’s walking backwards, of course.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Yes, it
was
too easy, wasn’t it?’ She finished the
jian bing
and handed it to him. He bit into its spicy, savoury softness and drew out a two-yuan note. She pushed his hand away. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

‘I’m not being silly,’ he insisted, and reached beyond her to drop the note in her tin. ‘If your house was burgled and I was sent to investigate, would you phone my bosses and say, “It’s all right, you don’t need to pay him for this investigation, I know him”?’

She couldn’t resist a smile. ‘Is this a riddle for me?’

‘No, it’s not. I don’t have one today. You didn’t give me enough time to prepare.’

‘OK,’ she said, ‘I’ve got another one for you, then. Much harder this time.’ He nodded, and continued stuffing
jian bing
into his mouth. ‘Three men check into a hotel. They want to share a room, and the receptionist charges them thirty yuan.’

‘That’s a cheap hotel room,’ he cut in.

‘Depends what kind of hotel,’ she said. ‘Anyway, for the purposes of the riddle it’s thirty yuan and they pay ten yuan each.’

‘OK.’

‘So, after they’ve gone up to their room she realises she should only have charged them twenty-five yuan.’

‘This hotel gets cheaper and cheaper.’

She ignored him. ‘She calls the bellboy, explains the situation, and gives him five yuan to take up to the room to pay them back. On the way up, the bellboy figures it’s going to be hard for these guys to split five yuan three ways. So he decides to give them only three – one each – and keep the remaining two for himself.’

‘Dishonesty,’ said Li, shaking his head sadly. ‘This is what I have to deal with every day.’

‘The question is,’ she ignored him again. ‘If each of the three men got one yuan back, that means they only paid nine yuan each. A total of twenty-seven yuan. The bellboy kept two to himself. That makes twenty-nine yuan. What happened to the other yuan?’

Li stopped chewing for a moment as he did a quick calculation. Then he frowned. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he said. Then, ‘But that’s not possible.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Therein lies the riddle.’

He did the calculation again and shook his head. ‘I’m going to have to think about this. Obviously it’s something really simple.’

‘Obviously.’ She delved into the bag hanging from her bicycle. ‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. I brought you this. I thought you might be interested to read it.’ She took out a battered, dark blue, hardcover book. ‘
Redgauntlet
by Sir Walter Scott.’

‘I know the name. I think my uncle might have had some of his books. Who is he?’

‘Was. He was a very famous Scottish writer. I saw the movie
Braveheart
recently, about the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace. It made me interested in the country. So I’ve been reading Sir Walter Scott. I think you might enjoy him.’

Li took the book. ‘Thanks, Mei Yuan. It might be a while before I can get it back to you. I’m pretty much up to the neck in a case just now.’

‘That’s all right. Whenever,’ she said. ‘What a friend has is never lost.’

Some people came for
jian bings
and she turned to cook them, and Li stood silently watching the traffic, reflecting on the tragedy of a dozen years of madness that had stolen the life of a clever, educated woman, and cast her eventually on to the streets to make a living cooking savoury pancakes. But by the time Mei Yuan had finished and turned back, his minded had drifted again to Margaret and the encounter he could not avoid. He came out of his reverie to find her watching him.

‘What’s on your mind, Li Yan?’ she asked.

How could he explain it to her? How could he even begin to explain it? He said, ‘What would you do if your heart said one thing and your superiors another?’

‘Is this a riddle?’

‘No, it’s a question.’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘This is a conflict between … what … love and loyalty?’

‘I suppose it’s something like that, though not quite that simple.’

‘If only everything in life was as simple as the solution to a riddle,’ she said, and touched his arm. ‘Is there no way to accommodate both? It is better to walk on two legs.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t.’

III

Li walked past the games court, cracked concrete baking behind a chickenwire fence. A group of students was playing volleyball, shouting and laughing. Li felt envious of their youth, free from the concerns of the real world that lay beyond the campus. He had been a student here himself once. He knew how it felt, and he experienced a sense of loss at an innocence long gone.

He had been angered, on his return to Section One, to discover that the Americans had insisted on carrying out the autopsy at the Centre of Material Evidence Determination on the campus of the University of Public Security in south-west Beijing. Dr Campbell, apparently, had complained that facilities at Pao Jü Hutong were not good enough. He remembered just how much she had irritated him when they first met. She was having the same effect on him now.

He saw the limousine with its big red
shi
character, meaning
envoy
, followed by 224, identifying it as a US Embassy car. It was parked outside the Centre, and for a moment all his anger and irritation was displaced by a huge sense of apprehension. He felt his pulse quicken, and his mouth became dry.

Detective Qian was already there, and he glanced anxiously at Li as he entered the autopsy room. There was a very young-looking Asian woman with short, dark hair standing at the back of the room. Her face was very pale and she looked as if she wished she were somewhere else. Pathologist Wang had brought his two assistants from Pao Jü Hutong. With Margaret he had been examining photographs of the crime scene laid out on a white covered table, along with the placard that had been hung around the victim’s neck. The room almost crackled with an unspoken tension.

Li’s first sight of Margaret put him at a distinct disadvantage. Preparations for the autopsy were almost complete, and she was dressed ready to begin, almost unrecognisable beneath layers of professional clothing: surgeon’s green pyjamas, a plastic apron, a long-sleeved cotton gown. Her hair was piled beneath a shower cap, and her face hidden behind her surgeon’s mask and goggles. The soft, freckled skin of her forearms was concealed by plastic sleeve covers, and her long, elegant fingers, by latex gloves. All these layers were like a barrier between them, concealing and protecting her from his gaze. He, on the other hand, in jeans and open-necked shirt, felt exposed and vulnerable to the eyes he sensed piercing him from behind the anonymity of the goggles. She looked long and hard in his direction, then the voice he knew so well said, ‘Late as usual, Deputy Section Chief.’ And he felt himself blush.

‘For the record,’ he said. ‘I would like it to be known that I object to this autopsy being carried out by anyone other than our own pathologist, who has conducted the previous three autopsies in this case.’

‘Really?’ That familiar acid tone. ‘Perhaps if you had called in a professional sooner, there wouldn’t be the need for a
fourth
autopsy.’

Li heard the Asian girl gasp. It was like a slap in the face. A calculated insult. He glanced at Wang, uncertain as to whether his English had been good enough to follow this quick-fire exchange. But if the Chinese pathologist had understood, he gave no indication of it. His loss of
mianzi
, face, like Margaret’s hurt, was hidden behind mask and goggles.

Margaret nodded to the two assistants. ‘Now that the boss has finally arrived, I suppose we’d better begin.’

They glanced at Pathologist Wang, who made some imperceptible gesture of consent, and they went out and wheeled in the body, still fully clothed, on a gurney, and positioned it beneath a microphone hanging from the ceiling.

It was a bizarre sight, lying on its back, arched over the arms which were pulled behind to where they were still tied at the wrist. The head, propped on a blood-soaked towel, was placed approximately at the neck, but lying at a very odd angle and staring, open-eyed and open-mouthed, off to one side.

Margaret used the moment, when all attention was focused on the corpse, to sneak a proper look at Li. He was thinner than when she had seen him last, the strain showing in shadows beneath his eyes. She was shocked by how Chinese he looked. When she had been with him almost every waking hour, she had ceased completely to see him as Chinese. He was just Li Yan, who touched her with a gentleness she had not known before in a man, whose eyes were soft and dark and full of humour and life, drawing her unaccountably to him. Now all that familiarity was gone. He seemed almost like a stranger, and she succumbed to an odd sense of disappointment. All she really felt towards him now was anger.

She turned her attention quickly back to the body and switched on the overhead microphone, escaping into a professional world where death took precedence over life. But she paused for a moment, struck by the strange posture of the body, flexed against the hands behind its back, the odd position of the disembodied head. It somehow reinforced the sense of a man forced to his death, much more than a simple stabbing or shooting. There was something in his demeanour that hinted at the terror he had experienced in the anticipation of his own beheading. It was unimaginable. She quickly began the preliminary examination, recording for later transcription, what she saw as she went.