by Peter May
‘I’m sorry, Tao, if you feel slighted. Protocol has its time and its place. Unfortunately, this morning there was no time.’ Li picked up his folder to go, but Tao was not finished. He stood his ground.
‘I want to put on record my strongest objections to the fact that this report has been doctored.’ He tapped his forefinger on the file as he spoke.
Li was losing patience. Tao’s pedantry was tiresome at the best of times. But in this instance, he was also touching a raw nerve. ‘Are you objecting to the doctoring of the report or the fact that you weren’t consulted about it?’ They each knew it was the latter.
‘Both,’ Tao said defiantly. ‘As far as I am aware it is not the practice of this section to file inaccurate reports.’
‘You’re right,’ Li said. ‘It’s not. But for reasons I am not prepared to discuss, this case is an exception. And if you have a problem with that then I suggest you take it up with the Minister.’
Tao frowned. ‘The Minister?’
‘Of Public Security,’ Li said wearily. He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sure he’ll be at his desk by now if you want to give him a call and express your disapproval in person.’
Tao drew his lips into a thin, tight line. ‘And is the Minister also responsible for re-assigning the autopsy on Sui Mingshan?’
‘I’ve already told you the reason for that.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Tao said. ‘Doctor Campbell is the “best available”. You seem to be of the opinion, Section Chief, that anything American is better than everything Chinese.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps you should have stayed there.’
Li glared back at him. ‘Your trouble, Tao, is that you spent too long under the British in Hong Kong learning how to be arrogant and superior. Perhaps you should have stayed there.’
He brushed past his deputy, but paused at the door long enough to tell him, ‘By the way, I’m taking personal charge of this investigation, and I’ll expect officers released from other duties as and when I require them.’
He went out leaving Tao silently fuming in the cold, empty meeting room.
III
Li and Wu arrived at Pao Jü Hutong as the autopsy was nearing its completion. Jia Jing lay on the stainless steel autopsy table, his chest cavity cut open and prised wide like a carcass in a butcher’s shop. Li had downloaded essential information on Jia Jing from the Internet. He was five feet, eight inches tall, and weighed three hundred and thirty-three pounds. Three threes. These should have been lucky numbers, but somewhere it had all gone wrong for Jia. He held the current Chinese weightlifting record with an extraordinary squat lift of one thousand and eight pounds.
His heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, had already been removed. Extraneous body fluids trickled along the side channels, dripping into the drain below. The body was fresh, so the smell was not overpowering, and the temperature in the autopsy room was so low their breath condensed through their masks and clouded around their faces. Chill white light reflecting harshly off scrubbed white tiles made it seem even colder.
Li shivered as he gazed upon the vast cadaver of a man who had once had the power to lift more than three times his own body weight, an achievement put into context by the fact that it had taken eight officers to prise him free of his lover, and four sturdy autopsy assistants to get him from the gurney on to the table. But all his strength was gone now, stolen by death, and all that remained was the mountain of bulging muscle he had worked so hard to cultivate, limp and useless.
Doctor Wang was swaddled in layers of protective clothing, eyes darting behind his goggles, sweat gathering, in spite of the cold, along the elasticated line of his plastic head cover. He had peeled the dead man’s scalp down over his face and was preparing the oscillating saw to cut through the top of the skull and remove the brain.
‘Never seen muscles like them,’ he was saying. ‘In all my years. A man of this size, you’d expect a lot of fat. There’s hardly an ounce of it.’
‘Is that abnormal in a weightlifter?’ Wu asked.
‘If I’d cut one open before, I might be able to tell you,’ Wang said with a faintly withering tone. ‘But I can tell you that all the weight he was carrying, and all the weight he was lifting, will have contributed in no small way to his death. The heart is just another muscle, after all. You put too much strain on it, you’ll damage it.’ He put down his saw and crossed to the table where the sections of Jia Jang’s heart lay at an angle, piled one on top of the other, like thick slices of bread. ‘In this case … ’ he picked up a slice of heart, ‘ … the left anterior descending coronary artery was clogged, causing it simply to erupt. Probably congenital.’ Holding up the cross section of the artery, he added, ‘There was also an acute rupture of the atherosclerotic plaque. You see this kind of yellow, cheesy stuff? In older people that gets rock hard and calcified. It blocks the lumen of the artery, like sludge build-up in an old pipe, narrowing the available space for the blood to flow through. You can see here that the artery is about zero-point-four of a centimeter in diameter, and it’s about seventy-five percent blocked. And if you look closely under this cheesy stuff … ’ Li made a face, but moved closer to see, ‘ … there’s a thin layer of red. Blood. Under pressure from the artery it has dissected into and under the plaque, expanding it to further block the lumen, occluding it and stopping blood flow to that portion of the heart which the artery serves.’ Wang sucked air through his teeth. ‘Effectively, he had a massive heart attack.’ He looked at Li. ‘The fact that he was in the act of sexual intercourse at the time may have been what brought it on. A lot of men die on the job … so to speak.’
‘Way to go,’ Wu said.
Wang cast a critical eye over him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were in much danger, Wu.’ The detective pulled a face. ‘I’m amazed, however, that our friend here had the where-withal.’ He crossed back to the body and they followed him, watching as he lifted the penis up and weighed the testicles appraisingly in his hand. ‘Tiny,’ he said.
‘Is there some significance in that?’ Li asked.
Wang shrugged. ‘The muscle mass, the reduced size of the testes. Could be consistent with steroid abuse.’ He paused. ‘Or not. He may just have had small testicles, and built his muscle mass by training very hard.’
‘Yeh,’ Wu cut in, ‘but if his nuts were that small, it would have reduced his testosterone production, and therefore his sex drive, wouldn’t it? Hardly consistent with a man having an affair.’
Wang said, ‘Testosterone is often the steroid of choice when it comes to building muscle. In the short term that can actually increase the sex drive, although a side-effect can be the shrinking of the testes, and ultimately severely impaired sexual performance.’
‘Is there any way you can tell for sure if he’d been taking steroids?’ Li asked. He smelled a scandal. Some high profile Chinese weightlifters and swimmers had tested positive for drug-taking in the nineties and been banned from national and international sport. The authorities were very anxious to clean up the country’s image.
‘I’ve asked specifically for hormone screening. If he took any during the last month it’ll show up in tox. If it’s been longer than that, no.’ He took his oscillating saw around the top of the skull and eased the brain out into a stainless steel bowl. ‘Of course, there can often be behavioural changes with steroid abuse. Users can become moody, aggressive. Talk to people who knew him.’
Li walked over to a side table against the wall, where Jia Jing’s clothes were laid out along with the contents of his pockets and a small shoulder bag he had had with him. The clothes were huge. Vast, elasticated cotton pants, an enormous singlet, a shirt like a tent, a hand-knitted cardigan and a quilted jacket which he must have had specially made. He wore an odd little blue cap with a toggle on the top, and must have looked very odd with his pleated queue hanging down below it to his shoulder blades. Li glanced back at the autopsy table as Wang pulled back the scalp which had been covering his face. Jia’s features were almost as gross as the rest of hi
m, thick pale lips and a flattened nose, eyes like slits in tumescent swellings beneath his brows. He made Li think of a Japanese sumo wrestler. He was an ugly man, and heaven only knew what the woman he died on top of had seen in him.
His pockets had turned out very little. There was a leather purse with some coins; a wallet with several one hundred yuan notes, a couple of international credit cards and membership cards for three different gymnasia; some taxi receipts and a bill from a restaurant; a small gold-coloured aerosol breath freshener. Li wondered if steroids gave you bad breath. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, sniffed and recoiled from its pungent menthol sharpness. There was a length of white silk cord tassled at each end. ‘What’s the rope for?’ Li asked.
Wang laughed. ‘That was his belt. Infinitely flexible when it comes to keeping trousers in place over a belly like his.’
Li picked up a dog-eared photograph, its glaze cracked in several places where it had been folded. The colour was too strong and the picture was a little fuzzy, but Li recognised Jia immediately. He was wearing his lifting singlet and a white leather back brace, black boots laced up to his calves. There was a gold medal on a blue ribbon around his neck, and he was holding it up for emphasis. He was flanked on one side by a small elderly man with thinning grey hair, and on the other by an even smaller woman with a round face and deep wrinkles radiating outwards from smiling eyes. Both were beaming for the camera. Li turned the picture over. Jia had scrawled on the back With Mum and Dad, June 2000. Li looked at Mum and Dad again and saw the pride in their smiles, and for a moment he felt their pain. The people they brought in here to butcher did not live or die in isolation. They had mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children. He put the photograph back with Jia’s belongings and wondered how it was possible that such a small woman could have carried such a giant inside her.
He turned briskly to Wang. ‘You’ll let me have your report as soon as you have the results in from tox?’
‘Of course.’
Li said to Wu, ‘You might as well stay with it. I’m heading out to Qinghua University with Sun to talk to Sui Mingshan’s team-mates. Keep me up to date with any developments.’
And he hurried out, feeling oddly squeamish. Death was never easy, but with such a big, powerful man, it seemed particularly cruel somehow. He had been only twenty-three years old.
IV
Sun steered Li’s Jeep carefully through the bike and tricycle carts that thronged the narrow Dongzhimen Beixiao Street, taking them down from Section One on to Ghost Street. Li sat in the passenger seat, huddled in his dark grey three-quarter-length woollen coat, a red scarf tied at the neck, gloved hands resting in his lap. He gazed out at the wasteland on their left. The streets and courtyards, the jumble of roofs that had once stretched away to the distant trees of Nanguan Park and the Russian Embassy beyond, were all gone. They had been replaced by a flattened, featureless wasteland where tower blocks and shops would eventually replace the life that had once existed there. For the moment it provided temporary parking for hundreds of bikes and carts belonging to the traders and customers of the food market opposite. Li looked right, and on the other side of the street the old Beijing that he knew so well existed still, as it always had. Although, for how much longer he was not sure.
A boy stood in the doorway of a downmarket clothes store in his red slippers, slurping noodles from a bowl. Next door, a woman wrapped in a brown coat was arranging oranges in boxes along her shop front. A group of young men was delivering fresh cooked lotus buns from the back of a tricycle, hands blue with the cold. A woman with a jaunty hat and green scarf cycled slowly past them, talking animatedly into her cell-phone. An old man with matted hair, sporting army surplus jacket and trousers, strained at his pedals to move a tottering pile of coal briquettes at less than walking pace.
Li told Sun to pull in at the corner where a woman was cooking jian bing in a pitched roof glass shelter mounted on the back of an extended tricycle. She wore blue padded protective sleeves over a white jacket, and a long black and white chequered apron over that. A round white hat was pulled down over her hair, covering her eyebrows, and there was a long red and white silk scarf wrapped several times around her neck. For years Mei Yuan had occupied the space on the south-east corner of the intersection. But all the buildings had been demolished and hoardings erected. She had been forced to the opposite side of the road.
Li gave her a hug.
‘You missed breakfast this morning,’ she said.
‘I was too early for you,’ he smiled. ‘And my stomach has been grumbling all morning.’
‘Well, we can put that right straight away,’ she said, brown eyes shining with fondness. She glanced at Sun. ‘One? Two?’
Li turned to Sun. ‘Have you tried a jian bing yet?’
Sun shook his head. ‘I’ve driven past often enough,’ he said, ‘but I never stopped to try one.’ He did not sound very enthusiastic.
‘Well, now’s your chance,’ Li said. And he turned back to Mei Yuan. ‘Two.’
They watched as she leaned into the shelter through a large opening on the far side and poured a scoop of batter mix on to a large hotplate. She dragged it into a perfect circle before breaking an egg on to it and smearing it over the pancake. From a jar she sprinkled the pancake with seeds and then flipped it over, steam rising from it all the while. Above the roar of the traffic in Ghost Street and the blasting of car horns, they could hear the repetitive rhythmic thumping of sledge-hammers on concrete as demolition men worked hard to reduce the city around them to rubble.
Mei Yuan was smearing the pancake now with hoisin and chilli and other spices from jars around the hotplate before throwing on a couple of handfuls of chopped spring onion. Finally she placed a square of deep fried, whipped egg white in its centre, folded the pancake in four and scooped it up in a paper bag. Li handed it to Sun who looked apprehensive. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Try it.’
Reluctantly, Sun bit into the soft, savoury, spicy pancake which dissolved almost immediately in his mouth. He smiled his surprise. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘This is good.’ And he took another mouthful, and another. Li grinned. Mei Yuan had already started on his.
She said, ‘I have the answer to your riddle. It really was too easy.’
‘Riddle?’ Sun looked perplexed. ‘What riddle?’
Li said, ‘Mei Yuan and I set each other riddles to solve each day. She always gets mine straight away. I usually take days to figure out hers.’
Sun looked from one to the other in disbelief before taking another mouthful of jian bing and saying, ‘Okay, try it on me.’
Li looked faintly embarrassed. ‘It’s just a silly game, Sun.’
‘Let the boy see if he can work it out,’ Mei Yuan said.
Li shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What is as old as the world, but never older than five weeks?’
Sun thought for a moment, then he glanced suspiciously from one to the other. ‘Is this a joke? There’s a catch, right? So I make a fool of myself.’
‘There’s no catch,’ Li said.
Sun shrugged. ‘Well, then, it’s obvious,’ he said. ‘It’s the moon.’
‘Hah!’ Mei Yuan clapped her hands in delight. ‘You see? Too easy.’ Then she looked thoughtfully at Sun. ‘You know, I could have made a better riddle out of it with you.’
Sun was taken aback. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Your name is Sun. In Roman letters that would be spelled S-U-N. Which in English means the sun, in the sky. Given some time I could have made an interesting wordplay with sun and moon to create a riddle just for you.’
‘You speak English?’ Sun was clearly astonished at the idea that some peasant woman selling snacks on a street corner could speak a foreign language. Then suddenly realised how he must have sounded. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … ’
‘Do you speak English?’ Mei Yuan asked.
He shrugged, embarrassed now. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘Not very well.’
Li grinned. ‘M
ei Yuan graduated in art and literature from Beijing University.’
‘But life does not always follow the path we plan for it,’ she said quickly. ‘Do you have any English books? My passion is reading.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Sun said, clearly disappointed that he could not oblige. Then suddenly he said, ‘But I have a friend whose English is excellent. He has many books. I’m sure he would be happy to lend you some. What kind do you like?’
‘Oh, anything,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘History, literature … ’ she grinned, her cheeks dimpling, ‘ … a good detective story … ’
‘I’ll see what he has.’
Li reached over and pulled out a book stuffed down the back of her saddle. It was where she always kept her current book, pages read in snatches between the cooking of pancakes. ‘Bon-a-part-e,’ he read, ignorance furrowing his brow. ‘What is it?’
Her face lit up. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. You know him?’ Her eyes flickered between them.
‘Not personally,’ Sun said.
Li shook his head.
‘He was a dictator in nineteenth-century France,’ she told them, ‘who conquered nearly all of Europe. He died in lonely exile, banished to a tiny island in the South Atlantic. Some people even think he was murdered there. It is a fascinating story. I can lend it to you if you are interested.’
‘My English wouldn’t be good enough,’ Sun apologised.
‘Put it on the shelf for me,’ Li said, and he stuffed it back down behind the saddle. He had almost finished his jian bing, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, licking his lips. ‘So what do you have for me today?’
Mei Yuan’s smile widened, lights dancing mischievously in her dark eyes. ‘This is a good one, Li Yan,’ she said. ‘It is the story of Wei Chang.’ And she wiped cold red hands on her apron. ‘Wei Chang,’ she began, ‘was born on the second of February in the year 1925. He was a great practitioner of I Ching, and people would come from all over China to seek his advice and learn the future. One day, on his sixty-sixth birthday, a young woman came to see him. Before anything else he explained to her how important numbers and calculations would be in correctly interpreting her situation and prospects. For that reason, he said, he would not ask her name, but would instead give her a unique number. In that way they could keep a record of her readings. Then he explained how he would arrive at that unique number.