by Peter May
‘Mom, I’d like you to meet Mei Yuan, my very best friend in China.’
Mrs. Campbell shook Mei Yuan’s hand warily, but was scrupulously polite. ‘How do you do, Mrs. Yuan?’
Margaret laughed. ‘No, Mom, if it’s Mrs. anything, its Mrs. Mei.’ Her mother looked confused.
Mei Yuan explained. ‘In China, the family name always comes first. I am happy for you simply to call me Mei Yuan.’ She smiled. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Campbell.’
There was an awkward exchange of pleasantries about flights and weather before the conversation began to run dry. They all took seats as a girl in a red patterned tunic and black trousers poured them jasmine tea in small, handleless, bone china cups, and there was a momentary relief from the need to make small talk as they all sipped at the hot, perfumed liquid. To break the silence, Mei Yuan said, ‘Li Yan did not come for his breakfast this morning.’
Mrs. Campbell said, ‘Margaret’s fiancé takes his breakfast at your house?’
‘No, Mom. Mei Yuan has a stall on a corner near Li Yan’s office. She makes kind of hot, savoury Beijing pancakes called jian bing.’
Mrs. Campbell could barely conceal her surprise, or her horror. ‘You sell pancakes on a street corner?’
‘I make them fresh on a hotplate,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘But really only to feed my passion in life.’
Margaret’s mother was almost afraid to ask. ‘And what’s that?’
‘Reading. I love books, Mrs. Campbell.’
‘Do you? My husband lectured in modern American literature in Chicago. But I don’t suppose that’s the kind of reading you’re used to.’
‘I am a great admirer of Ernest Hemingway,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘And John Steinbeck. I am just now reading The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald.’
‘Oh, you’ll enjoy it,’ Mrs. Campbell said, for the moment forgetting who she was talking to. ‘A talented writer. But Gatsby was the only really great thing he wrote. He was ruined by alcohol and his wife.’
‘Zelda,’ Mei Yuan said.
‘Oh, you know about her?’ Mrs. Campbell was taken again by surprise.
‘I read about them both in Mr. Hemingway’s autobiography of his time spent in Paris.’
‘A Moveable Feast. It’s a wonderful read.’
‘It made me so much want to go there,’ Mei Yuan said.
Mrs. Campbell looked at her appraisingly, perhaps revising her first impressions. But they had no opportunity to pursue their conversation further, interrupted then by the arrival of Xiao Ling and Xinxin with Li’s father. Xinxin rushed to Margaret and threw her arms around her.
‘Careful, careful,’ Mei Yuan cautioned. ‘Remember the baby.’ Xinxin stood back for a moment and looked at the swelling of Margaret’s belly with a kind of wonder. Then she said, ‘You’ll still love me after you have your baby, won’t you, Magret?’
‘Of course,’ Margaret said, and kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll always love you, Xinxin.’
Xinxin grinned, and then noticed Mrs. Campbell. ‘Who’s this?’
‘This is my mommy,’ Margaret said.
Xinxin looked at her in astonishment. ‘You are Magret’s mommy?’
‘Yes,’ Mrs. Campbell said, and Margaret saw that her eyes were alive for the first time since she had arrived. ‘What’s your name?’
‘My name’s Xinxin, and I’m eight years old.’ And she turned to Xiao Ling. ‘And this is my mommy. Xiao Ling. But she doesn’t speak any English.’
Mei Yuan took over then and made all the introductions in Chinese and English. Mrs. Campbell remained seated after Margaret explained that she had injured her leg in a fall. The last to be formally introduced were Margaret and Li’s father. Margaret shook the hand which he offered limply, and searched for some sign of Li in his eyes. But she saw nothing there. His old man’s face was a blank, and he turned away to ease himself into a seat and turn a disconcertingly unblinking gaze on Margaret’s mother.
Xinxin was oblivious to any of the tensions that underlay relations among this odd gathering of strangers and said to Mrs. Campbell, ‘What’s your name, Magret’s mommy?’
‘Mrs. Campbell.’
Xinxin laughed and laughed. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Your real name. Your given name.’
Mrs. Campbell seemed faintly embarrassed. ‘Actually, it’s Jean.’
‘Jean,’ Xinxin repeated, delighted. ‘That’s a nice name. Can I sit beside you, Jean?’
The elderly American flushed with unexpected pleasure. ‘Of course, Xinxin,’ she said, trying very hard to pronounce the name correctly.
And Xinxin climbed up on the bench beside her and sat down, her feet not touching the floor. She took Mrs. Campbell’s hand quite unselfconsciously and said, ‘I like Magret’s mommy.’ And in Chinese to Li’s father, ‘Do you like Jean, too, Grandad?’
And Margaret saw him smile for the first time, although she had no idea what was said in the exchange between grandfather and grandchild. ‘Sure I do, little one. Sure I do.’
And then they all sat smiling at each other in awkward silence. Margaret glanced at her watch. ‘Well, the only thing missing is Li Yan. As usual. I hope he’s not too late.’
VI
The taxi dropped Li on the edge of a wide slash of waste ground. There were no lights, the road here was pitted and broken, and the driver refused to take his car any further. Looking back, Li could still see the tall streetlights on the Fourth Ring Road, catching in their beams the snow that drove horizontally across the carriageway. He could only just hear the distant roar of the traffic above the whining of the wind. Somehow, somewhere, the driver had taken a wrong turn. Li could see the lights of the tower blocks where Dai Lili lived, but they were on the other side of this bleak, open stretch of ground where hutongs and siheyuans, once home to thousands, had been razed to the ground. It was easier to walk across it than have the driver go round again to try to find the right road.
He watched the taillights of the taxi recede towards the Ring Road, and pulled up his collar against the snow and the wind to make his way across the wasteland that stretched in darkness before him. It was harder than he had imagined. The tracks left by great heavy treaded tyres churning wet earth in the Fall had frozen solid and made it difficult to negotiate. Frozen puddles had disappeared beneath the inch of snow that now lay across the earth, making it slippery and even more treacherous.
He knew that he was already late for the betrothal. But he had come this far, and once he got to the apartment he would call on his cellphone to say he would be another hour. He slipped and fell and hit the ground with a crack. He cursed and sat for a moment in the snow nursing a painful elbow, before getting back to his feet and pushing on again towards the distant towers, cursing his luck and his situation. It was another fifteen minutes before the lights of the courtyard in front of the first tower picked out the cars that were parked there, and threw into shadow the bicycles that sheltered under corrugated iron. He was almost there.
A voice came out of the darkness to his left, low, sing-song and sinister. ‘What do we have here?’
‘Someone’s lost his way.’ Another voice from behind.
‘Lost your way, big man?’ Yet another voice, off to his right this time. ‘We’ll set you on your way. For a price.’
‘Better hope you got a nice fat wallet, big man. Or you could be a big dead man.’ The first voice again.
Li froze and peered into the darkness, and gradually he saw the shadows of three figures emerging from the driving snow, converging on him from three sides. He saw the glint of a blade. He fumbled quickly in his pocket for the penlight he kept on his keyring, and turned its pencil-thin beam on the face of the nearest figure. It was a young man, only seventeen or eighteen, and he raised a hand instinctively to cover his face. Snowflakes flashed through the length of the beam.
‘You boys had better hope you can run fucking fast,’ Li said, realising he was shouting, and surprised by the strength of his own voice.
‘Wha
t are you talking about, shit-for-brains?’ It was the first voice again. Li swung the torch towards him and he stood brazenly, caught in its light.
‘I’m a cop, you stupid little fuck. And if I catch you you’re going to spend the next fifteen years re-educating yourself through labour.’
‘Yeh, sure.’
Li pulled out his ID, holding it up and turning the penlight to illuminate it. ‘You want to come closer for a better look?’
There was a long, silent stand-off in which some unspoken message must have passed between the muggers, because almost without Li realising it they were gone, slipping off into the night as anonymously as they had arrived. He peered through the driving snow but could see nothing, and he felt the tension in his chest subsiding, and the air rushing back into his lungs, stinging and painful. God only knew how close he had been to a knife slipped between the ribs. Nice place to live, he thought.
* * *
Dai Lili’s apartment was on the seventh floor. The elevator was not working, and Li was grateful that the runner had not lived twenty storeys up. He unlocked the stairgate and climbed wearily up seven flights of stairs. Every landing was piled with garbage, and there were usually three or four bicycles chained together on each. A smell of old cabbage and urine permeated the whole building. Green paint peeled off damp walls, and vandals had scrawled obscenities in all the stairwells. Most of the doorways had padlocked steel grilles for additional security.
Li could not help but make a comparison with the homes of the other athletes he had visited in the last few days. There was none. They were at opposite ends of the social and financial spectrum. Here lived the poor of Beijing, rehoused in decrepit tower blocks thrown up to replace the communities which the municipal planners had seen fit to demolish. They had been just as poor then, but the traditional Chinese values of family and community had survived a thousand years of poverty, and people had felt safe, a sense of belonging. Overnight their security, their communities and their values, had been destroyed. And this was the result.
The security gate on Dai Lili’s door was firmly locked, but the light-bulbs in the hallway had been stolen and it took Li several minutes, fumbling in the dark with his penlight, to find the right key and unlock it. When, finally, he got the door itself open, he stepped into another world. The foul odours which had accompanied him on his climb were absent from the cool, sterile atmosphere of the apartment. He hurriedly closed the door to keep the foul stuff out, and found the light switch. The apartment was small. Two rooms, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet. Naked floorboards had been sanded and varnished a pale gold. The walls were painted cream and unadorned with pictures or hangings. There was little or no furniture. A bed and a small desk in one room. Nothing in the other except for a padded grey mat on the floor, about two metres square. A series of diagrams had been pinned to one wall illustrating a sequence of exercises designed to tone every muscle group in the body. Li could see the impressions in the mat where Lili must have performed her last set of exercises. But there was nothing to indicate when that might have been.
There were no curtains on the windows, and he stood for a moment looking south at the lights of the city, and the snow driving through them out of a black sky. He turned and cast his eyes around the room. What kind of creature was she that could live in a place like this? Spartan, without personality, without warmth.
He went back to the bedroom. The single bed was dressed with a white duvet and one pillow, neatly plumped and cold to the touch. Sliding doors revealed a built-in closet. Her clothes hung there in neat rows. Tracksuits and tee-shirts and shorts. Nothing for dressing up. Socks and panties were carefully stacked on shelves, and half a dozen pairs of trainers and running shoes sat side by side on a shoe-rack in the bottom of the closet. On the desk, a hairbrush still had some strands of her hair caught between its bristles. There was a comb, a tub of facial astringent, unscented. No make-up. This girl was obsessive. There was room for only two things in her mind, in her life; her fitness and her running.
In the kitchen there were fresh vegetables in a rack, fresh fruit in a bowl on the worktop. In the cupboard Li found packets of brown rice, tinned fruit and vegetables, dried lentils and black beans. In the tiny refrigerator there was tofu and fruit juice and yoghurt. No meat anywhere. Nothing sweet. No alcohol. No comfort eating.
The toilet was spotlessly clean. A shower head on the wall drained through a grille built in to the concrete floor. There was anti-bacterial soap in the rack, a bottle of unperfumed hypo-allergenic shampoo. Li opened a small wall cabinet above the sink and felt the hair stand up on his neck and shoulders. This girl, who wore no make-up, who used unscented soap and shampoo, who cleaned her face with unperfumed astringent, had two bottles of Chanel sitting in her bathroom cabinet, side by side. The same brand as the after-shave he had found in the homes of Sui and Jia Jing. He sprayed each in turn into the cold, clear air of the toilet and sniffed. One he did not recognise. It had a harsh, lemon smell, faintly acidic, certainly not sweet. The other he knew immediately was the same as the aftershave he had breathed in at Jia Jing’s apartment. Strange, musky, like almonds and vanilla. Again, bitter. No hint of sweetness.
It was a coincidence too far, bizarre and unfathomable, and he cursed himself for not having paid more attention to his earlier concerns about the same scents turning up in the other apartments. They had made an impression on him at the time, but it had been fleeting and all but forgotten. He slipped one of the bottles into his pocket and started going through the apartment again in the minutest detail. He lifted the mat in the main room and rolled it into a corner. There was nothing else in the room. In the bedroom he checked inside every shoe, and went through the pockets of all the jogpants. Nothing. He was about to leave the room when something caught his eye lying against the wall on the floor beneath the desk. Something small and gold-coloured that was catching the light. He went down on his knees to retrieve it, knowing that he had found what he was looking for. He was holding a little cylindrical aerosol breath freshener, and suspected that when he finally found this girl she was going to be long dead.
In the hallway outside her apartment, he had locked the door and the gate before remembering that he had meant to call the restaurant to tell them he would be late for the betrothal. He cursed under his breath and fumbled to switch on his phone in the dark. He pressed a key and the display lit up. The slightest of sounds made him lift his head in time to see a fist, illuminated by the light of his phone, in the moment before it smashed into his face. He staggered backwards, dropping his phone, gasping and gagging on the blood that filled his airways. Someone behind him struck him very hard on the back of the neck and his legs buckled. He dropped to his knees and a foot caught him on the side of his head, smacking it against the wall. He heard his own breath gurgling in his lungs before a blackness descended on him, soft and warm like a summer’s night, and his pain melted away.
VII
Plates of food sat piled on the revolving centre of the banqueting table. Delicacies served to the emperor. Snake and scorpion, five-flavoured intestine, jelly fish, sea slugs. And more mundane fare. Meat balls and sesame buns, soup and dumplings. Everything hot had long since gone cold. And everything cold seemed even less appetising than when served. Nothing had been touched. Margaret’s mother had spent much of the time eyeing the table with great apprehension and, Margaret thought, when Li failed to appear and the meal appeared destined to remain uneaten, considerable relief. The gifts in front of them remained unopened.
Margaret was angry and worried at the same time. It was more than an hour since Mei Yuan had called Section One to find out what had happened to Li. Nobody knew. And there was no response from his cellphone. The atmosphere had deteriorated to the point where the tension between the two families gathered for the betrothal was very nearly unbearable. Conversation had long since dried up. Mei Yuan had done her best to stay animated and fill the silences with her chatter. But even she had run out of things to say, a
nd they all sat now avoiding each other’s eyes. Xinxin was fast asleep with her head on Mrs. Campbell’s lap, purring gently, the only one of them unconcerned by the fact that her uncle was more than two hours late.
The two waitresses who had brought the food stood on either side of the door exchanging nervous glances, concerned, embarrassed, and resisting a temptation to giggle. They quickly stood aside as the manageress entered briskly with a harrassed-looking Qian in tow. His face was flushed, colour blushing high on his cheeks beneath wide eyes that betrayed his concern.
Margaret was on her feet immediately. ‘What is it?’
Qian spoke quickly, breathlessly, in Chinese for several seconds and Margaret turned to Mei Yuan to see the colour drain from her face. She looked at Margaret and said in a small voice, ‘Li Yan has been attacked. He is in the hospital.’
* * *
Li had been drifting in and out of consciousness for some time, aware of a dazzle of overhead light, the beeping of a machine off to his left, winking green and red lights registering on the periphery of his vision. He had also been only too aware of a pain that appeared to have wrapped itself around his chest like a vice. His head throbbed, and his face felt swollen and incapable of expression. His tongue seemed extraordinarily thick in a dry mouth that tasted of blood. Just to close his eyes and slip away was a blissful escape.
Now he was aware of a shadow falling over his eyes and he opened them to see Margaret’s worried face looking down at him. He tried to smile, but his mouth hurt. ‘Sorry I was late for the betrothal,’ he said.