by Peter May
‘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 k
nown 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.’