by Peter May
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.’
Chapter Ten
I
Traffic in the city had already ground to a halt. And there was not even light, yet, in the sky. Li hobbled past lines of stationary vehicles blocking all six lanes on Jianguomenwai Avenue. A few taxis were making their way gingerly along the cycle lanes, cyclists weaving past them on both sides, leaving drunken tracks in the snow. He would have to take the subway to Section One, for what would probably be his last time.
Margaret was still asleep when he left. He had no idea when either of them had drifted off, finally, to escape from their stalemate for a few short hours. But he had wakened early and lay listening to her slow, steady breathing on the pillow beside him. She had looked so peaceful, so innocent in sleep, this woman he loved. This pig-headed, stubborn, utterly unreasonable woman he loved.
He walked quickly to burn up anger and frustration. Not just with Margaret, but with everything in his life. With a bureaucracy that wouldn’t allow him to marry her and still keep his job. With an investigation that grew more obscure the more he uncovered. With his father for blaming him unreasonably for things that were not his fault. With himself for not being able to solve his own problems. With his Uncle Yifu for not being there when he needed him most.
And still the snow fell.
He reached the subway station at Jianguomen, and limped down the steps. Warm air rushed up to meet him. He bought a ticket and stood on a crowded platform waiting for a train going north. A southbound train, headed for Beijing Railway Station, came in on the other line, debouching a handful of passengers before sucking in all the people on the far side of the platform.
Li had seen the face of the driver in his cab as it came in, pale and weary in the early morning, caught for a moment in the dazzle of lights on the platform. As it left, he saw the guard peering from the side window of the cab at the other end. Had the train come in on Li’s side, heading in the other direction, their roles would have been reversed. And he realised consciously for the first time that the trains were reversible. They could be driven from either end. The same going forwards as backwards. And he wondered why something tucked away in the farthest and darkest recesses of his mind was telling him that there was significance in this.
His train arrived, and he squeezed into it to stand clutching an overhead handrail, using his free arm to protect his ribs from the other passengers crushing in around him. The recorded voice of a female announcer told them that the next stop was Chaoyangmen. And the significance of the reversible train came to him quite unexpectedly. It was Mei Yuan’s riddle. About the I Ching expert and the girl who came to consult him on his sixty-sixth birthday. Somewhere, beyond awareness, his subconscious had been chipping away at it, and now that the solution had come to him, he wondered why he had not seen it immediately. It was breath-takingly simple.
At Dongzhimen he struggled painfully to the top of the stairs, emerging once more into the cold, bitter wind that blew the snow in from the Gobi Desert. The sky was filled with a purple-grey light now, and the traffic was grinding slowly in both directions along Ghost Street. The demolition men were out already, thankful for once to be wielding their hammers, burning energy to keep themselves warm. The snow lay in ledges along every branch of every tree lining both sides of the street, on walls and window-sills and doorways, so that it felt as if the whole world were edged in white. Even the gap sites looked less ugly under their pristine, sparkling carpets.
Li was surprised to see Mei Yuan serving customers at her usual corner, steam rising in the cold from her hotplate as she scooped up jian bing in brown paper parcels to hand over in exchange for cash. She had rigged up an umbrella from her bicycle stall to fen
d off the snow as she worked. But the wind was defeating it, and large, soft flakes blew in all around her.
‘You’re early,’ he said to her.
She looked up, surprised. ‘So are you.’ There was a moment of awkwardness between them. Unfinished business from the betrothal meeting, unspoken exchanges. Confusion and sympathy. Perhaps a little anger. She said, ‘I’m going to the park later today. With Mrs. Campbell. She expressed an interest in tai chi.’
‘Did she?’ But he wasn’t really interested.
‘Would you like a jian bing?’
He nodded, the smell of the pancakes making him realise for the first time just how hungry he was. Although his head was protected by the hood of his jacket, the snow blew in all around his face, making it wet and cold. Big flakes clung to his eyebrows. He brushed them away. ‘I’m sorry about last night.’
She shrugged. ‘Someday, perhaps, you’ll feel like telling me about it.’
‘Someday,’ he said. And he watched her make his jian bing in silence. When finally she finished it and handed it to him, steaming and deliciously hot in his hands, he took a bite and said, ‘I figured out your riddle.’
‘You took your time,’ was all she said.
‘I had other things on my mind.’
She waited, but when he said nothing, grew impatient. ‘Well?’
He took another bite and spoke with his mouth full, savouring both the pancake and his solution. ‘Wei Chang was the I Ching practitioner, right?’ She nodded. ‘He was born on the second of February, nineteen twenty-five, and he was sixty-six on the day the young woman came to see him. That meant the date was February the second, nineteen ninety-one.’ She nodded again. ‘If you were to write that down it would be 2-2-1991. He wanted to add her age to that and then reverse the number to make a code specially for her. Of course, you didn’t tell me her age. But for this number to be so unusual, so auspicious, the woman had to be twenty-two. That way, the number he was making up for her would be 22199122, yes? Which makes it palindromic. The same backwards as forwards.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘I was beginning to despair of you ever working it out.’
‘I was distracted.’
‘So I gather.’
But he did not want to get into that. ‘Where did you come across it?’
‘I didn’t. I made it up.’
He looked at her surprised. ‘Really? How in the name of your ancestors did you think of it?’
‘The English book I was reading on Napoleon Bonaparte,’ she said. ‘Not a very serious biography. The writer seemed more intent on making a fool of the Frenchman. He referred to an old joke about Bonaparte’s exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. He was alleged to have said on arriving there, Able was I ere I saw Elba. A perfect palindrome. Exactly the same forwards as backwards. Entirely apocryphal, of course. He was French! Why would he speak in English? But it gave me the idea, and since a palindrome wouldn’t work in Chinese, I made it with numbers instead.’
Li grinned at her, forgetting all his troubles for the moment. ‘You’re a smart lady, Mei Yuan. Did anyone ever tell you that?’
‘All the time.’ She smiled, and the tension between them melted like the snow on her hotplate. ‘It’s an interesting book. I’ll lend it to you if you like.’
‘I don’t have much time for reading just now.’
‘You should always make time for reading, Li Yan. And anyway, there’s an element of criminal investigation in it. That should interest you.’
And Li thought how very soon he would have no interest of any kind in criminal investigation. ‘Oh?’
Mei Yuan’s eyes grew distant, and Li knew that she had transported herself to some other place on this earth. It was why she loved to read. Her escape from the cold and the drudgery of making pancakes on a street corner. In this case, her destination was the island of St Helena – the place of Napoleon’s final exile – and a debate now nearly two centuries old. ‘When the British finally defeated Napoleon,’ she said, ‘he was banished to a tiny island in the South Atlantic where he died in 1821. It has long been rumoured and written that he was actually murdered there to prevent his escape and return to France. It was said that his food was laced with arsenic, and that he died from poisoning.’ She reached behind her saddle and pulled out the book, holding it with a kind of reverence. ‘But according to this, a medical archaeologist from Canada disproved the murder theory nearly one hundred and eighty years after Napoleon’s death.’
In spite of his mood and the cold and the snow, Li found his interest engaged. ‘How?’
‘Locks of his hair were taken at autopsy and kept for posterity. This medical archaeologist, Doctor Peter Lewin, got access to the hair and was able to conduct an analysis of it which disproved the theory of murder by poisoning.’
Li frowned. ‘How could he tell that from examining the hair?’
‘Apparently the hair is like a kind of log of chemicals and poisons that pass through our bodies. Doctor Lewin contended that if Napoleon had, indeed, been poisoned, there would still be traces of the arsenic that killed him in his hair. He found none.’
But Li was no longer interested in Napoleon. He was a long way from St Helena and arsenic poisoning. He was in an autopsy room looking at a young swimmer with a shaven head. To her surprise, he took Mei Yuan’s red smiling face in his hands and kissed her. ‘Thank you, Mei Yuan. Thank you.’
II
Margaret woke late, disorientated, panicked by unfamiliar surroundings. It was a full five seconds before she remembered where she was, and the blanks in her memory started filling themselves in like the component parts of a page on the internet. Li. Making love. Triads. His resignation. Fighting. His words coming back to her. I quit the force tonight. Like the cold steel of an autopsy knife slipping between her ribs. But she could feel no anger. Only his pain. And she wished that she could make it go away.
But nothing was going to go away. Not this hotel room, nor the bruised sky spitting snow at the window. Nor her mother waking alone in her tiny apartment, nor this baby that was growing and growing inside her.
Or the strange, nagging idea that had haunted her dreams, and was still there in her waking moments, not quite formed and not entirely within her grasp.
She slipped out of bed and took a shower, trying to wash away her depression with hot, running water. But like the scent of the soap, it lingered long after. She dressed and hurried downstairs, glancing furtively at the reception desk as she passed, hoping that Li had paid the bill and that she would not be stopped at the door like some common prostitute.
As the revolving door propelled her out on to the sidewalk, the cold hit her like a physical blow. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath, and saw that the traffic in the avenue was still gridlocked in the snow. No chance of a taxi.
It took her an hour to get back to her apartment, trudging the last twenty minutes through snow from the subway station. One side of her was white where the wind had driven the thick, soft flakes against her coat and her jeans. Her face had frozen rigid by the time she stepped into the elevator. Even had she felt the desire to smile at the sullen operator, her facial muscles would not have obliged. She peeled off her red ski hat and shook out the hair she had flattened beneath it. At least her ears were still warm.
‘Mom,’ she called out as she let herself into the apartment. But there were no lights on, and it felt strangely empty. ‘Mom?’ She checked the bedroom, but the bed had been made and the room tidied. Her mother was not in the kitchen or the toilet, and the sitting room was empty. There was a note on the gate-leg table beside her laptop. It was written in Mei Yuan’s careful hand.
I have taken your mother to Zhongshan Park to teach her tai chi in the snow.
Margaret felt hugely relieved. Her mother was the last person she had felt like facing right now. She switched on the overhead light and saw her own reflection in the window, and realised that she did not much want to deal with herself either. She switched the light of
f again and sat down at the table, turning on her laptop. The idea that had germinated in her sleep, taken root and poked through into her waking world, was still there. She did not want to try to bring it too sharply into focus in case she lost it. At least, not just yet.
She connected to the Internet, searched through the list of sites she had visited most recently, and pulled up the Time article on Hans Fleischer. She read it all through again, very slowly, very carefully, and then returned to the top of the profile. He had graduated from Potsdam with a double degree in sports medicine and genetics. Genetics. She scrolled down through the article again and stopped near the foot of it. After his time in Berlin he had returned to Nitsche, where he was said to have been involved in the development of a new method of stimulating natural hormone production. These things had lodged very consciously with her yesterday. But there had been so many other things competing for space in her thoughts. It was sleep which had found room for them there, and brought them fizzing to the surface. And now the idea they had sparked was taking tangible shape in her waking mind.
She grabbed her coat from where it was still dripping melting snow on to the kitchen floor, and pulled on her ski cap and gloves, a vision of the runner with the purple birthmark filling her mind with a bleak sense of urgency. She had only just stepped into the elevator and asked the girl to take her to the ground floor when the phone rang in her apartment. But the doors closed before she heard it.
* * *
Li tapped his desk impatiently, listening to the long, single ring of the phone go unanswered at the other end. He waited nearly a minute before he hung up. It was the third time he had called. He had phoned the hotel some time earlier, but she had already left. Reception did not know when. There was a knock at the door and Qian poked his head around it. ‘Got a moment, Chief?’
Li nodded. ‘Sure.’ He felt a pang of regret. After today nobody would call him ‘Chief’ any more.