Chinese Whispers tct-6

by Peter May

  In the street outside, he just kept walking, blinking hard to stop the tears from filling his eyes. He was oblivious to everything around him, blinded by anger and fear and impotence, and an acute sense of loss. It was extraordinary how easy it had been to render him powerless. And completely harmless.

  In Hepinglidong Street, Chinese flags whipped in the wind outside a barber’s shop opposite a huge construction clad entirely in green netting and bamboo scaffolding. A worker with a red hard hat stood on the top of it, a green flag raised in one hand, a red one poised in the other, as a huge steel girder was lifted slowly up the outside of the building by a crane that dominated the sky above it. Its shadow followed at a discreet distance. As far as you could see, looking north, blocks of flats wrapped in green net were in various stages of construction. Li passed the entrance to a crumbling old siheyuan courtyard where rusting bicycles nestled under buckled corrugated roofing. There was a tree in the centre of the courtyard, and beyond it you could just see, through its leaves, the windows of Section One.

  Someone tugged at his arm. ‘Chief.’ He looked around and saw Wu struggling to keep up with him.

  Li did not break stride. ‘What is it, Wu?’

  ‘They told us we weren’t to talk to you, Chief.’

  ‘So why are you disobeying orders?’

  ‘You know I never liked taking orders, Chief.’ Li heard his grin, and the open-mouthed chewing of his gum. ‘Except from you, of course.’

  A blue and white wall had been built around the gap site left by the demolition of what had once been a covered food market. Li missed the old Beijing. It had all been comfortingly familiar. Now he felt like a stranger, displaced in an alien city.

  ‘Chief, I can’t keep up with you.’

  Li stopped and looked at Wu who staggered to a halt and stood gasping for air.

  ‘I had to run to catch you up,’ he said by way of explanation.

  ‘Maybe you should give up smoking,’ Li said.

  ‘What, and miss the fun of coughing my lungs up every morning?’ They stood just looking at each other for a moment. When Wu’s smile faded he looked faintly embarrassed. ‘We all know you didn’t sell that story to the Youth Daily, Chief.’

  ‘You know about that?’ Li was taken aback.

  ‘Someone’s doing a pretty good job of character assassination, Chief.’ Then he winked. ‘A few of the boys are going to have a quiet word with that journalist. And as for that shit community cop, I’ve already called CID to tell them it was the other way around. That guy assaulted me.’ He paused. ‘The boys are going to have a word with him, too.’

  Li shook his head. ‘I don’t want anyone getting into trouble.’

  ‘You’re the one that’s in trouble, Chief.’

  Li said, ‘Wu, I’m not your chief any more.’

  Wu’s jaw kept grinding away steadily on his gum. ‘Yeah, you are. Qian’s taken over as acting Chief, but everyone knows it’s just temporary. He’s staying in his old office. And no one’s getting to touch a damned thing in yours until you’re back.’

  Li felt unaccountably moved, and had to blink back the tears he felt pricking his eyes. He looked away towards Dongzhimen so that Wu wouldn’t see them. ‘I appreciate it,’ he said. He pushed his hands deep in his coat pockets and felt awkward. He looked at the ground. ‘So what’s happening?’

  Wu’s face clouded. ‘Something you need to know, Chief.’ He hesitated and Li looked up, frowning.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’ve arrested Margaret.’

  Li couldn’t believe it. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s really stupid,’ Wu said. ‘Everyone knows she’s been living with you for the last year. But officially she’s still supposed to be in that apartment across town at the University of Public Security.’

  Li looked towards the heavens. ‘In the name of the sky, Wu, they allocated that apartment to someone else more than six months ago.’

  Wu shrugged. ‘The thing is, officially she never informed her local PSB office. So technically she’s in breach of regulations.’

  ‘Which everyone knew about. From the tea boy to the goddamned minister!’

  ‘I guess it’s just another club to beat you with, Chief.’

  Li saw a taxi in the line of traffic crawling past. He waved it down. ‘Where’s she being held?’

  ‘Yuetan police station. That’s the headquarters for the Western District. It’s where she’s still registered.’

  Li opened the door of the taxi, but paused and turned back. ‘Thanks, Wu,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, Chief,’ Wu said, ‘I’ll be expecting a big promotion when you get back in the hotseat.’

  * * *

  Li sat in the back of the taxi watching the city drift past him without seeing it. Someone was trying to dismantle his life, piece by piece by piece. And they were succeeding. He had no job, no car. The life of his child had been threatened, and his lover had been arrested. He felt like a man falling down a mountain, hitting off the rocks, unable to get a hand or a foothold to stop the fall and start the long climb back. He just kept falling. And every time he looked up another rock would smash him in the face. His cellphone trilled. He took it out of his coat pocket and pressed the handset symbol. ‘Wei?’

  ‘Li Yan?’

  He knew immediately that it was his father. And he knew that something must be wrong, for his father never phoned him. ‘What is it, Dad?’ It felt odd to call him dad. He never usually addressed him as anything, and father seemed absurdly formal. But the telephone seemed to require some form of address. He heard a child crying in the background. ‘What’s happened?’

  His father seemed disorientated, his voice shaky and uncertain. ‘I’m going to miss my train back to Sichuan,’ he said. ‘Your sister did not come home for lunch. I thought maybe she and Xinxin were eating out somewhere and had forgotten to tell me. So I was fixing something to eat for myself when the school phoned.’

  ‘What school?’

  ‘Xinxin’s school.’ He sounded indignant. ‘What other school would it be?’

  ‘What did they say, Dad?’ Li contained his impatience.

  ‘They said that Xiao Ling never came to pick up Xinxin. She always picks up Xinxin at lunchtime. They thought maybe something was wrong.’

  ‘Dad, just tell me what happened.’

  ‘I went to the school myself. In a taxi. And when I got back here with Xinxin I telephoned Xiao Ling’s work. The neighbour across the landing gave me the number.’ Li bit his tongue. Details he did not need to know. ‘When I phoned, they said she had been arrested.’

  For what seemed like a lifetime, Li could not even seem to draw a breath. When finally he did, all he could say was, ‘What?’

  ‘The police raided the Jeep factory this morning and searched all the staff lockers. In Xiao Ling’s locker they found cocaine.’ The incredulity in the old man’s voice found an echo in Li’s brain.

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘She’s a good girl, Li Yan. She would not use stuff like that.’

  ‘Dad, she couldn’t afford stuff like that,’ Li said. Yet another piece of his life being taken apart. Another demonstration of the power his unknown enemy had over him. Another rock in the face. It was not just Li who was being targeted. It was his whole family. He wanted to punch the roof of the taxi, kick the seat in front of him. He wanted to yell and hit out. But instead he held it all inside himself, seething, dangerous.

  ‘Dad, just stay there with Xinxin. Don’t answer the door to anyone except me.’

  He heard the fear in his father’s voice. ‘Li Yan, what is happening?’

  ‘Just sit tight, dad. I’ll be there as soon as I can. But it’s going to be a while.’

  III

  Yuetan police station was on the corner of Yuetan Nan Jie and Yuetan Xie Jie, a block from the park. It was a modern six-storey building with a glass centrepiece on its front facade that rose through five storeys. A Chinese flag flapped in the wind above the red,
gold and blue Public Security emblem.

  Li climbed the steps and pushed through glass doors into a shining marble lobby. A uniformed policewoman sat at a desk with a telephone switchboard. She looked up with clear recognition in her face as she saw Li approaching. ‘I need to talk to the Chief of Police,’ he said.

  She fumbled nervously with the switchboard and called through to the Chief’s office to pass on his request. She listened, and her face coloured slightly. Then she hung up and said, ‘Sorry, the Chief’s not available.’

  Li clenched and unclenched his jaw. ‘What floor is his office on?’

  She seemed nonplussed. ‘The fifth. But he can’t see you.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ Li looked around for the stairs but didn’t see any. Through double doors was a public office where officials sat behind glass windows administering household and individual registrations. It was where, legally, Margaret should have notified her change of address. Li headed off in the other direction, down a long corridor.

  ‘You can’t enter the building without a pass,’ he heard the policewoman calling after him. And the sound of her heels clacking on the tiled floor followed in his wake.

  He turned a corner and found himself looking through windows into an indoor basketball court spanned by an arched glass roof. He recognised it from the promotional video they had shown at the Great Hall of the People. A recreational facility for the one hundred and twenty-two police officers based here. Three of them, in jogsuits and trainers, were bouncing a ball up and down the court, taking it in turns to shoot baskets. Li turned in disgust and started back the way he had come, almost bumping into the pursuing policewoman. ‘Where are the stairs?’ he growled.

  ‘I’m sorry, Section Chief,’ she said. ‘You can’t go up there.’

  Li wheeled around on his heels to face her. ‘Are you going to stop me?’ She just looked at him. ‘So tell me where the stairs are.’

  ‘There’s an elevator at the far side of the lobby,’ she said meekly.

  ‘Thank you.’ Li strode back into the lobby and crossed it to the brushed chrome doors of the elevator. As he stepped inside and turned to press the button for the fifth floor, he saw the policewoman, back at her desk, lifting the phone. The doors slid shut, and the elevator whisked him smoothly up through five floors to a white-painted landing where gold characters on a dark blue mural urged officers to Try To Be Best. Corridors ran off left and right. From the right, a small round man in the uniform of a Superintendent, First Class, emerged from an office with a plaque above the door which read, Logistics. Beyond him, Li saw a large reception room, and a door into the Chief’s office. The logistics officer blocked his way.

  ‘The Chief is not on duty today,’ he said. Introductions were not necessary. Clearly he had been the recipient of the phone call from the lobby.

  ‘I’ll see his deputy, then.’ Li looked along the doors that lined the corridor. At least three of them were labelled, Deputy Chief.

  ‘Not available.’

  ‘One of them’s got to be here.’ Li pushed past the little man and started opening the doors of the deputies’ offices. The first two were empty. The logistics officer trailed along behind him. The third was empty, too.

  ‘I told you, he’s not available.’

  ‘He must be in the building. There always has to be someone in charge of the building.’ Li glared at the smaller man. ‘I’m not leaving until I see him.’

  The logistics officer sighed. ‘He’s in the gym.’

  ‘The gym? Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s on the top floor. If you’ll just wait a minute I’ll call him.’ The logistics officer turned back towards his office.

  ‘No time,’ Li said, and he strode off down the other corridor. There had to be a stairwell. He found it at the south end of the building, and climbed the stairs two at a time. On the landing the same armed policewoman with whom he had become familiar on the wall of Commissioner Zhu’s reception room, gazed down at him from a framed poster. He noticed, absurdly, and for the first time, that she was quite attractive, and he wondered if she was really a policewoman, or just a model dressed up for the photoshoot.

  The gym occupied the whole of the top floor. A telephone was ringing, unanswered. There were three table tennis tables, a pool table, a row of comfortable leather armchairs lined up against the end wall. Sunshine streamed in windows all along one side. The walls were lined with photographs of winning police football teams. At the far end was an impressive collection of muscle-building machinery and aerobic exercisers. At first Li thought it was deserted, then the clang of heavy weights from the other side of the gym attracted his attention. The Deputy Chief was dressed in shorts and a singlet, reclined on his back along a low bench beneath a stand supporting a bar with transferable weights on either end. With upstretched arms he was lifting the bar from its cradle, and then lowering to his chest and raising it again in sets of five. Air escaped from his lips in loud bursts, like pneumatic brakes on a truck. The telephone stopped ringing.

  Li wandered slowly across the shiny floor of the gym until he was standing almost above the deputy. On the wall was a poster of a golden-haired woman with a man’s body wearing a ridiculously tiny bikini top. Opposite was a poster of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, looking for all the world as if someone had stuck a bicycle pump into some orifice and blown him up. Perhaps it was the Deputy Chief’s ambition to look like him. Li glanced down. If it was, he had a long way to go. He had short arms and legs, and a wiry, if muscular, body. He would never be a Schwarzenegger. Li waited until the fifth lift, and then leaned over to stop the Deputy putting the bar back in its cradle. The Deputy gasped, and arms already aching from the lifts started shaking with the strain of holding up the bar. If they gave way, the bar would come down with enough force to crush his chest.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted.

  Li said quite calmly. ‘You’re holding my partner and my son, and I want them back.’

  ‘Who the …?’ To the Deputy Chief, Li’s face was upside down. He tilted his head to one side to get a better look. ‘You’ve been suspended,’ he said, and gasped again as the pain in his arms started to become unbearable.

  ‘And you think that gives you the right to fuck with my family?’

  ‘You’re through, Li. All washed up.’ He groaned. ‘I’m going to drop this!’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Li said. ‘Not about dropping the bar. You probably will. And it’ll probably take them days to recover all the bits of rib from your lungs. But you’re wrong about me being washed up. Because the charges against me are false. And in a day, or a week, or a month, I will be restored to my rank and position. And when that happens, I’m going to make your life so unpleasant you’re going to wish you’d dropped this bar on your head.’

  ‘Okay, okay, okay!’ The Deputy Chief almost screamed. The veins on his arms were standing out like ropes, and Li could see the elbows starting to give. He pulled the bar back in line with the cradle and the Deputy let go of it, immediately wheeling around to sit on the edge of the bench, doubled over, flexing his arms and moaning from the pain of it. ‘You bastard!’

  ‘Believe it,’ Li said.

  The Deputy cast him a sideways glance. ‘If I had a witness, you’d go down for this.’

  ‘I want Margaret and Li Jon now,’ Li said. ‘Or I’ll drop the fucking bar on your head myself.’ He cast his eyes around the gym. ‘No witnesses to that, either.’

  The Deputy Chief got to his feet, folding his arms across his chest, and massaging aching upper arm muscles with his fingers. ‘We could only have held them for forty-eight hours. And after that it doesn’t matter. She’ll have to leave the country anyway.’

  ‘What?’ Li was caught completely off guard.

  A slow, bitter smile spread across the Deputy’s face. A small revenge. ‘Didn’t you know, Section Chief Li? Your little American lover has had her visa refused. She’s got to be on a plane home by Saturday.’r />
  * * *

  By the time the Deputy Chief of the Yuetan police station was back in uniform he had recovered a little of his dignity and composure. He would not attempt to stop Li from taking Margaret and Li Jon away with him, but it was not something he would forget in a hurry. Li had made himself another enemy. He held himself stiffly as he took Li down to the ground floor and through to the control room. Officers sat behind glass at a bank of computer screens and telephones, in constant radio contact with all the patrol cars in the district

  Li looked around. ‘Where are the cells?’ He had a grim picture in his head of Margaret behind metal grilles in a locksafe door, sitting miserably on a hard bunk bed cradling Li Jon.

  ‘We don’t have cells here,’ the Deputy Chief said, imagining the picture that Li had in his head, and bristling at it. ‘Suspects are detained in interview rooms, monitored by closed-circuit TV. Nobody gets abused in this station.’ They passed a glass-walled detention room and the Deputy stopped outside a door marked Family Room. ‘She’s in here. Normally we use this place to mediate in family disputes. Kind of appropriate, don’t you think?’ He opened the door.

  Margaret was sitting at a highly polished, six-sided table reading her copy of the Ripper book, her coat hanging over the back of her chair. Li Jon was asleep in his buggy beside her. She looked up as the door opened and saw Li. She was on her feet and across the room and in his arms almost before he could cross the threshold. ‘Oh, God, Li Yan …’ Her fingers dug into the back of his neck. ‘I’ve been so scared. I knew you’d come and get me, I knew it.’ She broke away and looked at him, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘They’ve refused to renew my visa. They say I have to be out the country by Saturday.’

  Li nodded grimly. ‘I heard.’