The Firemaker

by Peter May

  “No, let’s stick with your little finger,” Margaret said, “since your penis probably isn’t any bigger.”

  He grinned. “Bear with me. My little finger represents a penis, representing a virus I’m going to put into the rice. Okay? Now imagine I slip a rubber over my penis.” And he ran his forefinger and thumb down the length of his little finger. “And this represents the protein overcoat of the virus. Because, after all, what is a virus except a gene with a protein overcoat?”

  Margaret nodded. “Okay.”

  McCord said, “So, to this overcoat I attach the gene fragments I want to introduce to the rice—the stuff that’s going to make it disease and insect-resistant. We insert the virus into the rice, like the penis into the vagina. Only, once inside the rubber slips off and sends my gene fragments to all the right places, like sperm to the egg.” He sat back, pleased with himself, and drained his glass.

  Margaret was incensed. “So, effectively, you’ve contaminated the entire rice crop of China with a virus.”

  McCord nodded happily. “Sure. But it’s a harmless plant virus. Hell, we eat the damned things all the time. And a virus is the best carrier for the genes. ’Cos, you see, a virus only has one aim in life, and that’s to reproduce. So it carries the genes into every cell, and bingo! We just helped Mother Nature do a better job.”

  Margaret shook her head. “I can’t believe you’ve actually gone into production with this stuff, that you actually think you’re somewhere up there with ‘Mother Nature.’ Jesus Christ, McCord, you’re tinkering at the edges of a billion years of evolution. You can’t possibly know what kind of monster you’re releasing into the environment.”

  “Dr. McCord,” a friendly voice boomed out, and a big hand slapped down on his shoulder.

  Margaret looked up, startled to see Bob with Li Yan and Li’s animated friend from the table downstairs. It was the friend who had greeted McCord with such bonhomie. McCord looked up at him, confused.

  “What . . . Who the hell are you?”

  “Ma Yongli. Chef at the Jingtan. Don’t you remember? Good friend of Lotus. She’s waiting for you back at the hotel.” He grinned and winked.

  “Is she? I didn’t know that.”

  “She says you made an arrangement.”

  “Really? Jeez, I don’t remember.”

  Yongli almost lifted him out of his chair. “Come on. We’ll get you a taxi. Don’t want keep Lotus waiting, huh?”

  “Hell, no.”

  And Yongli led him off towards the stairs. Bob shook Li’s hand. “Thanks, Li Yan. Appreciate it.”

  Li smiled. “My pleasure.” He nodded acknowledgement to Professor Jiang and they exchanged a few words. He nodded to the others around the table until his eyes fell on Margaret. The clear contempt they held for her had an almost withering effect and she flushed with embarrassment and lowered her eyes. And she wished with all her heart that she had never come to China. When she looked up again he had gone. A buzz of conversation broke out around the table and Bob pulled up a chair beside her.

  “Not the most auspicious of starts,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “I didn’t invite him,” she said.

  “You didn’t have to engage him in open warfare.”

  “I wouldn’t have had to if you people had had the balls to tell him where to go.”

  “We couldn’t!” Bob was in danger of raising his voice. He stopped himself and lowered it again. “McCord has connections in this town. His whole rice project had the backing of Pang Xiaosheng, former Minister of Agriculture, now a member of the Politburo—and a national hero. It was Pang who persuaded the leadership to do the deal with Grogan Industries, and it’s Pang who’s reaped the rewards. He’s the bookie’s favourite to be the next leader of the People’s Republic.” Bob stopped to draw a grim breath. “And you don’t fuck with people like that, Margaret.”

  It was dark outside as Li and Yongli escorted the now semiconscious McCord through the tunnel from the restaurant to the street. A sleepy trishaw driver lingering in the carpark raised a hopeful eye, assessed the situation, and relapsed into a semi-slumber. The traffic had not abated, and the street was still crowded, ablaze with the lights of neons and vehicles. Li waved at an air-conditioned taxi, but it was occupied and sailed past. He turned and whispered to Yongli, “He’s going to be pretty disappointed when he finds out that Lotus isn’t waiting for him back at the hotel.”

  Yongli shrugged. “I’ll give her a call. She’ll take care of him.”

  Li looked at his friend with complete incomprehension. “You’d ask her to do that?”

  “Why not? The guy’s drunk. It’s not as though he’d be any threat. She’s dealt with him before.”

  Li shook his head. He knew he would never understand his friend’s relationship with Lotus. He waved down another taxi, but a black Volvo with darkened windows swung into the space at the kerb and blocked it off. The taxi driver honked his horn furiously, but decided against an argument with the Volvo and screeched away in a temper. A large, uniformed chauffeur stepped out and took McCord’s arm from Yongli. “I’ll take Dr. McCord,” he said.

  “Back to the hotel?” Yongli was puzzled by the sudden appearance of the chauffeur-driven limousine.

  “No. He has an appointment elsewhere.” The chauffeur opened the back door and bundled McCord unceremoniously inside.

  “Hey, I got a rendezvous with Lotus,” McCord protested, suddenly aware that plans were being changed over his head. The door was slammed shut on him and he disappeared from view behind the tinted windows. The chauffeur slipped behind the wheel, and the car whispered away into the traffic.

  “Government car,” Yongli said thoughtfully. “Wonder where they’re taking him?”

  Li knew better than even to think of asking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I

  Tuesday Morning

  Buses and bicycles fought for space among the people and traffic that clogged the narrow artery that was Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie Street. It ran north to south, bisecting the centre-east of the city. Cycling north along it took Li directly into the heart of Dongcheng District, where the Beijing Municipal Police had sited the new operational headquarters of Section One. The final stretch before the intersection with Dongzhimennei Street was heavily shaded by leaning, leafy trees, and was a deliciously cool escape from the early morning heat. Li coasted the last few hundred yards, enjoying the respite, and pulled over at the corner of Dongzhimennei. Mei Yuan greeted him with her usual, “Hi, have you eaten?”

  And he responded with his customary, “Yes, I have eaten.” And she began preparing his breakfast. The familiar greeting, ritually exchanged between Beijingers, had little to do with food but much to do with friendship.

  Li parked his bike and leaned against the wall, watching Mei Yuan at work. She had a round, unlined face with beautifully slanted almond eyes that sparkled with mischief. Her dark hair, showing only a trace of grey at the temples, was drawn back in a tight bun and wrapped in a green scarf. Dimples in her cheeks became like deep scars when she smiled, which was often. For the moment, her concentration was on the preparation of his jian bing on the hot plate in the replica house that stood on the back of her three-wheeled cycle. Its corrugated roof, pitched and pink, had tiny curled eaves, and sat over sliding glass screens that protected the gas hot plate and Mei Yuan’s cooking ingredients. She splashed a ladleful of watery batter over the hot plate and it sizzled as it quickly cooked and set. Then she flipped the pancake over and broke an egg on to it, spreading it thinly. Smearing this with hoi sin and a little chili, she sprinkled it with chopped spring onion and broke a large piece of deep-fried whipped egg white into its centre. She then folded it in four, wrapped it in brown paper, and handed it to Li in exchange for two yuan. She watched with satisfaction as he bit hungrily into the steaming savoury pancake. “Wonderful,” he said, wiping a smear of hoi sin from the corner of his mouth. “If I didn’t have to share an apartment with my uncle I would marry you.�
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  She laughed heartily. “I’m old enough to be your mother.”

  “But my mother never made jian bing the way you do.”

  In truth, his mother had never made jian bing. And had the world turned another way, Mei Yuan would not have had to. In another era she might, perhaps, have been a lecturer at the university, or a senior civil servant. Li inclined his head a little to catch the title of the book she had stuffed down the back of her saddle. Descartes’ Meditations. He looked at her plump little hands, scarred by a thousand tiny burns, and felt the pain of her life in his heart. A generation cursed by the twelve years of madness that was the Cultural Revolution. And yet if she had regrets, there was no hint of them in that dimpled smile and those mischievous eyes.

  She had not missed him noticing her book. “I’ll lend it to you when I’m finished. He was an extraordinary man.” She smiled. “I think, therefore I am.” It would have taken her a long time to save up enough money to buy the book, so her offer to lend it to him was an extraordinary act of generosity and trust.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I would like that. And I will be sure to return it to you when I have read it.” He filled his mouth with more jian bing. “So. Do you have an answer?”

  She grinned. “The third person in the queue must have been his wife. You tried to make me think it was a man.”

  “No, no. I didn’t try to make you think anything. You assumed it was a man. It was only when you stopped making that assumption that you realised who she was.”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “Not very clever. But effective.”

  “So what have you got for me?” He devoured the last of his jian bing and threw the wrapper in the bin.

  “Two men,” she said. “And there is no ambiguity here.” She twinkled. “One of them is the keeper of every book in the world, giving him access to the source of all knowledge. Knowledge is power, so this makes him a very powerful man. The other possesses only two sticks. Yet this gives him more power than the other. Why?”

  Li turned it over quickly in his head, but no solution came immediately to mind. “It’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  He winked and glanced at the fob watch he kept in a leather pouch on his belt. “Got to go. Zai jian.” And he flicked his bike stand up with his foot. She watched with affection as the tall figure in short-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers dodged the traffic to cross Dongzhimennei Street. Somewhere in this vast country, she liked to believe, lived the son she had been separated from almost thirty years ago, when Red Guards had dragged her off to the labour camp. He would be about Li’s age now. And it was her fervent hope that he might have turned out something like him.

  Li cycled up the gentle slope to the corner of Beixinqiao Santiao, where the square, flat-roofed, four-storey brick building that housed Section One sat discreetly behind a screen of trees. Past the traditional revolving sign of a barber shop, the musty smell of damp hair and the snip of scissors as he passed its door, he was still turning over Mei Yuan’s riddle in his head. Two sticks. Were they chopsticks? No, why would that give the man power? Were they big sticks with which he could beat the other man to death? If so, why would he require two? Focusing his mind on the problem calmed the butterflies in his stomach reflecting the self-doubts that dogged the start of his first day as Deputy Section Chief. He turned in past the red-roofed garage and parked his bicycle. A uniformed officer came down the steps from the door of Section One. He gave Li a wave. “Heard the good news, Li Yan. Congratulations.”

  Li grinned. “My ancestors must have been watching over me.” Important to seem confident, not to be taking it too seriously.

  He went inside, turned right, and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Everyone he met in the corridor—a secretary, another uniformed officer, a rookie detective—offered their congratulations. It was becoming embarrassing. There were only two officers in the detectives’ room when he went in, Qu and Gao. Both had been with Section One longer than he, and were now a rank below him. Qu winked. “Morning, boss.” There was a heavy ironical stress on the word “boss,” but it was fond rather than rancorous. Li was popular with the other detectives.

  “Come to get your stuff?” Gao asked. “Can’t wait to move into your new office, eh?”

  Strangely, Li realised, he hadn’t given that a thought. He had been heading instinctively for his old desk. He glanced, almost with regret, around the cluttered detectives’ office with its jumble of desks and filing cabinets, walls plastered with memos and posters and photographs of crime scenes past and present.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Qu said. “One of the girls’ll put your stuff in a box and take it through. Chief wants to see you.”

  Section Chief Chen Anming rose from his desk as Li came into his office and shook his hand. “Well done, Li Yan. You deserve it.”

  “Thanks, Chief. That’s what I’ve been telling everyone.”

  But Chen didn’t smile. He sat down again, distracted, and shuffled some papers on his desk. He was a lean, silver-headed man in his late fifties from Hunan province. A chain-smoker, years of cigarette smoke had streaked his hair yellow above his right temple. He wore a permanently dour expression, and the girls in the typing pool had been known to run a book on days of the month on which he might smile. “Busy start for you. Three suspicious deaths overnight. Two of them look pretty much like murder, the third could be a suicide. A charred body in Ritan Park. Still burning when it was discovered. Can of gasoline near by. Looks like he doused himself, squatted among the trees and lit a match. Bizarre stuff. Qian Yi’s already there. I’ve dispatched Wu and Zhao to the suspected murders. You’d better have a look at the suicide, just in case. Then debrief the other two and let me know what you think.”

  Several hundred curious onlookers had gathered by the lakeside among the willows. Word had swept like wildfire through the nearby market streets, and rumours of death in the park held the promise of drama; a kind of street theatre, something to break the monotonous repetition of their daily lives. Nearly sixty uniformed officers had been assigned to crowd control. Several plainclothes policemen moved among the spectators, listening to gossip and speculation in the hope of picking up even the smallest piece of information that might prove useful. From across the water, where people were packed in under the shade of the pavilion, from above the babble of voices, came the mournful wail of a single-stringed violin, like a dirge for the dead. The rest of the park was deserted.

  Li inched his way through the crowd in a dark blue Jeep, red light flashing on the roof, horn sounding. People were reluctant to get out of the way. Curious faces stared in at him as he squeezed past, but he was oblivious. Confidence had returned. He was back on home territory, doing what he was good at. Finally, at the north side of the lake, he drew into an area that had been cleared and taped off by the uniformed police. Several other vehicles, including an ambulance and a forensics van, were already there. As he got out of the Jeep, a uniformed officer pointed up a dusty slope to the trees beyond.

  At the top of the rise, Li stepped over the line of powdered chalk that ringed the potential crime scene and caught his first scent of burnt human flesh. It would linger in his nostrils for hours to come. He curled his upper lip and clenched his teeth firmly to prevent his stomach from heaving. The dead man, or woman, was still squatting in the centre of the clearing, a stiff, blackened figure in the shape of a human. And yet there was something strangely unhuman about the corpse, as if it might have been the abstract creation of a sculptor chiselling roughly in ebony. The charred debris of the victim’s clothes was scattered around it. The leaves of nearby trees had been scorched by the intensity of the heat. Lights had been erected, and the corpse was being photographed from various angles. Two forensics officers wearing white gloves were combing the area for anything that might throw some illumination on the events of little over an hour before. A doctor from the pathology department at the Centre of Criminal Techn
ological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong, Dr. Wang Xing, also in white gloves, stood talking to Detective Qian on the far side of the clearing. Qian saw Li arrive, detached himself from the doctor, and made his way carefully around the perimeter of the clearing. He shook Li’s hand. “Congratulations on the promotion, boss.”

  Li acknowledged with the faintest nod. “What’s the verdict?”

  Qian shrugged. “Well, all the doc can tell us at this stage is that it’s a male. If he was carrying ID then it’s been destroyed.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Burning’s the obvious choice, but until they get him on the slab they won’t know for sure. Doc says an autopsy on a body in this state’s a bit specialised. They’ll probably have to send it up to the pathology lab at the university. Identification could be a problem. All we’ve found so far are the remains of a Zippo cigarette lighter, a charred signet ring and a belt buckle. Nothing particularly distinguishing about any of them.”

  “The gasoline can?”

  “Just an ordinary can. They’re dusting it for prints. No sign of a struggle, but then it would be hard to tell. The ground’s baked hard here. It hasn’t rained in weeks. Oh, and we found this . . .” He removed a clear plastic evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to let Li see the cigarette end inside. “Looks like he had a last cigarette before pouring gasoline all over himself and igniting his lighter.”

  Li took the bag and examined the cigarette end closely. It had been stamped out before burning down to the tip, and the brand name was still clearly legible. Marlboro. “How come the cigarette end didn’t burn up in the fire?”

  “It wasn’t next to the body. Forensics found it over there.” He pointed to the west side of the clearing.

  Li was thoughtful for a moment. “Anyone see him arriving?”

  Qian made a moue with his lips and exhaled sharply through them. “Nobody’s come forward yet. We’re trying to get the names of everyone who was in the park from six this morning. A lot of them will be the same people who come every day. Someone might have seen a man carrying a can, but it isn’t much of a description to offer them. I’ve already spoken to the ticket clerk but she has no recollection. Until we know who he is and maybe get a photograph . . .” He shrugged.