The Firemaker

by Peter May

  Following their exchange in the autopsy room, Li had been cold and distant. Margaret wondered if this was a response to her jibe about taking two years to solve a murder, or whether it was a repeat performance of his mood swing of yesterday. Despite the fact that he had asked her along, she had the strong feeling that he resented her presence. They drove east in uncomfortable silence through the late morning traffic along West Xuanwumen Avenue, a huge loop of six-lane freeway that marked the outer boundary of the inner city. Bamboo scaffolding scaled concrete towers. High among the structures, tiny figures in blue, with yellow hard hats, moved easily around the skeleton blocks. Giant cranes swung back and forth overhead, like prehistoric monsters stalking a concrete landscape. Margaret’s growing resentment at Li’s silence finally found voice. “Look, if you don’t want me around, just say so. Stop the car now and I’ll get a taxi back to the university.”

  “What are you talking about?” He seemed perplexed, but made no move to pull over.

  “I’m talking about you resenting every minute you have to spend in my company. This may be news to you, but it wasn’t my idea to get involved in any of this. I didn’t offer my help. You asked for it.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “My chief asked for it.”

  “And don’t you just hate the fact that your chief thought you could use the help of some foreigner.”

  “I don’t need your help.” He flashed an angry glance at her across the Jeep.

  “No? And how long would it have taken you to identify Chao Heng without me?”

  “We would have identified Chao Heng in time.” His voice was steady and controlled.

  “Yeah, six weeks from now. And you’d probably still be looking at a suicide. Are you going to let me out or not?”

  Li kept driving. “You know, what I don’t understand is why you ever came here in the first place.” He knew that somewhere in this area she was vulnerable.

  “That’s none of your business!”

  But he was not going to be deflected. “I mean, when I went to the States I spent months reading up on it. Constitution, law enforcement, culture . . . Hah.” He laughed out loud. “If it’s possible to use the words American and culture in the same breath.” She glared at him. “You decide to come to China, and what do you do? Nothing. You prepare nothing, you know nothing. About our law enforcement, our history, our culture. You’re in the country five minutes and you’re shouting the odds in the street about male attitudes to women drivers. You pick a fight in a restaurant and offend your hosts who’ve gone to great expense to welcome you.”

  “Welcome me?” Margaret spluttered her indignation. “From the moment I arrived in this goddamn country people have been telling me what not to do, what not to say, in case I stepped on your precious Chinese sensibilities. You know, you people ought to lighten up and join the rest of us in what will very shortly be the twenty-first century.” She immediately raised a hand. “And don’t tell me about your five-thousand-year history. I’ve already had that lecture. How you invented paper and the printing press.”

  “And the crossbow, and the umbrella, and the seismograph, and the steam engine—about a thousand years before the Europeans thought of it,” Li said.

  “Jesus,” Margaret gasped. “Spare me. Please.”

  But Li was on a roll. “And what has America given the world? The hamburger and the hot dog?”

  Margaret was stung. “We invented the light bulb, the means of generating electricity on a commercial scale, the gramophone, the motion picture. We put the first men on the moon, invented the microchip, the personal computer, developed technologies that allow people to communicate around the world in nanoseconds, and send pictures from Mars with better definition than Chinese television. Jesus, everything you people did was in the past. All you can do is look back. We’re doing it now.”

  Li flushed with anger, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “Oh yes? And just what exactly is it you are doing now?” He raised a hand to stop her answering. “No, no, let me tell you. You stomp around the world like overbearing school bullies, self-appointed world policemen telling the rest of us how to live and how to behave. And if we don’t knuckle down and conform to your moral code, you’re just as likely to give us a bloody nose. You preach about freedom and democracy, and practise racial and political discrimination.”

  “That’s rich, coming from someone with your country’s human rights record!”

  Li swung the Jeep hard left, honking his horn and driving like a man possessed. They swept past Mao’s mausoleum on their left, and the great expanse of Tiananmen Square opened up before them, the orange-tiled roof of the Gate of Heavenly Peace shimmering in the hazy middle distance. “Don’t start,” he said. Hours of listening to his uncle debating world politics with his cronies had given him a good grasp of events over the past thirty years. “You’ll be telling me next how the United States had no part in supporting the murderous regime of the Shah of Iran, or in the downfall of the democratically elected president of Chile. That the United States was justified in dropping Agent Orange and napalm on innocent women and children in Vietnam, or in supporting tinpot dictators who were bleeding their people dry, because it suited US strategic policy.”

  “What about the thousands of political prisoners held in Chinese jails without trial?”

  “That’s history. Myth.”

  “Oh yes?” She waved her hand out of the window at the square. “And I suppose it’s a myth that your government sent armed soldiers and tanks into this very square to mow down hundreds of unarmed students engaged in peaceful demonstration. Or is that just ‘history’ as well?”

  “It’s as much history as the National Guardsmen who gunned down protesting students on campus at Kent State University in Ohio, in ’70. The only difference is one of scale.” He breathed deeply in frustration and banged his open hands down on top of the steering wheel. “Dammit, I’m not trying to justify Tiananmen, but the Western view of it is a romantic fiction. Peace-loving students demonstrating for freedom and democracy? Hah! Your cameras never covered the gangs of armed youths roaming the suburbs, attacking and murdering soldiers and police who were under orders not to harm them, and then stealing their weapons. What would your government have done if it had seen its very existence threatened by a million ranting students in the streets of Washington demanding that the President and the Congress explain their policies to them in person, and then abusing and humiliating them on live TV? If gangs of thugs were beating police officers to death, and the seeds of insurrection were being sown throughout the fifty states, do you think they would just have stood by and done nothing?”

  Beads of perspiration stood out on Li’s forehead. His eyes burned with a curious fervour. “It was a nightmare. I know, I was there.” And the bloody images swam before his eyes, like the tears he had spilled during those four fateful June days, for the dead, for his country, for the devastating, wasteful futility of it all. “But I can look at China today,” he said, “and I see people with money in their pockets, roofs over the heads, food in their bellies, education for their children, an economy growing at ten per cent a year. And I look at what is happening in the former Soviet Union, or in Yugoslavia, in the name of freedom, and democracy. I see economic ruin, people going hungry, children dying of disease; I see war and rising crime and death and destruction in the streets. I don’t believe there are many Chinese who would swap what they have for that. You may not like communism, because you’ve been indoctrinated in the West by prejudice and preconception. But in China, for all its faults, it has brought stability and peace, and a population that is healthier, wealthier and better fed than at any time in its history.”

  They had turned now into East Chang’an Avenue, Tiananmen Square receding behind them. Margaret glanced back, and tried to imagine the tanks rolling down the streets, the square jammed with a hundred thousand students. She recalled vividly the images that had flashed around the world of the student standing before a tank, refu
sing to let it past, and the tank driver’s attempts to get around him without hurting him. What bitter tears must have been spilled with the blood. She had heard the passion in Li’s voice, and understood perhaps for the first time the dreadful dichotomy inherent in those images. The wounds clearly still ran deep, and she wondered how it might have been if similar circumstances had presented themselves in the US. There had been rioting in the sixties and seventies over civil rights and Vietnam, divisions that had split the country down the middle. Only now, thirty years on, were some of those scars beginning to heal. Others were still raw.

  She shook her head. “This is stupid,” she said. “We’re doing what people do that makes them go to war—arguing over their differences. When it’s our differences that make us . . .” She searched for the right words. “. . . human, unique.” He said nothing, and they drove in silence along the length of Jianguomennei Avenue past the CITIC building and the World Trade Centre and up the ramp on to the third ring road. Eventually she said, “Where are we going?” She needed a response from him. Any kind of response, to anything.

  He said, “The Hard Rock Café.” But that was all. The atmosphere between them remained sour.

  The Hard Rock Café was attached to the Beijing Landmark Towers off Dongsanhuanbei Road. A red soft-top Chevvy with fifties fins projected from a first-floor roof, for all the world as if it had fallen from the top of the adjacent fourteen-storey tower block and lodged there. A blue globe, with the Hard Rock Café logo, sat atop an elaborately roofed mock-Greek-pillared entrance. Out front, on the sidewalk, stood a ten-foot-high red Les Paul guitar. Margaret followed Li up black-and-red steps, scared to touch and smear the polished brass handrail supported on black-and-gold Les Pauls. They passed beneath a large five-point red star over the legend NO DRUGS AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS ALLOWED. They had not spoken for more than fifteen minutes.

  Inside, the restaurant was doing brisk business. Staff wearing emerald shirts and black jeans were serving early lunches to Beijing’s new young jet set and a scattering of curious tourists and foreign residents.

  A pretty young waitress approached Li and they had a brief conversation. She nodded towards a stall in the far corner, and Li headed off towards it. Margaret followed, depressed and annoyed with him, and wondering why she was here. As they approached the stall, she saw that there were four young men seated in it. They were all immaculately and expensively dressed, with beautifully cut hair and manicured hands. They were unlike any other Chinese she had seen since she arrived. They reeked of wealth. A hush fell over their conversation as Li arrived at the table, and one of them aborted the call he’d been making on his cellphone. The man in the far right-hand corner smiled to show beautiful predatory teeth, and Margaret saw that he was not as young as he had first appeared. Mid-thirties, perhaps. His confidence, and the way the other three at the table deferred to him, immediately marked him out as the man Li had called The Needle. He might sell drugs, but he didn’t look like a man who used them.

  “Well, well,” he said, still smiling. “If it isn’t Mr. Li Yan, our friendly neighbourhood cop. Heard you got yourself promoted, Mr. Li. Congratulations.” He held out his hand, but Li ignored it.

  “I want a word,” he said.

  “Oh, do you?” The Needle glanced at Margaret. “And who’s this? Your girlfriend?”

  “She’s an American observer.”

  “An observer?” He exaggerated a look of surprise. “And what’s she come to observe? How Beijing cops harass innocent citizens?”

  “No,” Li said evenly. “She’s here to observe how innocent citizens are willing to co-operate with the police and spare them the trouble of getting a warrant.”

  “She speak Chinese?” The Needle glanced at her suspiciously.

  “No.”

  “Hey, lady, you want to fuck?” The Needle directed this at Margaret in Chinese.

  Margaret looked at Li, confused. “Was he speaking to me?”

  “Sure,” The Needle said in English. “I just say, how you doing?”

  “I need to talk for a few minutes,” Li said, ignoring this exchange.

  “Talk, then.”

  “In private.”

  “Where?” The Needle grew cautious.

  “In the Jeep. I’m just round the corner in the carpark.” The Needle hesitated. Li said, “You’ve got nothing to hide, right? So you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s just a little information I need.”

  The Needle was pensive for a moment, then wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood up. “You’ve got ten minutes. I’m a busy man.”

  His adjutant, on his left, moved quickly to let him out, and he followed Li and Margaret to the door.

  “What’s going on?” Margaret whispered to Li.

  “We’re just going to have a little chat,” Li said. But there was something in his tone that set Margaret’s nerves on edge. And there was something cold and hard in his eyes that she hadn’t seen there before.

  The Jeep was in the carpark of the Landmark Towers Hotel. Li told Margaret to get in the back. The Needle got in the front passenger seat. Li started the engine. “Hey!” The Needle barked, startled. “You didn’t say anything about going anywhere.”

  “Just a short drive,” Li said, unperturbed. “It’ll give us a chance to talk.” But he said nothing as they drove south, and then west on Gongren Tiyuchang Road. The Needle grew increasingly uneasy.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just somewhere quiet and discreet, so we won’t be disturbed. I know how important your street cred is. You don’t want to be seen hanging around with a cop, do you?”

  “Stop, right now, and let me out!” The Needle was starting to panic. “This isn’t what I agreed to.”

  Li turned south on Dongdoqiao Road. “You’re not making a very good show of co-operating with the police,” Li said. “You don’t want to give our American observer the wrong idea, do you?”

  “Fuck your American observer! Let me out!” He tried to open the door but it was locked.

  “What’s going on?” Margaret asked from the back, becoming concerned.

  “Oh, nothing much,” Li said. “Just a routine breach of human rights.”

  He turned the Jeep hard right, through open gates, and into a vast concourse, the giant circular Beijing Workers’ Stadium looming ahead of them. Soldiers on exercise, dressed in green camouflage, were piling into covered lorries and sweeping through the concourse in a wide arc towards the gates as Li drove in. He steered a course between them and slid the Jeep to a stop outside one of the exit ramps from the stadium. He killed the engine, flicked off the central locking and turned to The Needle. “Get out,” he said.

  Through a crack in the vast doors that opened on to the stadium at the top of the ramp, there was a glimpse of green grass and concrete terrace. The Needle jumped out of the Jeep. “What the hell are you up to, Li?”

  Li rounded the bonnet and with one hand grabbed The Needle by his lapel. There was a sound of tearing cloth and stitching. Margaret was right behind them. “What are you doing?” She was alarmed now.

  Li dragged the unwilling Needle up the ramp behind him, the drug dealer’s physical resistance feeble in the face of Li’s size and strength. He searched around desperately for some sign of life—a face, a figure, a witness. But there was no one. No one but Margaret, chasing after them up the ramp, shouting at Li, demanding to know what the hell he thought he was up to.

  Li ignored them both, pulling the door open a fraction and jerking The Needle through the gap. Margaret stood for a moment, panting, then squeezed through in their wake, in time to see Li push the other man down the slope, across the running track and on to the grass pitch. Terraces of empty seats rose up all around them. On days when China’s national soccer team played here, it was filled with sixty thousand cheering, screaming fans. Now it was eerily quiet, the voices of the two men on the grass echoing around the acoustic bowl of the stadium. Margaret heard the creak of the door they had entered, and t
urned in time to see it shutting behind them. A sensation, like ice-cold fingers, touched the back of her neck. “Li!” she screamed. But Li’s attention was elsewhere. His left hand was holding The Needle by his shirt collar, twisting it, pushing it hard into his throat.

  Gone was the cool confidence of this untouchable trafficker in drugs and misery. He seemed very small beside Li, childlike and whimpering. His feet almost left the ground. With his free hand, Li drew a large revolver from a shoulder holster beneath his jacket, and pushed the nozzle-end into The Needle’s forehead. His face was pale and grim, his eyes black. Margaret ran on to the grass. “Stop this,” she said quietly. The Needle flicked a panicked glance in her direction. She might be an ally, the witness he needed to stop Li.

  Li ignored her. “I want you to tell me about Chao Heng and Mao Mao,” he said, his focus totally on The Needle.

  For a moment, consternation replaced fear on the face of the drugs baron. “What do you mean?”

  “We both know,” Li said, “that anything you tell me now is just between us. She doesn’t speak Chinese, and I can’t use information extracted at gunpoint against you. So do us both a favour and tell me what I want to know.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Li sighed deeply. “Okay, we’ll do it the hard way.”

  “What?” The Needle was panicking again. Li turned him round and forced him to his knees. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at? You won’t get away with this!” The Needle tried to get up and Li pushed him back down. “Help me!” The Needle screamed at Margaret in English.

  She stood several feet away, breathing hard, eyes wild with fear and anger; fear of what was going to happen, anger that Li had dragged her here. “I won’t be any part of this,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” Li said.

  She looked around. There didn’t appear to be any way out, and the door they’d come in through was shut. “If you harm that man I will give evidence against you.”