The Firemaker

by Peter May

  “But if everyone only has one child, and every child is a son, there won’t be any women to bear the next generation of children.”

  He shrugged. “I can only tell you how it is. The orphanages are full of baby girls who were abandoned on doorsteps.”

  “So your uncle is going to talk her out of having the baby?”

  “I don’t know what my uncle is going to say to her. I’m not sure he knows himself. But whatever he says, she will listen, in the way that she will listen to no one else.” He stretched up to look down the length of the queue. It didn’t appear to have moved at all. “This is no damned good,” he said, and pulled out his Public Security ID wallet from a back pocket and pushed his way up to the head of the queue.

  Margaret watched from a distance as several people at the head of the queue began to remonstrate with him. She smiled as he turned and with a few sharp words and a flash of his ID silenced their complaints. And some were more equal than others, she thought wryly.

  He hurried back across the concourse with the ticket and she followed him outside into the crowded square. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to take the ticket to my uncle first,” he said, glancing up at the nearer clock tower. “His train is in just over three hours.”

  “How long will he be away?”

  “Oh, he’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  “Short conversation.”

  Li shrugged. “He’ll say what he has to say then go. At the end of the day it is her decision.”

  They climbed into the Jeep. “What do you think she should do?” She watched him closely, interested in his reply.

  “I think she should not have got pregnant,” he said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  He looked at her very seriously. “It is not my problem. I have enough of my own.” And she realised that a veil was being drawn over a part of him he did not want revealed.

  As he shifted into first gear and started to pull away, he had to brake sharply as a woman in her thirties wheeled a pram across their intended path. It was a strange, crude, wooden pram, with two tiny seats facing each other across a small, square table. Home-made, Margaret might have thought, except that she had seen others just like it in the street. But there was only one seat occupied. The other, empty one was a potent symbol of frustrated Chinese parenthood. Li didn’t seem to see it as he waited for the mother to pass, glaring at them as she did. Then he slipped back into gear and squeezed the Jeep into the main stream of traffic heading west on Beijingzhanxi Street.

  III

  Songbirds in bamboo cages hung among the pines, competing with wailing renditions of songs from the Beijing Opera. Their voices raised in Eastern discord, a group of a dozen old men, accompanied by the plucks and whines of age-old Chinese instruments, sang behind trembling wisteria in the pergola where yesterday Li had seen a drunken youth sucking alcohol from a plastic bottle. The same white-coated barber was clip-clipping among the trees, tufts of black hair tumbling to the sun-baked dusty earth. Bicycles leaned against tree trunks, their owners gathered around games of cards or chess. Somewhere in the distance, from the park itself, came the sound of a disco beat, insistent and incongruous.

  Li and Margaret walked through the dappled early evening sunlight. Li said, “In the park there is a lake, Jade Lake, officially designated for swimming. In the winter it freezes over and it is used by skaters. But they cut a hole in the ice at one side for bathers to dip themselves in the freezing water. My uncle does this every morning.”

  Margaret shivered at the thought. Li put a hand on her arm to stop her. She glanced at him, then followed his eyes to where an old man with dark, curling hair stood in the shade, legs apart, slowly arcing a sword above his head, before bringing it down in a long slow sweep through 180 degrees to point at the earth. In perfect slow motion, he swivelled on the ball of one foot, folding one leg high to his chest, and turned to swing the sword up and across his body, then out to his right, stamping his raised foot down with a thud, the sword now pointed directly at Li and Margaret. The old man glared at them with fiercely burning eyes and then broke into a broad grin. “Li Yan,” he said. “Have you got my ticket?”

  Li took the ticket from his pocket and held it out as he approached him. “It leaves at eight.”

  Old Yifu looked beyond him at Margaret. “And you must be Dr. Campbell,” he said, his English almost without accent. He lowered his sword and held out his hand. “I am very pleased to meet you.”

  Margaret shook his hand, bemused to find that Li’s legendary Uncle Yifu was this smiling, shrunken old man swinging a sword under the trees.

  “My Uncle Yifu,” Li said.

  “I’ve heard a great deal about you . . . Mr. . . .” Margaret didn’t know how to address him.

  “Just call me Old Yifu. When you get to my age people call you ‘old’ as a mark of respect.”

  Margaret laughed. “That won’t come easy to me. In the States, to call someone ‘old’ would be dismissive, or derogatory.”

  He took her arm and steered her towards the low stone table where his chessmen were laid out on their board. “Ah, but in China to be old is to be venerated. Age equates with wisdom.” He grinned. “We have a saying: ‘Old ginger tastes the best.’ Sit down, please.” He indicated a folding canvas chair. “Naturally, at my advanced age, I should be very wise. And, of course, everyone thinks I am.” He laid his sword on the ground and sat opposite her, then leaned confidentially across the table. “I would be very wise if I could remember everything I knew.” He sighed sadly. “The trouble is, nowadays I’ve forgotten more than I can remember.” And his eyes twinkled as he added, “That is why I am still learning my English vocabulary. It helps to fill up all the empty places left in my head by everything I have forgotten.”

  “Well, you certainly haven’t forgotten how to charm a lady.” She smiled back at him, an immediate rapport established.

  “Pah,” he said dismissively. “Not much use to me now.” He raised an eyebrow and nodded towards Li. “If only my nephew had inherited a little of it. But he takes after his father. Slow in affairs of the heart.” He looked at Li. “What age are you now, Li Yan?”

  Li was acutely embarrassed. “You know what age I am, Uncle.”

  Old Yifu turned back to Margaret, mischief all over his face. “Thirty-three years old and still single. Doesn’t even have a girlfriend. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, I think.”

  Margaret stifled her smile, enjoying Li’s discomfort.

  “I’m glad he at least took my advice,” Old Yifu said.

  “Advice on what?”

  “Uncle, I think you should be going back to the apartment and getting packed,” Li said.

  Old Yifu ignored him. “On obtaining your help for the investigation.”

  Li wished the ground would simply swallow him up. Margaret cocked an eyebrow at him then turned back to Old Yifu. “Oh, so that was your idea, was it?”

  “Well . . . let’s just say I encouraged him in that direction.” Old Yifu bared his teeth in a broad smile. “Now I can see why he didn’t take too much persuasion. He didn’t tell me how attractive you were.”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t think I am.”

  “Oh, I do not think he would be blushing like that if he did not think so.”

  Li could barely contain his embarrassment. He sighed and gazed off through the trees, teeth clenched. Margaret was enjoying herself.

  Old Yifu asked, “Do you play chess?”

  “You don’t have time, Uncle. Your train is at eight. It is nearly five thirty.”

  “Of course I have time.”

  Margaret said, looking at the board, “I think the chess you play may be a little different from the version I know.”

  “No, no, no. It is very similar. Instead of your representational carvings, we play with these wooden disks. The character on each disk tells us what it is.”

  “She’s not familiar with Chinese characters, Uncle. Once the pieces are out of po
sition she’ll never remember what they are.”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem,” Margaret said, a tiny edge to her voice. “I have a pretty well photographic memory.”

  “Good, good.” Old Yifu clapped his hands with pleasure and began explaining the board and the rules. Instead of moving pieces into each square, you moved them on to the intersection. There was a King, but no Queen, just two King’s Guides. The four-square area at the centre-back at each side was the only area in which the King could move—one space at a time at right angles. The same rule applied to the King’s Guides, except that they could only move on the diagonal. The pawns were called Soldiers, the knight was a Horse, and while it moved in the same way as the knight, it could not jump another piece to do so. There were other minor variations in the names of pieces and their movements, but essentially it was the game Margaret knew and played in the States. The board, however, was dissected by a single broad belt representing a river. And you didn’t “take” a piece, you “ate” it.

  Margaret was to play with the red pieces, Old Yifu with the black. Li, resigned to the game going ahead, sighed and leaned back against the trunk of the tree that shaded the board and folded his arms across his chest. “How is your office?” Old Yifu asked him as Margaret made her first move.

  “It’s fine,” Li said.

  “Fine? Just fine? The feng shui man showed me his plan. It looked excellent to me. You will work well in this office.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you, Uncle.”

  Old Yifu grinned wickedly at Margaret. “I detect a little scepticism. He thinks his uncle is a superstitious old fool.”

  “Then he is the fool,” Margaret said. “Feng shui or not, I can see sound reasons for all the changes.”

  “Naturally. Superstition grows from the practice of truths. Not the other way around.” He brought his Horse straight into play. “Your move.” And as she contemplated her next move, he said, “I have always been a great admirer of the Americans. Like the Chinese, you are a very practical people. But you are also dreamers who try to make your dreams come true. And that is not at all practical.” He shrugged. “But, then, you have succeeded in turning so many of your dreams into reality. I think it is a good thing to have a dream in life. It is something to aim for, to give you focus.”

  “Is that not a bit too much of an ‘individual’ concept for a communist system?” Margaret slid her Castle across the back line.

  “You must not give way to that bad American habit, Dr. Campbell, of intolerance for other ideas. One must always be pragmatic. I was a committed Marxist myself as a young man. Now I am, I guess, a liberal. We all evolve.”

  “Didn’t someone once say if you are not a Marxist at twenty you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative at sixty you have no brain?”

  He smiled with delight. “I had not heard that one. It is very clever.”

  “Very paraphrased, I think. I don’t know where it comes from.”

  “The words are unimportant if the meaning is plain. And a truth is a truth no matter who says it.” One of his Soldiers ate one of her Soldiers.

  Li sighed theatrically to signal his impatience, but they both ignored him. Margaret slid her Bishop across the diagonal, eating one of Old Yifu’s Soldiers and threatening his forward Horse. He was forced into a defensive move, conceding the initiative to her. “Li Yan told me you were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution,” she said.

  “Did he?”

  To her disappointment, Old Yifu seemed disinclined to talk about it. “For three years, Li Yan said.”

  “He says a lot, it seems.”

  There was no eye contact during this. Both were focused on the board, contemplating the next move, sliding a piece here, jumping the river there.

  “You must have been very bitter.”

  He ate her Bishop. “Why?”

  “You lost three years of your life.” She swooped on the offending Horse and left his Castle wide open to attack. Again he was forced on to the defensive.

  “No. I learned much about human nature. I learned even more about myself. Sometimes learning can be a difficult, even painful, process. But one should never resent it.” He thought carefully before blocking the line to his Castle with his King’s Guide. “Besides, I was only in prison for one and a half years.”

  “You always told me three,” said Li, taken aback.

  “I was physically there for three years. But for half that time I slept, and when I slept I dreamed, and when I dreamed they could not keep me there. Because in my dreams I was free. Free to visit my childhood and speak again to my parents, free to go to the places I have loved in my life: the high mountains of Tibet, the Yellow Sea washing on the shores of Jiangsu, the Hong Kong of my boyhood, with the sun setting blood red across the South China Sea. They can never touch those things, or take them away. And as long as you have them, you have your freedom.”

  Margaret’s eyes flickered up from the board to look at Old Yifu, his attention still focused, apparently, on the game. What horrors must he have endured? And yet he had chosen to take the positive view. Tales of torture and persecution would, perhaps, have been too painful, or too easy. Instead he chose to remember the escape he had made each day, sustaining hope and spirit.

  “My only regret,” he said, “is that I was separated from my wife for that period. We had so little time together afterwards.”

  And she saw a moistness in his eyes, and a colour rising on his cheeks. My uncle has never really got over the loss of her, Li had told her. She swooped quickly to eat another of his Soldiers with her Horse, changing the pace of the game and the mood of their conversation. “So you were brought up in Hong Kong?” she said.

  “The family was originally from Canton. But we had been in Hong Kong for nearly two generations, a wealthy family by Chinese standards. Li Yan’s father and myself were in middle school when the Japanese invaded and we fled to China as refugees. We ended up in Sichuan, and I finished middle school there before going on to the American University in Beijing.”

  He took the bait and made the mistake of eating her Horse. She slid her Castle two-thirds of the way down the board. “Check.”

  “Good God!” Old Yifu seemed genuinely taken aback, then he looked up at her, smiling shrewdly. “Now I see,” he said. “All these questions. You were hoping to distract me.”

  “Me?” said Margaret innocently, and feigning shock.

  Old Yifu brought his remaining Horse into play, blocking her route to the King. It was his only real option, but it left his other Castle exposed and unprotected. He shook his head sadly. “I can see my demise.”

  Margaret ate his Castle quite ruthlessly. “You must have seen a lot of changes in your lifetime.”

  But his concentration was on his move, and he did not reply until he had moved a Bishop to threaten a Soldier. “Everything has changed,” he said, “except the character of the Chinese people. I think, maybe, that will remain the one great constant.”

  “So what do you think of China today?”

  “She is changing again. More rapidly this time. For better or worse I do not know. But people have more money in their pockets and food in their bellies and clothes on their backs. And everyone has a roof over his head. I remember when it was not so.”

  Margaret smiled. It was clear to see where Li’s influences lay. She moved her Horse into a position that would threaten Old Yifu’s King if he took her Soldier, and lose him his Bishop if he didn’t. “I read somewhere that in fifty years, as the West declines and the East develops, China will become the richest and most powerful country on earth.” He was still puzzling over his next move. “Do you think that’s true?”

  He took her Soldier, effectively conceding defeat. “It is difficult to say. China has such a long history, and this period is such a small link in a chain that stretches back five thousand years. Only time will tell. Mao once said, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, ‘It is too early to say.’ So who
am I to predict the future for China?” He smiled as she moved her Castle.

  “Checkmate,” she said.

  He conceded defeat with a small shrug and a nod of his head, and his smile seemed full of genuine pleasure. “Congratulations. It is the first time I have been beaten in many years. One grows complacent. I look forward to more games with you.”

  “It will be a pleasure.”

  “If only my nephew could be such a worthy opponent.”

  “Perhaps if I’d had a better teacher . . .” Li responded, stung by his uncle’s rebuke.

  “You can teach anyone the rules,” Old Yifu said. “But the intelligence to use them you must be born with.” He started packing his chess pieces into their old cardboard box. “Anyway, I can’t afford to hang about here wasting time talking to you. I have a train to catch. And I’m going to be late.” He winked at Margaret.

  IV

  The uniformed officer unlocked the door and let them into Chao Heng’s apartment. There was that same, strange antiseptic smell as before, Li noticed. They walked around the bloodstain on the carpet, now ringed off by strips of white tape, and into the living room. “What is it you are looking for?” he asked Margaret.

  She shook her head. “I don’t really know. Like you, I just get the feeling that this whole case is about Chao Heng. I don’t know where the other two tie in, but they seem . . . incidental, somehow. There’s got to be something we are missing. Something we already know, or should know about him. Something here in this apartment, maybe. Something in the weird nature of his killing.”

  Li had offered to run Old Yifu back to their apartment, but he had had his bike with him and said he had already packed and only needed to collect his bag. He would get a taxi to the station, which was just around the corner anyway.

  The two had embraced, a strangely touching moment after all the friction there had been between them. They hardly spoke. “Tell Xiao Ling I send my love,” Li had said.