The Firemaker

by Peter May

“As long as you let me help to unlock it.” Margaret raised an appealing eyebrow.

  “You’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “A lot can happen in . . .” She checked her watch. “. . . Seventeen and a half hours.”

  II

  Li turned the Jeep down Beijingzhan Street, and ahead of them rose the twin towers of Beijing railway station, where Old Yifu would arrive back from Sichuan some time that evening. Li had taken a circuitous route to Chongwenmen to avoid the traffic that had ground to its habitual afternoon standstill on the second ring road. He had finally summoned up the courage to ask Margaret what had happened to make her quit the university. And she had told him: about missing her lecture, about the attitude of Jiang and his staff, about her row with Bob. Now he shook his head and said, “I am so sorry, Margaret.”

  “Why? It’s not your fault.”

  “If I had taken you back to your hotel instead of my apartment none of this would have happened.”

  “If I hadn’t got drunk . . .” She didn’t need to finish. “Well, anyway, it’s that little bitch, Lily Peng, that I blame. It was her that snitched on us.”

  Li shrugged. “If it had not been her it would have been someone else—the duty policeman at the apartments, the staff at the Friendship . . . But there was no reason for you to quit.”

  She sighed. “Yes, there was. I guess maybe Bob’s holier-than-thou attitude pushed me over the edge, but the blow-up’s been coming since the moment I stepped off the plane. I should never have come here, Li Yan. I came for all the wrong reasons—to escape the mess of my life back home, not because I wanted to come to China. And Bob was absolutely right. I didn’t take the interest I should have, I didn’t prepare properly. I arrived with all the baggage of popular paranoid American propaganda about China and communism—and a completely closed mind.” She glanced at him across the Jeep and smiled ruefully. “If I hadn’t met you, if you hadn’t challenged me and forced me to open my eyes and my mind, I would probably have gone through my six weeks here like some kind of automaton, and none of this country would have rubbed off on me. And I’d have gone home the same person I was when I arrived. And the same wasted life would have been waiting for me when I got back. But these four days have changed me. When I go home tomorrow, it’ll be a different me who gets off the plane in Chicago. And I won’t be going back to the same old wasted life. I’ll be starting a new one.” She stared at her hands. “I just wish . . .” But she couldn’t finish what she had started and shrugged, a little hopelessly. “So why did you take me back to your apartment?”

  He kept his eyes ahead of him as he circumnavigated the station, turning east at the junction into Chongwenmen Dong Street. He wanted to tell her it was because he needed to be close to her, that he didn’t want to leave her, that just her presence, her scent, in his apartment was worth all the wrath that he knew would pour down on him from above. He said, “With Johnny Ren on the loose I was concerned for your safety.”

  “Oh,” she said, somehow disappointed that there wasn’t more to it. “And is that what you told your boss?”

  Li nodded. “He wasn’t impressed.”

  Margaret bridled. “You know, that’s what gets me about this whole disapproval thing. I spent the night in your apartment, entirely innocently. But they don’t believe it. There’s something prurient about the whole lot of them.”

  Li smiled. “And when people think you are guilty, you might as well have had the pleasure of committing the crime.”

  Margaret turned and looked at him curiously. “Pleasure?”

  But still he kept his eyes on the road. “It’s a pity we’ll never know.” After a moment he glanced across, but she had turned away again and he could not gauge her reaction. In fact, her heart was pounding. Was he really expressing regret that they had not slept together? Certainly, it was characteristically oblique, although paradoxically it was also uncharacteristically direct. She wanted to grab his face and tell him to say what he meant, express what he felt. But she realised that she had done neither herself. Why was it so difficult? But, of course, she knew. It was fear. Her fear of involving herself in a relationship with no future, especially when she was still so raw from the last one. His fear of involving himself in any kind of relationship. She suspected that his career had predominated for so long he had forgotten how to be with a woman.

  They turned off Xihuashi Street and into the compound overlooked by the apartment block where Chao had lived. Li parked the Jeep in the shade of the trees and Margaret followed him to the door of Chairwoman Liu Xinxin’s ground-floor apartment. Liu Xinxin answered the door cautiously, glaring at Li for a moment until recognition dawned.

  “Detective Li,” she said. And then she stared inquisitively at Margaret.

  “Chairwoman Liu, this is Dr. Campbell, an American pathologist who is helping with our inquiry. Do you speak English?”

  Liu Xinxin’s face lit up. “Oh, yes. But I am slow now. I no get much practice.” She held out a hand to Margaret. “Am very please meet you, Doctah Cambo.”

  Margaret shook her hand. “It is my pleasure.”

  “Please to come in.” She led Li and Margaret into her living room. Her two grandsons were squatting on the carpet playing with a toy steam locomotive crudely carved in wood and painted by hand. They gawped at Margaret in awe. “Tea?” Liu Xinxin asked.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Li said. “Unfortunately we have very little time today.” He was anxious not to be drawn into another rousing chorus of “Our Country” around the piano. “I wondered if you could tell us which doctor Mr. Chao attended.”

  “Hah!” Liu Xinxin waved her hand dismissively. “Very strange man, Mr. Chao. He is scientist, educated in West.” She nodded towards Margaret as if to say, “You should know, you come from the West.” “Everything modern, modern. Expensive hi-fi. CD player. Mobile telephone. But he no like modern medicine. He like traditional, Chinese herbal medicine. He go Tongrentan.”

  Margaret glanced at Li. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a traditional Chinese medicine store. The kind of place where you pay a year’s wages for a piece of fifty-year-old ginseng root.” He turned back to Liu Xinxin. “What branch?”

  “Dazhalan.”

  “I don’t understand,” Margaret said. “He went to a medicine store instead of a doctor?”

  Li shook his head. “They have consulting doctors there. Usually retired. It’s a way to augment their pensions.”

  “And they prescribe herbal medicine?”

  “Traditional Chinese medicine,” Liu Xinxin said. “Very good medicine. Make you well very fast.”

  “Well, he certainly didn’t get reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitors in a herbal medicine shop,” Margaret said.

  Dazhalan was a jumble of street markets and curiosity shops in narrow, medieval hutongs just south of Qianmen. Li and Margaret pushed their way through frenetic crowds of shoppers. Tinny music blasted from loudspeakers hanging at every corner. Red and yellow character banners zigzagged above their heads. Shopfronts were fantastic creations of tiled and curling eaves supported on intricate and colourfully painted beams and pillars. “During the Ming Dynasty,” Li told her, “there were great wicket gates here that closed off the inner city at night. Dazhalan means, literally, ‘big stockades.’ In imperial Beijing, shops and theatres were not permitted in the centre of the city. So they opened up here, just outside the gates. It was the place to come on a dull Beijing night.”

  They passed a four-hundred-year-old emporium selling pickle and sauce, a restaurant offering imperial snacks, a shop which had been dealing in silks and wool and furs for more than a hundred years. “This used to be the red-light district,” Li said. “Until the communists shut all the brothels down in 1949 and sent the girls to work in factories.” And suddenly he remembered Lotus, and his promise to Yongli. He cursed inwardly, but he was in no position to do anything about it now.

  Beneath a colourful and beautifully ornate canopy, white marb
le lions in wrought-iron cages guarded the entrance to the Tongrentan Traditional Medicine Shop, purveyor of herbal concoctions since 1669. But they had not prevented several young men from slipping into the shade of the canopy and curling up on the cool marble slabs to sleep away the afternoon. Li and Margaret stepped over an older man who was snoring aggressively and pushed through glass doors into the deliciously cool air-conditioned interior.

  It was not what Margaret had been expecting. Somehow the notion of traditional Chinese herbal medicine had conjured in her mind a dark and dingy shop, with daylight slanting in through old wooden shutters, and an old man with a long, wispy white beard serving behind a counter piled high with jars and bottles of exotic pills and lotions. Instead it was large and bright and modern. A gallery on the second floor was supported on red-and-gold pillars and overlooked the first-floor shop where the pills and lotions were displayed in very ordinary cardboard boxes in fluorescently lit glass display cabinets. High above them, huge glass lampshades were painted with scenes of imperial China and hung with long yellow tassels. The medicines themselves, however, surpassed even her wildest expectations: dried seahorses and sea slugs, tiger bone, rhino horn and snake wine, cures for everything from fright to encephalitis—or so they claimed.

  Just inside the doors, a long and patiently waiting queue of people snaked across the breadth of the shop. The object of their vigilance was a consultation with an old, pinched-faced man perched in a booth off to the left. This retired doctor of medicine was, apparently, slow in dispensing his sagacity, and Li had no intention of waiting his turn. He pushed his way to the head of the queue, displaying his Ministry ID. Margaret hurried after him, eliciting odd and occasionally resentful stares. But no one voiced any objection. Li and Margaret entered the booth as a girl in her early twenties emerged, pasty-faced and spotty-cheeked, clutching a prescription and looking distinctly worried. The old doctor looked at Li’s ID for a long time before examining his face carefully and then inviting them both to sit. He barely gave Margaret a second glance. “What can I do for you, Detective?” he asked.

  “I’m interested in one of your patients, Chao Heng.”

  The doctor tipped his head in Margaret’s direction. “Who is she?”

  “An American doctor. A pathologist helping us with a case.”

  The old man turned to Margaret, eyeing her now with interest. “Where did you train?” he asked her in perfect English.

  She was taken aback. “The University of Illinois.”

  “Ah. I spent some time at the University of California, Davis Medical School. A research project on glandular cancer with my very good friend Dr. Hibbard Williams. Endocrinology is his speciality. Perhaps you have heard of him?”

  “I’m afraid not.” She frowned. “I thought you were a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine.”

  “I studied both traditional Chinese and Western medicines. There is much that each can learn from the other. What is your speciality?”

  “Burn victims.”

  His nose wrinkled in distaste. “How unpleasant.”

  Li interrupted. “Chao Heng did consult with you? Is that right?”

  The doctor nodded. “Mr. Chao, yes.”

  “I understand that he was unwell for some time.”

  “Has something happened to him?”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Ah.” The doctor seemed unconcerned. “How unfortunate. But he was dying anyway.”

  “What of?” Margaret asked.

  “I have no idea. I treated his symptoms for about six months but nothing worked for him. Eventually I suggested to him that he see a former colleague of mine at the Beijing Hospital in Dahua Lu. He was not very keen. He was a great believer in traditional remedies. But there was nothing more I could do for him.”

  “What were his symptoms?” Margaret was curious.

  “They were many,” the old doctor said, shaking his head. “He suffered from exhaustion and diarrhoea, and he had frequent fevers. He had recurrent bouts of thrush and a cough that would not go away. He later developed swollen glands in the groin and the armpits. He was losing a lot of weight latterly. Some of his symptoms responded to treatment, at least for a time. But they always came back.”

  Margaret was frowning. “These are all possible indicators of HIV. Was he ever AIDS-tested?”

  “Yes, I believe he was tested for HIV at the Beijing Hospital. That was about the last time I saw him.”

  “And?” Margaret asked.

  “And what?” the old man responded testily.

  “Was the test positive?”

  “Oh no.” The old herbalist scratched his chin. “Mr. Chao did not have AIDS.”

  III

  Li parked the Jeep in the shade of the trees at the east end of Dong Jiaominxiang Lane, a stone’s throw away from the back entrance to Municipal Police Headquarters where Li and Margaret had had their first encounter the previous Monday. She gazed along the street towards the redbrick building that housed the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department and the arched gateway that led into its compound. Was it really only three days since that first meeting? She said to Li, “That’s where we first bumped into each other, isn’t it?” And she grinned. “Literally.”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling and remembering how angry he had been. “I was going for an interview for this job. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. I’d spent all morning ironing my uniform so that I would look my best. And I ended up covered in dirt, with my elbow grazed, and my shirt splashed with water where I tried to wash away the blood.”

  Margaret laughed. That’s why he had been so annoyed. “It got you the job, though, didn’t it? They must have thought you looked like a man of action.”

  “I’d got the job anyway. I’m just lucky they didn’t change their minds when they saw the state I was in.”

  She touched his arm where he had grazed it, and he felt the heat of her fingers like a burn. “It’s taken a long time to heal,” she said.

  “That’s a fresh one.”

  “Oh.” She sounded surprised. “Some other girl knock you off your bike?”

  He smiled. “It’s a long story.”

  “Better not tell me, then. Because we don’t have much time left.” She had meant it in fun, but no sooner had she said it than they both felt the truth of it, and there was an unacknowledged pain in the fact of her looming departure.

  They walked east in silence then, under the leafy canopy of trees, and turned left into Dahua Lu. It was a long street running north, with mature trees down the east side, shading the entrance to Dongdan Park. The Beijing Hospital, a modern jumble of sprawling white buildings of two and five storeys, ran along the west side behind high white-painted railings. There was a constant traffic of white-uniformed nurses in the street, the occasional ambulance coming or going. An old man in slippers and pale pyjamas, with a face as grey as the ash on his cigarette, shuffled at one of the gates, puffing smoke into the late afternoon sky. They passed the smoker on the way in, and Li asked for directions to the administration block from an armed policeman on sentry duty.

  When they got inside, Li spoke for several minutes to a receptionist before they were led upstairs to a waiting room on the third floor and left there to kick their heels. It was a square room, with low, khaki-green settees around the walls and glass-topped tables with lace doilies—standard factory-issue furniture for reception rooms across China. After ten minutes a Reception Officer arrived to shake hands and exchange cards with Li and enquire politely about the purpose of their visit. Margaret watched the ritual exchange in Chinese and tried to exercise all three Ps simultaneously. The dialogue seemed interminable. The Reception Officer left and she asked Li what was happening. “He has gone to arrange a meeting with the Administration Officer,” he said. “And to send in some tea.”

  “Tea?”

  “We might be some time.”

  In fact it was several cups and another twenty minutes before the Administration
Officer arrived with an entourage of assistants and the Reception Officer, who then made the introductions. More ritual handshaking and exchanging of cards. Then they all sat down, Li and Margaret on one side of the room, the reception committee on the other. They had all cast curious glances in her direction, but otherwise made no comment.

  Margaret sat in frustrated ignorance during the subsequent exchange between Li and the Administration Officer. It was a short conversation. She saw Li visibly pale, then the Administration Officer stood up, signalling an end to their meeting. More ritual handshaking, and they were led back down to the ground floor. She was itching to ask Li what had been said, but the Reception Officer was determined to see them out of the door himself, and there was some paperwork to be completed at the reception desk. She contained her impatience.

  Li retraced their steps down Dahua Lu in long, loping strides, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. Margaret was struggling to keep up with him, half running to do so. “But what did they say?” She was almost beside herself with curiosity, and he was being infuriatingly uncommunicative, concentrating on unshared dark thoughts that swam through his head behind deeply furrowed brows. They reached the Jeep and he got in behind the wheel. She got into the passenger side. “For God’s sake, Li Yan!”

  He turned towards her. “Are you hungry?”

  “What?”

  “I could really go a jian bing. I haven’t eaten all day.”

  “Neither have I, but I’d rather know what they told you in the hospital.”

  “Mei Yuan will still be selling jian bing at the corner of Dongzhimennei,” he said. He started the Jeep and pulled away from the sidewalk. They had driven north, the length of Dahua Lu, and were turning east on to Jianguomennei Avenue when he said, “It seems they ran all sorts of tests on Chao.” He replayed in his mind the short conversation he had conducted with the Administration Officer at the hospital. “But certain results never came back from the laboratory, and the next thing all his medical records were removed from the Beijing Hospital and he was transferred as an in-patient to Military Hospital Number 301.”