by Peter May
But another, greater, problem awaited.
As Li cycled north, Xinxin sat side-saddle on the bag carrier over the rear wheel of his bicycle, gaping in wonder at the people and traffic in this huge and seemingly never-ending city. She watched the children on their way to school with a wide-eyed fascination, the boys who toiled up the hutongs with their three-wheeled coal carriers, the unbelievable numbers of people on foot and on bikes and clambering off and on buses. Li felt the unaccustomed burden of responsibility for the child on his bike, and now, as he pulled in beside the jian bing stall at the Dongzhimennei corner, his heart sank as the woman at the hotplate turned to greet him, and it was the face of a stranger.
‘Where is Mei Yuan?’ he asked, perplexed.
The woman said, ‘She had to go to the public security bureau to renew her licence. So she asked me to make her jian bings this morning.’
‘When will she be back?’
‘I don’t know. In a few hours, perhaps.’ The woman paused. ‘Who are you?’
‘Li Yan,’ he said, and her face opened up in a smile.
‘Ah, Li Yan. She has told me all about you. I am Jiang Shimei, her cousin.’ She held out her hand to shake his. ‘You looked after Mei Yuan when she was not well.’ She looked at Xinxin. ‘Is this your daughter?’
‘No.’ Li was embarrassed. ‘She is my niece.’
‘She is very beautiful.’ Jiang Shimei stooped to run fingers lightly down Xinxin’s cheek. ‘What is your name, little one?’
‘Xinxin.’
‘Xinxin? What a lovely name.’
‘Can you put my hair in bunches?’ Xinxin asked suddenly, and she dug into the pockets of her little green pinafore to produce two pink elasticated bands with plastic cartoon fox heads. ‘My Uncle Yan is hopeless. He says he doesn’t know how.’
‘Of course,’ Jiang Shimei said, and Li shuffled awkwardly while she quickly arranged makeshift bunches high on either side of Xinxin’s head. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Just perfect.’ And Xinxin’s little round face beamed with pleasure. And she did look perfect, Li thought, with the red piping on her white blouse matching the red tights she wore beneath her green pinafore, her red satchel slung over her shoulder, tiny feet secured in open white sandals.
‘Tell Mei Yuan,’ Li said, ‘that I need her advice. I will come back later.’ He lifted Xinxin on to the bike behind him.
‘Do you not want a jian bing?’
‘I have no time today.’ And he pushed off across the road, weaving through the stream of traffic, whose horns blared angrily. He cycled up the slope, past fruit and vegetable stalls on his left, a barber’s shop open for business already, the smell of wet cut hair and scented oil drifting out of the open door. He parked under the trees next to the front entrance of Section One and took Xinxin by the hand, leading her with great apprehension to the side door, and up three flights to the top floor. The pair drew curious glances from secretarial staff and detectives. Apart from nodded acknowledgements, no one made any comment. Li hesitated briefly outside the door to the detectives’ room, then summoned all his courage and walked in, little Xinxin trotting wide-eyed at his side, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Zhao was just putting down the telephone. He turned and caught sight of Li. ‘Boss, I’ve got a car waiting downstairs to take us to the Middle School …’ His voice trailed off as he saw Xinxin. Other heads turned. The hubbub of voices died down.
Wu pushed his sunglasses back on his head. ‘Um … is there something you haven’t been telling us, boss?’
Li decided to brazen it out. ‘Guys, this is my niece, Xinxin. Her mom’s not very well right now, so I told Xinxin that you would keep her amused this morning while I conduct those interviews.’
There was a moment’s stunned silence before Qian, whose own little girl was nearly ten, took the initiative. ‘Hello, Xinxin,’ he said, rounding the desk. ‘Those are beautiful bunches you’ve got. Did your Uncle Yan do them for you?’
Xinxin tutted and raised her eyes to the ceiling as if he was mad. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Uncle Yan’s useless.’ Which elicited much laughter from around the room. She went on, warming to her reception, ‘It was a lady in the street that did it.’
‘Yeah,’ Wu said, ‘we all think Uncle Yan’s pretty useless, too, don’t we, guys?’ There was a general chorus of consent as Li drew Wu a look.
Qian lifted her up to sit on the edge of the desk and looked in her satchel. ‘What have you got here?’ And he pulled out the books that Mei Yuan had left two nights previously, and a jigsaw puzzle in a cardboard box.
‘It’s dead easy,’ Xinxin said. ‘Do you want me to show you how to do it?’
‘Sure,’ Qian said. The other detectives started gathering around, indulging the age-old adoration that the Chinese have for their children. ‘Has Uncle Yan tried it yet?’
Xinxin laughed so infectiously it got all the detectives laughing with her. ‘Silly!’ she said. ‘How could someone who doesn’t know how to do bunches do a jigsaw?’ More laughter at Li’s expense.
‘Li!’ The voice was sharp and imperative, and brought the room to silence. Li turned to see Section Chief Chen Anming standing in the doorway. Chen flicked his head towards Li’s office. ‘A word.’ And he went through. Li pulled a face at the other detectives and then followed Chen through.
Chen turned. ‘Shut the door,’ he said. ‘What the hell’s going on, Li?’
Li shrugged. ‘I’ve got a problem, Chief.’ And he explained how his sister had abandoned Xinxin, literally on his doorstep. It would take a week or more, he explained, to write to her father so that he could come and get her. Meantime he didn’t know what else to do.
‘Well, you can’t turn the detectives’ office into a crèche,’ Chen said. ‘In the name of the sky, Li, we’ve got a serial killer on the loose!’
Li was at a loss. ‘I know,’ he said lamely.
Chen glared at him for a moment, then shook his head, giving way at least a little to the sympathy he felt for Li’s predicament. ‘Where does her father live?’
‘Near Zigong, in Sichuan Province.’
‘I’ll call the police chief there and have him get in touch with your brother-in-law. He could be on a train to Beijing by tonight.’
Li nodded, abashed. ‘Thanks, Chief.’
There was a burst of laughter from the office outside, and Li grinned, embarrassed. ‘She seems to be a big hit with the guys.’ He paused. ‘You’ve got a couple of kids, haven’t you, Chief?’
Chen grunted. ‘A long time since they were that age. My daughter’s in publishing, and my son teaches quantum physics.’
The door to Li’s office swung open and Xinxin strutted in holding out one of Mei Yuan’s books. ‘Will you read this to me, Uncle Yan?’
Li glanced beyond her to the expectant faces of the detectives outside and knew that she’d been put up to it. ‘I can’t, honey,’ he said. ‘I have to go and interview some men. I’m late already.’
Xinxin turned to Chen. ‘Will you read it to me, Uncle Anming?’
Chen flushed, and narrowed his eyes at the detectives in the next room, realising that he, too, had been set up. He flicked a look at Li who was somehow managing to keep his face straight. ‘I’m very busy, little one,’ he said.
Xinxin frowned. ‘What’s that yellow mark on your head?’ she asked, gazing up at him, and the sound of stifled laughter drifted through from the next office.
Chen flushed. ‘That’s from smoking too much,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ Xinxin’s face fell and she said, very seriously, ‘Smoking’s ve-ery bad for you.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Chen said.
Xinxin giggled. ‘Good. So now you stop smoking and read to me, OK?’
She took his hand, quite unselfconsciously, and he blushed to the roots of his hair.
Li said quickly, ‘Now you take good care of Uncle Anming while I’m away, Xinxin.’ He glanced quickly at Chen, hardly daring to meet his eye. ‘Sorry, Ch
ief. Got to dash. Late already.’ And he turned and hurried out, before Chen had time to object. Li collected Zhao as he went, grabbing him by the arm and whisking him through the door.
The two of them stifled their laughter all the way down the corridor, before it finally burst forth in the stairwell and resounded around the building.
‘Oh, shit, Zhao,’ Li said, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes. ‘I’m going to be in big trouble when we get back.’
*
No. 29 Middle School was hidden away behind a plain white-tile entrance at the far corner of a bus park just off Qian Men Xi Da Jie, a spit away from the south-west corner of Tiananmen Square. Above the heavy green metal gates, a photograph mounted on a long board showed the school’s original elaborate stone entrance. Zhao parked the Jeep outside, and a janitor hurried out from a brick gatehouse to let them in. As the metal gates swung closed behind them, they entered a strange oasis of calm in the centre of the city. Two-storey, brick-built classroom blocks stretched off to left and right, shaded by neatly cropped trees. Through a tunnel lined with school noticeboards and potted plants with luxuriant leafy fronds, the sun shone directly on to a tree-lined quadrangle with basketball and badminton courts. Classrooms overlooked it from all sides. The sounds of traffic in the street had become a distant rumble.
Li looked around in amazement. ‘I had no idea this place was here,’ he said.
‘It used to be a university,’ the janitor said.
Zhao frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘University of China.’ The janitor grinned and nodded. Li thought, perhaps he was a little simple. ‘Sun Yat-Sen founded the university in 1912. We have an exhibition. Come and see.’
And he ushered them into a classroom that had been converted into an exhibition room. Blue panels mounted all around the walls exhibited photographs of the school’s founders and teachers, and other historic memorabilia. The janitor was not simple. It had been founded by the President of the first Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-Sen, and it had indeed been the University of China. Faces from history stared down at them from the walls: the balding Sun Yat-Sen with his neatly clipped silver moustache; the crop-haired Li Da Zhao with his Stalinesque whiskers, a professor of economics there in the twenties who had translated the works of Marx into Chinese for the first time, before being hanged by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1928; the honorary headmaster, General Zhang Xüe Liang, who betrayed Chiang Kai-Shek to the communists in the infamous Xi’an incident of 1936. In a glass case stood the bell that had called the first students to class at the start of the previous century. And it had hung from a tree that today still stood sentinel over the quadrangle outside.
The story of the school’s history written on the walls revealed that when the communists came to power in 1949, the University of China had become ‘The New Beginning Middle School’, then three years later, more prosaically, the No. 29 Middle School.
A young man wearing jeans and a dark zip-neck sweatshirt over a grey tee shirt, hurried into the room, a little short of breath. ‘How do you do?’ he said, shaking their hands. ‘The headmaster asked me to take care of you this morning. I have no classes till the afternoon.’
‘You are a teacher?’ Li asked, surprised. Teachers had not dressed like that in his day.
‘Sure,’ said the teacher. ‘I am Teacher Huang.’
‘There’s quite a history to this place,’ said Li.
‘Sure. We are very proud of our history,’ Teacher Huang said. ‘But now we are just a Middle School. We have six hundred students and one hundred and fifty teachers. Follow me. You can have my classroom for the interviews.’
Teacher Huang’s classroom had four rows of six desks, with a long blackboard at either end. Tall windows opened out on each side of the room. Li lifted a chair down from a desktop. ‘Are there no classes this morning?’
‘Sure,’ said Teacher Huang. ‘There are plenty of classes. You will know when they have a break, because the students will make plenty of noise.’ He grinned. Then, ‘An old teacher from here, Lao Sun Lian, and some former pupils are waiting in another room. When you want to speak to them let me know.’
‘Send in Teacher Sun,’ Li said. And then as Teacher Huang went to the door, asked, ‘By the way, what happened to the original school gate?’
‘It was destroyed by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution,’ Teacher Huang said.
‘The same ones who destroyed the school records?’
Teacher Huang shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Possibly. But I am only twenty-eight. I don’t remember.’ And he went out.
Li and Zhao arranged three desks with two chairs for themselves on one side, and a single chair on the other. The smell of the classroom, of stale food and chalk dust, reminded Li of his own schooldays. It had the same pale green and cream walls, the same sense of something institutionalised, uniform and dull. Nothing, it seemed, had changed much over the years.
It was hot in here. Li wandered to the nearest window and opened it as wide as it would go. He looked out on the quadrangle. They had all played here, all four victims. They had shared the same experiences, suffered the same doubts and ignominies, the same hopes and aspirations. Something in this place, in its classrooms, or its quadrangle, something that had happened here more than thirty years before, had sown the seeds of destruction that someone with a bronze sword had harvested all these years later. Somewhere, here, in this cradle of modern Chinese academic history, lay a motive for murder. Li was sure of it.
Teacher Sun was seventy-nine years old, with thin, iron-grey hair scraped back across a scalp spattered brown with age spots. He wore an old blue cotton Mao suit. Not because it signified anything political, he told them, but because he had got used to wearing them, and they were cool and comfortable. It did not look as if there was much flesh on the bones beneath the baggy blue cotton. He walked with a stick and was dragging on the stump of a hand-rolled cigarette. He sat down on the other side of the desks and looked at them reflectively, a light shining still in his dark old eyes.
‘This makes me think,’ he said, ‘of the bad old days.’ And he stamped his cigarette end on the floor.
‘What days were those?’ Li asked.
‘When they brought me into classrooms like this and sat me down and talked rubbish at me for hours. And then wanted me to talk rubbish back.’
‘During the Cultural Revolution?’ Li said. The old man nodded. ‘You had a bad time?’
He nodded again. ‘Not as bad as some. But bad enough. Struggle Sessions, they called them.’ He chuckled. ‘They would struggle to make me confess and I would struggle not to.’
‘What did you have to confess to?’ asked Zhao.
‘Whatever it was they decided to accuse me of. If I didn’t confess I was accused of being arrogant and an active counter-revolutionary. If I did confess I was pilloried and abused. It was like those women accused of being witches in medieval Europe. They threw them into the river, if they survived they were witches, if they drowned they were innocent. There was no way you could win.’
‘But why would they want to accuse their teachers?’ Zhao was curious. Li glanced at him, surprised, then realised that the Cultural Revolution would have been over by the time Zhao started school, and it had been a long time after that before people spoke about what had happened. And now there was a whole generation profoundly ignorant about the events of those twelve tragic years.
But the old man just smiled sadly at Zhao’s ignorance. ‘Had you been here, you could have read why,’ he said. ‘The Red Guards came and pasted da-zi-bao posters all over the walls out there in the square, great handwritten propaganda posters denouncing us all as revisionists.’ He chuckled and shook his head. ‘Of course, usually it was the stupid ones who led all the attacks, and they just copied their slogans from the newspapers. Apparently, although we did not hold bombs or knives, we teachers were still dangerous enemies. We filled our students with revisionist ideas. We taught them that scholars were superior to workers,
and promoted personal ambition by encouraging competition for the highest grades. It seems the authorities believed that in trying to raise the standards and expectations of our students we were changing good young socialists into corrupt revisionists. In truth, it was simply that an ignorant peasant was less of a threat than an intelligent thinker. So the leaders believed that the invisible knives wielded by the teachers were much more dangerous than any real knives or guns.’
Li sat back and lit a cigarette. He said, ‘You know why we are here, Teacher Sun?’
Teacher Sun shrugged. ‘I hear rumours.’
‘Four of your former pupils,’ Li said, ‘have been murdered.’ Teacher Sun nodded. ‘I want to know if you remember them.’ And Li rattled off their names.
As he did so, the old man raised an eyebrow, then shook his head. ‘Very sad,’ he said. ‘I remember Yuan Tao well. He was a brilliant student. By far and away the best in his year. A likeable boy, shy and unassuming.’ His eyes flickered and focused somewhere in the middle distance as he remembered Yuan with clear affection. And then a cloud descended on him, and all the light went out of his black eyes. ‘The others …’ he said, ‘… I only remember for one reason. Dull students, except for Yue Shi. He went on to become a professor of archaeology, I believe. Brighter than the others, but an unpleasant boy, easily led.’ He shuddered at some disagreeable memory. Then he looked very directly at Li. ‘They were all members of a group of Red Guards who called themselves the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade. Part of the Red-Red-Red Faction. Stupid, brutish boys, manipulated by much cleverer people much higher up.’