by Peter May
Of course, he realised, it might have been someone from the embassy. Their security officer, perhaps. Americans were fond of their aftershave. But it left Li feeling uneasy. If someone had searched the apartment in the diplomatic compound, had they found what they were looking for? He quickly gulped down the last of his beer and went in search of his shoes, buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his jeans as he went. He was damned if he was going to sit here feeling sorry for himself. If Yuan Tao had hidden something in the apartment he was renting illegally, he might also have hidden something in his embassy apartment. Something that may, or may not, still be there. But it was worth a look.
Li glanced at the time. It was a quarter to midnight. But it didn’t matter. There would be a guard on the gate of the compound all night.
II
Li wheeled his uncle’s bike through the gates of the diplomatic compound, and looked up at the windows. There were lights still on in quite a few of them — embassy staff and their families watching television or working late.
‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ The guard hurried out from behind the hut where he had been having a cigarette. He stamped it out under foot as he approached Li. It was not the same guard who had been on duty during his last visit.
Li played dumb. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean, what makes you think you’ve got the fucking right to just waltz in there?’ The guard swaggered up to him. He was young and cocky, and a sneer curled his lip.
‘I’m going to visit a friend.’
‘No you’re not.’ The guard pushed his face close to Li’s. ‘Not unless I say you can.’
Li ignored the guard’s aggression and asked innocently, ‘Why not?’
The guard looked at him as if he had two heads. ‘Because this is a diplomatic compound, dickhead. And Chinese like you don’t get in unless I say so.’
Li drew out his Public Security ID wallet and thrust it in the guard’s face. ‘I don’t know if they taught you to read where you come from — dickhead.’ The guard’s startled face recoiled, almost as if from an electric shock. ‘But in case they didn’t, you’re talking to a senior ranking CID officer of the Beijing Municipal Police. And if I ever catch you talking to another Chinese like that again I’ll see to it that you spend the rest of your career on border patrol in Inner Mongolia.’ The guard blinked and gulped. His face had gone pasty pale. ‘Understand?’ The boy nodded. ‘Good,’ Li said. ‘And is that how you speak to foreigners?’
‘No, boss.’ The guard shook his head vigorously, completing his transformation from snarling hound to grovelling mongrel.
‘So if I was a yangguizi and I told you I was visiting a friend, what would you say?’
‘I’d check who it was you were going to see and then let you in.’
‘Wouldn’t they have to come down and get me?’
‘Only if you were a Chinese.’ He looked at the ground and wouldn’t meet Li’s eye. So it would be difficult, Li thought, for anyone who did not live in the apartment building to gain access to it, unless he was a foreigner.
‘Look at me, son,’ Li said, and the boy reluctantly raised his eyes. ‘That uniform doesn’t make you any better than anyone else. Treat people the way you would have them treat you.’ He tucked his ID into his back pocket and wheeled his bike on into the compound.
There was tape stuck across the door — black on yellow: ‘CRIME SCENE, DO NOT ENTER’. Li opened the door and ducked under the tape. He was struck immediately by the familiar smells of stale cooking and body odour. But there was no hint of the scent he had detected on his first visit. So it had been fresh. One of the Americans probably. The light in the entrance hall did not work, and he fumbled in the dark into the tiny living room and felt for the light switch. A fluorescent strip hanging from the ceiling flickered into life and washed the room in its cold, harsh light. It seemed very sad and empty. A lonely place where a single man spent long hours with only his books for company. What on earth had drawn him back to China? From a job of position and prestige at a top American university, to a lowly visa clerk in Beijing. What kind of life had he lived, processing paperwork at the Bruce Compound during the day, cooped up here alone at night with his books? And yet there had been another life. A secret life. Why had he needed another apartment? According to his neighbours he spent hardly any time there. It was not a meeting place. If he had received visitors his neighbours in the apartment building would have known. But someone had visited. Someone had entered late at night, unobserved. Someone had torn up the linoleum and found something hidden beneath the floorboards. Someone had murdered Yuan Tao there and left unseen.
Li examined the linoleum in the living room. Bookcases stood along one edge of it, piles of books and magazines along the other. One could not have lifted it without moving almost everything in the room. There were no creases or tears obvious to the naked eye. He felt a tiny stab of disappointment.
He turned his attentions then to the bedroom, stripping the bed and checking the mattress and the base. There was nothing. He moved the wardrobe and tapped it front and back for hidden panels. But it was a utilitarian piece of furniture. What you saw was what you got. The linoleum in here had been tacked to the floor.
He went through to the toilet. But it was too small to hide anything. Plaster walls, concrete floor, one tiny cabinet on the wall. Li unscrewed the top of the cistern and looked inside. A cheap plastic mechanism winked up at him from the clear cold water that filled it. He stooped to remove the hair that had gathered in the drainer in the floor beneath the shower head and tried to prise it loose. But it was stuck fast. He washed his hands and went back through to the living room. He checked the armchair, pulling all its cushions away, then tipping it on to its side and tearing the hessian base to reveal the springs within its frame. Nothing.
He looked around, disappointed. Frustrated. All that remained were the books. He squatted down and began lifting them out in batches of six or eight, piling them on the floor at his feet. There were dozens of political volumes. Books on the history and development of the Communist Party in China, a Chinese translation of the works of Karl Marx, a series on the development of democracy in Taiwan, a fat volume on political changes in Hong Kong since the handover. There was a history of the Kuomintang and the legacy of Chiang Kai-Shek, another on the Chinese Secret Service written by two French journalists. Almost an entire shelf was devoted to the bloody events that had occurred in Tiananmen Square in ’89: The Long March to the Fourth of June; Cries for Democracy; Voices from Tiananmen Square; Death in Beijing. Yet another shelf seemed devoted to books on the Cultural Revolution. Li picked one out. Like most of the others it was in English. A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He opened it and saw that it had been first published in China in the late 1980s by the Workers’ Publishing House, before an American company had published this translation in the mid-nineties. There was a bookmark near the back of the book, and Li wondered if Yuan had been reading it in the days before he died. He flicked through to the marked page and the bookmark fell to the floor. He scanned the pages, but there was nothing of significance in them, and he lifted the bookmark to put it back and realised that it was in fact a sheet of paper twice folded. He put the book down and unfolded it. It had yellowed slightly and was a little brittle. There were handwritten Chinese characters scrawled across it, and Li realised that it was a letter. It was addressed to Yuan Tao c/o the University of California, Berkeley. The sender lived at an address at Guang’anmen in south-west Beijing. Li glanced to the foot of the page and saw that it was signed by Yuan’s cousin, Yang Shouqian.
His mouth was dry as he righted the armchair and sat on the edge of it to read the letter. It was dated May 15th, 1995.
My Dear Cousin Tao,
I wrote to cousin Liu in San Francisco in search of your address, but since the death of his father he was no longer sure where you were living. He was, however, almost certain that you were still teaching at the University of Ber
keley, and as I was able to confirm this on the Internet I am writing to you now.
You are probably not aware that my mother died about six weeks ago. She was nearly ninety. She had had a good life, and the end was peaceful. It was only when I was going through her things last week that I came across the enclosed diary. There was a letter with it, from your mother, dated 1970, which I have kept. In it she asked her sister to see that you got her diary. It covers the years after you went to America.
At first I did not understand why my mother had not done as her sister requested. That is, until I started to read the diary. I am sorry that I did so. I did not mean to invade your privacy. As you will see, it is written as a personal account to you. I did not read it all. In truth, I think I would have found it difficult to do so.
I suppose my mother was trying to protect you, but I think she should have sent it, none the less. Although it might be she was afraid that it would not have reached you at that time. And perhaps with the passage of time she thought it better to leave well alone.
However, it all now seems like such a very long time ago, and I think you have the right to know what happened. So here is the diary.
Please write to me to let me know how you are. Did you ever marry? Do you have children? I have a daughter who is at university now. If you should ever return to Beijing, I would very much like to see you again after all these years. I remember you only as a teenager, when I was not much older myself.
With all my very best wishes.
Your faithful cousin,
Yang Shouqian
Li was aware of the letter trembling slightly in his hand. Somewhere, just ahead, there was a door that he felt certain must open on to enlightenment. And in his hand he held, if not the key, then the intimation of its existence. He had the letter, but where was the diary? He had no idea what it looked like, whether it was large or small, black, red, blue … He laid the letter carefully on the table and cleared the bookshelves, checking each and every book, stripping the covers off hardbacks in case they concealed the diary underneath. Nothing.
He turned then to the piles of books and magazines under the window. Again he found nothing that remotely resembled a diary. He stood in the centre of the room and looked hopelessly around the disarray. He could not think where else it might be concealed. He crossed to pick up the letter again and felt the faintest of creaks beneath his foot. And paused. He stepped back and then rocked forward again. But this time there was nothing. Had he imagined it? And, anyway, what if he hadn’t? Floors creaked. Li followed again the line of the linoleum around the edges of the room with his eyes. If Yuan Tao had hidden anything under it, he had not envisaged requiring quick or easy access. But still, Li figured, if he had hidden something under the floor in the other apartment, might he not have done the same here? His earlier stab of disappointment became a spur of hope and anticipation.
It took him nearly twenty minutes to clear all the furniture and books to one end of the room so that he could pull back the linoleum. It had stuck a little to the floorboards around the edges, then as he rolled it back, he saw that there was a layer of old newspapers underneath it. He checked the dates and saw that they were all about six months old — just around the time Yuan Tao would have taken possession of the apartment. He rolled the linoleum right up to the furniture, then swept the newspapers aside, clearing a space in the middle of the floor where he had felt the boards creak underfoot. Immediately he saw where a single board had been lifted at a join, cut about twelve inches from it, and then nailed down again. Li had no idea whether Yuan had cut it, or whether it had been done long before by some tradesman accessing cables or pipes. He had no idea, either, how he was going to lift it again.
He searched the apartment for something with which he could prise up the floorboard, eventually finding a small box of tools in the cupboard under the sink. Taking a stout screwdriver, he drove it between the boards and forced them apart, levering the cut board upwards. The wood splintered, and the nails groaned as they were forced free of the joist. Eventually the twelve-inch length of board sprang free and clattered away across the floor. Li found himself looking into a space made dark by his own shadow. He moved so that he was not in his own light and saw, among the deadening rubble, the gleam of something plastic and shiny. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and reached in to lift out a small red book wrapped in clear plastic. For a long time he kneeled there, staring at it, hearing the sound of his own breath rasping in the silence of the apartment. A tiny rivulet of sweat ran down his forehead and dripped from his brow on to the bare floorboards.
*
The duty officer at Section One was astonished to see Li coming down the corridor on the top floor. He checked his watch. It was after 2 a.m. He had just been to refill his flask with hot water and was on his way to make a mug of green tea. He hurried into the detectives’ office after Li. A couple of detectives looked up in surprise. ‘Either you’re very early boss, or you’re very late,’ the duty officer said.
But all Li said was, ‘I don’t want to be disturbed. For any reason.’ And he slammed the door of his office shut behind him.
III
July 17th, 1966
A boy whom I recognised as one of your old schoolfriends came to our house this morning. His name is Tian Jingfu, a pudgy boy whom I seem to remember you called Pigsy. Your father remembered him, too, as a former pupil. Not a very bright one, he said. Anyway, now he wears a red arm band. He is one of the hung wei ping, the Red Guard activists who are spreading the word of Chairman Mao. He told us that all teachers were to report back to the No. 29 Middle School. Your father has not been there since classes were suspended in June. I do not know why Tian Jingfu was sent. He is no longer at the school.
When your father returned, he told me that da-zi-bao posters had been pasted up on all the walls by the pupils, who are being encouraged to criticise their teachers. When he and the other teachers got there the children were all painting slogans. They stopped what they were doing and watched their teachers with great caution, as if they were afraid that they might be punished. But your father said that when they realised the teachers no longer had power, they started to taunt them, calling them ‘rightists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. There were several posters that mentioned your father by name.
You probably do not recall that your father was denounced as a ‘rightist’ in 1958 and sent to work in the countryside for six months. We thought that was all behind us — until today.
A meeting was held in the square and a cadre from the party addressed the whole school and told them it was now the duty of every student and every teacher to take part in the ‘Anti-Four Olds’ campaign. The ‘Four Olds’, he said, were old ideas, old superstitions, old customs, old bourgeois life-styles. The worst exponents of the Four Olds, he said, were persons in authority taking the capitalist road. Then everyone was told to go home.
Your father believes he will be all right because he has already been punished as a ‘rightist’ and can claim that he has been reformed through labour. But he is always the optimist. I am not so sure. I am just happy that you will not be a part of this. And although you are far away, at least I feel I can talk to you by keeping this record of what is happening. I will try to keep it up to date so that like a photo album you will have a record of your family. But I am scared, Tao. Not so much for me as for your father.
Li rubbed his eyes with gloved hands. The concentrated light of his desk lamp on the white pages of the diary were making them water. He sat back and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke into the darkness that lay beyond the ring of light. Then he leaned forward again, and with his white gloves he turned each page with great care in order not to disturb whatever forensic evidence the diary might yield. Reading it was depressing, like a journey back through time to a distant memory of his own childhood and an experience shared with millions of people all over China. July 1966. It was only just beginning.
He did not read it all, flicking carefull
y forward through the pages, August, September, stopping here and there to read the increasingly harrowing account, as the fate that befell Yuan Tao’s parents unfolded.
September 15th, 1966
Your father and I watched from our window today as Mr Cai from across the landing was attacked in the street by Red Guards. They took his shoes and made him squat on a stool in full view of the street and shaved his head. I do not know why. It seems more and more that they can do what they like to you on whatever pretext they dream up.
Your father has not been at the school for nearly two weeks. His angina attacks are less frequent now, and he has learned to sit quietly and wait with great patience for the pain to pass. It is an awful thing for me to think, but I am glad of his heart condition. It keeps him away from the school. I fear for his life every time he goes there.
October 21st, 1966
They came to the house today. Six of them. All former pupils of your father. To look for ‘black’ materials, they said. This is anything that they believe is opposed to the Communist Party. The leader is a boy who lives in our street, Ge Yan. I think you know him. He is the boy who keeps birds in his yard. It is strange to think of someone who can love such delicate creatures being so violent and filled with hate. He screamed and shouted at me when I refused to let him see your father. He was very red in the face, with veins bulging at his temples. I was very frightened. But your father had not been well earlier, and he was in his bed.
Finally, when he heard all the shouting, he came out in his dressing gown and asked them what they wanted. He was quite angry with them for shouting at me, and they seemed quite taken aback. I don’t think they knew how to deal with him. They still remembered him as their teacher and I think were still a little afraid of him.