by Peter May
‘Are you finished?’ Li’s voice startled her out of her reverie.
She turned to find him standing in the doorway. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, and she selected Print, and crossed the room to the printer as it spewed out two copies of the half-dozen pages of the North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts.
Li appeared beside her. ‘What’s this?’
‘Report on a sword arts competition in Vancouver two years ago. Yuan Tao came second in his category. Apparently he took up the practice of the Japanese sword art of Kendo shortly after he got his mother’s diary in 1995. Seems he was pretty good at it by the time he got here.’ She handed the copies to Li. ‘Not much doubt now about Yuan being our man.’
‘None,’ Li said. ‘That bloody fingerprint in Bai Qiyu’s office? It was Yuan’s.’
Margaret clicked her tongue. ‘That’s it, then. We’ve got motive, opportunity, a whole bunch of circumstantial evidence — the blue dust, the wine, the sword expertise — and now evidence that puts him at one of the crime scenes. Enough to get a conviction in any court.’
‘Except that someone beat us to it and took the law into their own hands. Here,’ he handed her a loose and weighty folder and turned towards the door.
She headed after him, struggling not to spill its paper content all over the floor. ‘What’s this?’
He strode off down the corridor. ‘All the latest updates for your records,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Transcripts of all the interviews we conducted with teachers and former pupils of Yuan’s old school, a translation of the diary, profiles on the remaining Red Guards …’
‘Could you not just have had these sent over to the embassy?’
Li turned at the top of the stairs and there was something in his smugness that infuriated her. ‘I wanted to deliver them personally into your hands, so no one can ever accuse me of failing to keep you fully informed.’ He started off down the stairs.
‘Where are you going?’ A bunch of papers slipped from the folder and fluttered down the steps in his wake. But he didn’t turn.
‘We.’ His voice reverberated around the stairwell.
‘We what?’ she gasped in frustration as she tried to retrieve the dropped sheets.
‘Where are we going.’ His voice rose up to her as he started on the next flight down.
She picked up the last of the papers and ran after him. ‘OK, where are we going?’ She caught up with him at the foot of the stairs, the file clutched to her bosom, arms wrapped around it. She was breathing hard.
He stopped and tucked a copy of the computer print-out into the top of the folder. ‘To see Pauper,’ he said.
‘Who’s Pauper?’
But he seemed lost in thought for a moment before tentatively meeting her eye. ‘You might as well know, I did a check on Michael Zimmerman’s whereabouts during the first three murders.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Margaret exploded.
Li said, ‘Chinese police work requires meticulous attention to detail, Dr Campbell.’ He paused, but before she could tell him what she thought of his Chinese police work, he added, ‘You’ll be pleased to know he wasn’t even in the country when the first two murders took place.’
And he went out into the glare of afternoon sunshine. She caught up with him again at the Jeep. The few moments it took allowed her temper to cool just a little, enough at least for good sense to prevail. There was no point in pursuing it. It was over. ‘So, who’s Pauper?’ she asked again.
‘One of the Red Guards.’ He opened the driver’s door and got in behind the wheel, then watched as she struggled to keep her folder intact and open the passenger door at the same time.
‘Don’t help or anything,’ she said as she finally slipped into the passenger seat and unloaded the files on to the floor behind her. ‘So you think this Pauper person’s a potential suspect?’
He shook his head. ‘Not a chance.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s blind.’
CHAPTER NINE
I
Pauper’s hutong meandered through a quiet maze of traditional siheyuan courtyard homes in a leafy area north of Behai Park. Li parked at the end of the lane, and they walked along the narrow alleyway between high crumbling brick walls, past a trishaw with a single bed strapped to the back of it. Stout wooden gates, left and right, opened on to secluded courtyards where as many as four families shared living space on each side of the square. Through the dark openings, Margaret could see bicycles and pot plants, brushes and buckets, and all manner of the accumulated junk of siheyuan life.
Ahead of them, a large crowd of tourists wearing silly baseball hats was gathered around a Chinese tour guide with a red flag and a battery-operated megaphone at his mouth. In a strange metallic monotone, the guide was pointing out the features associated with the siheyuan. ‘This traditional black tile roof,’ he said, then repeated for emphasis, ‘traditional black tile roof. In ancient times, black tiles for ordinary people, for ordinary people.’ And using his rolled up flag on a stick as a pointer, he jabbed at a square brown box mounted on the wall at the top right of the doorway. A thick black cable fed in and out of it. ‘Another traditional feature of siheyuan,’ he said. ‘Traditional feature of siheyuan. This box for cable TV.’ And he giggled at his joke. ‘For cable TV. We have fifteen channel of cable TV going into traditional siheyuan.’
Li and Margaret drew a few curious glances from bored-looking tourists as they passed the group and Margaret heard a middle-aged American lady whisper to her companion, ‘Why does he have to repeat everything? I just don’t know why he has to repeat everything.’
After another twenty yards, beyond a small shop window displaying cigarettes and soft drinks, they turned into an open doorway, stepping over a wooden barrier and then down steps into Pauper’s courtyard. Round coal briquettes were stacked three deep and two metres high against one wall. An old broken chair lay at an odd angle on the stairs. Bicycles rested one against the other. Potted plants bloomed on every available space. Two canaries sang in a bamboo cage hung from a shady tree that seemed to grow out of a crack in the slabs. The atmosphere was curiously still and restful. The city seemed to have melted away into some unpleasant dream somewhere just beyond reach. Margaret saw inquisitive faces peering out of windows and doors at the far side of the courtyard. Li saw them, too. ‘I’m looking for Blind Pauper,’ he called. A woman pointed at a door to their left. It was lying open. Li turned to Margaret. ‘This way.’
They passed another door to a tiny cluttered kitchen with a two-ring gas stove and a charred extractor. A microwave sat incongruously on a melamine cabinet opposite an old white porcelain tub and an electric water heater.
Li paused at the door to the apartment and was about to knock when a woman’s voice called, ‘Who’s looking for Blind Pauper?’
‘Police,’ Li said, and Margaret followed him in.
Pauper was sitting knitting on a two-seater settee opposite a television set mounted on a white-painted wall unit. There was a small table with an ashtray on it, a bookcase, an electric fan. Through a glass-panelled door they could see into her tiny bedroom, bare and cell-like with a single bed. Everything was neatly arranged, fastidiously clean. There were, Margaret noticed, no pictures on the walls.
‘Who’s the woman?’ Pauper said. She was a shrunken old lady with silver hair tied back in a bun. She wore a traditional blue Mao suit and small black slippers on her tiny feet. Margaret would have taken her for seventy, before realising with a shock that she must be the same age as the others. Only fifty-one. Her round, black-lensed spectacles gave her a faintly sinister air.
‘How do you know there’s a woman with me?’ Li asked.
‘I can smell her.’ Pauper’s lips curled in an expression of distaste. ‘Wearing some cheap Western perfume.’
‘She’s an American.’
‘Ah! Yangguizi!’ Pauper spat out the word like a gob of phlegm.
‘I take it you don’t speak English,’ Li said.
‘Why should you think that?’ Pauper said in perfect English, startling Margaret with the sudden change of language, and the vitriol in her tone. ‘You think I am stupid because I come from a poor family and didn’t do well at school?’
‘No,’ Li said evenly. ‘But I know that not many schools taught English in the sixties.’
‘I learned English to read braille. There is not enough of it in Chinese to feed a mind without eyes.’ She paused. ‘You have come about the murders?’
‘Yes,’ Li said. He slipped a book out of the bookcase and started leafing through it, running his fingers over the raised patterns of dots that could be ‘read’ like words. ‘What do you know about them?’
‘Please do not touch my books.’ she said. ‘They are very precious to me.’ Li was startled, and peered at her closely, as if believing for a moment that she could actually see. ‘I can hear you,’ she said as if she could read what was in his mind. ‘You may be a policeman, but it doesn’t give you the right to touch my stuff. Who is the American?’
‘I’m a pathologist,’ Margaret said. ‘I am helping with the investigation.’
‘Since when did the Chinese need help from the Americans?’ Pauper’s disgust was patent.
‘We don’t need their help,’ Li said. ‘But one of the victims was an American.’
Pauper frowned. ‘An American?’ She was clearly caught off balance. ‘I only know about Monkey and Zero and Pigsy. What American?’
‘A Chinese-American,’ Li said. ‘He was born here. You went to school with him. His name was Yuan Tao.’
What little colour there was drained from Pauper’s face. ‘In the name of the sky,’ she said. ‘Cat!’ And there was a sudden dawning in her expression. She put a hand to her mouth. ‘He killed them. We knew it was someone out to get us. One by one. But Cat,’ she said again in wonder. ‘I never would have thought him capable of it.’
‘Who’s we?’ Li asked her.
‘Birdie and me. The only ones left.’
‘What about Tortoise? We haven’t been able to track him down.’
‘You’d have to go to hell to find him,’ she said. ‘He’s been dead more than ten years now. A stupid boy. He was simple, you know. He went down to Tiananmen Square the first night of the trouble, to see what it was all about, and got himself squashed by a tank.’ She was struck by another thought. ‘But, then, who killed Cat?’
‘We thought you might be able to tell us.’
‘Me?’ Pauper laughed a humourless laugh, and then she pursed her lips and her eyes wrinkled shrewdly. ‘You think it was one of us.’ And she laughed again. ‘Maybe you think I killed him.’
‘What about Birdie?’
‘Birdie?’ she chortled, and chuckled to herself, unable to contain her mirth. ‘Birdie? Are you serious? Have you spoken to him?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Birdie couldn’t kill anyone. He’s a pathetic, harmless old man.’
‘I thought he was the leader of the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade,’ Li said. ‘The one who led the attack on the teachers, the one who ordered the school gate destroyed.’
‘That was a long time ago,’ Pauper said. ‘More than thirty years. He was brave and strong and I thought the world of him then. But when the Red-Red-Red Faction split, they turned on him. You’ve heard the old saying that the wheel of fate turns every sixty years. Well, it turned on poor old Birdie. They beat him and kept him in a room for nearly two years, making him write self-criticisms and dragging him out for struggle sessions. They killed all his birds and finally sent him to Inner Mongolia to labour, building frontier defences. I met him again a few years later, and he was a changed man.’ She laughed, but it was a sour laugh, filled with bitterness. ‘Of course, I was a changed woman by then, too. I had lost my eyes.’
‘How did that happen?’ Margaret asked.
Pauper swivelled her head in Margaret’s direction and sniffed as if making some olfactory assessment. ‘They thought I was stupid at school,’ she said eventually. ‘Because I could not see right. I kept telling them I had headaches, but they thought I was just malingering. I told them I had a black cloud in my eyes, that I could not see the blackboard any more.’ She shook her head. ‘It was another two years before my father took me to the hospital. But not before I had collapsed. They said I had a tumour in my right eye and that it was malignant and they would have to take the eye away.’ The sour laugh again, lips stretched over yellow teeth. ‘They believed me then.’ She snapped her mouth shut and Margaret saw her lower lip tremble. ‘All I could think was how ugly I would look without an eye. But they said they could give me a glass one and no one would know the difference.’
‘Were you still in the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade then?’ Li asked.
‘No. Birdie had been arrested and we had broken up and gone our separate ways.’
‘So what happened to your other eye?’ Margaret was curious.
Pauper turned a sneer on her. ‘You’re a doctor, can’t you guess?’
‘Not my speciality,’ Margaret said.
‘Hah,’ Pauper said. ‘Doctors! What do they know?’ Her tiny hands clutched her knitting tightly. ‘After about six months the headaches came back. At first I thought it was the glass eye, because it was not so bad when I took it out. But it kept getting worse and the doctors said I had a tumour in the other eye. It would have to go, too, they said. But my father wouldn’t let them. I wasn’t even twenty years old, he said. What had I seen? Of life, of my country.’ Again, her lower lip trembled, and Margaret believed if she had had eyes, tears would have spilled from them.
‘My father was a packer in a factory,’ Pauper said. ‘My mother was dead. We were very poor. But he borrowed money from the other workers. Six hundred yuan. It was a lot of cash in those days. He told the doctors they could have my other eye in two months. But first I was going to see my country. We took the train and went to Xi’an and Chongqing, and then down the Yangtse to Nanjing and Shanghai. And then he took me to his home town of Qingdao, where I had been born. He took me to the top of a hill above the town so that I could look down on it and see the sun rise in the east across the Yellow Sea. But the sea wasn’t yellow. It was red. The colour of blood, and Chongqing looked like it was on fire. I’ll never forget it. I can still see it now, in my mind’s eye. I can never see it again any other way.’
She took a moment or two to steady her breathing, and Margaret saw her grip on her knitting relax just a little. ‘By the time we were on the train home, everything was milky and blurred, like a mist had come down. And then they took my other eye, and I had to learn to “see” in other ways. With my ears and my nose and my fingers. Sometimes I think I can see things better without my eyes.’ She waved a hand towards the other side of the room. ‘That is why I have a television. I see with my ears, and make pictures in my head. I can tell from a voice the expression on a face. I don’t need my eyes any more.’
They sat in silence for what seemed like a very long time. Then Li said, ‘How did you get your nickname?’
‘Pauper?’ The bitterness was back in her laugh again. ‘How do you think? My father could barely afford to clothe me. My mother was dead and he was no good at patching things, so all my clothes were worn and torn and badly patched. Other kids were poor, too. But they didn’t look it. They called me Pauper to make fun of me, and it stuck. All my life. Only, now, I’m Blind Pauper. Poor and blind.’
Li scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Have you ever heard the nickname, Digger?’
She frowned. ‘Digger? No, I have never heard that name. Who is Digger?’
‘We thought it might have been Yuan Tao.’
‘Cat? No. He has always been Cat. Scaredy Cat.’ Her lip curled into its habitual sneer. ‘I am glad someone killed him. What right did he have to a better life than us? What right did he have to revenge?’
They heard a familiar metallic voice buzzing through a megaphone. ‘This traditional siheyuan courtyard. Siheyuan courtyard. In ancie
nt time only one family live here. Only one family. Now there are four family. Four family.’
Pauper put her knitting aside and got stiffly to her feet. ‘How else does a blind person make a living these days?’ she said. ‘They bring tourists to my house to see the curiosity, how an old blind Chinese lady lives. They pay me more money than my father earned in his factory. And at least I am spared from having to look at them.’
Li and Margaret moved to the door. Li said, ‘Do you see Birdie often?’
‘I have not seen Birdie since they took my eyes,’ Pauper said. ‘But he comes to visit me often and his birds sing to me, and chatter and make a wonderful noise.’
‘And he knew about Monkey and Zero and Pigsy as well?’
‘Of course. We spoke several times about which of us would be next.’
The megaphone arrived at the door. ‘Only six people at a time, please. Six at a time. This is traditional siheyuan home. Ve-ery small inside. Ve-ery small.’ He glared at Li and Margaret.
Li said to Pauper, ‘We have an address for Birdie in Dengshikou Street. Does he still live there?’
She nodded. ‘But you won’t find him there now. He has a stall at the Guanyuan bird market. That is where his life is. Where it has always been. With his birds.’
As Li and Margaret pushed out, the tour group was pushing in, chattering excitedly at the prurient prospect of invading an old lady’s privacy.
II
Li manoeuvred his Jeep slowly west through the traffic. Beneath the sprinkling of shade cast by the trees, bicycles weaved precariously in and out of narrow lanes, overtaking tricycle carts, avoiding buses and taxis. The sidewalks were alive with activity in this busy shopping quarter, stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables and great baskets of chestnuts outside shops whose windows were crammed with computers and hi-fis and DVD players. In the hazy distance, they could see the flyover at the junction with the second ring road. Horns peeped and blasted, not so much in anger as frustration. Li leaned on his wheel, his mouth set in a grim line. Soon, he thought, Beijing would slip into permanent gridlock and bicycles would become fashionable again, not just as the fastest, but as the only way of getting around.