by Peter May
And yet here was another contradiction. She had lived in an expensive apartment, paid cash for costly dental work, been able to afford a babysitter for her child. It did not fit with everything else they knew about her. Li wondered again what had happened to the child, and the thought led him to his own problem of Xinxin and her future. It was no life for her, stuck in a hotel room with a babysitter, moved around from one kindergarten to another, never knowing where to call home or who would come through the door at night. It was a problem he knew he would have to deal with as soon as this case was over. If this case would ever be over.
III
Xinxin’s shrieks of pleasure split the air and echoed around the park. Her knuckles glowed white as she gripped the tiny steering wheel on the little red, plastic car and pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The car sailed through a red light at a cross junction, narrowly missing a small boy on a blue motorbike and sidecar. Margaret, almost helpless with laughter, tried to explain to Xinxin that running red lights was not the object of the exercise. But communication that sophisticated was not possible. And, anyway, there was no real danger. Margaret could have climbed out of the car and walked faster. Xinxin was in seventh heaven, her bunches bouncing around on either side of her head, her face a picture of concentration and happiness. She flew round a roundabout the wrong way and her laughter pealed out again in the misty afternoon. She stole a glance at Margaret, and something about the mischief in those dark eyes led Margaret to believe that Xinxin knew only too well which way she was supposed to go round the roundabout, and that you were meant to stop at red lights.
They passed under a bridge, and an elderly couple sitting on a bench at the side of the miniature road waved, laughing at the sight of the little Chinese girl shrieking like a banshee and the blue-eyed foreign devil with the blonde hair squeezed into the tiny car beside her. They passed a yellow car coming in the opposite direction, a proud father smiling fondly as his son took evasive action to avoid a head-on collision with Xinxin.
The streets were bordered by narrow, paved sidewalks, and cut through large grassy areas planted with trees and neatly manicured shrubs and hedges. At intervals, there were five- and six-foot replicas of landmark buildings in Shanghai including, Margaret noticed as they whizzed past it, a model of the Peace Hotel, with its distinctive green copper roof rising to a point. In one corner of the park children played on chutes and swings under the watchful eyes of adoring parents. In another, dads and sons, and moms and daughters, pedalled tiny carriages around an overhead monorail. Beyond the fence that marked the boundary of the Tiantan Traffic Park, skyscrapers and tower blocks rose pale and colourless into a burned out sky. Somewhere above the mist, the sun was trying to push its way through, and it was sticky warm.
They swung around again past the entrance gate, where three-foot models of Goofy and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Pinocchio caused Xinxin no end of amusement. She gazed at them in delight as they passed, and Margaret had to grab the wheel to prevent them from mounting the sidewalk. They passed stone statues of a boy reclining and a girl dancing, and Xinxin swung them back into the main drag that bisected the park. She showed remarkable control of the tiny vehicle, and Margaret thought she would have no trouble getting a job as a taxi-driver in Beijing. They took a left, heading towards the open shed where the toy cars and motorbikes were collected and returned, then right again, past an area under construction. A workmen’s grey van was parked there beside a mechanical digger. Xinxin made another round of the park, and Margaret just sat back and enjoyed the ride. She had not felt this relaxed or this happy in a long time. She felt nothing but warmth and affection for little Xinxin. The only cloud on her happiness was a distant ache somewhere inside for a child of her own, and a sense of loss over the child she might once have borne.
They went around for a fourth time, and as they turned right at the gate and along the top end, Margaret made Xinxin stop outside the toilet block. She made it clear to the child that she was to wait there with the car. Margaret would only be a moment. Xinxin nodded vigorously and watched as Margaret hurried up the path and into the ladies’ washroom. She could have been no more than two minutes, but when she came out Xinxin was gone. Margaret cursed. She was sure the child had understood that she was not to move. She looked left and right and saw a green car and a yellow one, and a blue three-wheeled motorbike negotiating the roundabout at the far end of the main street. Several of the green benches along the sidewalks were occupied by elderly people, or students with their heads buried in books. She could hear the shriek and laughter of children and a babble of adult voices from the play area at the far side of the park. Margaret could not have said what it was exactly, but there was something in the absolute normality of everything that started pushing panic buttons in her head. Everything was normal, except for the fact that Xinxin was nowhere to be seen.
Margaret called out her name. Once, twice. And then she positively yelled it. Heads turned in her direction, and she started running along the main street, looking left and right for the little red car and Xinxin with her familiar pink dress and hair in bunches. She stopped at the first roundabout as the workers’ grey van she had seen earlier cruised slowly past her towards the exit. And then she saw the car. It was sitting at an angle in the middle of a parallel street about fifty metres away, next to the area under development Margaret sprinted towards it, calling Xinxin’s name again. The car was empty. It had about it a sense of abandonment, the wheels turned hard left to full lock. The elderly couple she had noticed before were still sitting on their bench about twenty metres further down the road. She ran towards them. ‘What happened to the little girl? Did you see where the little girl went?’ she called breathlessly. They looked at her, a little alarmed, as if they thought she might be insane. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you speak English!’ The panic was rising now in her throat, constricting her breathing. The couple looked at her blankly. Margaret pointed back along the street to the abandoned car. They looked and then shook their heads, uncomprehending.
She gave up and ran back towards the collect and return point where they had picked up the car half an hour before. There was a small group of parents and children gathered around the office window paying for cars. And then Margaret saw Xinxin at the far side of the lot sitting on a yellow motor-bike. Her knees nearly folded under her with relief. ‘Xinxin!’ she shouted and ran towards the child. But Xinxin wasn’t paying her any attention, and as Margaret got close and called again the child turned, startled, and Margaret saw that it was not Xinxin after all. She had the same high-gathered bunches, but her dress was pale green. The little girl looked alarmed and began crying. The adults at the office window turned and glared in Margaret’s direction, and in her heart Margaret knew then that Xinxin was gone. ‘Oh, God,’ she wailed. ‘Oh, God, help me, please. Someone please help me.’
*
Rain wept from the sky like the tears that ran down Margaret’s cheeks. She sat stock still, staring into an abyss, a black hole that was her own personal hell. She was numb from the shock of it, choked still by disbelief. In two short minutes a child had vanished and her world had come to an end.
Police radios crackled somewhere nearby. Uniformed officers combed the park for clues. A line of mothers and fathers and children stood outside the gatehouse waiting to be interviewed. Shock and fear stole among the adults who knew that a child had gone and that it could so easily have been one of theirs. The comfort and security of their lives had been shattered. The Disney characters that stood clustered on the grassy bank just inside the gate seemed only to mock them now. In the street outside, a huge crowd was gathering as news spread through the shops and apartments in the surrounding streets. More than a dozen police vehicles were drawn up at the sidewalk, and already the traffic cops were arriving to take over crowd control. A fast food store on the other side of the tree-lined Zunyi Road, which advertised ‘Metro Sandwiches New York Style’, was doing brisk business.
There was a
slightly hysterical pitch to Li’s voice as he barked commands at uniformed officers. He had been on the scene within twenty minutes of Margaret’s call. It was now an hour since Xinxin had gone missing. With the exception of a few terse questions, he had barely spoken to Margaret. She knew he blamed her. She blamed herself. You cannot leave a six-year-old child on its own anywhere, at any time.
And yet it had felt so safe here.
She reflected on how, finally, in near hysterics, she had found a middle-aged man who spoke a little English. The alarm had been raised, the police called, and word spread through the park that a child had vanished. Everyone, then, had started to search for Xinxin. The women at the gate had not seen her leave. They would have seen her for sure, they said. And yet she was nowhere to be found within the park.
A red-faced uniformed officer approached Li at a run. ‘There’s been a development, Boss, you’d better come to the gatehouse.’ Li followed him quickly to the small concrete building at the gate, green canopies shading door and windows. They passed the line of parents and kids, and ducked inside. Three undernourished-looking men stood smoking in the tiny office, engaged in animated discussion with another two uniformed officers. They were dressed in blue workmen’s overalls. They had dirty faces and big, callused workers’ hands. One of them was older, with thinning hair. The other two had thick untidy mops speckled with plaster dust. The older man spoke for them.
‘We just got here, Chief,’ he said nervously. ‘We didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t know what?’ The dark fear that lurked in Li’s heart was making him aggressive.
‘That the van was missing. The boss just sent us to get it.’
‘Hold on.’ Li put up a hand to stop him. ‘Start from the beginning. Who are you?’
‘We work for the parks department. On contract from the street committee. You know, sometimes they got work for us, sometimes they don’t. Anyway, we was here this morning, demolishing that old building on the far side of the park. We loaded up the lorry with the debris and drove it down to an in-fill site way over in Pudong. Two of us had come in the van, but we had to leave it here when we took the crap away. The boss just told us half an hour ago that we better go get it.’ He hawked a gob of phlegm into his throat and was about to spit it on the floor when he thought better of it and reluctantly swallowed instead. He dragged his sleeve across his brow to wipe away the sweat. ‘Anyway, we get here and the place is crawling with cops. Takes us ages to persuade that bossy big bastard out there to let us in to get the van. Eventually they let Mao Jun here in to fetch it.’ He nodded towards one of the younger men. ‘Only it’s not there.’
‘You mean someone’s taken it?’ Li asked.
The man shrugged exaggeratedly. ‘Well, I don’t figure it drove off all by itself.’
Li glanced quickly at the other uniforms in the office. ‘Anyone see it leave?’
One of them nodded. ‘The woman at the ticket desk said it went out not long before the alarm got raised about the kid.’ He pulled a face. ‘But she didn’t see who was driving it.’
Li turned back to the workers. ‘It couldn’t have been one of your people?’
‘Shit, no. There’s only us and the boss in our unit.’
‘What about keys?’
‘What about them?’
‘Well, was it locked?’
‘Naw, the keys was in the ignition,’ the man said. He shrugged again. ‘We didn’t figure there was any danger of the kids taking off in it.’
Li drew in a deep breath to steady himself as he tried to take in the implications of all this. A grim-faced Dai rapped sharply on the door and squeezed into the overcrowded office. ‘We’re getting reports of some foreign guy seen sprinting down Ziyun Road towards the Yan’an flyover a little over an hour ago, Chief. Several people saw him.’
‘Foreign?’ Li frowned. ‘What do you mean by foreign?’
Dai shrugged. ‘A Westerner. Dark-haired, wearing jeans and a pale-coloured jacket. That’s the best description we’ve got. He was running south down the middle of Ziyun Road. It was kind of unusual, you know, so people noticed. Apparently he was chasing after a light-grey van and actually caught up with it briefly at the junction, banging on the side of it, before it sped off up on to the overhead road. People said he stood for a long time in the middle of the street just breathing real hard. Then he stopped a taxi and got in, and it went off in the same direction as the van.’
Li put his hand to his forehead and pressed middle-finger and thumb into his pounding temples to try to alleviate the pain there so that he could think clearly. None of this was making much sense. If the van had been stolen at around the time Xinxin disappeared, did that mean someone had snatched her? And why? What possible reason could there be? He could barely address the thought for the fear it conjured in his mind. But what about the Westerner running down the middle of the road chasing the van? Was it connected? Was it even the same van? He turned to Dai. ‘See if we can match up the description of the van with the one that’s missing.’ He waved a hand at the workmen. ‘These guys might be able to tell us if there was something, anything, distinctive about it. And let’s see if we can find the taxi-driver who picked this guy up.’ He could see the despair etch itself on Dai’s face at the thought. There were more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand privately licensed taxis in Shanghai. He added, ‘Let’s get an appeal out on radio and television. Anyone who was in the area who might have seen anything, we want to talk to them.’
He found it no easier to breathe outside, and compounded his distress by lighting a cigarette with trembling fingers. His legs were like jelly, his stomach had turned to water, and as the full realisation sank in that Xinxin had not just wandered off, that she might have been kidnapped, he felt fear, like bile, rising in his throat. The sign on the gate read: SPARETIME SCHOOL OF TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR CHILDREN. TRAFFIC OFFICE, SHANGHAI POLICE BUREAU. And even as he read it, the characters were blurred by his tears. He was not, he knew, the best person to lead this operation. Every thought, every judgement, was coloured by emotion.
He turned to see Margaret being led to a car by a policewoman. Her face was streaked black with mascara, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. She moved like an automaton, no emotion visible in her expression. Before she stooped to get into the car she turned and saw Li watching her. At that moment he felt something more than anger. It felt like hate. Somewhere, buried so deep inside him as not to make a difference, he knew perhaps that it wasn’t really her fault. But every conscious part of him blamed her. Every muscle and sinew strained to scream abuse and blame, to punch and slap and hurt her. She recoiled slightly, as if from a blow, almost as though his darkest thoughts had taken physical form. He made no move towards her, no sign. She got into the car with her misery, and he turned away as it drove off.
IV
Japanese warlords in period costume strutted about a stylised set gesturing wildly at each other, eyes staring and burning with a kind of madness. Chinese subtitles flashed on and off the screen, lines of tiny characters that could not possibly be read in the allotted time. The sound on the television was switched to mute, and its flickering luminescence was the only light in the room.
Margaret sat on the edge of the bed, close to a phone which had resolutely refused to ring all evening. In her hand she clutched a tumbler of whisky. She had worked her way through all the miniatures in the mini-bar, and was now on to the Scotch. But it didn’t seem to matter how much she drank, she couldn’t get drunk. Oblivion was all she sought, and yet it remained elusive, despite her best efforts.
Her mouth was dry, and the pain thumped in her head with every beat of her heart, each pulse a reminder of her guilt, of her shame, of her failure. Responsibility for a young life had been placed in her hands today and she had not lived up to her obligations. She was not fit to be a mother. She was not fit to live. She remembered once, during her time as an intern, losing a patient in the emergency room. A young woman, the victim of a knife attack
. Margaret had been incapable of stopping the internal bleeding. It wasn’t her fault, but it had been a turning point in her life, a moment when she realised that no matter how well trained, no matter how experienced, control of that moment which ultimately decided between life and death was never really in your hands.
But today, Xinxin’s life had been in her hands. She had had absolute control and failed to exercise it. As a young doctor she had turned from the futility of trying to save the living, to the predictability of dissecting the dead. Now all she wanted to do was to give up life completely, her own life, and find some escape in the final embrace of death, her own death. But she was, she knew, too big a coward for that. And, besides, death would be too lenient a punishment.
She emptied her glass and stood up, crossing unsteadily to the window and drawing back the curtains. Saturday night. Nanjing Road was filled with people and traffic. She looked down at the crowd below her and wished that she were one of them, freed from the burden of guilt and fear for a child she had failed. But, then, who knew what pain other people carried in their heads, what private grief, what personal hell. She would not be the only person suffering in the world tonight. But that knowledge did nothing to take away the pain.