The Killing Room

by Peter May

  She looked out of the window at the featureless mud flats below as her plane circled in from the ocean and descended rapidly to the new international airport at the south-west extreme of Pudong New Area. From the air, the curved roofs of the terminal building looked like the outstretched wings of some giant bird in flight.

  Inside the cavernous terminal, a high ceiling studded with lights reflected off a polished marble floor into an unfocused distance. Solitary travellers were dotted about among vacant rows of white seats, while cream columns soared up from an endless line of airline desks. The passengers from Margaret’s flight, which had felt very crowded, were quickly dispersed and swallowed up in its vastness.

  Margaret passed expeditiously through immigration. Her two heavy suitcases were already circling on the carousel when she reached it, and there was not a soul on duty at customs. On the sparsely populated concourse she looked around for signs in English, or a familiar face. She found neither. Only a group of elderly wide-eyed men and women in blue Mao suits, being shepherded around by a patient tour-guide wearing jeans and a tee-shirt emblazoned with the letters NYPD. Piped muzak somewhere in the background was playing “My Way.”

  “You know, you can always spot an American. They never travel light.” The American accent drawling at her right ear made Margaret spin around, and she found herself looking into the smiling face of a man of around forty, boyish good looks below an untidy mop of hair that was quickly going grey. He nodded towards the travel-scarred cases on her trolley. “Bet they weigh a ton, too. You need a hand?”

  “No, thank you,” Margaret said curtly.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” he said and held out his hand. “I’m Jack Geller.” Very reluctantly she shook it. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Campbell.”

  Margaret was taken aback She couldn’t believe that Li had sent this man to pick her up. He certainly didn’t look like he had anything to do with the Chinese police. He wore baggy brown corduroys, a shapeless green jacket that had seen better days and a grey, open-necked shirt. “How do you know my name?” she said.

  He grinned and pulled a rolled up newspaper from his jacket pocket and held it up so that it unravelled to reveal the front page. It was all in Chinese. But there, in the top right corner, was a large photograph of Margaret with short hair, the same one they had used on the TV news. “See, you’re famous here already.”

  She regarded him suspiciously. “You weren’t sent here to pick me up.”

  “No, that was my idea. But if you’re expecting someone else, you know, you could be in for a long wait. Traffic in town just grinds to a halt sometimes, and we’re a long way out. I, on the other hand, have a taxi waiting and would be happy to give you a ride.”

  “I don’t think so,” Margaret said. She paused. “Who exactly are you, Mr. Geller?”

  He fished in an inside pocket and produced a dog-eared business card and presented it to Margaret in the Chinese fashion, holding the top two corners between thumb and forefinger and offering it with both hands so that it can be read by the recipient. Only it was in Chinese. Margaret flipped it over. On the other side it read: JACK GELLER Freelance Journalist, and listed his address, and home and mobile numbers. She sighed and handed it back. But he held up a hand, refusing to take it. “No, keep it. You never know when you might want to give me a call.”

  “I can’t imagine a single circumstance,” Margaret said with irritation, slipping it into her purse.

  “That’s a pity,” he said. “I was hoping you might give me an interview, ahead of the pack.”

  “I won’t be giving any interviews to anyone,” Margaret said, and started pushing her trolley away from him.

  “The taxi rank’s the other way,” he said.

  Gathering as much dignity as she could, Margaret turned her trolley around and headed past him in the other direction. He tagged along beside her. “The foreign press here are going to be on your tail for as long as this investigation’s on-going. You can make it easy on yourself, or hard.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “A contact here at the airport checked the manifests for me. So I knew what flight you were coming in on. I always figured initiative deserved reward.”

  “And I always thought,” she said, “that the individual had a right to privacy.”

  “Hey, you’re in China now,” he said. “No such thing as the individual. And anyhow, in a kind of a way you’re representing your country here. Freedom of information and all that.”

  “Like you said, Mr. Geller, we’re in China now.”

  Glass doors slid open at their approach and Margaret pushed her trolley through them out on to a huge covered concourse, an empty four-lane highway running beyond it. Everywhere appeared deserted, apart from a short line of taxis at the far end. The lead driver looked hopefully in her direction, but she shook her head firmly.

  “Well,” Geller said, “I’d have thought if they were picking you up they’d have been here by now.”

  “They’ll be here,” Margaret said.

  He shrugged. “I’ll catch up with you later, then. At the Peace Hotel.”

  “Where?”

  “The Peace Hotel. That’s where you’re staying, isn’t it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, take my word for it.” He raised two fingers to his temple in a small salute, gave a slight nod and moved off towards the taxi rank.

  Margaret stood for a quarter of an hour watching the rain fall on the empty road, growing colder and more irritable with every passing minute. She raised her eyes hopefully each time she heard the sound of a car, but usually it was just another taxi dropping someone off and then joining the line. After twenty minutes she felt she knew every cold concrete surface in this bleak approach to International Arrivals and was contemplating going upstairs and getting the first flight back out. She had expected to see Li. It was what had sustained her across all the hours of the flight. And now she felt dashed, hurt mixed with anger. How her mother would have enjoyed the moment.

  Then a car drew up in front of her and her heart immediately lifted. She stepped forward to see Jack Geller leaning across the rear seat to open the door and her heart sank again. “You might as well get in,” he said through the open window. “Unless your Chinese is pretty good, you’re going to have a lot of trouble trying to tell a taxi-driver you want him to take you to the headquarters of the criminal investigation department.” He paused. “How is your Chinese by the way?”

  “If it was good enough to tell you to go forth and multiply, I would.” She sighed, acquiescing reluctantly. “But since it’s not, I guess I’d better just accept your offer gracefully.”

  He grinned and rattled off something in Chinese to the driver, who hurried out of the car to take Margaret’s cases and put them in the trunk. A small, wiry man of indeterminate age, he heaved and strained to lift them.

  An almost empty six-lane highway sped them north and east through the mist and rain of a flat, featureless landscape reclaimed from ancient mud flats. Huge billboards raised on polished chrome stalks flashed by on each side of the road, like enormous weeds. On one of them, what looked like four giant glasses of carrot juice prompted the slogan, in English, PROTECT THE VIRESCENCE, CHERISH THE LIFE. Another depicted a group of prosperous-looking children running across a green meadow towards a cluster of red-roofed villas, school satchels slung across their shoulders. It was an ad for the Shanghai Commercial Bank, a depiction of the new Chinese dream. Yet another, beneath a portrait of Deng Xiaoping, proclaimed, DEVELOPMENT IS TRUTH.

  Geller laughed. “The Chinese authorities still haven’t got over their need to sloganise. It’s just the messages that are different, and a little more confused. Mind if I smoke?”

  Margaret shrugged. “It’s your cab. And your life.”

  He lit up, then rolled down the window a little to blow out the smoke. “I was at a racetrack down in Canton recently. Horse-racing’s really catching on again in China. You’ve never seen anything like it. The car park wa
s filled with expensive imported cars, punters were queuing up to place bets at computerised betting windows. Wealthy businessmen were crowded into private rooms in the stand, cheering on horses with names like ‘Millionaire’ and ‘GetRichQuick.’ But, anyway, right above them all, draped from the roof, was a giant red banner proclaiming, ‘Resolutely Implement the Central Government’s Order on Forbidding Gambling.’” He laughed uproariously.

  In spite of her mood, Margaret’s face cracked in a smile. Although she would have been loath to admit it, there was something quite likeable about this wry and slightly tousled reporter who smelled faintly of alcohol.

  “See what I mean about confused?” he said. They passed another billboard, a photograph of the Great Wall with the slogan, LOVE OUR SHANGHAI, LOVE OUR COUNTRY. “Of course, Shanghai and Beijing hate each other’s guts,” Geller said. “Beijing’s got all the power, and Shanghai’s got all the money, and each one envies the other. But for me, Shanghai wins hands down. It’s quite a place. You been here before, Miss Campbell?”

  Margaret shook her head. “No.”

  “The Whore of the Orient.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Some people called it the Paris of the East, but I like the Whore of the Orient. I think it probably characterises best what it was like here between the wars. You know the place was virtually run by the British and the Americans? And the French. Oh, and the Japs.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Margaret was curious for the first time. She really knew nothing about Shanghai. “How did that happen?”

  “Oh, the Chinese were forced to grant various trading concessions to foreign powers in cities up and down the coast after the Opium Wars,” he said. “But Shanghai’s where it really took off. The place became the commercial gateway to China.” He drew on his cigarette and focused somewhere away in the middle distance. “We got together with the Brits to create what they called the International Settlement. The Frogs, as always, did their own thing in the French Concession. The ‘foreign devils’ ran everything here. Police, sanitation, building regulations. They were completely self-governing, dominated by the most powerful business interests. The Chinese got squeezed into the slums of the old town and never got a look in. It’s hardly any wonder this is where the Chinese Communist Party started up.” He sat back with a kind of dreamy smile on his face and took another long pull on his cigarette. “Shanghai was the most cosmopolitan city in the world. There were people here drawn from across the widest spectrum of East and West, from Nazi spies and Filipino band leaders to Arab gendarmes and Indian princesses.” He turned and grinned at her, “I’d have loved to have been around in those days. The place was teeming with gangsters and adventurers. A twentieth-century Sodom and Gomorrah.” He put on an English accent. “Spiced up by Lea and Perrin’s sauce and played out to the accompaniment of Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “Not very Chinese,” Margaret said.

  “Not at all,” Geller conceded. “But then large parts of Shanghai aren’t. You’ll see for yourself in time. Even the hotel you’re staying in is very British old colonial.”

  After Beijing, this was not what Margaret had been expecting. Another billboard flashed past advertising Haier electrical goods under the slogan, HAIER AND HIGHER. Off to their right a collection of Greek classical villas with white pillars, balustraded balconies and red roofs, just like those in the ad, stood behind gated security walls in a compound called LONG DONG GARDEN. Geller grinned at Margaret. “Always makes me smile. Juvenile, isn’t it?”

  Now Margaret saw the skyscrapers of the Lujiazui financial district emerging from the mist, the Pearl TV tower and the river beyond, and almost before she knew it, they were sweeping over the Nanpu Bridge and cruising north along the waterside expressway, the Bund appearing out of the rains like a mirage, wholly incongruous, like water in a desert. For a fleeting moment, Margaret experienced the illusion of being transported back to sometime in the late 1930s, drifting past grand European edifices, banks built by the French, consulates established by the British and Russians, cathedrals of commerce where one paid homage to the great business empire of Jardine, Matheson and Company.

  “That’s your hotel,” Geller said, pointing out of the window and breaking the spell. It was on the corner of Nanjing Road, a huge stone structure on fourteen floors with a steeply sloped green copper roof. “Used to be the Cathay Hotel, the most luxurious hotel in the east. Pure Art Deco. It’s still pretty stunning.” And a couple of buildings further on, he pointed up towards a line of statues, mythical heroes holding up a crenellated roof. “The Communists covered them up when they came to power. A symbol of the oppressed worker or something. They revealed them again in all their glory on the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic. I suppose now they are seen to symbolise strength and power.”

  On the river side of the Bund, a wide promenade was jammed with Chinese tourists in from the country, all jostling to have their photographs taken with the Oriental Pearl TV tower in the background.

  Their taxi swung across the Waibaidu Bridge over Suzhou Creek, in the shadow of the impressive Shanghai Mansions and the old Stock Exchange building, now converted to cheap hotel rooms and apartment rentals. They headed north then, through burgeoning high-rise suburbs, afternoon traffic choking narrow streets, to join up with the northern ring road. By the time the car pulled up outside the gates of 803, Margaret was completely disorientated.

  “This is you,” Geller said.

  “This is me where?” Margaret asked peering through the rain at the white gatehouse and the pink-tiled buildings beyond.

  “The headquarters of criminal investigation.” He spoke to the driver who retrieved her cases from the trunk. “Sure you don’t want a hand with those?” he said as he pushed open the door for her.

  “I can manage fine, thank you,” she said.

  “You won’t mind if I don’t get out, then. It’s kind of wet out there.” He grinned. The driver got back in and Geller pulled the door shut. He rolled down the window. “I’ll see you at the press conference.”

  “What press conference?” Margaret asked, confused. Geller appeared to know so much more about her movements than she did. But the car was already pulling away. She realised she was getting soaked, and pulled up the collar of her cotton jacket. She was not dressed for rain.

  A uniformed guard watched implacably as she dragged her cases over to the window of the gatehouse, to discover that nobody there spoke English. It was another fifteen minutes, after much to-ing and fro-ing and phoning back and forth, that a young uniformed policewoman who spoke English after a fashion said, “You follow me,” and led her into the main building where they took the lift up to the eighth floor. No one had offered to give her a hand with her cases. Her wet hair was smeared over her face, and her temper, short at the best of times, was strained to breaking point. At the end of a long corridor, they stopped at the open door of the detectives’ room. “You wait,” the policewoman said.

  Margaret stood, silently fuming, and watched as the young woman crossed the busy office, and then for the first time she saw Li at a window on the far side of the room. He was deep in earnest conversation with an attractive Chinese woman who appeared to be hanging on his every word. He said something that made her laugh, a strange braying laugh that Margaret could hear above the noise of the office, and she saw the woman touch the back of his hand. Just lightly, with the tips of her fingers. But there was something oddly intimate in it, and Margaret felt a sudden surge of fear and insecurity, swiftly followed by anger. She had not travelled six thousand miles across the world to watch her lover sharing an intimate moment with another woman.

  The uniformed policewoman spoke to Li and he glanced quickly across the room to see Margaret in the doorway. His face lit up in a smile and he hurried across towards her. And for a moment Margaret’s anger and insecurity melted away and all she wanted was for Li to take her in his arms and hold her. But, of course, he couldn’t. And she saw that the woman who had touch
ed his hand had followed immediately behind him.

  “Margaret,” he said, strangely formal. “I thought you’d be here earlier.”

  “I would have been, if I hadn’t had to find my own way from the airport.” Her voice could have frosted the windows on the other side of the room.

  Li frowned. “But I sent a car out to meet you.” He turned to the Chinese woman. “You put in a request for one, didn’t you, Mei-Ling?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking very puzzled. “I do not understand what could have happened. I will make enquiries about it.” She spoke in very good, clear English, with a slightly English accent. And Margaret knew immediately that Mei-Ling had somehow contrived to sabotage the pick-up. There was something in the smile she flashed at Margaret. Something slightly knowing, slightly superior. And all of Margaret’s instincts told her that this woman was after her man.

  Li seemed oblivious. “I am really sorry, Margaret. I would have come for you myself, but I have been up to the eyes.” He paused. “This is Nien Mei-Ling. She is my opposite number here in Shanghai. We are working together on the case.”

  Mei-Ling gave her a winning smile and shook her hand. “Hi,” she said. “Li Yan has told me so much about you.”

  “Has he?” Margaret shook her hand a little more firmly than required. You did not cut through human ribs with heavy shears without developing greater than average hand strength. She saw Mei-Ling’s smile become a little more fixed.

  Barely a dozen words had passed between the two women, but there had been an unspoken declaration of war, clear and unequivocal, with Li as the disputed territory.

  Li had heard only the dozen words and had no reason to take them at anything other than face value. He glanced at his watch. “We had better move. The press conference is in half an hour.”

  Margaret forced her thoughts away from Mei-Ling. “Press conference?” So Jack Geller really did know his stuff, she thought.