The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “Do you know where we can find this boyfriend?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “An Wenjiang works on the boats. Or, at least, he did the last time I heard. Huangpu River cruises for tourists.” She gazed off into space, an angry thought clearly forming. “He’s never once been to see his daughter. I pray at night that he will fall overboard and drown. With luck, perhaps, he already has.”

  Outside, life ebbed and flowed along the length of Nanjing Road, people going about their lives, oblivious to the tragedies of others being played out all around them. But then, Li supposed, everyone had their own personal tragedies. Why should they be concerned about those of other people.

  “I hate this,” he said to Mei-Ling. They were only stirring it all up again for these poor people. The memories, the hopes, the fears. And offering them nothing in return. Not hope, not even an end to it. Just more uncertainty.

  She gave his arm a small squeeze. “Me, too.” They walked back in silence to where they had parked the car, and Mei-Ling revved the engine and they dodged the bicycles in Guangdong Road to set a course for the river.

  The booking office for the Huangpu River cruises was in a triangular granite edifice at the ferry terminal at the south end of the Bund. Mei-Ling parked the car in the street opposite, and they negotiated a complex network of pedestrian overpasses that led them, eventually, down to the quay. The first cruise of the day left at ten forty-five and it was almost that now. The waiting room was deserted, apart from a bored-looking girl standing at a drinks counter and a couple of uniformed women behind the sales desk. Clocks on the wall behind them gave the time in New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney. Li wondered, distractedly, why anyone embarking on a two-hour river cruise in Shanghai would want to know the time in London.

  Mei-Ling asked one of the women at the sales desk where they could find An Wenjiang. “He drives the boat,” she said, pointing through glass doors towards the quay. “But they are just leaving.”

  Neither Li nor Mei-Ling wanted to hang around for two hours waiting for him to come back. “Come on,” Li said, and they sprinted for the door.

  “You haven’t bought your tickets!” the woman called after them.

  A sodden red carpet ran out across the landing stage beneath an arch of woven bamboo. The cruisers were berthed three-deep. The boat about to leave was on the outside. They could hear its engines gunning. Mei-Ling followed Li as he jumped aboard the first boat, ran across the bow and leapt on to the middle boat. He shouted to a couple of deckhands on the outside boat who were in the process of casting off. The cruiser was just beginning to ease away from its neighbour. “Open the gate!” Li called, and he waved his Public Security ID at them. They opened the gate in the safety rail and he jumped across the two-foot gap without looking down, then turned to hold out a hand for Mei-Ling. The gap was widening all the time. She hesitated. He shouted at her to jump. She took a deep breath and leapt across. Several pairs of hands grabbed her and held her safely.

  The elder of the deckhands slammed the gate shut and turned on Li. “I don’t care who the fuck you are,” he said, “don’t you ever do that again. I’m responsible for the safety of people on this boat. It’s my neck as well as yours.”

  Li held up his hands. “Sorry, friend,” he said. “Urgent police business. We need to talk to An Wenjiang.”

  The deckhand frowned. “Why, what’s he done?”

  “None of your business,” Mei-Ling said. “Where is he?”

  The old man raised his eyes and flicked his head upwards. “On the upper deck, in the wheelhouse.” And he gave them both a surly look.

  There was no one at the bar in the downstairs cabin as they passed through to the stairs at the stern. All the tourists were packed on to the open upper deck as the cruiser nosed its way out into midstream and the broad sweep of slow-moving grey water. This was not a day to see Shanghai at its best. Although it was not raining, the cloud was low over the city and the air was heavy with humidity. The Bund stood on one side, representing the old world. Pudong, facing it directly, represented the new. Both had faded in the mist, losing substance and colour, dominated by the breadth and depth and timelessness of the river that separated them.

  There was no wheel in the wheelhouse. The cruiser was guided by a joystick which apparently controlled both the rudder and the engine speed. The man with his hand on the joystick turned as Li opened the door. He looked to Li as if they were about the same age. But beneath his baseball cap his hair was long and greasy. He wore jeans and a denim jacket, his hands were black, engrained with oil, his fingernails broken and filthy. There was a cigarette burning in an overfull ashtray, and a jar of green tea slopped about on the dash. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing! You’re not allowed in here!” His voice was coarse, and there was a sneer on his lips. Li thought of the opera singer and wondered what she could possibly have seen in this man, what they could possibly have had in common.

  “Watch your language,” Li said, and he showed him his ID. “There’s a lady present.”

  An Wenjiang looked at Mei-Ling as if the last thing he believed her to be was a lady. “She a cop, too?” he asked.

  “Do you have a problem with that?” Mei-Ling said.

  “I have a problem with cops.” He glared at Li. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to keep your eyes on the river and to answer a few questions.”

  Reluctantly An Wenjiang dragged his eyes away from Li and back to the river. He steered them around a line of barges heading upriver and set a course towards the Pudong side. “Questions about what?” he said.

  “Xiao Fengzhen,” Mei-Ling said, and his eyes immediately flicked back towards them.

  “What about her?”

  Li said, “I want you to tell us about her.”

  “Why?” He squinted at them suspiciously.

  “Do you know what happened to her?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “How would I know that? The cow ran off and left me.”

  “You weren’t living together,” Li said.

  “That was only because of her mother. We were going to patch it all up and she and the kid were going to move back in with me.”

  “So what happened that weekend she was going to stay over and you were going to sort things out?”

  “She never showed up. I told you people at the time. I think her mother thought I killed her or something.”

  Mei-Ling said, “You used to beat her up.”

  “Once!” he almost spat at her. “And she was asking for it. Wanted to get pregnant again without telling me. Stopped taking precautions. A little girl wasn’t good enough for her. Oh, no. She wanted a little boy. And what kind of shit would we have been in then? Huge fines from the family planning people. I soon knocked that idea out of her.” He glared out across the water. “You want to know what I think? I think she ran off, and I think her mother put her up to it. She didn’t think I was good enough for her precious daughter. And, hey, you know, Fengzhen didn’t either. Never took me to any of her fancy dos at the opera with all her hoity-toity pals. Didn’t want them asking her why she was fucking some lowlife like me.”

  “And why was she?” Mei-Ling asked, and it was clear from her tone that it was beyond her comprehension, too.

  An Wenjiang turned and leered at her, a sick grin on his face. “Because she liked a bit of rough trade, darling. And I knew how to pull her trigger.” Mei-Ling shuddered visibly, which appeared to please him. His grin widened to reveal nicotine-stained teeth. “And all that stuff about wanting kids . . . it was just about sex. I mean, at the end of the day she ran off and left the kid the same as she left me. She didn’t give a shit about the kid.”

  “Oh, and you do,” Li said. “How many times have you been to see her?”

  “Never.” An Wenjiang wore his indifference like a badge. “I never wanted a kid in the first place. That was her idea. I don’t like kids. Never have. That’s not a crime, is it?”

  “No,” Mei-Ling said. “But murder is
.”

  An Wenjiang’s reaction was strangely mute. He stared dead ahead for some moments before he said quietly, “You telling me she’s dead?”

  “We’re trying to identify a body,” Li said.

  An Wenjiang looked at him sharply. “She one of those bodies they pulled out of the mud over there in Pudong the other day?”

  Mei-Ling said, “What do you know about that?”

  “Only what I read in the papers. I thought they’d been cut up by medical students or something.”

  Li said, “Did you ever have any medical training? Work in a hospital, someplace like that?”

  Now An Wenjiang just laughed. “Me? Are you serious?” Then his smile faded. “You want me to identify her? Is that what you’re asking? Because if it is, I’ll do it.” He saw that his cigarette had burned away and he lit another with trembling fingers. “Was she murdered?” It was what the girl at the theatre had asked.

  Li nodded, and to his surprise saw what looked like tears gathering in the other man’s eyes. An Wenjiang looked away quickly. “Fuck,” he said. “You find out who did it, you let me know.” And Li realised that whatever they thought of him, An Wenjiang had felt something for his opera singer that went deeper than just the sex that he boasted about.

  They left him then and went out on to the top deck and felt the breeze whip cold, damp air into their faces. They had navigated the bend in the river, past the international passenger terminal. On their left the city disappeared into a haze of factories and apartment blocks, and on their right they cruised past the Shanghai No. 10 Cotton Textile Mill and the Li Hua papermill. The great rusting hulks of what had once been ocean-going liners were berthed forlornly at the Shanghai Shipyard among cranes that rose above them like dinosaurs picking over dead meat.

  “What do you think?” Mei-Ling asked.

  Li shook his head. “I think,” he said, “that I will never understand what makes people tick.”

  They sat and watched the river pass by. They still had more than an hour to kill before the cruiser would return them to the terminal. Li looked back and saw the city crowding either bank, a city of irreconcilable contradictions, of past, present and future, of enormous wealth and terrible poverty. A long barge passed them, its hold laden with bricks, water slapping dangerously at its sides. In a cabin at the rear, a man sat barefoot in the open doorway wearing only a singlet and a pair of dark-blue cotton trousers. He was bent over a bowl of water, washing his hair. Behind him a small boy peered out at the tourist cruiser and waved. The barge was probably their home, Li realised. It was possible that such people never set foot on dry land.

  They passed row upon row of similar barges, each tied to the other, berthed along the south bank. Lines extended front to rear, clothes put optimistically out to dry in the cold and humid air. Fishing boats and cargo tramps hung anchor chains from huge rusting buoys in the middle of the river, rising and falling gently in the slow swell that rolled up from the estuary.

  Mei-Ling shivered and moved closer to him, hugging her arms around herself. “It’s cold,” she said. “I’m not dressed for this.” He put an arm around her so that she could share his warmth, and she looked at him, surprise in her expression, and he immediately felt self-conscious. He took his arm away.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No it’s all right. It helps.” She moved a little closer, and he put his arm tentatively around her again. “What sign are you?” she asked.

  He frowned, not understanding. “Sign?”

  “Birth sign.”

  He smiled. “Oh. That. I was born in the year of the horse.”

  She did a quick mental calculation. “So you’re two years younger than me.”

  He acknowledged with a tilt of his head. Now it was his turn to do the calculation. “You’re a tiger,” he said.

  She grinned mischievously, “Men are always telling me that.”

  “So there have been a lot of men in your life,” he said.

  Her grin turned rueful. “I wish.”

  Li shrugged. “A good-looking woman like you . . . there must have been someone special, at some time.”

  She clouded. “Not really.” And he knew she was keeping something from him.

  “You never get involved with another cop?” He tried to make it sound innocent, but she looked at him sharply and moved away, breaking free of his arm around her shoulders.

  “You’ve been listening to departmental gossip,” she said coldly.

  “I never listen to gossip,” Li said. “But sometimes I can’t help hearing it.”

  “I swear to my ancestors, they’re nothing but a lot of old women in that detectives’ office.” Mei-Ling seemed unaccountably agitated. “They think they’re a bunch of hard men, but they’re worse than schoolgirls. Men!” She glared at Li. “You’re all the same. Only ever think of one thing, and think that women do, too. Well, they don’t!” The tiger was showing her claws.

  “Hey,” Li said defensively, “don’t lump me in with all the rest. I don’t think anything. I was just asking, that’s all. You asked about me and Margaret. I told you.”

  There was a moment of tension between them, then Mei-Ling dropped her shoulders and relented. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not just about being the only woman in an office full of men. It’s also about being their boss. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, there’s always a sexual tension there. There’s always guys who think they can make you. And when they can’t, they make things up about you.”

  The sky above them suddenly opened up, and there was an unexpected wash of sunshine across the water. And there, lit against the black sky beyond it, was the impressive span of the Yangpu Suspension Bridge. The cruiser started to make its turn, and Li saw An Wenjiang watching them from the window of the wheelhouse.

  “Forget I asked,” he said. “It’s not important.”

  III

  Margaret sat in the viewing room with Dr. Lan and the other pathologists on the team. They were drinking mugs of hot green tea in silence when Li and Mei-Ling walked in. Margaret glanced up wearily at Li. She had been wide awake at four in the morning, now she was barely able to keep her eyes open. And she had no desire to have to fend off recriminations about last night. It had been a very long day.

  “Finished the autopsies?” Li asked.

  She nodded.

  “And?”

  “I can confirm,” Margaret said, “that they are all quite dead.” When this was met with a cold silence, she added, “We had one other positive ID. From fingerprints.”

  “We know about that,” Mei-Ling said. “There is someone working on it already.”

  Margaret shrugged. “But there’s nothing much else to go on. The MO’s the same in every case. While it wouldn’t stand up in court, I’d pretty much stake my reputation that all the operations were carried out by the same surgeon.”

  “Operations?” Li asked. It seemed like an odd way to describe what had been done to these women.

  But Margaret was in no mood for semantics. “Operations, procedures, whatever you want to call them. The victims were all alive at the beginning and they were all dead at the end.”

  Dr. Lan intervened. “I think what Margaret is trying to say is that they were all killed at the hand of a skilled surgeon.” Li noticed that Lan referred to Margaret by her first name. There had obviously been some sort of reconciliation, even bonding, during the course of the day. And he remembered Margaret once telling him that to share the experience of an autopsy was to share in a heightened sense of mortality. Margaret and Lan had worked together on eighteen bodies. That was a lot of sharing, a lot of mortality.

  “Are we any nearer to determining why they were killed?” Mei-Ling asked impatiently.

  Margaret shook her head. “Dr. Lan and I have discussed this at length. In other circumstances I think we would probably have reached the conclusion that this was some kind of organ harvesting on the grand scale.”

  “All the transplantable material has be
en removed from the bodies,” Dr. Lan said. “Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas . . .”

  “Even the eyes,” Margaret said.

  “Eyes?” Li frowned. “You cannot transplant eyes, can you?”

  “Corneal tissue can be used in eye surgery,” Mei-Ling said.

  “But they did not take the spleen,” said Lan, “which is not transplantable.”

  “Or anything else,” Margaret said. “In fact, nothing else was even touched—apart from the subsequent hacking up of the bodies.”

  Li accepted a mug of green tea from a white-coated assistant and sat down. Mei-Ling waved the assistant aside and remained standing. Li said, “Would the returns really be worth the risk? I mean, who is going to buy an organ? How much could it possibly be worth?”

  Margaret leaned forward. “In the United States alone there are more than sixty thousand people waiting for life-saving organ transplants. I read somewhere that about twelve Americans die every day waiting for one, and that about every fifteen minutes another name is added to the waiting list.”

  “So what you have worldwide,” said Lan, “is a huge demand.”

  “And a very limited supply,” Margaret said.

  “Ah, yes,” said Li. “Supply and demand. The life-blood of capitalism. The American Way.”

  “A simple fact of life,” Margaret said. “And people with money will pay anything to buy themselves a few more years. I’ve heard that the going rate for a single kidney transplant is more than a hundred thousand dollars. There are clinics in India making millions from the procedure. Of course, there the donors are alive and willing to give a kidney or an eye in return for what they see as a passport out of poverty.”

  Li was astonished. He had heard rumours of organ theft, but had never actually encountered it, or ever really considered the economics. “But how would it work? I mean, you could not keep the organs fresh for very long, could you?”

  Dr. Lan shrugged. “The heart, no. Four hours, maybe. The recipient would need to be on hand.”

  Margaret said, “I’d have to check, but most of the other organs could probably be kept fresh for anything up to two or three days, the liver certainly for up to thirty-six hours. They would just flush the organs through with iced water, or with a solution of high-molecular-weight sugars, plop them in a cold box on wet ice, and they could be flown out to almost anywhere in the world as hand luggage.”