by Peter May
IV
Nine chairs, tipped to an angle of forty-five degrees, were balanced one on top of the other in an upward arc, counterbalanced by six upside down teenage girls in yellow and green costumes, stacked up like steps on a stairway to heaven. They appeared to be defying gravity and breaking all the laws of physics at the same time. A pale blue spotlight cast their shadows on a screen at the back of the stage. It was not until, with a small shriek, one of the girls overbalanced and all the chairs went tumbling across the stage, that Li saw the girls were supported on wires. They went spinning through the air, crashing into each other like demented birds.
Immediately, a middle-aged woman sitting in the front stalls got stiffly to her feet and began screaming imprecations at them for their clumsiness. Several boys came running on to the stage to retrieve the chairs, and the girls began slowly descending, faces pink with exertion, embarrassment and, perhaps, fear.
“I’m so sorry, Ma’am,” the youngest of them whimpered. “It was my fault.”
“You are all to blame!” the woman yelled. “You are supposed to be a team. Each one relies on the other. You all depend on everyone else making those little adjustments, all the time. What kind of fools are you going to look if you do that in front of an audience tonight?”
The younger ones hung their heads. One or two of the older girls, who were maybe seventeen or eighteen, thrust their chins forward defiantly. The boys had reassembled the chairs and were preparing to set up the stunt all over again.
“This time,” the woman bellowed, “I want you to hold your positions for two minutes!”
There were audible groans from the girls. Li turned to Mei-Ling and whispered, “Do you think they’re still attached to those wires during the real show.”
“I hope so,” Mei-Ling said. “There could be a lot of cracked skulls if they’re not.” She smiled wryly. “The trouble is, there are nine chairs. Lucky for some, unlucky for others. I should know.”
The woman at the front, who had heard the voices from the back, turned round and glared at them. “This is a rehearsal,” she shouted. “Members of the public are not allowed.”
Mei-Ling followed Li down the right-hand aisle. “Police,” Li said, and flashed his ID.
The woman glared from one to the other, and Li saw that she was only, perhaps, forty. But her face was set in a permanent scowl that made her look older, and she was supporting herself on a stout walking stick. “What do you want?”
“We’re looking for Sun Jie,” Mei-Ling said.
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Is he in trouble?”
Mei-Ling shook her head. “It’s about his wife, Wu Liyao.”
“You’ve found her?”
“Perhaps. That’s what we’d like to discuss with Sun Jie.”
“Well, maybe you’d like to discuss it with me first,” the woman said. “The little bitch owes me. Disappeared right before we were supposed to go on tour. And then Sun Jie was no damned good to us. What did she do? Run off with some fat cat?”
“Actually,” Li said, “we believe she might have been murdered.”
Which took the wind right out of the woman’s sails. She sat down very suddenly, leaning heavily on her stick, and waved her hand in the direction of the stage. “Take a break, girls,” she called. Her eyes were strangely glazed for a moment before she turned them up to Li. “What happened?”
“We need to confirm identity first,” Mei-Ling said. “Was she an important member of the troupe?”
“Oh,” the woman said dismissively, “she no longer performed. She was too old for that. She and Sun Jie trained the young ones. And, anyway, she damaged one of her feet in a fall. She was no longer capable of producing the level of performance required.”
Li and Mei-Ling exchanged looks. Li said, “Do you know the sort of people she mixed with, if anyone might have borne her a grudge?”
“The people she mixed with were all acrobats,” the woman snapped. “This is not just a job, it is a way of life. And she had no life outside of the circus.”
“What about her husband?” Mei-Ling asked.
“They both used to be stars of the show. But age takes its toll, you know.” The woman smiled sourly. “I used to be a star of the show myself, and look what it did for me.”
Li knew that it was neither time nor wear and tear that had imprinted the ugly scowl so deeply in the woman’s face. That came from inside. A reflection of the soul. The stick was another matter. He said, “So where can we find Sun Jie?”
“Huh!” the woman was scornful. “He’s a waste of space, that one. He was beside himself when Liyao went missing. Eventually, when they couldn’t find her, he rejoined the tour. But he’s never been the same man since.” She sneered, “He’s found religion now, you know. He’s a Buddhist.” She couldn’t keep the contempt out of her voice. “He spends his afternoons at the Jing’an Temple.” She checked her watch. “If you hurry you’ll catch him there now.”
A pall of sweet smoke hung in the still air over the temple like a protective cloud. Here was a bizarre anachronism, a corner of ancient China lurking behind brick walls and surrounded on all sides by towers of glass and concrete and steel. The entrance courtyard, behind high gates, was crowded with people burning paper offerings and incense in large smouldering metal boats. Yellow and red flags hung from covered balconies where monks roomed beneath crumbling black-tiled roofs. Covered passageways, supported on rust red pillars, provided shelter for elaborate gold-leaf altars presided over by giant Buddhas.
Li looked around in wonder. He had never been in any kind of temple before. Religion was a mystery to him, intriguing, perplexing, even a little frightening, and beyond all comprehension. He stared in amazement as young women knelt on crimson altar cushions, hands clasped in prayer, incense sticks smoking between pressed palms. Men and women of all ages and backgrounds sat sociably around tables lining the courtyards and passageways, folding sheets of gold and silver paper into tiny origami shapes with which they filled red paper carrier bags and old shoe boxes before burning them. He had no idea why.
He was surprised when Mei-Ling took his arm and leaned in confidentially. “This place was a hotbed of corruption in the twenties and thirties, you know. Legend has it that it was run by a six-foot, four-inch abbot. Apart from being married to a very rich woman, he had seven concubines. He conducted business with the gangsters of the day, and wouldn’t go anywhere without his White Russian bodyguards.”
They wandered through an inner chamber where people were pasting thousands of gold-coloured strips of paper to the walls. Some of them bore small photographs. Perhaps, Li thought, pictures of dead relatives. Through another courtyard, eyes stinging in the smoke, they saw saffron-robed monks gathered around a huge jade Buddha, chanting incantations from open prayer books.
“There is a much grander temple up the road,” Mei-Ling said. “The one the tourists all go to. Filled with treasures from the past. It only survived the Cultural Revolution because the monks cleverly pasted giant posters of Mao Zedong over the gates, and the Red Guards would not defile the likeness of their hero to gain entry. So it survived intact.”
From here, Li and Mei-Ling turned south, through a circular opening in a yellow wall and into a narrow passageway, with prayer rooms leading off to left and right. Shrubs and miniature trees grew everywhere in terracotta pots. The eerie mumblings, and chants and cants of small gatherings of monks, drifted out of open doorways. They heard the steady clapping of hands, the deep, sonorous and monotonously regular beat of a drum. They followed the directions given them by the crippled manageress of the acrobatic circus and found themselves in a room at the end of the passage where half a dozen monks sat around a long table reading in silence. A solitary figure in a shabby blue suit sat alone at one end of a row of seats at the back of the room. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him, his head bowed. Long strips of red cloth hung from the ceiling, embroidered with black characters. A red velvet
cloth was draped across the prayer table, and candles burned around a small Buddha at one end of it. Several of the monks glanced curiously at Li and Mei-Ling as they entered and approached the man in the blue suit. It wasn’t until Li asked him if he was Sun Jie, and he looked up, that Li realised he was still a young man, perhaps under thirty, even younger than his lost wife.
Several shaven heads turned now from the table and glared at them for having had the audacity to break the silence of the room. Their silence. Li produced his Ministry ID and said to the man in the blue suit, “We want to talk to you about your wife.”
Li saw a moment of hope light in Sun Jie’s eyes, then cloud again almost as quickly with fear. He glanced nervously towards the monks. “Not here,” he said, and he stood up and hurried out into the passageway. Li and Mei-Ling followed.
Sun Jie led them quickly away from the main courtyard, passing through two circular openings, until finally they found themselves in a deserted square beneath the rising balconies of the monks’ living quarters. It was a tight, claustrophobic space, several levels of roof plunging downwards in a dramatic sweep overhead, only to turn up at the last moment, rising to narrow points at the corners. The chanting and the smoke and the beat of the drum seemed a long way away from here. The monks’ daily washing, draped across plastic lines on the balconies above, stirred slightly in the breeze. Sun Jie stopped and turned to face them suddenly, as if he had been steeling himself to confront the truth. “Is she dead?”
Li saw no point in offering false hope. “We have recovered the body of a woman who may be your wife. Unfortunately her features are—” He hesitated. “She has suffered a certain amount of decomposition. We would like you to make an identification.”
There was no perceptible change in Sun Jie’s expression. But he was silent for a very long time before he said, “What makes you think it is Wu Liyao?”
Mei-Ling said, “She had stress fractures in one of her feet. The pathologist thought it might have been a sports injury.”
“Which foot?”
“The right.”
Sun Jie’s head sank. “When do you want me to look at the body?”
“Today, if possible.”
He nodded, and Li said, “Is there anything at all you can tell us about your wife’s disappearance that might help shed light on what happened to her?”
Sun Jie lifted his head to gaze hopelessly at the heavens. Then he looked at Li. “She went out shopping one Saturday morning and she never came back.”
“Do you think she planned it?” Mei-Ling asked.
He looked at her with dead eyes. “She left a pot of soup simmering on the stove, and she was halfway through writing a letter to her mother. She had just put in a washing to pack clean clothes for a tour.” He paused. “So I think she meant to come back.”
Mei-Ling pressed him, “There was no chance she was seeing someone else?”
“None.”
“How can you be sure?”
His smile was a sad one. “Because the demands of the troupe were such we barely had time for one another, never mind anyone else.” He shook his head, eyes laden with regret. “The things you think are important . . .” He turned his gaze on Li. “So you never found the man who was following her?”
“What?” Li was startled. There was no mention in the report of a man following her. He looked at Mei-Ling and she shrugged.
“I knew they didn’t believe me at the time,” Sun Jie said. “A distraught husband trying to find excuses for a wife who’d left him. But she saw him several times. She told me. She was really spooked.”
Li felt his scalp tighten. It was the first break they’d had, the first hint that any of these women might have been watched, that they might have been stalked and snatched. “What exactly did she tell you?”
Sun Jie fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette and Li lit it for him. “The first time she saw him, she told me, she was coming home from the theatre one night after a performance. I had the flu and was in bed. She’d seen him in the atrium outside the theatre, and then again on the bus. She hadn’t thought much about it until she saw him again a few days later standing across the road from the bus stop, outside the exhibition hall, smoking a cigarette and watching her as she got on the bus. She still wasn’t particularly concerned. But a couple of days after that she saw him in our street, standing just inside the entrance to an alleyway. And she knew he was watching her. She got really scared then. And that’s when she told me.”
“What did he look like, this guy?” Li asked. He was almost certain Sun Jie was going to describe someone very like Jiang Baofu.
Sun Jie drew on his cigarette and blew smoke at the sky. “Well, that’s the thing. That’s why she noticed him at all. I mean, a face like that you wouldn’t forget. Liyao said he had long, greasy hair. He wasn’t very tall, kind of squat and thick-set. She said he looked like a Mongolian, and he had a real ugly scar on his upper lip. She thought it could have been a hare-lip.”
V
The miniature house of tin and glass mounted on the rear of Mei Yuan’s tricycle was looking a little battered and the worse for wear. The pink tin roof was dented and discoloured, and the searing heat of the hotplate inside had scorched the cream-painted sides. Mei Yuan, too, was showing signs of age. Wrapped in a thick padded jacket and scarf, a woollen hat, with a turned up peak, pulled down over greying hair, her face was red raw with the cold. Her lips were cracked, and her brow furrowed in a concentrated frown against the icy wind. She wore thick gloves and stood stamping her feet on the sidewalk beneath the trees at the corner of Dongzhimennei Street and Chaoyangmen. She gave the appearance of being crushed by the onset of winter.
But the moment she saw Margaret her eyes lit up, and the familiar dimples appeared in her cheeks, like deep scars in her round face. She was almost overcome by excitement. “Ni hau, ni hau, ni hau,” she babbled excitedly, and threw her arms around Margaret in a very un-Chinese expression of affection. Margaret held on to her tightly. It felt as if Mei Yuan was about the closest thing left in the world to someone who cared about her. Then Mei Yuan held her at arm’s length and inspected her. “Ni chi guo le ma?” she asked—the traditional Beijinger’s greeting—Have you eaten?
“Yes, I have eaten,” Margaret lied. It was the traditional response. But, in truth, she was ravenous. She had not eaten all day.
“I will make you a jian bing,” Mei Yuan said, astutely. “I need the practice. I have hardly sold one since midday.”
And Margaret watched as Mei Yuan poured a ladleful of her pancake mix on to the sizzling hotplate behind the glass screens of the miniature house. When she flipped it over, she spread it with chilli sauce and hoisin and then broke an egg on to it, before sprinkling it with chopped spring onion and pressing down a square of deep-fried egg white. The whole thing was folded over twice and wrapped in brown paper. Mei Yuan handed it to Margaret, her face gleaming with pleasure. “So,” she said, “how is my Li Yan? I am missing him.”
Margaret bit into the soft savoury pancake and tried to seem natural. “He’s fine,” she replied. But Mei Yuan had an unerring instinct for the truth, and for the obfuscation of it. Her smile vanished immediately.
She said, “What is wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” Margaret responded.
“And I ride home each night on a dragon’s back,” Mei Yuan said.
Margaret chewed reflectively for a moment on her jian bing before she said, “He has found someone in Shanghai who I think maybe he likes better.”
Mei Yuan snorted her derision. “How can he know he likes her better when he cannot know her as well as he knows you?”
Margaret shrugged. “Perhaps he has gotten to know me too well and doesn’t like what he sees. Anyway, she is Chinese. I am not.”
Mei Yuan waved a hand dismissively. “Culture and colour do not count. It is only the heart that matters. Here . . .” She started rummaging in the bag hanging from her trike, and pulled out a dog-eared paperback book. “
I have been keeping this for you.” It was a volume of Chinese love poetry, translated into English. “You’ll see,” she said. “Chinese are no different. We all feel and express the same things.” She paused, and with a twinkle added, “You should give this to Li Yan.”
And Margaret thought what an extraordinary person Mei Yuan was. A well-read and educated woman, torn down by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, content now to sell jian bing on the street corner and indulge her passion for reading. She had lost her son during those terrible years, as Li Yan had lost his mother. And by some strange quirk of fate they had found each other on a street corner, and somehow managed to fill the missing parts of each other’s lives. “Thank you,” Margaret said, and she gave Mei Yuan a hug. “When do we collect little Xinxin?”
Kites filled the sky like birds, and the children cast shadows several times longer than themselves. The vast expanse of Tiananmen Square meant nothing to them, other than limitless open space and empty skies in which to fly their simple structures of wire and plastic. None of them had been born when the tanks rolled in, leaving the blood and hopes of a generation to stain the paving stones. A century of bloody change had been played out here, and now it was just a place to fly a kite.
Mei Yuan said the kindergarten often brought the children here to fly their kites in the late afternoon when the sky was clear and the cold winds blew down from the north. Now the sun was very low in the west, and the strong shadows it cast somehow charred all colour from the scene, except for the red walls of the Forbidden City, and the orange-tiled roof of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. A troupe of armed police in long green coats and peaked caps marched past them in rigid formation, eyes fixed and unblinking. A woman with a thick scarf wrapped around her mouth tried to sell the two women a kite shaped like an eagle. The square was busy with tourists up from the country. There was barely a Western face in sight, and so Margaret was an object of great curiosity. Several groups of peasants followed them for some way before hurrying off excitedly to tell their friends about the blue-eyed, fair-haired foreign devil.