The Fourth Sacrifice (The China Thrillers 2)

by Peter May

  Li did not even bother turning to look. ‘I’m not seeing anyone right now,’ he said.

  ‘I think you’ll want to see this guy,’ Qian persisted. ‘It’s Birdie’s friend, Moon. The one who couldn’t give him an alibi for Monday night.’

  Moon was a shrunken little man with a completely bald head and a small round face. He wore a shabby grey suit over an open-necked white shirt with a collar frayed and ringed with grime. He sat, legs crossed, on the chair where Birdie had sat only yesterday pleading his innocence. A hand-rolled cigarette had burned down to nicotine-stained fingers. He was pale, and agitated.

  ‘Well?’ Li barked at him as he came into the interview room.

  Moon glanced nervously at Qian who nodded and said, ‘Just tell him what you told me.’

  Moon looked apprehensive. He took a final draw on the stump of his cigarette, stood on it, and then started rolling another. It gave him something to look at rather than meet Li’s eye. ‘I heard what happened,’ he said. ‘I just wish I had come last night. Now it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late for what?’

  ‘I screwed up. I don’t know why. We always played checkers on a Tuesday night, me and Birdie. And we did move it to a Monday night one week because I had a cousin coming in from the country on the Tuesday. Only for some reason, I thought it was the week before last. I was sure it was.’ He looked up, finally, at Li, his moist eyes appealing for understanding. ‘I don’t know … I forget things these days. It wasn’t until my cousin phoned yesterday that I realised. If I’d known it was so important …’ His voice trailed away and he looked down again at his roll-up to hide his tears.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Li asked.

  Moon lit his cigarette. ‘It was last Monday we played, just like Birdie said. Down on the wall at Xidan. Till late. Then he came back to mine for a beer. Didn’t leave till the early hours. So whatever it was you thought he did, it couldn’t have been him. I swear on the grave of my ancestors.’

  *

  Qian chased after Li along the top corridor. ‘What do you mean you’re not going to do anything about it?’

  ‘Chen doesn’t want to know.’

  ‘And that makes it right?’

  ‘No it doesn’t!’ Li turned on Qian, annoyed that this cop, his senior by several years but his junior in rank, should think that Li was in any way happy about it. ‘All Moon’s alibi does is confirm what I already knew. Chen didn’t want to know before, he’s not going to want to know now.’

  Qian looked at him and shook his head. ‘Meantime, whoever did it is still out there. And you’re going to let them get away with it?’

  Li gasped in frustration. He knew Qian was right. ‘No,’ he said despondently. There was no way his sense of justice would allow him to do that. But it would mean a fight, and right now he did not know if he had the heart for it.

  ‘Li!’ Chen’s voice reached them down the corridor, and they turned to see the Section Chief hurrying towards them. ‘Take a couple of officers and get out to the airport.’

  ‘Chief,’ Li said wearily, ‘there’s been a development on the Yuan Tao case.’

  ‘Now, Li!’ Chen said, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘We’ve got an emergency out there.’

  Li glanced at Qian. ‘I’m sorry, chief, I’m not going anywhere until we discuss the Yuan Tao case.’ Chen was stopped in his tracks. There was no way he could ignore this direct challenge to his authority. Li went on quickly, ‘There was a mix-up over Birdie’s alibi. The guy he said he was playing checkers with? The one who said he wasn’t? He got his weeks mixed up. He just came in to tell us he realised he was with Birdie that night after all. There’s no way Birdie could have killed Yuan.’

  In the presence of Qian, it was impossible for Chen to ignore this. He paused for a moment, looking dangerously at Li. At length, he made a decision. ‘We’ll talk about it when you get back from the airport.’

  Li’s frustration bubbled over. ‘What the hell are we going to the airport for? That’s the jurisdiction of the aviation police.’

  Chen kept his temper in check. He said evenly, ‘A large shipment of Terracotta Warriors, destined for a touring exhibition in the United States was being loaded into the hold of a cargo plane at the Capital Airport this morning. There was an accident with one of the forklifts. A packing case containing a warrior fell twenty feet on to the tarmac, breaking open and smashing the contents.’

  Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with us?’

  ‘There were two warriors in the packing case,’ Chen said.

  ‘So?’ The penny still had not dropped.

  Chen sighed. ‘There was only supposed to be one.’

  *

  Li’s counterpart in the aviation police based at Capital Airport was a man of medium height, hair swept back and plastered to his skull with some kind of scented hair oil. Deputy Section Chief Wei was perhaps thirty-five years old. He wore a white shirt with jeans and sneakers, sported three rings on each hand, and wore a chunky chain bracelet on his right wrist. He reeked of aftershave. He gave Li an oily smile and shook his hand and introduced him to his subordinate officers, one of whom was in uniform. Li, in turn, introduced Wu and Qian. Formalities over, Wei slid open the door of a Toyota people carrier that would take them out on to the tarmac.

  It was a long drive across the apron to where the cargo plane sat shimmering in the heat. Behind them, the old and new terminal buildings had receded into the hazy distance. Ahead of them, a truck and a forklift were parked by the open hold of the aircraft. There were several police vehicles and at least two dozen uniformed officers and several other individuals in civilian clothes. The airplane had been completely ringed off by yellow and black striped tape that fluttered and bowed in the hot breeze that blew unfettered across the runway. The people carrier pulled in beside the aircraft, and the investigating officers from Beijing stepped out into the breeze, negotiating the tape and moving towards the centre of interest – which was a large wooden crate split open by the impact of its fall. Thick protective wadding, which had failed to protect the contents, had sprung free. The shattered remains were spread all around it. Shards of pottery warriors that had survived more than two thousand years only to end up smashed to pieces on the apron of a Beijing airport. Two heads were clearly visible, one of them split completely in half.

  ‘Who’s in charge of this stuff? Li asked.

  A middle-aged man in a suit and wearing sunglasses stepped forward to shake Li’s hand. ‘Jin Gang,’ he said. ‘Head of security at the Terracotta Warriors Museum in Xi’an.’

  ‘You supervise the packing?’

  Jin nodded. ‘There are five of us accompanying the exhibition. My deputy, an archaeologist and two researchers, all from the museum. We were all present when the warriors were packed.’

  ‘And only one went into each case?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So how come there are two in this one?’

  Jin crouched by the broken crate and pulled away several strips of side planking. ‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘There’s a false bottom. The second warrior was already inside when the crate was packed. We’ve checked the rest.’ He nodded towards the stacks of crates half unloaded from the truck. ‘They are all the same.’ He paused. ‘Two go out. Presumably just one comes back.’

  Li squatted beside him, looking at the splintered packing case. He picked up a piece of broken pottery and frowned. ‘Are they genuine?’

  Jin glanced up at an elderly man who was leaning over and watching every move. The man nodded to Li. ‘I am Yan Shu,’ he said, extending his arm to shake Li’s hand. ‘The senior archaeologist at the Museum. They are all genuine Terracotta Warriors, Deputy Section Chief. There is no doubt about that.’

  Li looked up at the faces ranged around him and looking down at him expectantly. ‘Well, where the hell did they come from?’

  No one said anything. The wind was increasing in strength, whistling around the undercarriage of
the huge metal bird that loomed over them.

  ‘Well, who made the crates, then?’

  ‘A packing company in Beijing, in Haidan District,’ Jin said, getting stiffly to his feet. ‘But they were commissioned by the organisers of the exhibition, not by the museum.’

  Li rose, too. ‘So who are the organisers?’

  ‘An American company. The Art of War, Inc. It’s a dedicated company, set up by the Americans to organise the exhibition to go with the documentary series.’

  ‘What documentary series?’ Li felt like he was wading through a sea of ignorance, the answers to which, apparently, seemed obvious to everyone but him. He glanced at Qian, but he just shrugged.

  ‘Michael Zimmerman’s The Art of War,’ Jin said. ‘It starts screening in the United States next month.’

  Li felt the skin on his face and neck tingling as it tightened, and in spite of the heat he shivered as if someone had just stepped on his grave. ‘What’s Michael Zimmerman got to do with this?’

  Jin said, ‘He’s organising the exhibition. The Art of War, Inc. is his company.’

  *

  The twin towers of the China World Trade Centre, where Michael Zimmerman had his apartment on the twenty-second floor, towered over the east end of the city, reflecting the warm autumn sunlight. The head of residential security had carefully scrutinised the search warrant issued by the office of the Procurator General, before riding up in the elevator with Li, Wu, Qian and several uniformed officers. Service staff had confirmed that Michael had not spent the night in his apartment. But Li already knew that.

  The security man unlocked the door and opened it on to a world of luxury beyond the experience, or even the wildest dreams, of most of Li’s officers. There was a vast expanse of thick-piled wall-to-wall carpet, a luxurious white three-piece suite, a beautiful beechwood dining suite with matching coffee tables and bureau. A huge colour television stood on a white semi-circular stand with a video recorder on the shelf below. There were video tapes piled on the floor all around it. Fine, framed prints hung on cream walls, and wall-to-ceiling windows looked out on spectacular city views. The windows were draped with tastefully patterned curtains that could be drawn, when required, on a world where hundreds of feet below, whole families lived in single rooms. One door stood ajar, leading to a Western brand-name fitted kitchen with every possible appliance and convenience. Another led to a fitted bathroom with a circular sunken bath and a separate shower cabinet. The taps were gold-plated. A master bedroom with fitted wardrobe and king-size bed had an en-suite dressing room.

  The detectives stood looking around for several moments in awe. It was hard to believe that such luxury could exist cheek by jowl with the comparative poverty of the people who lived all around it. Li wondered what must go through the minds of those who cleaned and serviced these apartments, returning at the end of the day to crumbling siheyuan homes, or tiny apartments in state-built blocks where communal heating was not turned on until mid-November, when the frost was already lying thick on the sidewalks.

  He turned to the security man and told him he could wait outside. When they were on their own, Li said to his officers, ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for, so we’ll look at everything. But go carefully, we’re on diplomatically sensitive turf here.’

  A saxophone lay discarded on the bed. Rows of Italian suits and designer jeans hung in the wardrobe. There were more than a dozen pairs of shoes on the rail beneath them. Drawers were filled with name-labelled tee shirts and boxer shorts. The bathroom cabinet was well charged with brand-name soaps and shower gels: Yves St Laurent, Paco Rabane.

  From the moment he had stepped into the apartment Li had been vaguely, almost subconsciously, aware of a low-pitched scent that hung in the air. It was very background, and it was not until he walked into the bathroom and it became stronger, rising above the scents of soaps and shampoos, that he became properly conscious of it. He tracked it down to a small, brown bottle with a screw cap that was squeezed into a corner of the bathroom cabinet. Li unscrewed the cap and sniffed the sweet, pungent smell of the essential oil it held. He looked at the label. Patchouli. He knew immediately it was what he had smelled in both of Yuan’s apartments. Very faint, barely registering. And he realised now that the strange sense of something familiar that had always haunted him around Zimmerman was that same scent of Patchouli. Never strong, but always there, somewhere just beyond consciousness. He cursed himself for not being aware of it before. While it had promoted an uneasiness somewhere at the back of his mind, it had never made the leap to the front of it.

  But now he knew that Zimmerman had been in Yuan’s embassy apartment, and the one he had been renting secretly in Tuan Jie Hu Dongli. Probably on the night Yuan had been murdered. Something turned over inside him, and Li realised with a shock that there was a strong chance that Margaret could be in danger.

  He went back into the main room as his officers sifted through Zimmerman’s personal belongings. Wu, sunglasses pushed back on his head, was examining the piles of videos stacked on the floor around the TV cabinet. ‘This guy must watch a hell of a lot of movies,’ he said. Li took one of the boxes from him and read the label.

  ‘They’re rushes,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’ Wu looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘VHS copies of the stuff Zimmerman’s been shooting out on location. Presumably he looks at it each day when he gets in at night.’

  ‘If he gets in at night,’ Wu said with a raised eyebrow.

  In spite of the fact that none of his detectives knew about the relationship between Margaret and Zimmerman, Li felt himself blushing.

  But Wu didn’t notice. He was too concerned with trying to get one of the tapes to play. Finally he got a picture up on the screen of extras dressed as peasants, storming the square below the stele pavilion at Ding Ling, and Li recognised the setup he had witnessed out on location two days earlier. A big, red-bearded face beneath a baseball cap ballooned into shot. ‘OK, cut,’ said the face, and its owner ran a finger horizontally across his throat. The picture slewed haphazardly across the square before dropping to an out-of-focus shot of a piece of ground and then cutting to black.

  Li didn’t know what he hoped to find here. He had no idea what Zimmerman was involved in, or to what extent. But he did not have high expectations of something incriminating simply dropping into his lap. He crossed to the bureau. A micro-hifi sat on top of it, and there were a dozen or more CDs on the shelf. He flipped idly through them, curious about Zimmerman’s taste in music. They were nearly all jazz, and a few classical collections. Verdi, Mozart, Bach. And, incongruously, one collection of sentimental love songs by Lionel Ritchie. He wondered what it was that had attracted Margaret to him. Li had taken an immediate and instinctive dislike to Zimmerman the first time they had met at the Sanwei tearoom. But then his view of him had been clouded by a jealousy he neither wanted nor could control. Now that Zimmerman was a suspect in both a murder investigation and an attempt to smuggle priceless artefacts out of the country, Li’s feelings towards him were coldly professional.

  ‘Hey, boss,’ Wu said. ‘Look at this.’ And he held up a tape. Li crossed to have a look at it. ‘Why do you think he’s got a security tape from Beijing University? What’s the Fourth Chamber?’

  Li snatched the tape and examined it. It was a labelled tape from an internal video security system at the university. Written on it by hand were the words, Fourth Chamber, and it was dated September 14th. Li repeated the date aloud. ‘September fourteenth … Should that date mean something to us?’ Wu shrugged.

  Qian said, ‘We found Professor Yue’s body on the fifteenth.’

  Li handed the tape back to Wu. ‘Put it on,’ he said.

  Qian drew the curtain on the window behind them to stop sunlight reflecting off the screen, and all the officers gathered around to watch. The picture flickered and jumped as a fuzzy black and white image came into focus. The lighting was poor, and it was difficult to tell what th
ey were looking at. There was no soundtrack. There appeared to be rows of dark figures standing still in the background. But then almost immediately a moving figure came into shot, emerging from the bottom of the screen, from below the camera. It was the hunched figure of a man, staggering as he was pushed forward by a more erect figure following behind. As they reached almost centre screen, the second man forced the first one to turn and then pushed him to his knees.

  ‘Shit,’ Wu said. ‘That’s Yue Shi, Professor Yue. Look, his hands are tied behind his back.’

  And they saw, also, the placard hanging around his neck and could clearly read the name, Monkey, upside down and scored through, below the number 4. The professor seemed to be weeping. The other man, whose face they still could not clearly see, appeared to be talking to him and looking around. And then he turned, so that he was almost facing the camera. Li had known, from the moment the figures stumbled into shot, who they were. But it was still a shock to see Yuan Tao turning towards the camera, his face triumphant, almost gloating. The last time Li had seen him was on the autopsy table.

  Yuan raised something from his side, and they saw that in his right hand was his executioner’s sword, the bronze replica that he had commissioned from Mr Mao in Xi’an. The professor made a half-hearted attempt to get to his feet, but Yuan pushed him down again. He was easy to manipulate under the influence of the flunitrazepam. Yuan put his hand on the back of Yue’s head and pushed it forward, then he stood back, adopting a position, legs astride, slightly behind his victim and to his left. He placed the blade of the sword briefly on the back of the professor’s neck, and then in one swift and expert movement, he raised it high over his head and brought it down to send the professor’s head spinning away across the floor.

  In Zimmerman’s apartment there was a collective intake of breath, six men watching in horror as the headless body of Yue Shi fell forwards and sideways, blood spurting from the severed carotid arteries. Yuan stepped back, took a rag from his pocket and drew it swiftly along the length of his sword, then seemed to look behind him again at the rows of silent witnesses.