The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1)

by Peter May

  If Margaret had been expecting some impressive showpiece building to house the headquarters of Section One, she would have been disappointed by the undistinguished brick block skulking anonymously behind the trees. From the street there was nothing to suggest that this was the nerve centre of Beijing’s fight against serious crime. Only a well-informed and observant onlooker would have spotted that the registration numbers of all the unmarked cars parked in the street began with the Chinese character representing the word Capital, followed by a zero – the telltale registration mark of all Beijing police vehicles. Li led Margaret, followed by Lily, in through the side entrance and up to the top floor. To his extreme discomfort the detectives’ room was full of officers sitting around poking chopsticks into carry-out dishes of noodles and rice, jars of green tea sitting on desks. There was an odd air of expectation as he walked in, and a hush that descended on their conversation, even before Margaret appeared in the doorway. Her appearance served only to heighten an already tense atmosphere. Detectives sat up self-consciously, wondering, clearly, who she was and why she was there. But Li was determined to play it cool.

  ‘Qian,’ he said. ‘We’ve made an identification of our burn victim. His name is Chao Heng, graduated from the American University of Wisconsin in 1972 in …’ He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand, ‘… microbial genetics. Whatever that is. Let’s get an address and find out what we can about him ASAP. Okay?’

  Qian almost sat to attention. ‘I’m on it already, boss.’ And he reached for a telephone. But he hesitated before dialling, watching, like everyone else in the room, as Li opened the door to his office. There were some stifled sniggers as he stopped in his tracks, confronted by the bizarre figure of an old man with long, wispy white hair and an equally long silver goatee. He was wearing what could only be described as black pyjamas and was sitting cross-legged on Li’s desk. Margaret peered round Li to see what the cause of the hilarity was.

  ‘What the hell …’ Li looked at the old man in consternation, aware now of some less restrained laughter behind him. Lily had come into the room and was staring open-mouthed at the old man.

  ‘Who is he?’ Margaret finally asked, perplexed by the bizarre nature of the scene unfolding before her.

  ‘No idea,’ Li said. And in Chinese to the old man, ‘Would you like to tell me what you are doing in my office?’

  More laughter from the detectives’ room as the old man emerged from some deep contemplation and turned on Li a wizened and solemn face. ‘Bad feng shui,’ he said. ‘Ve-ery bad feng shui.’

  ‘Feng shui?’ Margaret said, recognising the words. ‘I know what that is.’

  Li turned to her in astonishment. ‘You do?’

  ‘Sure. It’s a current passion among middle-class Middle Americans with nothing better to do with their time. A girlfriend dragged me along to a class once. The balance of yin and yang and the flow of ch’i and all that kind of stuff. The spirituality of architecture and interior design.’ She paused. ‘So who’s this guy?’

  ‘Evidently, a feng shui man,’ said Li through gritted teeth.

  ‘And … he goes with the job, does he?’

  Li glared at her, and was then distracted by more unrestrained laughter from his colleagues. He turned his glare on them, which muted their laughter a little, before turning back to the feng shui man. ‘What are you doing in my office?’ he repeated, although he already knew the answer.

  His heart sank as the feng shui man confirmed, ‘Your Uncle Yifu asked me to fix your feng shui. He is very concerned about this place. And he is right to be. Ve-ery bad feng shui.’

  Detective Wu brushed respectfully past Margaret with a solemn nod and appeared at Li’s shoulder. He pushed his dark glasses up on to his forehead. ‘Chief wants to see you, boss.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As soon as you got back, he said. I think maybe he’s worried about your … feng shui.’ And he couldn’t keep his face straight any longer.

  Li’s lips pressed together in a resolute line. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Margaret, and pushed back out into the corridor.

  At the far end he rapped on a door and walked into Chen’s office. Chen’s face clouded as he looked up from his desk. ‘Shut the door,’ he said tersely. ‘What is that man doing in your office?’

  ‘He’s a feng shui man,’ Li said hopelessly.

  ‘I know what he is.’ Chen was struggling to keep his voice down. ‘What is he doing here?’

  Li sighed. ‘My Uncle Yifu sent him.’

  Chen leaned back in his seat and groaned in frustration. ‘I suppose I should have guessed.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Chief, I had no idea …’

  ‘You know that the practice of feng shui is not approved of in official institutions. Just get rid of him. Now.’

  ‘Yes, Chief.’ Li turned to the door, but stopped, his hand still on the handle. He turned back. ‘By the way. The suicide in the park? It’s a murder.’

  When he got back to the detectives’ office Margaret was engaged in what appeared to be animated conversation with the entire office, Lily acting as interpreter. Li closed his eyes for a moment and wished, fervently, that he was somewhere else. ‘Hey, boss,’ Wu said, ‘this is some smart lady. Lily’s been telling us how she figured out the identity of the body in the park.’

  Margaret was sitting on one of the desks and swivelled towards the door. ‘This is a really nice bunch of guys you’ve got working for you, Deputy Section Chief Li.’

  ‘Li Yan,’ Li said. ‘My name’s Li Yan.’ And he felt the colour on his cheeks rise involuntarily, blushing to the roots of his hair. He wondered if his day could possibly get any worse, and hurried into his office. The feng shui man was standing in the centre of the room taking notes. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to go,’ Li said.

  The old man nodded sagely. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I shall need to give this much thought.’ He pointed towards the filing cabinet on the door wall. ‘This cabinet is no good here. It stops the door opening fully. The door must open one hundred eighty degrees. Negative ch’i collects in empty spaces behind doors, and you can’t see the whole room when you enter.’ He shook his head and turned to the window. ‘Window is jammed. Restricts the view. Will bring limited opportunities.’ He tapped the desk. ‘Are you left or right-handed?’

  Li sighed. ‘Right-handed. Why?’

  ‘We have to move the desk. Light must not come from your writing side. And we need water in here and fresh plants.’ He pointed at dead plants in old pots on the sill. They had once belonged to Li’s predecessor, but since his death no one had watered them and so they, too, had died. ‘This is very bad feng shui. And we should think about the colour of the walls …’

  Li took him gently by the arm. ‘I’m quite happy with the colour of the walls. But you really have to go now.’

  ‘Tomorrow I come back with the plan.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that. I’ll speak to my uncle tonight.’

  ‘Your uncle is my very good friend. I owe him many favours.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  The old man took a last look back as Li guided him out into the corridor. ‘Bad feng shui,’ he said. ‘Ve-ery bad feng shui.’

  Li turned back into the detectives’ room to find all of them, including Margaret, watching him with ill-concealed smiles.

  ‘Anyway,’ Margaret said, ‘I think it’s time you took me to lunch, don’t you?’

  ‘She just asked him to take her to lunch,’ Lily translated quickly for the rest of the room, and they all waited with intense interest to see what Li’s response would be. He was trapped. She had just performed a huge favour for his boss, and therefore indirectly for him. The etiquette of guanxi required him to return the favour. And lunch was a very small price to pay. Except that his colleagues were unlikely to let him forget it in a hurry. He fumbled to remove his fob watch from the small leather pouch looped on to his belt and glanced at the time.

  ‘I do
n’t have much time, and it’s a little late,’ he said lamely.

  Lily whispered a translation. ‘Aw, come on, boss,’ Wu said. ‘The least you can do is buy the lady some lunch.’

  Margaret didn’t need a translation. ‘Something fast. A burger would be fine.’

  Li knew there was no way out of it, and a tiny mischievous thought formed itself in his mind. ‘Okay. I know a place.’

  ‘I tell the driver to bring car round.’ Lily started for the door.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Li said quickly. ‘I’ll take a pool car. We’ll meet you back here in an hour.’ He held the door open for Margaret.

  Lily scowled, displeased to be excluded from this outing, but in no position to argue.

  ‘Bye-bye,’ Wu called after them, in English.

  Margaret stopped by the door, struggling to recapture what seemed like a very distant memory of an hour spent with a phrase book on the plane. ‘Zai jian,’ she said eventually, eliciting some laughter and some applause, and a chorus of ‘bye-byes’ from the other detectives.

  II

  Li picked up a dark blue Beijing Jeep in the street outside and they turned south and then west along Dongzhimennei Street. They sat in silence for several minutes as he appeared to focus all concentration on negotiating the traffic. Eventually Margaret glanced at him and said, ‘Lily said the detectives told her it was your uncle who sent the feng shui man.’

  ‘Yes.’ Li was not inclined to talk about it, but Margaret persisted.

  ‘So, it’s not widely practised in China now? Feng shui.’

  Li shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But not officially. I don’t know very much about it.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Since it was the Chinese who invented it. It was an American Chinese who took the class I attended. He told us that the whole philosophy arose from the practice of the ancient Chinese religion of Taoism.’

  ‘What does an American Chinese know about Taoism?’ Li was scathing.

  ‘More than you, apparently.’

  Li gave expression to his annoyance with a blast of his horn at a cyclist. ‘Taoism,’ he said. ‘From the word tao, literally meaning “the way”. It teaches us we must all find a place for ourselves in the natural way of things that does not disrupt the function of the whole. When we accept our place in the world, we become more concerned for the consequences of our actions, since for every action there is a reaction, and everything we do has a consequence for others.’

  Beyond her surprise at this sudden and unexpected articulation of the centuries-old philosophy, Margaret made the connection for the first time with what Bob had been trying to tell her earlier; about Chinese society and the way it is reflected in its legal system; the sublimation of the individual in favour of the collective good; the realisation that none of us is alone in this world, that we are all interdependent.

  Almost as if reading her thoughts, Li went on, ‘Of course, this is not just a Chinese philosophy. It has expression in much Western thinking. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main …”’

  Almost automatically, Margaret recalled the lines from her classes in English Lit. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”’

  ‘Of course, John Donne was writing in seventeenth-century England,’ Li said. ‘He no doubt drew his inspiration from much older Chinese philosophies.’

  Margaret could barely conceal her amazement. ‘They didn’t teach you John Donne at the University of Public Security.’

  Li laughed at the idea. ‘No.’

  ‘At school?’

  He shook his head. ‘My Uncle Yifu. He was educated at the American University in Beijing before the communists came to power in ’49. He was offered the chance to do a post-graduate course at Cambridge, in England. But he chose to stay and help build the new China.’ A shadow passed almost imperceptibly across his face. ‘You might say that my uncle was the embodiment of the philosophy of Taoism.’

  ‘And how did he help to build “the new China”?’ Margaret was sceptical.

  But Li didn’t notice. His mind was transported to another place, another time. ‘He became a policeman.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was considered to be an “intellectual”. And in those days this was not a good thing to be. Free thinkers were dangerous. So he volunteered to join the police force and go to Tibet.’

  Margaret blew a jet of air through pursed lips. ‘That’s a bit of a leap. From Cambridge post-grad to Tibetan cop.’

  Li was philosophical. ‘It was how the world turned then. He and his wife walked to Tibet from their home in Sichuan.’

  ‘Walked!’ Margaret was incredulous.

  ‘There were very few roads in those days over the mountains to the roof of the world. It took them three months.’

  This seemed extraordinary to Margaret. The only thing with which she could equate it was the brave trek west across the United States made by pioneers in the early nineteenth century. And yet this had been less than fifty years ago.

  ‘They brought him back to Beijing in 1960,’ Li said. ‘By the time he retired five years ago, he had become a Senior Commissioner, and was head of the Beijing Municipal Police. I have been staying with him in his apartment since I came here to the Public Security University.’

  He wondered if Margaret could possibly divine from this how hard it had been for him to walk in the footsteps of such an uncle. Footsteps that had always been too big, the strides between them too long. If by some miracle he should ever manage to fill them and match the strides, he would be accused of having been given his uncle’s shoes. There was no way for him to win.

  They were heading south now on North Xidan Avenue, and near its corner with West Chang’an Avenue Li pulled the car into the kerb outside a colourful restaurant with a red-and-green-striped wall and yellow awnings. A raised, double-sided entrance under a green-tiled arching roof led up to a self-service snack bar on the first floor. In a street jammed with bicycles parked side by side, row upon row under the trees, pavement hawkers of every description were selling their wares: face masks with extending and retracting moustaches; nylons that wouldn’t rip or ladder even when jabbed with a needle. An old lady sat with a pair of scales on which you could weigh yourself for a handful of jiao. The hawkers were attracting large crowds, who paused briefly to take in the blonde-haired, blue-eyed yangguizi who got out of the Jeep with the young Chinese. Margaret felt awkward and, not for the first time, noted that the Chinese were not in the least self-conscious about simply staring at her.

  ‘Tianfu Douhua Zhuang,’ Li said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  He let her precede him up the steps. ‘It is the name of the restaurant. Tianfu meaning “land of abundance”, signifying my home province of Sichuan. Douhua Zhuang means “Tofu Village”. The food is excellent.’

  The first floor was jammed with late diners cramming communal tables. Round the walls, pre-cooked dishes sat in bowls behind glass counters. People at the door were queuing for carry-out noodles. Li nodded towards the stairs. ‘There is a proper restaurant with a full menu on the second floor, but we are too late for lunch today. This is for snacks, but you can eat well. Okay?’

  ‘Sure,’ Margaret said, a little overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all. ‘But you choose. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Okay. You like noodles?’ She nodded, and he grabbed a tray and got them each a bowl of noodles. Then they made their way round the glass counters, Li choosing a range of dishes: boiled tofu with sauce, won-ton, skewered meat, pickled vegetable, sweet dumplings. Everything was smothered with spicy sauces. Li got them each a beer, paid and then found them a corner at a busy table, and they sat down. Conversation lulled momentarily at the table, curious faces turning in their direction, and then the pursuits of idle gossip once more took over and Li and Margaret were relegated to happy anonymity.
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  ‘So …’ Margaret was anxious to pick up their conversation from the car. ‘You’re still living with your aunt and uncle?’

  ‘No. Just my uncle. My aunt died before I came to Beijing. I did not know her. My uncle has never really got over the loss of her.’

  Margaret watched Li carefully, and helped herself from the bowls that he had just visited. The food was delicious, but within minutes a mild burning sensation in her mouth had turned into a searing heat. She gasped for breath. ‘My God, it’s hot!’ And she grabbed her beer, draining nearly half the glass in a single draught. She looked up and saw a smile playing about Li’s lips.

  ‘Sichuan food,’ he said, ‘is always spicy. It is good, yes?’

  She was having hot flushes now, her face, she was sure, a bright pink, perspiration breaking out across her forehead. Her eyes narrowed. ‘You brought me here on purpose, didn’t you? You’re trying to burn the mouth off me.’

  Li’s smugness infuriated her further. ‘This is the cuisine of my home,’ he said. ‘I thought you would be interested to try it. I did not realise your soft American palate would be so … sensitive.’

  She glared at him. ‘You’re a complete bastard, Li Yan, you know that?’

  He felt a thrill of pleasure, not only from the sound of his name on her lips, but from the fact that she had remembered it. She took another gulp of beer and he took pity on her. ‘No, no.’ He took the glass from her. ‘Drinking will not help.’ He took a sachet of sugar from his pocket and passed it to her. ‘This will help.’

  ‘Sugar.’

  ‘Sure. It will stop the burning.’

  Still suspicious, she opened the sachet and emptied its contents into her mouth. Miraculously, as it melted, so did the heat in the sweetness. ‘It does,’ she said with surprise.

  Li smiled. ‘Spicy and sweet. And therein you have the balance of opposites. Yin and yang. As in feng shui.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know anything about feng shui,’ Margaret said suspiciously.

  ‘Not of its practice. But I understand the principles.’ He filled his mouth with more spicy food.