The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1)

by Peter May

  ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  He gazed at her steadily. ‘To watch,’ he said.

  The Needle was sprawled on the grass now, trying to edge away as Li turned his attention back to him. ‘Stay where you are,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll give you a chance. Maybe several. But the odds’ll get shorter.’ He flipped the barrel out from the main body of the revolver and took out the bullets one by one, leaving only a single round. ‘A game invented by our neighbours in Russia.’ He snapped the barrel back in place.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Margaret said, and she walked away, out towards the centre of the pitch, her back turned towards them. She put her hands on her hips and stared up to the heavens. Physically, she knew, there was nothing she could do to stop it. But she was damned if she was going to watch.

  The Needle followed her with his eyes, a sense of hopelessness growing like nausea in his belly. She wasn’t going to do anything. Li hauled him back to his knees and placed the revolver at the base of his skull. The tip of it was cold and hard against his skin and pulled at his hair. ‘Okay, so I’ll ask you again,’ Li said softly.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The Needle had had a sudden revelation. Li wasn’t going to pull that trigger. Not with the American there. It was obvious there was friction between them. Then he felt, more than heard, the squeezing of the trigger mechanism raising the hammer, and the smack of it against an empty chamber. He lost control of his bladder and felt a rush of hot urine on his thigh.

  Margaret heard the sound of the hammer on the empty chamber echo around the terracing, and swivelled to stare at Li in disbelief. Somehow, somewhere deep inside, she hadn’t believed he would actually do it. ‘Jesus!’ And she listened to her voice whispering round the stadium, as if it belonged to someone else.

  ‘Tell me about Chao Heng,’ Li insisted.

  ‘I told you …’ The Needle started to weep.

  Crack! The hammer smacked down on another empty chamber.

  ‘Li! For God’s sake!’ Margaret screamed at him.

  ‘Tell me,’ Li said, his voice tight and controlled. He blinked and flicked his head as a trickle of sweat ran into one eye.

  The Needle felt the grate of the trigger mechanism again. ‘Okay, okay, okay!’ he screamed.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Li said.

  ‘Chao Heng was well known,’ The Needle gasped. ‘He used to hang around the clubs downtown trying to pick up boys. The younger the better. Everyone knew what he was like.’ The Needle was babbling like a baby now, words and all inhibition loosened, like the muscles of his bladder, by naked fear. ‘I didn’t know him personally, but I knew him by sight. He got his stuff off a guy called Liang Daozu.’

  ‘One of your people?’

  ‘I don’t have any people,’ he shouted, and felt the muzzle of the gun push harder into his neck. ‘Okay, yeah, he was one of my guys.’

  ‘What about Mao Mao?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What was his connection with Chao Heng?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Again the muzzle pushed hard into the base of his skull. ‘For God’s sake, I didn’t even know they knew one another! Mao Mao was low life, street scum. He didn’t move in the same circles as someone like Chao Heng.’

  ‘Or you?’

  ‘Or me. Shit, I don’t trade stuff on the streets. Never have. That’s for users and losers like Mao Mao.’

  ‘Maybe Mao Mao was into little boys, like Chao?’

  The Needle shook his head. ‘Not that I knew of.’

  Not that anyone else knew of either. Li had read the statements of Mao Mao’s family and friends. He’d had a wife and a kid somewhere, and a string of mistresses. Li’s adrenalin rush was slowly giving way to disappointment. He had The Needle on his knees in front of him, confessing to anything and everything. But not only would it be impossible to use any of it against him, none of it helped in the investigation. He pulled the trigger anyway. Crack!

  The Needle yelped. ‘Shit, man, what are you doing! I told you what you wanted to know.’

  Li pushed him over on to his back, and The Needle lay staring up at him in disbelief, paralysed by fear. Li extended his arm downwards and pointed the revolver straight at the centre of The Needle’s face.

  ‘Li?’ Margaret took a step towards him. She had thought it was over. The Needle had talked rapidly for nearly a minute, telling Li, it had seemed, what he wanted to know. Now Li was going to kill him in cold blood.

  Li pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. The Needle screamed, a long scream of anguish, the pain of knowing he was going to die, almost worse than death itself.

  Margaret’s heart stood still. ‘That’s six,’ she said.

  The Needle looked up at Li in breathless disbelief. Li extended his left hand towards Margaret and opened his fist. Six bullets nestled in his palm. ‘The speed of the hand deceives the eye,’ he said grimly.

  Margaret closed her eyes. She wanted to strike him with her fists, with her feet, to bite him, inflict pain on him in any way she could. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

  Li ignored her, holstering the gun and slipping the bullets into his pocket. He stooped and dragged the hapless Needle to his feet and pushed his face into his. ‘Maybe you think you’ve lost a bit of face here today.’ The Needle said nothing. ‘I just hope the next time you go visiting a stadium, it’s to get a bullet in your head for real. And with a bit of luck they’ll blow your face clean off.’ He let go of him, and The Needle dropped back to his knees. Li looked in disgust at the black urine patch on his trousers. ‘I was going to give you a lift back, but I don’t want you fouling up my Jeep. And maybe you’d rather change before you drop back in on the boys.’

  The Needle stared up at him with hatred in his eyes and murder in his heart.

  II

  ‘Just take me straight back to the university.’ Margaret sat tight-lipped and furious in the passenger seat.

  ‘Sure.’ Li nodded and they drove in silence for some way.

  But she was unable to contain her anger for long. ‘You had that all planned, didn’t you?’ He shrugged. ‘And someone at the stadium knew we were coming.’

  ‘I’ve got my contacts,’ he said.

  ‘It was moronic,’ she said. ‘Absolutely moronic. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I learned it from a couple of cops in Chicago. I think, maybe, they did it for my benefit. Back seat of the squad car, up a blind alley. A small-time pusher with dirt on someone higher up the chain. They sure as hell scared the kid. He told them everything they wanted to know.’

  She flashed him a look that might have turned him to stone had he met her eye. ‘That doesn’t justify it. For them, or you.’

  ‘At least I saved a dozen of my detectives maybe six weeks’ work chasing a connection that doesn’t exist.’

  ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Because if there was a drugs connection between Chao Heng and Mao Mao, The Needle would have known about it. And, somehow, I believed him when he said he didn’t.’ He glanced over at her. ‘I wouldn’t spill any tears over The Needle. He’ll get over it.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about The Needle,’ she said. ‘It’s what you put me through in that stadium. If I’d known there were no bullets …’

  ‘You would have approved?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Which is why I did not tell you. I was not sure I would even take you into the stadium.’

  ‘Oh, I’m supposed to feel honoured now, am I? Jesus!’ She slapped her palms on the dashboard. ‘Why did you take me in?’

  ‘You were so ready to believe in human rights violations in China, I thought maybe you should see some for yourself, first hand, as inspired by Americans.’

  ‘Well, first off, let’s not confuse human rights and civil rights. What you saw those cops in America do was a breach of that kid’s civil rights. They also broke the law. And I can assure you it’s not comm
on practice.’

  ‘Nor is it in China.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Like there are no violations of civil or human rights in China?’

  ‘Not on my watch.’

  ‘Oh, so today was the first time you’ve ever done anything like this, right?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He turned to meet her disbelief face on. ‘It was.’ And the sincerity in his eyes disconcerted her. ‘For myself, I would happily have killed that man. As a policeman, it is against everything I believe. My uncle would be ashamed of me. He would tell me that the measure of any civilisation is the strength and balance of its system of justice. And he would be right. And he would not listen when I told him that I had a feeling, an instinct, that we could not afford to spend weeks, months, maybe years finding this killer. He would tell me that I should employ good police work to back up that instinct.’

  In spite of herself, she was interested. ‘What instinct?’

  ‘If I knew what it was, maybe today would never have been necessary. There is something … bizarre about these killings. Something in what we already know that I am missing. Something that troubles my unconscious mind, but that my conscious mind has not grasped. So I have taken a short cut that I should not have taken, because somehow I know there is no time.’

  ‘You think he’s going to kill again?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ They had stopped at traffic lights, and he turned and examined her face, and thought he saw the shadow of doubt in it. ‘Have you never had an instinct about something? Something you can’t explain, you just feel?’

  There was a catch in her throat, and she didn’t dare to speak, as she remembered how she had fought her instincts, committing to an act of faith in Michael that went beyond all reasonable expectation. She found it hard, now, to understand why. She should have known better. She dragged her eyes away from Li’s and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘And I didn’t follow it.’ Her hands were clasped in her lap, and Li saw her knuckles go white. ‘And I should have.’

  They drove past the top of Wangfujing Street and into Wusi Street, which took them into Jingshanquan Street and past the rear gate of the Forbidden City. The car in front of them braked suddenly to avoid a child on the road, careening sideways into a trolley bus amidst a shower of sparks, before spinning across two lanes of oncoming traffic and ploughing into the cycle lane. Vehicles travelling nose to tail slithered into one another, locking fenders. All traffic ground to a halt, horns blaring, a trail of devastation across the road. The child who had caused the accident ran away, unharmed, down the far sidewalk. Several cyclists picked themselves off the dusty street, and started examining buckled wheels and twisted frames, shouting oaths at drivers, remonstrating with one another. Some were bleeding from grazes on arms and foreheads, others had torn trousers at the knee and shirts at the elbow. Above the noise of horns and raised voices and revving engines was a woman’s single, repeating scream.

  Li had swung the Jeep side-on across the middle of the road and planted a flashing red lamp on the roof, and was now making an urgent call on the police radio. Margaret was shaken, but unhurt. She could hear the woman screaming, but couldn’t see her. She got out of the Jeep and started running between the vehicles and the people standing arguing in the road. There was a crowd gathering around the car that had slewed across the street in the first place. It had half mounted the sidewalk and buried its nose in the trunk of a locust tree. The dazed driver was staggering from the vehicle. Margaret grabbed him and looked at the wound on his forehead. He would live. The woman was still screaming, a babble of hysterical voices rising from the crowd around the front of the car. As she rounded the bonnet, Margaret saw the buckled remains of a bicycle under the front wheel and a woman trapped beneath the bicycle, gouts of blood spouting from a wound high on her left leg. She was screaming more in fear than pain as she saw the life flooding out of her. Li appeared at Margaret’s shoulder. ‘She’s going to die if we don’t stop that bleeding fast,’ Margaret said. ‘We’ve got to get her out of there.’

  Li’s voice boomed out above the racket, insistent, commanding, and seven or eight men immediately detached themselves from the crowd. Li waved them to either side of the vehicle and they all found what handholds they could. As they lifted, there was a groan of metal, and a jet of steam escaped from the broken radiator. Margaret grabbed the woman under each armpit and pulled. She was aware of others beside her. The bicycle was torn away. The woman was drawn free. The intensity of her screams was fading along with her life. There was blood everywhere, still pumping from her leg as her heart fought vainly against the rapid drain of the wound.

  Li said, ‘Emergency services are on their way.’

  ‘No time!’ Margaret shouted. ‘Hold her down.’ And to Li’s and everyone else’s amazement, this fair-haired, blue-eyed yangguizi kicked off her trainers and stood on top of the injured woman’s thigh, pressing her full body weight down on to the wound. She grabbed one of the men who had lifted the car, and held him for balance. He froze, like a rabbit caught in headlights. The woman lurched and screamed, and tried to buck Margaret off. ‘For Christ’s sake hold her still,’ Margaret said. ‘Her femoral artery’s been severed. This is the only way I can get enough pressure on it to stop the bleeding.’

  Li sat in the road by the woman’s head, gently taking her flailing arms and folding them in, raising her head on to his lap, restraining her fight and her fear, talking rapidly, gently, reassuringly. Her resistance subsided and she relaxed and started weeping. There were several hundred people in the street now, pressing around them in silent amazement. Margaret looked down at the blood oozing slowly through her toes. She had staunched the bleeding for the moment, but the woman had lost a great deal of blood. She was in her mid-forties, stockily built, with the flattened features of a peasant Chinese. Her blue print dress was soaked in red. The ribbon that tied her hair back had come free, and long black strands of it sprayed out across Li’s legs. She gazed up at him as he continued softly speaking, stroking her face. Margaret had no idea what he was saying, but she found it almost impossible to equate this gentle, genuinely caring man with the cold, ruthless individual she had witnessed in the stadium just fifteen minutes earlier.

  In the distance they heard the sound of sirens. Minutes later paramedics were pushing their way through the crowd with stretchers, and Margaret was relieved of the burden of standing on the wound. The injured woman held Li’s hand all the way to the ambulance. He returned to find Margaret retrieving her shoes, still an object of intense curiosity for the crowd. They were dispersing reluctantly on the orders of uniformed traffic cops who were trying to clear the road. Li’s hand slipped gently round Margaret’s upper arm and he led her back to the Jeep, her bare feet leaving a trail of bloody footprints in their wake. There was blood drying on her hands, on her tee-shirt, on the bottoms of her jeans. ‘I’m going to need to change,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll take you back to your hotel.’ Li started the Jeep, turned it around and headed back for the previous junction before swinging north.

  III

  ‘I’ll wait for you here.’ Li had parked in the forecourt at the foot of the steps to the main entrance.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Come up. You need to wash. You’ve got blood on your hands and your face.’ She jumped out of the Jeep, forgetting, as it was so easy to do, that they had been cocooned in air-conditioned unreality. The heat bounced back at her from the white concrete, dusty and hot, almost violent in its intensity, and she felt her knees weaken.

  Li looked and saw the crusty rust colour of dried blood on his hands, aware of it for the first time. In the rear-view mirror he saw a smear of it on his cheek. He could see the dark stains of it on his trousers and jacket, and vivid spatters on the white of his shirt. He got reluctantly out of the Jeep and followed Margaret up the steps, passing between pillars the same colour as the blood on his hands, and into the chilled atmosphere of the lobby. On the third floor, the
attendants regarded them with amazement, watching open-mouthed as they walked the length of the corridor.

  Her room was soft and luxurious, palely seductive, slashed by the blood-red silk of the headboard on her bed. He never ceased to be astonished by the degree of luxury demanded by foreigners. And yet it was without character or personality, like any hotel room in any city around the world.

  She threw her bag on the bed. ‘I’ll take a quick shower and change, then you can get in and wash.’ She grabbed the remote control for the television and switched it on. ‘To stop you from getting bored.’ She smiled. It was tuned to CNN, a news report about freak flooding in northern California. He heard the rush of water in the shower and wandered to the dressing table. There were make-ups items and creams, a map and a guide book. He picked up and flipped through a small red Chinese phrase book, stopping at random. A page on dealing with money. I’m completely broke. Can I use this credit card? He shook his head in wonder at the things foreigners thought important. Another page on ‘entertainment’. Do you want to come out with me tonight? Which is the best disco round here? Li smiled. Somehow he didn’t think that either phrase would trip off Margaret’s tongue.

  He lifted a hairbrush and teased some of the shiny golden hair free of its bristles. It was very soft and fine. He put it to his nose and smelled her scent. On an impulse he could not have explained if asked to, he wound the hair around his index finger to make a curl of it, and slipped it carefully into his breast pocket between the pages of a small notebook.

  The rush of the shower stopped abruptly, and the bathroom door creaked slightly ajar. In the mirror above the dresser he could see, reflected through the crack in the door, the pale lemon of a towel draped across the shower screen. Suddenly it slid from view, and he saw Margaret’s naked form, still standing in the bath, legs apart, body glistening in the light; slim and white and tempting. Her breasts were firm and erect, juddering as she briskly towelled herself down. He glanced quickly away, reddening with shame, feeling guilt for having looked. But in a moment, his eyes were drawn back, and he saw her step out of the bath, water still clinging in droplets to the pale triangle of curled pubic hair between her legs. She swivelled on the ball of one foot and he caught a glimpse of the pink half-peach rounds of her buttocks and the firm muscle that tapered in from the tops of her thighs. He followed the arch of her back up to beautifully squared shoulders and saw that her head was turned, and that she was watching his reflection watching hers.