The Firemaker (28 page)

*

Mei Yuan sat on a stool by her
jian bing
‘house’ on the corner of Dongzhimennei. Business was slow, but she was not unhappy. It gave her time to read. She had almost finished her copy of
Meditations
, and it was from some cold imagined Dutch medieval landscape that she had to drag herself as a dark blue Beijing Jeep pulled up at the kerb and a pale, blonde Western woman in a lemon dress got out of the passenger side. Then she saw Li coming round the bonnet, and her face broke into a smile. ‘Hey, Li Yan, have you eaten?’

‘Yes, I have eaten, Mei Yuan. But I am hungry.’

‘Good. I will make you a
jian bing
.’ She lit the gas under her hot plate and looked at Margaret. ‘Two?’

‘Two,’ said Li. And in English, ‘Mei Yuan, this is Dr Margaret Campbell, a forensic pathologist from the United States.’

‘Ah.’ Mei Yuan held out a plump hand. ‘Are you here on holiday or on business?’

Margaret was taken aback by the perfect English that rolled fluently off the tongue of what she had taken to be a peasant street vendor. ‘I’m lecturing at the People’s University of Public Security,’ she said.

‘And are you a practising pathologist, or an academic?’

Again Margaret was startled. ‘Practising,’ she said. ‘I only lecture part-time.’ And then, ‘You speak excellent English.’

‘Thank you,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘I get very little chance to practise it nowadays. So I am what you would call a little rusty.’

‘No, not at all.’ Margaret glanced at Li for illumination.

‘Mei Yuan was a graduate of art and literature at Beijing University in the late fifties,’ he said.

Mei Yuan added, without any apparent regret, ‘But my life did not follow an academic course. I spent most of it in the countryside in Hunan province. I only returned to Beijing a few years ago when my husband died.’ She turned to Li. ‘You missed breakfast.’

‘I was too early for you.’

‘I think, perhaps, my riddle was too difficult for you. You were avoiding me.’

Li laughed. ‘No, I wasn’t. I figured that out yesterday afternoon.’

‘Figured what out?’ Margaret asked.

Li shook his head, smiling. ‘It’s a sort of game we play,’ he explained. ‘I usually stop for breakfast on the way to work. Mei Yuan will pose me a problem, or a riddle. I’ve got till the next day to figure it out. If I come up with the right answer, I set her one. Mind games.’

Mei Yuan laughed. ‘Mindless games. For people with nothing better to do at that time of the morning.’

‘So what was the riddle?’ Margaret was intrigued.

‘There are two men,’ said Li. ‘One of them is the keeper of all books, giving him access to all knowledge. Knowledge is power, so he is very powerful. The other has only two sticks. But they give him more power than the other. Why?’

Margaret thought for a moment. ‘That’s easy,’ she said.

Li looked at her sceptically. ‘Oh, sure.’

‘We have a saying at home about not having two pennies to rub together – meaning you are very poor. But if you have two sticks to rub together, you can make fire. And if you can make fire you can burn books and destroy the knowledge they contain. You take away knowledge, you take away power.’

Mei Yuan clapped her hands in delight. ‘Very good.’

Li was astonished, and full of grudging admiration. ‘It took me all day to work that out.’

Margaret grinned, and as Mei Yuan prepared their
jian bings
asked her about the book she was reading.

‘
Meditations
,’ she said.

‘Descartes?’ Margaret was taken aback.

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘Have you read it?’

‘No. I suppose I should have. But there are so many books. You can’t read them all.’

‘If I had one wish in life,’ said Mei Yuan, ‘it would be that I could spend the rest of it doing nothing else all day but reading.’

Li remembered the books lining the wall in Chao Heng’s apartment, and wondered if he had read them all.

Margaret bit into her
jian bing
and crunched it cautiously. ‘Hmmm,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘It’s fantastic.’ And then quickly, ‘It’s not going to burn the mouth off me, is it?’

Li laughed. ‘Not this time. Just a gentle chili burn.’ And she felt the slow warmth and the flavours fill her mouth.

Mei Yuan handed one to Li. ‘So,’ she said. ‘You have something for me today?’

Li’s mouth was full of
jian bing
. He shrugged apologetically. ‘I haven’t had a chance to think of anything, Mei Yuan. I have a big investigation on.’

She waggled a finger at him. ‘This is no excuse.’

‘Okay,’ he said, his mind turning over quickly. ‘What about this? A man commits three perfect murders on the same night. There is nothing to connect them to one another, or to him. But he quite deliberately leaves a clue beside each victim which makes it clear that they were all killed by the same man. Why does he do this?’

‘That’s not fair,’ Margaret said.

Mei Yuan looked at her, puzzled. ‘You know the answer to this?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Then it must be very difficult.’ She thought for a moment. ‘What sort of clue does he leave?’

‘A cigarette end. He is clever enough to know that traces of his saliva will remain on the paper and that the police will discover that the DNA in the saliva from each cigarette end is the same.’

She looked from one to the other. ‘Is this real?’

Li nodded grimly. ‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘Then I will think about it,’ said Mei Yuan seriously. ‘And if you ask me tomorrow I will tell you what I have thought.’

Li smiled. ‘I only hope I will know the answer by then, so that I can tell you if you are right or wrong.’

In the Jeep, as they headed north through the traffic chaos of bicycles and buses in the narrow Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie Street, Margaret said, ‘Why is a woman like that selling fast food on a street corner?’

Li shrugged. ‘The Cultural Revolution ruined many lives in China. Hers was only one.’

Margaret shook her head in exasperation. ‘What exactly
was
the Cultural Revolution?’ And she was immediately embarrassed by her ignorance. ‘I mean, I know I should probably know. But it was a long time ago in a far-off place … from America, that is.’ She flicked a glance at him. ‘Jesus, I never realised how little I knew about the rest of the world until I came here.’

Li glanced at her across the Jeep and thought for a moment. ‘You know how it is, as a young person, to feel you have no control over your life, that everything is run by old people? And that by the time you are old enough to change things, you are too old to enjoy them? Well, the Cultural Revolution reversed all that. It gave power to the young, to change things while they were young.’ He shivered in the heat as memories of his childhood came flooding back.

‘Young people came from all over China to Beijing to become Red Guards and parade in front of Mao in Tiananmen Square. For them, Mao was the “red, red sun in their hearts”. But really, they were just children with all discipline removed. They went crazy. They attacked people just because they were “intellectuals”. They could come into your house and take over your home. And you would be “criticised”, and maybe you would have to write essays criticising yourself, or they would force you through “struggle sessions” or maybe just beat you up for fun. Many people were put in prisons or sent to labour camps. Others were killed – just murdered. And nothing would happen to those who killed them because the legal system had fallen apart, and most policemen were in prison themselves or had been sent to labour in the countryside.’

Margaret tried to imagine how it must have been, to have all the constraints of a civilised society removed, for power to be in the hands of children run riot. But it was unimaginable.

‘All the worst and most basic instincts of human nature were given free rein,’ Li said. ‘And you know how cruel children can be. In my classroom at primary school, my teacher was made by some of the older kids to sit in front of class wearing a dunce’s cap and recite over and over, “I am a cow demon”. For a short time you think it is funny. But then when your teacher is found kicked to death in the school dining room, you get pretty scared.

‘It all got out of control. Even the extremist cadres in the Party, who had set it all in motion, and thought they could control it for their own ends, lost control. Many of the country’s leaders had been purged, Deng Xiaoping among them. And eventually the army had to be sent in to restore some kind of order. But we had twelve years of it. Twelve years of madness. I was born the year before it began. I was thirteen when it ended, and my family was destroyed.’

Margaret was shocked. ‘What do you mean, destroyed?’

Both my parents were sent to labour camps. They had been denounced as ‘rightists’. They were educated, you see. My mother died there, and my father was a broken man. My Uncle Yifu was a policeman in Beijing. He was denounced and spent three years in prison.’

Margaret was stunned. ‘I had no idea. I really had no idea.’

She thought of all the Chinese she had met since her arrival. Every one of them had lived through the Cultural Revolution. Some of them would have been Red Guards, others their victims. Now, it seemed, they lived and worked together as if nothing had happened. ‘How do people do that?’ she said. ‘I mean, live with each other again. Red Guards, and the people they persecuted.’ A society riddled with the forces of guilt and revenge.

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just seemed natural. Like being better after being ill. You just got on with your life. People didn’t talk much about it at the time. They do now, if you ask. For many people being a Red Guard was the most exciting time of their lives. They travelled all over the country. They didn’t have to pay for their train fares or their food. People were scared of them. They had power.

‘You know, maybe like old soldiers remembering a war, no matter whether it had been good or bad for them, the experience was so heightened, everything in their lives after it seems dull.’

‘And their victims?’

‘When the war ends you don’t go on fighting,’ Li said. ‘You get on with the peace.’

Margaret was not convinced she could have been so philosophical. ‘What happened to Mei Yuan?’

‘She was sent to a labour camp in Hunan where she was forced to work in the fields along with the peasants. But in some ways she was lucky.’

‘Lucky!’

‘Her husband was sent to the same camp. They were not separated like so many others.’ His face clouded. She saw it immediately.

‘What?’

He shrugged. ‘In other ways she was not so lucky.’ There was a catch in his voice. ‘Their baby boy was taken away from them. She never saw him again.’

*

A towering marble statue of Chairman Mao in greatcoat and peaked cap stood just inside the gate of the Ministry of Agriculture on Hepinglidong Street, an arm outstretched in welcome. The Ministry, set in its sprawling, leafy compound, was housed in a huge concrete edifice behind stone-pillared gates. A stone-faced guard stood outside, glowering at a crowd of several dozen schoolchildren and their teachers, who had set up a long table on the sidewalk. A strip of white linen ran its length, and the children were trying to persuade passers-by to sign it in support of some conservation issue.

Li skirted the schoolchildren and turned past the guard and parked the Jeep in the shade of a large tree inside the compound walls. He said, ‘Perhaps you should wait for me here. It might not be politic for me to take you into a government building.’

She nodded. ‘Sure.’ She watched him head off inside and sat for a long time thinking about the Cultural Revolution, about what it must have meant to have had your parents torn away from you as a child, to grow up in a world where all the norms of civilised behaviour were turned on their head. That was all Li had known until he was thirteen. What would ‘normal’ have meant to him? She wondered who had raised him when his parents were in labour camp. Did he have any brothers or sisters?

After a time she found herself succumbing again to an overpowering desire to sleep, and she did not want Li returning to find her snoring in the passenger seat. She got out of the Jeep and wandered back through the gates to the street to see what cause the children were espousing. Beneath green Chinese characters on a long white banner was an explanation in English. They were collecting a million signatures in support of an international drive to save the world from desertification.

Almost immediately she was besieged by clamouring teenage girls who took her hands and pulled her towards the table. A teacher on the other side smiled and handed her a red marker pen. What the hell, she thought. It seemed like a reasonable enough cause. She glanced briefly at all the multicoloured character signatures scrawled across the cloth, before stooping to sign her own name in looping Roman letters. All the children gathered round to watch in amazement, and her signature provoked both astonishment and amusement.

The girls were eager to try out their embryonic English. ‘You British?’

‘No, American.’

‘American! Coca-Cola. Big Mac.’

Margaret smiled wryly. Maybe Li was right. Perhaps that was how the rest of the world saw America’s contribution to international culture after all. In a country whose culinary creations included aromatic crispy duck and lamb that ‘tastes like honey’, fizzy drinks and hamburgers probably seemed pretty crass. But then, she reflected, there were always long queues at the McDonald burger joints she had seen in Beijing.

As she turned back towards the gate, a taxi drew up and a familiar figure emerged. Perspiring profusely, and gasping with the effort of getting out of the car, McCord leaned through the window to pay the driver. As the taxi pulled away, and he turned into the Ministry of Agriculture, Margaret fell into step beside him. ‘Well, hello again,’ she said.

He turned, startled, with eyes like a frightened rabbit. When he saw who it was his face relaxed into a sneer. ‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’

‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’

‘I work here, remember?’