The Firemaker (34 page)

He smiled. ‘The tearoom is upstairs.’

He led her into a small entrance lobby. Down a couple of steps, and through glass doors, was the bookshop, row upon row of shelves lined with thousands of books, assistants idly wandering the aisles. It was not doing much business. They turned left through a door and up gloomy stairs into another world.

Here was a room from another age, peaceful and hushed in its dimly lit elegance, cloistered and unreal, an oasis amidst the humid dereliction of the street outside. From its high ceiling, fans swung in lazy unison, stirring paper lanterns hanging over sets of lacquered dark-wood tables and chairs. Along one side ran a narrow passageway behind a low wall and tall columns. Along the other, ornately carved wooden screens were arranged to create private alcoves. Flowers grew in pots on every available space, vases stood on every table. The walls were lined with both modern and traditional Chinese paintings.

A young girl greeted them at the top of the stairs and led them across the tiled floor to a table in an alcove. There was not another soul in the place. The rumble of traffic was a distant memory, and the air-conditioning took the heat out of the night. The girl lit a candle at their table and handed them each a menu. Margaret was afraid to raise her voice, as if in a church. ‘This place is amazing,’ she said. ‘You would never know it was here.’

‘It’s popular with writers and artists,’ he said. ‘And musicians. It’s very crowded at the weekends, and there is usually music. But in the early week it is quiet.’ His eyes reflected the flickering candlelight like shiny black coals. ‘What would you like to drink?’

‘Just tea.’

He ordered, and the girl brought a tray of delicacies for them to choose from. Margaret picked a small dish of toasted sunflower seeds to nibble on. The tea came in colourfully patterned china cups set in deep saucers and covered with lids. Hot water was poured over a sprinkling of dried green leaves in the bottom of the cups from a heavy, traditionally shaped brass teapot. The girl left it at the table for them to top up their own. The green leaves floated to the tops of their cups, expanding and turning fleshy as they rehydrated. Li replaced the lids. ‘Better to wait a few minutes.’

They sat in silence then for some time. Not a difficult silence, not awkward or self-conscious, but comfortable. Words seemed unnecessary somehow. Li looked at her hands, clasped on the table in front of her. He marvelled at how pink the flesh was beneath the nails, how delicate the fingers that wielded the instruments of autopsy, cutting open corpses to unravel the mysteries of death.

‘What on earth made you want to be a doctor?’ he asked suddenly, almost without meaning to. And immediately he regretted it, fearing she would take offence at his tone.

But she just laughed. ‘Why? Is it so awful?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be …’ He tailed off and shook his head. ‘You know, when you told those students I was squeamish about being at autopsies, you were right.’

She looked at him, surprised. ‘But you must have been at dozens.’

‘I have. And I want to throw up every time.’

Which made her smile. ‘You poor soul.’

‘I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it. Cutting up dead bodies. Or living ones. In fact, that’s probably worse. Diseases and cancers. People dying all the time.’

‘That’s what got to
me
,’ she said. ‘People dying on me. It’s much easier dealing with the dead. You don’t get attached to them.’ She removed the lid from her cup and sipped at the tea. It was still very hot, and wonderfully refreshing. ‘I used to think medicine was vocational. You know, something you were born to. But I’m pretty cynical about it now. Most doctors I know are in it for the money. I’d wanted to be a doctor as long as I could remember. To help people, to save their lives, to ease their pain. But it’s not like that. There’s never enough money, there’s never enough time. When you graduate from medical school you think you know it all, then you find out you know nothing. Whatever you can do, it’s never enough.

‘When I worked in the emergency room at the UIC Medical Centre, I had people in my care dying nearly every day. Stabbings, muggings, poor bastards pulled from car wrecks, kids hit by automobiles, fires, suicides. You name it. They’d come in with arms and legs hanging off. People burned from head to toe, so bad they don’t feel a thing. They’ll sit talking to you, and you know what they don’t – in a couple of hours they’re going to die. They talk about patients in trauma. But half the time the doctors are in trauma, too. There’s a limit to how much of that you can take, Li Yan, before you start turning into some kind of automaton.

‘The dead? They’re gone. Where, I don’t know. But the body’s just a receptacle, and I can be cold and detached and clinical about cutting it up, because whoever that person was is not there now.’

Her tea was cooling, and she took a longer draught of it and nibbled some sunflower seeds.

‘I think maybe doctors must be a little like cops,’ Li said. ‘No home life.’

Margaret flicked him a glance and then looked away again quickly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No home life worth a damn.’

He took his life in his hands and strayed into that unknown and potentially treacherous territory he had come close to twice before. ‘Is that why you and your husband divorced?’

She met his eye head-on. ‘Oh, we didn’t get divorced,’ she said.

He was taken by surprise, confused and disappointed. ‘But you said you were no longer …’

‘He’s dead,’ she said simply, interrupting.

‘Oh.’ Li knew he’d just stood on a land-mine. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I’m not.’ But her voice was tight with emotion. She reined it in and kept it to herself for some moments, staring at her hands. Then she said, ‘Michael was a good-looking guy. All the girls thought he was gorgeous, and all my friends thought I was so lucky when we got engaged. So did I. But then, what do you know at twenty-four?’ She took a deep, trembling breath. ‘He was a few years older than me, so I guess I looked up to him. He was so smart, and so passionate about stuff. Especially genetics. And he was always bucking the Establishment, taking the unorthodox view, speaking his mind, even at the expense of his career. That’s why he ended up lecturing at the Roosevelt when he was capable of so much better. I admired him for his principles.’ There was a sad fondness in her smile as she remembered.

‘In the early days we used to sit up talking late into the night, smoking dope and drinking beer and putting the world to rights. Like teenagers. We were big kids, really.

‘But then, life started taking over. For me, anyway. You know how it is. You get your first job. You’re on the first rung of the ladder. They know it, so they work you every hour God gives. You know it, so you do it ’cos you want to climb the ladder. Michael wanted kids, I didn’t. Not then, anyway. There was a lot I still had to achieve in life. I wasn’t about to throw it all away for motherhood. There would be time for that, or so I thought.

‘So maybe it was my fault he started playing around. But I think maybe he’d always been doing it. I just never knew until it all came out at the trial.’ She stopped herself, wondering why she was telling him all this. It was coming so easy, pouring from her like blood from a wound, or maybe pus from an infected sore.

She glanced up and found his eyes fixed on her, deep and dark and sympathetic. Then for a moment she became aware of the girl who had served them shuffling idly between the tables, adjusting a chair she might have adjusted a dozen times before, wiping a speck of dust from a table, her mind lost in thoughts of a life they would never know.

‘I should have known from my student days,’ Margaret said. ‘There was always one lecturer, maybe younger than the rest though not always, that the girls would all find attractive. And for a semester, or maybe even a whole year, one of them would have a passionate affair with him. They had so much in common, she would tell the others. He was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced. By the end of the year she would grow up and move on, and he would have another passionate affair with some kid the next year, some starry-eyed young girl who would think he was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced.’ Margaret’s smile was bitter and sad. ‘Michael was one of those. Every year another student, or maybe two. And he would sit up with them into the small hours, smoking dope and drinking beer, putting the world to rights. While I was working ninety-five-hour weeks as an intern, busting a gut to build a career.’ Her eyes started to fill, and for a moment she panicked, thinking she might start to cry. She blinked furiously, and a couple of salty drops splashed on the lacquered surface of the table. She drained her tea, down to the thick green leaves that had sunk to the bottom of the cup. Without a word Li refilled her cup, and then she felt his hand slip over hers, warm and dry and comforting. She blinked at him and smiled bravely. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …’ She sighed. ‘I should never have started this.’

‘It is all right,’ he said softly. ‘Go on if you want to. Stop if you don’t.’

She withdrew her hand from his and took a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. ‘The first I knew anything about it,’ she said, ‘was when the police came to arrest him.’ She remembered vividly how it had been. ‘I was with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office by that time. I’d been working late. Michael was still up when I got home. He’d been smoking a lot of dope and was acting pretty strange. There’d been a murder on campus, in the student residence. One of his students, a nineteen-year-old girl, raped and battered to death. We’d been talking about it the day before. He seemed pretty shocked. I’d fallen asleep on the settee, and the next I knew the police were at the door. Six in the morning. I was still half asleep. I didn’t really know what was happening. They read him his Miranda rights, cuffed him and took him away. He just kept saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags, I didn’t do it”.’ She glanced up at Li, a hint of what he took to be something close to shame in her eyes. ‘And I believed him. Or, at least, I wanted to.’

She shook her head. ‘The trial was a nightmare. He pled not guilty, of course. But there was overwhelming forensic and DNA evidence against him. The prosecution said he’d been drinking and that he couldn’t take the rejection when the girl said no. They said he was used to getting his way with young girls, attractive, impressionable students falling at his feet year after year. A procession of them came to the witness stand and went through their affairs with him in graphic detail.’ She took a moment to control herself. ‘The thing is, I knew it was true. Everything they said. It was just Michael. I was so angry – with myself, for not having seen it. I could believe it of him so easily. I just couldn’t believe he was a murderer. My family, my friends, everyone thought the same. He’d been a rat. Sure. But kill someone? Michael? No, not Michael. Not dear, sweet, intelligent Michael with all his great liberal ideas and his concern for humankind.

‘So I did everything in my power to try to undermine the scientific evidence against him. The blood, the semen, the fibres collected at the scene. Contaminated. All contaminated. Sloppy police work, I said. His legal team did a good job. But not good enough. He was no O. J. Simpson. He couldn’t afford the best. The trial lasted three weeks and it took every penny we had. We lost the apartment, the automobile. I moved in with a friend.’ She paused, lost for a long time in private thought. ‘The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to life. And still he was saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags. You gotta believe me, I didn’t do it”. So I started borrowing money to kick off the appeals procedure. But it wasn’t going well, and he was more and more depressed every time I went to see him. And then one night I got a phone call. He’d hanged himself in his cell. He was dead. It was over, and I could always believe he was innocent. The victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. That’s what my folks said, and my friends. They were really supportive. I cried for about twelve hours, till I got that I was aching so much I couldn’t feel a thing.

‘Then the next day I get this letter through the door. It’s his handwriting. I knew it right away. It was like he’d come back from the dead, and I still wasn’t used to him not being alive. It didn’t say much.’ She bit her lip as she remembered. ‘“Dear Mags, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. But I just can’t go on living with this. I never meant to kill her. I hope you’ll believe that. I’ll always love you. Mikey.”’ Big, silent tears ran down Margaret’s cheeks. ‘He couldn’t live with it. But he made damn sure I had to. Like he was passing on all the guilt. He killed that girl. He raped her and then he hit her again and again and again until he had smashed her skull. He had lied to me about everything. Why couldn’t he have lied to me one last time?’ She put her fist to her mouth and bit down hard on the knuckles. Li stretched over and pulled it gently away and held her hand as she sobbed, and the tears splashed in great heavy drops on the table, glistening in the flickering candlelight.

It was several minutes before she could speak again. Her tissue was sodden, her eyes red and swollen, her cheeks blotched. ‘I never told anyone before,’ she said. ‘About the letter. It was easier to let everyone else go on believing the lie, or at least hold back from giving them a reason not to.’

‘Does it help?’ he asked gently. ‘Having told me?’

‘It may not look like it.’ She half laughed through the tears. ‘But I haven’t felt this good in months.’

She didn’t know why she had told him. Perhaps because he was a stranger, a long way from her life back home, from her friends and her family; because in a few weeks she would be getting on a plane and flying back across the Pacific and would never see him again; because she felt close to him, drawn by his deep, dark eyes and the sensitivity she knew they reflected. But maybe simply because she had needed to tell someone. Anyone. The burden of guilt and hurt and confusion had just become too much to bear. And already she felt the weight of it lifted from her. But she was glad it was Li, and in those moments she felt as close to him as she had felt to anyone in years.