A Killing Air

by Nigel Price

  But. It was the only word that he could instantly find to describe in perfect entirety the figure of Clive Miller as he advanced down the aisle towards Harry and Lisa. There was something about the supercilious grin on his thin lips, the triumphant glint in his narrow eye, the slippery gait of his spindly legs that to Harry simply screamed ‘smarmy’. Not that he was prejudging the encounter of course.

  “Clive,” Harry said, trying ferociously to regain some composure. In truth he had been utterly trumped. He hated that. “So, we meet again.” We meet again? Come on, Harry.

  “So it would seem. You’ve saved me and the chaps a lot of trouble.” Miller chortled with delight. Down either side of the bus, the policemen beamed and tittered without understanding a word of it. “We were on our way to help with the search. But look! Here you are. Come right to us.” Miller closed the final paces and leered at the two fugitives. “That is so incredibly thoughtful of you, Harry old chap.”

  “So what now?” It seemed a reasonable question. “Are you going to murder us too?”

  Miller frowned. “Too?”

  “Like Herbert Zhu,” Harry said bitterly. He felt his temper rising. He wanted nothing more than to pin Miller’s smug face against the side of the bus and keep punching it until it was time to wash his hands and go in for supper.

  “They murdered Herbert Zhu,” Lisa cut in. Her face was scarlet, whether from fear or rage Harry couldn’t tell. In their current predicament it was pretty irrelevant.

  “Who did?”

  “The villagers did.”

  Miller frowned. “I’d heard something to that effect. You can rest assured the perpetrators will be identified and brought to justice.”

  “Don’t talk bollocks, Clive,” Harry said. “You know full bloody well that nothing will happen to them. You’re all in it together. The whole poisonous lot of you.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Which puts you in a bit of a pickle, doesn’t it.”

  “How so, dear chap?”

  “You either have to sort out the whole bloody mess you and your guys have made, or you’ve got to kill us too.”

  Miller’s eyes widened. “Careful what you wish for, Harry.”

  Harry sighed. “I wasn’t wishing for it, you dick.”

  Miller seemed confused, losing the thread. He wasn’t very good at rapid exchanges. “What I mean is, you’re in deep trouble now. You and …” for a moment he had trouble recalling Lisa’s name, “ … her.”

  “Are we under arrest?” Harry asked.

  “You bet you bloody are!”

  “For what?”

  Miller fluffed for an answer. “Trespassing. Assault.” He waved a hand wildly in the air. “Whatever I bloody say. Now just shut up.” He barked a command at someone behind him and stood aside to let them pass.

  Two policemen stepped up to the mark, glowering at him. Harry took one look at them and blanched. The bruises had faded but to him they were instantly recognisable. Thug Pair. Mrs Yan’s cops from the underpass. Gun Man and Sidekick.

  Harry smiled at them sweetly. “Hello, gentlemen.”

  They glared at him with savage delight. Without speaking they pushed their way past Miller and sat down, one on either side of Harry and Lisa. Lisa shoved closer until she was sticking to Harry like duct tape. She gave him a single terrified look, understanding who they were.

  Miller moved back to the front of the bus and sat down. Harry glanced at Gun Man next to him. He was staring stonily ahead. Sidekick was similarly inscrutable. Harry could imagine the thoughts running through their thick heads. The images of what they would do to him given half a chance. He sincerely hoped they wouldn’t get it.

  The bus rumbled on. Harry tried to follow where they were going, but all he could see past his guards through the filthy windows, was smudged countryside. Farmland, more forest, the occasional dwelling. They passed through small townships. First one, then another. He began to feel increasingly uncomfortable as the journey lengthened into hours. So their destination was not Chengde?

  At one point he tried speaking to Thug Pair but was rewarded with a vicious scowl and some untranslatable vitriol in their local dialect. He turned to Lisa for a translation but she just shrugged, none the wiser. Her terror seemed to have abated into dull acceptance. She remained glued to his side.

  It was early afternoon when they came to a grey suburban sprawl. The sky was once again a thoroughly unpleasant yellow, visibility decreasing with every mile. Beijing perhaps? Harry tried his best to look for landmarks that he might recognise. He had been to the capital many times, so it was not an unreasonable hope that something familiar might spark his memory.

  Nothing.

  The buildings seemed newer than Beijing’s grubby grey concrete constructions, though they were all built with the same absence of character. Just glass and steel and concrete. He lamented. What kind of legacy was the present generation leaving for a future population? That was the problem when you had to play catch-up in the space of two decades. There was no time for the luxury of evolutionary development. It was a simple case of add water and mix. Instant modernity. Except that the supposed modernity would age more quickly than anticipated. To the present leadership that didn’t matter. They had other priorities. Making up for lost decades spent in the disaster of Maoism and the even worse Gang of Four era that succeeded it. They probably reckoned that at some time in the future China would be able to afford the luxury of slowing down. Of focusing a bit more on character. For now they didn’t have that option. They either had to catch up with the rest of the world, or be taken apart once again by outsiders.

  Lisa perked up. She sat straight and looked about her, staring hard through the windows.

  “Tianjin,” she said quietly.

  The sea port for the capital. Harry had been there only once before, some years ago. He recalled it as utterly soulless. A wind-swept wasteland of high rise blocks with little of the old Tientsin worth seeing. He realised that his Chinese hosts would scoff at that opinion. Whereas Harry’s interest was in the old colonial structures and the port’s history in the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, the present day leadership preferred to forget past foreign domination, not unreasonably. With their modern focus on growth and competition in the globalised world, they had no time for all that historic nonsense. For them it was not a pleasant memory. Harry had to concede that they had a point.

  He leaned closer to her. “Why have they brought us here?”

  He felt the shrug of her shoulder pressed against his. Not much more to say. They had no option but to sit it out and see what Miller had in store for them.

  Some twenty minutes later that became apparent. The bus entered a large compound and shuddered to a halt. The length of the bus, police stretched and started to sit up and take note that they had arrived. Harry noticed that none of them got up or prepared to leave the bus. It seemed they were expecting to continue their own journey elsewhere.

  Miller stood at the front and spoke to the policeman at his side. The man duly got up and moved down the aisle towards Harry and Lisa. When he reached them he gabbled something at Thug Pair. There was a brief exchange of verbal fire, after which Thug Pair lumbered to their feet, then pulled Harry and Lisa to theirs. Jerks of the chin indicated that their captives had to move to the front of the bus. When they got there, they saw that Miller was already outside. A shove in the small of the back sent Harry staggering down the steps and onto the ground. Lisa followed with equal lack of ceremony.

  Three other officers got off in addition to Thug Pair. One was a policewoman who took post alongside Lisa, scowling at her. So, Harry noted. She gets the one old bird, and I get four louts all to myself. He took a perverse pride in that.

  “This way,” Miller said pompously. He led them across the compound to where a mini-bus sat with motor idling. He slid open the side door. “Get in.”

  “Where are we—?”

  “Get in and shut the fuck up.”

  Harry did so. It seemed chur
lish to give the fellow a hard time. Especially as the four louts were jostling him and would obviously have liked nothing more than to give him a thorough working-over. Harry was bundled in by his escort, all of whom piled in afterwards, sitting on either side of him, and before and aft. He realised there would be no chance of breaking away from this bunch. Lisa and her single escort got into the rear seats. Miller in the front alongside the driver who stared at him vacantly.

  Miller snapped out an order. The driver looked terrified, clearly not understanding a word. Miller repeated it. The driver, panic written all over his face, turned to Gun Man for help. Gun Man repeated the command in a form of language the man could grasp. He shoved in the gear, let out the clutch too quickly, and the vehicle lurched forward in a series of kangaroo jumps that gave Miller whiplash.

  As they moved towards the exit, the bus that had brought them was making its own departure. The minibus idled while the bus left the compound and set off.

  “Aren’t they coming with us?” Harry asked nicely.

  “Piss off.”

  “Now what would the Head of your old alma mater say if he heard you talking like that?” Harry couldn’t help himself. To his inner child, Miller was a flashing red button marked ‘Do not press under any circumstances’.

  Miller turned round in his seat. His grin was quite unpleasant. “If you knew what was good for you, you really would shut the fuck up.”

  Harry settled back in his seat, his puerile mission accomplished. He glanced round at Lisa. She looked at him as if he was mad which made him feel guilty. For himself he had no cares whatsoever. If he had just made life more uncomfortable for her though, that he did regret. So, accepting Miller’s command, Harry Brown did indeed shut the fuck up.

  The minibus rattled along at a fair pace. It entered traffic on some main thoroughfare, then left it, moving down side roads. Eventually it pulled into yet another compound, smarter than the previous one. It was swept and tiled, and in front of them stood a medium-sized glass and concrete office block. Harry looked at it with interest. It might have been the Tianjin headquarters of a global accountancy firm recently expanded from its Beijing office into the provinces.

  The minibus halted and the side door was hauled open. Miller didn’t wait for Harry and the others but jogged lightly up the cream marble steps to the broad glass front doors, chose one and went inside. Harry and Lisa were hustled from the bus by their assorted thugs and nudged and prodded up the steps.

  In the lobby they found Miller leaning on a tall reception desk, addressing the seemingly severed head of the small receptionist sitting behind it. The head examined Harry, Lisa and the others and appeared to be expecting them. Other minders, smarter than the bus thugs, stepped out of nowhere and took over, releasing the bus thugs to stand aside, while the new ones escorted Harry, Lisa and Miller to one of several lifts.

  At their destination floor, they went rapidly along a marble-floored corridor, past offices from which shiny, inquisitive faces scrutinised them. The dress everywhere was ‘smart casual’.

  Finally they stood before large double wooden doors. Highly polished, they were carved with strange geometric designs of a sort that, if stared at for long enough, might cause the subconscious to reveal forgotten childhood traumas.

  Miller knocked but one of the new flunkeys turned the handle and opened it anyway. The office on the other side was little short of magnificent. Spacious, exuberantly furnished and decorated, with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling windows giving a view of the city and some sort of river or canal or drainage nullah. It was hard to tell what it was because severe angular concrete embankments took from it any natural beauty that it might otherwise have had. To Harry it was a metaphor of modern China – rigid control constricting spontaneity.

  The desk that confronted them however was the centrepiece to which all eyes were drawn like captured light into a black hole. Massively tasteless, it had wings that curved like a coral atoll. Behind it, sheltered in the carpeted lagoon, sat a high-backed chair of radically conflicting colour and design.

  The man who rose from it was smaller than implied by the many posters adorning walls in Chengde and other cities and towns throughout China. He held out a hand, less to be shaken than kissed.

  “Hello, Harry,” he said. “I’m Ryder Chau.”

  Thirty Four

  Harry stepped forward, ignoring the quick shifts in stance of the minders on either side of him. He reached across the desk and clasped the proffered hand. For a moment he considered hauling Ryder Chau over the top. Chau smiled as he submitted to the vigorous handshake.

  “Mr Chau,” Harry said.

  “Please, call me Ryder.”

  “Is that Ryder as in Cup, or Rider as in Haggard?”

  Ryder Chau tried to work out if he had been insulted. He glanced at Miller for guidance. Miller shook his head. Don’t worry about it, Boss.

  Ryder Chau was dressed as if for one of his poster shoots. The same shiny suit and tie. The same hair coiffed into the rigid perfection of a motorcycle helmet. Harry wondered if members of the Chinese leadership ever wore tattered jeans and flip-flops. It was hard to picture. They were like enlivened mannequins.

  “Sit down.” Ryder Chau indicated a chair. “You too, Miss Tang.”

  Lisa seemed awe-struck. She didn’t say a word as she obediently took her seat. Harry sat down beside her, the two of them looking up at the figure on the far side of the desk. Ryder Chau lowered himself into his seat and surveyed them.

  “You’ve been having quite a time, haven’t you,” he said. He smiled. It might have been pleasant, as if he had been enquiring about a visit they had made to Chengde’s Mountain Resort as part of a tourist excursion.

  His expression remained polite but hardened. “What is it you both want?”

  Harry looked around the room, taking it all in. “You disappoint me, Mr Chau,” he said. Against all reason, he felt himself as relaxed as if he had just outrun the Germans and secured the best lounger by the pool. He spread out his towel and luxuriated in the warmth of the sun from Ryder Chau’s glare.

  Chau was quizzical. “How so?”

  “I would have expected a hollow volcano at the very least. I mean, you’ve got all the staff.” He thumbed Miller. “The consigliere, the power, but this office block doesn’t do you justice. I mean, come on.”

  To his surprise Ryder Chau smiled. “Very funny. Nice that you can joke. A sign of character.” The smile died. “What do you want?”

  “The truth,” Harry said. And instantly felt diminished. Somehow Ryder Chau made him feel like a rebellious schoolboy finally brought to book in front of the headmaster, his tiresome pranks exposed.

  “About?”

  “Mrs Yan Yajun, for starters,” Harry said. He glanced at Lisa but she was still in awe and sitting frozen to her seat.

  “Yan Yajun.” Ryder Chau repeated the name as if having to dig deep. He looked out of the window for the answer and found it somewhere in mid-air over the concrete river. “I remember her, though a lot of people come to see me for one thing or another. Clive refreshed my memory after speaking to you. He tells me you said she shot herself. That is terrible.”

  “She only shot herself after being beaten almost to death by two undercover policemen from Chengde. Your men, I presume, seeing as they’re currently picking their teeth in the lobby downstairs.”

  Chau ignored the provocation. “Why did you not report this to the police in Beijing? Someone might accuse you of concealing a crime.”

  “At least I’m not the one who committed it.”

  “But nonetheless you helped it go unreported. Why?”

  “I’m not so stupid as to go to the police when it is the police themselves who committed the crime.”

  Chau acknowledged with the slightest bow of the head. “You say the men are downstairs. How can you be so sure they are the same men? I can’t believe you can have had a very clear view of them. According to the account you gave to Clive it was night an
d the lighting was poor.”

  “It was the same men.”

  “Who you followed to Chengde?”

  “No. We went to Chengde to find out more about Mrs Yan, and they were on the bus.”

  “Just like that. Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think? I’d say it is more likely that you saw two men on the bus who you assumed were the ones from your underpass fracas, saw them get into a police van, and your imagination constructed all manner of fantasies from there.”

  Harry sat back and folded his arms. “If you say so, Ryder. But it’s got you rattled, hasn’t it? Which I find a bit odd, if your employees weren’t the ones beating the old woman to a pulp.”

  Ryder Chau levelled a cold stare at Harry who was again reminded of that interview with a headmaster. “Well, that might be your opinion, Harry, but it wouldn’t stand up in court. Not that it would ever get that far. No one would listen to you.”

  “You are,” Harry said.

  Chau smiled. “Don’t overestimate your importance. And they’re not my employees, as you put it. They are Chengde police officers who have you under arrest. They and their colleagues are on their way to Beijing to assist in the heightened security arrangements for the forthcoming National Congress. They can hardly appreciate being diverted to help search for you as you wander round the countryside causing trouble. You’ve barged your way into our internal affairs, ever the arrogant foreigner.”

  “And Ms Tang?”

  Chau regarded Lisa. “The misguided youth of our country. They didn’t live through the dark years. They’ve only known the better times that people like me have helped give to them. They need to … what’s that lovely phrase? They need to wake up and smell the coffee.” He was delighted with himself. Miller dutifully snorted approval.

  Ryder Chau rearranged items on his desk, none of which needed rearranging. “You know, Harry, westerners like you irritate me. I’m sorry to have to say that, but they really do. Coming here, telling us how to run our affairs. The days of gunboat diplomacy ended a long, long time ago.”