The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “I swear on the graves of all my ancestors,” Huang said, his voice barely a whisper, “I never intended to kill her.”

  Slowly, with legs like jelly, Li got back to his feet. “Then why did you? In the name of the sky, Huang, why?”

  “She was going to arrest me. I couldn’t let her do that. I had paid enough. I had to be my own executioner.”

  Li felt like a man sleepwalking through a nightmare. None of this seemed possible, none of it made sense. “Why would she want to arrest you?”

  “From the moment you found out what had been going on at Cui’s clinic, she knew that I was involved. I guess she probably suspected for a long time.” He shook his head. There was pain for him in remembering. “She couldn’t understand why I was so hostile to the idea of bringing you in on the investigation. You never knew it, but she was fighting your battles for you behind closed doors. Why was I being so obstructive over approaching Cui Feng? Why wouldn’t I support your request for a search warrant?”

  Li looked at the small, frail body of Mei-Ling lying on the floor. He remembered her smile, her twinkling eyes, that braying laugh of hers, her jealousy of Margaret. How easily all that life and vitality had been taken from her. He turned his tearful gaze back on Huang. For the first time, the Section Chief could not meet it. He looked away and took a long, deep breath.

  “It must have been so clear to her. She knew, of course, that it was only a liver transplant three years ago that saved the life of my wife.” He shook his head and forced himself to meet Li’s eyes again. “She knew that only too well, because up until then she and I had been lovers.” His eyes flickered to the body on the floor. “I don’t know now whether it was love, or lust. But it was full of passion. I was going to leave my wife.” He paused. “Until she was diagnosed with terminal liver disease.” And he looked quickly at Li, an appeal for understanding in his voice and his eyes. “I couldn’t leave her then. I couldn’t just abandon her. I don’t know whether it was guilt, or whether somewhere deep inside I still loved her, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I had to choose between them. But I had no choice.” His appeal for understanding, even sympathy, fell on stony ground, and he retreated back into himself. “I don’t think Mei-Ling ever really got over it.” His voice had retreated, too, almost to a whisper.

  Li stood, unable to move, the silence singing in his ears, before he became aware of the slow tick, tick, of a clock somewhere in the room. Even as it invaded his consciousness it grew louder, until Huang’s voice suddenly snuffed it out again.

  “I don’t even know how Cui found out about my wife, but when he approached me with the offer of a transplant, how could I refuse? I could never have afforded it. But Cui waived all the fees. He told me I should regard it as a favour. A gift. A gift of life.” He shook his head. “I should have known, of course, that he was simply investing in a little guanxi, in the knowledge that what was a small thing for him, was incalculable for me. That I would be forever in his debt. But I could never have known just how much. It was not the gift of life he promised it would be. It was a gift of death.”

  Li said, “So he told you just how he had acquired the liver that saved your wife’s life.” The mechanics of Huang’s entrapment had become suddenly very clear to him.

  Huang nodded. “What could I do? I was appalled. But it was done, and I couldn’t undo it. And the treatment didn’t stop there. My wife continued to need constant care and expensive medication against possible rejection of her new liver. If I took any action at all it would kill her.” His anger and frustration raised the pitch of his voice now. “He had me. Held my very soul in his hand, and there was not one damned thing I could do about it.”

  “So you traded the life of a woman you had been about to leave for the lives of all those poor girls.”

  Anger and guilt flashed at once in Huang’s eyes. “What would you have done?”

  Li had no idea. He could not begin to imagine the circumstance. But he knew that what Huang had done was wrong. He said, “So what did he want you to do? Apart from turning a blind eye?”

  Huang shrunk from the withering accusation in Li’s voice. It sparked his own guilt, and living with that was worse than anything anyone else could do or say to him. “I provided him with certification when he required it. Proof that the organs he was selling abroad had been legitimately acquired from the bodies of executed prisoners. They were little more than official letterheads, but that was enough to satisfy his clients. And, of course, everyone knows that the Chinese take organs from executed prisoners. The dissidents have been screaming about it in America for years. Only they claim it’s done without permission. Which is a nice scare story to feed the American fantasy of the Chinese bogey man.” He shook his head. “As well as providing the perfect cover story for Cui Feng.”

  “And you never once thought about all those innocent women who were the real donors?” There was bile now in Li’s voice. Angry and bitter.

  “No,” Huang almost shouted at him. “I didn’t. I never knew the full extent of it until they found those bodies at Lujiazui. But I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t even contemplate it. How could I?” His eyes burned with the fire of his own futile defence. “And do you know the ultimate irony? The ultimate fucking irony?” His breath was coming in short gasps. He waved his hand helplessly towards the open door. “She died anyway. It was all for nothing.” Tears, like acid, burned down his cheeks. “All the drugs, all the treatment, and in the end her body still rejected the damned thing. Three years on, and we were back where we started. She was slipping back into that same terminal decline, only this time there was nothing that could be done.” He wept openly now, sobbing deeply, pressing his mouth into the palm of his hand to try to hold in the pain.

  And as Huang descended into the hell of his own making, Li’s anger ebbed away, leaving him washed up and spent on a bleak and barren shoreline. There was only one thing left on his mind, and he was almost afraid to pursue it. “Where’s Xinxin?” His voice was hoarse.

  Huang took a moment or two to bring himself back under control. “Wasn’t my idea,” he said eventually. “Cui thought if he had the kid snatched it would distract you from the investigation. At least long enough for him to cover his tracks.”

  Li felt his heart beat like a fist punching his ribs from the inside. “Where is she?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know.” And there was something in Huang’s tone that suggested he didn’t much care. “If I was to guess,” he said, “I’d figure they’d probably taken her to the safe house.”

  “What safe house?”

  “Where they took the women after they’d been snatched. They were held there until the ‘patient’ had flown in and been prepared, then they were taken to the clinic for . . . well, for the operation.”

  “Where is it?” There was an imperative, dangerous quality in Li’s voice now.

  “Li Yan?” Margaret’s voice calling from the other end of the hall crashed into the moment like a gunshot. Huang stiffened, his eyes suddenly shining and alert.

  Li cursed inwardly, but ignored Margaret’s call. “Where the fuck is it!” He was hanging on to his hope by a thread.

  Huang looked at him and seemed to relax again for a moment. “Cui has a clinic at Suzhou,” he said. “It’s about sixty kilometres outside of Shanghai.”

  Li knew of Suzhou. It was famous in China for its beauty. The Venice of the East. And almost as if she were speaking to him from beyond the grave, he remembered Mei-Ling telling him that her family had come originally from Hangzhou. We have a saying, she had told him that night at the Green Wave restaurant. Above there is Heaven, and on earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou. It was ironic, he thought, that all these women destined for death on the surgeon’s table should have spent their last days and nights in a place that the Chinese believed was like Heaven on earth.

  Huang said, “They kept the women in the basement. You can only get to it by canal from the rear of the building. It mea
nt that at night they could take the women in and out by boat, and nobody would be any the wiser.”

  “Li Yan?” Margaret’s voice was closer now, and softer. He heard her footfall in the hall. But still he kept his focus on Xinxin.

  “Is she still alive?” His own voice sounded detached to him, distant, like an echo. He held his breath.

  “I’ve no idea,” Huang said. And it was like some last, petty revenge exacted on Li, as if somehow he were to be blamed for everything.

  Li heard a gasp behind him, and he turned to see Margaret standing in the doorway. She was looking at Mei-Ling’s prone and bloody form on the floor. She looked up at Li, and then beyond him to where Huang still sat in his chair.

  Li turned quickly and took a step towards Huang. The Section Chief raised his gun and pointed it at Li’s chest. “Don’t even think about it,” he said quietly. Li stopped, and Huang turned the barrel of the gun and placed it in his mouth. The shot rang out before Li could even shout for him to stop. It had a strange, muffled quality, and Li felt Huang’s blood and brain tissue spatter hot across his face.

  II

  They had left the lights of Shanghai behind them some fifteen minutes earlier, and Li’s foot kept the accelerator pressed to the floor so that their car maintained a steady one hundred and thirty kilometres an hour. Shortly after they crossed the Wusong River, known in the days of the International Settlement as Suzhou Creek, they passed out of the Shanghai administrative area and into Jiangsu Province. There was very little traffic on the Shanghai–Nanjing expressway. The odd truck rumbling west, the occasional bus, a few private cars. The windscreen wipers beat against the thrashing of the rain, and beyond the ring of their headlights the night was black and impenetrable.

  Margaret sat in the passenger seat in a state of shock. The picture of Mei-Ling lying in her own blood was etched indelibly in her mind’s eye and she could not rid herself of it. She saw, still, the small hand stretched out on the floor, delicate little fingers, crooked slightly as if attempting to grasp at something, perhaps a vain attempt to hold on to life. There was no way to give expression to the sadness Margaret felt, no way to take back all the things she had said and felt in anger and jealousy. The men in my life always seem to have other priorities, Mei-Ling had told her. Only a matter of hours later, the man in her life had killed her and then put a bullet in his own brain. Had she had some kind of premonition of what was to come? Her Heavenly Element signifying danger, her trigram, K’an, the colour of blood. Margaret glanced at Li. Huang’s blood was still smeared on his face. Poor Mei-Ling, she thought. And she wondered what you ever really knew about other people’s lives?

  Occasionally the police radio crackled and interrupted her thoughts. Earlier, Li had spoken briefly to someone at headquarters as he had turned the car up a ramp on to the Zhongshan Xilu ring road. A few minutes later he had relayed to her the contents of a cryptic return call. They would be met in Suzhou by officers of the local public security bureau. And his request for an arrest warrant for Cui Feng had been turned down by the Procurator General, on grounds of lack of evidence. Neither had passed comment on this, and there had been no exchange between them since.

  The journey felt interminable although, in truth, less than an hour had passed since they had left Huang’s apartment building. An endless succession of broken white lines, illuminated by their headlamps, threw themselves at the windscreen and vanished into history. But in spite of their hypnotic effect, the image of Mei-Ling still lingered. Closing her eyes, Margaret could not erase it. Only the dreadful spectre of what they might find when they reached Suzhou could compete for space in her burned-out imagination.

  Shortly before they saw the lights of Suzhou in the distance, the rain stopped. Somewhere away to their right, the waters of Yang Cheng Lake lay brooding in the darkness. Li took a spur off the expressway and they turned south towards Loumen Gate at the north-east corner of the old city wall. Beyond the gate, a convoy of five police vehicles was pulled in at the side of the road, red lights flashing. Li pulled up beside them and got out. Margaret remained in the car and watched as he walked forward to be met by the senior officer. There were about a dozen men in total, all in uniform. They spoke for several minutes before Li returned to the car. He said, “They have a small sampan waiting to take us to the basement at the rear of Cui’s clinic. It is only approachable by river.” He took several deep breaths. “There will be three officers with us. The officer in charge was afraid that a motor boat would alert anyone who might be on guard. Some of the others will remain at the landing stage and the rest will cover the building from the road at the front. Apparently there are no lights on there at the moment. The place appears to be locked and empty.” His words had a focused professionalism. He was trying to be a police officer doing a job, rather than a man afraid of what he might find in Cui’s basement.

  They followed the convoy of police vehicles through the brightly lit modern streets of the new town, catching only glimpses to their right of the narrow streets that ran off into the old city, where hundreds of steeply arched bridges traversed the dozens of natural waterways on which the town had been built two-and-a-half thousand years before.

  At an intersection, the convoy split up, and now they were following only two vehicles into the narrow streets of the ancient city, a jumble of whitewashed houses built one on top of the other. Beyond the steeply pitched grey-tiled roofs, Margaret saw the tiers of a pagoda rising into the night sky. They passed a tearoom perched on the edge of a narrow creek where old men would sit through the day, listening to the chirrup of their caged birds, and gaze on the tranquillity of life that drifted by.

  In a dark, quiet square, they pulled into the kerb and got out of their vehicles. Several of the Suzhou officers stared curiously at Margaret. Their senior officer barked a command and Li steered Margaret gently by the elbow to follow him through an elaborate brick-carved arch, into a narrow lane that weaved its way between the crumbling whitewashed walls of ancient private dwellings. They crossed a number of humpbacked bridges over impossibly narrow waterways. Margaret saw covered corridors linking one house with another across deep, dark water. Finally, they reached a much wider river, and climbed down steep, uneven steps to where a sampan was bobbing gently on the swell, and the smell of raw sewage filled the damp air.

  A fisherman in blue cotton pants and a white shirt held the boat steady as Li, Margaret and three uniformed officers climbed aboard. It was very dark. The houses on either side of the river rose straight out of the water, stones jutting out from the walls to form an arrangement of steps leading up to shadowed doorways. There were lights in only a few windows, and they cast pale, flickering reflections on the water. Margaret heard the steady slap, slap, of river water on the side of the boat and the breathing of the men who gathered around her in the belly of the small craft. The fisherman cast off and stood at the stern of the boat, grasping a long oar in both hands, working it easily backwards and forwards to propel them with surprising speed downriver. The old wooden vessel creaked and groaned against the resistance of the water, but the fisherman barely broke sweat. Margaret was wondering how on earth he managed to see in the dark, when suddenly, overhead, the clouds parted and an almost full moon poured a bright silvery light down upon them. It was a transformation. The whitewashed houses glowed like ghosts on either side of a river of mercury. Trees that overhung the water from between buildings, rustled gently in a breeze that had sprung from nowhere. It was immediately cooler, and Margaret shivered.

  They passed under two bridges, before gradually slowing and drawing in towards the right bank. The helmsman looked back along the riverbank and appeared to be counting. Then, finally satisfied, he pulled up at a flight of stone steps that looked much like any other. At the top of them a stout, studded, wooden door stood firmly shut. The windows on the lower level were all barred. There were another two levels above that, accessible, Margaret assumed, from the street on the other side. A cloud scudded across the moon and t
hey were plunged briefly into darkness before, in a moment, being flooded again with light.

  Li jumped on to the bottom step and drew out the gun he had removed from Huang’s dead hand. The blood had dried rust red on it. There was a brief, whispered exchange between him and the senior uniformed officer who was unarmed, before they proceeded up the steps. The fisherman helped Margaret out of the boat and she followed them. The other two officers climbed out after her, but remained on the bottom step.

  At the top of the steps, Li tried the door. But it was securely locked. He put his shoulder to it twice, but could not move it. After another whispered exchange one of the other officers hurried up the steps with a long metal crowbar. Slowly, working it backwards and forwards, he managed to insinuate it between the door and the jamb until he achieved sufficient leverage to force it open. There was a splintering and cracking of wood that was deafening in the stillness of the night. The door swung open and they were met by a rush of damp, fetid air. Everyone stood stock still, but there was nothing to be heard. Li felt inside the wall for a light switch, but found nothing. The darkness beyond was inky black. The third officer climbed back aboard the boat and grabbed two flash lights. He jumped out again and ran up the steps to pass them to Li and his senior officer.

  Li snapped on his light, and its strong beam penetrated the blackness to reveal a long, narrow corridor with a flagstone floor. Stone walls ran damp with condensation. Somewhere up ahead a small creature, probably a rat, scurried away from the light. Li froze for a moment, then began moving cautiously inside. The senior officer switched on his flashlight and followed. Margaret stepped gingerly after them, her hand recoiling from the cold, slimy touch of the wall.

  There were half a dozen doors at regular intervals, on left and right. The first two they passed stood open. The doors had small, barred, unglazed openings in them. In the rooms beyond, there were cot beds freshly made up with sheets and blankets, small bedside cabinets, rush matting on the floor.