The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1)

by Peter May

  He sluiced his face with water and dabbed away the blood on his arm with paper towels. His anger at the incident at the gate was giving way again to the butterflies that had been fluttering inside his ribcage all morning.

  When the position of Deputy Section Chief had become vacant there was an automatic assumption among his peers that Li would get the job. Still only thirty-three, he was one of the most experienced detectives in Section One. He had broken a record number of homicides and armed robberies since his graduation to the section from the University of Public Security, where he had been the top student of his year. Li himself had felt that he was ready for the job, but he was not in a position to apply for it. The decision on his eligibility or otherwise would be made in the Promotions Department, with a final decision being taken by the Chief of Police. Cosy assumptions of promotion from within had, however, been thrown into disarray by rumours that a senior detective of the Shanghai CID was being recommended for the post. It had been impossible to ascertain the veracity of the rumour and, through the long bureaucratic process, Li did not know if he was even being considered. Until his summons to attend an interview with the divisional head of the CID, Commissioner Hu Yisheng. And even now he had no idea what to expect. His immediate boss at Section One, Chen Anming, had been tight-lipped and grim-faced. Li feared the worst. He took a deep breath, straightened his cap, tugged at his shirt, and stepped out of the toilet.

  *

  Commissioner Hu Yisheng sat in shirtsleeves behind his desk in a high-backed leather chair, his jacket carefully draped over the back of it. Behind him, rows of hardback books in a glass-fronted bookcase, a red Chinese flag hanging limp in the heat, various photographs and certificates framed on the wall. He leaned over his desk, writing slowly, tight, careful characters in a large open notebook. His mirror image gazed back at him from the highly polished surface. He waved Li to a seat without looking up. Li slowly lowered his hand from an unseen salute and perched uncomfortably on the edge of a seat opposite the Commissioner. The silence was broken only by the gentle whirring of a fan lifting the edges of papers at one side of the desk – and by the heavy scratching of the Commissioner’s fountain pen. Li cleared his throat nervously and the Commissioner glanced up at him for a moment, perhaps suspecting impatience. Then he returned to his writing. It was important, Li decided, that he didn’t clear his throat again. And almost as the thought formed, so the phlegm seemed to gather in his throat, tempting him to clear it. Like an itch you can’t scratch. He swallowed.

  After what seemed an eternity, the Commissioner finally placed the top back on his pen and closed the book. He folded his hands in front of him and regarded Li almost speculatively.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘How is your uncle?’

  ‘He is very well, Commissioner. He sends his regards.’

  The Commissioner smiled, and there was genuine affection in it. ‘A very great man,’ he said. ‘He suffered more than most, you know, during the Smashing of the Four Olds.’

  ‘I know.’ Li nodded. He had heard it all before.

  ‘He was my inspiration when the Cultural Revolution ended. There was no bitterness in him, you see. After everything that happened, Old Yifu would only look forward. “No use worrying over the might-have-beens,” he used to say to me. “It is a happy thing to have a broken mirror reshaped.” It was the spirit of men like your uncle that put this country back on the rails.’

  Li smiled his dutiful agreement and felt a sudden foreboding creep over him.

  ‘Unfortunately, it makes it very difficult,’ said the Commissioner. ‘For you – and us. You understand, of course, it is the policy of the Party to discourage nepotism in all its insidious forms.’

  And Li knew then that he hadn’t got the job. He loved his Uncle Yifu dearly. He was the kindest, fairest, wisest man he knew. But he was also a legend in the Beijing police. Even five years after his retirement. And legends cast long shadows.

  ‘It is incumbent upon you to be better than the rest, and for us to examine your record more critically.’ The Commissioner sat back and took in a long, slow breath through his nose. ‘Just as well we are both good at our jobs, eh?’ A twinkle in his eye. ‘As of eight a.m. tomorrow you are promoted to the rank of Senior Supervisor, Class Three, and to the position of Deputy Section Chief, Section One.’ A broad smile split his face suddenly and he rose to his feet, extending an arm towards the bewildered Li. ‘Congratulations.’

  III

  The car sat idling in the somnolent shade of a tree just inside the rear entrance to police headquarters, across the compound from the door of the redbrick building that Supervisor Li had passed through more than fifteen minutes earlier.

  ‘That Mistah Wade now.’

  If Margaret had lapsed into gentle snoring in the back seat Lily gave no sign of having heard it. She leaned across and unlocked the door. Bob Wade slipped in beside Margaret. He was incredibly tall and skinny and seemed to have to fold himself up to fit in the car.

  ‘Hey, you guys, I’m really sorry to keep you waiting.’ He pumped Margaret’s hand enthusiastically. ‘Hi. You must be Dr Campbell.’

  ‘Margaret,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, Margaret. Bob Wade. Jeez, it’s hot out there.’ He took a grubby-looking handkerchief and wiped away the beads of sweat forming across a high, receding forehead. ‘Lily looking after you okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ Margaret nodded slowly. ‘Lily’s a real gem.’

  Lily flicked her a look, and Bob was not slow to detect Margaret’s tone. He leaned forward to the driver. ‘How about we hot-tail it to the university, Shimei? We’re running a bit behind schedule.’

  Shimei gunned the engine and backed out into the compound before swinging round towards the gate. As they passed under the arch, Margaret noticed Supervisor Li emerging from the redbrick building. His whole demeanour had changed – a spring in his step, a smile on his face. He didn’t even see their car. His shoulders were pushed back and Margaret realised that he was very tall for a Chinese, maybe six feet. He pulled his cap down over his flat-top crew cut. Its peak cast a shadow over his square-jawed high-cheek-boned face and, as he disappeared from view, she thought how unattractive he was.

  ‘You must be pretty tired.’ She turned to find Bob examining her closely. He would be around fifty-five – the age she felt right now.

  She nodded. ‘I’ve been on the go something like twenty-two hours. It seems like one hell of a long day. Only it’s tomorrow already and I’ve still got nearly half of it to go.’

  He grinned. ‘Yeah, I know. You’re chasing the day until about halfway across the Pacific and suddenly you jump a day ahead.’ He leaned towards her, lowering his voice. ‘What happened with Lily?’

  ‘Oh …’ Margaret didn’t want to go through it all again. ‘Just a little misunderstanding.’

  ‘You mustn’t mind her really. She’s not all bad. Bark’s worse than her bite. You know, she was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. A real old-fashioned comrade. Only her kind of communism’s not really in vogue any more, so she’ll stay at the bottom of the pile. Never be anything more than a three-star constable.’

  The Cultural Revolution was something Margaret had always meant to read up on. She’d heard of it often enough without ever really knowing what it was – except that it had been a bad time in China. She decided, however, not to display her ignorance to Bob.

  ‘So what made you decide to come to China?’ he asked.

  The truth wasn’t an option for Margaret. She shrugged vaguely. ‘Oh, you know … I was always kind of interested in the place. The Mysterious East and all that. I was doing some lecturing, part-time, at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and this guy from the Office of International Criminal Justice …’

  ‘Dick Goldman.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him. He said the OICJ were looking for someone to do a six-week stint at the People’s University of Public Security in Beijing, lecturing on forensic pathology, and was I interested. I thought, hell, i
t beats chasing fire engines for the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office. Lot of fires in Chicago in June.’

  Bob smiled. ‘You’ll find they do things a lot differently here than Chicago. I’ve been out here nearly two years and I’m still trying to get my lecture notes photocopied.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘You ever heard of the Three Ps?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, they represent the three things you must have to survive in this country. That’s Patience, Patience and Patience. The Chinese have their own way of doing things. I’m not saying they do them any worse or any better than we do. Just different. And they’ve got a totally different perspective on the world.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, for example, you come here thinking: I’m an American citizen. I live in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And you think that makes you pretty damned superior. But the humblest peasant working fifteen hours a day in the paddy fields will look down his nose at you. Why? Because you’re not Chinese and he is. Because he is a citizen of the Middle Kingdom. That’s their name for China. So called because it is, of course, the centre of the world, and everything beyond its borders is peripheral and inferior, populated by yangguizi – foreign devils like you and me.’

  She snorted. ‘That’s just empty arrogance.’

  Bob raised an eyebrow. ‘Is it? The Chinese were weaving silk three thousand years ago. They were casting iron eighteen hundred years before the Europeans figured out how to do it. They invented paper, and were printing books hundreds of years before Gutenberg built his first printing press. By comparison, we Americans are just a pimple on the face of history.’

  Margaret wondered how often he’d delivered this little homily to visiting American lecturers. He probably thought it made him seem more knowledgeable, and China more daunting. And he was right.

  ‘Biggest single difference – culturally?’

  She shrugged her complete ignorance.

  ‘The Chinese focus on and reward group efforts, rather than individual ones. They’re team players. And the individual is expected to put the team’s interests way ahead of his own. And that’s a pretty big deal in a country of 1.2 billion people. Guess that’s why they’ve been around for five thousand years.’

  Margaret was getting tired of her cultural studies lesson. ‘So what happens now?’

  Bob became brisk and businesslike. ‘Okay. We’ll get you settled in at the university, meet the people you’ve got to meet, then you can go and get changed and freshened up for the banquet.’

  Lily’s words came back from earlier. ‘Banquet?’

  ‘Yeah, at the famous Quanjude Beijing Duck restaurant. It’s a traditional welcome. Didn’t you get an OICJ briefing document?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Margaret didn’t like to confess that she hadn’t read it. She had meant to. If she could stay awake long enough she would do it tonight.

  ‘There’s a lot of etiquette associated with these things. Do’s and don’ts. Chinese can be a bit touchy, you know what I mean? But don’t worry, I’ll be around to keep you right.’

  Margaret didn’t know whether to be pleased or pissed. Bob, she thought, could become pretty tiresome.

  They were heading due west now along another six-lane highway running through a canyon of modern tower blocks. The sun was dipping lower in the late afternoon, dazzling through the dust and insects that caked the windscreen. Out of the haze, a sweeping flyover rose up from the road ahead. But at the last moment they bore right on to a smaller road thick with cyclists, and then right again into what looked like a building site.

  ‘Here we are,’ Bob said.

  ‘We are?’ Margaret looked with some horror.

  They bumped across a pot-holed yard, raising a cloud of dust in their wake, and turned through a gate where a policeman stood endlessly to attention in the searing heat. He saluted as they passed. No one bothered to acknowledge him. Then suddenly they were on a private tree-lined road, a large all-weather games pitch behind a high fence on their left. They pulled up outside a tall white building with curled eaves and ornamental brown pillars.

  Margaret got stiffly out of the car and was nearly knocked over by the heat. In the cool, cloistered air-conditioning of the BMW, she had forgotten how hot it was out there.

  Bob pointed to a twenty-storey building beyond the administration block. ‘Staff live in there.’

  ‘What?’ Margaret was incredulous. ‘How many staff are there?’

  ‘Oh, about a thousand.’ He steered her through double doors and up dark marble steps in the cool interior.

  ‘And how many students?’

  ‘Around three thousand.’

  Margaret gasped. A three-to-one student-teacher ratio was unheard of in the States.

  ‘It’s kind of like the West Point for police in China. Down here.’ And they set off down a long featureless corridor.

  Margaret had had no idea the university was on such a small scale. She was seriously regretting now not having read her briefing material.

  ‘Of course,’ Bob went on, enjoying his possession of superior knowledge, ‘you’ll be interested in the pathology department and the forensics. That’s all down the far end of the playing fields. The Centre of Material Evidence Determination. They got some pretty sophisticated stuff down there, including a brand-new block with all the latest laboratory testing facilities – DNA, you name it. Stuff from all over China gets sent there. Christ, they even take ear-prints – you know, like fingerprints, only ears. But I got to admit, I can’t see many perps leaving their ear-prints at the scene of a crime, unless they’ve beaten somebody to death with their hearing aid.’ He laughed at his own joke. But Margaret was distracted. His smile faded. ‘Not my field, of course.’

  ‘What is your field?’

  ‘Computer profiling. I’ve been helping them set up a system here that’s going to be as good as anything the FBI’ve got back home. In here.’ He opened the door into a tiny office, no bigger than eight feet square, with one small window at ceiling height. There were two desks pushed together, three small plastic chairs of the stacking variety, and a single filing cabinet. Three cardboard boxes stood side by side on one of the desks. ‘This is you.’

  Margaret looked at him in consternation. ‘This is me what?’

  ‘Your office. And think yourself lucky. Space is at a premium.’

  She was about to voice an opinion on Bob’s definition of the word ‘lucky’, but was prevented from doing so by the arrival of two middle-aged men and a woman all wearing the uniform of senior police officers. They smiled and bowed and Margaret smiled and bowed back, and then glanced anxiously at Bob for help.

  ‘These are your colleagues in the Criminal Investigation Department here at the university.’ He rattled off something in Chinese and they all bowed and smiled again. Margaret bowed and smiled back. ‘Professors Tian and Bai, and the delightful Dr Mu,’ Bob introduced them. They all shook hands, and then one by one solemnly produced their business cards and presented them to Margaret, the corners held between thumb and forefinger, the English translations of their names facing towards her. She took them each in turn and fumbled in her bag for her own cards and handed one back to each.

  ‘Ni hau,’ she said, exercising the only Chinese she knew.

  ‘You’re supposed to present your cards to them the way they did to you,’ Bob said.

  ‘Am I?’ She was flustered by this, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

  ‘Didn’t you read your briefing material?’

  ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

  She smiled at them again and they all smiled back, then one by one lifted a cardboard box from the desk and left.

  Margaret looked around in despair. ‘This is hopeless, Bob. I can’t work in this space for six weeks.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Wrong with it? It’s like a cell. I’ll be banging my head off the walls after a week in here.’

  ‘Well, I
wouldn’t mention it to Professors Tian, Bai and Dr Mu.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t think you’d find them very sympathetic. They probably don’t like you very much already.’

  Margaret couldn’t believe she was hearing this. ‘Why wouldn’t they like me? They’ve only just met me.’

  ‘Well, for one thing …’ Bob sat on the edge of one of the desks, ‘… you probably make more in a week than they earn in a year. And for another … they’ve just been moved out of their office to make way for you.’

  Margaret’s jaw slackened.

  ‘Anyway …’ Bob stood up. ‘… time you met Professor Jiang. He’ll be waiting for you.’

  *

  Professor Jiang was a thickset man in his late fifties, who looked like he’d been scrubbed and freshly pressed for the meeting. He had a head of beautifully cut thick hair, greying in attractive streaks, and wore the rank-equivalent uniform of a Senior Commissioner. His dark-rimmed glasses seemed a little too large for his face. He rose expectantly as Bob ushered Margaret into the reception room. It was cool in here, blinds drawn to keep the sun at bay, two rows of soft low chairs facing each other across the room, even lower tables in front of each, bottles of chilled water placed before every chair. Also rising to greet them were a younger man in uniform, and a pretty girl in her early twenties wearing a plain cream dress. Bob made the introductions. First in Chinese, then in English.