Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

‘They are high-ranking officials from the Special Intelligence Section. They say it’s urgent.’

‘Let them in ten minutes from now.’

Ya Ru replaced the receiver. He held his breath. The SIS only dealt with matters involving men at the very top of the government or, like Ya Ru, men who lived between the political and economic power brokers — the modern bridge-builders picked out by Deng to be of crucial importance for the country’s development.

What did they want? Ya Ru went to the window and looked out over the city in the morning haze. Could it have anything to do with Hong Qiu’s death? He thought of all the known and unknown enemies he had. Was one of them trying to exploit Hong Qiu’s death in order to destroy his good name and reputation? Or was there something he had overlooked, despite everything? He knew that Hong Qiu had been in touch with a prosecutor, but he belonged to quite a different authority.

Hong Qiu could naturally have spoken to other people he didn’t know about.

He couldn’t think of any explanation. All he could do was listen to what the men had to say.

After ten minutes had passed he put the plans into a drawer and sat down at his desk. The two men Mrs Shen showed in were in their sixties. That increased Ya Ru’s uneasiness. The officers sent out were usually younger. The fact that these two men were older indicated that they were very experienced and the matter they wanted to discuss was serious.

Ya Ru stood up, bowed and invited them to sit down. He didn’t ask their names, as he knew that Mrs Shen would have checked their identity papers very carefully.

They sat down in armchairs around a low table in front of the window. Ya Ru offered them tea, but the men declined.

It was the elder of the two men who did the talking. Ya Ru detected an unmistakable Shanghai accent.

‘We have received information,’ said the man. ‘We can’t say where the information came from, but it is so detailed that we can’t ignore it. Our instructions have become stricter when it comes to dealing with crimes against the state and the constitution.’

‘I have been involved in tightening up on action against corruption,’ said Ya Ru. ‘I don’t understand why you are here.’

‘We have received information suggesting that your construction companies are seeking advantages using forbidden methods.’

‘Forbidden methods?’

‘Forbidden exchange of favours.’

‘In other words, bribery and corruption? Taking bribes?’

‘The information we have received is very detailed. We are worried.’

‘So you have come here at this early hour of the morning to tell me that you are investigating irregularities in my companies?’

‘We would prefer to say that we are informing you of the suspicions.’

‘To warn me?’

‘If you like.’

Ya Ru understood. He was a man with powerful friends, even in the anti-corruption authority. And so he had been given a head start. To eradicate the trail, get rid of proof, or demand explanations if he was not personally aware of what was going on.

He thought of the shot in the back of the head that had recently killed Shen Weixian. It was as if the two grey men sitting opposite him were emitting a cold chill, just as, according to legend, the African iceberg had.

Ya Ru wondered again if he had been careless. Perhaps on one occasion or another he had felt too secure and allowed himself to be carried away by his arrogance. If so, that had been a mistake. Such mistakes are always punished.

‘I need to know more,’ he said. ‘This is too vague, too general.’

‘Our instructions don’t allow us to say more.’

‘The accusations, even if they are anonymous, must come from somewhere.’

‘We can’t answer that either.’

Ya Ru wondered for a moment if it might be possible to pay the two men to give him more information. But he did not dare take the risk. One or perhaps both of them might be carrying concealed microphones recording the conversation. There was of course also a chance that they were honest and didn’t have a price — unlike so many government officials.

‘These vague accusations are totally without foundation,’ said Ya Ru. ‘I’m grateful to have heard about the rumours that are evidently surrounding me and my companies. But anonymity is often a source of falsehood, envy and insidious lies. I make sure that my enterprises are beyond reproach, i have the confidence of the government and the party and have no hesitation in maintaining that I am sufficiently in control to know that my managing directors follow my directives. Obviously I’m not able to claim that there are no minor irregularities; my employees number more than thirty thousand.’

Ya Ru stood up as a signal that, as far as he was concerned, the meeting was over. The two men bowed and left the room. When they had gone, he rang through to Mrs Shen.

‘Get hold of one of my security chiefs and tell him to find out who these two are,’ he said. ‘Find out who their bosses are. Then summon my nine managing directors to a meeting three days from now. Everybody must attend, no excuses accepted. Anybody who doesn’t turn up will be fired on the spot. This has to be sorted out.’

Ya Ru was furious. What he did was no worse than what anybody else did. A man like Shen Weixian frequently went too far and in addition had been rude to the state officials who cleared the way for him. He had been an appropriate scapegoat, and nobody would miss him now that he was gone.

Ya Ru spent several hours of intensive activity working out a plan for what to do next and puzzling over which of his managing directors could have secretly opened up the poison cupboard and given away information about his dodgy deals and secret agreements.

Three days later his managing directors assembled in a hotel in Beijing. Ya Ru had chosen the location with care. It was there that he used to call a meeting once a year and fire one of his directors in order to demonstrate that nobody was safe. The group of men gathered in the conference room shortly after ten in the morning looked distinctly pale. None of them had been informed precisely what the meeting was about. Ya Ru kept them waiting for more than an hour before putting in an appearance. His strategy was very simple. First he confiscated their mobile phones, so that they were unable to contact one another or be in touch with the outside world, then he sent them out of the room. Each of them had to sit in a small room with one of the guards summoned by Mrs Shen at his side. Then Ya Ru interviewed them one at a time and told them without beating about the bush what he had heard a couple of days previously. What did they have to say? Any explanations? Was there something Ya Ru ought to know? He observed their faces closely and tried to detect if any of them seemed to have prepared what to say in advance. If there was such a person, Ya Ru could be sure that he had found the source of the leak.

But all the directors displayed the same degree of surprise and indignation. At the end of the day, he was forced to conclude that he hadn’t found a guilty person. He let them go without firing anybody. But all of them received strict instructions to look into the security of their own set-ups.

It was only some days later, when Mrs Shen reported on what his investigators had discovered about the men from the security services, that he realised he had been following a false trail. Once again he’d been studying the plans for his house in Africa when she came in. He asked her to sit down and adjusted the desk lamp so that his face was in shadow. He liked listening to her voice. No matter what she told him, be it a financial report or a summary of new directives from some government authority, he always had the feeling that she was telling him a story. There was something in her voice that reminded him of the childhood he had long since forgotten about, or been robbed of — he couldn’t make up his mind which.