Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

She noted how many fewer and fewer people were strolling through the park, and eventually stood up to return to her hotel.

Then she saw him. He came along one of the paths diagonally behind where she had been sitting. He was dressed in black and could only have been the man whose photo was taken by Sture Hermansson’s surveillance camera. He was walking straight towards her, carrying something shiny in his hand.

She screamed and took a step back. As he came closer, she fell over backwards and hit her head against the iron edge of the bench.

The last thing she saw was his face; it was as if her eyes had taken one more picture of him. Then she faded away into an all-embracing and silent darkness.

Ya Ru loved the shadows. He could make himself invisible there, just like the beasts of prey he both admired and feared. But others had the same ability. It had often occurred to him that young entrepreneurs were in the process of taking over the economy, and hence before long would be demanding a seat at the table where political decisions were made. Everybody starts in the shadows, where they can watch and observe without being seen.

But the shadow he was hiding behind on this particular evening in rainy London had a different aim. He watched Birgitta Roslin, sitting on a bench in a little park in Leicester Square. From where he was standing he could see only her back. But he didn’t dare risk discovery. He had already noticed that she was on her guard like a restless animal. Ya Ru didn’t underestimate her. If Hong Qiu had trusted Birgitta Roslin, he needed to take her extremely seriously.

He had been following her all day, ever since she turned up outside the building where Ho lived. He had been amused to realise he owned the restaurant where Ho’s husband Wa worked. They didn’t know that, of course — Ya Ru seldom owned anything under his own name. The Ming Restaurant belonged to Chinese Food, Inc., a limited company registered in Liechtenstein, where Ya Ru had placed his European restaurant portfolio. He kept a careful eye on the accounts and quarterly reports produced by young, gifted Chinese employees he had recruited from the top English universities. Ya Ru hated everything English. He would never forget what history told him. He was delighted to rob the country of talented young businessmen who had taken advantage of the best universities.

Ya Ru had never eaten a meal at the Ming Restaurant. He didn’t intend to do so on this occasion either. As soon as he had fulfilled his mission he would return to Beijing.

There had been a time in his life when he’d regarded airports with almost religious emotions. They were the modern equivalent of harbours. In those days Ya Ru had never travelled anywhere without a copy of The Travels of Marco Polo. The man’s fearless desire to investigate the unknown had been an inspiration. Nowadays he thought more and more that travelling was a pain, even if he did have a private jet and was usually spared the agony of hanging around in disconsolate and soul-destroying airports. The feeling that one’s mind was revitalised by all these sudden changes of location, the intoxicating delight of passing through time zones, was negated by all the pointless time spent waiting for departures or baggage. The neon-lit shopping malls at airports, the moving walkways, the echoing corridors, the ever-smaller glass cages in which smokers were crammed together, were not places where new thoughts or new philosophical ideas could be developed. He thought back to the time when people travelled by train or by transatlantic liners. In those days intellectual discussions and learned arguments had been taken for granted, as much a part of the accepted environment as luxury and idleness.

That was why he had fitted his private jet, the big Gulfstream he now owned, with antique bookshelves, in which he kept the most significant works of Chinese and foreign literature.

He felt like a distant relative — with no blood relationship, only a mystical one — of Captain Nemo, who travelled in his underwater vessel like a lone emperor without an empire but with a large library and a devastating hatred of the people who had ruined his life. It was believed that Nemo modelled himself after a vanished Indian prince who had opposed the British Empire. Ya Ru could feel an affinity to this, but what he really sympathised with was the gloomy and embittered figure of Nemo himself, the inspired engineer and widely read philosopher. He named the Gulfstream Nautilus II. An enlargement of one of the original etchings in the book, depicting Nemo with his reluctant visitors in the extensive library of the Nautilus , was displayed on the wall next to the entrance to the flight deck.

But now everything was about the shadows. He concealed himself efficiently and observed the woman he would have to kill. Another thing he had in common with Nemo was his belief in revenge. The necessity of revenge left its mark through history like a leitmotif.

It would all soon be over. Now that he was in Chinatown in London, with raindrops falling on the collar of his jacket, it struck him that there was something remarkable about the end of this story taking place in England. It was from here that the Wang brothers had commenced their journey back to China, the country that only one of them would ever see again.

Ya Ru didn’t mind waiting when he was in control of the time involved, unlike at airports. This attitude often surprised his friends, who regarded life as all too short, created by a god that could seem like a miserable old mandarin who didn’t want the joy of existence to last too long. Ya Ru had argued that, on the contrary, the gods responsible for creating life knew exactly what they were doing. If humans were allowed to live too long, their knowledge would increase to such an extent that they would be able to see through the mandarins and join forces to exterminate them. A short life span prevents many revolutions, Ya Ru maintained. And his friends usually agreed, though they didn’t always understand his thinking.

Ya Ru always looked to animals when he wanted to understand his own behaviour and that of others. He was the leopard, and he was also the stallion that fought off all challengers in order to become the sole emperor.

If Deng was the colourless cat that hunted mice better than any other, Mao was the owl, the wise bird, but also the ice-cold raptor that knew exactly when to swoop down in silence and seize its prey.

His line of thought was broken by Birgitta Roslin standing up. During the day he had spent following her, one thing had become abundantly clear: she was scared. She was always looking around, never still. Worries were flowing constantly through her head. He would be able to make use of that observation, even if he hadn’t yet decided how.

But now she stood up. Ya Ru hung back in the shadows.

Then something happened he was totally unprepared for. She gave a start, screamed, then stumbled backwards and hit her head on a bench. A Chinese man stopped and bent down to investigate what had happened. Several other people came hurrying over. Ya Ru stepped out of the shadows and approached the group standing around the prostrate woman. Two police officers came running. Ya Ru pushed his way forward to get a better view. Birgitta Roslin sat up. She had evidently lost consciousness for a few seconds. He heard the police officers asking if she needed an ambulance, but she said no.

It was the first time Ya Ru had heard her voice. He memorised it — a deep, expressive voice.

‘I must have stumbled,’ he heard her saying. ‘I thought somebody was coming towards me. I was frightened.’

‘Were you attacked?’

‘No. It was just my imagination.’

The man who had frightened her was still there. Ya Ru noticed that there was a certain similarity between Liu Xan and this man, who by sheer coincidence had entered into a story he had nothing to do with.