Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

Ya Ru smiled to himself. She is indeed scared and on her guard.

The police officers escorted Birgitta Roslin back to her hotel. Ya Ru remained in the background. But now he knew where she was staying. After checking once more that she was steady on her feet, the police officers walked off while she went in through the hotel doors. Ya Ru saw her being given her key by a receptionist who took it from one of the highest shelves. He waited a few more minutes before entering the hotel lobby. The receptionist was Chinese. Ya Ru bowed and held out a sheet of paper.

‘The lady who just came in, she dropped this in the street outside.’

The receptionist took the paper and put it into the empty mail slot. It was for room 614, on the very top floor of the hotel.

The sheet of paper was white, and blank. Ya Ru suspected that Birgitta would ask the receptionist who had handed it in. A Chinese man, she would be told. And she would become even more on edge. There was no risk to himself.

Ya Ru pretended to be reading a brochure advertising the hotel while thinking about how he could find out how long Birgitta Roslin was staying. The opportunity came when the Chinese receptionist disappeared into a back room and was replaced by a young Englishwoman. Ya Ru went up to the counter.

‘Mrs Birgitta Roslin,’ he said. ‘From Sweden. I’m supposed to pick her up and drive her to the airport. It’s not clear if she’s expecting to be picked up tomorrow or the day after.’

Without more ado the receptionist tapped away at the computer keyboard.

‘Mrs Roslin is booked in for three days,’ she said. ‘Shall I call her so that you can sort out when she needs to be collected?’

‘No, I’ll sort it out with the office. We don’t like to disturb our clients unnecessarily.’

Ya Ru left the hotel. It had started drizzling again. He turned up his collar and walked towards Gower Street to find a taxi. Now he didn’t need to worry about how much time he had at his disposal. A very long time has passed since all this began, he thought. A few more days until it reaches its inevitable conclusion are of no significance.

He hailed a taxi and gave the address in Whitehall where his company in Liechtenstein owned a flat he stayed at on his visits to England. He had often felt that he was betraying the memory of his forefathers by staying in London when he could just as well go to Paris or Berlin. As he sat in the taxi he made up his mind to sell the Whitehall flat and look for a new place in Paris.

It was time to bring that part of his life to a close as well.

He lay down on the bed and listened to the silence. He had insulated all the walls when he first bought the flat. Now he couldn’t even hear the distant hum of traffic. The only sound was the sighing of the air conditioner. It gave him the feeling of being on board a ship. He felt very much at peace.

‘How long ago was it?’ he said aloud into the room. ‘How long ago was it when this story that is now coming to a close first started?’

He did the calculation in his head. It was 1868 when San first sat down in his little room at the mission station. Now it was 2006. One hundred and thirty-eight years ago. San had sat down in the candlelight and meticulously chronicled the story of himself and his two brothers, Guo Si and Wu. It had begun the day they left their squalid home and set off on the long trek to Canton. There they had been exposed to a wicked demon in the guise of Zi. From then onward death followed them wherever they went. In the end the only one left alive was San, with his stubborn determination to tell his story.

They died in a state of deepest humiliation, Ya Ru thought. The succession of emperors and mandarins followed Confucius’s advice to keep the population on such a tight rein that rebellion could never be possible. But just as the English maltreated the natives in their colonies, the brothers were tortured by Americans when they were building the railways. At the same time the English displayed icy contempt for the Chinese and attempted to make them all drug addicts by swamping the markets in China with opium. That is how I see those brutal Englishmen, as drug dealers standing on street corners selling their dope to people they hate and regard as inferior creatures. It’s not so long since Chinese were depicted in European and American cartoons as apes with tails. But the caricatures were true: we were born to be humiliated and turned into slaves. We were not human. We were animals. We had tails.

When Ya Ru used to wander around the streets of London, he would think about how many of the buildings surrounding him were built with enslaved people’s money, their toil and their suffering, their backs and their deaths.

What had San written? That they had built the railway through the American desert using their own ribs as sleepers under the rails. Similarly, the screams and pains of slaves were infused into the iron bridges that spanned the Thames, or in the thick stone walls of the enormous buildings in the fine old financial district of London.

Ya Ru’s train of thought was broken when he dozed off. On waking he went into the living room, where all the furniture and lamps were Chinese. On the table in front of the dark red sofa was a light blue silk bag. He opened it, having first placed a sheet of white paper on the table. Then he poured out a pile of finely ground glass. It was an ancient method of killing people, mixing the almost invisible grains of glass into a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. There was no escape for anybody who drank it. The thousands of microscopic grains of glass cut the victim’s intestines to shreds. In ancient times it was known as the invisible death because it was sudden and couldn’t be explained.

The pulverised glass would bring San’s story to an end. Ya Ru carefully tipped the glass back into the silk bag and tied it with a knot. Then he switched off all the lamps except for one with a red shade inset with dragons in gold brocade. He sat down in an easy chair that had once belonged to a rich landowner in Shandong Province. He was breathing slowly and sank into the peaceful state in which he thought most clearly.

It took him an hour to decide how he would conclude this last chapter by killing Birgitta Roslin, who in all probability had given his sister Hong Qiu information that could harm him. Information that she could well have passed on to others without his knowing. When he had made up his mind, he pressed a button on the table. A few minutes later he heard old Lang starting to prepare dinner in the kitchen.

She used to clean Ya Ru’s office in Beijing. Night after night he had observed Lang’s silent movements. She was a better cleaner than any of the others who between them kept his skyscraper clean.

When he heard that, in addition to her cleaning work, she also prepared traditional dinners for weddings and funerals, he asked her to cook him a dinner the following evening. He then appointed her his cook and paid her a wage she would otherwise never have been able to dream of. She had a son who had emigrated to London, and Ya Ru arranged for her to fly to Europe in order to look after him during his many visits.

That evening Lang served a series of small dishes. Without Ya Ru having said anything, she had divined what he wanted. She placed his tea on a small kerosene-flamed heater in the living room.

‘Breakfast tomorrow?’ she asked before leaving.

‘No, I’ll see to that myself. But dinner — fish.’

Ya Ru went to bed early. He hadn’t had many uninterrupted hours of sleep since leaving Beijing. First the flight to Europe, then the complicated connections to the town in the north of Sweden, then the visit to Helsingborg, where he had broken into Birgitta’s study and found the word ‘London’ underlined on a scrap of paper next to her telephone. He had flown to Stockholm in his private jet and then on to Copenhagen, followed by London. He had assumed that Roslin would be going to visit Ho.