Peter May - The Firemaker

And he responded with his customary ‘Yes, I have eaten’. And she began preparing his breakfast. The familiar greeting, ritually exchanged between Beijingers, had little to do with food but much to do with friendship.

Li parked his bike and leaned against the wall, watching Mei Yuan at work. She had a round, unlined face with beautifully slanted almond eyes that sparkled with mischief. Her dark hair, showing only a trace of grey at the temples, was drawn back in a tight bun and wrapped in a green scarf. Dimples in her cheeks became like deep scars when she smiled, which was often. For the moment, her concentration was on the preparation of his jian bing on the hot plate in the replica house that stood on the back of her three-wheeled cycle. Its corrugated roof, pitched and pink, had tiny curled eaves, and sat over sliding glass screens that protected the gas hot plate and Mei Yuan’s cooking ingredients. She splashed a ladleful of watery batter over the hot plate and it sizzled as it quickly cooked and set. Then she flipped the pancake over and broke an egg on to it, spreading it thinly. Smearing this with hoi sin and a little chili, she sprinkled it with chopped spring onion and broke a large piece of deep-fried whipped egg white into its centre. She then folded it in four, wrapped it in brown paper, and handed it to Li in exchange for two yuan. She watched with satisfaction as he bit hungrily into the steaming savoury pancake. ‘Wonderful,’ he said, wiping a smear of hoi sin from the corner of his mouth. ‘If I didn’t have to share an apartment with my uncle I would marry you.’

She laughed heartily. ‘I’m old enough to be your mother.’

‘But my mother never made jian bing the way you do.’

In truth, his mother had never made jian bing . And had the world turned another way, Mei Yuan would not have had to. In another era she might, perhaps, have been a lecturer at the university, or a senior civil servant. Li inclined his head a little to catch the title of the book she had stuffed down the back of her saddle. Descartes’ Meditations . He looked at her plump little hands, scarred by a thousand tiny burns, and felt the pain of her life in his heart. A generation cursed by the twelve years of madness that was the Cultural Revolution. And yet if she had regrets, there was no hint of them in that dimpled smile and those mischievous eyes.

She had not missed him noticing her book. ‘I’ll lend it to you when I’m finished. He was an extraordinary man.’ She smiled. ‘ I think, therefore I am .’ It would have taken her a long time to save up enough money to buy the book, so her offer to lend it to him was an extraordinary act of generosity and trust.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I would like that. And I will be sure to return it to you when I have read it.’ He filled his mouth with more jian bing . ‘So. Do you have an answer?’

She grinned. ‘The third person in the queue must have been his wife. You tried to make me think it was a man.’

‘No, no. I didn’t try to make you think anything. You assumed it was a man. It was only when you stopped making that assumption that you realised who she was.’

She shook her head, still smiling. ‘Not very clever. But effective.’

‘So what have you got for me?’ He devoured the last of his jian bing and threw the wrapper in the bin.

‘Two men,’ she said. ‘And there is no ambiguity here.’ She twinkled. ‘One of them is the keeper of every book in the world, giving him access to the source of all knowledge. Knowledge is power, so this makes him a very powerful man. The other possesses only two sticks. Yet this gives him more power than the other. Why?’

Li turned it over quickly in his head, but no solution came immediately to mind. ‘It’ll have to wait till tomorrow.’

She nodded. ‘Of course.’

He winked and glanced at the fob watch he kept in a leather pouch on his belt. ‘Got to go. Zai jian .’ And he flicked his bike stand up with his foot. She watched with affection as the tall figure in short-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers dodged the traffic to cross Dongzhimennei Street. Somewhere in this vast country, she liked to believe, lived the son she had been separated from almost thirty years ago, when Red Guards had dragged her off to the labour camp. He would be about Li’s age now. And it was her fervent hope that he might have turned out something like him.

Li cycled up the gentle slope to the corner of Beixinqiao Santiao, where the square, flat-roofed, four-storey brick building that housed Section One sat discreetly behind a screen of trees. Past the traditional revolving sign of a barber shop, the musty smell of damp hair and the snip of scissors as he passed its door, he was still turning over Mei Yuan’s riddle in his head. Two sticks. Were they chopsticks? No, why would that give the man power? Were they big sticks with which he could beat the other man to death? If so, why would he require two? Focusing his mind on the problem calmed the butterflies in his stomach reflecting the self-doubts that dogged the start of his first day as Deputy Section Chief. He turned in past the red-roofed garage and parked his bicycle. A uniformed officer came down the steps from the door of Section One. He gave Li a wave. ‘Heard the good news, Li Yan. Congratulations.’

Li grinned. ‘My ancestors must have been watching over me.’ Important to seem confident, not to be taking it too seriously.

He went inside, turned right, and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Everyone he met in the corridor — a secretary, another uniformed officer, a rookie detective — offered their congratulations. It was becoming embarrassing. There were only two officers in the detectives’ room when he went in, Qu and Gao. Both had been with Section One longer than he, and were now a rank below him. Qu winked. ‘Morning, boss.’ There was a heavy ironical stress on the word ‘boss’, but it was fond rather than rancorous. Li was popular with the other detectives.

‘Come to get your stuff?’ Gao asked. ‘Can’t wait to move into your new office, eh?’

Strangely, Li realised, he hadn’t given that a thought. He had been heading instinctively for his old desk. He glanced, almost with regret, around the cluttered detectives’ office with its jumble of desks and filing cabinets, walls plastered with memos and posters and photographs of crime scenes past and present.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Qu said. ‘One of the girls’ll put your stuff in a box and take it through. Chief wants to see you.’

Section Chief Chen Anming rose from his desk as Li came into his office and shook his hand. ‘Well done, Li Yan. You deserve it.’

‘Thanks, Chief. That’s what I’ve been telling everyone.’

But Chen didn’t smile. He sat down again, distracted, and shuffled some papers on his desk. He was a lean, silver-headed man in his late fifties from Hunan province. A chain-smoker, years of cigarette smoke had streaked his hair yellow above his right temple. He wore a permanently dour expression, and the girls in the typing pool had been known to run a book on days of the month on which he might smile. ‘Busy start for you. Three suspicious deaths overnight. Two of them look pretty much like murder, the third could be a suicide. A charred body in Ritan Park. Still burning when it was discovered. Can of gasoline near by. Looks like he doused himself, squatted among the trees and lit a match. Bizarre stuff. Qian Yi’s already there. I’ve dispatched Wu and Zhao to the suspected murders. You’d better have a look at the suicide, just in case. Then debrief the other two and let me know what you think.’

Several hundred curious onlookers had gathered by the lakeside among the willows. Word had swept like wildfire through the nearby market streets, and rumours of death in the park held the promise of drama; a kind of street theatre, something to break the monotonous repetition of their daily lives. Nearly sixty uniformed officers had been assigned to crowd control. Several plainclothes policemen moved among the spectators, listening to gossip and speculation in the hope of picking up even the smallest piece of information that might prove useful. From across the water, where people were packed in under the shade of the pavilion, from above the babble of voices, came the mournful wail of a single-stringed violin, like a dirge for the dead. The rest of the park was deserted.