Peter May - The Firemaker

‘No. Just my uncle. My aunt died before I came to Beijing. I did not know her. My uncle has never really got over the loss of her.’

Margaret watched Li carefully, and helped herself from the bowls that he had just visited. The food was delicious, but within minutes a mild burning sensation in her mouth had turned into a searing heat. She gasped for breath. ‘My God, it’s hot!’ And she grabbed her beer, draining nearly half the glass in a single draught. She looked up and saw a smile playing about Li’s lips.

‘Sichuan food,’ he said, ‘is always spicy. It is good, yes?’

She was having hot flushes now, her face, she was sure, a bright pink, perspiration breaking out across her forehead. Her eyes narrowed. ‘You brought me here on purpose, didn’t you? You’re trying to burn the mouth off me.’

Li’s smugness infuriated her further. ‘This is the cuisine of my home,’ he said. ‘I thought you would be interested to try it. I did not realise your soft American palate would be so… sensitive.’

She glared at him. ‘You’re a complete bastard, Li Yan, you know that?’

He felt a thrill of pleasure, not only from the sound of his name on her lips, but from the fact that she had remembered it. She took another gulp of beer and he took pity on her. ‘No, no.’ He took the glass from her. ‘Drinking will not help.’ He took a sachet of sugar from his pocket and passed it to her. ‘This will help.’

‘Sugar.’

‘Sure. It will stop the burning.’

Still suspicious, she opened the sachet and emptied its contents into her mouth. Miraculously, as it melted, so did the heat in the sweetness. ‘It does,’ she said with surprise.

Li smiled. ‘Spicy and sweet. And therein you have the balance of opposites. Yin and yang. As in feng shui .’

‘I thought you didn’t know anything about feng shui ,’ Margaret said suspiciously.

‘Not of its practice. But I understand the principles.’ He filled his mouth with more spicy food.

‘How can you do that?’ Margaret asked. ‘Doesn’t it burn you, too?’

‘I am used to it. And if you will eat some more now, you will find it does not burn so much and you will taste the flavours. And always take some noodles with each mouthful.’

Hesitantly, she followed his advice, and to her amazement the food did not seem quite as hot as it had. But she proceeded more cautiously now, sipping frequently at her beer. ‘So where did you learn to speak such good English? At school?’

‘No. We did learn English at school, but it was my Uncle Yifu who taught me to speak it properly. He said there are only two languages in the world worth speaking. The first is Chinese, the second is English.’

Margaret couldn’t help but notice the warmth in his eyes when he spoke of his uncle, and she realised, almost with a shock, that she had stopped seeing his face as Chinese, or as different in any way. It was just familiar now, a face she knew, a face she had even stopped seeing as ugly, for there was something deep and darkly attractive in his eyes.

‘He made me learn ten words every day,’ Li said, ‘and one verb. And he would test me on them, and make me practise. In Yuyuantan Park there is a place they call the “English Corner”. Chinese who speak English meet there just to talk to one another and practise speaking the language. Uncle Yifu used to take me there every Sunday morning and we would talk English until my head hurt. Sometimes there would be some English or American tourist or businessman staying in the city who would hear about the “English Corner” and come and make conversation with us. And that would be very special, because we could ask about slang and colloquialism and cursing that you cannot find in books. Uncle Yifu always says you only fully understand a society when you know which words they debase for swearing.’

Margaret smiled, seeing the truth in this. ‘Your uncle should have been a teacher.’

‘I think, maybe, he would have liked that. He never had any children of his own, so all the things a father would like to pass on to his son, Uncle Yifu has passed on to me.’ Li raised the noodle bowl almost to his lips, and scooped noodles quickly into his mouth with his chopsticks. ‘But I didn’t learn all my English from my uncle. I spent six months in Hong Kong after the handover, working with a very experienced English police officer who had decided to stay on. This was very good for my English. And then I was sent for three months to the United States to take a course in criminal investigation at the University of Illinois in Chicago.’

‘You’re kidding!’ Margaret shook her head in wonder. ‘I took that course.’

‘But you are a forensic pathologist.’

‘Sure, that’s what I’m experienced in, but I also had firearms training with the Chicago PD. Was a pretty good shot, too. And I took the course in criminal investigation because… well, because it does no harm to broaden your horizons. A year later I was teaching forensics part-time on the same course. That’s where I met your boss. It’s amazing we didn’t run into each other.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Your employer paid for you to take this course?’

‘Hell, no.’ Margaret smiled at the thought. ‘I took three months out at my own expense. I suppose I could afford to in those days. I had a husband who was working.’

‘Ah.’ Li couldn’t have explained, even to himself, why he was disappointed to be reminded that she was married. His eye flickered down to the ring on her wedding finger. ‘You have been married a long time?’

‘Foolishly,’ she said with a bitterness he had neither seen nor heard in her before, ‘since I was twenty-four. Seven years. Must have broken a mirror.’

‘I’m sorry? You broke a mirror?’ Li was confused.

‘It’s a silly superstition in the West. They say if you break a mirror it will bring you seven years’ bad luck. Anyway, I am no longer married, so perhaps my luck is changing.’

Li was unaccountably relieved. But still intrigued. ‘What did he do, your husband?’

‘Oh, he lectured in genetics at the Roosevelt University in Chicago. It was his great passion. Or so I used to think.’ Li heard great hurt in her voice, but she was trying to disguise it by being flippant. ‘He always used to say genetics could be our salvation, or our downfall. We had to make the right choices.’

‘Life is always about making the right choices.’

‘And some of us always seem to make the wrong ones.’ And she suddenly realised she had gone too far, and her eyes flickered downwards with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t want to know about my sordid private life.’ She tried to laugh it off. ‘I’m sure you’d much rather know how I became an expert in crispy critters.’

‘In what?’

She laughed. ‘That’s what a pathologist I used to work for called his burn victims. Crispy critters. Sick, isn’t it?’ Li thought it was. ‘I guess it’s a kind of self-defence mechanism, that kind of humour. We live in a pretty sick world, and that’s our pretty sick way of dealing with it.’

‘So how did you become an expert in… “crispy critters”?’ The distasteful sound of it seemed to bring back the smells of the autopsy room, and Li’s nose wrinkled in disgust.

Margaret smiled at his squeamishness. ‘Oh, I guess I got interested when I was assisting a pathologist at Waco. And then during my residency at the UIC Medical Centre I got lots of experience dealing with victims in trauma, fire victims from automobile accidents, home fires, airplane accidents, even a couple of cases of self-immolation, like you thought your guy in the park was. Then when I got a job as a pathologist with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, I just sort of developed the speciality. I can’t say it had ever been an ambition. But then, we don’t always end up doing or being what we started out to do or be, do we?’ She looked at him. ‘Did you always want to be a policeman?’