Peter May - The Firemaker

Zhengyi Road was dark and deserted as Li wheeled his bicycle past the shuttered fruit-and-vegetable shop at the entrance to the apartment complex. The slightest breeze stirred the sticky humid night air and rattled the leaves overhead. Li nodded to the night sentry in the guard box as he passed. Row after row of twelve-storey apartment blocks rose up into the murky black sky. Beyond the glow of the streetlights there were no stars visible through the layers of dust and mist in the upper atmosphere.

Li parked and locked his bike and entered the block where he lived with his uncle — superior apartments, behind high Ministry walls, reserved for top Ministry officials and senior police officers. It was late and the elevator was turned off for the night. Li unlocked the stair gate and climbed the two flights to their apartment. There was still a singing in his ears from the music in the club and his hearing felt woolly and dull, but even as he opened the door, he could hear the deep rumble of Old Yifu’s snoring coming from the further bedroom. He went first into the kitchen, where he took a bottle of chilled water from the refrigerator and drank deeply, washing away the bad taste of cigarettes and beer, and then into his bedroom, where he sat on the bed for fifteen minutes or more, thinking, about the day that had just passed, about the day that lay ahead. He was tired, but not remotely sleepy. There was an ache at the back of his head, and acid burned his stomach.

He tipped forward and slid open the top drawer of a dark-wood utility dresser. Under an assortment of clean underwear, he found the collection of leather strapping he was looking for and pulled it out. He had never worn it beyond the first time he had tried it on. He had adjusted the buckles then so that it still fitted neatly to his shoulder, soft tan leather straps holding the holster firmly in place. It had been a gift from his lecturer in Chicago, a full-time cop, part-time lecturer, who had taken a shine to him and arranged for him to sit in the back of a squad car over several night shifts. It had been an extraordinary experience, frightening, sometimes bloody, often intimidating. It had opened his eyes to a crime culture and the means of combating it that was unknown in China. These cops were as hard and ruthless as the petty criminals, muggers and pimps, junkies and prostitutes they had to deal with. It was a world, Li reflected now, almost shocked by the thought, with which Margaret must be only too familiar. He wondered how it was possible to endure prolonged exposure to it without suffering lasting damage. He saw the soft, freckled skin of her forearm, the unfettered breasts pushing against the thin cotton of her tee-shirt, a recurring vision that somehow emphasised her soft, vulnerable femininity. How long could that survive in the dark, creepy-crawly world she inhabited beneath the rock of civilised Chicago society? How long before the shell she would make to protect herself from it enveloped her completely, making her, like the cops he had shared the night shift with, cynical and hard beyond redemption?

Quietly he slipped down the hall and carefully opened the door to Old Yifu’s bedroom. The snoring rumbled on, undisturbed. It would take something approaching ten on the Richter scale to waken his uncle once asleep. Li looked at his face, lying at a slight angle on the pillow, mouth open, and felt a wave of love and affection for him. Those bushy eyebrows were still pushed up quizzically on his forehead. For all his experience of life, of tragedy and struggle, there was still an innocence about him, emphasised somehow by the repose of sleep. His face was remarkably unlined, almost childlike. And for a moment, Li had second thoughts. Then he steeled himself. Uncle Yifu would never know, and what he did not know could not hurt him. He crouched down and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. At the right hand side, at the back, was the shoe box Old Yifu had kept there for years. Li lifted it out and took off the lid. Inside, on a bed of carefully arranged tissue, lay his old service revolver from Tibet and a box of cartridges. Somehow he had succeeded in hanging on to them over the years, and kept them now as a souvenir. He had only ever fired the revolver in practice, he told Li once, and had never ever pointed it at another human being. Whatever else he might have inherited from his uncle, Li knew that he did not possess his even temperament, his sense of compassion. There was anger and a latent violence in Li, which he strove always to control. But tomorrow, he knew, he was going to ease back a little on that control and take a short cut of which neither his uncle, nor the authorities, would approve.

He lifted the revolver out of its box and slipped it into the holster. It fitted like a glove, almost as if the two had been designed one for the other. He counted out six rounds and dropped them in his pocket. Quietly, he replaced the lid of the box and returned it to its place at the back of the drawer and slid the drawer shut. As he stood up, his uncle turned over, and the snoring stopped. Li held his breath. But a deep grunt signalled its restart, and Old Yifu rumbled on in blissful ignorance of his nephew’s presence. Li drifted silently out of the room, gently closing the door behind him.

Wednesday Morning

At first it was just a distant glow. But as he drew nearer, he saw that the glow was flickering, flames licking upward in the dark. He continued to close in, peering through the heat, focusing on the dark mass at its centre. Suddenly a hand reached out towards him, shrivelled by the heat, claw-like and blackened, and the face moved out of the flames, mouth open in a silent scream, melting eyes appealing for help. And he realised, in a moment of supreme horror, that he was looking at himself.

He sat up with a start, blinking in the darkness, sweat gathered across his forehead, glistening on his chest, a trickle of it turning cold as it ran down to his belly. He was breathing hard. A red digital display on his bedside table showed 2 a.m. He lay back on the pillow and tried to excise the image from his mind. Reaching out like he was asking for help , the baby-sitter had said. But what strange distortions of his subconscious had turned the burning figure of his dream into himself? He forced himself to breathe more slowly and gradually felt the pace of his heart slow, too. He closed his eyes and consciously wiped his mind clean.

Li barely slept the rest of the night, drifting through a dreamlike semiconsciousness until his alarm went off at five, and he rose almost with a sense of relief. The sky was light, but the sun had not yet penetrated the early morning mist, and so it was grey and deliciously fresh as he cycled east then north through the city into Dongcheng District. It was too early for Mei Yuan, who was not at her usual corner at Dongzhimennei, and so he had no breakfast.

The first interviewees of the day were already gathering in the street outside the headquarters of Section One as officers on night shift drifted off to get something to eat before going home to bed, just as their families were getting out of theirs.

‘Hey, Li Yan, you’re looking very smart today,’ an officer greeted him in the corridor. ‘Going for an interview?’

Li was wearing a dark blue cotton suit, trousers gathered in fashionable pleats at the waist, a fresh white shirt open at the neck, and a pair of polished black shoes. He grinned. ‘Just dressing up for the job.’

‘Pity the Chief never thought of that,’ the officer said, safe in the knowledge that Section Chief Chen had not yet arrived for work. Chen always wore a pair of baggy grey pants, shiny at the seat, a blue or light grey shirt, and a cream-coloured polyester jerkin that had seen better days. He had been described by one of his bosses early in his career as a sartorial disaster. But it had done him no harm whatsoever.