Peter May - The Firemaker

‘Hey, you guys, I’m really sorry to keep you waiting.’ He pumped Margaret’s hand enthusiastically. ‘Hi. You must be Dr Campbell.’

‘Margaret,’ she said.

‘Okay, Margaret. Bob Wade. Jeez, it’s hot out there.’ He took a grubby-looking handkerchief and wiped away the beads of sweat forming across a high, receding forehead. ‘Lily looking after you okay?’

‘Sure.’ Margaret nodded slowly. ‘Lily’s a real gem.’

Lily flicked her a look, and Bob was not slow to detect Margaret’s tone. He leaned forward to the driver. ‘How about we hot-tail it to the university, Shimei? We’re running a bit behind schedule.’

Shimei gunned the engine and backed out into the compound before swinging round towards the gate. As they passed under the arch, Margaret noticed Supervisor Li emerging from the redbrick building. His whole demeanour had changed — a spring in his step, a smile on his face. He didn’t even see their car. His shoulders were pushed back and Margaret realised that he was very tall for a Chinese, maybe six feet. He pulled his cap down over his flat-top crew cut. Its peak cast a shadow over his square-jawed high-cheek-boned face and, as he disappeared from view, she thought how unattractive he was.

‘You must be pretty tired.’ She turned to find Bob examining her closely. He would be around fifty-five — the age she felt right now.

She nodded. ‘I’ve been on the go something like twenty-two hours. It seems like one hell of a long day. Only it’s tomorrow already and I’ve still got nearly half of it to go.’

He grinned. ‘Yeah, I know. You’re chasing the day until about halfway across the Pacific and suddenly you jump a day ahead.’ He leaned towards her, lowering his voice. ‘What happened with Lily?’

‘Oh…’ Margaret didn’t want to go through it all again. ‘Just a little misunderstanding.’

‘You mustn’t mind her really. She’s not all bad. Bark’s worse than her bite. You know, she was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. A real old-fashioned comrade. Only her kind of communism’s not really in vogue any more, so she’ll stay at the bottom of the pile. Never be anything more than a three-star constable.’

The Cultural Revolution was something Margaret had always meant to read up on. She’d heard of it often enough without ever really knowing what it was — except that it had been a bad time in China. She decided, however, not to display her ignorance to Bob.

‘So what made you decide to come to China?’ he asked.

The truth wasn’t an option for Margaret. She shrugged vaguely. ‘Oh, you know… I was always kind of interested in the place. The Mysterious East and all that. I was doing some lecturing, part-time, at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and this guy from the Office of International Criminal Justice…’

‘Dick Goldman.’

‘Yeah, that’s him. He said the OICJ were looking for someone to do a six-week stint at the People’s University of Public Security in Beijing, lecturing on forensic pathology, and was I interested. I thought, hell, it beats chasing fire engines for the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office. Lot of fires in Chicago in June.’

Bob smiled. ‘You’ll find they do things a lot differently here than Chicago. I’ve been out here nearly two years and I’m still trying to get my lecture notes photocopied.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘You ever heard of the Three Ps?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, they represent the three things you must have to survive in this country. That’s Patience, Patience and Patience. The Chinese have their own way of doing things. I’m not saying they do them any worse or any better than we do. Just different. And they’ve got a totally different perspective on the world.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, for example, you come here thinking: I’m an American citizen. I live in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And you think that makes you pretty damned superior. But the humblest peasant working fifteen hours a day in the paddy fields will look down his nose at you. Why? Because you’re not Chinese and he is. Because he is a citizen of the Middle Kingdom. That’s their name for China. So called because it is, of course, the centre of the world, and everything beyond its borders is peripheral and inferior, populated by yangguizi — foreign devils like you and me.’

She snorted. ‘That’s just empty arrogance.’

Bob raised an eyebrow. ‘Is it? The Chinese were weaving silk three thousand years ago. They were casting iron eighteen hundred years before the Europeans figured out how to do it. They invented paper, and were printing books hundreds of years before Gutenberg built his first printing press. By comparison, we Americans are just a pimple on the face of history.’

Margaret wondered how often he’d delivered this little homily to visiting American lecturers. He probably thought it made him seem more knowledgeable, and China more daunting. And he was right.

‘Biggest single difference — culturally?’

She shrugged her complete ignorance.

‘The Chinese focus on and reward group efforts, rather than individual ones. They’re team players. And the individual is expected to put the team’s interests way ahead of his own. And that’s a pretty big deal in a country of 1.2 billion people. Guess that’s why they’ve been around for five thousand years.’

Margaret was getting tired of her cultural studies lesson. ‘So what happens now?’

Bob became brisk and businesslike. ‘Okay. We’ll get you settled in at the university, meet the people you’ve got to meet, then you can go and get changed and freshened up for the banquet.’

Lily’s words came back from earlier. ‘Banquet?’

‘Yeah, at the famous Quanjude Beijing Duck restaurant. It’s a traditional welcome. Didn’t you get an OICJ briefing document?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Margaret didn’t like to confess that she hadn’t read it. She had meant to. If she could stay awake long enough she would do it tonight.

‘There’s a lot of etiquette associated with these things. Do’s and don’ts. Chinese can be a bit touchy, you know what I mean? But don’t worry, I’ll be around to keep you right.’

Margaret didn’t know whether to be pleased or pissed. Bob, she thought, could become pretty tiresome.

They were heading due west now along another six-lane highway running through a canyon of modern tower blocks. The sun was dipping lower in the late afternoon, dazzling through the dust and insects that caked the windscreen. Out of the haze, a sweeping flyover rose up from the road ahead. But at the last moment they bore right on to a smaller road thick with cyclists, and then right again into what looked like a building site.

‘Here we are,’ Bob said.

‘We are?’ Margaret looked with some horror.

They bumped across a pot-holed yard, raising a cloud of dust in their wake, and turned through a gate where a policeman stood endlessly to attention in the searing heat. He saluted as they passed. No one bothered to acknowledge him. Then suddenly they were on a private tree-lined road, a large all-weather games pitch behind a high fence on their left. They pulled up outside a tall white building with curled eaves and ornamental brown pillars.

Margaret got stiffly out of the car and was nearly knocked over by the heat. In the cool, cloistered air-conditioning of the BMW, she had forgotten how hot it was out there.

Bob pointed to a twenty-storey building beyond the administration block. ‘Staff live in there.’

‘What?’ Margaret was incredulous. ‘How many staff are there?’

‘Oh, about a thousand.’ He steered her through double doors and up dark marble steps in the cool interior.