Peter May - Chinese Whispers

Li closed his eyes. It was beginning. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ he said.

‘Be sure that you are,’ Miss Shen Shuji told him. ‘The Director General has a meeting at nine and would like to see you beforehand.’ She hung up abruptly. Sometimes the secretaries were worse than their masters. Li slipped the phone into his pocket and checked the time. It was just after eight. Yan Bo was at his desk early. Even allowing for the rush hour traffic, Li knew he could be there in ten to fifteen minutes, so he took his time finishing his jian bing , putting off the moment for as long as possible. Whatever Yan Bo wanted, it was unlikely to be an exchange of pleasantries. One way or another, something of what was going on must have found its way to his office.

Reluctantly, Li threw his jian bing wrapper in the bin and stepped back into his car. He had left the engine running to keep it warm. Carefully, he pulled out into the traffic flow, avoiding the bicycles, and drove a hundred metres south to the intersection, where he turned east into West Changan Avenue. The sun was blinding, diffused by the dirt on his windscreen. He flicked on the wash-wipe, and sunlight smeared itself all over his vision before clearing to reveal the queues of traffic backed-up from the flag-unfurling ceremony in Tiananmen Square. By the time he reached the entrance to the Ministry compound on the far side of the square, it was nearly eight-thirty.

He showed his ID to the guard at the gate and drove in to navigate his way through the maze of buildings inside the old British Embassy compound now jointly occupied by the Ministries of State and Public Security. Bizarrely, there were children playing in the road, offspring of some senior mandarin, for whom the oddly cloistered world of the two Ministries was home. Li drove slowly past them, and envied them their youth and their innocence — both of which they would lose all too soon.

He parked beside a flower bed outside the block which housed the Political Department, and took an elevator up to the fourth floor. Miss Shen Shuji, Li was surprised to discover, was an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties. Attractive, he decided quickly, only for about two seconds. She had blue make-up on her eyes and wore red lipstick, and dressed as if she were just about to head out to a fashion show. There was not the trace of a smile on her face. When he told her who he was, she said, ‘Sit,’ as if he were a dog, and picked up the phone to report to her boss that Section Chief Li Yan had arrived. When he refused to follow her order and instead wandered around her office looking at the wall-hangings, she glared at him for several moments before returning to the task he had interrupted — painting her fingernails the same colour as her lips. After several long minutes, her phone rang and she said to Li, ‘You can go in now.’

Li knocked and entered. Yan Bo’s office was a large, blue-carpeted room with wood-panelled walls. Yan Bo seemed very small behind his enormous shiny desk, engulfed by a large, leather reclining chair, and dwarfed by the Chinese flags which hung limply from the wall on either side of his desk. Venetian blinds were lowered and half shut, obscuring the view from his window, but allowing long, thin strips of early yellow light to lie crookedly across the contours of the room.

Yan Bo was scribbling something on a tablet of note-paper on his desk. He pulled off the top sheet, screwed it up and threw it in the bin, beginning again on a fresh one. He behaved as if he were unaware that Li had entered. With his head bowed in concentration over his note taking, Li could see that his hair was very thin on top and carefully combed to disguise the fact. Li stood in uncomfortable silence waiting for this powerful little man to look up. When, eventually, he finished his scribbling and raised his head, he gave Li a look that verged on contempt.

‘What the hell do you think you are trying to do, Li?’

Li was taken aback by the aggressiveness of his tone. ‘My job, Director General,’ he said.

‘Don’t get cute with me, sonny!’ the Political Director snapped back at him. ‘There is no part of your job that entails bringing this Ministry into disrepute.’

‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean,’ Li said.

Yan Bo slapped his hand on his desk, leaving a damp palm print on its shiny surface. ‘Accusing a senior officer of murder is hardly going to do much for the public image of the Ministry.’

So much for Commissioner Zhu’s consultation with high officialdom, Li thought. He had gone straight to Yan Bo, neatly passing the buck. Li said, ‘With respect, Director General, it would hardly be fair to blame the messenger because you don’t like the message.’

‘Don’t be so damned insolent, Section Chief!’ Yan Bo stood up and glared at Li, then perhaps realising that he was still looking up at him, sat down again. ‘We have barely recovered from the prosecution of Li Jizhou, or the fourteen other officials who were executed in the wake of his conviction.’ Li Jizhou was a former vice-minister of Public Security sentenced to death for his part in a smuggling conspiracy which had brought more than eight billion dollars’ worth of illicit goods into China during the nineties. The scandal had shaken the ministry to its core. Corruption was a highly sensitive issue. Murder was unthinkable. ‘Goddamnit, man! According to Zhu, I am also on your list of suspects. Is that true?’

Li shifted uncomfortably. ‘Everyone who took part in the MERMER demonstration has to be considered a suspect.’

‘Including you?’

‘I’ve already ruled myself out, Director General.’

Yan Bo glared at him, suspecting sarcasm, but unable to detect any in Li Yan’s inscrutability. ‘And do you have any hard evidence to back up your suspicions?’

Li braced himself. ‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet.’ Yan Bo repeated. ‘Not yet?’ He gazed at Li with shining black eyes. ‘Not ever,’ he said. ‘I will not entertain groundless accusations being made about senior officers of this ministry. Not to mention the Deputy Minister himself. You might think, Section Chief, that your high public profile and your awards and commendations make you something special. Let me assure you they do not. You are nobody. As you will come to realise very quickly if you continue with this line of investigation. Do you understand?’ Li made no reply. ‘Do. You. Understand!’ Yan Bo thundered.

‘Perfectly,’ Li said.

‘Good. Then I do not wish to hear another thing about it. Get out of my sight.’ He pulled his tablet towards him and starting scribbling furiously, and Li noticed that he was using red ink.

Margaret raised her left leg and felt all the stiff muscles of her buttock tug at her hamstring as she stretched. Slowly she turned through ninety degrees, arms raised level with her shoulders and bent up at the elbow, before bringing her foot down and raising the other leg. She felt the same stretching of the muscles, and was amazed at just how out of condition she was. The cold was stinging her face, and although she wore gloves, her fingers were frozen stiff. Her breath wreathed around her head like the smoke of dragon’s fire. The plink-plonk of a traditional Chinese orchestra emanating from a ghetto blaster on the wall lent succour to the illusion.

The previous day’s autopsy had taken more out of her than she could have believed. The muscles of her arms and shoulders were stiff and sore from wielding heavy shears to cut through ribs, and from turning the body this way and that in the course of its dissection. Her lower back and the tops of her legs ached from the angle at which she had held herself to cut through dead flesh and remove organs. Even her thrice weekly tai chi sessions in Zhongshan Park with Mei Yuan had failed to keep her fit and supple for a professional activity she had always taken for granted.