Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘Dad, just stay there with Xinxin. Don’t answer the door to anyone except me.’

He heard the fear in his father’s voice. ‘Li Yan, what is happening?’

‘Just sit tight, dad. I’ll be there as soon as I can. But it’s going to be a while.’

Yuetan police station was on the corner of Yuetan Nan Jie and Yuetan Xie Jie, a block from the park. It was a modern six-storey building with a glass centrepiece on its front facade that rose through five storeys. A Chinese flag flapped in the wind above the red, gold and blue Public Security emblem.

Li climbed the steps and pushed through glass doors into a shining marble lobby. A uniformed policewoman sat at a desk with a telephone switchboard. She looked up with clear recognition in her face as she saw Li approaching. ‘I need to talk to the Chief of Police,’ he said.

She fumbled nervously with the switchboard and called through to the Chief’s office to pass on his request. She listened, and her face coloured slightly. Then she hung up and said, ‘Sorry, the Chief’s not available.’

Li clenched and unclenched his jaw. ‘What floor is his office on?’

She seemed nonplussed. ‘The fifth. But he can’t see you.’

‘We’ll see about that.’ Li looked around for the stairs but didn’t see any. Through double doors was a public office where officials sat behind glass windows administering household and individual registrations. It was where, legally, Margaret should have notified her change of address. Li headed off in the other direction, down a long corridor.

‘You can’t enter the building without a pass,’ he heard the policewoman calling after him. And the sound of her heels clacking on the tiled floor followed in his wake.

He turned a corner and found himself looking through windows into an indoor basketball court spanned by an arched glass roof. He recognised it from the promotional video they had shown at the Great Hall of the People. A recreational facility for the one hundred and twenty-two police officers based here. Three of them, in jogsuits and trainers, were bouncing a ball up and down the court, taking it in turns to shoot baskets. Li turned in disgust and started back the way he had come, almost bumping into the pursuing policewoman. ‘Where are the stairs?’ he growled.

‘I’m sorry, Section Chief,’ she said. ‘You can’t go up there.’

Li wheeled around on his heels to face her. ‘Are you going to stop me?’ She just looked at him. ‘So tell me where the stairs are.’

‘There’s an elevator at the far side of the lobby,’ she said meekly.

‘Thank you.’ Li strode back into the lobby and crossed it to the brushed chrome doors of the elevator. As he stepped inside and turned to press the button for the fifth floor, he saw the policewoman, back at her desk, lifting the phone. The doors slid shut, and the elevator whisked him smoothly up through five floors to a white-painted landing where gold characters on a dark blue mural urged officers to Try To Be Best . Corridors ran off left and right. From the right, a small round man in the uniform of a Superintendent, First Class, emerged from an office with a plaque above the door which read, Logistics . Beyond him, Li saw a large reception room, and a door into the Chief’s office. The logistics officer blocked his way.

‘The Chief is not on duty today,’ he said. Introductions were not necessary. Clearly he had been the recipient of the phone call from the lobby.

‘I’ll see his deputy, then.’ Li looked along the doors that lined the corridor. At least three of them were labelled, Deputy Chief .

‘Not available.’

‘One of them’s got to be here.’ Li pushed past the little man and started opening the doors of the deputies’ offices. The first two were empty. The logistics officer trailed along behind him. The third was empty, too.

‘I told you, he’s not available.’

‘He must be in the building. There always has to be someone in charge of the building.’ Li glared at the smaller man. ‘I’m not leaving until I see him.’

The logistics officer sighed. ‘He’s in the gym.’

‘The gym? Where’s that?’

‘It’s on the top floor. If you’ll just wait a minute I’ll call him.’ The logistics officer turned back towards his office.

‘No time,’ Li said, and he strode off down the other corridor. There had to be a stairwell. He found it at the south end of the building, and climbed the stairs two at a time. On the landing the same armed policewoman with whom he had become familiar on the wall of Commissioner Zhu’s reception room, gazed down at him from a framed poster. He noticed, absurdly, and for the first time, that she was quite attractive, and he wondered if she was really a policewoman, or just a model dressed up for the photoshoot.

The gym occupied the whole of the top floor. A telephone was ringing, unanswered. There were three table tennis tables, a pool table, a row of comfortable leather armchairs lined up against the end wall. Sunshine streamed in windows all along one side. The walls were lined with photographs of winning police football teams. At the far end was an impressive collection of muscle-building machinery and aerobic exercisers. At first Li thought it was deserted, then the clang of heavy weights from the other side of the gym attracted his attention. The Deputy Chief was dressed in shorts and a singlet, reclined on his back along a low bench beneath a stand supporting a bar with transferable weights on either end. With upstretched arms he was lifting the bar from its cradle, and then lowering to his chest and raising it again in sets of five. Air escaped from his lips in loud bursts, like pneumatic brakes on a truck. The telephone stopped ringing.

Li wandered slowly across the shiny floor of the gym until he was standing almost above the deputy. On the wall was a poster of a golden-haired woman with a man’s body wearing a ridiculously tiny bikini top. Opposite was a poster of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, looking for all the world as if someone had stuck a bicycle pump into some orifice and blown him up. Perhaps it was the Deputy Chief’s ambition to look like him. Li glanced down. If it was, he had a long way to go. He had short arms and legs, and a wiry, if muscular, body. He would never be a Schwarzenegger. Li waited until the fifth lift, and then leaned over to stop the Deputy putting the bar back in its cradle. The Deputy gasped, and arms already aching from the lifts started shaking with the strain of holding up the bar. If they gave way, the bar would come down with enough force to crush his chest.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted.

Li said quite calmly. ‘You’re holding my partner and my son, and I want them back.’

‘Who the …?’ To the Deputy Chief, Li’s face was upside down. He tilted his head to one side to get a better look. ‘You’ve been suspended,’ he said, and gasped again as the pain in his arms started to become unbearable.

‘And you think that gives you the right to fuck with my family?’

‘You’re through, Li. All washed up.’ He groaned. ‘I’m going to drop this!’

‘You’re wrong,’ Li said. ‘Not about dropping the bar. You probably will. And it’ll probably take them days to recover all the bits of rib from your lungs. But you’re wrong about me being washed up. Because the charges against me are false. And in a day, or a week, or a month, I will be restored to my rank and position. And when that happens, I’m going to make your life so unpleasant you’re going to wish you’d dropped this bar on your head.’

‘Okay, okay, okay!’ The Deputy Chief almost screamed. The veins on his arms were standing out like ropes, and Li could see the elbows starting to give. He pulled the bar back in line with the cradle and the Deputy let go of it, immediately wheeling around to sit on the edge of the bench, doubled over, flexing his arms and moaning from the pain of it. ‘You bastard!’