Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘Oh, he’s the Deputy Commissioner, alright,’ Li said. ‘He’s just not Cao Xu.’

Li stood on the edge of the concourse and looked at the clock on the west tower. It was six minutes past seven, and the eastern sky was yellow beneath the deep blue of the vanishing night. He shivered, more from fatigue than the cold. He was well wrapped up against that, with his long coat and thick red scarf. He wore a pair of soft leather gloves and a dark blue, soft peaked cap. His breath billowed around him in the chill of the early morning breeze. There were hundreds of people criss-crossing the vast paved square in front of Beijing Railway Station, all of them insulated against the winter air that swept into the city from the icy plains of the Gobi desert. The last breath of autumn before winter set in.

Li seemed to be the only person there standing still. A tall, dark figure surrounded by animation. Anonymous creatures hurrying, heads down, to the station or the metro, to the bus stops or taxi stands. They moved around him, like the currents of a river around a boulder, talking on their cellphones, or setting grim faces towards the day ahead. Women with the blue overalls and white face masks were already out with their brooms and shovels, clearing away the detritus of the crowd, raising dust to carry grit in the wind into sleepy eyes. Crowds of travellers, dark-skinned peasants up from the country, sat on the steps atop huge piles of tattered luggage, smoking and laughing and watching the early morning world go by.

Li felt a tap on his arm and found Wu standing there, looking as bad as he felt, if not worse. His hair was unkempt and whipping about his head in the wind, his face pallid and puffy. His moustache seemed even more sparse that usual. Li had phoned him shortly after 4a.m. to ask him a favour, and heard a woman’s voice in the background. Wu had not sounded too pleased to hear from him. But here he was at the crack of dawn, as arranged, clutching a dog-eared folder. He could have had little more sleep than Li. The nicotine on his fingers seemed more pronounced than usual, and Li surmised that he had spent most of the rest of the night with a cigarette in his hand.

‘What did you get?’ Li said.

‘Everything you wanted.’

‘And it’s him?’

Wu nodded. ‘Yep. Born in Taiyuan City in 1948 and raised in an orphanage in the southern suburbs. It’s all in there.’ He thrust the folder at Li. ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Deputy Commissioner Cao Xu but were afraid to ask.’

‘Where did you get it?’

Wu grinned. ‘Off the internet mostly. The ministry’s own website.’ And then his smile faded. ‘And the police net. His registration records. If anyone cared to check, they’d know I was in there. So you’d better get this guy or I’ll be in as much trouble as you.’

‘I’ll get him,’ Li said grimly. He was no longer fighting a phantom, some elusive, faceless enemy. He knew his man. And the playing field had just levelled off.

‘Why do you have to go to Taiyuan City?’ Wu asked. ‘Haven’t you got enough already?’

Li shook his head. ‘In the normal course of events I would go straight to Commissioner Zhu. But Cao’s done such a good job of discrediting me I’m going to need better proof than a handful of graphs. There are still too many questions I don’t have the answers to.’

‘And you think you’ll find them in Taiyuan?’

‘I have no idea. But it seems like the best place to start. At the beginning.’

Li was about to turn away towards the ticket hall when Wu put a hand on his arm. ‘Something else you should know, Chief.’ Li turned back. ‘We finally made contact with that guy, Thomas Dowman, the one who wrote the Jack the Ripper book. Apparently he had dinner a couple of times with Deputy Cao and his wife when he was here for that legal exchange a couple of years ago. He says Cao was real pally and kept in touch with him by e-mail.’ He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and cupped his hands around it as he lit it. Smoke whipped away from his mouth on the breeze. ‘Dowman sent him an advance copy of the Chinese translation of the book eight weeks ago.’

* * *

As the train puffed slowly away from the industrial southern fringes of the Chinese capital, a pretty girl in a red jacket checked his ticket and gave him a plastic token in return. Li took a small chrome flask from his satchel and emptied into it a sachet of wiry, dry green tea leaves. He leaned down to take out the big flask from below the table at the window and pour boiling water from it into his own. Then he screwed the top back on the smaller one and set it aside to let it infuse.

There were two other passengers in his soft class compartment. Both looked like businessmen, in dark suits and plain ties. To Li’s relief, neither of them seemed anxious to indulge in conversation. One had his face buried in a newspaper, and the other was asleep before they left the city. Li opened Wu’s folder and settled down to read all about Deputy Beijing Police Commissioner Cao Xu.

The second in command of the Beijing force had come from humble origins, abandoned by an elderly widowed aunt following the death of his parents in an agricultural accident. He had been two years old then. His aunt had been childless, and he was without family. The authorities had placed him in the care of a state orphanage.

He never graduated from school, being inducted, as many of his generation were, into the ranks of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s teenage missionaries of ideological madness travelled all over China during those years of chaos and persecution. Cao had been no different from the rest, spending several years in various southern provinces before coming to Beijing to join the cheering throngs in Tiananmen Square where Mao would make regular appearances, urging them to greater efforts in rooting out the enemies of the people. But then Mao, and subsequently the Gang of Four, had passed into history, and China returned from the brink to start reinventing itself. Like everyone else, Cao shrugged off those years and started over. He sat and passed the necessary exams to gain entry into the University of Public Security, where Li himself was later trained. When he graduated, he married Tie Ning, a girl he had met during his Red Guard years. Their first child had died aged three, and then Ning had belatedly given birth to a baby boy, now a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Li unscrewed the cap of his flask and saw that the tea leaves had absorbed enough water to become fleshy and heavy and sink to the bottom. He took a sip and wondered when the man known as Cao Xu had stepped into those shoes. Sometime between the orphanage and the university, he figured. It had to have been at some point during the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, when almost every facet of a once civilised society had been broken down, and the bureaucracy which had been the glue holding China together for thousands of years had all but disintegrated. Li turned back to the printouts.

Cao had risen quickly through the ranks in the Criminal Investigation Department, before being assigned as a detective to the Section One serious crime squad. Li was struck, as he read, by how similar their career paths had been, Cao blazing a trail ahead of him. He was more than fifteen years Li’s senior, but then Li had been a teenager when he enrolled at the Public Security University. Cao had been well into his twenties. So Li had followed not too distantly in his wake.

Like Li, Cao had become Deputy Section Chief, before taking over as head of the department. He had achieved striking success in a rapidly changing city. The very nature of crime and criminals in the People’s Republic was morphing into something quite different then. As economic change swept in, unemployment grew, and crime festered among the increasingly large floating population of itinerant workers travelling around the country looking for work. Cao had introduced changes in policing, modernising the approach of investigators, leading the section to greater reliance on science and technology. He had been a great administrator, politically aware, and a Party member. It was only ever a matter of time before he climbed higher up the promotion ladder.