Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Mei Yuan was busy preparing two jian bings for a couple of schoolgirls as Li drew up his bike. It gave him the chance to watch her as she worked the hotplate inside the small glass house with its pitched red roof that perched on the rear of her extended tricycle. Her dark hair was drawn back in its customary bun, her smooth-skinned face a little more lined and showing more strain than usual. She grinned when she saw him, cheeks dimpling, and the life immediately returned to her lovely, dark, slanted eyes. She had, he knew, a soft spot for him. There was an unspoken empathy between them. In some very small way he filled the space left by the son she had lost, and she the hole in his life left by the death of his mother — both victims of the Cultural Revolution. Neither made demands on the other. It was just something that had grown quietly.

She poured some pancake mix on to her hotplate and watched it sizzle and bubble before breaking an egg on to it. He could barely resist the temptation to give her a hug. The previous week she had been missing from her corner for a few days, and finally he had gone to her home to find out why. He had found her in bed, sick and alone. One of the new breed of self-employed, she had no work unit to look after her welfare. He had cooked her a meal himself that night, and paid for a girl to go in every day to feed her and keep the house clean. The previous evening she had told him she would be back at her usual corner today, even although he felt she was not completely recovered. And here she was, pale and strained, and fighting to kick-start her life again.

She flipped the pancake over, smeared it with hoisin and chilli, and sprinkled it with chopped spring onion and coriander, before breaking a square of deep-fried whipped egg white into its centre, folding it in half and in half again, and then handing it, wrapped in brown paper, to the second schoolgirl. ‘Two yuan,’ she said, then turned beaming to Li. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes, I have eaten.’ He made the traditional response to the Beijing greeting, then added, ‘I’m sorry I missed breakfast. Work.’

‘That’s no excuse,’ she chided him. ‘A big lad like you needs feeding.’ She began another jian bing . ‘I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding me.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you don’t have an answer to the last riddle I set you?’

He frowned. ‘When did you set me a riddle?’

‘Before I got sick.’

‘Oh,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I don’t remember it.’

‘How very convenient,’ she said. ‘I’ll remind you.’

‘I thought you might.’

She grinned. ‘If a man walks in a straight line without turning his head, how can he continue to see everything he has walked past? And there are no mirrors involved.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Li said. ‘I remember now. It was too easy.’

‘Oh? So tell me.’

Li shrugged. ‘He’s walking backwards, of course.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Yes, it was too easy, wasn’t it?’ She finished the jian bing and handed it to him. He bit into its spicy, savoury softness and drew out a two-yuan note. She pushed his hand away. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

‘I’m not being silly,’ he insisted, and reached beyond her to drop the note in her tin. ‘If your house was burgled and I was sent to investigate, would you phone my bosses and say, “It’s all right, you don’t need to pay him for this investigation, I know him”?’

She couldn’t resist a smile. ‘Is this a riddle for me?’

‘No, it’s not. I don’t have one today. You didn’t give me enough time to prepare.’

‘OK,’ she said, ‘I’ve got another one for you, then. Much harder this time.’ He nodded, and continued stuffing jian bing into his mouth. ‘Three men check into a hotel. They want to share a room, and the receptionist charges them thirty yuan.’

‘That’s a cheap hotel room,’ he cut in.

‘Depends what kind of hotel,’ she said. ‘Anyway, for the purposes of the riddle it’s thirty yuan and they pay ten yuan each.’

‘OK.’

‘So, after they’ve gone up to their room she realises she should only have charged them twenty-five yuan.’

‘This hotel gets cheaper and cheaper.’

She ignored him. ‘She calls the bellboy, explains the situation, and gives him five yuan to take up to the room to pay them back. On the way up, the bellboy figures it’s going to be hard for these guys to split five yuan three ways. So he decides to give them only three — one each — and keep the remaining two for himself.’

‘Dishonesty,’ said Li, shaking his head sadly. ‘This is what I have to deal with every day.’

‘The question is,’ she ignored him again. ‘If each of the three men got one yuan back, that means they only paid nine yuan each. A total of twenty-seven yuan. The bellboy kept two to himself. That makes twenty-nine yuan. What happened to the other yuan?’

Li stopped chewing for a moment as he did a quick calculation. Then he frowned. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he said. Then, ‘But that’s not possible.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Therein lies the riddle.’

He did the calculation again and shook his head. ‘I’m going to have to think about this. Obviously it’s something really simple.’

‘Obviously.’ She delved into the bag hanging from her bicycle. ‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. I brought you this. I thought you might be interested to read it.’ She took out a battered, dark blue, hardcover book. ‘ Redgauntlet by Sir Walter Scott.’

‘I know the name. I think my uncle might have had some of his books. Who is he?’

‘Was. He was a very famous Scottish writer. I saw the movie Braveheart recently, about the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace. It made me interested in the country. So I’ve been reading Sir Walter Scott. I think you might enjoy him.’

Li took the book. ‘Thanks, Mei Yuan. It might be a while before I can get it back to you. I’m pretty much up to the neck in a case just now.’

‘That’s all right. Whenever,’ she said. ‘What a friend has is never lost.’

Some people came for jian bings and she turned to cook them, and Li stood silently watching the traffic, reflecting on the tragedy of a dozen years of madness that had stolen the life of a clever, educated woman, and cast her eventually on to the streets to make a living cooking savoury pancakes. But by the time Mei Yuan had finished and turned back, his minded had drifted again to Margaret and the encounter he could not avoid. He came out of his reverie to find her watching him.

‘What’s on your mind, Li Yan?’ she asked.

How could he explain it to her? How could he even begin to explain it? He said, ‘What would you do if your heart said one thing and your superiors another?’

‘Is this a riddle?’

‘No, it’s a question.’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘This is a conflict between … what … love and loyalty?’

‘I suppose it’s something like that, though not quite that simple.’

‘If only everything in life was as simple as the solution to a riddle,’ she said, and touched his arm. ‘Is there no way to accommodate both? It is better to walk on two legs.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t.’

Li walked past the games court, cracked concrete baking behind a chickenwire fence. A group of students was playing volleyball, shouting and laughing. Li felt envious of their youth, free from the concerns of the real world that lay beyond the campus. He had been a student here himself once. He knew how it felt, and he experienced a sense of loss at an innocence long gone.