Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Margaret threw her files on the bed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she put her arms around his waist and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss him lightly on the lips. ‘I didn’t want anything to spoil tonight for us.’

He smiled wanly. ‘It won’t, he said. And he bent to return her kiss, and slip his arms around her. ‘I think I could probably do with a drink first. Then I’ll show you Xi’an. And then we’ll eat.’

‘And then …?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Margaret. Let’s just wait and see.’

And she felt a huge surge of disappointment, and she cursed Li and his investigation. Whatever she did, whichever way she turned, somehow he always seemed to be there spoiling things for her. And now he had driven a wedge between her and Michael, brought home to him the reality of her job, confronted him with the death of a friend. As if, somehow, Li had planned it all, to ensure that her relationship with Michael stayed, as she had described it to him, platonic.

*

When they stepped out of the Japanese-owned Ana Chengbao Hotel it was dark, and Margaret looked in astonishment at the transformation of this dusty and undistinguished daytime city into a night-time place of light and life. The towering south gate, immediately facing them, and the crenellated city wall that ran off to east and west, were outlined in yellow neon, for all the world as if someone had taken a luminous yellow marker pen and drawn them against the night sky. Multicoloured lights illuminated the elegantly curled roofs of the ancient gate and the watchtowers that shimmered in the distant darkness.

Michael grinned. ‘A bit Disneyesque,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ And he took her by the hand and flagged down a taxi.

Their car followed the route of the great moat, which was separated from the wall by a park full of quiet walkways and peaceful pavilions completely encircling the city. Above it, for mile after mile, the crenellations of the wall were drawn yellow on black. The sidewalks of the streets outside, empty during daylight, had turned into endless open-air eateries. Row upon row of tables was laid out under the trees, lit by low-hanging red lamps strung from loops of electric cable. Braziers and barbecues burned and smoked in the dark, while people congregated in their thousands, families, friends, eating together beneath fleshy green leaves in the balmy autumn evening.

‘They are night people, the inhabitants of Xi’an,’ Michael said. ‘When the sun goes down this is an exciting city.’

‘Where are we going?’ Margaret asked.

‘To the Muslim Quarter.’ He smiled. ‘An experience not to be missed. I know a little place where we can get authentic Muslim cuisine.’

Margaret raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Muslims? In China? I thought religion was banned here?’

‘Ah,’ said Michael sagely. ‘You’ve been listening to the anti-Chinese propagandists back home. The God botherers. The truth is, in the last twenty years people have been free to worship whatever god they want. But, then, after the appalling religious persecution of the Cultural Revolution, it’s not really surprising that it’s taken a little longer for people to become open about it again.’

‘But is religion not a threat to the Communists?’ Margaret asked. ‘I mean, communism’s an atheist philosophy, isn’t it?’

‘The thing is, Margaret,’ Michael said, ‘Communism’s kind of like the state religion here. It has about fifty million members — the numbers go up and down when the corrupt ones get weeded out and shot, and the next batch of young urban technocrats sign up. But, you know, The Word according to Mao, or even Deng Xiaoping, is not what it used to be. Nowadays the Party’s more like a big club. People don’t join it because they’ve seen The Light. They join for the same reasons a businessman in Chicago signs up for the Rotary. To make contacts and connections. To get on in life.’

Margaret watched him talk, eyes twinkling, his voice animated by enthusiasm. He took pleasure in what he knew, in passing it on to others. She saw exactly why he was such a success on television, regardless of his subject.

A couple of whiskies had relaxed him after the shock of seeing the photographs on her bedroom floor. He had been genuinely shaken by the sight of things that Margaret viewed as routine. It made her wonder again if there was something wrong with her, if she had been desensitised by her job, made indifferent by years of exposure to the horrors of death in all its guises. But whatever effect her work might have had on her, she knew that she was not impervious to the emotional slaps in the face that life seemed constantly to deliver: a husband who had betrayed her and died bequeathing her all his guilt; a lover from an alien culture who would neither accept her fully into his life, nor make the transition to be accepted into hers.

She wondered if Michael would be any different. If she succumbed to those desires that pulled and taunted her, would she just end up being hurt again? And yet she felt so comfortable with him. Safe. There was something wonderfully reassuring in his hand holding hers in the back of the taxi. Here was someone taking care of her, guiding her gently through a strange and fascinating world. A world from whose dangers, she felt certain, she would be protected in his company. And after so many years of being the independent, hard-assed career woman, there was something deliciously appealing in the idea of simply delivering herself into his care.

They turned east now, through the west gate along Xi Dajie, and Margaret watched a whole family on a motorbike overtake them. A small boy nestled between the father and the front handlebars. A slightly bigger girl was sandwiched between the father and the mother who was riding pillion. Four of them on the one bike. Margaret was so taken aback by the sight, that it was several moments before she realised how rare it was to see a family of four in a country whose social structure had been so dislocated by the One-Child Policy.

Ahead of them, a huge floodlit building rose up into the night sky.

‘The Bell Tower,’ Michael said. He spoke to the driver and they pulled in at the edge of a large square, neatly manicured lawns crisscrossed by paths and walkways, a broad flight of steps leading down to the bright lights of an underground shopping centre. They got out and Michael paid the driver. Margaret looked around. At the far side, a great long restaurant built in traditional Chinese style, was traced against the sky in neon. The square itself was crowded, families out for an evening stroll, children playing on mini-dodgems on a concrete apron, people sitting on a wall by a pond reading newspapers and books by the light of an illuminated fountain. A woman tried to sell them a giant paper caterpillar that rippled across the concrete with unnerving realism at the tug of a length of string. But Michael just smiled and shook his head.

As he led Margaret across the square people openly gawped and called, ‘Hello,’ or, ‘So pleased to see you,’ in strange English intonations. They passed beneath the shadow of what Michael told her was the drum tower, and turned into a narrow covered alleyway lined on both sides by hawkers’ stalls filled with tourist junk and religious trinkets.

On the other side of the wall, to their left, Michael said, was the Great Mosque. Religion and commerce, it seemed, went hand in hand. They ran the gauntlet of traders trying to sell them everything from teapots to ornamental swords. Occasionally Michael would stop and speak to one of them. You could see the astonishment on their faces as he spoke in fluent Chinese, and whatever he said would invariably make them laugh.

The alleyway was crowded with shoppers and kids on bicycles, the occasional motorbike inching its way past, and soon they turned left, past the entrance to the mosque itself, and into the comparative quiet of a crumbling, dusty hutong .