Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

‘And he knew about Monkey and Zero and Pigsy as well?’

‘Of course. We spoke several times about which of us would be next.’

The megaphone arrived at the door. ‘Only six people at a time, please. Six at a time. This is traditional siheyuan home. Ve-ery small inside. Ve-ery small.’ He glared at Li and Margaret.

Li said to Pauper, ‘We have an address for Birdie in Dengshikou Street. Does he still live there?’

She nodded. ‘But you won’t find him there now. He has a stall at the Guanyuan bird market. That is where his life is. Where it has always been. With his birds.’

As Li and Margaret pushed out, the tour group was pushing in, chattering excitedly at the prurient prospect of invading an old lady’s privacy.

Li manoeuvred his Jeep slowly west through the traffic. Beneath the sprinkling of shade cast by the trees, bicycles weaved precariously in and out of narrow lanes, overtaking tricycle carts, avoiding buses and taxis. The sidewalks were alive with activity in this busy shopping quarter, stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables and great baskets of chestnuts outside shops whose windows were crammed with computers and hi-fis and DVD players. In the hazy distance, they could see the flyover at the junction with the second ring road. Horns peeped and blasted, not so much in anger as frustration. Li leaned on his wheel, his mouth set in a grim line. Soon, he thought, Beijing would slip into permanent gridlock and bicycles would become fashionable again, not just as the fastest, but as the only way of getting around.

‘Do you want to tell me about the nickname?’ Margaret’s voice broke into his thoughts, and he immediately detected the hint of accusation in it.

‘You’ll read all about it in the statements we took at the school,’ he said. And, in a voice laden with meaning, added, ‘When you were in Xi’an.’

He heard her sigh, but kept his eyes on the traffic ahead. ‘I’ll probably get around to reading them sometime,’ she said in that acid tone that was so familiar to him. ‘Maybe next year, or the year after. But right now it might save time if you just told me.’

He shrugged. ‘Like Pauper said, Yuan’s nickname was Cat, not Digger.’

‘And anyone who knew him at school would know that?’

He nodded. ‘Which kind of punches a hole in your theory about his killer being one of the remaining Red Guards.’ He turned to look at her, but she was frowning into the middle distance, lost in thought.

‘It’s looking less and less likely anyway,’ she said. ‘One of them’s dead, the other’s blind. That just leaves Birdie. And he would know Yuan’s nickname. Unless …’

‘What?’

‘Unless he deliberately used another name to confuse the police.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Li said.

‘Why not?’

‘You would have to be pretty smart to think of something like that. From all accounts Birdie would have trouble getting his IQ up to room temperature.’

‘So why are we going to see him?’ But before he could respond, she answered for herself. ‘No, don’t tell me, I know. “Because Chinese police work requires meticulous attention to detail.”’ She sighed again and looked at the traffic ahead of them. It was at a standstill. ‘Chinese police work also requires great patience,’ she said. ‘Since it takes so goddamn long just to get from A to B.’

But Li’s patience had already run out. He opened the window and slapped a flashing red light on the roof, flicked on his siren and squeezed across the line of on-coming traffic into a narrow lane. He pulled the Jeep in beside a railing and jumped out. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll walk the rest. It’s not far.’

A hundred yards down, the lane was crowded with people buying tropical fish from roadside vendors. Jars of exotic marine life were piled on stalls and carts, plastic trays filled with terrapins and tortoises laid out along the sidewalk. An old lady was selling goldfish in water-filled plastic bags hung from the handlebars of her bicycle. They passed a long, corrugated shed stacked from floor to ceiling with tanks full of brilliantly coloured fish fighting for space in green, bubbling water. Margaret had never seen so many fish. There was an ocean’s worth. Whole shops were devoted to selling accessories — tanks, stands, lighting, feed. The shed and stalls and shops were jammed with customers. Feng shui was back in fashion. Fish were in. Business was good.

They turned west, leaving the fish market behind, past demolition work behind high hordings, then south again at Chegongzhuang Subway Station. On South Xizhimen Street, on the sidewalk beyond the tree-lined cycle lane, they saw the first clutches of old men gathered around their birdcages. Bicycles parked by the hundred lined the sidewalk on either side of the entrance to the market. Men with birds of prey tethered to the handlebars of their bicycles showed off new, brilliantly coloured purchases in bamboo cages. Budgerigars, canaries, hawks, parakeets. The collective sound of ten thousand birds drowned out even the roar of traffic on the second ring road.

Li and Margaret turned under a red banner into a covered courtyard stacked high with thousands of cages filled with the most extraordinary dazzle of coloured birds. Yellow, green, vermilion, black with yellow flashes. Old men and young boys bargained noisily with loquacious venders selling everything from kittens and hamsters to grasshoppers caged in tiny bamboo mesh balls. A bald man in a blue shirt and grey waistcoat stood behind a counter laden with a hundred different tobaccos, fine-rolled, rough shredded, black, yellow, green. Great bundles of whole dried leaf hung from the wall behind him between racks of rough carved wooden pipes with curling stems. Margaret was wide-eyed. As with so many things in China, she had never seen anything like it before.

Li stopped at an antiques stall sandwiched between rows of hanging cages and had to raise his voice almost to a shout to ask an old woman where they could find Birdie. She pointed towards a stall at the bottom of the row but said, ‘You won’t find him there now. Only in the mornings. At this time of day he’ll be in Purple Bamboo Park.’

*

It took them another half-hour to get to Purple Bamboo Park through late afternoon traffic that was gathering itself for the rush hour frenzy. Margaret recognised the entrance to the park, with its tiers of curling bamboo roofs, topiary elephants and incongruous European mannequins standing amidst a profusion of flowers. She had passed it daily, on the cycle from the Friendship Hotel to the People’s University of Public Security when she first arrived in Beijing.

At the gate Li spoke to the ticket collector who knew Birdie well. He came every day, she said. Bicycles were not normally allowed in the park, but his tricycle was a carrier for the birdcages that he piled upon it, one tied to the other, or hung from the handlebars. The birds were his constant and only companions, so they let him in with his tricycle, and he wheeled it to a cool bamboo pavilion east of the lake where he practised wu shu .

Li and Margaret walked in silence through the gloomy green shade of the early evening, through thick groves of the purple bamboo that gave the park its name. Beyond the weeping willows at the far side of the lake the sky glowed pink as the day slipped slowly towards night. They turned off the main thoroughfare and followed a narrow path that curved up under leaning pine trees to an open pavilion overlooking a brackish brown pond. A dozen cages filled with chattering, singing birds, hung from a bamboo roof supported on stout, lacquered posts. Beneath it, a man in black pyjamas and canvas slippers brought his silver sword arcing through the gloom to pierce and slash the thick, warm evening air in the ancient Chinese sword art of wu shu . He was tall and gaunt, with thin wisps of fine dark hair, and a straggling beard that clung precariously to his sunken cheeks and swept to a point at the end of his chin.