Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

‘Michael Zimmerman’s The Art of War ,’ Jin said. ‘It starts screening in the United States next month.’

Li felt the skin on his face and neck tingling as it tightened, and in spite of the heat he shivered as if someone had just stepped on his grave. ‘What’s Michael Zimmerman got to do with this?’

Jin said, ‘He’s organising the exhibition. The Art of War, Inc. is his company.’

*

The twin towers of the China World Trade Centre, where Michael Zimmerman had his apartment on the twenty-second floor, towered over the east end of the city, reflecting the warm autumn sunlight. The head of residential security had carefully scrutinised the search warrant issued by the office of the Procurator General, before riding up in the elevator with Li, Wu, Qian and several uniformed officers. Service staff had confirmed that Michael had not spent the night in his apartment. But Li already knew that.

The security man unlocked the door and opened it on to a world of luxury beyond the experience, or even the wildest dreams, of most of Li’s officers. There was a vast expanse of thick-piled wall-to-wall carpet, a luxurious white three-piece suite, a beautiful beechwood dining suite with matching coffee tables and bureau. A huge colour television stood on a white semi-circular stand with a video recorder on the shelf below. There were video tapes piled on the floor all around it. Fine, framed prints hung on cream walls, and wall-to-ceiling windows looked out on spectacular city views. The windows were draped with tastefully patterned curtains that could be drawn, when required, on a world where hundreds of feet below, whole families lived in single rooms. One door stood ajar, leading to a Western brand-name fitted kitchen with every possible appliance and convenience. Another led to a fitted bathroom with a circular sunken bath and a separate shower cabinet. The taps were gold-plated. A master bedroom with fitted wardrobe and king-size bed had an en-suite dressing room.

The detectives stood looking around for several moments in awe. It was hard to believe that such luxury could exist cheek by jowl with the comparative poverty of the people who lived all around it. Li wondered what must go through the minds of those who cleaned and serviced these apartments, returning at the end of the day to crumbling siheyuan homes, or tiny apartments in state-built blocks where communal heating was not turned on until mid-November, when the frost was already lying thick on the sidewalks.

He turned to the security man and told him he could wait outside. When they were on their own, Li said to his officers, ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for, so we’ll look at everything. But go carefully, we’re on diplomatically sensitive turf here.’

A saxophone lay discarded on the bed. Rows of Italian suits and designer jeans hung in the wardrobe. There were more than a dozen pairs of shoes on the rail beneath them. Drawers were filled with name-labelled tee shirts and boxer shorts. The bathroom cabinet was well charged with brand-name soaps and shower gels: Yves St Laurent, Paco Rabane.

From the moment he had stepped into the apartment Li had been vaguely, almost subconsciously, aware of a low-pitched scent that hung in the air. It was very background, and it was not until he walked into the bathroom and it became stronger, rising above the scents of soaps and shampoos, that he became properly conscious of it. He tracked it down to a small, brown bottle with a screw cap that was squeezed into a corner of the bathroom cabinet. Li unscrewed the cap and sniffed the sweet, pungent smell of the essential oil it held. He looked at the label. Patchouli. He knew immediately it was what he had smelled in both of Yuan’s apartments. Very faint, barely registering. And he realised now that the strange sense of something familiar that had always haunted him around Zimmerman was that same scent of Patchouli. Never strong, but always there, somewhere just beyond consciousness. He cursed himself for not being aware of it before. While it had promoted an uneasiness somewhere at the back of his mind, it had never made the leap to the front of it.

But now he knew that Zimmerman had been in Yuan’s embassy apartment, and the one he had been renting secretly in Tuan Jie Hu Dongli. Probably on the night Yuan had been murdered. Something turned over inside him, and Li realised with a shock that there was a strong chance that Margaret could be in danger.

He went back into the main room as his officers sifted through Zimmerman’s personal belongings. Wu, sunglasses pushed back on his head, was examining the piles of videos stacked on the floor around the TV cabinet. ‘This guy must watch a hell of a lot of movies,’ he said. Li took one of the boxes from him and read the label.

‘They’re rushes,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ Wu looked at him uncomprehendingly.

‘VHS copies of the stuff Zimmerman’s been shooting out on location. Presumably he looks at it each day when he gets in at night.’

‘ If he gets in at night,’ Wu said with a raised eyebrow.

In spite of the fact that none of his detectives knew about the relationship between Margaret and Zimmerman, Li felt himself blushing.

But Wu didn’t notice. He was too concerned with trying to get one of the tapes to play. Finally he got a picture up on the screen of extras dressed as peasants, storming the square below the stele pavilion at Ding Ling, and Li recognised the setup he had witnessed out on location two days earlier. A big, red-bearded face beneath a baseball cap ballooned into shot. ‘OK, cut,’ said the face, and its owner ran a finger horizontally across his throat. The picture slewed haphazardly across the square before dropping to an out-of-focus shot of a piece of ground and then cutting to black.

Li didn’t know what he hoped to find here. He had no idea what Zimmerman was involved in, or to what extent. But he did not have high expectations of something incriminating simply dropping into his lap. He crossed to the bureau. A micro-hifi sat on top of it, and there were a dozen or more CDs on the shelf. He flipped idly through them, curious about Zimmerman’s taste in music. They were nearly all jazz, and a few classical collections. Verdi, Mozart, Bach. And, incongruously, one collection of sentimental love songs by Lionel Ritchie. He wondered what it was that had attracted Margaret to him. Li had taken an immediate and instinctive dislike to Zimmerman the first time they had met at the Sanwei tearoom. But then his view of him had been clouded by a jealousy he neither wanted nor could control. Now that Zimmerman was a suspect in both a murder investigation and an attempt to smuggle priceless artefacts out of the country, Li’s feelings towards him were coldly professional.

‘Hey, boss,’ Wu said. ‘Look at this.’ And he held up a tape. Li crossed to have a look at it. ‘Why do you think he’s got a security tape from Beijing University? What’s the Fourth Chamber?’

Li snatched the tape and examined it. It was a labelled tape from an internal video security system at the university. Written on it by hand were the words, Fourth Chamber , and it was dated September 14th . Li repeated the date aloud. ‘September fourteenth … Should that date mean something to us?’ Wu shrugged.

Qian said, ‘We found Professor Yue’s body on the fifteenth.’

Li handed the tape back to Wu. ‘Put it on,’ he said.

Qian drew the curtain on the window behind them to stop sunlight reflecting off the screen, and all the officers gathered around to watch. The picture flickered and jumped as a fuzzy black and white image came into focus. The lighting was poor, and it was difficult to tell what they were looking at. There was no soundtrack. There appeared to be rows of dark figures standing still in the background. But then almost immediately a moving figure came into shot, emerging from the bottom of the screen, from below the camera. It was the hunched figure of a man, staggering as he was pushed forward by a more erect figure following behind. As they reached almost centre screen, the second man forced the first one to turn and then pushed him to his knees.