Peter May - The Runner

Li emptied his second glass and stood up. There was nothing for him to say. No comfort he could give. He felt the mao tai burning all the way down to his stomach. ‘I’ll go and check on progress,’ he said. He wanted this over as soon as possible.

Beyond the screens, half a dozen men with pickaxes were breaking up the last of the earth around the coffin. It had been buried in only about three feet of soil, and the ground was frozen most of the way down. Li was sure there must be regulations covering burials like this, but if there were, nobody knew them. And if they did, they ignored them. The coffin itself was a crude, home-made box with a heavy lid, well nailed down. It took the officers who had uncovered the coffin several minutes to prise all the nails loose and remove the lid. The body inside was wrapped in a white blanket. Li moved closer for a better look as the pathologist stepped down into the grave to remove the wrapping.

Xing Da lay naked, with his hands crossed over his chest. His skin was a bloodless blue-white in the light of the arc lamps, and apart from the horrific chest and head injuries received in the crash, he looked as if he had lain down there the day before and simply gone to sleep. There was little or no sign of decay. The temperatures had plummeted just a day or two after he was buried, and he was fresher than if he had been kept in the chiller at the morgue.

He was a big man, with a well-developed upper chest and arms, and thick, sturdy legs. A sprinter. Built for power. The shadow of his hair lay across his scalp where it had been shaved off, shocking in its absence, and there was something like the hint of a smile on his face. As if he were mocking them. They had so many questions. And he had all the answers. Only, he could never tell them. Not now. Not ever.

Li sat in the large outer office, perched uncomfortably on the edge of a very low settee which had almost swallowed him when he first sat in it. A young secretary at a computer studiously ignored him, and a grey-uniformed security guard watched him with interest from the other side of a glass door. From the window, Li saw the sun, still low in the sky, reflecting on the side of a glass skyscraper and casting long shadows on the city streets twenty-three storeys below. He glanced at his watch for the umpteenth time. He had been kept waiting nearly half an hour.

It was another five minutes before the phone rang and the secretary waved him towards the door of the inner office. ‘You can go in now.’ Li stood up and tugged the wrinkles out of his best suit. He pulled uncomfortably at the knot of his tie. It felt as if it were strangling him. Li never wore a tie. He knocked tentatively on the door, and at the behest of a voice beyond it, stepped into the inner office.

It was a large office with a huge desk set in front of floor-to-ceiling windows which opened on to a spectacular view of the city looking west. Li could see, in sharp outline against the distant sky, the Tianshou mountains where, at midnight the night before, they had pulled the body of Xing Da from the ground. The walls were covered with photographs of security people in various uniforms and at various locations. To the right of the desk, male and female mannequins modelled the latest uniforms. The male wore a light-grey, short-sleeved shirt and trousers with a dark tie and beret. His epaulettes bore silver stars and bars. She wore a light-grey baseball cap, silver-braided and adorned with the badge of Beijing Security. Abnormally large breasts pushed out the folds of her short-sleeved blouse. She wore white gloves, a knee-length skirt and black boots.

Behind the desk, in a black leather executive chair that he wore like an oversized jacket, was a large man with sleek black hair brushed back from a brow like a cliff face. The wide smile that stretched his thick, pale lips, reduced sparkling eyes to gashes on either side of a broken nose. There was no doubting his genuine delight at seeing Li. He blew smoke into the air and said, ‘How the hell are you…what is it they call you now…Chief? I’ve been looking forward to this ever since we got your letter.’ He made no attempt to get up, just reclining himself further in his executive chair and waving Li to a rather modest seat on the other side of the desk. ‘Have a seat, Li.’

Li stood for a moment, hesitating. It occurred to him that he could just turn around and walk out now. Save himself the humiliation. But somehow he knew that would just give Yi even more satisfaction. He sat down.

‘Cigarette?’ Yi held out a packet.

Li shook his head. ‘I’ve given up.’

Yi dropped the pack on the desk. ‘Why am I not surprised? You always were better than the rest of us. Stronger, smarter, faster. More will-power.’ He grinned. ‘So how are things at the Section?’

‘They’re good,’ Li said.

Yi raised an eyebrow. ‘So good that you want to pack it in and come work for Beijing Security?’ He leaned forward, frowning. ‘You know, I’ve been puzzling over that for days. You’re a big name, Li. Cracked a lot of high profile cases. The youngest detective ever to make Section Chief.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘And you want to give it all up?’

‘I have my reasons,’ Li said.

‘I’m sure you do. Just like I’m sure you had your reasons for kicking my ass out of the Section.’

‘You were a bad cop, Yi. I don’t like officers who’re on the take.’

‘You had no proof.’

‘If I’d had proof you wouldn’t be sitting here now. You’d be learning reform through labour. You should think yourself lucky.’

‘Lucky?’ His voice had raised its pitch, and his smile was a distant memory. ‘That you fucked up my career in the police? That I spent six months unemployed? You know my wife left me? Took the kids?’

‘Good for her.’

Yi glared at Li, both his fists clenched on the desk in front of him. Li half expected him to leap over it and attack him. And then suddenly Yi relaxed, and sat back again, the smile returning. ‘But then I made my own luck,’ he said. ‘Got in on the ground floor here at Beijing Security.’ It was a new joint venture between State and private enterprise to take over some of the security aspects of the old Public Security Bureaux. ‘Rising to the very top.’

‘Scum usually collects on the surface,’ Li said. He had known from the moment he set eyes on Yi there would be no job for him here. Not that he could ever have brought himself to work for the man. It was all a question now of which of them would lose face. And Yi was holding all the cards in that particular contest.

Yi’s smile didn’t waver. He said, ‘But I hold no grudges. After all, when someone of your experience and qualifications comes knocking, it would be a foolish man who would close the door on him without a second thought.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘Of course, you couldn’t expect to start on the twenty-third floor. You’d have to begin at the bottom and work your way up. You ever wondered what it’s like, Li, doing the night shift on the gate of some government building in the middle of December? I don’t have to wonder. I know. And you know what, I believe it’s an experience everyone should have. It prepares them better for management.’ He cocked his head to one side and looked at Li appraisingly. ‘You’d look good in uniform again.’ And he flicked his head towards the mannequins. ‘Pretty neat, huh?’

Li stood up. It was time to put an end to this. ‘I think you’re wasting my time, Yi.’

Yi tipped forward suddenly in his seat, the smile vanishing once again, eyes filled with hate. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s wasting my time. Soon as your application hit my desk I knew there was something weird about it. Why the hell would a man like you, at the peak of his career, suddenly throw it all away? So I made a few enquiries. Seems you finally got that pathologist bitch pregnant. And now you want to marry her?’ Yi shook his head. ‘And you thought for one minute that we might actually employ you? This is a security firm, Li. And a Chinese married to an American is a security risk. You’re unemployable in this business.’ And suddenly his face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Goodbye.’