Peter May - The Runner

‘Careful, careful,’ Mei Yuan cautioned. ‘Remember the baby.’ Xinxin stood back for a moment and looked at the swelling of Margaret’s belly with a kind of wonder. Then she said, ‘You’ll still love me after you have your baby, won’t you, Magret?’

‘Of course,’ Margaret said, and kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll always love you, Xinxin.’

Xinxin grinned, and then noticed Mrs. Campbell. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This is my mommy,’ Margaret said.

Xinxin looked at her in astonishment. ‘You are Magret’s mommy?’

‘Yes,’ Mrs. Campbell said, and Margaret saw that her eyes were alive for the first time since she had arrived. ‘What’s your name?’

‘My name’s Xinxin, and I’m eight years old.’ And she turned to Xiao Ling. ‘And this is my mommy. Xiao Ling. But she doesn’t speak any English.’

Mei Yuan took over then and made all the introductions in Chinese and English. Mrs. Campbell remained seated after Margaret explained that she had injured her leg in a fall. The last to be formally introduced were Margaret and Li’s father. Margaret shook the hand which he offered limply, and searched for some sign of Li in his eyes. But she saw nothing there. His old man’s face was a blank, and he turned away to ease himself into a seat and turn a disconcertingly unblinking gaze on Margaret’s mother.

Xinxin was oblivious to any of the tensions that underlay relations among this odd gathering of strangers and said to Mrs. Campbell, ‘What’s your name, Magret’s mommy?’

‘Mrs. Campbell.’

Xinxin laughed and laughed. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Your real name. Your given name.’

Mrs. Campbell seemed faintly embarrassed. ‘Actually, it’s Jean.’

‘Jean,’ Xinxin repeated, delighted. ‘That’s a nice name. Can I sit beside you, Jean?’

The elderly American flushed with unexpected pleasure. ‘Of course, Xinxin,’ she said, trying very hard to pronounce the name correctly.

And Xinxin climbed up on the bench beside her and sat down, her feet not touching the floor. She took Mrs. Campbell’s hand quite unselfconsciously and said, ‘I like Magret’s mommy.’ And in Chinese to Li’s father, ‘Do you like Jean, too, Grandad?’

And Margaret saw him smile for the first time, although she had no idea what was said in the exchange between grandfather and grandchild. ‘Sure I do, little one. Sure I do.’

And then they all sat smiling at each other in awkward silence. Margaret glanced at her watch. ‘Well, the only thing missing is Li Yan. As usual. I hope he’s not too late.’

The taxi dropped Li on the edge of a wide slash of waste ground. There were no lights, the road here was pitted and broken, and the driver refused to take his car any further. Looking back, Li could still see the tall streetlights on the Fourth Ring Road, catching in their beams the snow that drove horizontally across the carriageway. He could only just hear the distant roar of the traffic above the whining of the wind. Somehow, somewhere, the driver had taken a wrong turn. Li could see the lights of the tower blocks where Dai Lili lived, but they were on the other side of this bleak, open stretch of ground where hutongs and siheyuans , once home to thousands, had been razed to the ground. It was easier to walk across it than have the driver go round again to try to find the right road.

He watched the taillights of the taxi recede towards the Ring Road, and pulled up his collar against the snow and the wind to make his way across the wasteland that stretched in darkness before him. It was harder than he had imagined. The tracks left by great heavy treaded tyres churning wet earth in the Fall had frozen solid and made it difficult to negotiate. Frozen puddles had disappeared beneath the inch of snow that now lay across the earth, making it slippery and even more treacherous.

He knew that he was already late for the betrothal. But he had come this far, and once he got to the apartment he would call on his cellphone to say he would be another hour. He slipped and fell and hit the ground with a crack. He cursed and sat for a moment in the snow nursing a painful elbow, before getting back to his feet and pushing on again towards the distant towers, cursing his luck and his situation. It was another fifteen minutes before the lights of the courtyard in front of the first tower picked out the cars that were parked there, and threw into shadow the bicycles that sheltered under corrugated iron. He was almost there.

A voice came out of the darkness to his left, low, sing-song and sinister. ‘What do we have here?’

‘Someone’s lost his way.’ Another voice from behind.

‘Lost your way, big man?’ Yet another voice, off to his right this time. ‘We’ll set you on your way. For a price.’

‘Better hope you got a nice fat wallet, big man. Or you could be a big dead man.’ The first voice again.

Li froze and peered into the darkness, and gradually he saw the shadows of three figures emerging from the driving snow, converging on him from three sides. He saw the glint of a blade. He fumbled quickly in his pocket for the penlight he kept on his keyring, and turned its pencil-thin beam on the face of the nearest figure. It was a young man, only seventeen or eighteen, and he raised a hand instinctively to cover his face. Snowflakes flashed through the length of the beam.

‘You boys had better hope you can run fucking fast,’ Li said, realising he was shouting, and surprised by the strength of his own voice.

‘What are you talking about, shit-for-brains?’ It was the first voice again. Li swung the torch towards him and he stood brazenly, caught in its light.

‘I’m a cop, you stupid little fuck. And if I catch you you’re going to spend the next fifteen years re-educating yourself through labour.’

‘Yeh, sure.’

Li pulled out his ID, holding it up and turning the penlight to illuminate it. ‘You want to come closer for a better look?’

There was a long, silent stand-off in which some unspoken message must have passed between the muggers, because almost without Li realising it they were gone, slipping off into the night as anonymously as they had arrived. He peered through the driving snow but could see nothing, and he felt the tension in his chest subsiding, and the air rushing back into his lungs, stinging and painful. God only knew how close he had been to a knife slipped between the ribs. Nice place to live, he thought.

Dai Lili’s apartment was on the seventh floor. The elevator was not working, and Li was grateful that the runner had not lived twenty storeys up. He unlocked the stairgate and climbed wearily up seven flights of stairs. Every landing was piled with garbage, and there were usually three or four bicycles chained together on each. A smell of old cabbage and urine permeated the whole building. Green paint peeled off damp walls, and vandals had scrawled obscenities in all the stairwells. Most of the doorways had padlocked steel grilles for additional security.

Li could not help but make a comparison with the homes of the other athletes he had visited in the last few days. There was none. They were at opposite ends of the social and financial spectrum. Here lived the poor of Beijing, rehoused in decrepit tower blocks thrown up to replace the communities which the municipal planners had seen fit to demolish. They had been just as poor then, but the traditional Chinese values of family and community had survived a thousand years of poverty, and people had felt safe, a sense of belonging. Overnight their security, their communities and their values, had been destroyed. And this was the result.

The security gate on Dai Lili’s door was firmly locked, but the light-bulbs in the hallway had been stolen and it took Li several minutes, fumbling in the dark with his penlight, to find the right key and unlock it. When, finally, he got the door itself open, he stepped into another world. The foul odours which had accompanied him on his climb were absent from the cool, sterile atmosphere of the apartment. He hurriedly closed the door to keep the foul stuff out, and found the light switch. The apartment was small. Two rooms, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet. Naked floorboards had been sanded and varnished a pale gold. The walls were painted cream and unadorned with pictures or hangings. There was little or no furniture. A bed and a small desk in one room. Nothing in the other except for a padded grey mat on the floor, about two meters square. A series of diagrams had been pinned to one wall illustrating a sequence of exercises designed to tone every muscle group in the body. Li could see the impressions in the mat where Lili must have performed her last set of exercises. But there was nothing to indicate when that might have been.