Peter May - The Runner

She dried her remaining tears and thanked God that the ice-cold wind would explain her red-rimmed watering eyes and blotchy cheeks. She sucked in a lungful of air and headed off, more carefully this time, towards the corner where Mei Yuan plied her trade. As she approached it, she saw that there was a large crowd gathered around the stall. She eased herself through the figures grouped on the sidewalk and realised that it was a queue. Mei Yuan hardly ever did this kind of business. And then Margaret saw why. Mei Yuan was standing a pace or two back from the hotplate, supervising, as Mrs. Campbell made the jian bing with an expertise Margaret found hard to believe. Even harder to believe was the sight of her mother in a blue jacket and trousers beneath a large chequered apron, with a scarf tied around her head. The Chinese were jostling to be first in line, eager to be served by this foreign devil making their favourite Beijing pancake.

Mrs. Campbell glanced up as she handed a jian bing to a smiling Chinese and accepted a five yuan note. She caught sight of Margaret as she handed over the change. ‘You’ll have to take your place in the line,’ she said. ‘You’ll get no favours here just because you’re another da bidze .’ And her face broke into a wide grin. Margaret was struck by just now natural and unselfconscious the smile was. She was not used to seeing her mother this happy. It was inexplicable.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘Look at the line. That’s why. Mei Yuan says we’re doing ten times her normal business. And anyway, it’s easy, and it’s fun.’ The queue, meantime, had grown bigger as more Chinese gathered around to watch this exchange between the two foreign women. Mrs. Campbell looked at the first in line. She was a middle-aged woman warmly wrapped in her winter woollies, eyes wide in wonder. ‘ Ni hau ,’ Mrs. Campbell said. ‘ Yi? Er? ’

‘ Yi ,’ the woman said timidly, holding up one finger, and the crowd laughed and clapped.

Margaret looked at a smiling Mei Yuan. ‘When did my mother learn to speak Chinese?’ she asked.

‘Oh, we had a small lesson this morning,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘She can say hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome, and count from one to ten. She also makes very good jian bing .’ Then a slight frown of concern clouded her happiness. She inclined her head a little and peered at Margaret. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Margaret said quickly, remembering that she wasn’t. ‘I was just coming to collect my mother to take her home.’

‘I’ll get a taxi back later,’ Mrs. Campbell said without looking up from her jian bing . ‘Must make hay while the sun shines.’

Mei Yuan was still looking oddly at Margaret. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Of course,’ Margaret said, self-consciously. She knew her face was a mess, and she knew that Mei Yuan knew there was something wrong. ‘Look, I have to go. I’ll see you later, Mom.’

She knew she should be happy at this unexpected change in her mother, a woman who had stood on her dignity all her life, who never ventured out with a hair out of place or her make-up incomplete. And here she was, dressed like a Chinese peasant selling hot pancakes from a street stall. Freed somehow from the constraints of her own self-image. Free, for the first time that Margaret could remember, to be unreservedly happy. Perhaps playing at being someone else allowed her to be truly herself for the first time in her life. Mei Yuan was having a profound effect on her.

But Margaret was unable to break free from the constraints of her own unhappiness, and as she slipped into the back seat of a taxi on Ghost Street, she was overwhelmed again by a sense of self-pity.

The apartment was strangely empty without her mother. It was amazing how quickly you could get used to another presence in your home. Even one that was unwelcome. Margaret shrugged off her coat, kicked off her boots and eased herself onto the sofa. She felt her baby kicking inside her, and it set her heart fluttering with both fear and anticipation of a future which had been thrown into complete confusion in the space of a couple of hours. She didn’t want to think about it. And so she stretched out on the sofa and found herself looking out of an upside down window at the snow falling thick and fast. She closed her eyes, and saw the face of the bearded westerner in the photograph on Li’s desk, almost immediately followed by a certain knowledge of who he was. She sat bolt upright, heart pounding. Fleischer. Hans. John of the Flesh. The mental translation she had done of his name at the time. Doctor. Shit!

Immediately she crossed to her little gate-leg table and lifted one of the leaves. She set her laptop on it and plugged it in, and while it booted up got down on her hands and knees to unplug the telephone and replace it with the modern cable from her computer. She drew in a chair and dialled up her Internet server. This was good, she thought. Something else to fill her mind. Something, anything to think about, rather than what she was going to do at the betrothal meeting tonight.

She had first heard of Doctor Hans Fleischer during her trip to Germany in the late nineties to give evidence on behalf of her dead client, Gertrude Klimt. The prosecutors had brought charges against many of the doctors in the former East German state who had been responsible for feeding drugs to young athletes. But the one they most wanted, the biggest fish of all, had somehow swum through their net. Doctor Fleischer had simply disappeared. His photograph had been in all the German papers; old newsreel of him at the trackside during Olympic competition in the eighties had played endlessly on German newscasts. There were various rumours. He had gone to South America. South Africa. Australia. China. But no one knew for certain, and the good doctor had successfully avoided his day in court, and a certain prison term.

Margaret had set Google as both her home page and her search engine. She tapped in ‘Dr. Hans Fleischer’ and hit the return key. After a few seconds her screen was filled with links to dozens of pieces of information on Fleischer harvested from around the Internet. Mostly newspaper and magazine articles, transcripts of television documentaries, official documents copied on to the net by activists. Almost all in German. Margaret scrolled through the list until she hit a link to a piece on him carried by Time magazine in 1998. She clicked on the link and up came the text of the original story. Half a dozen photographs that went with it confirmed Margaret’s identification. He had sported a beard then, too. Close-cropped, unlike his hair, not quite as silver in those days, shot through with a few streaks of darker colour. He had not even bothered to try to disguise himself. Perhaps he had assumed that he would be safe in China, anonymous.

The article traced Fleischer’s career from a brilliant double degree in sports medicine and genetics at the University of Potsdam, to his meteoric rise through the ranks at the state-owned pharmaceutical giant, Nitsche Laboratories, to become its head of research, aged only twenty-six. The next five years were something of a mystery that not even Time had been able to unravel. He had simply disappeared from sight, his career at Nitsche mysteriously cut short. There was speculation that he had spent those missing years somewhere in the Soviet Union, but that is all it ever was. Speculation.

Then in 1970 he had turned up again in the unlikely role of Senior Physician with the East German Sport Club, SC Dynamo Berlin. At this point, the Time piece fast-forwarded to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the German Democratic Republic. The files of the East German secret police, the Stasi, fell into the hands of the press. And there, the true role of Doctor Fleischer was revealed for the first time. An agent of the Stasi, codenamed ‘Schwartz’, Fleischer had been instrumental in establishing and controlling the systematic state-sponsored doping of GDR athletes for nearly two decades.