Peter May - The Runner

Pioneering the use of the state-developed steroids, Oral-Turinabol and Testosterone-Depot, his initial success in developing a new breed of super athletes was startling. From a medal count of twenty at the 1972 Olympics, East German competitors doubled their medal tally to forty in just four years, in the process winning eleven out of the thirteen Olympic swimming events in 1976.

Most of the athletes had come to him as children, taken from their parents and trained and educated in a strictly controlled environment which included administering the little blue and pink pills on a daily basis. Pills which turned little girls into hulking, masculine, sex-driven winning machines, and little boys into growling, muscle-bound medal winners. Fleischer had always assured them that the pills were nothing more than vitamin supplements. He had been an austere father-figure whom the children had nicknamed Father Fleischer. But by the time they were old enough to realise that the pills they had been swallowing during all those years were more than just vitamins, the damage had already been done. Both to their psyches and their bodies. Many of them, like Gertrude Klimt, would later die of cancer. Others had to endure a different kind of living hell; women giving birth to babies with abnormalities, or finding that their reproductive organs had been irreparably damaged; men made sterile, or impotent, or both; both sexes, in their thirties, suffering from debilitating tumours.

In the nineties, when the truth finally emerged, these children, now adults, had wanted their revenge. Many of them handed back the medals they had won and came forward to give evidence at the trials of their former coaches, nearly all of whom had been involved in doping the athletes in their care. But the one they had most wanted to see in the dock, the one who had promised them the earth and fed them the poison, Father Fleischer, was gone.

The Time article quoted sources as saying that he had left SC Dynamo Berlin sometime in the late eighties, before the house of cards came tumbling down, and returned to work for Nitsche. There he was reported to have been involved in research to develop a new method of stimulating natural hormone production. But it had never come to anything, and he had disappeared from Nitsche’s employment records in the Fall of 1989. By the time the Wall came down in 1990, he had disappeared, apparently from the face of the earth.

Until now.

Margaret looked at an on-screen photograph of him smiling into the camera, a tanned, nearly handsome, face. But there was something sinister in his cold, unsmiling blue eyes. Something ugly. She shivered and felt an unpleasant sense of misgiving. He was here, this man. In Beijing. And Olympic athletes were dying for no apparent reason. Surely to God this wasn’t another generation of children, Chinese this time, whose lives were being destroyed by Father Fleischer? And yet, there was nothing to connect him in any way. A chance snapshot taken at a recreation club for wealthy businessmen. That was all.

Margaret re-read the article, pausing over the speculation surrounding his activities after leaving the Berlin sports club. It had been rumoured that he had been involved in the development of a new method of stimulating natural hormone production . She frowned, thinking about it. Stimulating natural hormone production . How would you do that? She went back to his original qualifications. He had graduated from Potsdam with a double degree. Sports medicine. And genetics. None of it really helped. Even if he had found a way of stimulating natural hormone production in those dead athletes, autopsy results would have shown abnormally high hormone levels in their bodies. She shook her head. Maybe she was simply looking for connections that didn’t exist. Maybe she was simply trying to fill her mind with anything that would stop her from thinking about Li, about how he had lied to her, and what she was going to do about it.

Li knew there was something wrong the moment he saw her. But with everyone else having arrived at the restaurant before him, there was no opportunity to find out what. ‘Oh, you made it tonight?’ she said with that familiar acid tone that he had once known so well, a tone which had mellowed considerably in the years since they first met. Or so he had thought. ‘My mother was thinking perhaps you had gone and got yourself beaten up again just so you wouldn’t have to meet her.’

‘I did not!’ Mrs. Campbell was horrified.

Margaret ignored her. ‘Mom, this is Li Yan. Honest, upstanding officer of the Beijing Municipal Police. He’s not always this ugly. But almost. Apparently some unsavoury members of the Beijing underworld rearranged his features last night. At least, that was his excuse for failing to come and ask me to marry him.’

Li was embarrassed, and blushed as he shook her mother’s hand. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Campbell.’

‘Uncle Yan, what happened to your face?’ Xinxin asked, concerned. Li stooped tentatively to give her a hug, and winced as she squeezed his ribs. ‘Just an accident, little one,’ he said.

‘Nothing that a little plastic surgery wouldn’t put right,’ Margaret said. He flicked her a look, and she smiled an ersatz little smile.

Xiao Ling gave him a kiss and ran her fingers lightly over her brother’s face, concern in her eyes. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Sure.’

Mei Yuan quickly took over. ‘Now we’re all here tonight, because Li Yan and Margaret have announced their intention to get married,’ she said. ‘And in China that means a joining together not only of two people, but of two families.’ And she turned to the presents which she had set out on the lacquer table for the second night running, and asked Mrs. Campbell and Li’s father to take seats at opposite ends of the table while she presented them.

Ninety-nine dollars from Mrs. Campbell.

Dragon and phoenix cake from Mr. Li.

Sweetmeats from the Campbells.

Tobacco from the Lis.

‘A pity none of us smokes,’ Margaret said.

Mei Yuan pressed quickly on, and they exchanged bottles of wine, packs of sugar, a set of brightly painted china hens.

When, finally, a tin of green tea was presented to Mrs. Campbell she said, ‘Ah, yes, to encourage as many little Lis and Campbells as possible.’ She looked pointedly at Margaret’s bump. ‘It’s just a pity they didn’t wait until they were married.’ She paused a moment before she smiled, and then everyone else burst out laughing, a release of tension.

Margaret’s smile was fixed and false. She said, ‘I see Mr. Li is having no trouble with his English tonight.’

The smile faded on the old man’s face, and he glanced at Li who could only shrug, bewildered and angered by Margaret’s behaviour.

But the moment was broken by the arrival of the manageress, who announced that food would now be served, and would they please take their places at the table.

As everyone rose to cross the room, Mrs. Campbell grabbed her daughter’s arm and hissed, ‘What on earth’s got into you, Margaret?’

‘Nothing,’ Margaret said. She pulled free of her mother’s grasp and took her seat, flicking her napkin on to her lap and sitting, then, in sullen silence. She knew she was behaving badly, but could not help herself. She should never have come, she knew that now. It was all a charade. A farce.

Tonight’s fare included fewer ‘delicacies’, following Mei Yuan’s quiet word with the manageress about the sensitivities of the western palate. And so dish after dish of more conventional cuisine was brought to the table and placed on the Lazy Susan. A silence fell over the gathering as the guests picked and ate, and Mrs. Campbell struggled to make her chopsticks convey the food from the plate to her mouth. Beer was poured for everyone, and tiny golden goblets filled with wine for toasting.