Peter May - The Runner

He rolled over and knelt between her legs without entering her and cupped her swollen breasts in his hands, feeling the nipples grow hard against his palms, and he ran his tongue up over her belly, squeezing her breasts together so that he could move his lips quickly from one nipple to the other, sucking, teasing, biting. She arched backwards as he moved up to her neck, and his hot breath on her skin made her shiver. He found her lips, and the sweetness of her tongue, and then he slipped inside her, catching her almost unawares, and she gasped.

They moved together in slow, rhythmic waves for fifteen minutes or more, turning one way, then the other, gripped by their passion, but gentle with the knowledge of their baby lying curled between them, the perfect product of a previous encounter. Until finally, he thrust hard and deep, arching backwards so as not to bear down on her, feeling her fingers biting into his back. She screamed at the moment of his release, and he felt her muscular spasm suck him dry, taking his seed this time for love alone.

Afterwards, they lay for more than ten minutes on their backs, side by side, listening to snowflakes brush the window like falling feathers.

‘You’ve been smoking,’ Margaret said suddenly.

‘Just one. Well, really, just half of one.’ He hesitated for a long time, steeling himself for this. ‘Margaret, we need to talk about the wedding.’

‘I’ve done enough talking about that tonight. I had to face my mother, remember, after you dropped me at the apartment.’

‘What did she say?’

‘I think she was relieved that she wasn’t going to have some Chinese as a son-in-law after all.’

He was silent for several minutes then. ‘You seem to be taking it very calmly.’

‘Do I?’ She inclined her head to look at him. ‘Appearances can be deceptive.’

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘You mean apart from hating you for not telling me?’

‘Apart from that.’

‘I’m thinking about how much I just want to hurt you for hurting me,’ she said. ‘For lying to me. For deceiving me.’

‘I still want to marry you,’ he said.

‘Forget it.’ And she tried very hard not to succumb to the self-pity which was welling up inside. After all, hadn’t she spent long enough these last weeks debating with herself whether marriage and motherhood were really what she wanted in life? She made a determined effort to force a change of topic. ‘So how did it go tonight? Did you find Fleischer?’

Li lay back and closed his eyes. He still didn’t have the courage to tell her. So he released his thoughts to run over the night’s events, and shuddered again at the recollection of what he had uncovered at the club. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But if there’s a connection between Fleischer and the dead athletes, then we’re up against something much more powerful than I could ever have imagined.’

For a moment Margaret forgot her own concerns. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The club where Fleischer was photographed is run by Triads.’

She frowned. ‘Triads? That’s like a kind of Chinese mafia, isn’t it?’

‘Bigger, more pervasive, steeped in ritual and tradition.’ He turned to find her watching him intently. ‘The Event Hall at the club is a ceremonial chamber for the induction of new members. It has an east — west orientation, with doors on all four walls, a representation of the lodges where these original inductions took place. Most times I would have walked into it and never have known, but tonight it was all set up for an induction ceremony.’

He described to her the layout of the hall, with its three, freestanding, ornamental doorways representing the entries to the chambers of a traditional lodge; the items laid out on the floor, symbolic of a journey made by the founding monks.

‘The monks came from a Shaolin monastery in Fujian,’ he said. ‘They were supposed to have answered a call by the last Ming emperor to save the dynasty and take up arms against the Ch’ing. But one of their number betrayed them, and most of them were killed when the monastery was set on fire. Five escaped. And they’re what they call the “First Five Ancestors”. According to legend they had a series of extraordinary adventures and miraculous escapes. I mean, literally miraculous. Like a grass sandal turning into a boat so that they could sail across a river and escape the Ch’ing soldiers. During this journey, their numbers grew until they became an army, and they called themselves the “Hung League”. But, then, over the years they became fragmented, dividing into hundreds of different groups or gangs who inducted new members by re-enacting the original legend.’ He snorted. ‘Of course, they never did restore the Ming Dynasty. They turned to crime instead. I guess they were one of the world’s first crime syndicates.’

Margaret listened in horror and fascination. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘I read up on it before I went to Hong Kong. Yifu was a bit of an expert. Our family came from the colony before they moved to Sichuan.’

‘And all that stuff on the floor. What did it mean, exactly?’

‘I think the bamboo hoop with the red serrated paper was supposed to represent a hole through which the founding monks escaped from the burning monastery. I guess new recruits would have to step through it. The pieces of charcoal laid out on the floor would represent the burned-out remains. The monks are then supposed to have escaped across a river on stepping stones. I think that’s what the circles of paper were. The two lengths of string, I think, symbolise a two-planked bridge which also aided their escape. They would be held up and stretched tight for the recruits to duck under during the ceremony.’

Margaret was wide-eyed in amazement. ‘This is bizarre stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to believe that crap like that still goes on in this day and age.’

Li nodded. ‘It would be laughable if these people weren’t so dangerous. And, believe me, they are.’

‘Why are they called Triads?’ Margaret asked.

‘It was the Europeans who called them that,’ Li said. ‘They were known by all sorts of different names over the years. The term “Triads” might have came from one of them — the “Three United Association”. But I don’t know for sure.’

He told her, then, about the table draped with yellow paper and the strange collection of items laid out on top of it. ‘I figure the table was some kind of altar. When the monks were escaping from the monastery, a huge yellow curtain was supposed to have fallen on them and saved them from the flames. I think that’s what the yellow paper was supposed to represent.’

‘What about the stuff on top of the altar?’ She remembered Mei Yuan telling her about the rice bowl and chopsticks placed on a wedding altar to commemorate a death in the family.

‘Everything’s related to the original legend,’ Li said. ‘I don’t know all the details. I mean, the rush sandal is obvious. That’s what was supposed to have turned into a boat. I think the white cloth with the red stains represents a monk’s robe smeared with blood. The sword would be used to execute traitors. The punishment for anyone breaking one of the thirty-six oaths of allegiance is “death by a myriad of swords”.’

Margaret felt goosebumps rise up all along her arms and across her shoulders. ‘That girl you found in the park,’ she whispered. ‘You said she worked at the club.’ Li looked at her, the thought dawning on him for the first time. Margaret said, ‘She died of multiple stab wounds, didn’t she? Laid out on a stone slab like a ritual sacrifice. Or execution.’

‘My God,’ Li said. ‘ They killed her.’

‘But why? She wouldn’t have been a member, would she?’