The Firemaker (40 page)

But Yongli behaved as if he hadn’t heard. He said, ‘When we left your apartment this morning we went back to the Xanadu. The cops raided the place just before five. Some kind of vice sweep. We all got taken downtown.’

‘Ma Yongli, I don’t have time just now.’ Li started for the door and Yongli followed him.

‘They found drugs in her bag. Heroin. She says she has no idea how it got there.’

‘They always do,’ Li said, losing patience. It bore out all his worst fears about Lotus. He turned down the corridor, Yongli trailing in his wake.

‘I believe her, Li Yan. She’s not into drugs. Never has been. But they’ve arrested her. She could get sent down for years. Hell, they shoot people for less!’

Li stopped outside the door of the meeting room and turned on his friend. ‘Look, I told you she was trouble. Right from the start. I mean, what do you expect me to do? I’ve got a triple murder on my hands, a room full of detectives waiting on me. And you want me to drop everything and bale out some whore with a bagful of smack?’ He regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth.

Colour rose on Yongli’s pale cheeks and his eyes turned cold. ‘Whatever you think of Lotus, it’s me who’s asking for help. I thought we were friends, Li Yan. Or was that just some silly delusion I had?’

‘Look, don’t do this to me,’ Li pleaded. ‘You know as well as I do that she’ll have been pulled in by another section. I wouldn’t have any influence …’

‘So you won’t do anything?’

The door of the meeting room opened and Chen stood there looking at them. ‘Deputy Section Chief Li,’ he said very deliberately. ‘I have a meeting in thirty minutes.’

‘On my way in, Chief,’ Li said. ‘Two seconds.’

‘Will that be earth seconds?’ Chen asked, and he let the door swing shut without waiting for an answer.

Li drew a deep breath and turned back to Yongli. ‘Look, I’ll see what I can do, okay?’

Yongli looked at him sceptically. ‘Yeah, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Anything to get me off your back.’

‘Aw, come on,’ Li snapped. ‘Give me a break. I said I’d do what I could.’

There was contempt mixed with the hurt now in Yongli’s eyes. ‘I won’t be holding my breath.’ He turned and walked briskly away down the corridor. Li felt like a complete shit. He screwed up his eyes and exhaled through his teeth. Yongli deserved better than that. And he thought about how good Lotus had been last night with Margaret. He would make some enquiries. First chance he got. He wheeled around and walked into the meeting room.

A dozen detectives and Section Chief Chen sat around the table waiting for him. A veil of smoke hung over the group like a cloud, reflecting Chen’s mood. ‘Sorry to keep you,’ Li said. He sat down and lit up. ‘You’ve all got copies of the stuff from Hong Kong.’ He pulled out the facsimile image of Johnny Ren. ‘Take a good look at this face,’ he said. ‘He’s our killer. I expect to have full forensic confirmation by lunch-time. But I have no doubts that he is our man. He’s very good, and he’s very dangerous. And he’s still here in Beijing. Or, at least, he was last night.’ He rubbed his bruising ruefully. ‘I want this face on the front page of every newspaper in China by tomorrow morning. I want it on every news bulletin on every TV station. I want his face faxed to every police station, railway station, border post. This man is armed and dangerous. I want us to brief the armed police, the border police, the transport police,
and
the army. I don’t want him to be able to move from A to B without someone recognising him. I want us to check every hotel and hostel and guest-house in the city. He’s got to be sleeping somewhere. Someone’s seen him. Someone knows where he is. It can only be a matter of time. Detective Qian, I want you to co-ordinate this.’

Wu leaned back in his seat, cigarette hand dangling from the arm of his chair. His sunglasses were pushed up on his forehead and he was chewing reflectively on a ubiquitous piece of gum. ‘We still haven’t established motive on this one, boss, have we?’

‘Money,’ Li said. ‘He’s a professional. Probably thinks of himself as a poor boy made good. The truth is, he’s a bad boy made worse. What we don’t know is who hired him, or why. And when we get him I doubt if he’s going to tell us.’

‘So meantime we carry on trying to find the connection between our three victims?’ Wu asked.

‘Unless you’ve got a better idea.’ Wu hadn’t. ‘So, anything new on that front?’ Heads were shaken around the table. ‘Okay, we carry on interviewing. But there is one new piece of potentially important evidence. Chao may have had AIDS. I expect the result of a blood test to confirm that today. We know he had a penchant for teenage boys. Until yesterday afternoon we’d been concentrating on trying to make a drugs connection between Chao and Mao Mao. Thanks to our good friend, The Needle, we’ve been able to eliminate that possibility from our inquiry.’ Detectives around the table glanced at Chen, but he remained impassive. ‘Maybe there’s a gay link somewhere in all this. Someone with AIDS looking for revenge. I know there’s been no suggestion of homosexuality with either our drug dealer or the itinerant. But then, we haven’t been looking for it. So, I’m going to have AIDS tests done on blood samples taken from both of them. Zhao’ – he turned towards the young detective – ‘we need to start digging up the boys who were making regular visits to Chao’s apartment. And if someone was supplying them, then we need to know who, and we want to talk to him pretty damn quick.’

‘I’m on it straight away, boss.’ Zhao scribbled quickly in his notebook.

‘Okay.’ Li sat back. ‘Any thoughts, questions, ideas?’

Wu blew a jet of smoke lazily at the overhead fan and watched it scatter in the breeze. ‘Yeah, I got a question,’ he said. ‘Is that attractive American pathologist still working on the case with us?’ His colleagues choked back laughs of disbelief. ‘Because, I mean, you know, boss, it’s not fair you keeping her all to yourself. Some of us feel we could also benefit from her experience.’ He remained deadpan, for all the world as if it had been a serious question.

Chen had a face like sour milk. Li said, ‘Actually, Detective, I think you would probably benefit more from a couple of years’ experience on traffic duty in Tiananmen Square.’ Which allowed the others to release their pent-up laughter. ‘You and I can take shift about.’ More laughter. Li glanced at Chen, on whose face had appeared the faintest glimmer of a smile. ‘And in answer to your question, Wu, Dr Campbell will no longer be assisting us with the inquiry.’ He closed his folder. ‘That’s all just now, unless there’s anything else?’ There wasn’t. ‘Okay, let’s go catch Johnny Ren.’

As chairs scraped on the floor, and cigarettes were stubbed out in ashtrays, Li said, ‘Just one more thing. Keep the paperwork coming into my office down to a bare minimum, guys. Essential stuff only, please. I’ve got enough already in there to keep me fully occupied for the next five years.’

The detectives drifted out. Chen wandered up the table to Li and touched his shoulder lightly. ‘Keep me in touch with developments.’

Li sat for a moment after they had all gone, and found himself filled with a strange, aching melancholy. He picked up his folder and forced himself to stand up. He seemed to have lost all energy. Perhaps, he told himself, it was simply his hangover. He walked slowly back down the corridor. Although he had made light of Wu’s reference to Margaret, it had forced him to face the truth – that without her involvement in the investigation he had no real reason for seeing her. At least, not professionally. And the demands of the job were such that he wasn’t likely to have much free time in the foreseeable future. In less than five weeks she would be gone and he would be unlikely ever to see her again. So it would be pointless trying to pursue any kind of relationship in the few hours they might have together between now and then. And without the case to discuss, what would they talk about? It wasn’t as if they had much in common. In fact, it was insane for him ever to have considered that there might be something between them that could form the basis of a relationship. It was as well that an end had been put to it now. But however convincingly he told himself this, he remained resolutely unconvinced. He was deeply depressed at the thought that she might already have slipped out of his life for ever.

The corridor was buzzing with activity – detectives and secretaries and witnesses, phones ringing; somewhere the sound of a photocopier on a large print run, the whine of a fax machine spewing out images from the ether. As Li approached the door of the detectives’ office a man bumped into him, knocking the file from his hand. He walked quickly on without an apology. Li cursed and stooped to pick up the papers that had spilled from the folder. He had caught the briefest glimpse of the man’s face, pale and tense and intent on avoiding Li’s eye. From his crouching position, he turned and looked back down the corridor at the retreating figure, and a face swam into his consciousness: a face contorted with anger and intent; a face in black and white on the page of a fax; a face that was staring up at him now from a sheet of paper on the floor of the corridor; the face of the man who had just bumped into him.

‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Stop! Stop that man!’

Several people turned to stare at him in amazement. But not the man at the end of the corridor. He started running and had reached the stairs even before Li stood up. Li took off like a sprinter from starting blocks, papers from his folder flying in his wake. Someone got in his way, and with a bone-crunching collision went spinning into the wall. ‘Get out of the way!’ Li shouted. ‘Get out of the fucking way!’ Bodies scattered left and right. Detectives appeared in office doorways.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ someone shouted.

Li reached the stairs and could hear Johnny Ren’s footsteps on the flight below. He saw a flap of Versace suit, caught a glimpse of an expensive haircut, the flash of a face turned briefly upward. He took the stairs two at a time, screaming at people to get out of his way. Above him he heard a voice shouting, ‘What the hell’s going on, Li!’ It might have been Chen. But he wasn’t about to stop and explain. He reached the foot of the stairs gasping for breath, and the heat of the day punched through the doorway and struck him like a blow. The contrast between the dark interior of Section One and the white heat of the morning sun momentarily blinded him. He raised an arm to shield his eyes and glanced right and left.

There was no sign of Johnny Ren. Somewhere off to the right came the clatter of a bin. Li followed the noise, past the red-roofed police garage, into a narrow lane behind the shops in Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie. At the far end he saw the running figure of the Marlboro man. A bin still rocked in the dirt where it had spilled its stinking contents into the sunlight. Li vaulted the bin and pounded down the lane after Johnny Ren, brushing the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve. At the end of the lane he saw Ren turn right. Left would have taken him out on to Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie. Right took him into a maze of
hutongs
that turned and twisted through a jumble of crumbling brick courtyards and even narrower alleyways. He was already gone from sight by the time Li reached the turn. But he could hear his footsteps echoing off the walls. His lungs tore at his chest in a frantic attempt to suck in more oxygen, and for the first time in his life he regretted being a smoker. His only consolation was that Johnny Ren was one too, and would be sharing in Li’s pain. He was running with less conviction now, the excesses of the night before beginning to tell. His head was pounding. He turned a corner and crashed into a meandering cyclist lost in a world of adolescent fantasy. Li’s legs became somehow inextricably tied up in the front wheel and he twisted and fell, landing on top of the young cyclist. Just a boy, no more than twelve or thirteen, he yelled with pain and wriggled frantically to get out from under this big, heavy man who seemed to have dropped on him from the sky. Li cursed and staggered to his feet. Blood was oozing from a graze on his elbow, and his pants were torn at the knee. The boy was still yelling. Li grabbed his shoulders. ‘Are you all right, son?’

But the boy’s only concern was his bicycle. ‘Look at my bike! Look what you’ve done to my bike, you moron!’ The front wheel was badly buckled.

Li breathed a sigh of relief. Wheels could be fixed or replaced. ‘I’m a police officer,’ he gasped. ‘Go to the police station round the corner and wait for me there.’ And he started running again.

‘A likely fucking story!’ the boy shouted at his back. ‘You’re a fucking moron!’

Li reached a junction fifty yards further on. He stopped, fighting for breath, and looked right and left. Nothing. Trees stirring lightly in the breeze. All that he could hear, apart from his own rasping breath, was the distant rumble of traffic on Dongzhimennei Street. He went right, walking past arched gateways to decaying
siheyuan
on both sides, peering in as he went. In the entrance to one, an old woman was sweeping up with a straw broom. He held out his Public Security wallet. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘Did you see a man in a dark suit? He must have passed you.’

She shook her head. ‘I saw no one,’ she said. ‘Except for some small boys about ten minutes ago.’

He turned immediately and started jogging back the way he had come, passing the junction where he had taken the right turn, and carrying on down to Dongzhimennei. The street was thick with traffic, a blur of bicycles in the cycle lane, the sidewalk crowded with pedestrains, a couple of street cleaners, some vegetable sellers. No one even gave him a second glance as he stood breathing hard, his face shining with sweat, looking one way, then the other. Johnny Ren was gone.

*

‘Are you people blind!’ he raged at his detectives when he got back. ‘You walk out of a meeting where this guy is the main topic of discussion. You all have a photograph of him in your folders. You come back in here and you don’t notice him walking out of my office?’

They all stood in stunned silence. The whole building was buzzing with rumour and speculation. Li’s first stop had been Chen’s office, where he had demanded armed guards on all entrances to the building, and that everyone coming in and out have their IDs checked. ‘I can’t believe this man’s audacity, Chief. We’re in the meeting room talking about how we’re going to catch him, and he walks into the building, cool as you like, and has all the time in the world to go through anything he wants to in my office.’