The Fourth Sacrifice (37 page)

‘Who’s the woman?’ Pauper said. She was a shrunken old lady with silver hair tied back in a bun. She wore a traditional blue Mao suit and small black slippers on her tiny feet. Margaret would have taken her for seventy, before realising with a shock that she must be the same age as the others. Only fifty-one. Her round, black-lensed spectacles gave her a faintly sinister air.

‘How do you know there’s a woman with me?’ Li asked.

‘I can smell her.’ Pauper’s lips curled in an expression of distaste. ‘Wearing some cheap Western perfume.’

‘She’s an American.’

‘Ah!
Yangguizi!
’ Pauper spat out the word like a gob of phlegm.

‘I take it you don’t speak English,’ Li said.

‘Why should you think that?’ Pauper said in perfect English, startling Margaret with the sudden change of language, and the vitriol in her tone. ‘You think I am stupid because I come from a poor family and didn’t do well at school?’

‘No,’ Li said evenly. ‘But I know that not many schools taught English in the sixties.’

‘I learned English to read braille. There is not enough of it in Chinese to feed a mind without eyes.’ She paused. ‘You have come about the murders?’

‘Yes,’ Li said. He slipped a book out of the bookcase and started leafing through it, running his fingers over the raised patterns of dots that could be ‘read’ like words. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘Please do not touch my books.’ she said. ‘They are very precious to me.’ Li was startled, and peered at her closely, as if believing for a moment that she could actually see. ‘I can hear you,’ she said as if she could read what was in his mind. ‘You may be a policeman, but it doesn’t give you the right to touch my stuff. Who is the American?’

‘I’m a pathologist,’ Margaret said. ‘I am helping with the investigation.’

‘Since when did the Chinese need help from the Americans?’ Pauper’s disgust was patent.

‘We don’t need their help,’ Li said. ‘But one of the victims was an American.’

Pauper frowned. ‘An American?’ She was clearly caught off balance. ‘I only know about Monkey and Zero and Pigsy. What American?’

‘A Chinese-American,’ Li said. ‘He was born here. You went to school with him. His name was Yuan Tao.’

What little colour there was drained from Pauper’s face. ‘In the name of the sky,’ she said. ‘Cat!’ And there was a sudden dawning in her expression. She put a hand to her mouth. ‘
He
killed them. We knew it was someone out to get us. One by one. But Cat,’ she said again in wonder. ‘I never would have thought him capable of it.’

‘Who’s we?’ Li asked her.

‘Birdie and me. The only ones left.’

‘What about Tortoise? We haven’t been able to track him down.’

‘You’d have to go to hell to find him,’ she said. ‘He’s been dead more than ten years now. A stupid boy. He was simple, you know. He went down to Tiananmen Square the first night of the trouble, to see what it was all about, and got himself squashed by a tank.’ She was struck by another thought. ‘But, then, who killed Cat?’

‘We thought you might be able to tell us.’

‘Me?’ Pauper laughed a humourless laugh, and then she pursed her lips and her eyes wrinkled shrewdly. ‘You think it was one of us.’ And she laughed again. ‘Maybe you think I killed him.’

‘What about Birdie?’

‘Birdie?’ she chortled, and chuckled to herself, unable to contain her mirth. ‘Birdie? Are you serious? Have you spoken to him?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Birdie couldn’t kill anyone. He’s a pathetic, harmless old man.’

‘I thought he was the leader of the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade,’ Li said. ‘The one who led the attack on the teachers, the one who ordered the school gate destroyed.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Pauper said. ‘More than thirty years. He was brave and strong and I thought the world of him then. But when the Red-Red-Red Faction split, they turned on him. You’ve heard the old saying that the wheel of fate turns every sixty years. Well, it turned on poor old Birdie. They beat him and kept him in a room for nearly two years, making him write self-criticisms and dragging him out for struggle sessions. They killed all his birds and finally sent him to Inner Mongolia to labour, building frontier defences. I met him again a few years later, and he was a changed man.’ She laughed, but it was a sour laugh, filled with bitterness. ‘Of course, I was a changed woman by then, too. I had lost my eyes.’

‘How did that happen?’ Margaret asked.

Pauper swivelled her head in Margaret’s direction and sniffed as if making some olfactory assessment. ‘They thought I was stupid at school,’ she said eventually. ‘Because I could not see right. I kept telling them I had headaches, but they thought I was just malingering. I told them I had a black cloud in my eyes, that I could not see the blackboard any more.’ She shook her head. ‘It was another two years before my father took me to the hospital. But not before I had collapsed. They said I had a tumour in my right eye and that it was malignant and they would have to take the eye away.’ The sour laugh again, lips stretched over yellow teeth. ‘They believed me then.’ She snapped her mouth shut and Margaret saw her lower lip tremble. ‘All I could think was how ugly I would look without an eye. But they said they could give me a glass one and no one would know the difference.’

‘Were you still in the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade then?’ Li asked.

‘No. Birdie had been arrested and we had broken up and gone our separate ways.’

‘So what happened to your other eye?’ Margaret was curious.

Pauper turned a sneer on her. ‘You’re a doctor, can’t you guess?’

‘Not my speciality,’ Margaret said.

‘Hah,’ Pauper said. ‘Doctors! What do they know?’ Her tiny hands clutched her knitting tightly. ‘After about six months the headaches came back. At first I thought it was the glass eye, because it was not so bad when I took it out. But it kept getting worse and the doctors said I had a tumour in the other eye. It would have to go, too, they said. But my father wouldn’t let them. I wasn’t even twenty years old, he said. What had I seen? Of life, of my country.’ Again, her lower lip trembled, and Margaret believed if she had had eyes, tears would have spilled from them.

‘My father was a packer in a factory,’ Pauper said. ‘My mother was dead. We were very poor. But he borrowed money from the other workers. Six hundred yuan. It was a lot of cash in those days. He told the doctors they could have my other eye in two months. But first I was going to see my country. We took the train and went to Xi’an and Chongqing, and then down the Yangtse to Nanjing and Shanghai. And then he took me to his home town of Qingdao, where I had been born. He took me to the top of a hill above the town so that I could look down on it and see the sun rise in the east across the Yellow Sea. But the sea wasn’t yellow. It was red. The colour of blood, and Chongqing looked like it was on fire. I’ll never forget it. I can still see it now, in my mind’s eye. I can never see it again any other way.’

She took a moment or two to steady her breathing, and Margaret saw her grip on her knitting relax just a little. ‘By the time we were on the train home, everything was milky and blurred, like a mist had come down. And then they took my other eye, and I had to learn to “see” in other ways. With my ears and my nose and my fingers. Sometimes I think I can see things better without my eyes.’ She waved a hand towards the other side of the room. ‘That is why I have a television. I see with my ears, and make pictures in my head. I can tell from a voice the expression on a face. I don’t need my eyes any more.’

They sat in silence for what seemed like a very long time. Then Li said, ‘How did you get your nickname?’

‘Pauper?’ The bitterness was back in her laugh again. ‘How do you think? My father could barely afford to clothe me. My mother was dead and he was no good at patching things, so all my clothes were worn and torn and badly patched. Other kids were poor, too. But they didn’t look it. They called me Pauper to make fun of me, and it stuck. All my life. Only, now, I’m Blind Pauper. Poor
and
blind.’

Li scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Have you ever heard the nickname, Digger?’

She frowned. ‘Digger? No, I have never heard that name. Who is Digger?’

‘We thought it might have been Yuan Tao.’

‘Cat? No. He has always been Cat. Scaredy Cat.’ Her lip curled into its habitual sneer. ‘I am glad someone killed him. What right did he have to a better life than us? What right did he have to revenge?’

They heard a familiar metallic voice buzzing through a megaphone. ‘This traditional
siheyuan
courtyard.
Siheyuan
courtyard. In ancient time only
one
family live here. Only
one
family. Now there are
four
family.
Four
family.’

Pauper put her knitting aside and got stiffly to her feet. ‘How else does a blind person make a living these days?’ she said. ‘They bring tourists to my house to see the curiosity, how an old blind Chinese lady lives. They pay me more money than my father earned in his factory. And at least I am spared from having to look at them.’

Li and Margaret moved to the door. Li said, ‘Do you see Birdie often?’

‘I have not seen Birdie since they took my eyes,’ Pauper said. ‘But he comes to visit me often and his birds sing to me, and chatter and make a wonderful noise.’

‘And he knew about Monkey and Zero and Pigsy as well?’

‘Of course. We spoke several times about which of us would be next.’

The megaphone arrived at the door. ‘Only
six
people at a time, please.
Six
at a time. This is traditional
siheyuan
home.
Ve-ery
small inside.
Ve-ery
small.’ He glared at Li and Margaret.

Li said to Pauper, ‘We have an address for Birdie in Dengshikou Street. Does he still live there?’

She nodded. ‘But you won’t find him there now. He has a stall at the Guanyuan bird market. That is where his life is. Where it has always been. With his birds.’

As Li and Margaret pushed out, the tour group was pushing in, chattering excitedly at the prurient prospect of invading an old lady’s privacy.

II

Li manoeuvred his Jeep slowly west through the traffic. Beneath the sprinkling of shade cast by the trees, bicycles weaved precariously in and out of narrow lanes, overtaking tricycle carts, avoiding buses and taxis. The sidewalks were alive with activity in this busy shopping quarter, stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables and great baskets of chestnuts outside shops whose windows were crammed with computers and hi-fis and DVD players. In the hazy distance, they could see the flyover at the junction with the second ring road. Horns peeped and blasted, not so much in anger as frustration. Li leaned on his wheel, his mouth set in a grim line. Soon, he thought, Beijing would slip into permanent gridlock and bicycles would become fashionable again, not just as the fastest, but as the only way of getting around.

‘Do you want to tell me about the nickname?’ Margaret’s voice broke into his thoughts, and he immediately detected the hint of accusation in it.

‘You’ll read all about it in the statements we took at the school,’ he said. And, in a voice laden with meaning, added, ‘When you were in Xi’an.’

He heard her sigh, but kept his eyes on the traffic ahead. ‘I’ll probably get around to reading them sometime,’ she said in that acid tone that was so familiar to him. ‘Maybe next year, or the year after. But right now it might save time if you just told me.’

He shrugged. ‘Like Pauper said, Yuan’s nickname was Cat, not Digger.’

‘And anyone who knew him at school would know that?’

He nodded. ‘Which kind of punches a hole in your theory about his killer being one of the remaining Red Guards.’ He turned to look at her, but she was frowning into the middle distance, lost in thought.

‘It’s looking less and less likely anyway,’ she said. ‘One of them’s dead, the other’s blind. That just leaves Birdie. And he would know Yuan’s nickname. Unless …’

‘What?’

‘Unless he deliberately used another name to confuse the police.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Li said.

‘Why not?’

‘You would have to be pretty smart to think of something like that. From all accounts Birdie would have trouble getting his IQ up to room temperature.’

‘So why are we going to see him?’ But before he could respond, she answered for herself. ‘No, don’t tell me, I know. “Because Chinese police work requires meticulous attention to detail.”’ She sighed again and looked at the traffic ahead of them. It was at a standstill. ‘Chinese police work also requires great patience,’ she said. ‘Since it takes so goddamn long just to get from A to B.’

But Li’s patience had already run out. He opened the window and slapped a flashing red light on the roof, flicked on his siren and squeezed across the line of on-coming traffic into a narrow lane. He pulled the Jeep in beside a railing and jumped out. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll walk the rest. It’s not far.’

A hundred yards down, the lane was crowded with people buying tropical fish from roadside vendors. Jars of exotic marine life were piled on stalls and carts, plastic trays filled with terrapins and tortoises laid out along the sidewalk. An old lady was selling goldfish in water-filled plastic bags hung from the handlebars of her bicycle. They passed a long, corrugated shed stacked from floor to ceiling with tanks full of brilliantly coloured fish fighting for space in green, bubbling water. Margaret had never seen so many fish. There was an ocean’s worth. Whole shops were devoted to selling accessories – tanks, stands, lighting, feed. The shed and stalls and shops were jammed with customers.
Feng shui
was back in fashion. Fish were in. Business was good.

They turned west, leaving the fish market behind, past demolition work behind high hordings, then south again at Chegongzhuang Subway Station. On South Xizhimen Street, on the sidewalk beyond the tree-lined cycle lane, they saw the first clutches of old men gathered around their birdcages. Bicycles parked by the hundred lined the sidewalk on either side of the entrance to the market. Men with birds of prey tethered to the handlebars of their bicycles showed off new, brilliantly coloured purchases in bamboo cages. Budgerigars, canaries, hawks, parakeets. The collective sound of ten thousand birds drowned out even the roar of traffic on the second ring road.