‘On one of the rare occasions he opened his mouth. Of course, that was early on. I can’t remember the last time he even acknowledged my existence. But you can smell it off him, you know?’
Li said, ‘Smell what?’
‘You know …’ Her face curled up in disgust. ‘Medical things. Dead people. They cut them up for practice down in that place, don’t they? There’s a smell. Like sickness, or hospitals. I don’t know how to describe it. But it gives me the shivers.’
She rode up in the elevator with them to the ninth floor and along a narrow corridor with windows down one side. On the other side, metal grilles and iron gates covered windows and doors to apartments. Sunshine slanted in through the outside windows, illuminating the passage, and Li saw in its light that the cream and green paintwork on the walls was immaculate. This was no cheap housing thrown up quickly to accommodate the masses. ‘Who lives in these apartments?’ Li asked.
The caretaker said, ‘Mostly company people, a lot of retired folk, a few private individuals.’
‘Who does Jiang rent from?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Since the housing market went private it’s impossible to keep track of who owns what.’ She stopped outside number 2001 and began to unlock the iron gate that guarded the door to Jiang’s apartment.
‘You wouldn’t know how much he pays, then?’
‘A lot, I can tell you that. None of these places are cheap.’ She swung the gate out into the corridor and unlocked the door, pushing it open into a small entrance lobby leading to a kitchen. ‘You see what I mean about the smell?’ she said, and she wrinkled her nose. ‘The whole place stinks of it.’
Li was immediately aware of a high-pitched antiseptic odour that suffused the atmosphere of the apartment. It made him think of hospitals and mortuaries, disinfectant and formaldehyde. He stepped in front of the caretaker to stop her from entering. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘We’ll let you know when we’re leaving so that you can lock up.’
She was clearly disappointed not to be allowed in, peering past Li as he spoke, trying to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. ‘So am I supposed not to tell him you were here?’ she said, a distinct pique in her voice.
‘I think we might be speaking to him before you do,’ Li said.
‘So you know where he’s gone, then?’
Li and Mei-Ling exchanged glances. ‘Gone?’ Li said. ‘What do you mean?’ Jiang Baofu had not been at the Medical University when they had. Professor Lu had consulted his timetables and told them the student had no lectures until the afternoon. Li had half-expected to find him at home.
‘He’s gone away for a few days.’ There was a hint of triumph now in the caretaker’s tone. She knew something they did not. ‘He told my relief he was going to visit a cousin somewhere.’
‘Where?’
‘
I
don’t know. You’re the police. You should know that sort of thing.’
‘Did he say when he’d be back?’
‘The weekend, I think. But I couldn’t swear to it. You’ll have to ask her.’
‘We will. Thank you,’ Li said, and he pulled the iron gate closed, and then shut the door on her. They heard her annoyance in the sharp click, click of her heels as she hurried off down the corridor. Li looked grimly at Mei-Ling. ‘You read his file?’ She nodded. ‘He doesn’t have a cousin, does he?’
She shook her head. ‘And Dai’s pretty thorough,’ she said. ‘But we’ll need to check.’
The apartment was small and compact, just two rooms with a tiny kitchen and dining area. But by Chinese standards it was huge for a single occupancy. Li looked around with a sense of awe. The place was spotless, freshly painted walls of cream and pale lime, polished wooden floors gleaming in the sunlight that flooded in through large windows in the living room and bedroom. There was a spartan quality to the apartment. Everything, apparently, had a place and was in it. Cooking implements hung shining side by side from hooks on the wall. Jars stood in ordered rows on open shelves. Worktops on either side of the cooker were immaculate, food containers and an electric blender arranged carefully along the wall behind them. A microwave oven sat on top of a tall green refrigerator. Li looked inside the fridge. It was as ordered as the kitchen, and all but empty. Crockery was neatly stacked in a glass-doored cabinet, and Li recognised the portable television from the night watchman’s hut at Pudong sitting on top of it. A small, square table with a single chair was covered in a lilac-patterned plastic cloth.
Net curtains hung from the window in the small living room. There was an uncomfortable two-seater settee, a desk below the window with a wooden stool pulled up to it. A bookcase next to it was crammed with volumes on medicine and surgery. In the opposite corner another television with a VCR on top of it sat on a stereo cabinet with a CD player and a rack of CDs. Two speaker cabinets, standing nearly three-feet high, stood at either end of the wall. The walls themselves were neatly pinned with charts and diagrams: a representation of the human skeleton with all of its two hundred and six bones labelled; a large photograph of the underside of the brain and brainstem, with labels on each of the twelve pairs of cranial nerves; a poster-sized diagram of the blood vessels of the chest and abdomen with all of the arteries showing in red, the veins in blue, and the organs depicted as see-through shadows; a representation of the eye with its muscles and nerves attached, half of it cut through longitudinally to show its layers and chambers, including the retina, lens, cornea and sclera.
The bedroom walls were naked. Perhaps, Li thought, Jiang was afraid that body parts pasted on the walls here might invade his dreams. There was very little in the bedroom apart from a small wardrobe, a double bed, a chest of drawers with a television on top of it, a single bedside cabinet and one chair.
Li and Mei-Ling had not spoken as they wandered slowly through the apartment drinking in its ordered sterility. Now they stood in the living room looking around at all the hard, cold surfaces unbroken by a plant or an ornament, or anything personal. ‘This guy is very weird,’ Li said eventually, and the echo of his voice sounded odd in the chill silence of the place. ‘There is nothing of him here, not a single clue to his personality. Except for the place itself.’
Mei-Ling nodded. ‘Filled with order, but no warmth.’ She let her eyes wander around the room. ‘How does he spend his time, do you think?’
‘Watching television, apparently,’ Li said. ‘When he’s not reading his medical books or examining his medical posters.’ He shook his head. ‘I have never seen so many televisions in one house. And did you notice the microwave, and the refrigerator, the blender, the stereo … ? How can this guy afford these things?’
‘And where does he get the money to pay for the apartment?’ Mei-Ling said. She stooped to open the glass door of the stereo cabinet and switched on the CD. There was a disk in it, and she hit the play button. The room was immediately filled with the cold string sounds of German chamber music. They listened to the strange, alien scrape of it for nearly a minute while Mei-Ling examined the other CDs in the collection. Bach and Beethoven, some traditional Chinese stringed music. She switched the chamber music off, and in the silence that followed turned her attention to a shelf of videos. She took one out at random, slipped it into the VCR and turned on the television. It was a recording, made live, during a heart-transplant operation. The surgical team were speaking in English and sounded American. As it played, Mei-Ling worked her way through the other tapes. ‘They’re all the same,’ she said, examining the labels. ‘Edited recordings of operations, commercially produced for instruction in US medical schools.’ They watched, fascinated for a moment, as the bloody hands of the lead surgeon gently massaged the pumping muscle of a new heart.
Li said, ‘He’s obsessed.’ He let his eyes drift again around the posters on the wall – see-through organs, cranial nerves, corneal sections. ‘I think we should get forensics to go through this place with a fine-toothed comb.’ But he wasn’t sure that they would find anything. It was as if the place had been sterilised. It was not the environment of a normal human being. ‘And we need to find Jiang Baofu as soon as possible and bring him in for questioning.’ He wasn’t quite sure why, but he felt a sudden sense of urgency, as if perhaps he sensed that further lives were now at risk.
III
Margaret felt the chill edge of the wind cut through her as she hurried from the new Arrivals terminal at Beijing Capital Airport to the taxi rank. After the mist and rain of Shanghai, the capital was bright and crisp and clear. The sky was cloudless. The late autumn sunshine, set lower now in the sky, cut deep shadows against the sunlit surfaces of the proud new buildings that lined the expressway into the city. Everything here seemed more ordered. From the compass oriented grid system of roads and buildings, and broad bicycle lanes lined with trees, to the taxi queues and the white-gloved traffic cops pirouetting on circular podiums at road junctions. It was all in stark contrast to the jumble of buildings and streets, and the confusion of traffic and cyclists, that was Shanghai. In the distance, far off to the west, Margaret could see the mountains cut sharp against the sky, snow-capped peaks tracing a brilliant white profile on the deepest of blues. She sat back in her taxi and let the city wash over her. If someone had told her two years ago that she would one day feel at home in Beijing, she would have told them they were insane. But after the pain of her father’s funeral, the sense of dislocation she had felt in Chicago, and the strangeness of Shanghai, it really did feel like coming home.
For the first time since rushing to catch a taxi out to Hongqiao Airport early that morning, she took the time to reflect on the previous night. She remembered the reading of the horoscopes, and wondered in the cold light of day if five thousand years of civilisation had given the Chinese insights into people and their compatibilities that Western society could not even guess at. Could Margaret and Li’s conflicting birth years really explain the stormy nature of their relationship? Was she fighting a losing battle against the fates in even trying to hold on to him? She thought about Li’s lucky number three, and Mei-Ling’s dark and foreboding unlucky nine, her trigram the colour of dried blood. And for the first time, perhaps, Margaret began to see that there was a kind of desperation in Mei-Ling in her endeavours to win Li’s affections and shut Margaret out. A
yang orphan
her aunt had said she was. And there had been a clue in her brother’s description of her fight to succeed in a man’s world. A compensation for something lacking in her life. Margaret realised that she really knew nothing about Mei-Ling, and wondered if perhaps there had been some tragedy in her life that had made her the way she was. Or maybe, as her stars suggested, that tragedy was still to come, a dark shadow hanging over her future. Margaret shivered, as if someone had walked over her grave, and felt a disquiet in the thought that disturbed her.
As her taxi turned off the expressway on to the third ring road, huge new structures rose all around into a sky crowded with neon advertisements for Japanese and American consumer goods. Margaret turned her thoughts to Li, and she remembered him making love to her in the semi-darkness of her hotel room. And then, through a fog of memories made hazier by alcohol, she recalled something else, something she had buried away in the depths of her subconscious. For even in her drunken state, she had been aware of a desperation in their lovemaking, that same quality she had seen in Mei-Ling. Something that owed more to fear than fulfilment. And now it came bubbling back to the surface and clouded her day with depression. She was, she knew, losing him, and perhaps the desperation she saw in Mei-Ling was merely a reflection of the hopelessness she felt in herself.
The taxi had negotiated its way on to the second ring road, and now turned south at the Yong Hegong Lamasery into a labyrinth of
hutongs
, narrow lanes bounded by
siheyuan
courtyards that owed their origins to the Mongol conquerors who swept down from the north centuries before. The Beijing Municipal Police Department of Forensic Pathology was buried away in an anonymous white building in Pau Jü Hutong. Margaret’s taxi pulled up beside the concrete ramp that ran up to gates leading into the basement of the building. She paid the driver and stepped out into the midday chill. The brown, brittle leaves of autumn rattled along the cobbles in the breeze. Margaret remembered a moment at this spot when she and Li had almost kissed for the first time, pulling back only at the last moment when they became aware of an armed guard watching them from the gate. There was still an armed guard at the gate, but the world had moved on since then. She thought of Li’s whispered farewell in the early hours of last night. He had to get back to his hotel, he had said. Mei-Ling was picking him up in the morning. He had left Margaret’s airplane ticket on the bedside table and ordered an alarm call for her from the telephone in her room. She had still been drunk, but not so drunk that it hadn’t occurred to her that the only reason Li wanted to go back to his hotel was so that Mei-Ling would not find out he had spent the night with Margaret. The faintest traces of a lingering headache reminded her of her excesses in toasting Mei-Ling to oblivion. It hadn’t taken much. Which was just as well, because Margaret had had a considerable head start in the consumption of alcohol. She wondered how Mei-Ling felt today.
*
The mutilated remains of what had once been a young woman lay assembled on the autopsy table. Decompositional juices trickled into the drainage channels and the smell of decay hung thick in the air. When they found her body in February, she had already been in the ground for about a week. Now the original carnage inflicted on her, followed by an autopsy and eight months in the freezer, and then four days of slow defrosting, had all taken their toll. The face of the severed head had been virtually obliterated by decay. The white crusting of freezer burn on the skin was being destroyed in turn by the formation of slimy dark green blisters filled with the collected fluids of decomposition.