No doubt there were some who thought he was dangerous. It was true that several times, earlier in his life, he had lost his temper and physically harmed people, but that no longer happened. He didn’t mind that many were frightened of him. More important was not to lose control over the anger that sometimes surged through him.
Occasionally, very early in the morning, Ya Ru would leave his flat through a secret back door. He would go to a nearby park and perform the concentrated gymnastic exercises known as t’ai chi. It made him feel like a small, insignificant part of the great, anonymous mass of Chinese people. Nobody knew who he was or what he was called. He sometimes thought it was like giving himself a thorough wash. When he returned to his flat afterwards and resumed his identity, he always felt stronger.
Midnight was approaching. He was expecting two visits that night. It amused him to hold meetings in the middle of the night or as dawn was breaking. Having control of the time gave him an advantage: in a cold room in the pale light of dawn, it was easier for him to get what he wanted.
He gazed out over the city. In 1967, when the Cultural Revolution was stormier than ever, he had been born in a hospital somewhere down there among those glittering lights. His father had not been present; as a university professor, he had been caught up in the frenzied purges of the Red Guard and banished to the country to tend peasants’ pigs. Ya Ru had never met him. He had vanished and was never heard from again. Later in life Ya Ru had sent some of his closest colleagues to the place where it was thought his father had been exiled, but without success. Nobody remembered his father. Nor was there any trace in the chaotic archives of that period. Ya Ru’s father had drowned in the big political tidal wave that Mao had set in motion.
It had been a difficult time for his mother, alone with her son and her older daughter, Hong Qiu. His first memory was of his mother crying. It was rather blurred, but he had never forgotten it. Later, at the beginning of the 1980s, when their situation had improved and his mother had got her job back as a lecturer in theoretical physics at one of the universities in Beijing, he had a better understanding of the chaos that had reigned when he was born. Mao had tried to create a new universe. In the same way as the universe had been created, a new China would emerge from the mass tumult Mao had brought about.
Ya Ru realised early on that the only guarantee to success was to learn where the centre of power was at any given time. An appreciation of the various trends in political and economic life was essential to climb to the level at which he now found himself.
When the markets loosened up here in China, I was ready, Ya Ru thought. I was one of those cats Deng spoke about — the ones that didn’t need to be black or grey as long as they hunted mice. Now I’m one of the richest men of my generation. I have secured my position thanks to contacts deep in the new age’s Forbidden City, where the innermost power circles of the Communist Party rule. I pay for their foreign trips; I fly in dress designers for their wives. I arrange places at top US universities for their children and build houses for their parents. In return, I have my freedom.
He interrupted his train of thought and checked the clock. Nearly midnight. He went to his desk and pressed an intercom button. Mrs Shen answered immediately.
‘I’m expecting a visitor,’ he said, ‘in about ten minutes. Make her wait for half an hour. Then I’ll buzz her in.’
Ya Ru sat down at his desk. It was always bare when he left in the evening. Every new day should be greeted by a clean slate on which new challenges could be spread out.
Lying on it at the moment was a well-thumbed old book whose covers were worn. Ya Ru sometimes thought he ought to engage a skilled craftsman to rebind the book before it fell to pieces. But he had decided to leave it as it was; the contents were still intact after all the years that had passed since it was written.
He placed it carefully to one side, pressed a button under the desk and a computer screen rose up effortlessly. He typed in a few characters, and his family tree appeared on the glowing screen. It had taken him a lot of time and money to put together this chart, or at least the parts he could be certain about. During the violent and bloodstained history of China, it was not only cultural treasures that had been lost; many archives had been destroyed. There were gaps in the tree that Ya Ru was looking at, gaps that he would never be able to fill in.
Even so, the key names were there. Including, most important, that of the man who had written the diary lying on his desk.
Ya Ru had searched for the house where his ancestor had sat writing in the light from a tallow candle. But there was nothing of it left. Where Wang San had lived was now covered in a network of main roads.
San had written in his diary that his words were meant for the wind and his children. Ya Ru had never understood what was meant by the wind reading the book. Presumably San had been a romantic deep down in his heart, despite the brutal life he had been forced to live and the need for revenge that never left him. But the children were there, above all a son named Guo Si. Guo Si was born in 1882. He had been one of the first leaders of the Communist Party and had been killed by the Japanese in their war with China.
Ya Ru often thought that the diary San had written was meant just for him. Although there was more than a century between its creation and the evening when he had sat reading it, it was as if San were speaking to him directly. The hatred his ancestor had felt all that time ago was still alive inside Ya Ru. First San, then Guo Si, and eventually himself.
There was a photograph of San’s son Guo Si from the beginning of the 1930s, posing with several other men in a mountainous landscape. Ya Ru had scanned it into his computer. Whenever he looked at the picture, it seemed to him that he was very close to Guo Si, who was standing just behind the man with a smile on his face and a wart on his cheek. He was so close to absolute power, Ya Ru thought. And I, too, his kinsman, have come that close to power in my life.
There was a soft buzz from the intercom. His first visitor had arrived, but he intended to make her wait. A long time ago he had read about a political leader who had reduced to a fine art the classification of his political friends or enemies according to the length of time they had to wait before getting to see him. They could then compare their times with one another and work out how far they were from the leader’s inner circle.
Ya Ru switched off the computer, and it disappeared under the desktop with the same faint humming noise as when it had appeared. He poured himself a glass of water from a carafe on the desk. The water came from Italy and was produced especially for him by a company partly owned by one of his own enterprises.
Water and oil, he thought. I surround myself with liquids. Today oil, tomorrow perhaps the right to extract water from various rivers and lakes.
He went over to the window again and looked towards the district where the Forbidden City lay. He liked to go there, visiting his friends whose money he looked after and increased for them. Today the emperor’s throne was empty. But power was still concentrated inside the walls of the ancient imperial city. Deng had once said that the old imperial dynasty would have envied the Communist Party its power. There was no other land in the world with a power base to match it. At this moment in time, every fifth person on earth who breathed was dependent on what the party’s emperor-like leader decided.