Ya Ru stood up as a signal that, as far as he was concerned, the meeting was over. The two men bowed and left the room. When they had gone, he rang through to Mrs Shen.
‘Get hold of one of my security chiefs and tell him to find out who these two are,’ he said. ‘Find out who their bosses are. Then summon my nine managing directors to a meeting three days from now. Everybody must attend, no excuses accepted. Anybody who doesn’t turn up will be fired on the spot. This has to be sorted out.’
Ya Ru was furious. What he did was no worse than what anybody else did. A man like Shen Weixian frequently went too far and in addition had been rude to the state officials who cleared the way for him. He had been an appropriate scapegoat, and nobody would miss him now that he was gone.
Ya Ru spent several hours of intensive activity working out a plan for what to do next and puzzling over which of his managing directors could have secretly opened up the poison cupboard and given away information about his dodgy deals and secret agreements.
Three days later his managing directors assembled in a hotel in Beijing. Ya Ru had chosen the location with care. It was there that he used to call a meeting once a year and fire one of his directors in order to demonstrate that nobody was safe. The group of men gathered in the conference room shortly after ten in the morning looked distinctly pale. None of them had been informed precisely what the meeting was about. Ya Ru kept them waiting for more than an hour before putting in an appearance. His strategy was very simple. First he confiscated their mobile phones, so that they were unable to contact one another or be in touch with the outside world, then he sent them out of the room. Each of them had to sit in a small room with one of the guards summoned by Mrs Shen at his side. Then Ya Ru interviewed them one at a time and told them without beating about the bush what he had heard a couple of days previously. What did they have to say? Any explanations? Was there something Ya Ru ought to know? He observed their faces closely and tried to detect if any of them seemed to have prepared what to say in advance. If there was such a person, Ya Ru could be sure that he had found the source of the leak.
But all the directors displayed the same degree of surprise and indignation. At the end of the day, he was forced to conclude that he hadn’t found a guilty person. He let them go without firing anybody. But all of them received strict instructions to look into the security of their own set-ups.
It was only some days later, when Mrs Shen reported on what his investigators had discovered about the men from the security services, that he realised he had been following a false trail. Once again he’d been studying the plans for his house in Africa when she came in. He asked her to sit down and adjusted the desk lamp so that his face was in shadow. He liked listening to her voice. No matter what she told him, be it a financial report or a summary of new directives from some government authority, he always had the feeling that she was telling him a story. There was something in her voice that reminded him of the childhood he had long since forgotten about, or been robbed of — he couldn’t make up his mind which.
‘Somehow or other it seems to be connected with your dead sister Hong Qiu. She was in close contact with some of the top men at the State Security Bureau. Her name keeps cropping up whenever we try to link the men who came to visit us the other morning and others hovering in the background. We think the information can only have been circulating for a short time before she died so tragically. Nevertheless, somebody at the very highest level seems to have given the go-ahead.’
Ya Ru noticed that Mrs Shen broke off. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Nothing is sure. Has somebody at the very top authorised this investigation into my activities?’
‘I can’t say if it’s true or not, but rumour has it that those in authority are not satisfied with the outcome of the sentence passed on Shen Weixian.’
A shiver ran down Ya Ru’s spine. He understood the implications before Mrs Shen had time to say any more.
‘Another scapegoat? Do they want to condemn another rich man in order to demonstrate that this is now a campaign and not merely an indication that patience is running out?’
Mrs Shen nodded. Ya Ru shrank further back into the shadows. ‘Anything else?’
‘No.’
‘You may go.’
Mrs Shen left the room. Ya Ru didn’t move. He forced himself to think, although what he wanted to do most of all was run away.
When he had made the difficult decision to kill Hong Qiu, and that the murder would take place in Africa, he had been sure that she was still his loyal sister. Of course, they had different views, they often argued. In this very room, on his birthday, she had accused him of taking bribes.
That was when he had realised that sooner or later Hong Qiu would become too big a danger to him. He now saw that he ought to have acted sooner. Hong Qiu had already abandoned him.
Ya Ru shook his head slowly. He now understood something that had never occurred to him before. Hong Qiu had been prepared to do the same thing to him as he had done to her. She hadn’t intended to use a weapon herself — Hong Qiu preferred to proceed via the laws of the land. But if Ya Ru had been condemned to death, she would have been one of those declaring it the right thing to do.
Ya Ru thought of his friend Lai Changxing, who some years previously had been forced to flee the country when the police raided all his companies early one morning. The only reason he managed to save himself and his family had been that he owned a private plane that was always ready to take off at a moment’s notice. He had fled to Canada, which did not have an extradition treaty with China. He was the son of a peasant who had made an amazing career for himself when Deng created a free market. He had started by digging wells but later became a smuggler and invested all he earned in companies that within a few years generated an enormous fortune. Ya Ru had once visited him in the Red Manor he had built in his home district of Xiamen. He had also taken upon himself major social responsibilities by constructing old people’s homes and schools. Even in those days Ya Ru had been put off by Lai Changxing’s arrogant ostentation and had warned his friend that he could be heading for a fall. They had sat one evening discussing the envy many people felt with regard to the new capitalists, the Second Dynasty, as Lai Changxing called them ironically — but only when talking in private with people he trusted.
Ya Ru had not been surprised when the gigantic house of cards collapsed and Lai had to flee the country. After he’d left, several of those involved with his businesses were executed. Others — hundreds of them — had been imprisoned. But at the same time, he was revered as a generous man in his poor home district. He would give fortunes to taxi drivers in the form of tips or give generous gifts to impoverished families whose names he didn’t even know, for no obvious reason. Ya Ru also knew that Lai was now writing his memoir — which worried many high-ranking officials and politicians in China. Lai was in possession of many truths, and as he now lived in Canada, nobody could censure him.
But Ya Ru had no intention of fleeing his country.
There was another thought beginning to gnaw away at his mind. Ma Li, Hong Qiu’s friend, had also been on the visit to Africa. Ya Ru knew that the two women had had long conversations. Moreover, Hong Qiu had always been a letter writer.
Perhaps Ma Li was in possession of an incriminating letter from Hong Qiu? Something she had passed on to people who had in turn informed the security services?
Three days later, when one of the winter’s severe sandstorms was raging over Beijing, Ya Ru visited Ma Li’s office not far from Ritan Gongyuan, the Sun God’s Park. Ma Li worked in a government department devoted to financial analyses and wasn’t sufficiently senior to cause him any serious problems. Mrs Shen and her assistants had investigated Ma Li and found no links with the inner circles of government and the party. Ma Li had two children. Her current husband was an insignificant bureaucrat. As her first husband had died in the war with the Vietnamese in the 1970s, nobody had objected to her remarrying and having another child. Both of the children now led lives of their own: the eldest, a daughter, was an educational adviser in a teacher training college, and the son worked as a surgeon at a hospital in Shanghai. Neither of them had contacts that caused Ya Ru any worries. But he had been careful to note that Ma Li had two grandchildren to whom she devoted a large amount of her time.