Behind the desk, in a black leather executive chair that he wore like an oversized jacket, was a large man with sleek black hair brushed back from a brow like a cliff face. The wide smile that stretched his thick, pale lips, reduced sparkling eyes to gashes on either side of a broken nose. There was no doubting his genuine delight at seeing Li. He blew smoke into the air and said, ‘How the hell are you…what is it they call you now…Chief? I’ve been looking forward to this ever since we got your letter.’ He made no attempt to get up, just reclining himself further in his executive chair and waving Li to a rather modest seat on the other side of the desk. ‘Have a seat, Li.’
Li stood for a moment, hesitating. It occurred to him that he could just turn around and walk out now. Save himself the humiliation. But somehow he knew that would just give Yi even more satisfaction. He sat down.
‘Cigarette?’ Yi held out a packet.
Li shook his head. ‘I’ve given up.’
Yi dropped the pack on the desk. ‘Why am I not surprised? You always were better than the rest of us. Stronger, smarter, faster. More will-power.’ He grinned. ‘So how are things at the Section?’
‘They’re good,’ Li said.
Yi raised an eyebrow. ‘So good that you want to pack it in and come work for Beijing Security?’ He leaned forward, frowning. ‘You know, I’ve been puzzling over that for days. You’re a big name, Li. Cracked a lot of high profile cases. The youngest detective ever to make Section Chief.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘And you want to give it all up?’
‘I have my reasons,’ Li said.
‘I’m sure you do. Just like I’m sure you had your reasons for kicking my ass out of the Section.’
‘You were a bad cop, Yi. I don’t like officers who’re on the take.’
‘You had no proof.’
‘If I’d had proof you wouldn’t be sitting here now. You’d be learning reform through labour. You should think yourself lucky.’
‘Lucky?’ His voice had raised its pitch, and his smile was a distant memory. ‘That you fucked up my career in the police? That I spent six months unemployed? You know my wife left me? Took the kids?’
‘Good for her.’
Yi glared at Li, both his fists clenched on the desk in front of him. Li half expected him to leap over it and attack him. And then suddenly Yi relaxed, and sat back again, the smile returning. ‘But then I made my own luck,’ he said. ‘Got in on the ground floor here at Beijing Security.’ It was a new joint venture between State and private enterprise to take over some of the security aspects of the old Public Security Bureaux. ‘Rising to the very top.’
‘Scum usually collects on the surface,’ Li said. He had known from the moment he set eyes on Yi there would be no job for him here. Not that he could ever have brought himself to work for the man. It was all a question now of which of them would lose face. And Yi was holding all the cards in that particular contest.
Yi’s smile didn’t waver. He said, ‘But I hold no grudges. After all, when someone of your experience and qualifications comes knocking, it would be a foolish man who would close the door on him without a second thought.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘Of course, you couldn’t expect to start on the twenty-third floor. You’d have to begin at the bottom and work your way up. You ever wondered what it’s like, Li, doing the night shift on the gate of some government building in the middle of December? I don’t have to wonder. I know. And you know what, I believe it’s an experience everyone should have. It prepares them better for management.’ He cocked his head to one side and looked at Li appraisingly. ‘You’d look good in uniform again.’ And he flicked his head towards the mannequins. ‘Pretty neat, huh?’
Li stood up. It was time to put an end to this. ‘I think you’re wasting my time, Yi.’
Yi tipped forward suddenly in his seat, the smile vanishing once again, eyes filled with hate. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s wasting my time. Soon as your application hit my desk I knew there was something weird about it. Why the hell would a man like you, at the peak of his career, suddenly throw it all away? So I made a few enquiries. Seems you finally got that pathologist bitch pregnant. And now you want to marry her?’ Yi shook his head. ‘And you thought for one minute that we might actually employ you? This is a security firm, Li. And a Chinese married to an American is a security risk. You’re unemployable in this business.’ And suddenly his face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Goodbye.’
He closed the folder on his desk in front of him, picked up the phone and swivelled his chair so that he had his back to Li, looking out over the view of the city. ‘Yeh, get me Central Services,’ Li heard him saying.
Yi had played his cards, and there was no doubt that Li had lost. He stood for a moment, wrapped in his humiliation, then turned and walked out of the office.
II
‘You’re late. Again.’ Margaret raised her eyes through her goggles and froze in mid-cut. She looked in astonishment at Li in his neatly pressed dark suit, white shirt and blue tie. Even if it was loosened at the neck, Li never wore a tie. ‘You look like you’ve just come from a job interview,’ she joked.
Li shifted uncomfortably and glanced at Sun who stood on the opposite side of the body from Margaret, wearing a green apron and a plastic shower cap. Sun’s face was expressionless.
‘I told you I had an important meeting this morning,’ Li said.
‘An appointment, you said,’ Margaret corrected him. She had a habit of remembering things with great accuracy. ‘A mysterious appointment that you wouldn’t tell me anything about.’
‘Have I missed anything?’ Li asked, ignoring the barb.
‘And still won’t apparently,’ Margaret muttered under her breath. She turned her attentions back to Xing Da. His body was just a shell now, ribs cut through and prised apart, the flesh of the chest and belly folded to either side of the central cut of the ‘Y’. The organs had been removed, as well as the brain, the top of the skull lying in a dish next to the autopsy table. Xing’s shaven scalp was folded down over his eyes and nose. ‘He was a mess,’ she said. ‘Broken ribs, liver and spleen mashed, probably by the steering wheel. It seems he was driving. No seat belt, so there were severe head and facial injuries when he hit the windshield. You could almost choose from half a dozen different injuries as being the cause of death, although in fact it was none of them.’
‘So what did kill him?’ Li asked, intrigued.
‘I have no idea. Yet. But I can tell you what didn’t kill him.’ Li waited, but she wanted him to ask.
‘What didn’t kill him?’ he obliged.
‘The car crash.’
Li frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean he was dead before the car hit the lamppost. And since he was driving, and we all know that dead men can’t drive, one has to wonder how the car came to be travelling at a hundred kilometers per hour down a Beijing Street at eleven o’clock at night.’
‘How can you tell he was dead before the crash?’
‘Detective Sun will tell you,’ Margaret said airily. ‘Since he was here on time, he’s already had that described for him. Meantime, I’m going to prepare frozen sections of the heart for microscopic examination.’ She disappeared across the autopsy room to where the organs had been breadloafed and spoke quickly to one of her assistants.
Li looked at Sun. ‘Well?’
‘Hey, Chief,’ he said, ‘my English isn’t that great. I think I understood, but…’ He shrugged.
Li said, ‘Give it a try.’
With some distaste, Sun indicated Xing Da’s superficial injuries, the contusions, abrasions and lacerations about his head and chest and stomach. ‘Doctor Campbell says if this guy had been alive when he picked up all these injuries, they would look quite different. They should be kind of red, or purple, you know, like blood beneath the surface of the skin. Apparently you don’t bleed too well if you’re dead, so if you were dead when you got them, injuries like these would be kind of tough, golden, parchment-like.’ Which they were. Sun took a deep breath. ‘Same with the internal stuff. His liver was pretty much crushed. According to the Doc there should have been at least a couple of litres of blood as a result. There was virtually none.’