IV
He took the last subway train south on the loop line from Dongzhimen to Jianguomen. There he found himself an almost solitary figure trudging through the snow in the dark past the Friendship Store, and the bottom end of the deserted Silk Street. There were still some late diners in McDonald’s, and the in-crowd was clouding windows at Starbucks, sipping coffees and mochas and hot chocolates that cost more than the average Beijinger earned in a day. At the Dongdoqiao intersection, the lonely figure of a frozen traffic cop stood rigidly inside his long, fur-collared coat, cap pulled down as low over his face as it would go. The traffic was scant, and the pedestrians few and far between. He was ignoring both, and the snow was gathering in ledges on each of his shoulders. A red-faced beggar came scurrying through the snow towards Li, dragging a wailing child in his wake. He turned away, disappointed, when he saw that Li was Chinese, and not some soft-hearted yangguizi. If only he had known, Li never failed to give a beggar the change in his pocket.
Outside the floodlit entrance of the Jianguo Hotel, a group of well-fed foreigners tumbled out of a taxi and hurried, laughing, into the lobby. Water-skiing plastic Santas frolicked around a fountain in an ornamental pool in the forecourt, and fake snow hung from the roof of a Christmas log cabin. The soft strains of Jingle Bells drifted into the night sky. Li ploughed on past the rows of redundant taxis, drivers grouped together inside with engines running, the heating on, playing cards for money. A golden Christmas tree dotted with fairy lights twinkled opposite the revolving door of the Jinglun Hotel. In the lobby, beneath a giant polystyrene effigy of Santa Claus in his reindeer-drawn sleigh, Christmas party-goers fell out of the restaurant past staff in red and white Santa hats. In here the public address system was playing Silent Night.
Beneath the soaring gold pillars and the tall palm trees, Li saw Margaret sitting at a table on her own. Behind her, in the doorway of the twenty-four-hour café, a life-sized animated clown was dancing, and singing The Yellow Rose of Texas in a strange electronic voice which intermittently broke off to scream, ‘Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho.’
She stood up as soon as she saw Li. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said. ‘Another five minutes and you’d have been investigating the death of a clown.’
‘Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho,’ said the clown, and she glared at it. He took her arm. ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs.’
Their room was on the fifth floor, at the far end of a long corridor. Li saw the security camera that pointed along it from the elevators and wondered just who was watching. Although he had asked for a double, they had given him a twin-bedded room. The beds were dressed with garishly patterned quilt covers. He switched out the lights and pulled back the quilt on the bed nearest the window. It was more than big enough for two. He did not draw the curtains, and once their eyes had adjusted there was sufficient ambient light from the avenue below by which to see.
A strange urgency overtook them as they undressed and slipped into bed. The warmth of her skin on his immediately stirred his sexual desire. He kissed her lips and her breasts and her belly, and smelled the sex in her soft, downy triangle of hair. He felt her grip his buttocks and try to pull him into her. But he wanted to wait, to take his time, to savour the moment. ‘Please,’ she whispered to him in the dark. ‘Please, Li Yan.’
He rolled over and knelt between her legs without entering her and cupped her swollen breasts in his hands, feeling the nipples grow hard against his palms, and he ran his tongue up over her belly, squeezing her breasts together so that he could move his lips quickly from one nipple to the other, sucking, teasing, biting. She arched backwards as he moved up to her neck, and his hot breath on her skin made her shiver. He found her lips, and the sweetness of her tongue, and then he slipped inside her, catching her almost unawares, and she gasped.
They moved together in slow, rhythmic waves for fifteen minutes or more, turning one way, then the other, gripped by their passion, but gentle with the knowledge of their baby lying curled between them, the perfect product of a previous encounter. Until finally, he thrust hard and deep, arching backwards so as not to bear down on her, feeling her fingers biting into his back. She screamed at the moment of his release, and he felt her muscular spasm suck him dry, taking his seed this time for love alone.
Afterwards, they lay for more than ten minutes on their backs, side by side, listening to snowflakes brush the window like falling feathers.
‘You’ve been smoking,’ Margaret said suddenly.
‘Just one. Well, really, just half of one.’ He hesitated for a long time, steeling himself for this. ‘Margaret, we need to talk about the wedding.’
‘I’ve done enough talking about that tonight. I had to face my mother, remember, after you dropped me at the apartment.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I think she was relieved that she wasn’t going to have some Chinese as a son-in-law after all.’
He was silent for several minutes then. ‘You seem to be taking it very calmly.’
‘Do I?’ She inclined her head to look at him. ‘Appearances can be deceptive.’
‘So what are you thinking?’
‘You mean apart from hating you for not telling me?’
‘Apart from that.’
‘I’m thinking about how much I just want to hurt you for hurting me,’ she said. ‘For lying to me. For deceiving me.’
‘I still want to marry you,’ he said.
‘Forget it.’ And she tried very hard not to succumb to the self-pity which was welling up inside. After all, hadn’t she spent long enough these last weeks debating with herself whether marriage and motherhood were really what she wanted in life? She made a determined effort to force a change of topic. ‘So how did it go tonight? Did you find Fleischer?’
Li lay back and closed his eyes. He still didn’t have the courage to tell her. So he released his thoughts to run over the night’s events, and shuddered again at the recollection of what he had uncovered at the club. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But if there’s a connection between Fleischer and the dead athletes, then we’re up against something much more powerful than I could ever have imagined.’
For a moment Margaret forgot her own concerns. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The club where Fleischer was photographed is run by Triads.’
She frowned. ‘Triads? That’s like a kind of Chinese mafia, isn’t it?’
‘Bigger, more pervasive, steeped in ritual and tradition.’ He turned to find her watching him intently. ‘The Event Hall at the club is a ceremonial chamber for the induction of new members. It has an east — west orientation, with doors on all four walls, a representation of the lodges where these original inductions took place. Most times I would have walked into it and never have known, but tonight it was all set up for an induction ceremony.’
He described to her the layout of the hall, with its three, freestanding, ornamental doorways representing the entries to the chambers of a traditional lodge; the items laid out on the floor, symbolic of a journey made by the founding monks.
‘The monks came from a Shaolin monastery in Fujian,’ he said. ‘They were supposed to have answered a call by the last Ming emperor to save the dynasty and take up arms against the Ch’ing. But one of their number betrayed them, and most of them were killed when the monastery was set on fire. Five escaped. And they’re what they call the “First Five Ancestors”. According to legend they had a series of extraordinary adventures and miraculous escapes. I mean, literally miraculous. Like a grass sandal turning into a boat so that they could sail across a river and escape the Ch’ing soldiers. During this journey, their numbers grew until they became an army, and they called themselves the “Hung League”. But, then, over the years they became fragmented, dividing into hundreds of different groups or gangs who inducted new members by re-enacting the original legend.’ He snorted. ‘Of course, they never did restore the Ming Dynasty. They turned to crime instead. I guess they were one of the world’s first crime syndicates.’