And still the snow fell.
He reached the subway station at Jianguomen, and limped down the steps. Warm air rushed up to meet him. He bought a ticket and stood on a crowded platform waiting for a train going north. A southbound train, headed for Beijing Railway Station, came in on the other line, debouching a handful of passengers before sucking in all the people on the far side of the platform.
Li had seen the face of the driver in his cab as it came in, pale and weary in the early morning, caught for a moment in the dazzle of lights on the platform. As it left, he saw the guard peering from the side window of the cab at the other end. Had the train come in on Li’s side, heading in the other direction, their roles would have been reversed. And he realised consciously for the first time that the trains were reversible. They could be driven from either end. The same going forwards as backwards. And he wondered why something tucked away in the farthest and darkest recesses of his mind was telling him that there was significance in this.
His train arrived, and he squeezed into it to stand clutching an overhead handrail, using his free arm to protect his ribs from the other passengers crushing in around him. The recorded voice of a female announcer told them that the next stop was Chaoyangmen. And the significance of the reversible train came to him quite unexpectedly. It was Mei Yuan’s riddle. About the I Ching expert and the girl who came to consult him on his sixty-sixth birthday. Somewhere, beyond awareness, his subconscious had been chipping away at it, and now that the solution had come to him, he wondered why he had not seen it immediately. It was breath-takingly simple.
At Dongzhimen he struggled painfully to the top of the stairs, emerging once more into the cold, bitter wind that blew the snow in from the Gobi Desert. The sky was filled with a purple-grey light now, and the traffic was grinding slowly in both directions along Ghost Street. The demolition men were out already, thankful for once to be wielding their hammers, burning energy to keep themselves warm. The snow lay in ledges along every branch of every tree lining both sides of the street, on walls and window-sills and doorways, so that it felt as if the whole world were edged in white. Even the gap sites looked less ugly under their pristine, sparkling carpets.
Li was surprised to see Mei Yuan serving customers at her usual corner, steam rising in the cold from her hotplate as she scooped up jian bing in brown paper parcels to hand over in exchange for cash. She had rigged up an umbrella from her bicycle stall to fend off the snow as she worked. But the wind was defeating it, and large, soft flakes blew in all around her.
‘You’re early,’ he said to her.
She looked up, surprised. ‘So are you.’ There was a moment of awkwardness between them. Unfinished business from the betrothal meeting, unspoken exchanges. Confusion and sympathy. Perhaps a little anger. She said, ‘I’m going to the park later today. With Mrs. Campbell. She expressed an interest in tai chi.’
‘Did she?’ But he wasn’t really interested.
‘Would you like a jian bing?’
He nodded, the smell of the pancakes making him realise for the first time just how hungry he was. Although his head was protected by the hood of his jacket, the snow blew in all around his face, making it wet and cold. Big flakes clung to his eyebrows. He brushed them away. ‘I’m sorry about last night.’
She shrugged. ‘Someday, perhaps, you’ll feel like telling me about it.’
‘Someday,’ he said. And he watched her make his jian bing in silence. When finally she finished it and handed it to him, steaming and deliciously hot in his hands, he took a bite and said, ‘I figured out your riddle.’
‘You took your time,’ was all she said.
‘I had other things on my mind.’
She waited, but when he said nothing, grew impatient. ‘Well?’
He took another bite and spoke with his mouth full, savouring both the pancake and his solution. ‘Wei Chang was the I Ching practitioner, right?’ She nodded. ‘He was born on the second of February, nineteen twenty-five, and he was sixty-six on the day the young woman came to see him. That meant the date was February the second, nineteen ninety-one.’ She nodded again. ‘If you were to write that down it would be 2-2-1991. He wanted to add her age to that and then reverse the number to make a code specially for her. Of course, you didn’t tell me her age. But for this number to be so unusual, so auspicious, the woman had to be twenty-two. That way, the number he was making up for her would be 22199122, yes? Which makes it palindromic. The same backwards as forwards.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘I was beginning to despair of you ever working it out.’
‘I was distracted.’
‘So I gather.’
But he did not want to get into that. ‘Where did you come across it?’
‘I didn’t. I made it up.’
He looked at her surprised. ‘Really? How in the name of your ancestors did you think of it?’
‘The English book I was reading on Napoleon Bonaparte,’ she said. ‘Not a very serious biography. The writer seemed more intent on making a fool of the Frenchman. He referred to an old joke about Bonaparte’s exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. He was alleged to have said on arriving there, Able was I ere I saw Elba. A perfect palindrome. Exactly the same forwards as backwards. Entirely apocryphal, of course. He was French! Why would he speak in English? But it gave me the idea, and since a palindrome wouldn’t work in Chinese, I made it with numbers instead.’
Li grinned at her, forgetting all his troubles for the moment. ‘You’re a smart lady, Mei Yuan. Did anyone ever tell you that?’
‘All the time.’ She smiled, and the tension between them melted like the snow on her hotplate. ‘It’s an interesting book. I’ll lend it to you if you like.’
‘I don’t have much time for reading just now.’
‘You should always make time for reading, Li Yan. And anyway, there’s an element of criminal investigation in it. That should interest you.’
And Li thought how very soon he would have no interest of any kind in criminal investigation. ‘Oh?’
Mei Yuan’s eyes grew distant, and Li knew that she had transported herself to some other place on this earth. It was why she loved to read. Her escape from the cold and the drudgery of making pancakes on a street corner. In this case, her destination was the island of St Helena — the place of Napoleon’s final exile — and a debate now nearly two centuries old. ‘When the British finally defeated Napoleon,’ she said, ‘he was banished to a tiny island in the South Atlantic where he died in 1821. It has long been rumoured and written that he was actually murdered there to prevent his escape and return to France. It was said that his food was laced with arsenic, and that he died from poisoning.’ She reached behind her saddle and pulled out the book, holding it with a kind of reverence. ‘But according to this, a medical archaeologist from Canada disproved the murder theory nearly one hundred and eighty years after Napoleon’s death.’
In spite of his mood and the cold and the snow, Li found his interest engaged. ‘How?’
‘Locks of his hair were taken at autopsy and kept for posterity. This medical archaeologist, Doctor Peter Lewin, got access to the hair and was able to conduct an analysis of it which disproved the theory of murder by poisoning.’
Li frowned. ‘How could he tell that from examining the hair?’
‘Apparently the hair is like a kind of log of chemicals and poisons that pass through our bodies. Doctor Lewin contended that if Napoleon had, indeed, been poisoned, there would still be traces of the arsenic that killed him in his hair. He found none.’