She smiled. ‘Hi.’
The American turned to Margaret, extending his hand. ‘And you must be Margaret. My name’s Bill Hart. I have heard so much about you, Margaret.’
‘All of it bad, no doubt.’
He shrugged a shoulder. ‘Pretty much. But I figure, hell, with a reputation like that, you gotta be worth meeting.’
Margaret raised an eyebrow. ‘I hope I won’t disappoint you, then.’
He grinned. ‘Don’t you dare.’ And he turned to his wife. ‘This is Chi Lyang.’
Margaret shook hands with her. ‘Don’t believe everything you hear about me,’ she said. ‘Since I became a mother I’ve retired from hostilities.’
Lyang smiled, dark eyes sparkling. ‘Well, since I became a wife, I’ve had to retire from the police. But I still like to indulge in a bit of hostility now and then.’
‘And, boy, can she be hostile,’ Hart said.
‘We should get on just fine, then,’ Margaret said.
Lyang cupped her hand under a sleepy Li Jon’s chin and he squinted at her in the bright sunlight. ‘He’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing him. I couldn’t find anyone to look after him at short notice.’
‘If I’d known I’d have brought Ling with me. She’s fifteen months.’
‘It’s Li Jon’s first birthday next month.’
‘Well, you’ll have no shortage of things to talk about,’ Hart said. He rattled off some Chinese at a waitress and she disappeared, returning quickly with a highchair for Li Jon.
They settled themselves around the table, and the red-jacketed serving girls brought in a large tray with plates bearing a variety of raw sliced mushrooms and placed it on a side table. Hart ordered beer, and another waitress brought a large, cooked black chicken in stock and tipped it carefully into the bubbling liquid in the centre of the table.
‘You ever had black chicken before?’ Hart asked Margaret. She shook her head. ‘Just tastes like chicken, except it’s black,’ he said.
Lyang said, ‘In traditional Chinese medicine, black chicken is used to treat female diseases.’
‘And since I don’t have any female diseases, obviously it works,’ Hart said.
Margaret smiled. ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Sounds appetising.’
Li said to Lyang, ‘You speak exceptionally good English.’
She inclined her head a little in acknowledgement. ‘I was a translator at the Ministry of State Security. Russian and English. That was before I moved over to Public Security.’
‘And if she hadn’t become a cop, I’d never have met her,’ Hart said.
‘And if we’d never met, I’d still have been a cop,’ she replied. There was no hint of rancour in her tone, but Margaret sensed some underlying tension. She knew only too well that the authorities would not allow a serving police officer to marry a foreign national. If you wanted to marry, you had to quit the force. She glanced at Li, but he was avoiding her eye.
‘We met at a conference in Boston,’ Hart said. ‘Lyang was trained in polygraphy at the University of Public Security here in Beijing. She was on an exchange trip to see how the Americans do it.’
‘And no doubt we Americans do it better,’ Margaret said. ‘We always do everything better, don’t we?’
Hart smiled indulgently at her sarcasm. ‘We do it differently. And we’ve had a lot more experience. The Chinese began using the polygraph just ten years ago, and it has only been employed in around eight thousand cases since then. Compare that to the States, where we’ve been using lie detection for more than seventy years, and almost every government employee has to submit to a polygraph test to get his job. I think we know a little more about it.’
Margaret shrugged. ‘What’s to know? It’s just a bunch of wires and sensors that read heart-rate, breathing, perspiration. The operator is the lie detector, not the machine. It’s all psychology. Smoke and mirrors.’
Hart laughed infectiously. ‘You’re right, of course, Margaret. Which is why experience counts for so much.’
‘Then how come you manage to get it wrong so often?’
‘Margaret…’ Li said, a hint of warning in his voice.
But Hart was unruffled. ‘Relax, Li Yan, I’m enjoying this. It’s good to do battle with someone who can make a good argument.’ He turned back to Margaret. ‘Actually, we have a pretty high success rate. Ninety percent or higher.’
But Margaret was unimpressed. ‘Not according to the OTA. You know what that is?’
‘Sure. The Office of Technology Assessment. It’s an arm of the US federal government that analyses and evaluates current technology.’
‘Whose evaluation of the success rate of the polygraph is as low as 50 percent. Hell, I can guess and be right half the time.’
Lyang was grinning. ‘Still enjoying the argument, Bill?’
But Margaret wasn’t finished. ‘I read somewhere that between one and four million private citizens in the US submit to a polygraph every year. Even assuming you did have a 90 percent success rate, that’s a heck of a lot of people to be wrong about. People who might lose or fail to gain employment, people stigmatised as liars because of inaccurate polygraph tests. It’s not science, Bill, it’s voodoo.’
Hart’s grin never faltered as he eyed Margaret with something approaching admiration. ‘Jesus, Margaret, they were right about you. I’d love to get you in the chair and wire you up. Pin you down on my territory.’
‘Okay,’ Margaret said, to everyone’s surprise.
‘What, you mean you’d let me give you a polygraph test?’
‘If you let me give you an autopsy.’ The others roared with laughter. And Margaret broke into a smile for the first time. ‘I reckon I’d find out a lot more about you in an hour and a half than you’d ever find out about me.’
Hart nodded, still smiling, acknowledging defeat. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I give in. Let’s eat.’
And the waitresses brought the mushrooms to the table and started cooking them in the stock with the chicken. Lyang showed Margaret how to mix up her own dip from three dishes of sesame paste, chili and garlic, and dip the cooked pieces of mushroom in the mix before eating. Margaret was surprised at just how delicious the mushrooms were, each with its own distinctive flavour and texture. A waitress broke up the chicken in the pot and served portions of it into each of their individual bowls. It melted in the mouth.
‘Actually,’ Hart said, washing down mushroom with beer, ‘I’m not in favour of using the polygraph on employees or job applicants. I regard it only as a useful tool in criminal interrogation. It is at its most effective when the suspect believes the machine will catch him in a lie. You’d be amazed at how often they just confess.’ He spooned some of the stock into his bowl and drank it like soup. ‘You know, the Chinese invented a pretty good method of lie detection about three thousand years ago.’
Li looked up surprised. ‘We did?’
‘Sure we did,’ Lyang said. ‘Works on the principle that if you are telling a lie you produce less saliva. So the ancient Chinese gave the suspect a mouthful of rice to chew, then told him to spit it out. If he was afraid of the test because he was lying, he would suffer from dry mouth and the rice would stick to his tongue and the roof of his mouth. An innocent person, on the other hand, would be able to spit it out clean.’
Hart said, ‘But the Indians had an even better one. They would put lampblack on the tail of a donkey and lead it into a dark room. Suspects were ordered to go into the room and pull the donkey’s tail. They were told that it was a magic donkey and would be able to tell if the suspect was being truthful or not. When the suspects came out of the room their hands were examined. If they didn’t have any lampblack on them they hadn’t pulled the donkey’s tail. Why? Obviously because they were scared of being found out. Guilty as charged.’