The trishaw driver was still asleep under his candy-striped canopy as Li and Wu turned out of the main gate. Wu was chewing furiously on his gum. ‘I don’t know about you, Chief, but I’m starving.’ He checked his watch. ‘How about we stop somewhere for a bite of lunch.’
Li said, ‘I’m never hungry after an autopsy.’ He sighed. ‘But I’ve got a lunch appointment at twelve, so I’m going to have to find an appetite from somewhere.’
Wu was not impressed. ‘Lucky you. Who’s buying you lunch?’
‘An American polygraph expert from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He’s set up a demonstration this afternoon for a group of top Ministry of Public Security people.’
Wu was unimpressed. ‘A polygraph demonstration?’
‘No,’ Li said. ‘It’s a new thing called MERMER.’
‘Mermer?’ Wu pulled a face. ‘What the hell’s a Mermer when it’s at home?’
‘Some kind of foolproof way of detecting guilty knowledge in the brain,’ Li said. ‘At least, that’s what they claim.’ He cast a wry smile in Wu’s direction. ‘A good job your wife never had access to it.’
Wu laughed. ‘If she had, we’d only have got divorced all the sooner.’
III
The Mo Gu Huo Guo mushroom hotpot restaurant stood on a corner, in the shadow of the tall cylindrical tower of the Central Music Conservatory, just off Pufang Lu. Its speciality was mushrooms from Sichuan and Yunan Provinces. Margaret stood on the steps in the sunshine with Li Jon in her arms. The American polygraph expert had wanted to meet her. He had married a Chinese cop and thought that the two couples might have quite a lot in common. She watched as the Santana pulled up under the trees, a chill wind rustling stubborn leaves that refused to fall. As Li climbed out, Wu slipped into the driver’s seat and drove off.
Margaret eyed the father of her child as he approached her across the broad curve of pavement, his shadow falling away to his right. He looked good in his long coat, tall and broad-shouldered, his black hair cropped in its distinctive flat-top crew cut. His pants were still sharply creased, although a little crinkled around the knee, and his white shirt was tucked tightly in at his impossibly narrow waist. Clothes hung beautifully on the Chinese frame, and Margaret marvelled at how she was still attracted to Li, even after all this time. Her stomach did a little flip, and she remembered how their passion had been frustrated by the call on his cellphone in the early hours of that morning. And she saw a weariness in his face that she recognised as owing more to what the call had led him to confront than to the simple interruption of his sleep.
He smiled and stooped to kiss her, and ran a hand through the black hair beginning to grow more thickly now on his son’s head. ‘Been waiting long?’
‘Just arrived.’
‘They’re probably already here then. We’d better go in.’
He wasn’t volunteering anything about his call-out this morning, and she knew better than to ask.
The restaurant was drum-shaped, like its taller neighbour, the Central Conservatory. It had dining halls on three floors, with private rooms around the outside on the second and third. A pretty waitress in a red jacket and skirt led them up a circular staircase and around a pillared corridor which skirted the second-floor dining room. The American and his wife were waiting for them in a private room about two-thirds of the way around. They stood up from a table with a large pot sunk into its centre, over a concealed gas ring. Steam rose from bubbling stock. The room was ablaze with sunlight, and Li and Margaret were dazzled by it, entering from the dark inner hall.
The polygrapher was tall and slim, a man in his forties with a head of thick, greying hair. He wore a baggy brown suit and checked shirt, with a tie loose at the neck. ‘Yeh, blinding isn’t it?’ He grinned at them as they shaded their eyes. ‘But, then, I always figure I look better when you can’t see me.’ He shook Li’s hand warmly. ‘Good to see you again, Li Yan. You haven’t met Chi Lyang, have you?’
‘No.’ Li shook hands with a slight, but attractive-looking Chinese woman in her mid-thirties. Her long black hair was drawn back in a ponytail. She wore jeans and sneakers and a white blouse. ‘Ni hau,’ he said.
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 redjacketed 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.’