Li turned off the water and pushed open the shower door. He stood dripping wet and naked, quite unselfconscious. ‘And he was the Police Commissioner?’
‘Sir Charles Warren. Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’ She eyed him lustfully and took hold of him with her free hand, feeling him swelling in her grasp from an immediate rush of blood. ‘If we didn’t have to be out of here in the next twenty minutes …’
He grinned. ‘Twenty minutes, huh? I suppose I could always try to speed things up.’
She squeezed him hard, making him flinch. ‘I should be so lucky.’
He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her softly, and then parted her lips with his tongue and sought hers. Li Jon started crying in the next room. He dropped his forehead on to her shoulder.
‘Shit,’ she hissed. And the buzzer sounded at the door. She pushed his clothes into his wet arms and said, ‘You’d better get dressed fast. I’ll let Mei Yuan in.’ As he danced naked through the hall towards their bedroom she shouted after him, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re having dinner tomorrow night with the Harts — if you can tear yourself away from the office for once.’
IV
The Great Hall of the People had played host to some of the fiercest political struggles in modern Chinese history. Built by Mao in the nineteen-fifties after the creation of the Republic, it stood along the west side of Tiananmen Square, facing east towards the Museum of Chinese History, and had been witness to the bloody events of 1989 when students demanding democracy were crushed under the wheels of army tanks. An event which had catapulted the Middle Kingdom headlong into such radical change it had produced not democracy, but instead the fastest growing economy in the world.
It was an impressive building, three hundred metres long, its three-storey facade supported by tall marble columns. Along with all the other buildings around the square, it was floodlit. The whole of central Beijing, it seemed, was floodlit, obliterating the stars that shone beyond the light in a clear, black sky overhead.
It took Li and Margaret just fifteen minutes to walk in the cold to the Great Hall from their apartment, along Qianmen Dong Da Jie, and up through Tiananmen from the south end, past Mao’s mausoleum. Margaret had queued once to see the great man lying preserved in his coffin beneath a glass dome, and came away convinced that all she had witnessed was a wax effigy.
She held Li’s arm, and felt his warmth and strength even through the thickness of his coat. Beneath it he wore his dress uniform, and he cut an impressive figure as he strode across the pavings of the huge square. She was proud of him, even though she knew he was opposed to this award and dreading the ceremony.
There were streams of cars dropping people off on the corner of Renminda Hutong Xilu where they were entering the gardens in front of the hall through turnstile gates. Guests of honour strolled across the vast, paved concourse and stood chatting in groups on the steps beneath the pillars. Margaret felt a small frisson of excitement. The Great Hall of the People was a piece of history and she was about to enter it with the man who would be centre stage in its auditorium. ‘How many people are going to be here?’ she asked. She had not expected so many cars.
‘It will be full,’ Li said.
‘How many is that?’
‘Ten thousand.’
‘Ten thousand!’ It seemed inconceivable. ‘Who are they all?’
‘Invited guests,’ Li said with a tone, and Margaret felt his tension.
‘It must be some size of auditorium.’
‘It’s on three levels,’ he said. ‘Sixty metres wide, seventy metres from stage to back, and forty metres high.’ Figures that had been dinned into him in primary school. ‘And there are no pillars.’ The coup de grâce. His teacher’s eyes had shone with wonder as she told them. Li doubted if she had ever actually seen it for herself — a hick teacher from a primary school in rural Sichuan. He had later seen her beaten to death by Red Guards.
They crossed the concourse, and Li flashed his ID to the guard on duty who immediately saluted and lifted the chain to let them through. On the steps they were greeted by Commissioner Zhu and Deputy Cao, who were standing smoking in the cold night air, accompanied by their respective wives. Zhu glanced at his watch and said, ‘You’re late.’ He made no introductions and ignored Margaret. ‘They’re waiting for you.’ He took Li by the elbow and steered him away up the stairs.
Li called back to Margaret, ‘I’ll see you after the ceremony.’
She nodded, smiled politely at Cao and the two women. ‘Ni hau,’ she said, and made her way up through the pillars to the main entrance, conscious of their silence, and of their eyes on her back.
Inside, she had to put her purse through an airport-style x-ray security machine and walk through a frame that scanned her for … she had no idea what. Metal objects, she supposed. Guns or knives. As if she might be intent on attacking the father of her child. Through another doorway, and she was into the main lobby, a huge marbled hall, overlooked by a balcony that ran all the way around it. Stairs led up to it from either end. Tall wooden double doors along the entire length of the central hall, on both levels, led into the auditorium itself. There were already thousands of people thronging the floor, the echo of their voices thundering back at them from a ceiling you could hardly see, enormous chandeliers casting yellow light on a sea of black heads. Margaret felt at once conspicuous, anonymous and lost, aware of her fair hair and blue eyes drawing curious looks. Most of the guests would not have expected to have encountered a yangguizi on an occasion like this. She felt a tug on her arm, and turned to find a young Chinese girl grinning up at her.
‘Magret,’ Xinxin said. Li’s niece was nearly ten now and almost up to Margaret’s shoulder. Although her English was excellent, she still pronounced Margaret’s name the way she had when they had first met and the child had no English at all.
‘Xinxin!’ Margaret was both pleased and relieved to see her. She stooped to kiss her and give her a hug, and then looked around. ‘Where’s your mother? And your grandfather?’
By way of reply, Xinxin took her hand — which still felt very small in hers — and said, ‘You come with me, Magret. We are invited to reception for guest of honour.’ And she glowed with obvious pride and pleasure at the thought that her Uncle Yan was the guest of honour.
The child led the adult confidently through the crowds to the north end of the hall, and up a staircase at the far corner to the pillared balcony above. They hurried then across thick red carpet, past open doors leading to a huge overlit room with chairs set in a circle below a wall displaying a vast aerial photograph of the Forbidden City. ‘That Beijing Room,’ Xinxin said. ‘There is one room for every province in Great Hall. Even one for Taiwan, for when she come back to China.’ She grinned as if she understood the politics of it.
Margaret couldn’t resist a smile. ‘How do you know all this, little one?’
‘I come here on tour with school,’ she said. ‘All school visit Great Hall of People.’
Almost opposite the Beijing Hall, an enormous doorway led to the reception room, already crowded with dignitaries. There were high-ranking police officers and government ministers. Faces Margaret had only ever seen in newspapers or on television screens. She also saw some more familiar faces. Detectives from Li’s section. Qian and Wu and a few others whose names she could not recall. Glasses filled with champagne and orange juice were set out on a long table beneath a twenty-foot mural of a Chinese mountainscape illuminated by a rising sun. Most of the guests were drinking champagne.