‘Of course.’ Old Meng glanced at the big clock on the wall. ‘But you’ll need to wait until I finish at six. And then I’ll take you to him.’
* * *
Li had never known an hour to pass so slowly. He sat on a low wall in the courtyard outside the municipal building smoking cigarette after cigarette. More for something to do than anything else, he had crossed the road to a small general store on the corner and bought a pack. Now he was nearly halfway through it, and his mouth felt dry and kippered. It was ten past six and almost dark before the old man pushed open the door of the main building and came down the steps towards him, dwarfed by his big coat and wearing a thermal ski cap. He made Li think of his father, and his heart lurched with the memory of the old man abandoned in Lao Dai’s apartment. He must be wondering what had happened to his son.
‘You got a car?’ old Meng said. Li shook his head. ‘We’ll need a taxi then.’
The taxi ride took less than fifteen minutes. Li sat in the back, while the old man sat up front with the driver arguing about the best route to take, a constant dialogue. Li watched the city slip by him as darkness fell. It was darker than Beijing. Here there were fewer lights. They did not have as much power to waste. Li had no idea where they were, or where they were going. He heard the name Taigang mentioned several times, but it meant nothing to him. And then through the windscreen he saw a huge floodlit tower like a cut-down Washington Monument reaching into the blackness. The taxi drew up on the side of a small square dominated by the stone needle and old Meng climbed stiffly out. Li followed him and looked around. This was no residential area. An area of parkland brooded darkly behind a high fence. The gates to it stood opposite the tower.
‘We’d better hurry,’ the old man said. ‘They’ll be closing up shortly.’
Li followed him across the cobbles and through the gates. There seemed to be one long, treelined avenue washed by the light of ornamental street lamps, and small paths led off at right-angles to left and right. ‘Where the hell are we?’ Li asked.
‘Tomb park,’ said old Meng. And he pointed ahead to a large, floodlit monument. As they approached it Li saw that it was a memorial tomb to the soldiers who died fighting to liberate Taiyuan from the grip of the Nationalists in 1948. It was inscribed, Niutuozai Soldiers’ Tomb.
Li turned away from the glare of the floodlights and looked around him. And as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom of the poorly lit pathways that criss-crossed the park, he suddenly realised where he was. ‘It’s a cemetery,’ he said. In the cities no one buried their dead any more. Land was at a premium. Cremation was the only permitted form of disposal.
‘This way,’ old Meng said. And he headed off to the left down a long pathway strewn with leaves. Small posts with built-in lights every few metres cast feeble illumination across their route. Li could see the mounds on either side, and the stone tablets raised in the memory of the dead. He had seen graves in the countryside, where the peasants still buried their dead on the land. He had attended many cremations. But he had never been in a city cemetery like this before, hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies interred all around him. He pulled his coat tight to keep out the cold, damp sorrow of the place. Old Meng stopped and took out a small flashlight from a bag slung across his shoulder and flashed its beam from one headstone to another. ‘Somewhere around here,’ he mumbled. Then, ‘Ah, here he is.’
Li’s mouth was dry, and he felt the blood pulsing in his throat, as he knelt down beside a small, plain headstone lying crookedly at one end of a short mound. The municipal authorities clearly made some attempt at keeping the cemetery from falling into total ruin, but still the grass grew up around the tablet, almost obscuring it. He pulled it aside, and by the light of Meng’s lamp rubbed away the layer of moss that concealed the inscription.
‘Scarlet fever,’ Meng said. ‘Took him in a matter of days.’
Li took the flashlight from him and peered through its light at the faded characters carved in the stone. It said simply, Cao Xu. 1948–1962. He had been only fourteen years old when he died.
Chapter Thirteen
I
There were queues of people up ahead trying to get into the hard class waiting room. A female announcer with a high-pitched nasal voice cut above the gabble in the station to announce the departure of the 19.10 train to Shanghai, followed by information about a delay in the arrival of the 14.45 from Xian. Strings of red electronic characters streamed across information boards. A woman in a white smock was selling hot noodles in polystyrene cartons.
Li checked into the soft class waiting room and glanced at the departure board. As far as he could tell, his train would leave on time. A 7.30p.m. departure, arriving back in Beijing at 2.30 the following morning. Seven hours! He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It seemed like an eternity.
The real Cao Xu was dead. Carried away in childhood by scarlet fever. He had the testimony of the old man, and knew from him that there were others who worked at the orphanage back then who were still alive and would remember him, too. And there must be kids they could track down who would recall the real Cao Xu — and his passing.
But Li was the only person who knew how it all fitted together. The only one who could convincingly discredit the man who had stolen a dead child’s identity and lived a lie for more than forty years. That put Li, and everyone close to him, in danger. When he left this morning, his cellphone was dead. He had forgotten to recharge the battery. So Margaret had loaned him hers. He took it out now and dialled the number of the Harts’ apartment. Lyang answered. Her voice sounded dull and lifeless.
‘Everything alright?’ Li asked.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You want to speak to Margaret?’
Margaret’s voice was full of concern. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Yes. I found Cao Xu.’
There was a moment of stunned silence on the other end of the line. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He died, Margaret. From scarlet fever, aged fourteen. I’ve seen his grave. The orphanage where he grew up was destroyed by fire in the early seventies, along with all its records. He must have torched the place to cover his tracks.’
There was more silence from Margaret’s end. ‘But if he didn’t come from Taiyuan, how did he even know of this boy’s existence to be able to steal his identity? And if he set the place on fire, then he must have been there. Why didn’t he recognise the twin pagodas?’
Li thought about the overgrown remains of what had once been the Wutaishan Orphanage, almost in the shadow of the twin pagodas. It would have been impossible to have been there without seeing them. And if Cao, or whoever he was, had seen them, then he would have registered a MERMER response during the demonstration. A black cloud descended on his mind, obscuring the clarity he thought he had found here in Taiyuan City. ‘I don’t know. Either the fire at the orphanage was a quirk of fate, and he just took advantage of it, or …’ He hardly dared think about it. ‘Or someone else set the fire for him.’
‘Which means that someone else knows that he’s not who he says he is.’
‘Or knew,’ Li said. ‘It seems that people don’t live very long when they know the truth.’
‘Oh, Li Yan.’ He heard the fear in Margaret’s voice. ‘For God’s sake be careful.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back sometime before three.’
He disconnected the phone, and dropped into a soft leather seat to stare up at the electronic arrivals and departures board, seething with a latent fury that had been building in him these last few days, determined that the killing would stop here, that he would get his life back again, and that the man who called himself Cao Xu would be brought, finally, to justice.