The Killing Room (31 page)

‘Do you mind if I ask what for?’ He lit a cigarette and ran a hand back through his mop of unruly hair.

‘No.’

He waited. ‘And … ?’

‘And what?’

‘What were you doing in Beijing?’

‘I said I didn’t mind if you asked. I didn’t say I’d tell you.’

He smiled wryly and rubbed a hand across his unshaven jaw. It made a soft rasping sound. ‘Guess I must be slipping.’

Margaret looked at him. ‘Well, you’re certainly not shaving.’

‘I hate shaving,’ he said. ‘If I use a razor I always cut myself. If I use an electric shaver it makes me break out in a rash.’

‘You’re such a sensitive soul.’ She reached out and ran her fingers lightly over his silvery stubble. ‘Having sex with you must be like making love to a sheet of sandpaper.’

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘did you say
having sex with me
? I mean, is that a thought that even crossed your mind?’ She laughed and he said, ‘Listen, lend me your razor and I’ll shave right now.’

She laughed again, and somewhere at the back of her mind she wondered what it would be like making love to Jack Geller. Less intense, she thought, than with Li Yan. But more fun, perhaps. At least she and Jack could share a joke, have a laugh without stopping to choose their words and wonder if they were the right ones. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘All my blades are blunt.’

He said, ‘You could always use your tongue. It’s pretty sharp.’

‘Too sharp for my own good,’ she said. ‘People get too close to me I cut them.’ It was difficult to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

He looked at her for a moment. ‘You’re not a very happy lady.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

He shrugged. ‘You do a pretty good job of hiding it. Most of the time.’

‘But not, of course, to a seasoned student of human nature like yourself.’

‘Naturally.’ He paused and took a long pull at his beer, then studied her for a moment or two as she sipped at her vodka. ‘Have you had dinner?’

‘I did last night,’ she said.

He stubbed out his cigarette, slipped off his stool and drained the last of his beer. ‘Come on, then.’

‘Where?’

‘To a place that’s got the best view of Shanghai in the whole city.’

*

Shanghai opened up below them. The Huangpu River, reflecting lights from both sides, snaked through the heart of it, the Bund glowing along one side of its length like a bejewelled glowworm, the lights of Pudong on the other, reaching into a sky crisscrossed with coloured searchlights dissecting and bisecting the night. Immediately beneath them a Japanese cruise ship, from here no bigger than a model boat, was docked at the International Passenger Terminal, its lights blazing out across the water, its passengers returning from an exploration of the city’s commercial pleasures. From the twenty-eighth floor of the Shanghai Bund International Tower at number ninety-nine Huangpu Road, the semi-circular sweep of floor-to-ceiling window in the bar of the American Club gave on to an unparalleled view of the city. The bar curved around the central sweep of the window, and Margaret and Geller sat at it in comfortably upholstered bar chairs which looked past what appeared to be two very small barmen to the view beyond.

‘Why,’ Margaret said, ‘are all the barmen here so vertically challenged?’

Geller frowned, for a moment not understanding, then he burst out laughing. ‘Dwarf barmen,’ he said choking on his cigarette, and both barmen glared at him, not amused. ‘They’re not really midgets,’ Geller said. ‘It’s a sunken bar.’

‘Why would anyone want to sink a bar?’ Margaret asked.

‘I dunno. I guess so that when you’re sitting at it the bartender’s looking straight into your eyes. Anyway, listen, vertically challenged or not, these guys make great vodka martinis, and they got olives here the size of apples.’

‘Is that an offer?’

‘You bet.’

They ordered two vodka martinis which each came with three enormous olives on cocktail sticks. Margaret took a sip and nodded approvingly. ‘You’re right, they
are
good.’ On top of her vodka tonics, she felt the alcohol soothe away her tension and began to wonder vaguely if she was heading for a drink problem. She cast an eye distractedly over a large menu handed to her by the maître d’ from the restaurant next door, and realised with some pleasure that the food was very definitely not Chinese. ‘I’ll just have the roast salmon and some salad,’ she said. Geller ordered a steak and a bottle of Californian Zinfandel.

When the waiter had taken their order, Geller looked at Margaret thoughtfully for some moments. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what progress in the battle of American girl versus Chinese girl for the favours of Chinese guy?’

She smiled and sucked in more vodka martini. ‘No competition,’ she said. ‘The Chinese girl’s winning hands down. In fact, it looks like she’ll even get the kid as well.’

‘The kid?’ Geller frowned. ‘You two have a kid?’

Margaret laughed. ‘I entertained thoughts of children once. But I got talked out of that quickly enough.’ She hesitated, then explained to Geller about Li’s niece and the fact that she had instantly become a new battleground in the fight for affections. She shook her head. ‘The thing is, I’m not sure I care any more. If he doesn’t want me, if he wants her, then she can have him. Kid and all.’

‘Only it’s not true,’ Geller said. She turned to find him looking at her earnestly.

‘What isn’t?’

‘That you don’t care.’

‘And you’d know.’

He shrugged. ‘Like you said, I’m a seasoned student of human nature.’

‘Which of course makes you an expert on fucked-up pathologists with a predilection for self-pity and alcohol.’

He let her bitterness wash over him and added a dash of his own. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But when it comes to fucked-up
people
with a predilection for self-pity and alcohol, I’m the world’s foremost authority.’ He paused and smiled sadly, adding, in case she had missed the point, ‘Being one myself.’

She looked at him curiously, and for a moment that curiosity made her forget about herself. ‘What are you doing here, Jack?’ she said. ‘What are you running away from?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, I’m not running away from anything. I wish I could, but I wouldn’t know where to run to.’

‘What about home?’

‘This is it. Shanghai. That’s home. I don’t have another one.’

She frowned. ‘How come?’

‘I guess, like Springstein says, I was born in the USA.’ He chuckled. ‘But I never spent much time there. My folks moved around the world. Africa, Middle-East, South-East Asia. My old man was in the ball-bearing business. You’d be amazed how much money there is in ball-bearings. Anyway, I managed to see the inside of just about every American school on every continent you can think of. Just long enough to get to know the name of the kid at the next desk, and then off again. And then my dad goes and dies on us. In Thailand. And my mom gets offered this job in Shanghai. So she flies him back to the US, puts him in the ground in Connecticut somewhere, and then heads for Shanghai. I’ve spent more of my life here than anywhere else in the world.’

‘How did you get into journalism?’

‘Oh, that was an accident. Amazing really how little of our lives we plan for ourselves.’ He lit a cigarette. Down below them, at the International Passenger Terminal, the Japanese cruise liner was pulling out into the deep navigation channel, mid-stream. It looked like a floating Christmas tree as it headed slowly downriver towards the estuary. Geller’s eyes seemed fixed on it for several moments before he said, ‘My mom met this Chinese guy here. Got married again. I’m in my mid-teens and probably a bit difficult, so they send me off to the States to go to college.’ He shook his head, lost in some distant memory. ‘I hated it. What was I supposed to do there? I didn’t know anyone. Didn’t have any friends. No family – at least, not any that I knew. And then, when I finish college, I see this one-year course in journalism advertised in Boston. I sail through it. For the first time in my life somebody actually thought I might be good at something. I spoke fluent Chinese. So after a couple of years as a cub on the
Globe
, it wasn’t hard to get a job stringing back here for a whole bunch of US publications. It was like coming home. I’ve been here ever since.’

‘What about your mom. Is she still here?’

The brightness in his eyes dulled and he lowered his head. ‘She’s dead,’ he said. ‘So’s my stepdad. Just little ol’ me left.’ He looked up and forced a smile. ‘Goddamn it,’ he said. ‘I could’ve wished for better company.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m quite enjoying it.’

He looked at her very seriously for a moment. ‘I come with a lot of baggage,’ he said.

‘Don’t we all.’ She raised her glass. ‘To misfits the world over,’ she said.

He grinned and chinked her glass, and they both sipped from the large conical glasses. ‘So listen,’ he said. ‘You want to give the kid a treat? Put one over on the Chinese chick?’

Margaret grinned and shook her head. ‘I’d be happy just to make Xinxin happy.’

‘Then take her to Tiantan Traffic Park.’

‘What the hell’s that?’

He leaned forward, demonstrating with his hands, a boyish enthusiasm about him. ‘It’s a great place. Out on the west side. You’d never know it was there if you didn’t know it was there – if you know what I mean?’

She smiled. ‘I think so.’

‘It’s just a small park, but it’s laid out with miniature roads and sidewalks and replicas of famous buildings in Shanghai. There are traffic lights at the intersections, and little overhead bridges. Folks take their kids there to teach them the rules of the road from an early age. They rent little battery-powered automobiles, and the kids drive them around, with mom or dad sitting in. I tell you, the kids love it. They just love it.’

‘Sounds neat,’ Margaret said, and it never occurred to her to ask him how he knew about it.

The maître d’ came to tell them that their table was ready, and they followed him through to a large dining room with windows down one side and an elaborate buffet down the other. He seated them at a table by the window, and they saw the Japanese cruise liner just before it disappeared round the curve in the river beyond the Yangpu Bridge. Margaret put her hand over his. ‘Thank you for this,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how much I needed it.’

He shrugged, and was suddenly self-concious. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, ‘Just don’t ever forget why, Margaret.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You said it yourself the other day. You’re just work to me.’

Margaret felt unaccountably disappointed. ‘I thought maybe I’d become a little more than that.’

Geller said, ‘Even if you had, I couldn’t allow that to get in the way.’ And she saw that he was absolutely serious, and felt the first stirrings of anger with him.

‘So it’s all right for you to bring your work to the dinner table.’ She snorted. ‘You wouldn’t be very happy if I did.’

‘That’s exactly what I want you to do, Margaret,’ he said. He took a deep breath. ‘I want to know what’s happening, what progress you’re making with your investigation. You know that.’

She wondered why she should feel such a sense of betrayal. After all, he had made it clear from the start it was what he wanted. But she really did think they had moved on from there. ‘And you think you can buy my confidence with dinner and a vodka martini?’

He made the smallest of shrugs. Perhaps it was an apology. ‘It’s important to me, Margaret.’ And there was a strange intensity about him.

A waiter was endeavouring to spread a starched white napkin in Margaret’s lap. She took it from him and folded it on the table. She sighed and said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, Jack, I don’t come that cheap.’ She stood up. ‘But thanks for the offer.’ And she turned and made her way back through to the bar and out to the elevators, leaving Geller sitting on his own, a forlorn figure with a medium rare steak in front of him, a piece of roast salmon on the plate opposite, and a very empty feeling inside.

III

‘Jiang Baofu? The medical student?’ Margaret was taken aback. ‘You don’t really believe
he
did it?’

Nine small tables had been pushed together to make one long one in the centre of the room. Margaret sat at one side of it facing Li and Mei-Ling on the other. The skulls of murder and suicide victims watched them from behind the glass doors of a display cabinet at one end of the room. At the opposite end, pieces of human organs hung suspended in jars of preservative: a section of stomach showing the hole where a knife had entered; a bullet hole in a lung. Along the wall facing the window hung a profusion of velvet banners, awards made for police bravery and success in criminal detection.

Li said, ‘Do you not think he would be capable of performing these procedures?’ Jiang had arrived back at his apartment the previous night, as forensics were completing their search of the place. He had been arrested and spent the night in custody and was now sitting in an interview room downstairs awaiting interrogation.

‘Fifth year at med school? Specialising in surgery? He would certainly have the skills. What’s his motive?’

‘Ah …’ Mei-Ling said, ‘… the American obsession with motive.’

‘Okay,’ Margaret said levelly, determined not to be ruffled, ‘what evidence do you have against him? Other than the fact that he’s a bit creepy and was the night watchman at the building site.’

‘Everything we have learned about him would lead us to believe that Jiang may be … mmm …’ Mei-Ling searched for the right word, ‘… unbalanced. You said yourself we should be looking for a
psycho surgeon
.’ She said the words with a tone.

Margaret raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘The fact that he might be a little odd hardly constitutes evidence. And, I mean, the collection of evidence, that’s the Chinese way, isn’t it? The painstaking piecing together of the facts, bit by bit. Surely you must have some if you’ve arrested him?’

Li said, ‘His medical background, the testimony of his tutors, his unique access to the site where the bodies were found – all of these things justify our bringing him in for questioning.’