The Man From Beijing (47 page)

Hong Qiu could naturally have spoken to other people he didn’t know about.

He couldn’t think of any explanation. All he could do was listen to what the men had to say.

After ten minutes had passed he put the plans into a drawer and sat down at his desk. The two men Mrs Shen showed in were in their sixties. That increased Ya Ru’s uneasiness. The officers sent out were usually younger. The fact that these two men were older indicated that they were very experienced and the matter they wanted to discuss was serious.

Ya Ru stood up, bowed and invited them to sit down. He didn’t ask their names, as he knew that Mrs Shen would have checked their identity papers very carefully.

They sat down in armchairs around a low table in front of the window. Ya Ru offered them tea, but the men declined.

It was the elder of the two men who did the talking. Ya Ru detected an unmistakable Shanghai accent.

‘We have received information,’ said the man. ‘We can’t say where the information came from, but it is so detailed that we can’t ignore it. Our instructions have become stricter when it comes to dealing with crimes against the state and the constitution.’

‘I have been involved in tightening up on action against corruption,’ said Ya Ru. ‘I don’t understand why you are here.’

‘We have received information suggesting that your construction companies are seeking advantages using forbidden methods.’

‘Forbidden methods?’

‘Forbidden exchange of favours.’

‘In other words, bribery and corruption? Taking bribes?’

‘The information we have received is very detailed. We are worried.’

‘So you have come here at this early hour of the morning to tell me that you are investigating irregularities in my companies?’

‘We would prefer to say that we are informing you of the suspicions.’

‘To warn me?’

‘If you like.’

Ya Ru understood. He was a man with powerful friends, even in the anti-corruption authority. And so he had been given a head start. To eradicate the trail, get rid of proof, or demand explanations if he was not personally aware of what was going on.

He thought of the shot in the back of the head that had recently killed Shen Weixian. It was as if the two grey men sitting opposite him were emitting a cold chill, just as, according to legend, the African iceberg had.

Ya Ru wondered again if he had been careless. Perhaps on one occasion or another he had felt too secure and allowed himself to be carried away by his arrogance. If so, that had been a mistake. Such mistakes are always punished.

‘I need to know more,’ he said. ‘This is too vague, too general.’

‘Our instructions don’t allow us to say more.’

‘The accusations, even if they are anonymous, must come from somewhere.’

‘We can’t answer that either.’

Ya Ru wondered for a moment if it might be possible to pay the two men to give him more information. But he did not dare take the risk. One or perhaps both of them might be carrying concealed microphones recording the conversation. There was of course also a chance that they were honest and didn’t have a price – unlike so many government officials.

‘These vague accusations are totally without foundation,’ said Ya Ru. ‘I’m grateful to have heard about the rumours that are evidently surrounding me and my companies. But anonymity is often a source of falsehood, envy and insidious lies. I make sure that my enterprises are beyond reproach, i have the confidence of the government and the party and have no hesitation in maintaining that I am sufficiently in control to know that my managing directors follow my directives. Obviously I’m not able to claim that there are no minor irregularities; my employees number more than thirty thousand.’

Ya Ru stood up as a signal that, as far as he was concerned, the meeting was over. The two men bowed and left the room. When they had gone, he rang through to Mrs Shen.

‘Get hold of one of my security chiefs and tell him to find out who these two are,’ he said. ‘Find out who their bosses are. Then summon my nine managing directors to a meeting three days from now. Everybody must attend, no excuses accepted. Anybody who doesn’t turn up will be fired on the spot. This has to be sorted out.’

Ya Ru was furious. What he did was no worse than what anybody else did. A man like Shen Weixian frequently went too far and in addition had been rude to the state officials who cleared the way for him. He had been an appropriate scapegoat, and nobody would miss him now that he was gone.

Ya Ru spent several hours of intensive activity working out a plan for what to do next and puzzling over which of his managing directors could have secretly opened up the poison cupboard and given away information about his dodgy deals and secret agreements.

Three days later his managing directors assembled in a hotel in Beijing. Ya Ru had chosen the location with care. It was there that he used to call a meeting once a year and fire one of his directors in order to demonstrate that nobody was safe. The group of men gathered in the conference room shortly after ten in the morning looked distinctly pale. None of them had been informed precisely what the meeting was about. Ya Ru kept them waiting for more than an hour before putting in an appearance. His strategy was very simple. First he confiscated their mobile phones, so that they were unable to contact one another or be in touch with the outside world, then he sent them out of the room. Each of them had to sit in a small room with one of the guards summoned by Mrs Shen at his side. Then Ya Ru interviewed them one at a time and told them without beating about the bush what he had heard a couple of days previously. What did they have to say? Any explanations? Was there something Ya Ru ought to know? He observed their faces closely and tried to detect if any of them seemed to have prepared what to say in advance. If there was such a person, Ya Ru could be sure that he had found the source of the leak.

But all the directors displayed the same degree of surprise and indignation. At the end of the day, he was forced to conclude that he hadn’t found a guilty person. He let them go without firing anybody. But all of them received strict instructions to look into the security of their own set-ups.

It was only some days later, when Mrs Shen reported on what his investigators had discovered about the men from the security services, that he realised he had been following a false trail. Once again he’d been studying the plans for his house in Africa when she came in. He asked her to sit down and adjusted the desk lamp so that his face was in shadow. He liked listening to her voice. No matter what she told him, be it a financial report or a summary of new directives from some government authority, he always had the feeling that she was telling him a story. There was something in her voice that reminded him of the childhood he had long since forgotten about, or been robbed of – he couldn’t make up his mind which.

‘Somehow or other it seems to be connected with your dead sister Hong Qiu. She was in close contact with some of the top men at the State Security Bureau. Her name keeps cropping up whenever we try to link the men who came to visit us the other morning and others hovering in the background. We think the information can only have been circulating for a short time before she died so tragically. Nevertheless, somebody at the very highest level seems to have given the go-ahead.’

Ya Ru noticed that Mrs Shen broke off. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Nothing is sure. Has somebody at the very top authorised this investigation into my activities?’

‘I can’t say if it’s true or not, but rumour has it that those in authority are not satisfied with the outcome of the sentence passed on Shen Weixian.’

A shiver ran down Ya Ru’s spine. He understood the implications before Mrs Shen had time to say any more.

‘Another scapegoat? Do they want to condemn another rich man in order to demonstrate that this is now a campaign and not merely an indication that patience is running out?’

Mrs Shen nodded. Ya Ru shrank further back into the shadows. ‘Anything else?’

‘No.’

‘You may go.’

Mrs Shen left the room. Ya Ru didn’t move. He forced himself to think, although what he wanted to do most of all was run away.

When he had made the difficult decision to kill Hong Qiu, and that the murder would take place in Africa, he had been sure that she was still his loyal sister. Of course, they had different views, they often argued. In this very room, on his birthday, she had accused him of taking bribes.

That was when he had realised that sooner or later Hong Qiu would become too big a danger to him. He now saw that he ought to have acted sooner. Hong Qiu had already abandoned him.

Ya Ru shook his head slowly. He now understood something that had never occurred to him before. Hong Qiu had been prepared to do the same thing to him as he had done to her. She hadn’t intended to use a weapon herself – Hong Qiu preferred to proceed via the laws of the land. But if Ya Ru had been condemned to death, she would have been one of those declaring it the right thing to do.

Ya Ru thought of his friend Lai Changxing, who some years previously had been forced to flee the country when the police raided all his companies early one morning. The only reason he managed to save himself and his family had been that he owned a private plane that was always ready to take off at a moment’s notice. He had fled to Canada, which did not have an extradition treaty with China. He was the son of a peasant who had made an amazing career for himself when Deng created a free market. He had started by digging wells but later became a smuggler and invested all he earned in companies that within a few years generated an enormous fortune. Ya Ru had once visited him in the Red Manor he had built in his home district of Xiamen. He had also taken upon himself major social responsibilities by constructing old people’s homes and schools. Even in those days Ya Ru had been put off by Lai Changxing’s arrogant ostentation and had warned his friend that he could be heading for a fall. They had sat one evening discussing the envy many people felt with regard to the new capitalists, the Second Dynasty, as Lai Changxing called them ironically – but only when talking in private with people he trusted.

Ya Ru had not been surprised when the gigantic house of cards collapsed and Lai had to flee the country. After he’d left, several of those involved with his businesses were executed. Others – hundreds of them – had been imprisoned. But at the same time, he was revered as a generous man in his poor home district. He would give fortunes to taxi drivers in the form of tips or give generous gifts to impoverished families whose names he didn’t even know, for no obvious reason. Ya Ru also knew that Lai was now writing his memoir – which worried many high-ranking officials and politicians in China. Lai was in possession of many truths, and as he now lived in Canada, nobody could censure him.

But Ya Ru had no intention of fleeing his country.

There was another thought beginning to gnaw away at his mind. Ma Li, Hong Qiu’s friend, had also been on the visit to Africa. Ya Ru knew that the two women had had long conversations. Moreover, Hong Qiu had always been a letter writer.

Perhaps Ma Li was in possession of an incriminating letter from Hong Qiu? Something she had passed on to people who had in turn informed the security services?

Three days later, when one of the winter’s severe sandstorms was raging over Beijing, Ya Ru visited Ma Li’s office not far from Ritan Gongyuan, the Sun God’s Park. Ma Li worked in a government department devoted to financial analyses and wasn’t sufficiently senior to cause him any serious problems. Mrs Shen and her assistants had investigated Ma Li and found no links with the inner circles of government and the party. Ma Li had two children. Her current husband was an insignificant bureaucrat. As her first husband had died in the war with the Vietnamese in the 1970s, nobody had objected to her remarrying and having another child. Both of the children now led lives of their own: the eldest, a daughter, was an educational adviser in a teacher training college, and the son worked as a surgeon at a hospital in Shanghai. Neither of them had contacts that caused Ya Ru any worries. But he had been careful to note that Ma Li had two grandchildren to whom she devoted a large amount of her time.

Mrs Shen fixed an appointment with Ma Li. She hadn’t mentioned what the meeting was about, only that it was urgent and probably connected with the trip to Africa. That ought to worry her a bit, Ya Ru thought as he sat in the back seat of his car observing the city they were driving through. As he had plenty of time, he had asked the driver to make a diversion past some of the construction sites he had business interests in. His main priority was the Olympic Games. One of Ya Ru’s big contracts was for the demolition of a residential area that had to be cleared in order to make way for roads to the new sports stadia. Ya Ru expected to earn billions, even after he had subtracted the massive payments made to civil servants and politicians.

The car pulled up outside an unremarkable building where Ma Li worked. She was standing on the steps, waiting for him.

‘Ma Li,’ said Ya Ru. ‘Seeing you now makes me think that our trip to Africa, which ended in such tragedy, was a very long time ago.’

‘I think about my dear friend Hong Qiu every day,’ said Ma Li. ‘But I allow Africa to drift away into the past. I shall never go back there.’

‘As you know, we sign new contracts with many countries on the African continent every day. We are building bridges that will last for a long time to come.’

As they talked they walked along a deserted corridor to Ma Li’s office, whose windows looked out onto a little garden surrounded by a high wall. In the middle of the garden was a fountain that had been turned off for the winter.

Ma Li switched off her telephone and served tea. Ya Ru could hear somebody laughing in the distance.