The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder

Author:Mo Hayder [Hayder, Mo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Historical, Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense, Suspense fiction, Mystery & Detective, Horror, Criminals, Young women, Psychological, Tokyo (Japan), British, Nightclubs, Sino-Japanese Conflict; 1937-1945, Nanking Massacre; Nanjing; Jiangsu Sheng; China; 1937, College teachers, Sino-Japanese War; 1937-1945, British - Japan
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2006-05-30T07:01:30.281000+00:00

32

‘You seem very different.’ Shi Chongming was studying me from where he sat on the steamer chair. His coat was wrapped tightly round him, his white hair had been brushed and maybe oiled so that it lay long and straight over his ears, and the pink skin was showing through, like the skin of an albino rat. ‘You’re shivering.’

I looked down at my hands. He was right. They were shaking. That was from a lack of food. Yesterday morning, as the sun was coming up, Jason and I had made breakfast from the convenience-store snacks. And that was the last thing I could remember eating in almost thirty hours.

‘I think you’ve changed.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had allowed a day and a half to go by, and it was only when he’d called me that I mentioned I’d been at Fuyuki’s. Shi Chongming had wanted to come over straight away – he was ‘astonished’, ‘disappointed’ that I hadn’t called earlier. I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t describe what he couldn’t see – that in just one day something hard and sweet and old had spread out under my ribs, like a kiss, and that somehow things that had once seemed urgent didn’t sting any more. ‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I suppose I have.’

He waited as if he expected me to say something else. Then, when he saw I wasn’t going to, he sighed. He opened his hands and looked round the garden. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ he said. ‘Niwa, they call the garden, the pure place. Not like your corruptible Edens in the West. To the Japanese a garden is the place where harmony reigns. A perfect beauty.’

I looked at the garden. It had changed since I was last out here. The subtle varnish of autumn was on it: the maple was a deep butterscotch colour and the ginkgo had dropped some of its leaves. The tangled undergrowth was bare, like a collection of dried bird bones. But I could see what he meant. There was something beautiful about it. Maybe, I thought, you have to work to experience beauty. ‘I suppose it is rather.’

‘You suppose it is rather what? Rather beautiful?’

I looked carefully at the long line of white Hansel-and-Gretel stones leading past the do-not-go-here stone and into the undergrowth. ‘Yes. That is what I mean. It’s very beautiful.’

He tapped his fingers on the chair arm and smiled thoughtfully at me. ‘You can see a beauty in this country that you’re living in? At last?’

‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to adjust?’

Shi Chongming made a small sound of amusement in his throat. ‘Ah, yes. I see you are suddenly very, very wise.’

I adjusted the coat across my legs, moving subtly on the chair. I hadn’t bathed, and the smallest movement released the trapped smell of Jason. Under my coat I wore a black camisole I’d bought weeks ago in Omotesando. Tight-fitting and ribbed with tiny silk flowers stitched on the neckline, it stretched all the way down over my stomach, clinging tightly to my hips.

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