The Man from Beijing

2010_3_09 The Man from Beijing
The story opens with a lone wolf finding something to eat in a remote village in Sweden during the dead of winter. What he found was a severed human leg; it provided him with the nourishment he needed to continue his lonely trek to God knows where. That scene is followed by a traveler’s discovery of a horrendous murder scene of 18 people slaughtered by a long knife in the small hamlet of Hesjovallen. Deeply shaken by the shock the traveler calls the police before he dies of a heart attack sitting in his car. The murders took place at night, after the residents had gone to bed, all of whom were elderly, except for one young boy, apparently a visitor. After the local police investigate the scene they discover that the majority of the victims were members of one family, the Andrens. The boy died in a different manner than the others: his spine was snapped in two. In a sense it was a mercy killing, in the sense that he died instantly. They found no murder weapon and only one clue, a piece of red ribbon in the snow. The local authorities were not only horrified and sickened by the brutality of the killings, but they are utterly baffled and can’t imagine what the motive could have been. Such a wholesale slaughter of elderly human beings seemed unthinkable. Who would do such a thing and why? Their first conclusion, understandably, was it had to be the work of a madman.
The Man from Beijing is not another Kurt Wallander novel. This novel suggests something along the lines of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. That is to say it is a genre-leaping tale and an author at the top of his game. It remains to be seen if there is a character the equal of Raskolnikov.
The main character and accidental investigator in this crime story was a middle aged woman, Birgitta Roslin, a provincial judge who held court in the nearby city of Helsingborg. She became involved because two of the people killed were her distant relatives. They were both in their 90s. The Judge had just been put on furlough by her doctor because her blood pressure was too high, which allowed her the time to follow the case. We also are told her marriage was shaky—no sex and a cooling of affections, what sometimes happens to long-married couples. By page 157, where I stopped reading yesterday, she had a better notion than the local police about what might have happened that awful night in January.
The first piece of the puzzle was a parallel event in America, the bloody murder of four members of the Andren family in Reno, Nevada, that were similarly cut down by a long knife. Father, mother and two kids were dispatched the same bloody way. The judge reasoned there must be a connection, but when she reported this online fact to the official investigators they were less convinced and were rather dismissive of her and her interest in the case. After being allowed to visit the home of her relatives she doubled back under the cloak of darkness to ‘borrow’ a journal and some letters she had come across when she looked around the house. She had read about a Swedish man always referred to JA, which referred to Jan August Andren, who was a foreman for the Intercontinental railroad in the 1860s, when the company was laying track in an easterly direction. JA was the boss of a crew of drunken Irishmen and Chinese coolies. He hated both groups equally, only he had more respect for the Chinese for at least they were good workers. But he still thought of both of them as inferior, virtually subhuman and as a consequence he treated them roughly. The Chinese grew to hate him with a passion. He was also a boastful individual who exaggerated his importance and how much money he made.
Mankell also devotes a long chapter to the long suffering Chinese who worked for the railroad, focusing on three brothers who had come to America together but not by choice. They bear witness to JA’s sadistic treatment and only one brother survived to live to tell the tale to later generations. It was San who wrote the history of how cruel the Swede was.
So at this point in the novel it appears we are dealing with a blood feud spread over several generations; it is an eye-for-an-eye situation.
(Two days later) In between Judge Roslin’s peculiar encounters with Chinese officials in Beijing, which include her purse-snatching incident, her stay in the hospital, and being forced to stay in Beijing for an extra day to satisfy police procedures, and her hospitality guide, Hong Qui, discovering that there was indeed substance to the Judge’s theory that there was a Chinese connection to the murders in Sweden. Hong Qui was a pro-Mao Old Guard Communist, while Birgitta Roslin was a pro-Mao protester back in the Sixties, so a chord of sympathy was activated between the two women.
Then there was a long digression concerned with a five hour speech given at an important Communist Party gathering by a scholar at Beijing University who was head of the Department of “Futurology.” His name was Yan Ban and he had spent many hours pouring over this speech which was highly anticipated. He had been commissioned to give this speech as it was felt the country was at a crossroad and the Party was interested in his educated opinion. The speech went on and on but one part of it was especially relevant to the narrative, and that was the idea of moving millions of China’s rural poor to east Africa. I know that China has made political inroads into Africa but for them to contemplate colonizing some countries by immigration pluralities was a pretty far-fetched idea, not to mention against communist ideology. Silly or not, the idea was part of a conflict between the Old Guard and the think-anew crowd that tended to resemble the Russian oligarchs and plutocrats. Representing that conflict were Hong Qui and her brother, Ya Ru, a ruthless and power-hungry thug/politician. Hong Qui also had a conversation with an ex-associate of her brother, Shen Weixian, who was about to be put to death for crime of bribery. He told her that the rumor was that Ya Ru was behind the mass murders in Sweden.
Earlier in the story we had learned that Ya Ru had sent his bodyguard, Liu Xin, on a special mission of great importance to Ya Ru and his ancestors, and now we know that assignment must have been the murders in Reno and Sweden. Xin was the “man from Beijing” of the title. Judge Roslin had earlier shown a photograph of Xin to Hong Qui who did not let on she knew who it was. It was a photograph she had obtained from the owner of a hotel in Sweden where the assassin had stayed, a picture taken by a hidden camera the manager had installed for security reasons. The judge had also discovered where the red ribbon that had been found at the site of the massacre had come from. She had eaten at the same restaurant that Xin had and noticed that the lamps over each booth were hung with four strands of red ribbon. A waitress verified that Xin had sat in that booth to eat where one of the ribbons was missing. What he had in mind was anybody’s guess? The judge realized that the whole charade over her purse was just an excuse to search her hotel room. Ya Ru had agents everywhere.
(The next day) I finished the novel late last night. The penultimate scene involved Ya Ru’s attempt to kill the Judge who he figured knew too much and had to go. He had followed her to a restaurant and while she was way from her table he went to put some ground glass in her coffee, an old Chinese method of getting rid of your enemies. But just as he was about to pour the powdery substance into her cup Ya Ru was struck by a bullet that hit him in the temple and he was dead before he hit the floor. The judge was hustled out of the hotel by a woman who knew Hong Qui. The shooter was a young man named San, who was the son of Hong Qui who was earlier killed in Africa by Ya Ru. (San was also the name of the brother who survived the cruelty of Jan August Andren.) Ya Ru had forced Hong Qui to go with a delegation to east Africa and while there had plotted to kill his own sister, and Liu Xin, his dedicated bodyguard, making it look like a car accident. Hong Qui had figured her brother would attempt to kill her in Africa so she wrote a letter to a woman friend; she told the woman that if something happened to her should give the letter to authorities; it included all her suspicions about her brother’s involvement in the Swedish massacre. The friend also alerted Ho and San, and fortunately for the judge, they had arrived at the hotel in the nick of time.
Ya Ru was a selfish, rapacious, and vindictive person. He saw the current China as a land of opportunity for people like him. You make your fortune, by hook or by crook, by any means necessary. Murder was just a tool for the wise man wheeling and dealing. In contrast, Hong Qui was a more traditional Marxist politician and idealist. Her prime virtues were solidarity and helping the rural poor get under the “red tent” of communism. But not in Africa. She was against the building of personal empires. That was a betrayal of first principles. Hong Qui and Birgitta Roslin were on the same frequency.
The novel closed with a final chapter and a short epilogue. In the last chapter the Judge has sent a friendly letter to a female detective involved with the murder case in Sweden, telling her that the man who confessed to the crime was a liar and a fraud. To prove it she included excerpt from Ya Ru’s diary about Liu Xin waiting to go on his killing spree. Xin explains how he bought a Japanese sword and had it sharpened for this special occasion. Ya Ru had written about the three brother’s mistreatment and death which were an “unbearable persecution” and needed to be ‘justified’ by an equal portion of death and tragedy. He said that final chapter needed to lead to a “necessary ending, revenge.” The Judge closed her letter by saying she would tell them she’d be happy to tell them the rest of the story whenever they might want to hear it.
The epilogue referred back to that lone wolf that opened the novel, this time on his way back to where he had come from. But this time he was shot and killed as he was passing through looking for something to eat. Mankell must have sought some kind of poetic justice by that death.
I would take issue with Mankell’s unimaginative title for the book. A more relevant title would be THE RED RIBBON or the SCARLETT RIBBON IN THE SNOW. No one ever figured out what it was all about, but it served nicely as a mysterious loose end.