Start of Death of a Blue Lantern

The Dragon King smiled, cracking his swirling mask of red and black. He sang; his voice soared up and down the musical scale like the roller coaster in the Cultural Park. He spoke, spitting out whole groups of syllables like a machine-gun then taking one and toying with it endlessly, till all possible meaning had been shaken out of it. The Witch Queen simply watched, nodding her head and sending long ripples up the pheasant feathers of her headdress. Then a cacophony of drums, woodblocks and gongs exploded from the wings. An apparently armless acrobat saltoed across the forestage; two men with wooden swords entered stage right and began slashing violently at one another. The air rang with the din of tramping feet, of ululating percussion, of crazy, keening voices.

Inspector Wang Anzhuang of the Beijing CID squeezed on to a wooden bench near the back of the auditorium and breathed a sigh of relief. He only went to the opera once a month, but work always seemed to make him late - last time he'd had to type up some ludicrous report for Team-leader Chen; this time it had been a call from an 'informant' telling him a whole lot of things about the Huashan thefts that he knew already. This thought made him angry, and he lit a cigarette to calm himself down. It was a Panda, for Party members only. Almost everyone else in the audience - mainly old men with close-cropped hair, work-wrinkled faces and gap-toothed grins - would be smoking stuff like Flying Horse: real throat-rotters. Many of them would have been working all day on hot, noisy, monotonous factory floors. Wang inhaled deeply and reminded himself he was lucky to have his desk, his perpetual refills of green tea, his status symbol pocketful of pens - not to mention his Type 77 service revolver as a memento of past action and adventure.

The on-stage action subsided. An ingenue began to sing, alone except for an erhu, a two-stringed violin that had been played in Wang's home province of Shandong for thousands of years. The inspector felt his heart wrench: the scraping fiddle and the lilting, lovelorn voice created a feeling of exquisite melancholy.

Lucky? Everyone in this room was lucky, to know and love this music, to share the culture from which it came - to be Chinese, to belong. The inspector finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the floor. Recently a Party directive had advised members to cut down on smoking for health reasons. But what did Tsao Tsao, his favourite soldier-poet, say?

'Drink and sing! How long is life?'

The players stood on the stage applauding the audience: the performance was over. The audience replied by stampeding for the doors, not from disrespect but necessity - last buses ran early, many had long cycle rides home, their factories would want them back at work at six next morning. Wang, with a Party flat in the centre of town, could take his time, relax and let the piece replay itself in his mind. Only when the hall was empty - apart from a drunk who had fallen asleep in the back row and two cleaners swishing brooms across the floor by the front exits - did he get up and walk slowly out into the narrow alley outside.

Dazhalan Street was always busy. Wang pushed his way through a throng of late-night vendors and shoppers. held out a T-shirt with Chairman Mao's face on - once this would have been sacrilege, but now, in the nineties, it was good business. A honeymoon couple - from the countryside, look at their sunburnt faces - held calloused hands and posed for a photographer. Music blared out of a clothes shop: Careless Whisper, one of the few Western tunes Wang knew and didn't dislike. A man selling deep-fried dough-sticks from a trolley bellowed his wares. The crisp, clean, morning-fresh smell had the inspector reaching in his pockets for a two-jiao note.

But it was no use. The image wouldn't go away. There had been something very strange about that sleeping figure in the back row, something that, as a policeman, Wang had a duty to investigate. He sniffed the dough-sticks again, sighed and turned on his heels.

By the time he re-entered the auditorium, the sweepers were halfway to the back; they had built two mountains of rubbish and were working hard - and noisily - on the third. The figure at the back was still leaning against the rear wall, his head at the same slight angle, his hands still by his side, and his complexion still as white as noodle-flour.

'Are you all right?' Wang called out. No reply.

The inspector made his way up the row and shook the man by the shoulders. The head moved only stiffly. He took his plastic- covered police ID and held it up to the man's mouth. Not a droplet of breath.

He didn't even try resuscitation. For a moment, Wang thought of phoning the authorities anonymously. He wanted to go home and get some sleep: night staff got paid night rates; they could come and sort this out. But his sense of duty, that shadow companion of Tsao Tsao's drinking and singing, rebelled, just as it had done out on the street. Just as it always did.

One, check the body for foul play. Not that that was very likely, here at the opera. Two, search for -

The inspector stopped, dumbfounded. At the back of the man's neck was a small hole surrounded by dry, black blood.

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