Gelignite (3 page)

'Right!'

'No!' O'Yee said.

Feiffer said, 'What was that?'

O'Yee said, 'There's still some missing.'

'What? Bodies?'

O'Yee looked down at the water. He heard the crowd humming. He thought, "My father would have—" He said, '
Bits
!'

Spencer said suddenly, 'I've found the head!' His tone changed. He said, 'Oh . . . God!' He leaned forward in the water to pick it up the way Auden had done.

Feiffer said, 'That's four.'

O'Yee said, "There's still some missing.' 

'What?'

'I don't know! I haven't been keeping bloody score!' He glanced back at the crowd. They
had
been keeping score and they knew there was still some missing. He said, 'Something! There's still some missing!' He shouted out to Macarthur at his ambulance, 'What's missing?' 

'What?' Macarthur shouted back. 

'Missing! What's still missing?'

Macarthur glanced back into bis ambulance. 'A leg!' He shrugged. He shouted back, 'It's just a leg! Don't worry about it!' He shouted to them all as one. 'You can come in now!' 

O'Yee said to Feiffer, 'There's a leg missing!' 

'Does that matter?' 

'Doesn't it?'

Feiffer looked across the cove. The current was changing with the beginning of the morning tide. He said, "The tide's starting to turn. It'll be too late anyway in fifteen minutes.' He said, 'We've done pretty well, considering, and if the Water Police are certain it isn't a murder investigation—' 

'It's because they're bloody Chinese, isn't it!' 

'What the hell are you talking about?' 

'If they were bloody Europeans you'd think it mattered!' 

Feiffer said, 'I'm not even going to answer that one.' He said with concern in his voice, 'I don't know what's gotten into you, Christopher. I know this has been a bloody awful job, but you've seen worse—'

Macarthur called out, 'You can leave it now! I'm taking the ambulance in!' He went to the cab of the ambulance and roused the driver to shut the back doors. 

O'Yee said, 'I just think we should find all of it, that's all.' 

'There isn't the time. We could be here for the rest of the week.' He called to Auden and Spencer, 'OK, you can go in now—!' Feiffer looked over to Sun and Lee. 'You can go now. Off you go.' 

Sun and Lee hesitated. They looked at O'Yee.

'Go on,' Feiffer said.

Sun and Lee looked at the crowd.

Feiffer said, 'That's an order!'

Sun said, 'Yes, sir.' He glanced at Lee and made a motion of resignation with his head. He and Lee waded past with Auden and Spencer.

Feiffer said to O'Yee, 'And you too.'

On the beach the ambulance passed through the crowd and out of sight. 

O'Yee said, 'I think we should stay and find the leg.'

'No.'

'I think we should.'

'Why?'

'I—I just think we should, that's all.'

'The Water Police'll find it, or it'll be washed up on the evening tide, or tomorrow. Maybe never. It's just a leg. If it was a head it'd be different, but after all, it's only a bloody leg—'

'I think we should stay.'

Feiffer looked at him. He said, 'Unless you can give me some sort of strong reason, you can forget it. For all I know you just have a fascination about putting all the little wooden pieces together in bloody puzzles and jigsaws. For all I know, you—'

'You shut your goddamned mouth!' 

'What the
hell
is the matter with you?' 

'Nothing's the matter with—'

Feiffer said evenly, 'I'm ordering you to go to shore and that's all there is to it. We'll probably hear the leg's been found tomorrow or the next day and that'll all be fine and neat, but we do have other cases current in this district and I'm not about to waste all my detectives for the rest of the bloody day just to find a bit of dead meat that's probably been eaten by the bloody fishes anyway!
Now bloodywell get back to shore
!'

O'Yee looked at the beach. The crowd was moving forward past Auden and Spencer to where Sun and Lee took off their waders by the second police car. Sun said something to Lee and they both got quickly into the vehicle and drove off. The crowd turned to the shoreline and looked out at O'Yee. 

Feiffer said, 'Go on. In.' 

'I'd like to stay, Harry.' 

'No.'

'I mean it.'

'So do I. We've got other work and it's just as important— more so.' 

'If you could just spare me for—' 

'No.'

O'Yee said, 'You can't have any objection if I—' He said, This isn't the scene of a possible crime anymore. I mean, now anyone can come here and—' 

'Anyone who's off duty. But you're not.' 

O'Yee looked at the crowd. He said, 'I meant,
them
!' 

'They can do what they like.'

O'Yee said, 'I've never had very much time for religion or —for that sort of thing...' 

Feiffer began wading in towards the shore. 

O'Yee thought, "If I call out to them—to the crowd—they'll come in and look for the leg because they all believe it" He thought, "They ought to. Maybe they don't." He thought, "Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's the European side of me trying to be so goddamned Chinese there isn't a Chinese on earth who'd know what the hell I was talking about." He thought, "Maybe I'm imagining it all. Maybe they're just curious ghouls counting the grisly remains." He thought, "If I don't call them, I'll imagine they'll all be looking at me and feeling disgusted." He thought, "And if I do call them and they don't know what I mean, I'll look foolish." He thought, "It'll be a loss of face, Chinese or no." He thought, "They're all from this district: I have to make them take me seriously as a policeman or I'll be finished." Something in the water bumped against his knee. He thought, "If I don't say anything I'll never know." 

Feiffer said irritably, thinking of the caseload, 'Are you coming?'

The object bumped his knee again. O'Yee thought, "I'll never know." He knew what the object was without looking at it. He took out a plastic bag and bent down to recover it.

He took the leg into shore with a puzzled expression on his face.

As usual they were tearing Yellowthread Street down preparatory to rebuilding it up. Or, they were rebuilding it up preparatory to tearing it down. It was a mess. It was a mess five times a year. Fives times a year Yellowthread Street was torn down or rebuilt. Standing outside his ivory shop on the corner of Canton Street, Mr Leung sighed. A giant pneumatic hammer went hammer, hammer, hammer, HAMMER! in the foundations of a torn-down or rebuilt office block; there was someone working with a nail gun high up on the flat roof of a half demolished post office branch (soon to be a bank office branch): POW! POW! POW! POW-POW! (as someone else with a nail gun gunned nails); a climbing crane balancing a half ton block of cement for the third floor of someone's prestigious development went grind, grind-snort! as it turned on its unoiled axis, and the traffic: the traffic, as usual, went roar! honk! roar! skreech! towards the new flyover near Beach Road.

Mr Leung, a sedate, prosperous man in his middle fifties who sometimes regretted his decision to enter commerce and not a monastery, sighed.

In the detectives' room of the Yellowthread Street Police Station, Auden shouted at the top of his voice, 'I'M GOING DEAF!'

Someone out in the corridor—one of the uniformed men— shouted back, '
Shut up
!'

Auden shrieked, '
I'm going bloody deaf
!'

The noise went HAMMER! HAMMER! HAMMER! POW! HAMMER! POW! POW! ROAR! HAMMER! HAMMER! SKREECH! HONK! HONK! POW! and then there was a pause and then it all went HAMMERPOWHONK-ROARHAMMERHAMMERPOWPOWPOW-ROARHAMMER—HAMMER ! ! ! !

Mr Leung considered the eternal philosophic dilemma of the noise frightening customers away from his store or the noise driving customers into his store, and considered in evidential reflection, his receipts.

Auden screamed, 'Deaf! It's sending me deaf! I'm going deaf I tell you!
Deaf
! !'

Five times a year. Autumn, Spring, Summer and Winter and whenever someone lost his fortune and sold off his Hong Bay real estate for redevelopment or someone else made his fortune and bought it.

Auden ripped open the street window and yelled out into the street, 'Shut—
up
!'

Feiffer shouted, 'Shut that window!'

Someone passing in the street looked up at Auden and shouted up, '
What
?'

Feiffer shouted, 'SHUT THE WINDOW!'

The someone in the street shouted up to Auden, 'I
can't hear you
!'

Auden shut the window.

ROARHAMMERPOWHAMMER-HONKSKREECH-ROARPOWPOWHAMMERHONK—HAMMER! POW! HAMMER!

Spring in Hong Bay.

The passing someone in the street, for no apparent reason, to no apparent person, yelled at the top of his lungs, '
SHUT —UP
! ! ! !'

8 am.

R-O-A-R! ... HAMMER! ! ! !

Sigh...

*

Nicola Feiffer waddled across the living room of her third floor apartment on her bare feet and felt sludgy. She thought, "Sludgy, that's how I feel." She looked down at the pregnant sludge of her body and thought she was pure sludge from one end to the other. She looked at the brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece and wondered how metal managed to stay so slim and constant and unbulging. She thought, "Sludge." She waddled across to the divan, deposited her sludge into the upholstery and felt— 

 —sludgy.

She looked at the newspaper television programme. Nothing started for hours. She thought, "I can't even be bothered to get out of my dressing gown." She thought, "And I'm certainly not going to try to make myself look presentable." She thought, "I hate everyone." She thought, "Everyone." She leaned over and picked up the phone to ring her husband.

Her husband shouted,
WHAT
?'

She hung up.

*

The noise stopped. There seemed to be no good reason why it did, but it stopped.

The postman took a handkerchief away from his nose, coughed a lungful of unoiled crane, pneumatic hammer, nail gun and traffic dust out from his bronchial tubes and said to Mr Leung outside his shop, 'It's stopped.' He handed Mr Leung a packet of letters held together with a rubber band. He said hopelessly to Mr Leung, 'They're probably all bills.'

'Hmm,' Mr Leung said. He took the packet of letters without looking at them.

 'Or cheques,' the postman said. 

'Hmm,' Mr Leung said. He glanced upwards at a maze of bamboo scaffolding on the soon-to-be (or once-had-been) prestigious office block development across the road.

The postman said, 'Maybe a rich relative in America's died and left you his oil wells in Texas.'

'Hmm,' Mr Leung said. He sighed and thought of the peace and tranquillity of the monastic life where a man of mature spirit might come to grips with the great questions of life and the cosmos.

The postman said, 'Or Arabia, that's the place to have an oil well these days.' He said, 'There's an Arab on my beat, but he's a clerk or something for El AL' He said on reflection, That's a Jewish airline, isn't it? Maybe he isn't an Arab after all.' He said, 'He's got an Arab name.' He said to himself, 'How should I know?' He said consolingly to Mr Leung, Maybe one of the letters is good news.' He asked Mr Leung hopefully, 'What do you think?'

'Hmm,' Mr Leung said. He turned to go back inside his shop.

The postman said, 'You never know do you?' He knew there was a letter in his bag to one of the detectives at the Police Station written in the same hand as one of the letters for Mr Leung. He said happily to Mr Leung, 'I hope everything's all right.'

'Hmm,' Mr Leung said. He did not turn around. He put the letters on his little oak desk by the wall and went to check the price tags on his new stock and thought if there was one thing that always brought his monastic contemplation back to reality with a nasty bump in the mornings it was a chatty postman.

He said to himself, 'Hmmm.'

He sniffed.

*

O'Yee said, 'They're probably on strike.' At times like these it was one of the great consolations of the cruel capitalist system, 'They're probably knocking off for half an hour to complain.' He said to Auden, 'They'll probably work an extra two hours this evening to make up for it.' He asked Feiffer, 'Who was that on the phone?'

Feiffer looked up from a pile of forms, 'What was that?' He wriggled his finger in his ear to make sure that the silence wasn't an auditory hallucination.

 O'Yee asked, 'Who was that on the phone?' 

'Just then?' 

'Yes.'

'I don't know. They rang off as soon as I answered.' He said without feelings about it one way or the other, 'Probably just another nut.' He went back to his forms and corrected a spelling mistake with his fountain pen.

Auden said, 'Have any of you seen that crane they've got out on that new building opposite Canton Street?' He went to the closed window and opened it exploratorily. The noise did not start again. He said, 'It's carrying around the biggest blocks of cement I've ever seen in my life.' He poked his head out of the window to catch sight of the climbing crane anchored to the top of the half built block. He said, 'If they ever let go of one of those loads you'd hear the crash half way to Peking.' He said to Spencer, 'When I was a kid I used to like watching cranes.'

'Really?' Spencer asked. He said, 'Where was—' His phone rang. He picked it up and said, 'Spencer . . . oh.' He glanced furtively around the room, bent forward at his desk and cupped his hand around the mouthpiece. He said very softly, 'Hullo, Frank...'

! Auden said to O'Yee, 'When I was a kid, I used to like patching the cranes move when the chasers signalled them. They used to blow a whistle or make signals with their hands.'

O'Yee looked interested, 'What are they called again?' 

'Crane chasers.'

O'Yee said, 'I've never heard that one before.' He asked, 'What exactly is a—' His phone rang. He picked it up and said, 'O'Yee ... yes.' He paused. He said, 'Oh. Oh, well... yes, sir . . .' His eyes flickered cautiously around the room. He bent forward a little at his desk and cupped his hand around the mouthpiece. He said, 'Oh ... yes, sir... Oh.'