The Golden Mountain Murders (26 page)

“Not if the liquid display is cracked. The memory chip is set up to refuse tampering. If you open the chip, it disintegrates.”

Fong paused. He looked across the water then he spoke very carefully. “But if I press any one of the keys of the phone it will call the phone that called it. Right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I can only do it once?”

“Just once, sir.”

Fong thought of offices above the twenty-seventh floor of a building and what could get all the occupants of all those offices to gather in one place.

One place where he could place a phone call by pressing any key of the old assassin’s phone.

And the words WATCHDOG came to him from faraway.

The Tong boys and their computer whiz kid found little resistance when they took over the WATCHDOG command centre at the EA building. Once ready, they called Fong’s cell, “You ready, Inspector?”

Fong looked at the large empty room with its reinforced walls and ceiling – the safe room. Personally Fong doubted there was such a thing as a safe room. He put his cell phone to his lips and said, “Do it.” The Tong leader threw the WATCHDOG emergency switch – and every computer in the EA building blinked out. Then all hell broke loose.

An hour and twenty minutes later every tenant of the EA building, except six who had booked off sick, were checked off as present in the safe room. Fong took out the guild assassin’s damaged cell phone, hoped to hell that Captain Chen was right and pressed “Return Call.”

When his cell phone rang, Evan felt mildly embarrassed – as if he’d farted in church. But then he looked around and saw that dozens of other people in the room were on their cell phones. So he flipped his open to take the call.

Across the room on a small raised dais, Fong saw Evan Balderson answer his phone and when Fong snapped his phone shut, Evan reacted, as he should, like someone had just unceremoniously hung up on him.

Fong made sure he had Evan in his line of sight, then put away the guild assassin’s cell phone and pulled out his own. He called the Tong leader in the WATCHDOG command centre. “Sound the all clear.”

Ten minutes later Evan was outside his office punching in the door code. When the door opened, he found himself thrown head first into his office.

Fong shut the door behind him and bolted it shut.

Evan staggered to his feet, “Who are you?”

“I’m the one who called your cell phone just now.”

“So?”

“I called. You answered.”

“Yeah, I answered my wife’s cell phone. So what? She asked me to get it fixed and . . .”

“Your wife’s cell phone?”

“She’s in the flat above my office, she’s . . .”

Evan never got out the word “sick” before he found himself bound and gagged. Shortly Fong found Evan’s key ring and shortly thereafter he stood in the beautifully furnished apartment of Mrs. Evan Balderson.

“Who are you?” she demanded as she used her two crutches to rise.

Fong’s explanation was short and to the point, his proof that she was the silent partner and the guild assassin’s employer, even briefer.

Then to Fong’s surprise, she made her way laboriously to the bar and poured herself two fingers of fifty-year-old brandy, took a sip, then said, “So fucking what?”

“S
o what are you going to do, Mr. Zhong? You’ve found what you sought so diligently – well, I’m here in front of you – now what?” She walked, leaning heavily on a silver cane she had picked up by the bar. “This is Canada, our business is legal, it’s even registered with what you would no doubt call the ‘authorities.’ Now, we may have been bending the laws of God – but then again you don’t believe in God and hence he could not have laws that I or my company could possibly break. So where does that leave us, Mr. Zhong? Actually, let’s start with you – where does it leave you?”

Fong paused – the woman’s words just flowed out of her like water from beneath the ground. “So this was just about money?” Fong finally managed to say.

That seemed to momentarily stop her. Then she found his voice, “Only those without money would use the phrase ‘just about money.’” She took a step towards Fong and raised her silver cane. “You have no jurisdiction here. No right to judge. This is the Golden Mountain and you are nothing but a foreigner here. A monkey fresh down from the trees.” She turned her back to Fong. “See the beauty out there? The mountains. Our mountains! Not yours, ours! Pure. Not half-monkey, half-coolie like you.”

Fong couldn’t move, couldn’t shut out the woman’s words. Suddenly he felt himself falling. Somehow or other this crippled woman had pushed him over the lip of a well, backwards, on a starless night.

He plummeted down the well, past the deaths in his life – Fu Tsong, the men he’d seen executed, the man he’d shared the cell with west of the Wall, the assassin Loa Wei Fen – and finally his own father who had disappeared into the night to fight for the liberation of China when Fong was four, never to return, never to lean over Fong and tell him bedtime stories or explain the moves in the Peking Opera, never to touch him with his soft hands, never to point his moral compass – “So, here you are, Fong.” His father’s voice was still light, his breath tinged with tobacco. “So, you are here, Fong,” he repeated.

“But you’re not– here, that is,” Fong replied.

“As you wish,” his father said and retreated back into the recess in the well in which he stood like a statue in a church niche.

“Come back, Father.”

Fong’s father re-emerged from the recess and shrugged his shoulders.

“Was it worth dying for China?” Fong asked.

His father bowed his head as if in thought, then said, “I’m not sure – how could I know what I missed – what life I would have enjoyed – if . . .”

“How did you die, Father?”

“With suddenness – and blunt force – at the hands of a man who fought to make money to feed his family.”

“Was there pain?”

“Yes, and loneliness – and this place.” He indicated the well shaft with an outstretched hand. Fong noted the long tapered fingers and the delicate skin. He looked at his own hands – they were identical. “You look old, Fong.”

“I feel old, Father. I’m over twice as old as you were when . . .”

“I died – yes, you are. But it is not age that makes you old, Fong, it is the sadness you carry. Have you found no love in your life, Fong?”

“I have. I have been very blessed with love, Father. More blessed than I deserve.”

His father smiled. His teeth were bad. “I’m glad to hear it – I was never so blessed.”

Fong wanted to ask about his mother, whether his father had loved his mother, but didn’t know how to even phrase the words.

“If you have found love, Fong, why are you here and why so bent beneath your burden?”

“I don’t know the way, Father. I don’t know anymore how to determine right from wrong – moral from obscene . . .”

“. . . sacred from profane?” Fong’s father asked.

“I don’t believe there is a difference between sacred and profane.”

“Of course you do, Fong, or you wouldn’t be here. How can you possibly justify talking to your dead father if you don’t believe in the sacred?”

Fong thought about that, then he heard his father laugh – a tumbling sound that fell upon itself then rose only to fall upon itself over and over again – like a crease in the water on the downstream side of a large rock in a raging river. And Fong fell into the very centre of the crease – the laughter all around him. Then he was laughing – laughing and running back to the present.

“What’s so funny, Mr. Zhong?” Meredith Balderson asked.

“You. You that you think you are above time – beyond the pull of the earth – outside of the rest of us. Your wealth may not be based on our poverty – but our poverty supports your wealth – taints it – disgusts it – like a spider in the bottom of your flute of champagne.”

“That’s almost Shakespearean of you.”

“From
A Winter’s Tale,
isn’t it?”

“You are full of surprises, Mr. Zhong.”

Fong didn’t answer but an idea blossomed in his consciousness like a seed in the early spring rain. Full of surprises, he thought, like a human lie detector with a girlfriend who writes for a local paper – that kind of surprise.

Fong began to nod his head up and down and the laughter roared out of him – because he had finally figured out how to think from the end of the puzzle – how to put the three towers one upon the other upon the other – to bring Mrs. Evan Balderson’s world crashing down.

M
atthew Mark handed the
Vancouver Sun
delivery guy ten bucks as he snapped the wire on the stack of next-day’s papers. It was two o’clock in the morning and the city was quiet.

And there it was on the front cover – entitled “Anhui Story.”

Fong sat in the back of the cab and nodded. His wounds ached beneath their bandages but they could have been much worse.

“You should be happy, Inspector. I think we won.”

Fong didn’t know about winning. As long as there were extremely poor people they were vulnerable to the likes of the Baldersons. There would always be those whose only asset was their blood. He sighed and forced himself to smile.

Matthew beeped the cab’s horn gaily then said, “Where to, sir?”

The hospital room blinked in the darkness, its machinery little more than red lights in the gloom. On the gurney bed Robert turned his head and the two large morphine drips swayed on their stands. Fong closed the door quietly and sat by the bed. Fong read the fear in Robert’s eyes. For the first time in his life Fong wished that he was religious. Maybe then he would have words to offer, comfort to give.

Instead he told Robert of their success. He spread out the Vancouver paper on the sheets of Robert’s hospital bed. But Robert didn’t look.

“Are you my friend, Fong?” The voice was little more than a soft whisper. Then Robert shifted in the bed and dark crevices of pain erupted on his face. “Are you?”

Fong nodded slowly.

“Then take me from here. I don’t want to die here.”

Slowly Fong said, “Slide down the drain all the way to New Orleans in the fall?”

“All the way to New Orleans in the fall,” Robert replied.

It wasn’t hard, with Matthew’s connections in the hospital, to get Robert out of the building. It was harder to get the big man into the cab. And hardest to get him across the meadows then down the steep path to Wreck Beach.

And there Fong sat with him as the night got colder until slowly the dawn came.

“I’m ready,” Robert said, holding out the bottle of pills that his doctor had given him all those months ago in a fancy Annex office in downtown Toronto. “Feed me them, until they’re all gone.”

And Fong did.

And Robert – as his doctor had told him he would – flew.

And by the time the first bathers arrived and removed their clothes, Robert Cowens was no more.

When Fong hobbled out to the road he was surprised to see two men in dark suits approach him. “Hold it right there, Inspector Zhong.” A black Passat pulled up behind a Subaru Outback and two more darksuited men got out. The nearest man took a wallet from his pocket and flicked it open.

Fong read the CSIS ID card closely. “Am I under arrest?”

One of the men frisked him quickly and efficiently. Fong looked at the Passat and the Subaru. “I’ve seen those cars. You and two other cars tailed me the first day I was in Vancouver.”

“Yep, and we have every move since . . .”

“Then why didn’t you step in. Why didn’t you interfere . . .”

“Why should we? You did so well. We had a problem. Chinese blood products coming into the country. It’s legal, but it’s immoral and everyone knows that – but it’s legal. Then we have you. You’re moral but illegal. We let you do the work that we’re not allowed to do – and you did it very well, Inspector Zhong. My congratulations.”

Pointing back towards the beach, “Are you going to arrest me for . . .”

“For Mr. Cowen’s death? No.”

“Just another moral dilemma that I’m the solution for?”

“If you want to think of it that way – sure. But Inspector Zhong, now it’s time for you to shut up and get into the Passat. We’ll be escorting you to Vancouver International Airport. You’re booked on the midnight flight over the pole to Shanghai.”

“Could I ask one thing?”

The CSIS man nodded.

“Could I have a cigarette?”

The man lit Fong’s cigarette and Fong inhaled deeply, an old smile returning to his face.

“Fine. Now get in the car, it’s time for you to leave the Golden Mountain.”

Fong was asleep before the plane left the runway.

He awoke with the dawn as the plane crested the Aleutian Islands – the stepping-stones to the Golden Mountain. He counted them as they disappeared beneath the belly of the plane. One after another until solid land – Asia – filled his window and the plane turned south.

He crossed to the other side of the half-empty plane and sat in a window seat and watched the sun rise – the dragon out of the east that brings a new day to the East.

For an instant the ghosts surrounded him – Kenneth, his wife, his daughter, his baby, Robert, the rag man and finally the old guild assassin whose toothless mouth sucked on a sugar cube.

Then he thought of Joan Shui, and the ghosts departed. She would be waking soon and starting her day. The very thought of that brought a smile to Fong’s face. He rested his head and closed his eyes. The last thought in his mind before sleep took him again was, If there is a god, love is surely his gift.

Joan Shui twisted to one side to avoid the oncoming bicyclist carrying a small refrigerator on his handlebars. An eel seller yelled at the refrigerator man. The green-vegetable seller screamed at the eel seller to shut up. Then others hollered their complaints. The five-spice egg seller closed an ancient nostril with a filthy forefinger and blew hard. The extrusion missed her cooking pot by less than an inch. The maestro fixed one bicycle while he bartered with two men over the price of a bike chain. The sounds of cha-cha-cha came from Renmin Park as old folks learned how to Western-style ballroom dance, and the sounds and the smells and the sights of another Shanghai morning.

Joan took it in, breathed it in – and smiled.

The digital image of Fong getting onto the plane at the Vancouver International Airport pixelated on the computer screen. The young female guild assassin hit the print icon.

As she picked up Fong’s image from the print tray, she felt the cobra on her back fill with blood – and her
chi
race through her body.

The peasant slipped off the back of the oxcart. “I will walk the rest of the way,” he said. As he watched the cart disappear over the hill he thought of all the kilometres he had walked from Shanghai. He stepped off the road and found the old footpath.

He passed the place where he and his wife had made love the first time, then where his wife had found the valuable herbs, then he felt her – his body parting the air that her body had once parted. That they had parted together.

His feet felt heavy, his hands wet. He stopped and looked down at the rice paddies of his family farm, at the small plot that he had cleared for their house – and his hands flew up in the air like doves at the end of their tethers and his knees gave out and a howl came from him that filled the valleys all the way from the Green Mountains to the sea.

Xiao Ming awoke with a start. She pulled back the blind. Shanghai’s summer sun lit her face from without but it was the joy from within that made her luminous as she shouted to the world, “Daddy’s coming home today.”