The Golden Mountain Murders (3 page)

“Not much, thanks Lily.”

She reverted to English, “No problem, Short Stuff, care though be. No like I this one bite.”

The next afternoon Fong used his Special Investigations ID to get him and Captain Chen into the restricted area of the Shanghai port facility.

The huge harbour was alive with activity. Cranes lifted massive metal containers high in the air then swung them over the open holds of the great oceangoing vessels. Men guided each container to its sea berth. The echoes of their shouts just made it to where Fong and Captain Chen stood and watched. In some ports heavy work was done solely by computer- controlled robotics, but this was the Port of Shanghai – in the People’s Republic of China. There are few, if any, jobs that are too menial – too beneath the dignity of a Chinese labouring man in need of a wage to feed his family. The Shanghai port, the very centre of the world’s foremost economic miracle, is still powered by the cheap and readily available sweat of men, Fong thought, as he struck a match and held it out towards the cigarette that dangled from the thick lips of harbour master, Jiajou Shi.

When Fong first produced his ID, the man’s face had revealed no more than a rock reveals when you kick it.

Captain Chen stood to one side as Fong had instructed. Sure enough, the poor man’s features acted as a conversation starter. Glancing at Chen, Jiajou Shi said, “If he was a fish and I was starving, I’d throw him back.” The harbour master steadied Fong’s hand and drew the flame towards the cigarette in his mouth. Fong sensed the smoke before he smelled it. The man smoked Snake Charmers. Fong had smoked them for years before he’d switched to Kents.

“So what’s this all about, Inspector?” The man took a bottle of Fanta from the railing and snapped the top off with his teeth.

“That’s not the recommended way of opening those,” Fong said.

“Yeah, well . . .” the harbour master said then emptied almost half of the sweet orange concoction in a gulp. The man waited for Fong to say something. Fong didn’t oblige him. “Well, this has been fun but your cute friend over there is making my stomach turn so I’m going to get back to . . .”

“Your work,” Fong said then put his hands in his pockets and stared at his shoes.

The harbour master looked at Fong’s shoes too. Then he stopped looking and turned to go. “There’s blood in three of the refrigerated containers. Chinese blood.”

Jiajou Shi stopped and turned back to Fong. “Is that illegal, Inspector? If it is then arrest the offenders and get it off my ships. If it’s not, then fuck yourself very much and leave me to do my work.”

“It’s Chinese blood taken from Chinese for almost nothing that will be sold to rich Long Noses so they can live an extra day or two.”

The harbour master stopped at that.

“It’s going to the West?”

“Yes, Chinese blood going to the West, in three of the refrigerated containers on board one of your ships.”

“Which one?”

Fong looked to Captain Chen who took a computer printout from his pocket and handed it to the man.

The man read it quickly and then turned his head towards the ship at the far crane platform.

“I believe that blood is heading to Vancouver, Canada. Have you had many refrigerator containers heading to that port of call?”

Jiajou Shi didn’t say anything, but nodded.

“I understand that blood and blood products need to stay refrigerated to maintain their efficacy.”

“I don’t know that word.”

“Potency. The blood becomes useless if the refrigeration . . .”

“You wouldn’t, as the head of Special Investigations, Shanghai District, be instructing me to interfere with international trade, would you, Inspector Zhong?”

“Absolutely not.” Fong smiled. “Did you suggest that, Captain Chen?”

“No, sir, I did not suggest that this man reset the refrigerator temperature gauge.”

“Although, Captain Chen, I’m given to understand that such things have been known to happen.”

“Rumour has it, sir, that the mechanism of a thermostat is very delicate.”

“Unreliable, sometimes.”

Captain Chen made a face that Fong assumed meant “such is life” but with the intensity of the ugliness of his features it was hard to be sure.

The harbour master finished his Fanta, stubbed out his cigarette then spat on the ground. For a moment Fong thought he was going to tell them to go to hell. But he was wrong. What the man did was step on his own spit then grind it into the ground, an ancient curse. “Fuckin’ Round Eyes have everything, even our blood.” Then he stomped away.

When he was out of sight, Captain Chen asked, “Do you think he’ll do it?”

“I think he loved his mother.”

The two men headed back towards the Bund. “What exactly will hurting that shipment of blood do, sir?”

Fong wanted to tell Captain Chen about the rest of his plan but decided it was safer for Chen if he didn’t. He’d already put one of his men in jeopardy. Finally he said, “It will set the rats scurrying.”

“And that will . . .?”

Fong ignored Chen’s question. They walked a little farther, then Fong asked, “How long will that ship take to get to Vancouver?”

“It’s scheduled to leave tomorrow. Should be there in five to seven days.”

Fong thought about that. He hoped that would time out right, but he wasn’t sure. He wished he knew Canadian geography better. On Chinese maps Canada doesn’t look all that big. But then again Chinese maps are Afro-centric so that Europe looks tiny too. He’d just have to figure out things when he got there. This chat with the grieving harbour master and the raid on the Internet café to allow him a clean email line to Robert Cowens were the last pieces of his plan that he could put into play while he was still in the Middle Kingdom. The rest he’d have to do there – in the Golden Mountain.

Very late that night he and Lily met in his office. He filled her in on the details of his plan to trap the Vancouver money behind the Anhui blood trade.

“Once you set things going, Fong, it’s hard to know when or where they’ll stop.”

“True, Lily, very true.”

“What have you not told me, Fong?” Lily said in Shanghanese.

“What do you mean?”

She let out a long sigh. “I’m tired, Fong. But listen to me. I know you, Fong. I lived with you. I shared your bed. I gave birth to our daughter and I know you’ve held something back from me. Something that you’re ashamed of. Am I right?”

“It couldn’t be helped.”

Lily turned away from him. “It can never be helped Fong, can it?” Her voice was tight, angry. Fong couldn’t meet her eyes.

It startled him when he felt her hand on his cheek. “Do you need my help?”

“Help me rearrange the pieces that I know.”

Lily looked at Fong’s desktop. She’d seen him work this way often enough in the past. There were three columns of three-by-five cards laid out on the scratched wooden surface. Long chalk marks led from the bottom of each of the three columns to a single card at the bottom of the desk marked with the dark thick title: THE MONEY.

She lifted her head. Over his shoulder, and across the Huangpo River, the new Pudong sparkled its enticement – its seventy cock-proud office towers, an open invitation to join in the glories of the New China. She crossed to the floor-to-ceiling window and placed her hand on the pane. Its coolness pleased her. She hadn’t spent much time with Fong since they had separated. She was surprised how much she enjoyed his company – despite the fact that she fully understood that this was business, not pleasure.

She turned from the window. Fong was at his desk rearranging the cards, then making the three columns into three towers. “Don’t change things, Short Stuff,” Lily said in her unique brand of English. “No way better other than way.”

Fong finally put the three-by-five cards aside. He’d thought and rethought his options but couldn’t seem to increase his odds of success – and so many lives were in the balance. It frightened him. The weight of the responsibility bent him as surely as a heavy burden bends a coolie’s back.

“Alone, feel, Fong?”

Yes, he certainly felt alone. There was so much money in all this that he didn’t know who to trust. Only Lily and Chen at this point. And even they didn’t know the full extent of what he was thinking about setting into motion – about what he’d asked of Kenneth Lo and the plans he’d set up with the two young investigators. Even the new woman in his life, Joan Shui – when he forced himself to be honest – was not totally in his circle of trust. The decades of propaganda he, like everyone else in the PRC, had ingested couldn’t totally allow him to trust anyone from Hong Kong when it came to money. Even Joan Shui, his lover.

“Conference terror, when, Fong?”

He told her.

She blew a high-pitched whistle through her teeth. “Too soon, no?”

“What other choice do I have? You’ve completed your research on our people over there?”

Lily nodded and returned to Shanghanese, “But be careful. The boy is reliable but not his father and who knows about the grandfather.”

“And he understands what we need?”

She smiled and in oddly accented English said, “He homosexual so he know.” She smiled and said brightly, “I like homosexuals. Maybe I fag shag.”

Fong thought that was highly unlikely but he responded, “Right.” Then he glanced down at the three-by-five cards again. Each had writing in English in block letters: Robert Cowens, Apology from the Canadian Government, Dalong Fada, V5S 9W2, V6P 2Y7, three bills of lading for refrigerated containers, Newspaper Articles, Riots, Arrests – and others. Too many others. But too many cards had no writing on them, just wide, raw question marks.

The first of the three columns was headed by the name: CHIANG. Several cards were beneath it and then a long thick chalk line to THE MONEY. The second column was headed by a card entitled: THE LAYWER, which was then followed by many cards and again the chalk line leading to: THE MONEY. The third column was headed by a card with a large “?” on it. There were cards beneath and a chalk line to: THE MONEY – once again.

“Three lines,” she said.

“Three possible ways to the money behind all this, Lily,” he responded.

Lily let him sit with his thoughts for a moment, then said in Shanghanese “And you set this all in motion by inviting Kenneth Lo to your office with that computer for everyone to see.”

“I didn’t . . .”

“You did, Fong. Everyone knew he was working on the computer from the company that sold blood. Everyone knew that Kenneth is brilliant and would eventually break into that hard drive and get the hidden information there. Everyone knew that the moment you called him to your office that he had broken in and found the secret data. Everyone knew . . . and you knew that one of them might tell someone.”

Fong sighed. “I didn’t know how else to get this to begin. We were in Anhui for months but no one there is big enough to be important. The information in that hard drive might be big enough to rattle their cage so I can watch them scurry. Maybe I can detect their pattern from the scurrying. Scurrying rats leave tracks, Lily. Rats that are calm don’t disturb the dust.” He was tempted to move a card from the second column to the third but decided against it. “We need to stay in contact.” It sounded funny in Fong’s ears, as if he were inviting her out on a date.

She held out the electronic square that Kenneth Lo had been showing Chen in the meeting. “It’s called a BlackBerry.”

“Why?”

“Why is it called a BlackBerry?”

“Yeah.”

Lily lifted her shoulders in a manner she always did before she let loose with a flurry of English obscenities, “Why fuck I know what, shit Blueberry, called. Who fuck care what fuck?”

Fong wanted to laugh but he didn’t. He saw the worry in her eyes. “Chen will teach you how to use it,” she said in Shanghanese. “Between it and your cell phone I should be able to feed you the information that you need. You have our Vancouver secure fax contact?”

Fong nodded. He didn’t know what to do next. Then Lily put her finger beneath his chin and lifted his face so he looked right into her eyes – always so deep, so very very sad. “Be careful, Short Stuff. Be very careful.”

Then she was gone and he was alone with his three columns and his doubts. Suddenly he was consumed by the feeling that he didn’t even know what he didn’t know. He worried that he had missed something terribly important – like who it was that was tracking him.

So here he was still not knowing what he didn’t know, flying over more Canadian mountains, green valleys and regularly plotted farms that spread like a quilt over the few level areas by the rivers that sometimes took the breadth of lakes in their ceaseless meander to the ocean. To which ocean Fong wasn’t quite sure.

Fong reached into the pouch attached to the seat in front of him. Maybe the airline magazine would have a map and at least he could answer that question. He found the magazine behind four identical copies of a cheap-looking magazine that claimed to be Canada’s national magazine. If it was, why was it named after a Scottish man? Or was it named after a hamburger store? Fong didn’t know or care.

He leafed through the airplane magazine to find a map. As he did, a flyer fell on his lap. It was an advertisement for a benefit performance of
Twelve Angry Men
at the Vancouver Theatre Centre. He stared at the picture – another theatre image in his life – another point of access back to his deceased wife, the famous actress, Fu Tsong. He shrugged off that thought and shoved the flyer into his pocket. At the back of the magazine he finally found a map that showed Air Canada’s airline routes throughout the world, but it didn’t help him determine to which ocean the river beneath him ran.

He stood and stretched. The plane he had taken from China was filled with people of one hue – one ancestry, the black-haired people. But this plane which he had boarded in Vancouver was a different story; all around him were people literally from the four corners of the earth. All of whom were evidently Canadian now. A maroon-turbaned Sikh sat across the aisle; directly behind him a black teenager nodded to the rhythm being delivered directly to his brain by a huge set of earphones. There were several Japanese couples and an elderly Korean woman – and children – always the great divide between people from the Middle Kingdom and the rest of the world – children, sometimes three or four from a single family.