The Golden Mountain Murders (5 page)

The man took out a cigarette and lit it.

Fong smiled. Beijing hadn’t briefed this one well enough. These Canadians don’t like smokers much. As if on cue, the woman beside his young minder waved her hand in the cold air shushing away the smoke and said something that Fong couldn’t hear but could guess at. The minder looked at the woman, clearly lost as to what offence of etiquette he had committed. Fong thought about walking up to the minder and snatching the cigarette from his youthful mouth, but decided to forego the fun stuff – he had bigger things that needed his time and effort during his short stay in Canada. Things that his minder would not appreciate.

Then without warning the Canadian woman reached over, plucked the cigarette from the young man’s mouth and shouted, “Filthy, filthy, filthy habit.” She threw the thing to the ground, then stomped on it as if she were driving it deep into the earth with a curse reminiscent of Jiajou Shi on the docks of Shanghai not five days ago.

Fong wanted to cheer. Instead he shook his head. That made the large cowboy hat slip from the back of his head and slide over his forehead.

Fong saw the photo flash from beneath the brim of the hat. The photo that appeared in newspapers around the world showed Fong sitting in the front row, his face almost totally obscured by the white cowboy hat.

The conference itself began with footage from the collapse of the World Trade Towers – but not the footage that had been broadcast to the world. This footage had never been shown on television or even mentioned in newspapers. This footage showed people jumping from the upper levels of the towers.

Hundreds of them.

Some holding hands.

Many alone.

Was there more alone than this? Fong wondered.

Person after person after person jumped.

The numbness of familiarity quickly set in – even horror can be rendered banal by repetition. Then the banality sundered and fresh bright waves of horror pulsed through Fong’s heart. On the screen a young man with long hair stood on an upper ledge, some hundred stories in the air. He removed his suit jacket, folded it and placed it on the ledge. Then he looked up – something luminous crossed his face. He bent his knees and pushed – up and out. His body rose gracefully away from his perch, then his arms shot up and his body turned slowly so his feet were heavenward. Once the rotation was complete he opened his arms wide, puffed out his chest and pulled back his chin as if he were proudly accepting his death – as a groom does the arrival of his bride as she walks down the aisle to take his hand.

Fong stared at the solitary figure – the beauty – until it left the bottom of the frame. His heart was racing. He was seeing out of the man’s eyes. Seeing the pavement approach – no – race towards his face. He thrust his arms forward as if somehow to mitigate the damage of the concussion.

Then Fong sensed the man seated beside him looking at him. Had he spoken aloud? Had he cried out? He had said something. His heart pounded in his chest so hard that he was sure the man could at least hear that.

The man removed his tortoiseshell glasses and polished the lenses. “Sad, huh?”

Fong nodded, careful to keep his mouth shut and his eyes away from the man. Then he looked up once again at the screen. The second plane entered the body of the second tower – and the world changed.

When the images stopped, Fong and the rest of the police officers were left to sit in the dark with their thoughts. Shanghai was already a huge and powerful city, its seventy-odd new towers seemed to have leapt from the ground itself. It was not hard to move from the images on the screen to the streets of his own city – to the Pudong, across the Huangpo River, where his first wife’s body lay in cold obstruction in the cement foundation of an office tower.

The rest of the day consisted of speakers who moved from horror to horror. Dirty bombs, missing radioactive material, bioterrorism, the vulnerability of computer networks, the impossibility of protecting water, food, subways and on and on and on.

As the litany continued, Fong slowly retreated. At least in China there was a whole civil defence structure – granted it was not really there to protect the citizenry – but it was in place and could quickly be activated. As well, Fong felt it unlikely that China would be a target just yet. True, there were Muslim rumblings in the west but sheer numbers were against them as was the willingness of Beijing to use overwhelming force if necessary to subdue any uprising. Shanghai’s new subway system was, no doubt, vulnerable and Fong listened carefully to the speaker from Japan when he talked about the Serine gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed so many. The Russian speaker’s detailed account of Chechen sabotage on Moscow’s subway system also sent a chill through Fong’s gut. Warnings of the need for evacuation routes and safe rooms for all skyscrapers followed. A tiny ray of hope came when a South African speaker addressed that issue, with a computer warning system called WATCHDOG that was linked to every computer in a building. On activation, it first flashed a warning on the screen with directions to the safe room then shut the computer down. So, as the man said, “You can’t ignore the warning as businesspeople tend to do when fire alarms go off in their buildings. Because until WATCHDOG allows it, your computers will not work. See.” With that, he switched a toggle and exclamations came from around the room. Fong looked at the blank computer screen on the lap of the man beside him. “That’s what that little button we gave you as you came into the hall allows us to do. This system is already installed in many buildings in my country and in a few on the West Coast of Canada.” Then he flicked the toggle the other way and said, “WATCHDOG sleeps,” and sure enough the computer screen on the man’s lap returned to its previous screen.

The American speaker snuffed out what little good feeling WATCHDOG had given the room with his talk on the danger of crop dusters, which was fortunately unimportant to Fong. There simply weren’t many, if any, crop dusters in mainland China. The airline security analyst also left no impression on Fong. Air China had a very simple, very effective security system: when in doubt – any doubt – strip the passenger. Fong couldn’t understand the resistance to this approach in the West. The idea of “sanctity of the body” must have come from Christian texts because it made no sense to Fong. How could a person’s potential embarrassment about their body parts be more important than the potential safety of hundreds of people? Nonsense. Fong found it incomprehensible, but then again Fong was the grandson of night-soil collectors. That tended to make one sanguine about the niceties of human bodies.

Near the end of the conference, however, a speaker broached a calamity that could bring his city to its knees – the idea of a man infected with smallpox let loose amidst Shanghai’s 18 million uninoculated souls.

That night Fong dreamt the terror. He was running in Shanghai’s vacant echoing night streets, quiet, oil slick iridescence on the pavement. A desiccated countrywoman steps out of an alley – one earthdarkened arm around a filthy child, the other hand out for a bit of money. Fong shouts at the woman, “Stand back!” She opens her mouth – lips already ulcerated with open smallpox sores, her pleas surrounded by mists of saliva – death floats towards him on the cool night air. Then she throws her baby, wrapped in rags, at him. In horror, Fong watches the baby rise and shake free of its blanket, then everything slows and the infant lays out and turns slowly, head over heels, a full circle, as it opens its arms and, chin back chest out, heads towards the pavement. Fong throws himself forward to catch the soiled child. But the filthy rag blanket lands on Fong’s face. Fong calls out and thrashes, trying to get the infected thing off him until he awakens entwined in the crisp white sheets of his Kananaskis hotel room – the pale light of a cold dawn coming through the oversized window.

Fong was pleased when precisely at 9:00 a.m. that morning Robert Cowens, the Toronto lawyer who had helped him end the life of the arsonist who called himself Angel Michael, approached his table. It was gratifying to see that the effort that had gone into contacting Mr. Cowens had paid off, although he felt bad about the necessary damage he had to do to the Internet café on Han’an Lu. How else was he to send an email to Mr. Cowens without it being traced back to him by the Beijing authorities? True, the owners of the Internet café were out of business, but such is life in the rapidly growing economy of the People’s Republic of China.

Their greeting in the hotel’s snack bar – a turn of phrase that confused Fong – was warm but distant.

The thing that had brought them together, the danger posed by the arsonist who called himself Angel Michael, was no more. Fong’s first wife, Fu Tsong, had talked about the instant intimacy that actors felt when they worked on projects. He never told her that it was not only actors who experienced that kind of closeness. Danger either closes the heart down or opens it wide. The situation that Robert Cowens and Fong had found themselves in only seventeen months ago in Shanghai was nothing if not full of danger.

“You called, Inspector Zhong?”

“Well, I emailed . . .” he picked up the idiom and smiled.

Robert smiled back. “So you’ve been listening to the horror show?”

“You mean the conference?”

“I do.”

Fong took a newspaper from his lap and put it on the table between them. “Well, yes, I have – been listening to the horror show.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think all religions should be outlawed.”

“Very liberal of you.”

“Is that a reference to what you call civil rights?”

“Well, freedom of religion is thought by many to be a civil right.”

“By you?”

Robert shrugged.

“I am a police officer, Mr. Cowens. I’m interested in the safety of the people I am paid to protect. I have no interest in what you call civil rights. What rights are there, civil or otherwise in a city of eighteen million people if panic sets in?”

“And you think religions cause panic?”

“They justify it. They propel it.”

“How?”

“They claim there are rewards after death.”

“Well . . .”

“They claim that if you follow them you get to sing forever in some sort of heavenly chorus or you get fifty widows in the afterlife.”

“Virgins.”

“What?”

“Virgins. You get fifty virgins or eighty or something.”

“Who would want fifty or eighty totally inexperienced sexual partners?”

Robert sighed. “Let’s leave this.”

“Fine, but as a lawyer you should know that after death there is only dirt and decay and a return to the earth. Nothing more.”

“No heaven?”

“More importantly, no hell. Just a good life lived to honour the creator.”

“So you believe in a creator?”

“Of course. Where else could beauty come from? What I don’t believe is that there are rules to please the creator. That the creator is so petty that he cares whether you bend one knee or two, that you recite his name over and over again, that he watches over one person’s individual welfare and allows millions of others to starve to death. No. Only one thing pleases him – you live your life as fully and with as much respect as you can for others. Period. No other rules.”

Robert nodded.

For the first time Fong caught the edges of sadness in the Canadian’s eyes.

“How is your health, Mr. Cowens?”

Robert turned away as he said, “It could be better, Detective Zhong, it could be better.”

Odd, Fong thought. In his experience most North Americans liked to talk about their problems. Another, very un-Chinese thing to do. But here was Robert Cowens closing down conversation about himself.

“But I’m sure you asked to see me for more than old time’s sake.”

And now he was changing the subject, Fong thought. For the umpteenth time in his life Fong had to remind himself that the omnipresent propaganda that claimed that Caucasians were stupid was just that – propaganda.

“I need your help,” said Fong.

“I’m a lawyer, not a cop, Detective Zhong.”

“You can drop the formality. Just Fong is enough.”

“I feel privileged.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Several dozen con men, thieves and hookers in the Pudong also refer to me that way.”

“Ah.”

“Fine. I need your help.”

“And again the Canadian says, I’m a lawyer not a cop.”

“Cops have to obey rules over here – lawyers don’t.”

“That’s not exactly true. Fong, what is it you want from me?”

Without so much as an ahem as a segue, Fong said, “We have an incipient AIDS epidemic in rural China.”

“Are there that many gay men in rural China?”

“No. Very few, if any.”

“Intravenous drug users then?”

“Rural China is extremely poor. If there is drug use, opium would be the drug of choice. Opium is smoked, not injected.”

“Then how the hell is there an AIDS epidemic there?”

“They sell their blood.”

“Who does, the peasants?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so they make a few bucks and blood is a renewable resource after all, so good for them.”

“Good if you like them dead. Thin and dead.”

“But how . . .”

“The men who buy the blood don’t clean the needles they use to draw the blood. They don’t take precautions. They just want to collect as much blood as cheaply as they can – tough luck if you give us your blood and we give you an American dollar and some diseased blood in return that will not only kill you but could infect others.”

Robert sighed deeply. “So where does the blood they collect go to? Which comfy little American town?”

“Vancouver, British Columbia. That comfy little American town.”

Robert looked sharply at Fong.

“I know who the Chinese partner is. But he’s not the money. He’s the conduit. But it’s the money that drives all this. If I can’t stop the money behind it I can’t stop the blood trade. I can arrest the blood collectors – we call them blood heads. I can arrest fifty of them on Monday and by Tuesday morning there will be fifty different people out in the paddies replacing them. The money is just too great to pass up. The only way to stop the disease is to cut off the source of the capital that is pushing the whole thing. And that’s in Vancouver, and that’s what I need you to help me with.”