The Last Six Million Seconds (24 page)

“I’ve asked the commissioner for ICAC to be here simply to underline what we all already know. Roland?”

It was Roland Brown’s turn to cough. Chan watched the Englishman work himself up to the infinitely painful act of communication. Brown searched in his pockets for something that never emerged, coughed again. As the head of ICAC he had powers in the colony greater than those accorded to the head of the FBI in America, but his shyness was known to be crippling. Finally he wriggled and spoke. Chan caught the words “radiation,” “death of three good men,” “uranium,” “panic reaction,” “apology in order”
before the Englishman’s whisper merged with the rattle of a tea trolley outside the office.

An English mandarin apologize? Chan was almost disappointed, as if he had watched a famous Pacific island, a landmark to shipping, subside slowly into the ocean and, with a yawn, disappear forever.

“Well, there we are then.” Cuthbert beamed.

Roland Brown stood up, nodded once to Chan and left without a word. It seemed from the looks on the faces of the two remaining Englishmen and Tsui that Chan had not merely been rehabilitated but elevated to a position of intimate friendship with these three powerful men. Chan saw an opportunity to take one small advantage.

“Mind if I smoke?”

In unison the three men signaled that they were very happy for Chan to smoke. He tapped a Benson out of the box, lit up and inhaled gratefully.

Cuthbert shuffled with a piece of blank paper in front of him. “In view of the fact that I don’t … I mean … you’re not … how shall I say? … not on my staff, perhaps the commissioner of police would explain a little of what we have in mind.”

Clearly Cuthbert had not prepared Tsui for this moment, for Tsui threw him a quick glare. He drew a cough sweet out of a tin box that was on the table in front of him, began to suck. He thought carefully, it seemed, before speaking.

“What we have in mind is simply that you, ah, carry on the good work. I think that’s about it, isn’t it, Milton?”

Cuthbert frowned deeply at the piece of blank paper, and Chan was sure that Tsui had failed miserably to keep his end up, as the British put it. But then the expression on the political adviser’s face changed with startling abruptness. He turned to Tsui.

“D’you know, Ronny, I think it is.” He smiled recklessly.

“Well, there we are,” Caxton Smith said. It was the first and only time he spoke.

Startled and only halfway through his cigarette, Chan realized that he’d missed some vital part of the semaphore, and now it was too
late. As so often with this kind of Englishman, the punch line was left out of the joke.

“Well, Milton, if that’s all, I think I’ll give Chief Inspector Chan a lift back to Arsenal Street,” Tsui said.

Cuthbert smiled again. “Excellent idea, Ronny, excellent.”

In the back of the large Toyota Tsui started to laugh. Chan saw that some kind of racial table had been turned. He wasn’t prepared, though, for the commissioner’s Cantonese expletive, uttered as he took a single sheet of paper from a file that he’d been carrying and gave it to Chan to read. “You made them look like a bunch of jerks” would be a rough translation of what he said. Chan studied the document, which bore the letterhead of the British Foreign Office and a
TOP SECRET
stamp. It was a photocopy of a fax to the political adviser and was clearly part of a series of communications.

“Thanks for yours of 0800 yesterday, but frankly it’s not clear to us why C. I. Chan was suspected in the first place. The identity of the victims of this atrocity, together with the exact origin, ownership and intended use of the items discovered in the trunk is information of crucial importance to us at the present delicate state of play with the PRC. If C. I. Chan is the best hope, then he must be given every facility. Repeat, every facility.”

The fax ended abruptly in an illegible signature. When Chan had read it, Tsui took it back, still laughing.

There was no reason for Chan to follow Tsui into the police headquarters; the copy fax from London said everything. Tsui let him out on Lockhart Road. Crossing Wanchai to Queen’s Road, Chan waited for an old green tram to clank past. As always it was crammed with people, their faces pressed against the dirty glass windows. One in particular caught his eye: an old man with wispy beard, gaunt face and eyes that had passed beyond suffering into some other dimension. Chan waved at the old man, who smiled and waved back as the tram trundled toward Wanchai.

28

C
han noted with approval that the top secret fax from London had had a bracing effect on the local corridors of power. Cuthbert instructed that the chief inspector should have free run of what the diplomat called the Toys Department of the local chapter of MI6, and Commissioner Tsui promised to authorize, if necessary in retrospect, any electronic surveillance that Chan deemed necessary. From an ingenious collection of eavesdropping and visual surveillance devices, Chan chose a button-size microphone/transmitter with accompanying receiver and recorder and five cameras the size and shape of a lipstick tube. He locked the microphone and receiver in his safe at work and slipped the five cameras into his pocket.

The owners of the warehouse in which the vat had been found had finally lost patience and, from Albuquerque, instructed lawyers in Hong Kong to threaten the commissioner of police with legal proceedings if he did not release their property, currently losing ten thousand dollars per day in rental income, but despite writs and threatened injunctions, the warehouse remained empty, blocked by police barricades at both entrances. Chan edged past the barricade, used keys to open the door, pressed the heavy-duty light switch. Fluorescent strips blinked and blazed. The ladder remained where he had left it, under the still-defective light.

He dragged the stepladder to a pillar ten feet from the flickering tube, took from his pocket a small tube of glue that he used to stick a Velcro pad to the top of the pillar. The cameras were wide-angle automatic focus and enclosed in Velcro jackets. Chan tried to
guess the angle as he pressed the camera into the pad. He repeated the process on two other pillars, then took from his pocket a small plastic bag that he had partly filled with sugar previously ground in a mortar. He tossed the bag on the floor to dirty it, then dragged the stepladder back to the flickering light, which he dismantled in order to stow the bag. Finally he returned to each of the three cameras to switch them on. Powered by nickel cadmium batteries, they were activated by body heat, which triggered an invisible infrared flash. The batteries had to be replaced every five days.

The remaining cameras he placed at the entrances to the warehouse.

It was a long shot, based on Chan’s knowledge of the behavior of addicts. To a drug addict the substance he or she abuses acquires a religious value as well as an irresistible compulsion. Chan felt the same way about nicotine. If a fellow addict had seen Clare Coletti hide her dope, it would take unusual discipline, over the long term, to resist coming back to retrieve it. True, someone could have returned already and found the stash gone; that was a risk he could do nothing about; he’d only that day been given use of the cameras. He increased the odds in his favor by leaving both doors unlocked and dismissing the two uniformed policemen at the ground-floor lift lobby who for weeks had been checking the identity cards of everyone entering the building. He walked back to the police station, where he had scheduled meetings with murderers for the rest of the day.

Chan had been through the process of interrogating underworld cognoscenti once already, when the vat was first discovered, but the records he had kept were scanty. The related deaths of three policemen from radiation sickness, though, imparted a new spirit of formality to the investigation. It was likely that in time the case records would be mulled over by security forces, diplomats, politicians and even, perhaps, historians. He wanted to be able to show that he’d questioned the usual suspects, fired up the usual informants, recorded the usual dead ends.

Although part of him resented it, he was feeling good. He was working again and officially rehabilitated, despite those who maintained that anyone that lucky could not be entirely honest. At the funerals of Higgins and the divers he had stood at the back, left early. Now Saliver Kan, foot soldier in the Sun Yee On, was sitting in the chair on the other side of Chan’s desk for the second time in a month. Aston had nicknamed him the Walking Spittoon.

“I told you, Firstborn,” Kan said, “this wasn’t triad.” A snort executed on an inhalation temporarily cleared his troubled nasal passages. “Nice work, though. Maybe we’ll use a mincer on the 14K next time they try to take over Nathan Road.”

“You want a Kleenex?” Chan asked.

“Fuck your mother.”

“It was just a hope.”

“Pass the wastepaper basket. Thanks. Heard you found the machine? Will that be, you know, auctioned, like old police cars?”

“No.”

With an internal rumble Kan made a substantial contribution to the contents of the wastebasket. “Too bad. Doesn’t matter, you can buy them, right?”

“Suppose there’s money in it. A lot of money?”

“Money doesn’t make it triad, Firstborn.”

“Three people were tortured to death. There had to be screams, struggle. They had to be taken to where they were killed; then the vat had to be removed and taken to that warehouse—probably by truck with lifting gear. Somebody must have seen or heard something.”

Kan sniffed loudly. “How much money?”

Chan had checked with Commissioner Tsui that morning. There was no limit to what the government was prepared to pay at this stage.

“Maybe a million Hong Kong dollars.”

For the first time Chan felt he had Kan’s full attention. The triad rubbed the blue singlet across his chest, hoicked thoughtfully. “Fuck your mother. For three little murders? They mince the emperor of France or something?”

“If you hear anything—”

“I’ll be knocking down your door, Firstborn.”

“It has to be—”

“I know. ‘Information leading to the arrest’ et cetera. You had a wanted poster out on me once. Five thousand you were offering, for a bank heist. Next time I’m using a mincer. A million! Fuck me slowly down the Yangtze. Wait’ll I tell the red pole. He might put me on it full-time.” Getting up to leave, Kan paused. “Come to think of it, maybe I won’t tell the red pole. If it was, you know, really good evidence—”

“I confirm the figure’s negotiable,” Chan said.

Kan nodded. At the door he paused again, gathered together a bolus, which he swallowed. “Million’s just the starting figure, right?”

Throughout the day the same chair was occupied by other assassins with pebble eyes, hewn-rock features and cartoon names: Fat Boy Wong; Four-Finger Bosco; High-Rise Lam.

Joker Liu said: “Maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree, Chief. Maybe it was an industrial accident.” He stood up to mime his theory. “Sort of thing that happens all the time. The mincer stops, so victim one sticks his hand down to fix it, like this. Whoops! It starts up of its own accord—it was a mainland model, right?—it pulls victim one down, look, headfirst. Hearing his screams, victim two rushes to the rescue, grabs victim one’s foot while he still has one, like so. Hangs on too long, fuck your mother, he’s trapped too. Victim three to the rescue—same thing.” He sat down. “Lucky the whole of Mongkok wasn’t minced, seeing as how we care about each other so much.”

“We’re offering a million for hard evidence.”

Joker Liu paused on the brink of more black humor, nodded slowly, scratched his face. “No kidding.” At the door he said: “A million—that’s the starting price, right?”

Chan’s standard lecture to recruits who came under his care, usually delivered at the moment of the recruit’s first experience of an
investigative dead end, had not varied in ten years: “Most criminals inform on their colleagues at some stage in their careers, motivated by greed, envy, spite, malice or no good reason at all beyond a love of treachery. Such one-off aberrations can be valuable, but a successful detective needs at least one source for whom informing is a vocation.”

To young recruits to whom he took a liking, he would add that a detective’s career could rise or fall depending on the quality of his most important informants. If you were exceptionally lucky and made contact with an informant of genius who trusted you, then you were a fool not to cultivate him, pamper him, put up with him, no matter what the price. You’d be a fool too not to make this person’s identity one of the most closely guarded secrets of your life.

Chan never allowed Wheelchair Lee to come to his office and always took elaborate precautions to avoid being seen when he visited him. Leaving Aston to write out the reports of the day’s interviews with some of Mongkok’s more prolific killers, Chan slipped out of the police station complex, crossed Nathan Road between the bumpers of gridlocked cars, from which exhaust fumes rose steadily like steam from a throbbing morass, took turns down alleys with Chinese names only, then finally down a footpath with no name at all. The footpath led to the back of a computer store open at both ends. Chan walked through the store to exit into a small road with lockup garages more or less dedicated to the storage and onward dispatch of stolen goods and the illegal copying of computer software. A complicated knock on the heavily fortified door of one of them brought a curse in Cantonese and, eventually, the unlocking of the door, which began to open vertically. Chan ducked under before it was fully open. Lee maneuvered his wheelchair to pull the door down again once Chan was inside. A battery of lights illuminated the garage with its half dozen trestle tables piled with computer hard disks, coaxial cables, highly colored boxes of software, screens and cardboard boxes full of floppy disks.

Lee: under a navy cutaway T-shirt, the magnificent musculature
of a paraplegic. Neck and arm muscles bulged as he twisted to shoot a heavy iron bolt across the steel door, then twisted his head up again to look at Chan. Overbright eyes scanned Chan’s.