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Authors: Tom Bradby

BOOK: The Master of Rain
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“Everything you told me this afternoon was a pack of lies.”
“And you’re hurt?”
“That’s an offense, do you know that?”
“Is that a threat?”
“You can laugh at us all you want, but you’re vulnerable here, Miss Medvedev, no matter how much you sleep with the likes of Charlie Lewis or Lu.”
She was staring at him. “Is that what you think I am? You think I’m a prostitute?”
From a standing start, he’d insulted and perhaps—this couldn’t be true, but somehow seemed to be—hurt her. He wished he were less drunk. The conversation had developed a momentum that their brief acquaintance hardly merited.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. The ways of the city are strange.”
She was still looking at him, her hostility not assuaged. “They are strange, and perhaps it is you who should be careful.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a warning.”
“You were good friends with Lena Orlov.”
“Yes I was.” Now she threw her own cigarette through the window.
“Then why did you lie to me?”
“Because I didn’t want to answer a lot of questions.”
“Why did you go around to her apartment?”
She sighed. “To get some milk.”
“But—”
“I went in because it was unusual for her door to be unlocked. That was the only lie.” She sighed. “Lena was a Russian girl, Detective.”
“Like you.”
“Yes, like me.”
“So it doesn’t matter.”
She looked at him, then came forward and took the lapel of his jacket, flicking it with one long, thin finger. “You need a new suit, or you’ll boil to death. The summer has only just begun.”
Charles Lewis walked in through the doors and stopped. “Conspiracy,” he said. “He’s not rich enough for you.” He took Natasha Medvedev’s hand. “Come on, I want one more dance.”

 

Field left and took a rickshaw back to his dingy room in the Carter Road quarters. The steward was asleep in his chair when he got to the top floor and the corridor quiet. Prokopieff’s door was, thankfully, shut.
Field closed his own door carefully, lest Prokopieff hear, and took off his jacket, switching on the fan on the wall beside him.
The room was tiny. Yellow paint peeled in large strips off the walls and ceiling on account of the damp. There was a small window, but Field had learned never to open it in the summer because of the mosquitoes.
He sat down at his desk, put his holster on the starched white sheet beside him, and opened the leather-bound diary. He returned to his jacket to remove his father’s fountain pen.
Underneath the date and still feeling drunk, he wrote:
Met a girl—a woman—and can’t stop thinking about whether or not she is compromised and . . . honest. Don’t know why it matters, but it does.
He stared at the page for a few moments more—this was the first thing he’d written for weeks—then slipped off his shoes, trousers, and shirt and slumped down onto the bed. He leaned forward again to flick the light switch and clumsily knocked the copy of
The Great Gatsby
he had bought last week onto the floor. He didn’t bother to pick it up.
There were no curtains, so the streetlamps created dappled pools of light and shadow on the walls and ceiling.
Field closed his eyes. His head and heart pounded as he imagined Natasha doing what the Chinese girl had done, his hands entwined in her long hair. His whole body was covered in sweat.
Eight
W
e have made the assumption,” Caprisi said, looking around the C.1 office, “that the doorman was killed because he could definitively identify the murderer. Chen has been through the building and the surrounding area, and everyone insists they saw no one arrive or leave. But the murderer must have come in sometime during the evening.”
They were in a small group outside Macleod’s office. It was not yet nine and Field was glad he’d come in early, though his awakening several hours ago was the result of a night’s drunken, dehydrated sleep and Prokopieff berating the steward on their landing for bringing him tea rather than coffee.
“Where does Lu come into it?” Macleod asked.
“Lu owned the flats,” Caprisi said. “We believe his men were responsible for the abduction of the doorman.”
“Says who?”
“Chen.”
They all looked at the Chinese detective, who smiled.
“All right,” Macleod went on, “his men were cleaning up, so he might have killed the girl, but why?”
“His flat,” Caprisi said, “his girl. His pleasure.”
“Wouldn’t he take the precaution of getting her over to the French Concession first?”
“Perhaps he lost his temper, although”—Caprisi looked at Field—“Maretsky says it is more premeditated than that.” He shrugged. “Maybe Lu is arrogant enough now to think he can get away with anything, anywhere.”
Macleod nodded.
“We should apply to the French authorities for permission to interview him formally.”
“Yes.” Macleod’s voice was hard and confident, but he fiddled with the chain around his neck as he talked. He looked at Field—which all of them kept on doing, he noticed, as if eyeing an enemy in their midst. It was clear that none of them trusted him or felt comfortable with his presence. “So you think it could have been Lu himself?” Macleod went on.
“It could have been,” Caprisi said. “But if it isn’t, then he knows who it is and is protecting him. That’s why they disposed of the doorman. There was certainly a cleanup operation. There was no murder weapon, no prints on the cuffs.”
Macleod was staring at the floor, still fiddling with the chain. In some ways, he reminded Field of his father; he seemed to have the same sense of moral and practical certainty.
Caprisi had a notebook open in his hand. “So we talk to Lu when permission comes through from the French. We try the apartment block again and talk to Natasha, the unhelpful neighbor.”
“Natasha and Lena were close friends,” Field said. “They danced together at the Majestic Café.”
All three detectives looked at him in silence for a moment. “Okay,” Caprisi said, “since we are short of direct evidence, we should work on tracing through Orlov’s life. Was she a prostitute? Did she have a regular man? Did she exclusively belong to Lu, and did he lend her to anyone else? And there’s this.” Caprisi produced the leather volume with the hole cut in it and handed it, open, to Macleod, who took out the notebook and glanced through it.
“Names of ships, departure dates, and destinations,” Caprisi explained.
“I can see that.”
“We don’t know its relevance, but if Lena was one of Lu’s girls, it may have something to do with him, or with the man who killed her.”
Macleod shut the book and handed it back to Caprisi. “Right. Keep me briefed. The municipal authorities wish to be kept closely informed on this investigation, and the commissioner wants regular updates.”
They all frowned, including Field.
Caprisi turned away. Field followed Chen toward the American detective’s desk.
“Field,” Macleod said. Field stopped and turned. “You playing rugby tomorrow?”
“Yes, I believe so, sir.”
“Granger has been telling everyone you’re a find.”
“He’s never seen me play.”
“You’re fit?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?” Macleod was smiling.
“I’m sure.”
“Caprisi, make sure you break this boy’s leg.” Macleod took a step toward Field and stretched his arms above his head. “He’s good, you know, for a Yank.”
“So everyone says.”

 

Field sensed the tension as soon as he entered the ten o’clock briefing. It was held in a large, gloomy room behind the duty sergeant’s counter on the first floor. Field took a seat at the back behind Caprisi, at a desk almost identical to the ones they’d had at school, even down to the graffiti. Someone had carved in big letters:
Smith for fucking Pope.
There was graffiti etched into the dark wooden panels beside him, too, paint on the walls above peeling off in large chunks. There were no pictures or adornments of any kind and the two fans hanging down on long metal poles from the ceiling stood idle. Field had never seen them work. Whatever the police budget was being spent on, it wasn’t building maintenance. The whole building had an aura of decay about it.
The old clock between the frosted glass windows at the end of the room was tilted to the side, but still showed that the briefing was late again.
Field leaned against the wooden panel and closed his eyes, losing himself in the hubbub around him.
He was jostled and turned to see a group of officers in full protective gear coming through the door. Sorenson, a small, surly, dark-haired man from Ohio, took off his heavy metal jacket and let it drop to the floor with a loud thud, then stacked it and the helmet against the back wall along with his machine gun. He had been unfriendly during Field’s attachment to the incident room here in Central, and didn’t bother to acknowledge him as he shoved his way into a seat next to one of the Chinese officers on the far wall.
Caprisi lit a cigarette and then, without looking around, threw the packet over his shoulder onto Field’s lap.
Captain Smith walked in. He clipped Caprisi over the head playfully with a buff-colored folder on his way to the lectern. He was tall—six feet two or three—with a narrow face and white hair. Like most of the men in the room, he was in blue summer uniform, the silver badge on his lapel above his name tag highly polished. He ran his fingers along his nose. “All right, gentlemen.” He was looking at the file in front of him. “I’m going to let Mr. Granger begin today.”
Granger had been standing quietly in the doorway and now ambled forward, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. As he took Smith’s place at the lectern, he half closed his eyes against the smoke, which drifted up toward the ceiling.
“Borodin is back in town,” he said with an obvious distaste for the communist agitator. “He’s been in the south to organize the Reds down there and make sure the funding is getting through, but he arrived back at Central Station last night.” He cleared his throat. “There is only one strike at the moment, over in Pudong, but be on the lookout for any information you can pick up. I will be doing the rounds of the other stations, but we believe they will be targeting Central for leaflet handouts and quick impromptu rallies. He’ll be using students to do the dirty work. We want to respond swiftly and I hardly need remind you what happens when the mob gets out of hand.” He looked around the room. “So make it a priority. Of course, the Municipal Council is very anxious that we keep up last year’s tough line.” Granger took another drag of his cigarette. “Any questions?”
Apart from a couple of coughs and feet scuffing the floor, the room was silent.
“All right,” Smith said, stepping forward. “Sorenson led a team out on the armed robbery this morning at a jeweler’s shop on Boone Road that you will probably have heard about. It looks like our friends in the Green Gang again, but they’re improving their speed; they were long gone by the time we got there. They wore masks, so no IDs from the old couple in the shop, but we did get a license plate, B4563. Please make a note of that.”
Field watched the uniformed officers around him writing the number down in their books.
“We’ve also got a kidnapping this morning. Bubbling Well Road, next to the Italian consulate. Young boy, about eleven, dark hair. Father’s quite high up in Fraser’s. Chinese, obviously. Not sure why they’ve reported it. I’m sure they’ll pay up in the end. No message in the paper yet, but probably the Green Gang again. There’s a picture of the boy pinned to the back wall there, so take a look at it on the way out. Now . . . there was a Russian girl murdered yesterday in the Happy Times block on Foochow Road.” Captain Smith was smiling as he said this and there was a jeer from the men. Sorenson whistled at the back. “I give you Detective Caprisi.”
Caprisi got up and walked to the front as the men continued to cheer and whistle. He wasn’t smiling when he turned and faced them.
“The Russian girl’s name,” Caprisi said, having waited for them to stop, “was Lena Orlov. She was tied up, stabbed almost twenty times. There does not appear to have been a sexual assault.”
“He couldn’t get the handcuffs undone,” Sorenson said. There was a guffaw of laughter.
Caprisi ignored it. “Has anyone ever heard of anything similar . . . not murder, but violence against Russian girls . . .”
“I’ve got a thousand,” Sorenson said. “A thousand cases.”
“I’ve got two,” someone else added, and there was another guffaw of laughter.
“The flats belong to Lu,” Caprisi said, his mood souring further. “So do the women in it. The doorman was taken away and executed yesterday, and everyone else in the neighborhood claims not to have seen a thing.”

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