The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory (6 page)

Before Fong could translate, the consul general said the exact same thing, in fluent Shanghanese, even getting the complex idiom right. When he was finished, he laughed at the shock on the faces of the Chinese men.

In rapid-fire English, Fong said, “I don’t care for this game, if you have something to say to me, say it.”

“I thought you Chinese liked games.”

“This is not the time—”

“On the contrary. This is absolutely the right time for games. ‘At times of change humanity tests the new through the use of games.’”

“Who said that?”

With a smile that had absolutely no warmth, he snapped, “Me. Just now.”

At 11:37 P.M., April 19, just over twenty-five hours since the dismembered pieces of Richard Fallon’s body were found in an alley off Julu Lu, Zhong Fong called it a day. As in all investigations at this stage, he had a ton of work ahead of him before he could even guess where to begin. But it would have to wait. Now, he needed time to sit and think so he went out of the office, which everyone else had left long ago, and headed down to Zhong Shan Road. The evening was cool, the oppressive summer heat was still at bay, and the rainy season had not yet come. But it would.

Usually at night, before heading back to his apartment at the theatre academy, he walked the Bund and admired the stateliness of the building where he worked. He’d come a long way, but not in distance. He worked in the former English Concession and lived in the former French Concession but he had grown up in the part of Shanghai that no foreigners wanted, the Old City, the Chinese section of Shanghai. A mere fiveminute walk from glittering Nanjing Road or ever-sochic Huai Hai Road and you found it, just as it had been for so many years, as it would always be, he hoped. The real Shanghai, the Chinese Shanghai.

But it was not there that he headed this evening. Tonight he needed a place to think. Stepping out of his office he turned left and headed toward the confluence of the Huangpo River and the Su Zhou Creek.

Coming to the Beijing Road pedestrian underpass, he stopped and looked behind him. It was an old habit, but on that after today’s events he decided to revive. He scanned the faces. Most were Chinese. All were haggard at this hour of the night.

Satisfied that he wasn’t being followed, Fong headed into the cool dampness of the tunnel. Unlike Western cities where these enclosures would have been filled with street people at this hour of the night, in Shanghai the tunnels were both safe and relatively empty. Only one beggar sat there. By his side was a filthy boy child of three or four. In his gnarled hands the old man held an ancient stringed instrument, an arhu. Fong approached him and put two kwai in his bowl. “Play me something, grandpa. Play me something and help me forget.”

With that Fong took a piece of newspaper from his coat pocket, spread it carefully on the ground, and sat down. He tilted his head back against the cool tiles of the tunnel and closed his eyes. The unearthly sounds of the arhu filled the tunnel and seemed to echo behind his forehead. They looped and bonged off the hard surfaces of his skull and finally pierced the softness of his brain. And there waiting, as she always waited, was Fu Tsong. Quick and lithe, and fire.

Something plunked down in his lap. Without opening his eyes he felt the tangled hair of the beggar boy. The boy sighed happily as he snuggled into Fong’s lap and in the stroke of a bow and the lilt of a melody was fast asleep. For a moment Fong thought that he was losing his mind.

Finally the blessing of sleep came to him, borne on a cool breeze, the haunt of the music, and a breath of faith.

Then the nightmare came—again.

The second day proved no easier than the first. The lab reports came in and to no one’s surprise the blood on the wallet matched Richard Fallon’s, as did the partial fingerprints from the credit cards. The coroner’s report added a few details and confirmed that the most likely time of death was between 9:30 and 10:30 P.M. on April 18. As for the weapon, the coroner concluded that it was a thin instrument with at least a sixinch blade. It was double-sided and, most curiously, it was evidently used with both the left and the right hand. Bones were seldom cut or even nicked in the process; the incisions were made mostly through the joints, severing tendons and levering balls out of sockets. There was a distinct hole in each of the ball joints at the hip which could indicate that as well as having two razor-sharp edges, this particular weapon also had a point capable of puncturing bone.

Wang Jun’s men had waited in vain for the arrival of the street sweeper. So now they were trying to find where she lived, a thing harder to do than it sounds since so many people made their homes in alleys and under stairways. Barely places, let alone places with addresses.

The American consulate had finally returned Fong’s phone calls and had informed him that the consul general was out of the country on a personal matter and that they were not sure when he would be back. In the meantime, they went on, he could talk to the second assistant for Asian affairs should he need any further assistance from the consulate. Fong declined. Before hanging up he was informed that Mrs. Richard Fallon had boarded a JAL flight in Chicago that morning and should be in Shanghai at noon tomorrow and that the American consulate expected him to make himself available to Mrs. Fallon upon her arrival.

Available for what, Fong wondered. He contemplated calling Commissioner Hu and begging off the Mrs. Fallon chore but decided against it. He’d need to interview her anyway.

The consul general’s abrupt departure hadn’t really surprised Fong. It occurred to Fong that the Americans were not being represented at the meeting, but rather that a single consul general was attempting to pass on information he knew he could not pass on in any other way. Or perhaps he was just an American piece of shit who enjoyed pulling the coolie’s pigtail. Fong knew that it was unlikely that he would ever find an answer to this one, so he shelved it and moved on.

He got up and closed the door to his office, but not before he saw the prying eyes of his assistant, whom he now called “Shrug and Knock.” He crossed to his desk and opened the top drawer. Sliding the things in it to one side, he popped open a virtually invisible bottom panel by using the long fingernail on the pinkie of his left hand. From the panel he removed the photographs of the body that were taken before anything had been moved. After a day of investigation he knew what some of the objects in the picture were. The body, although carved up, had been put back somewhat in its godly order. The torso was badly twisted but from above you could clearly see the figure of a man lying on his stomach, his chin in the cement, staring straight forward, his arms and legs spread. The fingers of his left hand were extended unnaturally to point directly toward the alley wall. Directly toward the wallet. The small blob of bloody pulp directly between his legs on the pavement Fong now knew was the piece of the heart the killer had chewed on and then spat out. It was no doubt overlooked as just another piece of viscera and either discarded or thrown in with all the other guts when they were transported to the Hua Shan Hospital morgue. The air sickness bag seal hadn’t been found but that didn’t worry Fong now that he knew what had been carried in the waterproof bag—half of Richard Fallon’s heart. Carried where? That he did not know yet. A left hand that points to a wallet, a piece of heart between the legs—but the fingers of the right hand were pointing as well. To what? Something had been there. Something intrinsic to the message the killer wanted to send. Something that was now gone.

He was about to dial Wang Jun’s number when the light on his phone came on. “Who?”

“Gae Fee Hai Lan.”

“Who?”

“A long nose who speaks terribly. I think he said Gae Fee Hai Lan.”

Fong was still unsure who was calling but decided to take it. “Can I help you?” Fong said in English.

“Your English is a lot better than my Shanghanese, Fong.”

With a laugh he did not feel, Fong said, “So you’re Gae Fee Hai Lan?”

“I guess so. What does that mean?”

“Water buffalo hill country or something, I don’t know, depends how you inflect it.”

Small talk dies quickly between men who hate each other. Between two men who loved the same woman.

“What can I do for you, Geoffrey Hyland?” Fong’s pronunciation of the Canadian’s name was crisp, perfect, and infinitely cold.

Geoffrey did have some shortcomings as a director but the inability to recognize true feelings in someone’s voice was not one of them. Fong’s chilliness did not escape his attention but he let it pass. “There was a message in my room to call you. So I’m calling. That’s all.”

“I didn’t leave a message for you to call me.”

“Well, someone did.” Geoffrey’s voice rose dangerously.

“And I’m telling you I didn’t,” returned Fong with the snap of a cracking whip. The silence that followed was slowly filled by the line’s electronic hum. The line now connected the two men electronically as surely as Fu Tsong’s being had connected them emotionally, in the peculiar erotic bondage of lover and cuckold.

Geoffrey considered hanging up the phone and then thought better of it. “I start rehearsal this afternoon, but maybe we could meet for dinner.”

The ludicrousness of that suggestion was clear to both men. Finally Fong broke the silence. “It would be hard for me, I’ve got a case that’s pretty explosive here.”

“The Dim Sum murder?”

“You heard.”

“The papers are having a field day.”

“The restaurants aren’t very pleased about the whole thing. Look, Gae Fee Hai Lan, maybe it is time that we sat down and talked, but it’ll have to be later. I know where to find you, at least. Once you get going you’ll never get your nose out of that damned theatre—or has that changed?”

After a brief pause, Geoffrey sighed, “Things do change, don’t they, Fong?”

That hung in the air between the two men like the half a world that separated their home cities. Neither broke the silence for almost a minute. Finally Geoffrey said, “Yeah, I’ll be in the theatre a lot, come by sometime.”

As Geoffrey hung up, an obscenity ripped up from his gut and tore at his throat. It landed flat and useless in his quiet room.

Fong suddenly felt as if he were somehow falling.

The moment of vertigo passed and he punched Shrug and Knock’s line. “Get me all the morning papers and their editors’ phone numbers.” Without waiting for a response he clicked off and called Wang Jun.

Between Huai Hai and Chong Shu there is a pleasant side street called Dong Lu. About halfway down its curved short stretch is the Long Li Guest House. On the north side of the guest house is a tea house complete with gardens. On the tea house’s south side is a small cinema specializing in American action films and softcore porno flicks. In front of the guest house, extremely expensive, mostly black, late-model automobiles were double and triple parked. All had Taiwanese plates. The Taiwanese, forty-five years after dragging their sorry asses off the mainland thoroughly defeated in war, had returned victors in commerce.

The security here was discreet. The Taiwanese clientele often less so. There was a bar called the Standing Room Only, not twenty yards from the guest house, where the girls were usually kept. They drank and played cards and planned their next shopping spree. Some of them had pock marks on their faces. Many had tracks in their arms. All had the demarcations of transient beauty that had already bloomed and was now on the wane. So the lights in the bar were kept low. The back exit from the Standing Room Only accessed the private grounds of the Long Li Guest House. A businessman could go into the bar, buy a drink, indicate his choice to the bartender and leave his key. The girl then arrived on her own, shortly thereafter, without having to go through the front reception area and potentially embarrass any wives that may have insisted on joining their husbands. The expenses of the tryst were dealt with in confidence through the hotel. They simply appeared on the client’s bill as “Cleaning.”

But on this day, the men meeting in the back room of the Long Li Guest House were not there to swap stories of favourite whores and bedding techniques. They were there to discuss the death of Richard Fallon and the arrival of half of his heart at one of their hotel rooms.

• • •

At the same time as the meeting was taking place at the Long Li Guest House, there was a more formal gathering across the Huangpo River in the Pudong’s newest building, appropriately enough, a power plant. There were no fancy cars here or girls in the bar next door. There were just the simple trappings of power, real power.

Because of the health of the old man who presided, the lights were always kept low. With the lights so dim, the meeting became more about voices than faces.

The ancient cracked Asian voice gulped air to carry its sounds: “Has our message been received, do you think?”

A crisp young European voice responded, “Received, yes, but accepted? That we don’t know.”

A younger Asian voice chimed in, “These traders have had their way for a long time here, they will not easily be scared off.”

There was a murmur of assent around the room.

There had been no murmurs of assent five years ago when the old man had set all of this into motion. There had been just him and his thoughts.

It was a delicate time, a time when nations rose or fell on the decisions of their leaders. He knew that doing nothing would lead to inevitable ruin. The West had invested heavily in China and in Shanghai particularly. But now the big stick of the West, the renewal of most-favoured-nation trade status with the United States, an $8-billion-a-year trading partner, was meeting resistance in the American Senate. The loss of MFN status would effectively end the run of growth in China and possibly plunge it into a savage depression.

The old man with the hoarse voice knew this. He also knew that his beloved Shanghai would be hit hardest. After being ignored by Beijing for almost forty years, the city had finally begun to flourish after Deng’s famous cat remark: “ A red cat, a black cat, both are cats.” This remark was interpreted as meaning money from the East, money from the West, money is money. When four months later Deng casually remarked, “What’s so bad about being rich?” the race toward a market economy was on. The five years since had been years of startling growth in Shanghai. Growth and revitalization crowned by the new Pudong Free Trade Region. But now all this was in danger. As quickly as it began it could falter. The old man had seen it happen too many times before. If he had believed in the gods, he would have said that they were fickle and on occasion needed a good laugh. So they played around with our lives—they fully understood the idea of irony. But he didn’t believe in gods. He believed in planning and thought. He knew what the Americans wanted from China in exchange for MFN status. They wanted what they called progress on what they called human rights.

That they would not get. Ever. China would be governed by Chinese. Never again would a foreign power dictate to China how she was to run her own affairs. This was not 1840 and the shameful Treaty of Nanking where China sold her sovereignty to the English in exchange for opium. And yet, the old man chuckled, he much liked his house in the English Concession and that would not have existed had the English not run Shanghai from the Treaty of Nanking until the Liberation.

He remembered taking up his old writing brush and dabbing it in the ink that had pooled in the well of the stone. He had twisted and feathered the brush on the ancient stone’s flattened surface. Then, drawing out a piece of rice paper, he had started his list. On one side he drew the characters for WHAT THEY WANT. On the other: WHAT WE WILL DO.

The list went this way: They want action on, what they call, human rights in China. We will do nothing about this. They want the cessation of export of all goods made by the Red Army. We will stop some but put new labels on most and continue to export them. They want us to stop producing automatic weapons for export. We will protest vigorously and then give in on this point. They want us to stop exporting goods made by political prisoners. We will move the political prisoners to prisons for common criminals and continue their work. They want a cessation of trade in the products of endangered species.

For a moment he had gulped air and sorted his thoughts. Then with a deft flick of his wrist he had slashed characters that read: We will go to any length to stop the trade in ivory in our country.

Rhino horn was not mentioned. Only the old knew the true value of the miracle elixir made from that rare product. He was old. He knew. Knew and would not be denied its benefits.

The cracked-voiced man had been lost in thought. He saw that they were waiting for him. He finally asked wearily, “And this is important, we still agree?”

“If Shanghai is to grow and prosper it is,” said a middle-aged Chinese voice. It was affirmed by an American twang.

Once more there were murmurs of assent.

“How can a culture love animals so much?” the old man thought for the thousandth time. He remembered seeing a picture of a German concentration camp commandant tenderly petting a dog while in the background, the dead and the dying were kept behind wire. Like the Japanese at Kwongjo, he thought. Sentimentality is a dangerous thing.

Insurance like that which he had set in motion with the Canadian director was its antidote.

He noted again that the room was waiting for him. It was getting harder and harder to get enough air into his lungs to speak. The operation had greatly drained his powers. Gulping deeply, he forced out, “Then let us authorize a second message.”Beneath the massive city, the fibre optic networks glimmered light. And faster than a thought an African man’s fate was sealed.