Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 661 & 662, September/October 1996

The Lady Fish Mystery by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

© 1996 by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

This second installment in the adventures of Mongolian police detective Dorj finds the inspector back from his posting in the Gobi desert for a short holiday in his home city, Ulaan Baatar. But its the time of the Chinese New Year celebrations, and in Ulaan Baatar’s Chinatown, Dorj’s detecting shills are called into play. The authors, a team of Rochester writers, beautifully evoke the color of the occasion.

In Ulaan Baatar’s Chinatown, a crisp staccato of firecrackers welcomed the Year of the Dog. To Inspector Dorj, making his way slowly down the crowded street, it seemed that every one of the thousand Chinese who remained in the Mongolian capital had turned out for the celebration.

Swept from Ulaan Baatar to the Gobi Desert by the twin cold winds of social revolution and reassignment, Inspector Dorj felt something of that hunger for home which all exiles know. But now that he had returned for a long-awaited visit he felt like a stranger. Was it the Chinese faces, or was Dorj becoming accustomed to the sparsely inhabited desert outside his new posting at Dalanzadgad?

The city felt as cold as the desert. Around him, smoke from firecrackers mingled with the crowd’s frozen, misty breath. Red banners decorated with gold ideograms snapped in the same bitter wind that plastered his thin trousers to the backs of his legs.

Dorj stopped and stood with his back against the concrete-block wall of a bicycle shop. Across the wide avenue from him loomed one of the capital’s ponderous Soviet-built apartment blocks. Could it be the one he had come looking for?

Over the entrance someone had constructed a makeshift red canopy, decorated with red bats. Was it part of the celebration? Dorj reached back into his memories. The red bats, he recalled, symbolized happiness and joy. A wedding was planned, that was it. White was not associated with Chinese weddings. It was a funeral color.

A young Chinese girl passed through his line of vision and for a moment he mistook her for someone else. He was a rookie policeman again. And his eyes were suddenly wet. It was the cold wind, he told himself. He removed his eyeglasses and ran a gloved hand across his eyes. When he looked back at the apartment block he returned to the present. The bride had arrived in a red bridal chair, borne on poles by four young men. Another young man was aiming a bow at the chair.

Ceremoniously, he shot three arrows under the chair. What was it Mai had said, years ago? It was against any evil entering with the bride, something like that.

More firecrackers exploded. Larger ones this time. Dorj had watched long enough. He moved away from the bicycle shop and continued down the avenue. If anything, the crowd seemed even noisier than it had before. Someone shouted something in Chinese. There seemed to be some disturbance near the Dollar Shop at the corner.

Even on vacation, Dorj was prepared for police work. The inspector forced his way through the crowd with practiced skill.

A knot had formed halfway down the alley beside the shop. Dorj pushed aside one of the celebrants who stood slumped, his red banner dragging on the ground.

The crowds had not trampled all the snow out of the alleyway yet and around the crumpled body lying there, the snow was stained with blood which was very red, and very real — not symbolic of anything.

“Tea?” inquired Captain Ariunbat. He grasped the teapot with pudgy fingers encircled by several heavy-looking rings. He was heavy himself, and soft-looking. Perhaps that was why he had chosen to suffix his name with “bat,” which in Mongolian means “solid.” Dorj settled into a metal folding chair in front of the cluttered metal desk in his host’s sparsely furnished office and accepted a cup of salty, milky tea. He had not really expected to be visiting police headquarters during his vacation. It too brought back memories.

“I apologize for interrupting your vacation,” said Ariunbat. “But since you were on the scene shortly after the murder—”

“It’s all right,” said Dorj, not meaning it.

“You were in Chinatown for the celebration?”

“Actually I was taking a walk.” More like a pilgrimage, Dorj thought to himself. “I once knew someone who lived in the area.”

Dorj didn’t remember the captain. He wondered from which aimag he’d been transferred. He had the grayish blue eyes and vaguely Western look of a native Kazakh.

“The dead man,” resumed Ariunbat, “was a Mr. Deng Liu. One of the leading lights of the Chinese community here in the capital.”

“An entrepreneur,” said Dorj. “I understood he owned several Dollar Shops — quite lucrative until the new government required them to accept tugriks rather than dollars. Didn’t he also have interests in mining ventures?”

Ariunbat regarded Dorj with some surprise. “You seem well informed. But, of course, you once worked here.”

“I was fortunate enough to dine with Liu and his family a couple of times. Oddly enough, the last time was also as the year turned. I remember we had Nien Fan, one of those traditional dishes for the occasion. It was rice with dried fruit, and a persimmon perched on top.”

“Persimmon?”

“Well, as we know, he is, was, well off. I must admit I didn’t care for the taste much.” Dorj sipped his salty tea.

“No. The Chinese have strange tastes.” Ariunbat leafed slowly through the papers on his desk, as if it were an effort. “At any rate, Mr. Liu died around three o’clock this afternoon at the Russian Polyclinic. He was shot — as you know — around two P.M. — ” The Captain paused. “In what used to be Gorky Street. Though they’ve gone and renamed it, I understand. Did you notice a sign?”

“No,” said Dorj. “All the signs seem to have vanished. Any idea who the murderer might be?”

Ariunbat gave a tired shrug. “Probably one of his countrymen, although there’s a lot of bad blood between the Chinese and our people.”

“They seem to have caught on to this free enterprise idea more quickly than we did,” noted Dorj.

Ariunbat ignored the remark. He stirred some extra milk into his cup of tea. He said, “A few months ago we tracked down a man who’d embezzled from Liu, a man named Chi, so it isn’t beyond reason that — well — Chi killed himself, you see, couldn’t stand the shame and did the honorable thing. Jumped into the Tuul. Left two sons and an ailing wife. So maybe it’s revenge. We’ve questioned Lui’s family. He had a daughter — Song Liu — although his wife was dead. But then, you probably know that.”

“Yes,” agreed Dorj. “She was just a child when I knew him.”

“She’s engaged now,” said Ariunbat. “Works in a bookstore near the park. She gave a statement. She says that her father had been unwell, and was rather distracted this morning. He went out about nine, saying he would be back later, but of course he never returned.”

“What about the notebook?” asked Dorj.

“Oh yes.” From under a pile of papers, he produced a pocket-size, leather-bound notebook. “Did you get a chance to examine it when you picked it up?”

“I only glanced at it.”

Ariunbat pushed the book across his cluttered desk, ignoring the papers which fell on the floor. “What do you make of it?”

Dorj picked the book up and opened it at the space allotted for that day, where there was a small drawing of a fish with wavy lines around its head.

Ariunbat said, “There are other days marked the same way, about every three weeks this past year. Some kind of Chinese accounting method?”

Dorj pondered a moment. “Did the daughter know anything about these fish markings?”

“No, except that she said it was a ‘mei ren yu,’ whatever that is.”

“You have to say it rather more nasally,” said Dorj. He looked out the window for a moment, not seeing Central Square and the heroic statue of Sukhe Baatar, but thinking instead of a young Chinese girl who had coached him in Mandarin for a regrettably brief time. Mai’s lessons had been considerably less formal than those conducted by his Soviet instructors at the Mongolian State University. “As to what it means,” he said, “it means ‘beautiful lady fish,’ or, in other words, a mermaid.”

“A mermaid? But we’re nowhere near an ocean! And how is it you speak a bit of Mandarin anyway?” Ariunbat made it sound like an accusation.

Dorj smiled uncomfortably. He did not care to share much of his past with the man. “It was a personal interest of mine, once,” he said.

Ariunbat tapped his cup slowly. “But why a mermaid?”

“It’s puzzling. Many Chinese mariners consider them unlucky. Liu was such a traditionalist that I can’t see him starting the new year by inscribing an unlucky symbol into his diary for the very day that it begins, so there must have been a more pressing reason. I would guess it was a memory aid.”

“Well,” said Ariunbat, “considering your obvious interest in Chinese culture, I’m sure I could use your assistance in interviewing the daughter.”

“Ah,” said Dorj, wishing he hadn’t mentioned the persimmon.

The next morning Dorj accompanied Ariunbat to the northern suburb where the late Mr. Liu’s daughter lived. They bicycled. Fuel was too scarce to squander except in emergencies. Ariunbat rode a fancy ten-speed model, while Dorj had to content himself with a battered police issue with balloon tires. Despite his bulk, Ariunbat pedaled expertly, even braking neatly to avoid a cow grazing on some frozen grass in front of the Altai Hotel. He wore a set of headphones and Dorj wondered what he was playing on his portable cassette machine, but didn’t ask.

Song Liu lived in the fourth in a line of gers. Dorj had always preferred his solid, cozy — and thankfully square — apartment to the traditional circular, tentlike structures of white felt. But, he knew, most Mongolians aspired to their own suburban gers, complete with electricity.

The policemen left their bicycles beside the gate of the fenced-in yard surrounding the ger. Ariunbat knocked on the elaborately carved wooden door. Song Liu answered. She was a pale, pretty girl, not unlike Mai, Dorj thought.

“Wai,” said Dorj, dredging his memory for the greeting.

“You speak some Chinese, too?” The words were spoken in English by a large, overhearty American who appeared suddenly beside the Chinese girl. His handshake almost dislocated Dorj’s arm. “Pleased to meet you, Inspector,” his new acquaintance twanged. “Myrori: Young’s the name, here’s my card. Song here has been teaching me the odd phrase.”

“Sorry to disturb you,” said Ariunbat, in Mongolian. “We’ll try to be brief.”

The two policemen and Song took wooden chairs beside the stove in the center of the ger. Young positioned himself protectively behind Song’s chair. Dorj noticed that the shelves and tables that sat against the ger s crisscrossed wooden framework were burdened incongruously with the type of bric-a-brac usually found in tourist shops.

While Ariunbat offered condolences to Song, Dorj looked at the business card he had been handed. Apparently Mr. Young was a mining engineer — an associate of the late Mr. Liu.

“Did your father have any enemies?” Ariunbat asked Song.

The girl shook her head. “So far as I know, none, at least among the Chinese community.”

Dorj and Ariunbat exchanged glances. Was she suggesting that a Mongolian was responsible for her father’s death? There was tension between the Mongolians and Chinese. More than one Chinese had been beaten by gangs, usually drunks. But things had been quiet for a while.

“Your father — he was a man of mild temperament, not likely to get into an argument, say?” Ariunbat asked.

“He never lost his temper, not even when Myron — Mr. Young, that is, wished to marry me.”

“Dear!” the engineer said, “I don’t think we ought to—”

“Nonsense!” was the brisk reply. Dorj blinked. For a family so traditional to have such a modern-thinking girl seemed odd. “We must tell the truth about everything.”

Ariunbat’s pencil hovered hopefully over his notepad. “And that is—?”

“Well, my father was not happy about the idea. He wished for me to have an arranged marriage to one of his friends. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to go to America with Myron.”

Dorj sighed. Another young woman seeking her dreams in a foreign land. She seemed remarkably composed, less than a day after her father’s death. Maybe, thought Dorj, her grief was tempered by the removal of an impediment to her plans.

“Anyhow,” Song continued, “my father was adamant that we could not marry, and he sent Myron to look into a silver mine in Olgii.”

Dorj was familiar with the place, in the far reaches of the country on the border of Kazakhstan. The highest form of culture it boasted was a cinema that tended to show Indian films without subtitles.

“That’s right,” Young confirmed. “Song and I were separated for six weeks. We couldn’t even talk — except when the phones were working.”

“My father wasn’t himself recently,” added Song. “He had been ill, I think, but he didn’t like to discuss such things. Bad luck. I’m sure he would have changed his mind.”

Ariunbat nodded. “And, Mr. Young, what are you doing in Mongolia?”

“Joint mining venture with Mr. Liu. At least that’s what my company hoped for. Your country has plenty of untapped resources, Captain. Money to be made there. We’ll have you all living in proper houses before you know it.”

“Certainly,” said Ariunbat. “When did you return from Olgii?”

“Late last night. I have a room in the Ulaan Baatar Hotel. Rolled into bed and went out like a light. Firecrackers woke me up. It was an awful racket. Drums and people yelling New Year greetings. Like I said, Song’s taught me a little Mandarin. I decided to head into Chinatown.”

Ariunbat scowled thoughtfully.

“This was around eight A.M.,” Young explained quickly. “I wanted to see the lion dance.”

“We may need to talk to you further,” said Ariunbat, rising from his chair with some difficulty.

The big American accompanied them out the door. When they were outside he leaned forward confidentially, lowering his voice. “While I was in Chinatown yesterday morning, I overheard something that you may find useful. There were two Chinese boys behind me — teenagers — and I caught a bit of their conversation. Mr. Liu’s name came up. Well, as you can imagine, that caught my interest. One of the boys said something about getting ‘a black pearl.’ And then there was something else about a ‘yee chuan’ — an inheritance. And it must’ve been a big one because they were talking a million cash — paper money. So I began to wonder, were they planning a robbery?”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” asked Ariunbat.

“I guess I couldn’t really believe what I was hearing. Figured it was probably my imagination, or maybe I’d misheard. But I came straight back here to warn him anyhow. He’d left before I got here.”

“What did these boys look like?”

“They looked like — well — Chinese boys.” Young paused to think for a moment. “They were dressed in red. I do remember that.”

“Yes, I saw any number of boys dressed in red yesterday afternoon,” said Dorj. “Part of the celebrations. But why would a couple of teenagers be discussing Mr. Liu’s finances?”

The two policemen had stopped for lunch at the Altai Hotel. Ariunbat removed his goose-down jacket, turned his attention to his plate of boiled mutton, and vigorously began to make up for his bicycling exercise. Dorj had planned on attending a production of Hamlet at the Drama Theater but that, apparently, was not to be. At any rate, hearing about the wished-for marriage between Song Liu and the foreigner, Young, had raised a personal ghost. Where was Mai now, he wondered? Had she and her family weathered the Cultural Revolution? Did she ever wish they had stayed in Mongolia?

“I wonder,” said Ariunbat, “if they might have been Chi’s sons? The embezzler had two sons. They might’ve heard their father talking about Liu’s wealth.”

“So revenge would’ve been a motive, as well as robbery.”

“What other Chinese boys would’ve had that kind of information? It’s obvious.”

“Yes, obvious,” agreed Dorj.

“What do you say, Dorj,” said Ariunbat. “I could pull the sons in for questioning, and maybe he’d recognize them.”

“He might. Of course, it might have just been the usual violent drunks — nothing to do with the conversation Young overheard.”

“And what about the American?” continued Ariunbat. “I checked at his hotel. He did arrive when he said, but as to the next day — the day of the murder — well, you know how our hotels are run.” He wiped grease from his lips.

“Mr. Liu was apparently standing in the way of Young’s marriage to Song.”

“But can you see him killing off his business partner? Besides, the girl said she expected her father to come around to the idea when he felt better.”

“It’s a difficult case,” said Dorj. There was something wrong that he couldn’t quite identify. Was it Song’s odd composure? Or something about those queer fishlike markings in the notebook? Were they in any way related to the murder?

He found himself thinking again about the wedding he’d witnessed. But something else — the girl who’d reminded him momentarily of Mai. Could it have been Song?

Dorj felt suddenly depressed, hemmed in. He almost missed the desert — cold and scoured clean by the winds off the massifs.

The next day, the local telephone service being what it was, Dorj simply walked unannounced into the dark, uninviting store where Song Liu worked. Her job was as seemingly at odds with her late father’s wealth as the family ger. But then the Chinese were reputed to be industrious. Unlike the grocery stores’, the bookstore’s shelves were full, but the books were dusty, and mostly in Russian.

When he saw her kneeling to arrange some maps on a low shelf, he recalled when he and Mai had spent hours browsing bookstores. Not long afterwards, he found himself sitting on a bench with Song, next to the Ferris wheel in Nairamdal Park.

“Yes, I was in Chinatown that afternoon,” admitted Song. She was not so pale. The cold, perhaps, had brought color to her high cheekbones. The bright but ineffectual sun high up in the vast, bright blue sky shone in her dark hair. “I... I stayed at Myron’s hotel the night before.”

“What about your father?” Dorj felt an irrational pang of jealousy.

“Oh, Father would have been furious if he’d known. I told him I was staying with friends. Myron had to go out early, on business, he said.”

“But you stayed in Chinatown for a time?”

“I was watching the celebrations. I knew nothing about the...” Her voice broke and she closed her eyes tightly.

Dorj stared at the Ferris wheel, recalling it in summer, filled with children excited to be carried just a little way up into that blue sky.

“I didn’t tell you the whole truth,” said Song abruptly. “I said Father was ill. He was dying.”

Dorj looked at her questioningly.

“He’d told me,” Song continued. “We’d made all the arrangements. That was just before he sent Myron away. I wouldn’t have put up with it otherwise. I would’ve married Myron on the spot. But I knew Father wasn’t himself. And how could I— Oh, if he’d only given us his blessing before—”

She began to cry and leaned against Dorj’s shoulder. He put his arm around her, uncomfortably.

Dusk was falling when Dorj and Ariunbat reached the Tuul River bridge on what had once been Marx Avenue. Ariunbat stopped and climbed off his bicycle. “The restaurant’s in the next block,” said Ariunbat, who had invited Dorj to discuss the case over dinner. “It’s excellent. I go there often.”

Ariunbat glanced at his watch, illuminated by fitful greenish light from a sputtering streetlamp, and leaned against the balustrade. The river was frozen, except where it eddied around the piers of the bridge. He said, “You can see the lights of the city from here.”

“Have you pulled in those two brothers?” asked Dorj.

“Not yet.”

“I think you should abandon Chi’s family and look a little closer to home.”

Ariunbat was incredulous. “Surely you don’t mean... No, I can’t see a little fragile flower like her being involved in patricide.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Song.”

“The engineer— Young?”

“Yes. I find myself thinking about the conversation he overheard.”

The captain nodded, his double chin trembling. “And...?”

“Red is the color of joy.”

Ariunbat looked at Dorj as if the inspector had gone mad.

“In China, red symbolizes joy,” explained Dorj. “Chi’s sons would hardly be wearing red so soon after their father’s death.”

“Do you mean Young made the conversation up?”

“Not necessarily the conversation itself.”

“But if it wasn’t the sons—”

“Has it occurred to you that Myron Young sounds a lot like ‘mei ren yu’?”

“Well, it does when you say it, yes. So what?”

“The mermaid symbols in the notebook,” said Dorj. “They might have been a sort of code for Myron Young.”

“But why?”

“I’m sure you know that the Dollar Shops were highly profitable when they were actually dollar shops — when they only accepted foreign currency. Most of them were put out of business when our new leaders decided to force them to accept tugriks instead.”

“That’s true.”

“And it wasn’t so long after that decree that Mr. Liu put you onto an embezzler.”

“So?”

“Well, there wasn’t any embezzler. I suspect Liu tinkered with the books to try and stay afloat and called you with that embezzler story as a smokescreen. Unfortunately, you apprehended a suspect. Young must’ve found out all about it somehow. He was blackmailing Liu. Maybe the mermaid symbols marked dates for payments. In which case they were due to meet on the day Liu was murdered. I’ll bet the Dollar Shop off the alley where Liu died was a store he owned.”

Ariunbat pushed his bulk away from the balustrade. “But why would Young kill a man he was milking like that?”

“Maybe he was afraid he’d be found out. Maybe he wanted everything at once. He got impatient for the inheritance he planned to get his hands on by marrying Liu’s daughter.”

“And where did he hear about this inheritance if it wasn’t from those boys?”

“Song told me Mr. Liu was dying. She and her father discussed funeral arrangements. I imagine Young came calling at the ger and overheard — and misunderstood — considering he knows only a little Mandarin.”

“Misunderstood? But what about the ‘black pearl,’ the paper money, the inheritance?”

“A black pearl is part of Chinese funeral rites. The paper money that was supposedly an inheritance is the paper money they burn for the dead.”

The streetlight buzzed and flickered. Dorj thought he could see surprise in Ariunbat’s blue eyes. Eyes that suddenly reminded him of something he’d forgotten, a connection he’d failed to make.

The crunch of footsteps on the icy roadway made Dorj turn. It was Myron Young.

“Never was much good at foreign languages,” said Young. “Hell of a thing. Still, the old man must’ve left something.”

Dorj said, “Are you proposing to shoot me with the gun you used to kill Liu?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Young. “But, no. We had something different in mind.”

“As you recall, our embezzler, Mr. Chi, jumped into the Tuul,” said Ariunbat, and Dorj felt a meaty arm close around his throat.

The inspector’s feet left the ground as Ariunbat swung him toward the balustrade. Dorj glimpsed a patch of swirling black water surrounded by snow-covered ice. Then a gunshot cracked the silence and Ariunbat crumpled.

Dorj, always prepared, even while vacationing, scrambled free of the dying man’s grasp and aimed his police revolver at Young who raised his hands obligingly.

“I’m an American,” said Young. “I’ve got a right to a lawyer. What time is it in Houston?”

“Yes, they were both blackmailing your father,” Dorj told Song. “Ariunbat had met Young in Olgii, during one of Young’s previous trips to the silver mine there. Ariunbat’s a Kazakh — he has the look, the blue eyes. After he was transferred to Ulaan Baatar, he and Young must have gotten together. The conversation probably turned, naturally enough, to your father’s embezzler. Ariunbat had the doctored records and his police investigations, Young had some business smarts. Between the two of them they figured out what was going on and decided to take advantage.

“When Young misinterpreted the conversation about funeral arrangements, their plan changed. They wanted it all at once. They also wanted to pin the murder on Chi’s sons, but it seemed to me Ariunbat was a little too quick to pretend to connect them with the crime.”

“My father was horrified when Chi died,” said Song. “He never expected that. I’m sure he intended to tell Ariunbat not to press charges.”

“That is probably true,” said Dorj, who knew from experience there was no predicting what people might do when it came to money.

He stood with Song and members of Liu’s family on the junction of two temporarily unnamed streets. Song, dressed in funeral white, blended in with the freshly fallen snow that gave even Ulaan Baatar a sparkling sheen of promise.

Song’s eyes were watery. But she was remarkably calm. No doubt she had been steeling herself for her father’s imminent death for weeks. It had come only a bit sooner, and much differently than she’d expected. And, Dorj thought ruefully, the gunshot had been kinder in the end than cancer would have been. But he kept that to himself.

Mr. Liu’s funeral procession came down the street, the white-draped coffin followed by mourners, all in white, bearing white banners inscribed with the character for “life.” Some of the onlookers threw paper money into the cold air.

When the procession had passed, Dorj said, “I won’t be able to come to the cemetery. My plane will be leaving and — well — you have to catch flights when they have the fuel to make them.”

“Thank you,” said Song.

“Maybe next time I’m in Ulaan Baatar, you might like to see a play,” said Dorj, realizing the inappropriateness of the remark even as he spoke. But the girl nodded.

He reached back into his memory again. “Zai-jan,” he said. “Goodbye.”