The Hua Shan Hospital Murders

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Robert peeled off another 1,000-yuan note and put it on the dirty tablecloth. Across from him the small man eyed the money with the kind of disdain that Robert had come to expect. On the far side of the restaurant, an aging beauty was showing a new girl how to properly deliver a drink to a table. Much attention was given to turning the body so that the customer would be looking directly at the young waitress’s chest.

Why did his informants always want to meet in cheesy places like this? Well, better than the new “high concept” restaurants that were all the thing in Shanghai. The newest and most successful of these was an eatery called Cool Chains that was a mock-up of a Chinese federal prison. Diners ate in their own cells, receiving their food through a metal slot. Ridiculous.

The man across the table cleared his throat. “Go ahead, spit. It doesn’t bother me,” Robert thought.

At first, bribing people for information about the fate of his sister Rivkah had been difficult for him. But over his three years of inquiry he had acquired an appreciation for the finer points of the art. In fact, he had of late, gained a genuine taste for it. Just as he had for the gelatinous Shanghanese dishes that made most Westerners’ gorges rise.

The man across the table extended a pinky finger with a long buffed nail and poked at the money as if he were not sure whether it was alive or dead. The finger retracted. Robert added another 1,000-yuan note to the pile. The man smiled. Robert had done this little dance many times and knew he was now close to getting answers to his questions.

His investigations had taken him down two paths. The first had to do with the events leading up to and the eventual period of the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. It was relatively easy to find this information and not all that expensive. But the second path of investigation, into the life of the infamous Iraqi Jew Silas Darfun, had taxed both his ingenuity and the bankroll he had amassed from his illegal trading in antiquities.

Silas Darfun had somehow, even in death, erected tall thick walls around his secrets. Robert hoped the man across the table might just show him a way over those walls.

“And you would like to know what precisely about Mr. Darfun?”

“You were his gardener?”

“One of his gardeners. It was a big place. It needed many gardeners.”

“And you were with him during the war?”

The man cocked his head and gave a crooked smile. “And what war is it that you refer to? The war of liberation?”

Robert hadn’t met this form of resistance before. The man knew perfectly well which war he was talking about but Robert didn’t know the name the Chinese used for the Second World War. While doing work in the American South Robert had been astonished to hear the American Civil War referred to by Southerners as the war between the states or the war of northern aggression. He’d quickly learned that south of the Mason/Dixon line referring to the conflict by anything but those two terms led to an intense silence. So he feared not being able to come up with the Chinese name for WW II would silence this gardener.

“The time of Japanese occupation.”

“Yes, I was there throughout that time.”

Fine, that hurdle was behind him. “Were you there when Mr. Darfun took in the children?”

The man pulled out a cigarette, a Snake Charmer, and struck a match against the table. Robert controlled his impulse to pull away from the flame. Abitter cloud of smoke escaped the man’s lips, then he began to cough. The cough shook him like a strong wind does a piece of laundry satayed out an apartment window on a bamboo pole. The shaking subsided and he picked a tiny brown flake off his tongue as if that bit of tobacco had caused the coughing fit.

“Which children would that be?”

Robert knew that Silas had gained intense notoriety in both Shanghai’s Chinese and Jewish communities when he married his Chinese mistress. He had also ruffled many feathers when he and his wife took in forty street children and raised them as their own. Robert looked at the man.

The man smiled thinly and let out another bitter cloud of smoke, “Ah, you don’t mean the street children – you mean the Jew brats?” Robert’s shocked look seemed to please him. “You have been asking questions about Mr. Darfun for almost three years now. Surely you don’t think you have been able to keep such inquiries secret.”

He had. In fact he’d never really considered that the Chinese men and women he had bribed for information would even admit to having talked to him. Why should they? He looked at the man. How little he understood these people. Then he smiled. How little they understood him.

Fine.

“Yeah, the Jew brats.”

“I was there then.”

“Did Silas keep a record of their names?”

“Of course.”

Robert waited but the man said nothing. He stared at the 1,000-yuan note. Robert put three more 1,000-yuan notes beside them. The man reached over and folded the bills together, then pocketed them. “Are these the proceeds from sales of the priceless cave frescos, books, and statues from my country’s glorious past?”

Again Robert found himself surprised. Odd that a gardener would be so well informed. He put on his best “fuck you” smile and said, “You wouldn’t be suggesting that I am involved in smuggling antiquities, would you?”

The man met Robert’s fuck-you smile with one of his own. “No – not suggesting – knowing.”

“Knowing what?”

“That you are a smuggler, Mr. Robert Cowens.”

A smuggler. Not a usual occupation for a nice Jewish boy. But then again Robert wasn’t all that nice and he wasn’t Jewish in the sense of being religious. In fact, he enjoyed referring to himself as an active and committed agnostic. Despite that, he was definitely a Jew – a card-carrying, yeah-but-is-it-good-for-Jews kind of tribal member.

A smuggler Jew.

He had first come to Asia four years ago when his law firm had insisted that there was big movie business to do in the far east. “Kung fooey films?” he’d asked. But when they showed him the grosses from the latest Jett Li film he’d whistled through the gap in his front teeth. Then they showed him the cheap cost of production. He calculated the net profit without their help. All he asked was, “When’s my flight?”

It was that night. He flew to Chicago then transferred planes. The JAL flight took him up the Mackenzie River, over the pole, then down to Hong Kong. He’d lived in Canada all his life but had never even remotely appreciated the vastness of the country until that trip. He didn’t even know where Great Slave Lake was until he saw it slide beneath the belly of the plane. It changed him. But not the way turning forty had changed him or the way leaving his wife had. He had touched the Plexiglas window of the plane and sensed the movement of time through the vibrations. He allowed himself to think about his recently deceased father – and their snooker games.

Robert used to play snooker with his father every Wednesday right up until six weeks before he died. They’d lunch together at his father’s golf club – his father still played well into his late eighties. Robert never played. The two of them would eat downstairs at the snack bar, then retreat to the large L-shaped room that was known as the men’s section. Truth be told, the women referred to it as the old men’s section. There were a few card tables, a glassed-in smoking area, a large-screen television usually tuned to a station that had stock quotes running across the bottom, and a single full-sized snooker table.

At the card tables, gin rummy was the game but bullshitting was the entertainment. The elderly Jewish men seated there were the last remnants of their kind. The very end of the European Jews in North America. “From whence we came,” Robert thought as he watched an old guy slam his cards down on the table and announce to the room, “I got a hard on for this one.” Robert looked back at the pool table where his father was carefully setting up the snooker balls. The man at the card table who had shouted was named Itch. Or at least that’s what he was called. Robert assumed he didn’t like the nickname. At least it could have been grammatically correct: Itchy. Well, whether that mattered to Itch or whether he did or didn’t like the appellation, Robert was certain of one thing about Itch. The man hadn’t had a hard on – for a card game or much of anything else – for quite some time.

Robert’s father broke the stack of red balls, being careful to hit the cue ball so it travelled back down table. Despite his age, Robert’s father was a good snooker player. For as long as Robert could remember, his father had been a good snooker player. As he walked over to the cue ball, Robert remembered how his father had convinced his crazy mother to allow him to buy a pool table for the basement of their house: “It will keep the boys out of the pool halls.”

Robert came down on the very first day the pool table arrived and grabbed a cue. His father took it from him and showed him how to form a bridge with his seven-year-old hand. He wouldn’t let Robert even hit a ball until he could glide the pool stick across his bridged fingers perfectly parallel to the green felt surface for a full three feet. That took more than a week of practice.

Robert never forgot the feel of finally hitting cue to ball. The solidity of it pleased him. But it was the pure mathematics of the game – the controlled, totally non-subjective reality of it – that hooked him. His father insisted that he learn how to play English billiards first. He blocked the pockets with plugs and put a red ball and a black ball and a white ball on the table. “The black is yours. The white is mine. The red is common. Now make your ball hit my ball, bounce off a rail, then hit the red. Each time you do, it’s worth two points.” There were no sinking balls in the game. Just caroms and spins to position your cue ball. Robert lost that first game 100 to 8. After three months of practice, his father finally removed the pocket plugs. He took three red balls and put them in an arc about a foot and a half away from a side pocket. Then he took the cue ball and put it down table on the snooker spot for the pink ball. “When you can pot each of those balls twenty times in a row without a miss, call me.” Then he left. It took Robert just under two months to accomplish this task.

Thereafter he and his father played nightly. Snooker. Only snooker. The only night he didn’t play with his father was on Thursdays when his father had his cronies over and there was big money changing hands in the basement – sometimes over single shots.

Robert remembered returning home one Thursday night after a summer evening of carousing with his high school friends and hearing his father and his buddies whooping it up downstairs. Maybe it was his desire to show off his skills with a cue stick – or maybe it was the false courage induced by the excellent Lebanese hashish that coursed through his veins – for whatever reason, Robert found himself downstairs – $120 of his hard-earned dollars on the table, a pool cue in his seventeen-year-old hands.

His father took every penny from him in less than an hour, then asked if he wanted to play double or nothing on three balls. Robert agreed. He never got to shoot in the game. As he left the basement, hurt and angry, his father spoke to him. “Two lessons, Robert. One, don’t ever make any decisions about money when you’re in that ‘condition,’ and two, you’ll pay me back every penny before you spend a single penny on anything else. Is that clear?” Robert nodded. His father patted his cheek hard and said, “Check on your mother before you go to bed. I don’t want her wandering the halls.”

Robert ignored the order, assuming his father must have been light on his insulin dosage that day. His mother had been dead for some eight years at that point. Robert didn’t ignore the rest of the order though, and paid back every penny he owed his father. And $240 was a fortune to a seventeen year old in 1965. But the lesson was worth the cost he thought, as his father’s liver-spotted hands began to shake causing his cue to tap a red ball to his left. All those years later, Robert once again worried that his father had forgotten to take his insulin shot.

Snippets of conversations floated over from the card table:

What a cash-business he had.

You bet, you wanted a coat you went to Morty, period.

But not pants.

Nah, never. Morty’s pants were fercached.

Pants can’t be fercached.

Why not?

’Cause they can’t, people yes, God sure, your procrastinate, usually, but not pants.

Why not?

He asks again.

Again I ask.

’Cause pal o’ mine, it makes no sense – pants can’t be fercached and that’s that.

Listen to him, the dentist’s the expert.

In this yes.

Want to take a peek at a crown in my mouth?

Thanks no, it’s your play and I got a hard on for this one.

Why should this hand be different from all other hands?

The rummy player’s fir cushes.

Don’t start.

An unexpected silence descended on the room. Robert looked up from his shot. He knew what he’d see – someone much nearer to the end than the other elderly men must have entered. Such quiet always greeted the cold breath of near-death.

“Cancer,” his father said a little too loud.

The man’s clothes hung from his frame like limp things on a line. Robert couldn’t place the man’s face, but then again, near the end so many looked alike.

“Cancer,” his father repeated. “What ball are we on?”

“We’re not up to potting the balls in order yet, Dad.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I meant have I sunk a red ball!”

“Yeah. You can shoot any coloured ball you want.”

He hadn’t but who cared? Robert watched the slow shamble of the cancer man through the over-airconditioned room. The man went to the door at the far end and was pulling on it when it needed to be pushed. Robert put down his cue and opened the door for the cancer man. The man smiled at him – the word rictus popped into Robert’s head. Robert forced a smile to his lips.

“Cancer,” his father repeated as Robert returned to the table. He was about to respond when his father added, “I wish that fucking Silas Darfun had had cancer.”

Robert’s father was proud of being a professional. He was not a merchant and seldom used profanity – but the real new information was the weirdly named Silas Darfun.

“Silas who?” Robert prompted.

“Darfun – Silas Darfun. The Sephardic Jew from Iraq. You know, in Shanghai.”

Robert hadn’t been born when the family was in Shanghai but he let that pass. Again Robert wondered if his father had forgotten to take his insulin shot.

“In Shanghai?” he prompted again.

“Yeah, Robert, where else but Shanghai?”

Robert’s parents had gotten out of Austria in August of 1937 but they’d been refused visas to Australia, the United States, England, Canada, and New Zealand. Only China had granted them an entry visa. They’d made their way overland to the Middle Kingdom where they lived out the war in the relative security of Japanese-controlled Shanghai.

True, his informants had told him that it got tense after Pearl Harbor when the German ambassador arrived with Berlin’s plans for the Final Solution for the Jews of Shanghai. In February 1943 an “isolation area for Jews” was set up. In the next three months over a thousand Jewish families were moved from their 811 apartments into a sectioned-off part of the city that was less than two square kilometres. Their apartments and their 307 businesses went to the occupying forces of Japan. Things quickly got bad in the “isolation area.” Many people were reduced to begging to live. Some managed to land backbreaking work in the local Chinese mill. Children headed out daily to the markets on Shan Yin Lu or Li Yang Lu hoping to find discarded vegetables and foodstuffs. Things continued to degenerate in the isolation area as 1943 neared its end. But the Germans’ extermination plans were resisted by the Japanese who owed much to the Jewish bankers who had financed their successful invasion of Russia in 1904. In fact, the German final solution for Shanghai’s Jews never came to pass. The isolation area lasted for 561 days ending with the German defeat by the Allies. Just over three hundred of the ghetto dwellers had died of disease and hunger. But to be fair, Robert’s research had also revealed that many people in Shanghai at that time died of the same two maladies.

Robert had found out that it wasn’t the deaths that caused so much hurt and anxiety in the Jewish community. It was something, in its own way, far more sinister. It had cost a lot of money, but Robert had bought access to records that showed that seven of the ghettoed Jewish women had applied for and were permitted to become prostitutes servicing the occupying Japanese forces – and at least ten Jewish children had been sold.

One of these children was Robert’s mad mother’s first-born, Rivkah.

“She sold our first-born, Rivkah,” his father said, “to this Silas Darfun. She was pregnant. She needed food to nourish the baby inside her. She had been told that Silas Darfun treated children well and that they would be returned when the war was over. That’s what she was led to believe.

“When we were finally released from the ghetto we went to get Rivkah back. We couldn’t get past the security guards around the Darfun mansion. Your mother waited day and night for weeks outside that gate to get a chance to talk to the great man.”

“It made her the way she was, Robert. Even the birth of you boys only momentarily rescued her. Then back she’d go. It poisoned her. She never trusted anyone ever again. No trust – no love.” He raised his arms in the ancient gesture of “What’s to do?”

No trust – no love – so simple. So true. So true in Robert’s life.

His father had done the best he could to give Robert and his two brothers a caring home, but Robert was aware at a very early age that his mother’s volatile temper could erupt at any time. Robert never brought friends home. He often awakened to his mother’s screaming accusations at phantoms in the darkened hallways of their house.

“So that’s what that was all about,” Robert thought. “Why do old Europeans keep so many secrets?” He stepped forward and took the pool cue out of his father’s hands.

“Are we finished? There are still balls-”

“No, we’re not finished. Did you ever see Rivkah again, Dad?”

“Who knows? Your mother claimed she saw her the day before we were to board the ship to leave Shanghai. A tiny, filthy white girl was asleep in the garbage at the end of a stinking alley. Your mother raced to her, calling her name. The girl bit your mother’s hand – drew blood – then ran away. So fast. So very fast. I refused to chase after her. Your mother never never forgave me for that. We boarded the ship the next day.”

“And the baby Mom was carrying?”

“Born dead. God’s a swell guy, Robbie. A real swell guy. Like fucking Silas Darfun.”

“What happened to this Silas Darfun?”

“I don’t know. May he rot in hell with fucking cancer.”

“You seek the records of those Jew children?”

“I do,” said Robert eyeing the man across the table more seriously now than before.

The man stood up and Robert leapt to his feet. “You are a rich man, Mr. Cowens. You may even be a smart man. But you have one great disadvantage in your search.”

“And that would be?”

“You are a white man in an Asian country. And the documents you seek are now State property. They are controlled by men of my colour, not yours. I wish you well in your search.” He began to move then stopped. “Are you a betting man, Mr. Cowens?”

“Are you?”

He raised his shoulders, almost Yiddisha, and said in answer to Robert’s question, “I’m Chinese, so naturally I am a betting man. I asked if you were a betting man?”

“It seems I’ve become one at this late juncture in my life.”

“Well, I’d be careful, because I wouldn’t bet a single yuan on your chances of ever tracking down whoever it is you think Old Silas had in his house during what you people so egotistically call the Second World War.” The man took a final look at the young waitress-in-training’s chest, then left without saying another word to Robert.

Robert had one last contact before he was left with no other option but a frontal assault upon the Chinese bureaucracy: an elderly woman who had been one of the Chinese street urchins saved by the Darfuns in the mid-thirties. Her name had cost him a small fortune and forced him into some hasty and probably ill-advised dealings in the antique markets. Finding her had taken all his wits. When they finally met face-to-face – him kneeling on the wet pavement because she was a seller of five-spiced eggs – he was disappointed by her information.

Sitting on her little bamboo stool, she stirred her pot slowly, allowing the ancient eggs to take in the five secret ingredients that she had added that morning to the boiling water. The smell coming from the pot reminded Robert of something that grew between your toes. He smiled at her. She smiled back. Only a single tooth remained in her mouth. He asked his question.

She took a moment to look at him then responded that she didn’t know the names. “Those Jewish children all looked alike. Now that I am older I can be honest. I can’t tell one of you white people from another. It amazes me that you can.” She stirred the pot. The toe-cheese smell almost overwhelmed Robert.

Then she added one piece of information that caught Robert completely off guard.

“Only the men,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I’m not following you.”

“Silas only dealt with the men from the ghetto. He never did business with women. Never.”

“But-”

“Never with women. And only with the men when they proved they were in desperate need. Usually because they were sick or something.”

“Listen, I think my mother was pregnant and needed food. Could that be a reason that Silas would take a girl into his house?”

“No. He would have taken in the mother.”

That shocked Robert. “Did he take in pregnant women?”

“When he could. But there were few pregnant women. Lack of food makes conception difficult.”

“What happened to the children he took in?”

“Their parents all came for them at the end. Silas educated the girls. That’s why they were there.”

“They weren’t used by him. Used in his factories or whatever he did?”

She smiled at him sadly. “No. He was a trader, Mr. Cowens. He had no use for young girls.”

* * *

Fong allowed his now bloodied hands to touch the large piece of glass that still hung down from the top of the window frame. He saw his image buried in the glass. Him standing in the room looking out; his image, perfect, stuck in the shard of glass looking in.

He watched his image smile.

Then he turned to Lily, “Do you remember the riddle you told me?”

“Yes. You solved it, Fong,” answered Lily.

“I did.” Fong looked to the men. “Are you good at riddles?” Wu Fan-zi and Chen couldn’t have been more surprised if Fong had asked them if they could ballroom dance. Neither man moved.

“Fine,” said Fong, “solve the riddle Lily told me. A man and his son are in a terrible car accident. The father is killed instantly but the boy survives and is rushed to the emergency room of a small hospital. He is quickly prepped and raced into an operating room. The surgeon in the room takes one look at the boy and screams, ‘This is my son!’ Since the boy’s father died in the car crash, how could the surgeon also be the boy’s father?”

Chen and Wu Fan-zi were both silent.

Fong said, “The surgeon isn’t the boy’s father. She’s the boy’s mother.”

Wu Fan-zi and Chen each gave a yeah-but-so-what kind of nod.

“But that’s not the real riddle, is it?”

“It’s not, Fong?” asked Lily.

“No. The real riddle is why is it that people can’t solve that simple little riddle. Why is that Lily, do you think?”

“They presuppose that a doctor . . .”

“. . . must be male.” Fong completed his wife’s statement. “Just like we presuppose an American must be white.”

Suddenly there was energy in the room. Wu Fanzi’s eyes shone.

“You mean . . .?”

“What if the American we’re looking for is Asian – Chinese.”

“He could pass as a garbage collector and get the fetuses that he uses.”

“He wouldn’t have been questioned in our hotel sweeps.”

“He could go in and out of hospitals and put nasty notes on receptionists’ desks without being noticed.”

“And he wouldn’t stand out in the video of the crowd outside the Hua Shan Hospital.”

Fong picked up the phone. “I want as many of the Hua Shan Hospital workers as you can find to view the VHS tape. Be sure to get the receptionist who found the note. I want them to ID every face on that tape. Got it?” Fong put his hand over the phone and turned to the people in the room. “At the very least we should be able to eliminate some faces – maybe we’ll even get lucky. That would be a first in this case.” He spoke into the phone again, “Use the biggest auditorium you can find and do it fast. I want a report in two hours.” Fong hung up and turned back to the room. “Okay, that’s part one but he didn’t show up on our money transfer checks either.” The others readied themselves. “Check my thinking,” Fong began to pace. “We know the bomber is a foreigner – probably an American – perhaps a Chinese-American.”

Lily, Wu Fan-zi, and Chen nodded.

“We know that what he does costs big money.”

“That first blast could have cost well in excess of ten thousand US dollars,” said Wu Fan-zi.

“That’s the reason we’ve been chasing down big bank transfers.”

“Maybe he brought the money with him.”

“He wouldn’t dare, Chen. Knowing what he’s going to do he wouldn’t chance breaking our currency restrictions. Our bomber must make his money inside China.”

A silence followed as each considered this new possibility.

“But how would he make that kind of money in Shanghai?” asked Lily.

“Drugs?” Chen suggested.

“Women,” Lily chimed in but gave up on the idea before it was even out of her mouth.

Fong turned toward the shattered window facing the new Pudong Industrial Area across the Huangpo River. “What’s hanging on our apartment on the left side of the window, Lily?”

“The fresco . . . He’s trading in antiques?”

“Why not? If he bought from locals and sold to tourists the profits could be astounding. And it’s not hard to get antiques, is it, Lily?”

“No, Fong, it’s not.”

“So, we’re looking for a Chinese-American who has been dealing in antiques. How hard can he be to find?” asked Lily.

“Very hard if he’s smart,” said Fong.

“And I think he’s smart,” added Captain Chen.

Fong whirled quickly, “I want every smuggler in Shanghai rounded up, Chen – all of them – now!”

Six hours after Fong ordered the round-up of smugglers, Robert Cowens was standing on the crowded sidewalk outside of the new apartment block on Hu Qin Road. The building didn’t give a hint of what had been demolished in 1985 to make way for it – the Beth Aharon Synagogue. Robert ignored the curious looks he was getting from the Chinese passersby. He was desperate. His three years of searching had led to tantalizing bits and pieces but nothing substantial. Nothing that changes one’s life – no proof of the need for revenge.

The Beth Aharon Synagogue was one of the last stray pieces of information that Robert had been able to track down. It had been built by Silas Darfun in 1927. But it was what had been in the synagogue during the war that infuriated Robert. Silas Darfun had paid huge bribes to the Nazis to lift, intact, the famous Mir Yeshiva from Europe. All four hundred Jewish scholars had been moved to Shanghai where they spent the war in Silas’s Beth Aharon Synagogue continuing their studies.

It made Darfun a fucking hero. He was no hero. “You can’t buy your way into heaven, you old fuck,” Robert thought. Then he wondered at himself. He’d never given heaven a second thought before. Maybe Tuan Li was right – there is a time in a man’s life for faith. It was exactly at the moment he felt something hard hit him in the base of his spine. He began to call out but his face hit the cement with such force that he momentarily lost consciousness. When he managed to swim back to the present, a young aggressive police officer was cuffing his hands behind his back just as another one yanked him to his feet.

Then a middle-aged cop with delicate features stepped out of a waiting car.

“Are you Robert Cowens?”

Robert was surprised at how good the man’s English was. “Yes. Who are you?”

“Detective Zhong Fong, head of Special Investigations, Shanghai District – I believe we have much to talk about.”