The Lake Ching murders

CHAPTER THREE

A bright light pierced Fong’s sleep. He shook his head, trying to stop the glare inside his skull. Then he realized that the light wasn’t coming from within, that it wasn’t part of a dream, but rather it was the beam of a high-powered flashlight. He shrugged off the inner tube and held up his manacled hands to blinker the glare.

Through his fingers he saw the silhouettes of the thug and the politico then they bent over the opened trunk. The light bouncing off his hands lit their faces. The thug scowled. That didn’t bother Fong. But the politico’s knowing nod sent a shiver down his spine. That allunderstanding nod, that I-told-you-so smile, let Fong know that the inner tube and the tire had been provided intentionally. That they had been planted. Prepared. That much forethought had been put into this little excursion.

Fong kicked aside the shredded carpet and struggled to a sitting position. A thought sprouted in his head. This asshole thought putting the tire and inner tube there for him to find proved how powerful he was. Fong knew that it proved the opposite. They put the stuff in the trunk because they didn’t want him too badly hurt. Roughed up, yes – but hurt, no. Because they needed him to do something for them. Lily’s telegram said TONS OVER HEAD GOING DOWN ON YOU SOON. REAL SUCKING TONS, YOU NEED A HAT. Maybe, Lily, maybe. Fong was careful not to smile. But inside he was gleeful. They wanted him scared but basically unharmed. They were concerned that he survive the ride. They must really need him to work on something big.

It was dark. He could smell the deep intensity of manure in the air. They must be in a small village. No doubt still a commune-dominated place that turned out the street lights, perhaps all electricity in the town, at 9 p.m. There was a time when all power went off in Shanghai at 10 p.m. Big daddy government saying, Enough kids – you’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow, go to bed. In Shanghai, all that did was spawn a new business in illicit generators. The Shanghanese loved their pleasures and were not about to be denied them by some Beijing government edict!

The thug lifted Fong from the trunk with shockingly little effort. Fong’s knees gave out when he hit the ground. It was muddy. The politico laughed. “You’ve allowed your physical skills to deteriorate badly, Traitor Zhong. Even a disgusting traitor ought to take care of the vessel of life.”

Fong struggled to his feet and took a good look at this flower-eater. “Vessel of life?” he thought. Has the world changed that much? Or is this guy just too . . . too . . . Fong couldn’t find the right word.

The thug grabbed his upper arm and walked him forward. The smell of the politico’s cigarette caught in Fong’s nostrils. The acrid smoke stung his eyes but he longed for a drag. Just one.

They crossed the deserted street and opened the door of a single-storey concrete-block building. They were met by two young men in federal uniforms. Quickly, papers were signed and Fong was hustled down a corridor of empty cells.

“This evening’s accommodations,” Fong thought. But he was careful to keep his eyes down. No point fighting now. “Fight when there is the possibility of winning. Attack when they assume you are going to defend. Never show the enemy your formation because the outside betrays the inner self. Attack only when you know the enemy.” That advice from Sun Tzu’s book The Art of War popped into Fong’s head. It was the only thing, besides Mao’s little red book, he’d been allowed to read in Ti Lan Chou prison.

The jailer pressed the coded cell lock and the door swung open. Fong sensed more than saw the young man huddled in the back reaches of the cell. “We thought you’d enjoy some company after your lonely trip.” Fong hadn’t noticed that the politico had followed them down the corridor. “Prisoner Tao, this is traitor Zhong. Traitor Zhong, this is prisoner Tao.” He allowed a slight pause then hissed, “Tao’s to be executed for crimes against the state – at sunrise.”

Fong was shoved forward. He tripped as the ankle chain snagged. To his surprise his fall was cushioned by prisoner Tao.

The laugh from the corridor behind him was totally humourless. The door clanged shut and the electronic locking mechanism slammed the bolts into place. Fong nodded his thanks to Tao as they both listened to the retreating footsteps. The footfalls silenced. Prisoner Tao moved to the far corner of the cell. When he turned back, he held out a bowl of half-eaten rice and a set of chopsticks.

Fong nodded and took the food. He positioned the bowl between his raised knees. Chinese handcuffs are joined by a longer chain than their sisters in the West to allow for the use of chopsticks. Fong looked at the rice. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d last eaten. It was one of the many things that had changed in his life. Food was just a matter of refuelling now. So unlike his time in Shanghai.

Fong shook the thought from his head. That was past. Now was right before him. A bowl of rice. A prisoner about to be executed. The need for clarity was obvious.

He tilted the container and scraped a few grains into his mouth. Although the food in the western village had been simple, it had been pure. Here Fong tasted the edges of saltpeter and dust that were so familiar from Ti Lan Chou prison. His gorge rose, rejecting the food, but he stopped it. Saltpeter and dust or piss or shit – it didn’t matter. He needed the sustenance of the rice to keep up his strength or he’d never make it to the end of this. Whatever this was.

“You are hungry.” Prisoner Tao’s voice was gentle. His accent was from the south. He spoke the Mandarin words as if they were part of his second language.

In the dim light Fong looked at the young man’s face. The smooth skin. The clear eyes.

Fong’s time in prison had taught him to mind his own business, to deal with his own problems – to be alone. That proffered friendship and a warden’s snitch were often one and the same. But something else said talk to this boy. Comfort him. He is important to you.

“You are not from here.”

“No, from Sichuan province.”

Fong had never been to that part of the country. “How did you get here?”

“They brought me.”

“Why?”

The young man looked sharply at Fong. “Have you been sent here to torment me at the end? Is this the final insult?”

“No.” A long silence ensued.

At last Fong spoke. “I have no way of proving that to you.” Fong gave him back the remainder of the rice. “Thank you for your food.”

A silence grew like a dark cloud between them. Finally the young man pointed to Fong’s shackles. “Do they hurt?”

Fong snapped back. “Yes. Of course they hurt. They were made to hurt. They are intended to hurt. They put them on me to hurt.” Why was he being hard on this boy? He was about to apologize when the young man turned away and, stretching his long arms along the wall, tilted his head so it rested against the cool stone.

“It’s all intended isn’t it, Traitor Zhong?” He turned to Fong and there were tears in his eyes.

“Yes, it’s all planned,” Fong answered slowly.

“So I’m just part of their plan?”

For the first time it occurred to Fong that this young man’s death may have been specifically designed for him to witness – to learn from. To remind him who was in charge in China. He wanted to get up and yell through the bars that it wasn’t necessary. That he acknowledged that they owned him. That there was no reason for this object lesson. That it was sinful to execute a boy to prove a point to him.

But he didn’t. He sank to the floor and hung his head.

Later that night, Fong awoke to the boy’s gentle crying. No words were spoken, but the two came together. The boy’s head rested in Fong’s lap and Fong ran his fingers through the young man’s greasy hair until finally the youth’s breathing deepened and sleep took him.

Fong sat in the darkness and allowed himself, just for a moment, the grace of thinking of himself as the boy’s father.

Then lines – favourite lines of his dead wife, Fu Tsong – came to him:

Fong traced the beauty of the young man’s face with his fingers – and remembered. On his release from Ti Lan Chou political prison and his banishment to internal exile beyond the Wall, the authorities had allowed Fong three hours in Shanghai to collect his things. They knew he’d return to the two rooms at the Shanghai Theatre Academy where he and his wife had lived.

When he opened the door he was shocked to find the rooms empty. Unoccupied rooms in Shanghai were rarer than shrimp in shrimp dumplings. At first he was unable to enter. All the furniture was gone. The walls were bare. Everything that was “them” was gone. How small rooms appeared when emptied of their lives.

In the bathroom he found the only vestige of Fu Tsong – her Complete Works of Shakespeare. It was open on the cracked tile. The ammonia smell of urine rose from the still damp pages.

He had clutched the book to his chest for the entire seven-day, hard-seat train journey to the west.

When he finally arrived on the edges of the Chinese known world, the party man who met his train assigned him the “job” of head constable, gave him a ration card and pointed to a mud-floored hut. Then he gave Fong papers to sign and departed, all with a bare minimum of talk. Eyes watched Fong as he moved in the small village. They all knew who he was – the traitor from the hated city of Shanghai.

Silence was his constant companion. When work ended, the real punishment began – boredom. He had nothing to do. Nothing to read. Nothing to see. He wasn’t permitted beyond the village’s outer perimeter and he, of course, had no means of leaving. The nights seemed to grow longer and longer.

In those tedious hours, he’d taken to devising ways of hiding Fu Tsong’s Complete Works of Shakespeare. She’d treasured the collection with its Mandarin translation. Now it was his. Now he treasured it. It was his last link to their life together. He understood that the authorities had allowed him to keep the book only so there was still one more thing they could take from him. It was a potent weapon.

He initially thought of hiding the book in the village. Quickly he gave up that idea. They’d find it even if he buried it deep in the ground. It was only when he was mending his torn Mao jacket with the needle and thread he’d been given as part of his twice-yearly household rations that he landed on a solution.

Every night by candlelight in the cold of his hut, he’d carefully cut single pages from the text. Then he sewed them together, the bottom of the first page to the top of the second. He found he could manage between fifteen and twenty pages before the rationed candle began to splutter. Once he saw the light start to give out, he’d pick open the stitches of his padded Mao jacket’s lining and insert the pages into the pockets that he had sewn there.

Chinese characters are much more compact than English sentences. A hundred-page play in English could be as few as twenty pages in Mandarin. So coping with Shakespeare’s works in the Common Speech was not too time-consuming and more important, when carefully smoothed and inserted into the pouches beneath his coat’s lining, the pages were not noticeable beneath the jacket’s padding. But Fong’s English was very good and he was loath to give up any of the original versions of the plays. He understood, though, that trying to keep all the plays could endanger the entire enterprise. So he’d have to choose. Which plays? The answer came to him one night. It was simple. He’d keep the English language versions of the plays in which his wife had performed. Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, Othello, Hamlet and Pericles. The rest, the ones she hadn’t brought to life for him, he’d leave behind. Measure for Measure had been one of her favourites and she had insisted that he memorize many of the speeches from the play.

Fu Tsong often sought his help with new roles. She found his didactic approach to the plays helpful. Over and over again he looked at plot twists and specific lines as a detective would the layout of a crime scene. Why would someone say that at that exact moment? Doesn’t her saying that imply that she knows this? Why would he go there rather than here? His most crucial insights were about what was missing from a scene or a character. What wasn’t said or done told him more than what was. His interpretations were occasionally difficult for Fu Tsong to incorporate, but from time to time they were invaluable. In the case of her Isabella in Measure for Measure, they formed the basis for one of her most famous performances.

Fu Tsong loved Shakespeare.

“Because of his deep humanity and his belief in love,” she said coming into the bedroom, a cup of steaming cha in her hands. Her favourite silk robe, sashed at her waist, clung to her slender frame. A bath towel swathed her hair. He stared openly at her beauty. She smiled then shook her head slowly.

“What?” he asked, feigning innocence.

“Later, Fong. Later. The play first. ‘That’ later.” Her laugh tickled the walls and lit up their modest rooms. “So tell me what you’ve found for me in this play. You have done your homework, I hope.”

He had been examining the text on his lunch breaks. “I’ve read this Measure for Measure, Fu Tsong.”

“That’s a beginning. So?”

“It loses me. All the time, I’m off-balance with this one. Are there sections missing from it or something?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“But what the characters do doesn’t make sense.”

She took that in and nodded, “An example, please.”

“Well, Angelo’s the villain, right?”

“So it would seem,” she said sitting beside him on the bed.

Turning to her, he went on. “Then what kind of punishment is it for the villain to have to marry Marianne at the end? For that matter, how do the rewards in this play work anyway? I mean ‘Measure for Measure,’ the title, refers to equal for equal, doesn’t it? Rice bowl for rice bowl.”

“It’s a reference to the long nose’s Bible. Biblical justice.”

“Justice.” The word came from Fong’s mouth like something spat to the ground.

She was surprised. “Fong?”

Fong was on his feet, his angular body tense. “Justice! Justice! Who knows anything about justice? How does justice work?”

“This from a police officer, sir?” she said, twinkling, but was careful not to mock.

He turned to her. His face a mask of anger. “I’ve been a cop for twelve years and I don’t know if I’ve been involved in a single case in which justice was the issue. Retribution. Setting an example. Simple frustration. Putting an end to something. Prevention. Yes. But justice? I don’t know. When foreign delegations come to the city, we sweep the beggars off the Bund promenade. Is there any justice in that? When a peasant, freshly arrived at the North Train Station, looks at the wealth of the thieving Taiwanese and helps himself to some of it, is it justice that we throw him in prison? Why shouldn’t the whoreson Taiwanese be thrown in prison for the theft his father must have committed to allow him that much money?” Fu Tsong knew better than to try and stop him. “I spend whole months as a police officer where justice isn’t even mentioned. Not even thought about.” He turned from her and stared out the window. A group of untalented student actors lounged on the grass as if they had somehow earned the right to green space in the concrete jungle that was Shanghai.

Fu Tsong stared at him. She had come from a comfortable background. A loving mother and doting father. A whole family that had contributed to her education as an actress. Fong’s life had been much different. He pretended his life had begun when he met her. Only on occasion did she get glimpses into her husband’s past – most often when they went to Shanghai’s Old City. There he’d change before her eyes. People seemed to know him there. He’d stop standing erect and hunch over, crowd into himself, become a thing of that dank and dark place.

It always amazed her. He became so unlike the proud man that she knew and loved. This was an urban peasant. A spitter.

What she didn’t know was that in fact this was a night-soil collector. A person who makes his living from others’ waste products has a very different view of life than those who deposit their filled honey buckets on the street at night, and then retrieve them magically emptied in the morning.

“Are the first lines in scenes in Shakespeare the first lines of the conversation?”

“Fong?”

He turned toward her. “Is the first thing said in a scene the first thing said between the characters?” he repeated.

Fu Tsong thought about this for a moment. “Not always. Often it’s the first important thing said. Why, Fong? Have you found something in Measure for Measure that . . .”

“This Isabella. This nun person?”

“My role.”

“Yes,” he threw up his hands and began to pace. “Yes, this unlikely casting of my lascivious wife as a nun.” She took the towel from her head and snapped it at him. “Fine. This aggressive, lascivious wife of mine who’s supposed to be a nun . . .”

“Yes, dear – and your question would be?”

“Isabella, this woman who wants to be a nun, who you’re about to play?”

“Yes, Fong?” She tapped her foot in mock impatience.

“What’s the first thing she says in the play?”

Fu Tsong looked at him. He repeated his question. “What’s the first thing she says in the play?”

Fu Tsong reached for her Complete Works of Shakespeare, but Fong pulled it away.

“The first thing that this nun person says in Measure for Measure is ‘And have you nuns no further privileges?’ And what more privileges does she want? A second rice bowl, a new dress – a new lover – what? And isn’t it odd that that’s the first thing out of her mouth? This supposed virgin. And what about this Duke who walks away from his responsibilities? Hands over his kingdom to this villain Angelo. Is he not guilty of some offence? And what is he doing at the friar’s place when he leaves the court? He wants a disguise. Fine. But what does his opening line in that scene mean? ‘No, holy father; throw away that thought.’ What thought? That he is here for some lecherous rendezvous? And obviously from the way he’s speaking to the man, he has been there before. So is this Duke, this lecher, the man who will mete out justice? And going back to Isabella. Why is she anxious to join a nunnery? She doesn’t seem religious. Why is she going there? Is she spurned?”

“I love it when you talk like that, spurned.” She patted the bed beside her. He sat. “Say it again Fong. Spurned.” Her voice was suddenly hoarse.

“Spurned.”

She touched his lips with a hand soft as velvet. Then her fingers parted his lips and entered his mouth. Her eyes never left his. His tongue tasted the perfume on her fingertips.

She got to her feet. The sash whispered to the floor. “You going to spurn me, Fong?”

“I believe not,” he tried to say, but no sound came from his lips.

She smiled and let her robe fall away.

He managed to say her name, but his voice was pulled so far back in his throat that the words sounded as if they came from someone else. Someone far, far away.

After, entwined, she talked through her ideas of the character – of seeking piety, of celibacy and purity. He countered with Isabella’s refusal to face her own carnal desires. Her selfishness in the face of her brother’s death. Finally she threw aside the bedcovers and walked, lithe and naked, to the closet. He got up and sat on the side of the bed, waiting.

She returned with her Peking Opera stage paints and brushes. She straddled his leg and held out two large combs. He felt her wetness – their wetness – on his thigh. He reached up and put her long hair behind her shoulders. Then he pinned back her long bangs.

She stared into his eyes and began to talk. Just ideas of Isabella. Images. Flows of self. Currents of character. As she spoke he took the paints and brushes and began. Long ago she’d taught him the art of Peking Opera makeup. He’d been a swift and avid learner. Applying a beautiful artifice to the true beauty of her face sent razor shards of erotic shocks through his system. It was so close, as close as they could get.

Over his shoulder she looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror. And slowly the naturalistic Isabella grew beneath the artificial surface of the makeup. When he finished, she allowed her hands to trace his naked torso.

“Who’s touching you, Fong?”

He always marvelled how her entire persona shifted beneath the paint.

“Who’s touching you?” she asked again.

“Isabella.” His breath was tight in his chest. Raspy as it hit the air.

Then a smile appeared through the miracle of the classical makeup, a smile he’d never seen before on the wife he adored – the smile of a lascivious nun. Her eyes held his as she guided him into her – into Isabella – the complex leading lady of a white man’s play about justice.

The crack of the rifle report was so loud that Fong smacked his head hard against the wall of the cell. It came from outside. From the courtyard. He looked around him. The boy from Sichuan province was gone.

Fong sprang to his feet and tried to hoist himself up to the barred window. He was desperate to see out. “They couldn’t have,” he told himself. “They couldn’t have executed him.”

Then they were in the cell, checking his hand and foot manacles. He started to resist then stopped himself and bowed his head. A long fingernail scraped beneath his chin and tilted his head upward. The politico’s face was smooth; his eyes had a renewed cruelty. The man canted his head slightly and looked into Fong’s eyes. Without a word the two communicated perfectly. The politico’s silence said, “Do you see, Traitor Zhong, that we completely control you and your life and your hopes?” And Fong’s silent response said, “I see.” But in his heart he said, “Those with real power do not need to use it. A real warrior wins without fighting. And you – you are a running dog who needs my help.” Then the real question rose in Fong. “Needs my help for what?”