The Shanghai Murders

DAY TWO

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.

Being a black man in China was like being an extremely expensive pet tiger who refused to wear its leash. The Chinese all stared at you but because you were supposed to be oppressed, like them, they didn’t gawk the way they did at white people. Ngalto Chomi, Zairian consul general, had everything a robust young male could ever ask for. An almost inexhaustible supply of money from his private and ever-so-confidential “importing” business, cars, women, and the crucial linchpin of diplomatic immunity. So Shanghai was a playland awaiting his tastes and proclivities. After six months of confinement in the Beijing embassy, constantly under the watch of the conservative ambassador, he had been transferred to the new consulate in Shanghai. He’d been sprung. No more Russians here, just Chinese and a few westerners. Not even many black people. It was a rare day that he encountered another black face on the streets. And he was on the streets of the city all the time. What a city! A candy store of infinite proportions that catered to all tastes, all curiosities. The Chinese were curious about him, too. He felt the eyes of the young women watching him as he moved past them on the crowded streets. He felt the envy as he slid into his sleek Mercedes with its Chinese chauffeur. He felt them-so many of them-all watching him.

The one person watching him that he didn’t pick out was a slight-figured Chinese man in a nicely tailored but unremarkable suit. He didn’t notice Loa Wei Fen. No one noticed Loa Wei Fen. But Loa Wei Fen was taking note of him, and carefully recording where he went and how long he stayed at each of his stops. Mr. Lo was still the lion cub on the roof, but with every passing day he was getting closer to the edge-to the leap onto that narrow strip.

The large African got back into his car, and Loa Wei Fen slid onto his bicycle. At this hour of the day, a bicycle could make as good time as a car. The large car pulled off Nanjing Road and headed south toward the Old City. Loa Wei Fen guessed he was going to the Old Shanghai Restaurant around the corner from the YuYuan Garden.

He was wrong. But he was close.

Signalling his driver to stop, Ngalto Chomi hopped out on Fang Bang Road just south and west of the popular garden. He was in the heart of the Old City. He liked it here. Here they stared at a black man, and here, he stared back at them. Here his six feet seven inches of height gave him a view of the world of the little people. The people who hacked and spat and called him very “colourful” names. The people who resented his presence. The people who knew so much about opium.

He grabbed a plastic bag of cut-up pineapple off one of the stands, threw down a ten-kwai note and, without waiting for the change, headed north on He Nan smiling and munching as he went. The day was clear but the Old City had its own thickness, not of heat but of intense human experience. Chomi loved it here.

The African’s turn off He Nan into Fu Yu surprised Loa Wei Fen. Fu Yu was the famous open-air antiques market. This didn’t seem to fit. Besides, it was crowded there and he could lose his prey if he was unlucky. Quickly leaving his bicycle against a post he plunged into the crowd now fifteen yards behind the black man. Only Chomi’s height allowed Loa Wei Fen to follow him. But the African moved quickly and, as fortune would have it, a motorized three-wheeled cart pulled out in front of Loa Wei Fen. By the time it was cleared there was no sign of his quarry. Quickly Loa Wei Fen leapt onto a garbage bin at the side of one of the dumpling carts. Ignoring the screams of the vendor, he craned his neck but couldn’t see Chomi. Jumping down, he raced through the crowd and ducked into the first available building. He ran through a hallway crowded with beds and up a set of steps. On the first level, he raced down a corridor crowded with more mattresses and threw open the door leading to the front room. An old woman was there with her granddaughter on her lap. She screamed as Loa Wei Fen entered the room. He whirled on her and, in a breath, was an inch from her withered face. The move shocked her into silence. Loa Wei Fen stuck his head out the window and peered in both directions. The black man was nowhere to be seen.

Swiftly descending the steps, he made his way thoughtfully through the crowd. He quickly reviewed the day’s events. It had begun before dawn with the e-mail arrival of his new quarry’s picture, vital statistics, and addresses. He started his surveillance of the Zairian

Consulate at 7:15. The Zairian consul arrived at 9:50. Just past 11:00, the African emerged from the building and got into his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Loa Wei Fen smiled.

Now he was racing through the crowd, oblivious to the anger and shouts of those he pushed past. At the foot of the flea market he crossed the street. Once there he looked both ways. There were alleys behind the buildings on both sides. He chose east and sped toward that alley.

About 250 yards down the alley sat Ngalto Chomi’s car. His Chinese driver was smoking a cigarette while waiting for his charge to come back from his afternoon diversion. Loa Wei Fen casually strolled down the alley, walking right past the car. Ten yards past the Mercedes and around a sharp bend in the alley he looked to his left, but he needn’t have. The smell of the opium cut into the afternoon air, a slight rancidness amid the heady aroma of life in the Old City.

Loa Wei Fen was pleased. As he left the alley, he noticed a squatting father holding his bare-bottomed young daughter under her knees and shaking her gently so that the last of her urine didn’t get on her legs. She was oblivious to people watching and sang a little tune as her father completed his task and then pulled up her pants. She hopped over the little puddle of pee and went to help her grandmother clean some vegetables in a small red plastic tub. The father stretched and then hawked a wad of phlegm onto the street. No one gave it a second glance. Evidently everyone found it as natural as . . . as peeing on the sidewalk. Loa Wei Fen liked the Old City too. It was a fine place for a murder.

Amanda Fallon had been told that the JAL flight from Chicago to Tokyo would take thirteen hours. She had no idea what thirteen hours on an airplane meant. Despite the fact that the plane was almost empty, thirteen hours was every one of thirteen hours. The first three hours were tedium incarnate. Flying over the Canadian prairies made even airplane food seem a pleasant diversion. But then just as she was about to drift off, the pilot announced that they were turning north and that their flight path would bring them over some of the wildest regions on earth. The plane in short order passed by Edmonton and entered the Canadian Northwest Territories. The terrain quickly moved from temperate desert cattle farms to a true wilderness. She stayed glued to the window once she caught her first glimpse of the mighty Mackenzie River-still ice bound, etching its glacial path to the Arctic Ocean. She watched in fascination as the frozen striations passed beneath the plane. And then the plane veered west again and range after glacier-capped range of towering mountains leading to Alaska glided beneath the belly of the aircraft. Finally the Bering Strait yawned ahead. Three hours had passed as if in a minute. Amanda’s forehead bore a large round red mark where she had pushed up against the Plexiglas window. There was a wildness down there, the likes of which Amanda Fallon had never even dreamed. As the plane crested the Bering Strait and headed south along the Russian coastline, she reached into her bag and took out a pen and a piece of scrap paper. Without preamble or overt thought she began to jot down notes.

She hadn’t written for years. She hadn’t grown for years. But now she was writing, at first tentatively, but shortly with growing confidence-writing about the glory of what she saw. What she saw after all those years of blindness as Mrs. Richard Fallon.

The second day of a murder investigation was all about what you didn’t know. It tended to be depressing, and as Fong entered the musty meeting room with the large round table he looked into the faces of his investigation team and found little to give him solace. Lily was handing out copies of her forensic report, while people were glancing through the file on the coroner’s findings. Wang Jun’s time chart was on the wall along with several of the photos of the alley-with and without the pieces of Richard Fallon’s body. Several of the younger officers held large jars of Tang that they had filled with lutsah, green tea leaves. As the meeting progressed they would refresh the leaves regularly with boiling water from the omnipresent thermoses. The sting of cigarette smoke was in the air. For a moment it occurred to Fong that just such a gathering must have been convened upon the death of his wife. Charts of the construction site would have been hung and pictures of Fu Tsong’s . . . He let the thought go and moved to the chair at the head of the table. He had never found out who led the investigation into Fu Tsong’s murder but he suspected that it was Wang Jun, who now stood up to go through the crime scene data.

He did it with his normal efficiency. The statement of the doctor confirmed the warden’s report. The physician had in fact been at the sick man’s side for less than five minutes (evidently proclaiming loudly, “He’s dying, what do you want from me?”) and then headed back down the length of the alley. He had, as expected, seen nothing out of the ordinary. The man who had been reported for causing a disturbance had ended up in jail that night and hence was easy to locate. He claimed he was so drunk he didn’t know where he was, let alone what he was doing. Further coroner and forensic reports added little. The nature of the ambidextrous killer held the table’s interest for some time. Fong assigned his best young detective, Li Xiao, to cover this area of the investigation. He was to check into martial arts academies and see what was known about this kind of fighting skill. The coroner suggested that the kind of knife, twosided and with a significant thrusting point, might be a place to start. Detective Li Xiao took a note and headed out. Lily’s analysis of the tiny crystalline shards in Richard Fallon’s lungs was still inconclusive. She made the point that with the equipment available to her she might never be able to identify them. Fong authorized a contact with the Hong Kong constabulary and a request to use their facilities. The table was surprised by Fong’s willingness to break with tradition and reach out for help to the despised Hong Kong Protectorate.

Wang Jun’s people had still not been able to locate the street sweeper so Fong assigned two more people to help in the search and then dismissed the meeting except for Lily, Wang Jun, and the old coroner. Fong’s assistant tried to stay behind but Fong sent him out and locked the door behind him.

“That may not be so smart,” Wang Jun said.

“I never claimed to be smart, Wang Jun.”

“I know that, but try not to be stupid. He’s probably on his way to the commissioner’s office now.”

“That’ll give us ten minutes.”

After a moment of silence, Lily said, “For what?”

Fong moved toward the time line. As he passed the picture, a copy of the one he had in his desk, he noted that no one had yet mentioned the blob of heart between Richard Fallon’s legs or the fingers of Richard Fallon’s right hand that were pointing-pointing to what? At the time line he stopped and looked at them. Then he took out a copy of the Shanghai Daily News from that first morning with the headline DIM SUM KILLER STRIKES IN JULU LU ALLEY. “We’ve got a problem.” Pointing at the time chart, “The body was found at 10:43 by rookie cop Ling Che. The CSU arrived at 10:52. Right?”

“To the point, Fong, time’s a-wastin’ here,” chimed in Wang Jun.

“Were there any reporters at the scene? Do you remember when the first reporters showed up?”

Lily and Wang Jun were now interested. “Yeah, I remember, because I was surprised how long it took them to smell this one out. I don’t think there was one there before the body was already photographed. So not before midnight, at the earliest.”

“Right,” said Fong. Then turning to the coroner, “And what time did I get to the Hua Shan Hospital morgue?”

The coroner flipped through his pad but Fong interrupted him. “It was 12:49, trust me. And I didn’t come up with the Dim Sum crack until at least one o’clock.”

The coroner was lost. “So?”

But it was Lily who was on top of it. “Throw me that paper.”

Fong did. Lily looked carefully at the masthead. “This is the early edition,” said Lily.

Fong nodded. “Right.”

The coroner still didn’t get it. “So?”

Wang Jun let out a lungful of smoke that seemed to jet across the room. “So? So, the early edition goes to press before midnight. The reporters didn’t arrive until after midnight. Even with cellular phones they couldn’t possibly have filed the story in time to make this paper.”

Then Fong played his trump card. “It’s not just a matter of being in time to file their story. They have to clear stories, especially stories about foreigners, with the authorities. I needn’t remind you that China does not exactly have a free press.”

With a look of shock, Lily said, “Are you trying to say that the paper had this story before Richard Fallon was killed?”

“The story and the clearance for the story,” nodded Fong.

After a moment, while this was sinking in, the coroner added, “I guess they just got lucky with the dim sum stuff.”

At that there was a knocking on the door that quickly became a pounding. Fong opened the door to a very angry Commissioner Hu and a smiling Shrug and Knock.

Fong sat in the back of the campus’s rickety old theatre that night. His chair squeaked. Every chair in the ancient place squeaked, every floorboard moaned, and the archaic electrical fixtures, which would have closed down most other public establishments, hummed loudly. The large black overhead fans rotated at different speeds (two did not rotate at all) and the sound of the air exhaust system alternated between deafening and concussive. The place smelled of people. Fong liked it. It had been Fu Tsong’s favourite theatre and she had played in theatres all over China as well as in Southeast Asia and Japan. In fact she had fought the new thousand-seat theatre on campus, first against the building and then against the design. But it was always hard to convince Chinese people to trust their own theatrical instincts when there were Russian consultants around. Russians used the name Stanislavski like a weapon.

“The proscenium’s too wide.” “Stanislavski loved a wide proscenium.”

“Chinese audiences need the floor of the stage lowered because the average height of Chinese people is less than that of Russians.” “Stanislavski always had his stages this height.”

“The dimension of this place is inhuman. Brutal.” “Stanislavski said the humanity should be on the stage, not in the house.” And so on.

So she had lost. Actually, the city of Shanghai had lost. A lot of money had been spent on a virtually useless theatrical space because a Russian acting teacher who had probably not said a third of the things Russians claim he said was too godlike to be challenged.

Fu Tsong assumed that Stanislavski was a nice enough guy with the odd good idea. She also assumed that he never intended to be quoted and deified. . . although being Russian it’s possible he was interested in deification. Be that as it may, Fu Tsong had found it a breath of fresh air when Geoffrey Hyland entered her theatrical life with the line: “Stanislavski who? If I had a dog, I might call him Stanislavski-if he were long dead and gone and irrelevant to the twentieth century art of acting, that is.” It had been artistic love at first sight.

Fong remembered Fu Tsong coming home after that first rehearsal with Geoffrey Hyland. He remembered her excitement, her joy. He also remembered his feeling of being outside her world. Outside while Geoffrey was inside.

Now, on the stage, Geoffrey spoke to the Twelfth Night cast who sat around old wooden tables. There was a rapt concentration so unlike most Chinese rehearsals, which were often exercises in wasted energy and diffused focus. Fong noted that the academics had been ushered out of the room. This session was not about text. Not even about Twelfth Night. This session, the first rehearsal in Geoffrey Hyland’s theatre land, was about his passion: acting. Fong had heard Fu Tsong talk about Geoffrey Hyland’s first rehearsals. She had said that she learned more about acting in two hours with Geoffrey Hyland than she had in four years at theatre school. So Fong leaned forward and tried to catch every word, to hear what she had heard.

Geoffrey was on his feet-“in full flight” was the phrase that came to Fong’s mind-his translator at his side. “For an actor the art form of the theatre is not theatre, but acting. Acting is the art. Because most actors are taught by directors they are usually taught that what actors do is interpret. That acting is not an art but a craft. It behooves a director to have a pliant, obedient actor. And the best way to achieve this is through convincing an actor that his job is to serve the text, the way a brick mason serves an architect. Bullshit! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, and more fucking bullshit.”

Geoffrey looked out into the house. For the briefest moment his eyes locked with Fong’s.

Geoffrey took a breath and allowed his interpreter to catch up. “Acting is not about pretending. Acting is about knowing your instrument and selecting the notes on that instrument that produce the ’most eloquent music.’ Hamlet, when pumped for information by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, takes a recorder from his pocket and offers it to one of them saying, ’Will you play upon this pipe?’ To which Guildenstern responds, ’My lord I cannot.’ After further beseeching by Hamlet, Guildenstern finally says, ’I know no touch of it, my lord!’ To which Hamlet responds, ’Tis as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.’ Then taking back the recorder he says, ’Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from the lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to play on than a pipe?’ Like everything else in this play, Hamlet is talking about acting. What an actor does, as Hamlet says, is know his ventages and his stops and plays them in order to create most eloquent music. To do so is an art, not a craft.”

Once again Geoffrey let his gaze move to the theatre seats. Fong was still there. Listening. Taking it in. Rapt, as Fu Tsong had been.

Fong felt Geoffrey’s eyes on him and knew that with every word Geoffrey was proving to him that he understood Fu Tsong’s world in a way that Fong never could. It was a truth against which Fong had no defence. Fong felt the world spinning on its axis. It was several minutes more before he gained enough composure to refocus on Geoffrey’s words.

“In The Empty Space, Peter Brook begins with a comment that seeing five actors just standing on the stage his eye was drawn to one and not to the other four. He then goes on to make the point that the one able to attract his eye has a gift, is gifted. Fine. Perhaps. But I was sitting in a particularly dull bar back in Toronto one night in 1988. The faces were bland, boring, lifeless. Mr. Brook’s other four actors, if you will. And then a strange Flemish lady came on the bar’s television and informed Canada that our national hero, Ben Johnson, had been disqualified from the Olympics and that his gold medal was being taken back because he was so cooked up he could hardly find his way back to the dorm after the race or some such. Well, the faces in the bar became electric as everyone of them fell into the pure primary state of being of I AM BETRAYED. In that primary all the faces in the bar would have attracted Mr. Brook’s eye. But even as I watched, fascinated by the change in the people, I saw the faces close down as they were unable to stay in the primary of I AM BETRAYED and fell off into the redneck secondary state of being of ”We let the fucker into our country and what does he do”-I AM ANGRY-or the liberal secondary state of being of “Well, you know it’s hard on a black man in this country and his dad’s not here”-I UNDERSTAND. Actors get paid to stay in primary states of being-to stay in I AM BETRAYED and not roll over into secondaries. We pay five bucks or ten bucks or 129 bucks or however many fucking kwai to sit in the dark and watch you stay in primaries. To fully experience for us that which our systems are unable to fully experience for ourselves. Civilians, nonactors, retreat from primaries to the relative safety of secondaries to be able to live their lives, but pay money, sometimes a lot of money, to watch actors stay in primaries and experience live, before their very eyes, that which they themselves are unable to experience. They come to the theatre to watch actors act. To watch them find and stay in primaries. They come to watch artists-actors.”

As if coming out of a reverie, Geoffrey looked up and smiled at Fong. Had he said these things out loud or were they only in Fong’s head? Fong didn’t know. He noticed that the actors, to a man, were hanging on every word. Then, to Fong’s amazement, he was sure that he heard Geoffrey’s voice deep in his head, as if the late night whisper of a lover dropped into a tilted ear. “Watched her, Fong. We watched her. From down there. You the cop and me the director. We watched her. But at least I appreciated, loved what she did. Loved her. And she loved me.” Fong lifted his head from his hands and stared at the stage. Geoffrey was standing to one side. His interpreter was translating Geoffrey’s answer to a question about balance between playing actions and maintaining states of being. Evidently a whole section of Geoffrey’s talk had passed by as Fong was dealing with the voices in his head. As his translator finished, Geoffrey moved toward her and with the ease of theatre people everywhere put an arm around her shoulders and kissed her. Then to the actors: “I get carried away. We’ll pick up tomorrow.” There were smiles and thanks and good-byes as Geoffrey shouted, “Ming tien jien, see you tomorrow,” as the actors left.

In his seat at the back of the theatre, Fong lit a Kent and tried to release his tension with the smoke that he blew into the musty air.

Geoffrey packed up his bag and stopped as he was about to turn off the stage lights. He called out, “So do you really know why you’re here, Fong?”

Slowly, almost against his will Fong answered, “Because Fu Tsong loved this play.”

“She certainly did,” said Geoffrey as he struck the lights and headed down the steps into the theatre. “She claimed that everyone in the world was in this play. That all you had to do was allow yourself to know yourself. And once you did you would recognize yourself as one of the characters of Twelfth Night.”

“And who was she?” Fong found himself asking.

“Olivia, naturally. She who is loved.”

“And you?”

“For me to know, and indeed I do know, but seldom admit even to myself, let alone to you, Fong.” That hovered in the air for a moment, then Geoffrey added, “You of course are easier to spot in the play. Obvious to all but you, no doubt. You may have to see a few more rehearsals to allow yourself to know, ‘what all else do know.’”

The silence between the two men deepened even as the connection grew. Geoffrey felt lumpish in comparison to this thin tight Chinese man. Fong for his part felt outside, outside a world that Geoffrey Hyland clearly knew very well. A world that his wife had loved as she loved her life and the child that had grown within her.

Without prompting Geoffrey said, “Fu Tsong was brilliant when it came to making most eloquent music. I’ve never seen anyone understand their ventages and stops like her. She was the most artful actor with whom I have ever worked.” He didn’t say more but a set of lines from Twelfth Night sprang full blown into his head:

For a moment the two men stood in silence in the ancient theatre. An entire world separating them. A woman uniting them forever.

The call came at 3:22 in the morning of the third day. Wang Jun had found the street sweeper. There was a car waiting downstairs.

DAY THREE

It was 3:46 A.M. as Fong dragged himself into the passenger seat of the car. Wang Jun sat behind the wheel. He had on sunglasses, white gloves, and the hint of a smile.

“It’s very early in the morning,” sighed Fong.

“It’s almost tomorrow in Hawaii,” replied Wang Jun. “I’ll take your word for it. That dateline stuff always made me nervous. No matter what time it is in Hawaii, it’s too dark to be wearing sunglasses, Wang Jun.”

Wang Jun obediently flipped up his sunglasses. His smile broadened.

“Where did you find her?” asked Fong.

Wang Jun set the car in gear and with a laugh said, “Back in the country.”

Fong groaned. He hated the country.

“By one of the water towns,” Wang Jun added, as the smile creased his face. Fong really hated the filthy water towns.

Pleased with himself, Wang Jun flipped down his sunglasses, sped up Yan’an and headed out of the city.

The drive could take as little as an hour and a half or as long as six depending on the traffic. At that hour, it took just over two. Along the way they saw some fishermen pulling in their early morning catch from ancient manmade lakes, the odd farmer harnessing his water buffalo for its daily labours, and a great many people trudging their sorry asses toward Shanghai with their lives on their backs. At 4:50 the sun began to rise, and Fong wished that he had brought his sunglasses too. Wang Jun noticed but decided not to comment.

They passed by Grand View Garden in Qingpu County. The massive re-creation was a sort of theme park based on a classic piece of Chinese erotica, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Despite protests from the prudish, the place proved to be a magnet to Chinese tourists from hundreds of miles around. They all came, knowing the sordid story of concubine intrigue and couplings. They gawked from one re-created pavilion bedroom to the next, ogling the finery in which these bored slatterns lived or were supposed to have lived. At the time Fong remembered wondering how, as the brochure puts it, the exhibits could be “faithful in even the finest detail.” Faithful to what? It was a book. An incomplete book to boot. Fu Tsong howled with laughter when they went the first time. “And here’s where she blew the serving boy, and here’s where both of the men disrobed for her and did each other to please her. It’s beautifully re-created don’t you think? I wonder if the chamber pots are full. Those novel characters do use chamber pots, don’t they?” A few years after their first visit Fu Tsong, because of her popular portrayal of a young concubine on Beijing radio had been asked to lead a tour of dignitaries to the park. She begged Fong to come on the tour and, after not too much cajoling, he agreed.

He had stood near the back, a pair of dark glasses supposedly hiding his identity, as she led the crowd of politicos. It was a sight Fong thought he would never see. Puritanical, up-tight Communist party officials convulsed with laughter as Fu Tsong insinuated which sexual positions were used in which rooms. From one of the ornate mahogany beds she picked up a beautiful piece of yellow silk with rather hefty knots tied into its length. Swinging it in the air she asked if anyone of the politicians could help her out as to the use of this particular gizmo. They ate it up. She was a dream of desire with just the right taint of smut.

That night she had showed him the many uses of a knotted piece of silk. And each had made him gasp with pleasure. But none more so than when he opened his eyes and saw her joy in giving him that pleasure.

He awoke to a punch on the shoulder from Wang Jun. The sun hurt his eyes and he had a crick in his neck. He looked out the window and saw nothing but fields and a steepish, grassy hill.

“Where?”

Wang Jun pointed at the hill about a half mile off. They got out of the car and began to walk. As they got closer Fong could make out a small chimney on the top of the grassy mound and the slightest of smoke tendrils against the cloudless sky. “She lives in a hill?”

“No, but her brother and his family do,” replied Wang Jun as he slid his service revolver into his hand and checked the cylinders.

Surprised to see the gun, Fong remarked, “It’s the street sweeper I asked you to pick up, right?”

“Right, Fong, but she ran. People with things to hide run. Or at least that’s been my experience, and I’m getting too old to chase them. So this,” he said, pointing to the gun, “is my way of being sure that should they try to run, I won’t get hurt following them.”

“What happened to the gentlemanly touch of a few years ago?”

“It got tired.” They were now a mere one hundred yards from the grassy hill. The door would be around the other side facing south, although “door” was probably a misnomer. An opening with a cover would be more likely. However, now with the new market reforms, a peasant could get rich, and quickly too. You never knew what you’d find at a peasant’s place. A complete Sony home entertainment system, a Jaguar convertible, a geisha-it was getting out of hand.

The grassy hills were of course man-made. They were the accumulation of the original dirt that had been removed to form the sunken rice paddies. In this part of China several of these mounds were more than eight hundred years old. They had been constantly inhabited since they were first built. Few remained. Of those that did, the truly valued ones were covered in grass like this one. They were said to be remarkably warm in winter and cool in summer and totally water-proof. Yeah, but what about the view, thought Fong.

The path led them to the south side of the hill. The other three sides were covered with freshly flooded rice paddies. Fong shivered at the thought of entering the barrow.

Their reception was chilly, to say the least. The brother, a creature not so differently textured from the thick mud that passed as soil in this part of the world, stood in the doorway and would not let them in. At first he claimed his wife needed time to dress and then he claimed that his humble abode was unworthy of such esteemed guests. Then Wang Jun shoved him hard against the side of the opening and the policemen marched into the barrow.

The first thing to hit Fong’s senses was the deep scent of the earth. The domelike shape above him was living earth supporting plants and animals. And he was beneath it. The dampness of the air was complete. Fong felt his entire body coat with sweat. But he wasn’t totally sure it was from the air. There was fear here, too. Huddled to one side of the rounded space was a youngish peasant wife and her young son. Across the way was the grandmother. There was also beautiful Danish modern furniture sitting on a silk rug that must have cost several thousand kwai. Behind the furniture were various elaborate fish tanks. Besides the usual tanks that you would see in any restaurant window containing edible fish and eels, there was also a tropical tank replete with godly floating experiments in colour and design. Next to this aquarium was a large glass enclosure sitting on a sturdy wooden cabinet. As Fong took a step toward the enclosure, a mighty serpent, its body as thick as a man’s arm, rose a full two feet up and stared at him. For a moment the great animal was completely still and then it flared its hood and lashed at the glass, sending shivers through the panes.

Wang Jun had managed to get some of the basics from the brother. Like his name. After some badgering the man even acknowledged that he knew his sister. But no, he hadn’t seen her for years, maybe twenty years. Wang Jun turned to the grandmother for confirmation of that fact and was met with an uncomprehending look.

“She speaks only Cantonese.”

“Yeah, and I’m Doctor Bethune,” Wang Jun shouted back. That made the child cry. The mother comforted him. Fong noticed that the boy was plump. A fat Chinese peasant boy-the world was changing. Wang Jun took a slow walk around the room and finally said, “You folks live pretty well. It would be a shame to have to confiscate it all as evidence in a murder case.” That clearly shook the wife, but the brother stared her down.

Fong watched all this and said nothing. From the moment he entered the barrow he sensed that there was something else present here. There was something wrong with the geography of it all. He looked toward the door opening and then to the cooking fire in the opposite wall. The smell of morning porridge was thick in the room. He walked by the kitchen area and then parted a hanging sheet revealing the family’s sleeping mattresses, each a new Japanese-style futon on its own raised wooden platform. Then he crossed back into the centre of the room and stood directly under the apex of the dome. Entrance to the south, sleeping quarters to the west, cooking fire to the north, and silk-rugged living area to the east with its rows of aquariums against the wall.

Something about the aquariums. He walked toward them. The brother shouted at him to take his shoes off before he stepped on the silk rug. He ignored the peasant’s protest and crossed toward the aquariums. Three held food fish. Two, food eels. One held tropical fish and one, the great snake. Then he turned back and faced the kitchen.

No Chinese family would keep the aquariums in the living room. They held food. They belonged in the cooking area. He looked at the aquariums and saw that their backs were painted black. The large one with the cobra was almost three feet tall and stood on a solid two-foot cabinet. For a moment, the great snake dared him. It rose up again and flared its hood. The body whipped back and forth as if waiting for its chance to smash the glass and lunge at Fong. Fong took a breath and putting his hand between the back of the glass and the wall, he pushed. The cabinet with the snake slid out smoothly revealing a tunnel, some ten yards long, heading out into the fields.

Over his shoulder he heard Wang Jun swear. Fong raced through the tunnel, the smell of sodden earth all around him. He squeezed out the far end into the knee-deep mud of a paddy. Two paddies over, a figure he took to be the street sweeper was running at top speed along the ridges between the flooded plains. Fong headed right for her, crossing the paddies as fast as he could and shouting at her to stop. She did, for one breathless instant, and then hurled herself across the adjoining paddy. At that moment, Fong’s footing gave out under him and he plunged head first into the murky water. He came up soaked and spluttering for air and continued the chase. As he leapt into the second paddy, his hands instinctively reached up to pull what he thought were fat weeds from his lip and neck but the slick stuff refused to come off. When Fong finally got a good hold of the thing on his lip he realized that the weed was alive and not merely stuck to his lip but actively moving toward his open mouth.

In fact his body was alive with fat, succulent leeches.

He bit the one closest to his mouth and spat out half the wriggling thing as he jumped onto the perimeter wall of the second paddy. The street sweeper didn’t seem to be making much better progress than he so he tried the wall rather than the paddy this time. As he did, he heard a shriek from the paddy ahead. When he got there he saw that the street sweeper had fallen into the netting that separated the eel section of the paddy from the rice section. The creatures were now actively pouring through the rent in the net, many of them crawling over the street sweeper who was howling in terror. Her howls attracted the locals, one of whom owned the eel section. His howls outdid hers.

Fong finally got to the exhausted street sweeper. He stood on the mud bank and managed to pull the sucker end of the leech off his face. As he tossed it into the teeming eely waters, he couldn’t help but thinking that he really hated the country. He really did.

Back in the barrow, the street sweeper faced the two policemen. She was probably in her early twenties but it was hard to tell. Her work on the streets of Shanghai, in the traffic fumes and dirt, year after year, for eleven out of every fourteen days, had taken its toll. It’s possible she had hopes and aspirations like the rest of us, but the wheezing in her lungs as she breathed did not bode well for them.

Fong had salted off the remaining leeches and found that he only had one serious sore, near his right hip, which continued to bleed despite the compress from the first aid box in the car. Ignoring the blood, Fong, still in his soaking suit, sat down opposite the street sweeper. Wang Jun had taken the silk carpet and thrown it over the snake aquarium, then cleared the rest of the barrow of its inhabitants. While doing so he took the opportunity to slam the brother across the temple with his revolver “just so that he’d remember next time not to lie to the police.”

The street sweeper sat on a low bamboo stool and shivered. Fong was quite calm. He had done many interrogations. His very first had almost cost him his life, when he decided that a young thief needed understanding and a friend, not a swift kick in the teeth. He still carried the scar of the knife wound a blade edge from his left kidney. Fong lit one of the cigarettes from Wang Jun’s dry pack and sent a funnel of smoke in the street sweeper’s direction. It had its desired effect. The poor creature began to cough violently.

“Where’s your face mask?”

She indicated her pocket. “You can put it on if it helps.”

She grunted what passed for a thank you, took out the wet mask and put it over her mouth and nose. The street sweepers all wore them-at first just in the latter parts of the day, then all day and finally almost all the time. Some slept with them on. The ever generous state supplied them free of charge.

Wang Jun had already taken the preliminaries from the brother. She was twenty-seven, single, worked the second street cleaning shift on Julu Lu from 5:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. Her name was Tsong Shing and it’s possible that there was a time in her life when her eyes were not filled with the fear of her own death.

“My name is Zhong Fong and I am head of Special Investigations for the Shanghai District. Two nights ago, between nine-thirty and ten-thirty on the evening of April 18 a man was killed in an alley off Julu Lu. The alley is on your route. It is in fact your responsibility according to your supervisor.” There was no response from Tsong Shing. She sat sullenly with her eyes down and wheezed through the mask.

“The dead man was chopped into pieces and left like so much rancid meat to stink in the alley,” Fong said, his voice rising ominously. “Open your stupid mouth and tell me if you saw him.”

Her mouth, behind the mask, stupid or not, opened and then shut. Like a trapped animal she was looking for a way out. She wasn’t sure where the danger lay and hence thought it best to stay where she was, pretty much the way most pedestrians in Shanghai deal with the reality of hundreds of bicycles coming at them on a walkway. Don’t move, let them avoid you.

But Fong was a good interrogator. Some policemen thought interrogations were a joyous opportunity to degrade a suspect. Fong never believed that. He found it base and demeaning to humble another human being. He felt himself a lesser entity each time he walked out of an interrogation room with the suspect broken into mental pieces.

Softly he said, “We know that you didn’t kill him.” There was the slightest glimmer of hope in her eyes. “We assume that you didn’t even see him, the killer, that is.” Rushing toward the safe spot she almost screamed. “I didn’t. I swear to you that I didn’t, I didn’t. Honest.”

“But you did see the dead man, didn’t you, or at least the pieces of the dead man, didn’t you?” Slowly her head moved up and down. Then in a sharp nasal tone, with harshly punched consonants, Fong snapped, “You missed his wallet, you little idiot.” Tsong Shing literally faltered under the surprise attack. Her body slipped from the small stool as if someone had upended it. Before she could rebalance herself, Fong was on her, so close to her face that he could smell her breath through the mask. “But you found something in the alley, didn’t you? Didn’t you! His right hand was pointing, wasn’t it? What did it point at? What did you pick up in the alley, what!” But this time the trick wouldn’t work. He saw it in her eyes halfway through his attack. They had gone dull as she retreated back inside herself. With a hand she pushed him back and then virtually spat into the mask, “I have nothing! I have nothing. Everyone else has something, everyone, but I have nothing. Nothing.” Then she crumpled on the ground, moaning softly.

“Finished with the psychological crap, Fong?” Wang Jun was standing across the barrow.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Shall I execute plan B?”

“It seems they leave us no alternative.”

Wang Jun then pulled out his revolver and yelled toward the door opening, “Get your fucking ass in here.” In a hurry, the brother, his face now quite swollen from Wang Jun’s pistol whipping, came to the door.

Wang Jun approached the rich peasant. “Well, comrade, and I use the term guardedly here, I think we have ourselves a situation. It being this.” He pointed at the street sweeper but spoke directly to the brother. “Your little thieving whore of a sister over there took something from a Julu Lu alley two nights ago. We as the representatives of law and order in the District of Shanghai want it back.” The brother went to speak but Wang Jun indicated that he thought silence the only correct response at this point. The brother stared at Wang Jun’s raised gun and said nothing. “Very good, you’re a smart guy for a peasant.” Reaching for the silk rug, he said, “This will have to be taken in evidence, as will. . .” and he rattled off a list of every valuable article in the place. At the end of his recitation he handed the brother a card and said, “That’s my number, if you want your stuff back, you call me and tell me what your slut sister took from the alley.” The brother was eyeing his sister with fury. Seeing this, Wang Jun took Fong by the arm and headed him toward the entrance. As they left he said under his breath, “He’ll have what we need within a day or I’ll eat leech for lunch. By the way I’m hungry and there’s a good restaurant in the next water town.”

Even as Fong was formulating his arguments against going into the water town, not the least of which was that his clothes smelled like the shit used to fertilize the rice paddies, Loa Wei Fen was watching Ngalto Chomi, Zairian consul general. Once again the agile African completed his office chores and headed down toward Fu Yu. Loa Wei Fen looked to the eastern sky. No rain today, he thought, but dust. The dry hot wind straight off the Mongolian steppes was running strong. The city’s grit would mix with the loess from the country, carried by the strong wind-by the cleansing wind of the plains. Loa Wei Fen noted that many people chose to stay indoors to avoid the dust, that the endless strings of bicycle riders on Yan’an were thinner than usual.

As he pedalled his bicycle following the black man’s car, he slipped his hand into his inside suit pocket. There the snake-handled Mongolian knife seemed to roll over into his palm as if a thing alive. A day kill in the Old City would provoke the kind of response that his employers wished. A day kill would also move him nearer to the eave of the roof. Nearer to the leap to the curved pole with the other lion cubs.

Amanda found the bus ride from Narita to the JAL hotel vaguely reminiscent of travelling through the clean New Jersey suburbs. At the hotel it took less than a minute to check her in and JAL had booked her bags all the way through to Shanghai.

The deep tub in the bathroom was a joyous sight. She had been travelling since eight in the morning and the trip had taken a total of seventeen hours. So that made it one in the morning her time, although it was 3:30 in the afternoon in Tokyo, but the next day. It didn’t matter what time it was. She was tired and a bath would unwind her enough, she hoped, to sleep. On the bed was a cotton bathrobe and a pair of paper sandals. Without bothering to draw the curtains, she removed her travelling clothes and undid her hair. Out the window there were crowds of Japanese men, many of whom would be happy to pay a healthy portion of their monthly paycheques to get a glimpse at what was offered so freely to the late afternoon sun.

The bathwater was softer than she expected. She sank into its warmth and sighed. Then, holding her breath, she slid down farther so that her head was beneath the water.

She didn’t know if the tears started while she was beneath the water or whether they began their flow when she came up for air. It hardly mattered. Her body began to heave with sobs. She didn’t know if she was crying for the death of a man she had married but had never really known or for all the lost years she had spent with that man. All she knew was that alone in a cubicle of a hotel room in Japan she finally began to mourn.

Loa Wei Fen had made a mistake, but he’d been lucky. The black man had been much stronger than he had anticipated. And the opium had made him physically unpredictable. Once he had managed to cut the African, his knife had done its work with its usual precision. It was not the knife that had faltered. He, Loa Wei Fen, was the one.

There had been no time to dawdle. No time to arrange body pieces. It surprised Loa Wei Fen that Ngalto Chomi carried no wallet. He must simply let the driver settle his accounts. But the wallet was no matter. A black man was not hard to identify in Shanghai.

It was the other thing that he had failed to leave that so angered him. It was not in fact until he was back in his room at the Portman that Loa Wei Fen reached in his pocket and remembered it. His employers would not be pleased. But more important, he was not pleased. He was trained not to make errors. He was trained to be perfect. And here he clearly was not.

He threw the slender white objects at the ceiling.

They shattered. But the sound did not pacify him. To him the ivory shards were nothing more than snowflakes falling on the roof, making it slippery for the lion cub to jump to the pole.

About the time that Amanda was sinking into her hotel tub, Fong and Wang Jun finally reached the outlying suburbs of Shanghai. Both men would have been amazed to learn that the new housing going up there looked exactly like lower-income homes in Southern California commuter communities.

Shortly thereafter in one of the alleyways off Fu Yu, a five-year-old boy brought a piece of what he thought was “funny dark meat” to his grandmother’s outdoor cook stand. The old woman’s screams did the unthinkable-they brought Shanghai’s traffic momentarily to a halt. This in turn brought the police. Which in short order brought a phone call to Special Investigations.

By the time Fong and Wang Jun got there, the crime scene had been severely compromised. The alleyway off Fu Yu was densely travelled, so despite the best efforts of the local police, it quickly had become almost impossible to tell what was left where and by whom. Fong ordered the evacuation of almost the entire alley and despite the protests of the citizens and a cellular query from Commissioner Hu, he got his way. Then he had construction site searchlights set up all along the alley and quarter-meter sector lines laid down. Seventytwo police officers picked through every inch of one of the filthiest alleys in Shanghai for the better part of twelve hours and came up with almost nothing.

Over and over again, Fong was approached with “What are you looking for?” And over and over again, he said, “I’ll know when I see it.” So they brought him everything they found. A small handful of one-fen coins, half a well-leafed-through Hong Kong porno magazine, bits of several different kinds of food in various degrees of decay, a sole from the toe of a lady’s shoe, and many more things-none of which pleased Fong. He had already found the piece of heart and the strip from the JAL airsickness bag, where he thought they would be. The Chinese driver informed the police that his Zairian charge never carried a wallet, that he, the driver, always went in after his client was finished and paid the bills. So that accounted for the wallet’s whereabouts.

As the driver headed downtown with a police officer to make a full statement, Wang Jun approached Fong. “One hand points to the guy’s ID.”

“The other to the second part of the message,” replied Fong.

“Which is?” asked Wang Jun.

“Which is what we are looking for. No! What we’ll keep looking for until we find.”

Wang Jun slipped a cigarette into his mouth. “Did you notice that the body pieces weren’t put together very well this time?”

“I noticed that.”

“Could it be that our guy is slipping? Maybe he made a mistake.”

“Perhaps.”

Wang Jun looked closely at the younger man. Fong’s face seemed hard as a river stone. Set. Not looking outward at all, rather turned inward as if probing a memory.

Fong had told her it was nothing more than a mistake. A slip of the tongue. That whatever she was carrying he would love and cherish as he loved and cherished her. But Fu Tsong knew her husband, the cop who loved the actress. She knew the pride he had in coming from the depths of the Old City to his present job, she knew his training in being a man. And she knew that part of that training insisted that he have a son.

Spending her life in the relativity of art, she adored the factual solidity of Zhong Fong. His bluntness pleased her. So did his unrelentingly straight-line maleness. He never apologized for it, yet could easily converse with her many gay and effeminate male friends from the theatre. She enjoyed the pleasure of his touch and thrilled at how after all these years she still roused him by the simple removal of her blouse. She’d catch him in the mirror watching her put on her makeup. Walking into a room with a towel around her, fresh from the shower, provoked a smile from deep inside him. And his smile made her smile. Even the momentary slip of a bra strap outside a loose blouse attracted his attention. As if they were kids-no, not kids, but young lovers who thought their love the only love in the garden of delights.

She also liked his incisive intelligence. He’d read each of her scripts and often had questions that made her see the text in new and different ways. He’d approach things deductively, always starting with “Now what would make someone use that exact phrase?” And then that liquid mind of his would put together backgrounds, often several of them that would lead an individual to say precisely those words. More often than she admitted she used his insights in her work.

But now, as he pleaded his case before her, claiming it was just a slip of the tongue when he said “I’m lifting you and our son,” she knew differently. She applied his thinking. What could possibly make a person say that exact line? And there were very few answers. In fact there was only one. A person would only say “I’m lifting you and our son” if what the person wanted was the wife he held aloft to be carrying a son deep in her womb.

Fong was almost ready to call it quits when the brother from the country raced down the alleyway shouting, “I want my fucking carpet back.”

“Do you have something for me, comrade?” inquired Wang Jun as he threw an arm around the peasant’s shoulders.

“I do, but I want my fucking carpet first.”

He wouldn’t speak until he was shown his carpet. So Fong, Wang Jun, and the brother hustled into a patrol car and sped off to the police warehouse by the airport. Once inside, the brother was given a glimpse of his carpet and the other pieces of his property. Fong then sent everyone else except the brother and Wang Jun out of the enclosure. “So you have something for us,” said Fong.

The brother hesitated for a moment and then reached into his pocket and pulled out three small intricate white carvings. Taking them, Fong said, “These? These are what your sister took from the alley off Julu Lu?”

“Those.”

“There wouldn’t happen to be several dozen more of them would there, comrade?” snarled Wang Jun, but Fong waved the question aside and turned to go.

Catching up to Fong, Wang Jun stared at the delicate figures. “Ivory?”

“Yes, ivory.”

“Like ivory-from-elephants-type ivory?”

“The same, Wang Jun,” said Fong as an idea tickled at the side of his brain but refused to come forward. From far behind them, they heard the brother scream, “How’m I suppose to get my fucking carpet back to my house?” Ignoring this Fong asked Wang Jun, “You don’t think he beat the street sweeper to get her to tell him, do you?”

“If it makes you happy to believe that all of a sudden out of the goodness of her heart she fessed up so be it. For me, I hope he didn’t kill her. That’s all I hope.”

The murder of the Zairian consul general was all over the papers. This time, every paper in town had the story and all could have gotten it legitimately. No one jumped the gun. The inevitable call from the Zairian embassy in Beijing was handled at a higher level so Fong never even knew the content of that no doubt unpleasant exchange.

Fong was alone in his office as the dawn crested the river. On the table in front of him was a puzzle. Not a godly jigsaw puzzle this time but rather a number of human events whose points of intersection were still in doubt. One part of the puzzle was the personal data on Richard Fallon, another part was the personal data on Ngalto Chomi-between them were the three small ivory statuettes. Fong took a thick pencil and drew a line to join Richard Fallon to the ivory. Then he circled the ivory and continued the line to Ngalto Chomi. Then he put question marks over each of the connecting lines. He drew a wide arc over the ivory joining Fallon and Chomi. Again he put a question mark over that line. Below the ivory he put the few pieces of data he had on the Dim Sum Killer-weapon specs, a professional, leaving a message, daylight and populous alley kills- and drew a line to the ivory. Then he erased it. He drew lines to Fallon and Chomi and on them wrote the word “contracts.” Then he wrote out questions.

Who authorized the contracts? He drew a line from the Dim Sum Killer to an empty circle with a large question mark in it.

If a message is being sent, to whom? He drew a line from the ivory to another empty circle with a question mark in it as well.

Then he took out a piece of paper and wrote LEADS TO FOLLOW UP. Under it he put:

Shanghai Daily News publishes story before it happens

American consul tries to warn me of something, then disappears

ivory

the specs on the weapon

the shards in Fallon’s lung tissue

He divided up his personnel. Wang Jun would take the newspaper problem in his usual diplomatic fashion, Lily was following the shards, Detective Li Xiao was already at work on the weapon specs, and he suspected that the American consul was a dead end.

That left the ivory to him.