The Shanghai Murders

DAY EIGHT

Shrug and Knock was smiling as Fong came into the office the next morning. The smile was so startling that Fong knew something was seriously amiss. So, without entering his office, he walked right past the door and exited down the exterior stairway. Once outside he crossed over to the promenade and waited in line at the crowded phone kiosk. When his turn finally came he called Lily.

“What’s up?” he queried in English.

“Really, but I think that’s unlikely, don’t you?” replied Lily uncharacteristically in content, tone and her use of Shanghanese.

“Someone’s there so you can’t talk?”

“Yes, I believe we in this office have answered that request before.” She then pretended to rifle through some files and continued, “Yes, we have, and what you say is true.”

“What’s wrong, Lily? Come on, tell me, what’s his Hu-ness up to?”

“Well yes, we are approaching an indictment in the case of that woman’s death in the Pudong. Yes, in fact we are waiting to make an arrest even as we speak.”

Fong didn’t need to hear any more. He understood. He didn’t know how long she continued to talk, he simply held the phone in his hand with no words coming to his mouth. The young man behind him claimed with a piercing yell that his beeper was getting heavy he had so many calls to return. Fong looked at the man as in a dream and, handing over the phone, walked to the river side of the promenade. The Pudong was booming across the water. Rising like a live thing taking sustenance from the very ground. . . the very ground where his wife and unborn child lay buried in cold obstruction.

He walked to the north end of the promenade and then crossed the Bund and walked up Beijing Road, the longest hardware store in the world. For over two and a half miles, the stores on both sides of the street sell nothing but hardware-all kinds and sizes, but in Fong’s experience never the piece you needed to fix the broken light switch in your room. Beijing Road was less travelled than most of the east-west roadways and Fong felt exposed. He crossed the street and headed north a block to the Su Zhou Creek. In fewer than twenty steps he was back in old China-sampans and river barges, people cleaning their clothes in the filthy stream. It calmed him enough to allow him to think.

He knew they had investigated Fu Tsong’s death. He knew they still had questions. He didn’t know who was in charge of the investigation.

That being the case, he may have already made a fatal error by calling Lily, but he didn’t think so. It occurred to him as he watched an elderly woman washing her dishes in the brown water that it was Lily he chose to call, not Wang Jun. He couldn’t justify his choice, nor at this moment did he wish to think about it. He’d try to contact Lily again. There were certain pieces of information that he needed. Today was the day he was to hear from Dung Tsu Hong the pimp, Shen Lai the customs broker/tong connection, and from the money changer. He was also anxious to get Li Xiao’s report from Taipei. But as he walked along the river, Why now? was the only real thought in his head.

Why were they reopening the investigation into Fu Tsong’s death now? Because I was getting close? It had to be. But close to the killer? No. Now they were trying to give me the killer. They had gone so far as to make Taipei cooperate, no mean feat. I must be getting close to the one who bought the killer’s services. Who owns him.

“Power,” Fong said aloud.

He headed back, away from the creek, toward the book shop on Han Kou, which in the thirties had been the fanciest brothel in Shanghai. He went to the newspaper section in the back and began reading through the papers. The coverage of Ngalto Chomi’s death was still front-page news. This truly loved African had touched the hearts of so many that there was a constant stream of testimonials to his goodness and the horror of his death. The papers also had more of the specifics than before. Still nothing about the heart, so the old coroner was clean-for the time being.

The death had even made it into the International Herald Tribune under the headline ZAIRIAN CONSUL MURDERED IN BUSY SHANGHAI ALLEY. The word was getting out. The message was disseminating worldwide. They’d hit the mother of all communication with this one. No one gave a fuck that Richard Fallon was dead but the world seemed to mourn the passing of Ngalto Chomi. An ironic twist on the usual story, thought Fong. White man ignored, ethnic gets all the attention. Well, maybe the world was changing.

As he was about to leave the shop, he saw an edition of the New York Times. He picked it up. On the back page of the first section was a full-page advertisement telling the Western world that Shanghai was free of smuggled ivory. That Shanghai cared about the endangered species of the world. That Shanghai was their kind of town. The only thing missing was the phrase Invest Now! Two murders was a small price to pay for the continuation of the lifeblood of Shanghai, Western money.

Fong felt sick. He and Richard Fallon and Ngalto Chomi had been nothing more than pawns in a game. But now he was on the run, and he knew that they were serious about getting him. One more bloody stain meant nothing to these men.

Loa Wei Fen felt the smoke curl down his throat, slither through his belly and clutch at his groin. He felt the beast on his back rear in angry protest. But then she was there to lull the monster and awaken the man.

She’d been awakening this man for several days now Slowly the man had spoken of things in his opium dreams. Dark things. The opium works differently on different people. The keepers of the drug know this and are wary of the signs that the drug is opening deeply placed, often hidden, doors in the smokers.

On his first night with her he had screamed in his sleep, “Old man, you stink of rotted paper,” and pushed her away. Later he had curled up and suckled at her breast for almost an hour, which seemed to give him peace and allow him to sleep. Lately his “reachings” had been incoherent jabs of speech and slashes with his body. But yesterday he had cried out in anger at her, “You love the black man, not me.” For a moment she was sure that he had awakened, that the opium had trailed with the dawn. But as she looked, his eyes had rolled all the way back in his head and the drug had taken him on another dream-filled loop.

She remembered all of that as she inserted him into herself. She also remembered the card that the policeman had given her. As she rocked to his rhythm she watched the drug take effect. The violent carving on his back calmed. As it did she wondered if she should call the number on that card.

Li Xiao had never been out of the country before and as the police car with the polished young driver took him into Taipei, he tried not to stare. All around him he saw wealth. Housing far superior to his present living situation in Shanghai or to any he could ever hope to have. Cars the likes of which Shanghanese policemen could only dream about. And these were the remains of the defeated Kuomintang who forty-five years ago had fled to Taiwan! The dogs who had retreated with their tails between their legs. The vanquished who for forty-five years had been supported by the United States and the immense treasure that they had plundered from the real China.

Their prosperity disgusted him.

As the car turned into the new central administration building, he saw two little girls holding their pregnant mother’s hands as they waited to cross the street. Three children! The ultimate injustice.

Inside, the building whispered and purred. Li Xiao was guided along carpeted hallways to the commissioner’s office. There were handshakes and nods and a lot of false smiles but quicker than he expected they got down to business. They handed him a computer-generated file. It started with a detailed report on a secret school that specialized in the kind of knife training that matched the old coroner’s data. There followed a few pages on the history and use of the school with a note that although the school was secretive it was not illegal. Names of the teachers came next and their present whereabouts, followed by names and ages of former pupils. Of the pupils, only seventeen were considered to fit the specifications forwarded by the Shanghai police. Of those seventeen, fifteen were accounted for during the period in question, which left just two men.

Two photographs followed.

Li Xiao flipped over the first. It was of a youngish teenager.

“How old’s this boy?”

“Fifteen when the picture was taken, seventeen now.”

“And he’s in China now?”

With a noticeable wince, the Taipei police commissioner said, “On the mainland, yes.”

“In China,” Li Xiao corrected him, then went on without waiting for a rebuttal. “And this?” He was referring to the second photograph. The one in which Loa Wei Fen stood in the Shanghai airport’s arrivals terminal.

“Taken less than two weeks ago. In the Shanghai Airport.”

“Yes, it was convenient to get the Shanghai Airport sign in the picture.” The commissioner stifled a response. Li Xiao knew a setup when he saw one. He was getting the sick feeling you get when you know that you’re being used but you can’t avoid it. “What’s this fucker’s name?”

“Loa Wei Fen. He’s a hired assassin, we’ve tracked him for some time.” Then with a broad smile, “He’s on the mainland even as we speak.”

Li Xiao looked at the man. At his finely tailored clothes and his expensive shoes. His eyes momentarily lingered on a large ring on the man’s hand.

“Is there anything further we can do to be of assistance, Detective Li?” asked the commissioner, still smiling.

“No, well yes, I guess there is.”

“And what’s that?”

“Tell me how you manage to sleep at night, get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and still believe you’re a man.” Before there was an answer, Li Xiao turned on his heel and left.

As he slammed his way down the marble-walled corridor, he couldn’t help feeling the injustice. This asshole was going to live a long and fruitful life while Zhong Fong, a cop whom Li Xiao truly admired, was going to take a big-time fall. He looked at the picture of Loa Wei Fen in his hand and said out loud, “And you, my friend, are going to wish you’d never been born.”

Fong had always considered Shanghai home. He’d known its physical intricacies since his boyhood and its metaphysical realities since the age of majority. But now it was a place of strangeness, a wary watching place about which he seemed to know little. Every intersection with its white-jacketed traffic cop, every block with its red armbanded street warden, every second block with its strolling brown-jacketed pair of patrol cops. . . In all these places all would soon be looking for him, if they were not already. So he headed for his home within home: the Old City.

As he entered it his pace slowed and, as if answering a call, he dropped his cop walk and became a part of the dankness of the ancient place, a member of the swamp. He had a long day to wait out, realizing that darkness might be the best friend he had left in his hometown.

His Hu-ness sat at the head of the table in the musty meeting room. At his side Shrug and Knock smiled a smile that upset the rest of those present-Lily, the coroner, and Wang Jun.

“Detective Li Xiao will join us shortly, I’ve been told his flight from Taipei landed an hour ago,” began Commissioner Hu.

“Then let’s wait until he gets here,” said Wang Jun.

Shrug and Knock smiled. “That’s not necessary, is it, Commissioner?”

“No, it’s not. I’ve ordered an all-points bulletin sent out for the arrest of Zhong Fong and he should be brought in shortly,” said the commissioner.

Wang Jun was not pleased. He knew that much of what was being said was a reminder to him that his IOU had come due. He was snapped out of his personal concern by the arrival of Li Xiao, who literally burst into the room. “I am heading this investigation. Who called this meeting in my absence?” he demanded.

Shrug and Knock nodded toward the commissioner. Li Xiao almost spat but decided against it. With barely concealed anger he barked out, “This is my case-the least you could have done is wait for my return.”

“I thought it proper to act quickly on this urgent matter,” responded his Hu-ness.

“What exactly made this matter urgent all of a sudden?” snapped Li Xiao.

“The new information that Wang Jun received. Perhaps you’d care to fill in our young detective, Wang Jun,” said the commissioner with the confidence of a gambler holding four aces.

Wang Jun quickly repeated the highlights of his two conversations with Geoffrey Hyland. Upon his completion, the room was quiet for a moment.

“You found Zhong Fong four years ago with his dead wife didn’t you, Wang Jun?” asked Li Xiao.

“I was there first. He’d called me and I tried to trace the cab that took his wife to the Pudong. I was there first, that’s all,” said Wang Jun.

“Yet you saw no reason to arrest him then, did you?” asked Li Xiao.

“No, I didn’t,” said Wang Jun.

“Despite what Zhong Fong did with the body and the baby, you saw no need to arrest him then?” pushed Li Xiao.

“I’m not on trial here, Li Xiao,” snapped back Wang Jun.

Li Xiao looked at the older man and wondered what was in it for him. He’d always assumed that Wang Jun and Zhong Fong were close. But a sixty-year-old cop staring a pension in the face in a city whose inflation rate might shortly skyrocket was an easy mark. Easy to turn-even against a friend. Out of the side of his eye he saw Shrug and Knock smile. The crosscurrents in the room were intense. Clearly Shrug and Knock was having a good time. The commissioner was staring down Wang Jun, and it seemed that both the coroner and Lily were unnaturally silent.

“Any new physical evidence?” Li Xiao barked out.

“We only found pieces of the two bodies from the construction site. Small fragments. Cement was never intended as a preservative of human flesh. But nothing new has come to the morgue, so I wonder why I am here,” the coroner said.

“Nothing new has landed in Forensics either,” said Lily.

Li Xiao looked around the table and finally bellowed, “Then why are we all here?”

After a moment the commissioner rose. Shrug and Knock followed suit. “You are here to arrest and convict Zhong Fong for the murder of his wife. That is why you are here. I want him apprehended and brought in with all haste. I want our case against him made as quickly as possible. In the meantime, when you catch him, he’s to be kept in Ti Lan Chou Prison.” Then directly to Wang Jun, “Is that clear?”

Wang Jun nodded. The commissioner and Shrug and Knock left the room.

Ti Lan Chou was the political prison perched on the east reach of the Huangpo near its confluence with the Yangtze. It was the largest prison of its kind in China and hence probably the largest of its kind in the world. People were held there for crimes against the state. Sentences were long. Never commuted. No pardons or bail. Lots of time spent in sweatshops making goods that the state sold to the West. It was not a prison with which Special Investigations dealt. This was federal police territory. Even in a hardened policeman like Li Xiao, the threat of Ti Lan Chou Prison struck a rich vein of fear. Li Xiao knew why Zhong Fong was to be held there. It would give the feds time to rig a case that would be presented to the public in photographs, which were referred to as object lessons and could be viewed in various strategic locations throughout the city. These sets of photographs, which detailed crimes and punishments, were immensely popular during the Cultural Revolution, a regular people’s art form. Li Xiao’s favourite had been the one that was up for months near Jing An Park on the Nanjing side. It consisted of several gory photographs of the murder victim followed by photographs of an arrested suspect, photographs of the suspect tried, and finally photographs of the suspect executed-a complete morality play on six yards of fence. It was indeed very impressive and bespoke tremendous efficiency on the part of the police and the judiciary. All well and good except that Li Xiao had worked on that case and they’d never caught the perpetrator. What they had found were photos of him which had been cleverly doctored into this cute little political lesson. The photo technicians had advanced their art mightily since the days of Mao swimming the Yangtze.

Li Xiao knew that with the priority APB issued by the commissioner they would catch Zhong Fong. That was for sure.

Li Xiao was troubled, though. Troubled by the timing of it all. Troubled by the arbitrariness of it all. Troubled by what he felt was the betrayal of a friend.

Wang Jun’s new portable phone rang in his pocket. Li Xiao looked at the man. Would a man sell a friend for a phone line? In Shanghai, maybe? But no, it would have to be bigger for Wang Jun. He was alone in the world. No wife, no children. And age with its inevitable inevitability was working its terror on him. Where was honour in this city of greed? Things were truly getting out of hand.

He almost didn’t hear Lily guide the conversation round to the Dim Sum Killer case. She had information on the bike and interesting tidbits from three informers. As she went through these Li Xiao pulled out the photo of Loa Wei Fen and put it on the table.

“And this is?” asked the coroner, at last interested in the conversatIon.

“A man trained to work with a swolta, a six-inch double-sided blade with a piercing point. He also is in Shanghai as you’ll note by the airport sign in the photo. He’s ambidextrous too,” said Li Xiao.

“Distinguishing marks?” asked the coroner.

“A cobra carved into his back. That distinguishing enough for you?” Then turning to Wang Jun, “I guess you’re the chief on this one now, do you think that’s enough for an APB on a real killer?”

Lily took the phone out of her mother’s hands before the old woman could say hello. She knew who it’d be. Before the caller could say anything, she rifled off a phone number and an address and then said, “Half an hour on the dot. I won’t call twice. Don’t call here again.” As she hung up she said to her mother, who was looking shocked, “A date, Mom, your little girl’s got a date.”

Exactly half an hour later Lily dialled the number of the payphone in the kiosk at the corner of Delicious Food Street and Huai Hai. It rang once and Fong picked it up. He was dressed in an old blue padded Mao jacket and wore a cap. His hair had been cut off and dirt was worked deep into his palms. There was a nasty cut across his cheek as if he had shaved that morning in cold water. He looked older. Worn. He wore army issue spectacles. Fong listened to the news about the meeting. He openly gasped when he heard about the idea of arresting him and putting him in Ti Lan Chou Prison but he managed to control his fear.

“Can you get me the picture of this Loa Wei Fen and the reports from our snitches?”

“How?”

“I don’t know, Lily, you’re the devious one-think of something devious.”

“Do you remember the case of the boy with the bike?” Fong certainly did; it was one of his first cases as a member of the Shanghai Police Department. A plump, six-year-old boy had taken a bicycle from a fourteen-year-old neighbour and ridden it on the sidewalk. The bike, being too big, was too much for him to control and he had run right into an old man. The man staggered onto the street had a heart attack and died on the spot. His family went nuts.

When Fong arrived, the dead man was still on his back in the street, snarling traffic. His wife, completely ignoring him, was screaming at the boy, whom she was holding against the wall with her strong peasant hands. Her aged sister had slipped a clothesline over a tree and then around the boy’s neck and was heaving mightily, trying to hoist the boy off his feet and hang him in the middle of the busy block. A crowd had gathered around them and was offering unsolicited advice on the art of hanging fat kids. It took all of Fong’s moral authority and the help of three block wardens to break up the would-be lynching.

After calling for a coroner Fong had walked the boy, who still had the rope around his neck, back to his home. As soon as he handed the boy over to his doting parents he turned completely unrepentant. He snarled at Fong and screamed that he should arrest those stupid old ladies and that the old man had had his turn and was better off dead. One less old revolutionary idiot. He was only sorry he didn’t get more of them. But he would with the next bike he took. He was going to be a businessman and drive a big car, his fat little mouth said. Not some stupid policeman.

At that comment Fong grabbed the roll of fat around the child’s neck, pulled him toward a park down the way and would have beaten the daylights out of him had Lily not happened to have been there flirting with her boyfriend.

She took the boy from Fong and brought him home. “I know which park you’re talking about,” said Fong.

“I’ll leave the things you want in the garbage can by the statue of the Long Nose. Give me an hour. I don’t want to see you, understand?”

“I do Lily.”

“In the meantime, the whore from the opium den called in. I don’t think anyone else got the information. You check her out and by the time you’re finished with her you can go to the park to pick up the stuff.”

“Thanks, Lily.”

“Good luck, short stuff.”

The old man in the opium den was hesitant to allow this peasant-looking man into his establishment. But when Fong removed the cap and eyeglasses and showed his police ID the old man bowed and led him down the smoky corridor. Once in the room Fong broke with the formalities of the place and immediately asked for the little whore, Wu Yeh. She arrived quickly. She was clearly frailer than before. She seemed drugged. Her robe hung limply about her, open in the front. Her pallor was now a ghastly white. He introduced himself gently. She smiled a little smile as if she didn’t know what else to do.

“You have seen the man named Loa Wei Fen?”

“The one with the snake on his back?”

“Yes, him.”

“Yes, he comes here often now.” There was no love in her words, just retreat. She seemed to be singing softly to herself. Fong reached out and touched her arm. An unusual gesture for Chinese people. It seemed to centre Wu Yeh. Her internal singing stopped. There was a light in her eyes for a moment.

“You can bring back my man, can’t you?” she said.

“The man with the snake?”

“No, not him, not him. He hurts me. Bring back my man, my beautiful black man, you can do that, can’t you?”

If he were still a believer he would have said, you blaspheme. But his faith had died with the death of Fu Tsong. So he just shook his head.

“If you see the man with the snake on his back, you call me. You call me when he comes here.”

She was lost in her thoughts again. The light in her eyes was almost gone. The song was returning.

“If he comes you call me, okay? Call me at the number on the card. Ask for Lily. She’ll get a message to me.”

She nodded but said nothing, actively retreating into her world of loss. Fong stood to go and was already out in the corridor when he heard her say as if to herself, “He wants me to come to his hotel now. Doesn’t want to come here. Wants me to go there.”

Fong looked at her in wonder and asked as simply as he could, “Which hotel?”

“The Portman.”

As he slowly walked toward the park where Lily was going to leave him the information, Fong allowed himself to really look at his city. The knowledge that if he were caught he would not see it again for a very long time seemed to sharpen his eye. What he saw thrilled and appalled him at the same time. Life in transition. Complicated. Intricate. But endlessly alive. Everything seemed to catch his attention. Hidden gardens behind high, broken-glass-topped walls. Shopkeepers splashing water from red plastic tubs to keep the summer dust down. Laundry hanging across the sidewalk dripping onto an oblivious teenager’s glutinous rice treat. Stained quilt sleeping mats draped over cheap folding chairs on the sidewalks. The Old Feeling Restaurant on Shan Xi- which old feeling was not specified. A young clerk eating ice milk on a stick within which black rice chunks were embedded-as if ants had ventured into the freezer. Restaurant windows stocked with suckable cured chicken feet. Hunchbacks and dwarves. In the open air market: strawberries and eels, pigs’ feet and squirming baby crabs, bamboo hearts and a man holding a live chicken by its wings. And a five-spice egg, although supposedly cooked in boiling water, rocks gently as the chick’s beak pierces the shell and a new life seeks the sunlight. A scrawny Shanghanese cat, with wide cheekbones and a yellow stare, wary and watching. The brutal Russian architecture of the hotel on Yan’an with the Kaige sign on top. A young man strutting with his double-deck Aiwa boom box incongruously encased in purple velvet. Large flower displays in wicker baskets outside a newly opened business, hoping for good luck. The Shanghai 21st Radio Factory. (Fong had lived his entire forty-four years in Shanghai and had never seen Shanghai Radio Factories One through Twenty.) Black velvet equestrian hats, which were all the rage for motorcyclists. Car owners dusting their pride and joys with three-foot-long feather dusters. Former great houses of the wealthy now laundry bedecked and packed- people in every closet and stairwell. And everywhere construction. Bamboo scaffoldings mounting the walls in impossible leaps and bounds, all seemingly festooned with electrical wires swaying in the late afternoon breeze. Street cobblers with rows of ladies’ shoe heels laid out on the sidewalk beside their portable benches. Street barbers. Street food sellers. Street bicycle repair men with bulbous red inner tubes exploding from black tires like fat snakes refusing to be stuffed back into the darkness. People rushing for the accordion-joined buses. Men wearing two-tone brown-and-white shoes. A waiter charging out of his restaurant with a large squirming freshwater eel in his hands. With a quick motion he slams the lithe creature against the sidewalk. There is a wet slap and the creature moves no more. The waiter smiles toothlessly. Men wearing cheap pants too large but kept up by belts which are wrapped around and around their thin waists. Practical. Chinese practical. No doubt both the pants and the belt were bought on sale. Young people sporting T-shirts with English writing on them. For some reason “Hug Me I’m Lonely” was a popular shirt. It hardly mattered. The shirt could have said Fuck Me I’m Slavic or Eat Me I Taste Good Broiled, they wouldn’t have known the difference. Near the park Fong noticed an old man shaking a Russian-made pocket watch. Fong thought this the ultimate definition of old-style faith. Not even the Almighty could have made that piece of junk work again. He saw a pregnant woman walking her belly with the special pride of those who procreate in a single-child town.

He stopped at a street vendor and bought a piece of twisted fried bread. It burned the roof of his mouth as he tried to eat it. The laughter of the woman vendor told him in no uncertain terms that he was no longer being taken for a cop. Now he was just another sucker who had bought a piece of refried dough, perhaps refried for the third or fourth time that day. He turned to look at her and was about to complain but he stopped himself. He needed his disguise. Bigger fish to fry today.

Still a little early, he passed by the mosque on Chang Le which was now a stock market. The other one, on Xinle Lu at Xiang Yang Lu, was a nightclub. He couldn’t decide which was a more unfortunate fate for a religious building.

It was after dusk when he finally neared the two small parks in the triangular patches formed by the diagonal crossing of Fuxing and Huai Hai.

In the eastern park there was a stone statue of two children dancing. There were beds of flowers but nowhere to sit. In an action that could only be described as cruel, the sittable cement sides of the flower beds had been studded with sharp iron prods, lest one needed to rest one’s weary bones. The western park was dominated by a cast iron statue of a Long Nose, his arms raised as if either teaching or pleading, it was hard to tell which. On the pedestal were the dates 1912-1935. During the Cultural Revolution all other means of identifying the twenty-three-year-old westerner had been obliterated. Old men huddled around games of Chinese checkers, not the game with marbles children play in the West. This is a complex game that resembles a cross between go and chess. The game near the statue had drawn a crowd of watchers, each sagely advising what he would do were he the player whose move was next.

Fong approached as if to watch the game and spotted the manila folder in the trash can. Lily had slid it down one side so that it was clearly visible but not easy to pluck out. As Fong moved toward the can he saw to his horror one of the city-paid scavengers approaching the basket. These people carried a wicker basket over their shoulders and an iron pincer in their hands with which they plucked specific materials out of garbage cans for recycling. One of the assignments was paper.

But as Fong approached the recycler he could smell that paper was not this worker’s assignment. This scavenger was collecting compostable materials. The odour of rot enveloped her like a thick haze. As she walked away Fong moved toward the basket and plucked out the manila envelope. As naturally as a man on his evening stroll, he moved out of the park, passing the old men doing tai chi and the elderly women doing the oldlady version of it, “shake a leg.”

Fong sat in the growing darkness of Fuxing Park reviewing the material that Lily had left for him. Most of it was highly suspicious. The picture of Loa Wei Fen at the airport supplied by the Taiwanese screamed “set up.” The one piece of information he found untainted was from the opium whore, Wu Yeh. The pimp’s information was of little use, as was the money changer’s-both coming up with save-their-skin suggestions but no hard facts. But the tong connection, Fish Face, provided surprisingly exact information-troublingly so. It was as if the Taiwanese and the tongs were trying to outdo each other in their efforts to give Loa Wei Fen to the police. The data from the two sources was almost identical but there was an open mockery in the note from Fish Face. His ended with the phrase “Get him before he gets you.”

As Fong headed toward the park’s exit he could smell burning refuse. It was 7:00 P.M. and Shanghai was adding the pungent scent of burnt garbage to the already potent mix of the city’s air. He thought back to Wu Yeh in the opium den. He thought of the brightness leaving her and the blurred opaque dullness replacing it. Opium replacing love. One addiction for another. But the addiction of love added light while the addiction of opium simply clouded. The light was dimming in her soul, that was plain to see-as the lights had dimmed in his with Fu Tsong’s death. Dimmed but not extinguished. Now his light was reviving, thanks to a blond American sitting at a desk in the Shanghai International Equatorial and writing a letter to her sister.

Dearest Sister,

I wasn’t unhappy to find him in my hotel room when I got back. I was shocked, though, at his appearance. He’d cut off his hair and there was a gash across his face. And he wore an old quilted coat. He looked-well, he looked Chinese. I know that sounds strange but that’s what I thought as he stepped out of the shadows. For a moment I didn’t recognize him. Before I could do anything he passed by me and stepped out into the corridor. Then he returned to the room and turned out the lights, shut the draperies and pulled me into the bathroom. Before I could say anything he said as explanation, “There are no windows in here.” Well it’s hard to deny that. He pulled a picture out of a manila envelope and putting it on the sink said, “Have you seen this man?” The Chinese man in the picture was young and silkily handsome. He wore an expensive suit. “Have you?” Fong asked a second time. I told him I hadn’t although it was hard for me to be sure and who was this guy anyway? He replied without batting an eyelash, “He’s the man who killed your husband, Ms. Pitman.”

The mention of Richard’s death and Fong’s formality chilled the air. “So arrest him.”

“I don’t want to arrest him. I want to talk to him. I want to find out who put him up to this.”

“So talk to him. Or don’t you know where he is?”

“He’s staying at the Portman Hotel.” Before I could stop myself I heard my voice saying, “He looks Chinese.”

“Hotels are not segregated in Shanghai now. A Chinese man with the right money can now stay where he wishes, even eat in the same restaurants as whites, and fuck in the same beds. One would hope that the sheets had been changed, but it is hard to regulate such things. It has been a while since we have seen NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED signs in Shanghai.”

He had caught me. Nailed me for my assumption that any man with enough money to stay in the Portman would have to be European or Japanese. The silence between us began to grow. I’d lived in a marriage of wide and complex silences. I did not want this relationship to be like that, so I forced myself to reach out to him.

“It scarcely matters if I say that I’m not guilty, does it?” His silence was a succinct answer but much to my relief he was not continuing to fade into the background, to move away. “If you know where he is and you want to talk to him, go over and pay him a social call.”

“He’d kill me.”

“You’re a policeman. You know how to defend yourself.”

“Not against this kind of man. He’d kill me . . . but he might not kill you.”

I laughed at him. I told him to forget it. I told him this was his problem, not mine. I told him to get out of the bathroom, I needed to take a pee. He told me to go ahead but he didn’t move. So I hiked my skirt and peed.

Then he did.

Then in the deep tub of the Shanghai International Equatorial Hotel I came alive with a Chinese man I’d barely known for five days. As the shower beat down on my back and head I rode him to an oblivion that had been denied me for many years.

When I awoke it was after midnight. He had just finished dressing and was heading toward the door with a promise to return-a promise I extracted from him when I said I would find the room number of the man who killed Richard.

Pray for me, A.

To Fong the school’s old theatre, late at night, echoed of life past, finished. Joy and laughter huddled in the corners of the ancient building, hiding from the emptiness lest their potency be sucked dry by the void.

That evening the top of the proscenium arch was emblazoned with a red banner proclaiming the vital role of the theatre workers. There must have been a political meeting in here earlier in the day. That’s a wee bit redundant, all meetings are political. Especially in China. The theatre, which of course belonged to the people, could be taken over by the “people’s representatives” whenever the people’s representatives decided that the people needed further encouragement in their labours, studies, or work habits. Meetings were also called whenever these representatives needed to remind the people how very important it was to be represented by representatives.

The meetings occurred frequently enough in the theatre that a special rigging for the banner had been drilled into the plaster on either side of the arch: a strangely archaic set of heavy pulleys and ropes. As if the banner, which could not weigh in excess of two pounds, somehow, no doubt because of its weighty message, assumed untold mass.

As Fong stood in the empty space, he heard the flick of an electric switch and in a moment the sound of a compressor pump. Slowly a dim light bathed the stage set-a scene of a Victorian garden. On stage left going downstage and then across the front was a shallow stone-bordered stream. The compressor pump was forcing water into the stream. Fong was not surprised when Geoffrey Hyland walked out of the wings into his Victorian Twelfth Night world. What did surprise Fong was that he was holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Geoffrey gestured to the set and the water. “Do you like?” he called out. Fong chose not to respond. “Ah, your silence speaks volumes. Long time no see, Fong old bud. I’d begun to look forward to your cryptic presence in the back of my rehearsals.”

“Why?”

“You give it all a kind of edge. After all, you’re the real thing aren’t you, Fong?”

“What real thing?”

“The real thing. That which would kill for love. You are Orsino in action. Willing to kill your love before allowing another to touch her. I told you that everyone could find themselves in this play. I told you that.”

“You truly believe that?”

“I do, I’ve said so twice now.”

“And you believe I’m Orsino, willing to kill for love?”

“Once again I say, I do,” pronounced Geoffrey with a mawkish bow. A wobbly mawkish bow. Fong had never seen Geoffrey drunk before. He wondered why he was drunk now. He was afraid he knew.

“Are you all right, Geoffrey?”

“Couldn’t be better,” he said, righting himself. He waved at the stage. “Do you like my pathetic little stream?” Then he pointed downstage right. “Malvolio sits down there, dangling his footsies in the cool stream, like this.” Geoffrey crossed to the corner of the stage, and kicking off his shoes put his stocking feet into the water. “It’s surprisingly cold. Be that as it may, the conspirators put the letter, folded like a boat, in the stream up there. The water carries Malvolio’s demise right to him. It hits him on the foot in fact. We’ve practised. It works every time.” Then smiling, he said, “Neat, huh? The poor ass does nothing, but God’s water brings him his doom. Like me. No? I just sat in this fucking theatre and in walked your wife. But then you know all about that, don’t you, Fong?”

Very slowly, without any inflection, Fong replied, “No, I don’t, Geoffrey.”

Pulling a mock look of shock Geoffrey said, “Why don’t you come up into the light like the rest of us lovelost buffoons?”

“I’m not an actor, Geoffrey.”

“So you say. So you say, Fong.”

“You have two children, don’t you Geoffrey?”

Geoffrey quickly corrected him. “Had two children, a boy and a girl.”

“Why had?”

Then in a voice filled with self-loathing Geoffrey yelled back, “Had because after I met your wife, your fucking amazing wife, I could never really go back to them. Not really. Children know. Everyone knows. Even you know, don’t you, Fong? Look into your heart, Fong! You know, don’t you!” He took a long pull from his bottle.

The stream pumped water. The ancient lights flickered. And Fong knew that Geoffrey Hyland was adrift in an ocean of pain and recrimination. Enough of both to have driven him to the police. So at least Fong had learned that much.

Leaving the theatre Fong hugged the sides of the buildings as he made his way toward his apartment. Untalented students rehearsing scenes; an extraordinarily loud television set in the open-sided faculty room; the staircase leading up to the apartment. No guards, no police. It wasn’t possible that they would have overlooked his apartment with an all-points-bulletin out for his arrest. He pushed open a basement door and tiptoed past the couple asleep on a mattress on the damp concrete. Then he ran up a back stairway to the second floor.

Even as he opened the door to his apartment, he knew that he had not been the first to open that door this evening. Lived-in rooms, especially rooms of love, have a consistency to them. A firmness that links one object to the next in a continuous flowing idea.

There was no flow here now. At first he thought it was because of him and Amanda but quickly his eye lit on the telltale clues of another kind of brief but serious intrusion. The bathroom door, always hard to close, now left slightly ajar; the puff in the drapery fabric that always results when opened and not given the necessary attention when subsequently closed-but more than these telltales was the feel of the other’s presence.

As the key was turned in the lock and the door cracked open, Loa Wei Fen allowed the knife to turn in his right hand. His left was pressed flat against the surface of the top of the armoire, upon which he was hiding. “Always attack from above.” The leap would be awkward unless the policeman, who was now dressed like a peasant, moved one step farther into the room.

Loa Wei Fen had been waiting on top of the armoire for over two hours. The police search finished over three hours ago. He had watched the search while crouching on the tile roof across the way. There were so many police and then none. This troubled him. So he waited for a full hour before slipping into the apartment.

He too had felt the former solidity of the place. Anger surged through him and he reached for his knife.

Fong stood in the door, a slash of light from the hallway across the apartment’s carpet. What was wrong here? The police had been here, yes. But that was not all that he was sensing. What else was here? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that his body was preparing him to run. And that’s what he did. Leaving his apartment without entering, without closing the door, he raced to the basement and out a rear door into an alley. He threw himself over the now locked gate of the academy. Pushed through the crowded Marco Polo club across the way. Barged into a washroom and pried open a window. Then he leapt out. He could only hope that he finally lost whoever or whatever was following him as he merged with the traffic on Yan’an.

Loa Wei Fen followed as fast as he could. The basement, the gate, the club all were no problem. When he saw the policeman racing toward the washroom he knew that the man would be looking to crash out a window so he headed back out of the club and ran toward the side of the building. But Loa Wei Fen was unlucky this time. An electrified fence awaited him. Its fourteen-foot height prevented him from following the escaping figure of the policeman who, emerging from the high window, looked so much like a serving man escaping from a princess’s boudoir.

Fong had no idea whether he’d fully thrown off his ghost. His fear was still very real. He grabbed the phone from one of the public kiosks and threw a five-jiao note at the owner. Amanda picked up at the top of the second ring.

“Are you all right?”

“Never better, but I’m not coming back there this evening.”

“What about your promise, Mr. Policeman?”

There was mockery in her voice and a seductive taunt. For a moment he considered going there. Then he saw Loa Wei Fen half a block down the street walking slowly, sectoring the area with his gaze. Searching. Searching for him.

“I’m being followed. I don’t want to lead him to you.”

“The man in the picture?”

“Yes. Go to the Portman tomorrow and find out what room he’s in.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Loa Wei Fen was too close. His gaze moving with terrifying precision.

The half-demolished, three-story Victorian house stood empty-more accurately forceably emptied-at the junction of Yan’an and Nanjing. Across the way the compact car stood on its metal pedestal, some sixteen feet in the air. The wrecking ball had taken a bite out of the circular balcony at the top of the house. No glass remained in the windows, no wood panelling on the walls, or fixtures on the doors. Red tiles, seemingly defying gravity, balanced precariously on the now sodden roof. Outside the building was a vast hole, the beginnings of a mega-story building. Inside, in the one remaining corner of a third-story room, Fong sat and tried to stop shivering. He was safe until morning. His mind knew that, but his body was still filled with adrenaline.

Then a wind picked up from out of the east. A breath from the Mongolian steppe travelling pure and cold, blowing aside for a moment the haze of Shanghai summer. It surrounded him in the bleak of night and roused him from his stupor-the way she used to. With a subtle change of the air pressure Fu Tsong was there. All around him.

It didn’t help that Fong knew that this was only a dream. It didn’t help because he’d had this dream many times before. And it would not stop at his command. Each time the dream supplied him with more bits of the memory that he had so desperately tried to erase.

This night it began with him racing out of the theatre, with Geoffrey Hyland’s voice ringing in his ears. “If anything happens to her, I’ll chase you wherever you go. Wherever you go I’ll find you and get my revenge.”

He had to think clearly. Fu Tsong was gone. She had gone to the theatre to get a cab. She was carrying a small bag.

Where would she go?

Back at their apartment, Fong called Wang Jun and got him to start tracking down the cab. Fong had to consciously steady his thoughts as he hung up the phone. She took a small suitcase. Which one? He opened the armoire in the bedroom where he kept their few suitcases. The small brown wicker bag was gone.

It was so small, what could she take that she couldn’t have just carried? The phone rang. It was Wang Jun. The cab company had given him the probable cab number and a general vicinity in which to look. Dispatcher shifts had changed since the cab was sent out and since the dispatcher had no radio link with cabs and no records are kept after a call, they had to find the off-duty dispatcher. Wang Jun said they already had a lead on his whereabouts. Then he hung up.

What would Fu Tsong have put in that small wicker suitcase? Fong opened her drawers but, like most men couldn’t tell what was missing or not missing. Then he opened her closet. Everything seemed to be there, but as he went to close it his eyes were drawn to an empty hook on the door. His heart almost stopped.

Fu Tsong owned two bathrobes: a beautiful silk one that she wore all the time, which was still there, and a tattered plaid terrycloth robe that was too big for her, but which she would wear whenever she was ill. “It makes me feel safe and warm while the sickness rages inside. It’s my way of helping everything get fixed,” she’d often said.

That robe was gone. The empty hook seemed cruel.

His mind was afloat, lost in a wash of terror. He forced himself to answer more questions. Where would she go to get fixed? The Pudong rose in his throat like a round hard thing. He swallowed it down and forced himself to concentrate. Fu Tsong’s life depended on it. His baby daughter’s life depended on it. His whole world depended on it.

Where exactly would she go? The Pudong is a big place. She’d never been able to remember an address in her life. She’d write it down. But she’d hide something like that from him. Where, though? He started with her desk in the living room corner. No, couldn’t be! It was too open to him. Where would she hide something from me? She’s smart! Where did she know I’d never accidentally look? Nothing on her bedside table. Nothing in her closet or clothing. Nothing in the medicine cabinet over the sink. . . but even as he went to close the cabinet he knew where Fu Tsong would hide something she really didn’t want him to find.

On the shelf over the toilet Fu Tsong kept a set of brushes, some face cream, and an unusually shapeless bag with a zipper. In the bag she kept her spermicide and her now unused diaphragm.

He pulled out the beige diaphragm case. It opened with a plop. He picked out the plastic dome revealing a cheap business card on the bottom of the case. On the card was printed a name and an address in the Pudong. Below the address was a guarantee of satisfaction in its services “for women desirous of giving birth to male children.” For a moment Fong’s knees went weak.

The phone rang in the other room.

He listened to Wang Jun’s voice say that they had located the dispatcher and had sent a car to get him. Fong hung up before Wang Jun was finished.

Pelting rain against the windshield of his police car. Hand held down hard on horn, flashers going, siren piercing the downpour. Screams of anger as he whipped past hundreds of bicyclists in their cheap plastic ponchos that made them look like coloured pyramids on wheels, and sped down Yan’an.

The address in the Pudong was in the north sector. He roared toward Beijing Road. A traffic jam at Nanjing Road and Xian brought him to a screeching halt. It was solid for almost six blocks in all directions. Something had spilled or stopped or someone was hit. He was still over two miles from the Pudong address where his wife and daughter were. Abandoning his car, he ran like a wild man, screaming and shouting, toward the overhead walkway. Racing up the rain-slicked steps he leapt over a prone beggar and got to the centre of the strangely elegant structure.

Only a supreme act of will kept him from stopping in the middle of the overpass spanning the busiest intersection in Asia and screaming Help me, help me, help me!

Charging toward the Xian side he slipped on the wet overpass pavement and careened down the forty-five steps to the street below. Then he was running again. A sharp pain in his hand drew his attention. Two of the fingers of his left hand must have landed awkwardly in his fall. One dangled backward at a peculiar angle. The other had been pushed back over the knuckle. The former he ignored. The latter, with a yell of pain, he yanked back to its original length.

At Beijing Road he flagged a cab, pulled the driver out and dumped the surprised man in the gutter. Before the cabby could open his mouth to complain Fong was speeding away from him toward the Bund.

Inside the cab, Fong floored the late-model Santana and controlled the fishtailing as he careened toward the river. In a flash of lightning he saw the huge television tower across the Huangpo River. And momentarily thereafter he smelled the river. Even in the rain once you crossed Delicious Food Street the river announced its imminent presence.

He turned south. A second traffic jam, this one a half mile of cars trying to get onto the new suspension bridge heading toward the Pudong. Once again he abandoned a car and took to foot, this time racing toward the suspension bridge across the Huangpo.

Anyone paying attention would have marvelled at the lone running figure clearly etched against the darkened, lightning-streaked sky. So tiny, insignificant when com- pared to the suspension bridge’s massiveness. The bridge swayed in the wind as the tiny figure dodged and weaved and at times climbed over cars stalled by the intense downpour.

At the end of the bridge, Fong was in the Pudong. Instantly the familiarity of home flooded him. It was like the Old City where he had grown up. In the downpour few people were on the streets to ask for directions. He finally found a steamed bun shop open and raced in, shouting the address at the old lady behind the counter.

If the sight of the soaked, broken-fingered man surprised her she didn’t let on. She simply pointed farther down the street. Running in the direction the woman pointed, Fong turned a sharp bend in the road and was instantly greeted by the new Pudong: towering cranes, massive construction sites, mud and mud-coated haulers of progress. No one seemed to know where the address was that the short madman was shouting at them. Finally a foreman, drawn by the ruckus, came up and, hearing the address, pointed toward the one remaining shanty in the midst of the moonscape of construction sites.

Fong ran directly toward the ancient structure, not bothering with roads. He raced into a construction site, across it and up the other side, and then through, across, and up a second until he stood panting at the closed door of the old house.

The building was bathed in the eerie glow of the construction site’s arc lights.

Fong was about to yell Fu Tsong’s name when he heard her moaning.

The door burst open under his running thrust, and he was greeted with a vision from hell.

The baby must have been in the breech position. A botched attempt to “untimely rip.” Something had ruptured. The butcher fled-and left this.

White walls, grime encrusted. Aluminum table. A single lightbulb swinging wildly from the ceiling. Rain pouring through the roof. And there in the midst, on the table, wrapped in her tartan bathrobe, a small line of her blood dripping off the table onto the already blood-rich earthen floor, Fu Tsong clutched a blood-and mucus-covered thing to her-and screamed for the mercy of death.

Fong felt his heart click in his chest.

Then everything stopped. Fu Tsong’s eyes opened wide for an instant, her arm swung off the side of the table and something infinitely cold filled the room.

Fong felt himself falling, plumeting through darkness, utterly, totally alone.

Even as Fong was fighting his night demons, Wang Jun was remembering how he had found his young friend that night four years ago in the Pudong. It was a vision Wang Jun could not easily forget.

A lightning flash had silhouetted Fong against the open back door of the shanty. The outline of the small man, his feet seemingly stuck to the mud floor of the horrible little room. Then a scream filled the confined space. And the small man moved with terrible speed. Before Wang Jun could intercede, Fong lifted the inert bodies of his wife and unborn child and raced out the back door into the rain.

When Wang Jun finally caught up to Fong, the younger man was standing alone on the lip overlooking the construction pit. Sixty feet beneath him was the newly poured cement foundation of a huge building. Even as Wang Jun looked over the edge, the bodies of Fu Tsong and her baby were swallowed by the grayish muck. The sash of Fu Tsong’s bathrobe floated incongruously on the surface-gently in motion as if catching life from the rain itself.

He stared at Fong.

Fong stood very still for a long time. The rain increased. The thunder roared its approval. Fong seemed to take it all in. For a moment his eyes brightened, then the light behind them dimmed. As they did he shouted to the sky. “You win! You win! I have delivered her to you. Take her. Take her for my sins!” Then he tilted back his head and spat well out into the pit.

Wang Jun rubbed his eyes, chasing away the image. As far as Wang Jun knew that was the last time that Fong had ventured into the Pudong. But it was all one now. It was late. They’d find Fong tomorrow. They most certainly would.

Fong awoke from his nightmare covered in sweat. The dream had ended the way it always did. Him alone. Them gone. A truth. But not the complete truth. Not yet.

Breathing heavily he looked out at the city. In the Shanghai dawn the smog clings quilt-thick to the buildings. Roads, still passable, await the coming assault of day. For a breath the bamboo-coated construction sites let out a sigh of relief between shifts-restful, but only for a moment. For the tumult would begin again, as it must, if Shanghai was to continue its assault upon the sky. And, just for a moment, Fong thought, To have been an ant in its midst, a moment of its time, the slightest ripple in its stream has been an honour. Then he spat and faced the reality of a dangerous dawn after a terrifying night.