The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory (23 page)

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.

The Portman, like every other major hotel in Shanghai, had extensive security in its lobby. Discreet but extensive. Also like most Shanghai hotels, at the Portman you could sit in the lobby if you ordered a drink or a cup of coffee. It was too early for a drink so Amanda ordered coffee. She was not surprised that the cup of bitter coffee cost more than the entire lunch she and the two policemen had eaten at the Old Shanghai Restaurant on the day of their dead man’s walk.

She sipped the rancid stuff as she watched the human traffic in the lobby. After fifteen minutes she knew that this would get her nowhere. There were too many elevators to watch and besides even if she saw the man in the picture how would she find his room number?

She finished her coffee and went over to the concierge’s desk. A young man with pimples, reasonable English, and a well-cut suit stepped forward to help her. She asked for a city map and was given a small piece of paper that was almost decipherable. She looked at it closely and put on a puzzled expression. “Is there a problem?” the young man asked her. Amanda bit her lower lip. Why do men like that?

“Well, there is, actually.”

“May I help?”

“I hope so.” She pulled out the picture of Loa Wei Fen from her purse and put it on the table. “Do you know this man?”

The young concierge nodded.

“He’s staying here?” Once again he nodded. Then, with seemingly uncontrollable excitement, Amanda bit her knuckles. “Bobby Tol is staying here? Really?”

“Who?”

“Bobby Tol, the Okinawan singer, here in this hotel?” The young concierge looked at the picture again and said, “I guess he is.” It was clear that he didn’t know who Bobby Tol was but it was also clear that he was more than a little taken with Amanda.

“Would you do something for me?” Amanda said and marked the effect of her words on the young man.

He replied weakly, “What?”

“Take some flowers up to his room for me. I don’t want to invade his privacy but I’m such a fan. Would you take care of delivering them?” He nodded eagerly. If he were a dog his tongue would have been on the pavement.

“You’re great, thanks. I’ll be right back with the flowers.” With that she touched his hand gently. He spluttered and reddened and looked ready to drop to the ground and kiss her feet.

• • •

There was a florist in the arcade on the west side of the hotel. She bought an enormous basket of flowers and winced when she saw the price. Oh well, the better to follow you by, she thought. She carried the flower basket back into the Portman lobby, smiling back at all the questioning looks.

By the time she brought the flowers to the concierge, he had regained his composure. He took the basket and asked if she wanted to send a card as well. She declined and after thanking him profusely retreated to the far end of the lobby. The concierge called over a uniformed bellhop and gave him the flowers and a room number.

It was not difficult for Amanda to follow the enormous basket of flowers to room 2714.

Li Xiao was in a fury. The object of that fury was Wang Jun. The two men sat alone in the big conference room.

“It was a mistake,” yelled Wang Jun.

“All our men just happened to take a break at the same time? Is that what you are trying to tell me? That the three men detailed to stake out Zhong Fong’s apartment just happened all to be called away. I’m supposed to believe this?”

“Talk to Commissioner Hu if you have a problem,” snapped back Wang Jun.

“You’re telling me you didn’t do this, Wang Jun?”

“I’m telling you this isn’t any normal investigation in case you haven’t figured that out yet.”

“We have new testimony from the Canadian director, whatever his name is, and so we reopened the investigation. Right?”

“Sure, if you have to believe that, believe that. But just for the record, I wouldn’t get carried away by the idea that you are in charge of this investigation. Everything here is going through his Hu-ness. He may look stupid, but he’s cleverer than you and me put together.”

“If that’s so, why did our cops miss Fong yesterday?”

“Because his Hu-ness had another surprise waiting for Fong.”

“What?!”

“Even you can’t be that young, Li Xiao. Fong’s a dead man. One way or the other, he’s a dead man.”

“I thought he was your friend, Wang Jun.”

“Funny how that works, isn’t it?”

Fong
was
Wang Jun’s friend. His only real friend. But things being what they were, Wang Jun would go to the wall to catch his friend and put him behind bars in a prison from which he would never emerge. The New China was growing and Wang Jun wanted to live his last days riding the shoulders of the giant rather than ground beneath its heels.

Amanda almost screamed when Fong slid up beside her on the busy street corner.

“You have the room number?”

“Don’t do that! You’ll scare the panties off a poor girl.”
“Do you?”

“2714.”

“Good, let’s go.”

“Where? To the Portman?”

“Where else?”

“Is he there?”

“Would we be going there if he was there?”

“Well, then where the hell is he?”

“Looking for me.”

“Oh,” she said and began to pick up her pace to keep up with him. It occurred to her that if Loa Wei Fen was looking for Fong, then he might in fact be following them now. It made her laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“All of this is. Yet it isn’t, is it? I used to know but now I’m not so sure.”

Fong smiled. “Welcome to China.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

“If you have to ask the question you wouldn’t understand the answer,” he replied.

But Fong was wrong. Amanda asked her question out of a sense of etiquette rather than out of any real need to know. The paradoxical nature of it all was not lost on her. Far from it. What she didn’t know, though, was that as Shanghai worked its awakening magic on her, it also brought her to the attention of the true centres of power in this ancient land.

They approached the Portman from the back and Fong led her through a maze of tunnels beneath the building to a freight elevator. He was about to step in when he said, “Go up to the lobby and take the elevator there. I’ll meet you at the twenty-seventh floor.” To her inquiring look he simply said, “I would look out of place in the lobby elevator. You would look out of place in here.”

They met in front of room 2714 without incident. He had her watch the bank of elevators as he deftly picked the lock. Within a minute they were inside Loa Wei Fen’s room.

“What are we looking for?” she asked.

“A trail. Something that helps us get from the assassin to the one who bought his services. The one who owns him.” As he talked he was methodically opening and searching each of the drawers of the desk.

As Fong went about his by-the-book search Amanda checked the bathroom, entirely devoid of cosmetics; the closet, two very expensive suits, finally the bed side table with the square carrying case. She opened the case and took out a computer notebook.

“What have we here?” She put the computer on the end table and fired it up.

“You know how to work things like that?”

“This is more complicated than I’m used to but they’re all basically the same.” The computer went through its virus check and came to an opening menu. Six down the menu was e-mail. Before he could point to it, she had already selected it.

It required a password.

She went back to the menu and transferred to the operating system. From there to the drivers. Each layer of the computer opened under her command. Finally e-mail access appeared. There was a single character beside the code.

“What does it mean?”

“
Tao
. The way.”

She backtracked and went to e-mail again. This time she supplied the English letters for the character. The screen lit up as if it were happy to see her.

“How do you know how to do that?”

“I used to write but I didn’t want Richard to see what I wrote so I got very knowledgeable about computer things like passwords and other protective devices. I used all of them.”

“You really didn’t want him to see your work.”

“I told you that already.” She returned her attention to the monitor. “What am I looking for?”

“His messages.”

“The ones he sent?”

“No, the ones sent to him.”

With the stroke of a few keys, up came the message that instructed Loa Wei Fen to kill Zhong Fong and then disappear for a very, very long time. Fong paled as he scanned the screen. Amanda looked closely at Fong, but before she could say anything he asked, “Who sent it?”

“You don’t care what it says?”

“I care. Who sent it?”

“Give me a second.” She backtracked to the operating system and worked through several screens. Finally she looked at him and said, “And the winner in Peoria is . . . E-M-29-7976.”

“That’s a code?” he asked, but his mind was far away. E-M-29-7976. Where had he seen that before? “Get his e-mail address and then let’s get out of here.”

They were outside the room a minute later. But as Fong was about to close the door, he stopped himself and headed back into the room. There, to Amanda’s amazement, he upended the bed and threw Loa Wei Fen’s few possessions into the toilet. As he emerged there was a strange smile on his face. All he said was “Our friend likes leaving messages, so I thought he might find it interesting to receive one. You’ve got his e-mail address?”

She had never seen this side of him before. She liked it.

Outside the Portman, he turned to her and said, “Can you get me the street address that goes with that e-mail number?”

“In North America I’d say no, but here the servers are so antiquated that I’ve got a chance. Back at the Equatorial there’s a business centre. They’ve got computers, I’ll give it a shot.”

“Can you send an e-mail message to him?”

“That I know I can do. What do you want to say?”

“’Loa Wei Fen, they’re trying to kill us both. We both have a lot to lose in this stupid game.’ Sign it Zhong Fong.”

She repeated the message and he nodded. “Where’ll you meet me?”

“How long should it take?”

“Sending a message, almost nothing. Finding the address of E-M-29-7976 could take a long time. Sorry.”

“When a screen has that number flashing on it, is the screen the sender or the receiver?” asked Fong.

“Why do you ask? Have you seen the number?”

“Yes, I think I have,” he said. Then slowly he added, “I believe the address is 29 Zhongshan Road, seventh floor, suite 976.”

“Are you sure?”

As if weary from it all, “Yes, but check it for me, will you.”

“Whose address is that?”

“The commissioner of police, Shanghai District.” Fong felt dizzy.

The upended bed and the general disarray of his few possessions didn’t penetrate Loa Wei Fen’s calm. The reversal of roles, however, did. He had been in their rooms, both of their rooms, but he was not prepared for them to be in his. The flashing light on his computer notebook caught his eye. When he punched through to e-mail and read the message from Zhong Fong, he had to control his twisting anger. Then he called up the program that would tell him the address of the sender of the e-mail. When it came up on the screen he smiled.

He would go to the Long Hua Temple. He would meditate into the eyes of the lion cub on the roof. Then as the darkness fell he would revisit the Shanghai International Equatorial Hotel, the address from which the e-mail had come.

Breaking into police headquarters would have been simple for Fong to do alone, but with a tall blond woman it proved a challenge. But he had no choice, he needed her computer expertise. So they went together. And since there was no real way to hide they just barged in.

It was the end of the workday and his Hu-ness never stayed past 3:00. They had been lucky and avoided Li Xiao, Wang Jun, and Shrug and Knock so that although they received some pretty strange looks they were not challenged. That is until they got up to his Hu-ness’s secretary’s office. Then the challenge was momentarily loud. Loud because the secretary screamed. Momentary because Fong grabbed her and stuffed almost an entire box of tissues into her face, before tying her to her swivel chair.

Even as he was doing it Amanda was getting the e-mail messages off the machine.

“Is this always so easy? Aren’t there security codes and stuff?”

“There are, but the machines here aren’t new. China’s been sold a stack of old machinery. Unused. But old. Old enough that the security features are rudimentary enough for me to dismantle.” As she finished she punched up a series of e-mail messages. There had been seventeen in the last twenty-four hours. Sixteen had been from the same address. She wrote it down.

Leaving the office they almost bumped straight into Shrug and Knock. Fong wouldn’t admit, even to himself, how much joy he got in cold-cocking his former assistant.

It was dark by the time they got back to the Equatorial. Amanda had to do some pretty fancy talking to get herself and Fong into the business centre a second time that day. “There is much demand for these services,” she was informed by the silk-bloused receptionist.

“May I see your supervisor?” Amanda said, smiling pleasantly. Within minutes of meeting the male supervisor, Fong and Amanda were being led into the interior of glass-walled office spaces. As the supervisor left them alone in the glassed-in office she turned to Fong and with a smile said, “It’s hard to say no to a tall blond.”

To which Fong responded straight-faced, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

When Li Xiao got back to the office it didn’t take him long to identify the blond lady who had arrived with Fong. Wang Jun identified her in three words and a twohanded gesture. “Tall? Blond? Tits?” His hand gesture accompanied the last. Then he said, “She’s at the Equatorial.”

Loa Wei Fen used his most cultured voice on the phone. “Does the hotel have a computer centre?” He nodded at the reply and said “Thank you.” He hung up, took one last look at the dishevelled bed and slipped out of Amanda’s room, heading toward the computer centre in the lobby.