The Case of the Chinese Boxes

by Marele Day

  She obliged like an obedient child. The eyes were bloodshot as hell and not focused. It looked to me like more than Valium.

  ‘Would you like the police to ask you questions about the cook?’

  ‘The key,’ she said, and sighed briefly. ‘You must find the key. Be a good girl and find the key.’

  ‘No, Mrs Chen, I will not find the key. I have taken myself off the case. I am no longer your hired hand. Find someone else to run round in circles.’

  I was in the vestibule trying to get out. It was locked from the inside. I’d made a stunning exit but was still stuck in the house.

  Charles to the rescue. Or so I thought.

  ‘My mother is . . . sick, she has taken . . . medication . . . ’ The Chen cool didn’t extend to the son. If he’d been a nail-biter they would have been down to the quick by now. He had more nervous energy than he could contain. ‘You must find the key, it is imperative.’

  ‘That’s what your mother said, but I’m afraid imperatives have lost their charm. Would you kindly let me out of this house?’ I looked at the ornate furniture. It didn’t buy you peace of mind.

  Mrs Chen floated into the vestibule. ‘Charles, let Miss Valentine out. She has to find the key.’

  Charles looked like he was about to go down on his knees and beg me.

  ‘Open the door, Charles.’

  ‘Tell her, for Christ’s sake, tell her!’

  ‘Open the door, Charles.’

  Helplessly he opened the door, his assertiveness limited to one outburst.

  I was out. Onto emerald-green pastures that looked like they’d been manicured rather than mown.

  I got back in the Daimler, took off my high heels and drove away.

  Instead of heading west when I got to the city side of the Bridge I went east. To the Botanic Gardens. A breath of relatively fresh air.

  I swung the car down past St Mary’s Cathedral. A wedding party was there, the bride and groom and the rest of them getting their photos taken on the steps. There were lots of hats about and everyone exuded an air of money. I hoped they would live happily ever after.

  I parked the car and entered the Gardens. The joggers were fitter now than they used to be and shorts were shorter. I liked that.

  Office girls and boys were sitting on the grass eating their sandwiches and getting a weekday tan. I strolled past a pond that had an island of wilderness in the middle of it. Ducks swam by silently, gliding along the surface while their webbed feet paddled through the murky brown water. I headed down to the blue water, the harbour with its rock wall. A young woman came along the walkway pushing a pram. Just like an English children’s storybook with nannies in the park. Except in English storybooks you don’t have harbours like this. There was traffic out there, speedboats and the odd windsurfer. From this angle the Bridge was huge and arched like an old-fashioned amusement arcade. The water was the colour of my shirt and there wasn’t too much garbage in it. It was all fairly picturesque, the only eyesore the green and red floating restaurant that reminded me of something David would make with his Lego when he was feeling particularly perverse.

  It was a long way from Chinatown and even further from St Ives.

  I’d walked out of the Chen house and off the Chen case. I didn’t care about their troubles any more or what it was Mrs Chen had to, for Christ’s sake, tell me. Such a lot of trouble for one little key. It might well have been lying at the bottom of this very patch of water I was looking at. That was one theory, that the robbers had dumped the load in the harbour.

  An hour later I was still thinking about it all. Out of the Chen house but maybe not off the case. It was like leaving off reading a good book because you didn’t like one of the characters. I was curious, curious to know how it turned out. The only way to do that was to keep reading.

  There’d been a few more additions since the last time I’d visited the State Library. On Macquarie Street, alongside the old yellow-brown sandstone building was a new glass and marble one. You could see white painted metal staircases inside. I thought I’d approach the old from the new and went up to the automatic circular doors. I had to wait a full half minute before the inner part would open, a subtle hint perhaps not to try and do a runner here with any books.

  Inside was like a hotel reception area. Mushroom pink carpets and dark blue vinyl lounge chairs, and a circular information desk.

  I melted into the chairs for a minute to take it all in. Then I walked up the stairs, round and about, and down more stairs to come out to the entrance of the old Library.

  In books lie the soul

  of the whole past time

  the articulate audible

  voice of the past

  when the body

  and material substance

  of it has altogether

  vanished like a dream

  I saw Tasman’s inlaid map and walked on the strip of grey carpet over the surrounding ocean. There were even cherubim breathing out wind to give the ships fair sail.

  The old section of the Library had received a new lease of life as well. There was now carpet inside and smart dark red filing cabinets. At the entrance were two tasteful displays of pink, grey and black silk flowers in large vases, no doubt fashioned by one of our leading craftspeople. On commission. There was a lot of money going around for such things in 1988.

  Books still lined the walls, their various colours like tiny pieces in a huge stained-glass mural. Above them light filtered down from pale pink and blue glass ceiling panels.

  Getting into the computer catalogue was a bit like trying to get information out of Mrs Chen. You knew there must be something there but it kept going blank when you asked the wrong question.

  Nothing came up for ‘key’. Nothing came up for ‘Triad’. Something came up for ‘Chen’ but it was ‘Ch’en’ and all historical. All that came up for ‘puzzles’ were kids’ ones. ‘Dragon’ brought up Chinese ornament: the lotus and the dragon, and The Dragon: nature of spirit, spirit of nature. ‘Tong’ and ‘secret societies’ brought up the following—Primitive revolutionaries of China: a study of secret societies in the late nineteenth century; The sociology of secret societies; and Tong in Cheek (Cherry Delight Thrillers).

  At the desk I went through the rigmarole of filling out the order slips and waiting. A twenty minute delay. There was a hush like I couldn’t believe, the light grey carpet absorbing any stray sighs and grunts. The other readers were a mixed bunch, people who were in there because they liked books, others because they liked information.

  Twenty minutes. There were better ways of filling in time than watching other people read. The computer wasn’t the only way to get information. Its store of knowledge was greater than mine and it had a fantastic memory. But it didn’t have legs and it didn’t know it was in a library surrounded by books. I did and I was.

  I walked to the shelves and took out some dictionaries of symbols. I was looking for keys, and boxes, preferably Buddha boxes.

  There was nothing under ‘boxes’ but the other entry made interesting reading. And it wasn’t all irrelevant.

  ‘The key was a power to open the heavens and hells to many early religions and an attribute of numerous early deities.’ It figured largely in all cultures and in all mythologies, including Christian. ‘Power of keys’ referred to Matthew xvi, 19 and the ecclesiastical authority of popes. It rested on a key. Jesus said to Peter, ‘I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’ Is that why the Chen family remained influential? The power of the key?

  I looked for instances of keys in Chinese folklore.

  ‘A key is always given to an only son to lock him into life.’

  Charles Chen was an only son. And he was a nervous boy. Was it his life and death that the key affected? Did he have some curious disease that could only be comforted by that dragon key? Could the gold of that key help his ‘illness’ in the same way that copper bracelets were supposed to ease arthritis?

  Another dictionary told me tha
t locks had been in existence since 2000 BC. More significantly, in the ‘sixteenth century the combination lock, borrowed from the Chinese, came into vogue for jewellery boxes and safes’. Boxes for keeping treasures hidden, holy relics even.

  But a combination lock didn’t require a key.

  So why did James Ho want a description of the Chens’ key? A detailed description of the key.

  I went to the serials section and sifted through China Reconstructs till I came to the November 1987 issue. All the same information was there as in the photocopy that Ho had given me. But there was more.

  There were photos of the Buddha boxes. They were indeed opulent and fitted the descriptions given in the written word. I looked at the photos closely. It was a great pity they didn’t show all sides of the boxes.

  Because there was one detail missing.

  My pile of books came from the stacks. A small pile. There were only three books—the revolutionaries, the sociology, and Cherry Delight. I would save Cherry for dessert.

  The sociology told me that the Triad Society began when monks at a monastery named Shao-lin chih helped the Manchu government defeat a small but formidable kingdom. All one hundred and eight monks were subsequently persecuted by jealous government officers, but five of them resolved to form a secret society in order to dethrone the Manchus. They were a fighting order and practised what became kung fu.

  They started off as Robin Hood type bandits; all men were brothers in the Triad, regardless of rank in the outside world. The book quoted one of the Triad ‘poems’:

  After joining the Hung Men (the Triad), I

  find that all members are brothers,

  I am not covetous of money nor greedy of other’s offers,

  So kind that you, my brother, come to initiate me,

  How could I forget your mercy and betray the Family.

  Primitive Revolutionaries told the same story and more. There was a long glossary of terms in the back, among them euphemisms for killing—‘wash the body’, and ‘wash the face’ which translated into ‘cut off the head’. A hand was described as a five-clawed dragon.

  It also gave the procedural details of a Triad initiation ceremony, which often took place in a temple. I found that interesting. For the initiation ceremony the temple was called the City of Willows and represented the flight of the five from the Manchus.

  The recruits had to go through stages to get to the altar where the ceremony was completed.

  As I looked at the plan of the City of Willows I thought of the temple in Glebe. The altar in Glebe was on the southern side of the temple but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be moved to suit the occasion.

  The temple could easily be transformed into a Triad City of Willows.

  For that matter, so could any room with four walls.

  I came to the last offering, Tong in Cheek. There was a photo on the cover of a woman in a wig and false eyelashes, baring a breast and a revolver. The blurb said:

  I’m Cherry Delight and I’m good at what I do. No boast, just fact. With revolver or automatic I can put six out of six in a bullseye, or a body. My hair is naturally red—hence the Cherry—and a Delight is what I am for people I like, or those I want to destroy . . . I love sex and I hate the Mob . . . I can speak six languages and kill without saying a word.

  Cherry turned out to be a sharpshooting, rooting, tooting bimbo; mainly rooting. As far as she was concerned the Tongs were just another version of the Mob, just as shootable, just as rootable.

  The Library was no place for Cherry’s delights.

  When I walked back over the ocean of Tasman’s map Detective Sergeant Jim Campbell was waiting. In plainclothes—a light grey windcheater, though everyone else was in shirt sleeves. He had to hide the gun somewhere. Navy-blue trousers, tight across his thighs.

  ‘Afternoon, Sergeant,’ I said without stopping. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’

  He followed me down the stairs, sidestepping to avoid treading on a thin-armed young man sitting in the sun reading.

  ‘Been to a wedding. Mickey Doolan’s daughter. Thought I might browse the dudes. You never know what weddings and funerals might bring out of the woodwork.’

  He drew level with me, pacing fast to keep up. ‘Heard you had a bit of bother.’

  ‘What bit of bother would that be?’

  ‘Yesterday. Glebe. Able to leap temple walls in a single bound.’

  ‘It was no bother, no bother at all. How did you get to hear about it?’

  ‘It’s usually quiet down that end of Glebe on a Sunday afternoon. Wasn’t so quiet yesterday. Trying out for a part in The Flying Nun?’

  Very funny, I thought, but I wasn’t laughing. Not even smiling.

  ‘What’s it to you what I do with my Sunday afternoons?’ I stood still now. We’d reached the quiet street where the Daimler was parked. I wasn’t going to invite him in. He probably had a car parked in a No Standing zone anyway.

  ‘Thought you might be on to some breakers.’

  ‘The only place I’d be on breakers is Bondi.’

  He laughed. Or rather, said, ‘Ha, ha. Bank breakers. Thought maybe they were holed up in the temple. Religious asylum or something.’

  ‘I’m sure if they’d been there you would have found them. Anyway, the matter is no longer of interest to me,’ I said airily. ‘I’m no longer looking.’

  ‘You’ve found what you were looking for?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Boredom set in.’ I yawned. ‘Like it is now. Good day, Sergeant.’

  I parked the car in Queen Street, Woollahra, and walked into the gallery where the Chinese detective had shown me some of his six thousand years of civilisation.

  The same girl was there and she recognised me. ‘You are friend of James,’ she said. That’s debatable, I thought, but smiled just the same. ‘James my friend too,’ she said, with a hint of one-upmanship.

  Then I noticed her earrings—diamonds in an antique gold setting, replicas of the ones he’d given me. Or maybe it was me who got the replicas. I stopped smiling.

  ‘I would like to look at the cabinets,’ I said to her, like a serious buyer.

  ‘Cabinets?’

  ‘Boxes.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she beamed. ‘You like boxes? This way, please.’

  She took me to the same room and I looked at the same boxes. Looked at all of them, from every possible angle. Even picked one or two up and examined the bottom of them. Searched in vain for that one small detail that had been missing from the photos in the Library.

  The keyhole.

  Not one of the boxes had a keyhole.

  So what was the key all about and why was James Ho willing to trade six thousand years of civilisation for a detailed description of it?

  I brought the photo of the key back to mind. Not the dragon but the intricate unlocking mechanism. The six teeth. Some short, some long.

  They couldn’t physically unlock a series of boxes with no keyhole.

  But they might tell you how to do it.

  This pebble created such ripples on the not so calm lake of my mind that I hardly noticed bumping into two people on my way out of the cabinet room.

  Two people that I’d seen before. And in two separate places. A man and a woman.

  As I bumped into him the man raised his walking-stick in a reflex action then relaxed it and smiled. His mouth was full of gold teeth. They were almost as intriguing as the badly botched skin graft on the side of his face. He pulled his black hat down to cover it and I saw again the same flashy gold ring he’d worn at the snooker room in Cabramatta.

  The woman wore leather trousers. She flicked her hair back, the same gesture I’d seen in the lift at the Airport Hilton. I remembered then the destination she had given the cab driver.

  Cabramatta.

  And here they were together, the man in the black hat and James Ho’s high-class prostitute. What a coincidence. Sydney was a small town. But I wouldn’t want to draw a map of it.

  It was just after
two when I arrived at Brian Collier’s office.

  ‘You’re lucky to catch me,’ he said. ‘I was about to go off for a late lunch.’

  ‘Sounds like a great idea. Where are we going?’

  ‘The Rose and Crown. You remember.’

  Yes, I remembered. It was at the Rose and Crown that I’d met up with this man that I hadn’t seen since childhood.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of fans out there,’ he said, handing me a box. It was full of letters. There must have been a hundred of them.

  We ordered rare steaks and a couple of bottles of Cascade, and went to the same table by the window. Brian’s table.

  We’d hardly sat down when a young blond man wearing glasses came up. ‘Brian Collier?’ he asked nervously. Brian looked at him, neither affirming nor denying. ‘Got a minute? I’d like to talk to you.’ He looked at me then back to Brian. Brian still didn’t answer. ‘Later maybe,’ said the young man. Brian nodded and went back to his drink.

  ‘You never stop working in this game,’ Brian said when he’d gone, ‘not even at lunchtime.’

  Our number was called and we went to the counter to pick up our steaks, adding condiments—mustard for me, tomato sauce and horseradish for Brian.

  ‘I have one of these two, three times a week; and you know something? They’re always perfect. How’s yours?’

  I swallowed the mouthful I was chewing. ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to open your mail?’

  ‘You curious?’

  ‘Moderately. News on the bank job is as dead as a doornail. You never know, there might be something of interest in that lot.’

  He had a slightly more persuasive manner than Detective Sergeant Campbell, more open-handed, never overbearing. I told him about Campbell.

  ‘Things must be quiet on that front too if they’re watching the private detectives.’ He put down his knife and fork and leaned on his elbow. ‘You know, if those boys keep their mouths shut and don’t get too cocky they’re home and hosed.’

  ‘The cops aren’t going to learn anything more by watching me. I’ve taken myself off the case.’