The Hua Shan Hospital Murders

by David Rotenberg

  A setback, but not a disaster. All around him police officers were readying themselves. “For nothing,” he thought. Then he remembered the note he was carrying in his left hand. He knew he should get rid of it.

  He surveyed the scene before him. For a moment he considered abandoning his briefcase and its incriminating contents, but the explosive snuggled there had cost him a small fortune to obtain. He looked back at the middle-aged Chinese man who had been speaking English. A cop? Maybe. Then his eyes went to the younger woman at his side. Her gaunt features struck an odd note in him. “Was he responding to her beauty?” he wondered. Then he saw her sad eyes and he almost gasped aloud – they were filled with light. For the first time in many, many years he had a yearning to reach out and touch flesh that was not his own.

  She turned and looked right at him. His heart skipped a beat – then another. Her eyes moved past him. He had a terrible desire to tell the lady with the light in her sad eyes not to worry – that it was only he, Angel Michael, bringing back the light.

  Chen introduced himself to the two detectives who had started tracking down the origins of the titanium cage. He hadn’t gotten out more than an awkward hello before a familiar grin crossed the faces of the two men. Chen allowed a beat to pass then asked them to present the work that they had done so far. After an initial resistance they presented their preliminary findings because they quickly recognized two things: Fong and Lily were this guy’s personal backers, and this ugly young man with the country manners and peasant accent was a talented cop.

  Chen was happy that it hadn’t taken too long to win the men over. He knew there was much work to do and that Fong was counting on him. He asked to see the actual cage. The men unwrapped the thing and put it on the table.

  Chen stared at the titanium structure. The idea of the fetus in the thing left an indelible image in his mind. It was in fact his inability to implant such a thing in his wife’s womb that had led to the ignominious end of their six-year marriage. He had been lucky to have her even that long – everyone had said so. Even his mother had agreed when he told her of the divorce.

  Divorce was not complicated in China but it was highly frowned upon. Divorce in the countryside, where Chen lived, started with a trip to the county seat where the estranged husband and wife had to undergo counselling from a party representative. The advice, often a directive, was invariably to stay together. However, when Chen arrived with his wife, the party representative, a busybody old lady, took one look at him and said to his wife, “How long have you been married?”

  “Six years,” Chen’s wife replied.

  “You deserve a medal,” the party lady said.

  A phone call from the party representative was followed by a ten-minute wait; then there was a knock at the door. A man entered holding a document with a government stamp on it. It had been issued in record time by the marriage court. Chen was a single man. His wife was ecstatic. In fact, she seemed happier at their breakup than she had been on their wedding day – to say nothing of their wedding night.

  So, Chen was pleased when only six weeks later word had come that he was wanted in Shanghai. For once timing had worked in his favour. And then there was Lily. If Chen were honest with himself he’d admit that what little energy he had for patching up his marriage had dissipated after he’d met Lily. He found her infinitely appealing – although totally out of his league.

  Chen turned the titanium cage over. He was good with tools and understood technological things with surprising ease. He admired the skilled welding joins for a moment and then held the cage at arm’s-length. His keen eye immediately saw the complex internal symmetries of the piece. This was not a craftsman’s work but rather that of an artist.

  Artwork executed in metal was a rarity in China. Painting was common, even in the interior of slendernecked glass bottles. So was porcelain and other forms of pottery, but sculpture was almost exclusively confined to ivory carving. Yet here before him was a work of art rendered in the most complicated of metals – titanium.

  “Shanghai went through the Great Leap Forward in the fifties, didn’t it?” Chen asked.

  “Yeah, Shanghai’s part of China despite what Beijing likes to say,” one of the cops replied, wondering where this was leading.

  “So there were blast furnaces set up all over the city like in the country?”

  “It was before my time, Captain Chen, but yeah, I think there were,” the man replied.

  Chen nodded. It was before his time too but the Great Leap Forward was an idiocy that had left its mark. The idea had been to catch up to the West’s steel production by putting small blast furnaces in almost every commune. Then each commune, or in the city each urban unit, was given a quota of steel ingots they had to produce. The failure to produce the quota resulted in severe punishments for all involved.

  One small problem: the geniuses in Beijing never supplied any iron ore from which to smelt steel!

  Initially the quotas were met by tossing every conceivable metal object the people owned into the blast furnaces – farm implements, picture frames, cooking utensils, door knobs, etc. This simply resulted in the increase of the quotas, which in turn forced more and more sacrifices from the people. Before the end of the first year there wasn’t a wok left in all of China. By the end of two years almost every available piece of wood had been used to fuel the blast furnaces. The result was the denuding of the countryside and this led to massive desertification of valuable farmland. What land escaped the onslaught of the desert often lay fallow since the wooden farm tools used to work the land had been burned to fuel the blast furnaces. And of course farmers who spend their time working backyard blast furnaces don’t spend their time in the fields. Famine was the most immediate and ultimately the most profound result of the Great Leap Forward. Afamine that gripped the land and was felt throughout the Middle Kingdom. By some estimates as many as sixty million people starved to death as a direct result of the Great Leap Forward.

  The final irony, as if idiocy needed irony to make its point, was that over 80 percent of the steel produced was of such poor quality that it was completely unusable. That left a lot of scrap metal around. Artisans quickly learned to work in the metals that were suddenly so readily available – unlike good clay or quality ivory. In the dawning hours of morning, they could be seen by the furnaces trying different mixes of metals in an effort to find workable combinations. Many became quite proficient creating and working with new metals. Chen’s father had been one such artisan. That’s why Chen knew so much about this. After all, as the saying goes: “A dragon is born to a dragon, a phoenix to a phoenix, and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in a wall.”

  “Can we get a map of Shanghai from the period of the Great Leap Forward showing the exact locations of the blast furnaces?”

  “Sure, but . . .”

  “Would you mind?” The Shanghai cop was going to question Chen further, then he saw something hard in the man’s eyes.

  “Will do, sir.” The man left.

  “Thank you,” Chen said, then turned to the other cop. “Get me a list of all registered artists in the Shanghai district. The Great Leap ended in 1958. That’s more than forty years ago. I want to find out where all artists who are presently over fifty-five years of age lived during the Great Leap.”

  “So, they would be . . .”

  “Old enough to learn basic metallurgy during the Leap.”

  “This could take a while.”

  “Even the longest journey begins with a single step.”

  “We don’t quote Mao much anymore in Shanghai, sir.”

  “Nor do we in the country, but sometimes he was right. Just like a broken clock.”

  “Sir?”

  “Twice a day a broken clock tells the right time.”

  “Ah.” The man smiled at Chen then headed out to compile the list. Chen was pleased. These Shanghai cops weren’t half as nasty as he thought they’d be – and they even liked the only joke he knew.r />
  Then he looked at the cage and stopped smiling. There was nothing funny about a baby in a cage.

  The door to the Hua Shan Hospital had remained shut for what seemed like hours. No sound. No word from within. Finally the door opened slowly and Wu Fan-zi, still in full bomb protection gear, lumbered out onto the steps. He pulled the suit’s heavy headpiece off and let it drop to the ground with a thud. Then, still without saying a word, he re-opened the hospital door and went back inside. When he reemerged, he was carrying a large plaster fresco, almost five feet tall and a foot across. The lower half of it was still covered in flimsy brown wrap.

  Wu Fan-zi raised the thing over his head – looking to Angel Michael like Moses raising the tablets in rage upon seeing the Israelites worshipping the golden calf.

  Wu Fan-zi’s mouth opened and he shouted in fury, “What idiot had this delivered to the reception desk?”

  Fong felt Lily’s hand slip from his. He looked toward her but she was running up the steps yelling at Wu Fan-zi to be careful with that – that it was an antique.

  As she grabbed the fresco from Wu Fan-zi the wrapping came loose and exposed the entirety of the piece.

  Angel Michael gasped. The exposed section revealed a beautifully rendered figure of Prometheus, the god who had stolen fire from the other gods and given it to man.

  What little doubt Angel Michael had about his mission vanished. He whispered a prayer of thanks for this sign – this reassurance – and faded back into the crowd – so pleased with himself that he didn’t notice the round-bellied white man with the camcorder not twenty yards away – or the fact that he’d dropped the note he had in his left hand. As Angel Michael effortlessly moved through the street traffic he thought, “The Hua Shan Hospital’s abortion clinic could wait for another day. After all, there were so many other dark places in this town of eighteen million souls.”

  Fong closed the door to their apartment and before Lily could even put the fresco down Fong was on her, “What’s wrong with you? You’re a police officer. It’s illegal to own something like that. And to have it delivered to the hospital was just plain stupid.”

  The last word had come out so forcefully that he cringed, but he refused to back down. He was happy that the baby was at his mother-in-law’s.

  “So!” he demanded.

  Lily didn’t say anything. She turned from him and looked out the window at the grass courtyard – such a luxury in this city of pavement.

  Then the phone rang. Fong grabbed it. He listened for a moment then shouted into the mouthpiece, “What!” The desperation in his voice made Lily turn to him. He was ghostly pale as he hung up the phone.

  “What?” Lily asked carefully.

  Fong had to steady himself against the bureau.

  “What?” Lily asked again but even more quietly.

  Fong shook his head trying to clear it, then looked at Lily. He held out his arms to her and she slowly moved toward him.

  He held her tight. Very tight.

  “What was that, Fong?” she asked, a tremble in her voice.

  “It was the hospital.”

  “The Hua Shan Hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “A bomb, Fong?”

  “No.”

  Lily relaxed a little, slumping against him.

  “Another cage . . . with a fetus.” Lily stifled a cry. “In the third abortion surgery. Directly below your office.”

  “But no bomb?”

  “No bomb.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the commotion caused by your fresco arriving scared him off.”

  Lily pulled away a bit. “Maybe it did?”

  “Maybe . . .” Fong said, “it did.” Fong turned to go.

  “Do you need me at the hospital?”

  “Soon.”

  “See if the head nurse from the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital was seen, Fong.”

  “Good point, Lily. Very good point. . . . Lily?” He hesitated.

  “What Fong?”

  “I’d hang the fresco on the other side of the window so the figure is turned toward the centre of the room, not the side. It’s exquisite, Lily. Really special.”

  He smiled.

  She smiled back.

  Then he took a long look at her and wondered what his life would be like without her. “Call Chen. I want him at the hospital.”

  As Fong approached the Hua Shan Hospital he was once again met by the head of hospital security. The man’s mouth opened but Fong put up a hand for him to stop. Something had struck an odd chord in Fong. A very odd chord.

  He scanned the steps. Wu Fan-zi had been over there – the head of hospital security had been exactly where he was now – that had spurred Fong’s memory – but memory of what?

  “What?” he screamed at himself as Chen’s car screeched to a halt and the ugly young cop ran up to him.

  “Where is it, sir?”

  “In one of the operating theatres.”

  “Near where Lily works?” Chen asked. If Fong hadn’t been so preoccupied with his memory he would have noted the obvious terror in Chen’s voice. The terror of a man frightened of losing a lover, not of a man in fear of losing a friend.

  The head of security ushered Fong and Chen into the third operating room. The surgical team was standing to one side. The security chief stepped forward and pointed to one of the lower cabinets.

  Fong and Chen leaned down and there behind stacks of surgical supplies was the cage complete with fetus. Fong pushed aside the supplies and pulled out the cage. On the metal sheathing that was wrapped around the fetus was etched a phrase, in English: THIS BLASPHEMY WILL STOP. THE LIGHT WILL COME.

  Fong looked around the room and spotted the window high up on the south wall. “Do the ORs all have windows?”

  “One other does, the other four don’t.”

  Fong grunted, then turned to the head of security. “Has the room been swept?”

  “The whole area, sir. If there’s a bomb here we would have found it. Wu Fan-zi has been summoned.”

  “Twice in one day, he’ll be thrilled.” The man nodded and raised his shoulders in a what-can-you-do gesture. Fong turned to the surgical team. “Who found this . . . thing?”

  A young nurse stepped forward. Chen waited for Fong to begin his interrogation. When he didn’t, Chen took down the basics. While he did, Fong hurried out of the room and ran back to the front steps of the hospital. That’s where Chen found him twenty minutes later. Fong was standing at the bottom of the wide set of concrete steps scanning the now almost entirely empty vista in front of him. Chen approached him carefully. Without looking at the younger man Fong said, “Wu Fan-zi was over there, the head of hospital security was right there, Lily was beside me.” Fong looked around. “The crowd had gathered there behind the police line . . . the . . . the . . . the man . . . the white man . . . with the video camera had been over there.”

  After a prolonged silence, Chen prompted, “Sir?”

  “Shit,” Fong said aloud.

  “What, sir?”

  “A tourist–” Fong thought for a moment. “An American. White shoes. White belt. Golf shirt. Reading glasses on a silver chain around his neck. Red hair – though all Westerners seem to have red hair. Freckles. A Fujitsu video camera.” Fong was moving fast now and shouting orders to the nearby cops, “Find him for me. Start with the local five-star hotels. Set up a command post in the lobby of the Hilton. I want the hotels to know that we mean business.”

  “Sir, should I continue to track down the cage?” asked Chen.

  Fong stopped and looked at his ugly companion. “Take ten men. Tape off the entire area. I want every scrap of anything brought to me. Then you follow the cage, I’ll follow the tourist.”

  Chen handed Fong the notes he’d taken from the OR nurse. “I had her wait for you, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  The young nurse was country-round and her eyes were dark saucers of fear.

  Fong sat opposite
her in a small office that security had provided. “Would you like some tea?” Fong asked. She shook her head. “Fanta?” Again she shook her head. Her mouth opened and a few remarkably quiet words came out: “I’m afraid I may vomit.”

  “Why? What have you done?” Fong asked.

  Her “nothing” came out with a small quantity of spittle.

  Fong knew that vulnerable witnesses were sometimes valuable witnesses. “Fine,” Fong said. “Were you close with the head nurse of the abortion clinic at the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital?”

  “Who?”

  “The head nurse of the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital.”

  “Why would I know this person?” she demanded.

  “No reason,” Fong answered, then changed tack. “Do you like your work here?”

  She checked his face for traces of condemnation and seeing none said, “We are helping these women. Most of them are just girls.” Fong said nothing. He was waiting for more and it finally came. “Sometimes, though, it’s hard. So many. So small. Sometimes so . . .”

  Fong prompted with the word, “Lifelike?”

  Anger blossomed on the young nurse’s face. “How dare you! We are not killers here! We are . . .” but once again she ran out of words.

  Fong got the nurse to give him the basic facts about the use of the operating room in which the cage with the fetus had been found. It had been closed down at 10 p.m. the previous night like all the ORs. But in the morning they hadn’t opened up the room because there had been a bad smell that they couldn’t locate. So they’d ordered in a cleaning crew and doubled up the use of the other ORs.

  Fong thanked her and went to the hospital’s housekeeping office. An elderly man showed him the charts for cleaning rotation. As Fong leafed through the papers the man said, “It’s almost impossible to keep people at this kind of work now that the government doesn’t force people to do what needs doing.”

  “That so?” Fong asked looking up from the paperwork.