The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  He thought of the two divers who had died hating him; he thought of Higgins swollen and skinned like a monstrous pig; he thought of radiation sickness and the word “exfoliation.” He thought also of the enigma of Cuthbert. At home he ransacked his library, which lay hidden in a wardrobe that could not be opened without moving the bed. When he did so, old books tumbled out like corpses, each one a mood or hope or perception he’d once entertained for a long, sleepless night, before killing it in the morning.

  As an officer in the Hong Kong Police Force Chan didn’t need to be secretive about his reading. No one would have believed him anyway. He rarely admitted it, but it was a fact that his father had just had time to communicate a wanderer’s eclectic taste: the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats and e. e. cummings; the books of Lewis Carroll; the Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám-not in book form; the Irishman had known the seventy-stanza poem off by heart. What the wanderer had really communicated, though, was a Celtic tendency to seek answers in books.

  Chan had read a great deal about modern China and about the British, his colonial masters. He’d decided that the latter formed the greater enigma. Pompous, blundering fools for the most part, racist exploiters who had never begun to understand the true wealth or depth of the Oriental cultures they were plundering, yet it seemed that every now and then this insensitive people gave birth to a genius so exalted that it defied classification. The best book about China he’d ever read was by an Englishman who’d never been there and who didn’t know that he was writing about the PRC. By an uncanny coincidence 1984 was published the same year that Mao founded the People’s Republic of China. All the cruel perversity of Mao’s regime was contained in the first sentence of the book, which he had memorized in two lines as if it were a Chinese poem:

  It was a bright cold day in April,

  And the clocks were striking thirteen.

  It was from Orwell’s gray hell that Mai-mai had escaped and to which she’d finally returned. Indeed it was mostly Mai-mai he looked for in the books, and she was not difficult to find. In a manner of speaking she was the Asian twentieth century: a simple peasant caught between two heartless systems that had ground her to dust. At three in the morning, alone with the neon leaking through the curtains, Chan wondered if the same were not happening to her son.

  He should, he knew, have been concentrating on means of extricating himself from his predicament. Indeed the peculiar anguish of false accusation, a kind of spiritual nausea that clawed at the hackles, choked him from time to time with a murderous rage. Strangely, though, it passed in minutes. For long stretches of time his own case merged in his mind with that of a billion others. Frequently the image of an old Chinese man with long sparse beard and incongruous John Lennon T-shirt popped into his mind and seemed to beckon like a sage of ancient times.

  Ever since boyhood Chan had recognized in himself a fatal tendency to vibrate at the same frequency as certain tragic souls. On the rare occasions that he and Jenny had gone to the movies he always emerged choked from overidentification with the hero. Jenny was always thrilled by the action; horses, guns and blood cheered her up.

  Like a powerful lover, the old man was difficult to resist, but Chan foresaw only pain, embarrassment and failure. Thursday evening he dragged his feet on the way to Wanchai and took time to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the sage’s favorite liquor. When he arrived, the old man was alone and morose.

  “What happened to your meeting, your recruits?”

  The old man shrugged. “They both have New Zealand passports. What do they care about laogai? China, a quarter of the world’s population, can go fuck itself. They think.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “Not to the pictures. Ever since I showed them to you and you freaked out, I’ve been quiet about the photographs.”

  “I’m a special case. They killed my mother.”

  “Not so special. They killed a million mothers.”

  “Want me to go?”

  “I wanted you to be on time. You might have made a difference.”

  “Sorry.”

  The old man was working himself up to an unsagelike fury. “Why does nobody care? The Chinese prison system, the laogaidui, uses slaves, slaves, to produce wine, tea, paper, cars, opium, heroin that it sells to the West. Over fifty million people have been imprisoned in laogai since 1949; that’s almost the population of England. And nobody gives a fuck. Why? When Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet gulag, they practically beatified him.”

  “You know why. We’re yellow, Asiatic. The white man can’t relate to us. In the back of his mind we’re basically slave material anyway. Less than a hundred years ago we were selling each other into slavery in the West Indies and Brazil. They don’t care because we don’t care. Have a drink.”

  Chan went to the kitchen to fetch glasses. He opened the whiskey and poured two generous slugs. The old man hardly looked at the glass before knocking back half the contents. He breathed out appreciatively.

  “You have your uses.” He expelled some of his rage with a sigh. “You’re partly right, the race thing. It’s also the sheer mass: one point four billion! How do you even begin to communicate? I tell myself you’ve got to start somewhere. Hong Kong seemed a good place. But here everyone has other concerns. How to make money or how to escape. Or both. And then I have a credibility problem. I’m too old, too weird and not even Cantonese. I guess I come across as a pompous old fart.” The old man finished the whiskey in one long swallow, smacked his lips and held the glass out for more. “I’m out of sync with the times. Ezra Pound said that. Look, while we’re still sober, would you listen to my presentation? I recorded it. That’s what salesmen do these days, so I’m told.” He fetched a tape recorder from one of the shelves, placed it beside him on the sofa and switched it on. His voice emerged from the machine in a slow, steady and, to Chan, haunting rhythm.

  “Slavery is like malaria,” the voice said. “Forty years ago it seemed as if it had been eradicated worldwide except for a few small, isolated pockets. But nothing mutates like evil. The twentieth century will be remembered for many awful things, but who’s predicting that it will be the century when numerically more human beings were enslaved than at any time in history? No one except me.”

  Bad start, Chan thought. A shocking and difficult idea delivered pitilessly. On the tape a woman said irritably: “You haven’t told us why you were imprisoned in the first place.”

  “Good question. When I was nineteen, my father had saved up enough to send me to study humanities at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States of America. It was 1947. I specialized in English and American literature. After graduation I went back to be part of the great adventure of socialism, the finest challenge and the greatest revolution in the history of mankind.”

  There was a long silence while the tape wound on; then the old man finally resumed. “I had about a month teaching English at the University of Beijing before my first purge. See, no true Communist could believe that anyone would be dumb enough to leave the United States to return to China. I had to be a capitalist spy. From then on I was branded socially.”

  Chan got up to pause the tape. “Bad mistake.”

  The old man rolled his eyes. “I know.”

  “Never tell Chinese you’re branded socially. They’ll brand you socially.”

  “I know.”

  “For God’s sake, it was you who told me that stuff about cultures of shame, cultures of guilt.”

  The old man groaned. “You’re a ruthless coach.”

  “The Chinese have a culture of shame par excellence. To be branded socially is the ultimate sanction, a kind of death penalty. That’s how we’ve been manipulated by a ruling class for five thousand years.”

  The old man switched off the tape recorder. “You’re right, definitely lost them there. Tons too heavy.” He picked up the glass that Chan had replenished. “What the hell. Am I wrong or are they? I worry about human destiny, the obscenit
y of slavery in the late twentieth century. They think about what kind of washing machine they’ll have in New Zealand, how life will be without a Filipina servant. My soul may be black, but at least I have a soul.”

  “You should be more forgiving,” Chan said. “You had forty years to meditate on the human condition. They’re lucky if they get five minutes on the underground on the way home.”

  The old man finished the whiskey again and smirked. “Don’t insult my virility. Forty years thinking about the human condition, are you crazy? I spent forty years thinking about women. Why d’you think I live in the red-light district?”

  Chan watched the old man laugh. He was free, this old man; behind his outrage he walked with his god. Was that the way to go? In an inverted world, stand on your head and let the gods decide who was right? Did Chan want to end up like that?

  At the door the old man held his elbow for a moment.

  “Answer me one question. Thirty miles north over the border they’re starving girl orphans to death in state-run orphanages. Why don’t we care?”

  When Chan searched his face, the old man held up his hand. “I’m not being self-righteous here; it’s a simple question. The peasants dump little girls down wells; the state exterminates them. You know about it, I know about it, America and Europe know about it, it was on CNN-why don’t we care?”

  Chan was still pondering this question the next day when the commissioner of police himself telephoned to invite him to a meeting the following morning.

  27

  When Chan was shown into Cuthbert’s suite at Queensway Plaza, Commissioner Tsui was already there with Caxton Smith, the commissioner for security, and Roland Brown, the commissioner for the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Chan sat at the extreme end of the long table that was the main feature of the anteroom annexed to Cuthbert’s office; only the political adviser and his positively vetted English secretary were allowed to enter the office itself. Cuthbert sat at the head of the table with Roland Brown on his left, Tsui and Caxton Smith on his right.

  Over the years Chan had learned some of the semaphore that the English use in place of speech. Within seconds he had absorbed signals to the effect that the meeting was informal, that he was no longer in trouble, that indeed the three men staring at him were according him a measure of respect usually reserved for their own ranks; in other words, they wanted his help. Now it was time for someone to say something. Cuthbert coughed.

  “I’ve asked the commissioner for ICAC to be here simply to underline what we all already know. Roland?”

  It was Roland Brown’s turn to cough. Chan watched the Englishman work himself up to the infinitely painful act of communication. Brown searched in his pockets for something that never emerged, coughed again. As the head of ICAC he had powers in the colony greater than those accorded to the head of the FBI in America, but his shyness was known to be crippling. Finally he wriggled and spoke. Chan caught the words “radiation,” “death of three good men,” “uranium,” “panic reaction,” “apology in order” before the Englishman’s whisper merged with the rattle of a tea trolley outside the office.

  An English mandarin apologize? Chan was almost disappointed, as if he had watched a famous Pacific island, a landmark to shipping, subside slowly into the ocean and, with a yawn, disappear forever.

  “Well, there we are then.” Cuthbert beamed.

  Roland Brown stood up, nodded once to Chan and left without a word. It seemed from the looks on the faces of the two remaining Englishmen and Tsui that Chan had not merely been rehabilitated but elevated to a position of intimate friendship with these three powerful men. Chan saw an opportunity to take one small advantage.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  In unison the three men signaled that they were very happy for Chan to smoke. He tapped a Benson out of the box, lit up and inhaled gratefully.

  Cuthbert shuffled with a piece of blank paper in front of him. “In view of the fact that I don’t… I mean… you’re not… how shall I say?… not on my staff, perhaps the commissioner of police would explain a little of what we have in mind.”

  Clearly Cuthbert had not prepared Tsui for this moment, for Tsui threw him a quick glare. He drew a cough sweet out of a tin box that was on the table in front of him, began to suck. He thought carefully, it seemed, before speaking.

  “What we have in mind is simply that you, ah, carry on the good work. I think that’s about it, isn’t it, Milton?”

  Cuthbert frowned deeply at the piece of blank paper, and Chan was sure that Tsui had failed miserably to keep his end up, as the British put it. But then the expression on the political adviser’s face changed with startling abruptness. He turned to Tsui.

  “D’you know, Ronny, I think it is.” He smiled recklessly.

  “Well, there we are,” Caxton Smith said. It was the first and only time he spoke.

  Startled and only halfway through his cigarette, Chan realized that he’d missed some vital part of the semaphore, and now it was too late. As so often with this kind of Englishman, the punch line was left out of the joke.

  “Well, Milton, if that’s all, I think I’ll give Chief Inspector Chan a lift back to Arsenal Street,” Tsui said.

  Cuthbert smiled again. “Excellent idea, Ronny, excellent.”

  In the back of the large Toyota Tsui started to laugh. Chan saw that some kind of racial table had been turned. He wasn’t prepared, though, for the commissioner’s Cantonese expletive, uttered as he took a single sheet of paper from a file that he’d been carrying and gave it to Chan to read. “You made them look like a bunch of jerks” would be a rough translation of what he said. Chan studied the document, which bore the letterhead of the British Foreign Office and a TOP SECRET stamp. It was a photocopy of a fax to the political adviser and was clearly part of a series of communications.

  “Thanks for yours of 0800 yesterday, but frankly it’s not clear to us why C. I. Chan was suspected in the first place. The identity of the victims of this atrocity, together with the exact origin, ownership and intended use of the items discovered in the trunk is information of crucial importance to us at the present delicate state of play with the PRC. If C. I. Chan is the best hope, then he must be given every facility. Repeat, every facility.”

  The fax ended abruptly in an illegible signature. When Chan had read it, Tsui took it back, still laughing.

  There was no reason for Chan to follow Tsui into the police headquarters; the copy fax from London said everything. Tsui let him out on Lockhart Road. Crossing Wanchai to Queen’s Road, Chan waited for an old green tram to clank past. As always it was crammed with people, their faces pressed against the dirty glass windows. One in particular caught his eye: an old man with wispy beard, gaunt face and eyes that had passed beyond suffering into some other dimension. Chan waved at the old man, who smiled and waved back as the tram trundled toward Wanchai.

  28

  Chan noted with approval that the top secret fax from London had had a bracing effect on the local corridors of power. Cuthbert instructed that the chief inspector should have free run of what the diplomat called the Toys Department of the local chapter of MI6, and Commissioner Tsui promised to authorize, if necessary in retrospect, any electronic surveillance that Chan deemed necessary. From an ingenious collection of eavesdropping and visual surveillance devices, Chan chose a button-size microphone/transmitter with accompanying receiver and recorder and five cameras the size and shape of a lipstick tube. He locked the microphone and receiver in his safe at work and slipped the five cameras into his pocket.

  The owners of the warehouse in which the vat had been found had finally lost patience and, from Albuquerque, instructed lawyers in Hong Kong to threaten the commissioner of police with legal proceedings if he did not release their property, currently losing ten thousand dollars per day in rental income, but despite writs and threatened injunctions, the warehouse remained empty, blocked by police barricades at both entrances. Chan edged past the barricade, used keys to
open the door, pressed the heavy-duty light switch. Fluorescent strips blinked and blazed. The ladder remained where he had left it, under the still-defective light.

  He dragged the stepladder to a pillar ten feet from the flickering tube, took from his pocket a small tube of glue that he used to stick a Velcro pad to the top of the pillar. The cameras were wide-angle automatic focus and enclosed in Velcro jackets. Chan tried to guess the angle as he pressed the camera into the pad. He repeated the process on two other pillars, then took from his pocket a small plastic bag that he had partly filled with sugar previously ground in a mortar. He tossed the bag on the floor to dirty it, then dragged the stepladder back to the flickering light, which he dismantled in order to stow the bag. Finally he returned to each of the three cameras to switch them on. Powered by nickel cadmium batteries, they were activated by body heat, which triggered an invisible infrared flash. The batteries had to be replaced every five days.

  The remaining cameras he placed at the entrances to the warehouse.

  It was a long shot, based on Chan’s knowledge of the behavior of addicts. To a drug addict the substance he or she abuses acquires a religious value as well as an irresistible compulsion. Chan felt the same way about nicotine. If a fellow addict had seen Clare Coletti hide her dope, it would take unusual discipline, over the long term, to resist coming back to retrieve it. True, someone could have returned already and found the stash gone; that was a risk he could do nothing about; he’d only that day been given use of the cameras. He increased the odds in his favor by leaving both doors unlocked and dismissing the two uniformed policemen at the ground-floor lift lobby who for weeks had been checking the identity cards of everyone entering the building. He walked back to the police station, where he had scheduled meetings with murderers for the rest of the day.