The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  One by one he began to sort through the pictures. From the camera that he’d placed by an entrance, several shots taken in quick succession showed a pair of blue jeans-ragged-and bare feet in plastic thongs. The image was blurred from the speed of the subject’s movement, almost a run, Chan guessed. The telephone rang again. He ignored it. From one of the pillars a camera had caught a pair of emaciated hands like claws reaching up to the strip light. Aston came to stand by his side and picked up the telephone.

  “Chief’s busy,” he said in passable Cantonese. Chan glanced up for a second, then returned to the pictures. “He says five million,” Aston said in English with his hand over the mouthpiece, but by then Chan’s hearing was drowned by a rush of perception that drained the blood from his cheeks. He stared at a blurred image of slightly tilted Eurasian eyes, short, thick black hair and a fine face with which he was familiar.

  “Phone back later,” Aston said into the telephone, and hung up. He stood by Chan’s shoulder, stared at the picture that Chan found so disturbing-and understood nothing.

  In his last year of school in the New Territories Chan had participated in some Outward Bound courses, products of the character-building aspect of the English education system. One afternoon the teacher and the group had left Chan all alone in the bush with a compass, a map, a flask of water and some rations. It should have been a simple map-reading orientation exercise, but the compass was jammed. Chan wandered around in the muggy heat, pretty sure of his direction but continually frustrated by the way the paths ran. Dense cloud obscured the sun. By nighttime he was feeling desperate, though he supposed that they would come looking for him eventually. Then with the change in temperature that occurs at night the clouds dispersed and the stars came out. He checked the Big Dipper, the last two stars of which, they had told him, always pointed to the North Star. There it was, the North Star, almost precisely where he’d least expected it to be. Shaking his head, he turned the map through 180 degrees and walked in the opposite direction. He was back at camp in an hour. Detection was sometimes like that.

  With Aston watching he took a small knife with retractable blade out of a drawer, cut the photograph of the Eurasian face horizontally just under the eyes and placed the lower half over a copy of the picture of Clare that Moira had brought. He glanced up at Aston, who stared, disbelieving.

  “But she’s dead,” Aston pointed out. “It’s her murder we’re investigating.”

  Chan looked into his eyes for a moment and then away. It was a hard lesson for the young, who had such rigid views on life, that victim and perpetrator were often interchangeable roles. It was a rare case where one did not, sooner or later, acquire attributes of the other. For the murder victim to turn into possible murderer, though, that did pose problems. And of course there was no proof. What sane cop would bet a blurred photograph against dental records? But Chan knew he was right.

  “Check with every cosmetic surgeon with a practice in Hong Kong,” Chan said. “Start with the best, the most expensive, and work down.”

  As he spoke, the telephone rang again. “Three million and it’s a deal,” Kan said, after a long snort.

  “Two,” Chan said.

  “Two and a half.”

  “Two.”

  “Fuck your mother.” By the submissive voice in which Kan spoke, Chan knew that the deal was concluded.

  Fixing himself a late lunch of fried noodles at home, he stood and watched the fax machine roll out a message: “Wow! That was a quick response. Sure do appreciate it; at my age a girl doesn’t like to be kept dangling. Say, do you have any old cop stories I haven’t heard? That’s about the only thing I miss from NYPD, those canteen yarns. I’ll trade you. Jai gin.”

  Chan thought for a moment, wrote his reply and watched the machine go to work. If Moira’s daughter was still alive, who was dead? Who knew?

  Back at his desk he tapped a Benson out of the box and stared at the blurred Eurasian face in the photograph. He put the cigarette to his mouth and dialed Emily’s number at the same time. He was surprised that the billionairess answered her own telephone.

  Chan lit his Benson. “Hi.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Your scuba buddy.”

  He listened to her breathing.

  “I’ve been expecting you to call.”

  “I know.”

  “Come round tonight. I have a dinner engagement that’ll take most of the evening, so make it about eleven-thirty.”

  “Shall I bring your present?”

  A long pause. “Yes, why not?”

  That evening he waited until the police station was reduced to its night skeleton staff. Then he strolled to the tea room and bent down under the sink to retrieve the plastic bag he had found concealed in The Travels of Marco Polo, after the trip on Emily’s boat.

  43

  Opium: Chan knew all about it. The story begins with a field of poppies in the Shan states on the border between Laos, China and Burma. Hmong tribesmen collect the sap first in small wooden bowls, then bundle it in tiny bamboo parcels: raw opium. Chinese traders of the Chiu Chow clan exchange salt, iron bars, silver coins for the harvest that begins each year in February.

  As a seventeen-year-old cadet he’d taken part in busts of some of the last opium divans of yesteryear. He remembered small rooms with bunk beds, bamboo pipes with bowls a third of the way up the stem, spirit lamps and the sweet, heavy smell. Emaciated prostitutes combined the vices, selling in one market, buying in the other. Whores aside, the clients were mostly men, often middle-aged. Chan remembered his first corpse. Everyone else in the divan was so stoned they had not noticed the old man die. The old man hadn’t noticed either, to judge from the look of rapture on his face.

  Opium was a subtle high that left the American warrior spirit unsatisfied, so when the number of GIs stationed in Vietnam increased to the hundreds of thousands, the Chiu Chow sought ways to improve their product. Encouraged by Ho Chi Minh, who saw the proliferation of the debilitating drug among the Americans as a legitimate war aim, and even by the CIA, which participated in the opium traffic from Laos to help pay for the war, the traders saw a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity. In factories hidden in Hong Kong, Thailand, South Vietnam, Taiwan-anywhere but Communist China during its puritanical phase-raw opium was added to drums of hot water and dissolved with lime fertilizer and ammonia: morphine. Boil the morphine with acetic anhydride for six hours at eight-five degrees Fahrenheit: brown heroin, known as brown sugar or simply Number 3. Asians smoked it or injected it like that and were satisfied, but the West needed a bone-jarring jolt to raise it from its strange despair. Add the Number 3 to alcohol, ether and hydrochloric acid. Sometimes there was an explosion that carried away the triad “cook” and most of his factory, but if performed well, the process produced Number 4 or pure white heroin; the American armed forces had found their high.

  A hundred thousand GIs took their habit home, where it multiplied. The Chiu Chow adapted quickly to the huge new market on the other side of the world. With profit margins at over 1,000 percent they hardly bothered to smuggle plain opium anymore, and as a consequence nobody used it.

  Well, almost nobody. Emily’s secret package continued to baffle him. A setup? A test? A gift? Why opium?

  It was close to midnight by the time Chan’s taxi turned into Emily’s drive. Expecting a servant to open the door, he was surprised that the mistress herself stood in the doorway leaning against the frame. She held the top of a green silk kimono together with one hand.

  “You’re late.”

  “I know.” Chan held up a cheap black fiberglass briefcase. “I brought your gift back.”

  She let him in and closed the door behind him. He watched her lock all three bolts and switch on an alarm at a console by the door. A minute red light started to flash.

  “Burglars are a risk, I guess?”

  “Kidnappers. You know that.”

  She led him through the house to the veranda at the back. On a long marbl
e table she had set out an opium pipe and a spirit lamp. He sat at the table, unlocked the black briefcase, took out the plastic bag with its sticky black contents, which he placed in front of her, locked the briefcase again.

  He said: “I thought you were setting me up.”

  “I was. I was going to have you busted by an ICAC officer who wants promotion after June; then I changed my mind. Wasn’t that nice of me?”

  “Xian told you to get me under control?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  She touched his cheek. “Oh, you’re such a pretty boy I couldn’t stand to see you get into trouble.” She said it without a smile, almost mournfully. “I told him it wouldn’t work. You’re the martyr type: better death than compromise.”

  Chan scowled. “Just out of interest, why opium?”

  Emily looked away over the Lamma Channel. “It’s a family tradition. My father smoked; so did my grandfather. I never knew that Dad indulged every Friday night until Milton Cuthbert told me. When I confronted my father, he explained that working for the British, you need something to remind you from time to time that you’re Chinese. For him, smoking was a way of making contact with the ancestors. For me, it brings relief from stress.”

  “I should arrest you.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “You’d tell your friend Xian. He’d threaten to explode an atom bomb in Central.”

  Emily winced. “I know nothing about that. I heard the rumor about weapons-grade uranium from someone in government only yesterday. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “You asked me up here just to tell me that?”

  She opened the package, lifted it up to her face, inhaled, set it down again.

  “You must have spoken to Milton by now. I’ve heard that your investigation has expanded.”

  “It’s becoming a very Chinese investigation. It grows without progressing.”

  She smiled thinly without looking at him. “You think I’m the world’s biggest bitch?”

  “Laogai,” Chan said.

  It was like hitting a fairground target and causing loud bells to ring, except that the bells were violent tears. Chan thought of a child in deep pain, searching for comfort while its body contorted with sobs. A dedicated interrogator would drive home the advantage. Chan looked away, waited.

  “Excuse me.” She held the tears long enough to rise from the table and walk quickly into the house. Chan heard a door bang and more sobs muffled by the building. It took her fifteen minutes to recover herself and return. She had switched kimonos. This one was an austere black drawn tightly up to her neck.

  She sat down again more or less composed. “Perfect timing. I must congratulate you.”

  “You wanted to know what I knew. Now you know. You want me to go?”

  Her eyes hovered over the opium. “Such a reluctant detective. And everyone said you were a fanatic.”

  Chan lit a cigarette. “I don’t like wasting time. You can help my investigation because you know something about Clare Coletti. This even a dunce like me can deduce. You are Xian’s main front in Hong Kong, so you know why he’s so damn interested in this case. Either you want to talk or you don’t. I can’t make you do things. You belong to Xian. He bought you ten years ago.”

  Until he had spoken, Chan had not realized how angry he was. He was begging a possible accomplice to provide information because she was rich and powerful enough to despise the law. This was all wrong. No, it wasn’t wrong; it was Chinese. Refusing to look at her, he stared into the billion-dollar night. Below, moving lights-red, green and white-traced the movements of tankers. He felt her hand move over the table, slip over his own.

  “Sleep with me.”

  “No.”

  “How about underwater? We can use the pool.”

  He faced her in surprise.

  She smiled. “Joke.” She touched her hair. “Is disliking me more difficult than you thought?”

  “Yes,” Chan admitted. “But I won’t sleep with you.”

  She withdrew her hand. “Then if you want your answers, you’ll have to share a different pleasure with me. You’re right, there’s nothing in the world you can do to make me talk. Only the guilt can do that. Without opium I don’t think I’ll have the guts; we can’t all be righteous heroes. Why should I smoke alone? If you want to solve your case and save the world, a little smoke is no price at all to pay.”

  “No.”

  She held his chin between finger and thumb and pulled his head around. “That no wasn’t half as convincing as the first. I think you like the edge. I think you made love to me eighty feet under water because you’re as curious about death as I am. Opium can take you into death. It’s a privilege the poppy offers people like us. With the body anesthetized, you walk through a door, and there it is: eternity in all its glory. Who knows what a man like you might find there?”

  He watched her skilled fingers roll a tiny piece of the opium into a ball. She heated it on a pinhead over the spirit lamp. Her movements were too quick to follow. In less than a second she was holding the pipe up, tilted sideways over the spirit lamp. She sucked while jabbing the bubbling black ball with the pin to allow air to pass. She consumed the first dose in a second.

  “Don’t try it so you’ll never know how good it is, isn’t that what they say? To someone like you, though, that’s an inducement. Take the pipe.”

  “No.”

  “I can tell you everything you want to know. Not just about the case. I know so much. I’m weary with all this knowledge. I want to share it with a true hero who will know what to do with it.”

  She touched his hair delicately with the tips of her fingers. It was eerie how her personality had begun to alter. He sensed a burden not of knowledge but of loneliness. She seemed almost shy. Her voice was softer and slower with a girlish lilt of longing. “Your friend, for example, that old man in Wanchai-I know about him.”

  “You do?”

  “I knew about him long before I knew about you. So many times I’ve been on the point of going to see him. I have information he could use, a whole head full. When you protected him, I admired you. I wanted to be like you. I wanted even more to be like that old man. Can you imagine, the purity of his soul? To live at peace with oneself like that…”

  Her arm was around his shoulders. In her other hand she held the pipe. “It’s not like sex, my friend. I promise you, you’ll feel no connection, no obligation afterwards. Just a wonderful peace.”

  He watched her prepare the pipe again. “Imagine, eight whole hours free from the demon that drives you. It will be the only holiday of your life.” She caressed his head. “Be kind to yourself for once; it’s only addictive if you do it a lot.”

  When she had finished preparing the pipe, he hesitated, then bent forward to inhale. In the bowl of the pipe the black ball burned away.

  He was disappointed to find that the drug had no apparent effect, except for a mild improvement in his patience. He slipped a hand into his pocket to flick a switch on the microphone that would activate the tape recorder and waited until she had smoked another pipe of her own. The receiver was locked with the tape recorder in the black briefcase.

  “Milton told you he used me. But I’m sure he didn’t tell you what for?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “I was a go-between. Xian wasn’t happy about the Joint Declaration between London and Beijing; nobody had consulted him about it. He insisted on a secret protocol. Milton had to agree to his demands. There’s no border control on anything Xian wants to move out of China into Hong Kong. That was the deal. Of course it’s not the sort of thing anyone wanted written down, and neither Xian nor Milton was openly talking at that stage. That’s why they used me.”

  Chan sat still, trying to absorb a simple phrase: no border control. He should have guessed; the most appalling answers are often correct. So much fell into place when the message of those three words was properly absorbed.
He saw the outline of a fine historical irony: England as reluctant comprador; a drug that was steadily corroding Western societies.

  “They let him bring anything in?”

  “Anything at all. And he can ship from here too. Of course, once it leaves Hong Kong, it’s his risk.”

  “And he runs the army in southern China?”

  “He and sixteen other generals. Little by little they’ve bought up more than half the major public companies in Hong Kong, using proxies, of course. They’ve bought Hong Kong. It’s simple, but it’s brilliant. Shanghai collapsed in ’49 because the West took all its money away. They won’t do that this time because half the local companies are supported by Chinese shareholders with unlimited funds. As the British found last century, nothing is more reliable than narcotics.”

  “You’re their agent. You launder the money, procure the proxies, set up the companies. That’s what you do?”

  She nodded. “When it started, I didn’t know anything about laogai. I’d like you to believe that.”

  It was possible. Laogai even now was hardly more than a rumor. The press rarely mentioned the slaves in the gulag over the border. In Mongkok it was no more than a Chinese whisper. Chan thought of an old man with wispy beard, John Lennon T-shirt and tunnels for eyes.

  After the second pipe Chan felt a deep relaxation penetrate to the core of his being. Nerves that had been clenched for a lifetime stretched like cats and purred.

  Emily carefully replaced the pipe on the table. “Before Milton I was a normally romantic twenty-six-year-old. I’d had only one other lover. Since him I’ve had hundreds, but no one even comes close. It was a bizarre triangle. I found him fascinating. Xian needed me. Milton was transfixed by Xian. At first I didn’t understand. Milton’s the most cultivated man I’ve ever met. His Mandarin is better than mine; his Cantonese is perfect; his Latin and Greek are not half bad. His main hobby is translating classical Chinese poets. Xian is a rough peasant with no education, twenty words of English and the heart of a butcher. But Xian’s instinct for power is infallible. Only Mao came close, and he’s dead. Milton told me once that he’d trade a lifetime’s erudition for one minute with a finger on a true lever of power. He’s a bystander, and Xian’s a major player; that’s the difference. Another pipe.”