The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  “No.”

  “It’s the price you must pay, Chief Inspector. Nothing is free in Hong Kong, and you have nothing to offer except your virginity.”

  He watched while she prepared the pipe and found himself dutifully inhaling the sweet smoke once again.

  “Sex and opium are the best anesthetics. With sex you forget everything for a moment; with opium you remember even your worst transgressions with pleasure.”

  “Clare Coletti,” Chan said. The words emerged slowly as if from another mouth in a graveyard tone. “She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

  He had saved the question until now, expecting a dramatic reaction, but Emily appraised him as if checking his level of intoxication. She looked away, ignoring the question. “Milton taught me to smoke, of course; Dad warned me not to. But I guess Milton knew I would need it. He said if it was good enough for Thomas De Quincey and Sherlock Holmes, it was good enough for him. He’s very disciplined about it, of course.”

  “Sherlock Holmes used cocaine,” Chan said, and almost giggled. He remembered the diplomat’s extreme languor on the boat that night. He felt Emily’s eyes studying him.

  “It had to be you; there’s really no one else I can talk to. And it had to be opium because by morning this will be no more than an opium dream. You won’t even be sure if you’re remem bering correctly. You’ll have no proof.” She gave a short, humorless laugh. “For your purposes it really would have been preferable to screw me.”

  “Clare…” He found he had difficulty remembering the last name. How odd, it was a surname he’d been living with for weeks.

  “Coletti.” Emily placed both hands palms down on the marble table, stared at them for a moment. She heaved a great sigh. “Is she still alive? Perhaps she is. Does it matter that much? Let me start at the beginning. For years Xian had been thinking about linking up with an overseas organization on a permanent footing. He started negotiations with people in New York. He never mentioned anything to me about weapons-grade uranium. Then all of a sudden the most ridiculous woman in the world shows up, and-”

  He had been exerting all his will to concentrate on what she was saying. He tried to convince himself that it was important, but somewhere in the middle distance other events of far greater significance were taking place. It was rude to ignore Emily, and there was his professional reputation at stake; he bent his mind back to the case. In his bending it, a tension grew that he was unable to control.

  It happened suddenly, like a door springing open that had been locked for an age. In a blink he was not with Emily anymore. It was a summer’s day, and he was with Jenny on their old sampan. He noticed the colors-golds, blues and greens-how perfect they were, like the finest porcelain. Jenny was pointing to something in the water. He followed the direction of her arm. Mai-mai floated under the surface of an emerald sea. He thought at first that she was dead, but she turned her head to the sky. When she saw him, she smiled and beckoned eagerly. In slow motion he stood at the end of the sampan, gathered his energy and sprang in a perfect dive into the sea. He followed where she led, down, down, slowly down into the depths of a friendly ocean.

  When she saw that the chief inspector had slipped away into an hallucination, Emily stood up. She stared at him transfixed. Under the influence of the drug the tension that normally afflicted him had fallen away. He looked boyish, naive-and beautiful. For a moment she toyed with a wicked thought, before discarding it as impractical. Some sins really were for men only. With a sigh she walked slowly toward the swimming pool. The problem with opium was the speed with which one built up a resistance. She would need ten pipes before she could reach Chan’s rapturous state. But for that kind of excess, one paid a price. Sometimes in place of rapture these days she often found demons: a line of gray, emaciated Chinese slaves with their hair in queues, stretching to infinity. Before each ghoul she knelt to ask forgiveness, and each one promised to forgive her as soon as she had been forgiven by his neighbor. It was a form of mental torture by repetition that exhausted her, when in the past the drug had always left her refreshed.

  Even with the low dosage of the drug in her blood she could feel the slave-ghosts around her, a whispering army no more substantial than wind and just as persistent, calling her name with voices dry as grass. Quickly she returned to the table and her opium pipe. The only cure for opium phantoms was more opium. Sherlock Holmes and Thomas De Quincey both knew that.

  Chan emerged from the opium dream in exactly the position in which he had entered it: elbows on the marble table, leaning forward eagerly, determined not to miss some compelling drama taking place in the middle distance. Even his brow was furrowed in the same way as five hours before. It was daylight now, and as the drug receded, he began to sweat in the glare of the sun. He searched the house, which was empty. Not even a servant appeared from the quarters at the back. Suddenly remembering and delving in his pocket, he found that the miniature microphone and transmitter were gone. The black briefcase that had contained the receiver and tape recorder was under the table where he had placed it. It was open-and empty. For ten minutes he stood motionless while every word and event from the previous night, both imagined and real, faded like a construction of mist even as he tried to grab at it with the open fingers of his mind. She had made a fool of him, this billionairess who was above the law, but he was still too opiated to care.

  The swimming pool was empty too, and more tempting than money. He stripped, dived naked into the perfect blue: down, down. The beauty of opium was that the next day you felt as if you’d had the best sleep of a lifetime, even if someone did steal your dignity while you were dreaming. Still beautifully relaxed, he dressed and went to work.

  ***

  By early evening, though, the drug had leached every ounce of energy from his body, and concentration had evaporated. He went home early, lay down on his bed and fell into a heavy sleep.

  In the middle of the night it seemed he reeled himself back from limitless depths toward a droning that grew louder as he approached full consciousness. He shook his head, levered his body out of bed, using an elbow, and groped his way to the telephone in the living room. Naked, he leaned against the wall while an English voice spoke in his ear. The voice belonged to an inspector called Spruce from Scotland Yard who wanted to know what the time was in Hong Kong. It was a question the English often asked, as if deviation from Greenwich mean time was hard to believe.

  “Seven hours later than it is there.” Chan, who had left most of his mind in the deep faraway, had no idea what time it was.

  “Not too late then, it’s just turned four in the afternoon here.”

  “Ah.”

  “I hope you weren’t asleep. I’ve been asked to communicate the findings of our forensic laboratory to you, concerning a murder inquiry, it says here. I tried to reach you at Mongkok Police Station, but you’d left, sir. They said you wouldn’t mind if I telephoned you at home. I’ll be sending the full report, but it’s a bit lengthy. I thought you might want to have the gist over the phone, to see if I can help any further. Shall I read the summary?” Chan grunted. “Not very exciting, I’m afraid.” Spruce’s voice dropped to a monotone as he read. “The samples which are water-resistant proved on examination to consist mostly of natural resins, probably derived from pine, and a variety of synthetic latex. The latex has probably been introduced in order to attain a specific degree of plasticity. Titanium dioxide was also found in a small quantity.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chan said, “I think I lost you at ‘water-resistant.’ ”

  “We seem to be talking about a form of gum, sir.”

  “Huh?”

  “Resins give the consistency, latex holds it all together in one lump in your mouth and titanium dioxide provides coloring. I don’t know the case, of course, but the likely explanation is that the victims shared a packet of chewing gum before they died.”

  “Chewing gum?” Cops were inured to trivia, but it could still hurt.

  “Afraid so. Of co
urse there may be more to it; it’s hard to say from here. What’s the weather like over there?”

  “Hot.”

  “I was wondering if you needed any assistance at the scene of crime itself?”

  So that’s why you phoned. Chan had wondered why Spruce hadn’t sent a fax. “No.”

  “Oh, well, just a thought.”

  “Is it cold there?”

  “Fairly chilly. And raining.”

  “Next time.”

  Spruce perked up. “You’ll see the number for my direct line on the covering letter to the report, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  Chan hung up, then lifted the receiver and let it dangle. In the dark he groped his way back to the bed, lay down and instantly fell asleep again. Then he woke with a jolt. Gum? He switched on a light this time, padded back to the telephone. It took half an hour for the Scotland Yard switchboard to locate Spruce.

  “You didn’t mention flavoring,” Chan said. “That titanium, for coloring, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And the resins and the latex, they would be tasteless in themselves, I guess?”

  “Correct. No flavoring is recorded here as being found on the specimens. Flavoring is the first to dissolve, though. I took up gum when I gave up cigarettes. It can be very disappointing after the first three minutes. Monotonous and tasteless. I suppose you don’t use chewing gum yourself, sir?”

  “I’m still with nicotine.” Chan reached for a pack of Bensons on the coffee table. “Suppose there never was any flavoring. What would that give?”

  “Flavorless gum, sir. No tasty lead-in period. Not an attractive commercial proposition, I would have thought. An acquired taste anyway.”

  “Or a specialized use. You’ve been a great help, Spruce. Next time I’ll ask for you to bring the report personally, business class.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir.”

  44

  Nine thirty A.M. in the car park of the University of Hong Kong Chan and Aston waited for Dr. Lam. Only five minutes late, the dentist’s black Mercedes drew up. Lam spoke a few words to his driver, then climbed the stairs with the two policemen to the radiation laboratory. Vivian Ip was waiting. She gestured to the lead-glass cabinet. “All yours,” she said to Chan.

  Chan pointed to the small reddish-colored block in the far corner on the other side of the glass. “What’s that?”

  Lam peered through his thick spectacles. “May I?” He slipped his hands into the concertina arm sockets and manipulated the metal instruments until he was able to lift the block. He used the pincers to squeeze it and observed the dent that was retained by the material. He withdrew his hands.

  “I don’t know. Unless I hold it in my hands, I can’t give a professional view.”

  Vivian Ip assessed him with her quick eyes. “So what would be a professional guess? I mean, if you came across something like that during the course of your dental practice, what would you assume it was?”

  She looked at Chan, who nodded approval.

  “Gum. You all must have had to bite on it at one time or another. It retains the bite so a dentist can tell which teeth are proud of the others, where the pressure points are, how to design false teeth, that sort of thing. Actually there are a hundred and one uses for it in a dentist’s surgery.”

  “Does dental gum have the same ingredients as chewing gum?” Chan asked.

  “I have no idea. Actually it doesn’t much matter what you use; anything that would retain the bite would do. Something with resins and latex would be normal. Coloring to make it easier to work with.”

  Aston was beginning to catch up. “Could it be used to construct a dental record-you know, upper left incisor missing, that sort of thing?”

  Lam looked from Aston to Chan. “Impossible.” He thrust his hands in his pockets, walked up and down in front of them as if addressing a seminar. “If the purpose of the exercise was to construct a dental record from a distance without the patient’s mouth to look at, gum would have only a secondary function. You’d need detailed photographs of the mouth, taken with a miniature camera; that’s what one would rely on to identify crowns, fillings, et cetera. The gum would be used as a cross-check, to see if there were any special features to the bite-a gap not obvious from the pictures, half a bicuspid missing, that sort of thing. It would take a professional, of course.” He adjusted his spectacles, looked at Chan and smiled. “So I was right; it wasn’t food between the victims’ teeth.”

  Chan nodded at Vivian Ip, then led Lam and Aston back down the stairs to the car park where Lam’s Mercedes was waiting. The interlude had taken less than fifteen minutes and could be said to have produced a major breakthrough. On the other hand, Chan complained in the taxi to Aston, it could also be said that they were back to square one: Who were the bodies in the vat? Who were the heads in the bag? He told the taxi driver to take them to the address of a small and very exclusive surgery in a small commercial building on the Peak near the tram stop, where they had made an appointment with Hong Kong’s most expensive cosmetic surgeon.

  “Blond hair and blue eyes are two of mankind’s less successful genes. Men can expect to be balding by their mid-thirties, and women will likely be shortsighted. Both sexes will be prone to skin cancer if they spend much time in the sun. The tendency of other races to emulate North European genes through cosmetic surgery is a function of Hollywood and the advertising industry. In Asia, though, the curve is declining rapidly. In the eighties I would do on average forty or fifty eye jobs a year. Nowadays, maybe ten.”

  The speaker, Dr. Alexander Yu, smiled; as he did so, slanted lids closed tight as oyster shells. A gene, surely, designed for a race that for ten thousand years looked up from intense green paddy to squint at the sun.

  “Eye jobs?” Aston, blond and blue-eyed, said.

  “The so-called epicanthic fold, also known as the Mongolian eye fold-I’ve got it-is an inward fold of the upper eyelid across the inner corner of the canthus; it’s what makes us look slit-eyed. Everyone from Mongol extraction has it, so, as a matter of fact, do some American Indians and some Poles and Scandinavians. Now and then women pay to have it removed.” He gestured to the wall, which was adorned with before and after photographs. Chan stood to examine them.

  Well, every profession must market itself according to its skills. His stomach turned at the monstrous victims of facial burns, traffic accidents, violent assaults, all of whom had reachieved a degree of aesthetic normality at Yu’s expensive hands. In between the monsters were interspersed the faces of perfectly normal Chinese women-rich Chinese women, Chan suspected-who had paid Yu to modify the so-called Mongolian fold. The result was hardly Caucasian; in the “after” photos eyes no rounder than Chan’s peered out of distinctly flat, high-cheekboned Han faces.

  “Is it a degrading castration of one’s own racial identity?” the physician continued. “Frankly, yes. I never like doing it.”

  “But you do it anyway?” Aston said.

  “I charge double for my time.” He laughed. “Anyway, the issue is quickly becoming academic. It’s like the fad among African Americans in the late fifties to try to have the kinks removed from their hair. That sort of genuflection to the master white race has gone out of style over here too, where even maids and chauffeurs know that the future belongs to Asia. I wasn’t expecting the reverse effect to begin for at least another decade, though. So far there’s only been one example. That’s why I knew exactly who you were talking about when you telephoned.”

  At a nod from Chan Aston took out Moira’s photograph of her daughter, Clare, passed it over Yu’s desk.

  “Yes, that’s her. Before, of course.”

  “D’you have an after shot? If you do, we’d really appreciate an opportunity to copy it.”

  Yu shook his head. “Alas, no. I practically begged her and offered to cut my fee, but she refused. It wasn’t a bad job either. To be honest, I was going to create quite a stir in the journals, but without the pix there’s no impact-not
at my end of the profession.”

  Chan nodded. It was an answer he’d expected. “You only took care of the eye shape. What about the eye color and the hair?”

  “Eye color is the easiest to change. Tinted contact lenses. For hair she already had a wig. Short, straight, black, thick and Asian.” Yu grinned.

  Aston took out the picture of the Eurasian reaching up to the strip light. Yu studied it.

  “Definitely. Can I have a copy?”

  That afternoon from home, after a shower, Chan telephoned Emily at all her numbers. Nobody, not even a servant or secretary, responded at any of them. When he was about to leave for work, his own telephone rang. He picked up the receiver.

  “I love you. My prince, my benefactor.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “You did it to make me happy, didn’t you?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You offered me money, imagine! I’ll pay you if you like, anything you say. Just don’t take me off the case. Not yet.”

  “Get to the point, I’m in a hurry.”

  Wheelchair Lee’s excitement sprang out of the telephone like a demon. “I will, I will. Oh, this is big, big, big. Big enough to hurt the 14K very badly. Just don’t ask me to keep quiet. It’ll take me a couple of days. I’ll have someone tell you where to meet me. We have to be careful so as not to spoil the party. Watch this space.”

  Lee hung up.

  From the police station Chan telephoned Emily again at home and at her office. Chan supposed she’d given instructions not to be disturbed, a Hong Kong princess withdrawing behind a curtain of cash now that the thrill had faded. Anger accumulated through the day and by early evening was burning a hole in his stomach. By nighttime he had decided to take a taxi up to the Peak again. He promised himself one full-blooded slap across her face. Some satisfactions were worth a career.