The Golden Mountain Murders

by David Rotenberg

  The harbour master stopped at that.

  “It’s going to the West?”

  “Yes, Chinese blood going to the West, in three of the refrigerated containers on board one of your ships.”

  “Which one?”

  Fong looked to Captain Chen who took a computer printout from his pocket and handed it to the man.

  The man read it quickly and then turned his head towards the ship at the far crane platform.

  “I believe that blood is heading to Vancouver, Canada. Have you had many refrigerator containers heading to that port of call?”

  Jiajou Shi didn’t say anything, but nodded.

  “I understand that blood and blood products need to stay refrigerated to maintain their efficacy.”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “Potency. The blood becomes useless if the refrigeration . . .”

  “You wouldn’t, as the head of Special Investigations, Shanghai District, be instructing me to interfere with international trade, would you, Inspector Zhong?”

  “Absolutely not.” Fong smiled. “Did you suggest that, Captain Chen?”

  “No, sir, I did not suggest that this man reset the refrigerator temperature gauge.”

  “Although, Captain Chen, I’m given to understand that such things have been known to happen.”

  “Rumour has it, sir, that the mechanism of a thermostat is very delicate.”

  “Unreliable, sometimes.”

  Captain Chen made a face that Fong assumed meant “such is life” but with the intensity of the ugliness of his features it was hard to be sure.

  The harbour master finished his Fanta, stubbed out his cigarette then spat on the ground. For a moment Fong thought he was going to tell them to go to hell. But he was wrong. What the man did was step on his own spit then grind it into the ground, an ancient curse. “Fuckin’ Round Eyes have everything, even our blood.” Then he stomped away.

  When he was out of sight, Captain Chen asked, “Do you think he’ll do it?”

  “I think he loved his mother.”

  The two men headed back towards the Bund. “What exactly will hurting that shipment of blood do, sir?”

  Fong wanted to tell Captain Chen about the rest of his plan but decided it was safer for Chen if he didn’t. He’d already put one of his men in jeopardy. Finally he said, “It will set the rats scurrying.”

  “And that will . . .?”

  Fong ignored Chen’s question. They walked a little farther, then Fong asked, “How long will that ship take to get to Vancouver?”

  “It’s scheduled to leave tomorrow. Should be there in five to seven days.”

  Fong thought about that. He hoped that would time out right, but he wasn’t sure. He wished he knew Canadian geography better. On Chinese maps Canada doesn’t look all that big. But then again Chinese maps are Afro-centric so that Europe looks tiny too. He’d just have to figure out things when he got there. This chat with the grieving harbour master and the raid on the Internet café to allow him a clean email line to Robert Cowens were the last pieces of his plan that he could put into play while he was still in the Middle Kingdom. The rest he’d have to do there – in the Golden Mountain.

  Very late that night he and Lily met in his office. He filled her in on the details of his plan to trap the Vancouver money behind the Anhui blood trade.

  “Once you set things going, Fong, it’s hard to know when or where they’ll stop.”

  “True, Lily, very true.”

  “What have you not told me, Fong?” Lily said in Shanghanese.

  “What do you mean?”

  She let out a long sigh. “I’m tired, Fong. But listen to me. I know you, Fong. I lived with you. I shared your bed. I gave birth to our daughter and I know you’ve held something back from me. Something that you’re ashamed of. Am I right?”

  “It couldn’t be helped.”

  Lily turned away from him. “It can never be helped Fong, can it?” Her voice was tight, angry. Fong couldn’t meet her eyes.

  It startled him when he felt her hand on his cheek. “Do you need my help?”

  “Help me rearrange the pieces that I know.”

  Lily looked at Fong’s desktop. She’d seen him work this way often enough in the past. There were three columns of three-by-five cards laid out on the scratched wooden surface. Long chalk marks led from the bottom of each of the three columns to a single card at the bottom of the desk marked with the dark thick title: THE MONEY.

  She lifted her head. Over his shoulder, and across the Huangpo River, the new Pudong sparkled its enticement – its seventy cock-proud office towers, an open invitation to join in the glories of the New China. She crossed to the floor-to-ceiling window and placed her hand on the pane. Its coolness pleased her. She hadn’t spent much time with Fong since they had separated. She was surprised how much she enjoyed his company – despite the fact that she fully understood that this was business, not pleasure.

  She turned from the window. Fong was at his desk rearranging the cards, then making the three columns into three towers. “Don’t change things, Short Stuff,” Lily said in her unique brand of English. “No way better other than way.”

  Fong finally put the three-by-five cards aside. He’d thought and rethought his options but couldn’t seem to increase his odds of success – and so many lives were in the balance. It frightened him. The weight of the responsibility bent him as surely as a heavy burden bends a coolie’s back.

  “Alone, feel, Fong?”

  Yes, he certainly felt alone. There was so much money in all this that he didn’t know who to trust. Only Lily and Chen at this point. And even they didn’t know the full extent of what he was thinking about setting into motion – about what he’d asked of Kenneth Lo and the plans he’d set up with the two young investigators. Even the new woman in his life, Joan Shui – when he forced himself to be honest – was not totally in his circle of trust. The decades of propaganda he, like everyone else in the PRC, had ingested couldn’t totally allow him to trust anyone from Hong Kong when it came to money. Even Joan Shui, his lover.

  “Conference terror, when, Fong?”

  He told her.

  She blew a high-pitched whistle through her teeth. “Too soon, no?”

  “What other choice do I have? You’ve completed your research on our people over there?”

  Lily nodded and returned to Shanghanese, “But be careful. The boy is reliable but not his father and who knows about the grandfather.”

  “And he understands what we need?”

  She smiled and in oddly accented English said, “He homosexual so he know.” She smiled and said brightly, “I like homosexuals. Maybe I fag shag.”

  Fong thought that was highly unlikely but he responded, “Right.” Then he glanced down at the three-by-five cards again. Each had writing in English in block letters: Robert Cowens, Apology from the Canadian Government, Dalong Fada, V5S 9W2, V6P 2Y7, three bills of lading for refrigerated containers, Newspaper Articles, Riots, Arrests – and others. Too many others. But too many cards had no writing on them, just wide, raw question marks.

  The first of the three columns was headed by the name: CHIANG. Several cards were beneath it and then a long thick chalk line to THE MONEY. The second column was headed by a card entitled: THE LAYWER, which was then followed by many cards and again the chalk line leading to: THE MONEY. The third column was headed by a card with a large “?” on it. There were cards beneath and a chalk line to: THE MONEY – once again.

  “Three lines,” she said.

  “Three possible ways to the money behind all this, Lily,” he responded.

  Lily let him sit with his thoughts for a moment, then said in Shanghanese “And you set this all in motion by inviting Kenneth Lo to your office with that computer for everyone to see.”

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “You did, Fong. Everyone knew he was working on the computer from the company that sold blood. Everyone knew that Kenneth is brilliant and wou
ld eventually break into that hard drive and get the hidden information there. Everyone knew that the moment you called him to your office that he had broken in and found the secret data. Everyone knew . . . and you knew that one of them might tell someone.”

  Fong sighed. “I didn’t know how else to get this to begin. We were in Anhui for months but no one there is big enough to be important. The information in that hard drive might be big enough to rattle their cage so I can watch them scurry. Maybe I can detect their pattern from the scurrying. Scurrying rats leave tracks, Lily. Rats that are calm don’t disturb the dust.” He was tempted to move a card from the second column to the third but decided against it. “We need to stay in contact.” It sounded funny in Fong’s ears, as if he were inviting her out on a date.

  She held out the electronic square that Kenneth Lo had been showing Chen in the meeting. “It’s called a BlackBerry.”

  “Why?”

  “Why is it called a BlackBerry?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lily lifted her shoulders in a manner she always did before she let loose with a flurry of English obscenities, “Why fuck I know what, shit Blueberry, called. Who fuck care what fuck?”

  Fong wanted to laugh but he didn’t. He saw the worry in her eyes. “Chen will teach you how to use it,” she said in Shanghanese. “Between it and your cell phone I should be able to feed you the information that you need. You have our Vancouver secure fax contact?”

  Fong nodded. He didn’t know what to do next. Then Lily put her finger beneath his chin and lifted his face so he looked right into her eyes – always so deep, so very very sad. “Be careful, Short Stuff. Be very careful.”

  Then she was gone and he was alone with his three columns and his doubts. Suddenly he was consumed by the feeling that he didn’t even know what he didn’t know. He worried that he had missed something terribly important – like who it was that was tracking him.

  So here he was still not knowing what he didn’t know, flying over more Canadian mountains, green valleys and regularly plotted farms that spread like a quilt over the few level areas by the rivers that sometimes took the breadth of lakes in their ceaseless meander to the ocean. To which ocean Fong wasn’t quite sure.

  Fong reached into the pouch attached to the seat in front of him. Maybe the airline magazine would have a map and at least he could answer that question. He found the magazine behind four identical copies of a cheap-looking magazine that claimed to be Canada’s national magazine. If it was, why was it named after a Scottish man? Or was it named after a hamburger store? Fong didn’t know or care.

  He leafed through the airplane magazine to find a map. As he did, a flyer fell on his lap. It was an advertisement for a benefit performance of Twelve Angry Men at the Vancouver Theatre Centre. He stared at the picture – another theatre image in his life – another point of access back to his deceased wife, the famous actress, Fu Tsong. He shrugged off that thought and shoved the flyer into his pocket. At the back of the magazine he finally found a map that showed Air Canada’s airline routes throughout the world, but it didn’t help him determine to which ocean the river beneath him ran.

  He stood and stretched. The plane he had taken from China was filled with people of one hue – one ancestry, the black-haired people. But this plane which he had boarded in Vancouver was a different story; all around him were people literally from the four corners of the earth. All of whom were evidently Canadian now. A maroon-turbaned Sikh sat across the aisle; directly behind him a black teenager nodded to the rhythm being delivered directly to his brain by a huge set of earphones. There were several Japanese couples and an elderly Korean woman – and children – always the great divide between people from the Middle Kingdom and the rest of the world – children, sometimes three or four from a single family.

  He thought of his own daughter, Xiao Ming, now with her mother, Lily, and her stepfather, Captain Chen.

  The plane tilted slightly and began a wide arcing change of course. A child cried that particularly highpitched wail – so filled with betrayal – that some think only children feel.

  The vast land, almost empty of people, continued to pass by his window, beneath the plane. The river was wider now, as if its effort was the achievement of girth. It elegantly seeks its end, its demise, Fong thought, in what had of late become his almost continuous inner monologue. He failed to add the two words, “Like me,” afraid even in that private sanctum to give word to such thoughts.

  A six- or seven-year-old girl awaiting access to the forward washroom first hopped up and down, then knocked at the closed washroom door, then decided that crying had more chance of getting the locked door to open. The girl was wearing shorts and a bright blue T-shirt with a red “S” within a yellow triangle.

  Fong assumed it was a sports team of some sort and wondered where he could find such a thing for Xiao Ming.

  Every time he saw his daughter it seemed that she’d grown. But not just bigger – somehow deeper. She’d always, at least as far as he was concerned, been wide awake to her surroundings. From the beginning she’d been fully aware. Her language was advanced for a five year old, and when she was with him they only spoke English. It was hard for him not to correct the mistakes she’d picked up from her mother, whose English was a wild mix mostly learned from CNN and American TV talk shows. Fong’s English was textbook stilted but accurate – very accurate.

  Lily and her new husband, Captain Chen, always made him feel welcome in their small rooms when he came to pick up Xiao Ming. They were strict about bringing her back at the appointed hour but that was understandable. They also insisted that she be kept away from anything that could bring back the days of near catatonia she’d experienced after her rescue from the arsonist who called himself Angel Michael. The poor thing still cringed when she heard loud noises or even saw a match struck. Just before he left for the Golden Mountain he had taken Xiao Ming back to the home in which he’d grown up.

  As they had turned the corner and stepped onto Feng Beng Lu, Fong felt his daughter’s hand curl in his. Quickly the new Shanghai faded away and was replaced by the old – the permanent, the ageless Shanghai – what was laughingly referred to by the locals as the Chinese concession. The ancient buildings gave the lie to the high bright towers across the river, the California-style condominiums in the embassy district and the English-language slogans on T-shirts and sweatshirts and pant butts. There was none of that here in the old city.

  Fong and Xiao Ming hunched into the dankness of the place. Whispers followed them from behind pulled curtains; naked children being washed in bright red plastic tubs on the sidewalk openly stared at them; the five-spice egg seller gave Fong the evil eye as she had to a Japanese soldier who had raped her mother sixty years ago on this very street in Shanghai’s Old City.

  But as Fong and Xiao moved deeper into the Chinese concession they became more of the Old City and the denizens allowed them to pass. Fong had returned to from where he had come and where he had come from accepted him.

  They passed by the Temple to the City God and the Old Shanghai Restaurant, then entered an unmarked alley. Immediately the smell of cooking engulfed them and Xiao Ming identified each smell. With each identification, she held her father’s hand tighter and finally asked, “Where are we going, Father?”

  “To my father’s house. Your grandfather’s house.”

  “Do I get to meet Grandfather?” she said, her voice alive with awe.

  Fong stopped and picked her up. Then he said softly, “My father has been dead a long time. The last time I saw him I was your age. But he was a very good man. A kind man. I loved my father and still miss him.” He paused. “I hope you don’t miss me, Xiao Ming.”

  She shrugged in his arms then touched his face. “You are my father.”

  “I know, but I’m not always there for you.”

  “You are. Whenever I want you I call you and you always come.”

  “When I can.”

  “When you can.” He put he
r down. They took a few more steps and the alley widened. Set back a few paces from the alley was the old archway that demarked the entrance to a family compound.

  “Is this where Grandfather used to live?”

  Fong stared at the archway. As a boy it had separated them from us. There was safety outside the archway and the wrath of his grandmother inside. He remembered when the family owned the whole compound. Now the place probably housed twenty families.

  He pushed open the door and memory flooded him. His father had carried him on his shoulders in this open courtyard. He had told him the old stories. He had defended him from his grandmother. He had done the best he could to keep him safe from the diseases inherent in the family business, night-soil collecting. He had sat by Fong’s side when he had contracted the cholera and had been thrown from the house with a blanket and a sleeping palette and been told by his grandmother to, “Get better or die quickly. There is work to be done.”

  Then his father had left to fight for the liberation. And had never returned.

  Seven years later when the Red Army re-entered Shanghai as victors, Fong had raced to the rooftops and waited and waited for his father to come marching by. But he had not come. Even hours after the last troops had passed, Fong stayed on the rooftop waiting. Waiting for the return of the man who held him on his shoulders in this courtyard.

  “What can I do for you?” the middle-aged man said as he filled a metal pail with water from the courtyard’s central spigot.

  Fong explained that he had lived there and that this was his daughter and he wanted to show her . . .

  “Show her what? What you and your bourgeois family had once owned but now belongs to the people. What you stole from us all and now we have regained?”

  “Shut up, Father,” said a young, well-dressed man carrying an expensive briefcase. The man stared at his son for a moment then pulled on his Mao jacket proudly, despite the heat, spat on the ground and left.

  “You must forgive my father. The old ways die hard.” The young man said, then introduced himself and listened to Fong’s request. “No problem. Look all you like, those were the good old days and they’re going to come back. Young people like me are going to make sure that they come back.”