The Golden Mountain Murders

by David Rotenberg

  “Set the clock at twenty seconds please!!! Get ready, get set – gooooooo!”

  The clock ticked forward. The husband calmly took his piece of dowelling and tilted over the first of the three boxes onto its side. As he did this, his wife did the same for the second and then the third. Only four seconds had ticked by. Then the husband placed his dowelling on the bottom of the first carton while his wife placed hers on the top of the third carton. Then they gently pushed towards each other. Between their sticks, on the table, lay the three cartons perfectly arranged. The ninth second ticked by. But before the game show host could chime in with “Halfway!” The wife applied pressure to her end and the husband applied pressure back. Then the wife and husband lifted the entire tower of three cartons off the table and gave it a ninety-degree turn. The audience actually gasped. They lowered it to the table and slid away their dowels. There it was – the solution to the problem – puzzle solved.” Robert seemed suddenly drained. His face flushed. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

  “Because it is a precious memory,” Fong said. He thought through what Robert had just told him. The winners didn’t deal with the pieces of the puzzle but the puzzle in total. Then worked backwards. They analyzed the problem and the weapons they had and saw the solution in a new light. Very good. Important. Fong’s mind suddenly put him back in Shanghai in his office on the Bund. His three columns of cards were in front of him on his desktop. The Lawyer, the Chiangs and the third column headed by a card with a large “?” on it. Each column – each tower – could lead to THE MONEY. Three columns, three towers. Fong looked back at Robert – it could just be the angle of the setting sun crossing the man’s face – but Fong doubted it – this man looked ghastly.

  “Look Fong, you can’t try to attack Vancouver directly. It is often not what it seems. It is both more violent and more peaceful, more tolerant and more prejudiced, more paradise and more hell than you think at first glance. You have to figure out what weapons you have – dowels, if you will – then figure out how to use them to stand the blocks one upon the next. And it’s not going to be successful if you try the way you first think. You’ve got to find a way to see the problem in a different light – a light specific to this place – or you won’t solve it at all.” Robert’s face was a deep red. His throat stretched. A vein pulsed erratically in his forehead.

  Fong changed the topic. “What did you think of that Blood Trader article I left for you to read?”

  “Fucking Appleton, Wisconsin.”

  “You know this place?”

  “Birth and final resting place of Joseph McCarthy.”

  “Who?”

  “Just a dead American-style fascist.”

  “Is the information in that article public knowledge in your country?”

  “Not really. I’ve heard a bit about this. The bigger scandal in Canada was about tainted blood bought from an Arkansas prison – some seven thousand Canadian hemophiliacs contracted AIDS when they were transfused. The guy running the Arkansas program denied that the blood he’d sold to Canada was tainted. According to this genius there was no homosexual activity in Arkansas prisons so there couldn’t be any AIDS virus in the blood they sold. By the way, the guy was a Clinton appointee and confidante of both Bill and Hillary. Nothing’s simple when it comes to blood.”

  Fong was happy to see that Robert’s colour was returning to normal. “What’s Monica up to these days?” he asked brightly.

  “Who knows? You know Monica Lewinsky, but not Joseph McCarthy . . .”

  “A free press is a recent development in the Middle Kingdom.”

  “Fine. Enough with the history lesson. Where to now, Fong?”

  Fong shrugged but chose to ask a question rather than answer one, “What’s your next move?”

  “More schmoozing.”

  “What?”

  “Schmoozing. Chatting with folks who don’t want to talk to you – schmoozing – it’s a verb and a noun and probably a gerund if I knew what that was.”

  Fong was happy that Robert was able to make jokes. He reached into his pocket and extracted a piece of paper with the name of the law firm that the woman who had killed the man she loved had given to Joan Shui. “Why not schmooze these folks?” Fong passed over the piece of paper.

  Robert read the company name and blanched. “What does this lily white law firm have to do with all this?”

  They are the name at the top of one of my columns that could lead me to The Money he thought, but what he said was, “They represented the blood-exporting company in China.”

  “Damn,” Robert swore under his breath.

  “What?” Fong asked.

  “Nothing – it’s just that these guys are the white heart of the darkness of this place.”

  Robert got up and despite the heat put on his overcoat.

  Fong watched him, then asked, “What was the name of that game show, Robert?”

  “Beat the Clock,” he said and turned towards the door.

  Fong watched Robert leave. The man shambled more than walked. Fong frowned. Beat the Clock. Now there was Western silliness. Surely the clock is the one thing that no living thing can beat. And the clock is running – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – but always running.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE CHIANGS’ SHIP LANDS

  The ocean freighter tugged at its moorings, a restive wild thing straining at its tethers. Manifests were handed over. Three full containers were lifted from the hold by great cranes and set on the backs of three large flatbed trucks. A normal day in a normal port. Then something happened. A workman securing one of the containers removed his gloves to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and leaned against one of the containers. The metal container was hot to the touch. Refrigerated containers are not cold to the touch but they aren’t warm either – and never hot – like the three huge shipments of blood products that sat on these three flatbed trucks at the Port of Vancouver.

  The phone call was disturbing enough that the Chiang sons agreed to wake their father – a thing that needed careful doing. The eldest son took the lead.

  The ancient liver-spotted eyelids slid back smoothly, revealing the coal black eyes of the patriarch of the Vancouver branch of the Chiang clan. Chiang’s eyes were clear, aware. As if even in sleep he had been totally awake. He adjusted the plastic tubing in his nose, swung his legs out of the bed and breathed deeply. The portable oxygen tank obliged him with an invigorating funnel of almost pure oxygen. “Open the blinds,” he said. His eldest son did as ordered.

  The old man wheeled his oxygen canister to the window and stared at the mountains of North Vancouver – still so foreign even after all these years. He reached for his cigarettes only to find an empty pocket. Emphysema and cigarettes – the road to a hacking grave.

  Then he thought of his beautiful granddaughter, the brilliant one who would take over all this, all that he had worked so hard to earn. He touched the cool glass of the window and examined his now-gnarled fingers as his eldest son reported the bad news from the docks. So much blood gone bad. So much money lost. But it was neither of those things that occupied his mind. He was thinking about timing. Blood goes bad. A new access to the Eastern marketplaces arrives out of nowhere. And a Shanghai cop walks the streets of Vancouver. He didn’t like it. “Call Suzanne; have her meet me at the usual place.” After the slightest of hesitations his eldest son flipped open his expensive cell phone and placed the call to Chiang’s granddaughter. Chiang turned slowly away from the boy. The boy was closer to fifty than forty but he would always be a boy while Chiang was alive. A privileged boy with a very bad temper and a chaotic mind. He would have to advise Suzanne on how to deal with this problem too.

  The “problem” son’s call was immediately inter-cepted and orders were relayed. Tong members took their assigned places and a full-fledged surveillance swung into motion.

  Forty-five minutes later a sleek black Mercedes pulled to a stop in front of a restaurant and Chiang got out. Befor
e his foot hit the ground a doorman was there with an umbrella while the maître d’hotel offered a helping hand. Chiang permitted them to assist him into the backroom. This backroom had at one time been a sealed-off smoking room, but since the City of Vancouver had outlawed smoking in any public place, the restaurant had converted the sealed room to an oxygen-rich environment. Younger couples used its extra oxygen and privacy for their own ends. But the extra oxygen in the room was a different kind of boon to Chiang – it allowed him to unhook himself from his oxygen supply.

  The enclosed space provided another advantage to Chiang – it was an easy room to sweep for unwelcome electronic intrusion.

  The maître d’ held open the door, and immediately Suzanne rose from the table and approached her grandfather. They touched with a surprising intimacy and then she assisted him to a seat at the small table. The door wheezed shut. They were the only ones in the room. Tea and traditional morning porridge were waiting on a side table.

  Chiang sat and savoured the pleasure of unassisted breathing. She served him. It reminded him of being served by a class two geisha in Edo when he was young. He had found it highly erotic but had wondered at his own response to the ritual nature of every move, every tilt of the head; the almost theatrical approach to the simplest of acts – kneeling, speaking, pouring tea – the absolutely open acknowledgement of the façade. There was no attempt to make the client believe that the geisha was anything but a highly trained aberration of a female. It was in fact the linkage of that façade with eroticism that fascinated but confused him. Years later, after the war, he was in Paris completing a business transaction for his father when his host told him that they had been invited to a most exclusive soiree. Chiang had accepted the invitation and, once his people had cleared the security in the place, was happy to attend. There was a lot of fine food and drink and many people of great wealth and power milled about. But the centre of attention was a mad-eyed dishevelled French writer who repeatedly screamed the word “bourgeois” at the crowd. With each escalating scream of that word the crowd grew more and more attentive. Chiang found it perverse until he listened to the man. And here from the mouth of this uncouth artiste came the answer to the confusion he had felt in the presence of the geisha. “Sex is about an agreed-upon foolery. That’s why whores call it turning a trick. The thing that starts sex is the acceptance of the fakery. The embracing of it. For example: it’s not exciting for most grown men to be alone with a fourteen-yearold girl in a school uniform, no matter how high up she hikes her skirt. But for a grown woman to openly dress as a schoolgirl – no matter how little she rolls up her skirt – it’s enticing. It’s a trick. A folie à deux. She creates the portal of the masque and you both enter into the world of Eros together.” He smiled.

  “What, Grandfather?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were smiling.”

  “Was I? The porridge is very good.”

  “How would you know, you haven’t tried it?” Then she smiled. He smiled back, then tasted the porridge. It was nothing special. His mother, Suzanne’s great-grandmother, had made much better – and for far less. He put aside his spoon and laid out the problem they had before them at the Port of Vancouver.

  She sat quietly and took it all in. When he finally finished, she reached for the teapot, then got up and crossed to his side of the table. With a practised dip she poured the hot liquid into his small cup. “We are sure that this was not an accident, Grandfather?”

  “This was no accident, Suzanne.” His voice was unusually sharp. “Three different, huge, shipping containers, each filled to overflowing with our blood products – the thermostats in all three fail – and the exterior monitors of all three containers just happen to be stuck exactly at the right temperature for preserving the blood products.” He turned towards her. “That is some extraordinary accident, wouldn’t you say, Suzanne?”

  A darkness moved across her fine features.

  He was pleased to see it – access to violence was necessary if one was going to lead.

  When she spoke the darkness increased, “An extraordinary and perhaps very personal accident.”

  “I agree, Suzanne,” he said, but the question in his head was personal against exactly whom?

  “The blood trade is legal,” she said.

  He nodded but he didn’t totally agree. He preferred doing business in the East or continental Europe. If a business transaction made money in those places, it was good. If it didn’t, it was bad – simple. Money was the determinant of morality – of good and bad. But here in the moral hypocrisy of the Golden Mountain there existed what he thought of as theological capitalism that produced a grey area. If you steal a man’s wallet at the opera it is theft. If you steal a man’s wallet in a porno theatre or for that matter in a table-dancing club or, heaven forefend, in flagrante delicto with a whore, then you have entered the grey area. Fail to refrigerate sides of Kobi beef properly and there is culpable negligence. But – fail to refrigerate perfectly legal blood products and . . . grey area, damn the West’s theological capitalism.

  “What do we do, Grandfather?”

  He thought about contacting their silent partner, then dismissed it. “Now we wait. We do nothing.”

  “And what exactly are we waiting for, Grandfather?”

  He wanted to say, “For the other tower to fall,” but instead chose to say, “for what happens next.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE LIE DETECTOR

  Fong listened to the report on his cell phone as he looked at the overly ornate painted gate to Old Chinatown at the corner of Main and Cobalt. If this was Old Chinatown, what would these folks call places like Xian, he thought. Then he heard something on the phone that snapped him back to the task at hand. “That’s it? No more calls to or from Chiang?”

  “Not a peep, Inspector, except for the older son calling one of his mistresses,” the Tong leader reported.

  “And they know about the spoiled blood?” Fong pressed.

  “They know, but just now they’re doing nothing. We’ll keep monitoring their phones.”

  “Good,” Fong said but he was troubled. The spoiled-blood shipment should have sent the Chiangs into a flap of phone calling – hopefully leading him to the silent partner. “Keep me posted,” he said, then hung up and turned to Robert. “So have you managed to pierce the heart of white darkness, Robert?”

  “I did. My contact is very well connected. It didn’t take too long before my story of representing an eastern syndicate that wants to invest in the blood trade got me the appropriate meeting.”

  “And it was at Henderson, Millet, Cavender and Barton, Attorneys at Law?”

  “It certainly was.”

  “And what did you make of the lawyer you met there?”

  Robert paused and did his best to put aside his natural prejudice but couldn’t. “I hated him.”

  “Naturally, but what else?”

  “He claimed that he represents the major investor behind the blood trade but that he has never met the man or his representative. That all his dealings are through blind trusts and Swiss bank accounts. Then, of course, he added that even if he could, he wouldn’t reveal who his client was – lawyer/client privilege exists in this country, Fong.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “About not knowing who he represents? I don’t know. It’s possible but . . .”

  “But what, Robert?”

  “I can’t tell. He pissed me off the moment I met him. So my judgment was clouded to say the least.”

  “Maybe he and his law firm are the source of the money behind the blood trade.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Business – good business, bad business – all business takes balls. You’ve got to put something out – you’ve got to risk. Lawyers go to law school so they don’t have to risk. They are risk-averse. The blood trade is dicey. These guys are lawyers. They make a killing without having to stick out their necks. It’s
just not in the genes of a lawyer to take a real chance. They’ve seen lots of businesses fuck up.”

  “But he might be lying to you. Robert, we have to know if he is lying.” Fong’s vehemence surprised Robert. “Listen to me. This lawyer could be our only access to the money behind all this.” Robert turned away. “What?” Fong demanded.

  “You remember I said I had a second contact out here?”

  “Yes, but you weren’t sure about him.”

  “I’m not. But he might be able to help us. But he’s such a weird guy.”

  “How do you mean, weird?”

  After a pause Robert looked Fong in the eyes and said, “He’s a lie detector.”

  For a moment Fong didn’t know if he’d heard Robert correctly. Robert nodded, “Yeah, you heard me right.”

  “He’s a what?”

  “A lie detector. We use him at my Toronto firm. He listens to tapes of final vettings of executives and then tells us if he thinks the guy is lying or not. He’s better than a résumé-checking service and he’s beaten every polygraph and eye-scan comparative study we’ve ever done. It’s quite amazing. In fact, he’s never been wrong in our experience and you can believe that we checked and then re-checked before we trusted him.”

  “And he’s here in Vancouver, now?”

  “He has a girlfriend who writes for a local paper so he takes any job out here he can get.”

  “What kind of jobs?”

  “Theatre stuff mostly. He directs, whatever that means.”

  For a moment Fong didn’t know what to do, then he asked, “Is he in rehearsal now?”