The Golden Mountain Murders

by David Rotenberg

  Because of his first wife, Fong knew a lot about the theatre. He’d seen a lot of plays and had heard endless hours of Fu Tsong’s tales from the rehearsal hall. But nothing prepared him for what he saw when Robert pushed open the door of the lower-level rehearsal hall of the Vancouver Theatre Centre.

  Twelve men in business suits, extremely conservative business suits, were around a large table, some seated, others standing, with scripts in hand – nothing terribly unusual about that – but these men were clearly not actors – egotists yes, actors, no. One middle-aged balding man delivered a two-line speech without referring to his script, then actually stood to receive a “high five” from the man beside him.

  “What is this?” Fong asked.

  “A rehearsal for a benefit.”

  “A benefit for whom?”

  “This theatre.”

  “But there already is a theatre here, why does it need a benefit?”

  “Let’s not go into that. Suffice it to say that arts institutions in this country have trouble carrying their own financial weight so they have to do things like this.”

  Fong watched a little more and made a face, “Like this? Really? Like this? But these are not actors.”

  “True, Fong. They’re lawyers. Actually these men are the top lawyers in the city, four of them from the firm that handles the blood contracts out of China.”

  Fong watched a little more of the “performance.” Finally he couldn’t resist asking, “If they are lawyers, what are they doing on the stage?”

  “Preening.”

  Fong gave him a look. “I don’t know that word.”

  “Like a bird does when he puffs up its feathers.”

  Fong gave him an even stranger look. “These lawyers are doing some sort of sexual display for prospective mates?”

  Robert thought about that and concluded that lawyers trying to be actors was pretty close to them being involved in some sort of sexual display. At least a notion of “mine’s bigger than yours.” So he said, “Close enough.”

  “And this theatre lets these lawyers do this on their stage?”

  “Once a year. It is a performance for heavy hitters. Donors. Vancouver’s social elite pay good money to come and see some of their own strut their stuff.”

  “In this play, is that what you mean?”

  “Yeah, the audience’ll have an expensive dinner with lots of wine and roll on over to the theatre all gussied up to eyeball their divorce lawyers and tax lawyers and bankruptcy lawyers make appropriate fools of themselves.”

  “And the audience pays for the privilege of seeing this?”

  “Through the nose. It’s actually one of the more successful benefits that theatres have found to do over the years. The lawyers themselves buy up the entire house and then resell the tickets.”

  “And can these lawyers do this play any justice?”

  “Probably not, but at least it’s a play about justice. It’s called Twelve Angry Men.”

  The director, a curly-haired olive-skinned man in his middle to late thirties, was a real youngster in this crowd, although Fong noted his incredibly old eyes. He was trying to get one of the lawyers to make even basic sense of one of his lines, but the lawyer wasn’t buying it.

  “Henry Fonda didn’t do it that way in the movie.”

  “This isn’t the movie, it’s the play,” the director replied.

  “Yeah, but the movie was great; why don’t we use that script? I can make a call to Levine in Toronto right now,” he said, whipping out a cell phone, “and he’ll get us the rights, no trouble.”

  “Mr. McKintyre, can we please just do the play as it’s written. We only have two rehearsals, then you guys are on.”

  “Park your ass, Mac,” said another lawyer, “You ain’t no Henry Fonda and I’m no Lee J. Cobb. Let’s just do this.”

  “What’s your hurry? Got a date?”

  From the man’s extensive girth Fong thought that unlikely.

  An extremely thin, almost puny lawyer stepped forward and said, “Why do I have to play the E.G. Marshall role? He’s such a dink.”

  The lawyer beside him said, “Dink? I haven’t heard that word used in the new millennium. Actually I only heard it twice in the previous millennium.”

  “Was that in reference to your private parts?” asked another lawyer.

  Fong couldn’t believe it. These powerful, wealthy men were just boys trying to out-piss each other.

  “I’ll trade you for the Ed Begley role. I can be really mean.”

  “Yeah, like you were in that Pinson case, really mean,” he said, putting up his hands in mock fear.

  A tall blond-haired lawyer riffled through his script then tossed it on the table. “Hey, I hardly have anything to say in this play.”

  The oldest of the lawyers leaned close to the man beside him and said in a whisper loud enough to carry to the back of the rehearsal hall, “And who says there’s no justice in the world?”

  The razzing continued, but Fong wasn’t watching the stage. He was examining the young director – Robert’s lie detector. The young man was taking in the interaction of his would-be actors, deciphering codes and sorting out complex hierarchical structures. Then, suddenly, as if a page had turned, he smiled and forged into the piece with an accuracy that surprised Fong. As he did, the man’s face lit with joy. The inherent old age in his eyes disappeared and was replaced by a surprisingly youthful glee. It was a joyousness that Fong had seen before but he couldn’t recall where. As Fong watched, the young man lifted his head and tilted back – as if he were sniffing something above him.

  It reminded Fong of the skateboard park. How exactly he didn’t know. But for sure it reminded him of those talented boys flying on their boards.

  Rehearsal continued. The young man’s cadence was interesting. He found an instance of momentum and pursued it, then backed off when inertia set in. Then he shepherded his troops to a new section of the play. Before long they were waiting for him to guide them and the text took shape. The kid in the jeans was leading the twelve men in the expensive suits. Fong smiled.

  “That’s a miss,” the young man said.

  “A what?”

  “A miss. The way you said that line was accurate to you but not to the character you spoke to. Look, if you were trying to get me to leave you alone, you would approach your line one way, but if you tried to get the man beside you to leave you alone you’d have to say the line another way. Truth is accurate to the person you’re addressing, not to yourself.”

  “That’s why it was a miss?”

  “That’s why.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Yes it is, and if you’re really interested in this, come on down and audit my master acting class – you might find that interesting too. Now, try the line again and be accurate to your acting partner, not to the words in the line itself.”

  Very impressive – almost Geoff-like, Fong thought. “What’s your lie detector’s name?” he asked.

  “Charles Roeg,” Robert said. “He specializes in doing these benefits. He’s apparently raised substantial sums of money for the theatres in this country with this little parlour trick of his.”

  “He’s teaching now.”

  “So he said. Why?”

  “Just a thought.”

  Later that day Fong sat at the back of the open studio and watched Charles Roeg tear apart a scene on the video monitor. The packed room of actors hung on his every word.

  The actors were clearly impressed with Charles. In fact, Fong might have been impressed as well but he found himself in the throes of an absolutely visceral response to this younger man.

  “Because it’s not in present tense,” Charles said to the actress. The handsome woman made a “whatdya’mean” face and Charles launched into an explanation. “You have to see and hear like the narrator in a Great Russian novel.”

  A shiver of recognition moved up Fong’s spine. He knew these words.

  “Only when you�
�re present – when you really see everything that’s in front of you – when you hear not only the words your acting partner speaks but also the implication of the words and then the implication of the implication and allow all that data in your eyes and ears and pull it down with your breath to your heart, unencumbered with politics – unfiltered – unfettered with connotation – only then are you present – are you ready to act.”

  These words were slightly different but the “implication” of Charles’s words were terribly familiar to Fong. He shifted in his seat to get a better look at the lie detector. Dark, not squat but not long either, but alive in his centre – molten – and quick, very, very quick. Beautiful hands. And those old, old eyes.

  When the class ended, an older black actor and a young Italian set to dismantling the camera equipment as Charles talked with three actors in a corner.

  Fong stood and stretched. The class had started promptly at 6:00 and it was almost 11:00. Charles had taken a two-minute “half-time” break but was clearly present himself for the entirety of the fivehour class.

  The confab in the corner broke up. An older actor with bushy eyebrows smiled and promised to bring coffee to the next class. The young actress turned away from Charles and headed towards the door, clearly hiding tears. A slender woman who parted her straight hair in the middle, evidently made some crack about the crying girl and Charles rolled his eyes. The slender woman rested her fingertips on Charles’s forearm for just a moment too long.

  Then Charles spun around and faced Fong. His eyes were suddenly bright, vibrant, as if he’d just run a race. “Ni hao,” he chirped.

  Fong smiled and replied in Mandarin – if you speak the Common Tongue then I’m a chili pepper in a whore’s armpit.

  Charles smiled. Fong found himself liking the smile. “You got me. All the Mandarin I know is how to say hello.” He then repeated, “Ni hao.”

  Fong resisted correcting Charles’s use of tones in the word. His childish approach to the word reminded Fong of student actors on the Shanghai theatre academy campus who loved to approach Westerners with loud salutations of the only English phrase they knew: “Well, Come too Chey Na!”

  “Your class was very interesting,” Fong said. “You are very skilled. My name is Zhong Fong,” Fong said in his textbook-perfect English.

  Charles turned to the students who were still dis-mantling the video equipment, “That’s enough, thanks. I’ll do the rest.”

  “You going to join us for a drink?” asked the older black actor.

  “Do I ever join you for a drink?” Charles asked.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Right. But thanks for asking. One of these days I’ll surprise you all and show up.”

  “We’ll try to hide our astonishment.”

  “Just find the truth, breathe in the truth and say the stupid words.”

  “Good-night” and “Great class!” were offered by the actors and gratefully accepted by Charles. And then the actors were gone. Charles closed the main door behind them and opened the blinds on the south side of the studio. A full moon sat low in the night sky. Charles stared at it, doing what Fong’s actress wife, Fu Tsong, used to call “breathing it in.”

  Fong allowed himself to breathe in Charles watching the low-slung moon. He sensed something almost ancient in this young man. Finally he asked, “Is there not madness in watching the moon?”

  “No, there’s no madness there, Mr. Zhong,” Charles said without turning back to face Fong. “There is truth in the moon’s movement.”

  “Truth in the moon? How can that be when the moon constantly changes?”

  “The moon changes because it is about time – no, it is time itself. Trying to find truth between human beings without understanding time is folly.”

  “Is it truth between human beings that I saw you teach this evening?”

  “No art is about the clever rearranging of the truth. It is by its nature a kid of deception.”

  “Then teaching acting is teaching lying.”

  “No. I never said that, although there are far too many liars who claim to be acting teachers.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about truth.”

  Charles finally turned to face Fong. The moon hung between the two. “I assumed we’d meet again. Once is a chance meeting. Twice is an odd coincidence that assumes the arrival of the third meeting.”

  “But this is only our second meeting,” Fong said.

  “Wrong. Third.” Before Fong could respond Charles added, “Be that as it may, ni hao.”

  This time Fong corrected Charles’s inflection. Charles accepted the correction and, much to Fong’s surprise, repeated the complicated up and down tonal pattern – so foreign to English speakers – perfectly. Then he surprised Fong again. “You sit behind your eyes, Mr. Zhong.”

  Fong remembered conversations with his actress wife about the positions that actors “wear their eyes” – and how to change the position. He parted his lips and touched the tip of his left index finger to the end of his tongue. He tasted the bacterial mix on his skin. It moved him forward from behind his eyes. Then, as his eyes softened, he dropped down to his mouth.

  Charles noted the movement of Fong’s self from behind his eyes eventually into his mouth and nodded. “Who taught you that trick?”

  “My wife.”

  “She’s an actress.”

  “Was an actress,” Fong said.

  Charles got it. Implication and all. Fong’s wife had been an actress. Fong’s wife had died. Fong adored his deceased wife. Those facts were obvious to Charles. What wasn’t clear was, “Who taught her?”

  Fong hesitated.

  Then Charles smiled, “Poor Geoff.” It was a statement of fact not a question.

  Fong nodded. Then he surprised Charles, “And you taught Geoff, didn’t you?” Again it was a statement not a question.

  It was Charles’s turn to nod. “He was older than me by almost fifteen years but he wanted to learn what I had to teach.” He sighed deeply. “It’s rare that an older man is willing to learn from a younger one. Geoff was a rare talent and in his own way modest.”

  Fong didn’t know what to say to that.

  Momentarily time stretched between the two men as the full moon outside the window perfectly framed the two and held the moment in time’s viscous suspension – neither man took a breath – then the moment passed – breath and time resumed – the moon no longer centred the two men.

  “Three meetings?” Fong prompted.

  “Third meeting now. Second meeting in my rehearsal room at the Vancouver Theatre Centre watching twelve angry egotists. First meeting at the skateboard park.”

  “You were there?” Fong said cautiously.

  “I go to watch and I saw you see.”

  “See what?”

  “Don’t lie. I’m quite good at knowing when someone is lying.” Fong didn’t respond. “When Stanislavski, the great Russian acting teacher, lost his faith in what he was doing – which, being a Russian, happened to him a lot – he would always go to the beaches of the Black Sea and watch children play. Watch them put their heads up into the pure river of a child’s truth.” Charles kicked the hardwood floor with a dirty shoe. “The Black Sea is pretty far from here, Mr. Zhong – skateboard parks have a tendency to be closer. There’s a kind of truth there. I make my living by perceiving truth. By sticking my head up into the pure flow of the jet stream and hoping it doesn’t drag me back too far in time.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s not important, Mr. Zhong. What is important is that just like me, you saw the truth in what those kids were doing – and, Mr. Zhong, I saw you see it. The powerful believe that they understand the truth and that everyone beneath them is influenced by the gyrations, fluctuations and even subtle movements of their truth. But they are wrong. Completely wrong. There are other pure rivers of truth. One of them was being played out before your eyes in the skateboard park.

  “Remember the girl skateboar
der? She brought something different by accessing the only commonly known pure stream: sex. It’s the one that pornographers have been building ladders to, then elevators and finally high-speed modems. I don’t care about the morality of what they do, only that they debase something that can be pure. They make it common, banal. The greatest threat the West poses to the rest of the world is its relentless pursuit of ways to bottle that ‘jet stream’ and sell it.”

  “But no one can commodify the ethereal,” Fong said.

  “Perhaps, but the effort to do so is the greatest sin of the West.”

  “And does the East have a greatest sin?”

  “For sure.”

  “And that sin is?”

  “The East demands obedience to gain freedom. They refuse to see that talent is needed to make the leap to the truth. And there is no talent without freedom.”

  “That’s a touch elitist, don’t you think?” Fong countered.

  “Perhaps, Inspector Zhong, but there are real obligations imposed on people of talent – you know that yourself.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Sure you do. Don’t lie, Inspector Zhong.”

  Fong ignored the comment. “What kind of obligation does talent demand?”

  “To share. Talents are to be shared. Ever hear of the parable of the talents?”

  “Is that a TV game show?”

  Charles laughed. Fong found the sound pleasant if disturbingly older than the sound ought to be. “If it’s possible to be the opposite of a TV game show, the parable of the talents is. The parable tells us not to hide talents, in the case of the parable, beneath a bushel – because talents are to be shared.”

  “Do you share your talent, Mr. Roeg?”

  “I teach, Inspector Zhong. It wasn’t what I intended to do but it was where some of my talents led me.”

  Fong nodded.

  “And you share your talents, too, Inspector Zhong.”

  Fong thought of Captain Chen and Lily and the dozens of young officers that he’d taken under his wing – but he said nothing, although he did smile.

  And Charles Roeg smiled back. “No doubt merchants are already hard at work trying to bottle what the skateboarders have – but it’s hard – skateboarding requires the one thing the West is not good at – dedication. But only with dedication can you reach up into the jet stream and fly with God.” Charles took a breath and then began to coil camera wire. “Let’s leave it at that.”