The Golden Mountain Murders

by David Rotenberg

  “Yeah but I asked them to confirm that both roadblocks were fully functioning.”

  “And?”

  “And I haven’t heard dick and I can’t get through to them.” A shiver of fear snaked down Fong’s spine as they swung around a huge bend in the road and headed farther up the gorge.

  The assassin loped along with a simple elegant stride. His teeth were bad but his body was well toned. A ten-kilometre run was a nice way to prepare oneself. As he ran he sensed that he was not alone. He didn’t look but he was sure that Loa Wei Fen was running, step for step, beside him. Their every footfall in perfect synchronization. Two as one. He headed deeper into the forest and turned straight up the gorge. He checked his cell-phone’s screen – the yellow luminescence was indeed heading towards the Capilano swinging bridge. A fine place for a killing.

  He returned the cell-phone, whose one and only call had released him from his waiting and set him on the kill, to an inner pocket.

  “There was supposed to be a roadblock there,” Fong said as he turned and craned his head to see.

  “What do we do, Fong?”

  Fong looked out either side of the car. Traffic was thin but there was no way to turn around on the steep mountain road with the fall off several thousand feet on each side.

  “Drive.”

  Two more kilometres up the road and Fong knew that they were on their own. The second roadblock wasn’t in place either. Fong pointed to a scenic-view spot on the opposite side of the highway. “Turn around. Let’s head back.”

  The moment Robert pulled into the lay by, two cop cars screeched to a halt, preventing him from turning around. Robert got out of the car only to find himself pushed back into the driver’s seat. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Cowens,” said Doug, tilting up his mirror sunglasses to reveal those pale blue eyes. “Sorry for the inconvenience, fellas, but there is construction on the road, as you may have noticed if you weren’t too busy and we’re insisting that people go to the head of the road before they turn and come back. Okay?”

  Robert slowly turned the car and waited to find an opportunity to, once more, head up the gorge. Suddenly a hand smacked hard against his window. Robert turned. Doug’s face almost filled the entire windowpane and his lips were not hard to read, “Your taillight still needs fixing!”

  * * *

  As the car climbed it began to rain. Robert coughed and the blood from his mouth splayed on the windshield. “Fong . . .”

  “Pull over, Robert.”

  Robert pulled the car as far off the road as he dared then set the emergency brake. Fong hopped out of the car and came around to the driver’s side. “Does the seat recline?”

  Robert pointed at a slider on the side of the seat. Fong tilted it backwards and Robert’s seat slowly reclined to an almost flat position. “Listen, Robert, are you listening?”

  Robert nodded slowly.

  “They want me not you. I was going to leave you at the reception centre. There’s no reason for you to be in danger.”

  “Fong . . .”

  Fong covered Robert with a blanket from the trunk then took out his cell phone. “Is there an emergency number here?”

  “911.”

  Fong turned towards the highway, wiped the raindrops off the cell phone and dialed. “There is an extremely sick man in a car on the side of Capilano Road not far from the reception centre.” He listened and said, “How long . . . fine. His name is Robert Cowens.”

  When Fong looked back, he was surprised to see Robert’s head shaking from side to side. “What?”

  “If they take me to a hospital I’ll never leave.” Then he said something peculiar. “If I die there I will never fly, Fong.” He breathed heavily, pain clearly etching its lines on his face. “Do you remember the kid in that song?”

  “What song, Robert?”

  “That Tom Waits song you hated. The one about the kid in the hospital and his friend sending him ‘down the rain pipe to New Orleans in the fall.’”

  Fong remembered – he also remembered the image of the man jumping from the World Trade Center – and flying to his end.

  “I need a friend, Fong.”

  “I’m your friend, Robert.”

  Robert closed his eyes. Fong thought about friendship for a moment. Then he thought about the peasant from Anhui and he reached over and pried off the bug – and shoved it in his pocket. As he did, he muttered, “Come and get me.”

  Fong was running. Just as he had run nine years ago in the Pudong. He crashed through the brambles and tight vines at the side of the road and plunged into the dense underbrush beneath the cathedral tall Douglas Firs.

  He ran and ran – ran for his life. If he could make it to the bridge the assassin’s advantage would be limited by the width and swing of the treacherous thing. He wasn’t thinking, at that moment, about getting the assassin to tell him who was the money behind all this. Now all he wanted was to live another day.

  The assassin approached the parked car at the side of the road and looked into the eyes of the dying man in the driver’s seat. “Wrong one,” he thought as he circled the car for signs of Fong. He noted that the bug was gone from the side-view mirror. He pulled out his cell phone. The luminescent dot was in motion. “You want me – you got me,” he mumbled. Then he heard the wail of an ambulance siren coming up the mountain road and he stepped back into the brush – and returned to the chase with a seemingly effortless loping stride.

  Fong was hearing things and he knew it. But he was hearing things! He dashed across the parking lot of the reception area and past the restaurant, then climbed a small hill and looked back. The drizzle had increased to a full-fledged rain. People were emerging from their cars with either umbrellas or their hoods pulled up on their anoraks. Both made it hard for Fong to see their faces – to compare them against the images in his head of the three guild assassins meeting Loa Wei Fen’s coffin. Then a sleek Mercedes pulled into the lot and out hopped three Chinese men in their early thirties. The rain didn’t seem to bother them.

  Fong turned and raced into the dense woods.

  The assassin stood by the back entrance to the reception centre restaurant and surveyed the landscape on the park map in his hand. He placed the luminescent yellow dot into the geography of this place. Then he smiled. “Very good, Zhong Fong,” he said aloud. If I were being chased, that’s the kind of place I would seek out too. His body ached to run after Fong but the voice of his teacher came to him again, “Choose the place carefully. Never fight on the target’s ground. Strike from either above or below, never on the plane your opponent expects. Patience is the only knowledge available to all.”

  Then an elderly Chinese waiter stepped out and lit up a cigarette. The elderly man smiled at the assassin, “Wanna smoke?” he said holding the pack out.

  “Wanna smoke” were the man’s last words.

  Fong waited in the centre of the swaying bridge. He tried desperately to contact any of his “troops” on his cell phone but the gorge evidently created problems. Over and over again he got the message: “This call cannot be completed. The customer you are calling is out of your calling area or has his phone turned off.”

  The rain had slowed a bit, but the boards of the swinging bridge were slick underfoot. Fong watched every person who ventured onto the bridge, waiting for the three assassins from the BlackBerry image.

  Finally they arrived. Without umbrellas. Without hoods. They allowed the water to drip down their faces and headed directly toward Fong . . . and then past him.

  Fong couldn’t believe it.

  Half an hour later Fong finally was able to get through to Matthew, “I’m in the restaurant at the reception centre at Capilano Park.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fucked up but all right.” He had the BlackBerry on the table with the image of the three men with their hands on Loa Wei Fen’s coffin. A Chinese waiter approached his table, “More tea?”

  Fong nodded.

  The waiter poure
d the tea; a little splashed over the side onto Fong’s lap. “I’m so sorry, sir. I’ll get a cloth,” the waiter said, as he walked back to the kitchen.

  Fong smelled chocolate. Chocolate?

  He stood and looked around. In the reflection of the big mirror on the west wall of the restaurant he noticed his waiter clearing a table. Fong was about to sit when he saw the man deftly scrape a finger along the top of a piece of half-eaten chocolate cake then quickly suck the icing off his finger.

  Chocolate.

  The squiggle taken off the top of the Hostess Cup Cake in the refrigerator of Kenneth Lo’s apartment.

  “Sweets are only of interest to the young and the very old,” the Yale nurse had said to him.

  Fong’s heart felt like it had stopped in his chest.

  Two coal-black eyes reflected in the shoe-store window. An old man standing on one leg on Jericho Beach. An old man on the airplane. An old man standing on a bench on the raised promenade on the Bund looking at him. No. Looking through him.

  A heart cut in half with soft impressions, soft impressions because the aged assassin’s mouth had so few teeth left!

  Fong sat and looked at the BlackBerry image again. This time not at the three men by the coffin but at the one older man – the servant – who was pushing the cart.

  “So sorry, sir.” The man’s voice was terribly loud. He reached towards Fong with the towel.

  “Not a problem,” Fong said through the fog of his fear. Then he looked the old assassin in the eyes. “You like sweets.”

  “Sir?”

  “You explode bombs in apartments of innocents, including a baby, a sleeping baby.”

  “Really . . .”

  “You work for rich white men against the interests of our people. Who employed you?” This last was said so loudly that the entire restaurant turned towards them. “Why not kill me here, in front of all these nice white people?” Fong screamed. “You take their money, you do their dirty work, so go ahead and kill me here. Who gives a fuck about peasants dying in Anhui Province! You don’t give a fuck about anything . . .”

  Not true, the assassin thought, I cared about Loa Wei Fen. The swalto blade pierced Fong’s shoulder and sent him spiralling to the ground. Instantly the assassin was on the table – from above – and launched himself at Fong.

  Light flickered off the blade and Fong rolled. Rolled beneath the next table. Patrons scattered everywhere and Fong scrambled to his feet and threw himself out the open window to the wraparound porch. He landed on his side and the pain roared down his arm.

  He heard screaming from within, then he was running.

  Running through the fishery ponds and back towards the swinging bridge.

  The assassin’s heart was beating heavy in his chest. He had never felt that before. He disentangled himself from the terrified restaurant patrons and dashed out the door. Fog had replaced the rain. “Good,” he thought. “This night you return to the fog, Zhong Fong.”

  On the bridge Fong made his way carefully to the very centre and yanked out his cell phone. No connections. Then he remembered his BlackBerry. Captain Chen had said something about a different network system for it. Something about it being powerful. Something about how the fuck to use the thing as a phone.

  The assassin approached the swinging bridge from beneath. He’d spotted Fong’s position from across the way. No need to walk right up to him when you can approach from beneath. He put the swalto in his mouth. The snakeskin handle tasted sour; the cobra on his back flared. Then he reached up and wrapped a strong hand around the metal cable that ran beneath the bridge.

  Menu. It’s in menu. Fuck, everything in electronics is in menu. But where in menu?

  The river sang to the assassin as it thundered beneath him. He looked down. There in the shallows of the river was a native stone statue of a man. Six beautifully balanced stones – too much like the one upon which he had bled only yesterday, he thought. Then he nodded. If it is so, it is so. He hung there by one hand as he undid the buttons to his shirt and then allowed it to slip off his back and into the river. He turned and grabbed on with the other hand – the cobra now fully alive on his back.

  The BlackBerry yakked. He turned up the volume. “Where the fuck are you, Fong?” screamed Matthew Mark out of the thing.

  “In the centre of the Capilano . . .”

  He said no more. Pain roared through his foot. He looked down and the point of the swalto blade peaked out from the top of his left shoe. Blood added to the slickness and he staggered. But despite the fact that the swalto had split the board cleanly in two, the knife held him fast to the broken board of the bridge.

  Then the cobra came over the side and perched on the railing of the swinging bridge, its hood filled with blood, its eyes black with hatred. And it spoke, in an old man’s voice. “You killed the boy I loved. I loved.” The cobra seemed to sway on the railing. “I have seen so many things – the end of the Manchus, the rape of Nanking, the liberation of our country, the rise of our power. But things of beauty I have seen very few. But he was beautiful. Beautiful. And you took him from me.”

  The cobra leapt off the rail and landed with a surprising thud on the decking of the bridge.

  Fong forced himself to stop shaking and slowly inched his foot up off the swalto blade.

  Then the cobra hit Fong across the face so hard that his head smacked into the planking with a sickening thud. Before the pain set in Fong had a flash of thought, Not my teeth again. Please not my teeth.

  The next blow broke two ribs on his left side.

  Fong rolled over to protect his ribs and waited for the next blow.

  And waited.

  Then he heard the assassin whisper in a hoarse voice, “Why do they call this place the Golden Mountain? This is not our Golden Mountain. It is our doom.”

  Fong reached for the swalto and yanked it free of the split board. The thing flew from his hand – a foreign object – careened off the railing and pierced the old assassin beneath the right armpit.

  The man turned to Fong, a strange look on his face. He made one attempt to take the swalto from his body then turned – and the cobra fell forward, over the railing – towards the rock statue of a man that stood on the river’s bank.

  As the old assassin crashed to the ground, the tip of his nose caught the edge of the jagged stone and he heard, deep in his mind, the snap of bone and, as his hands flailed for but failed to find purchase, the grinding of cartilage and snap of ligaments as the bone shard slid between his eyes and pierced his thinking self.

  A moment of blossoming pain – then light.

  He was young again and in the centre of the Guild Academy’s contest ring. His left arm was raised and blood coursed down it as he sunk his strong teeth into the half of a heart he held aloft in his right hand.

  Then he bit down hard and tasted his opponent’s essence – then he spat it hard into the dust as the cheers of his teachers and fellow students filled his soul.

  His first victory. His first kill. His life journey just beginning.

  The carved cobra on his back leapt to life as he took his swalto blade and threw it with all his might straight up in the air.

  The Tibetan knife flew perfectly straight then, as if on some godly command, turned, flattened out and seemed to embrace its return to the earth.

  But just millimetres from the ground an elegant boy’s hand grasped the handle of the swalto and with a wild cry threw it high in the air a second time. Then the hand moved to a mouth – Loa Wei Fen’s mouth.

  So beautiful.

  “Forgive me, Loa Wei Fen, I have failed you.”

  “You stink of wet paper, old man!”

  The swalto seemed to give off a high-pitched, woman’s scream as it came back to earth, slicing through Loa Wei Fen’s shoulder and splitting open the boy’s torso to the waist.

  The snakeskin handle of the knife slowly turned crimson and everything changes.

  A hand, a female hand, reaches in and wraps it
s fingers around the snakeskin handle of the swalto blade – and in a single move cuts open the chest cavity and frees the heart of its ligament moorings. Then, holding it aloft, slices it in half and bites down hard.

  Blood sluicing down her chin and neck, crimson outlining her young breasts beneath the cotton shirt, she turns and bows to the old assassin.

  Yes, now he remembers, it had been a young woman who had surprisingly won the Guild tournament to honour the death of Loa Wei Fen.

  He smiles.

  She smiles back at him. She opens her mouth – her teeth are etched in blood.

  He senses the cobra on his back turning.

  “Sleep now, Grandfather. Sleep. You have earned your rest.”

  “But I failed.” His voice sounds like sand scraping against stone.

  “Allow your cobra to sleep. It is now my job to avenge Loa Wei Fen’s life.” He feels the snake on his back free itself from his skin and crawl down his leg. He wants to cry out for it to stay. But the great beast is already moving down his calf, then slithering off his left foot – then is gone. He feels himself stumble and her strong arms catch him and hold him tight. “Zhong Fong will pay with his life for your life. I swear it by the cobra on my back, Grandfather. Now sleep and dream the dream of dreaming.”

  “A girl is a good disguise for an assassin – a very good disguise,” he thought. Then he wondered if she had a candy, something sweet for him.

  Even as he thinks this he knows it is his last thought on this earth.

  A blood vessel tears open behind his eyes and his last vision of this world comes from behind a crimson curtain of his ancient blood. And there he is, Zhong Fong, as he must have been nine years ago in that construction pit in the Pudong – a killer of assassins, a tamer of cobras – a man destined to die at the hands of a girl.

  He wanted to bow to Zhong Fong, to acknowledge his talent, but he was already on the ground, his face pressed hard into the moist earth of the Golden Mountain. And he knew that he would shortly return to the earth from which he had come.