The Hamlet Murders

by David Rotenberg

  “Tell Lily I want these identified.” Fong said then as Chen descended his ladder Fong added, “and get me a Shakespeare expert too.” Before Chen could ask why, Fong turned his attention back to Geoff.

  It was only then that Fong noticed a slight paint stain on the outside of Geoff’s right shoe.

  From the back of the auditorium two men in suits, the Beijing men, watched and smiled. The older of the two took out a cell phone, punched in a speed-dial number and gave an order. Then he turned to the younger man. “You agree?”

  The younger man smiled, “I do.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GEOFF’S ROOM

  Fong was surprised. No. Shocked. Geoff’s room was untouched – no quadrant markings, no gummy residue from print dusting, no drawers opened, no bed turned over, no floorboards lifted. Here it was maybe twenty-four hours after Geoff’s death and the man’s room had not been scoured by the Crime Scene Unit, fuck, it hadn’t even been entered. Why? He stepped out of the room and closed the door. Then he turned to Chen. “Get Li Chou on your cell.”

  Chen began to ask why but found himself looking at Fong’s retreating back. He punched in the CSU number on his cell phone and after a brief nastiness Li Chou consented to pick up. “Li Chou’s on the line, sir,” Chen called to Fong. Fong didn’t turn. He seemed entranced by the pattern of the carpet in the guesthouse’s corridor. Without looking up, Fong said, “Ask him why CSU hasn’t been to Mr. Hyland’s room.”

  Chen relayed the question then had to hold the phone away from his ear as Li Chou shouted his response then hung up.

  Fong lifted his head, “So?”

  “He says that he was denied access to the room.”

  “Who denied him access?”

  “He says you did.”

  Fong thought about that for a moment. He certainly would have liked to deny Li Chou access to the crime site, but after the unpleasantness in front of the men in the theatre even he wouldn’t venture into that territory. “He claims he was denied access to the room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fong returned his attention to the complex pattern in the corridor carpet. He allowed his eye to trace one long wine red line as it intertwined with squares and circles of various colours and patterns and then disappeared beneath an intricate design of triangles and cubes. Several yards farther down the corridor he saw his wine red line emerge from the mess. He looked up.

  “Did you deny Li Chou access to Mr. Hyland’s room, Captain Chen?” Before the stunned man could answer, Fong held up his hand, “Just a joke, Captain Chen.” Chen was visibly relieved.

  “But someone did. I wonder who.” What he did not add was the important part of the thought: “Why had CSU been denied access?” He turned away from Chen again and once more traced the wine red line in the carpet. His thoughts cascaded quickly: “Question: What is the result of denying CSU access to Geoff’s room? Answer: It allows me to get in there first. Question: Who would want me to investigate a site before CSU? Answer: Someone who wanted a better chance of finding anything there was to find in Geoff’s room and therefore what happened to Geoff in the theatre.” No, that wasn’t completely right. Fong stopped moving. But before he could figure out exactly what part of the thought was wrong, the image of the two Beijing politicos who had been Geoff’s keepers popped into his head. Fong’s breath caught in his throat.

  Federal officers, Beijing politicos in Shanghai, no doubt with an agenda. They were the only ones powerful enough to block Li Chou from getting into Geoff’s room. They may have already been in the room but were unable to find what they wanted. Fong thought about that then dismissed it. But for sure something that Geoff had been hiding is important to them. And they want him to find it and no doubt hand it over to them so they can figure out exactly what happened to Geoff. Again, he sensed a false assumption in his thinking but couldn’t put his finger on it.

  He turned to Chen. “Yellow-tape this. It’s potentially a crime site.”

  “Aren’t we going in?”

  “Not yet. Somewhere to go first, we’ll be back.”

  On his way out, Fong noticed that the key lady was different than the one he and Chen had seen on the way in. Key ladies, remnants of the old Communist control system, refused to allow visitors to have the room keys. Westerners always complained about this because they’d return to their guesthouses and have to search out the key lady to get into their own rooms – a process that could take up to an hour. Most places that foreigners frequented had scrapped this practice, but because the old campus where Geoff stayed was technically a working commune, the system was still in place. “Where’s the lady who was here when we arrived?” Fong asked.

  The key lady clearly didn’t understand him.

  Before Fong could launch into his favourite tirade about the advancement of incompetent party members, most often from the country, over native Shanghanese, Chen tried the question in a country accent and the woman responded, “We’re covering for each other. We’re always short. Don’t know where they go. People just come and go as they please. I don’t even know most of their names. It’s hard to get good help these days.” That certainly was the truth. Try to get anyone to do a menial job and you’re lucky to keep him or her for even a few weeks. Fong thought of it as nothing more than another one of Shanghai’s growing pains on its road to becoming one of the world’s most powerful cities.

  Outside the guesthouse, Fong consulted his private phonebook and dialled the number of the head of the Communist Party in Shanghai. The great man picked up on the third ring. That surprised Fong but he collected himself and requested access to the two Beijing keepers. The man heard Fong out and then, with barely concealed glee, gave him the phone number for Ti Lan Chou Prison.

  The prison official took ten minutes to set up a meeting – at the prison of course.

  Fong arrived on time at the prison, but naturally they made him wait. Fong knew they would. Despite that, he couldn’t sit still. He was inundated with memories of his confinement here. That time had left deep slash cuts in his mind, deeper than he cared to acknowledge. It had taken a tremendous act of courage to force himself first to contact this place and then to walk through its tall iron doors. But there was nowhere else in Shanghai to contact the federal police force except here in Ti Lan Chou, the largest political prison in the world and a place where Fong had spent just under two of the hardest years of his life.

  A door slammed in a far-off corridor. Fong flinched. He’d forgotten how loud prisons were. How noise bounced off the concrete and steel and bounded and bounded unhindered and undiminished by anything soft to soak it up.

  Another sound, this of a key turning in a heavy lock followed closely by an electronic connection being made and the snapping-to of metal. Then the door opened. It was only then Fong realized that when the warden had left him alone in this room with the door closed and locked that he was not sure it would ever open again.

  The two Beijing men entered. Fong thought to rise but decided against it.

  Bad idea.

  “Stand up, Traitor Zhong,” said the older of the two.

  Getting to his feet, Fong said, “I am the head of Special Investigations, Shanghai District . . . ”

  “You are as long as we let you be . . . Traitor Zhong.”

  Fong breathed in that truth then jumped quickly to the corollary. If they let me it’s because I can do something of value for them. And what is that something?

  The younger man lit a cigarette and said as if to no one in particular and as if apropos of nothing, “No one is above being replaced in the People’s Republic of China. No one is that special.” His pronunciation of the word special was particularly venomous. But Fong declined to take the bait and the invective splatted to the table like a dollop of glutinous brown sauce from a dish of Hei Pei pork.

  The older man said, “Would you like to see the cell you spent two years in, Traitor Zhong? It’s fortuitously available at this time.”

  Fong took a
deep breath, “What do you want?”

  “We want you to investigate the unfortunate passing of Mr. Hyland. What else would we want?” The man smiled. His teeth stuck out of his gums at odd angles, like fenceposts after a monsoon. “We expect your best efforts. We expect you to think creatively. We also expect something else.”

  “And that would be . . . ?”

  “Your discretion, Traitor Zhong. You see, there could be much more here than may at first strike the eye.”

  Fong thought of the lines Hamlet says to Horatio about there being more things in heaven and earth than are ever dreamt of in philosophy. Then he got angry. “Why don’t you just tell me what you know?”

  The younger man smiled. “Maybe we don’t know anything.”

  Fong almost snarked back “That would be no surprise,” but he resisted that temptation. “Why were you assigned to keep an eye on Mr. Hyland?”

  “He’s a foreigner.”

  “He’s been here before and I never saw keepers with him then.”

  “Maybe this time he had more on his mind than directing plays and fucking your wife.”

  Fong couldn’t believe they’d gone there. All he could manage was, “What more?”

  The older man leaned against the wall, “Two weeks ago, Mr. Hyland entered the Jade Buddha Temple at 7:15 a.m. Once inside, he managed to lose our surveillance team in the morning crowd. He was gone for a day and a half. We don’t know where he went or what he did.” The man shifted position. “We want to know.”

  “What do you suspect?”

  The man pushed off the wall and began to pace with an oddly rhythmic elegance. “Mr. Hyland was a lonely man. A sentimental man. Someone who perhaps was looking for something to which he could dedicate the final years of his life.”

  “He was an artist. Artists have their art. They seldom need more.”

  “We think Mr. Hyland needed more,” shot back the younger man.

  The older man tossed a grainy photo onto the table. A young, handsome Han Chinese man in Western casual dress was hopping into a taxicab in some downtown area. There was a Caucasian in the back seat.

  Fong took the photo, “Shanghai?”

  “Yes. Near Julu Lu and Nanjing Lu.”

  “When?”

  “Over three months ago.”

  “And I’m supposed to know who this is?”

  “No. You’re not. The important thing is the man in the back seat of the cab. He’s Mr. Geoffrey Hyland.”

  “Geoffrey was here three months ago?”

  “Without papers.”

  “So this wasn’t a suicide, then?”

  The older man looked at the younger man who looked at Fong. “I don’t think either of us said or implied that, did we?” He looked to the older man who shook his head.

  “We didn’t,” said the older politico. “Keep in touch, Traitor Zhong. Now, I think both you and we have other things to do with our day.” He made an odd hand motion that was meant to be dismissive but came off more as the appropriate gesture for someone who says goodbye using the word toodles.

  Lily took the report from the young coroner. The young man’s hands were noticeably shaking. No doubt this was the first time he’d had to do an autopsy on a Caucasian. It was often a trying experience for Han Chinese. The very size of white people, even lying inert on a metal table, could be daunting. Then there was the smell. Han Chinese eat very few, if any, dairy products. The Caucasian diet of milk, cheese, yogurt, etc., leaves, to the Han Chinese olfactory sense, a most unpleasant odour on the skin. Then, of course, there was the fact of the suicide, so un- Chinese. At least for males.

  Lily thanked the young man and indicated that he was to leave the room. She looked at Geoff’s body. The handsome face, the inevitable thickening of middle age, the long – almost elegant – fingers. She briefly examined the ligature marks on the neck and compared them to the data she had about the rope that was in her office with the rest of the physical evidence. Then she checked for defensive wounds. Nothing. No skin under his nails, no cuts to either his skin or the clothing that he had worn.

  She examined the clothes. Well worn but not terribly expensive jeans, a vest – odd to wear in the heat – a broadcloth shirt with a Bloomingdale’s label. Lily knew from her CNN-watching that this was an expensive American store. The shirt, like the jeans, was well worn. Underwear, standard North American issue. It was his shoes that struck her as odd. They were of some sort of soft but durable lightbrown leather with a thong shoelace. Totally flat on the bottom with shoemaker’s nails in the soles. They had been handmade; machines didn’t leave the heads of nails visible. She lifted the shoes and was surprised by their light weight. Then she held them away from her face and was again surprised, this time by the pleasing fact of their dimensions. There were the normal kind of scuff marks that shoes pick up and a bit of paint on the outside edge of the right shoe.

  She put the shoes down and looked at the body again. For the first time, it occurred to her that she had a relationship, no matter how tenuous, to this entity on her autopsy table. Fong had been her first husband. Fong’s first wife, Fu Tsong, had loved this man. Lily had loved Fong. Fong had loved Fu Tsong. Fu Tsong had loved Geoffrey Hyland. It creeped her out.

  She took out her cell phone and called Chen. His voice was reassuring. It was wonderful to live with someone who was thrilled just to hear from you. They chatted briefly about the investigation then Chen asked about her daughter, Xiao Ming. She told him that her mother was baby-sitting and had promised not to play mah-jong. The slamming down of the tiles bothered the child.

  Chen laughed. She loved that. He found her funny, he found her beautiful, he found her infinitely desirable. She found him just right for her present needs. She ended the conversation and returned to the report.

  The alcohol level in Geoff’s body was high but not extraordinary, unless he wasn’t much of a drinker. She made a note to check. She flipped the pages of a basically negative toxicology report then stopped as something leapt out at her.

  There had been a stain on his underclothing. It was seminal fluid mixed with Nonoxynol. Lily grabbed her book on chemical compounds and began to search. There was very little information on Nonoxynol except that it was an anti-organic – a toxic substance used to eliminate growth. No specific uses were named. She grabbed her pharmacology book and repeated her search. Nonoxynol wasn’t even listed.

  She closed the book and thought. Whatever this was, it was mixed with seminal fluid, so probably had something to do with sex. Lily didn’t know much about Western contraceptive practices but she knew where to look. Six minutes of Google later and she had her answer. Nonoxynol was the active ingredient in a commercially sold spermicide. But few Chinese women used spermicide as part of their usual contraceptive practices. Lily wondered if maybe, with the new affluence of Shanghai, younger Chinese women were now using this kind of expensive product. She didn’t know.

  Yet here it was and mixed with Geoff’s seminal fluids. She looked back at the body. Could this man have been having sex literally moments before he committed suicide? She picked up the phone and called Fong.

  His voice mail picked up. “Call me, Short Stuff. Surprise big got I for you,” she said in her own version of English.

  Fong stood very still in the centre of Geoff’s room. Despite the man’s many visits to Shanghai and his considerable success, Geoff was still classified as a worker. Foreign worker, true, but worker nonetheless. So the room he was assigned on the academy’s grounds was adequate although hardly posh.

  Fong drew open the curtain. The back of the ancient prop shop was across the way. Its shutters were thrown wide in a vain effort to combat the heat of the day. The sounds of hammering something into submission filled the air. As Fong watched, an elderly technician came out, lit up a smoke and began to sew a leather pouch together.

  Fong turned back to the room. Bed, night table, small desk, laptop computer running a screen saver of fish swimming away from a big lazy shark, clothes
hung on a rod. Books in the corners, on the floor beside the bed, on the night table. Video cassettes on the desk and two notepads. A small television with adaptor and slot for a VHS tape on the floor by the window.

  Fong lifted the mattress and quickly established that there was nothing of interest there. He pulled it aside and went through the bedding and the pillows and the box spring. Nothing ripped, nothing opened, nothing there. Tossing them all in a corner, he knelt and ran his hands over the floorboards. They had probably been put down more than two hundred, maybe three hundred, years ago. It would be a clever man indeed who could prise one up and not leave telltale marks. There were none.

  He reassembled the bed and quickly headed into the bathroom. More cosmetics than Fong would have thought. Some he couldn’t identify but nothing hidden there.

  He returned to the bedroom. He went through the clothing roughly. Nothing.

  He tilted the lamp and unscrewed the bulb. Nothing.

  He stacked things on the bed so he could reach the overhead fixture. Nothing.

  He pulled off the faceplates of the electrical outlets. Nothing.

  He pulled off the back of the television and fished around inside, careful not to touch the capacitor. Nothing.

  He went into the bathroom and threw water on his face. When he looked up, he saw himself in the mirror – older than he thought of himself. Older than he knew he was. Behind him in the mirror were Geoff’s cosmetics, kept in a rack in the shower.

  Fong returned to the bedroom. The tapes, the books and the computer.

  He sat on the bed and grabbed the hardcover books that were on the night table beside Geoff’s Arden edition of Hamlet. Geoff was evidently reading three novels by a man named le Carré. John le Carré. A Frenchman named John? Fong flipped over the jacket of the first book and read about Mr. le Carré’s background. An English spy turned writer. Fong couldn’t quite see a Chinese man doing that. Maybe that’s why the guy changed his name when he wrote.