The Hamlet Murders

by David Rotenberg

  “Not a classic Dalong Fada thought,” said a sharp voice in Mandarin from behind Richard. The raven cawed loudly again and flapped its wings but maintained its roost on the post.

  Richard turned toward the source of the voice. The man standing there was in his mid-to-late twenties; the results of a fairly regular attendance in a weight room were evident on his arms, chest and neck. He held a fresh croissant in one hand. He wore expensive Italian slacks and a pure linen shirt. But his feet, exposed by his ever-so-fashionable sandals, were pure Hunan peasant.

  “How does a boy from the rice paddies get all the way to a university atop a mountain in Canada?” asked Richard.

  “The cause. And you?”

  Richard canted his head slightly to indicate that “the cause” had brought him here too, but they both knew they came for very different aspects of the cause. The two men stared at each other. The raven moved its cold eyes from one to the other.

  Finally, the younger man took a bite from the croissant and said, “I got your note.”

  “Good.”

  “Are we betrayed?”

  Richard looked away. “I don’t know. Xi Luan Tu is still in Shanghai. I don’t know if this Canadian theatre director betrayed him before they hanged him or not.”

  “You’re sure he was hanged then?”

  “No, I’m not sure,” he spat back then softened his tone as he continued, “but he had a cell phone with wireless Internet access programmed to get Xi Luan Tu most of the information he would need to get out of China. Mr. Hyland smuggled it into Shanghai on his first trip but never got it to Xi Luan Tu. He went back to deliver the phone as well as the money and papers he smuggled in this second time. Then he contacts us to tell us that the phone is safe but he had to jettison the money and the papers, and shortly thereafter he is swinging from a rope.” He picked up a pebble and thought of throwing it at the raven then decided to toss it over the edge of the platform. “The connective seems clear to me. Besides I don’t believe in coincidence, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. We have to move quickly now. Xi Luan Tu and many others are probably in great danger. Who knows what Mr. Hyland told the authorities before they hanged him. We must send someone else in there with the money and the papers Xi Luan Tu needs to get him out of there.”

  “Do we have an operative who can manage that?”

  “Yes.” Richard looked out at the mountains. “She won’t like it, but it’s time to activate her for the sake of her dead lover.”

  “The fireman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s she, now?”

  “In Hong Kong.”

  “Still with the police force?” the young man asked unable to hide the suspicion in his voice.

  “She’s an arson investigator there, not exactly a normal cop.”

  “You want me to contact her?”

  “No. I’ll do it, but I want you to activate your people in Shanghai. We may need their help to rescue Xi Luan Tu.”

  The younger man nodded then tossed a piece of the croissant to the raven. The bird ignored it and stared at the Chinese men as if wondering what could have brought these two to his domain.

  “Fly to my brother,” Richard said in his heart. “Tell him we’re coming to get him.” To the surprise of both men the great bird cawed loudly, flapped its wings and took flight. Richard watched him ascend a thermal then head east. “From the Golden Mountain to the Middle Kingdom,” Richard thought, but said nothing.

  Richard took a deep breath and allowed himself a moment of reflection. A looking back at the tumult of events that had brought him inevitably to this mountaintop university on the outskirts of Vancouver Canada. He knew that Dalong Fada is now the popular name for the movement that is one tradition within Xulian, ancient methods to cultivate the mind and keep the body healthy. Years ago, however, Xulian picked up a religious association, so groups adopted a new word for their practices – qigong (qi meaning life energy and gong meaning cultivation of energy). But Richard realized that Dalong Fada, no matter what its name, is far more than the series of physical exercises that structure the centre of the practice. As its leader has admitted, Dalong Fada is a way of life. Its methods of insight and health for the body and mind have attracted a large and loyal following.

  Every successful political movement (and since its modern inception in the early nineties, Dalong Fada has been incredibly successful, growing from a few practitioners to many millions of followers) gets to a point where it is seen as an opponent to the power structure. When that happens, those in power attack the upstart movement. The movement then splinters into those who propel its values and ideas and those who protect those values and ideas. It’s the inevitable division in any successful movement between faith and force. For the faithful, like Richard, it becomes the classic deal with the devil, in this case, the military arm of Dalong Fada, which is under the control of the young peasant from Hunan Province – the young man with the fancy clothes and open-toed sandals.

  The sound of young women’s voices made Richard turn. Over by the reflecting pool with the obscenely large piece of jade in its centre, three young women had taken off their tops and hopped into the water to cool themselves. “What would they do to cool themselves off in the stifling heat and humidity that is a Shanghai summer,” Richard wondered, “remove their skins?”

  The e-mail wasn’t a surprise to Joan Shui, but it threw her world into a tailspin, like a plane whose jet engine had just ingested a large bird.

  It was too soon. Wu Fan-zi, her Shanghanese lover, had only been dead seven months. His birthday, which she had celebrated with Fong and the Canadian lawyer Robert Cowens, was the last time she’d been in Shanghai.

  She curled in on herself. She thought for a moment about pulling out her phonebook – what she used to think of as her book of dates. Comfort, the oblivion of sex, being the object of desire seemed momentarily the only way out.

  Shanghai. Fuck. She looked at her recently refurnished condo on the forty-third floor of her building on Hong Kong’s Braemar Hill Road. This was real. Shanghai was . . . she didn’t know the right word for what Shanghai was, but she really wasn’t sure that she was ready to go back there yet. Wu Fan-zi’s face would be everywhere she looked.

  And this time, Fong would be the enemy.

  She checked her coded e-mail message a second then a third time. They definitely wanted her in Shanghai and no doubt they knew how to get her there. There was a long list of instructions, but the gist of them was that she was to deliver money and papers that would aid in the escape of Dalong Fada’s foremost organizer – Xi Luan Tu, Richard Lee’s brother. And, by the by, China’s most wanted man.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MEMORIES AND MEETINGS

  After unceremoniously kicking Shrug and Knock out of the sweltering meeting room, Fong sat at one end of the large oval table waiting for the others to arrive. At least there hadn’t been any evidence on the table for Shrug and Knock to snoop at. “Count the small blessings,” he reminded himself as he allowed his mind to drift. First to other meetings in this room then to a place in his memory he hadn’t visited for a very long time. He was sitting across his office desk from a middle-aged Englishman. Alternating waves of guilt and relief crossed the man’s handsome angular face. “You can go now, Mr. Paulin,” Fong repeated. “We know you didn’t have anything to do with the death of your wife. You were lucky.” The man stood slowly and headed toward the door. Fong rose from his chair. When he did, Mr. Paulin stopped in mid-stride as if suddenly he had become the icon for “Walk.”

  Fong said, “We know you didn’t kill your wife, Mr. Paulin, but we know you wanted her dead. To be exact, we know that you were getting ready to plan her death, but an out-of-control taxi on Wolumquoi Lu solved your problem, didn’t it?”

  Mr. Paulin didn’t move – couldn’t move – as if a brittle wire from Fong’s heart to his connected the two men. Then the wire snapped. Mr. Paulin reassumed his stature an
d looked down on Fong – not just from a height but from a long-held sense of racial superiority. “Can I go, Officer, or is there something else you want to say to me?”

  “You can go, Mr. Paulin.”

  “Good.”

  “But don’t think of coming back to Shanghai, Mr. Paulin.”

  The man whirled on Fong, clearly about to defend his right as a British citizen to come and go as he wished, to do business where he damned well pleased – but all he said was, “Anything else?”

  “Yes.” Fong made him wait for it. Then on the off breath he said, “Murder eats away the heart. It was only chance that saved you from killing your wife. Don’t forget that. And remember that chance does us a favour once but charges us twice. You owe fortune twice now, Mr. Paulin.”

  Fong held out the man’s passport. “You’ll need this to leave China. You have six hours to be gone from the Middle Kingdom. Starting from this very moment.”

  Mr. Paulin slammed the door as he left Fong’s office. Fong counted to twenty then released his breath and turned to the window. On the other side of the glass was the world famous Bund and across the Huangpo River the Pudong, which was in short order becoming the very centre of the miracle of economic revival that was Shanghai. He looked at the shiny new buildings but was unimpressed. “Maybe just because I’m getting older,” he said aloud to the empty room and leaned his head against the cool windowpane. He was having more and more trouble keeping the world’s evil at bay. The mangled body of Mrs. Paulin that they had extracted from the wrecked taxicab would now wake in the morning with him and accompany him to sleep at night – as would the relieved look on her husband’s face. So many souls tucked beneath his skin, fighting for space in the membranous sack around his heart. So much ghostly weight.

  Fong looked up. The room was filled with officers waiting for him. He wondered how long he had indulged in his memory.

  Li Chou was at the far end of the oval table. His men were on either side of him. Lily sat halfway up one side with her young assistant. Chen sat across from her with Fong’s people.

  Fong “ahemed” and the room quieted. Cigarette smoke hung in layered clouds in the room. The windows were open and the hazy saturated air of a Shanghai summer afternoon moved in and out like the water at the shore of a placid lake.

  Fong looked around the table. He really didn’t have any plan in mind. Just to get started.

  “Lily?”

  “Message pick up, did you?” she said in her own private version of English. She was about to add her pet phrase for him, “Short Stuff,” then decided against it in public.

  “No, I’m sorry but . . . ”

  “Fine. No nose off my teeth,” she said.

  He had no idea what that meant, but signalled that she should begin the proceedings. She opened a folder and handed out copies of the autopsy report and the toxicology data then said in her beautiful Mandarin, “If you look at the autopsy report, there is no evidence of previous trauma to the body. In other words, he wasn’t killed then hanged. He was just hanged. There were elevated levels of alcohol in Mr. Hyland’s bloodstream but they weren’t high enough to make him lose contact with reality unless he really wasn’t a drinker. Someone should check into that.”

  “I did,” said Fong. “He wasn’t a drunk or an abstainer, just a guy – he drinks, drank.”

  Lily nodded.

  From a large plastic bag she took out the noose and tossed it on the table then said, “It has one less turn than a traditional hangman’s noose but outside of that it’s standard issue. The position of the ladder conforms to the mathematical paradigm of something that tall being pushed from that height. The rope was easily strong enough to strangle a man of Mr. Hyland’s weight.”

  Fong looked up from his notes.

  “Yes, sorry about that, but this man’s neck wasn’t snapped like in a proper hanging. He strangled to death. It probably took several minutes.”

  She paused as that sank in.

  “That accounts for the ligature burns up and down Mr. Hyland’s neck,” she said.

  Fong nodded and made a note. He wasn’t sure Lily was right about that.

  “There are threads of the hemp embedded in his fingers and palms, which seem to indicate that he fought the rope at the end.”

  Fong experienced a moment of real panic. He didn’t want that image in his head. Geoff, dangling, trying to loosen the rope, trying to scream – no.

  One of the detectives put down his copy of the report and said, “He changed his mind, you mean?”

  “If . . . ” Lily didn’t complete her sentence.

  Fong did. “If this was actually a suicide. Anything else, Lily?”

  “There were no defensive wounds on the body. No skin under the nails. The only other toxicological findings of interest were traces of seminal fluid in his underclothing . . . ” She paused for a moment as the usual smirks in response to ejaculation at the end of a life passed over the men’s faces then she added, “mixed with Nonoxynol.”

  “What’s that?” Fong asked.

  “It’s a spermicide.” The men around the table looked blankly at Lily. None had any idea what she was talking about. Lily sighed her you-poor-benightedpagans smile and said, “Some Western women use it as a contraceptive. It seems Mr. Hyland had a little nooky-nooky sometime before his demise.” Then to Fong in English she added, “On message, Short Stuff. Pickup no surprise. No pickup, surprise surprise.”

  “How long before his demise, Lily?” Fong asked.

  “Not long. Soon details I get, then you get, you get me?”

  Fong nodded. A ripple of confusion circled the table, but Fong didn’t want to get sidetracked on that. “Anything else, Lily?”

  “No,” she said in Shanghanese.

  “What about the flowers that were in his vest pocket?”

  “Marigolds, forget-me-nots and primroses,” Lily replied then added, “is there anything . . . ”

  Fong cut her off, “What about the vest itself?”

  “What about it?”

  “It was a thousand degrees that night. Why would he wear a vest?”

  Lily shrugged then said, “Perhaps Mr. Hyland was a slave to fashion. Maybe he wanted to die looking his best.”

  “True, but who gets laid then kills himself?” asked Li Chou. “This was no suicide. I agree with Zhong Fong.”

  “Well, that’s a first,” Fong said in English to Lily, who raised an eyebrow in response.

  “What was that, Zhong Fong?” Li Chou asked.

  Fong smiled but wondered why Li Chou’s pronunciation of his name sounded to his ears awfully close to Traitor Zhong. “You’re up, Li Chou. What did you and your crew find?”

  Li Chou opened a stained folder and spread out a series of documents. “There were literally fingerprints everywhere. Sixteen partials and twenty-seven full prints. We’ve fingerprinted the theatre’s technicians and actors and are slowly identifying whose prints are whose. However, with so many prints on the ladder it is unlikely that this line of investigation will yield anything of interest.

  “The rope was actually cut from a stock of rope that was kept in the west side of the theatre. The cut on the tail of the rope there matches the head of the rope used to hang Mr. Hyland.”

  “I’m afraid there are small flesh deposits on the rope within reaching distance of the noose which supports Ms. Lily’s supposition that the man suffocated.”

  Fong wondered why Li Chou was being so solicitous. What was with the “I’m afraid” part of his last statement? But before Fong could speak, Lily piped up, “I don’t make suppositions, Mr. Li.”

  Li Chou’s hands flew up like he was fending off mosquitoes on Good Food Street. “No criticism intended, Ms. Lily.”

  “That would be another first,” Fong thought.

  “Then there were these.” He pushed a large plastic evidence bag marked Floor Findings onto the table. “Pretty normal stuff, nothing you wouldn’t expect on a stage. A few makeup sticks, bits of torn clot
h, cigarette butts, stick matches, a hair clip, three pages of some script, a sodden handkerchief, three small-denomination yuan notes, a paperclip, wood chips . . . ”

  Fong interrupted him, “Did Mr. Hyland have a rehearsal set up for that morning?”

  “Yes,” replied Captain Chen, referring to his notes. “No one was very happy about it. Apparently once a theatrical production starts to perform it is considered bad form to . . . ”

  “Who was called?”

  “Called?”

  “Told to be at rehearsal,” Fong clarified.

  Li Chou gave him a who-cares look.

  Fong ignored him and looked to Chen, “I want to see everyone who Geoff called to rehearsal for that morning.”

  Chen made a note and flipped open his cell, “Odd to call a rehearsal then kill yourself, don’t you think?”

  Fong could have added, “Odd to start writing a book then kill yourself,” but he didn’t.

  “Odd indeed, unless you wanted those called to rehearsal to come in and find you still swinging.” It was the commissioner who snuck noiselessly into the room behind Fong. The man had changed his demeanour of late. The rumour in the station was that he was modelling himself after the new actor who played the head of the district attorney’s office on the American television show Law and Order – not the original one, but the one who followed the lady who played it for a bit. Fong had never seen the program, but apparently it was very popular throughout Shanghai. For an instant he wondered if Fu Tsong would have liked the show. The man continued, “An odd sort of ‘up yours’ but, I imagine, in some people’s eyes, a very effective one.”

  The commissioner shifted his position in the doorway to catch the light better or something. It unnerved Fong that he hadn’t at least sensed the man’s presence.

  “Still to kill yourself like that?” the commissioner pressed on.

  “True, sir,” Fong said, “but there is every possibility that this was not a suicide.”