The Hamlet Murders

by David Rotenberg

  “Right. It should have been nine o’clock but Geoff was such a lazy . . . ”

  “Right,” he said snapping her off. “And did Geoff make the schedule that called Laertes and Ophelia in first, or did you?”

  “He did. I tried to talk him out of it but . . . ”

  Chen entered the room without knocking and indicated that Ms. Pants should stand up. She looked to Fong, who shrugged his shoulders with his best it’s-a-Communist-country-what-can-I-do look. Then Chen pointed her to the corner of the room and barked a country nursery rhyme in Mandarin. She went to the corner then Chen indicated with his finger that she should turn around and face the wall. He barked the nursery rhyme again but backwards this time. She resisted, but Chen screamed the opening lines of Mao’s red book at her.

  Captain Chen was having fun.

  Ms. Pants finally turned around and faced the wall still clutching her red zippered binder with the ever-so-valuable insights on the show’s progress.

  Fong smiled then the two of them left the office and quietly shut the door. Once they were outside Chen asked, “Is she a suspect?”

  “Of what?”

  “Mr. Hyland’s murder?”

  “No.”

  “So what is she suspected of doing?”

  A person like Ms. Pants, Fong assumed, could have organized a killing and staged it to look like a suicide but he couldn’t for the life of him think what her motive for doing so would be. Besides, the whole thing had artistic touches. The way Geoff was dressed, the positioning of the ladder, the flowers – artistic. And this woman didn’t have an artistic bone in her tight-assed body. “She’s suspected of being offensive to art. And of bad manners.”

  Chen just stared at Fong. Fong pointed toward the room. “Get her passport then let her go.”

  Chen turned to the office then stopped. “I don’t speak English.”

  “No, you don’t.” Fong smiled. “Just keep yelling in Mandarin until she figures it out. It’s good for a person like her to feel powerless. It’s what she enjoys doing to others. Maybe it will make her think twice before acting that way. Then again maybe it won’t.” Fong turned on his heel and headed toward the interrogation room the cops nicknamed the Hilton because it had a chair with all four legs and had been cleaned at least once in the past fiscal year.

  The other Screaming me-me, Ms. Marstal, sat looking as if her hands needed a cigarette. She didn’t stand when Fong entered but that was okay. Fong moved to the far side of the table and sat. He opened a folio and quickly leafed through the pages despite the fact that he already knew all the data there by heart.

  “So you are here as an adviser to the production?”

  “That’s not how I would describe it.”

  That surprised Fong. “How would you describe it then?”

  “My ex-husband put up the money for this. We were going to try out the concepts that Mr. Hyland had over here. Don’t ask me how Geoff talked my ex into doing it in Shanghai. If he wanted out of town we could have done New Haven or something.”

  Fong nodded although he had no idea what she was talking about. “Your money was behind the production?”

  “Yes. My ex-husband’s.”

  “Didn’t the theatre academy produce the show?”

  “They gave us the space and actors . . . ”

  “That’s not producing a show?”

  “Well, if you count that, I guess it was, but really the actors here . . . ” She didn’t complete her thought.

  Fong knew that Geoff was able to attract the finest actors in China. “You had a problem with some of the actors?”

  “Not a problem, they just aren’t very talented.”

  “Really?”

  “Especially the poor thing playing Gertrude.”

  Fong stopped listening as Ms. Marstal slandered Hao Yong’s work in the play. Fong understood what this was all about and began to nod and smile.

  “Something funny, Detective?”

  “Inspector.”

  “Fine. Inspector, what is so humorous?”

  Fong took a breath and remembered Fu Tsong’s comments about actresses who married rich producers. “They deprecate and fawn, Fong, and continually try to prove they haven’t slept their way into their roles. They usually have good tits but not enough brains to do the work. They always get attracted to the ethereal side of acting. There is real magic in good acting, Husband, but not the way their small brains can comprehend.”

  When he looked up, Ms. Marstal was talking again.

  “Geoff is so didactic – I’m interested in the spontaneous – channelling is the height of the form.” Then she laughed. Fong assumed she did that because she thought he didn’t understand what the hell she was talking about. He did – joke on you, lady. Then she rose and sort of posed against the door jamb, “Geoff didn’t find me attractive.” She waited for Fong to contradict Geoff’s taste. He didn’t. Finally she unfurled herself from the door and said, “Fool, him.”

  Fong wanted to say, “Geoff chased skirts not rags,” but thought better of it. Then he remembered the rest of that conversation with Fu Tsong about actresses like Ms. Marstal. “And then when they get older they use phrases like ‘old dames like me’ or ‘has-beens like me,’ but never believe them, Fong. They think they are still sixteen and want to be treated as if they hold the key to the secret gates to ecstasy all by themselves.”

  “Ms. Marstal, is it hard to find work at your age?”

  “Excuse me?” she said, clearly caught off balance by Fong’s question.

  “I believe you heard me. It must be difficult for an actress of your age in a field so dedicated to youth.”

  She softened. “Well, it’s hard for old dames like me, yes.”

  “And Gertrude was your role to play once the show moved back to North America?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  Fong just smiled. “Why were you at the theatre for a ten o’clock call?”

  “I attend most rehearsals.”

  “But no Gertrude scene was called.”

  “True, but Geoff needed guidance. I noticed him moving the show in a most unacceptable way.”

  “What way was that?”

  “Conceptual. As if his concept were more important than the actors.”

  “And that didn’t suit the show?”

  “No. It almost entirely undermines Gertrude’s character.” Fong smiled again and nodded. Ms. Marstal saw it and wasn’t pleased. “Gertrude is Hamlet’s mother. Her story is central to the whole thing. And she’s a sexually alive human being. She’s the sexual centre of the play itself.” She did that smiley thing again and said, “I mean how many times do has-beens like me get a chance to strut our stuff? I was at rehearsal to protect my role. If you knew anything about actresses you would understand my position.”

  Fong let that pass. “So what happens now?”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Who looks after the show after Geoff is gone?”

  “That duty falls to me. I’ve always wanted to direct. If I weren’t a woman I would have been asked to do so years ago. Did you know that Elinora Duza played Hamlet?”

  No, Fong didn’t know that. Nor did he know what an Elinora Duza was – perhaps some form of puffy Italian pastry or maybe it was the name for a Big Whopper in Rome or something. What he did know was that this woman wasn’t smart enough to plan the demise of Geoffrey Hyland. And even getting a chance to direct was not motive enough for murder. If, through some bizarre alignment of the stars or some trick of alchemy, the killing of a talented director would revive the career of a mediocre actress then Fong would have arrested Ms. Marstal on the spot. But since there wasn’t a hope of any such extraterritorial happenings he unceremoniously demanded her passport and left her to find her own way out of the police station.

  It was already dark as Fong entered his office. He sat at his desk and thought, “So much for the keyholders and those who were in the theatre just before and those called to be in the theatr
e just after Geoff’s death.” He slid the dossiers into a desk drawer. Then he noticed a piece of paper with a phone number on it. Beneath the number was Chen’s notation: Shakespeare Expert.

  He looked at the clock on the wall. Enough for today. He picked up the piece of paper and turned off the lights in his office. Standing in the dark, he looked at the dancing neon of the nighttime Pudong across the Huangpo River. Every day it seemed to grow.

  He left the office, putting the phone number on Shrug and Knock’s desk with a note attached to it saying “I want him in my office first thing tomorrow morning.”

  The office was almost deserted. He headed down the back stairway, crossed the eight lanes of traffic and four of bicycles on the Bund and entered a pedestrian underpass.

  And there he was. As always. The ancient man with his arhu and begging bowl. Fong spread out a piece of newspaper and sat on the dirty tiles across from the old man. He pressed his cheek into the coolness of the tile wall.

  “The weight is heavy on you tonight,” the old man said.

  “Yes,” Fong agreed.

  “Things must be permitted to end to allow other things to begin.”

  Fong nodded but said nothing.

  “The weight of ghosts can crush a man.”

  To this Fong was afraid even to nod his head, “Play something for me, Grandpa – and help me forget.” Fong slipped some yuan notes from his pocket and placed them in the begging bowl.

  The man’s ancient fingers touched the arhu’s strings. The instrument’s unearthly tones bounced like living things off the hard tile surfaces of the tunnel then fell from on high like diving birds into Fong’s ears where they fell, fell, fell through endless space to the still terribly deep pond beneath that was him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DONNY

  The next morning when Fong opened his office door he saw a bearded white man behind his desk, sitting in his chair. With a kind of jolly hop, this fireplug of a man stood up and, with his right hand extended, approached Fong, “Your assistant let me in. In fact, he was in here when I arrived.”

  Fong was about to reply that he had no assistant then understood that Shrug and Knock must have been in his office. That one never learns! He turned his thoughts back to the Long Nose in front of him.

  The man wore large glasses on his oval face, which Fong guessed were designed to keep his eyes apart, because whenever he laughed, which clearly happened often, his face threatened to fold in at the centre. He was barrel-chested and had tufts of greying hair sprouting from the top of his tight-fitting shirt. The man must have thought this stylish but no Chinese man would be caught dead wearing clothing that was too tight. And of course few had chest hair.

  Something about the man made Fong want to laugh out loud. He didn’t because he was too stunned by what Westerners call serendipity but what he knew was actually meaning manifesting itself. He’d seen this strange white man before! But where? The man was already talking, something about being the West’s foremost Shakespearean scholar. Fong nodded. He wanted to speak to an expert on Shakespeare’s plays in performance because he wanted to follow up Geoff’s assertion that “great directors put their present lives into everything they direct,” and Geoff was, as far as Fong was concerned, a great director. Fong suspected that clues to what was going on in Geoff’s life were embedded in his production of Hamlet. To that end, they’d found this man for him to interrogate.

  “Donny,” the man said.

  “That’s your name?” Fong asked.

  “Donny. Some call me Don.”

  “And you’re a . . . ”

  “A professor of dramatic literature in performance.”

  Fong thought about that for a moment. Literature in performance, what could that mean? An image of books dancing about a stage spouting lines leapt into his head.

  “Would you like to see my passport?”

  “Sure,” Fong said, while he thought, “Why is this man offering me his passport?”

  Donny handed him his American passport and Fong quickly understood. There it was. Don or Donny had a Class 2 visa status. Only politicians and big businessmen came in on higher classification. Directors and actors came in usually as Class 4 or Class 5 visitors. It had always pissed off Fu Tsong that academics were allowed into China on a higherstatus visa than artists who came over to actually do something. Fong handed back the passport, didn’t know where to start, so he said, “So you teach.”

  “For almost thirty years.”

  Fong wanted to say those were probably the longest thirty years of most of his students lives but didn’t. “Tell me your name again.”

  “Don. Donny to my friends.”

  Fong stared at this pumpkin of a man.

  Donny put a thick, hairy fist on the desk and assumed a professorial air, clearly something he had done many times before. “At any rate, I saw Mr. Hyland’s Hamlet. Very interesting.”

  “Good,” Fong said nodding, not knowing whether it was his turn to speak or not.

  “It was good, quite good, I thought,” Don said answering a question that Fong had not asked.

  “Me too, I thought it was excellent.”

  “Are you an aficionado, Detective?”

  “No, but I liked Mr. Hyland’s Hamlet very much.”

  “I see,” Don or Donny said noncommittally.

  “Was there anything about the production that struck you as out of the ordinary . . . ?”

  “Donny. I prefer it to Don, which is so East Rutherford, don’t you think?”

  Fong had absolutely no idea if he thought that or not but said, “Donny. So was there anything that struck you as unusual in Mr. Hyland’s production?”

  “Well, the opening . . . ”

  “Yes, I grant that.” Fong knew that the opening with Hamlet almost naked and screaming on the platform was unique, but he assumed that anything going on in the director’s head would worm itself into the production on a more subliminal level. “Other things . . . ”

  “Call me Donny.”

  Donny! Donny, Donny, Donny! Got it! The memory came back whole. Donny! It was years ago and his wife Fu Tsong had dragged him to the theatre. Sometimes she made him accompany her on what she called her “obligation.”

  “Come on, Fong. Do it for me,” she’d said as they rushed to flag down a cab on Nanjing Lu. Fong agreed, held out his badge and a cab immediately swerved across six lanes of traffic to pick them up.

  He loved Peking Opera, but modern spoken drama left him cold.

  “What is this play?” he asked as the cab busted its way through a twelve-cyclist-deep line.

  “This new thing, Fong. About the Qin Dynasty.”

  “A new play about the Qin Dynasty? Does that make any sense?”

  She gave him a be-good look.

  Their seats were, thankfully, near the back of the auditorium. He was pleased to see that the four seats in front of them were empty. If boredom gave way to yet more boredom he could put up his feet and take a snooze.

  She looked at him with an oddly sad expression on her face then put a slender index finger to her lips, “Shh.” The buzzer sounded and the play began although that did nothing to silence the audience who continued to chat, prepare full dinners at their seats and call across the auditorium when the fancy took them. Fong had brought along a snack, a dumpling wrapped in rice then steamed in a large grape leave, but he decided against eating it just yet.

  The opening scene had something to do with trouble in ol’ Xian, a princess, a tax collector – something else. Fong had already lost interest and was about to “assume the position” when three white people and an elderly Chinese lady hustled in and took the seats in front of them.

  The Chinese lady was clearly a party member with pretences of importance. Fong’d met her type before. She was of little interest to him, but the Caucasians were another matter. As head of Special Investigations in Shanghai he’d dealt with a lot of North Americans. But none quite like these three! Two were women. One was tal
l and darkish, pretty but somewhat put-upon – Tall Lady; the other, who Fong surmised was married to the man, was short and had a wide expanse of curly hair – Big Hair. Fong wondered for a moment if her head was just very wide. The man, Donny they called him, seemed to think he had to look after the women although it was obvious that these women needed no supervision.

  The Chinese woman, one of the 40 million-odd Madame Cheungs in the People’s Republic of China, spoke loudly although she seemed to have only a fleeting grasp of the English language. Even her Mandarin seemed a bit shaky. Fong wondered if some malicious bureaucrat had stuck these three white people with a person suffering from gentle dementia. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened.

  Suddenly the play inexplicably stopped and a long pantomime followed wherein most of the costumes were paraded.

  “Lots of hats,” Fong whispered.

  “Careful,” Fu Tsong hissed back.

  Then Tall Lady leaned over toward Big Hair and said, “They do talk in this play, don’t they? I mean this isn’t a mime, is it? I hate mime.”

  “Really?” asked Donny in mock surprise.

  “I hate mime’s nasty little cousins, ventriloquists, too,” said Big Hair.

  “Ventriloquists are only mimes with attitude,” said Tall Lady.

  “Mimes who can’t keep their mouths shut,” said Big Hair.

  “Mimes whose lips move,” chirped Donny.

  Listening to the chatter of the three Caucasians was an unexpected treat. Fong wanted to applaud. Give a hardy “Hoa.” Cleverness, never much in abundance in this kind of theatre, was a welcome relief.

  Madame Cheung responded, “Is noble – no?”

  Donny gave a get-this-broad look to Big Hair and Tall Lady then put an expansive smile on his face and turned to Madame Cheung, “It’s a fascinating mix of styles, the surreal and the naturalistic.”

  Tall Lady let out a groan.

  Fu Tsong whispered in Fong’s ear, “I like her and she has taste too.” The warmth of her breath made his heart miss a beat.

  The play finally got to its story line, something about an emperor whom everyone was trying to kill because he was sleeping with too many young girls in an effort to maintain his youth or something. Fong couldn’t understand why the other characters didn’t just rush at him and knock him off the stage and save everyone a lot of aggravation.