The Hamlet Murders

by David Rotenberg

  In darkened doorways couples steal kisses, hands caress curves and clutch hardness only to be laughed at by the local crone. Nightclubs pour their relentless beat onto the streets and Mao-jacketed elders shake their heads in disgust. A young man holds onto a lamppost and vomits in the gutter as others watch but no one helps – the fear of disease from the West now alive on the streets of the great city.

  A dark alley’s mouth emits sounds of anger and a whimpered apology. Floral wreathes outside a storefront announce the opening of a new business and plead for good luck from whichever gods have not yet forsaken the secular state of the People’s Republic of China.

  The recyclers are out in force with their large metal tongs extracting scraps of paper from the sodden waste in the garbage cans. Then, as if on some unheard cue, jetting flares erupt from the seven tall chimneys down by the Huangpo River. Shortly thereafter clouds of dark smoke belch into the night sky – the city’s garbage begins to incinerate.

  And the people and the smells and the lives in motion – Shanghai. Home.

  “Present your alibis, please,” Fong said for the third time.

  The two Beijing men didn’t move. They certainly didn’t answer Fong’s request.

  Fong got up from his desk and, turning his back on the Beijing men, stared out his floor-to-ceiling office window overlooking the Bund. Just getting these two into his office was a major coup – but it wasn’t enough. At this point in a murder investigation gains were made by subtraction and he had to be sure he was right before he removed anyone from his list of suspects. So alibis had to be demanded and checked. Without turning back to the Beijing men, Fong said, “This is a murder investigation. The murder of a foreigner in Shanghai falls within my jurisdiction, not yours.”

  The younger Beijing man took a step to his left, putting himself right beside Fong in the window’s reflection. “What did you find in Geoffrey Hyland’s room?”

  “Old books, stupid tapes and dirty underwear,” Fong answered the reflection without turning back to the men. He was careful not to lie since these facts could be checked.

  The older Beijing man took two oddly elegant steps making it a trio of reflections in the window. “You have been back to see Mr. Hyland’s play, this Hamlet, twice since his death. Why?”

  “To figure it out.”

  “What is there to figure out?”

  “Mr. Hyland was a great artist. Great artists often include their present concerns in their art.”

  “So you wanted to see what ‘concerns’ of Mr. Hyland’s life he put in the play?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what was there?”

  Fong hesitated for a moment. He could lie about this because the truths he found were ephemeral – not evidence but ethos.

  “What did you find, Traitor Zhong?”

  “Ghosts and ghosts of ghosts,” Fong said. But even as he spoke he thought: “I have seen that damned play one too many times.”

  The older man examined Fong’s face in the window’s reflection. Finally he said, “Be careful, Traitor Zhong, be very careful.”

  Fong responded quickly, overriding the threat, “Was Mr. Hyland a spy?”

  The younger man took a step toward Fong’s back, but the older man shot him a hard look and he stopped. “Why do you want to know that, Traitor Zhong?” asked the older Beijing man calmly.

  “Mr. Hyland’s version of Hamlet strikes me as heavy on the spy stuff. Since you guys are the only ones I know who deal with spooks, I thought maybe there was a connection.”

  “I doubt that he was spying in any ordinary sense of the term,” said the older man.

  “And in an extraordinary sense of the term?”

  The older man did that elegant moving thing again then said, “Perhaps.”

  “Ah,” said Fong and turned to face the two Beijing men. “Now that we have that cleared up, where exactly were you two clowns on the night of Mr. Hyland’s death, say between 11 a.m. and 6 a.m. the next morning?”

  Eventually the Beijing men coughed up alibis. The younger one had been in a K-TV lounge until almost three and the older man had led a seminar on counterterrorism late into the night in one of Beijing’s many Shanghai safe houses. Both were able to supply several names and addresses of people who could corroborate their stories.

  Upon completing his answer and then threatening Fong in an entirely predictable fashion – Fong thought of it as just more blah-blah from Beijing – the younger Beijing man shouted a final warning and stormed out of Fong’s office.

  Fong stood and once more turned toward the window – this meeting was over.

  Fong glanced up into the pane and was surprised to see the older Beijing man take a quick step toward him.

  Fong turned.

  Then the younger Beijing man reappeared in his office door. The older man stopped in his tracks, shouted a threat that Fong found oddly half-hearted then whirled on his heel and left the office followed closely by his younger partner.

  Fong watched their retreating figures and wondered if he needed to recalibrate where he thought they – or at least the older Beijing man – might fit in all this mess.

  And what a mess it was. Geoff’s death was not a suicide, although he had no idea who murdered him or why.

  Fong reminded himself that Geoff was smart. Geoff had tried to communicate with him through his business card – maybe he had tried to communicate in other ways. Geoff’s Hamlet certainly was concerned with spying and his two Beijing keepers were clearly more interested in Geoff’s comings and goings than in his death. “The play’s the thing” Fong remembered from the front of Geoff’s business card. It would be like Geoff to leave messages on both sides of the card.

  He checked that his office door was locked, noted that Shrug and Knock was gone then headed toward the old theatre on the campus of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Despite the fact that he had seen Geoff’s Hamlet twice since the director’s death, Fong had the gnawing feeling that he had overlooked something – something obvious.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A TRIP AND A CD-ROM

  After two days and nights travelling on local trains and buses, Joan Shui was 20 miles south of Shanghai. That night, she slept in the back room of a peasant’s hut on some dirty straw with the pigs and two other small furry animals she couldn’t identify, although she was told they were harmless.

  She had been passed smoothly from one Dalong Fada escort to the next and, although the officials’ demand to produce her papers increased as she neared Shanghai, no one had asked her to open the smelly bundle she carried on her back. In fact, the stinkier she got, the less interested officials were in her.

  A pig cuddled up to her back, oh well, a little more stink couldn’t but help. Yes dear, in this profession body odour is your friend. As she drifted off, she could just make out the angry whispers of this last escort’s wife, who evidently was not as loyal to the cause as her husband.

  Joan awoke in the middle of the night. Without a watch she had no idea what time it was. A second pig had nestled into her back and was snoring loudly in her ear. She’d heard worse at the Calden Inn. But it wasn’t the pig’s snoring that had awakened her.

  Just for a moment Joan Shui couldn’t catch her breath, as if her lungs had, for an instant, forgotten how to work.

  Fong sat at the back of the old theatre. The day’s heat had been trapped in the ancient building. Now, at almost two in the morning, it was obvious that the heat would keep its hold on the building through the night. Fong rolled up the bottoms of his pant legs so they were over his knees. Not a lot of relief, but some. He forced himself to think through the last time he had seen Geoff alive. It began with the Canadian director coming onstage while Fong was at the back of the auditorium. It ended with Geoff slipping Fong his business card, on the back of which were penned the words: Help me, Fong.

  Fong sat in the same seat now that he had sat in then and slowly rewound his mental tape, making himself put the events in sequence. Geoff had
said, “Fuck me with a stick, what brings your sorry ass here?” Fong had noted at the time how odd the words were, coming from Geoff’s mouth. Then Geoff had called for a run of the play from the top. He’d hopped off the stage and headed toward Fong. He was followed by his translator Da Wei at a respectful distance and then by the two Beijing keepers and the two Screaming me-me’s.

  Fong stopped – well no, not stopped, startled into a new kind of waking. Was that the first time Geoff had known he was sitting there at the back of the theatre? If Geoff were trying to communicate with him, which was evident from the plea for help on the back of his business card, then he may have been sending messages from the very first time he knew Fong was watching. It had never occurred to Fong before but perhaps Geoff knew he was in the theatre from the very moment, the instant, that he’d arrived. It had been that way in the past. Geoff had that kind of intuitive knowledge of the spaces in which he worked.

  Fong remembered a moment right after he arrived when Geoff seemed literally to stop in midair. Was that Geoff’s response to knowing he was sitting at the back of the theatre? Maybe. If that were true, then Geoff’s “Fuck me with a stick” may have been said to bring the two Beijing keepers into the open. To show them to Fong so that he would watch his mouth. That made some sense. Fong went back to his mental tape this time looking to see if there was other communication intended for him before Geoff claimed to discover him sitting in the back of the auditorium. Before “Fuck me with a stick,” Geoff had talked to a few actors, set the fight director to work on the fight between Hamlet and Laertes and . . .

  Fong felt a slither of cold make its way down his spine. Despite the heat he shivered. Geoff had spent all that time with the unusually large leather pouch used by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to transport the letter instructing the ship captain to murder Hamlet. Geoff hardly ever bothered with props. In fact, Fong had never seen Geoff so much as touch a prop onstage, let alone be so concerned about something as inconsequential as a pouch. And he had done it onstage. Not in the wings with a props man but onstage – so Fong could see.

  Fong rose and walked slowly toward the stage. A single bare light bulb hung from the ceiling upstage of the proscenium arch. It, too, seemed to sway with the turning of the earth – as Geoff had in the end.

  Fong hopped up on the stage, turned and looked out at the darkness of the auditorium – a cavern drawing him, an emptiness needing filling. No, demanding filling. He had an impulse to speak, to open his heart, to unburden himself into the maw of the theatre – but he didn’t. He knew he hadn’t earned that right.

  He crossed upstage of the proscenium arch stage right and flicked on the work lights. Harsh incandescence filled the cluttered space. Behind him Fong saw the props cage. He looked at the cheap lock. It took him a few minutes and a deep splinter to his left index finger, to force the hinges to pop.

  Fong opened the door and stepped in. All the show’s props, except the swords, were laid out on a large table with chalk marks around each and the name of each prop charactered beneath it. Fong admired the system – an oasis of organization in the chaos of the theatre. You look at the table, if any outline is empty, the prop is missing. Simple. Logical. Inexpensive. Very Chinese.

  Fong reached over and picked up the satchel that had so concerned Geoff.

  It was nothing very special, just a treated leather pouch sewn together with rough strips of hide. The front and back were lacquered stiff. He put a hand inside. Nothing. He turned it over and shook it. Nothing. He went to put it back on the table. As he did, the thing tilted and caught the light at an oblique angle. There. The slightest circular ridge on the outside of the leather. He picked up the pouch and tried to turn it inside out. It wouldn’t turn. The lacquered stiffness prevented the piece from reversing. He examined the outside closely, nothing. He slid his hand into the pouch again slowly running his fingers around the rim then down the sides.

  Halfway down, he felt an almost flat patch of something that could be glue.

  Fong had had enough of being careful. He took out his pocketknife, slit the pouch along its seams and folded it back. The ridge was of glue as he had thought. And it sealed shut a slit in the leather.

  Fong carefully broke the glue seal and opened the slit with his knife. Parting the lips of leather, he inserted his fingers.

  Something hard.

  A disk.

  A CD-ROM.

  By four in the morning Chen had the disk working in Fong’s office computer. “Do you want me to open it?”

  “Don’t you want to know where it came from, Captain Chen?”

  “I do want to know.” That hung in the air for a moment like something heavy.

  “Then ask, Captain Chen.”

  “I shouldn’t have to ask. I’m part of this investigation or I’m not. If I’m part of this investigation then you should tell me without me having to ask.”

  “True, but perhaps it’s safer that you don’t know.”

  “Like you having a key to the theatre was safer for me not to know?”

  This was the longest exchange he’d ever had with Chen without the country cop addressing him as “sir.” “No, not like that, Captain Chen. Having a key to the theatre could, and I emphasize could, make me a suspect in a murder with which I had nothing to do. But what is on this CD-ROM could make you and I actually guilty of a crime.”

  “Unless we reveal the contents of the CD-ROM to the proper authorities.”

  No “sir” again but Chen didn’t leave the office and go report to those proper authorities either. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Fong took a deep breath, “Ti Lan Chou Prison is not a happy place to spend the rest of your life.”

  Chen still didn’t head toward the door, so Fong sat at the computer and said, “Show me how to start this thing, Captain Chen.”

  “The CD-ROM, sir?”

  “Yes, Chen,” Fong said, “the CD-ROM.”

  Chen opened the CD-ROM drive then stood back to allow Fong some privacy as he interfaced with a ghost who performed in response to the click of a mouse.

  “Hello, Fong.” Geoff’s voice was ever so slightly out of sync with his lips. “I could use that old saw of ‘If you’re watching me now, then you’ve followed my clues.’ To be frank, I knew you would.

  “I used to hate you, Fong. All I wanted after Fu Tsong’s murder, and yes I still believe you murdered Fu Tsong, was to punish you. It helped me, that anger, for a while. It gave me a purpose, a goal to my days now that Fu Tsong was gone. Something else to love. Yes, I loved the idea of hurting you, Zhong Fong.

  “But it fades. Unlike love – the desire for revenge fades. And when it did, a purposelessness set in. Monday became indistinguishable from Thursday, November from February, nothing took on any uniqueness. Everything felt and was the same as everything else. Nothing became important or silly or insightful or stupid or lyric or banal or . . . well, you understand me, don’t you, Fong?”

  That last was in a different tone than what had come before.

  “Sameness stretched out all around me like a vast featureless white room. You know the first thing I discovered while I was lost in that big white room? Guess, Fong.”

  Geoff’s image stayed on the screen as he sang a silly ditty and moved his head back and forth in time to the melody like a metronome. Suddenly he stopped singing and his head stopped moving.

  “Time’s up, Fong. Your answer please.”

  Geoff turned so he was in full profile and cupped his ear as if waiting for a far-off response.

  “No answer, Fong? Fine. It’s your choice. The answer is: all human beings are better for the very fact of loving. Loving anything. It almost doesn’t matter what. And for most people that loving shows you the way out of the big white room. But I had nothing to love so I stumbled about for months until I chanced upon a door that led to yet another, and infinitely larger, white room in which I stayed for almost a year. Do you know what finally showed me the way out? Three, two, one
– time’s up. Purpose. If you can’t have love, you can at least have purpose! Finding a purpose showed me the way out of that fucking room. Humans need to have purpose. Seen the books in my room, Fong? Like the way I organized them for you? I did that just in case you missed my clues leading you to this little performance. Scientists call it a backup. I thought of it as another way to score a goal. It’s a hockey image – sorry, Fong, I assume hockey isn’t your game. Too bad. Great game, hockey. Really great.” This last was said with genuine feeling. Surprising feeling.

  “So . . . ” Geoff took a long breath and shook his shoulders as if they had suddenly become tight with tension. Fong noticed that sweat was appearing on his upper lip.

  Geoff smiled. “It just occurred to me that if you are watching this performance, I may be dead. Now there’s an odd thought, don’t you think? Be that as it may, after you stole Fu Tsong, saving Xi Luan Tu became my purpose.”

  Fong couldn’t believe it. Xi Luan Tu, the Dalong Fada activist and China’s most wanted man was Geoffrey Hyland’s purpose! No wonder the two Beijing guys were interested in Geoff’s comings and goings.

  Chen cleared his throat.

  Fong had forgotten the younger man was there. Fong clicked the Stop icon. “Leave now, Chen, and all you’ve heard is gobbledygook from a crazy Long Nose. Stay and you’ve crossed the line into something that Beijing no doubt will see as treasonous if we don’t report it.”

  Chen didn’t answer.

  “Are you sure, Captain Chen?”

  Chen didn’t move.