The Hamlet Murders

by David Rotenberg

  “Shall I pick you up?”

  “Is there any hurry?”

  Chen checked the screen of the PalmPilot, “The cell phone’s still in motion so I don’t think so.”

  “Fine,” said Fong and snapped his phone shut.

  Chen looked at the screen of the PalmPilot and then at his cell phone. He thought of Fong’s warnings about understanding the politics in the office. Then he thought of his obligation as a husband to Lily and a guardian to Xiao Ming and made a call.

  The younger Beijing man picked up and listened for a moment. “This was the wise thing to do.” He hung up the phone and turned to the older Beijing man. “He’s doing just what we expected.”

  The older Beijing man nodded, “As Mao said: allow a man to marry and have a child and he is lost to the Revolution.” The younger man hadn’t heard Mao quoted in quite some time. No one quoted Mao anymore. But it was the wistful tone in the older man’s voice that drew his attention.

  “Perhaps, but more to the point, they’ll lead us right to Xi Luan Tu.”

  The older man didn’t reply; he just looked out the window at the miracle that was modern Shanghai.

  Xi Luan Tu saw the limping woman make her way down the alley. He wheeled his barrel of grub pupae through the rusted gate at the back of the old Sovietstyle apartment block, where he slept on a basement mattress with twelve others. It was the appointed hour and he’d been waiting there every day at that time for the past two weeks. He watched her limp by, knowing she would make at least three passes before she made her drop.

  He hadn’t seen her for years. What had once been the slightest imbalance had progressed to a fullfledged limp. She was no longer young. Then again, neither was he. She didn’t look in his direction. It surprised him they had sent her. He questioned the wisdom of their choice. Her second time round came quicker than he thought it would. And her third that much quicker again. This time, she paused in front of the seventh garbage can in the row of cans – the assigned one – dropped something wrapped in newspaper into it – then made her way, this time quite slowly, along the alley. Just a good citizen who didn’t litter – not an old lover anxious to see her former mate.

  Xi Luan Tu wanted to chase after her but knew better. He put a tight metal mesh over the barrel with his grub pupae and locked it in place to an iron ring in the cement wall. Then he took out a cigarette, a snake charmer – he still liked the old brands – and lit up. If she was just a conscientious citizen then he was just a workingman enjoying a butt after a long day’s work.

  He smoked the harsh thing down to the filter as his eyes scanned the alley for watchers. He smoked a second then lit a third. Lots and lots of people, as there always were, but no one with any seeming interest in either him or the seventh garbage can in the row. He finished his third smoke then headed toward the row of garbage cans.

  He executed the pickup with casual precision.

  Five minutes later, crouching behind his barrel of grub pupae, he activated the cell phone he’d picked up from the seventh garbage can and made Internet contact – the first of many steps to get him out of Shanghai.

  Two minutes after that, Chen contacted Fong, “I believe she delivered the bugged cell phone.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Is shrimp dumpling made with shrimp?”

  Fong knew that Chen intended this as an affirmative answer to his question although in Shanghai it was extremely unlikely to find shrimp or anything even like shrimp in a shrimp dumpling. “Good, Chen. I’m at Dong Tai Lu in the Old City.”

  “I’ll be right there,” and after a brief pause added, “sir.”

  Fong heard the momentary pause and the slightly pushed end of Chen’s speech but didn’t know what to make of it.

  Xi Luan Tu didn’t sleep well that night. He knew he was approaching some very complicated decisions. He wondered about leaving Shanghai. If it were right. Then he wondered about his ability to withstand the pain of torture. Then he wondered at the ingenuity of his brother to arrange all this. Then he wondered at the movement itself that had grown from so few only fifteen years ago into the second strongest force in the People’s Republic of China. That thought calmed him and as the dawn crept closer he nodded off.

  Chen snored as he slept in the front seat of the car. Fong glanced over at the small screen on the PalmPilot. The bugged phone had not moved all night. Fong assumed that nothing of any real event would happen until the replacement money and the documents for those that Geoff had to burn were finally delivered to Xi Luan Tu. He assumed that the bug would lead them to that hand off. “Then what?” he asked himself. “Then we follow,” he answered his own question. But when the question “Why?” popped into his head he simply ducked it. He had absolutely no answer to “Why?” He had, often in the past, successfully followed what Westerners call hunches but he knew were insights. But this was not one of those occasions. He knew, in his heart, that he was following that cell phone because he didn’t have anything else to follow. That he had no real clues as to who murdered Geoff. No one with motive. No one who he even needed to interrogate further. Once again it occurred to him that he may have overlooked something obvious, something important.

  A car passed by and Fong slid down in his seat. The car turned the far corner of the market and sped away. Fong sat up in his seat. Is it possible that the two Beijing keepers were in that car? No. It’s just all this waiting. It’s made him jumpy, given him way too much time to think.

  And there was lots to think about. Why was the commissioner so quiet in all this? Why was Li Chou at least seemingly being cooperative? Why was there no diplomatic pressure from the Canadians to solve this murder? Or did they think it was a suicide? Had no one even raised the possibility with them that Geoff’s death was a murder?”

  The PalmPilot beeped. Slowly the street map overlay began to move. He nudged Chen who awoke with a start, as if he had just had a guilty dream. “What time is it, sir?”

  “Just before dawn, Captain Chen.”

  As Fong turned on the ignition and put the car in gear, a phone call was placed. “They’re moving, sir,” was all the voice said. The elderly Beijing man stretched. The younger Beijing man was surprised how fresh his elderly companion was.

  In the predawn cool, Fong and Chen moved carefully through the outdoor street market while the merchants set up for the day. The blip generated by the bug in the cell phone had moved then stopped here in the market. It had been still for a full half-hour. As Fong and Chen moved slowly south through the market toward the blip, others were moving too – toward them.

  At the height of the market’s morning rush, a peasant woman with a shabby bundle on her back and an awful haircut approached Xi Luan Tu’s barrel of grub pupae.

  “They’re for birds,” he said, “not humans.”

  “Do you think I am such a fool as to eat grubs?” she barked back.

  He noticed her southern accent and the exact use of the complex idiom such a fool. Then he saw her hands. Dirt-encrusted palms, ragged fingernails – but soft fingers. Not a callus to be seen. Not workers’ hands. He shallowed his breathing, ready.

  “Are you of the second wave?” he asked.

  “I bring the storm,” she responded.

  “Ah,” he said and handed her a large paper sack and began to ladle grub pupae into it.

  As she had been instructed, she yelled for him to stop. No one really took note – just another woman trying in vain to get a good bargain at the market.

  She unslung her pack, knelt down and opened it. He knelt down beside her with the bag of grubs between them.

  In her mind, she’d reviewed the scenario she’d read on yesterday’s Internet contact several times. She took a deep breath to clear her head then reached into the grub-filled bag and pulled out a handful of the nascent things. She was surprised they were so slimy but it was their movement inside their casings that almost drew a cry from her throat.

  “These are the finest . . . ” he bega
n to protest.

  She harrumphed and threw her handful of the squirming things at the side of the barrel. He squacked a protest, turned to the barrel while still making a racket and grabbed for the grub pupae. As he did, she shoved the open bag of grubs into her bundle and pulled out another brown paper bag containing the $25,000 in US currency, the passports and the four sets of identification papers that she’d taken from her bundle. He whirled back on her and shouted obscenities, grabbed the bag as if he were taking back his precious grub pupae and told her to get out of his sight.

  No one paid them any mind. Joan shouted a particularly colourful obscenity and then stomped away. She felt relieved that the switch had gone so smoothly although mildly disconcerted to think of the hundreds of grub pupae now perhaps loose in her pack.

  She moved quickly, looking for the way out – back to her life in Hong Kong.

  She passed out of the grub-seller section of the market and turned the corner. Immediately she was assailed by the sound of thousands of birds. Everywhere she looked, wrens, finches, canaries and kingfishers perched in bamboo cages that were piled by the walls of the buildings – sometimes four or five stories high.

  She leaned back to get a better look and felt something hard and cold against her neck. A voice she thought she recognized said, “Don’t make a fuss. We don’t want to hurt you.”

  Chen was surprised when Fong put his gun to the nape of the neck of the peasant woman with the bad haircut, who had done nothing but try to buy some grub pupae. But he wasn’t surprised to see, out of the corner of his eye, the two Beijing men running, followed by a dozen federal cops all heading right for the tall middle-aged man standing behind the barrel of live grub pupae.

  Xi Luan Tu saw it all happen before him and executed the escape plan he’d worked out months ago. He grabbed the brown paper bag with the money, ID and passports, patted his pocket once to assure himself he still had the cell phone, kicked over his barrel of grub pupae then charged around the corner and threw himself right at the mountain of fragile bamboo birdcages. Instantly, hundreds of the delicately balanced things crashed to the ground and split open – freeing their tiny captives. Amidst the screams of their owners, the birds moved as one living thing, claimed their freedom then headed directly for the mass of grub pupae on the ground. The shouts of anger and the hundreds of dive-bombing birds gave Xi Luan Tu enough cover to head toward the warrens.

  A volley of gunshots cut through the mayhem. A window shattered. An old man screamed in pain. Xi Luan Tu sped down the alleyway that accessed the warrens. As he made the last turn, he slipped and crashed to the pavement. He heard the skip of bullets off pavement all around him. When he regained his feet, a sharp pain on the outside of his left thigh almost threw him back to the ground. Then he heard a bullet splat into the alley wall beside his head and he forgot about the pain in his thigh or the blood that was flowing freely down his leg and pooling in his sock. He summoned all his strength and raced toward the safety of the warrens.

  On the first gunshot, Fong grabbed the peasant woman with the bundle and shoved her into the safety of a doorway. More shots. Birds screeched, people screamed.

  “Do you know who I am?” Fong hissed.

  Joan nodded.

  For a moment, Fong didn’t know what to do then he said, “Do you trust me?”

  Joan didn’t move.

  “Well, here are your choices. You trust me and help me or I hand you over to the federal officers who will arrest you for treason.”

  Joan looked at Fong. “If you put it that way . . . ”

  The Beijing men stood behind a stall that sold polished driftwood about halfway between Fong and the alley entrance to the warrens. The younger Beijing man barked orders to the local militia he had stationed strategically in the Old City. He paced as they began evacuating buildings and then entered the warrens from four different access points. The older Beijing man stood patiently to one side and allowed his fingers to trace the pleasing curve of one of the polished pieces . . . and he watched. He assumed Xi Luan Tu had a fifty-fifty chance of avoiding the troops in the warrens. But the Dalong Fada leader had no chance of avoiding Fong because of the bug in the cell phone – so the older Beijing man waited for Fong, his uncomely Captain Chen and the peasant woman with the awful haircut to make their move. Their move would betray Xi Tuan Lu’s whereabouts. His finger snagged as a splinter of wood entered a full two inches into his right ring finger. He didn’t wince but rather slowly backed his finger off the splinter. A thin line of blood dripped down his finger and pooled in his palm.

  Fong turned to Chen, “Captain Chen, Joan Shui. Joan Shui, Captain Chen.”

  Chen didn’t know what to do, whether he should shake hands or what. Before he could make up his mind, Fong asked, “We still have him?” Chen showed him the PalmPilot with the street overlays. “Not all that useful with Xi Luan Tu underground in the warrens.”

  “We’ll have to follow the best we can. I think it’s time to throw our friends off the track, don’t you, Captain Chen?”

  Chen hesitated for a moment as if he were unsure of the meaning of Fong’s question. Fong saw it and a shiver of fear went up his spine. Chen smiled and took out his cell phone. He punched in 555 555 555 1, listened for a tone, got it, then punched the pound key twice. Then he flipped his cell phone shut and said, “Problem turned into opportunity, sir.”

  Li Chou had heard the shots and screams from the market. The blip on his laptop began to move like someone running then stopped. He had his men in position and was about to give them directions when all of a sudden the street map overlay on his receiver began to move at tremendous speed. “Hold on,” he shouted into his cell phone. Finally the street map slowed then suddenly stopped. Li Chou looked at the thing. Shook it. The blip didn’t move. He hit the Enlarge button to get an exact address then dialled the snitch in central stores. He quickly told the man what had happened.

  The man really didn’t know what to make of Li Chou’s information but asked, “The blip is stable now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you can identify the cross streets?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s where the bug must be.”

  Li Chou contacted his men on his cell phone and shouted orders to them, hit the siren, U-turned across eight lanes of traffic and sped toward the arrest that he knew would send Zhong Fong back to the wasteland west of the Wall.

  While Li Chou’s siren pierced the din of Shanghai’s constant traffic jam, the young Beijing man stayed above-ground and on a makeshift map charted the unsteady progress of his troops in the warrens. Beside him, the older Beijing man kept his eyes on Fong, Chen and the peasant woman, who was with them now.

  “Money and passports and ID papers,” Joan answered Fong’s question. “I brought him all those things. Maybe you should arrest me.”

  “Maybe I will,” said Fong.

  Joan looked at the blip on the PalmPilot. “How did you bug him?”

  “It’s in the cell phone I brought him.”

  “Do you know who he is, Zhong Fong?”

  Fong nodded but said nothing. The blip had stopped moving. He looked at Chen who nodded. Then they moved quickly.

  The older Beijing man sat up straight and tapped the younger Beijing man. He pointed at Fong and Chen and the peasant woman who were running across the alley not twenty yards ahead of them.

  Li Chou whispered directions into his radio transmitter. His men responded with whispered affirmatives when they had reached their assigned positions around the Park Regent Hotel in the fashionable embassy district in the south end of the city. Four of the six had reported. He awaited the last two before he made his move.

  The tunnels got steeper and steeper while Fong, Chen and Shui made their way deeper and deeper into the heart of the warrens. Chen guided them as best he could by the blip on the screen of the PalmPilot. Fong knew the ins and outs of most of Shanghai, but this underground world was foreign to him. As a child, he’d ventured
into the warrens only a few times. Although he was never wealthy, Fong’s family had controlled night-soil collection throughout the Old City and he had some standing as a part of the family’s age-old business. The warrens were for those who had nothing. Not people like him. It was their domain, not his. The last time he’d gone down there he was twelve years old. He’d been robbed, beaten and only escaped worse through the unexpected kindness of one of the older ruffians.

  They passed by filthy mattresses on the wet ground and other evidence of human habitation. The blip had not moved for over ten minutes. Xi Luan Tu must have gone to ground. On occasion, the shouts of the militiamen echoed to them from a distance, but even these thinned out in the last few minutes. Twice Fong had put his hand up for them to stop and crept back to see if they were being followed. He was convinced that he’d heard footsteps but could not find anyone on their tail.

  They’d reached a turn in the tunnel. To their right the tunnel widened and headed toward the river. Directly in front of them was an almost sheer wall of rock. Chen put his fingers to his lips, looked at the blip then signalled that he was confused. Fong looked at the screen. It indicated straight ahead – somehow on the other side of the rock face, not down the tunnel. Fong was about to cuss all technology when he saw a wet sheen on the rock face. A sheen he recognized all too well. He reached up and touched the sticky slickness of fresh blood.

  The two Beijing men stood in the darkness of the tunnel and took out their firearms. Modern, German, lethal.

  Li Chou got the “In place!” from the last of his men. He took a breath. Referred one last time to the laptop. The blip had not moved. He counted to ten then yelled, “Now.”

  Climbing the rock face proved easier than it looked. Well-concealed but numerous handholds and footholds had been cut into the rock at appropriate intervals. This was evidently a much-travelled route. At the very top of the rock face was a small opening. Fong led; Joan and Chen followed. The opening narrowed so that even someone as slender as Fong had to squeeze to get through. But once through, a large tunnel travelled for ten yards then opened into a substantial cave. Along the walls of the cave were dozens of large barrels. Chen consulted the PalmPilot then pointed to a large barrel stencilled in white paint with: TO BE DELIVERED TO HU FAT CHOI SPADINA ROAD TORONTO CANADA.