The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory

by David Rotenberg

  Fong was almost ready to call it quits when the brother from the country raced down the alleyway shouting, “I want my fucking carpet back.”

  “Do you have something for me, comrade?” inquired Wang Jun as he threw an arm around the peasant’s shoulders.

  “I do, but I want my fucking carpet first.”

  He wouldn’t speak until he was shown his carpet. So Fong, Wang Jun, and the brother hustled into a patrol car and sped off to the police warehouse by the airport. Once inside, the brother was given a glimpse of his carpet and the other pieces of his property. Fong then sent everyone else except the brother and Wang Jun out of the enclosure. “So you have something for us,” said Fong.

  The brother hesitated for a moment and then reached into his pocket and pulled out three small intricate white carvings. Taking them, Fong said, “These? These are what your sister took from the alley off Julu Lu?”

  “Those.”

  “There wouldn’t happen to be several dozen more of them would there, comrade?” snarled Wang Jun, but Fong waved the question aside and turned to go.

  Catching up to Fong, Wang Jun stared at the delicate figures. “Ivory?”

  “Yes, ivory.”

  “Like ivory-from-elephants-type ivory?”

  “The same, Wang Jun,” said Fong as an idea tickled at the side of his brain but refused to come forward. From far behind them, they heard the brother scream, “How’m I suppose to get my fucking carpet back to my house?” Ignoring this Fong asked Wang Jun, “You don’t think he beat the street sweeper to get her to tell him, do you?”

  “If it makes you happy to believe that all of a sudden out of the goodness of her heart she fessed up so be it. For me, I hope he didn’t kill her. That’s all I hope.”

  The murder of the Zairian consul general was all over the papers. This time, every paper in town had the story and all could have gotten it legitimately. No one jumped the gun. The inevitable call from the Zairian embassy in Beijing was handled at a higher level so Fong never even knew the content of that no doubt unpleasant exchange.

  Fong was alone in his office as the dawn crested the river. On the table in front of him was a puzzle. Not a godly jigsaw puzzle this time but rather a number of human events whose points of intersection were still in doubt. One part of the puzzle was the personal data on Richard Fallon, another part was the personal data on Ngalto Chomi—between them were the three small ivory statuettes. Fong took a thick pencil and drew a line to join Richard Fallon to the ivory. Then he circled the ivory and continued the line to Ngalto Chomi. Then he put question marks over each of the connecting lines. He drew a wide arc over the ivory joining Fallon and Chomi. Again he put a question mark over that line. Below the ivory he put the few pieces of data he had on the Dim Sum Killer—weapon specs, a professional, leaving a message, daylight and populous alley kills— and drew a line to the ivory. Then he erased it. He drew lines to Fallon and Chomi and on them wrote the word “contracts.” Then he wrote out questions.

  Who authorized the contracts? He drew a line from the Dim Sum Killer to an empty circle with a large question mark in it.

  If a message is being sent, to whom? He drew a line from the ivory to another empty circle with a question mark in it as well.

  Then he took out a piece of paper and wrote LEADS TO FOLLOW UP. Under it he put:

  Shanghai Daily News publishes story before it happens

  American consul tries to warn me of something, then disappears

  ivory

  the specs on the weapon

  the shards in Fallon’s lung tissue

  He divided up his personnel. Wang Jun would take the newspaper problem in his usual diplomatic fashion, Lily was following the shards, Detective Li Xiao was already at work on the weapon specs, and he suspected that the American consul was a dead end.

  That left the ivory to him.

  DAY FOUR

  Fu Tsong had called it “the Mess.” She had labelled it “perfect Hilton Lobby art” and that is exactly where they had first seen it and where Fong was now looking at it again. It was just after 9:00 A.M. and he had not slept. But he knew what he needed. He needed to see the Mess.

  The Mess was a white plaster statue about three feet tall and two feet wide that stood inexplicably in a place of honour in the lobby of the Shanghai Hilton, China’s only five-star hotel. On the left was a Mongol warrior, complete with shaved head and lengthy braid, who was riding a fighting pony. Fair enough. But this fighting pony was now rearing high on its hind legs because a huge hovering eagle was pulling a long snake from the ground near where the horse’s front feet would have been had it not been rearing at the time. Sort of fair enough. But then, just to round out the Mess, the Mongol warrior, braid flying maniacally, had drawn his sword and was leaning over ready to cut the snake in half. Now why exactly was he doing this? The Mongol warrior’s dilemma, as Fu Tsong put it, was that he was going to fall on his pigtailed head because his horse was rearing. Now it was logical to assume that the large eagle, not five inches from the horse’s nose, could be the thing causing the poor animal to rear and hence should be the object of said Mongol’s sword. But no, the sword was raised against the snake. If the horse was frightened of the snake, that danger was taken care of by the eagle. But not if the Mongol warrior had his way. Well. . . as Fu Tsong put it, it’s a mess. It had unity but no sense. It’s not art, it’s kitsch. It’s the Mess.

  But Fong wasn’t so sure that Fu Tsong was right this time, because he saw sense here—not logic, but sense. He saw that the Mongol warrior was at his wits’ end. That he was inexplicably at the whim of fate. That he was falling through no fault of his own. That the warrior who was so used to control was going to meet his end completely and utterly as a joke of nature. A cosmic “gotcha.” The warrior’s reaction to this injustice was to lash out. At the nearest thing. In this case, the snake.

  Fong understood that. It was what he felt now. It was why he came to the lobby of the Hilton to see the Mess.

  Fong knew that the proverbial shit was going to come down on him today. A second dissection experiment on the streets of Shanghai would not go over well with the powers that be. It was going to be a shitty day, no two ways around that. But like all policemen everywhere, Fong had his sources of information and he was going to tap them before he was handed his head by Commissioner Hu. He was going to tap them until they hurt.

  Fu Tsong had called it his “round up the usual suspects” mood. Casablanca was one of the few American movies, which Fu Tsong had insisted he see, that Fong actually liked. Fu Tsong had been surprised. He’d never told her that he liked it because the hero was short, like him. He would never have the chance to tell her that or so many other things, after what happened to her in the Pudong.

  He slammed down hard on the brakes of his Volkswagen Santana and flipped off the flasher. With the hint of a smile on his face he crossed the street and entered the favourite whorehouse of one of his “usual suspects.” Fate might be throwing him from his horse but he was going to cut the fucking snake in half before he hit the ground.

  The gulped air of the hoarse-voiced old man was the only sound breaking the ominous silence in the Pudong power-plant room. Finally he said, “Why didn’t we just scare the merchants? They have no honour, no pride, they’d sell their mothers if they thought there was an American dollar to be made in it.”

  The silence lengthened in the dark room. At last it was broken by an elegant middle-aged Mandarin voice. “We have already discussed this. It is the smugglers who must be stopped. There are too many merchants to frighten into shutting down. But there are a limited number of people with the means to smuggle. So we agreed. Sir, you agreed. That we should send a message to the smugglers, to get them to stop.”

  “Won’t these killings frighten away investment money too?”

  “Only for a moment, but that moment will pass. The killer will be caught as we planned,” said the elegant voice.

  Once again there was a lengthy pau
se before the old man spoke. “It is a new world. All this because a group likes animals. . .”

  “And Shanghai must grow or die.”

  There was no message on his e-mail and that surprised Loa Wei Fen. His employers were no doubt upset. There had been no mention of the ivory anywhere in the press although the deaths had gotten prominent coverage.

  Well, they would contact him, that was a certainty. He looked down at the computer notebook on the bedside table. He affixed the modem jack and turned on the machine. With a few quick commands, he brought up the e-mail concerning the Zairian consul general. Its return address was E-M-29-7976. There was no identified server. That didn’t surprise Loa Wei Fen. The People’s Republic of China was doing its best to control e-mail correspondence and hence had probably instituted a central server system for the country. With his technological advantage it didn’t take Loa Wei Fen long to locate and break into the server’s data banks. In short order the street address from which the e-mail had been sent flashed merrily on his computer screen.

  He still had three days left on his contract and he thought that perhaps it was time to learn something about his employer. Time to be prudent. No. Now, it was imperative to be prudent.

  There was something satisfying about breaking in on a pimp in midcoital pump with one of his girls. Dung Tsu Hong looked every inch a fool as he attempted to cover himself with a pillow while his ladyfriend whined that she was wet and there was no shower here and besides who was this guy?

  It was always satisfying to shame them in front of the girls who were so frightened of them. That or rip their fancy clothes. Fong decided that since Dung Tsu Hong was naked, except for the pillow covering his crotch, the clothes option was out. So he grabbed the pillow away from the pimp and smiled.

  “I’ve got a question or two for you.”

  Dung Tsu Hong sank to the floor, holding his hands over his genitals.

  Fong knelt down beside him. “I want information on the two killings. I want it by the end of the week. Under stand me, Dung Tsu Hong! I could come back every day and do this, it gives me so much pleasure. Now if you don’t want to see me for a while find the answers to these questions: Who’s the knife artist? And where is he?” With that he grabbed a handful of the man’s greasy hair and pulled hard. “Those are easy questions for a smart guy like you, Dung Tsu Hong. Who’s the knife artist and where is he. Got it? Up and down means yes.”

  Dung Tsu Hong’s head moved slowly up and down. The whore on the bed giggled. Fong shot her a look. This one probably thought her work was fun. This one probably approached Dung Tsu Hong, not vice versa.

  In the morning light, returning to his car, Fong felt none too good. The likelihood that the pimp would be able to find anything was not great. But at least it was something. The punching bag punches back. He turned on the flasher and hit the siren. He had two more calls to make before he went to the office and had to face Commissioner Hu.

  Shrug and Knock pocketed his master key and cracked open the door to Fong’s office. He surveyed the interior. The Little Turd, as he called Fong, wasn’t there. Not usual for him. Then Shrug and Knock’s eyes were drawn to Fong’s schematic on the table. After a moment’s viewing he concentrated on the line drawn from the ivory pieces through the Dim Sum Killer to the circle with the large question mark inside it.

  Shrug and Knock knew that this would interest Commissioner Hu.

  Fong’s next two stops didn’t require violence, only the threat of it. The first was to an illegal money changer who frequented the Fu Yu market and also did a franchise operation off Haui Hai in the clothing market near the embassy district. Breaking in on him was not difficult and refusing the casually offered bribe proved that he was in earnest enough for the man to listen to him. The threat to close him down was enough to get the man’s full attention. Times were getting tough in the illegal money-changing business. Now that foreigner exchange currency, familiarly FEC, wasn’t being issued by the government to foreigners wishing to buy Chinese goods, a healthy chunk of the money-changers’ business, the exchange of FEC for REM (Chinese currency) was gone. Now a foreigner could get REM at any bank, just like a Chinese national. The money changers, formerly proponents of open markets, now had to compete against the Bank of China. They were learning that competition could be tough.

  Fong repeated his questions. Who was the knife artist and where was he? The money changer virtually kowtowed as he promised his full cooperation.

  Fong’s third stop was at the North Train Station across the Su Zhou Creek.

  This train station used to be a place of great silences. During the Cultural Revolution, the forced move to the countryside of thousands, perhaps millions of people began here. Their leavetakings took place in the cavernous terminus under the watchful eyes of the Red Guards, eyes that did not permit sentiment. Tears were an expression of the bourgeoisie. So silence was the only farewell.

  The train station was anything but quiet now, although it was still a place of vast sorrow. Every day thousands upon thousands of peasants from the countryside were disgorged from trains into the huge echoing building. They arrived hoping to find work in the economic miracle that was Shanghai. They arrived with sullenness and loathing in their eyes. Had they not fought the revolution to be equal to these execrable Shanghanese? Yet here they were like beggars on the street looking for the right to lift and haul with hands and carrying poles. Water buffalo work.

  Only the men came. They came in anger and hate and in the noonday sun; they crowded the station’s steps as they sat on their red-white-and-blue-striped satchels and glared at the passersby. At some they spat. At most women they threw stones. At the funny-looking little cop’s approach they looked the other way. They might be from the country but they recognized a policeman’s walk when they saw it.

  Fong passed by the huddled bunches of smoking men and entered the station. Its height always surprised him, but his business was not in the central hall. Flashing his police identification he quickly passed through security and was led to the customs warehouse.

  Inside the old warehouse, the sun etched spider webs through grit-plastered windows. Fong took a deep breath and then asked to see Shen Lai. The man who took his request returned in a moment and asked Fong to follow him.

  They walked down aisles with three-tiered shelves rising to the ceiling some sixty feet above them. All the shelves were piled high with crated goods. Stacks of electronic equipment from South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Clothing and food stuffs from America. Heavy machinery parts from India. Coffeemakers from France. Goods from almost every country that Fong could name, all waiting here for customs clearance. At one time this warehouse had been filled with goods from the USSR and Albania. From Romania and North Korea. Now they were the few countries that seemed not to be represented. As the two men passed through the last aisle, Fong did spot an area where the packages were half rotted through and the wrapping so badly put together that it was coming apart. Without looking he knew that this was the Russian section. Some things never changed.

  Shen Lai was not happy to see Fong. He was a roundfaced fat man in his early fifties with large puffy cheeks and the smallest mouth in the Eastern Hemisphere. Whenever he spoke his mouth looked like that of a goldfish, and that was in fact his nom de guerre, the Goldfish. Behind his back they called him Fish Face. Fong couldn’t see how the Goldfish was much of an improvement but then again Fong was never up to date on the intricacies of etiquette in the world of Chinese organized crime.

  Shen Lai was not one of the tong bosses but he was the appointed access point through which the authorities could reach the tong known as the Small Knife Society. The tongs had controlled customs houses in Shanghai since well before the British came. They took a modest percentage off each and every duty. Those percentages bankrolled almost all their other activities— drugs, women, gambling. They were the cash cow.

  Unlike most Chinese men of wealth, Shen Lai smoked a local brand—Snake Charm—and he was filling
the air with its pungent aroma as Fong entered the office. Fong took out one of his Kents and lit up. Shen Lai shook his head. “Bad for business, that,” he said, indicating the American cigarette. “Not patriotic.” He puffed harder on his Snake Charm. The picture of the small cigarette in the tiny mouth almost lost in the enormous cheeks made Fong smile.

  “Something funny, Zhong Fong?”

  “Not a thing, Shen Lai.” Fong crushed out his cigarette against a windowpane. “We’re worried about the safety of your workers here.”

  “Are you really?”

  “Yes, we’re going to have to close your operations for the better part of a month to make sure that health standards are being maintained. There have been complaints.”

  A month’s closure would cost the tong a lot of revenue and Fong knew it and he knew that Shen Lai knew it.

  “You can’t—”

  But he never got the rest out of his tiny mouth as Fong snapped back, “I can and you know I can. Then I can close down the customs yards at the docks and that would really hurt, wouldn’t it?”

  “You’re crazy, you’re out of your jurisdiction.”

  “Nonsense, I’m the head of Special Investigations. Public safety is part of my portfolio. This place is unsafe. You must have over a hundred workers here, I’m concerned for their health and well-being. I’m closing you down.”

  There was a beat of silence wherein Shen Lai weighed the threat. He found Fong just enough of a fool to go through with it. Lighting another cigarette he smiled,

  “Okay, you’ve made your point. What can I do for you?”

  “I want the knife artist who carved up those two men.