The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory

by David Rotenberg

  She’d been told that men changed once they got married but she really only believed that happened to other women. Women who couldn’t keep their men’s attention. And keeping men’s attention had never been a problem for Amanda. The problem was that the Richard she had married became a new Richard after they got married. He became obsessed with money. His interest in the wildlife issues of his work seemed simply to stop. The few friends from work whom she had really liked stopped coming around. When she would call them she clearly got the impression that they were happy enough talking to her but that they no longer cared to socialize with her husband. Richard seemed encased in an invisible shell. As if a deep solitude had descended upon him. Then the calls began to come in the middle of the night and then the business trips. And a secrecy that was not there before came between them, as easy to feel as a Canadian front blowing into New Orleans to relieve the humidity of summer. Their small house in the Garden District filled up with things she’d bought, but none were hers. She no longer really lived in the house in the Garden District with the man named Richard Fallon. For he was not the outgoing warm man that she had married. He was a silent man, a man alone.

  The chatter of a Chinese woman entering the sauna, buck naked, with a cellular phone stuck to her ear, broke the spell of the heat and the smell of the redwood. Amanda sat up and headed toward the shower.

  After her cold shower she dressed, got her key, and went back to her room. The message light was on. She called down to the desk and was told that an Inspector Fong had returned her call. They gave her a number to call and assured her that it would be answered by someone who spoke English.

  She thanked them and dialled the number.

  The phone was picked up on the first ring. “Forensicks, Lily talking.”

  “I was given this number to call to get through to Inspector Fong.”

  “Dui, right, you called here, good yes. Name please.”

  “Mrs. Richard Fallon.”

  For a moment Amanda thought she heard the words Dim Sum something or other said to someone standing near by, then Lily spoke into the phone. “Inspector Zhong not here now.”

  “When there?” Amanda almost shouted into the phone, annoyed that she’d been reduced to speaking pidgin English.

  “Inspector Zhong want to talk to you but not here.”

  “Where Inspector Zhong?” Pidgin again!

  “In theatre. Shanghai Theatre Academy on Hua Shan, 630.” Then the phone clicked off.

  Fong looked at Lily. He wasn’t pleased.

  “Lady sound desperate for seeing you, Zhong Fong.”

  Then, in wonderful saucy Shanghanese, she added, “This lady in front of you is more than desperate, this lady waits in sweet anticipation for seeing you.”

  Fong’s face didn’t break a smile.

  Finally in English Lily said, “So I shitted up, don’t fuck on me.”

  Fong was unable to top that so he shook his head and headed home. His only solace was the fact that few people, Chinese or otherwise, were clever enough to find the academy, let alone the theatre in the academy compound. And Richard Fallon’s widow didn’t sound all that bright.

  Geoffrey Hyland was winning at a game that he had played since he was first paid to direct a play at the tender age of eighteen. He was guiding human material into art, using a play as a template but not a score. He didn’t direct the way a conductor conducts a symphony. He worked more like the lead player in a jazz ensemble. He set the theme, and made sure that everyone else knew the key signature and the tempo and then off they went: improvising freely from each other to create something that lived and breathed, had rough edges—was of life itself. All he demanded was good listening and real talking from his actors. He insisted that they play the “what game.” If someone, anyone on stage at any time, spoke a line to them that didn’t make sense, that they couldn’t believe or in any way seemed “actorly” they were to say “What?” At which point the partner had to redeliver the line, sometimes many times, until some real signal was passed. At first, the actors were reluctant to use this technique; to them it implied condemnation of a fellow actor’s work. But once Hao Yong, the brilliant young actress playing Viola, used it against Feste and then used it again and again to get the old charlatan to finally give her something real to playoff of. . . well, they were off to the races. And race was the right metaphor. An emotional race with which everyone onstage and Geoffrey in the auditorium had to keep up. It was early but already exciting.

  Geoffrey’s Mandarin had improved greatly from the time eleven years ago when he first worked in Shanghai on The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, but he still worked with an interpreter at his side. Even in that first play, by the end of the second week he seldom needed his interpreter’s help. Geoffrey, like many stage directors, quickly memorized the script as the actors worked and hence knew where in the text the actors were at each moment. Although he could not exactly pinpoint which Mandarin word was which English word, he could always identify the emotional shifts required in the text and was able to see whether a shift was played by the actor or not. It was for this reason that the language was not a real barrier. If the States of Being were right, and that was something Geoffrey could see, and the actions played were right, then the image (that part of acting contained in the word) would basically look after itself. At least that was true in texts like Rita Joe where the language was not really of the essence. It was obviously less true of Shakespeare texts.

  Geoffrey held up his hand for a moment and called out “Hao” (good). He turned to his interpreter and asked Hao Yong to join them. She was now in her late twenties but she still carried herself like the teenager she had been when she played Rita Joe for Geoffrey those eleven years ago. Since then, she had been in a show a year for Geoffrey, sometimes more. She was talent that walked and talked. Not pretty, but so alive that when she smiled you smiled with her. In the eleven years she had learned a little English, enough to hold her own at lunch with Geoffrey from time to time. Enough to have been his lover briefly some seven years ago. Before Fu Tsong.

  “Help me with the language here.” He pointed to the Viola/Olivia scene and the three of them went through it line by line. “When you read this translation, Hao Yong, does it feel like Viola is falling under the power of Olivia?”

  For a moment Hao Yong looked at Geoffrey and then with an apologetic shrug of her slim shoulders turned to the translator. There followed a rapid and animated conversation in Shanghanese which left Geoffrey completely at a loss. He loved the way the Chinese actors talked about things like this. For years he thought that every Chinese conversation was a yelling match, but now he didn’t think so. Now he knew they were yelling matches.

  He watched Hao Yong’s face with a growing pleasure. As a student she had been truly brilliant. As a professional actor she was one of the few who was able to overcome her training. She had shucked off the old Stanislavski stranglehold and was in freefall. An artist of true power. But after all these years how little he knew of her. He had never been to her home. He knew that she was married now but he’d never met her husband. He didn’t even know if she was an only child; it was likely that she was as she’d been born in the onechild era. But she carried herself and used the knowledge of one who came from a more extended family.

  One of the strange ramifications of the single-child policy in China had been the loss of one of the basic communication tools for an actor. Actors use simple family relationships (father/son, older brother/younger sister, husband/wife, lovers, etc.) to convey to an audience the nature of more complex relationships. When an actor goes to work on, say, the relationship between a teacher and a student, the actor playing the teacher chooses father/son while the actor playing the student chooses younger brother to older brother. The ability to find conflicts even on the basic level of relationship greatly enriches performance. From the audience’s perspective they ’get’ teacher/student because they identify with it as either father/son or older brother/younger brother. Bu
t with the single-child policy, the basic knowledge of brothers and sisters has been diluted if not lost. It has removed a potent weapon from the actor’s arsenal. Some claim the other loss is that single children never learn how to play properly. Being the only child that the parents will ever have, the child is put under enormous pressure to succeed. Nightly, parents do the child’s homework with them. Weekends are often spent preparing for the child’s examinations. Getting into university has become an obsession in China. During the final callbacks for entrance to the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the 120 finalists, who had been chosen from over 2,800 applicants from across China, arrived on campus with parents and grandparents in tow. They were dressed and preened and poked like show dogs. It occurred to Geoffrey that the loss of sibling feeling and the loss of the ability to play could have serious effects on a society as a whole. But his mind did not travel comfortably in the world of sociopolitics.

  Hao Yong turned to him and touched his hand to bring him back to the present. What an enormous advance in contact that was. They had worked on three shows together before he felt it acceptable to touch her in any way. Her cool hand tapped the base of his palm and in accented, but pretty English, she said, “You think Viola love Olivia?” Her eyes twinkled. After all this time, she certainly knew that was precisely what he thought. “Yes, me too.”

  “Good,” he said, “but does the language support that?”

  “No,” she said, “but the silences do.”

  She smiled at him and for a moment he wondered how he ever let her get away. Then he said, “Hao” and was about to let rehearsal start up again when Hao Yong smiled at Geoffrey and said, “Viola is narcoticized to Olivia.”

  Geoffrey was lost and turned to the translator. A brief moment later, his translator, now embarrassed, said, “She says that Viola is addicted to Olivia.”

  Seeking clarification that he did not really need, Geoffrey asked, “Addicted but not drugged?”

  After a moment of conversation in Mandarin, Hao Yong squatted on the stage, her dress tucked between her knees, so that her face was at the height of Geoffrey’s as he stood on the auditorium floor. “No, Geoffrey,” she said, her eyes dancing again, “not drugged—addicted.” Then a smile erupted across her face. She turned back to Olivia and, spreading her arms, sang out, “Build me a willow cabin at your gates. . .”

  From the back of the house Fong watched the interaction between the delicately boned Hao Yong and the awkward white man. He was not surprised. He had been around Fu Tsong long enough to understand the casual nature of contact in the theatre. He had also heard the rumours about these two. Fu Tsong’s response to the rumours had been interesting. It had angered her.

  Fong held Fu Tsong’s massive complete works of Shakespeare in his lap. It had Mandarin translation on the left-hand pages. He was following the text as they rehearsed. He agreed with Hao Yong. Viola was not infatuated, she was addicted. This whole play was about love as a driving need which, once experienced, puts everything else into a false light. Addiction.

  Fong took out his note pad and jotted down the word.

  Fong’s English did not go to the extent of words like serendipity or synchronicity, but as a policeman and as an easterner he found these ideas above questioning. Two murdered men, ivory, and addiction—but how did these pieces fit together?

  Loa Wei Fen was surprised when he found out the address of the sender of the e-mail. No, surprised is the wrong word. He was shocked. For the first time in many years, something akin to fear tickled down his spine. He slowed his pulse and slid his breath into a deeper section of his lungs. The tickle went away. He had learned this basic trick many years before. As a child in the monastery he would wake the other children when he screamed in his sleep. The monks tried everything to stop him but failed until the Old One took him to his bed. There in the fastness of sleep, when the dreams took him, the Old One awoke him and taught him where fear lives. Taught him the breath that relieves the fear, taught him how to release his chi.

  There was never any sexual contact between the two men. In fact Loa Wei Fen was technically a virgin. His life energies were directed from the groin, not to it. The entertainments of the flesh had frequently been offered to him, but they held no allure, no fascination. His focus lay elsewhere.

  As his martial training continued he slowly learned how to release the energy of his chi into his fighting. On the day that it first exploded through his arms, he threw his partner so hard that the other boy’s ribs cracked and a shoulder blade snapped as he hit the floor.

  Loa Wei Fen had no idea what had happened, where this strength had come from. But his teacher knew. The Old One was brought in and from that day on, Loa Wei Fen did not see the other boys in the monastery. He ate alone. He meditated alone. It was only in lessons that he met others—teachers. Martial arts teachers. Fighters of every technique. Then one day in his eleventh year, his fifth at the monastery, his third since he was put into isolation, a young Mongolian woman appeared in the fighting room. She appeared alone and spoke none of the common tongue. For days and weeks she spoke at him as he sat in perfect stillness until finally her words began to fall into patterns. Phrases moved into his consciousness and eventually he understood her.

  Her broad dark face was a mountain terrain. There was life deep in her eyes. A glimmer of knowledge. At the end of their first month of daily sunrise-to-sunset meetings, she reached into her robe and pulled out a Mongolian swolta—a six-inch double-sided blade with a pin-sharp point made out of tempered steel hard as diamond. A carved serpent coiled around the handle. She was about to order him to close his eyes and turn away from her, but her thought had already conveyed itself to him. Yes, he was gifted.

  Then, with the swolta, she marked him.

  The blade did its work deftly in her hands. An eye on each deltoid and the line of life that joins them arching down toward the centre of his back. The cuts had to be deep enough to mark and the blade was nothing if not capable of such cuts. Then she rolled the knife handle in the blood from Loa Wei Fen’s back. Without her needing to ask him, both of his hands reached out, waiting. Yes, of course, the chosen will work with both hands.

  He put his hands behind his back, palms facing each other and stretched far back virtually closing the cuts. She slid the knife between his palms.

  Loa Wei Fen remembered the first touch of the knife. Slick with blood, the serpent had rolled in his hands. Rolled from one hand to the other, finding an ideal perch in each, then rolling back to the centre.

  The Mongolian watched with pleasure as the knife, seemingly on its own, moved in the boy’s hands, still stretched taut behind his back. After a moment the boy took a slow deep breath and, rolling his arms full circle in their shoulder sockets, brought the knife up over his head. Then he put the bloody hilt of the blade in his mouth and rising, he flared his marked deltoids.

  The cuts opened like red rivers on his flesh.

  She was pleased. The cobra’s hooded mask was clearly carved on his back.

  As he stood on the Promenade facing the Bund he allowed the nerves in the skin of his back to trace the line of the cobra. Full circle clockwise on the left eye, then down the line of life and up to the other eye, which he traced counterclockwise. Loa Wei Fen felt the snake’s hood open as he looked at the building directly across from him. It housed the District of Shanghai Central Police Administration. It was also the building from which the e-mail had been sent.

  Amanda found the streets confusing. The best map that the Shanghai International Equatorial Hotel could come up with was one that showed, in great detail, where all seven of the Esprit shops were located but hardly bothered to name most of the streets. She managed to get reasonably good directions from the concierge and then was forced to ask him, “Is it safe, for me to walk to the Shanghai Theatre Academy?” Being assured that it was not only quite safe but also quite nearby she headed out with a vague idea at least in what direction she ought to head.

  Once on the street she c
ame nose to nose with a large street map at one of the bus stops. Labelled OFFICIAL STREET MAP OF SHANGHAI 1989, it was infinitely better than the one that she held. Esprit didn’t sponsor the old one. Progress she guessed. Even at ten o’clock in the evening the streets were crowded with cars and bicycles. She stood at the corner of Yan’an and Hua Shan and waited for the light to change. As she waited the world passed her by and everyone from children to old women crossed the street. So she ventured forward. It was a mistake. There is an art to crossing Shanghai streets. An art that she had not yet mastered.

  Eventually managing to get to the other side, she walked along Hua Shan knowing that the academy was on Hua Shan. She reasoned that by following the street only three or four blocks as the concierge said she was bound to come across the school. She passed by the Hilton and the Bank of China building and crossed another street, which seemed to lead her to a more residential area.

  There were many people sitting on chairs on the narrow sidewalks taking the night air. Fruit stands were still open and small pineapples, which had been skinned and carved to remove the eyes, were on prominent display, their bright yellowy orange pulp a tropical temptation. Several times the sidewalks were clogged with bicycles, forcing Amanda out onto the street. And everywhere people looked at her. She was tall in a short world. Blond in a dark one. White in a brown one.

  A leather mini-skirted young Chinese woman, with dark brooding eyes, openly evaluated Amanda as she passed.

  Continuing, she crossed Julu Lu and sensed that something was wrong. She looked at the street sign on Hua Shan. It was in Chinese characters, thanks a heap. She crossed the street and looking back noticed that the street sign she had looked at was in English from this side. So, she recrossed the street and looked at the sign. It said Chong Shu. What? She hadn’t gotten off Hua Shan or had she? She doubled back the way she had come. The leather-skirted girl was still in her doorway and her laughter was not the least bit good-humoured as she saw Amanda coming back.