“No you’re not, but you’re funny coloured too.” Without waiting for a response, Fong started down the crowded street. Catching up to him Amanda demanded, “And where’s your friend?”
“He’s watching us, the way the killer watched Mr. Chomi.”
She looked back but couldn’t see Wang Jun. Fong, seeing this said, “This killer was very good. He would pick vantage points that even if Mr. Chomi knew he was being followed he would not be able to spot.”
With a big smile she pointed to one side and up a floor. There was Wang Jun. “There.”
“The killer was very good, Wang Jun is merely fair.” They moved on. It took a while for the idea of walking a dead man’s steps to sink in and even once it did, Amanda’s eyes were constantly being drawn to the extraordinary array of things around her. It never occurred to her that the bird and fish market would actually sell birds and fish. In fact on the first stretch it sold nothing but tropical fish and things to put them in, things to enhance their underwater worlds and things to feed them. In the crowd people carried little plastic bags with their newest acquisitions swimming in what seemed to Amanda like small clear water bubbles. After the fish came a section of bonsai trees and tropical plants. Her eye was drawn to a display of ancient roots that had been unearthed and polished to a high sheen. The knarls and whorls rivalled the artistry of any human hand. Behind the roots were large plastic buckets of polished stones. Fong pointed out the rocks with red markings. “We call them blood stones. The more red the more expensive they are.” Then came several stands selling polished brown Yangtze River stones whose surfaces fit perfectly in the palm and whose heft was particularly pleasing. As Amanda knelt to sift her hand through one of the larger buckets Fong talked to the woman at the stand. Then, as he grabbed a small tub from under the stand, he turned to Amanda. “Stand on that, will you?” She did, wondering exactly what this was about. But then she remembered that the black man had been six foot seven. She was herself close to six feet tall and the bucket was probably another six inches. Which put her close to the dead man’s height. She felt a shiver start in the base of her neck and work its way down.
“Can I step down now, please?”
Fong didn’t answer her but stared down one of the alleyways. Then he put his fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly. The old lady with the stones yelled at him to stop but he ignored her and whistled again. At that point Wang Jun stepped out from behind one of the fish stands and waved. Fong quickly made his way over to Wang Jun. The woman screamed at Amanda who needed no further prompting to get off the bucket and follow Fong.
Pointing to the alley crossroad, Fong said, “He’d have to assume a position for a little while as Mr. Chomi shopped. He’d have to be able to see down both the road and the alley? Right?”
“Right, so I guess he was either where we’re standing now, or cater-corner,” replied Wang Jun pointing across the way.
“And if Chomi dawdled, as the driver said he often did, then it’s possible that our killer had to wait here or there for quite some time. The woman selling stones remembered Chomi because he, as she put it, ’was a sweet talker who felt every fucking stone, spent a ton of my time, the cutie, and only bought one stone. My best one too.’”
“So he stayed for a while at the stand,” Wang Jun said.
“I never got the stone seller to confirm that. She lost interest when she figured out we weren’t buying.”
“You’ve got a funny look on your face, Fong.”
“It’s just the way she talked about him. Stone sellers don’t like customers, especially foreign customers. Do they?”
“Not in my experience. What are you getting at?”
“I don’t know.” Fong mulled the idea around for a moment but still came to no conclusion so he went back to being a plain street cop. “You ask on this side. I’ll ask across the way.” After only a few minutes, it became clear that no one had seen anything. Some remembered the African, but that was hardly the point.
They worked their way through the extensive market, walking Ngalto Chomi’s route and finding places from which the killer must have watched him. When they found these places they talked to the nearby merchants. No one remembered anything. The third alley was where the birds were, along with their racket and smell. Tiny finches and swallows were for sale as were more exotic birds. Once again animals were carried home in clear plastic bags, this time not filled with water but rather with air supplied by punching a hole in the bag, usually with a cigarette. Near the end of the hundred or so bird sellers were the bird food sellers. Large wooden barrels filled to overflowing with live grubs created an ever shifting pattern of transient life. Sellers of gray moth pupas, each with its very own live larva inside, were doing an active business as were the seed merchants. “Do you like birds?” asked Fong. “Not much,” replied Amanda. “Mr. Chomi evidently was extremely fond of birds. The Zairian consulate let us look at his rooms. He had a fine collection of finches. Unusual. Here, birds are women’s pets. Are you hungry? It’s near noon.”
“I could eat,” replied Amanda.
“Good, because that’s what Mr. Chomi did next.” Fong set off down the lane.
Catching up to Fong again she said, “And you, do you like birds, Inspector Zhong?”
“I’m actually quite fond of pigeon.”
“Really,” she asked surprised.
“Yes, the restaurant we’re going to is famous for its pigeon.”
She swallowed slightly and then stopped as a man thrust a cheap leatherette bag up close to her face and opened the zipper. Out popped the head of a puppy which yapped and tried to lick Amanda’s hand. The man with the dog was speaking to Amanda in an animated fashion.
Fong came up beside her. “He says this dog was made for you in heaven. A beautiful lady needs a beautiful dog to augment her beauty.”
Amanda looked hard at him. “That’s what he said.” The man then snapped a volley of words at Fong. “He also told me that no dog no matter how beautiful could make up for the ugliness that I carry with me.”
“He said that?”
“Actually no. He asked if the stupid blond lady wanted to buy the dog or not. And if not could she get her big butt out of the way of other potential customers.” And looking behind her, there were indeed many other potential customers.
This whole end of the alley was lined with dog sellers. Puppies only. All purebreds. As they left the alley, Amanda asked, “Where are the Heinz 57’s, the mutts? And where are the grown-up dogs?” Fong stopped and looked at her with an are-you-kidding-me? look. Deciding that he was not being kidded, he also decided that he wouldn’t answer her question so close to lunch.
As they headed toward the old city, the two policemen compared notes. They passed by the place where the driver had waited to pick up Chomi. For a moment they considered whether the killer had a car and then quickly discarded that idea. However, clearly he would need a bicycle. “Great, we’ve narrowed it down to one of the 7.8 million bicycle riders in the city of Shanghai.”
As the men talked, Amanda looked. The entire place was being torn down and put up anew. She’d never seen anything like it. And the faces—everywhere stories etched in human material. An old lady with a filthy child approached her and held out her hand, imploring Amanda to give her some money for the child. Amanda instinctively moved away. The woman followed her. Amanda went to step out into the street to avoid her but the woman reached out and grasped her arm. Amanda was shocked. Despite the enormous crush of people everywhere in Shanghai, touching was a rarity. Even in the cramped quarters of the Bird and Fish Market, people swerved and glided past each other without touching. Unlike New York City where being jostled was part of walking on the streets, here contact was kept to a strict minimum. So when the old lady grabbed her, Amanda screamed before she could stop herself. Both men reacted as if a gun had gone off. Fong recovered first and yelled something at the woman who yelled right back and then Fong stepped between Amanda and the old woman wh
ile Wang Jun guided Amanda away.
“I’m sorry, she startled me.”
“Country folk don’t take kindly to foreigners. They’re harmless but a nuisance. You have, they don’t, so they grab you to give them something. Simple,” said Wang Jun in his slightly lisping Shanghanese.
Amanda got the gist of his explanation. New Orleans had its share of street people too.
Fong came back and apologized to Amanda, who threw it off as nothing. But as they walked, Amanda knew that it wasn’t nothing. The old lady had pierced her armour and drawn blood. She picked up her pace to keep up with the men, who had entered another street market and were consulting a map.
“Lost, guys?”
“No, Ms. Pitman, but the driver stopped right here and Mr. Chomi got out pretty much right where you’re standing,” said Fong.
“I thought you said he went to lunch next.”
“That was the next stop but he evidently walked from here to the restaurant.”
“Why’d he do that? What’s to see here?” asked Amanda.
“I don’t think that Mr. Chomi was a tourist in the usual sense of the word. He worked here, lived here. Something attracted him to the Bird and Fish Market— from his home we can assume the birds—and then something attracted him to this street market,” said Fong.
“What?”
“That’s a good question, Ms. Pitman, one worth trying to answer perhaps.” Fong looked to Wang Jun who was pointing across the street to a woman who was taking money for the right to park a bicycle on her ten yards of sidewalk. She wore no red armband so she didn’t work for the government. She was just trying to get a little money on the side. What had attracted Wang Jun’s attention was the near fight she was having with a young secretary type who wasn’t about to pay to leave her bicycle where evidently she’d left it every day for a year.
“You don’t think he left his bicycle there, do you?”
“No, our friend kept his bicycle with him. There are too many alleys and ways out of this market for him to chance leaving it and then coming back for it.”
“I agree,” said Wang Jun.
But there was a shred of an idea here, thought Fong. The killer would need his bicycle to stalk the man. Would he then kill and ride it away? Perhaps. A bike offers speed but removes some mobility. The complex laws in Shanghai about where and when you can ride a bicycle are strictly enforced. Would the murderer chance the attention of one of the thousands of cops assigned to monitor bike traffic? Or would he leave the bike after the murder and simply slip into the mass of people always around in Shanghai?
Both men knew that a bicycle in Shanghai attracted attention if it was left overnight. For the first time, it occurred to Fong that they might be able to find the killer’s bike, but not here—nearer the scene of the murder perhaps.
As they walked Wang Jun caught Fong up on his newspaper investigation. It was simple—they were stonewalling him. His many queries had come up short. The whole thing had been handled by the editor-in-chief to whom Fong had spoken on that first morning. The editor claimed to have gotten the story straight off a cell phone report from one of his field guys and then banged out the story almost straight onto the printing press. Naturally, he refused to give up the guy’s name.
“But what about clearance? ”
“He claims it was one of those things where the Communications Ministry contact was actually in the building at the time and stood over his shoulder as he wrote it.”
“The timing’s still wrong.”
“I told him that. He claims that with the new technology they can alter an edition at the last moment, which allows them two more hours before press deadline.”
“Check that for me, will ya?” Fong was not pleased. But at that moment he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t pleased with the answers to Wang Jun’s inquiries or Wang Jun’s inquiry itself. They continued in silence for a few minutes. As they entered the heart of the food market Fong stopped and consulted the African’s itinerary. “Next thing that we know is that Mr. Chomi bought a skinned snake . . .”
Fong looked up.
Amanda was well ahead of them. She had joined a crowd and was on her tiptoes trying to get a better look at something on the ground.
The skinning of a live king cobra was shocking even if you knew it was about to happen. Amanda didn’t know.
Fong raced up, afraid that Amanda would faint.
The children in the crowd screamed in delight as the snake merchant flung the skin, still wriggling, into the air.
Amanda stood very still, very white, and took it all in.
The skinning did not make her faint. It made her understand something—understand it deeply.
Lunch at the Old Shanghai Restaurant upstairs in the Old City, around the corner from the famous YuYuan Gardens, was not all that Fong had expected. It seems that Ngalto Chomi had brought his freshly killed snake to the restaurant to have it cooked. He had done it several times before and the cooks knew him well. For a foreigner, especially a black foreigner, his memory was treated with surprising deference by the staff at the Old Shanghai. Wang Jun suggested that they should have brought a snake too, but Fong didn’t respond. Ms. Pitman’s silence had been ominous since the snake merchant had displayed his unique talent. Fong wondered how much whiter Amanda Pitman could get. He also wondered if all this was too much for her.
“Would you like me to get an officer to drive you back to your hotel?”
In her distracted state she had to ask him to repeat himself and he did. She declined his offer, but also declined all food at the restaurant. She smoked instead.
Chinese women smoked, but not in public. It would be wrong to say that both Wang Jun and Fong didn’t find it just a little bit titillating to be at a table with a tall blond white woman who was smoking cigarettes.
As the men finished eating their lunch Fong turned to Amanda. “You could help us by filling in some of your ex-husband’s background.”
Through the plume of her cigarette smoke, she said, “Shoot.”
“He was a police officer in New Orleans?”
“Not really.”
That surprised Fong. “His identity papers said that he worked for the New Orleans Police Department.”
“Where’s New Orleans?” Wang Jun asked in Shanghanese.
“Ohio, I think,” replied Fong in English.
“What’s Ohio?” said Amanda.
“Where New Orleans is,” said Fong.
“It’s in Louisiana, if that makes any difference.”
“Fine, Louisiana, but he wasn’t a police officer?”
“He technically worked for the New Orleans parish police department, but he was seconded from the federal fish and wildlife department,” said Amanda.
“And what did he do there?” queried Fong.
“He specialized in the prevention of the poaching of endangered species.” Fong quickly translated into Shanghanese and a bored Wang Jun perked up and took note.
“Ask her if he’d ever been to Africa,” said Wang Jun in Shanghanese.
“Later,” replied Fong, “after I find out if he was a cop on the take.”
“Anyone care to translate for me?” snapped Amanda.
“Wang Jun was just expressing his condolences for your loss.”
Amanda looked at Fong for a moment and then viciously spat out, “My husband was a much better liar than you, Inspector Zhong.” On Fong’s stunned look she rose from the table and, ignoring all the sidelong glances of the Chinese men, made her way to the ladies’ room.
Once she was gone, Wang Jun asked for a translation of the last few moments and got them. Then he turned to Fong and said, “We don’t need her for the rest of this. The next part is going to get pretty rough. Why do you want her here anyway? Get her a ride back to her hotel. You and I can complete this.”
But Fong wasn’t listening. He was watching the movement of people in the room. “You figure there’s a back way out in the kitchen?”
“
There has to be by law.”
“Since when do restaurants listen to the law? If he did leave through the kitchen, the killer must have been waiting by the alley entrance. Someone might have noticed. Check if he left that way.”
Wang Jun had just entered the kitchen when Amanda returned. From the glint of moisture on her face, Fong could tell that she had splashed it with cold water.
“Feel better?”
“A little, thanks.”
“You don’t have to go through with this. The next two stops aren’t going to be pleasant, that I can guarantee you.”
She didn’t say anything. Then carefully Fong moved forward. “How much did the State Department tell you about your husband’s death?”
“Just that he’d been murdered and . . . and I wouldn’t be able to view the remains . . . and that, uh”—she was getting faint, he could tell from her pallor—“uh, that it wouldn’t be possible to have an open-casket funeral.” As if having said it relieved the pressure, some colour came back into her face.
Unable to resist her vulnerability, Fong chipped in, “Did you love your husband, Ms. Pitman?”
Her “no” came out so loudly that several other people around the restaurant turned to see who was speaking.
Then a chatter of explanation, mao, boo she, boo dui.
“Mao what?” said Wang Jun.
“Nothing, just a comment from Ms. Pitman.”
“Well it’s mao from the kitchen too. There’s no exit and besides, one of the waiters remembers Mr. Chomi going out the front.”
Getting up, Amanda asked, “Who’s paying?”
She didn’t offer up any cash but moved through the crowd toward the exit as the two men fished out some bills and tossed them to the waiter. Then Fong went ahead to catch up with Amanda while Wang Jun yelled for a receipt. On a monthly salary of under 600 yuan, called kwai by the locals, about $75 U.S., he was damned if he was going to pay 68 kwai for a meal that he didn’t enjoy.
• • •
The three headed along Fang Bang Road through the heart of the Old City. Amanda was stunned. Squat hovels fronted the road, seemingly jostling each other for a little light and air. Despite the sunshine it was murky here. And despite the murk and the smell and the dirt Amanda loved it. She breathed in the pungent odour and drank in the dense view. She clearly sensed the life here. Fong looked at the strange American with more than a bit of surprise. The black man had walked this way but even if he hadn’t Fong had determined that Amanda Pitman was one white tourist who wasn’t going to leave his city believing that Shanghai was nothing more than Nanjing Road and Huai Hai. Nothing more than the Bund and the YuYuan Garden. This was the real Shanghai. Not the English Concession down by the river or the French Concession farther south. This was what was laughingly called the Chinese Concession. A concession that allowed the Chinese to live on the only piece of ground in Shanghai that Europeans didn’t want. They were actually within a few blocks of the house in which Fong had been raised when Amanda turned to him and said, “It’s. . . alive, isn’t it.” For a moment he checked for sarcasm, but he knew there was none. This place. This sinkhole was like a deep stagnant pool. Never good to drink from, often bad to smell, but always teeming with life. There was no need here to figure out where the killer had watched from. There were few alleys here and when there were they didn’t go anywhere. So he must simply have followed, pushing his bicycle—pushing his bike until he got to the Fu Yu antique market.
The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory Page 14