The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory

by David Rotenberg

  She remembered all of that as she inserted him into herself. She also remembered the card that the policeman had given her. As she rocked to his rhythm she watched the drug take effect. The violent carving on his back calmed. As it did she wondered if she should call the number on that card.

  Li Xiao had never been out of the country before and as the police car with the polished young driver took him into Taipei, he tried not to stare. All around him he saw wealth. Housing far superior to his present living situation in Shanghai or to any he could ever hope to have. Cars the likes of which Shanghanese policemen could only dream about. And these were the remains of the defeated Kuomintang who forty-five years ago had fled to Taiwan! The dogs who had retreated with their tails between their legs. The vanquished who for forty-five years had been supported by the United States and the immense treasure that they had plundered from the real China.

  Their prosperity disgusted him.

  As the car turned into the new central administration building, he saw two little girls holding their pregnant mother’s hands as they waited to cross the street. Three children! The ultimate injustice.

  Inside, the building whispered and purred. Li Xiao was guided along carpeted hallways to the commissioner’s office. There were handshakes and nods and a lot of false smiles but quicker than he expected they got down to business. They handed him a computer-generated file. It started with a detailed report on a secret school that specialized in the kind of knife training that matched the old coroner’s data. There followed a few pages on the history and use of the school with a note that although the school was secretive it was not illegal. Names of the teachers came next and their present whereabouts, followed by names and ages of former pupils. Of the pupils, only seventeen were considered to fit the specifications forwarded by the Shanghai police. Of those seventeen, fifteen were accounted for during the period in question, which left just two men.

  Two photographs followed.

  Li Xiao flipped over the first. It was of a youngish teenager.

  “How old’s this boy?”

  “Fifteen when the picture was taken, seventeen now.”

  “And he’s in China now?”

  With a noticeable wince, the Taipei police commissioner said, “On the mainland, yes.”

  “In China,” Li Xiao corrected him, then went on without waiting for a rebuttal. “And this?” He was referring to the second photograph. The one in which Loa Wei Fen stood in the Shanghai airport’s arrivals terminal.

  “Taken less than two weeks ago. In the Shanghai Airport.”

  “Yes, it was convenient to get the Shanghai Airport sign in the picture.” The commissioner stifled a response. Li Xiao knew a setup when he saw one. He was getting the sick feeling you get when you know that you’re being used but you can’t avoid it. “What’s this fucker’s name?”

  “Loa Wei Fen. He’s a hired assassin, we’ve tracked him for some time.” Then with a broad smile, “He’s on the mainland even as we speak.”

  Li Xiao looked at the man. At his finely tailored clothes and his expensive shoes. His eyes momentarily lingered on a large ring on the man’s hand.

  “Is there anything further we can do to be of assistance, Detective Li?” asked the commissioner, still smiling.

  “No, well yes, I guess there is.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Tell me how you manage to sleep at night, get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and still believe you’re a man.” Before there was an answer, Li Xiao turned on his heel and left.

  As he slammed his way down the marble-walled corridor, he couldn’t help feeling the injustice. This asshole was going to live a long and fruitful life while Zhong Fong, a cop whom Li Xiao truly admired, was going to take a big-time fall. He looked at the picture of Loa Wei Fen in his hand and said out loud, “And you, my friend, are going to wish you’d never been born.”

  Fong had always considered Shanghai home. He’d known its physical intricacies since his boyhood and its metaphysical realities since the age of majority. But now it was a place of strangeness, a wary watching place about which he seemed to know little. Every intersection with its white-jacketed traffic cop, every block with its red armbanded street warden, every second block with its strolling brown-jacketed pair of patrol cops. . . In all these places all would soon be looking for him, if they were not already. So he headed for his home within home: the Old City.

  As he entered it his pace slowed and, as if answering a call, he dropped his cop walk and became a part of the dankness of the ancient place, a member of the swamp. He had a long day to wait out, realizing that darkness might be the best friend he had left in his hometown.

  His Hu-ness sat at the head of the table in the musty meeting room. At his side Shrug and Knock smiled a smile that upset the rest of those present—Lily, the coroner, and Wang Jun.

  “Detective Li Xiao will join us shortly, I’ve been told his flight from Taipei landed an hour ago,” began Commissioner Hu.

  “Then let’s wait until he gets here,” said Wang Jun.

  Shrug and Knock smiled. “That’s not necessary, is it, Commissioner?”

  “No, it’s not. I’ve ordered an all-points bulletin sent out for the arrest of Zhong Fong and he should be brought in shortly,” said the commissioner.

  Wang Jun was not pleased. He knew that much of what was being said was a reminder to him that his IOU had come due. He was snapped out of his personal concern by the arrival of Li Xiao, who literally burst into the room. “I am heading this investigation. Who called this meeting in my absence?” he demanded.

  Shrug and Knock nodded toward the commissioner. Li Xiao almost spat but decided against it. With barely concealed anger he barked out, “This is my case—the least you could have done is wait for my return.”

  “I thought it proper to act quickly on this urgent matter,” responded his Hu-ness.

  “What exactly made this matter urgent all of a sudden?” snapped Li Xiao.

  “The new information that Wang Jun received. Perhaps you’d care to fill in our young detective, Wang Jun,” said the commissioner with the confidence of a gambler holding four aces.

  Wang Jun quickly repeated the highlights of his two conversations with Geoffrey Hyland. Upon his completion, the room was quiet for a moment.

  “You found Zhong Fong four years ago with his dead wife didn’t you, Wang Jun?” asked Li Xiao.

  “I was there first. He’d called me and I tried to trace the cab that took his wife to the Pudong. I was there first, that’s all,” said Wang Jun.

  “Yet you saw no reason to arrest him then, did you?” asked Li Xiao.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Wang Jun.

  “Despite what Zhong Fong did with the body and the baby, you saw no need to arrest him then?” pushed Li Xiao.

  “I’m not on trial here, Li Xiao,” snapped back Wang Jun.

  Li Xiao looked at the older man and wondered what was in it for him. He’d always assumed that Wang Jun and Zhong Fong were close. But a sixty-year-old cop staring a pension in the face in a city whose inflation rate might shortly skyrocket was an easy mark. Easy to turn—even against a friend. Out of the side of his eye he saw Shrug and Knock smile. The crosscurrents in the room were intense. Clearly Shrug and Knock was having a good time. The commissioner was staring down Wang Jun, and it seemed that both the coroner and Lily were unnaturally silent.

  “Any new physical evidence?” Li Xiao barked out.

  “We only found pieces of the two bodies from the construction site. Small fragments. Cement was never intended as a preservative of human flesh. But nothing new has come to the morgue, so I wonder why I am here,” the coroner said.

  “Nothing new has landed in Forensics either,” said Lily.

  Li Xiao looked around the table and finally bellowed, “Then why are we all here?”

  After a moment the commissioner rose. Shrug and Knock followed suit. “You are here to arrest and convict Zhong Fong for the murder of hi
s wife. That is why you are here. I want him apprehended and brought in with all haste. I want our case against him made as quickly as possible. In the meantime, when you catch him, he’s to be kept in Ti Lan Chou Prison.” Then directly to Wang Jun, “Is that clear?”

  Wang Jun nodded. The commissioner and Shrug and Knock left the room.

  Ti Lan Chou was the political prison perched on the east reach of the Huangpo near its confluence with the Yangtze. It was the largest prison of its kind in China and hence probably the largest of its kind in the world. People were held there for crimes against the state. Sentences were long. Never commuted. No pardons or bail. Lots of time spent in sweatshops making goods that the state sold to the West. It was not a prison with which Special Investigations dealt. This was federal police territory. Even in a hardened policeman like Li Xiao, the threat of Ti Lan Chou Prison struck a rich vein of fear. Li Xiao knew why Zhong Fong was to be held there. It would give the feds time to rig a case that would be presented to the public in photographs, which were referred to as object lessons and could be viewed in various strategic locations throughout the city. These sets of photographs, which detailed crimes and punishments, were immensely popular during the Cultural Revolution, a regular people’s art form. Li Xiao’s favourite had been the one that was up for months near Jing An Park on the Nanjing side. It consisted of several gory photographs of the murder victim followed by photographs of an arrested suspect, photographs of the suspect tried, and finally photographs of the suspect executed—a complete morality play on six yards of fence. It was indeed very impressive and bespoke tremendous efficiency on the part of the police and the judiciary. All well and good except that Li Xiao had worked on that case and they’d never caught the perpetrator. What they had found were photos of him which had been cleverly doctored into this cute little political lesson. The photo technicians had advanced their art mightily since the days of Mao swimming the Yangtze.

  Li Xiao knew that with the priority APB issued by the commissioner they would catch Zhong Fong. That was for sure.

  Li Xiao was troubled, though. Troubled by the timing of it all. Troubled by the arbitrariness of it all. Troubled by what he felt was the betrayal of a friend.

  Wang Jun’s new portable phone rang in his pocket. Li Xiao looked at the man. Would a man sell a friend for a phone line? In Shanghai, maybe? But no, it would have to be bigger for Wang Jun. He was alone in the world. No wife, no children. And age with its inevitable inevitability was working its terror on him. Where was honour in this city of greed? Things were truly getting out of hand.

  He almost didn’t hear Lily guide the conversation round to the Dim Sum Killer case. She had information on the bike and interesting tidbits from three informers. As she went through these Li Xiao pulled out the photo of Loa Wei Fen and put it on the table.

  “And this is?” asked the coroner, at last interested in the conversatIon.

  “A man trained to work with a swolta, a six-inch double-sided blade with a piercing point. He also is in Shanghai as you’ll note by the airport sign in the photo. He’s ambidextrous too,” said Li Xiao.

  “Distinguishing marks?” asked the coroner.

  “A cobra carved into his back. That distinguishing enough for you?” Then turning to Wang Jun, “I guess you’re the chief on this one now, do you think that’s enough for an APB on a real killer?”

  Lily took the phone out of her mother’s hands before the old woman could say hello. She knew who it’d be. Before the caller could say anything, she rifled off a phone number and an address and then said, “Half an hour on the dot. I won’t call twice. Don’t call here again.” As she hung up she said to her mother, who was looking shocked, “A date, Mom, your little girl’s got a date.”

  Exactly half an hour later Lily dialled the number of the payphone in the kiosk at the corner of Delicious Food Street and Huai Hai. It rang once and Fong picked it up. He was dressed in an old blue padded Mao jacket and wore a cap. His hair had been cut off and dirt was worked deep into his palms. There was a nasty cut across his cheek as if he had shaved that morning in cold water. He looked older. Worn. He wore army issue spectacles. Fong listened to the news about the meeting. He openly gasped when he heard about the idea of arresting him and putting him in Ti Lan Chou Prison but he managed to control his fear.

  “Can you get me the picture of this Loa Wei Fen and the reports from our snitches?”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, Lily, you’re the devious one—think of something devious.”

  “Do you remember the case of the boy with the bike?” Fong certainly did; it was one of his first cases as a member of the Shanghai Police Department. A plump, six-year-old boy had taken a bicycle from a fourteen-year-old neighbour and ridden it on the sidewalk. The bike, being too big, was too much for him to control and he had run right into an old man. The man staggered onto the street had a heart attack and died on the spot. His family went nuts.

  When Fong arrived, the dead man was still on his back in the street, snarling traffic. His wife, completely ignoring him, was screaming at the boy, whom she was holding against the wall with her strong peasant hands. Her aged sister had slipped a clothesline over a tree and then around the boy’s neck and was heaving mightily, trying to hoist the boy off his feet and hang him in the middle of the busy block. A crowd had gathered around them and was offering unsolicited advice on the art of hanging fat kids. It took all of Fong’s moral authority and the help of three block wardens to break up the would-be lynching.

  After calling for a coroner Fong had walked the boy, who still had the rope around his neck, back to his home. As soon as he handed the boy over to his doting parents he turned completely unrepentant. He snarled at Fong and screamed that he should arrest those stupid old ladies and that the old man had had his turn and was better off dead. One less old revolutionary idiot. He was only sorry he didn’t get more of them. But he would with the next bike he took. He was going to be a businessman and drive a big car, his fat little mouth said. Not some stupid policeman.

  At that comment Fong grabbed the roll of fat around the child’s neck, pulled him toward a park down the way and would have beaten the daylights out of him had Lily not happened to have been there flirting with her boyfriend.

  She took the boy from Fong and brought him home. “I know which park you’re talking about,” said Fong.

  “I’ll leave the things you want in the garbage can by the statue of the Long Nose. Give me an hour. I don’t want to see you, understand?”

  “I do Lily.”

  “In the meantime, the whore from the opium den called in. I don’t think anyone else got the information. You check her out and by the time you’re finished with her you can go to the park to pick up the stuff.”

  “Thanks, Lily.”

  “Good luck, short stuff.”

  The old man in the opium den was hesitant to allow this peasant-looking man into his establishment. But when Fong removed the cap and eyeglasses and showed his police ID the old man bowed and led him down the smoky corridor. Once in the room Fong broke with the formalities of the place and immediately asked for the little whore, Wu Yeh. She arrived quickly. She was clearly frailer than before. She seemed drugged. Her robe hung limply about her, open in the front. Her pallor was now a ghastly white. He introduced himself gently. She smiled a little smile as if she didn’t know what else to do.

  “You have seen the man named Loa Wei Fen?”

  “The one with the snake on his back?”

  “Yes, him.”

  “Yes, he comes here often now.” There was no love in her words, just retreat. She seemed to be singing softly to herself. Fong reached out and touched her arm. An unusual gesture for Chinese people. It seemed to centre Wu Yeh. Her internal singing stopped. There was a light in her eyes for a moment.

  “You can bring back my man, can’t you?” she said.

  “The man with the snake?”

  “No, not him, not him. He hurts me. Bring back m
y man, my beautiful black man, you can do that, can’t you?”

  If he were still a believer he would have said, you blaspheme. But his faith had died with the death of Fu Tsong. So he just shook his head.

  “If you see the man with the snake on his back, you call me. You call me when he comes here.”

  She was lost in her thoughts again. The light in her eyes was almost gone. The song was returning.

  “If he comes you call me, okay? Call me at the number on the card. Ask for Lily. She’ll get a message to me.”

  She nodded but said nothing, actively retreating into her world of loss. Fong stood to go and was already out in the corridor when he heard her say as if to herself, “He wants me to come to his hotel now. Doesn’t want to come here. Wants me to go there.”

  Fong looked at her in wonder and asked as simply as he could, “Which hotel?”

  “The Portman.”

  As he slowly walked toward the park where Lily was going to leave him the information, Fong allowed himself to really look at his city. The knowledge that if he were caught he would not see it again for a very long time seemed to sharpen his eye. What he saw thrilled and appalled him at the same time. Life in transition. Complicated. Intricate. But endlessly alive. Everything seemed to catch his attention. Hidden gardens behind high, broken-glass-topped walls. Shopkeepers splashing water from red plastic tubs to keep the summer dust down. Laundry hanging across the sidewalk dripping onto an oblivious teenager’s glutinous rice treat. Stained quilt sleeping mats draped over cheap folding chairs on the sidewalks. The Old Feeling Restaurant on Shan Xi— which old feeling was not specified. A young clerk eating ice milk on a stick within which black rice chunks were embedded—as if ants had ventured into the freezer. Restaurant windows stocked with suckable cured chicken feet. Hunchbacks and dwarves. In the open air market: strawberries and eels, pigs’ feet and squirming baby crabs, bamboo hearts and a man holding a live chicken by its wings. And a five-spice egg, although supposedly cooked in boiling water, rocks gently as the chick’s beak pierces the shell and a new life seeks the sunlight. A scrawny Shanghanese cat, with wide cheekbones and a yellow stare, wary and watching. The brutal Russian architecture of the hotel on Yan’an with the Kaige sign on top. A young man strutting with his double-deck Aiwa boom box incongruously encased in purple velvet. Large flower displays in wicker baskets outside a newly opened business, hoping for good luck. The Shanghai 21st Radio Factory. (Fong had lived his entire forty-four years in Shanghai and had never seen Shanghai Radio Factories One through Twenty.) Black velvet equestrian hats, which were all the rage for motorcyclists. Car owners dusting their pride and joys with three-foot-long feather dusters. Former great houses of the wealthy now laundry bedecked and packed— people in every closet and stairwell. And everywhere construction. Bamboo scaffoldings mounting the walls in impossible leaps and bounds, all seemingly festooned with electrical wires swaying in the late afternoon breeze. Street cobblers with rows of ladies’ shoe heels laid out on the sidewalk beside their portable benches. Street barbers. Street food sellers. Street bicycle repair men with bulbous red inner tubes exploding from black tires like fat snakes refusing to be stuffed back into the darkness. People rushing for the accordion-joined buses. Men wearing two-tone brown-and-white shoes. A waiter charging out of his restaurant with a large squirming freshwater eel in his hands. With a quick motion he slams the lithe creature against the sidewalk. There is a wet slap and the creature moves no more. The waiter smiles toothlessly. Men wearing cheap pants too large but kept up by belts which are wrapped around and around their thin waists. Practical. Chinese practical. No doubt both the pants and the belt were bought on sale. Young people sporting T-shirts with English writing on them. For some reason “Hug Me I’m Lonely” was a popular shirt. It hardly mattered. The shirt could have said Fuck Me I’m Slavic or Eat Me I Taste Good Broiled, they wouldn’t have known the difference. Near the park Fong noticed an old man shaking a Russian-made pocket watch. Fong thought this the ultimate definition of old-style faith. Not even the Almighty could have made that piece of junk work again. He saw a pregnant woman walking her belly with the special pride of those who procreate in a single-child town.