by D. L. Kung
Goddammit, where was Vic? If he were here to back her up, she could spend more time with Dr Liu; maybe take him to a quieter place to finish his story. If Cecilia couldn’t reach Vic by phone, Claire was going to have to go out to his apartment and rouse him personally. It would only be the fifth time he’d partied himself though a long weekend into a stupor.
‘I’m sorry for the interruption, Dr Liu. How could you be sure she was innocent?’
Dr Liu looked Claire straight in the eye for the first time. His fear had hardened into anger. ‘Because she didn’t just resemble someone from my village, I knew her. She was my stepsister, Gu Weng-kin, the daughter of my mother’s second husband. My own father was sent to a work camp in the interior and starved to death—we heard he was eaten by other villagers—during the Great Leap Forward.’
There were rumors reaching Hong Kong these days, terrible tales of cannibalism in the hardest hit provinces of those years, but still impossible to confirm. Claire shook her head with pity. ‘What do you think I should do? We’re a business magazine, and our readers expect us to report business stories.’
‘This was business first, justice last,’ Liu retorted, spilling his tea on the carpet. ‘Weng-kin was found in possession of some documents, some scientific research on radar equipment, but she wasn’t guilty of espionage. The date for her appeal hearing was set. She’d agreed to keep the documents for a friend at the Guangdong Provincial offices of the Ministry of Electronics, just an innocent favor to a former schoolmate. The Party lawyer had arranged that she would plead guilty and we were told the court would be lenient. She was going to get maybe ten, fifteen years. But the appeal was delayed and delayed, and when we tried to visit her at Women’s Detention Center in Guangzhou, she wasn’t there any longer.’
‘Where had they taken her?’
‘I never found out. Even her lawyers weren’t informed of her transfer and they’d been assigned to her case by the state. I heard the guards talking in the van on the way back. They thought I was too upset to pay attention to their chatter.’
He laughed ironically. ‘I heard them say an order had come through from this Hong Kong billionaire to our hospital in the form of a charitable donation—more than five million yuan—for two kidneys for his daughter. For immediate delivery and no mistakes, no infections, no rejections. One of them joked, there was only one place to be sure of really healthy specimens; Club Med, he called it, for medical.’
Dr Liu practically spat the words out in contempt. ‘But I didn’t dare ask where they meant. I figured if I knew too much, I was next.’
‘You’re saying she was killed on command from someone in the medical system or prison system—just for her kidneys? Murder for money? Who at the hospital pocketed the five million?’
‘I don’t know. A few months ago, some of the doctors were gossiping at the hospital canteen. A renal specialist complained that prison cadres are getting fat on organ sales and that the doctors should get a bigger cut. But we were always told that the money received from dead prisoners’ organ sales went to purchase expensive drugs to reduce tissue rejection. And anyway, we were told that the executed prisoners signed papers donating their organs to the motherland as transplants after their death.’
‘Gu Weng-kin had not agreed?’
Dr Liu looked at her wide-eyed. ‘No! If you could hear her screams: What are you doing? What are you doing? She had no warning! It was delivery on demand. I cannot live with this. Her screams keep me awake every night. Her eyes watching me, me holding the scalpel.’
Claire laid a hand gently on his wrist. ‘Where are you going now?’
‘ I spent two years in San Francisco as a student about ten years ago. Now I’m going back. I told our department head I was going for a seminar and bought a ticket with all my savings. Father Fresnay arranged someone at the Catholic University there to meet me.’
The telephone rang. Cecilia gestured to Claire that the caller was insisting on speaking to the bureau chief. Claire cursed, ‘Jesus, Mary and—’ and walked over to her desk to take the call.
‘Claire Raymond, may I help you?’
‘This is Mr Paul MacGinnes’ secretary at Brainchild Company calling. Mr MacGinnes would like a word with you.’
Claire raised her eyebrows at Cecilia who shrugged in ignorance. A confident American male voice took the line.
‘Miss Raymond? This is Paul MacGinnes. I’ve been waiting for your reporter, Vic D’Amato, for forty-five minutes now.’
Lord, Claire knew nothing about any assignment on Brainchild. This was another infuriating instance of Vic’s blindsiding her without telling her and passing something on to the International Edition editors without her go-ahead.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mr MacGinnes. As a matter of fact, he’s not in the office yet. It was a long weekend and—’
MacGinnes was chuckling indulgently. ‘I know how it is when these young guys hit Asian shores for the first time. I was pretty wild myself in the old days.’
Claire laughed along self-consciously. MacGinnes sounded like a reasonably nice person. A face was starting to come into focus, someone she’d seen at the American Chamber of Commerce’s lunches. Good-looking, well tailored, and very, very rich.
‘Business World doesn’t make a habit of standing up its interviewees. Thanks for being so forgiving. I hope you’ll consider rescheduling.’
MacGinnes was rustling papers at the other end. ‘We’ll try, but he already interviewed me just before the New Year break about electronics exports to the States. Pretty basic stuff. I was surprised he needed to see me again but we penciled him in for this morning.’
Claire glanced across the office at Dr Liu. Cecilia was refreshing his tea, but the doctor’s courage was visibly draining out of him.
‘Mr MacGinnes?’
‘Please call me Paul. We’re nearly acquaintances, have a lot of mutual friends.’
‘I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’m doing an interview in my office right now. May I get back to you as soon as I’ve located Vic?’
To her relief, the call ended pleasantly enough but now she was furious with Vic. She’d never missed an interview appointment or a deadline in her life. Throughout the exchange of contact numbers and good-bye with Dr Liu, the walk to the elevator door and the firm and—she hoped—comforting shake of his hand, her mind was reordering the priorities of the day around Vic’s delinquency.
Cecilia’s asked, ‘Do you think it’s a story?’
‘Yes, if the Chinese have started to put jurisprudence at the cruel mercy of Hong Kong’s renal requirements. It’s the first time I’ve heard of murder by transplant. Let’s see if we can collar this guy—whoever he is—who pays five million renminbi to have people broken down for parts. Even if that woman had been convicted and condemned, what they did is completely against all international codes.’
‘My, my, a first for the Chinese Communists,’ Cecilia said dryly. ‘I’ve finished the Indonesia stuff, so I’ll fax the Chase questions to the stringers if you have them ready.’
‘We don’t pay you enough to do Vic’s job for him. What I do think you could do is canvass the major Chinese tycoon families to see who, if any, have children suffering kidney disease. And then, I’m sorry to ask you, but yes, then please fax over the Chase questions for Vic.’
‘No, no, it’s my pleasure.’
Cecilia was only the bureau receptionist and researcher in the sense that a slender axle ‘only’ connects the wheels of a car. She’d started life in a textile factory, one of a dozen or so Chinese immigrant children stuffing jeans into shipment bags at her mother’s feet. She’d earned her librarian’s degree in evening classes at the Hong Kong Polytechnic. She now lived with her mother in the New Territories, a stretch of four hundred square miles ending in the long border with China itself.
Seeing she was a paragon of order and punctuality, Claire’s correspondent ‘friends’ often tried to lure Cecilia away, but only Claire knew there was a fragil
ity to Cecilia that needed subtle but consistent support. The young woman was buttressed by the security of the office and the rigor of her filing and translating responsibilities.
In 1989, she’d spontaneously joined thousands of other Hong Kong’ers who, in defiance of all refugees’ longstanding tradition of silence and distance from political commitment, marched to protest Beijing’s murderous crackdown on democracy demonstrators around the Communist capital’s Tiananmen Square. Watching the live television coverage of June 4 showing youths her own age rushing injured comrades away from the melee and hearing the estimates of dead and maimed had stunned the young woman.
For two weeks that hot summer she’d organized, telephoned, painted banners, and marched down Queen’s Road Central as she faced her uncertain future in a Hong Kong to be handed over to Beijing on June 1, 1997. She’d overworked herself into a fever of political fear and outrage. A nervous breakdown followed. A year later, Claire had hired her when no one else would.
The two women made a good team. Claire had to cover most of Asia, sometimes working long hours on a breaking story, other weeks fishing determinedly in quiet waters for a story idea. She had to switch gears quickly, read voraciously, and write fast. Cecilia kept very regular hours, was never late for work, and certainly never hung over. She never misplaced a file or lost a phone message. She didn’t resent Claire’s position, earned after so many years in the field. She was cheerful, loyal, and punctual. She spoke English and three dialects of Chinese.
Cecilia earned a mere $800 a month.
Vic had joined the bureau in January earning $52,000 a year not including his generous monthly housing allowance.
He spoke no Chinese and his foreign experience extended only as far as Miami’s Cuban community. He’d set Cecilia’s teeth on edge the minute he walked in, asking her to get his laptop modem serviced overnight and scout out a good place to buy cheap contact lenses. Since his arrival from the Chicago bureau, where he’d excelled on commodities, he’d filed some small, solid pieces, especially on the emerging financial markets in Southeast Asia. Already he was nagging Claire to assign him a cover story, even though once he did get to work each morning dressed in a tacky safari jacket matched by shoes with Velcro straps, he wasted an hour schmoozing to pals back in New York debating the merits of the Knicks before ‘batting around’ a few story ideas he’d failed to clear with Claire.
At first, Claire tried to explain to Cecilia that success at a domestic bureau never guaranteed a cure for the loneliness of the first year overseas. She herself had arrived in the seventies, spent a lot of time at the old Hong Kong Press Club after long hours reporting for the local English-language daily, eaten a lot of Chinese dinners with other young, unmarried reporters—Chinese, English, Australian, New Zealander—late into the night. She did understand Vic’s eager ambitions and irregular work habits. Now she was fighting off an urge to rip off the dozen pathetic bullet loops on his photographer’s flack vest and make him swallow them, one by one.
Before she forgot any of the horrendous details, Claire jotted down notes from her hour with Dr Liu and drafted a short memo to MacDermott in New York. She tried Vic’s home phone but got the usual taped response, against a background of blistering rock music, from his answering machine. She tried his cellphone; the one he said was too bulky and uncool to stuff in his pockets. She wasn’t surprised to hear it ring and ring.
Puppy-dog charm had expired hours ago. She was going to have to waste her lunch hour going out to Cheung Chau and dragging the puppy on a very tight leash off his beer-sodden mattress to work.
Chapter Two
—Friday midday—
Claire pondered Dr Liu’s story while eating a box of tepid chicken curry noodles on the ferry ride to Vic’s flat. The boat to Cheung Chau, a dumb-bell shaped island southeast of Victoria Island, offered a pleasant respite from Hong Kong’s business district—at least during weekdays.
Vic didn’t have to live on Cheung Chau. His housing allowance would have paid for a modern one-bedroom apartment in Midlevels, Wanchai or Happy Valley, only a few minutes’ taxi ride from their office. He wanted local color, he insisted, and so chose the dirty, crowded island instead. Claire respected his decision; although she hadn’t said what she was thinking—that ‘missed’ ferries were a classic way to shorten the work day when catching the early morning boats was too painful.
The heaving, three-story wooden ferries departed every hour from a ramshackle low-rise station with clanging old-fashioned turnstiles and peeling white paint. They were an incongruous reminder of gentler, slower days in Hong Kong. To the east of the station stood Hong Kong’s high-tech post office and towering new Stock Exchange building, to the west, Hong Kong’s more picturesque old market streets that were gentrifying into tourist attractions. Happily, the ferry remained just as Claire remembered from summer jaunts for long curry lunches with other young ‘journos’ over a decade ago.
The ferry’s cabin was crowded with retirees, housewives and boisterous pre-schoolers. One table of scrawny, paunchy men played poker and drank jasmine tea from glass mugs, while a second table of housekeepers heading home devoted themselves to high stakes at a game of mahjong. The noise of the mahjong tiles, the Cantonese conversation, and the pounding engine below was deafening.
Wrapping her long green woolen coat more tightly around her, Claire craved breezes and solitude, so she retreated up to the deck where the summer’s plastic chairs stood stacked in the corner. The blessing of the dry season from September to December had disappeared all too soon this year and Hong Kong had turned both cold and wet. In the colony’s late winter, even with the afternoon sun breaking through heavy cloud, the winds whipping the harbor felt like wet sheets slapping her face. The temperature had dropped to 14 degrees Celsius. Vic often arrived for work wearing two sweaters under his jacket. Only a few weeks ago he’d taken to donning a cheap down jacket picked up in the outlet lanes.
It had been years since she’d ridden out here. Had she been in Hong Kong too long, she thought? Thirty-six wasn’t old, but it felt old in Asia. She felt not only wise, but also worn. Liu’s story had saddened her, but the initial horror slowly passed. She’d heard pretty much all the stories there were to hear. Stories of war and mutilation, tuberculosis and leprosy, kidnapping, gambling, success and abject failure, glamor and impoverished determination, absurd excess and feudal superstition, beady eyed ambition and comic colonial folly.
She felt ancient these days, far removed from the passions of the world around her, at times almost asexual. For that matter, Chinese men had never looked at her much—red hair spelled ‘demon’ in Chinese mythology. Her five feet ten inches discouraged most males across the entire Asian hemisphere, and being in her late thirties merely rounded out the picture of a sexual ‘neutral’.
Her thoughts turned idly to Jim McIntyre. Two years’ worth of love letters nestled in the top left drawer of her desk at home. He’d been an amusement, she told herself, someone to play at love with. He hadn’t been toying with her, but to a boy from the Bronx, their affair was mostly about the color, the setting, and the glamour of a literate media woman. She’d brightened the tiring anonymity of his work. So she told herself, but in the darkening moments of watching the sun finally release the bustling colony to its neon strings of lights, she now asked herself, yet again, where had Jim gone? Where had he disappeared after that last casual kiss outside the Choi’s flower shop? Supposedly gone for one week on assignment, there’d been nothing but silence now for a very long time.
The ferry passed the Hotel Victoria where Xavier Vonalp rented a service flat as his regional base for operations as a United Nations agency delegate.
Xavier was in so many ways different from Jim, but just as elusive. It was hard to say after only a few months of dating this deep-voiced, forceful European exactly where their discreet affair was heading. It had been many years since she’d thought her life might veer from its predictable course. Was Xavier’s careful warmth and st
eady distance rather too convenient for her? For the moment, she had no difficult choices to make but perhaps that wasn’t such a good thing.
She enjoyed her fifty minutes of solitude, returning to the disturbing questions Liu’s tale prompted. Who was the Hong Kong property magnate with the sick daughter? Who could Claire talk to for a broader picture of what was going on with organ transplants and prisons? Was Liu possibly a plant or a fraud? Was he unstable? Or hoping she’d pay for more information?
She disembarked, cheeks reddened and spirits cleansed. The boat poured its passengers unceremoniously down a gangplank a few feet wide into the arms of fishmongers, pineapple juice vendors and garment hawkers.
She marched five minutes up the steep Peak Road to a tiny junction consisting of a signpost pointing left to a small temple and a little grocery store selling San Miguel beer, dried noodles, soda pop, and mosquito coils. Just beyond stood Vic’s apartment building, really just a mildewed three-story house, its backside supported on ugly cement stilts pounded into the slope falling away down to the village.
From the sidewalk where Claire stood, a small gate barred pedestrians from a short concrete bridge overhung with trees leading to the front door. Vic rented the top floor with rights to the terraced roof. His idea had been to fix up the roof for parties, but an air of overgrown moss, mosquitos and defeat hung over the place.
From Vic’s open window above she heard the thumping of an electric bass guitar. No wonder he couldn’t hear his phone ringing.
The communal front door stood open and Claire loped up the two flights to Vic’s. The music was so loud that there was no way anyone inside could have heard her knocking. Claire waited, irritated, until the last note of a song sounded. She hammered her fist loudly.