The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I)

by D. L. Kung

  Claire closed her eyes, stretched back on the bed and listened to the familiar sounds of a man taking a shower coming from her bathroom, but it had been different with Jim.

  Jim shared her passion for Chinese political intrigue—details like the headcount at each Party Congress or the byzantine chess moves of the Standing Committee of the Politburo up in Beijing. He’d worked undercover in Hong Kong for five years. He always made it clear that nothing long-term was possible. That’s probably why Jim had compensated with the fullest passions in their brief moments together. Lovely, strong, working-class, funny Jim, the boy from the wrong neighborhood made good, but gone—gone now—if always lurking with his dark wavy hair and winking expression in the backyard of her mind.

  If Xavier wasn’t quite as available as she would have wished, was Claire herself as available as she looked?

  She finally returned McDermott’s call to preview him on Dr Liu’s story as well as hash over Vic’s unexplained absence.

  MacDermott answered on the second ring. In the background she heard a strange sound and only after a minute guessed her international editor was shredding his Styrofoam coffee cup with nervous frustration.

  ‘OK, Claire, shoot back to the beginning. When was the last time you heard from D’Amato?’

  ‘Before the Chinese New Year break. We stayed late in the office on Wednesday night to close the textile export story, and in fact, we had a little, uh, well, I guess you could call it a meeting of minds? He expects to do a cover story, he wants to travel, he backchannels story pitches behind my back, I mean, c’mon, Roger. Before I give the boy a cover story, I expect a little show of team support, not to mention budget restraint before I give him carte blanche to travel Asia on bureau expenses.’

  ‘I’ll back you up on that. Did he get your message?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t look like it, does it?’ Claire laughed with frustration. ‘He takes off across the border without telling Cecilia or me. He misses interviews he lined up for himself back here in Hong Kong. Did you okay any story on electronics exports or a company called Brainchild?’

  ‘Not this desk. You’ve got my sympathy, but unfortunately your message was copied through the department and it came up at this morning’s meeting. Alan reacted pretty hard. He made a comment about bureau chiefs who misplace their newly arrived colleagues. Don’t forget, Alan personally poached Vic from the Chicago Tribune.’

  Claire paused. Clearly this was not a good time to mention that her Bangkok stringer had also turned up in all the wrong places.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m sure he’ll turn up. He just didn’t tell me he intended to take a long weekend on the mainland. Listen, as long as one of us is awake, let’s talk stories for a minute.’

  She outlined Dr Liu’s gruesome tale. She stressed that Weng-kin had not volunteered as a donor nor had her family been paid for her kidneys. The Chinese authorities were sure to claim everything was in order, and might even produce a paper with Weng-kin’s signature. MacDermott urged her to flesh out Liu’s accusation that Weng-kin had been intentionally condemned by mistrial to speed up an organ delivery.

  ‘It could be a great story if we can establish that this is happening regularly on a larger scale,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of stories out of India about poor people selling corneas and kidneys, but if the Chinese have turned this into a regular assembly line of judicial murder for organ export, yup, it’s a business story all right. We’ll match your coverage with some medical background here on the customer demand and regulatory climate for international organ traffic.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to hear you say. Great. I’m hoping Vic will be back from wherever he’s got himself stuck by tomorrow night, and then I’ll head up to Guangzhou myself on Monday and start interviewing medical people as soon as I can.’

  ‘Listen, Claire, I have to run. They’re doing the captions. But I should tell you before I hang up, if you can’t manage the guy, Alan will say there’s a problem in your bureau. It’s up to you to make it clear to Vic who’s the authority there. Otherwise we’re going to hear more heavy hints about the drawbacks of women in overseas management.’

  ‘And you always say don’t get paranoid when working alone in distant lands.’

  ‘Paranoid, no. Realistic, yes. Lester Chapman is busting a gut to get out there, and ever since his exposé on military overspending, Alan thinks the guy’s superman. Meanwhile, don’t hitch any rides in unmarked vans, okay?’

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  It took Claire many seconds after saying good-bye to McDermott to take in what he’d said. For ten years she’d free-lanced in the field, living on $10,000 a year in rundown apartments, avoiding emotional commitments, keeping hours that would kill a med school intern. Freelancing meant never saying no to any editor—at eight a.m., noon, four a.m. and then again at two a.m. ten days in a row while a news spike lasted. When the stories and the urgent calls dried up, it was back to editorial supplements, travel magazine features, and articles on ‘How to Buy the Perfect Silk Suit’—anything to cover the rent while she pitched story after story until the wire services put Asia back in the headlines again.

  Finally, after refusing more than once to do time at a metro desk somewhere in the States, she’d landed this plum Business World job as an outside hire, a real foreign correspondent on staff. For the stay-at-homes in New York, it was taking enough of a chance to keep her toiling in Asia for another two years before she was even considered for bureau chief. They passed her up when the Tokyo job came along, but she knew that had to go to one of the boys from New York.

  She wasn’t the corporate type, but she was absolutely the right choice for Hong Kong—one of three staffers who spoke Chinese, with years of experience all over China and Southeast Asia. She got the job at last, maybe ten years late by the standards of one of the high-flying yuppies at Rockefeller Center, but on her own terms.

  Now she might lose everything if a twerp who hadn’t paid one-tenth her dues couldn’t wrangle himself a train ticket home during holiday season.

  There was one more consideration that McDermott hadn’t mentioned. He didn’t have to. New York was just about to sign a big multi-million dollar publishing deal with the New China News Agency in Beijing to print a Chinese-language edition of Business World. If there were any problems between the Chinese government and the board of directors, Vic would be no more than a cocktail peanut stuck in Alan’s teeth They’d spit him out without a thought— Claire too, if it came to that.

  She sighed loudly enough for Xavier to sit down next to her, take the emptied water glass from her hand, and hold her. He didn’t say anything. Her reverie dissolved as she realized that Xavier thought she was sighing over him. Safer to leave it that way. How much of a turn-on was the Chinese-language edition of an American business weekly?

  She hugged him back tenderly. A hug was a hug. They’d arranged to spend all Saturday hiking with Father Fresnay in the New Territories and there was no reason to change their plans. Vic would turn up, she told herself. She’d be ready to leave Hong Kong on Monday. Dr Liu’s confession was only the tip of a good story.

  A soft rain turned the smoky gray of departing night to a more velvety haze. High-rise apartment buildings all around hers emerged from the mist. The parting steam wrapped around the fleshy pink fortresses of Queen’s Court and Dynasty Court. Bamboo scaffolding hung glistening and limp down the side of May Tower. Older, dirtier rooftops fell away below her window, their grungy air-conditioning units dripping brownish water down the stained cement walls. She closed her eyes and dozed off.

  ***

  A few hours later, Claire woke to the aroma of sizzling eggs, pepperoni, green pepper, and cheese. On her bedside table, set amidst the clutter of notes, alarm clock, her turquoise earrings, a couple of half-read magazines, and a melted vanilla candle, sat a little glass of fresh orange juice.

  She sank deeper into the blankets. Her last sleep had been deep and dreamless, the kind of slumber she no long
er took for granted. Until Vic had been transferred to Hong Kong, the office had been such a comforting place to spend the day. There would be the telex machine spilling out New York’s version of reality, and the reassurance of Cecilia’s singsong ‘It’s my pleasure’ at Claire’s small requests. There was the disgusting instant coffee, the daily pile of newspapers, the predictable noodle lunchboxes, the checklists of story ideas, feedbacks, faxes, stringer files—all the journalistic stuff that crammed her day up until she returned to the nightly variation—more phone calls, TV news, and reading.

  Now these comforts had reappeared, distorted into nightmares of long shifts of sleep-work. She dreamed she wrote stories that vanished in the morning, only to be written all over again at her desk that day.

  Schubert’s ‘Trout’ was playing on her CD player in the living room. Xavier was an early riser, and once he committed himself to something, like today’s hike, a paragon of organization. She slipped into the shower, scrubbing the dry skin off her freckled arms. It made her feel like a speedy, sleek filly.

  ‘You’re like a chestnut racehorse, long and graceful,’ Jim had told her, she remembered. Xavier never said things like that. Did she need words, or was it more important that Xavier was there when Jim wasn’t? Why wouldn’t Jim’s phantom leave them alone?

  But even before she had put on a fresh cotton robe and braided her hair, she realized the omelet should wait. She slipped into her study—with its tumbled shelves of histories, Chinese dictionaries and political glossaries, mysteries, and biographies—and booted up her computer to check the bureau traffic. Fluffy cumulus clouds scudded across the sky outside in a strong wind over the harbor. The rain had cleared for a while.

  While she waited for the New York signals to log on with her own code, she rang Vic’s apartment, but got only the machine again. She sipped her juice and punched in her call letters. The green-lettered messages started to scroll down her screen one after another, when suddenly, she hit the save button and leaned forward. She couldn’t believe her eyes.

  She cut the connection to New York and scrutinized the last message again:

  ZCZC

  CCRD

  MMCD

  .CDAM

  PRO MCDERMOTT, NEW YORK

  COPY RAYMOND, HONG KONG

  EX DAMATO, SHANGHAI

  AM IN SHANGHAI ON STORY. WILL EXPLAIN LATER. SORRY FOR DELAY. RETURNING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. BESTEST, VIC.

  ENDIT

  NNNN

  Shanghai? Well, it certainly wasn’t much. Vic, who was usually so voluble, apologetic, or aggressive was suddenly secretive and succinct. Claire leaned back in her big rattan chair and reread it. The computer recorded its arrival at seven o’clock, probably just after MacDermott had left his office. She read it again and again. Something was wrong with this message, and not just the dateline and the style, but—? An affectionate growl from Xavier about her eggs getting cold dragged her out of her study towards the kitchen.

  They finished breakfast and while Xavier cleaned up she loaded a backpack with a clean tablecloth, two bottles of a very decent red wine from Oliver’s, some frozen spaghetti sauce, a baguette, some cookies, and fruit for the hike. She also put in a tape of the Filipina pianist Cecilia Licad playing Rachmaninoff and a travel Scrabble. Xavier cheated, using Swiss-German words for which there was, by definition, no official spelling, but this was considered better than giving him a handicap for his smaller English vocabulary.

  While he shaved and prepared his own backpack, she pulled out some sheet music from the piano bench. She’d forgotten to run the dehumidifier, so the pages felt damp to the touch. She ran her fingers up and down the keyboard to warm up for a minute or so, before tackling an old piece from her teenage studies, ‘La Poule.’ Her hands retraced the old fingerings, the birds pecking and clucking in Rameau’s imagination around the hen yard. It was a demanding piece, and her fingers were rusty. She stopped playing and sighed. It was sad that after twenty years, she hadn’t improved a jot. But she had been awfully good, once.

  It was still cold outside, but drier, and the sun was building itself up to a cameo appearance. Claire tied a heavy sweater over her shoulders. Xavier came back from the parking lot below.

  ‘It wouldn’t start until the third try. The spark plugs are completely wet. Don’t you ever drive it while I’m away?’

  ‘Taxis are easier.’

  They headed off in her rust bucket of a Honda Civic. ‘This car is an insult to the asphalt,’ he teased her. ‘How can you drive it?’

  ‘I’m not driving it. You’re driving it, and it’s doing just fine.’

  ‘The floor is collapsing. I can see the ground through a hole here next to the gas pedal.’

  ‘Aren’t the Japanese clever? That is energy-efficient air-conditioning. Special cross-ventilation that comes in semitropical models.’

  ‘And the rust eating holes along the hood here in front of the windshield?’

  ‘Designed to increase its resale value to a sculptor I know at a Lan Kwai Fong gallery.’

  Xavier chuckled. In his twenties, he’d earned money for his architecture studies driving a taxi in Zurich. He steered the Honda deftly between two huge trucks blocking the road and unloading vegetables from China at the Wan Chai wet market.

  ‘Did you ever own a car, I mean something that deserved the name au-to-mo-bile?’

  ‘You mean, body intact, four wheels, left and right turning signals, rear-view mirror?’

  ‘Yes, one of those.’

  ‘No. When I was promoted to bureau chief I used the extra money to buy my piano. Anyway, we’re moving.’

  ‘Yeah. We’re even moving forward.’ He slapped his temple in mock amazement. ‘What was I thinking of back home, driving a Saab, when I could have had one of these?’

  The half hour of winding up the east coast of Kowloon and the New Territories to the entrance of Sai Kung Country Park passed quickly in a jocular mood. As usual the details of his latest mission was off-limits as conversation because she was a journalist. That was a problem for them, especially when he was working in closed societies such as Tibet, Burma or North Korea where American journalists were desperate to travel. Claire tried to respect his professionalism, but she longed to accompany him to the northern side of the Korean DMZ or the restricted Vietnamese-Chinese border.

  They headed northward along the park’s main road, a curvy two-lane route ending with a steep hill. A bus stop on the left and a small wooden gazebo on the right marked their meeting place with Fresnay.

  The priest was waiting, his long bare legs sticking awkwardly out of baggy khaki shorts and his long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. He must have been waiting for a while, because his pipe was in full steam. He hailed them with some relief as the Honda limped onto the verge.

  The trio set out on foot along the trail, a two-foot-wide old path rising and falling through the hills leading to the coast. Claire and Xavier weren’t as fit as their host. They conserved their breath in suppressed huffing and puffing while Fresnay bellowed out endless lengths of Baudelaire. He was a tremendous show-off when it came to his memory, whether the subject was Chinese characters, Scottish history, Shakespeare, or French poetry.

  ‘Il pleure dans mon coeur,

  Comme il pleure dans ma vie!’

  As they made their way slowly up the winding path, the inlets beneath leading to Tai Long Bay receded further with each curve. The countryside was devoid of tall trees. Deceptively gentle Asian hills unfolded in front of them. They looked more like mounds than real mountains, Xavier said, trying to retain some Alpine superiority while sweating profusely. A few campsites, drenched in litter, or ‘lap sap,’ were eyesores, but local teenagers, sitting around neon-colored tents, seemed inured to the polluted landscape. In fact, these city kids were adding to it, each party blasting Canto-pop music in an uneasy truce with nature.

  Beyond the campsite they passed a small cluster of fisher folks’ sheds as they descended back to sea level and the path
lining the water’s edge. This continued for twenty minutes, after which the climb began in earnest. Claire tried to ignore the ache in her legs and the blisters on her heels. At least her mind was emptying out. The absence of anxiety, she thought, could be an almost tactile pleasure. She gave herself to the rhythm of the ascent.

  Soon there was the last and highest hill to conquer before the delicious plummet to the village, signaled at a sudden turn by Ah Fok’s terrace café. Claire could already imagine the cold thrill of a San Miguel beer on the little concrete veranda. She was happily gasping by the time they reached the summit, her knees now two knots of pain.

  ‘Why did I look forward to this?’ laughed Xavier. They trudged in mini-triumph into the tiny settlement and were soon quaffing cool liquid. This athletic achievement of some ninety minutes earned nothing more than a grunt from Ah Fok, who rubbed his hands through his floppy hair in irritation at another party who actually wanted to order food. Luckily for Ah Fok, it was unlikely that his three-burner café was going to find itself competing against any upstart bistro soon.

  Tai Long was a dying village, its population now about a dozen souls, hidden along the coast of Sai Kung peninsula about halfway up the jagged eastern coast of the New Territories that stretched all the way to the Chinese border. You could imagine you were in pre-Liberation China, complete with ragged Kuomintang flags still flying. Fresnay marched happily to the coastal enclave every Friday afternoon, and offered Mass to anyone who turned up at the small chapel he had re-sanctified. He was nothing like the parish priests Claire had grown up with in California. His passions were languages, hiking, and history. He seemed indifferent to his friends’ states of grace or otherwise, left their sexual and marital status unquestioned, and functioned as a traditional priest only once a week, when he helped serve Masses on Sundays back in the city to Hong Kong’s 120,000 Filipina maids.