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

by D. L. Kung

  After about twenty minutes, the van was still on the same asphalt road, having crossed only two main junctions. Now it snaked its way through a few narrow lanes of modern housing. Tiny three-story townhouses with fancy tiles of different hues on each roof, little gates proclaiming the middle-class life stood only a few feet away from each other.

  Thinking of the tiny quarters that Cecilia and her mother shared back in Sha Tin, Claire wondered if the coming dissolution of the border in 1997 would heighten the envy felt by one side toward the other. If so, which neighbor would feel luckier—the cramped Hong Konger with slightly more political freedom, or the Guangdong provincial with a front lawn complete with a water sprinkler shaped like a plastic Confucius and an automatic timer?

  Punyu turned out to be a teeming little town that stank of diesel trucks, motorcycles with broken mufflers, fish frying in streetside stalls, and deep pools of stagnant rainwater. The van passed small shop houses festooned with cheap sweaters and silk dresses for sale. There were tiny noodle cafés and bicycle repair shops newly converted to motorcycle garages. Claire spotted beauty shops, massage parlors, crowded newspaper stands, and busy seafood restaurants. The sidewalks were new, the shop fronts unfinished, the rubbish untended, and everywhere there was honking, yelling, and noisy music.

  Past Punyu’s suburbs, the van turned up an older tree-lined street. Claire was startled to realize it was already nearly eleven as the lanes to either side filled up with young people heading out for lunch. Steam rose from woks brewing up hot bowls of floating wonton soup. Girls passed in twos and threes, some linking their arms in mainland fashion, while husbanding enormous fake-designer-brand handbags or umbrellas with their free arms.

  The driver grunted suddenly and turned the van sharply through an entrance flanked by ornate metal gates—one of Fenwick’s factories. Unlocking the side door, he left Claire to make her way toward the entrance. The din of sewing machines was slowing and she heard the outbreak of chatter. She made her way around thick puddles of mud and gravel and slipped nervously back out the gate, hoping no one in the offices had spotted the ‘visitor.’ She found herself on a main street amid a gaggle of lunch-goers, and she trailed them toward a large, new Hong Kong-style fish restaurant. Outside, a small clutch of drivers leaned against their black and red cars, whiling away their lunch hour while their bosses ate indoors.

  ‘Is there a small hotel here?’ she asked in English, playing the good tourist.

  ‘Only The Punyu,’ one driver shrugged. ‘You wanna change money?’

  ‘What’s your rate?’

  ‘Five to one.’

  ‘I could get better at a bank,’ she said. He took her for a real rube. ‘And your horse is crooked, too,’ she added in Chinese, pointing to his chest where his pirate copy of the Ralph Lauren polo player was about to drop the horseman on his head. Maybe this wasn’t such a friendly town.

  If she were Vic on a first trip into China, she’d head for the main hotel in town and sure enough, The Punyu Hotel wasn’t hard to find, smack in the center of town. Somehow, despite all the manufacturing investment from Hong Kong, nobody had glitzed up the local accommodations. Even a workaday Holiday Inn was absent from this industrial dump. The Punyu was a depressing version of China’s old Russian-style guesthouses built all over the country during the fifties for Communist Party cadres. Its dubious Stalinesque dignity was ruined once and for all by an incongruous new disco separated from the hotel by a ill-tended garden and festooned with tattered Christmas tree glitter.

  The hotel lobby was dark, with a carpet reeking of mildew and a plastic dehumidifier rattling away, its backside dripping water into a metal pail. A circular sofa of cheap burgundy velvet wrapped around a large pillar in the lobby center, providing permanent seating for two idle bellboys.

  Claire smiled at the two receptionists, a couple of teenage girls dressed in red cotton blazers. ‘Ni hao,’ she opened, and they said hello back.

  ‘Wo jao yi jao yi geh peng yeou,’ she said. ‘Looking for a friend’—well, there wasn’t too much that was provocative in that. ‘Maybe he’s still here—Keh shih ne ta hai zai.’ She spelled his name out carefully on a small piece of paper they shoved across the counter. D-A-M-A-T-O.

  One of the girls examined Claire’s spelling with a sullen expression. She worked her way up and down the rows of registration cards, many of which looked blank.

  ‘Ta hai zai, still here,’ she confirmed.

  Thank God, thought Claire.

  Then the girl spoke again.’Dann shi, hen chang de shi jian, mei yeou kan dao le.’

  Vic hadn’t been seen for some time.

  Claire asked how many days, indicating she would pay the bill..

  ‘Chi geh, bah geh, bu jr daw.’ The tougher looking of the two shrugged, ‘Maybe seven or eight, or longer.’ Five hundred kuay would cover it. She held out her hand, and Claire gave her the money. The girl thought this was normal. In a world where business reps came and went, and all foreigners were lumped together and identified by their company, neither girl asked any questions.

  The tougher one handed Claire the room key.

  Vic’s room on the second floor stood next to a storeroom of cleaning supplies where the staff could keep an eye on him. The hotel wouldn’t be busy until the summer, when the backbreaking Christmas delivery schedules brought supervisors up for a longer stay. Regular commuters, on the other hand, had spacious apartments they used all the time.

  Claire knocked on the door and, turning the key, called into the room.

  ‘Vic?’

  There was no answer. The air was stale and the curtains closed. She waited before stepping inside and flicked on the dim overheads. In the feeble yellow glow, his room looked quite ordinary—with twin beds made up and a small refrigerator humming in the corner—your average two-star Asian hotel room. The ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts. So much for service at the Punyu off-season. Vic always smoked in the toilet at work when Claire frustrated him with assignments.

  There was no other sign of Vic, she thought, then halted dead in her tracks at a very worrying sight.

  His laptop strap peeked out from underneath one of the lumpy beds. No journalist would leave a valuable computer just lying for days for the taking.

  There was nothing more to do here. Claire shoved his computer into her backpack and trudged down to the hotel’s tiny coffee shop. It was as sad as the rest of the place—furnished with just a few cheap Formica tables and folding chairs. She ordered a coffee. She got a cracked teacup of coffee-flavored evaporated milk.

  She was the only customer. Apart from the usual chatter near the kitchen and some clanging of pots beyond, the table offered the first quiet moment in which she could wrap up her confusion into one large question mark.

  What next? Vic had arrived and stayed a week ago in Punyu to see a MacGinnes assembly line. But nagging at the back of her mind was the memory of that gun in his apartment and of Hager’s arrogant, naked form embracing Vic’s girlfriend as if Vic didn’t exist. Back in Hong Kong, she would have to find out more from Nancy, who was hardly playing the frantic beloved.

  Claire had a dreadful feeling now that all of her effort was merely an exercise in ticking possibilities off a list to prove Vic wasn’t in Hong Kong the night of Craig’s murder. For one thing he wouldn’t have gone to either Shanghai or Hong Kong without his computer. At what point should she just tell her New York editors and Vic’s family that she had exhausted her trail of information? She cringed at the thought of alarming Mrs D’Amato back in New Jersey with the news that her son, the suspect, had vanished.

  The smell of bok choy searing in overheated peanut oil poured out of the kitchen. She was hungry but she wouldn’t eat in this dive. Better to use the rest of the afternoon looking at the MacGinnes factory and then hire one of the local boys to drive her up to Guangzhou for the night to start investigating that gruesome business of Dr Liu’s. She was a bureau chief with a good story to work on, even while her bureau’s ‘
young boy network’ was self-destructing.

  Her dismal reverie was interrupted by a cultured voice with an accent that was almost, but not quite, BBC World Service quality.

  ‘Miss Raymond. Would you care to join me for lunch? My car is waiting.’

  She looked up to see a slender, middle-aged Chinese man over six feet tall. His full head of black hair was flecked with strands of white. He wore a simple, well-cut pair of pants with a matching suit jacket in light gray wool. Unlike many mainlanders, he knew enough about Western suits to get his tailor to cut the jacket long and fitted, rather than make it a short little gray box. Underneath, he wore a plain white cotton shirt. His tie was dark maroon. An expensive fountain pen was clipped to his pocket.

  But it was his face that held her in silence seconds longer than was polite. She saw a longish head with a high-bridged nose, penetrating eyes under elegant wide brows, and a set of hard lips with a slight, knowing smile.

  He was one of the handsomest men she’d seen in a long time—apart from one unsettling detail. His ear lobes had been sliced down to form two sharp points.S

  Chapter Seven

  —Tuesday afternoon—

  ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

  He took her upper arm with a grip that was more a command than an invitation. They descended the hotel’s bleak steps to a shiny black Toyota with curtains drawn across the back windows. It was a car for Chinese bureaucrats. The driver held the back door open for her and shut it firmly.

  ‘Do you care for Shanghainese food?’ the man asked, as he reached inside his shirt pocket and handed her a name card.

  Claire didn’t respond. No Chinese would have dared kidnap her so elegantly without official authority. He knew her name. This wasn’t good.

  She read the card quickly, first in Chinese as he had handed it to her vertically, the Chinese characters running downward, then horizontally on the English side. His last name was Chen, his first name Jiafang, or ‘Liberation.’ That pinned his birth exactly to 1949 when millions of parents named their newborns after China’s biggest political event of the century.

  He looked older than that. Perhaps even by China’s grim standards, his life had been exceptionally unlucky. The card identified his office at the provincial Ministry of Electronics. That meant nothing. These days state jobs paid so little, cadres worked full-time in private business if they had the chance. Many only bothered to pick up their official paychecks once every few months.

  Who was Mr Chen, really? She hadn’t made up her mind as to how polite she had to be. He didn’t seem to mind her silence.

  ‘Frankly, I prefer the cooking of Shanghai, where I was born. Are you familiar with the noodle dish—you might have eaten it in Hong Kong—called in Cantonese ja cheung mien? One might almost mistake it for spaghetti Bolognese. On a wintry day like this, wouldn’t such a dish be most comforting?’

  The sedan wove its way carefully between pedestrians and motorbikes through back streets. It pulled up at a small restaurant set behind a clutch of trees off a side road. The interior was already smoky and crowded, filled with the chatter of workers on break, the sizzle of woks and the clatter of cheap plates. Hong Kong managers wearing expensive watches and Italian shoes sat six to a table. Chopsticks flew back and forth as serving platters flew through the air up one aisle and down the next. A place this busy had to serve good food. She was at least grateful to have escaped The Punyu Hotel’s kitchen.

  A fat old proprietor waved them to a table in the back. No reservation needed. Two waiters promptly placed a tall folding screen in front of their table, giving them privacy from the rest of the diners. As far as Claire was concerned, this was another discomforting signal.

  ‘We could have gone to one of the bigger places,’ Chen apologized, ‘but I have old friends here. Wang over there in the corner claims he worked at the French consulate in Shanghai in the old days. I’m sure he did work for the French consulate, but in the kitchen or laundry? Our little joke. You be the judge.’

  ‘Your card doesn’t tell me why you seem to know who I am, why you assume I can read Chinese and how you knew where I was. Am I under some sort of stylish arrest?’ asked Claire.

  ‘How dramatic.’ He paused. You know, you have very lovely eyes, called hazel, I think?’ said Chen. ‘Well, let’s order first, and then I shall explain. Do you care for bean curd?’

  ‘You know, I am an admirer of yours,’ he continued, but instead of looking at her, he fixed his gaze on the card listing the day’s ‘specials’ that sat next to the soy and chili sauce dishes on the table. ‘I . . . am . . . a careful reader of English-language magazines. It is an excellent way to update my faulty English. We subscribe to Business World at our unit’s library.’

  ‘What do you think of our coverage?’

  ‘You know a few things about China,’ he conceded, ‘and you aren’t afraid to admit what you don’t know. I admire that in a foreigner.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It means you know more than you should.’

  ‘You may know the joke—the term China expert is an oxymoron.’

  Chen laughed appreciatively.

  Claire looked him straight in the eye and her tone turned steely. ‘Your English isn’t faulty, Mr Chen. Oxymoron ain’t an easy word.’

  He glanced quickly at her. ‘Please call me Philip, or perhaps Phil, since you are an American. My father was a graduate of St. John’s in Shanghai. He named me Philip after a favorite professor with whom he studied theology before Liberation.’

  Claire waited patiently. One thing she would not, could not do, she thought, was address this person as ‘Phil.’ His iron-straight hair, so strong she could have almost counted every strand, the deft handling of his chopsticks as he mixed a bit of sauce with the cucumber appetizer, and his self-conscious posture, knees crossed, one foot bobbing cheerfully, all added up to mandarin, high-ranking Communist cadre, Eastern prince.

  ‘Phil?’ Hardly.

  Once the steamed towels, tea, and place setting had been carefully laid, their meal arrived. Steaming rice was scooped into their small bowls. A serving dish of sliced pork and dried bean-curd sauce came first, then some stir-fried eggs with shredded meat, cloud ear fungus and vegetables, with a sweet plum sauce on the side followed by a fried red garoupa on a bed of shredded ginger and scallions.

  Her host had ordered the smaller-size plates with no overpriced shellfish or excessively fussy food. The meal might be coming out of a private pocket, not necessarily Chen’s, but not the unit’s expense account either. An unusual Chinese official indeed.

  ‘It’s not exactly Shanghainese,’ he confessed, ‘but the owners found a new life in the south, not unlike myself.’

  Claire began to eat. ‘This isn’t just Punyu hospitality, the Chamber of Commerce working overtime, is it?’ she commented.

  ‘No, Miss Raymond. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious to know what brings one of the most senior American journalists based in Hong Kong to these backwaters. You write a lot about Sino-British relations, the Hong Kong stock market, textile and toy manufacturing, the tourist industry, hotel and airlines business’—he carefully folded his fingers back on his palm, one by one, the Chinese style of ticking off the possibilities— ‘So I ask myself, what is she doing here? A tall, redheaded reporter who has often appeared on Hong Kong television news shows gets off the local ferry. No one among the obvious candidates seems to be expecting her. She arrives without informing the New China News Agency, which is typical, I suppose, since nobody chooses to be nannied if they can help it. But none of the usual ministries is expecting you or has received a request from you for information.’

  He leaned back in his chair and said, ‘I deduce you are inquiring after your colleague.’

  ‘You know about Vic?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You talk as if you were in the Foreign Ministry or police, instead of electronics.’

  ‘As I said, don’t be alarmed. There are about sixty-six million peopl
e in this province, but in this town? Less than a hundred who matter. All the others stick little Power Rangers into MacDonald’s boxes or stitch labels onto jeans. There’s very little that goes on here that doesn’t get around. And you are in no personal danger. Detaining you would be more trouble for us than for you. But you’ve already guessed that, haven’t you?’

  She noticed that he was reluctant to show his teeth. Maybe he smoked too much.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ she pressed.

  ‘The girls at the hotel rang me as soon as your back was turned. I was his host, you are his colleague. It is their responsibility.’

  Of course. She hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘So what’s happened to Vic? He was there at the hotel and he’s missing now. Is he in trouble?’

  ‘I do not think so.’ With an elegant gesture, Chen placed a particularly nice morsel of fish on her plate. ‘He was here. He left after conducting his interviews at the Brainchild factory. He hired a driver and left Punyu. I’m sorry I cannot be of more help.’

  ‘May I speak to that driver?’

  ‘Of course. He will tell you that Vic paid six hundred Hong Kong dollars to drive to Guangzhou.’

  Without his computer? Chen didn’t know the laptop nestled inside the backpack at her feet belonged to Vic. Whatever had happened, the driver pointed out to her would confirm that he’d driven Vic to Guangzhou for six hundred dollars.

  Frustration boiled up inside her. She wasn’t about to say to a complete stranger, ‘Vic was rash and erratic. Sometimes he drank too much. He came to work late. We had problems with him. So help me clear him of a murder charge.’ Claire was surprised to realize she was feeling more loyalty to Vic at this point than the usual irritation.

  Instead she said, ‘Well, whatever happened, he would have contacted our office by now. If this town is as small as you say, and if you have the guan xi to know so much, why can’t you tell me more? Isn’t it worth it for you to make a discreet call or two for me?’