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

by D. L. Kung

  She showered, spritzed herself with L’Air du Temps, and threw on a gold-threaded antique Japanese kimono Xavier had brought her back from a mission in Kobe. A pair of gold leather sandals replaced her fuzzy slippers. She pulled her mane into a French twist.

  Her head started pounding almost immediately. She loosened her hairpins.

  Slaughter’s priorities weren’t hers. For him Vic was a suspect—possibly his only suspect— not just an irritating, irresponsible journalist dumb enough to get himself lost on the mainland. Slaughter’s job was to find Hager’s murderer, especially with the entire Bangkok police now dogging his progress. She had to be careful to say nothing that could be twisted later into something incriminating.

  Her angle was completely different. Hager was gone, colder than yesterday’s news, but Vic was innocent. She had to find him before someone killed him, too. The frustrating thing was not to know the motive. She wouldn’t actually impede Slaughter’s investigation, but she wasn’t going to do his job for him if she was running against time with her own headaches, literal and figurative.

  For one thing, she didn’t want Slaughter to know of her meeting today with Nancy. Hong Kong was both a small town and a big city, depending on which corners of the colony you frequented. Even if Nancy was a suspected accomplice, they couldn’t find her until she wanted to be found. Claire would leave it that way for the moment. She had to extract from Nancy as much as she could discover about Vic’s disappearance. If you knew the Cantonese, you knew Nancy had said all she was going to divulge to Slaughter back at the consulate.

  The policeman was cordial, but within seconds she glimpsed the familiar case folders in his slim briefcase. They exchanged small talk about the weather, ‘the strangest spring we’ve had since the early typhoons of ‘81,’ he commented. She poured the tea and offered ‘biscuits.’ He complimented her on the apartment, noting the lovingly polished piano, her small collection of Chinese pots and a Ch’ing Dynasty ‘scholar’s box’ of yellowish-brown pear wood recently refinished.

  Claire neither extended nor discouraged his pleasantries. It would be nearly impossible after two decades of covering the Far East not to have picked up a souvenir or two. Most Hong Kong long-timers’ apartments acquired, perhaps unintentionally, a distinct camphor smell, a gleam of polished sandal or cherry woods, a sheen of bronze, and a gleam of blue and white porcelains—that was the true color chart of China, north or south.

  Slaughter confessed to a weakness for yellow wares, especially the egg-yolk-colored dishes of the Qianlong Dynasty.

  ‘Quite beyond my means,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Mine too.’

  Claire waited. Slaughter was an experienced old hunting dog, but slowing down. He paused, straightened his back, unclasped his weathered paws, and finally came to the point.

  ‘We’ve had some very disturbing information from Bangkok. Very unfortunate. Apparently your man Hager had been in regular contact with rather unsavory people, Thais in Bangkok with connections to the military along the border with Burma. We don’t have proof of what his role was, but these people are known to have hired couriers before—European, that is, white couriers—to run heroin through international airports.’

  ‘You mean Hager was a drug mule?’ Claire gasped.

  ‘Very small-time, it appears. Did he ever discuss drugs with you?’

  ‘Of course not. He would have lost his Business World tie with us immediately. His resident’s permit in Thailand depends on his letter of accreditation from our international edition. We don’t pay any of our stringers a lot of money. The one in Beijing gets the largest monthly retainer, just $1000 US. So in lieu of cash we offer to carry stringers’ accreditation with the local government’s press office. It’s worthwhile if they use it wisely, set up shop and put our deadlines first when they string for other publications.’

  ‘Did he come to Hong Kong often without a good explanation? Spend more money here than you thought appropriate, even considering his reputed trust fund?’

  Claire thought, I can’t believe it. Drugs . . . Hager . . . Then she thought of his fancy tastes, his surprising ability to flit in and out of Hong Kong on his own money, his arrogance when she reminded him that he was expected to be on the job in Bangkok . . . and the gun.

  She also thought of something else, something she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell Slaughter. Vic’s own bank statement shoved into the office file had shown that unusual deposit. Maybe it hadn’t been a birthday gift from his parents, after all. Maybe it was a cut from Craig for the use of his flat. And the money Vic lent to Nancy’s brother? Oh, god, had Vic, weak Vic, the Vic who wanted to be everybody’s buddy, had Vic got himself involved with Craig’s drug runs?

  Slaughter waited. Her thoughts darted around.

  ‘Nancy Chew? Is she involved too?’ she asked.

  ‘We can’t tell. We need any information you can give us about what happened on Cheung Chau the other night. The consulate’s DEA men are working on it too, but this is still British territory.’

  ‘Yes, but I think I told you at the hospital all I remember. Nancy said she was packing her clothes, but she wasn’t. I could tell. She got angry at me and I think, saw somebody behind me and fled for her life.’

  Claire sipped her tea to steady herself. ‘The gun makes sense now.’

  ‘That gun is the type used by triads here in Hong Kong, or by hoodlums coming across the Chinese border. It might mean that locals with ties to Guangdong or Guangxi province are closely connected to this particular ring in Bangkok. We’re presuming that the Thais knew Hager wouldn’t be permitted through Kai Tak airport with a weapon, so they arranged for him to be given something for protection once he arrived here.’

  ‘Some protection, considering the results.’ Claire realized she was shaking. They were dealing, not with a rogue killer but with a community of killers, one of whom had cracked her skull?

  Slaughter noticed her inadvertent gesture toward the back of her head and nodded, soberly. ‘The forensics people also think Hager was knifed before he was shot. What we allowed might have been injuries inflicted in the water match a different description—an expert evisceration with an upward stroke of a short-bladed knife.’

  ‘Expert.’

  ‘Yes. Now the gun is gone. Mr Hager is dead. Miss Chew is gone. Mr D’Amato is gone. I must admit, my dear, that it is almost a stroke of good fortune that you were attacked.’ Slaughter smiled, but only very slightly, and tugged a little self-consciously at his white cuffs. His cuff links, engraved with a service insignia, had lost their veneer.

  Claire was confused. ‘I beg your pardon? You say I was lucky? I sustained a fracture. I could have suffered brain damage.’

  ‘Well, I don’t quite know how to put this. Didn’t you notice how quickly the Cheung Chau police found you in Mr D’Amato’s flat?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact it occurred to me later, but I figured it was because of that neighbor lady complaining about the broken window.’’

  ‘You’ve been under surveillance.’

  ‘You mean, to see if you could pick up some clues in my wake?’

  ‘ No, not exactly.’ He avoided her eyes, sipping tea.

  ‘You mean until the attack, I was a suspect?’

  The milky tea curdled in her stomach. Her face flushed with anger. Her right ear started aching badly. ‘When I’ve been busting my guts turning over every rock in the Pearl River delta looking for that jerk and trying to file to New York as if nothing was happening? When I’m told that fifteen years of trying to build a career are put into jeopardy by these idiots playing reporter? You thought I was trading drugs? Or that I killed my own colleague?’

  ‘Claire, my dear—’

  ‘What was my motive? His lousy punctuation?’

  ‘There are routines—’

  She stopped, and turned away. She hated to lose her temper in front of a colonial like Slaughter. It offended his precise idea of colonial ladies’ ‘grace under pressure,’—all
that stiff upper lip tradition.

  But a suspect? She’d been tussling with personal guilt and a sense of neglected responsibility. The suggestion that she’d actually plotted Vic’s disappearance or the gruesome demise of Hager was slanderous.

  Her outburst left Slaughter unmoved.

  ‘You mustn’t take it personally. The Hong Kong CID is a very unsentimental group of chaps, especially in a territory like this. We’ve seen it all. Yes, seen it all—espionage, bank fraud, drugs, murder, and corruption—and now I’m talking about just within our own ranks of the police, of course, sometimes committed by our closest friends. Remember Peter Godber? Corrupt as they come and he was Kowloon's Deputy District Commissioner.’

  ‘Before my time.’

  ‘Then you recall the fall-out, because even after they dragged him back, tried and convicted him and he served his four years for corruption, the aftertaste lasted for years—the suspicion, the tattling, the mopping up, the loss of informants—the whole bloody mess.’

  ‘You knew Godber?’

  ‘You take my point. If we have to suspect the man standing next to us in the same uniform, how can we give anyone else an automatic pass? Europeans, Brits, North Americans, you name it, are hardly above suspicion in a case like this, just because we know them. Even if we respect them very much.’

  He coughed and gulped down his tea.

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  Claire was close to asking Slaughter, as gentlemanly as he was, to leave. He hadn’t said the rest of it. Old-timers like Slaughter knew Claire had arrived in Hong Kong fifteen years before with a degree in Chinese and nothing in the bank. Where had she come from? What was a Berkeley graduate’s image to a provincial straight-arrow like Slaughter? Her start had been as lowly as his. She had pinched pennies from her local salary, got her hair cut in tiny North Point hair salons run by old Shanghainese. She’d roomed with four and five other freelancers at a time in ratty rented rooms on Kwing Kwong Street in North Point and then in a cramped apartment facing the racetrack on Wong Nai Chung Road in Happy Valley. She’d worn clothing bought from crowded stalls in the back alleys of Central where Chinese merchants sold ‘seconds’ of flawed cheap silk blouses, stone washed denims, and rabbit-hair sweaters.

  Maybe her success galled Slaughter. She’d arrived in a British colony with no reputation and no money probably a few years after he—many years her senior—had been transferred north from Malaysia. Now she lived in a pricey apartment paid for with a generous housing allowance and enjoyed unlimited travel over a territory of responsibility larger than Slaughter’s would ever be. She answered to a headquarters far away, not to a young Chinese upstart chief of police promoted over his head because of a localization program no one imagined when Slaughter first signed up.

  She suspected that, underneath his old-school manners and his years of cooperation, the resentment that coursed through the blood of many a colonial Brit when faced with rising American dominion in Asia simmered away.

  It was nothing personal. It was just one of the tensions that flavored life among expatriates in Hong Kong and it was worsening by the day as the “handover” date crept closer.

  She closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at Slaughter. He made her feel guilty for something she hadn’t done. Anything they held against her was entirely circumstantial. But in a colony, even though they now called it a ‘territory,’ this might be enough to taint her reputation, to hint that there was ‘more to the story’ than they were able to disclose to the public. It would travel from the police to the Government Information Offices, to local journalists in regular contact with the information officers at Beaconsfield House.

  To a journalist, reputation was everything. You needed a record of honesty, of accuracy, of discretion, and oh, yes, of not having killed anybody lately.

  Suddenly she thought of something else.

  ‘If you were watching me at Vic’s apartment, then your men must have seen Nancy Chew and whoever hit me.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry to say we didn’t. We had one man tailing you and he was watching the entrance. Anyone who had cased the building beforehand could exit through the servant’s way to avoid being seen, especially if they were worried about surveillance themselves.’

  Suddenly another thought struck her.

  ‘The baking.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Hager hadn’t been cooking that day I surprised him in bed with Nancy. Of course not. He wasn’t cooking in the kitchen.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘As you go into the apartment, the kitchen is on the left. It’s small and there’s only one work surface. I saw some kitchen scales, bowls and measuring cups. I saw white flour and thought, “baking.” But Hager was measuring out drugs, wasn’t he? Repackaging them to pass them on discreetly. When he went to make me coffee, I heard him washing down the kitch—’

  Slaughter leaned forward. He put his cup down. ‘Did you see anything else? Anything unusual?’

  ‘Unusual? Not really. Bowls, cups, the scales . . .’ she tried hard. ‘Baggies—you know—the kind of sandwich bags that seal up when you press along the top.’

  Slaughter nodded. Claire thought again. No, she couldn’t remember anything else. And she felt exhausted, even though she had slept in this morning.

  Now she understood the bogus Shanghai computer message. After her sudden visit to the Cheung Chau flat, Hager must have been frantic to put Claire off the scent and to make her complacent about Vic’s absence. He couldn’t afford to have her snooping around the apartment until the drug delivery was done and payment received. He couldn’t have guessed he’d used an outdated code for Vic.

  Slaughter finished taking notes on a small spiral pad and then rose. ‘Please remain in touch,’ he said, collecting his coat and umbrella. ‘Those other two can’t stay hidden forever, especially your man D’Amato. We know he’s somewhere inside Hong Kong borders.’

  ‘He could be anywhere.’

  ‘Meanwhile I advise you to be more careful. We can’t maintain a constant bodyguard service. We have to rely on your good sense. I’m afraid you may be in danger. Don’t stray too far. Stay in touch with our offices and with the consulate.’

  ‘Xavier flew to Japan this morning,’ said Claire. ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘Any friends who can stay with you?’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit extreme?’ Claire said. She was still taking in the various implications of Slaughter’s news.

  ’The apartment building has a management office off the lobby, mostly to watch out for car thieves, et cetera.’

  ‘I’ll speak to them as I go out.’ Slaughter’s tone was now almost avuncular, and as far as he was concerned, any outburst seemed forgotten. Claire couldn’t say she felt the same, but tried to be gracious as he told her:

  ‘In the meantime, don’t speak to anyone about this. It’s better if you play dumb. We’ll clear it up soon, and we’d appreciate it if you’d just inform your editors of developments at this end. We still respect your position as the magazine’s regional representative and as far as we’re concerned, you’re the person to handle communications with your magazine internally. Fair enough?’

  ‘Sure. Thanks.’ At least they allowed her that much. It certainly wouldn’t help her position with McDermott and Alan right now to have a couple of Drug Enforcement Agency investigators in polyester suits popping up on the fortieth floor overlooking Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. It was serious enough to inform Alan that someone remotely connected with the magazine had been dealing drugs on the side. Thank God she hadn’t hired Craig Hager in the first place.

  Slaughter was gone with a jaunty wave, umbrella swinging sharply ahead of him, up, down, up down, along the corridor toward the elevator.

  Claire cleared the tea tray and went to her piano. She pulled out Hanon’s Etudes— mindless warm-ups, mere calisthenics for the fingers. She’d been doing them since she was ten and they had become—even after she stopped taking lessons, stopped hoping
for a musical career—a kind of mantra during stressful times. She managed five pages of scales and variations, up and down and up down, before she felt ill and as the tea came surging up, realized that this was the third time in two weeks that her stomach had turned queasy on her. She took four aspirin, two for her stomach and two for her head.

  She wasn’t sure how long she could take this. She couldn’t recall any assignment that had actually made her physically ill day after day.

  At eleven-thirty, she snuck out the building by the servants’ door. Making sure she kept out of sight of Slaughter’s watcher at the front gate, she darted through the parking lot beneath her building, over a hedge, into the parking lot of the next residence and down their drive. Slaughter might have implied she was beyond suspicion in the hope he could trick her into leading them to Nancy. She still didn’t trust him. She didn’t want Nancy arrested under her nose before she had squeezed the truth out of her.

  Claire was confident the truth favored Vic, but the truth could be twisted.

  Icy rain started pissing down on her, and she’d forgotten her umbrella. She hailed a taxi plowing through flooding gutters and rode it down to the busiest intersection in Central— Pedder Street and Queen’s Road Central. She didn’t notice anyone behind her.

  One block north, closer to the harbor, she stood at a pedestrian crossing at Des Voeux Road and made a dash for one of the trams snaking their way along the center of the crowded junction. She was the last one to board, literally leaping at the back doors as they folded behind her and squeezing her way through the resistant crush of damp old ladies and students blocking the center aisle.

  She still didn’t see anyone following her.

  Slipping off at a stop on Queen’s Road East, Claire battled her way around the gesticulating, chattering pedestrians to the ‘Shanghai 369.’ Cars sped past, sending sheets of filthy water spraying across her legs. Taller than almost everyone she passed, she protected her eyes from the spokes of low-flying umbrellas.

  It wasn’t hard to spot Nancy inside the restaurant. The tiny shop was still only half-full. There the girl sat, testing a half-smile, but her nervousness clouded the friendly pose.