The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice

by David Rotenberg

  A boat. Naturally — they were going to a lake!

  He sorted the pictures. Exterior shots, shots of a bedroom, shots of a room with a small runway, shots of a video room and shots of a bar. Shots of Triad markings and a 14K medallion.

  He went back to the exterior shots of the flat-bottomed boat. He examined the Triad markings just above the waterline. They glistened. At first it was hard for him to discern that the boat was covered in ice. Then he saw the scorch marks through the ice and a shiver shot down his spine — the mongoose rolled over and blinked into waking.

  Fong got up and paced. He went to look out the window, as if he were still in his office on Shanghai’s Bund. As if he could see the rising figures of the great new buildings of the Pudong industrial area just across the Huangpo River. Of course, all he saw was brick and bars. This was hardly the splendour of his office on the Bund. This was a provincial jail and he was being used, but he didn’t care. He felt alive. On the trail of something. Then he stopped himself. No. Not on the trail of anything — except a way home.

  He flipped through the pictures of the boat’s exterior, separating out the photos of the Triad insignias and the scorch markings. Then he took four that had close-ups of the portals. He went to lean the pictures against the base of the wall then noticed the surface was covered with small nails placed at four-inch intervals, perfect for hanging photos like the ones in his hands.

  “Fuck them,” he thought, but he couldn’t resist hanging the four pictures he’d selected. Then he chose photos of the rooms that showed exterior windows. It took him some time, but eventually he figured out the positioning of the four rooms in the boat. All were in the bow. The video room on deck level to port, the room with the raised stage beside it to starboard, the two other rooms directly beneath them.

  He couldn’t guess what was midship or aft. He’d never been on a boat. He hated the water almost as much as he hated the countryside.

  Then he sorted the photos of the victims. Using the wide shots of the spaces, he was able to divide the victims into their respective rooms. Quickly he realized that the five gutted men were Japanese, the two decapitated men were Caucasian (from their clothes he guessed American but he’d noticed in his last years working in Shanghai that most Westerners dressed like Americans — he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why). The three in the video room were Korean. He guessed that the seven faceless men were Chinese.

  Fong hung the full-body shots beneath the photos of the rooms in which they’d been found. Then he hung the many detail photographs of each victim below the fullbody shot.

  He paused for a moment and approached the pictures of the bar room. Something was missing. He checked the wide-angle shots. What was missing? What? Then he figured it out — and smiled.

  By the time he had all the pictures arranged it was midmorning and there was hardly any empty space on the cell walls. It had taken him at least six hours. Maybe more. It was as if he’d fallen into the photographs and time had slipped away. Now, surrounded by the gruesome gallery, he examined the panorama of his handiwork, the order he had brought to this stupendous chaos. Another shiver up his spine. He couldn’t tell whether it was from excitement or fear.

  Fong turned slowly in the midst of the images. He was an intruder here, a voyeur of the dead. Then he stopped. He understood why he’d shivered. All this death made him feel alive. Gave him a reason to be. “No,” he told himself. “A way home,” he insisted. Yet he wasn’t sure.

  “Nicely done, Zhong Fong.”

  Fong turned to see a uniformed officer standing outside his cell door. He immediately tucked his chin to his chest and bowed his head. But even in his brief look at the man, Fong was struck by his blunt, stocky, pimply ugliness.

  “No need for that. My name is Captain Chen. I am in charge of the investigation. We are honoured to have a man of your reputation working on the case.”

  Fong looked up. Captain Chen was younger than Fong. Probably in his late twenties, definitively ugly. His square hairless face bore just the slightest wisp of foreign markings. Tibetan? No, Korean. They were the only things of delicacy in his entire being. Fong pulled his eyes away from the younger man’s face. He noted the army bars on his uniform. Only Shanghai, Beijing and Ghuongdzu had their own police forces. The rest of the country was policed by the army.

  Chen repeated himself. “We are honoured to have a man of your reputation working on the case.”

  “I bet you are,” Fong thought. But when he lifted his chin, the smile on his lips was completely noncommittal. A Chinese smile.

  Chen pulled on the door and entered. It wasn’t locked.

  “If I may, Zhong Fong,” he said as he took a close-up of one of the Americans and put it under the other American’s full-body shot. “The heads had been switched.”

  Fong found himself raising his eyebrows. Interested. He immediately covered by coughing into his hand.

  “A specialist from the North supervised the taking of these pictures. I hope you find them adequate.”

  “This ‘specialist’ knew what he was doing.”

  “He was very efficient.”

  Fong looked at the photos again. Each was one of a set. A shot of a body then the same from a higher elevation. Perhaps standing on the shoulders of another man. Perhaps not. But meticulous. A professional. Someone who knew his way around a crime scene. Fong took in the pictorial display again. “A lot of dead people on a boat,” he said.

  “A boat covered in ice, stuck on a shoal, out in a lake. Ironically, it was also burnt.”

  “Burnt in the ice?” Fong was surprised by the intensity of his own interest.

  “We had a freezing rain followed by a frigid snap. The three coldest days in living memory.”

  “So can I assume these were taken in March?”

  “If you did, you’d be wrong. January. Very early January.”

  “January? That’s over three months ago!” Fong almost shouted.

  Captain Chen nodded. “It’s a sensitive case. Beijing wanted all due care taken.”

  “Now why would that be?” Fong thought, but he put a false smile on his face and asked, “What is it you want from me, Captain Chen?”

  “Nothing, Traitor Zhong.” The politico stepped out of the shadows across the way. “Captain Chen wants nothing from you. This kind of personal thinking got you into trouble to begin with, Traitor Zhong. Captain Chen wants nothing from you. Your country wants something from you. Is that understood, Traitor Zhong?”

  Fong tilted his head, but only after a pause that was clearly noted by all three men. The politico was about to rise to the bait, but then he backed off and lit a cigarette. The sweet fumes tugged at Fong’s nose. “You were the head of Special Investigations, Traitor Zhong. You have dealt with crimes against foreigners before. We want to know who did this to the foreigners. What else would we want?”

  Fong chose to dodge that question but noted that the “we” the politico used sounded strangely like a first person pronoun. “Why the delay? Three months is a long time.” Fong thought he knew the answer to his question, but he couldn’t resist hearing the man admit that they couldn’t solve this one on their own.

  The politico smiled. “Even you, Traitor Zhong, can understand that this has become a matter of international concern.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, he added, “Foreign governments want to see justice done.”

  Fong stared at the man. Finally he spat out, “Just pick out some dumb peasants and claim they did it. Execute them in public if the West wants blood for blood.” He almost said “measure for measure.”

  “The specialist did that — picked out some dumb peasants, Traitor Zhong.”

  Fong again stared at the man in front of him. This was all the more baffling for his admission. “So?” he asked, completely at a loss.

  “Would you like to interview them, Traitor Zhong?” The politico was smiling.

  “They haven’t been executed?”

  “Obviously not, unless
, Traitor Zhong, you’re capable of interrogating the dead.”

  It was hard to argue with that. But it bothered Fong that the politico’s final statement was the only thing out of the man’s mouth that made much sense.

  Fong had seen both sides of a jail’s bars. He preferred the side he was standing on now. The side that had a corridor leading to an unlocked exit door.

  The three men in the cell on the other side of the bars were nondescript men of the land. More like stones than men. They looked a lot like each other. They were brothers. The guards prodded them to taciturn awakening. Three flat resigned sets of eyes focused on Fong as he entered the cell. Fong looked down at the files Captain Chen had given him.

  Fong knew that interrogations were best done in private. But he decided against causing a scene by asking the thug, the politico and Chen to leave. There was Fong’s vanity too. He was always a gifted interrogator and he couldn’t resist showing these men that he had lost none of his talent.

  He did his best not to wince when the door slammed shut behind him.

  Fong looked at the three brothers who stood accused of masterminding and then carrying out the murder of the seventeen foreigners on the luxury boat on Lake Ching. According to Chen’s files, all three were from a local island community. All looked to be in their earlyto mid-twenties. One of them had the unlikely given name of Hesheng, meaning “in this year of peace.”

  Fong started with that.

  The year of peace was 1949. It would make the man fifty years old. He was clearly less than half that. “Your parents played a joke with your name, Hesheng.”

  The men didn’t laugh. The men didn’t do anything. “How old are you, Hesheng?” Fong asked casually.

  Something passed over the man’s face. Was it anger, rage, fear — what? Then it was gone. No, not gone — stopped behind the hard mask of the man’s hatred. Fong did his best to calm his Shanghanese accent and tried again with his best country speech. “So are you twenty or thirty, Hesheng? Just give me a hint.”

  Again that cloud crossed the man’s face. This time it also crossed the faces of the other two. “Well, I’m enjoying this, how about you?”

  Fong turned from them and then whirled back on Hesheng. “They’re going to execute you for a crime that you’re too stupid to have committed and too fucking frightened to deny. Do you understand that, you ox? Or is that beyond your limited capabilities? Ever see what happens to a man when he’s dangled from a rope? His face turns purple, he shits his pants, he fights for breath. He claws at the noose. He kicks his feet . . . and the crowd cheers. Trust me on this, Hesheng, they cheer, and loudly. Is that what you want? Is it?” For a moment, it looked as if the man was going to speak then he turned away. “Open your fat mouth and tell me if that’s what you want?” Fong shouted.

  “Go away,” another of the young men said. His voice was surprisingly low. The timbre like aged liquor. Fong whirled around. When Fong stepped toward him, the man repeated his command. “Go away.” Again that low voice. A sense of having been places. Seen things.

  The third man came to the speaker’s defence and repeated his command. Another deep, aged voice in a young face. Fong found it incomprehensible. “I know you three didn’t do this. I know it. Now help me prove it.”

  “Why?”

  That low voice again. Fong looked at them almost unable to answer. “Because . . . it’s your life.”

  “That’s what we told him,” said Hesheng.

  A moment passed before Fong demanded, “Who?” The other two drew Hesheng behind them. Fong had missed his chance. He cursed himself. He was out of practice. Back in Shanghai he’d never have missed the opening that Hesheng had offered. But that was almost five years ago. “Who did you tell, Hesheng?” shouted Fong, knowing full well that there would be no answer.

  The men turned away from him and returned to that dark, still place from which they’d momentarily surfaced. Fong thought of them as three large rocks. Only marginally alive.

  Emerging from the line of cells, he found the politico smoking in the front room. The man at first hid the smile on his lips, then gave up the effort and did everything but laugh in Fong’s face. “So did you get a confession, Traitor Zhong?”

  “From the look on their faces you managed to bludgeon that out of them a long time ago.” Fong stepped in close to the politico. “So what is it you really want from me here?”

  “Are you threatening me, Traitor Zhong?” Fong hadn’t realized that he had grabbed the man by his lapels. He pulled his hands back and turned away. “Find out who did this, Zhong Fong. That’s all that is wanted. Do your duty. Use your talent.”

  The anger and sarcasm lathered on the word talent was so deep, so fulsome that it took Fong’s breath away. Then the man snapped his fingers and two uniformed officers came into the room. One knelt quickly and snapped a metal ankle cuff on Fong.

  Fong looked down at the thing. “It’s electronic, Traitor Zhong. A little something that happened in the world while you were on vacation. It can tell us exactly where you are whenever we want to know.”

  Fong stared at it. The single red eye blinked up at him. He had to use his considerable will power to stop from reaching down and tearing at the thing.

  “No, Traitor Zhong, it can’t be taken off without the proper code. And I assure you I will not supply the code until you find out what we want.” The “we” that sounded like “I” again. “Welcome back to the police force — Fong. Second chances are rare in this life. Don’t waste this one.”

  The man rose and moved past Fong, close enough to touch. A challenge. Hit me! But Fong didn’t. The confusion in Fong was whether he didn’t slug this guy because he knew better than to hit a ranking party official or whether he was no longer capable of fighting back.

  He didn’t know.

  He hung his head for a second.

  The hideous anklet blinked its red eye up at him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT BEGINS

  Squat Captain Chen drove up in an army issue Jeep. The thug and the Chaika were nowhere to be seen. The politico hopped in beside him. Fong climbed in the back. “At least I’m not handcuffed,” he thought. Then he looked down at his ankle and knew that wasn’t really true.

  They drove into downtown Ching — downtown nowhere as far as Fong could tell. Not because it was a small city on the edge of a large lake but because little of what, at one time, must have made this place distinct from any other place remained. Like so much of the country, it had been made over in the Sovietdominated period. The place reeked of a false practicality. Straight lines that people didn’t want to walk, square buildings that housed people but not souls — and worst of all, no old town. What little withstood the Sovietization of the place had probably been demolished by the Red Guards.

  The air tasted of some sort of industrial pollutant. Fong couldn’t tell which one. The streets were grimecoated. This was no resort town. Xian was far away. Ching didn’t have to be kept nice for tourists.

  They whizzed by the docks. Little activity to do with the lake was in evidence. It was as if the water didn’t really exist, or that it was seen as nothing more than a momentary impediment to the growth of this non-place. In fact it was eerie quiet.

  The politico pointed to a street corner and a coyly marked party hotel. Captain Chen pulled the vehicle over and the politico hopped out. He pulled open the back door and Fong stepped out onto the cracked pavement. Then, like a hotel doorman, the politico opened the front passenger door.

  Fong looked at him.

  The man smiled. His sharp pointy teeth looked rusty and his breath smelt heavy on the snap of the spring air. “Do your duty for China, Traitor Zhong,” he hissed.

  “I have always done my duty for China, comrade.” Fong’s voice cracked. The politico’s smile widened. “Am I to be supplied with the equipment needed to launch a major investigation?”

  “You will be supplied with the necessities, Traitor Zhong. These are hard times. We all must
do our duty with as little as possible . . . and as quickly as possible. In this new age, time is money.”

  The man turned and walked into the hotel. Fong caught a glimpse of the interior as the door swung open. The opulence reminded him of the photos of the rugs and draperies on the burnt, sunken boat — the one with seventeen dead foreigners.

  He got back into the front seat of the car. “Where to, Captain Chen?”

  The politico’s phone call travelled on totally secure lines. It was answered on the second ring. “Yes.” The voice was distorted by the speaker phone.

  The politico took a breath. “He’s in place, sir.”

  “Good.” The speaker phone crackled for a moment, then the line went dead.

  The politico lit a cigarette and let out a rope of smoke. But it didn’t relieve his tension. He’d never get used to speaking to one of the three most powerful men in the Middle Kingdom.

  Twenty minutes later, Fong stood on the filthy floor of a single-storey abandoned factory. The west side of the high ceiling had a bank of grimy slanted windows that at one time could have been louvered open. But that was clearly long ago. Rows of the kind of struts used to mount machine lathes stuck out of the floor. The lathes were long gone. Rusting metal barrels were stacked all the way to the ceiling in three of four corners. The place was dark and dank. “As they intended it to be,” Fong reminded himself.

  Against the south wall was a square, raised concrete slab that had at one time been tiled. A few chipped tiles still remained. Fong assumed there had once been walls to demarcate an office. On the slab were two desks, two chairs, two phones and a typewriter. A large topographic map was spread out on the floor. The crime scene photos were tacked to the wall.

  Fong looked closely at the wall. There would be listening devices. He didn’t look for them. What would he do if he found them? Better to accept them as part of the working conditions of the job.