“When did the crew leave the ship?”
“Just after I finished with the Americans. They were . . . well, sort of too drowsy to . . . you know. So they didn’t do anything.”
“How long after you left the dock was that?”
“A guess? Maybe an hour and a half . . . two, tops. Then the other guys came on board.” Fong held his breath. She shrugged, “You know, those odd-looking peasant guys.”
“Why do you say they were odd-looking?”
“Well, they all sort of looked the same, you know. Weird. Looked like the old guy who was on board. Farmers, you know.”
“Of course,” Fong thought, “it was a celebration. Iman would have been invited.” He smiled at her and asked, “How many of them were there?”
“Dozens. Hundreds. A lot — counting’s not my idea of fun. They seemed to be everywhere. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many up close. You may have noticed, I’m a city girl.”
She touched his arm. He shrugged her hand away. “How do you know they were farmers?”
“They carried tools.”
Fong saw the scraped-off faces of the Chinese men in the bar. He closed his eyes and asked, “Hoes?”
“I don’t know what you call them. The wide, short, sharp things used for . . .”
“Hewing. Building terraces. I’ve seen them,” he said almost in a whisper.
“If you say so — how would I know what they are?”
But Fong wasn’t listening to her. He had retreated into the recesses of his mind. A terrible truth sat there. All the island farmers did the killing onboard that ship.
Dizziness threatened to engulf him but he breathed it away and asked, “And these farmer types took over running the ship?”
“I guess. The guests seemed really sleepy, except for that old guy who they all looked like.”
His mind supplied the unwanted image of islanders entering the rooms, slashing blows of the hewers, gunshots, gutting, castration — fury — chi. He looked up at her. “How did you get away?”
“The fisherman.”
“What?”
“I was out on the deck and a fisherman . . . you know, one of those guys with the birds, yelled at me to jump. I thought he was nuts. The clothes I was wearing cost me a fortune. Besides, I don’t swim much.”
“How did he get you to jump?”
“When I saw how excited he was I figured that maybe I’d better listen to him. Know what I mean? Anyhow, I didn’t have to jump, he brought his boat in close and helped me down. I didn’t even get wet.” She stopped for a moment. “I didn’t kill anyone. Shit, I didn’t even fuck anyone. Or any other stuff. I just took off my clothes. Is that a crime in the New China? If so, since when?”
They were on their way to the China news agency across town as Fong finished telling them about his conversation with Sun Li Cha.
“It makes no sense, Fong. One girl for seventeen foreigners.” With a smile she added, “Chinese women are extraordinary, but seventeen to one seems . . .”
“You forget the girls pushing the broken-down bus Chen saw outside of Ching that night.”
“Russian craftsmanship strikes again,” added Chen.
“That breakdown probably saved their lives.”
“Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to be . . .”
He never got to complete his apology. “So how did Sun Li Cha get there, Fong?”
“She drove, Lily.”
“She has a car?” Lily asked, astounded.
“Evidently her business is thriving.” Lily frowned. He didn’t. “Are we getting close to the news bureau, Captain Chen?” The younger man nodded. “Who are we talking to there, Lily?”
“There’s a Reuters correspondent, a CNN guy and an Associated Press stringer.”
“Were they all there in December?”
“Not the Associated Press guy, but the other two were.”
“They’re all covering the story of the murders?”
“Well, they were until the government threatened to remove their credentials.”
“So there’s been no coverage overseas of the murders?” Fong asked incredulously.
“There was a furor for a while, then came the arrests. The recreation model was displayed prominently to the press as proof that prosecutions were imminent.”
“And now?”
“I think not much.”
“But that’s not the point, is it, Fong?” asked Lily. “Isn’t the issue how they got word of the story in the first place?”
“It sure is Lily, which is why I think maybe you ought to conduct these interviews.”
“Me?”
“Who else knows CNN and that other Western stuff better than you?”
Lily thought about that for a moment. “True. But I can’t meet them looking like this.”
“What’s wrong with the clothes you’re wearing. They look fine to me. Right, Chen?”
Chen blushed. “Maybe Lily has different standards than we do, sir.”
It had never occurred to Fong that Chen would be attracted to Lily. Well, why not? The young man’s marriage was falling apart. And Chen was a lot closer to Lily’s age than he was.
“Turn here, Chen,” Lily said, indicating a street at the right. It led to an area of high-class restaurants and fashionable shops.
“There.” Lily said, pointing at a large, Western-style store. “Stop the car, Chen. That looks promising.” She hopped out and leaned in the window. “What’s my budget?”
Fong had no idea if they even had a budget. Chen reached into his wallet and withdrew a credit card. “It’s got about four hundred American dollars left on it.” As Lily took the card, Fong stared at Chen. “Left on it?”
“It’s a smart card, sir.”
Fong nodded as if he understood what was said to him. But he didn’t. He’d been on the wrong side of the Wall for a long time. How could a credit card be smart — or dumb for that matter?
The store spread out before Lily like a cave freshly opened to the light. She stood on the entry dais some six feet above floor level. The Western influence was evident everywhere. This was a place for the privileged. There seemed to be more shopgirls than buyers in the store. To one side a few Western women were speaking too loudly as their bored husbands tried their best to be interested in more than just the price of their wives’ selections.
Two Chinese women moved with cool precision through the aisles, careful not to catch each other’s eyes. Each knew the compromises necessary to have the money to shop in such a store. Neither was anxious to broach the subject. Both were beautiful. Both were young. Both made Lily feel ugly and old for a moment. But only for a moment.
A shopgirl approached Lily and bowed slightly. Lily put on her best I’m-a-ranking-party-member look and moved past the girl who obediently followed in her wake.
Lily didn’t look back. She liked the unobstructed view. She liked shopping, especially on someone else’s budget — no, not someone, the government’s.
The selection was not as varied as in her favourite shops in Shanghai, but the quality of the merchandise was extremely high. The prices were shocking.
“Good,” she thought, “Beijing owes me something for my trouble.”
She paused by a display of eyeglass frames made in Paris. Such things were still extremely hard to find, even in Shanghai. A small sign indicated that these glass frames were for display purposes only but the frames could be ordered and that delivery would take between three and five months. “Probably closer to a year,” Lily thought.
At the end of the next aisle she saw one of the Chinese women looking at an array of mannequin torsos displaying lacy bras from Los Angeles. The woman’s beautiful figure hardly needed the accents offered by the expensive lingerie.
“Would you like to look, also?” asked the salesgirl from behind her.
“I’ll call for you when I need you,” Lily announced contemptuously. But the moment she’d spoken, she wished she could take back her words. This wa
s a country girl. Pretty. Trained, but a country girl. Not a hardened Shanghai store clerk. Lily turned around. “Perhaps you can help me.”
The girl’s eyes lit up.
Lily came down the stairs of the store like a queen descending from her throne. The two shopping bags dangling from her arms swayed to the rhythm of her hips.
The men were standing by the car. Chen stared openly at her, his mouth a little too agape. Fong examined her as he would a work of art. His eyes were not easily deceived. The black silk shirtwaist was delicately embroidered with silver threads. The garment accentuated her narrow waist and the length of her slender upper body. The leather skirt just peeked out enough to announce its presence. Her long elegant legs were silvery grey in sheer stockings that led the eye to black pumps with high heels. She was a corporate vision in black and grey. Her always-deep eyes were now alive and bright.
She raised her hands and executed a half-turn while keeping her eyes on the men. “So?” She looked at Chen, whose mouth had opened even a little more than before. “Good,” she murmured, “You may comment if you wish.”
“What’s in the bags?”
“My old clothes, Chen,” she snapped. Then in her sweetest voice she said, “I take it that you approve of my choices.”
“I do.” Chen did his best to collect himself.
“And the older member of our team?”
For a moment Fong thought she was referring to the coroner, then he remembered that the old man was at the morgue. He did his best to hide his disappointment. “Your choices are excellent for our purposes.”
“You sound like a Russian.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah.” Then in English she pleaded, “Tell you me like it. Please.”
Fong was touched — and relieved. In English he replied, “I like it Lily. I really do.”
She smiled and handed the bill and the card to Chen. “I wouldn’t try using that thing until it’s refuelled. Oh, by the way, in case you didn’t know, you have overdraft protection on the card. Had overdraft protection,” she corrected herself. “I used that up too.”
* * *
Fong’s decision to have Lily lead the interrogation at the China news agency was a good one. The three Westerners were charmed by her and answered her questions without a moment’s hesitation. On occasion her Shanghanese accent puzzled the men, so Fong translated into English.
“On the night of December 28 you were contacted?”
The eldest reporter, the one from Reuters, brushed at the coffee stains on his expansive white shirt, as he answered for the others. “Two of us were. Me and him.” He pointed at the handsome CNN reporter. “We were the only ones here then.”
“Who contacted you?”
“Beijing.”
“Beijing’s a big place.”
“It was a woman. An older woman. She called and told us that there had been a massacre of foreigners on Lake Ching.”
“Did you go to the lake?”
“We tried, but our usual drivers had been told not to take us out of Xian. Even our gypsies had been grounded.”
Lily spoke in highly colloquial Shanghanese so the Westerners couldn’t follow, “So someone called them to tell them about the murders then someone else made sure they couldn’t get to the lake?”
“That would be my guess. Parallel lines again.” Fong turned to the reporters. “When did you finally get to the lake?” Fong asked in English.
“Late January. And there was nothing to see.”
After the specialist came and the boat sank.
“Except that incredible model.”
“Very fancy, but who could tell dick from that?”
Lily wore a puzzled look, “What means who could tell dick?”
“Richard. Dick. Remember?”
“Oh,” Lily blushed. Fong thought she looked lovely when she was a little off-balance.
Chen tapped the elaborate display on the telephone on the reporter’s desk. “Did the call come to this phone?”
“Yeah,” said the Reuters man.
“This has call display, doesn’t it?”
“Sure.”
Chen flipped over the phone and read the Chinese inscription on the bottom. “It has memory.”
“So?” demanded Fong.
“So maybe it still has the number that called you from Beijing.”
The new world. It was as if he’d been asleep for a hundred years on the west side of the Wall.
Chen followed the digital instructions to the memory. He punched in 12/28 and three punches later several blinking zeros appeared in a neat digital line.
Chen was about to apologize, but Fong cut him off and turned to the reporters. “You keep a phone log don’t you?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Fong followed the man’s eye line to a well-thumbed notepad on the desk. He flipped it to December 28. There, logged in as the sixth call of the day, was an eightdigit number preceded by the Beijing area code.
“Hey!”
“We’re taking this as evidence.” Before anyone could complain further, Fong headed toward the door with the phone log under his arm. He had already memorized the number. Fong repeated the number slowly to himself. Was this a way back to a rogue in Beijing? Probably not, but at least it was a place to begin. He looked down at the tracking bracelet on his leg. Its single red eye blinked up at him. “A way to be free of you, you cyclops,” he thought. He didn’t dare think it might be a way to get home, back to Shanghai.
Half an hour later Chen pulled the Jeep up outside the Xian morgue. The coroner looked ancient. He was sitting on the poured concrete steps with his pants rolled up exposing his bony pale shins. Fong got out of the car and went over to him.
“You asleep, Grandpa?” The coroner looked up at Fong and shook his head. “Sick?” The old man looked away. “What then?”
The coroner spat on the pavement. Then said one word: “Typhoid.”
Fong suddenly felt he was sweltering with fever, his grandmother looming over his bed. Her words hot with anger at his sickness, his weakness: “Die boy if you’re going to, but be quick about it.”
Years later a ragged man had come to the rooms he shared with Fu Tsong at the theatre academy and announced that Fong’s grandmother was gravely ill and had requested his presence. He’d slammed the door in the man’s face. Then he warned Fu Tsong not to question him about this. Not about this!
He shook himself free of the memory and asked, “This girl from the island, this Chu Shi, she died of typhoid, Grandpa?”
“That’s what the autopsy report says,” he said, struggling to his feet.
“But that can’t be. They’ve been farming with feces as manure for ages. Why would typhoid all of a sudden break out?”
“It didn’t, Fong.”
“It didn’t . . . what?”
“This was a cultured strain of typhoid.”
“A what?”
“Cultured strain.” On seeing Fong’s lost look, the old man spat on the pavement a second time and said, “It was grown in a lab, Fong. This strain can’t naturally occur in nature. It was grown. Planted. It was cultured.”
He moved past Fong toward the car, his figure even more bent now than before. As if the extent of human evil were weighing him down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WITH A PIECE OF CHALK
Fong insisted that they drive back to Ching immediately. Lily and Chen protested, but Fong was adamant that the work could only be completed near the lake. He refused to specify what work. Chen drove; Lily sat beside him. The coroner sat in the back. He hadn’t spoken since his announcement about the cultured typhoid on the steps of the Xian morgue. No one spoke much.
Fong closed his eyes. His thoughts bounded from image to image as the Jeep bounced along the pitted road. He didn’t open his eyes until they stopped in front of the abandoned factory. It was already dark.
When they entered, Fong saw a large stack of boxes by the door.
�
�More projectors, sir. I thought they might help,” said Chen.
Fong nodded. They couldn’t hurt.
After a quick meal, Fong sat by himself beneath the bare bulb that illuminated his wide, flat-topped desk. Lily sat in the far corner, a book on American patent law on her lap. The book looked like it weighed in excess of forty pounds. The coroner dozed in his chair. Chen was spending the night at home with his “sad” wife.
Memories of his office on the Bund in Shanghai flooded through Fong as he slowly cleared his desktop. He took out the box of chalk Chen had brought him shortly after he arrived in Ching. That seemed a long time ago.
He selected a piece of chalk. This was his own private ritual. Something he didn’t share — not even with Fu Tsong. She would have laughed at him. He couldn’t have borne that.
He rolled the piece of chalk in his fingers.
A piece of chalk was the only gift he’d ever gotten from his grandmother. She claimed his father had been able to draw with “stupid things like this.” Landscapes. Gossamer impressions of things he’d never seen. Fong couldn’t draw a straight line — with a piece of chalk or without it. But he could think very well with a piece of chalk in his hand.
He turned on the projectors. Images of the death rooms surrounded him. After a moment he flicked them off and stared at the bare desktop as if its ancient wood grain would spur him to thought. Then he drew a large circle at the top. In the circle he wrote the words DNA PATENT WANTED. In smaller letters beneath that he wrote From the Islanders. Then in bold letters he wrote WHAT KIND OF DNA?
It all started there somehow.
At the bottom he drew another circle and was about to write in it but changed his mind and drew a circle two-thirds of the way down. In this circle he wrote the words SEVENTEEN DEAD FOREIGNERS ON A BOAT.
“They were not the end, just a means to an end,” he said aloud. Lily glanced in his direction then returned to her tome. “And Hesheng — the man whose name means ‘in this year of peace’ — was murdered because he might lead us to that end.”
He drew a line from the DNA PATENT WANTED From the Islanders circle to the SEVENTEEN DEAD FOREIGNERS ON A BOAT circle and then continued the line down to the circle at the bottom.
The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice Page 18