The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice

by David Rotenberg

  A harsh whispered, “No,” came from the darkness.

  “Justice is a hard thing, Dr. Roung. It’s not a thing that can be pieced together from whole cloth. You never have all the pieces when you try to find justice. And your justice and the islanders’ justice may not — no — are not the same. Are they?”

  “No.” The archeologist took off his army-issue glasses and rubbed his eyes. The last piece fell into place and Fong laughed.

  “What?”

  “Your glasses.”

  “What about them.”

  “Glasses are hard to get, aren’t they? Especially designer glasses. Right from the start, your glasses bothered me. Thinsulate vest and old army-issue glasses.” Fong strode over to the dummy of the eviscerated, castrated Japanese man with the fancy Parisian eyeglasses wobbly on his head. Fong pulled them off and turned to Dr. Roung. “Want them back?”

  The man went white and stiff.

  Fong reached into his pants and took something from his pocket. “Maybe you’d like this back.” He opened his fingers revealing the bronze statue of a horse’s frontquarters that he had taken from the archeologist’s desk.” Dr. Roung lunged at it, but Fong moved quickly aside. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Dr. Roung didn’t answer, then nodded. “The hindquarters are beautiful too.”

  “You’ve seen . . .”

  He reached into his other pocket and brought out the hindquarters. Fong continued quickly. “What an unusual girl she must have been. She died of the first recorded case of typhoid on the island in — what — a hundred years? Dug up so an autopsy could be performed. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  Dr. Roung nodded slowly again.

  “Then she was buried a second time.” Fong paused and waited for the archeologist to take a breath. When he did, Fong added, “Then dug up again.”

  Fong moved to the light switch and dimmed the lights. Then he plunged the room into darkness. “Did you know the fisherman was her father? That’s why her immune system wasn’t strong enough to protect her from the typhoid.” A long silence followed then another Counting Crows song, “Daylight Fading,” came up loudly. Beside him in the dark, Fong could hear the archeologist sobbing quietly.

  Fong took a breath and pressed hard on the light switch. The stage blared into shocking light. And there, wrapped in filthy, night soil–sodden, crimson burial cloth, stood the partially naked body of Chu Shi, her back to them, held up by a pole.

  A long tortured breath came from Dr. Roung.

  The music increased in volume and Chu Shi seemed to move to the rhythm despite being dead and propped up on a stick.

  “The Japanese were already dead when you arrived in the room. Weren’t they? Sure they were. After the fun with the Americans, the islanders split up, didn’t they? You and Iman led the revenge against the Taiwanese, but Jiajia had plans of his own in here, didn’t he? He and his men killed them and cut them open. Their intestines in their hands facing the stage. When you finally arrived, all the islanders were here, waiting. This was the finale, after all! Sure it was. Absolutely. Except it wasn’t the finale you thought. This wasn’t for them. This was for you. For the one who dared to sleep with one of their women. This wasn’t political. This was personal, wasn’t it? This was to prove to you that Chu Shi was nothing more than a whore who’d take off her clothes for anyone who had money. Who’d fuck anyone, from anywhere — after all, she was just a whore — wasn’t she?”

  Dr. Roung fell to his knees and retched. His glasses fell off.

  Fong knelt beside him. The vomit was surprisingly odourless. Fong whispered in his ear, “But what they did to her, to your precious Chu Shi, was not as bad as what you did to her. Was it?”

  A torrent of bile spewed from the archeologist’s mouth and slapped to the floor.

  “How did the typhoid get to the island? It was manmade, cultured typhoid that killed her. How did it get there?” A moment of silence and then Fong screamed, “Tell me!” He grabbed Dr. Roung’s arm and dragged him to his feet. Then he pushed him toward the empty chair at the head of the runway.

  Throwing him into the seat Fong shouted, “This was your chair, wasn’t it?” Then he tilted Dr. Roung’s head up and toward the stage — toward the dead woman in the tattered, scarlet burial cloth on the runway — the tattered, scarlet burial cloth covered in night soil–laden earth.

  Lily heard Fong yell. She had been holding her breath. Trying not to breathe in the filth. Trying not to imagine the horrible figures of the Japanese men watching her. Trying not to hear the music. Hoping this would be over before she shrieked or fainted or both. Then she stumbled forward.

  Dr. Roung screamed and held his head in his hands.

  Fong yanked the man’s face up so it looked right into his. “Tell me how the typhoid got to the island!”

  “From Beijing. They sent it in the ceremonial wine, from Beijing. The wine at the island banquet.”

  Fong stood and looked down at the man. “Did you know?”

  Dr. Roung looked up at Fong and screamed, “No!” The sound of the single word echoed off the walls of the old factory and repeated itself over and over and over again as it spiralled downward, like water from a dirty tub, into the nowhere beneath.

  Fong knelt in close. “Where in Beijing, Dr. Roung? What box in that city of boxes sent you the typhoid?”

  Dr. Roung Chen shook his head.

  Fong got to his feet and turned up the music. “Dance for him, Chu Shi!”

  Lily felt an odd relief to be able to move. Then a horror at what she was doing. She imagined men watching her coming to life. Their hands moving. Their mouths cheering her. The death shroud seemed to be falling off her of its own accord. As if seeking a way back to its mistress thrice buried on the island.

  Fong turned the archeologist’s face once again to the stage and using his fingers kept the man’s eyes wide open. “Look, Dr. Roung. Look what they did to your Chu Shi.”

  The archeologist tried to pull his face away from the horror but Fong held him tight. Finally the man barked out, “The ministry.”

  “Which ministry, Dr. Roung?” snapped Fong.

  “The Interior Ministry,” the man cried out.

  Fong found himself unable to breathe. The Interior Ministry! That was no small box of dissidents or hotheads. Not some solitary rogue. This was a full-fledged insurrection!

  Dr. Roung fell to the floor on his knees. Tears streamed from his eyes. Saliva dripped from his mouth. Then he shouted, a haunted cry to the ceiling. “My mother did this!”

  Fong turned slowly, “Madame Minister Wu is your mother?”

  * * *

  Lily heard it but didn’t hear it. Her own terror was rising. She was somehow or other back in the forensics lab all those years ago. The man on her. His hands ripping aside her skirt. Tearing her panties. Hurting her. Then Fong was there and somehow the man was gone and Fong was holding her, telling her, “It’s okay, Lily. It’s okay. You did great. We’ve got all we need.”

  But that’s not what he’d said back then. He’d just held her. He’d hardly said anything. Then she felt his hard body holding her tighter. And she wrapped her arms around him and held him to her as if he were the last way out of a dawning nightmare.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE DEAL

  The door of the jail cell clunked as it opened.“You wanted to see me?” The politico looked as if he had been awakened from a deep sleep. “I said . . .” Fong turned.

  “I heard what you said,” Fong snapped as he walked past the politico and slammed the door shut. “Okay!” Fong yelled.

  Somewhere beyond their line of sight Captain Chen threw the switch to lock the door. The politico jumped when he heard the tumblers slam home.

  Fong looked at the man. Something was missing. The thug, of course. Two generals. Always two generals. Parallel patterns. Fong knew that the politico reported to the Beijing government. That meant the thug wasn’t here because . . . because . . . because he reported to the rogue — Madam
e Wu.

  Fong laughed. The politico looked at him. Fong didn’t explain. He was relishing a vision of the bull of a man on the run. China was a big country but it was impossible to hide in China. Fong knew that. Oh yes, he knew that.

  “You have something for me, Traitor Zhong?”

  Fong looked at the politico. The man looked ridiculous claiming to still have power.

  “You need me. I don’t need you,” Fong barked. “This is a jail. I’ve lived in one of these cells. You haven’t.”

  The politico paled. “What do you want . . .” his voice tailed off before he said the words “Traitor Zhong.”

  Fong pushed aside the surge of anger he felt and ordered his thoughts. “I know who murdered the foreigners on the boat in Lake Ching.”

  The politico pulled himself up to his full height, making as if somehow this dank cell were his office in some government building. “Yes — Fong. You have done your duty as all citizens of the People’s . . .”

  Fong spat. “This is a jail cell, not an office in Beijing.” Fong spat again. This time the spittle landed close to the politico’s feet.

  The politico looked at the gob, then at Fong. Suddenly he seemed to see the jail cell. His eyes glazed over. He opened his mouth to speak but Fong spoke first. “And I know who in Beijing ordered the murders, which is what you’re really after, isn’t it?”

  The politico was very still. As if his interior was reconstructing itself after a total collapse. Fong could almost hear the ticky-tack of the man’s ribs reconnecting to his spine. “So do your duty and report your findings.”

  That floated in the thick air of the cell. Fong didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Didn’t breathe.

  “What do I get?”

  “Excuse me . . .”

  “You heard me, lackey. What do I get? I have information you want. No. You need. No. Your masters need. I have what they need and only I have it. Now, I want something too. Something in return.”

  The demand seemed to calm the politico. This he understood. “Of course it would,” thought Fong, “I’m behaving like him.” For a moment he considered telling the politico to wipe the sick smile off his face and fuck himself. Then he discarded the idea. “Let’s deal.”

  The politico nodded, again in full control. “Tell me what you want, Traitor Zhong.” He smiled.

  Fong thought about justice. About the relativity of it. When he spoke, his words sounded like they came from faraway. “I want my job back — in Shanghai — head of Special Investigations.”

  The politico nodded as if it were nothing out of the ordinary to make such a request. He lit a Kent and blew out a line of smoke. “We assumed that would be part of the price — what else?”

  Fong almost faltered then marshalled his forces again. “I want this damn thing taken off my ankle.” He pulled up his pant leg and planted his foot on the wall beside the politico, who reached over and tapped in four numbers of the code. His eyes locked with Fong’s. He was enjoying this. He tapped in the fifth number and the thing clattered to the cement floor. The sound it made somehow reminded Fong of the clinking his wedding ring had made when Fu Tsong hurled it against the wall of their small rooms in Shanghai.

  Fong shook aside the memory and stepped away from the politico. The man was smiling broadly now. “You’re no different than me, Traitor Zhong. There is nothing special about the great Zhong Fong.”

  Had he heard that or was it only his conscience speaking?

  “What else do you want for the information that is rightfully mine, Traitor Zhong?”

  “Tell me who the specialist was?” Fong knew he was on dangerous territory. Unscripted territory.

  The politico laughed. A hearty, un-Chinese laugh. An are-you-kidding-me laugh.

  “Madame Wu, Minister of the Interior is the rogue in your midst,” Fong shouted.

  The laughter stopped.

  A tense silence followed. For the first time the politico looked wide-eyed at Fong.

  “Are you . . .?”

  “Sure? Yes. Positive. Madame Wu induced the deaths on board that boat. She might as well have given the order. She sent wine with the cultured typhoid that killed the girl on the island. Then she showed the islanders how to get their revenge. The farmers from the island committed the actual deeds. A man named Jiajia was the head butcher if that matters to you.”

  The politico was having trouble digesting the information. He couldn’t care less who did the actual killing. He kept circling back to Madame Wu. Madame Minister Wu! Pieces began falling into place for him. His mouth opened then shut before a word could come out. He reached for a cigarette then realized he already had one in his lips. He removed it. “My partner . . .”

  Fong nodded, “Madame Wu’s man.”

  The politico took a wheezing breath and then removed the cigarette from his mouth.

  Fong looked at the cigarettes. The Kents. “You were pretty lucky you didn’t get on that boat yourself, weren’t you?” The politico was about to protest but Fong cut him off. “You were the eighth Chinese man with a hotel room in Xian that night, weren’t you?”

  The politico started to deny it but decided against it. He nodded.

  Fong smiled.

  The politico held out his right hand. “Deal, done?”

  Fong stared at him.

  The politico pushed his hand out farther. “The deal is done. I said it, so it is so.”

  Fong reached out and grabbed the man by the collar.

  The politico was remarkably calm. “Something else you wish to include in our bargain, Traitor Zhong?”

  “Yes,” Fong spat out. For a moment he couldn’t make himself say the words. Then he vomited them out. “I want my fucking teeth fixed!”

  The words came out loud. Too loud. And more embarrassing than Fong had anticipated. Too public. Too vain for a man about to be fifty.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  RICKSHAWS, FATHERS, BABIES

  “You’re staring, Fong,” Lily said. It was their first day back in Shanghai. They were on the Bund. A young man dressed in a shiny gold silk shirt, black pyjama pants and black cloth slippers was standing between the poles of a rickshaw on the other side of the six-lane road.

  “What is that?” hissed Fong.

  “You know very well what it is,” Lily replied carefully.

  Fong was staring at a vision from the past. A hideous vision of a time of shame. A rickshaw? Now?

  “What has happened here?”

  “You’ve been away five years, Fong.”

  “Human beings aren’t animals. Is this legal now?”

  Fong’s father had read him Lao She’s classic story, Rickshaw Boy. He had curled into his father’s side and smelt his sour but pleasant odour. His father had beautiful hands. He read sweetly by the flickering candlelight. Fong had been only three or four but he already knew that his grandmother must have been out or his father wouldn’t have dared to “fill the boy’s head with a stack of nonsense.”

  When his father finished the story of the boy who was little more than “a starving and crazy beast, who just wants to keep running,” he’d taken out a pamphlet. “This is what foreigners think of us, Fong.” He found a place in the pamphlet and read, “Rickshaw coolies live in dire poverty. Pay them liberally but not foolishly, for it is an idiosyncrasy of the coolie mind to mistake generosity for idiocy.” He looked at his son. “Do you understand, Fong?”

  Fong had nodded. It was then he saw the small satchel behind the door.

  His father got up. He wasn’t wearing his sleeping clothes. Fear began to take Fong. Something unnamed was in the room.

  “Be brave, Fong,” his father had said as he picked up the satchel. “This,” he said pointing at the pamphlet about the rickshaws, “must stop. Don’t you agree?”

  Fong had nodded although all he’d wanted to say was, “Where are you going, Papa?”

  His father slung the satchel across his back then knelt by Fong. “Be strong. Peace can only come with justice.” His lo
ng tapered fingers touched Fong’s face; Fong smelled him one last time, and then he was gone.

  Gone.

  He became the shame of the family. The Communist.

  Two years later, when the Red Army marched into Shanghai victorious, Fong climbed to the rooftops to find his father. Row upon row of soldiers marched by. But no one with beautiful hands appeared. No one who smelled like his father. No one to tell him “to be strong.” It was then, as the last of the soldiers passed, that Fong had discarded his childhood and decided to pursue justice; he joined the youth wing of the Party.

  Lily tried to move Fong along the crowded sidewalk, but he pulled his arm from hers and darted across the busy street. Then he was screaming at the young rickshaw man while hundreds of dazed tourists gawked. Lily ran up to him and pulled him away.

  “My father gave up his — my father . . .”

  “Tell me, Fong.”

  But he couldn’t. His past was his own. His shame. One fact would lead to another. Silence was a better alternative. Even Fu Tsong never knew his story. He had begun his life anew with Fu Tsong. He’d do it again with Lily.

  Lily hung her head in disappointment and stared at the Pudong industrial region — all spanking new and proud across the Huangpo River. Then she looked at Fong. His new teeth helped a lot. She reached for his hand. “You don’t have to go to work today. It’s your first day back. They’ll understand that you have to get acclimatized.”

  He allowed her to guide him by the hand.

  He allowed her to lead him back to the rooms on the grounds of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, which had been returned to him.

  He allowed her to undress him.

  And they completed a dance that had begun long ago in the darkness of a forensic lab.

  He sensed at the moment of his ejaculation that they had conceived a child.

  His second — although no one except Fu Tsong and the butcher abortionist had ever seen the first.

  As the sun rose the next morning Fong stared out the window. The courtyard still had the stupid statue. Drunken young actors still lounged on the tiny patch of grass.