Whispering Shadows

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  “What a way to say hello,” she whispered in his ear, and he felt her body relax in his arms. They held each other tight for a few long seconds and said nothing. “I’m sorry you had to wait. Josh showed me his homework again, at the last minute, just before going to bed.”

  “No problem.”

  “What shall we do? What do you feel like?”

  Paul shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t care what they did as long as Christine was by him. They stood next to each other shyly for a moment like two teenagers on their first date.

  “You wanted to have dessert, didn’t you?”

  Paul nodded.

  “There’s a pretty good café in the mall. Let’s go there.”

  They took another escalator up, crossed two streets, and entered a shopping mall. It was thronging with people inside; Paul stopped walking after a few steps, knitted his brows together, and felt goose pimples forming. He would not be able to stand being here even if he had wanted to. Not for any smile in the world.

  Christine saw immediately how he was feeling.

  “The old village of Hang Hau is ten minutes away. There are a couple of open-air restaurants there. Do you feel like taking a walk even in this weather?”

  “Sure. Let’s just get out of here.”

  They walked down the main road and were the only pedestrians to be seen far and wide. Only in the small park did Paul see two couples walking around and around having heated conversations.

  “This is our crisis park,” Christine explained, when she saw how surprised he looked. “This is where couples come when they are quarreling and don’t want the children or the neighbors to hear them.”

  They walked hand in hand down a narrow path that was barely lit. When an occasional, especially strong gust of wind blew, they stopped in their tracks and Christine sought protection behind Paul. After a few minutes they came to a traffic junction with several unremarkable restaurants around it. Their kitchens were on the sidewalk. Bare-chested men were standing in front of open fires clanging away at woks with ladles and chopsticks. They were clearly good at what they did, Paul thought, for there were many customers. The diners were sitting under tarpaulin coverings that were flapping vigorously in the wind, chattering away loudly. The air was filled with the smell of hot groundnut oil, stir-fried vegetables, and soy sauce.

  Christine got them a table and two stools. Paul ordered tea, a mango pudding, and sticky rice dumplings filled with black sesame.

  “Tong yuen,” Christine said, smiling.

  Paul knew what she was hinting at. The roundness of the rice dumplings signified unity and togetherness.

  “You can decide whether I’ve ordered them for their taste or for their symbolic value.”

  “I’ll tell you after I’ve tried them.”

  They looked over at the high-rise buildings of Hang Hau, which looked even more impressive from where they were sitting, but at the same time as unreal as a film set for a science fiction movie.

  Christine watched him for a while, leaned her head to one side, and asked, “Why have you come all the way to Hang Hau? Something must have happened.”

  “I don’t know,” he replied hesitantly. “I felt alone on Lamma. For the first time. I sat at the kitchen counter listening to the wind rustling the bamboo leaves and . . .” He fell silent.

  “And missed me?” she said, finishing his sentence with a question.

  “And missed you,” Paul repeated, smiling. He had not missed the trace of irony in her voice.

  “That makes me glad,” she said, waiting.

  “And there’s also a new development with this murder case.”

  Christine’s lips thinned and her eyes narrowed; she lifted her head and straightened in her seat.

  The waiter brought them their desserts. Paul cut a rice dumpling in two, took a spoonful, and offered it to her. She opened her mouth slowly, but kept her eyes fixed on Paul as she did so. If he was doing this to distract her or calm her down, it was not working. She knew that this was not the whole story yet.

  “The police in Shenzhen have arrested a suspect.”

  Paul waited for a reaction, but there was none forthcoming.

  “Apparently, he’s admitted to the murder.”

  “What do you mean ‘apparently’?”

  “Zhang himself is not sure. He knows very well how some of these confessions in China come about. I just took a look at Michael Owen’s computer and . . .”

  “What did you do?” she said, interrupting. “How did you get that?”

  “The first time I went to his apartment I took a few things like Zhang told me to. One of them was a hard drive and . . .”

  “You’ve committed a crime, Paul. Do you know that?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You removed a hard drive and goodness knows what else from an apartment!”

  “A police detective asked me to.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. That was theft.”

  “I just borrowed it. I’ll return everything to his parents. Don’t worry.”

  “At the very least, you tampered with some potential evidence,” Christine retorted. “I don’t think the Hong Kong police will have much understanding for that.”

  “They won’t know anything about it.”

  “Paul, stop it with the excuses.”

  They said nothing for a few moments, feeding each other spoonfuls of dessert until they had calmed down a little.

  “Okay,” Christine said, when both plates were almost empty. “What did you find on the hard drive?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

  “Most of the folders and documents were locked with a password, but the ones I could open were interesting enough.” He leaned forward and added in a whisper, “Michael Owen clearly had a girlfriend in Shenzhen.”

  Christine looked at him as though he was trying to make fun of her, but then she realized that he was being serious, and started laughing so loudly that the diners at the neighboring table turned to look at them curiously. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I know one or two people in Hong Kong who have girlfriends there. Like my ex-husband.”

  “But his family knew nothing about it.”

  “Yeah, that’s really unusual. If that doesn’t make him a suspicious character . . .” She practically choked out her reply, and Paul had to join in laughing at the clumsy way he was telling this story.

  “He was with her in Shanghai on a building site.”

  “A building site? And in Shanghai too? I thought there weren’t any of those in Shanghai?”

  “Christine, stop it,” Paul asked halfheartedly. She seemed to find his efforts at playing the assistant detective amusing at best.

  Maybe she was right and he was overestimating the importance of the information he had found.

  The only really unusual document he had found was a letter Owen had written to Victor Tang last week.

  “I also found a letter to his business partner. In it, Michael Owen is threatening him with legal action. It seems Tang tried to intimidate him in some way.”

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “Yes, but the letter shows that there was a pretty serious disagreement between them.”

  “What about it? Even business partners can have a fight without murdering each other as a result. You should take a look at some of my business correspondence sometime. If that were proof of anything, I’d have been in jail long ago.” She spooned up the last of the mango pudding, waved the spoon in front of Paul’s face, and put it into her own mouth. “So that doesn’t sound especially suspicious, Mr. Detective.”

  “Maybe not suspicious, but it’s a start on finding out what else Michael Owen did in China.”

  “Why do you want to know that when someone
has already confessed to the murder?”

  He took a deep breath preparing to explain Zhang’s doubts to her in detail once again, but he exhaled without saying anything at all. If he were honest with himself, he really had no answer.

  “Paul, I’ve already pleaded with you not to travel to China on this matter anymore,” she said in a serious but quiet tone. “You know why. You know I’m frightened.”

  She pushed the plates aside, took his hands in hers, and looked straight into his eyes. “It’s because of the things I have lived through, which my family suffer from even today, which I can’t forget and don’t want to forget. Not ever. That would make me feel as if I were betraying my father and my brother, and siding with the murderers. They want us to forget but I will never do that. Do you understand?”

  Of course he understood. Every word. Forgetting was betrayal.

  “You made a promise. Does it still hold?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. He took the last rice dumpling from the plate, bit it in two, and gave her the other half, which disappeared into her mouth with a slurping noise.

  The wind had let up, as though the typhoon were gathering strength for its full force tomorrow or the day after. They continued sitting under the tarpaulin as one fellow diner after another left, and until the cook doused the fire and started to fold the tables and chairs up. They watched the lights in the high-rise buildings go out one by one until some of the buildings could only be made out in the darkness by their towering outlines.

  Paul told her a bit about Justin, about the first pancake he made by himself, which landed on the kitchen floor, about his tears on his first day at school, about the nights watching over him when his dreams about witches and ghosts just would not go away. It was the first time he did not feel uncomfortable talking about these things. For the last three years he had had nobody with whom he had wanted to share his memories, and whenever he had hinted at them to Christine in the past, he had always regretted it soon after. In his mind these moments with Justin were so alive and so present to him that they could have happened yesterday; it was as if his son might walk through the door any moment and start making a new pancake. But as soon as Paul had put his memories into words they had become something final, part of the past, as though Justin had died a little more with each sentence.

  He did not get that feeling today. He knew she was the right person to share these memories with. On this wet and windy night, they drew the two of them closer together.

  By the time they got back to Exit B1, the last metro train had long gone. Under the streetlamp was a taxi that could take him back to Central.

  “Would you like to stay the night?” Christine asked.

  Only a short time ago, he would have thought such a question showed a lack of sensitivity. Now he remembered their night in the Mandarin Oriental hotel and suddenly felt unsure of himself. He was happy that she had asked him to stay, but what would she be expecting?

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Just stay the night. Nothing else.”

  He was constantly amazed at how well she could guess at his thoughts, doubts, questions, or fears.

  “What about your son?” Paul asked.

  “He’s sleeping. By the time you get up tomorrow he’ll have left for school. I’ve told him so much about you anyway.”

  They went up to the twelfth floor of a building in Wo Ming Court. The higher floors, Christine explained, had been too expensive.

  The entire apartment was barely larger than Paul’s dining room and living room combined. Right behind the front door was a tiny kitchen, then came a room with a round table, four chairs, and a couch. On the other side was a shelving unit with a DVD player and stereo system, with a big flat-screen television on top, and there was an ironing board and a basket full of laundry in front of it.

  They walked down a short narrow corridor: The bathroom, a walk-in closet, and Josh’s room led off it; at the end was Christine’s small bedroom. The double bed in the middle practically touched the walls on either side. Christine closed the door behind them, flung her arms wide, and whispered, “Make yourself at home.”

  “I love your sense of humor,” he whispered back.

  “The bathroom isn’t big enough for us to be in at the same time,” she said. “Shall I go first?”

  “In a moment,” he said quietly, pulling her T-shirt over her head carefully, taking her trousers off, and kissing her on her tummy. His desire grew with every breath he took; he would have liked nothing better than to pull her onto the bed and make love to her. But not here, he thought, not with her son sleeping in the next room. Maybe tomorrow. They would go to Lamma tomorrow. He would get groceries and cook her favorite soup in the afternoon, buy flowers, and a bottle of champagne, and fill the house with candles.

  “Will you come to Lamma tomorrow evening?” he whispered. “To stay the night?”

  She held his head in her hands and looked at him; he saw in her eyes that she knew exactly what he was thinking.

  “If you don’t change your mind by then.”

  ———

  Paul stayed awake for a long time. Christine had fallen asleep in his arms. He stared at the ceiling, listened to the dull hum of the air-conditioning, and was much too keyed up to be able to fall asleep. Since he had lived on Lamma, this was, following the night in the hotel a few days ago, only the second night that he had not spent in his own bed. He longed for the familiarity of his own house but loved having Christine’s warm, soft body next to him, her delicate skin, the lovely smell of her, and her breath on his shoulder; that was what made this night magical.

  He felt incredibly thirsty, so he nudged Christine’s head onto her pillow carefully and got up.

  He crept down the corridor to the living room, where he stood still for a moment. The furniture reminded him of all the other living rooms of his Hong Kong acquaintances. There were no books on the shelves but black and white photos of some ancestors with a stalk of plastic flowers next to them, and a statue of a shiny golden cat that was perpetually waving its left paw, a symbol of luck and wealth. There were several piles of DVDs behind it. On the wall above the black imitation-leather couch there was a framed poster of European alpine scenery with a lake, snow, and blue sky, probably from an airline or a foreign tourist agency.

  Paul thought about her tiny, badly ventilated, noisy, and hopelessly overcrowded office in which she had to work long and hard to be able to afford this small apartment for her and her son. How proud she should be of herself. How much he respected her for it.

  Placed tidily next to the sink in the kitchen were a red plastic container with the logo of an English football team on the lid and a water bottle with the same logo. Someone had gotten Josh’s lunchbox ready for school the night before. The sight of it was so unexpected and so painful that he had to bite his lips in order not to cry out. He bit down until the tears trickled down his cheeks and blood dripped onto the counter.

  Christine was strong, but was she strong enough for them both? Was he not too difficult a proposition? He went back into the bedroom, thought for a moment about whether to get dressed and slip away, out of the flat, out of her life, but he did not have the will. Instead, he lay down next to her in bed once again, curled up to her, and fell into a sleep like death after a few seconds.

  ———

  Morning voices woke him. Josh seemed to be looking for something and was swearing under his breath. The Filipina housemaid also did not know where the missing pencil case was, and was complaining about his mess. Christine kept asking her son to keep quiet and to hurry up. She was clearly running late. There was a smell of fresh coffee and baked goods. After a while the voices faded away, and Paul heard a door closing. Shortly after, Christine came into the bedroom holding a tray.

  “Did we wake you?”

  “No, I was awake already,” he lied. “What do you have
there?”

  She put the tray down on the bed. There were two cups of coffee, milk, sugar, and two croissants on it.

  “You’re amazed, aren’t you?” she asked. The pride in her voice moved him. “Josh loves croissants. They have chocolate in them. I had two left in the freezer. Real French croissants!”

  “But I’m not French,” he said, regretting his blunt reply immediately. He hated croissants, but he did not want to dim her happiness.

  “Neither is Josh. Don’t you like them?”

  “Yes, yes, I do. Great,” he said, sitting up.

  Only now did she see his wound.

  “Paul, what have you done to your lip?”

  “Nothing. Had a bad dream. Must have bitten on it in my sleep. I didn’t notice.”

  She gave him a considered look but let it pass without probing.

  They traveled into the city together. Paul took her to the office, and Christine promised to come to Lamma that night. At the door, they kissed with such passion that neither of them knew how they were to pass the day without the other.

  From Wan Chai, he took the metro to Queens Road, bought the groceries for the soup he was going to make, flowers, candles, and a bottle of champagne in the IFC Mall, and took the 12:20 PM ferry to Yung Shue Wan. The hydrometer on the pier displayed 96 percent humidity; it was one of those overcast hot days that never seemed to brighten up. The ash-gray clouds hung over the harbor like a giant lid. The water was still choppy but the wind had let up. Paul hoped the typhoon had either weakened or changed direction unexpectedly.

  In Yung Shue Wan, he took a seat at the Green Cottage Café on the harbor and ordered his usual—a freshly pressed apple and carrot juice with a little ginger—and tried to imagine the night ahead. Would the house be big enough for three? Would Christine forgive him again if he lost the strength? Did he have “all the time in the world,” as she had promised him once before?

  He bought some more fresh tofu, mangoes, and water in the village and climbed the hill to Tai Peng laden with two heavy bags.

  The storm had raged through his garden and terrace: leaves, small branches, frangipani flowers, geraniums, and bougainvillea petals were scattered everywhere. The wind had blown the rain through the old wooden window frames; the puddle of water pooled over the entire kitchen counter, with his cell phone in the middle. It was still working and was showing twelve missed calls from an unknown number. Who would have tried to ring him so many times? The Owens? Zhang? He wanted to ring his friend, but first he had to mop the kitchen. Then he put the flowers in a vase and the champagne in the fridge, put candles in all the holders he could find, and distributed them all over the house. He went upstairs, cleaned the bathroom, changed the sheets, dusted his and Justin’s room, cleaned the living room, swept the terrace, and had completely forgotten about Zhang until he heard footsteps and a familiar voice calling from the path.