Gelignite (15 page)

Auden the Special Branch man said, 'You must be bloody joking!'

'I'm not bloody joking at all!'

Spencer said conciliatingly, 'I don't think so, Harry. It's just a coincidence.' He said, 'After all, if a man owns a cemetery' (he corrected himself in the light of O'Yee's information) 'part-owns a cemetery, it follows that if you speak to enough people you're going to run across someone who has someone buried there or, in this case, is going to be buried there himself.' He asked politely, 'Don't you think so?'

'Yeah,' Feiffer said, 'So far, Forensic taffies the total amount of explosives he's used as four and a half pounds.' He said, 'Since the stuff usually comes in one pound sticks, he's got at least half a pound left.' He said, 'That's either one big bang in a Coca-Cola can or three or four smaller bangs in manilla envelopes.' He said unhappily, 'Assuming that's all he's got. And we can't assume that.' He said to Auden, 'Before you ask, there haven't been any reported thefts of the stuff.' He said, 'Your old mate in Special Branch checked.' He said as his telephone rang, 'And you can't ask anyone on the street if they saw anything.' He picked up the phone and said, 'What?'

A woman's voice said, 'I've got it!'

'Pardon?'

'Harry?'

'Nicola?'

Auden said, 'John? Marsha?' Spencer looked disapproving.

Nicola said, 'I've got it this time and there's not a damn thing you can say!'

Feiffer blinked.

'Are you there, Harry?'

'Yes, I'm here.'

Nicola Feiffer said triumphantly, 'An ant farm!'

'What about it?'

'I'm going to get one to keep me company!'

'Are you?'

'Yes!'

'Why?' (He thought instantly, "Oh, no, I've done it again!")

'What do you mean, "why"?'

'I'm sorry I said that.'

'To keep me company while I sludge about in an oversized torpor of pure sludge carrying your precious brat when I should be thin and sexy and full of life and doing what I want to do! That's why!'

Feiffer glanced around the Detectives' Room. Auden and Spencer both found something to do. (Spencer started ringing Frank. Auden stared out of the open window, thinking of Auden staring out of the open window.) Feiffer said softly, 'It wasn't only my idea. We decided on it together.' He said, 'I know it's hard for you to feel so, um—' He thought, "Get the right word" '—um, (non-productive? No. Useless? Oh my God—um . . . Bovine? Maybe. Bovine?—No!), 'Um—'

'Non-productive, useless and bloody bovine!' Nicola Feiffer said, 'So I'm getting an ant farm to keep me company.' She said, 'Surely to God that doesn't come under the heading in the lease of keeping pets!'

Feiffer said, 'No.'

'No?' She sounded surprised.

Feiffer said with great trepidation, 'That comes under the heading of infestation.'

Outside, the hammering, drilling and tearing down started again and, mercifully, the noise was so intense he could hardly make out what she said back at all.

*

On the eastern side of Hong Bay, crossing over Great Shanghai Road from the direction of the Aberdeen Road seawall, there is an old disused brick drainage sewer that was built by Army engineers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. You can see where it passes under the pavement by the line of rusted-up gratings that begin near the end of Formasa Street, pass over Matsu Lane into Amoy Lane and then go off in the direction of the Bay. No one has ever found an alternate use for the drain (which is the last remaining tunnel in what was once a fairly substantial system to drain reclaimed land) and it is—and has been for a very long time—largely forgotten. There were probably plans of the system in a dusty cardboard cylinder in the City Engineers Office at one time, but it is extremely likely that, like a lot of obsolete records, they were destroyed by the Japanese bombing of Hong Kong during the Second World War or used by someone for some more pressing sanitary need in the Occupation which followed.

The person in the Matsu Lane sewers, in any event, had no such plans. He knew where he was going, had paced the line of the drain out by the pavement gratings, and, carrying a largish parcel in his hand, knew where he was. He was directly under the intersection of Matsu Lane and Great Shanghai Road, moving slowly and carefully, bending his neck slightly to avoid the low brick roof, counting out his steps meticulously accurately in the water-dripping darkness.

*

Feiffer said wearily, 'We'll go and see Wong again in hospital and then Dien in the Street of Undertakers.' He said to Spencer, 'You take Wong,' and to Auden, 'You're Dien.'

He said, 'For what it's worth I'll go and see Tam and probably scare the life out of him again.' He glanced at Auden and Spencer and said without enthusiasm, 'Get on with it.'

He stood up and put his coat on.

*

The person in the sewer passed under an iron grating in Matsu Lane and ducked his head to avoid anyone seeing him as they passed over. The light from the grating showed the circular line of the roof into the next section of the tunnel and he went on, cradling his package in his hands. He disturbed something loose with his shoulder and it click-clicked onto the brick floor in a little cloud of dust: a loose chipping, and then something made a rustling sound and a faint squeaking and brushed past his ankles: a rat. Something a little behind the person made a sudden motion and then the squeaking stopped. The sound of the person's feet on the brick floor were muffled by the steady noise of traffic a long way above. The person stopped and put his palm up against the roof. It was warm from the traffic, and there was a steady vibration as taxis and cars, buses and the odd rickshaw went over and left their heat to seep down through the pavement and roadway.

The person stopped and worked out his bearings. He was at the eastern end of Matsu Lane, below the branch office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on the corner. The person thought about the strong room somewhere above his head and smiled. The contents of the strongroom seemed very trivial. He took another six steps and calculated he was under the main entrance to the bank. He indulged himself for a few moments thinking about the looks on people's faces, then became efficient again and went on another thirty steps.

Above him was an Indian provisions shop. He put his hand up to the roof. It felt warm. He thought, "All that curry," and smiled at his own joke. He went on another fifteen steps and ducked past the second iron grating. Someone passed over it at the same moment: a girl in a short skirt, and he thought— there was a disapproving shove from behind and he passed forward, thinking vaguely of the images of thighs and coloured underwear. He counted off another eighteen steps and halted. This was the spot. Another rat squeaked past him and then was suddenly silent. The person held his breath for a moment and then measured out another sixteen and a half paces to the next iron grating.

'He looked up. Above him, a man's black leather shoes bang-banged across the iron grating. The person moved back a little out of sight and unwrapped his parcel, folding the brown paper into a neat handkerchief-sized square and putting the paper carefully into the pocket of his windcheater. The person had a gold ring on his finger. He took that off and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt.

He wound up the rubber band escapement inside the control device on the body of the bomb, moved the activating lever to SET, pushed the number six detonator attached to the control device into the centre stick of the bundle of twelve one pound sticks of polar ammon gelignite, then stretched up and left the entire set-up on a narrow ledge eighteen inches or so beneath the iron grating and Matsu Lane.

The person went calmly back through the drain at an appropriate speed, surfaced back into the world through another grating three hundred feet away, dusted himself off, got into his car and, leaning over into the back seat, located by touch the tone-send button on the radio transmitter he had concealed there under a blanket. The tone-send button was made of moulded red plastic. It felt hard and cold.

He pressed it.

There were dead people still lying in the street. The lane had been cordoned off and the traffic diverted. A posse of ambulances shuttled back and forth from one end of the lane to the other, negotiating the rubble and the carpet of glass and masonry splinters and rubble in the centre of the roadway. Someone came walking towards one of the cordons, holding his head. He was a man with half his shirt charred. He only wore one shoe. He looked at Feiffer and O'Yee passing through the cordon and then at Auden and Spencer behind them and then he took his hand away from his head. An ambulanceman caught up with him and took him back against the wall and sat him down. There were two bodies covered in rubber sheets by the sitting man. He looked at them without saying a word. At one end of the lane there was a woman and a child lying dead in a blanket of red curry powder from the Indian provisions shop. A pall of faintly acrid smoke hung over the lane. There was a huge hole in the pavement up from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank branch and an entire window frame without glass lying half way into the hole by an upturned car. Feiffer saw Doctor Macarthur and another man by the upturned car. They were trying to look inside and the other man was shaking his head. There was a heavy humming in the air and the clinking of bits of glass falling from smashed frames, the soft hissing of something like gas or an overheated car radiator, and apart from that, nothing.

There was hardly any sound. The ambulances moved quietly as if on silent electric motors. No one was screaming. People looked at each other without expressions on their faces. Nobody made a sound above the hissing and the glass chinks. Matsu Lane was very quiet. Two Indians came out of what was left of the Indian provisions shop and looked at the blanket of red curry powder and the two dead people. There was brilliant sunshine in the street, coming down in almost direct arcs between the high buildings, and it made the curry look very bright. One of the Indians said something to the other one and the other one nodded. The other Indian looked up the street to the police cordons. He didn't know what to do. He went back inside his shop and came out with a broad mat and he and his friend laid it over the dead woman and the dead child.

Feiffer and O'Yee went forward to the bomb crater. The crater went down into what looked like a brick tunnel. There was a section of twisted iron grating half out of the hole, by the window frame, and it made the hole look like a solitary-confinement cell on Devil's Island. There was someone down in the crater—one of the people from Forensic—and he looked up at Feiffer and O'Yee and then went back to his work scraping at the bricks with a palette knife. The man from Forensic had thick glasses on. They made his eyes look very pale and watery. The man from Forensic went on scraping. There was part of a body embedded in the mortar and bricks just by his shoulder: a face and a hand protruding from the rubble where the pavement had collapsed into the crater, but the man from Forensic kept looking away from it.

Feiffer turned around. Spencer and Auden were wandering along the line of ambulances looking in, and then down at me bodies under the rubber blankets. Spencer's hands hung down by his sides: they seemed limp. He walked across the road and looked down at the two bodies under the Indians' mat. An ambulance carrying someone dead or dying passed through the cordon at the southern end of the street and then turned its siren on. It sounded as if it was muted or came from a long way off.

Humphrey Ho was in the street. He came out from behind an ambulance and over to the crater by Feiffer. He looked down into the hole and at the Forensic man with thick glasses. He had a small black cigar in his mouth, but it was not lit. Feiffer asked quietly, 'How many?'

'Twenty-seven.'

'Injured?'

'Forty-three. Another eight of them won't make it to the hospital.' He said, 'There may be more in the buildings, but there aren't any cries for help so they're probably dead too.' He said, as a final figure, 'Thirty-five or -six.'

'Dead.'

He nodded. He said quietly to O'Yee, 'Mr O'Yee, isn't it?'

O'Yee said, 'Yes.'

'Chief Inspector Ho, Special Branch.'

O'Yee nodded and looked down the street.

Ho asked Feiffer, 'Did you get a warning?'

'No.'

'Neither did we.' He drew a breath and lit his cigar with a gold lighter. His hand was shaking slightly, 'Him again, isn't it?' He looked down the street to where the ambulancemen were uncovering the bodies of the woman and her child and expelled a breath. 'No doubt about it.' He said, 'He's moved up in the world, hasn't he?'

Spencer and Auden were helping an old man into an ambulance. The old man's head was swathed in a bloody bandage. The old man kept touching at his leg and hobbling on it. Feiffer said, 'Oh, yes, it's him.' He said, 'You can smell the gelignite.' He said, 'It's him all right.'

O'Yee said, 'I'm going to help.' He went away towards an ambulance to see if there was anything he could do. Half way across the street Doctor Macarthur looked up and noticed him. Their eyes met. Doctor Macarthur looked back down to something moving under a blanket on a stretcher.

Ho said, 'Your friend Dien's here—the one Spencer's letter bomb was addressed to.'

'Is he?'

Ho nodded. He said, 'I assumed you'd want to wait until the medical people had done what they could.' He said, 'I saw one of your Constables going through the buildings looking for people trapped.'

'Yan.'

'Yes.' Ho said, 'I once saw the results of a car bomb that went off in Singapore. It was in a lane just like this one.' He said in an odd voice, 'He really blew them up this time.' He asked Feiffer in a voice that had a strained edge to it, 'Didn't he? He really blew them up this time.'

Feiffer drew a breath. He closed his mind to the street. 'When the Forensic man's finished down there and the corpse has been dug out, I want to go through that tunnel.' He asked Ho efficiently, 'What is it? Drainage?'

'Yeah.'

'Where does it go?'

'God knows. Down to the harbour. It's not one in current use.'