The Golden Mountain Murders (13 page)

“Mr. Clayton had some pretty powerful business partners. And they pressed him. Squeezed him to get more and more.”

“More and more blood?”

The woman who killed the man she loved looked away as if suddenly something on the dark cinderblock wall was of interest. Joan lit a cigarette and held it out to her. The woman’s head swivelled towards the smoke. Her nostrils flared. For a moment she looked straight into Joan’s eyes then said, “Thanks.” She took a long pull on the cigarette. Her posture changed and just for an instant she was beautiful again – and she knew it. She raised her head, showing her long elegant neck, and let the smoke out in a long line of pleasure. “Can I keep this?”

Joan nodded.

“Yeah, more blood. He was being pressured to get more . . .”

“Blood, and in doing so spread AIDS through an entire province.” Joan’s voice was sharp. It brooked no simple response. She reached over and took the cigarette from the prisoner.

“Hey, you said . . .”

“Yeah, well I changed my mind.” Joan crushed the cigarette on the cold concrete floor.

Anger flared on the prisoner’s face then slunk back into its cave. “You don’t understand,” she said.

“No. I understand perfectly. You slept with a man who murdered other men so he could make money to buy you fancy clothes or . . .”

“No.”

“No? Really? What else exactly would you call it? You get off and they get dead.”

The woman who murdered the man she loved looked away – towards the cinder-block wall again. Finally she said, “This is a hard place.”

Joan nodded.

“I didn’t have a lot of choices back then.”

“Bullshit. You were the best-looking woman I’d ever seen and I’m not exactly hard to look at myself.”

The prisoner locked eyes with Joan. Then she reached up and pulled on a patch of hair. “Not so beautiful now, am I?”

“Hair will grow back. You aren’t sick – yet. But much longer in here and no one’ll even know that at one time men threw money at you.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“So tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Who were your boss’s business partners?”

The woman who killed the man she loved stared at Joan for a second. The voice-activated audio recorders deep within the cinder blocks paused. The cameras pivoted and the woman put out her hand towards Joan.

Joan looked at the proffered hand – its once French-manicured nails, its still beautifully shaped fingers – then noticed the shred of toilet paper balled up between the woman’s middle and index finger. Joan took the hand and allowed her eyes to roam the prisoner’s face. The woman who killed the man she loved released the ball of tissue into Joan’s fingers then she withdrew her hand. “If you want me to touch you with that hand it’ll put you back ten thousand yuan. Want me to touch me it’ll cost you double that. You look like the kind that likes to watch.” Then her voice lowered and in a whisper barely louder than the movement of the air in the room breathed, “Get me out of here – please get me out of here.” Then the woman who murdered the man she loved pursed her lips as if she were ready to be kissed and laughed – or what passed for a laugh in this awful place.

Once Joan was back in her car she carefully unravelled the piece of tissue and spread it with her palm on the dashboard. The woman who killed the man she loved had printed ten words there in a precise, beautifully drawn hand:
Henderson, Millet, Cavender and Barton, Attorneys at Law, Vancouver, Canada.

T
he BlackBerry device beeped and, as Fong had been instructed, he punched the receive button. Up came Mandarin the character text:

“Fong I think this is important. I wrote it down as I remembered it – as it happened. I’ve faxed the complete document to the agreed-upon number. Go get it – and read it – just in case you are considering giving up on this whole thing. Once you read that fax you won’t. I want you to get those bastards, Fong. Get them. If not for me, then for that poor man. Your ex Lily.”

Fong hurried back to the agreed-upon fax pickup, a small convenience store owned by a Chinese family who had recently emigrated from Shanghai. He got the lengthy document that Lily had sent then returned to Jericho Beach. He wanted privacy to read it.

It began:

“I’m sorry,” I said to the square-shouldered peasant who had arrived unannounced almost a week ago at my office door, “but she died last night while you were asleep up here.” I was going to add that I didn’t wake him because it was the first time that I’d seen him sleep since he had arrived. But I didn’t. I didn’t know what to say or do for this unfortunate man, Fong.

The Hua Shan Hospital had refused to help him and in desperation he’d banged at every door in the building. I was in the forensic labs running a final check on a hair analysis when he hammered on my door. “My wife,” he’d said. The woman that he carried in his arms was terribly sick. He was clearly beyond exhaustion. I’d taken them in and bullied the hospital into admitting the sick woman. As you know, Fong, a cop can do that to a doctor, you taught me how. At any rate for five days he’d stayed in my office. I’d brought him food and news of his wife. He never left. He slept on the floor. He was always gentle. Always thankful. Always still.

Now I brought him news of her death.

He sat awkwardly on my swivel chair, his large calloused hands on my desk. A grimace worked its way across his heavy features. For an instant I thought he was going to hit me.

But he didn’t.

He pushed down on the desktop and stood. His head nodded to the rhythm of some interior logic – as if he were finally agreeing to something that he had resisted for a very long time. He took three strides towards the door, then stopped. He turned, looked at me then down at his feet.

I rushed towards him but I was too late.

His legs gave out under him and he crashed to the floor – and he stayed there, his left cheek pressed flush to the cold tiles.

I knelt down and looked closely at his face for signs of a seizure. There were none. “Sir?” I wanted to touch him but didn’t know what his response would be to a woman’s touch. His breath was coming in tight sharp gasps. “Do you need a glass of water or tea, something else?”

He didn’t move. He didn’t look like he’d heard me. He just lay there with his face against the floor – his cheek a mere two storeys above the now very cold cheek of his wife whose body had been transferred to the morgue two floors below.

I looked away to give him a little privacy. When I looked back he was on his feet and striding forcefully towards the door. “Sir” I called but he didn’t stop. He pulled on my office door but it needed to be pushed, not pulled, to open. He pulled again, harder this time. Again the door resisted. He gave it one last mighty heave – to no result. Then he turned to me and his large peasant hands came up, one holding his cap, and he criss-crossed the air with his palms. Then he took a single deep breath, a shudder – even the door had betrayed him – and began to cry.

There was a knock at the door.

“Dui.” My husband, Chen, was there with a haughty white woman and her translator. The Long Nose snarled in a foreign language. French I guessed, more from attitude than any knowledge of that language. No one on CNN or Jerry Springer speaks French. Her translator mumbled something about a needle and a marketplace, I couldn’t follow it. I held up my hand for silence. The French woman continued to fill the air with screeching but her translator had the good sense to shut his trap.

“Speak English, you?” I asked the translator in my very best English. He nodded. “Her English talk?” He shook his head. “Good. What fuck happen to stupid lady?”

The translator looked at me the way you used to Fong on occasions when I put the odd English word out of order. Who cared? What’s the difference? Who could remember all those English rules? The rain’s a pain when Spain is plain – who fuck give?

Finally the French translator began to nod his head. You used to do that too as if he was in the process of decoding what I was saying. At first I found it cute then I found it irritating, Fong. Very irritating. My English is just fine, thank you and fuck you very much.

The translator finished with the nodding and told me about the needle puncture and the pending test results from the French doctor. “French she?”

“Yes.”

I looked carefully at her. Her clothes were beautifully cut. Her makeup was exquisite. Even from a distance I could tell she smelled good. Very impressive haircut as well. Then I looked back at the peasant man in my office and swore in Shanghanese. Then I said, “This woman has no real problem. Send her home.”

He said something in French to the woman who threw her arms up in the air, muttered something that was no doubt a slander against the Middle Kingdom and everyone of its 1.3 billion inhabitants then turned on one of the heels of her expensive black pumps and left. I found myself breathless. This kind of woman takes all the oxygen from a room.

My husband stepped forward to apologize for bothering me with this creature but I waved it aside. “Come in, husband. I need your help.”

Chen shut the door as a final exclamation of fury floated up the stairway from the angry French woman.

I find the phrase “Angry Frenchwoman” redundant. Chen stepped into the outer office of the forensic lab. He nodded to the peasant man who stood against the far wall, his hat now held by both hands in front of his mid section. The man did not respond to Chen and retreated to the inner office.

“Is his wife okay?” Chen asked.

I shook my head. And shook it a second time trying to stop the tears but they wouldn’t be stopped. Chen held out his arms and I allowed him to hold me. Finally I stepped back and indicated the inner office where the newly widowed peasant stood. Once again his back was against a wall.

“Has he spoken yet?” Chen asked.

“Not since that day he arrived with his wife.”

“He needs someone to hear his story.” That would never have occurred to me. You and me were born and raised in Shanghai. Our city has a story not each individual. But my husband was born in rural China and he knew their ways. He understood the importance of being heard and the silencing that happens to those from the country when they come to the city. He also understood the huge risk taken by peasants who make their way to Shanghai – especially if one of those people was an active AIDS victim.

Chen poured steaming cha from a Thermos into two glass jars that used to contain Tang. He held one out to the man. “You can still taste the orange in the glass if you’re lucky,” he said. The man’s face lifted.

I stood to one side, an outsider in my own office. This was going to be a conversation between two men. Two countrymen.

The man took the offered cha and slouched down the wall so that he was in a full squat. Was he twenty or forty – I couldn’t tell. Chen squatted down opposite the man making sure that he wasn’t any taller than the peasant. “What’s your name?”

The man looked at my husband then looked again. My husband is a very kind man. A very good father. But he has not been blessed by the gods when it comes to appearance. I hardly notice anymore but most people when they first see him need to take a second look to be sure that their eyes have not deceived them. I’m trying to say that the American actor Bread Pit need not fear for his job from my husband. Does bread have pits in America?

The peasant took a second look then took a long sip of the hot cha. Chen sipped his after the man had begun to drink. He asked again, “What is your name, sir?”

Finally the peasant spoke, “You talk better than most of the people around here.”

Chen smiled. “I’m from the country too. Lake Ching, around Xian.”

The man nodded, noting that although Chen clearly had power, he was not so different than himself. “Is she really dead?” The question came out with a bit of spittle.

“What’s your name, sir?” Chen asked as if he hadn’t heard the man’s question.

“Dong Zhu Houng,” said the man.

“Hello, Mr. Dong. My name is Chen Liu Chi.” The man nodded. “And how did you meet your wife, Mr. Dong?”

I couldn’t have been more shocked by Chen’s question. I shot him a look. He ignored me.

“Was it at a festival? Was she from your village? At a market perhaps? How exactly did you two meet?”

I thought the man was going to attack Chen – but he didn’t. He took a huge breath . . . and began his story.

The ancient assassin removed his shoes and crouched, allowing his toes to knead the sand. He could see Fong down the beach. The assassin pushed the heel of his right foot down into the cold dark sand and rose up on the leg – and stayed there. He began his internal checks – just as he had been taught to do all those years ago as a student at the academy – internal checks that were necessary before every kill.

To Fong’s right the small campfire was little more than smoke. The lovers were hidden from sight behind a large log. Before him the oceangoing freighters were silhouetted against the twinkle of North Vancouver’s lights. To his left an old man was completing his pre-sleep exercises.

It was beautiful here. He lifted the fax and returned to Lily’s tale:

“Chen smiled. “She must have been very beautiful,” he said.

The man nodded. “The most beautiful in all Anhui Province.”

My god! Anhui! Anhui is so far from Shanghai. How had they managed to get all the way to the coast? If they came from the west side of the province just getting to the Yangtze River was a feat. If they lived in the east around the Yellow Mountains there was at least easy access to the great river that could, if they were lucky and resourceful, get them within striking distance of Shanghai.

“The most beautiful,” the peasant repeated. Was that a smile on his lips?

Yes.

The man’s smile lightened the air in the room. Chen stepped forward and prompted him to continue his story, “So you two got married?”

“Yes. On the third day of the fourth new moon. We moved in with my parents. It was not easy. There was so little space and my mother did not approve of . . .”

He never said her name. In fact I didn’t know her name. The tag on her toe in the morgue two floors below simply said: Han Chinese Female. The doctors had been too distressed with the extent of the disease to bother with niceties like names. The tag on her arm was a less neutral. It said simply: AIDS. BODY TO BE INCINERATED WITH ALL HASTE.

“Did she work the fields with you?”

“No.”

That surprised Chen. “You couldn’t use an extra set of hands in the rice paddies?”

At this suggestion the peasant just looked away. Chen knew perfectly well that there was always a need for more hands in the paddies.

“No, she was more helpful in other ways. She knew plants. Everything about plants. No one could find the valuable medicinal herbs in the mountains like her. She was so smart. She dried and saved them. We were close to having enough to raise the money necessary to begin to build a home of our own when . . .” His voice slacked off as if all moisture had left his system. He bowed his head. Silence enveloped the three of us just as the winter fog wraps its arms around the junks late at night down by the Su Zu Creek.

Chen waited for a moment then stood and looked out the window at the interior courtyard in which the arsonist Angel Michael had stored his grisly messages. Chen tapped the windowpane sharply. Dong Zhu Houng looked up as if he were a schoolboy frightened of being reprimanded for dozing off during a lesson. “Tell me about the herbs she collected.”

“We lived outside a small village west of the Da Bie Mountains.”

I almost gasped. The Da Bie Mountains were in the severe west of Anhui Province. A totally isolated area. The region is deeply impoverished, colder than most of China in the winter and hotter in the summer. At least if they had lived near the famous Yellow Mountains, the Huang Shan, they would have been exposed to some of modern China’s advances. But in the west – nothing much reached that far inland. Yet somehow these two had managed to get all the way to Shanghai!

“We took the herbs she collected to the nearest town, Luo Tian, which is the county . . .”

“Seat?” Chen suggested.

He nodded. “She was so clever with the merchants there. She never sold more than a small sample. She made them hungry for more. Much more. When they asked for further quantities, she insisted on a contract. They always resisted but always gave in when they realized that no one else had these special herbs from deep in the mountains. They always gave in, signed the contracts and gave her money to collect more.”