The Golden Mountain Murders (23 page)

“That was two months’ collection?” the silent partner asked, knowing full well it was a lot closer to four months of collection.

“Actually three months,” Old Chiang replied, knowing as well that they were talking about four months of work down the proverbial drain.

“Do we have a figure?” the British Columbian asked.

The granddaughter handed over a spreadsheet. The British Columbian touched her pretty hand. Very nice. Then he handed it to the handsome young cop whose unbelievably light blue eyes turned dark with anger. The British Columbian said, “Easy, Son. Are you still tracking the car?”

“The bug works just fine,” Blue Eyes answered.

The British Columbian took the spreadsheet and handed it back to the head of the Chiang family. “The loss is yours. Your error – your responsibility. I’ll expect prompt reimbursement of my investment. Surely you insured the shipment?”

The youngest Chiang spat on the floor – old habits die hard. “No insurer would touch this shipment,” he barked.

The British Columbian thought about that. There was technically nothing illegal about their business dealings. However the deal, like so many before it with the Chiangs, was unsavoury. Thus, insurance companies, ever wary of their public image, wouldn’t consider being caught making money off the transfer of blood from Asia to North America.

The railway business was not so different from the blood business. Totally legal – significantly unsavoury. The country is desperate for blood products but doesn’t want to know where or how the blood is attained. Just as long as the blood is safe – who cares how it gets into our hospitals. It was the same in great-grandfather’s time with the railways. The country wanted a transcontinental railway built within a specific period of time for a specific amount of money. So what if the Chinese labourers were lied to when they agreed to come to the Golden Mountain. So what if every dangerous job was given to the Chinese. So what if Chinese men made less than twenty percent of the wage that white men doing the same or less arduous jobs made. So what if thousands of Chinese men lost their lives building the railway. So what if once the railway was completed (the greatest act of industrial conspiracy in Canadian history that guaranteed a fine income for the families behind all this) we kicked the Chinese out on their skinny asses, then charged them a fortune in head tax to get back into the country they helped build. And even then we did everything we could to keep their women out. No Chinese breeding here! So what!

The British Columbian thought about the connection between blood and purity – the longevity of that connective – the essential nature of it. The Nazis went too far, but the whole world knew what was happening over there and no one raised a finger until the Germans threatened the real power structures of the West, England and the United States of America. Until then the world was content to allow the prerogatives of purity to play themselves out. Even after the war ended, when Canadians were asked which nationalities they didn’t want in their country, the order of the unwanted was Japanese, Jews, then Germans (Chinese were already blocked entry by the
Exclusion Act).
The nation had just fought a war against the Germans but preferred them to Jews. The prerogatives of purity were still in play. It always made the British Columbian laugh when hearing Ontario liberals twist themselves into logic pretzels in their effort to support the purlaine racist policies of Quebec – asymmetric federalism, my fanny!

They were talking again. More Mandarin mumble-mouth. Finally, the silent partner painfully rose. The gabble stopped. “The guild assassin is in place.”

The eldest Chiang’s mouth flopped open. The granddaughter’s shock was deeply gratifying.

“My family has dealt with problems in China for many generations. We have many sources of power there. Now, there are two things that need doing post-haste. One, you need to reimburse me for my losses due to your negligence and two, it is time to put an end to this Shanghai investigator’s investigation. We could sic the Vancouver police on him,” the silent partner pointed towards son Doug, “but that could get unnecessarily complicated. The guild assassin is in place – I’ll activate him.” The British Columbian turned towards the mountains, “After all, what’s one more dead Chinaman to the city of Vancouver?”

The British Columbian smiled then added, “It’s time for you people to go.”

As they left, the silent partner thought about Shakespeare and Dryden and Pope and Longfellow – and the beauty of an Anglican boys’ choir. They were the beauty of this life. They were us. Not them. Ours. Not theirs. Unique, special, unmatched in any other culture, unparalleled – a sacred trust to be protected at all cost.

It took Matthew very little time on his cell phone to determine that the third assistant director on the shoot was a member of the community, and very little time after that to get someone he knew who knew the man and contact him.

Shortly, a chubby man came out the front door with a clipboard in his hand, an earpiece plugged into his left ear and a quizzical look on his face. “Are you Matthew?”

“Was your shoot always planned for this location?” Fong demanded.

“Yeah.”

Fong believed in coincidence, but not like this.

Then the man added, “It was always planned for here but next week, Thursday night. Suddenly out of nowhere we get a call to haul ass over here. It’s crazy, but this is a crazy business.”

“Better,” Fong said. “They’re scurrying to cover their tracks.”

“Better than what?” Matthew asked.

“Nothing,” he said, then turned to the third AD. “Can you get me into the building with you?”

Matthew whispered something into the third AD’s ear and the man said, “Yeah, but just for a peek okay. The male stars are really touchy on this show. They’ve begun to think they really are superheroes or something. They hate looki-loos.”

Across the street, the guild assassin watched Fong talk to the plump man then go into the building. He sat back and opened his second Nanaimo bar of the day. The chocolate-covered chocolate squares were as close to perfect as the old assassin had ever experienced. Sugar’s version of nirvana. He thought about buying a third bar then decided he would wait until it got dark to treat himself again. He checked his cell phone. Still no call. But it had to be soon.

His revenge could not wait forever.

Fong entered the lobby of the building behind the third AD and then slid to one side beside a “WATCHDOG PROTECTS THIS BUILDING” sign. He wanted to see the elevator banks. To see the numbers as they descended. All four elevators were at lobby level. He noted that there were over forty floors and from the size of the lobby probably many offices on each floor – way too many possibilities.

A striking blonde woman, dressed in an army fatigue costume, passed by him. She carried a small baby and cooed, “Olivia,” to her. She noticed him and smiled. He smiled back. An actress, he thought.

There were a series of commands shouted from various assistant directors, and many walkie talkies responded. Lights were thrown on the walls and massive black draperies were dropped over the windows. Naturally Fong thought, they were supposed to shoot next week, at night, now they have to shoot in the daytime so they have to modify the light. Fu Tsong’s phrase “day for night” came to him.

He looked back at the elevator banks. The far one was rising from the ground floor. The others were all still. A camera crane moved between him and the bank of elevators. He took a step forward to see past the crane and a hand landed on his shoulder.

Fong spun and couldn’t believe his eyes. “So there you are, Zhong Fong,” said his young welldressed Beijing minder whom he thought he had lost in Calgary. “I didn’t know you were a fan of this show.”

”What show?” Fong said.

“Star Gate
. Very big hit at home, Zhong Fong. Very big. I couldn’t miss the opportunity of getting to watch them film an episode. Very exciting.”

Fong tried to step past the man but the Beijing man stood in his way. “You’re not going to disappear again are you, Inspector Zhong?”

Fong couldn’t see the bank of elevators because of the crane. Finally he said, “I hope you enjoy yourself,” and shoved his way clear of the man. He stepped past two technicians and turned quickly to see the elevators. The elevator was already descending past the twenty-seventh floor.

“Damn!” he said aloud.

“Quiet,” three people yelled at him.

Then the elevator opened and he had his first look at an ancient evil and the beautiful young dowager. The Chiangs stood for a moment in the light of the opened elevator as if they were the stars of the event – which as far as Fong was concerned, they were.

Later that night Fong faced a serious truth. He had no way of knowing which of the floors above the twenty-seventh floor, let alone which of the offices on those floors, the Chiangs had gone to. Despite that, he jotted down a note to get an exact list of the occupants of all the offices above the twenty-seventh floor of the building. He remembered the three columns of cards on his desktop back in Shanghai. The first column led from the lawyer to THE MONEY. That had failed. And now his second column through the Chiangs to THE MONEY had also failed. He had no more tools to force the Chiangs to contact the silent partner again.

He mentally moved to the third column of cards he’d left on his desk back in his office on the Bund – the column headed by the card with the large question mark.

T
he guild assassin watched the shadows move in the dirty windows of the warehouse. He was about to reenter and resume his watch from above when an elderly stooped Chinese man walked past him and instinctively averted his eyes.

The assassin stopped and rage filled him. He hadn’t even noticed the man’s approach. He felt the surge of his blood as it circled the eye marks on the hood of the cobra on his back. A mistake! He had to be careful. There should have been no way that an old man could have gotten that close to him. Then his cell phone purred in his pocket and he felt the hood flare – open – ready.

The fading light slitted through the filthy windows of the deserted warehouse. Fong wondered, not for the first time, why Tong guys liked meeting in storage rooms like this. In Shanghai this place would have been across the Su Zu Creek north of the city, the reek from the creek’s junks pungent in the air. Here in Vancouver they were in a dock area far up the estuary past Deep Cove. The Tong guards were not obvious, but Fong knew they would not be far away.

Fong stood beside Robert. Matthew and the head waiter of the restaurant stood to one side. The Dalong Fada guys stood near a pyramid of rusting barrels in a corner. The Tong leader, followed by six of his men in a tight phalanx, entered the room as if he were entering the Forbidden City at the head of a conquering army.

“We called in a lot of favours, Inspector Zhong, to get you this far.” The Tong leader’s voice was tinged with warning, like a poufy white dog giving notice that he’d had enough of whatever it was he didn’t want repeated. “You owe us an explanation, Inspector Zhong – so explain.”

Fong was careful to hide his distaste for the man. “Okay,” Fong said. “I set events in motion in China, then followed the Chiangs’ reaction, hoping they’d lead us to their silent partner. All we learned was that they met with someone in the EA Building in an office above the twenty-seventh floor.”

“Not terribly useful information, Inspector,” the Tong Leader said.

“I agree. As well, I tracked down the lawyer who handled the Shanghai blood company’s business in Vancouver, but that proved to be a dead end too. The lawyer has been working in a legally structured blind where he never meets or even knows the name of the silent partner. He has no record of the silent partner’s name. All contacts are made through Internet sites. All payments are made through account transfers in offshore bank accounts.”

“So you have no idea whose money is behind all this. You have found nothing!”

Fong again reminded himself that although he really didn’t care for the man’s approach he could not afford to lose the Tong leader as an ally if he was going to get anywhere with this. “I’m sure that the lawyer is not the man, nor is anyone else in his firm, nor does he know who the money is behind the Chiang’s blood-collecting operations in Anhui Province.”

“The Chiangs have enough money to fund such an operation themselves,” the Dalong Fada guy suggested.

“No doubt, but the Chiangs’ history suggests that they never spend their own money on anything. They provide muscle, contacts and expertise – but not money.”

The Tong leader looked to the smallish bespectacled man in his entourage. The man nodded his head. “And you think this lawyer is telling the truth?”

“I know that he doesn’t know who the silent partner is.”

“And you know this exactly how?” the Tong leader demanded.

Robert coughed. Fong thought Robert was warning him not to reveal Charles Roeg; then the man’s cough increased, sending wracking spasms through his body. Robert threw his hands over his mouth.

Flecks of blood seeped through his fingers.

“Are you all right?” Fong whispered.

Robert nodded but kept his hands tight to his lips.

Matthew turned away, stared out a window and thought of his grandfather. Finally he said, “So what do we do next?”

“Perhaps we walk away from this,” said the Dalong Fada guy. “There are other battles to fight.” He slid off the barrel and straightened his sweater.

“Where’s the rag man?” Fong asked.

“Who?”

“The rag man. The guy who warned me on Pender Street. He’s one of yours, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Matthew.

“So where is he?” Fong demanded.

“Why?”

“Where is he?” Then Fong surprised them all. He raised his voice and ordered, “Find him! Now!”

* * *

Robert was curled in a corner of the warehouse trying to sleep through the waves of pain when the waiter from the insulting restaurant ran into the warehouse. “He’s dead.”

“How do you know that?” demanded the Tong leader.

“Gay men are nurses throughout Vancouver – in the morgues too. I sent out the word and back it came. The ‘rag man’ was named Larry Allen. He was a lecturer at Langara College.”

“I need to see the autopsy report,” said Fong. No one moved. Fong turned to the Tong leader. “That shouldn’t be so hard for a connected guy like you?”

“Forensic labs are run by Japanese, not Hakka Chinese. You may recall our history, Inspector – there is no love lost between our two nations.”

Fong threw up his hands.

“Would the autopsy report go into a database?” the Tong leader asked.

“I would assume as much.”

The Tong leader looked to the young glasseswearing member of his “boys.”

“So?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes, twenty, tops.” The voice was confident but extremely high. Like that of a teenage girl’s.

The Tong leader read the data from the computer screen over his IT guy’s shoulder. “They found the rag man’s body in an alley behind Pender Street.” That stilled the movement in the room. Then he added, “He was cut into pieces. Severed cleanly at the joints. The coroner makes a notation that the work was done with ‘tremendous haste but great accuracy.’” He lit a British cigarette that had a goldcoloured filter then added, “You’ll love this. The heart was cut out of the guy’s chest then slit in half. They only found one of the halves at the crime site.”

“What!” The single word leapt out of Fong’s mouth with such force that every eye turned to him. “Say that again!” he ordered.

The man repeated the details of the severed heart. Fong couldn’t believe his ears. “I want that confirmed.” He turned to the Tong leader and said again, “Can you get confirmation of that?”

“Why?”

“Because if it’s true then none of us in this room, yourself included, smart guy, are safe. Is that a good enough reason?”

“Why would that . . .”

“Because that’s the signature of a guild assassin.”

“Oh come on that’s nothing more than . . .”

“Myth? Fairy tale? Listen to me! Nine years ago I killed a guild assassin. He butchered two men on the streets of Shanghai in broad daylight. In each case the bodies were left like human jigsaw puzzles and the hearts had been pulled from the victim’s chest, then cut in half. The half that was found, in both cases, had a piece bitten out of it.”

“But did this one,” asked the Dalong Fada leader, “have a piece bitten out of it?”

“Scroll,” the Tong Leader ordered. “There.” A strange smile came over the Tong leader’s face. “No. But there were markings on the cut side of the heart that the coroner couldn’t identify.”

“What kind of markings?” asked Fong.

“The coroner called them soft impressions.”

Fong tried to put that together but couldn’t.

“What does all that matter? Nine years ago you killed a guild assassin – you got him. So he was just . . .”

“It wasn’t my skill that allowed me to kill him. It was him,” Fong paused unwilling to put on the table his surmise that Loa Wei Fen had in fact committed suicide. Fong knew he had to offer up some sort of explanation for the young guild assassin’s death. All he could think of saying was, “Something was wrong with him.”

There was a lengthy pause in the room. No one knew what to say next. Finally the Tong leader said, “So this assassin is here, in Vancouver now?”

“I sensed that I’d been tracked for some time.” He didn’t bother mentioning the feeling of someone tracing the outline of his heart as he slept on Jericho Beach or the image he’d seen in the running-shoestore’s plate-glass window. “He’s here. A guild assassin in your city.”

Fong looked at the men in the room. The heads slowly nodded as the idea of a guild assassin in their midst solidified in their minds.

“But he may also be our last point of access,” Fong said.

“To what?”

“To whom,” Fong corrected.

“So to whom?” demanded the Tong leader.

Fong ignored the question. “The guild does not kill at random. They are sanctioned by the state. They are a last resort. I can only assume that the reason he hasn’t attacked yet is that he hasn’t been given the order to kill.”

“He killed the rag man.”

“Mr. Allen must have been unfortunate enough to have seen him up close.”

“But who would give the order?” Robert asked in a hoarse, weak voice.

“The money behind all this. The silent partner.”

“But who would be his target?” asked Matthew.

As all eyes turned to Fong, Fong’s mind was far away. Of course he would be the target. But the problem was that even if he could stop the assassin, how could he get the man to tell them who gave him the order to kill – in other words, who the silent partner was.

Dirty sunlight splashed across his face. He looked out the filthy window. It was another day.

As the assassin tracked Fong from the warehouse he felt the snake skin handle of the swalto blade turn towards his hand. “Soon,” he cooed softly. “Very soon.” He felt the weight of the ancient snake on his back. He felt purpose. He felt strength. He felt the presence of Loa Wei Fen at his side, begging him to revenge his death.

“I need it and I need it fast, Lily.” Fong was speaking too loudly into his cell phone and he knew it but he couldn’t stop himself. He was walking east on West Georgia trying to stay in the midst of as many people as possible. He knew it was no real defence, but it was all he could think of doing.

Lily hesitated but finally responded, “It was a long time ago Fong. Another world.”

“But the old coroner kept great records. Lily, I know this is hard. I know you cared about him. But he’s been dead a long time and he was the best coroner Shanghai ever had – and he was a meticulous record keeper. Lily, please. Get me those records.”

Again Lily hesitated. Fong heard her take a deep breath and then let it out slowly. When she spoke her voice was more centred – in fact, it was determined. “Will it help catch the people who are making this happen in Anhui Province?”

“Yes, Lily, I hope it will.”

“Not enough good, Short Stuff,” she said switching to her version of English. Then in her elegant Shanghanese she finished with, “Promise me. Promise me for our daughter, for Xiao Ming, that you will get these bastards.”

“I promise,” he replied in English, although he had no idea if he could fulfill his promise.

Lily held her breath and entered the old coroner’s office. As a young forensic specialist she had spent many hours in the old coroner’s domain. Never having known her own father, Lily often thought of the old man as her– well, as her father. When she turned on the light in the old autopsy room in the basement of the Hua Shan Hospital she was immediately flooded with memories. She felt that at any moment he would appear at her side hacking his guts out which was his normal “good morning, how’re ya” greeting – a lit cigarette on a constant dangle from the corner of his slightly downturned – or was it just his basic snarly – mouth. He never acknowledged it but he loved to teach and Lily was an avid learner. Over his shoulder she watched his remarkably delicate hands take apart the smallest sections of human tissue and pronounce upon the trauma evidenced there.

The old autopsy room had been converted into a storeroom when the Hua Shan Hospital finally completed its expansion. They hadn’t bothered to remove the slanted metal table and now it, as well as most of the available floor space, was piled high with the old coroner’s file cases.

Lily shook off the sentimental world of memory and forced herself to concentrate on why she was in the midst of this room stacked high with mouldy paper. Anhui – AIDS – a peasant man now walking some 1,000 kilometres to an empty home.

A rat skittered across the floor and disappeared behind one of the boxes. She walked calmly over to the box and shoved it hard against the wall. A momentary high-pitched squeal pierced the quiet of the room – then was no more. Lily didn’t wince. Killing rats was important for the health of the hospital and its patients. Finding rats was important for the health of defenceless peasants in Anhui Province who were dying in the thousands.

She grabbed the first file and scanned for dates.

It had been a while since the old assassin had seen his own blood.

He held up his hand and turned it in the morning sun. The blood that came from the back of his hand and circled its way down his inner arm didn’t bother him although he was taken aback that so much blood had been caused by such a little knick. He was however stunned that he had accidentally hit his hand. Control of both body and emotion had been central to his talent for so many years that he took it for granted. Then this.