The Golden Mountain Murders (4 page)

He thought of his own daughter, Xiao Ming, now with her mother, Lily, and her stepfather, Captain Chen.

The plane tilted slightly and began a wide arcing change of course. A child cried that particularly highpitched wail – so filled with betrayal – that some think only children feel.

The vast land, almost empty of people, continued to pass by his window, beneath the plane. The river was wider now, as if its effort was the achievement of girth. It elegantly seeks its end, its demise, Fong thought, in what had of late become his almost continuous inner monologue. He failed to add the two words, “Like me,” afraid even in that private sanctum to give word to such thoughts.

A six- or seven-year-old girl awaiting access to the forward washroom first hopped up and down, then knocked at the closed washroom door, then decided that crying had more chance of getting the locked door to open. The girl was wearing shorts and a bright blue T-shirt with a red “S” within a yellow triangle.

Fong assumed it was a sports team of some sort and wondered where he could find such a thing for Xiao Ming.

Every time he saw his daughter it seemed that she’d grown. But not just bigger – somehow deeper. She’d always, at least as far as he was concerned, been wide awake to her surroundings. From the beginning she’d been fully aware. Her language was advanced for a five year old, and when she was with him they only spoke English. It was hard for him not to correct the mistakes she’d picked up from her mother, whose English was a wild mix mostly learned from CNN and American TV talk shows. Fong’s English was textbook stilted but accurate – very accurate.

Lily and her new husband, Captain Chen, always made him feel welcome in their small rooms when he came to pick up Xiao Ming. They were strict about bringing her back at the appointed hour but that was understandable. They also insisted that she be kept away from anything that could bring back the days of near catatonia she’d experienced after her rescue from the arsonist who called himself Angel Michael. The poor thing still cringed when she heard loud noises or even saw a match struck. Just before he left for the Golden Mountain he had taken Xiao Ming back to the home in which he’d grown up.

As they had turned the corner and stepped onto Feng Beng Lu, Fong felt his daughter’s hand curl in his. Quickly the new Shanghai faded away and was replaced by the old – the permanent, the ageless Shanghai – what was laughingly referred to by the locals as the Chinese concession. The ancient buildings gave the lie to the high bright towers across the river, the California-style condominiums in the embassy district and the English-language slogans on T-shirts and sweatshirts and pant butts. There was none of that here in the old city.

Fong and Xiao Ming hunched into the dankness of the place. Whispers followed them from behind pulled curtains; naked children being washed in bright red plastic tubs on the sidewalk openly stared at them; the five-spice egg seller gave Fong the evil eye as she had to a Japanese soldier who had raped her mother sixty years ago on this very street in Shanghai’s Old City.

But as Fong and Xiao moved deeper into the Chinese concession they became more of the Old City and the denizens allowed them to pass. Fong had returned to from where he had come and where he had come from accepted him.

They passed by the Temple to the City God and the Old Shanghai Restaurant, then entered an unmarked alley. Immediately the smell of cooking engulfed them and Xiao Ming identified each smell. With each identification, she held her father’s hand tighter and finally asked, “Where are we going, Father?”

“To my father’s house. Your grandfather’s house.”

“Do I get to meet Grandfather?” she said, her voice alive with awe.

Fong stopped and picked her up. Then he said softly, “My father has been dead a long time. The last time I saw him I was your age. But he was a very good man. A kind man. I loved my father and still miss him.” He paused. “I hope you don’t miss me, Xiao Ming.”

She shrugged in his arms then touched his face. “You are my father.”

“I know, but I’m not always there for you.”

“You are. Whenever I want you I call you and you always come.”

“When I can.”

“When you can.” He put her down. They took a few more steps and the alley widened. Set back a few paces from the alley was the old archway that demarked the entrance to a family compound.

“Is this where Grandfather used to live?”

Fong stared at the archway. As a boy it had separated them from us. There was safety outside the archway and the wrath of his grandmother inside. He remembered when the family owned the whole compound. Now the place probably housed twenty families.

He pushed open the door and memory flooded him. His father had carried him on his shoulders in this open courtyard. He had told him the old stories. He had defended him from his grandmother. He had done the best he could to keep him safe from the diseases inherent in the family business, night-soil collecting. He had sat by Fong’s side when he had contracted the cholera and had been thrown from the house with a blanket and a sleeping palette and been told by his grandmother to, “Get better or die quickly. There is work to be done.”

Then his father had left to fight for the liberation. And had never returned.

Seven years later when the Red Army re-entered Shanghai as victors, Fong had raced to the rooftops and waited and waited for his father to come marching by. But he had not come. Even hours after the last troops had passed, Fong stayed on the rooftop waiting. Waiting for the return of the man who held him on his shoulders in this courtyard.

“What can I do for you?” the middle-aged man said as he filled a metal pail with water from the courtyard’s central spigot.

Fong explained that he had lived there and that this was his daughter and he wanted to show her . . .

“Show her what? What you and your bourgeois family had once owned but now belongs to the people. What you stole from us all and now we have regained?”

“Shut up, Father,” said a young, well-dressed man carrying an expensive briefcase. The man stared at his son for a moment then pulled on his Mao jacket proudly, despite the heat, spat on the ground and left.

“You must forgive my father. The old ways die hard.” The young man said, then introduced himself and listened to Fong’s request. “No problem. Look all you like, those were the good old days and they’re going to come back. Young people like me are going to make sure that they come back.”

Alone in the room that used to be Fong’s, Xiao Ming grabbed her father’s hand. “This, this place and places like it are of us, Xiao Ming. Not of them. Not McDonald’s or computers or Lexus automobiles. We made these places. We left our souls in these places. These places now must become part of you.”

The little girl stared at the dingy walls and the exposed wood beams. Then she smiled, “I like it here, Father.”

Fong took a breath – a deep breath – then lifted his daughter high into the air.

“It’s like flying here, isn’t it, papa? Flying into the past.”

Fong smiled and looked out the window. He wondered if Xiao Ming would have to wait until her fiftieth year to fly in an airplane. Somehow he doubted it.

The plane droned on and on. Fong couldn’t remember when he had last slept. His mind drifted to the beginnings of all this – all this blood.

It had been a cold night and Fong was working late. The knock on his office door had been soft – like a woman’s knock. He quickly got to his feet, hoping it was Joan Shui. But when he opened the door he saw his IT man, Kenneth Lo. “What is it? It’s late, Kenneth.”

“Success has no correct time of day,” Kenneth said in his stilted Shanghanese.

“You’ve lost me,” Fong had said, covering the work on his desktop with a sheet of newspaper.

“That computer you gave me?” Kenneth prompted.

“The one from the man who was murdered by the woman who loved him?”

“The very one.”

Fong had sighed and returned to his desk. “The case is over, Kenneth. The woman is in prison or executed. I don’t know which.”

To Fong’s surprise Kenneth was undeterred. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I think you’ll be interested in what the hard drive revealed about the nature of the dead man’s business. The International Exchange Institute traded . . .”

“The case is over. Closed – not of . . .”

“Blood.”

Fong was on his feet before he realized it. He went to the office window and snapped open a latch. He pushed and the thing pivoted, letting in the sound of the traffic beneath. The Bund traffic, even at this hour, was very loud.

Finally Fong asked, “Blood?” although it wasn’t really a question.

“Yes, Fong. The dead man’s company traded in blood.”

“Our blood?” Fong stepped from the window and smacked his hand against the wall. “I asked if it was Chinese blood this company was trading?”

“Yes, of course it was.”

There was a long pause, the sound of car horns honking below and faraway. A siren sounded loudly then just as quickly stopped.

“They buy the blood in the provinces then sell it in the West, Fong.”

“How do you know they sell it in the West?”

“All the figures on the hard drive, except one, are quoted in US dollars. And the figures are impressive, so where else . . .”

“What about quantities?”

“Huge and at the time of the man’s death on a sharp ascent.”

“Did they at least pay for the blood?”

“Yes, Fong, they paid. He kept immaculate spread- sheets – tiny yuan notes for pints of whole blood or platelets or plasma. Always from the distant provinces. Anhui seems a favourite place for them. They pay almost nothing for the blood products and then they sell them for top dollar. The profit margins are impressive.”

“What else did you get off the hard drive? Nothing useful like names and places I assume. You said that some figures weren’t US dollars.”

“Estimates of the numbers of AIDS victims in Anhui. They were evidently pulled down from an American university website that has nurses there.”

Fong felt the rage move through his blood, like an animal released.

“Fong?”

“Yeah.”

“Those figures seem to have been recorded by someone other than this Bob Clayton who ran the International Exchange Institute. They were stored in a different place on the hard drive from the business figures and were protected by a different password. So I figured . . .”

“. . . that another person did the inputting . . . the secretary?”

“Could be – is that the woman who killed the man she loved?”

Fong turned away. “AIDS in Anhui Province? AIDS in the backwoods of Anhui? How the fuck did AIDS get to that part of nowhere?”

“Think, Fong. They collect blood. Blood transmits AIDS and most peasants don’t understand that blood will replenish itself so they insist that when they give blood that they get re-injected with blood later. So the guys who collect the blood take it away and remove the commercial bits of it then mix all the blood that is left together and re-inject these poor fools the next day.”

Fong hit the solid surface of his desk three, four, five times. Then he almost shouted, “I want names and places in the West that make profit off . . .”

“They’re not on the hard drive. Only those two codes I told you about and collection schedules from Anhui Province and other . . . ”

“Vulnerable places.”

“Yeah. The only name we found in association with this company outside of the dead guy is not Western.”

“A Chinese name?”

“Chiang Wo.”

Fong nodded slowly.

Chiang Wo. An infamous name. So the Chiangs had returned to the Middle Kingdom.

And so Fong had gone to Anhui – which led him to this plane that was slowly making its descent into Calgary International Airport.

Calgary was a confusion to Fong. Were these people speaking English? Perhaps it was that he had been up for more than twenty-four hours. Then he realized that it was just past noon here. Morning was done. The morning of which day of the week he could only guess. Fortunately a large sign with his name in bold characters caught his eye when he left the customs area. The young Asian man with the sign smiled enthusiastically and grabbed Fong’s bag as he led him to a waiting SUV.

“We’re off to Kananaskis,” the young man said.

Fong didn’t completely get that but he smiled and closed his eyes.

When he awoke he was in some sort of mountain resort. The room they assigned him was so large that he expected several others to join him – although he knew they wouldn’t. He quickly showered – amazed by both the volume and pressure of the hot water and the towels – so many white towels.

A knock at his door. Fong opened it. The young man who drove the SUV was there. He spoke a few words, in what language Fong couldn’t guess.

“Let’s speak English,” Fong suggested.

“Fine, sir. The delegates are gathering in the lobby.”

Fong took the stairs down to the lobby. He was never very fond of elevators and besides he needed a little exercise after all the sitting – and on stairs you have a chance of spotting someone who is tracking you.

The lobby was filled with men, most of whom were his age or older. They all signed in and received packets, then the convention organizers herded them outside into the cold where a photographer waited. Each delegate was given a very large, white hat. Fong had seen cowboy movies before but he assumed that things like cowboy hats were just costumes like the headdresses worn in the Peking Opera. He never thought real people wore such impractical things. But before he could contemplate this he faced a more pressing dilemma. They couldn’t find a hat that was small enough for him. Finally they stuck a hat on the back of his head and muttered, “That’ll have to do, fella.” The cowboy-hatted police officers from all over the world were posed on the steps of the lodge and the photographer finished his fiddling.

But just before the photographer took his shot, Fong picked out a young Chinese man several metres behind the photographer. He’d seen him on the airplane. So you’re my minder are you, he thought. Well, welcome to the Golden Mountain, pardner. He allowed his eyes to sweep the crowd one more time and then returned to his Beijing “minder.” The man was younger than Fong thought he would be. He had sat far forward in the plane. To stop me from running up and jumping out the front door or something, I guess, but the thought didn’t humour Fong. This one’s youth bothered him. Fong had thought that Party members would always remain older than him. Now here was this agile, well-tailored, nicely hair-cut young man.