The Hamlet Murders

NERO

Published by Nero Books,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd.
Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane
Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia
email:
[email protected]
http://www.nerobooks.com.au

First published in Canada
by McArthur & Company, Toronto, 2002
First published in the United States
by St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1998

Copyright © 2009 David Rotenberg

All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mech anical, photo copying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

 Rotenberg, David (David Charles)

 The hamlet murders / David Rotenberg.

 ISBN: 9781863954488 (pbk.)

 Detectives—China—Shanghai—Fiction.
 Shanghai (China)—Fiction.

 813.54

Design & Composition: Mad Dog Design Inc.

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

For my father, Dr. Cyril Rotenberg,
whose quiet support was always there
and always greatly appreciated

I’d like to thank my brilliant translator and friend Ms. Zhang Fang for all her help with the novel. As well, I’d like to acknowledge the much-valued advice I received from my readers and support that Michael and Kim have offered me. And, as always, my thanks to my friends, brothers, Susan, Joey and Beth – without whose patience and inspiration no book could possibly come to completion.

I
t started with Fong in the shower, naked and covered in soap, when the water in his rooms on the grounds of the Shanghai Theatre Academy suddenly, for no apparent reason, just stopped. It ended with four people dead, one unaccounted for and love in tatters. But love, even torn and shredded and stomped on like something disgusting that crawled out of a sewer grate on Fuxing Donglu – even just the hope of love – remained the only thing that made getting out of bed in the morning worth the bother, whether there is any water in the shower or not. And love, even in the secular kingdom of the People’s Republic of China, still needed a miracle to lure it out of the dark cool shadows into the hot light of day–especially in the intense heat and humidity that is August in Shanghai.

Fong pushed aside the shower curtain and reached for a towel, and because he could see even less than usual with the soap in his eyes, he actually missed it. On his second attempt, he grabbed the towel, scraped the soap off his chest and then shouted,
“Wo cao!!!”
to no one in particular.

“Such language,” the ancient house warden shouted back from the courtyard outside his window. “And who exactly is it that you want to tickle your privates, Detective Zhong?” The crone cackled at her own cleverness then added, “Those renovations before the condo conversion you voted for are coming along just fine, don’t you think?” More of her throaty laughter came next, then a choking sound, then a horking and finally the distinct sound of something moist splatting to the cracked courtyard pavement.

Fong tried the taps a second time – no water. He was going to swear again, but really, what was the point? He wrapped the towel around his waist then headed back into the bedroom. Opening the blinds, he saw two paunchy white men wearing expensive raw silk jackets, the backs of which were turned up at odd angles like the pages of a paperback novel left out in the rain. Bum wings, the Shanghanese called them. As Fong wondered what idiots would bother with raw silk in the sweltering reality of a Shanghai summer, one of the men pulled a set of blueprints from a long tube and unfurled it. “Ah, contractors,” Fong thought. The man began gesticulating with his arms as if he had stepped on an open 220-volt line. Fong revised his assessment, “Ah, French contractors.” The French, Fong found, often spoke no Mandarin and only very bad English. For some reason, they expected people in the Middle Kingdom to learn French. Why? There were one point three billion of us, how many were there of them?

Before he could answer that question, a middleaged Han Chinese male emerged from the scene shop across the way with a steaming jar of tea. No doubt he was the Frenchmen’s Beijing keeper. Foreigners tended to look on their keepers as tour guides. They aren’t. They are ranking party officials who keep tabs on the comings and goings of powerful foreigners in the People’s Republic of China. The Beijing keeper turned his head. Almost the entirety of his left cheek and much of his chin was covered by a dark raspberry-coloured stain. Florid stain, bad suit, worse teeth, and probably enough power to have whole areas of the city closed down with a single phone call. Looking at the trio, Fong grinned. They sure deserved each other. All they had to do was add a full-dress mullah – are there any other kind – to make a full deck, or whatever the proper name was for a complete set of incompetent but powerful morons.

Then Fong noticed that the Henry Moore–esque statue, which had contaminated his view in the courtyard for many years, had been turned around. He squinted to be sure he was right. He was. Now the round hole, instead of the abundant curve, faced Fong’s rooms. Who would bother to turn the stupid thing around? For a moment, Fong wondered if that meant that the drunken student actors who frequented the statue would be closer to his rooms or farther away. In either case, they were too close.

Could this really be the beginning of the threatened renovations that were to precede the conversion of his building to condos? Water off, statue moved, three grownup idiots in the courtyard – yep, this could be it.

If it was, then this was the day that Fong had dreaded. He had been offered the “special insider’s price” to buy his rooms, but this was still way beyond his means. And he couldn’t leave here. It was here that he had known his first wife, Fu Tsong. Known her. Loved her. Come alive with her. He couldn’t even think about leaving here. These rooms had been Fu Tsong’s. Then they had belonged to both of them. Then just to him. But these rooms would always be Fu Tsong’s and he knew it – and gloried in it – too much. And he knew that too.

As he dragged his pants on, he reminded himself that it was only money – something that two of the three idiots in the courtyard, unlike himself, probably had. Then again, he had clothing appropriate to Shanghai’s summer and they clearly did not. For now, that would have to be enough.

His phone rang. “
Dui.
”

The mincing voice on the other end of the line was an annoyance from his past, a Party hack’s son or cousin or nephew or pimple or something, who evidently had been reassigned to Special Investigations. Fong had managed to get him moved elsewhere years ago, but clearly he had returned like a bad yuan note. Back then, Fong had dubbed him Shrug and Knock and restricted the man’s communication to shrugging his shoulders and knocking on his desk. This phone call was evidence that the man’s communication boundaries had been breached.

“What is it?” Fong asked.

“A reminder, Detective Zhong. It’s eye time.”

Fong flipped open his desk calendar and groaned. His departmentally mandated eye exam was today. He had avoided it for months even though he knew it was getting harder and harder for him to read reports, let alone the morning paper.

“You’re to be at the Ukrainian Eye Centre on time and a full report is to be submitted in triplicate to the commissioner’s office. Have a nice day, Detective Zhong.”

Every time this man talked, Fong felt like he was chewing tinfoil. Fong reminded himself that behind Shrug and Knock’s nasty façade was an even nastier self, so he should watch his step. He made a mental note to inform Captain Chen to watch his mouth around this snake, then he checked the eye doctor’s address and headed out into the already scorching morning heat – toward his ocular fate.

A
hand-painted sign on the oddly coloured blue-and-yellow door read: Ukrainian Eye Centre—Because Ukrainians Look Best. A plaque to one side of the door proclaimed: Only a Free Ukraine Makes Moscow Think Twice. Fong read the signs a second time just to be sure that his failing eyes hadn’t misled him. They hadn’t. He rang the bell. The door opened. A large white man in a double-breasted blue blazer stood there; apparently he was Ukrainian. A Ukrainian in Shanghai? What was a Ukrainian doing in Shanghai? And he was not just white, he was the whitest person that Fong had ever seen. And round.
Not a single angle on him anywhere. And to top it off, pear-shaped.

He did something with his face that Fong took for a smile, held out his pudgy white hand and said in truly awful Mandarin, “I’m Dr. Morris Wasniachenko. You can call me Dr. Wasniachenko, if that’s easier for you.”

Fong looked at the man and couldn’t help smiling. Was he for real? Was that Mandarin he was speaking? If it was, it was the most unusual approach to the language he had ever heard. In English, Fong asked, “Do you speak English?” The man looked at Fong as if he had morphed into something really peculiar and very small. Perhaps a baby mouse.

As close as Fong could guess, the next thing the man said was, “Do you not speak the common tongue?” Before Fong could attempt an answer, the man pulled a short white jacket over top of his blazer and lit a cigarette. “D’ya mind?” he asked, Fong guessed in reference to the cigarette, not the jacket. “Well, do you speak the common tongue?” This time Fong was sure that was what he asked.

“I speak it. What is it that you’re speaking?”
Fong asked on impulse.

The man made a sound that may well have been laughter. Of course, it could also have been the preamble to some sort of Ukrainian folk dance. A Ukrainian in Shanghai. A Ukrainian eye doctor. How the fuck had he, the head of Special Investigations for the entire Shanghai district, ended up here? The guy must have given the department a group rate or something.

Dr. Wasniachenko parked himself on a stubby black stool that he had rigged up on wheels. Then he used his feet to trolley over to a tiny desk. His butt hung over all sides. He pulled open a tiny drawer in the desk and took out a pair of thick glasses, put them on and looked at Fong again. Fong smiled. A visually challenged Ukrainian eye doctor! The man turned and raised his head very high so that he was looking down his bulbous nose at Fong as if trying to get the glasses to focus properly for him. Then he barked out, “You’re not Mrs. Jian!”

Fong laughed out loud and wondered who in his office had set this appointment up for him. He would have to return the favour in kind sometime and very soon.

“You don’t look like Mrs. Jian,” the good doctor said, suddenly concerned. Then his cell phone rang. He checked his pants pocket for it – no phone, his jacket pockets – no phone. “They’re so small I constantly misplace them,” he said as he pulled open a battered old briefcase.

Fong walked over and picked up the bright pink phone that was sitting in the very centre of the man’s desktop and handed it to the doctor. The man’s fat fingers barely fit on the phone’s face, but he did manage, probably through good fortune, to hit the Receive button. Instantly, his face took on a concerned look and his heavy head waggled up and down several times somewhat like an overripe tomato on the vine. Then he said, “Hold on just a second, Mom,” and put the phone down. He indicated that Fong should sit in the big red chair.

Fong did and the doctor came up very close to him, “You’re not Mrs. Jian?”

“No.”

“Do you know Mrs. Jian?”

“There are probably several hundred thousand Mrs. Jians in Shanghai, but I’m afraid I don’t know any of them.”

This seemed to greatly concern Dr. Wasniachenko. He tut-tutted, made a face, turned back to Fong as if he were going to check the facts one more time, then evidently decided against it. “My mother’s on the phone,” he said as if that needed to be further explained. “I’m very fond of my mother. Besides my wife Tsu-li, who died seven years ago last April, she’s the only woman I’ve ever loved. And she loves me too.”

Fong was genuinely touched by the odd man’s blunt candour. He found it refreshing. “You should speak to her.”

The man nodded sagely several times then took out a small dark bottle with a dropper top. He trolleyed over to Fong while he held the bottle at full arm’s length so that he could focus on it properly. “Open your eyes wide, Mr. Jian.”

Fong did and instantly wished he hadn’t because the doctor squeezed the dropper, letting loose a flood of murky brown liquid that found one eye, the entirety of his nose and dribbled down his chin. “Very good,” Dr. Wasniachenko said. “Now open the other, that would be the right eye.”

It wasn’t, but Fong didn’t see the point of contradicting the man so he opened the other eye, the left one. This time the doctor’s aim was true. “Now close your eyes and stay like that. The medication takes about ten minutes to take effect. I’m going to talk to my mother. She’s on the phone. Now where did I put that darned thing?”

Ten minutes later, the doctor trolleyed back into the examination room announcing, “That was my mother on the phone.” Fong was going to reply, but the words stuck in his throat as he looked at the man. He was huge. Then Fong realized that the man’s inordinate size must be the result of some sort of process induced by the medication that had been put in his eyes.

“Ever had your eyes tested before, Mr. Jian?” “No,” Fong said, cowering back just a little from this gigantic white person.

“So you’re a virgin?” he said and giggled. Then the giggle exploded into a full-fledged belly laugh. Quickly, Fong found himself laughing too, although for the life of him he couldn’t say why. This man was a walking absurdity. Then Dr. Wasniachenko flipped off the lights and turned on a projector that threw letters onto a small mirror and from there onto a wall across the way. “Can you see the letter configuration?”

“You mean the letters on the wall?” Fong asked.

The doctor took off his glasses to get a better look. In doing so, he stepped between Fong and the letters. “Yes, the ones on the wall. Read me the big letter on the top.”

“I can’t . . . ”

But before Fong could explain that he wasn’t able to see the letters through the good doctor’s body, the man began that tut-tutting thing again. “Serious. Very serious,” he said as he leaned in to take a close look at Fong. To do this, he moved out of the way and Fong read the whole chart from top to bottom.

“Amazing. From nothing to everything. I’ve only seen one other case like this. A case of hysterical nearsightedness. At first she could see almost nothing. Hardly a darn thing. Then I approached her and all at once gazzammo and she could see. Like Christ with the lepers. Things falling off here and there, a leg, an arm, a nose and then gazzammo and those body parts back in place and they were ready to make blini.”

Fong sat there completely amazed by this man. All he could think of saying was, “What was the woman’s name?”

And of course the answer to his question was “Mrs. Jian.” Fong nodded, and the doctor asked, “Do you know her?”

“No.”

“Nice woman. You’d like her. She’s Chinese, you know.” Fong nodded again, but the doctor caught his head in his fleshy hands and moved a square machine toward him. He took a slightly soiled handkerchief out of his pocket and put it on the metal strut that faced Fong. “Put your chin on that.” Fong did. “Now keep your eyes wide open.” Fong did. The doctor sat down on the other side of the contraption. “Look at the green light.” There was no green light but there was a red one so Fong looked at that although it was all the way at the upper periphery of his vision.

The doctor looked through his end of the machine and muttered loudly, “Where the hell are his darned eyes?” As he did, Fong heard the cranking of turning knobs and the red light disappeared above his line of vision. “Darn and darn again!” The doctor stood up, walked over to Fong and looked at the machine and Fong’s eye. He drew a line in the air between the machine’s opening and Fong’s eye then hustled back to his chair. Knobs were cranked again and the red light descended from on high, stopping exactly level with Fong’s right eye. “Gotch you, you little rascal. Now open your eye wide.”

Fong did.

The doctor hit a button and a puff of air struck Fong square in the eyeball. Fong let out a quick gasp. “Bull’s-eye. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve still got it. Yes, indeed. Son of a Cossack never loses his aim.” Then it was as if he realized that Fong was in the room. “Did that hurt, Mr. Jian?”

“No, it just startled me a little.”

“Well, they tell you to inform the patient what you’re going to do before you do it, but I never believed in that. Now open your other eye.”

It took several more tries – one puff went right up Fong’s left nostril – but eventually the doctor completed that part of the examination.

“Good. Very good. You’re sure you haven’t done this before? Be honest now.” But before Fong could respond, the doctor moved the clunky square machine out of the way and dropped in a heavy metal apparatus that perched on Fong’s nose and covered his eyes. Dr. Wasniachenko began to flick the lenses so that Fong’s vision went from acute to almost nonexistent. Then the doctor put a black lens in front of Fong’s left eye and touched a switch on the machine. Immediately, a line of words came up. “Can you read that?”

“I took my shoes to the cobbler.”

“Very good. Good, now watch the words.” He twisted some dials and the sentence split in two, the part on the left higher than the part on the right. Then the good doctor took a much-used chopstick that seemed to have the remains of a bean sprout stuck to the end of it and began to wave it back and forth in front of Fong’s eyes, “Just tell me when the two parts of the sentence align with one another. I mean when they are side by side. You could think of them as forming one long line. So that they would say ‘I took my shoes to the cobbler.’ If you get my meaning.”

Fong had got his meaning long ago but was unable to get a word in edgewise so the part that had been higher was now lower and they had to do the whole thing again. This time it worked fine, although Fong had trouble not laughing at the image of this large, round, doughy man sitting on a small stool with wheels moving a dirty chopstick back and forth very rapidly, the remains of the bean sprout moving in counterpoint to the stick.

Forty minutes, two more protestations that he had never met Mrs. Jian, and seven times being called Mr. Jian later and the good doctor informed Fong that he needed to wear glasses. What he called corrective lenses.

It had never occurred to Fong that he would need glasses. And even more important, it had never occurred to him that his vanity would resist the very idea.

Dr. Wasniachenko finished writing out a prescription just as Fong’s cell phone rang. Fong flipped it open,
“Dui.”
He listened for a moment, then got up as he said, “Where exactly?” He put on his coat saying, “Cordon it off. I want to get in before Li Chou, okay?”

Fong rushed out, leaving the prescription for his glasses between two of Dr. Wasniachenko’s plump fingers.

“Yet another victory for vanity – just the reason we Ukrainians lost our freedom to the Russians,” the good doctor thought.

But Dr. Wasniachenko was not as addled as he appeared. While he popped the prescription into an envelope and jotted Fong’s address on the outside, he phoned the Office of the Commissioner of Police for the Shanghai District and informed the duty officer there that Detective Zhong Fong would have to wear prescription lenses if he was to stay on the force. True, it was not until three days later that he remembered the prescription in the envelope, and not until two days after that that he got around to delivering it.