The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory (15 page)

Crossing the little brick bridge at last, she noticed that the woman was not washing her clothes in the muddy water as she had at first thought. Rather, she had taken the sump pump hose, which was causing the pool of water to form, and had put it into a red plastic tub in which she was scrubbing clothes with a large bar of orangish soap.

Halfway across the bricks she spotted Inspector Zhong. He was standing beside a gruff-looking older man. The two were smoking and looking at their respective watches.

Once across, Amanda strode over to the two men and said good morning. Fong introduced Wang Jun. Then, after consulting Ngalto Chomi’s itinerary, which his driver had given them, they set off. Wang Jun dropped back. A quizzical look crossed Amanda’s face.

“The killer tracked a man named Ngalto Chomi two days ago. He stalked him, I believe the American phrase is. Because Ngalto Chomi was an important man he had a driver and the driver knew where he dropped off Mr. Chomi and where he picked him up.” Pointing to the other side of the small pool, Fong said, “The driver dropped him off there where you got out of your cab and then he crossed, as you did, and came to where we are standing now.”

“How do you know he didn’t cross and move down that side street? ”

“Because I asked that merchant over there.”

Openly surprised she blurted out, “And he actually remembered? ”

“Mr. Chomi was a six-foot seven-inch black man. Not something we get to see every day in Shanghai. People would remember. Like they will remember you.”

“I’m not that tall.”

“No you’re not, but you’re funny coloured too.” Without waiting for a response, Fong started down the crowded street. Catching up to him Amanda demanded, “And where’s your friend?”

“He’s watching us, the way the killer watched Mr. Chomi.”

She looked back but couldn’t see Wang Jun. Fong, seeing this said, “This killer was very good. He would pick vantage points that even if Mr. Chomi knew he was being followed he would not be able to spot.”

With a big smile she pointed to one side and up a floor. There was Wang Jun. “There.”

“The killer was very good, Wang Jun is merely fair.” They moved on. It took a while for the idea of walking a dead man’s steps to sink in and even once it did, Amanda’s eyes were constantly being drawn to the extraordinary array of things around her. It never occurred to her that the bird and fish market would actually sell birds and fish. In fact on the first stretch it sold nothing but tropical fish and things to put them in, things to enhance their underwater worlds and things to feed them. In the crowd people carried little plastic bags with their newest acquisitions swimming in what seemed to Amanda like small clear water bubbles. After the fish came a section of bonsai trees and tropical plants. Her eye was drawn to a display of ancient roots that had been unearthed and polished to a high sheen. The knarls and whorls rivalled the artistry of any human hand. Behind the roots were large plastic buckets of polished stones. Fong pointed out the rocks with red markings. “We call them blood stones. The more red the more expensive they are.” Then came several stands selling polished brown Yangtze River stones whose surfaces fit perfectly in the palm and whose heft was particularly pleasing. As Amanda knelt to sift her hand through one of the larger buckets Fong talked to the woman at the stand. Then, as he grabbed a small tub from under the stand, he turned to Amanda. “Stand on that, will you?” She did, wondering exactly what this was about. But then she remembered that the black man had been six foot seven. She was herself close to six feet tall and the bucket was probably another six inches. Which put her close to the dead man’s height. She felt a shiver start in the base of her neck and work its way down.

“Can I step down now, please?”

Fong didn’t answer her but stared down one of the alleyways. Then he put his fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly. The old lady with the stones yelled at him to stop but he ignored her and whistled again. At that point Wang Jun stepped out from behind one of the fish stands and waved. Fong quickly made his way over to Wang Jun. The woman screamed at Amanda who needed no further prompting to get off the bucket and follow Fong.

Pointing to the alley crossroad, Fong said, “He’d have to assume a position for a little while as Mr. Chomi shopped. He’d have to be able to see down both the road and the alley? Right?”

“Right, so I guess he was either where we’re standing now, or cater-corner,” replied Wang Jun pointing across the way.

“And if Chomi dawdled, as the driver said he often did, then it’s possible that our killer had to wait here or there for quite some time. The woman selling stones remembered Chomi because he, as she put it, ’was a sweet talker who felt every fucking stone, spent a ton of my time, the cutie, and only bought one stone. My best one too.’”

“So he stayed for a while at the stand,” Wang Jun said.

“I never got the stone seller to confirm that. She lost interest when she figured out we weren’t buying.”

“You’ve got a funny look on your face, Fong.”

“It’s just the way she talked about him. Stone sellers don’t like customers, especially foreign customers. Do they?”

“Not in my experience. What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know.” Fong mulled the idea around for a moment but still came to no conclusion so he went back to being a plain street cop. “You ask on this side. I’ll ask across the way.” After only a few minutes, it became clear that no one had seen anything. Some remembered the African, but that was hardly the point.

They worked their way through the extensive market, walking Ngalto Chomi’s route and finding places from which the killer must have watched him. When they found these places they talked to the nearby merchants. No one remembered anything. The third alley was where the birds were, along with their racket and smell. Tiny finches and swallows were for sale as were more exotic birds. Once again animals were carried home in clear plastic bags, this time not filled with water but rather with air supplied by punching a hole in the bag, usually with a cigarette. Near the end of the hundred or so bird sellers were the bird food sellers. Large wooden barrels filled to overflowing with live grubs created an ever shifting pattern of transient life. Sellers of gray moth pupas, each with its very own live larva inside, were doing an active business as were the seed merchants. “Do you like birds?” asked Fong. “Not much,” replied Amanda. “Mr. Chomi evidently was extremely fond of birds. The Zairian consulate let us look at his rooms. He had a fine collection of finches. Unusual. Here, birds are women’s pets. Are you hungry? It’s near noon.”

“I could eat,” replied Amanda.

“Good, because that’s what Mr. Chomi did next.” Fong set off down the lane.

Catching up to Fong again she said, “And you, do you like birds, Inspector Zhong?”

“I’m actually quite fond of pigeon.”

“Really,” she asked surprised.

“Yes, the restaurant we’re going to is famous for its pigeon.”

She swallowed slightly and then stopped as a man thrust a cheap leatherette bag up close to her face and opened the zipper. Out popped the head of a puppy which yapped and tried to lick Amanda’s hand. The man with the dog was speaking to Amanda in an animated fashion.

Fong came up beside her. “He says this dog was made for you in heaven. A beautiful lady needs a beautiful dog to augment her beauty.”

Amanda looked hard at him. “That’s what he said.” The man then snapped a volley of words at Fong. “He also told me that no dog no matter how beautiful could make up for the ugliness that I carry with me.”

“He said that?”

“Actually no. He asked if the stupid blond lady wanted to buy the dog or not. And if not could she get her big butt out of the way of other potential customers.” And looking behind her, there were indeed many other potential customers.

This whole end of the alley was lined with dog sellers. Puppies only. All purebreds. As they left the alley, Amanda asked, “Where are the Heinz 57’s, the mutts? And where are the grown-up dogs?” Fong stopped and looked at her with an are-you-kidding-me? look. Deciding that he was not being kidded, he also decided that he wouldn’t answer her question so close to lunch.

As they headed toward the old city, the two policemen compared notes. They passed by the place where the driver had waited to pick up Chomi. For a moment they considered whether the killer had a car and then quickly discarded that idea. However, clearly he would need a bicycle. “Great, we’ve narrowed it down to one of the 7.8 million bicycle riders in the city of Shanghai.”

As the men talked, Amanda looked. The entire place was being torn down and put up anew. She’d never seen anything like it. And the faces—everywhere stories etched in human material. An old lady with a filthy child approached her and held out her hand, imploring Amanda to give her some money for the child. Amanda instinctively moved away. The woman followed her. Amanda went to step out into the street to avoid her but the woman reached out and grasped her arm. Amanda was shocked. Despite the enormous crush of people everywhere in Shanghai, touching was a rarity. Even in the cramped quarters of the Bird and Fish Market, people swerved and glided past each other without touching. Unlike New York City where being jostled was part of walking on the streets, here contact was kept to a strict minimum. So when the old lady grabbed her, Amanda screamed before she could stop herself. Both men reacted as if a gun had gone off. Fong recovered first and yelled something at the woman who yelled right back and then Fong stepped between Amanda and the old woman while Wang Jun guided Amanda away.

“I’m sorry, she startled me.”

“Country folk don’t take kindly to foreigners. They’re harmless but a nuisance. You have, they don’t, so they grab you to give them something. Simple,” said Wang Jun in his slightly lisping Shanghanese.

Amanda got the gist of his explanation. New Orleans had its share of street people too.

Fong came back and apologized to Amanda, who threw it off as nothing. But as they walked, Amanda knew that it wasn’t nothing. The old lady had pierced her armour and drawn blood. She picked up her pace to keep up with the men, who had entered another street market and were consulting a map.

“Lost, guys?”

“No, Ms. Pitman, but the driver stopped right here and Mr. Chomi got out pretty much right where you’re standing,” said Fong.

“I thought you said he went to lunch next.”

“That was the next stop but he evidently walked from here to the restaurant.”

“Why’d he do that? What’s to see here?” asked Amanda.

“I don’t think that Mr. Chomi was a tourist in the usual sense of the word. He worked here, lived here. Something attracted him to the Bird and Fish Market— from his home we can assume the birds—and then something attracted him to this street market,” said Fong.

“What?”

“That’s a good question, Ms. Pitman, one worth trying to answer perhaps.” Fong looked to Wang Jun who was pointing across the street to a woman who was taking money for the right to park a bicycle on her ten yards of sidewalk. She wore no red armband so she didn’t work for the government. She was just trying to get a little money on the side. What had attracted Wang Jun’s attention was the near fight she was having with a young secretary type who wasn’t about to pay to leave her bicycle where evidently she’d left it every day for a year.

“You don’t think he left his bicycle there, do you?”

“No, our friend kept his bicycle with him. There are too many alleys and ways out of this market for him to chance leaving it and then coming back for it.”

“I agree,” said Wang Jun.

But there was a shred of an idea here, thought Fong. The killer would need his bicycle to stalk the man. Would he then kill and ride it away? Perhaps. A bike offers speed but removes some mobility. The complex laws in Shanghai about where and when you can ride a bicycle are strictly enforced. Would the murderer chance the attention of one of the thousands of cops assigned to monitor bike traffic? Or would he leave the bike after the murder and simply slip into the mass of people always around in Shanghai?

Both men knew that a bicycle in Shanghai attracted attention if it was left overnight. For the first time, it occurred to Fong that they might be able to find the killer’s bike, but not here—nearer the scene of the murder perhaps.

As they walked Wang Jun caught Fong up on his newspaper investigation. It was simple—they were stonewalling him. His many queries had come up short. The whole thing had been handled by the editor-in-chief to whom Fong had spoken on that first morning. The editor claimed to have gotten the story straight off a cell phone report from one of his field guys and then banged out the story almost straight onto the printing press. Naturally, he refused to give up the guy’s name.

“But what about clearance? ”

“He claims it was one of those things where the Communications Ministry contact was actually in the building at the time and stood over his shoulder as he wrote it.”

“The timing’s still wrong.”

“I told him that. He claims that with the new technology they can alter an edition at the last moment, which allows them two more hours before press deadline.”

“Check that for me, will ya?” Fong was not pleased. But at that moment he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t pleased with the answers to Wang Jun’s inquiries or Wang Jun’s inquiry itself. They continued in silence for a few minutes. As they entered the heart of the food market Fong stopped and consulted the African’s itinerary. “Next thing that we know is that Mr. Chomi bought a skinned snake . . .”

Fong looked up.

Amanda was well ahead of them. She had joined a crowd and was on her tiptoes trying to get a better look at something on the ground.

The skinning of a live king cobra was shocking even if you knew it was about to happen. Amanda didn’t know.

Fong raced up, afraid that Amanda would faint.

The children in the crowd screamed in delight as the snake merchant flung the skin, still wriggling, into the air.

Amanda stood very still, very white, and took it all in.

The skinning did not make her faint. It made her understand something—understand it deeply.