The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory (17 page)

And so it proved to be.

Wu Yeh tearfully recounted her last time with her African lover.

Slowly the picture of Ngalto Chomi as a much loved man was coming into focus. Here was a man, who not only because of his colour and his height left a lasting impression on others—stone sellers, cooks, and a whore in an opium den who had been with more men in a week than most women have been with in their lives.

Mr. Chomi is proving to be an exceptional human being, Fong thought, as his eyes strayed to the ivory pipe. A human being whose heart could resist the knife.

They walked out the back door, as Ngalto Chomi had, and instantly knew where the killer must have hidden. The bend in the alley allowed a place from which the killer could have watched without being seen by the waiting driver. Wu Yeh said that she had walked him to the door and that as he lingered with her kiss, he had slid a hand inside her robe and caressed her breast. She had looked up at him and told him that the room was still his if he desired her more. But he had declined—and probably was murdered directly after he closed the door on the whore who loved him.

Wang Jun strung the area with police tape and informed the old man that the door wasn’t to be used until further notice. Then the three of them walked to the site itself. It was cleverly chosen but still partially exposed. The attacker had to be fast. Evidently he was. And then no doubt he made his escape away from the place where the driver was parked.

“Which means he left his bicycle back at the foot of Fu Yu,” said Fong.

“I agree. It’s two days ago, though,” replied Wang Jun. “We might get lucky, swamp the area with cops. I want to find that bike or whoever stole it. I want every bike on that sidewalk claimed and taken away. The one that’s left is our man’s.”

Fong drove Amanda back to her hotel in silence. When he finally stopped the car Amanda turned to him and asked,“Could the bicycle really be valuable in finding this guy?”

“Maybe. A bicycle here is not like in other places. People, you have no doubt noticed, use them all the time. And the roads are rough. No one rides a bicycle without having to get it fixed over and over again.”

“That’s what all those men with tool kits and pumps are doing on every street corner?”

“Precisely. And I have found that those men with tool kits and pumps, as you put it, have very good memories when it comes to bicycles and faces. There’s a man around the corner from the academy that we call the master. He can fix anything. And he never forgets either a bike or a face.”

“I see.”

He turned to her. Again he noticed the oddness of blue eyes in a white face. Then he said, “I was terribly out of line at the restaurant. I’m sorry for the question about your husband.”

“You know, I almost said who, when you said my husband. We were not close, hadn’t been for some time, Inspector.”

“Do you know what your husband was doing in Shanghai when he was murdered?”

“He was here on business, I thought.”

“He was a government employee, wasn’t he? What kind of business was he on?”

“He travelled all the time, Inspector. Europe, Asia, Africa—you name it and Richard had been there.”

Fong quickly said, “You lied to me about the ivory back in the opium den.”

“In a way yes. I never saw anything but trinkets, but I know a lot about ivory. Through Richard—a lot. For some time I’d known that we couldn’t be living the way we were on the meagre salary of a government official and the profit from the business I ran.”

“Is it possible that he was involved in smuggling ivory out of Africa under the protection of his government credentials?”

“It’s possible.”

Fong looked at her closely.

“More than possible,” she whispered.

“Thank you.”

She looked straight into his eyes for an instant. “Now that you know, you don’t need me anymore, do you?” He didn’t respond. “Do you?” she pressed.

“No.”

“I see. May I ask a favour?” He nodded. “Tell me what you know about my husband’s death.”

Slowly, with precision but without sentiment, he told her all he knew of the passing of Richard Fallon.

“And that’s what the U.S. consulate didn’t want me to know?” Fong chose not to answer that question. Amanda took his silence as assent. “So that’s everything.” It was a statement not a question.

A silence began to fill the space between them. She looked down at her hands in her lap. “So now you can go home,” he said.

She thought about that, about “going home.” When she raised her eyes his were there to meet hers. “I’m not sure I’m ready to go home yet, Inspector Zhong.”

Fong allowed a moment to pass then asked, “Do you like shopping, Ms. Pitman?”

“What are you—?”

“Perhaps you’d accompany me tomorrow. I know very little about ivory and I have a strange feeling that store keepers would be more open to your inquiries than to mine. All right?”

“Fine.”

“Tomorrow morning then.”

“Fine.”

“Dress up.”

“You too, Inspector.”

• • •

That night Fong sat in the back of the old theatre and watched Geoffrey Hyland stage the drunk scene in
Twelfth Night.
It was like watching a master etcher daubing his acid on human material. But this product wasn’t set in time and space. It was art in dynamic motion. Art that was molten and tactile. Art that was never the same moment to moment but never random. Never not art.

Hyland began with a simple question: Why is Toby Belch drinking? Answers were posed and tested. No acting was attempted until Hao Yong suggested that Toby needed to escape. Escape what? “A memory,” ventured the actor playing Toby, a frighteningly thin tall man in his early forties.

“Good,” replied Geoffrey. “Memories do haunt, don’t they?” For the slightest moment he tilted his head in Fong’s direction and then returned his attention to the actors. “Well?” Finally the actor playing Toby came up with the answer to which Geoffrey had led them. The answer was simple and in line with everything else in this play that parades itself as a comedy but by its conclusion is hardly humorous. The answer of course was that Toby Belch drinks to try to escape his terrifying love of Olivia. To escape even the memory of that unrequited love. Andrew drinks for the same reason. So does Maria, whose love for Toby will never truly be returned. And then there’s Feste—the clown who drinks to forget that he ever loved, that he ever had a reason to carry on with his life.

Then Geoffrey repeated Fu Tsong’s words, “We’re all here. Shakespeare wrote us all in the play. Which one are you?”

Time of day became the next discussion. Geoffrey postulated what he called the witching hour. That time when the Moslem crier, the muezzin, climbs the tower of the mosque and holds up a black thread and a white one. When he can see the difference between the two he calls the faithful to the first prayers of the day. It is the point at which Banquo returns to the castle with his son Fleance to meet his end. It is the moment of night’s end, in theory the victory of the light. But in
Twelfth Night
, the long night only leads to a longer day.

The actors began to work. A moment found, a moment lost, a line needing a better translation. Finally Geoffrey stops the group. The faces are flushed, alive. “Let’s try working this in vibrating primaries rather than in pure primaries. It’s not complicated, just hear me out for a moment. I have two kids, a boy eight and a girl six. They both love playgrounds—you know with swings and slides—they’d go nuts at the Children’s Palace on Yan’an. Well, every time we pass a playground my kids go into the pure right-handed primary of I SEE, I LOVE. And if I allow them to go into the playground the six-year-old stays in that pure primary, but the eight-year-old knows in his heart that he is too old to love something like this so much. So when he enters the park he changes from the pure right-handed primary of I SEE, I LOVE to the vibrating primary of I SEE, I LOVE, BUT I KNOW I SHOULDN’T. The six-year-old is a joy to watch in the playground in her pure primary state, but the eight-year-old is downright fascinating sitting squarely in the centre of his vibrating primary. Playing in pure primaries has a tendency to ride an actor’s age down creating that kiddy acting nonsense. To be childlike is not to be childish. To keep the work sophisticated the pure primary has to be mated with its opposite which makes the pendulum swing inside. It carves internal landscapes and hence you are compelling to watch without that hideous ’doing things.’ By the way,
only
when you’re in primaries is less more. When you’re in secondary less is only less. Clear?”

A few questions came back at Geoffrey, most having to do with the fear of playing emotions. In each case Geoffrey reiterated that he was not talking about playing emotions but being in emotional states. “You play your actions. You try to make your acting partner feel things that will spur them to do things. But to be compelling— to create density and interest in your work—you must play those actions and release the text’s images from a primary state—hopefully a vibrating primary.”

Geoffrey’s simple, elegant staging of the scene took shape over the next three hours. There were no breaks in Geoffrey Hyland rehearsals. Actors smoked when they were not needed, or drank tea from the omnipresent thermoses, but they never wandered off. This was not a place of idle chatter. It was an artist’s studio. They thought and contributed and went into themselves, trying to find their stops and ventages to make most eloquent music.

Only at the very end of the scene do any of the characters drink. Feste takes a sip and it pierces his heart. A cry of pain comes from him that is music itself and the scene ends with the sun rising over a stage of addicted lovers unable to sleep at night or be fully awake during the day.

Fong loved it. Unlike so much spoken theatre, it touched him deeply. Touched him the way that the Shanghanese Opera could. His grandmother had taken him when he was five to the theatre in the heart of the Old City. Shanghanese Opera is a form of classical Peking opera that varies only in interpretation, not genre, from the original. The Shanghanese version has a tendency to be shorter and more melodious. But it is still the singing, tumbling, acting, juggling, transcendent experience of the original.

The very first piece Fong saw took his heart completely. It was
Journey to the West
. The evening began with an oceanside leavetaking of a king and his beautiful daughter whom for political reasons he has to give in marriage to a prince of the western provinces. The scene, although formal, has cracks of tension in it where feeling is implied without being shown. Then a serving man is entrusted with the daughter’s safety and off the two go on the three-thousand-mile journey to the West. Their travels begin conventionally enough. The serving man walks as his beautiful mistress rides (indicated by the carrying of a four-tassled stick). She, naturally enough, treats him as a common serf but as the days pass and the adventures of crossing rivers, deserts and mountains, meeting dangerous enemies, dealing with cold, and sleeping in the rain accumulate, a new appreciation for the serving man begins to grow in her.

When finally he is hurt trying to help her safely cross a deep river, she insists that he ride the horse and she walk. After their four-hour stage journey, most of which is done without speech and often with just the two actors on stage, they finally reach the western court and the serving man must hand over his charge. He does and turns to walk back to the East.

The serving man is dressed plainly. He tumbles, dances, sings, fights with both sword and lance, and juggles the complicated war hammer. The princess is played with sleeves and headdress feathers, her lengthened sleeves providing an elongated image and the two long elegant feathers accentuating every head movement by tracing the pulse of the energy from base to tip. Often the feathers are pulled down and put into the mouth creating various configurations. She wears raised shoes, is dressed in red and her face is painted mask white. For many years, she was easily the most erotic thing that entered Fong’s life.

When he first met Fu Tsong, he often felt like the serving man in the
Journey to the West
whose job it was to deliver the princess to some great man’s bed. It was not until years after they were married that he confessed to her his fascination with traditional Chinese “sung” theatre. He thought she would find it ludicrous coming as she did from the new “spoken word” theatre. But she didn’t. In fact she openly acknowledged her great debt to her Peking opera training and said that in the hands of the great actors the opera roles were as real as anything done anywhere. That what the classic form did was find the essence of emotion and then over hundreds of years refine the emanation of that emotion in the body. In the hands of normal classical opera actors this just became a hollow shell, but with a master or mistress of the art the shell held a glowing truth.

So it was with delight that, years later, Fong wangled two tickets for a famous actress’s performance of
Journey
to the West
at Shanghai’s newly renovated Yi Fu Stage. As the evening went on Fong found himself once more lost in the story of the serving man and the princess. Amidst the noise of the audience and the comings and goings, there was real communication. Fong felt as if the actress were reaching out—putting her cool hand directly on his chest. Kneading and pressing toward his heart. Putting his nipple in her mouth and sucking firm and slow. He felt that he saw every quiver of her hand and flash of her eye. He was lost in the embrace of a woman on a stage with white makeup and four-foot feathers on her head.

As the serving man gave her over to her new husband Fu Tsong’s hand crept into his. “Special, isn’t it?” But he couldn’t respond, only nod and hope she couldn’t sense the tears welling up in him.

After the show, Fu Tsong excused herself and went backstage to say hello to the stage manager, who was an old friend. Theatre people had “old friends” that way and although Fong understood such things he always felt awkward in a world of people who were intimate but not close. He chose to wait in the lobby and gloried in the photographs of the actress, Su Shing, who played the princess.