The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory (21 page)

Wang Jun nodded. The commissioner and Shrug and Knock left the room.

Ti Lan Chou was the political prison perched on the east reach of the Huangpo near its confluence with the Yangtze. It was the largest prison of its kind in China and hence probably the largest of its kind in the world. People were held there for crimes against the state. Sentences were long. Never commuted. No pardons or bail. Lots of time spent in sweatshops making goods that the state sold to the West. It was not a prison with which Special Investigations dealt. This was federal police territory. Even in a hardened policeman like Li Xiao, the threat of Ti Lan Chou Prison struck a rich vein of fear. Li Xiao knew why Zhong Fong was to be held there. It would give the feds time to rig a case that would be presented to the public in photographs, which were referred to as object lessons and could be viewed in various strategic locations throughout the city. These sets of photographs, which detailed crimes and punishments, were immensely popular during the Cultural Revolution, a regular people’s art form. Li Xiao’s favourite had been the one that was up for months near Jing An Park on the Nanjing side. It consisted of several gory photographs of the murder victim followed by photographs of an arrested suspect, photographs of the suspect tried, and finally photographs of the suspect executed—a complete morality play on six yards of fence. It was indeed very impressive and bespoke tremendous efficiency on the part of the police and the judiciary. All well and good except that Li Xiao had worked on that case and they’d never caught the perpetrator. What they had found were photos of him which had been cleverly doctored into this cute little political lesson. The photo technicians had advanced their art mightily since the days of Mao swimming the Yangtze.

Li Xiao knew that with the priority APB issued by the commissioner they would catch Zhong Fong. That was for sure.

Li Xiao was troubled, though. Troubled by the timing of it all. Troubled by the arbitrariness of it all. Troubled by what he felt was the betrayal of a friend.

Wang Jun’s new portable phone rang in his pocket. Li Xiao looked at the man. Would a man sell a friend for a phone line? In Shanghai, maybe? But no, it would have to be bigger for Wang Jun. He was alone in the world. No wife, no children. And age with its inevitable inevitability was working its terror on him. Where was honour in this city of greed? Things were truly getting out of hand.

He almost didn’t hear Lily guide the conversation round to the Dim Sum Killer case. She had information on the bike and interesting tidbits from three informers. As she went through these Li Xiao pulled out the photo of Loa Wei Fen and put it on the table.

“And this is?” asked the coroner, at last interested in the conversatIon.

“A man trained to work with a swolta, a six-inch double-sided blade with a piercing point. He also is in Shanghai as you’ll note by the airport sign in the photo. He’s ambidextrous too,” said Li Xiao.

“Distinguishing marks?” asked the coroner.

“A cobra carved into his back. That distinguishing enough for you?” Then turning to Wang Jun, “I guess you’re the chief on this one now, do you think that’s enough for an APB on a real killer?”

Lily took the phone out of her mother’s hands before the old woman could say hello. She knew who it’d be. Before the caller could say anything, she rifled off a phone number and an address and then said, “Half an hour on the dot. I won’t call twice. Don’t call here again.” As she hung up she said to her mother, who was looking shocked, “A date, Mom, your little girl’s got a date.”

Exactly half an hour later Lily dialled the number of the payphone in the kiosk at the corner of Delicious Food Street and Huai Hai. It rang once and Fong picked it up. He was dressed in an old blue padded Mao jacket and wore a cap. His hair had been cut off and dirt was worked deep into his palms. There was a nasty cut across his cheek as if he had shaved that morning in cold water. He looked older. Worn. He wore army issue spectacles. Fong listened to the news about the meeting. He openly gasped when he heard about the idea of arresting him and putting him in Ti Lan Chou Prison but he managed to control his fear.

“Can you get me the picture of this Loa Wei Fen and the reports from our snitches?”

“How?”

“I don’t know, Lily, you’re the devious one—think of something devious.”

“Do you remember the case of the boy with the bike?” Fong certainly did; it was one of his first cases as a member of the Shanghai Police Department. A plump, six-year-old boy had taken a bicycle from a fourteen-year-old neighbour and ridden it on the sidewalk. The bike, being too big, was too much for him to control and he had run right into an old man. The man staggered onto the street had a heart attack and died on the spot. His family went nuts.

When Fong arrived, the dead man was still on his back in the street, snarling traffic. His wife, completely ignoring him, was screaming at the boy, whom she was holding against the wall with her strong peasant hands. Her aged sister had slipped a clothesline over a tree and then around the boy’s neck and was heaving mightily, trying to hoist the boy off his feet and hang him in the middle of the busy block. A crowd had gathered around them and was offering unsolicited advice on the art of hanging fat kids. It took all of Fong’s moral authority and the help of three block wardens to break up the would-be lynching.

After calling for a coroner Fong had walked the boy, who still had the rope around his neck, back to his home. As soon as he handed the boy over to his doting parents he turned completely unrepentant. He snarled at Fong and screamed that he should arrest those stupid old ladies and that the old man had had his turn and was better off dead. One less old revolutionary idiot. He was only sorry he didn’t get more of them. But he would with the next bike he took. He was going to be a businessman and drive a big car, his fat little mouth said. Not some stupid policeman.

At that comment Fong grabbed the roll of fat around the child’s neck, pulled him toward a park down the way and would have beaten the daylights out of him had Lily not happened to have been there flirting with her boyfriend.

She took the boy from Fong and brought him home. “I know which park you’re talking about,” said Fong.

“I’ll leave the things you want in the garbage can by the statue of the Long Nose. Give me an hour. I don’t want to see you, understand?”

“I do Lily.”

“In the meantime, the whore from the opium den called in. I don’t think anyone else got the information. You check her out and by the time you’re finished with her you can go to the park to pick up the stuff.”

“Thanks, Lily.”

“Good luck, short stuff.”

The old man in the opium den was hesitant to allow this peasant-looking man into his establishment. But when Fong removed the cap and eyeglasses and showed his police ID the old man bowed and led him down the smoky corridor. Once in the room Fong broke with the formalities of the place and immediately asked for the little whore, Wu Yeh. She arrived quickly. She was clearly frailer than before. She seemed drugged. Her robe hung limply about her, open in the front. Her pallor was now a ghastly white. He introduced himself gently. She smiled a little smile as if she didn’t know what else to do.

“You have seen the man named Loa Wei Fen?”

“The one with the snake on his back?”

“Yes, him.”

“Yes, he comes here often now.” There was no love in her words, just retreat. She seemed to be singing softly to herself. Fong reached out and touched her arm. An unusual gesture for Chinese people. It seemed to centre Wu Yeh. Her internal singing stopped. There was a light in her eyes for a moment.

“You can bring back my man, can’t you?” she said.

“The man with the snake?”

“No, not him, not him. He hurts me. Bring back my man, my beautiful black man, you can do that, can’t you?”

If he were still a believer he would have said, you blaspheme. But his faith had died with the death of Fu Tsong. So he just shook his head.

“If you see the man with the snake on his back, you call me. You call me when he comes here.”

She was lost in her thoughts again. The light in her eyes was almost gone. The song was returning.

“If he comes you call me, okay? Call me at the number on the card. Ask for Lily. She’ll get a message to me.”

She nodded but said nothing, actively retreating into her world of loss. Fong stood to go and was already out in the corridor when he heard her say as if to herself, “He wants me to come to his hotel now. Doesn’t want to come here. Wants me to go there.”

Fong looked at her in wonder and asked as simply as he could, “Which hotel?”

“The Portman.”

As he slowly walked toward the park where Lily was going to leave him the information, Fong allowed himself to really look at his city. The knowledge that if he were caught he would not see it again for a very long time seemed to sharpen his eye. What he saw thrilled and appalled him at the same time. Life in transition. Complicated. Intricate. But endlessly alive. Everything seemed to catch his attention. Hidden gardens behind high, broken-glass-topped walls. Shopkeepers splashing water from red plastic tubs to keep the summer dust down. Laundry hanging across the sidewalk dripping onto an oblivious teenager’s glutinous rice treat. Stained quilt sleeping mats draped over cheap folding chairs on the sidewalks. The Old Feeling Restaurant on Shan Xi— which old feeling was not specified. A young clerk eating ice milk on a stick within which black rice chunks were embedded—as if ants had ventured into the freezer. Restaurant windows stocked with suckable cured chicken feet. Hunchbacks and dwarves. In the open air market: strawberries and eels, pigs’ feet and squirming baby crabs, bamboo hearts and a man holding a live chicken by its wings. And a five-spice egg, although supposedly cooked in boiling water, rocks gently as the chick’s beak pierces the shell and a new life seeks the sunlight. A scrawny Shanghanese cat, with wide cheekbones and a yellow stare, wary and watching. The brutal Russian architecture of the hotel on Yan’an with the Kaige sign on top. A young man strutting with his double-deck Aiwa boom box incongruously encased in purple velvet. Large flower displays in wicker baskets outside a newly opened business, hoping for good luck. The Shanghai 21st Radio Factory. (Fong had lived his entire forty-four years in Shanghai and had never seen Shanghai Radio Factories One through Twenty.) Black velvet equestrian hats, which were all the rage for motorcyclists. Car owners dusting their pride and joys with three-foot-long feather dusters. Former great houses of the wealthy now laundry bedecked and packed— people in every closet and stairwell. And everywhere construction. Bamboo scaffoldings mounting the walls in impossible leaps and bounds, all seemingly festooned with electrical wires swaying in the late afternoon breeze. Street cobblers with rows of ladies’ shoe heels laid out on the sidewalk beside their portable benches. Street barbers. Street food sellers. Street bicycle repair men with bulbous red inner tubes exploding from black tires like fat snakes refusing to be stuffed back into the darkness. People rushing for the accordion-joined buses. Men wearing two-tone brown-and-white shoes. A waiter charging out of his restaurant with a large squirming freshwater eel in his hands. With a quick motion he slams the lithe creature against the sidewalk. There is a wet slap and the creature moves no more. The waiter smiles toothlessly. Men wearing cheap pants too large but kept up by belts which are wrapped around and around their thin waists. Practical. Chinese practical. No doubt both the pants and the belt were bought on sale. Young people sporting T-shirts with English writing on them. For some reason “Hug Me I’m Lonely” was a popular shirt. It hardly mattered. The shirt could have said Fuck Me I’m Slavic or Eat Me I Taste Good Broiled, they wouldn’t have known the difference. Near the park Fong noticed an old man shaking a Russian-made pocket watch. Fong thought this the ultimate definition of old-style faith. Not even the Almighty could have made that piece of junk work again. He saw a pregnant woman walking her belly with the special pride of those who procreate in a single-child town.

He stopped at a street vendor and bought a piece of twisted fried bread. It burned the roof of his mouth as he tried to eat it. The laughter of the woman vendor told him in no uncertain terms that he was no longer being taken for a cop. Now he was just another sucker who had bought a piece of refried dough, perhaps refried for the third or fourth time that day. He turned to look at her and was about to complain but he stopped himself. He needed his disguise. Bigger fish to fry today.

Still a little early, he passed by the mosque on Chang Le which was now a stock market. The other one, on Xinle Lu at Xiang Yang Lu, was a nightclub. He couldn’t decide which was a more unfortunate fate for a religious building.

It was after dusk when he finally neared the two small parks in the triangular patches formed by the diagonal crossing of Fuxing and Huai Hai.

In the eastern park there was a stone statue of two children dancing. There were beds of flowers but nowhere to sit. In an action that could only be described as cruel, the sittable cement sides of the flower beds had been studded with sharp iron prods, lest one needed to rest one’s weary bones. The western park was dominated by a cast iron statue of a Long Nose, his arms raised as if either teaching or pleading, it was hard to tell which. On the pedestal were the dates 1912-1935. During the Cultural Revolution all other means of identifying the twenty-three-year-old westerner had been obliterated. Old men huddled around games of Chinese checkers, not the game with marbles children play in the West. This is a complex game that resembles a cross between go and chess. The game near the statue had drawn a crowd of watchers, each sagely advising what he would do were he the player whose move was next.

Fong approached as if to watch the game and spotted the manila folder in the trash can. Lily had slid it down one side so that it was clearly visible but not easy to pluck out. As Fong moved toward the can he saw to his horror one of the city-paid scavengers approaching the basket. These people carried a wicker basket over their shoulders and an iron pincer in their hands with which they plucked specific materials out of garbage cans for recycling. One of the assignments was paper.