The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  Moving the barricade to one side, he pushed open one of the large steel doors.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  He called out just in case Riley and Aston had already arrived. There were no windows; his greeting fell into a black void. He remembered a heavy-duty switch at shoulder height on the wall near the entrance. All over the floor fluorescent tubes flickered into life. Over the area where the vat had stood the strip light flashed on and off and made a sound like hornets buzzing. At the far corner Chan found a stepladder with the letters RHKPF engraved on every step. He carried it to the chalk square that marked the position of the vat at the time of first discovery, climbed up to extract the fluorescent cylinder. It was held by two plastic clips containing the electrical outlets. He pulled out a long plastic plate to reveal the starter and electric cord above it. Next to the starter someone had taped a small plastic bag. He used a handkerchief to remove the bag. There was a movement on the far side of the warehouse near the door.

  “Wai? Wai?”

  Riley’s Cantonese reminded Chan of a cat fight.

  “Over here.”

  Aston followed Riley to the center of the empty floor. They stood under Chan’s stepladder. A patina of sweat covered Aston’s face. Lakes stained the chief superintendent’s shirt under the arms and contributed to the inland sea on his back. Chan replaced the plastic strip and the light. He held the handkerchief with the plastic bag in one open palm while he descended. He showed them the bag, then snatched it away from Riley when he tried to touch it.

  “Prints,” Chan said.

  Cradled in his handkerchief, he held the bag up to the light. A white powder too fine for sugar or salt, too coarse to be flour. If Riley was the next person to speak, it was number four heroin.

  “What is it?” Riley said.

  “My guess is number four heroin. Pure. Finest quality. But we’ll have to check with forensic.”

  “Funny it wasn’t found before.”

  “The tube wasn’t flickering before.” Chan disguised his professional shame with an aggressive tone.

  He picked up the ladder. As he did so, he noticed the blue-black corpses of beetles scattered around the perimeter of the white rectangle. The light caught them and transformed them into tiny iridescent carapaces, like beads from a broken necklace. He saw Riley staring at them too. He put down the steps, picked one up, beckoned to Riley.

  “Clue,” Chan said. Riley blinked. “The beetles told us the remains had been here for about seven days. Day one, flies arrive to deposit larvae. Word passes to the ants, who eat the larvae. The ants attract the wasps. By day five or six the feast’s in full swing. People who never gave dinner parties in death feed millions. Beetles are slow, though; it takes them about seven days to get here.” Chan held the beetle like a toy car. “Here they come now, trundling over rough terrain. The best has already been eaten, but they don’t mind. They prefer dry skin. When we took the vat away, they died of starvation.”

  Riley swallowed.

  “We’ve been over the place with a fine-tooth comb,” Chan continued, tossing the beetle carcass back onto the floor. “We didn’t check light fixtures because we weren’t looking for drugs. We were looking for signs of struggle, ropes, gags, scuff marks, shreds of clothing, claw marks from fingernails, torn fingernails, blood traces. Not the sort of things you find in light fixtures. We found nothing. The place is as clean as a whistle.”

  “Who owns it?”

  “A small company owned by a family who run a Chinese restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They’ve all been in New Mexico for over a year waiting for citizenship.”

  “Tenants?”

  “They’re between tenants.”

  “Other floors?”

  “We checked them all.”

  Chan took the stepladder back to the far wall, returned to where Riley and Aston were standing looking at the floor. He gripped Riley’s arm.

  “See, this is how it works. We rope off the warehouse. We establish only one route to use to and from the scene of the crime. We assign an officer to guard the scene and record all persons coming and going. We photograph and videotape the whole scene. We divide the area into zones; we search each zone. We check doors and windows. Before leaving the area, we make a list of all license plates of vehicles in the area; we obtain the names of all businesses and persons working around here; we interview everyone in the vicinity.”

  “You’ve been very thorough.”

  “Routine.”

  “And what have you come up with so far?”

  “Nothing. Except the heads that were spotted at sea-by a tourist.”

  “Any theories?”

  “The murders took place somewhere else. In Hong Kong or over the border-who knows? With lifting gear and a refrigerated lorry the vat could have come from a thousand miles away.”

  Chan and Aston watched Riley walk to one of the far walls, his footfall echoing off the raw concrete. It was like watching someone walk to nowhere from nowhere. When he reached the wall, there was nothing to do but come back again.

  “I see,” Riley said.

  On the way out Chan looked again at the flickering light and shook his head. Normally he would have checked light fixtures. The stench from the vat had driven everyone to take shortcuts.

  After agonizing, Chan slipped home midmorning with the case file. He was glad Moira had gone out. He’d said that she could stay another night-why not? He was hardly ever home. He’d given her a spare set of keys. She’d cleaned the flat during the morning, left a note to say she’d gone for a long walk.

  After leaving Riley, he had been to see Dr. Lam. There was no doubt about it: Clare was Polly; Polly was Clare. Chan knew that a brave man would sit down with Moira, put his arm around her, tell her everything, absorb some of her pain.

  He placed the file and a large bottle of scotch on the coffee table, left right away.

  14

  At the identification bureau at Arsenal Street, Chan had no trouble persuading one of the technicians, Raymond Tsim, to give up his lunch break. It was a Chinese deal: Chan would buy and deliver the takeaway noodles and pay two to one on Tsim’s bet that the plastic bag would carry no prints in common with The Travels of Marco Polo.

  In the lunchtime crowds Chan knew where he could have Tsim’s noodles in their Styrofoam box under his arm in less than five minutes. But Tsim was particular about his noodles. It was Mimi’s or the deal was off.

  Chan didn’t blame him. Mimi’s had all the characteristics of a restaurant the Cantonese respected. The waiters wrote nothing down but remembered the orders with precision. There was a deafening noise of chopsticks on plates, plates being stacked, customers sucking loudly on fish heads and egg yolks. Spittoons on the floor awaited the products of the incessant hoicking that provides background birdsong throughout Asia. The noodles were, quite simply, the best in the world. For every seated customer there was at least one other standing behind him, breathing down his neck and exerting whatever psychological pressure he could devise to make the seated one finish quickly. All over the restaurant taste buds were mercilessly excited by steaming dim sum baskets wheeled around on trolleys by scowling old ladies, who used the spittoons from time to time.

  Chan joined the takeaway line and tried to resist the temptation to jump the queue. After five minutes he took advantage of a distraction caused by the collapse of a construction of plates on a trolley near the kitchen. While everyone stared and laughed, he slipped in behind a woman who was about thirty places closer to the front. Even so it was twenty minutes before he returned to the identification bureau with the noodles.

  He was disappointed that Tsim had not yet begun the tests. The technician was absorbed in a glossy magazine with airbrushed centerfold. Chan crept silently up to where Tsim sat on a stool at his bench and admired the sensuous lines of the new IBM Thinkpad with Pentium chip, active matrix screen and sixteen megabytes of RAM with a 1.2 gigabyte hard disk.

  “Noodles,” Chan shouted in his ear.r />
  In a process that had more in common with inhalation than digestion Tsim finished the noodles in less than eight minutes, burped five times, put away the computer magazine, switched on the terminal by his right hand.

  Even a technological Neanderthal like Chan had come to pronounce one acronym with awe: CAFIS. With imported software Chan could use the computer assisted fingerprint indexing system to cross-check in seconds with every print known to central records, a task that in his early years with the RHKPF had taken days with a high risk of error. All you needed was the print from which to start the inquiry.

  Here there had been advances too. Dusting powder was still extensively used, but many of its limitations had been overcome through the use of other techniques: the marvelous Magna Brush, the astonishing argon-ion laser, iodide fuming, silver nitrate, ninhydrin and superglue. With each new invention the rate of detection spiked for a while, until the crooks caught up.

  With tweezers Tsim lifted the plastic bag (emptied of its contents, which had been sent to the chemists at Arsenal Street) out of the cardboard box that carried the case reference number and Chan’s name. With Chan watching intently by his side, Tsim jammed the top of the bag in a clamp on a small tripod. He lifted the tripod into a glass box the size of a small wardrobe and closed the box door. From outside the box Tsim was able to adjust the focus of the barrel of the laser that was inside. Also inside were a camera that automatically focused with the laser and a metal dish of superglue. With the laser focused Tsim pressed a switch that heated a hot plate under the superglue. Fumes rose and clung to tiny impressions on the plastic bag, which impressions were enhanced by the laser. Tsim pressed another switch, and the camera flashed several times.

  The technician peeled a pair of plastic gloves onto his hands, took a small retractable cutter from a drawer and sliced off the cover of The Travels of Marco Polo. Flicking arbitrarily through the thirteenth-century masterpiece, he cut out thumbed pages from the “Prologue,” “The Middle East, Kublai Khan” and “From Peking to Bengal.”

  At a chair further along the bench he used Chan’s cigarette lighter to light a small spirit lamp under a glass box. At the bottom of the box was a grill under which iodine crystals had been placed. He opened the lid on the box, inserted the front cover of the book. When violet fumes rose from the grill, Tsim blew out the spirit lamp. Chan watched while fatty matter absorbed some of the fumes. In a minute the secret record of the book’s handlers appeared: a mass of prints one on top of another as if a word-hungry army had fought over it. It was unlikely that Tsim would be able to retrieve ten clear points of identification from the chaos, but he took a photograph anyway. He removed the cardboard cover and replaced it with the first page that he had cut out.

  As Tsim worked, Chan saw that at its heart the book, handled by many, had known only one lover. The same fine finger- and thumbprints appeared at the top or bottom of each page. In the bottom corner a slim thumb had spread the spine. Chan held his breath. Here she was at last, that troubled young woman with the short hair. Still calling for help? Chan continued to look even after Tsim had taken all the pictures he needed. The violet whorls were like ridge lines on an ordnance survey map; each print was a tiny mountain of identity.

  Back in his office in Mongkok, Chan remembered to ask Aston to find the telephone numbers of the New York Police Department and New York University.

  By midafternoon Chan was restless. Moira hadn’t telephoned. That was understandable; what was there for her to say to him? But still he worried. How to explain the suicide of a victim’s mother in the apartment of the investigating detective? His twitch was at maximum mobility by the time he reached his apartment, sweating from the effort.

  She was sitting on the couch poring over the file and only grunted when he entered. He stood behind her, tried to see how far she’d read.

  “It’s all right. I already read it twice. I appreciate you doing it this way-much better than to have to break down in front of you. I already did that too-break down, I mean.” She looked up. “But you do good work over here. File’s in better shape than I’ve seen in a long while. Real quality control.”

  He glanced at the floor. The bottle of scotch was half empty.

  “I’m sorry.” His English was perfect but, on occasion, stale. There must be some other phrase gweilos used at moments like this? He said it again: “I’m sorry.”

  She grunted, stood up. Her legs were not as steady as her voice. She staggered a little on the way to the window.

  “No.” He started forward, but it was too late. She swung the window open until it crashed against the frame.

  Essence of Mongkok flooded the flat: diesel, burned monosodium glutamate, fried rice, fried noodles, dry cleaning fluid, burning rubber, burning petrol, fumes from the underground railway ventilator, hamburger, cooking oil, every human odor. In Mongkok nobody opened windows.

  Moira leaned out, screamed at the world once at the top of her lungs, coughed violently, closed the window.

  “That’s what I was waiting for you for. Didn’t trust myself to do it alone.”

  She walked back across the room toward him, steadier now. Her arms embraced him, clutched him tight. Her tears flooded down his neck. She made hardly any noise apart from the soft sucking sound of the sobs. It was minutes before he heard her voice, her face in his ear so close he could feel the fine hairs around her mouth. The voice was soft, caressing, comforting, as if the pain was his.

  “I’m going to ask you to do a terrible thing, Charlie. You can say no. But when you come home tonight, will you make love to me? I think if I don’t do one life-affirming thing today, I’ll just dry up forever.”

  15

  Although by no means the largest law firm in Hong Kong, Jonathan Wong’s catered exclusively to CIPs. As a litigation partner Chan’s brother-in-law divided the commercially important people who sought his advice into three groups. There were the rich, the very rich and the fabulously wealthy.

  Only the rich paid for their own lunches; the higher categories expected to be wined and dined, Emily Ping in particular. She was fabulously wealthy on a number of counts, but most recently her friends in Beijing had appointed her managing director of a PRC-owned development company registered in Hong Kong. The new company would raise funds in Hong Kong to develop large tracts of land along the Pearl River. As proof of her faith in the project she had put a huge slice of her own money into it.

  The Wong-Ping relationship was of a kind better understood in Asia than the West. Their families were distantly related, and they were lifetime friends. They had sat together in primary school, they had been close at grammar school, they had taken exams together and they had studied in England together, although at different universities (Emily at Cambridge, Wong at Oxford). They had never been lovers. Emily had acted as “best man” at Wong’s wedding to Charlie Chan’s sister, Jenny. In Asia some aspects of human life could still be innocent, if innocent meant uncontaminated by sexual innuendo.

  Money was different. Although Wong was from a wealthy family and would one day inherit more than a million U.S. dollars, she was infinitely richer. He owed his partnership in his firm to Emily, who insisted on channeling all her commercial work through him. In the circumstances Wong didn’t mind buying her lunch, which was on the firm in any case.

  Wong waited for her in the China Club, which occupied a complete floor in the old Bank of China building. The waiters dressed in Red Army uniforms; a huge portrait of Chairman Mao stared down on the diners; Democracy Wall posters competed with more abstract paintings from Beijing. Wong was fond of Chen Guanzhong and other PRC artists who painted with Chinese sensitivity in a Western style. The furniture was blackwood with marble. Everyone said it was a clever idea, to invoke nostalgia for Chinese communism before it was officially dead.

  Wong ordered a Bloody Mary. At a table nearby he recognized the English wife of one of his partners, to the other side of him a table for six included two lawyers and three businessmen all
well known to him and in the far corner he saw his intellectual property partner, a slim Englishman with the embarrassing habit of wearing a monocle. Hong Kong was a small town where the superrich occupied a social archipelago in which they bumped into one another all the time. As Wong sipped his drink, he saw an Englishman whom he knew to be the political adviser to the governor walk in with the mayor of Shanghai. Behind them was Emily.

  Her black Chanel suit with wide gold belt matched black stockings and black and white high heels, her substantial bust filled out a white blouse with gold buttons, she walked as straight as a ramrod and what one noticed most of all was what some claimed was her greatest business asset, her jaw. Sunbathing on the deck of a yacht, she still looked ready to climb a mountain.

  Wong heard her call out in Mandarin to the mayor of Shanghai. He turned, beaming. Cuthbert, the political adviser, stepped aside while the two old friends greeted each other. She knew Cuthbert too; the three stood exchanging pleasantries for a few moments until Emily pointed to the table where Wong sat and made her excuses.

  “Mayor of Shanghai,” Emily said, offering each cheek for Wong to kiss.

  “And Cuthbert, the political adviser.” Wong held his hands palms up. “You always know more important people than I do.”

  “I have a magic secret. It’s called working your buns off. If you’d eaten your fahn like your mummy told you and hadn’t watched all those movies, you might have got to know the mayor of Shanghai too.”

  “Boring. Anyway, how’re the tits?”

  Emily put a finger over her lips. “Shh! Not so loud!” She grimaced. “Not that good. It’s humiliating. God knows what persuaded me to have those implants; I wasn’t exactly flat-chested before. It’s not like me at all.”

  “I told you not to.” Wong pointed an accusing finger. “The feminists would shoot you.”