The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  As he drew closer to Central, the banks expanded and took over. From small shops with single electronic tellers in the wall they grew into great palaces with banking halls as lofty as railway termini. At the heart of it all rose the futuristic Hong Kong Bank with construction tubes all on the outside like a person clothed in his own intestines. And behind it, soaring above all else, the Bank of China with its sharp angles designed by the Chinese-American I. M. Pei. People who believed in fung shui (Chinese geomancy) said that the sharp edges were a Chinese thorn pressing into the heart of Hong Kong.

  Chan turned left down an underpass leading to the waterfront. At the machines with the steel revolving bars he inserted some coins, joined a small crowd waiting for the next Star Ferry to Kowloon.

  He sat at the front of the boat with the island and its manic skyline behind him. On Kowloon side the buildings were much lower because of the flight path to the airport. A familiar advertisement for Seiko watches was obscured by the top deck of a Viking Line cruise ship that had docked for a shore visit and refit. Sampans swarmed at the bottom of its steep walls; women with gold smiles and gold Rolex watches worked like mountaineers from flimsy platforms suspended by ropes from the decks. For speed, efficiency and economy there was no better place to repaint a large ship. Even the QE2 underwent a refit whenever she visited.

  On the second floor of the Ocean City complex, under a layer of congealed sweat, he finally arrived at the Standard Bookshop, one of the few well-stocked English-language bookshops in the territory. Chan went to the travel section, tried to find authors beginning with P.

  Western tourists favored glossy picture books about China featuring the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the underground army of Xi’an, but the serious China section was the most active; there was a new book about Chinese history, economy, politics almost every week. Everyone wanted to know what China would do next, not least the Chinese. Marco Polo was not there though. An assistant found him in the classics section.

  He liked to handle books before he bought, dipping here and there, guessing what kind of person it was who had had the gall to commit his or her thoughts to print. In the present case he had to guess too at the kind of modern young American woman who would buy such a book. Not your average drug-and-sex Bronx street kid, or a typical corporate woman either. Ever since Moira had left, he’d been having trouble with Clare, her life and times. To lay siege to the Mafia as the last bastion of male privilege was certainly quixotic, if not suicidal. Could an eight-hundred-year-old Italian help?

  “Several times a year parties of traders arrive with pearls and precious stones and gold and silver and other valuables, such as cloth of gold and silk, and surrender them all to the Great Khan. The Khan then summons twelve experts, who are chosen for the task and have special knowledge of it, and bids them examine the wares that the traders have brought and pay for them what they judge to be their true value.”

  Not a romantic Italian after all; the book was more an early edition of the ever-popular Trading with China. He paid for it and telephoned his office from the bookshop. He had wanted to speak to Aston, but Riley answered. The instructions he had intended for Aston he gave to Riley. The chief superintendent seemed grateful to run the errand.

  When he returned to the station late the same afternoon, he found Riley waiting in the small evidence room in the basement of Mongkok Police Station marked CHIEF INSPECTOR CHAN: MURDER ENQUIRY, NO ADMITTANCE. It seemed to Chan that he was standing as far away as possible from the large industrial mincer that squatted like a heavy gun emplacement on a trestle table in the middle of the room. Chan looked at two plastic Eski boxes, one large and one medium size, from which Riley was also distancing himself.

  “The morgue didn’t have anything suitable, so I had to buy these out of petty cash. Actually, the total was over my limit for petty cash, but there wasn’t anyone around to ask approval, so I went ahead anyway. Got a ten percent discount on the two.”

  Chan grunted.

  “Perhaps you’ll countersign the form in due course?”

  Chan grunted again. Ever since the great police scandals of the seventies and the founding of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, senior officers had talked like checkout girls.

  “Sure. You did well.”

  Riley tried a beam, settled for a frown. “Bit gruesome. Not that it bothers me, seen some things in my time, I can tell you. I expect it’s just routine for you?”

  Chan picked up the larger of the boxes, placed it on the table next to the mincer. “You should see my fridge.”

  He opened the box. Two frosty Chinese heads lay broken face to broken face on a misty layer of dry ice. White smoke rose from the box like a dragon. With both hands Chan lifted one head out, closed the box.

  The mincer’s funnel was inches out of reach.

  “Would you mind?” Chan said.

  Riley rushed to find a chair.

  “Another. I’d like you to look.”

  Standing on chairs on opposite sides of the table, Riley and Chan peered into the funnel. Their nostrils filled with the hearty odor of the sea. Apart from a battering at the edges and scraps of seaweed, the machine bore no signs of its sojourn at the bottom of the ocean other than a smell like oysters. Chan studied the shape of the funnel that narrowed toward the large screw that pulled in the meat and forced it against the double grinding blades beneath. Chan held the head by its black hair, now matted with frost. Jekyll-or was it Hyde?-had lost color during his stay in the morgue. His eyes were glazed, and his cheeks gray as stone.

  Riley’s nerves made him garrulous. “Seems to be grinning. I suppose that’s because they cut off his lips. Damned wicked thing to do, in my view. You know, I just don’t think… I mean-”

  “You mean it’s not the sort of thing a white man would do?”

  “Yes-I mean no. Of course that’s not what I mean.”

  Of course. “Imagine a nose, would you? How far out would it stick? A little Chinese nose, I mean, not a great Caucasian conk.”

  Riley looked at Chan’s nose, which managed to be small, flat, cruel and aquiline at the same time.

  “Add a half inch for ears too. Now, watch.”

  Chan lowered the head into the funnel. It slid in neatly until the frozen section of neck rested on the screw.

  “Even with a half inch each side for ears and, say, three quarters of an inch for the nose, it would still mince-don’t you think? Riley?”

  Chan left the head in the bottom of the mincer, ran around to the other side of the table, caught the tottering chief superintendent.

  “Steady, sir.” Chan sat him down in the chair, shook him. Riley groaned.

  “Good Lord.” Set into a bland face, a child’s frightened eyes looked up at Chan.

  Chan walked back to the other side of the table, climbed back on his chair, retrieved the head from the mincer, placed it on the trestle, took out the other. Like his companion, the small Chinese fitted the bottom of the mincer with millimeters to spare. Clare’s head was larger, however. It would not have minced without further mutilation.

  Chan replaced Clare’s head in the icebox, looked at Riley, who was staring at him.

  “An interesting experiment, without any firm conclusion,” Chan said.

  By then Riley was on his feet, a hand over his mouth. Chan opened the door for the chief superintendent on his way to the washroom. Pensive, Chan lifted the Chinese head from the trestle by the hair. Thawed now, the jaw dropped open as if the owner had finally decided to talk. Chan noticed the broken incisors and, toward the back, tiny flecks of something dark jammed between gaps in the teeth. On checking the other two mouths, he found similar particles. From a secretary’s desk outside the evidence room he called Dr. Lam. It was late Friday, but the odontologist seemed happy to meet at the morgue the following morning.

  Shades of gray: steel gray for the bench top; government gray for the walls; blue-gray for the blades of butcher’s instruments hanging from hooks above the postmort
em table. The air, tinged with formaldehyde and ether, was gray too. Chan wouldn’t have minded if he could have had access to nicotine, but a No Smoking sign was strident in blood red on stark white. He watched while Lam pulled the heads out of a gray steel box packed with dry ice and tossed them onto the bench with professional flamboyance. Frozen now, the mouth that had seemed to want to speak the day before was resolutely shut and resisted Lam’s strenuous efforts to open it. Chan used his eyes and chin to indicate the door.

  “Coffee?”

  Only thawing would overcome postmortem omertà, and smoking was permitted in the gray canteen on the first floor. When they returned ten minutes later, hinge joints had warmed and freed, but new condensation on the metal table formed a piste on which the heads skied away from Lam’s reach. The dentist looked around. Everything except a head clamp apparently. Chan grunted. From the opposite side of the bench he leaned over and with his face turned away held open the jaws while Lam probed. Through the bones in his hands Chan felt the vibrations as the dentist began to scrape with a steel instrument. Every few seconds Lam cleaned the point on a stiff sheet of transparent plastic. In less than ten minutes the dentist was tossing the heads back into the box.

  “You’re right, there are particles in the mouths that might not be food.” He pointed to a minuscule pile of scrapings on the plastic.

  “What could it be?”

  “Impossible to say. There’s not enough of it for anyone in Hong Kong to analyze properly. You’d need Scotland Yard to take it down to molecular level.” He gave the scrapings a glance and shrugged. “Up to you.” He adjusted the thick glasses on his nose. “You could feel pretty stupid if it turns out to be bay leaf or some herb that was in a meal they shared before they died.”

  At the steps of the morgue Chan lit a Benson while he watched the dentist be driven away by his chauffeur in his black Mercedes. And they said cops were insensitive. With a plastic bag in his pocket containing the scrapings he took a taxi to Arsenal Street, left the bag with forensic and walked up to Riley’s office to fill out the forms: RHKPF form hm91: “request for permission to seek scientific assistance overseas (if the agency you wish to consult is not Scotland Yard, give reasons). This form should be typed in quadruplicate.” Chan looked around Riley’s empty office: no typewriter, no carbon sheets, only a state-of-the-art printer. He completed the form in black ballpoint and left it in Riley’s in tray.

  Most of the rest of Riley’s corridor echoed with Saturday morning vacuum. He was surprised to see Angie on the stairs in jeans and T-shirt, taking a mug of tea back to her studio. She turned away quickly when she saw him, then changed her mind and faced him with an exaggerated pout. Brought to a halt on the stairs, Chan fidgeted, tried a grin.

  “Hi.”

  “You bastard.” She said it with a sly smile, though.

  “I should have phoned. Sorry.”

  She sighed. “That’s all right, mate. I understand. Come here a minute. I’ve got something to show you.”

  He followed her into her studio. She nodded at the easel, where she had clipped a wad of sketches. Angie sipped from her mug. “You were right about one thing.”

  From the easel the blond boy smiled out. It was an excellent likeness.

  “Check the others.”

  Chan lifted the sheets one by one. Blond boy in T-shirt, blond boy in bed, blond boy with erection, blond boy in centerfold pose.

  “You’ve captured him very well.”

  She curled her lips into a sneer. “At least Australians know what our bodies are for.”

  Chan steered a course across the room and around her, back to the door. “Sooner or later the rest of the world will catch up.”

  “Wanker.” The word bounced off the walls as he hurried down the stairs.

  32

  Often on Saturday afternoons Chan went to a beach or pier to watch the human species migrate from land to water. Square miles of sea disappeared under a counterpane of sampans, junks, tiny catamarans, seventy-foot sailing yachts, snakehead boats, twin-engine motor cruisers, board sailors, swimmers, divers, snorklers, water scooters, fleets of sailboats of a specific class competing in races, very large luxury yachts that almost deserved to be called ships. There was no real need to stare and yearn; he could have bought a small dinghy or rejoined his diving club. Ever since his divorce he had tended to deprive himself of pleasure, although he could not have explained the connection.

  For example, the Emily was a 120-foot triple-decker, the largest pleasure boat in Hong Kong, fully equipped with compressor and diving equipment, and Chan had refused the invitation to spend the weekend on it. When his sister, Jenny, had insisted, he had finally given in as a kind of social duty, like grave sweeping and writing Chinese New Year cards.

  He rode the underground from Mongkok, emerged at Central and took a taxi to Aberdeen. The marina was a large crescent with floating wooden docks attached to a spacious club that sold debentures to large corporations and consulates. The biggest boats berthed along a finger that pointed at the famous three floating restaurants where all tourists must eat once. Top heavy with lions and dragons in gold, red and green, they had emerged out of Western fantasies of mysterious China and were still cashing in. The Emily took up a double berth at the end of one finger with her stern pointed toward the largest of them.

  Chan could see her from the other side of the marina. Her hull was white with blue trim, her triple-deck superstructure blue with white trim. The paintwork was polished to a mirror finish. In the heat she undulated as if she were her own reflection. At the forward end the two lower decks ended in tinted wraparound glass. Emily was a billionairess in designer sunglasses.

  Chan wore white shorts, T-shirt, plastic thongs and carried a light backpack with his scuba gear, change of clothes, one book.

  People were spilling all over the marina, scrambling to find the boats they’d been invited to sail on or rushing with last-minute repairs to engines, sails, lines, halyards, outboards. On the Emily, though, a permanent crew kept the boat in readiness for the owner’s whims.

  Only Jenny was there to meet him. He kissed her on both cheeks, hugged her, studied her belly that seemed as flat as ever.

  “When?”

  “End January.”

  “My God, you’re as beautiful as ever.”

  She touched his nose. “Don’t flirt with your sister; it’s against the law.”

  Chan grimaced. “Pity.”

  “There are twelve cabins-berths to you. Jonathan and I have chosen ours, and of course Emily will have the what d’you call it?”

  “Stateroom.”

  “Exactly. So that leaves ten for you to choose from.”

  “No one else is coming?”

  Jenny hesitated. “There’ll be one or two. You know how these high-powered people are; they always manage to drag along someone terribly important at the last minute. But since you’re so early, you can select your own accommodation.”

  He followed Jenny below to a narrow corridor lined with polished teak. She turned to him with a grin.

  “Want to see the stateroom?”

  “Sure.”

  A solid teak door, arched, with “Stateroom” emblazoned in brass over the arch waited at the end of the corridor. Inside Chan saw a low king-size bed with red sheets, a panoramic window in curved tinted glass, polished teak wardrobes and chests all built into the curves of the hull, a red Chinese carpet with the double happiness character in gold in the center, a nautical writing desk with brass fittings and a brass lamp screwed to the top. Inside a polished bamboo and glass cabinet were a dozen opium pipes of the kind everyone collected. He gazed at a television/video/stereo/laser disk combination opposite a white three-seater leather sofa. Chan picked up the remote control, pressed a button. A Cantopop number with exaggerated bass and treble bounced from the walls. He turned it off.

  “Wow.”

  “Wait till you see the bridge. Of course I don’t know anything about it, but everyone says what a great
bridge it is.”

  Chan saw that Jenny and Jonathan had taken the cabin two doors away from the stateroom. The cabin next to it was therefore empty. Chan chose another, on the other side of Jenny and Jonathan, three doors away from the stateroom. It was a third the size, but there was a tiny en suite toilet and shower, a white bathrobe and an oil painting of a sampan above the bed. Looking through the porthole, he judged the water to be only two feet below.

  Jenny led the way. He marveled at how easily she had adapted to wealth; the multimillion-dollar vessel could have been her boat.

  On the bridge chrome beading two inches up the walls trapped a thick red carpet. Two stainless steel swivel chairs with black leather upholstery rose on deep chrome pedestals to preside over an arcade of computer screens.

  “My God, there’s even a fish finder,” Chan said.

  “Sometimes Emily has guests who like game fishing.”

  “Really? Like who?”

  Jenny glanced at him. “Who d’you think? Nobody loves ostentatious wealth like Communist cadres. But let’s not get into that. Jonathan and I have patched things up. I promised not to offend his friends so long as we saw less of them.” She wagged a finger. “So don’t you start asking questions and making everyone nervous.”

  Chan sat in the master’s chair. “Not if I’m allowed to play in here. Just one question, First Sister. Why was I invited?”

  Standing close to him, Jenny frowned, pushed the throttle up and down like a toy. “First, I wanted to invite you. Apart from ten minutes at the party I haven’t seen you for ages, and when I have the baby, I expect there’ll be no time for anything else-that’s what everyone says. And Emily specifically asked Jonathan to bring a guest who has nothing to do with his work. She remembers you from the party.”

  “I’m the one who investigates grotesque murders. I bet she’s delighted with your choice.”

  “Actually she wanted you to come. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “You mean laid?”

  Chan dodged but not quickly enough to avoid her jabbing elbow. In fights she’d always been quicker than he was. “Don’t set your sights so low, you crude cop. She’s single.”