The Golden Mountain Murders

by David Rotenberg

  Alone in the room that used to be Fong’s, Xiao Ming grabbed her father’s hand. “This, this place and places like it are of us, Xiao Ming. Not of them. Not McDonald’s or computers or Lexus automobiles. We made these places. We left our souls in these places. These places now must become part of you.”

  The little girl stared at the dingy walls and the exposed wood beams. Then she smiled, “I like it here, Father.”

  Fong took a breath – a deep breath – then lifted his daughter high into the air.

  “It’s like flying here, isn’t it, papa? Flying into the past.”

  Fong smiled and looked out the window. He wondered if Xiao Ming would have to wait until her fiftieth year to fly in an airplane. Somehow he doubted it.

  The plane droned on and on. Fong couldn’t remember when he had last slept. His mind drifted to the beginnings of all this – all this blood.

  It had been a cold night and Fong was working late. The knock on his office door had been soft – like a woman’s knock. He quickly got to his feet, hoping it was Joan Shui. But when he opened the door he saw his IT man, Kenneth Lo. “What is it? It’s late, Kenneth.”

  “Success has no correct time of day,” Kenneth said in his stilted Shanghanese.

  “You’ve lost me,” Fong had said, covering the work on his desktop with a sheet of newspaper.

  “That computer you gave me?” Kenneth prompted.

  “The one from the man who was murdered by the woman who loved him?”

  “The very one.”

  Fong had sighed and returned to his desk. “The case is over, Kenneth. The woman is in prison or executed. I don’t know which.”

  To Fong’s surprise Kenneth was undeterred. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I think you’ll be interested in what the hard drive revealed about the nature of the dead man’s business. The International Exchange Institute traded . . .”

  “The case is over. Closed – not of . . .”

  “Blood.”

  Fong was on his feet before he realized it. He went to the office window and snapped open a latch. He pushed and the thing pivoted, letting in the sound of the traffic beneath. The Bund traffic, even at this hour, was very loud.

  Finally Fong asked, “Blood?” although it wasn’t really a question.

  “Yes, Fong. The dead man’s company traded in blood.”

  “Our blood?” Fong stepped from the window and smacked his hand against the wall. “I asked if it was Chinese blood this company was trading?”

  “Yes, of course it was.”

  There was a long pause, the sound of car horns honking below and faraway. A siren sounded loudly then just as quickly stopped.

  “They buy the blood in the provinces then sell it in the West, Fong.”

  “How do you know they sell it in the West?”

  “All the figures on the hard drive, except one, are quoted in US dollars. And the figures are impressive, so where else . . .”

  “What about quantities?”

  “Huge and at the time of the man’s death on a sharp ascent.”

  “Did they at least pay for the blood?”

  “Yes, Fong, they paid. He kept immaculate spread- sheets – tiny yuan notes for pints of whole blood or platelets or plasma. Always from the distant provinces. Anhui seems a favourite place for them. They pay almost nothing for the blood products and then they sell them for top dollar. The profit margins are impressive.”

  “What else did you get off the hard drive? Nothing useful like names and places I assume. You said that some figures weren’t US dollars.”

  “Estimates of the numbers of AIDS victims in Anhui. They were evidently pulled down from an American university website that has nurses there.”

  Fong felt the rage move through his blood, like an animal released.

  “Fong?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Those figures seem to have been recorded by someone other than this Bob Clayton who ran the International Exchange Institute. They were stored in a different place on the hard drive from the business figures and were protected by a different password. So I figured . . .”

  “. . . that another person did the inputting . . . the secretary?”

  “Could be – is that the woman who killed the man she loved?”

  Fong turned away. “AIDS in Anhui Province? AIDS in the backwoods of Anhui? How the fuck did AIDS get to that part of nowhere?”

  “Think, Fong. They collect blood. Blood transmits AIDS and most peasants don’t understand that blood will replenish itself so they insist that when they give blood that they get re-injected with blood later. So the guys who collect the blood take it away and remove the commercial bits of it then mix all the blood that is left together and re-inject these poor fools the next day.”

  Fong hit the solid surface of his desk three, four, five times. Then he almost shouted, “I want names and places in the West that make profit off . . .”

  “They’re not on the hard drive. Only those two codes I told you about and collection schedules from Anhui Province and other . . . ”

  “Vulnerable places.”

  “Yeah. The only name we found in association with this company outside of the dead guy is not Western.”

  “A Chinese name?”

  “Chiang Wo.”

  Fong nodded slowly.

  Chiang Wo. An infamous name. So the Chiangs had returned to the Middle Kingdom.

  And so Fong had gone to Anhui – which led him to this plane that was slowly making its descent into Calgary International Airport.

  Calgary was a confusion to Fong. Were these people speaking English? Perhaps it was that he had been up for more than twenty-four hours. Then he realized that it was just past noon here. Morning was done. The morning of which day of the week he could only guess. Fortunately a large sign with his name in bold characters caught his eye when he left the customs area. The young Asian man with the sign smiled enthusiastically and grabbed Fong’s bag as he led him to a waiting SUV.

  “We’re off to Kananaskis,” the young man said.

  Fong didn’t completely get that but he smiled and closed his eyes.

  When he awoke he was in some sort of mountain resort. The room they assigned him was so large that he expected several others to join him – although he knew they wouldn’t. He quickly showered – amazed by both the volume and pressure of the hot water and the towels – so many white towels.

  A knock at his door. Fong opened it. The young man who drove the SUV was there. He spoke a few words, in what language Fong couldn’t guess.

  “Let’s speak English,” Fong suggested.

  “Fine, sir. The delegates are gathering in the lobby.”

  Fong took the stairs down to the lobby. He was never very fond of elevators and besides he needed a little exercise after all the sitting – and on stairs you have a chance of spotting someone who is tracking you.

  The lobby was filled with men, most of whom were his age or older. They all signed in and received packets, then the convention organizers herded them outside into the cold where a photographer waited. Each delegate was given a very large, white hat. Fong had seen cowboy movies before but he assumed that things like cowboy hats were just costumes like the headdresses worn in the Peking Opera. He never thought real people wore such impractical things. But before he could contemplate this he faced a more pressing dilemma. They couldn’t find a hat that was small enough for him. Finally they stuck a hat on the back of his head and muttered, “That’ll have to do, fella.” The cowboy-hatted police officers from all over the world were posed on the steps of the lodge and the photographer finished his fiddling.

  But just before the photographer took his shot, Fong picked out a young Chinese man several metres behind the photographer. He’d seen him on the airplane. So you’re my minder are you, he thought. Well, welcome to the Golden Mountain, pardner. He allowed his eyes to sweep the crowd one more time and then returned to his Beijing “minder.” The man was younger than Fong thought he woul
d be. He had sat far forward in the plane. To stop me from running up and jumping out the front door or something, I guess, but the thought didn’t humour Fong. This one’s youth bothered him. Fong had thought that Party members would always remain older than him. Now here was this agile, well-tailored, nicely hair-cut young man.

  The man took out a cigarette and lit it.

  Fong smiled. Beijing hadn’t briefed this one well enough. These Canadians don’t like smokers much. As if on cue, the woman beside his young minder waved her hand in the cold air shushing away the smoke and said something that Fong couldn’t hear but could guess at. The minder looked at the woman, clearly lost as to what offence of etiquette he had committed. Fong thought about walking up to the minder and snatching the cigarette from his youthful mouth, but decided to forego the fun stuff – he had bigger things that needed his time and effort during his short stay in Canada. Things that his minder would not appreciate.

  Then without warning the Canadian woman reached over, plucked the cigarette from the young man’s mouth and shouted, “Filthy, filthy, filthy habit.” She threw the thing to the ground, then stomped on it as if she were driving it deep into the earth with a curse reminiscent of Jiajou Shi on the docks of Shanghai not five days ago.

  Fong wanted to cheer. Instead he shook his head. That made the large cowboy hat slip from the back of his head and slide over his forehead.

  Fong saw the photo flash from beneath the brim of the hat. The photo that appeared in newspapers around the world showed Fong sitting in the front row, his face almost totally obscured by the white cowboy hat.

  The conference itself began with footage from the collapse of the World Trade Towers – but not the footage that had been broadcast to the world. This footage had never been shown on television or even mentioned in newspapers. This footage showed people jumping from the upper levels of the towers.

  Hundreds of them.

  Some holding hands.

  Many alone.

  Was there more alone than this? Fong wondered.

  Person after person after person jumped.

  The numbness of familiarity quickly set in – even horror can be rendered banal by repetition. Then the banality sundered and fresh bright waves of horror pulsed through Fong’s heart. On the screen a young man with long hair stood on an upper ledge, some hundred stories in the air. He removed his suit jacket, folded it and placed it on the ledge. Then he looked up – something luminous crossed his face. He bent his knees and pushed – up and out. His body rose gracefully away from his perch, then his arms shot up and his body turned slowly so his feet were heavenward. Once the rotation was complete he opened his arms wide, puffed out his chest and pulled back his chin as if he were proudly accepting his death – as a groom does the arrival of his bride as she walks down the aisle to take his hand.

  Fong stared at the solitary figure – the beauty – until it left the bottom of the frame. His heart was racing. He was seeing out of the man’s eyes. Seeing the pavement approach – no – race towards his face. He thrust his arms forward as if somehow to mitigate the damage of the concussion.

  Then Fong sensed the man seated beside him looking at him. Had he spoken aloud? Had he cried out? He had said something. His heart pounded in his chest so hard that he was sure the man could at least hear that.

  The man removed his tortoiseshell glasses and polished the lenses. “Sad, huh?”

  Fong nodded, careful to keep his mouth shut and his eyes away from the man. Then he looked up once again at the screen. The second plane entered the body of the second tower – and the world changed.

  When the images stopped, Fong and the rest of the police officers were left to sit in the dark with their thoughts. Shanghai was already a huge and powerful city, its seventy-odd new towers seemed to have leapt from the ground itself. It was not hard to move from the images on the screen to the streets of his own city – to the Pudong, across the Huangpo River, where his first wife’s body lay in cold obstruction in the cement foundation of an office tower.

  The rest of the day consisted of speakers who moved from horror to horror. Dirty bombs, missing radioactive material, bioterrorism, the vulnerability of computer networks, the impossibility of protecting water, food, subways and on and on and on.

  As the litany continued, Fong slowly retreated. At least in China there was a whole civil defence structure – granted it was not really there to protect the citizenry – but it was in place and could quickly be activated. As well, Fong felt it unlikely that China would be a target just yet. True, there were Muslim rumblings in the west but sheer numbers were against them as was the willingness of Beijing to use overwhelming force if necessary to subdue any uprising. Shanghai’s new subway system was, no doubt, vulnerable and Fong listened carefully to the speaker from Japan when he talked about the Serine gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed so many. The Russian speaker’s detailed account of Chechen sabotage on Moscow’s subway system also sent a chill through Fong’s gut. Warnings of the need for evacuation routes and safe rooms for all skyscrapers followed. A tiny ray of hope came when a South African speaker addressed that issue, with a computer warning system called WATCHDOG that was linked to every computer in a building. On activation, it first flashed a warning on the screen with directions to the safe room then shut the computer down. So, as the man said, “You can’t ignore the warning as businesspeople tend to do when fire alarms go off in their buildings. Because until WATCHDOG allows it, your computers will not work. See.” With that, he switched a toggle and exclamations came from around the room. Fong looked at the blank computer screen on the lap of the man beside him. “That’s what that little button we gave you as you came into the hall allows us to do. This system is already installed in many buildings in my country and in a few on the West Coast of Canada.” Then he flicked the toggle the other way and said, “WATCHDOG sleeps,” and sure enough the computer screen on the man’s lap returned to its previous screen.

  The American speaker snuffed out what little good feeling WATCHDOG had given the room with his talk on the danger of crop dusters, which was fortunately unimportant to Fong. There simply weren’t many, if any, crop dusters in mainland China. The airline security analyst also left no impression on Fong. Air China had a very simple, very effective security system: when in doubt – any doubt – strip the passenger. Fong couldn’t understand the resistance to this approach in the West. The idea of “sanctity of the body” must have come from Christian texts because it made no sense to Fong. How could a person’s potential embarrassment about their body parts be more important than the potential safety of hundreds of people? Nonsense. Fong found it incomprehensible, but then again Fong was the grandson of night-soil collectors. That tended to make one sanguine about the niceties of human bodies.

  Near the end of the conference, however, a speaker broached a calamity that could bring his city to its knees – the idea of a man infected with smallpox let loose amidst Shanghai’s 18 million uninoculated souls.

  That night Fong dreamt the terror. He was running in Shanghai’s vacant echoing night streets, quiet, oil slick iridescence on the pavement. A desiccated countrywoman steps out of an alley – one earthdarkened arm around a filthy child, the other hand out for a bit of money. Fong shouts at the woman, “Stand back!” She opens her mouth – lips already ulcerated with open smallpox sores, her pleas surrounded by mists of saliva – death floats towards him on the cool night air. Then she throws her baby, wrapped in rags, at him. In horror, Fong watches the baby rise and shake free of its blanket, then everything slows and the infant lays out and turns slowly, head over heels, a full circle, as it opens its arms and, chin back chest out, heads towards the pavement. Fong throws himself forward to catch the soiled child. But the filthy rag blanket lands on Fong’s face. Fong calls out and thrashes, trying to get the infected thing off him until he awakens entwined in the crisp white sheets of his Kananaskis hotel room – the pale light of a cold dawn coming through the oversized window.


  Fong was pleased when precisely at 9:00 a.m. that morning Robert Cowens, the Toronto lawyer who had helped him end the life of the arsonist who called himself Angel Michael, approached his table. It was gratifying to see that the effort that had gone into contacting Mr. Cowens had paid off, although he felt bad about the necessary damage he had to do to the Internet café on Han’an Lu. How else was he to send an email to Mr. Cowens without it being traced back to him by the Beijing authorities? True, the owners of the Internet café were out of business, but such is life in the rapidly growing economy of the People’s Republic of China.

  Their greeting in the hotel’s snack bar – a turn of phrase that confused Fong – was warm but distant.

  The thing that had brought them together, the danger posed by the arsonist who called himself Angel Michael, was no more. Fong’s first wife, Fu Tsong, had talked about the instant intimacy that actors felt when they worked on projects. He never told her that it was not only actors who experienced that kind of closeness. Danger either closes the heart down or opens it wide. The situation that Robert Cowens and Fong had found themselves in only seventeen months ago in Shanghai was nothing if not full of danger.

  “You called, Inspector Zhong?”

  “Well, I emailed . . .” he picked up the idiom and smiled.

  Robert smiled back. “So you’ve been listening to the horror show?”

  “You mean the conference?”

  “I do.”

  Fong took a newspaper from his lap and put it on the table between them. “Well, yes, I have – been listening to the horror show.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think all religions should be outlawed.”

  “Very liberal of you.”

  “Is that a reference to what you call civil rights?”

  “Well, freedom of religion is thought by many to be a civil right.”