“By you?”
Robert shrugged.
“I am a police officer, Mr. Cowens. I’m interested in the safety of the people I am paid to protect. I have no interest in what you call civil rights. What rights are there, civil or otherwise in a city of eighteen million people if panic sets in?”
“And you think religions cause panic?”
“They justify it. They propel it.”
“How?”
“They claim there are rewards after death.”
“Well . . .”
“They claim that if you follow them you get to sing forever in some sort of heavenly chorus or you get fifty widows in the afterlife.”
“Virgins.”
“What?”
“Virgins. You get fifty virgins or eighty or something.”
“Who would want fifty or eighty totally inexperienced sexual partners?”
Robert sighed. “Let’s leave this.”
“Fine, but as a lawyer you should know that after death there is only dirt and decay and a return to the earth. Nothing more.”
“No heaven?”
“More importantly, no hell. Just a good life lived to honour the creator.”
“So you believe in a creator?”
“Of course. Where else could beauty come from? What I don’t believe is that there are rules to please the creator. That the creator is so petty that he cares whether you bend one knee or two, that you recite his name over and over again, that he watches over one person’s individual welfare and allows millions of others to starve to death. No. Only one thing pleases him – you live your life as fully and with as much respect as you can for others. Period. No other rules.”
Robert nodded.
For the first time Fong caught the edges of sadness in the Canadian’s eyes.
“How is your health, Mr. Cowens?”
Robert turned away as he said, “It could be better, Detective Zhong, it could be better.”
Odd, Fong thought. In his experience most North Americans liked to talk about their problems. Another, very un-Chinese thing to do. But here was Robert Cowens closing down conversation about himself.
“But I’m sure you asked to see me for more than old time’s sake.”
And now he was changing the subject, Fong thought. For the umpteenth time in his life Fong had to remind himself that the omnipresent propaganda that claimed that Caucasians were stupid was just that – propaganda.
“I need your help,” said Fong.
“I’m a lawyer, not a cop, Detective Zhong.”
“You can drop the formality. Just Fong is enough.”
“I feel privileged.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Several dozen con men, thieves and hookers in the Pudong also refer to me that way.”
“Ah.”
“Fine. I need your help.”
“And again the Canadian says, I’m a lawyer not a cop.”
“Cops have to obey rules over here – lawyers don’t.”
“That’s not exactly true. Fong, what is it you want from me?”
Without so much as an ahem as a segue, Fong said, “We have an incipient AIDS epidemic in rural China.”
“Are there that many gay men in rural China?”
“No. Very few, if any.”
“Intravenous drug users then?”
“Rural China is extremely poor. If there is drug use, opium would be the drug of choice. Opium is smoked, not injected.”
“Then how the hell is there an AIDS epidemic there?”
“They sell their blood.”
“Who does, the peasants?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so they make a few bucks and blood is a renewable resource after all, so good for them.”
“Good if you like them dead. Thin and dead.”
“But how . . .”
“The men who buy the blood don’t clean the needles they use to draw the blood. They don’t take precautions. They just want to collect as much blood as cheaply as they can – tough luck if you give us your blood and we give you an American dollar and some diseased blood in return that will not only kill you but could infect others.”
Robert sighed deeply. “So where does the blood they collect go to? Which comfy little American town?”
“Vancouver, British Columbia. That comfy little American town.”
Robert looked sharply at Fong.
“I know who the Chinese partner is. But he’s not the money. He’s the conduit. But it’s the money that drives all this. If I can’t stop the money behind it I can’t stop the blood trade. I can arrest the blood collectors – we call them blood heads. I can arrest fifty of them on Monday and by Tuesday morning there will be fifty different people out in the paddies replacing them. The money is just too great to pass up. The only way to stop the disease is to cut off the source of the capital that is pushing the whole thing. And that’s in Vancouver, and that’s what I need you to help me with.”
“There’s that much money to be made collecting blood?”
“No. The money is in selling it.”
“How much?”
“Tons. They pay almost nothing to the collectors and peasants in China to get the blood, then sell it at market rates throughout North America and Europe.”
Robert’s face darkened.
“What, Mr. Cowens?”
“You can call me Robert.”
“What, Robert?”
“If the source was in Toronto or Montreal it would be easier for me to find out things, but Vancouver can be a hidden world to someone like me.”
“Like you . . . a lawyer?”
“No. Like me, a Jew. But I do have an old friend who could be a good contact to the business community in Vancouver and another guy who . . .”
“Please contact them.” Fong looked up sharply. Robert followed his eye line. Beijing’s young watcher, this time without a cigarette stuck in his face, was approaching from across the snack bar.
“He your keeper, Fong?” Robert asked sotto voce.
“He is.” Fong stood and shook Robert’s hand, saying loudly, “Thank you for your advice on this matter. Thank you very much.” Then as he turned he said in a practised undertone. “It’s in the newspaper. Follow it carefully. This could get dangerous.” Without looking back to Robert he said to his Beijing keeper in furious Shanghanese, “These Long Noses really don’t know when enough is enough. And their smell – wooo.”
“Ouch!” shouted the French tourist as she grabbed her stomach. All around her in the packed street market off Julu Lu, south of Shanghai’s embassy district, Chinese faces looked away – just another damn foreigner making a fuss over who knows what.
The tourist, Francine Allaire, couldn’t care less what these Asians thought. She pulled her blouse out of her slacks and looked closely at the pinprick hole just below her navel. It didn’t make any sense to her but she could only think of one explanation for that kind of puncture. She turned to the mass of Asian faces and screamed in her high-end Parisian French, “Which of you fucking Chink assholes stuck a goddamned needle in me?”
CHAPTER TWO
THE ASSASSIN
He almost laughed at what the sparkling new Pudong International Airport considered a security check. Of course he was carrying no weapon. A folded piece of paper was a perfectly adequate weapon when in his hands – not to mention a credit card, whether the edge was filed or not. He held his hands out to either side so they could wand his body. Nothing bleeped or blopped or whatever noise this devise would make. He didn’t know the appropriate sound – he’d never been on an airplane before. It was rare for the Guild of Assassins to take an assignment outside of the Middle Kingdom.
And this time the authorities had asked for him, the teacher – not one of his students. As he waited in line to board the plane he thought of his favourite student – perhaps the only one he’d ever really loved, Loa Wei Fen. The boy had slept in his bed for many years – although nea
r the end the boy had pushed him away in the night screaming, “You stink of wet paper!”
An odd phrase that – stink of wet paper. He had thought of that exact phrase when first he heard that Loa Wei Fen had met his unlikely end in a construction site in the Pudong Industrial District. Back then the Pudong, across the Huangpo River from the Bund, was a place in transition. The old shanty towns had been pulled down and replaced with massive construction pits – teeming with labourers. Now, ten years later, those huge holes in the ground housed the foundations of seventy of the most modern skyscrapers in the world. Loa Wei Fen had helped that come to be – had been a midwife to the birth of the New China.
There is no notion of the nobility of martyrdom in China – but sacrifice, although not honoured, is understood. Dying for one’s country is considered the act of a fool. The Guild of Assassins had mourned Loa Wei Fen’s passing with a three-day fast and then a week of contests. But no one had mourned more deeply than Loa Wei Fen’s teacher and bed partner who now, in his mind’s eye, reviewed each of the one-on-one combats. Then he considered the surprise winner – a girl. He wondered what her future held as he handed over his boarding pass at the second security check in the boarding lounge.
He found this security check as ludicrous as the first one. He was not some moron with plastique in his shoes and matches in his pocket. He was a trained and practised assassin, and had been for many, many years.
On the plane the attractive cabin attendant offered him a hand, as if he needed help walking down the aisle. That was good. Age is a fine disguise for an assassin. Fong passed by him and he noted the man’s gait, his slight stoop, his dark liquid eyes that were in constant motion – and the hands that had killed the boy he loved, Loa Wei Fen.
The old assassin closed his eyes. But he did not sleep. He roamed his memory leaping from one floating pod of images to the next. His mother crying as he was pulled from her grasp by his father and handed over to his uncle who recruited for the Guild. His uncle’s strong hand and stern voice telling him that he had been greatly honoured. His early schooling in the province west of the Wall. The sudden move to Taipei. The first time the power had roared through his arms and his opponent had been flung clear across the room. The Tibetan woman who had taught him the use of the swalto blade, then the night she had come to his bed and first made him a man then rolled him over and cut the outline of a cobra onto his back. Even now he could will the ancient red welts to life, fangs dripping, hood full of blood. But no reason to – not here. Not now. Zhong Fong was at the back of the plane. His contract was to follow and execute when so instructed.
Fine.
He’d done it many times before when the government had seen fit. Although he preferred the old ways – swalto and strong hands – he had also adapted to the new. The disappearing plane with political opponents on board. The collapsing building when an executive board meeting is taking place. The unaccountable fire – like the one that would take place in just over seventy-two hours in the apartment of computer expert Mr. Kenneth Lo. But he preferred the old. Poison was a special interest of his – and snakes. Poisonous snakes. Without willing it, the welted lines on his back filled with blood and the cobra awoke.
The plane hit air turbulence and the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign came on. He made as if he didn’t understand the announcement. The cabin attendant leaned over him and did up his belt. He allowed himself to take in her odour.
Sweet, like fruit left just a little too long in the sun.
She would suffice if he needed to use her – fleshy enough to be a shield. But he doubted he would need her “assistance.”
The plane travelled on through the night but he did not sleep. The sense of movement that so few others on the plane felt was minutely evident to him. He felt every directional shift. At one point before dawn the plane ceased its northward march and turned east – towards the West. Turning east to get to the West – to the Golden Mountain.
He remembered the “party” at Tiananmen Square and the boy with the flower standing in front of the tank. His young assassins had infiltrated the protestors and awaited his order. A single dead boy with a flower might have been enough to do the trick. A murder from inside their own ranks would have scared the protestors in a way that an army assault would not. A murder from within is so Chinese – so recognizably Chinese – that terror would have sped through their ranks and unleashed the thing that Chinese people fear most: chaos. The protestors would have slunk away with wary sidelong looks at each of their comrades and a deep sense of betrayal in their hearts. How much wiser that way than the frontal assault that eventually was used by the authorities. Wiser and more generous to life.
The old assassin saw no contradiction between his job and the desire to save life. He was an arm of diplomacy. His people had marched with Q’in She Huang when the mad tyrant first united China. They had been there when the Chinese invented gunpowder. When a Chinese junk circumnavigated the world almost two hundred years before the silly Italian bumped into the Americas. A whole section of The Art of War was written by a direct ancestor and four chapters based on the exploits of another early member of the Guild of Assassins.
He stroked his whiskers. Yes, we are very old in a very old world, he thought, then added, we are surely the oldest weapon of state, the only one that existed then and exists now. An attendant asked him if he would like a pillow. He shook his head. In all his years he had never slept with the aid of a pillow, never accepted the need for softness.
Love – yes. He’d needed that but it had been taken from him. Now he would revenge the death of his love, of Loa Wei Fen – even if his political masters didn’t want it so.
Zhong Fong passed by him, heading towards the bathroom in the front cabin. The old assassin studied him again. He had been tracking the inspector for the better part of a month. Nothing about him seemed unusual. But he knew this man was a worthy quarry. He must be. He had managed to kill Loa Wei Fen, the best student he had ever trained in the academy. Such a man must have some resources that he keeps to himself. A secret wellspring of knowledge – and perhaps power.
Women see it, he thought. And the man’s little girl. I do not yet, and I will not attack until I do.
The attendant’s hand came in front of him and lowered a table. Onto it she put a plate of what the old assassin thought must be food. He picked the icing off a slice of carrot cake and ate it. As he was losing his teeth, his love of sweets was increasing. He examined the rest of the “food” in front of him. He cracked a small hard paper tube hoping it would reveal a candy but was disappointed to find it to be salt. No more sweets. He sat back. He would not be eating anything else, although he looked at each dish closely and enumerated the number of ways that both the implements and the food itself could be used to kill an opponent. He was seventy-four years old. His teeth were bad but his body was as well toned as a well-conditioned man half his age. The enamel of teeth rots, but sinew and tendon, the real source of physical power, age well if they are looked after. And his sinews and tendons had been extended and strengthened by exercise every day for the past seven decades. He smiled, closed his eyes and waited. “We began in patience,” he heard his first teacher whisper in his ear. “Be still. Listen to the room, feel the earth spin and sense the power of your chi deep within – like a cobra raising itself – then flaring its hood.”
CHAPTER THREE
A DEAR ROBERT LETTER
Robert slipped the newspaper Fong had left on the table beneath his arm and headed back to his hotel room. In the elevator he began to feel silly – like he was playing spy or something. But when he took out his card to unlock his hotel room door he wondered how to tell if someone had been in his room while he was gone. Something about putting hairs across the door jamb or something – he wasn’t very fond of spy movies.
He locked his door, put on the safety catch and then spread the newspaper on the bed. There, in the innermost fold was a set of notes, instructions printed in remarkably tiny a
nd precise block letters. Almost prissy, he thought. It occurred to Robert that Fong drew his letters rather than wrote them.
Mr. Cowens:
I have not yet involved you in anything dangerous. However if you choose to meet me at the place indicated at the end of this note then you are involved and perhaps in danger. I am not trying to frighten you. I am trying to give you what I believe lawyers call full disclosure. Read this and if you do not wish to proceed please destroy these notes. Cut them into small pieces then burn them in the sink of your hotel room. Not all at once as a lot of smoke may set off a fire alarm or worse a sprinkler system. Once the notes are completely ash, crush them then wash them down the drain. Allow the water to continue to run for a few minutes. I am not trying to be dramatic, Mr. Cowens, just careful.
All of this started during a previous investigation. At the time I impounded a computer from a Shanghai company named the International Exchange Institute. The owner of this company had been murdered by his secretary. I gave the computer over to our expert in these matters, a man named Kenneth Lo who had recently joined our office from Hong Kong like Joan Shui, who you met. Kenneth is someone who I think you would probably quite like.
Robert wondered what Fong meant by that.
Well, at the time of the investigation, Kenneth came to me and told me that if he worked too quickly on the hard drive from the International Exchange Institute that he raised the likelihood that the machine would self-destruct – something about tripping electronic erase commands, booby traps – I admit I didn’t follow his technical talk. At any rate I informed him that he should take his time – that I wanted the information on that hard drive. I wanted to know what the dead man’s company was trading.
Months later, well after the case had come to a successful but unhappy conclusion, Kenneth, knocked on my office door. It was very late and the cold of the winter was upon us.
Fong related the events of that meeting with Kenneth Lo that sent him to the back country of Anhui Province and then eventually to Calgary.
The Golden Mountain Murders Page 5
