The Golden Mountain Murders

by David Rotenberg

  The Chinese workers were never supplied with gloves, coats, helmets or shoes and they received less than seventyfive cents a day for their efforts. When the railway was finally completed no transportation was supplied to the Chinese workers. Wherever the Chinese workers were when the “golden spike” joined the tracks from the east with the tracks from the west they were simply left – to fend for themselves – and by the way, to get out of Canada. In 1885 Canada increased the incentive to go by introducing a head tax for any Chinese man who wanted to bring in his wife and children - fifty dollars a Chinese soul. In 1900 the Canadian government got annoyed with the number of industrious Chinese men who could afford the head tax and raised it first to one hundred dollars a Chinese head, then three years later to five hundred dollars. To put that figure in context: in 1903, five hundred dollars in Canada could buy two hundred acres of prime farm land. By the end of 1923 it is estimated that the Chinese had paid $26 million in head tax. The cost to build the railway was only $25 million. In 1923 Canada had had enough of the Chinese altogether and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act that stated, “With the exception of diplomatic personnel, business people and students, no Chinese may enter Canada. No Chinese are allowed to bring their family to Canada. This ruling applies to Chinese only.” Nice of them to clarify that.

  But still the hatred lingered. In 1907 riots broke out in Vancouver’s Chinatown. In 1908 Vancouver and Victoria passed laws excluding Chinese students from attending the same schools as white children.

  Finally, in 1947 the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. The act was in place for just under twenty-four years. For that time Chinese people living in Canada had virtually no legal status. Yet, many fought – and some died – for Canada in the Second World War.

  Things have changed. In 1957 the first Chinese man was elected to Parliament. In 1965 a Chinese man was elected mayor of a major city. And now we have a Governor General who is Chinese. But there is still something missing. An apology – an official apology from the government of Canada to the Chinese people of this country who had a lot to do with making this a great nation.

  Fong put the document aside. He didn’t need to read the sixty pages of supporting material to know that the opening statement was true.

  “Where are you folks from?” Fong asked.

  “Here now.”

  “Right. But where originally?”

  “Anhui Province.”

  The phone rang in Robert’s Calgary hotel room. Robert picked it up, but before he could say anything he heard Evan’s gruff voice say, “I teach a course in Philosophy.”

  “So this would be helpful because . . .”

  “Because I teach it downtown, at night . . . to businesspeople. They love it. I’m very in, very happening, star-like, if you will.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You’re coming to town, I assume.”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “Should be there tomorrow.”

  “Call me the day after. At the very least I’ll have someone for you to talk to. But Robert . . .”

  “What, Evan?”

  “Do behave yourself – no talking with your hands.”

  “I promise. Ham and Swiss on white bread with butter.”

  “I like a bit of mayo on mine.”

  “Evan?”

  “What?”

  “It’s late.”

  “So it is.”

  “See you in two days.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  “Good.” Robert hung up the phone and looked at the bedside clock – just past two in the morning. Only one in the morning in Vancouver but clearly Evan was alone. The love of his life, Meredith, had insisted on living on her own as the disease grew in and around her. It was her way of saying that she was free – even from MS. She had at one time been a highly respected political power broker, a real behind-the-scenes operator. But not anymore.

  Robert thought of Evan. A bear of a man – roaming the darkness of his house, once their house – but now, his alone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A FIRE SCENE

  Joan Shui wasn’t happy. The preliminary report from the fire scene that unfurled from the fax machine in her Hong Kong condo struck her as cursory at best. But she hesitated to make a fuss. She was new to the Shanghai police force and all her years on the Hong Kong constabulary as a chief arson inspector meant squat to the Shanghanese. If anything, those years counted against her. Years of steady propaganda had instilled a deep loathing for Hong Kong in the Shanghanese, despite the fact that Shanghai was actively trying to out “Hong Kong” Hong Kong in every conceivable way. As well, her sponsor and lover Zhong Fong was off in the West at a counterterrorism conference. “That’s why I’m hesitating to respond to this bullshit fax,” she thought, then cast aside the thought.

  She reread the faxed report. Claptrap about a kitchen fire that got out of control. She was in Hong Kong finalizing the sale of her condo when she’d gotten the first call. The men in charge of the investigation were none too happy when she told them to fax their report to her. They were none too keen on taking orders of any sort from a woman, especially a woman who they thought of as a Westerner. She’d done her best to hold her temper when she spoke to them on the phone.

  “It was what?”

  “A simple kitchen fire. You know these people, they have kitchens now and they don’t know how to use them properly.”

  Joan knew that since the last “great leap forward” the entire population of Shanghai had basically eaten from communal kitchens – they had little choice because most Shanghanese had to melt down their kitchen utensils to meet the Beijing Government’s ludicrous demands for steel that they were supposed to produce in backyard blast furnaces. So it was possible that finally having a kitchen could pose issues. But it didn’t sound right.

  “All three are dead?” she asked.

  “Mom, pop and kid,” the cop said.

  His cell phone crackled for a few seconds – unusual in China where cell phone communication was first rate. Without the advent of cell-phone technology China could never have had the extraordinary economic growth of the past decade. There was no way to wire 1.3 billion people. But with cell phones there was obviously no need for telephone poles and trillions of kilometres of wires. Besides, cell phones were made in Chinese prisons and therefore were cheap. In fact, because cell phones came into China when they did, China never went through the early woes of cell-phone technology. In New York or London or Rome, cell phones regularly cacked out. Not in China. So the crackling sound on the man’s cell phone raised alarm bells in her head.

  “All dead. How?”

  “Fire.”

  She took a breath and told herself to keep her cool. “From burning or suffocation or body injury?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find that out for me. Then notify Lily that after I take a look, three bodies will be coming her way and we need cause of death on each. What about time?”

  “Well, the neighbour heard the boom around two in the morning.”

  An odd time to be using the kitchen, Joan thought. “How many rooms were in the apartment?”

  “Three.” The man’s voice was flat, angry.

  Naturally, she thought. He probably lived in half a room with another family on the other side of sheets strung on clotheslines to divide the place, so three rooms would strike him as offensive. “Were they rich?”

  “Recently from HK.” This time his voice wasn’t flat. The anger was open. “Oh, yeah, he worked for the department.”

  “What?”

  “He had one of those English names . . .”

  Joan held the phone away from her ear. Kenneth Lo – it could only have been Kenneth Lo and his wife and daughter. She looked out at the twinkle of lights across the bay in Macau. “They seemed to say: Kenneth is gone – an omen. Stay away from Shanghai!”

  “Three rooms, you said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “B
edroom, kitchen and what?”

  “Sort of an office, I guess. A desk, a couch that pulls out into a bed, a TV and dinner table and lounge chair and lots of electronic stuff, paintings, kids’ toys – stuff. What kind of room would you call that?”

  A room where you shoved together what you used to have in four or five rooms, she thought. Kenneth had moved his family from their six-room apartment in Hong Kong’s fancy Causeway Bay district to three rooms in Shanghai’s upscale, but modest, embassy district.

  “Was the desk destroyed?”

  “Yep.”

  “And his computers?”

  “Melted junk.”

  “Inform Captain Chen that after I take a look the computer equipment will be brought over to him.” She wondered briefly how well Chen knew Kenneth Lo. Probably pretty well. She needed Chen’s expertise; he was the only other technical expert in Special Investigations. “Tape the scene. Clear out the apartments on both sides and above and below. This is a homicide scene.”

  “What . . .”

  “Just do it. And no one but no one is to touch anything until I get there. Is that clear?”

  She hung up and called her lawyer. It was late but he agreed to meet her and they quickly settled the final arrangements for the sale of her condo. At first light she was at the airport, and by the end of rush hour she was heading towards the fire scene – towards Shanghai, towards a life with Fong. For a moment she recalled her first trip to Shanghai – six days dressed as a peasant working as a Dalong Fada courier and a troubling night when she slept with a peasant’s animals and awoke unable to catch her breath. But that was behind her, she hoped.

  Joan stood very still looking at the scorched little girl with the plastic doll melted to her tiny chest. The smell of barbecued human flesh still lingered in the room but she knew it was not as overpowering now as it would have been the day before when the fire ate this place. Now the smell lurked in the charred drywall, hid in the carpets, hung from the ceiling tiles. Just a fire scene she told herself. Just like so many she’d seen before.

  It was only when she went to take out her notebook that she realized she was crying.

  She checked to make sure that the gas outlets were turned off and that all the electrical appliances were unhooked. She wasn’t surprised to see that the food in the small refrigerator had been cleaned out. “Cop’s privilege,” she thought. What did surprise her were three sweet confections called Hostess Cup Cakes that for some reason had been left. They had been torn from their wrappers and the centre squiggle of white icing removed. Aside from some rotting tofu, they were the sole occupants of the icebox. The refrigerator itself was dented but unharmed. It was clearly not in the line of the blast.

  Once she was sure that the place wasn’t going to blow up a second time – something not unheard of in arson circles – she photographed the site in a practised manner. Slow, exact, meticulous. Then she began to go through drawers – and she came across another shock – there were baby clothes.

  “Oh, Kenneth, you didn’t.” But she knew he must have. No one keeps baby clothes without a baby. She recalled that Kenneth had taken six months to arrive in Shanghai claiming that he had business to complete in Xian – or somewhere. What she remembered was how angry Fong had been when Kenneth finally sauntered into Fong’s office, six-plus months late for work.

  She slammed the dresser drawer with the baby clothes shut and spun around. Where? She wanted to scream. They had only found the one child. Kenneth and his wife must have had a second child and hid it for fear of retribution for breaking the second child policy.

  “Oh, Kenneth, once a cheat, always a cheat,” she mumbled and then turned slowly, with real trepidation, to examine the walls of the room. Joan touched the wall and felt the heat still in it. She forced herself to make the palm of her hand move slowly along the wall about three feet above the baseboards. She circumnavigated the kitchen and the bedroom but found nothing.

  Then she took a deep breath and entered the room with the desk and the couch. She slowly pulled the burnt furniture away from the wallpapered wall. The design was badly scorched but it was a complex pattern of light vertical and horizontal lines on a dark field, with what seemed to be black dots wherever a vertical intersected a horizontal line.

  Joan ran her hand over one of the “dots.” It wasn’t a dot – it was a hole. Every dot was a hole! An air hole!

  For a moment she wanted to run. To get far away from here. But she didn’t. Instead she got down on her hands and knees and examined the baseboards. It was hard to tell – there had been so much damage from the fire. She stood and placed her hand flat against the wallpaper and slowly began to walk.

  Halfway across the second wall, which backed onto the bedroom, she felt a ridge. Right on a vertical line. She traced the line down to the floor and up about four feet, then horizontally for about three feet, then down to the floor. She tried to pry her fingers into the ridge but it wouldn’t budge.

  She stood back and looked at the rectangle she’d traced. The design on the wallpaper looked the same as the rest of the paper in the room. But then she noticed smudge marks in the very centre of the rectangle. She put her hand on the smudge marks and pushed.

  She heard a latch give before anything moved. Then the rectangle slid out on straight wheel casters. For a split second Joan wanted to laugh – a safe.

  Then her breath caught in her throat.

  And the smell of charred human flesh assaulted her.

  A tiny, once ornate, metal crib bent from the heat.

  A synthetic blanket melted to a tiny body.

  It had been a long time since she’d vomited at a crime scene but she was on her knees retching before she took another breath – and she stayed there for a long, long moment before she got to her feet and staggered to the door.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

  “It’s beautiful,” Fong said as Robert guided their rental car towards Vancouver from the international airport.

  “Rumour has it that we are under the visitor’s umbrella. Once you rent a place, the umbrella is removed and the rain starts – and never stops.”

  Fong turned in his seat to face Robert. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Robert replied.

  “Why don’t you like Vancouver, Robert? The air seems clean. There are mountains and the ocean and sunshine and space – look at all the space.”

  “If you like space, you’d love Saskatchewan,” Robert mumbled with a distinctly nasty edge in his voice.

  “I don’t understand, Robert.”

  “Fine, Fong. Vancouver’s paradise,” Robert said as he switched lanes to avoid the cars waiting to make left-hand turns off Granville Street.

  “You don’t like paradise, Robert?”

  “It’s just one of those things, Fong – let it be – fine. I don’t like paradise.”

  Fong considered replying then thought better of it and turned his attention to the road. Large singlefamily homes sat on both sides of the four-lane street. Some were hunched behind dense hedges; others were obscured by tall slender trees planted unnaturally close together. There were extravagant homes like this in the new outer reaches of Shanghai, although these houses were of an older vintage. Straight ahead, on the other side of what Fong assumed was the city centre, were snow-covered mountains. But here in the city the temperature was moderate and the sun was shining – and many pretty women in spring dresses strolled the sidewalks – paradise of a sort, surely.

  “Where are you going to start, Robert?”

  Robert allowed a car to pass him then changed lanes. “I have two contacts in Vancouver. One is actually from Toronto but he happens to be here now, but he’s a loose cannon, a really odd kind of guy. I know how to find him here but I haven’t gotten in touch. My other contact I called from Calgary. He’s an old teacher of mine who can introduce me to people who can perhaps introduce me to people. If this blood business is really big stuff
then someone will know someone who will know someone – I hope.”

  Something occurred to Fong and he hissed, “Tian na.”

  “Sorry, but my Mandarin’s a bit rusty.”

  “Tian na, it means ‘golly.’”

  “I doubt it means golly – nothing has meant golly since the fifties.” He waited for a response; none was forthcoming. “Golly what, Fong?”

  “I don’t know why, but it never crossed my mind. But is it even illegal to import blood into Canada?”

  “I’m happy to tell you that for the first time in this little venture I’m a step ahead of you. I used my Ontario law licence and logged into the law library in Calgary. It’s debatable, Fong. Raw blood is most probably illegal, but treated blood products, like those coming on that ship, are probably not illegal to import. Sorry.”

  “Not illegal?” Fong shook his head.

  “Probably not illegal,” Robert corrected him.

  “Cao ni ma de, cao ni, feng zi, bian tai, chu sheng, nao zi you mao bing!”

  “I assume those are charming home-grown cuss phrases of some sort. But I wouldn’t throw in the towel just yet. This is Canada, after all, and the province we’re in is called British Columbia – accent on the British. And with the British, shame works. Britain was shamed out of India. Can you imagine the French being shamed out of their colonial holdings – or the Germans or the Dutch or the fucking Belgians? But the British were shamed out of the crown jewel of all colonies, India. And there is enough vestigial British guilt here that, even though it may be legal, those who profit from the importation of Chinese blood could be ‘outed.’ Vancouver’s a social place, Fong – pariah status doesn’t get the missus an invite to the good parties.”