The Golden Mountain Murders

by David Rotenberg

  “We don’t – yet,” said Fong as he rose to leave.

  The Tong leader stepped forward, blocking Fong’s exit, “Who was following you today, Inspector?” With a forced nonchalance he added, “It wasn’t your Beijing watcher who, by the by, is finally on his way to Vancouver from Calgary, or the police. So who else is out there, Inspector?” The man’s voice was etched with an odd fear.

  “I don’t know,” Fong replied. “Probably no one.”

  That sat in the air like something big and fat.

  “Where will you stay tonight, Inspector?” asked Matthew.

  “You’re welcome to stay in one of our fine establishments,” said the Tong leader with a smile.

  “Thanks, but whorehouses . . .”

  The head of the Tongs took a step forward.

  Fong backed off a pace and canted his head in a simple apology. The Tong leader accepted by bowing in like style.

  Finally Fong said, “I have to have time to myself. I thank you for your offer. You all know how to contact me and I know how to contact you.” He turned on his heel and left.

  Fong found his way to Jericho Beach across from West Vancouver. There, arrayed before him, were the great ships of many nations awaiting off-loading in the Port of Vancouver. Far up the estuary huge cranes swung and gripped and off-loaded the cargo of the world – the Pacific world.

  The beach lay before Fong. Several campfires dotted the wide arc of sand welcoming the dying of the sun.

  And lovers.

  Many lovers – kissing.

  Fong found himself thinking of the women that he had known in his life. If there was a god, women were certainly his gift to Fong. His first wife Fu Tsong, Lily and now Joan Shui, whose information he was now awaiting.

  To one side, a couple stopped and, seeking the privacy of the side of a large tree, kissed and fondled and entwined. Fong couldn’t help himself. He watched like an old man in a window remembering the glory of the touch of mouths – the awe of kissing. It occurred to him that as sex entered his relationships, kissing faded away. Yet there was something so intimate about kissing. So volitional. So much a choice.

  He tasted the salt air on his tongue and forced himself to move farther down the beach. Then his cell phone rang.

  The connection was bad.

  Fong had never spoken long distance across an ocean before. He had images of wires going beneath the sea – the idea of signals bouncing off satellites simply didn’t enter his way of thinking.

  “Hold on to your hat, if you’re wearing a hat, Fong.”

  Joan’s voice was suddenly clear, as if she were sitting beside him on Jericho Beach watching the lovers stroll and touch and caress.

  “Fong, I said hold onto your hat.”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “So answer, jeez.”

  “So I’m holding onto my proverbial hat. What have you found?”

  “Kenneth Lo and his whole family are dead.”

  “What?”

  “Their apartment was firebombed – a cheap but effective timing device that could have been set days ahead, then plastique with a planche. Not exquisite but a pro for sure.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  Fong held the phone to his chest and tried to calm his breathing. Joan heard the sound of his heart and she was suddenly afraid. Finally Fong spoke into the phone. “Are you sure? I’m sorry Joan. I’m not questioning you, I’m just . . .”

  “. . . upset, Fong? This was arson. I actually found bits of the timer and there was evidence of directionality. It was set to go while they were asleep. All four died . . .”

  “Four!”

  Joan explained. Fong cursed his own stupidity – six months to complete business in Xian – and Fong had agreed. As if a man like Kenneth Lo would have business of any kind to finish up in Xian of all places. But he said none of this. What he said was, “Go through it slowly for me, Joan.” She talked him through her findings. He asked a few questions about the wallpaper, the baby crib, the icing pulled off the cupcakes in the refrigerator and the condition of the computer.

  “I got the hard drive over to Captain Chen, but between the inferno and the water they used to put out the blaze . . .”

  “Yeah,” Fong said, cutting her off more abruptly than he intended. “I needed the International Exchange Institute’s computer to tell us who their lawyer was. The Vancouver Tongs haven’t been able to find the lawyer either. Fuck, I need the name of that lawyer, Joan.” He paused. “Joan, do you remember the woman who murdered the man she loved?”

  “The Chinese woman who put an itty-bitty gun to the temple of her Long Nose lover?” she asked. What she thought was, Who could forget?

  “So do you remember or not, Joan?”

  “I remember.”

  Fong slowed his breathing again. Joan was the smartest, most intuitive woman he’d ever known. And she was a cop – and he didn’t want her to put all the pieces together. Specifically that he had insisted that Kenneth Lo return to his office a second time in the middle of the day, carrying the International Exchange Institute’s computer. Fong had virtually paraded Kenneth around with that damn computer. Fong knew there were snitches in the department and was sure that Kenneth’s visit with the computer would be reported to someone who knew someone. And the word would be out: Fong’s on your trail. It was the only way he knew to get the blood traders to track him, not Kenneth Lo, but him, and maybe, by doing so – show their hand.

  “Fong!” her voice was strong and angry in his ear. “Fong!”

  He let out a long line of breath. He had known from Kenneth’s first visit, late at night, that there was a connection between the International Exchange Institute and the blood trade. He’d needed the blood traders to make a move, put prints in the dust, scurry, and he’d used Kenneth’s second visit in broad daylight to set all this in motion, and now Kenneth and his wife and his two children were dead. “Joan, I need the name of that law firm.” He spoke quickly. He didn’t want her to interrupt him to accuse him of Kenneth’s death. “Find the woman who killed the man she loved and press her for that.”

  “Will the prison let me talk to her, Fong?” Her voice was hard but not accusatory.

  He let out a sigh of relief. “You’re with Special Investigations. Cajole, threaten, do whatever you have to do, but get in to see her. Get hold of Chen and have him work on that computer. Maybe the fire didn’t do as much damage as they wanted. Joan?”

  “Yeah?”

  He wanted to ask her if she understood what he had done. If she forgave him. But he couldn’t ask. All he could think of doing was ask, “What’s the time back there?”

  “It’s just before dawn.”

  “The sun’s setting here.”

  Neither mentioned that they were also a day apart. It was Tuesday morning in Shanghai but only Monday evening in Vancouver. Long-distance silence descended on both of them.

  “I’ll go see the girl as soon as I can.”

  “Let me know what you find.”

  She didn’t say anything. The click of the line disconnecting was the loneliest sound Fong had heard in a very long time.

  Fong took a breath and watched a young woman silhouetted against the flames of a campfire remove her blouse and snuggle close to her boyfriend. He walked down the beach, and Kenneth’s ghost walked beside him.

  “It could get dangerous,” Fong had warned Kenneth in their last meeting.

  “Blood’s like that, Fong – life-giving, life-taking – dangerous,” Kenneth had responded with that confidence that was so common to Hong Kongers.

  Fong looked past Kenneth. He had purposefully left his office door open and insisted that Kenneth bring the CPU from the International Exchange Institute with him. And as he had known, eyes from the other rooms had snuck peaks at the man from Hong Kong and the computer he carried. Shrug and Knock, the party-hack assistant who had been forced on Fong, went so far as to actually come into the office and hand over a
sheaf of papers to Fong with a terse, “Signatures needed.”

  “What’s he looking at?” Kenneth asked jauntily.

  “You,” Fong wanted to say but only managed to mumble something about fucking party political appointments.

  “Well, be that as it may,” Kenneth began and launched into a twenty-minute explanation of holding companies, shares in public companies and, finally, end users.

  “End users? You mean the buyers of the blood?”

  “Not really, Fong. The buyers are like wholesalers. They sell to retailers who then sell to the end users.”

  “You mean clients then?”

  “Yes, Fong. We have the beginning in Anhui Province. We have the retailers in the two Vancouver postal codes – both hospitals. The clients are the ones who actually pay for the blood products.”

  “Fine, Kenneth, but I’m not interested in arresting the peasants in Anhui Province who gave the blood or some sick old lady in Vancouver who needs a blood transfusion. I want to get to the money behind all this.”

  “I know, Fong. But maybe the only way to do that is to work from both the end and the beginning towards the middle where the money is.”

  Fong made a face as he thought his way through that. He’d chosen to work directly from the middle – the money. That’s why he’d insisted that Kenneth appear openly, at midday in his office with the computer.

  “Smile, Fong – things could be worse. At least we have an end and a beginning – and we have something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Me and whatever else I can find on this CPU,” Kenneth announced as yet another cop invented a reason for walking past his open office door, “and all the secrets I can release from this little ol’ CPU.”

  Fong looked out the window.

  Kenneth got up to leave but stopped at Fong’s office door, “Question?”

  Oh, shit, don’t ask me, Kenneth – don’t ask me why I ordered you to come to my office with that fucking CPU in broad daylight, Fong thought. But what he said was, “Ask.”

  “Do you know a good school? My daughter’s almost ready to start school.”

  Fong put on his best smile, “I’ll ask Lily. How’s your family settling in? Business all done in Xian?”

  “All done,” Kenneth said, then something dark crossed his features and disappeared as quickly as it arose. “We all love Shanghai.” Then he quickly added, “All three of us love it. What’s not to love, huh?”

  And he was gone.

  And Fong was alone walking on a Vancouver beach seeking the darkness and a way to forget Kenneth Lo and how he had used him and his family. He wanted a place to rest and renew himself for tomorrow’s terrors.

  He looked across the water, and a huge freighter made its way slowly into harbour. An oceangoing freighter – perhaps one very like the one carrying the spoiled blood.

  Robert looked out the window of Evan’s classroom. Across the way was the new offices of EA – Electronic Arts – which specialized in computer sports games. In the other direction was an obscenely expensive hotel that specialized in layovers for tourists about to get onto the Alaska-bound cruise ships that boarded just up the estuary. Farther east was the T-shirt mecca of Gastown, with its inexplicably popular steam-run clock in the midst of overpriced ice-cream shops and questionable sushi joints. Just up the way from there was Vancouver’s tender underbelly, the complication of Pender Street.

  “Is our wealth predicated upon their poverty? Or is their wealth, no matter how limited, a function of our economic success?” Evan spoke without referring to his notes. His audience was some sixty strong and an interesting mix. The men were older than the women. All were well dressed. All were well scrubbed, coiffed and manicured. Almost all were white aside from two Han Chinese males, one Japanese female and two fully veiled females – or at least Robert assumed they were females. Evan was lecturing on the ethics of business as seen through the eyes of several different philosophers. Few people took notes but everyone seemed to be following the arguments. References to particular texts elicited head nods all round. These folks were hardly your basic Philosophy 101 students. These were business elite types who thought a little philosophy could spice up their boardroom chatter or maybe their bedrooms.

  Evan went through the standard arguments about the creation of wealth – The Wealth of Nations; the Sam Adams argument; the Keynesian approaches; early Marx and Engel’s writing – pretty standard stuff although worth rehearing since all of them had influenced the nature of the present, if limited, economic debate in the West.

  Then Evan cranked up the rhetoric. “If our wealth is indeed predicated on their poverty, then they have every right to bomb those institutions that continue to enslave them. Like the World Trade Center.”

  The response was interesting. This was a group of businesspeople, so Fong assumed that they would have vociferously objected, but these are Western businesspeople. They too, in their own way, felt a form of enslavement to the works coming out of buildings in the East like the World Trade Center. So the objections were loud but not as loud as Fong would have thought.

  Evan answered a few brief questions. Made a joke about a son of his who runs an ethical mutual fund that only invests in companies that do not take advantage of non-unionized labour and dedicate themselves to the preservation of the environment. Someone asked, “How’s the fund doing?” Evan ducked the question and assigned next week’s readings. It was an odd assortment – Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

  The familiar sound of students packing up to go followed. A few people approached Evan with questions or excuses – “my stock portfolio ate my homework” or maybe “my Jaguar died” or some such.

  Back at his office overlooking the harbour, Evan tossed his battered leather briefcase onto a winecoloured Windsor chair. The satchel more resembled something the Scots would use to make Haggis than an article meant to carry a professor’s books.

  Beside the chair was a new top-of-the-line Apple computer with a WATCHDOG button on its side.

  “So what do you think, Robert?”

  “Of?”

  “My lecture, my office, life, Vancouver?”

  “I thought your lecture a bit pat, your office the fanciest I’ve ever seen for a university professor, life on the whole sucks and Vancouver is looking wonderful.”

  “It is, Robert. Vancouver is wonderful. It’s a privilege to live here. Drink, Robert?” Evan asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “As much as I’d love to believe that you called me because you miss my fine company and sparkling repartee, I can only assume you called because you wanted my help with something. And since I agreed to see you, I tacitly agreed to offer whatever help you want – so ask?”

  Robert paused for a beat, then asked, “Did you know that there is an AIDS epidemic in China?” Evan poured himself a modest amount of a single malt scotch into an elegant crystal snifter and sat. He listened as Robert told him the details of the blood industry in China. Robert ended his recitation with the fact, “The money behind all this comes from Vancouver.”

  Evan got to his feet and looked out the floor-toceiling plate-glass window that looked west up the estuary to . . . well, to Japan. Finally he turned back to Robert. “Do you have any idea how much money I make teaching for the university?”

  Robert had no idea why Evan had brought up this subject, but he responded, “You’ve been at it for most of forever so I assume you make reasonable coin.”

  “Wrong. I make a dollar a year. I’ve always made a dollar a year. My father and father-in-law before me taught for the university for the same wage.”

  “Why would . . .”

  “Because we come from old money, Robert. Something you might not know much about. With that money comes an obligation to give back. We all gave back the same way by teaching for a dollar a year.” Evan turned away from Robert. The moonlight silhouetted him, like Alfred Hitchcock at the beginning of his old telev
ision show. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed to Robert that Evan let out a very long silent sigh. Before Robert could think that through, Evan turned back to him.

  “How can I help?”

  Before Robert could answer, the phone on Evan’s desk buzzed. “Yes. Yes, I’m here. Fine, it went fine. Do you need anything? I’ll be right up.” He hung up the phone and turned to Robert, “Meredith.” He paused and seemed to be contemplating something. Then he said, “She’s very brave. Some days she’s more herself than ever – others . . .” He lifted his hands then let them fall as if their actions were beyond his meagre control.

  “He was frightened near the end.”

  Joan Shui listened carefully to the woman across the Ti Lan Chou Prison table from her. She’d last seen the woman about ten months ago. Those ten months had changed the woman who killed the man she loved. There was a pastiness about her skin and her muscle tone was already beginning to deteriorate. Her beautiful hair had been shorn and her scalp exhibited fine examples of prison bug bites. There was a jagged scar across her left cheek running diagonally from the bottom of her nose to her ear. But her eyes still shone, although with wariness now, not joy.

  “Why was that?” Joan asked.

  Ignoring Joan’s question the prisoner asked, “Where’s that cute little squeeze of yours. The one that locked me up. I think about him sometimes. Well, not him, his hands. I think about his hands and what they could be doin’ for me.”

  Joan permitted the whore act to continue for a bit longer then said, “Answer my question. Why was your boss frightened at the end?”

  “Mr. Clayton had some pretty powerful business partners. And they pressed him. Squeezed him to get more and more.”

  “More and more blood?”

  The woman who killed the man she loved looked away as if suddenly something on the dark cinderblock wall was of interest. Joan lit a cigarette and held it out to her. The woman’s head swivelled towards the smoke. Her nostrils flared. For a moment she looked straight into Joan’s eyes then said, “Thanks.” She took a long pull on the cigarette. Her posture changed and just for an instant she was beautiful again – and she knew it. She raised her head, showing her long elegant neck, and let the smoke out in a long line of pleasure. “Can I keep this?”