The Hamlet Murders

by David Rotenberg

“Very good. Good, now watch the words.” He twisted some dials and the sentence split in two, the part on the left higher than the part on the right. Then the good doctor took a much-used chopstick that seemed to have the remains of a bean sprout stuck to the end of it and began to wave it back and forth in front of Fong’s eyes, “Just tell me when the two parts of the sentence align with one another. I mean when they are side by side. You could think of them as forming one long line. So that they would say ‘I took my shoes to the cobbler.’ If you get my meaning.”

  Fong had got his meaning long ago but was unable to get a word in edgewise so the part that had been higher was now lower and they had to do the whole thing again. This time it worked fine, although Fong had trouble not laughing at the image of this large, round, doughy man sitting on a small stool with wheels moving a dirty chopstick back and forth very rapidly, the remains of the bean sprout moving in counterpoint to the stick.

  Forty minutes, two more protestations that he had never met Mrs. Jian, and seven times being called Mr. Jian later and the good doctor informed Fong that he needed to wear glasses. What he called corrective lenses.

  It had never occurred to Fong that he would need glasses. And even more important, it had never occurred to him that his vanity would resist the very idea.

  Dr. Wasniachenko finished writing out a prescription just as Fong’s cell phone rang. Fong flipped it open, “Dui.” He listened for a moment, then got up as he said, “Where exactly?” He put on his coat saying, “Cordon it off. I want to get in before Li Chou, okay?”

  Fong rushed out, leaving the prescription for his glasses between two of Dr. Wasniachenko’s plump fingers.

  “Yet another victory for vanity – just the reason we Ukrainians lost our freedom to the Russians,” the good doctor thought.

  But Dr. Wasniachenko was not as addled as he appeared. While he popped the prescription into an envelope and jotted Fong’s address on the outside, he phoned the Office of the Commissioner of Police for the Shanghai District and informed the duty officer there that Detective Zhong Fong would have to wear prescription lenses if he was to stay on the force. True, it was not until three days later that he remembered the prescription in the envelope, and not until two days after that that he got around to delivering it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SUICIDE?

  The white man’s left cheek was pressed hard against the green blotter that covered the centre of his chrome-and-glass desk. The blotter had done, with admirable efficiency, what blotters are designed to do. Of course, it was blood, not ink, that had been sucked into and then successfully held by the porous fibres of the material.

  Fong looked at the small weapon on the floor beside the dead man. “Guns,” he thought, but resisted the impulse to kick it aside. Fong hated guns and hadn’t fired one, even on a practice range, since his fluke shot had felled the Chinese-American arsonist who called himself Angel Michael. Fong actually found guns to be stupid. They made very bad hammers and only adequate paperweights. What they were good at – in fact, all they could do – was kill. Even little guns like the one on the floor beside his foot.

  Fong took a pen from his shirt pocket and used it to tilt the dead man’s head, exposing a tiny exit wound beneath the now tattered right earlobe. The small calibre of the bullet had caused little damage on its voyage in one ear and out just below the other. This guy was lucky to have managed to kill himself with such a narrow projectile. If lucky was the right word – and, if in fact, he had killed himself.

  Fong told the other officers crowding the room to leave but signalled Captain Chen to stay. Chen took a small digital camera from his pocket and began to collect images. Fong liked this country cop he’d met way out at Lake Ching, although it was somewhat more complicated now that Chen was married to Fong’s ex-wife, Lily, and was stepfather to his daughter, Xiao Ming.

  Fong fished the dead man’s wallet out from a coat pocket and checked his ID. “He’s an American.” “Should I notify the consulate, sir?” Chen asked, taking out a pad and pencil.

  There was a time in Fong’s life when he would have responded with a jibe about Americans’ desire to be first to know everything about everything, but he was past that. “Not yet.” Chen looked up from his notepad. “They don’t need to know just yet, Captain Chen.”

  Fong moved behind the large desk at which the dead man sprawled – and would sprawl forever if he were not moved – then turned back to the room. It was a small office in one of the dozens of gleaming new towers in the Pudong. But it was hardly elegant. “What’s the nameplate on the office door say, Chen?”

  Chen opened the door to check then turned back to Fong. “I can’t tell, it’s in English.”

  “Sorry,” said Fong as he moved to the door. “International Exchange Institute. Pretty neutral, I’d say. Like calling a street Avenue Road.”

  Chen didn’t laugh. He still didn’t know when he was allowed to laugh in Fong’s presence. All he could think of saying was, “Do they exchange money?”

  “Not in any normal sense or they would have been registered with our office. Special Investigations looks after banking, as well as crimes against foreigners.”

  “I know, sir. So what do they exchange?”

  Fong thought about that for a moment then dismissed the question and returned to the body. The cops in Forensics weren’t happy when Fong insisted on being left alone with bodies, especially if he got to the crime site before them. “Just more turf wars in the department. Just the desire to identify exactly who owns which box. Tough,” he thought as he canted his head toward Chen. The younger man crossed over to him. The two of them gently lifted the dead man from the desktop and leaned him back in the overly large chair. The man’s features were rounded, his nose tinted a bright red from an array of tiny broken blood vessels. Fong felt the material of the jacket – very fine, very expensive even for foreigners in Shanghai. He checked for the label and made a note, a Hong Kong private tailor. Then he looked at the man’s hands. Heavy, beefy and deeply calloused. He turned to Chen.

  “Expensive suit, but worker’s hands,” said the younger man.

  Fong nodded. A quizzical look crossed Chen’s face, or at least Fong thought that was what that look was.

  Fong pulled aside the dead man’s tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He paused for a beat, then quickly rolled up the man’s shirtsleeves and pant legs. Not an inch of the exposed skin was free from the tattoo artist’s needle. “Find out the style. See if it was local. It may have been Hong Kong, like the suit.”

  Chen started to photograph the skin art.

  “Who heard the gunshot?”

  “His secretary.”

  “She’s here?”

  “Drinking downstairs in a bar.”

  “We let her . . . ?”

  “She called us from there. I put an officer at the door.” Fong nodded and began to move about the room again.

  Chen had worked with Fong several times since Lake Ching and knew the procedure. Fong prowled and Chen waited. Finally feeling he had waited long enough, Chen asked, “Should I bring her up?”

  “No. Bars are just as good for interrogations as offices.”

  “It’s a suicide, right?”

  Fong wanted to agree but he was troubled by the calibre of the gun. He was troubled by a big man even owning such a small gun. It was a woman’s gun. Fong was also troubled by a man committing suicide. In China, suicide was a woman’s choice. More often a countrywoman’s choice. Most often accomplished by swallowing the omnipresent clear colourless pesticide provided by the government. But then again this was an American urban male, not a Chinese rural female. Fong gently returned the man’s head to its original position on the desk. “Call in Li Chou’s Crime Scene Unit and Forensics. And get our business folks on this. I want to know exactly what the International Exchange Institute does.”

  Chen nodded and headed out. Fong waited a moment to take in the place one more time. New. Clean. Sterile. Western. And a big guy with a
small bullet that went in his left ear and out the right side of the head, taking off the earlobe. The bullet had created a small hole in the cheap drywall across the room and was probably lodged, if they were lucky, in the under lath. If they were unlucky, it had hit a strut and shattered. But then again, who needs the bullet? We have the gun and the fingerprints on the gun, if there are any.

  A big, white beefy guy put a tiny gun into his left ear and pulled the trigger. Suicide. Not murder.

  Then Fong looked at the man’s date book – and a darkness crossed his face.

  The woman sitting on the high barstool looked as much hooker as secretary to Fong’s eyes. She wore a small sheer black top with spaghetti straps over her lovely shoulders. The tops of her patterned silk stockings weren’t completely covered by the short skirt. She identified herself as a personal assistant to the deceased.

  Her English was passable, but Fong decided to ask his questions in Mandarin. “How long have you worked for Mr. Clayton?”

  “Bob, you mean,” she corrected him.

  “Do I?”

  “His name is Bob.”

  “While we’re busy correcting each other, your use of the present tense in reference to Mr. Clayton is inappropriate, one could say, wrong, since he is now dead.” That quieted her for a moment. She reached for her drink but Fong beat her to it and pushed it aside. She dead-eyed him and he dead-eyed her right back. She reached for her bag on the bar and withdrew a long cigarette. “Do you mind?” she asked, clearly not giving a shit if he minded or not.

  He didn’t mind. Who minds a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette?

  “Did Mr. Clayton smoke too?”

  A burp of laughter exploded from her mouth.

  “What’s funny?”

  “He was trying to cut back. He was worried about his health.” This last was interrupted by a spluttering laugh that ended with her snorting. Pretty woman smoking, fine; snorting, not so good.

  “So what exactly did you do for Bob?”

  For a moment, Fong thought she was going to respond by listing sexual positions and precise bedroom activities, then he saw that she got the meaning of his question and said, “Typing, filing, girl stuff.”

  “Did you do his tattoos?”

  She stopped, her cigarette midway to her mouth, sighed then said, “If only. They are beautiful, aren’t they?”

  Fong nodded, choked down his desire to ask her for a smoke and said, “You were lovers.”

  Without flinching, she responded, “I was everything he’d let me be.” She reached down and lifted the hem of her short skirt. Where the stocking tops ended, the tattoos began. They seemed to be in the same style as her dead boss’s although newer.

  “Did it hurt to have it done?” Fong asked.

  “What do you think?” she said blowing a line of smoke past Fong’s left ear.

  He began to answer but sensed her retreating. He moved to the cop standing guard at the bar-room door. “Don’t let her leave.” Fong took out his wallet and handed over several bills. “Buy her a drink if she needs one, but she’s to stay here until I come back.”

  Back in Bob’s office, Li Chou, the plump head of CSU was finishing his work. Fong had already crossed swords with this man during the investigation into the abortion clinic bombings that eventually led to the killing of Angel Michael. “But that was then and this is now,” Fong thought.

  “Anything, Li Chou?” Fong asked.

  The man looked up from his work and stared at Fong as if he didn’t initially recognize him. Then something that could pass for a smile crossed his face, “Not yet.”

  No “sir” on the end of the sentence Fong noted. Well, he’d played the insubordination game himself often enough in the past so he let it pass. “Initial thoughts then, Li Chou?”

  “Small calibre gun. Burn marks on the skin inside his left ear suggests that he put the gun in there . . . then put a teensy hole through his stupid head.” Two of Li Chou’s assistants giggled.

  Fong’s responding silence killed the hilarity in the room. Li Chou smiled and prompted his guys with, “Teensy-weensy hole, I’d say.” Laughter, although somewhat forced, greeted Li Chou’s comment. Fong looked at the CSU guys. They were much closer to Li Chou’s age than his. Li Chou was their dim sum ticket, not him. Fong nodded then cut through the tittering saying, “Are you right-handed, Li Chou?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So pretend that the stapler on the desk is a gun, okay?”

  “Sure,” Li Chou said slowly as he made a funny face for his guys. “Funny kinda gun, wouldn’t you say?”

  “So sit in the chair over there,” Fong said. Li Chou made yet another face then did as Fong asked. “Now grip the stapler as if it were a gun. You’re righthanded so use your right hand. Good. Now put it in your left ear.”

  The man tried to do it then realized that he couldn’t get his finger to the trigger and still keep the gun in his ear. A look of real hatred crossed the man’s face. “So what?” Li Chou demanded.

  “So Mr. Clayton was right-handed too. That’s so what,” Fong spat back.

  Too late, Fong realized that he had embarrassed Li Chou in front of his subordinates. Fong glanced over and the younger men made themselves look as busy as they could. Fong knew he should apologize. He knew that losing face was a real thing in this world but he couldn’t resist adding, “If your English was better, you would have seen that from his writing.”

  Of course, if Fong hadn’t been so cocky he would have bothered to read the dead man’s final words on the notepad. It would not be until almost eighteen months later, in a far-off Western Canadian town called Kananaskis, that he would finally get a hint of what the International Exchange Institute actually exchanged.

  Back at his office on the Bund, Fong was greeted by the head of the business section of Special Investigations. The man was a few years older than Fong and had at one time run a major corporation in Hong Kong. Run it just a tad on the wrong side of the law. When Hong Kong came back to the fold of Mother China, the man was offered two options: either join Special Investigations and work for the good of China or spend his remaining days in Ti Lan Chou, the world’s largest political prison. The man moved his family to Shanghai and began to work for Special Investigations. And in many ways he was happier than he’d ever been. He drove a more modest car, he no longer spent time in expensive Japanese teahouses and he had actually relearned to appreciate his wife, which was helped along by his inability to finance his mistress. Kenneth Lo was now an elegant man in a somewhat pedestrian world.

  He insisted on being called, like many Chinese from Hong Kong, by his British name. Fong could put up with that because Kenneth Lo was a talented forensic accountant and his computer skills were second only to Chen’s in the office. Fong pointed to the chair across the desk from him. Kenneth sat and opened a large folder.

  “So, Kenneth, what did the International Exchange Institute do to make cash?” Fong asked in English.

  “It’s hard to tell.”

  That surprised Fong. “Any ideas?”

  “Some, but nothing sound. It seems to have something to do with Anhui Province.”

  “What could they want from that backwater?”

  “I can’t tell you ’til I get further into the computer’s hard drive. But there’s a problem.”

  “What a surprise – a problem with technology, who would have guessed?”

  “Do you want to hear the problem, Detective Zhong, or are you content with making nasty remarks about the twentieth century’s most important technological advance?”

  Fong took a breath and bridged his delicate fingers in front of his face, “Tell me the problem.”

  “The man’s hard drive has a series of complex locking mechanisms on it. I’m worried that if I go at the locks too quickly, I could trigger booby traps that would erase the material we need on it.”

  Fong thought about that but didn’t speak.

  Kenneth shifted positions in his chair. “Can we at
tack this another way?”

  “How?” Fong asked.

  “Just how important is the man’s business activities to his death? What I mean to say is, do the events of Mr. Clayton’s work necessarily intersect with the fact of his demise? I mean, aren’t there compartments, yes, that’s what I mean, aren’t there compartments – I like that phrase – compartments in which we keep the separate sections of our lives? So it is possible, isn’t it, that in one compartment Mr. Clayton had his work? And in another he had the part of his life that induced his death? Isn’t that a possibility? In fact, why does what the company did have anything to do with Mr. Clayton’s demise?”

  Fong wanted to say because it probably does but thought of the girl in the bar and said, “You may be right.”

  “Then why not let me go at the guy’s hard drive the safe way. Slow is safe in this case.”

  Fong thought about that then said, “Okay.”

  Kenneth gathered together his papers and stood. At the door he stopped and said, “It could take a while.”

  Fong wasn’t pleased. “When you’re done, will I have full access to that material on Mr. Clayton’s computer?”

  Kenneth nodded. As he left the office, he passed by the commissioner, who was cutting a path in the carpet to Fong’s office. Fong sensed this approach before he actually saw him and grabbed his phone, hit a number on his speed dial before his doorway filled with the angry backlit figure of the commissioner – the man who had personally appointed Li Chou as the new head of CSU.

  To Fong’s surprise, Lily’s voice came on the phone. “Dui!” Fong had hit her number on the speed dial by mistake. “Who fucked this?” Lily said in her own peculiar variant of the English language. “Who fucked this?” she repeated.

  For a heartbeat, Fong wanted to correct his exwife’s English slang. Fortunately he decided against it, hung up and turned to another point of wrath in his life, the commissioner of police for the Shanghai district.

  Late that night, a little less well for the pasting he’d taken from the commissioner, Fong returned to the bar. The police officer was still at the door. The secretary was still at the bar. She was very drunk. Under his breath, Fong said to the man, “You have any change for me?”