The Hamlet Murders

by David Rotenberg

Fong nodded and clicked the Play icon:“What follows, Fong, are the codes I was to use and a list of people willing to help get Xi Luan Tu to the safety of the West.” Fong scrolled through the list of contact names and numbers quickly. “Xi Luan Tu’s fate is now in your hands – well, your eyes actually. And so are the fates of all those people on the list. I’m sure that the people who entrusted me with helping get Xi Luan Tu out of the Middle Kingdom would not approve of me giving you this information. But they do not know you like I do. Through Fu Tsong, you and I are a kind of lovers. Aren’t we, Fong? Odd idea, isn’t it? Come to think of it, what is the name of the relationship between husband and lover anyways?”

  The word rivals bloomed in Fong’s mind.

  “At any rate, through Fu Tsong I know that you could not be a bad man. There was something quintessentially good about her. She could never love a bad man.” Geoff took an odd pause then continued. “So back to spy stuff. Here’s what you need to know, Fong. I’ve already managed to hide the cell phone with wireless Internet access that I was supposed to get to him. I taped it behind the toilet in the men’s room at the theatre – in the second stall. I had twenty- five-thousand American dollars and several sets of ID – party card memberships, residency papers, job assignments, three or four other such items and passports – to give to Xi Luan Tu as well. But I had to burn those. I couldn’t shake the two Beijing guys. Do you know how bulky twenty-five thousand US dollars are? I did manage to dump my two watchers for a day and a half but I couldn’t make contact with Xi Luan Tu. The money and papers went up in flames just before I ‘re-emerged’ into the company of my two Beijing keepers.” Geoff smiled sadly then he seemed to brighten. “Seen The Godfather, Fong? That’s how I got the idea where to hide the cell phone. Retrieve it, Fong. Make contact with someone on that list then get that phone to them. That’s my part in this enterprise – my purpose if you will. My role in the drama that I wasn’t able to complete because of the all-too-present presence of the two gentlemen from Beijing. So that’s where the gun – I mean the cell phone is. Get it and get it to one of those contacts. They’ll get it to Xi Luan Tu and he’ll use it to contact another Dalong Fada operative who should have backup money and papers to get him safely to the West. That’s all there is to it. Easy for a tough guy cop like you, Fong.”

  It looked as though Geoff wanted to say something more then decided against it. His image froze for an instant then disintegrated into pixels then the nothingness of digital nowhereness.

  There were a few beats of profound silence in the room. Finally Chen spoke, “Shall I retrieve the phone, sir?”

  Fong looked at this odd country cop with the potato-like facial features. “Do you understand . . . ”

  “ . . . what I’m doing? Yes. Shall I retrieve the cell phone?”

  “No, Captain Chen. I’ll do that. I want you to figure out how to put a bug into it. I’ll make that contact and deliver the phone but I want to be able to follow wherever that thing goes.”

  “Why?”

  No “sir” again. “Because what Mr. Hyland was doing might have something to do with who murdered him. This is not a political case to me. This is a murder investigation, Captain Chen.”

  Chen nodded but didn’t move.

  “What, Chen?”

  “We don’t carry that kind of electronic equipment in our section of the department. We’ll need to requisition it from central stores. Other people will know we’re up to something.” Then, to Fong’s surprise, Chen smiled.

  “Chen?”

  “This could be one of those situations that could prove to be a problem or an opportunity, couldn’t it, sir?”

  Fong smiled then nodded in agreement.

  Fong felt the icky warm wetness soak through the knees of his pants as he knelt facing the filthy toilet of the second stall in the men’s room at the old theatre. He held his breath as he reached behind the toilet tank and, with the tips of his fingers, located the cell phone taped there. “Why do Long Noses take ideas from movies!” he hissed and let out the rest of the air in his lungs. He took in a short sharp breath. He’d smelled worse but at the moment he couldn’t recall where. With his cheek pressed hard against the underside of the toilet seat he finally managed to get his left hand far enough behind the toilet tank and, with one mighty yank, ripped the cell phone free of its bonds.

  Geoff had used some kind of wide grey sticky tape to adhere the phone to the tank. Fong looked at the tape. He’d never seen anything like it. He unstuck it from itself and marvelled at it. It would have so many uses! But then it must be so expensive, so wasteful, so Western.

  As he left the stall he slid the cell phone with the wireless Internet connection into his pant pocket and wondered what to do with the tape. Then he wondered about Westerners and their love of movies. He remembered an old joke during the Vietnam-war era. It seemed that an American president, Johnson he believed, announced at a public gathering that he had seen a movie called Patton and it had inspired him to invade Cambodia. The joke was: here was the first time in history that a war was based on a movie not a movie based on a war.

  Joan’s arrival in Shanghai was somewhat less high profile than the first time she had come to the great city. Then she’d landed at Hong Qiao International Airport only to be detained by an overzealous immigration officer. She’d been saved from that indignity by the arrival of Wu Fan-zi who, for ten days and nights, became her reason to live. This time, with what appeared to be just a filthy bundle on her back, she trudged the last 9 miles along the side of a busy highway in the morning darkness surrounded by thousands of peasants. Hidden in her filthy bundle was US$25,000 and four sets of fake ID and passports – part of what was needed to get Xi Luan Tu out of Shanghai and to the West.

  Back in his office with the cell phone safely in his pocket, Fong activated Geoff’s CD-ROM. He fast-forwarded through the lists and copied the names, numbers and code words with their meanings onto a pad. Then he hit the Eject button and removed the CDROM from the computer.

  A milky morning light was just peeping over the horizon. Another day of heat clearly lay ahead. He called in Chen.

  “Sir?”

  “When I played this CD-ROM, did the computer copy it?”

  “Copy it, sir? Oh, you mean back it up.”

  “I guess. Did it?”

  Chen sat at the machine. Two clicks and a scroll down later and he gave Fong the bad news. “The machine is set up with an auto backup. And it takes cookies as well. Not all the digital material may have been burnt onto the hard drive but some of it probably was.”

  “Burnt means copied, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And cookies?”

  “Cues to the computer as to how to find material that is stored on the drive. The term is American and I’m told refers to pieces of pastry left behind so children can find their way out of the woods.”

  Fong nodded. For a moment he wondered why the children would use cookies to mark their path out of the woods. Wouldn’t animals eat the cookies? Then he wondered why he was wondering about stuff like this. He looked at Chen. The man was waiting for instructions. Okay. But destroying evidence was even more of a crime than having evidence and not reporting it. Fong would save Chen the problem if he knew how to destroy the CD-ROM and the hard drive – but he didn’t know how to safely get rid of either.

  “Do you want the copy erased, sir?”

  “Is that possible?”

  Chen’s face took on a funny look. Fong had no idea what that look might mean.

  “Well, Captain Chen?”

  “You want to be certain there is no copy on the hard drive, right, sir?”

  “Yes, Chen. That’s what I want.”

  Chen reached into his pant pocket and took out a penknife. He tilted the computer to expose the screws in the back. “You understand what this means, Captain Chen?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.” He undid the screws with a remarkable dexterity. Then, removing the case he snapped out the hard driv
e.

  “That’s the hard drive, right?”

  “Yes it is,” he said holding it out to show Fong. “Now give me the original CD-ROM.” Fong hesitated. “You want there to be no trace of this, don’t you, sir?”

  Fong nodded.

  “Then I need to destroy the CD-ROM along with the hard drive.” Chen’s hand was still extended toward Fong.

  Fong wanted to protect Chen from committing the offence of destroying evidence but he didn’t know how. Then it occurred to Fong that once he gave over the CD-ROM and the hard drive Chen would have all the evidence he’d need to really hurt him.

  Fong trusted Chen. But now it was not just his future he was handing over to this ugly country police captain whom he had first met on far-off Lake Ching, on the lake boat with the seventeen dead foreigners, and who now lived with his ex-wife Lily – it was the lives of all the people implicated by the material on that disk.

  Could Captain Chen be trusted with those lives?

  Maybe Captain Chen thought that Dalong Fada was a dangerous enemy that needed to be stomped out. Maybe he feared cults in general. Maybe there was a secret Captain Chen that Fong had never met who harboured ambitions within the Shanghai police force and would use information like this to advance his own career.

  Maybe Chen was as irrationally jealous of him as he had been of Geoff.

  Fong stared at the man. “How’s my daughter, Xiao Ming?”

  Chen blushed, “Getting used to having me around. She knows I’m not you. It’s clear she misses you. But I try to give her what little I can. I am not much of replacement for you, sir.”

  Chen’s answer was so devoid of guile that Fong relaxed. Chen was exactly what he seemed to be – an honest, absolutely good man. And loyal. Xiao Ming was lucky to have such a man in her life.

  All that was true, but what Fong failed to consider was: loyal to whom?

  Fong handed Chen the CD-ROM. Chen then wrapped the CD-ROM with the hard drive in newsprint he took off Fong’s desk, turned on his heel and headed toward the door.

  “How’re you going to destroy those things?”

  “I’m not. There’s no sure way to do that. I’m going to lose them.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to take a stroll across the new bridge to the Pudong and they’re going to happen to fall into the muddy waters of the Huangpo River. The silt is so thick there that even if they sent divers down there’s no chance they’d ever find them.”

  He smiled. Fong smiled back.

  “That’s all right, sir?”

  “It’s fine . . . and thanks.”

  As the door closed behind Captain Chen, Fong wondered at the new alliances that were now central to his life. Fu Tsong used to quote Shakespeare about just this sort of thing. Something about circumstance making strange bed-fellows. Then Fong stopped. Another of Fu Tsong’s favourite quotations from English writing had popped unbidden into his consciousness: “What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.”

  Fong eyed the first number on the list he had taken from the CD-ROM. He knew there was no point trying to find an address from the phone number because Shanghanese used cell phones almost exclusively and almost everyone prepaid for time used so there was no billing required. In theory, cell phone buyers had to give an address when they got a phone number, but everyone lied. Even Fong, on a reflex, had lied when he got his first cell phone. In fact, there was no incentive to tell the truth since there was not even a remote chance of being caught for such a violation of the law. Shanghanese purchase thousands of cell phones a week. In fact, without cellular technology there was no way that the economic miracle that had taken place in Shanghai could have happened. It would have been an insurmountable expense to have wired all of Shanghai.

  Fong punched in the number. The cell phone was answered on the third ring, “Dui.”

  The accent was Shanghanese, the background noise that of a large kitchen.

  Fong spoke using the first word in the coded sequence. There was a brief silence on the other end. Then a coded word was buried in the man’s response. Fong looked at his notes to find the word’s meaning. The word was soup – tang – and it meant be careful, I’m being watched.

  The man on the other end of Fong’s call was not the only man being watched at that time. Captain Chen’s stroll along the bridge to the Pudong was observed as was his entrance to central stores and his exit with a small plastic-covered package – by another set of wary, feral eyes. These eyes belonged to Shrug and Knock, who quickly reported to Li Chou.

  As Chen returned to Fong’s office with the bug for the cell phone that had the wireless Internet access for Xi Luan Tu, the desk phone in Fong’s office rang. “It’s for you, Captain Chen,” Fong said holding out the receiver.

  Chen hesitantly took the phone, listened for a moment then said, “Thanks. I owe you one or maybe two.” He handed the phone back to Fong.

  “Captain Chen?”

  “It’s good to have friends in low places, sir. They help situations become opportunities not problems.”

  Fong laughed. It was the first joke that Chen made that Fong understood. Chen blushed. “Is your friend more powerful than our friend’s friend, Captain Chen?”

  “Much, because he’s lower.”

  “And you’re sure that you were followed?”

  “Oh, yes, quite sure. They didn’t pay any attention to what I dropped off the bridge to the Pudong but I made sure they saw me pick up these. ” Chen smiled and unwrapped the two electronic bugs. One was attached to the other. Then he held out his hand for the cell phone with Internet access.

  As Fong gave him the phone, a darkness crossed Captain Chen’s features. “What?”

  “Remind me how following the cell phone will help us find who killed Mr. Hyland?”

  “Mr. Hyland was involved in a pretty risky enterprise. Perhaps someone in Dalong Fada, perhaps someone in the Beijing security services, perhaps someone who’s only peripherally involved with all this had it in for Mr. Hyland. I don’t know exactly, Captain Chen, but at this point in a murder investigation every lead has to be tracked down.”

  Chen thought about that for a moment then asked, “Are you going to tell the commissioner about the data on the CD-ROM?”

  Fong hesitated then said, “No.”

  “I assume you haven’t told the two men from Beijing who were with Mr. Hyland either?”

  Fong said nothing.

  “I see,” said Chen. He opened the cell phone and planted one of the electronic bugs. “This tiny guy sends out a signal that I can receive on my PalmPilot. It lets you and me track the phone wherever it goes. And this little fellow . . . ” he said, placing the second bug in the cell phone snuggly against the first one, “. . . this one lets them follow the phone too – as long as we want.”

  “And when we don’t want them to follow it anymore?”

  “I dial 555 555 555 1.”

  “And dialling that number . . . ?”

  “Cancels the signal from their bug and starts up a new signal from our third little friend.” Like a magician at a country fair, Chen produced a third bug from the recesses of one of his baggy pant pockets and held it in the palm of his hand.

  Fong watched Captain Chen complete his task.

  He did not fail to notice that all of Chen’s last statements were said without the use of the word: sir.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE HIDING MAN

  Xi Luan Tu hoped it was like being a mist inside a fog – either that or this hiding in plain sight was just a way of fooling himself. No doubt the truth would be evident soon enough. He glanced over his shoulder. The southern alley entrance to what as a kid he called “the warrens” was just a quick bolt away. As boys, he and his brother had explored this massive underground network of tunnels and caves that stretched for miles beneath the streets of Shanghai. Almost every section of the Old City could be accessed by one of the hundreds of underground alleyways. Some of them were now bei
ng widened for use in Shanghai’s new subway system, but most of the passageways were still secret. The warrens ran beside, beneath and behind the buildings of the Old City. They had been used by thousands of Chinese people since their inception in the mid-1800s when the British, French and Americans had been given the only useful lands in Shanghai in the disgraceful Treaty of Nanjing. The Chinese had been forced from their homes and moved into the lowlands, the swamps by the river. At first, the warrens were a way for the Chinese to avoid the British and French rulers of their city. Year by year, Chinese hand by Chinese hand, they had expanded until they became an intricate underground world. A secret world. A world where white men were not welcome. Where a Chinese man could hide from the authorities. Tunnels, caves, stores of food and water, booby traps, false exits, culs-de-sac and abandoned subterranean pathways stretched, unmapped, for miles. Xi Luan Tu had grown up playing in the warrens. If things got too hot for him above-ground, he’d head for the warrens. It was his best chance – not to escape, because there were no escape routes out of Shanghai from the warrens, but to hide.

  “How much?” the gruff man in front of his stand demanded as he pointed at the undulating carpet of life formed by the thousands of grub pupae that seethed in the barrel. Xi Luan Tu quoted him a reasonable price but not too low. He didn’t want his fellow market pupae-sellers to take too much note of the “new guy.” His forged vendor’s licence had been arranged by a follower whose father used to occupy the spot. If asked, Xi Luan Tu would inform a questioner that he was the nephew of the man who used to sell here and that he had recently arrived from Sichuan Province.

  “Too much,” said the potential customer and moved on down the alley to the next grub pupaeseller.

  The live things – he thought of them as grubs-intraining – continued their blind movements in the barrel. For three days he’d hidden in that very barrel while federal officers mounted sweeps in an effort to find him. Without the Dalong Fada exercises he would never have managed to maintain his sanity. The moment he lost the sense of himself as merely part of a much greater whole – the moment that he believed that he was the whole in and of himself – then the pain, the fear and misery took hold of him and led him toward madness.