The Illusion of Murder

by McCleary, Carol

  We come to the theater in sedan chairs instead of carriages, the narrow streets not being inviting for horse-drawn conveyances. The sight of handsomely dressed women stepping out of their chairs and the daintily colored Chinese lanterns—hanging fore and aft, marking the course the carriers take in the darkness—is very impressive. It is a luxury to have a carriage, of course, but there is something even more luxurious about owning a chair and having full-time carriers in one’s employ.

  A fine chair with silver-mounted poles and silk hangings can be bought, I should judge, for a little more than twenty dollars. Some women keep four and eight carriers; they are so cheap that one can afford to retain a number. Every member of a well-established household in Hong Kong has his or her own private chair with carriers waiting to pick up the poles.

  Many men prefer a coverless willow chair with swinging step, while many women have chairs that close entirely, so they can be carried along the streets secure against the gaze of the public. Convenient pockets, umbrella stands, and places for parcels are found in all well-appointed chairs.

  The Arabian Nights tale is a new version of the old story filled with local hits arranged for the club by a military captain; the music is by the bandmaster of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The beautiful and artistic scenery is designed and executed by two army men, as are the limelight effects.

  Inside, the scene is bewitching. A rustling of soft gowns, the odor of flowers, the fluttering of fans, the sounds of soft, happy whispering, a maze of lovely women in evening gowns mingling with handsome men in the regulation evening dress—what could be prettier?

  If American women would only ape the English in going bonnetless to the theater, we would forgive their little aping in other respects, and call it even. Upon the arrival of the governor the band plays “God Save the Queen,” during which the audience stands. Happily, they make it short.

  The play is pleasantly presented, the actors filling their roles most creditably, especially the one taking the part of Alley Sloper.*

  After Ali Baba discovers the cave of the Forty Thieves and brings part of their treasure back to his brother’s house, he meets Morgana, a clever slave girl.

  I cannot take my eyes off of Morgana because I recognize her. “What do you know about her?” I whisper to the purser, who has made himself an authority on Hong Kong plays.

  “Professional actress. Aussie, I think. Traveling drama group went broke and stranded her here. Name’s Virginia Lynn.”

  I resist the impulse to tell him that not long ago she identified herself as Amelia Cleveland and fled my hotel with me on her heels.

  Begging the pardon of my companions, as soon as the play is over, I part company with them and station myself at the stage door.

  She comes out with two men but goes in a different direction from them. I catch up with her.

  “Good evening, Amelia.”

  She throws me a glare. “Go away.”

  “You can talk to me,” I tell her back, “or to the police.”

  That stops her. She swings around and confronts me. “I’ve done nothing for the coppers to take an interest in me.”

  I get almost nose to nose with her and lock eyes. “Nothing except attempt to steal a valuable object through impersonation.”

  She takes a step back. “No. I was just a messenger.”

  “A messenger? We’ll see if the Hong Kong police think that is as funny as I find it.”

  “What do you want? Go, get away from here, go on that silly race you’re doing. Leave me alone, I’ve troubles enough.”

  “You’re going to have more troubles if you don’t tell me why you told me you were John Cleveland’s wife.”

  “It was a part I was hired to do, that’s all.”

  “Who hired you? Selous?”

  “Who?”

  “Tell me who hired you.”

  “A woman offered me two quid to go to the hotel and tell you I was John Cleveland’s wife and came to get his property.”

  “What did she look like?”

  Virginia Lynn gave that one some thought. “I can’t really say. Met me out here in the dark, just like you. I never really got a look at her. She wore one of those high-fashion hats with a thick veil.”

  “What was the color of her hair?”

  The actress shrugged. “Not really sure. Maybe brown.” She shakes her head. “Not really sure.”

  “What did her voice sound like?”

  “I don’t know. You have an American accent. Hers was British.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “She said she was John Cleveland’s wife and that Cleveland had given you something that belonged to her family.”

  “Did she tell you what it was?”

  “No. She said just to say I was his wife and you’d know what to give me.”

  “Did she tell you why she didn’t ask herself?”

  “I asked her that. She said she was too emotional about it. That’s all I know. I got two quid and now a headache. Leave me alone.”

  “Anything about the way she dressed that stood out? Broach, necklace—”

  “Her shoes. Tall heels, really exotic leather, light brown, had bumps on it, bumps with holes or nicks, maybe some kind of snake or something.”

  We part, her at almost a run, and I secure a chair to take me back to my hotel.

  Two women obviously fit the description the actress gave: Lady Warton and Sarah. The accent wasn’t important. I’ve heard Sarah imitate a British accent.

  It’s also obvious that half the European women in Hong Kong probably fit the vague description.

  Nor did it let Frederick Selous off the hook. He has intrigue going with both women and probably arranged the charade. Having a woman hire the actress was clever because it is easy for a woman to disguise herself behind big hats and scarves and veils. A woman’s size, shape, and age are much easier concealed than a man’s.

  Murder in Egypt and international intrigue that has already extended thousands of miles to Hong Kong and threatens to follow me around the other half of the world is too much for a young woman from Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534.

  Especially when I had another woman to worry about—the one giving me grief by turning my adventurous race against time into a competition.

  PART VI

  Day 45

  TO THE LAND OF THE MIKADO

  51

  My first order of business upon boarding the Oceanic is to get quickly to my cabin and make sure both my possessions and my little simian friend transferred from the Oriental are in good order.

  I meet the stewardess in the corridor and ask about my monkey.

  “We have met,” she says dryly.

  She pulls up her sleeve to reveal that her arm is bandaged from wrist to shoulder.

  “What did you do?” I ask in consternation.

  “I did nothing but scream; the monkey did the rest!”

  I hasten away from her complaints and go into my cabin to confront the little devil. He sees me and screeches as he throws nuts at me through the bars of the cage.

  “Keep it up and you will have to swim back to land.”

  He replies in monkey talk that I gratefully cannot decipher.

  Shortly before we are to push away from the pier for the voyage to Japan, I step outside my cabin door and find the ship’s most mysterious recluse in the corridor reading a cablegram.

  Sarah gives a grimace. “Well, at least I am as important as a racehorse.”

  I raise my eyebrows and she shakes her head. “Nothing, my dear, just mumbling. I came to insist that you come with me to see Madame Xi Shi.”

  She pronounces the name Zee She.

  The monkey screeches at her.

  “What is that?” she asks.

  “A mistake.”

  On our way to the outer deck, Sarah explains that she’d heard the famous Chinese spiritualist is waiting at the gangplank for the purser to clear her boarding papers.
r />   “I saw her perform in Paris three years ago. She has a true gift of calling forth spirits of the dead.”

  “Maybe I should ask her to give John Cleveland a call.”

  We take a place at the railing along with the others who had gathered to watch the entrance of the spiritualist. An elegant sedan chair with tightly closed curtains is at the foot of the gangplank with carriers standing by. A Chinese man and two women, all dressed in black, servants to the spiritualist I assume, are standing by the chair.

  The assistant purser comes onto the deck and shouts down permission to board, and the sedan chair starts up the gangplank.

  “Well, she is certainly privileged,” I say. “I’m sure even a queen would walk up.”

  “She would never make it up the gangplank. You’ll see why.”

  At the top of the ramp, the curtains are opened to reveal a tiny woman much shorter than my own barely five feet of height. She reminds me of a ceramic doll, very beautiful, delicate, and even fragile. A wrong movement and she’ll break into a million pieces. Her skin is pale white, emphasizing her red lips and cheeks. Her eyes are done in turquoise eyeshadow and lined in a deeper green. Raven black hair is twisted in coils, making a fat bun on the top of her head. Sticking out of the bun are little Oriental sticks with very small yellow feathers at each end. I can’t see her hands; they are hidden in the silk, flowered robe that hides any figure.

  Her red silk dress is exquisite, with dainty patterns embroidered with gold and silver thread, set off with a red silk umbrella.

  As she is assisted out of the sedan chair by the female servants, I realize why the gangplank would have been a mountain to her. Her feet, encased in red slippers, are abnormally short and stubby.

  “Lotus feet,” Sarah whispers.

  The male servant leads the way and the two female servants assist Madame Xi Shi as she walks across the deck and through a door to the interior. Even with the assistance, she sways more than a person ordinarily would … yet her movements are graceful. The way the woman sways could even be considered sexually suggestive.

  “I’ve heard of this,” I tell Sarah. “Feet that have been deformed by binding.”

  “Yes. Her feet would have been bound as a child so they grew bunched up rather than straight out. Her feet are only about three inches long. She’s a Golden Lotus because that is considered the most desirable length.”

  I look down at my feet. They are not excessively long for a woman, but compared to Madame Xi Shi’s, they look like planks.

  “The comparison is to a lotus,” Sarah says, “because of reverence for the flower in the Far East. That swaying walk is called the ‘Lotus Gait.’ It’s caused by the deformity of her feet. Chinese men consider it quite erotic. I’ve read about the process and consider it a brutal deformation of a woman’s body performed to satisfy the prurient desires of men.”

  “Amen to that! If men like deformed feet so much, they should have their own bound.”

  I can see enough of Sarah’s expression under the veil to know that she is about to land a good one.

  “Better yet, men who encourage this type of torture should have their penis bound so it is distorted like a lotus foot.”

  We shamelessly giggle like little girls. Eager for knowledge, even of oddities, I ask Sarah to tell me how lotus feet are created.

  “It begins by bandaging the foot at about six years of age. It’s done before the little girl’s arch is fully formed. Toenails are cut way back so they can’t become ingrown and all the toes and the arch are broken.”

  I shiver. “Good Lord. Why do they break the toes and arch?”

  “So the toes can be folded under the foot, up against the sole. That way the front half of the foot grows backward and bunched up. Rather like an odd-shaped stump.”

  “This happens all at once when the girl is six?”

  “The process takes some years. Until the foot is fully deformed and stops growing, the binding is tightened each day to give it a little less room to grow.”

  The sheer horror of it is mind-boggling to me.

  “Chinese sex manuals list dozens of ways for a man to play with a woman’s feet that have been deformed,” she says. She shakes her index finger at me. “But it’s not just the men of China who enslave women sexually. Arabic men insist upon hiding their women beneath veils—it’s a form of sexual slavery, keeping the woman all to themselves and chained to the hearth. European and American men do it by keeping control of a woman’s life, from money to education, frowning at a woman reading a newspaper or discussing politics. Women can’t vote, control their own property—”

  I change the subject. “Did you get to know Madame Xi Shi when she was in Paris?”

  “No, I was busy with a play but a friend was quite taken by her when she opened a channel between him and his dead mother. Her name, of course, has historical significance in China. It’s the name of one of the Four Beauties of ancient China. Do you know the story?”

  “Vaguely.” I am lying of course, trying to appear intelligent to this amazing woman.

  “Four women in the history of China were of such incredible beauty, legends about them arose. Their physical features were so dazzling that if they walked by a pond of fish, the fish would drown because they forgot to swim; birds would fall out of the sky because they would stop flapping their wings—”

  “Flowers would faint and fall over,” I interject as a guess.

  “The legend is that flowers would close their petals in shame, but I suppose that’s close enough.”

  Sarah retreats to her cabin and I stay at the railing and watch two other passengers board. The two women are familiar to me—the widow of the Aussie sharpshooter and the young assistant—but I find their mannerisms toward one another strange: Instead of two cats snarling at each other, they are cheerfully yakking as the widow shows the younger woman a jade bracelet on her wrist, while behind them comes a line of porters carrying not just their luggage, but boxes of new purchases. Many boxes.

  The widow appears to have made a nice recovery from having killed her husband in front of an audience. The gods have smiled upon her financially, too, since she complained about her money problems.

  It is simply too much for my paranoid brain to believe that the death of the sharpshooter isn’t connected to the intrigues that have been sailing with me since Port Said. I’m still convinced that the Aussie sharpshooter saw someone on the Colombo dock who he could blackmail.

  I have a feeling the wife knows who it is. And if I don’t ask, I won’t find out.

  Mind your own business, my good sense tells me, but I’m not listening.

  52

  Two hours later, when I’m certain the woman has unpacked and settled into her stateroom, I am at the “grieving” widow’s door, knocking.

  The door whips open. “Put it—” She is wearing a robe, her wet hair is in a towel, and she is barefoot. She stares at me, her expression turning sour.

  “I thought you were the steward. What do you want?”

  “My name is Nellie—”

  “I know who you are, you’re that nosy newspaper person.”

  I smile sweetly. This isn’t going well. Her face is flushed; whiskey and cheap perfume radiate from her. Rather early in the day for libations.

  “I was a great admirer of your husband—”

  She lets out a coarse burst of laughter. “Well you’d be the only one. Was he diddling you, too? He never could keep it in his pants.”

  “I’d like to do a story about the situation.”

  “I know what you’re up to, but you came knocking on the wrong door. I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Your husband was murdered.” It is a shot in the dark to stun her and to see how she reacts—which is hostile. I take a step back as she moves forward, ready to lunge at me.

  “You little bitch, you better mind your own business or you’ll be answering to me.”

  She steps back into the room and I move closer. “I’ll pay yo
u to tell me who your husband recognized at the dock.”

  The door to the stateroom bathroom opens and the assistant steps out, naked, wiping her wet hair. She sees me and stops. “What—” She recovers quickly and grins, not bothering to hide her nakedness.

  The widow leers at me. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

  I stumble back, avoiding a broken nose as the door slams in my face.

  Whew.

  Making my way down the corridor, I try to read the tea leaves again. It had not been a wasted visit. Before I knocked on the door it had been obvious to me that someone had given her a financial reward, but now I have added pieces to the puzzle: She had been warned not to talk to me. And her relationship with the assistant was a far cry from what they had earlier demonstrated in public.

  Her liaison with the assistant is not something that would erupt overnight while her husband’s body still lay warm. That raises an interesting question: What was the purpose of the public clawing at each other if they were having an intimate relationship?

  Had Mr. Murdock been aware of his wife’s affair with his assistant? More important, did the affair play any role in his death?

  My session with the woman had not added to the biggest question of all: Was there any relationship between his death and the Port Said matter?

  Well, this leg of my journey is turning out to be very interesting. Upside down on the bottom of the world, everything looks a bit cockeyed.

  STEAMSHIP RMS OCEANIC

  HONG KONG–TO–SAN FRANCISCO RUN

  53

  We are sailing between Hong Kong and Yokohama, Japan, as the New Year approaches. Standing at the bow, the forbidden zone, I let the wind and ocean spray blow at me as I stare at the horizon and wonder why I have been so fortunate as to find myself on this great adventure—and worry that I will not succeed, that the copycat reporter will not just steal my thunder but humiliate me into leaving reporting.