The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory

by David Rotenberg

  Something about the aquariums. He walked toward them. The brother shouted at him to take his shoes off before he stepped on the silk rug. He ignored the peasant’s protest and crossed toward the aquariums. Three held food fish. Two, food eels. One held tropical fish and one, the great snake. Then he turned back and faced the kitchen.

  No Chinese family would keep the aquariums in the living room. They held food. They belonged in the cooking area. He looked at the aquariums and saw that their backs were painted black. The large one with the cobra was almost three feet tall and stood on a solid two-foot cabinet. For a moment, the great snake dared him. It rose up again and flared its hood. The body whipped back and forth as if waiting for its chance to smash the glass and lunge at Fong. Fong took a breath and putting his hand between the back of the glass and the wall, he pushed. The cabinet with the snake slid out smoothly revealing a tunnel, some ten yards long, heading out into the fields.

  Over his shoulder he heard Wang Jun swear. Fong raced through the tunnel, the smell of sodden earth all around him. He squeezed out the far end into the knee-deep mud of a paddy. Two paddies over, a figure he took to be the street sweeper was running at top speed along the ridges between the flooded plains. Fong headed right for her, crossing the paddies as fast as he could and shouting at her to stop. She did, for one breathless instant, and then hurled herself across the adjoining paddy. At that moment, Fong’s footing gave out under him and he plunged head first into the murky water. He came up soaked and spluttering for air and continued the chase. As he leapt into the second paddy, his hands instinctively reached up to pull what he thought were fat weeds from his lip and neck but the slick stuff refused to come off. When Fong finally got a good hold of the thing on his lip he realized that the weed was alive and not merely stuck to his lip but actively moving toward his open mouth.

  In fact his body was alive with fat, succulent leeches.

  He bit the one closest to his mouth and spat out half the wriggling thing as he jumped onto the perimeter wall of the second paddy. The street sweeper didn’t seem to be making much better progress than he so he tried the wall rather than the paddy this time. As he did, he heard a shriek from the paddy ahead. When he got there he saw that the street sweeper had fallen into the netting that separated the eel section of the paddy from the rice section. The creatures were now actively pouring through the rent in the net, many of them crawling over the street sweeper who was howling in terror. Her howls attracted the locals, one of whom owned the eel section. His howls outdid hers.

  Fong finally got to the exhausted street sweeper. He stood on the mud bank and managed to pull the sucker end of the leech off his face. As he tossed it into the teeming eely waters, he couldn’t help but thinking that he really hated the country. He really did.

  Back in the barrow, the street sweeper faced the two policemen. She was probably in her early twenties but it was hard to tell. Her work on the streets of Shanghai, in the traffic fumes and dirt, year after year, for eleven out of every fourteen days, had taken its toll. It’s possible she had hopes and aspirations like the rest of us, but the wheezing in her lungs as she breathed did not bode well for them.

  Fong had salted off the remaining leeches and found that he only had one serious sore, near his right hip, which continued to bleed despite the compress from the first aid box in the car. Ignoring the blood, Fong, still in his soaking suit, sat down opposite the street sweeper. Wang Jun had taken the silk carpet and thrown it over the snake aquarium, then cleared the rest of the barrow of its inhabitants. While doing so he took the opportunity to slam the brother across the temple with his revolver “just so that he’d remember next time not to lie to the police.”

  The street sweeper sat on a low bamboo stool and shivered. Fong was quite calm. He had done many interrogations. His very first had almost cost him his life, when he decided that a young thief needed understanding and a friend, not a swift kick in the teeth. He still carried the scar of the knife wound a blade edge from his left kidney. Fong lit one of the cigarettes from Wang Jun’s dry pack and sent a funnel of smoke in the street sweeper’s direction. It had its desired effect. The poor creature began to cough violently.

  “Where’s your face mask?”

  She indicated her pocket. “You can put it on if it helps.”

  She grunted what passed for a thank you, took out the wet mask and put it over her mouth and nose. The street sweepers all wore them—at first just in the latter parts of the day, then all day and finally almost all the time. Some slept with them on. The ever generous state supplied them free of charge.

  Wang Jun had already taken the preliminaries from the brother. She was twenty-seven, single, worked the second street cleaning shift on Julu Lu from 5:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. Her name was Tsong Shing and it’s possible that there was a time in her life when her eyes were not filled with the fear of her own death.

  “My name is Zhong Fong and I am head of Special Investigations for the Shanghai District. Two nights ago, between nine-thirty and ten-thirty on the evening of April 18 a man was killed in an alley off Julu Lu. The alley is on your route. It is in fact your responsibility according to your supervisor.” There was no response from Tsong Shing. She sat sullenly with her eyes down and wheezed through the mask.

  “The dead man was chopped into pieces and left like so much rancid meat to stink in the alley,” Fong said, his voice rising ominously. “Open your stupid mouth and tell me if you saw him.”

  Her mouth, behind the mask, stupid or not, opened and then shut. Like a trapped animal she was looking for a way out. She wasn’t sure where the danger lay and hence thought it best to stay where she was, pretty much the way most pedestrians in Shanghai deal with the reality of hundreds of bicycles coming at them on a walkway. Don’t move, let them avoid you.

  But Fong was a good interrogator. Some policemen thought interrogations were a joyous opportunity to degrade a suspect. Fong never believed that. He found it base and demeaning to humble another human being. He felt himself a lesser entity each time he walked out of an interrogation room with the suspect broken into mental pieces.

  Softly he said, “We know that you didn’t kill him.” There was the slightest glimmer of hope in her eyes. “We assume that you didn’t even see him, the killer, that is.” Rushing toward the safe spot she almost screamed. “I didn’t. I swear to you that I didn’t, I didn’t. Honest.”

  “But you did see the dead man, didn’t you, or at least the pieces of the dead man, didn’t you?” Slowly her head moved up and down. Then in a sharp nasal tone, with harshly punched consonants, Fong snapped, “You missed his wallet, you little idiot.” Tsong Shing literally faltered under the surprise attack. Her body slipped from the small stool as if someone had upended it. Before she could rebalance herself, Fong was on her, so close to her face that he could smell her breath through the mask. “But you found something in the alley, didn’t you? Didn’t you! His right hand was pointing, wasn’t it? What did it point at? What did you pick up in the alley, what!” But this time the trick wouldn’t work. He saw it in her eyes halfway through his attack. They had gone dull as she retreated back inside herself. With a hand she pushed him back and then virtually spat into the mask, “I have nothing! I have nothing. Everyone else has something, everyone, but I have nothing. Nothing.” Then she crumpled on the ground, moaning softly.

  “Finished with the psychological crap, Fong?” Wang Jun was standing across the barrow.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Shall I execute plan B?”

  “It seems they leave us no alternative.”

  Wang Jun then pulled out his revolver and yelled toward the door opening, “Get your fucking ass in here.” In a hurry, the brother, his face now quite swollen from Wang Jun’s pistol whipping, came to the door.

  Wang Jun approached the rich peasant. “Well, comrade, and I use the term guardedly here, I think we have ourselves a situation. It being this.” He pointed at the street sweeper but spoke directly to t
he brother. “Your little thieving whore of a sister over there took something from a Julu Lu alley two nights ago. We as the representatives of law and order in the District of Shanghai want it back.” The brother went to speak but Wang Jun indicated that he thought silence the only correct response at this point. The brother stared at Wang Jun’s raised gun and said nothing. “Very good, you’re a smart guy for a peasant.” Reaching for the silk rug, he said, “This will have to be taken in evidence, as will. . .” and he rattled off a list of every valuable article in the place. At the end of his recitation he handed the brother a card and said, “That’s my number, if you want your stuff back, you call me and tell me what your slut sister took from the alley.” The brother was eyeing his sister with fury. Seeing this, Wang Jun took Fong by the arm and headed him toward the entrance. As they left he said under his breath, “He’ll have what we need within a day or I’ll eat leech for lunch. By the way I’m hungry and there’s a good restaurant in the next water town.”

  Even as Fong was formulating his arguments against going into the water town, not the least of which was that his clothes smelled like the shit used to fertilize the rice paddies, Loa Wei Fen was watching Ngalto Chomi, Zairian consul general. Once again the agile African completed his office chores and headed down toward Fu Yu. Loa Wei Fen looked to the eastern sky. No rain today, he thought, but dust. The dry hot wind straight off the Mongolian steppes was running strong. The city’s grit would mix with the loess from the country, carried by the strong wind—by the cleansing wind of the plains. Loa Wei Fen noted that many people chose to stay indoors to avoid the dust, that the endless strings of bicycle riders on Yan’an were thinner than usual.

  As he pedalled his bicycle following the black man’s car, he slipped his hand into his inside suit pocket. There the snake-handled Mongolian knife seemed to roll over into his palm as if a thing alive. A day kill in the Old City would provoke the kind of response that his employers wished. A day kill would also move him nearer to the eave of the roof. Nearer to the leap to the curved pole with the other lion cubs.

  Amanda found the bus ride from Narita to the JAL hotel vaguely reminiscent of travelling through the clean New Jersey suburbs. At the hotel it took less than a minute to check her in and JAL had booked her bags all the way through to Shanghai.

  The deep tub in the bathroom was a joyous sight. She had been travelling since eight in the morning and the trip had taken a total of seventeen hours. So that made it one in the morning her time, although it was 3:30 in the afternoon in Tokyo, but the next day. It didn’t matter what time it was. She was tired and a bath would unwind her enough, she hoped, to sleep. On the bed was a cotton bathrobe and a pair of paper sandals. Without bothering to draw the curtains, she removed her travelling clothes and undid her hair. Out the window there were crowds of Japanese men, many of whom would be happy to pay a healthy portion of their monthly paycheques to get a glimpse at what was offered so freely to the late afternoon sun.

  The bathwater was softer than she expected. She sank into its warmth and sighed. Then, holding her breath, she slid down farther so that her head was beneath the water.

  She didn’t know if the tears started while she was beneath the water or whether they began their flow when she came up for air. It hardly mattered. Her body began to heave with sobs. She didn’t know if she was crying for the death of a man she had married but had never really known or for all the lost years she had spent with that man. All she knew was that alone in a cubicle of a hotel room in Japan she finally began to mourn.

  Loa Wei Fen had made a mistake, but he’d been lucky. The black man had been much stronger than he had anticipated. And the opium had made him physically unpredictable. Once he had managed to cut the African, his knife had done its work with its usual precision. It was not the knife that had faltered. He, Loa Wei Fen, was the one.

  There had been no time to dawdle. No time to arrange body pieces. It surprised Loa Wei Fen that Ngalto Chomi carried no wallet. He must simply let the driver settle his accounts. But the wallet was no matter. A black man was not hard to identify in Shanghai.

  It was the other thing that he had failed to leave that so angered him. It was not in fact until he was back in his room at the Portman that Loa Wei Fen reached in his pocket and remembered it. His employers would not be pleased. But more important, he was not pleased. He was trained not to make errors. He was trained to be perfect. And here he clearly was not.

  He threw the slender white objects at the ceiling.

  They shattered. But the sound did not pacify him. To him the ivory shards were nothing more than snowflakes falling on the roof, making it slippery for the lion cub to jump to the pole.

  About the time that Amanda was sinking into her hotel tub, Fong and Wang Jun finally reached the outlying suburbs of Shanghai. Both men would have been amazed to learn that the new housing going up there looked exactly like lower-income homes in Southern California commuter communities.

  Shortly thereafter in one of the alleyways off Fu Yu, a five-year-old boy brought a piece of what he thought was “funny dark meat” to his grandmother’s outdoor cook stand. The old woman’s screams did the unthinkable—they brought Shanghai’s traffic momentarily to a halt. This in turn brought the police. Which in short order brought a phone call to Special Investigations.

  By the time Fong and Wang Jun got there, the crime scene had been severely compromised. The alleyway off Fu Yu was densely travelled, so despite the best efforts of the local police, it quickly had become almost impossible to tell what was left where and by whom. Fong ordered the evacuation of almost the entire alley and despite the protests of the citizens and a cellular query from Commissioner Hu, he got his way. Then he had construction site searchlights set up all along the alley and quarter-meter sector lines laid down. Seventytwo police officers picked through every inch of one of the filthiest alleys in Shanghai for the better part of twelve hours and came up with almost nothing.

  Over and over again, Fong was approached with “What are you looking for?” And over and over again, he said, “I’ll know when I see it.” So they brought him everything they found. A small handful of one-fen coins, half a well-leafed-through Hong Kong porno magazine, bits of several different kinds of food in various degrees of decay, a sole from the toe of a lady’s shoe, and many more things—none of which pleased Fong. He had already found the piece of heart and the strip from the JAL airsickness bag, where he thought they would be. The Chinese driver informed the police that his Zairian charge never carried a wallet, that he, the driver, always went in after his client was finished and paid the bills. So that accounted for the wallet’s whereabouts.

  As the driver headed downtown with a police officer to make a full statement, Wang Jun approached Fong. “One hand points to the guy’s ID.”

  “The other to the second part of the message,” replied Fong.

  “Which is?” asked Wang Jun.

  “Which is what we are looking for. No! What we’ll keep looking for until we find.”

  Wang Jun slipped a cigarette into his mouth. “Did you notice that the body pieces weren’t put together very well this time?”

  “I noticed that.”

  “Could it be that our guy is slipping? Maybe he made a mistake.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Wang Jun looked closely at the younger man. Fong’s face seemed hard as a river stone. Set. Not looking outward at all, rather turned inward as if probing a memory.

  Fong had told her it was nothing more than a mistake. A slip of the tongue. That whatever she was carrying he would love and cherish as he loved and cherished her. But Fu Tsong knew her husband, the cop who loved the actress. She knew the pride he had in coming from the depths of the Old City to his present job, she knew his training in being a man. And she knew that part of that training insisted that he have a son.

  Spending her life in the relativity of art, she adored the factual solidity of Zhong Fong. His bluntness pleased her. So did his unrelentingly str
aight-line maleness. He never apologized for it, yet could easily converse with her many gay and effeminate male friends from the theatre. She enjoyed the pleasure of his touch and thrilled at how after all these years she still roused him by the simple removal of her blouse. She’d catch him in the mirror watching her put on her makeup. Walking into a room with a towel around her, fresh from the shower, provoked a smile from deep inside him. And his smile made her smile. Even the momentary slip of a bra strap outside a loose blouse attracted his attention. As if they were kids—no, not kids, but young lovers who thought their love the only love in the garden of delights.

  She also liked his incisive intelligence. He’d read each of her scripts and often had questions that made her see the text in new and different ways. He’d approach things deductively, always starting with “Now what would make someone use that exact phrase?” And then that liquid mind of his would put together backgrounds, often several of them that would lead an individual to say precisely those words. More often than she admitted she used his insights in her work.

  But now, as he pleaded his case before her, claiming it was just a slip of the tongue when he said “I’m lifting you and our son,” she knew differently. She applied his thinking. What could possibly make a person say that exact line? And there were very few answers. In fact there was only one. A person would only say “I’m lifting you and our son” if what the person wanted was the wife he held aloft to be carrying a son deep in her womb.