The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory

by David Rotenberg

  He had made an error when he killed the black man. He didn’t know why he had made the error, but he did know that everything in his world had changed since.

  Two days ago, after discovering that the source of his e-mail commands was police headquarters on the Bund, he had headed back toward the Portman. He went via the Old City, intending to pick up his bicycle from where he had left it the day of the killing. But as he approached, he sensed rather than saw the watchers. After a moment’s examination, he spotted the police officers everywhere asking people about bicycles. He veered into the Fu Yu antique market and found himself somehow drawn toward the opium den where he had seen his quarry kiss the Chinese woman.

  The image of the Chinese woman materialized more lovely than his memory, when she parted the curtains, a pipe in her elegant hands. That image exploded in his heart when, after preparing the opium, she put her tongue in his mouth. That image implanted itself as the liquid dream floated into his lungs and the impossibly small woman inserted him into herself bringing the clouds and the rain.

  As if the two of them were part of something else. Part of a whole thing, he thought.

  On the floor of the Portman Hotel the memory hurt him. Hurt him more than the scarring on his back. More than the rigours of his training. Something was ripping open inside him. Then Wu Yeh, his opium whore, was there in his hotel room—although he knew she couldn’t be. The slender Chinese woman, pipe in hand, her robe open, awaiting him. As she approached, all Loa Wei Fen could think was that this isn’t true—what has happened to me? And the great beast carved on his back flared its hood, its eyes blood red, and sank its fangs deep into Loa Wei Fen’s heart.

  Even as he toiled in the midst of his nightmare of love, Loa Wei Fen’s computer was collecting data from the ether. A name appeared and an address. A photo likeness and a long set of names, dates, and places. The message ended simply. “Kill him any way you wish, and then disappear for a very, very long time.”

  DAY SEVEN

  Shanghai, PRC, An April Dawn

  Dearest Sister,

  In Shanghai, I wear my westernness like an overcoat. As the sun crests the horizon in Fuxing Park the long gray amoeba shadows of the old men doing tai chi glide in slow motion across the cracked pavement. A woman in stirrup stretch pants is conducting a ballroom dance class to the sounds coming from a crackly beat box. Couples are learning the steps to a rumba. To my left two men in old-fasioned undershirts are playing a game of go while six or seven other men crowd in to offer their unsolicited advice. I am left alone with pen and paper and a head full of phrases running this way and that. I saw a girl in love yesterday, mourning the death of her lover. Back in the hotel room at Narita I thought that was what I was doing, but now I know for sure that it was not. I was pushing my past out of me or it was rising out of me by itself. I saw a little boy peeing by the roadside yesterday evening and I wanted to run over to him and hug him and tell him to figure out how to love someone with that thing. But I didn’t. I just smiled. I do a lot of smiling here, sometimes when I don’t feel like smiling much. After spending the day walking with Inspector Zhong, I spent a large portion of the evening walking alone. I found an area down Wolumquoi Road, near the consulates, where the city is a little less hectic. I sat and watched and dreamed of being alive here in a city where life is all there is for most people.

  Tom Waits talks in a song about hiding in a hat, hanging in a curtain. I feel like I’ve been doing that for a long time. But, here I feel my time of hiding is almost over. That I have finally got to the brim of the hat, the hem of the curtain.

  There was a dry wind yesterday all the way from the Mongolian steppes, they say. A fine loess sifted into everything. The city was bone dry, parched. But this morning, at dawn, there is a mist over the mighty Huangpo River and the hint of the promise of summer rains to come.

  Love ya a hunk, squeeze those kids for me will you?—

  A.

  At the office that morning, Fong read the fax a third time, still unable to believe the words on the page. The Taiwanese government had okayed his request for assistance! And in less than a day to boot. On top of which they offered open access to their files and help in any way they could. It didn’t make sense. Unless. . . A thought began to tickle its way toward the surface of his consciousness.

  He had Shrug and Knock arrange airplane tickets for Li Xiao and confirm visas. But even as he spoke his mind was elsewhere. Tickling, tickling, the thought was coming to the air like a bubble from a still lake bottom. Unless. . . someone very powerful wanted the killer caught and ordered the Taiwanese to cooperate. Then it came to him clear. The messenger had delivered his message and was now expendable.

  And from that moment, Fong stopped trying to find the killer. Now he wanted to find the man who hired the killer. Who owned him. Who put the knife in his hand just as surely as the ivory pipe had been put into his own hands in the opium den. He recalled the heft of the pipe and the last vestiges of the tickling stopped. He knew in his heart that ivory was somehow the link that closed the chain between those killed and those who ordered the killings.

  He was waiting in the lobby of the International Equatorial Hotel later that morning when Amanda came down.

  As he requested, Amanda had dressed up. Zhong Fong had not. Amanda lifted her arms with a so-what-do-you-think? gesture.

  “Very nice, just right.”

  “Thanks. You on the other hand look like a cop.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Worse.”

  They started with the hotel gift shops working their way from the arcade at the Equatorial to the Jing An Hotel to the Hilton. In each shop they found helpful but totally uninformed sales people. Selling they could do. Telling you the history of the ivory pieces that were on display or even the source and type of the material was beyond their limited knowledge. One of the older saleswomen asked if they were concerned about importing a piece back to America.

  “Why? Should we be concerned?”

  “No, not really, it’s small. The embargo is really on large pieces.”

  “How old is this piece?”

  “Old enough you can be sure that it was made before the ban on elephant products came into effect.”

  Leaving the store, Amanda remarked, “She was lying.”

  But Fong wasn’t so sure. “There’s a lot more places to check out.”

  They walked east to Hua Shan and followed the road past the popular bakery near the hospital. As they stood in the middle of the street trying to cross, the traffic momentarily stopped to allow two young orderlies wheeling a patient on a stretcher. One of the orderlies held an IV bottle aloft. “Traffic accident,” said Fong.

  “I would never have guessed,” snarled Amanda as the cars whizzed pass them on both sides.

  “You think the traffic is dangerous here?”

  “I do think that, Inspector Zhong, yes I do.”

  “It’s statistically safer than all American cities. You North Americans have this myth about Asian drivers.”

  “Fine, but you have to admit that drivers here don’t seem to stop for anything. Except children. I’ve seen them stop for children.”

  The small man at her side all of a sudden became beautiful as a delicate sadness crossed his features. The sadness and the beauty disappeared in a moment. Then, with a wan smile, Fong replied, “We have a great fondness for children here in Shanghai. A great fondness.”

  On Hua Shan Road they finally got lucky. In an antiques store that displayed a turn of the century elephant tusk whose two-and-a-half-foot surface was entirely covered with Buddhist religious etchings, they found an elderly man who, with a bit of prodding, gave them their first real lead. “Yes, the ivory is very hard to come by now,” he said. More questions and more subtle evasions. For a moment the older man thought these two were dealers themselves. He distracted them with his collection of thin-necked perfume bottles whose designs had been painted on the inside of the glass. The woman was momentarily fascin
ated by the bottles but then brought the subject back to ivory. The salesman showed them an ivory ball about four inches across, with lace patterns carved into its surface. Inside the ball were thirty-four other balls of ivory, each and every one carved as delicately as the outside sphere. Finally the man, who by now the salesman had determined was a policeman, asked, “Who did the carving?”

  “Fen Shen Lo and Tong Tsu.” Then he supplied their addresses.

  The policeman said thank you and turned to go but the old man reached out and stopped him. “Don’t hurt these men. They are both very old now. And they are artists, see?” From beneath the counter he brought out a newish tusk, which unlike the scrimshaw etching style of the one in the window was carved into a three-dimensional rural scene of such intricacy that, totally unassisted by colour, the figures appeared lifelike. “This is the last piece I received from Fen Shen Lo. Is it not exquisite?” It was a question that required no answer.

  Tong Tsu’s home was closer so they went there first. The old carver’s daughter, now herself an old woman, answered the iron door leading to the inner courtyard. She too knew a cop when she saw one. “You’re looking for my father.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Fong acknowledged that they were, that they would like to talk to him.

  “You people call it talk now. What happened to hound, harass, and terrify?”

  “We would just like to meet with your father and talk about his art,” put in Amanda.

  “Well, you’re too late for that. After they raided his workshop six months ago and took away the piece that he’d been working on for over four years, he packed up and left without even saying goodbye. Someone from his village got a message to me that he had managed to get there but he was sick. They say he’s dying and I can’t manage to get enough money to go see him. They say his hands shake so badly he can’t drink his tea without it scalding his lap. This for a man whose hands could do this.” With that she pulled on an ordinary string around her neck. Off the string hung a three-dimensional ivory cameo of a young man in a top hat and tails beside his young wife with a baby in a frilly dress seated on her lap. All in extraordinary detail. All no more than an inch high and three-quarters of an inch across.

  She did not have to say that the woman was her mother, the man her father, and the baby herself. The cameo father had the woman’s eyes and nose, the mother the mouth, and the baby the shape of face.

  The cameo was a frozen moment in time caught by the artist through the living material called ivory.

  As they left the courtyard Amanda turned to Fong. “Would she accept money from me?”

  “No, but a train ticket to her father’s village would probably meet her approval.”

  They were luckier with Fen Shen Lo. He was a modest man who lived in a new apartment on the outskirts of the city. His advanced age and artistic reputation had allowed him a little more space than others. He answered the door with a smile and a greeting. He had been expecting them; the owner of the Hua Shan store had called him.

  Amanda immediately sensed a gentleness in this man.

  They had tea with him in his small sitting room. He apologized for not having sweets to offer them. Amanda liked the tea, the way the leaves sank to the bottom of the cups like seaweed by the shore. For the first time she understood the notion of reading tea leaves. There they were, as accurate a reckoning of the future as any other. Finally Mr. Fen turned to Amanda and said, “So you think us very cruel, do you, in the West?” Amanda went to protest but he raised a strong but gnarled hand. “Cruelty is such a complicated subject. Does the beauty you make from cruelty make the cruelty acceptable? Is it cruel to force the body into the contortions of your ballet dancing, or our Peking opera? I don’t know. I just know that there are things a carver can do in ivory that cannot be done in any other material. Let me show you.”

  With that he got to his feet and went through a simple door that opened to, for Shanghai, an extremely large studio space. There, mounted on end vises, were six large tusks. Each was an incomplete work. He directed them toward the largest of the tusks.

  “I have been working on this piece for almost eight years. Thirty years ago there were over three hundred registered ivory carvers in Shanghai. Now there are fewer than ten. And most of us. . . elderly.” He loosened one side of the end vise so that the tusk could be rotated. It was like looking into a living cave peopled with animals and plants and magic beings—all impossibly detailed. His work had progressed out from the fullness in the centre all the way to one end of the tusk and was now expanding toward the other side. His fingers touched it lovingly. He pointed toward a largish figure of a woman twirling, her dress floating out behind her, her sash out in front of her, her hair flying back. “Only in ivory. The material is so dense, so intrinsically solid and yet soft enough to work with hand tools. Only ivory allows this.”

  The sadness at his loss was clear.

  “I could tell you that all these tusks come from Chinese elephants in our southern Hunan province who died natural deaths but you would not believe me. No one believes. The papers say that ivory is smuggled into Shanghai. The papers want it stopped. Save the elephants. Perhaps they’re right.”

  “Where does this elephant tusk come from, Mr. Fen?”

  In a dull voice, almost not there anymore, the old man said, “From our Hunan province, in the south, it was taken from an elephant who died from natural causes.”

  Fong withdrew a photo of Ngalto Chomi from his pocket and put it on a table. “You know him, don’t you, Mr. Fen?”

  The old man’s eyes slid across the picture, the recognition clear on his face.

  “Did he supply you with some of these tusks?”

  Slowly the old man looked at the strange couple before him. It was a different age. He took a deep breath, then said, “Some? No. Not some. All. All my beauties.”

  When he shook their hands at the door, all that Amanda could think of was that his hands felt like rice paper. And his eyes were so sad that tears would never leave them.

  Fong saw it too, but read it a little differently. Fong saw them as the eyes of one in love. The eyes of one addicted to the thing he loved, who knew that the source of his addiction had dried up. That when his work on these tusks was finished, he would have no further reason to live.

  Just as Li Xiao was about to board the plane for Taipei he was summoned to the front desk by a page. When he took the offered phone from the hand of the airline hostess he noted her nails were painted blood red. He smiled at her and said his name into the phone. He listened briefly. “Yes, I’ve kept the records. No, I’d prefer to be there when they’re examined. I’ll be back tomorrow. It can wait, Wang Jun. The woman died almost four years ago, so it can wait another day.”

  He had slammed down the phone harder than he had intended. Red Nails looked at him, “Bad news?” she asked meekly.

  “Yeah, bad news. Thanks,” he said, handing back the phone. Fucking bad news, he thought. He liked Zhong Fong, but there were still too many unanswered questions about his wife’s death. Too many for Li Xiao, who had been in charge of the investigation since its inception four years ago, to ignore.

  Amanda and Fong walked along Chong Shu in the silence left from their meeting with the old carver. Fong was turning an idea over and over and over again in his mind. Ivory was being smuggled into Shanghai. Both of the dead men were connected to ivory smuggling. Someone was killing ivory smugglers. Why? To stop ivory smuggling. Why? It wasn’t a big business. To corner the marketplace in ivory? Is this killing off the competition? If so, why kill them that way and leave messages who they are and that this has to do with ivory as witnessed by what the street cleaner found? Two dead ivory smugglers as a message to others to stop smuggling ivory into Shanghai. But why? Who would benefit from the stoppage of the smuggling of ivory? Not the jade sellers or anything like that. This couldn’t have to do with business that way. Fong went back and turned the “idea bauble” another way. Who opposes the smuggling o
f ivory into Shanghai? In other words, who would be made happy by the stoppage of said smuggling? Friends of elephants. Anyone else? He racked his mind but could come up with no one else who would be made happy from stopping the smuggling. Only the friends of elephants. Fong searched for the English word for such people. And found it: conservationists. Who’s killing the great smugglers of ivory? Conservationists? No! For a moment vertigo enveloped him like a sickly cloud.

  Amanda turned to look at him. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, no, I’m just a little tired.”

  “You are a terrible liar. Come on, we’ll get you some tea.”

  Sitting in the window of the quiet restaurant, Amanda put up her hand as Fong began to order. Then she said to the waitress, “lu tsah” (words she knew meant green tea). For a moment the waitress’s face fell into a pattern of shock, and she was about to say something harsh to Amanda when Fong interceded with a few Chinese words and the waitress with an icy smile turned on her heel and left.

  Amanda looked at him. He smiled. “Right words. Wrong sounds, wrong stresses, wrong tones.”

  “She looked like I insulted her.”

  “You did”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to. What’d I say?”

  Not wishing to allow Amanda to pursue her line of inquiry, Fong posed a question of his own. “How strong are American conservationist lobbies?”

  “Now, quite strong,” she replied, surprised by his question.

  “Strong enough to sway the United States government?”