He stopped at a street vendor and bought a piece of twisted fried bread. It burned the roof of his mouth as he tried to eat it. The laughter of the woman vendor told him in no uncertain terms that he was no longer being taken for a cop. Now he was just another sucker who had bought a piece of refried dough, perhaps refried for the third or fourth time that day. He turned to look at her and was about to complain but he stopped himself. He needed his disguise. Bigger fish to fry today.
Still a little early, he passed by the mosque on Chang Le which was now a stock market. The other one, on Xinle Lu at Xiang Yang Lu, was a nightclub. He couldn’t decide which was a more unfortunate fate for a religious building.
It was after dusk when he finally neared the two small parks in the triangular patches formed by the diagonal crossing of Fuxing and Huai Hai.
In the eastern park there was a stone statue of two children dancing. There were beds of flowers but nowhere to sit. In an action that could only be described as cruel, the sittable cement sides of the flower beds had been studded with sharp iron prods, lest one needed to rest one’s weary bones. The western park was dominated by a cast iron statue of a Long Nose, his arms raised as if either teaching or pleading, it was hard to tell which. On the pedestal were the dates 1912-1935. During the Cultural Revolution all other means of identifying the twenty-three-year-old westerner had been obliterated. Old men huddled around games of Chinese checkers, not the game with marbles children play in the West. This is a complex game that resembles a cross between go and chess. The game near the statue had drawn a crowd of watchers, each sagely advising what he would do were he the player whose move was next.
Fong approached as if to watch the game and spotted the manila folder in the trash can. Lily had slid it down one side so that it was clearly visible but not easy to pluck out. As Fong moved toward the can he saw to his horror one of the city-paid scavengers approaching the basket. These people carried a wicker basket over their shoulders and an iron pincer in their hands with which they plucked specific materials out of garbage cans for recycling. One of the assignments was paper.
But as Fong approached the recycler he could smell that paper was not this worker’s assignment. This scavenger was collecting compostable materials. The odour of rot enveloped her like a thick haze. As she walked away Fong moved toward the basket and plucked out the manila envelope. As naturally as a man on his evening stroll, he moved out of the park, passing the old men doing tai chi and the elderly women doing the oldlady version of it, “shake a leg.”
Fong sat in the growing darkness of Fuxing Park reviewing the material that Lily had left for him. Most of it was highly suspicious. The picture of Loa Wei Fen at the airport supplied by the Taiwanese screamed “set up.” The one piece of information he found untainted was from the opium whore, Wu Yeh. The pimp’s information was of little use, as was the money changer’s—both coming up with save-their-skin suggestions but no hard facts. But the tong connection, Fish Face, provided surprisingly exact information—troublingly so. It was as if the Taiwanese and the tongs were trying to outdo each other in their efforts to give Loa Wei Fen to the police. The data from the two sources was almost identical but there was an open mockery in the note from Fish Face. His ended with the phrase “Get him before he gets you.”
As Fong headed toward the park’s exit he could smell burning refuse. It was 7:00 P.M. and Shanghai was adding the pungent scent of burnt garbage to the already potent mix of the city’s air. He thought back to Wu Yeh in the opium den. He thought of the brightness leaving her and the blurred opaque dullness replacing it. Opium replacing love. One addiction for another. But the addiction of love added light while the addiction of opium simply clouded. The light was dimming in her soul, that was plain to see—as the lights had dimmed in his with Fu Tsong’s death. Dimmed but not extinguished. Now his light was reviving, thanks to a blond American sitting at a desk in the Shanghai International Equatorial and writing a letter to her sister.
Dearest Sister,
I wasn’t unhappy to find him in my hotel room when I got back. I was shocked, though, at his appearance. He’d cut off his hair and there was a gash across his face. And he wore an old quilted coat. He looked—well, he looked Chinese. I know that sounds strange but that’s what I thought as he stepped out of the shadows. For a moment I didn’t recognize him. Before I could do anything he passed by me and stepped out into the corridor. Then he returned to the room and turned out the lights, shut the draperies and pulled me into the bathroom. Before I could say anything he said as explanation, “There are no windows in here.” Well it’s hard to deny that. He pulled a picture out of a manila envelope and putting it on the sink said, “Have you seen this man?” The Chinese man in the picture was young and silkily handsome. He wore an expensive suit. “Have you?” Fong asked a second time. I told him I hadn’t although it was hard for me to be sure and who was this guy anyway? He replied without batting an eyelash, “He’s the man who killed your husband, Ms. Pitman.”
The mention of Richard’s death and Fong’s formality chilled the air. “So arrest him.”
“I don’t want to arrest him. I want to talk to him. I want to find out who put him up to this.”
“So talk to him. Or don’t you know where he is?”
“He’s staying at the Portman Hotel.” Before I could stop myself I heard my voice saying, “He looks Chinese.”
“Hotels are not segregated in Shanghai now. A Chinese man with the right money can now stay where he wishes, even eat in the same restaurants as whites, and fuck in the same beds. One would hope that the sheets had been changed, but it is hard to regulate such things. It has been a while since we have seen NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED signs in Shanghai.”
He had caught me. Nailed me for my assumption that any man with enough money to stay in the Portman would have to be European or Japanese. The silence between us began to grow. I’d lived in a marriage of wide and complex silences. I did not want this relationship to be like that, so I forced myself to reach out to him.
“It scarcely matters if I say that I’m not guilty, does it?” His silence was a succinct answer but much to my relief he was not continuing to fade into the background, to move away. “If you know where he is and you want to talk to him, go over and pay him a social call.”
“He’d kill me.”
“You’re a policeman. You know how to defend yourself.”
“Not against this kind of man. He’d kill me . . . but he might not kill you.”
I laughed at him. I told him to forget it. I told him this was his problem, not mine. I told him to get out of the bathroom, I needed to take a pee. He told me to go ahead but he didn’t move. So I hiked my skirt and peed.
Then he did.
Then in the deep tub of the Shanghai International Equatorial Hotel I came alive with a Chinese man I’d barely known for five days. As the shower beat down on my back and head I rode him to an oblivion that had been denied me for many years.
When I awoke it was after midnight. He had just finished dressing and was heading toward the door with a promise to return—a promise I extracted from him when I said I would find the room number of the man who killed Richard.
Pray for me, A.
To Fong the school’s old theatre, late at night, echoed of life past, finished. Joy and laughter huddled in the corners of the ancient building, hiding from the emptiness lest their potency be sucked dry by the void.
That evening the top of the proscenium arch was emblazoned with a red banner proclaiming the vital role of the theatre workers. There must have been a political meeting in here earlier in the day. That’s a wee bit redundant, all meetings are political. Especially in China. The theatre, which of course belonged to the people, could be taken over by the “people’s representatives” whenever the people’s representatives decided that the people needed further encouragement in their labours, studies, or work habits. Meetings were also called whenever these representatives needed to remind the people
how very important it was to be represented by representatives.
The meetings occurred frequently enough in the theatre that a special rigging for the banner had been drilled into the plaster on either side of the arch: a strangely archaic set of heavy pulleys and ropes. As if the banner, which could not weigh in excess of two pounds, somehow, no doubt because of its weighty message, assumed untold mass.
As Fong stood in the empty space, he heard the flick of an electric switch and in a moment the sound of a compressor pump. Slowly a dim light bathed the stage set—a scene of a Victorian garden. On stage left going downstage and then across the front was a shallow stone-bordered stream. The compressor pump was forcing water into the stream. Fong was not surprised when Geoffrey Hyland walked out of the wings into his Victorian Twelfth Night world. What did surprise Fong was that he was holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Geoffrey gestured to the set and the water. “Do you like?” he called out. Fong chose not to respond. “Ah, your silence speaks volumes. Long time no see, Fong old bud. I’d begun to look forward to your cryptic presence in the back of my rehearsals.”
“Why?”
“You give it all a kind of edge. After all, you’re the real thing aren’t you, Fong?”
“What real thing?”
“The real thing. That which would kill for love. You are Orsino in action. Willing to kill your love before allowing another to touch her. I told you that everyone could find themselves in this play. I told you that.”
“You truly believe that?”
“I do, I’ve said so twice now.”
“And you believe I’m Orsino, willing to kill for love?”
“Once again I say, I do,” pronounced Geoffrey with a mawkish bow. A wobbly mawkish bow. Fong had never seen Geoffrey drunk before. He wondered why he was drunk now. He was afraid he knew.
“Are you all right, Geoffrey?”
“Couldn’t be better,” he said, righting himself. He waved at the stage. “Do you like my pathetic little stream?” Then he pointed downstage right. “Malvolio sits down there, dangling his footsies in the cool stream, like this.” Geoffrey crossed to the corner of the stage, and kicking off his shoes put his stocking feet into the water. “It’s surprisingly cold. Be that as it may, the conspirators put the letter, folded like a boat, in the stream up there. The water carries Malvolio’s demise right to him. It hits him on the foot in fact. We’ve practised. It works every time.” Then smiling, he said, “Neat, huh? The poor ass does nothing, but God’s water brings him his doom. Like me. No? I just sat in this fucking theatre and in walked your wife. But then you know all about that, don’t you, Fong?”
Very slowly, without any inflection, Fong replied, “No, I don’t, Geoffrey.”
Pulling a mock look of shock Geoffrey said, “Why don’t you come up into the light like the rest of us lovelost buffoons?”
“I’m not an actor, Geoffrey.”
“So you say. So you say, Fong.”
“You have two children, don’t you Geoffrey?”
Geoffrey quickly corrected him. “Had two children, a boy and a girl.”
“Why had?”
Then in a voice filled with self-loathing Geoffrey yelled back, “Had because after I met your wife, your fucking amazing wife, I could never really go back to them. Not really. Children know. Everyone knows. Even you know, don’t you, Fong? Look into your heart, Fong! You know, don’t you!” He took a long pull from his bottle.
The stream pumped water. The ancient lights flickered. And Fong knew that Geoffrey Hyland was adrift in an ocean of pain and recrimination. Enough of both to have driven him to the police. So at least Fong had learned that much.
Leaving the theatre Fong hugged the sides of the buildings as he made his way toward his apartment. Untalented students rehearsing scenes; an extraordinarily loud television set in the open-sided faculty room; the staircase leading up to the apartment. No guards, no police. It wasn’t possible that they would have overlooked his apartment with an all-points-bulletin out for his arrest. He pushed open a basement door and tiptoed past the couple asleep on a mattress on the damp concrete. Then he ran up a back stairway to the second floor.
Even as he opened the door to his apartment, he knew that he had not been the first to open that door this evening. Lived-in rooms, especially rooms of love, have a consistency to them. A firmness that links one object to the next in a continuous flowing idea.
There was no flow here now. At first he thought it was because of him and Amanda but quickly his eye lit on the telltale clues of another kind of brief but serious intrusion. The bathroom door, always hard to close, now left slightly ajar; the puff in the drapery fabric that always results when opened and not given the necessary attention when subsequently closed—but more than these telltales was the feel of the other’s presence.
As the key was turned in the lock and the door cracked open, Loa Wei Fen allowed the knife to turn in his right hand. His left was pressed flat against the surface of the top of the armoire, upon which he was hiding. “Always attack from above.” The leap would be awkward unless the policeman, who was now dressed like a peasant, moved one step farther into the room.
Loa Wei Fen had been waiting on top of the armoire for over two hours. The police search finished over three hours ago. He had watched the search while crouching on the tile roof across the way. There were so many police and then none. This troubled him. So he waited for a full hour before slipping into the apartment.
He too had felt the former solidity of the place. Anger surged through him and he reached for his knife.
Fong stood in the door, a slash of light from the hallway across the apartment’s carpet. What was wrong here? The police had been here, yes. But that was not all that he was sensing. What else was here? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that his body was preparing him to run. And that’s what he did. Leaving his apartment without entering, without closing the door, he raced to the basement and out a rear door into an alley. He threw himself over the now locked gate of the academy. Pushed through the crowded Marco Polo club across the way. Barged into a washroom and pried open a window. Then he leapt out. He could only hope that he finally lost whoever or whatever was following him as he merged with the traffic on Yan’an.
Loa Wei Fen followed as fast as he could. The basement, the gate, the club all were no problem. When he saw the policeman racing toward the washroom he knew that the man would be looking to crash out a window so he headed back out of the club and ran toward the side of the building. But Loa Wei Fen was unlucky this time. An electrified fence awaited him. Its fourteen-foot height prevented him from following the escaping figure of the policeman who, emerging from the high window, looked so much like a serving man escaping from a princess’s boudoir.
Fong had no idea whether he’d fully thrown off his ghost. His fear was still very real. He grabbed the phone from one of the public kiosks and threw a five-jiao note at the owner. Amanda picked up at the top of the second ring.
“Are you all right?”
“Never better, but I’m not coming back there this evening.”
“What about your promise, Mr. Policeman?”
There was mockery in her voice and a seductive taunt. For a moment he considered going there. Then he saw Loa Wei Fen half a block down the street walking slowly, sectoring the area with his gaze. Searching. Searching for him.
“I’m being followed. I don’t want to lead him to you.”
The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory Page 20
