His Hu-ness yelled back, “There will be no performance today. We are the representatives of the people.The people own this theatre, not you. You work for them. So work. Act and we the people’s representatives will watch.”
Amanda slipped out of her platform shoes. She was now the same height as the rest of the actresses in theirs. Su Shing screeched a command to the musicians. The music began and two of the actors moved forward. They enacted a section of the play where the serving man guides his charge across a raging river. Li Xiao and his Hu-ness were moving toward the stage.
As they got close to the group of women, Fong spotted Loa Wei Fen high in the flies over the stage. A reptile on the hunt.
Li Xiao was looking closely at the women. Amanda didn’t know it, but the wound on her face was bleeding through her makeup.
Fong caught Amanda’s eye. He canted his head slightly to the left. She looked and saw that the left side of the stage was not covered by the police, all of whom seemed intent upon examining the women. Amanda smiled slightly; as she did, she raised her arm slightly toward Fong.
Fong almost swooned. Something rose up inside him. A terror. A memory. The simple arm gesture from Amanda moved something deep inside him, as if his body organs had shifted as he stood.
Amanda repeated the gesture and said silently, without moving her lips, “Goodbye, Fong, and thank you.” Then she looked at the young detective who was near her. She slipped her platform shoes back on, making herself a full foot taller than he. She took a deep breath and then shouted in English, “Back off, pipsqueak.”
Li Xiao was so startled at the advance of this enormous woman speaking in a foreign tongue that he almost fell backward. Before he could get his balance she was advancing on him, blood pouring crimson on her white makeup.
“Yeah, you, I’m talking to you, you yellow devil, you monkey in a suit, I’m talking to you, you fucking son of a bitch, you cocksucking dog fucker.” Then she saw the man she assumed was his Hu-ness and charged at him. “I’m talking to you, you puny-dicked moron, you. . .”
It was enough. She’d caused the one thing the Chinese cannot handle. Chaos. There was screaming everywhere as her words were translated with as much delicacy as possible. When she grabbed his Hu-ness by the lapels, all hell broke loose. Cops were moving everywhere.
It was not hard for Fong to slip out. He didn’t delude himself into believing that Loa Wei Fen in the theatre’s flies would be fooled. So he ran. But as he ran he savoured the memory of Amanda Pitman calling his Hu-ness a puny-dicked moron.
Fong didn’t remember much of what happened next. It had begun to rain. Traffic was horribly snarled. He ran. Darkness fell. The storm broke in all its fury as he entered the tunnel under the Bund at Beijing Road. He had no idea how it had gotten so late so quickly. All he knew was that he could run no more.
The tunnel was empty except for the old musician and his filthy child.
“Just let me sleep here, grandfather. Betray me if you must.” The beggar child moved from his blanket rag and approached Fong with his hand out. Fong reached into his pocket and gave the boy every yuan note he had left. The boy neither smiled nor frowned but delivered the money to his father, who began to play. As the haunting music echoed in the tunnel, Fong leaned back against the coolness of the tunnel wall. He breathed through his open mouth, his eyes misting. Without a sound the beggar boy came over to him and curled up in his lap. The warmth of the boy on Fong’s body sent a sob through his being. With his hand in the beggar boy’s hair, he drifted off to sleep with one final thought: if there is a god, he is laughing now.
Fong’s dream that night began with the cobra. Its steel coils were snaking their way down the hallowed-out shaft of the construction site elevator. Fong was at the bottom, completely walled in, and despite his frantic efforts to pry open the elevator doors they refused to budge. Outside the elevator shaft Fong could see the rattan wrapping and the massive bamboo scaffolds. His screams for help were drowned out by the screech of the storm and the thunder of the cranes. Above, the mighty snake flared its hood and descended the cables of the elevator—never fast but constant. Suddenly the mercury vapor arc lights switched on, converting darkest night into frozen day. The reptile’s unblinking eyes glinted red. Without warning the mighty snake dropped itself from the cables directly onto Fong’s now almost paralyzed body.
His scream must have awakened the beggar boy, who was patting Fong’s hair and whispering that things were going to be all right.
It was very late at night. There was little traffic in the tunnel. The old string player was shovelling a small bowl of rice into his toothless maw and staring at Fong. He finished his rice, stood up and, taking the boy by the hand, headed out of the tunnel. Fong could have sworn that the old man said two words over his shoulder: the Pudong.
Then things happened in a blur. Wang Jun was at his side. The two of them were running. Sirens crowded the night, competing with the roiling thunder. They jumped into Wang Jun’s car and headed across the suspension bridge. “What are you doing, Wang Jun?”
“I’m being dangerously sentimental. I’m saving your sorry life.”
As Wang Jun’s car careened off the exit ramp from the suspension bridge, he headed away from the sirens— into the heart of the Pudong.
• • •
Li Xiao and Loa We Fen got the report of the escape from the tunnel at the same time. The difference was that Li Xiao was on the Shanghai side of the Huangpo River, Loa Wei Fen on the Pudong side. . . waiting.
Wang Jun slammed on the brakes, skidding his car to a stop not two feet from the police roadblock. With a precision that identified them as federal troops, the men at the roadblock advanced on Wang Jun’s car.
Fong looked at his old friend. Wang Jun didn’t seem to be unhappy. “Where will they put you, Wang Jun?”
“In hell with you, no doubt.”
“That’s only true if they catch us.”
Wang Jun reached inside his jacket and took out his gun. He held it out to Fong and said, “You’re younger.”
With that, both men slammed open their doors, rolled out onto the pavement and bounded to their feet before their would-be captors could react.
As he ran Fong heard the gunshots and the thud of Wang Jun’s body slamming to the pavement. He didn’t hesitate or look back. He ran deep into the mystery of the old area. Deep into the heart of this terrifying place. He didn’t stop until his legs would take him no farther.
He found himself in the midst of a large muck-filled construction site.
He leaned against a stack of bamboo, his breath ragged in his chest. Raising his head he saw two great arc lights far across the vast construction site. Their beams were focused on a solitary bamboo elevator shaft. He took a step toward it before it struck him like a sledgehammer blow to the chest. His heart leapt in fear. It was the elevator shaft from his dream.
Before he could move he heard the slosh of a foot sliding in the muck behind him. He instinctively ducked to his left. The swolta tore through his quilted jacket and sliced across his left breast just to one side of his nipple, continuing down to rip through sections of Fong’s left leg.
For a moment he looked at his attacker, who had slipped to the muck-covered ground, then he ran and slid and yelled and fought the pain until a darkness seemed to envelop him.
He had to rest. His body was soaked with blood and sweat, the pelting rain mixing the two in an unholy froth.
He leaned back against a solid surface that gave slightly against his weight. It was bamboo. He turned slowly, a tingling fear electrifying his blood.
He was at the base of the solitary elevator shaft, the construction lights full in his eyes.
Loa Wei Fen looked down. Beneath him was the end of his quest. Directly below, blinded by the bright construction-site lights, it crouched warily, its head moving left and right but never up. Never up the bamboo elevator shaft. Never to where Loa Wei Fen lurked and patiently waited, like a lion cub on a roof, ready
to jump.
“Above, Loa Wei Fen, always attack from above,” the voice of his old teacher whispered in his ears. So removing his muddied shirt, he began. His hand reached for the swolta. The knife hilt rolled slightly and fitted itself to its master’s palm. Then down, down the bamboo bracing he slithered, his prey never suspecting danger from above.
• • •
After the first attack Fong’s mobility was reduced to a hobbling gait but there was still spring in his step and although the knife had severed muscle it had missed tendon, so the leg still responded to his will. When he fell his gun had filled with thick mud. Now, as he braced himself against the bamboo elevator shaft, he tried desperately to clean the gun barrel. His enemy was clearly stronger and quicker than he. Only the bad footing had saved his life on that first attack. Now he would have to survive by his wits.
“Loa Wei Fen,” he shouted into the harsh lights. “Loa Wei Fen, we know who you are. We know your school in Taipei. We have pictures of you.” He waited. There was no response. The rain picked up again.
On one side of the tall bamboo shaft low-voltage electric lines hissed slightly as the rain caused shorts where the cables were jury-rigged together. The lines led to a major power source high up on the shaft. On the ground muck and puddles covered most of the area except for a slightly raised cement pad upon which the elevator car would eventually come to rest.
Fong took aim at one of the two large arc lights and fired. The gun kicked hard to the right and the bullet pinged harmlessly off the side of the light’s casing.
“They gave you to us, Loa Wei Fen. They’ve used you, and now they want you gone. They gave you to us, you stupid shit.”
Loa Wei Fen was slightly surprised by the gunshot but encouraged by the miss. The lights were to his advantage as they were aimed down at the quarry, not up at the hunter.
He felt the cobra markings on his back begin to fill with blood. Without conscious thought, he spread the muscles of his upper back, opening the cobra’s hood. He slid down to the sixth floor of the bamboo shaft. His quarry was directly beneath him, hollering at the wind.
“They used me too. We’re both just pawns for them,” Fong screamed into the now sheeting rain. He aimed and fired a second time. This bullet found its mark and one of the two arc lights snapped off.
Like the taking out of an eye, the blinking off of one of the lights robbed Loa Wei Fen of his depth perception in the middle of his swing to a central strut of the fifth floor. His fingers reached and found only air. For a moment he plunged, but instinct saved him as his other arm, in full extension, struck and held a cross strut. And there he hung by one arm as the wounded man below him began to yell again.
“We don’t mean anything to them! They don’t give a shit! They want us both dead, you idiot!”
Fong fired three times at the remaining light and missed each time.
Loa Wei Fen, after hanging for almost thirty seconds, pulled himself up by one hand and then continued his progress down. The shouting man was directly beneath him, looking tiny through the curtains of rain now blowing almost parallel to the ground. Loa Wei Fen put the hilt of the knife in his mouth and tasted the acid of the snake’s skin. Blood engorged the markings on his back so they stood out like brilliant red welts.
His next move downward knocked free a low-voltage auxiliary electric cable.
The slender power line popped and hissed in the puddle at Fong’s left. He leapt aside and traced the dangling wire upward. And there, two and a half floors above him, was the great cobra of his nightmares, its hood spread, its sinuous body ready to drop on him from above. Fear coursed through him so strongly that he soiled his pants and dropped his gun into the puddle beside him. It glowed blue in the electrified water.
With an expert push, Loa Wei Fen, swolta in hand, began his spinning fall toward his prey, arms outstretched, legs spread, knife ready.
Fong saw the approaching, twisting shadow, framed perfectly by the elevator platform. As the snake’s head rose, its single fang glinting in the arc light, Fong reached high up on the diagonal piece of bamboo that supported the major electrical cable, and pulled with all his might.
Below him Loa Wei Fen saw the man reaching up toward him, beckoning—like the little monk on the peacock at the end of the strut of the Jade Buddha Temple. The little monk below. He, the fearful lion cub, above. This finally was the leap to the path.
The bamboo snapped free and severed the heavy cable. The exposed end of the cable touched the scaffold. The electricity, offered a new avenue of escape, leapt up the soaking bamboo toward Loa Wei Fen. With the same speed it raced down to the arm of the small man now almost knee deep in the mud.
The electricity hit both men at the same time. For a moment both were lit by a ghostly fire. Muscles involuntarily knotted in response to the jolt. The voltage surge threw Fong to his back on the cement slab, his limbs twitching. It forced Loa Wei Fen to bite through his tongue as he plummeted earthward.
Then the electricity crossed the thick main cable high up the scaffolding. Bamboo burst into flame. Sharp lengths of the solid vine plunged like spears toward Fong.
Fong’s eyes snapped open. Lightning bolts of flaming bamboo were streaking down at him and in their midst the huge snake twisted its body, trying to turn, even as it fell directly at him. Fong never felt the bamboo spike pierce his left biceps and splinter against the concrete slab. He didn’t feel it because the cobra’s tooth, the swolta, was free falling, point downward, directly toward his heart.
The cobra completed its turn. For a moment the two men locked eyes. One on his back on the slab, the other plunging face down toward the earth, the swolta between the two.
Fong instinctively reached up to protect himself from the falling knife.
Loa Wei Fen saw the little monk signalling for him to follow. And he understood. At last he understood how to make the leap to the path. He lunged downward toward the plunging swolta and with a flick turned the blade upward toward himself.
Loa Wei Fen’s body crashed limb for limb on top of Fong. There was no cry, only a solid thud and the ripping sound the swolta makes as it slashes through bone and muscle.
Loa Wei Fen’s left hand fell off the slab into an electrified puddle. The electric current jolted through his body a second time, scorching the snake from his back. As he smelled the odour of his own seared flesh, Loa Wei Fen had a momentary clear vision of the little opium whore in the back alley with the large black man. Of the thrill on her face as the black man caressed her breast. And with this vision clearly in focus, his mind came alive with joy—his body a chimera of electrical impulses.
Fong felt the world spin. As the bamboo shaft burned away it revealed a horizon of tall buildings where once the old town had been. Where once people’s lives were their own to live. Where once he had held his wife and their unborn baby above a yawning maw in the ground. And then committed them to space and eternity—her arm gesturing to him, her mouth alive with silent words.
Loa Wei Fen moved on top of him. Their bodies were fitted together piece for piece. He could feel the man’s laboured breath on his cheek. Something was pooling, thick between them. He reached around the man and felt the point of the swolta protruding a full two inches out of the man’s back. He pushed with all his remaining strength and Loa Wei Fen rolled off him and lay on his back. As Fong struggled to his feet he saw the snake handle of the knife standing above Loa Wei Fen’s sternum, as ungodly a gift as ever offered man.
Loa Wei Fen smiled up at Fong. He moved his right shoulder and his hand lifted from the ground. It moved toward Fong and then back to himself.
Fong blanched.
It was the exact same movement that Fu Tsong had made as she fell toward the construction pit. It was the terror awaiting him at the end of each nightly horror excursion back to the Pudong.
The hand came up and made the same motion again.
Fong couldn’t move.
Loa Wei Fen’s mouth was moving, blood and bits of
tongue bubbling on the lips but no words.
For a moment Fong was on the edge of the construction pit again. Fu Tsong was in the air falling, with the baby, her arm moving exactly as Loa Wei Fen’s was moving now. Fu Tsong’s mouth had moved too but there were no words. Nothing to explain what the hand movement meant.
Loa Wei Fen tried one more time. Tried to communicate to the little monk to complete the job—to set him free. The little monk didn’t seem to understand.
With the howling of the storm in his ears, Loa Wei Fen forced words into his throat.
“Thank you,” came out cleanly. Then with great effort, “You’ve set me free.”
Fong saw the blood trace the words on the lips of the dying man. He saw the arm gesture again mated perfectly with the words.
And then he wasn’t there anymore. But with Fu Tsong. In midair her arm tracing the same path. But this time her lips moved and there was both sound and meaning. As clear as a lover’s sigh she said to him, “Thank you. You’ve set me free.”
The rain slashed down on him. His tears mixed with it. His sobs came up from the earth and roared out of his mouth. His sides cracked and suddenly he was on the ground, digging in the mud. Throwing it over himself. Burying himself in the cold obstruction. Trying with all his might to avoid the laughter of the heavens that drowned his sobs.
And there he lay until a thought grew in his mind. A thought that warmed his being. Set his mind strangely at rest. Knowing what Fu Tsong had being trying to say to him as she fell allowed him, for the first time in his life, to fully accept that Fu Tsong had loved him. Loved him enough to thank him for a death that was surely his fault. With her arm movement she was not being set free. She was setting him free.
He arose from his would-be grave and stood in the pelting rain for a moment longer. Then he stepped toward the charred body of Loa Wei Fen. There was a smile on the dying man’s face. Scraping the mud from his hands, Fong reached forward and pulled the knife from Loa Wei Fen’s chest. A bubble of blood came up with the blade, “Thank you,” bubbled from his shattered mouth as Loa Wei Fen, still smiling, repeated his hand gesture.
The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory Page 24
