by James Church
“I think that will do as an answer.” My uncle rested his eyes on Ping Man-ho. “You had something to add?”
Ping shook his head. “Nothing, Inspector.”
“Can we take a break? I think it’s time for a break.” Madame Fang made a grab for control. “Coffee and cookies would be nice, if you have any. Also, I wouldn’t mind going to see a man about a dog.”
Wu grumbled, “No one leaves this house.”
“What?” Gao swiveled around again to look at Wu. “We’re not under arrest. You can’t arrest me.”
“As it happens, we don’t have coffee, but we do have some tea, very fine tea from Yunnan. It arrived at our door this morning.” My uncle reached on the shelf behind him for a small box. “Miss Du, since you are from Kunming, would you do me the honor?”
Miss Du took the box gingerly. She examined the sides and looked closely at the ribbon that held the lid on. “Why don’t you save this for later?”
“No, please. It’s my pleasure to serve our guests only the finest things, isn’t that so, Major?” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to chime in, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
“Sure, only the finest.”
Miss Du tugged reluctantly at the ribbon. It came undone more easily than she had anticipated. The lid slipped off, and the contents of the box spilled onto her dress. She looked in horror at the object sitting on her lap. Before anyone could move, she screamed, threw the object at my uncle, and fainted.
2
It took a few minutes to bring Miss Du around. Wu went to the kitchen for a glass of cold water to splash on her face.
I motioned my uncle to join me in the hall. “What the hell was in the box?”
“A damp squib. I may have miscalculated,” he said.
“May have? She might have had a heart attack. What was it, and don’t tell me it was a shell-like ear with a gold filigree earring attached.”
“An ear? No, it was a piglet trotter. It looks a little like a human finger, several fingers actually, if you don’t examine it too closely. It was all I could come up with in a pinch. I didn’t realize she was quite so high-strung. I figured the sight of it would shock her into saying something unguarded. It nearly did. She’s very anxious for such a rich person.”
“You think she’s guilty of something but you don’t know what. You can’t just hurl pig parts at a person on a hunch.”
“It’s not exactly a violation of human rights, or due process, or whatever the hell is the lecture of the day. All I did was throw a little scare into her. Do I think she’s capable of murder? No, not murder, but everything short of that. Underneath that lace exterior, she’s as ruthless as they come. In this case, she’s motivated as well.”
“Don’t tell me you think she murdered Lu Xin. She wasn’t anywhere near that clinic.”
“You know that, do you?”
“It would be easy enough to establish.”
“When I told you there were a hundred arrows in the air aimed at Lu Xin, I wasn’t thinking hers was one of them. I still don’t think she would pull back the bowstring herself, but she might contract to have it done.”
There was a small scream from the library, then a string of curses, very Yunnan in content.
“Good, she’s back in form,” my uncle said. “When I give you the signal, you follow my lead. Tell Wu to be ready, too.”
He stepped back into the library and was making his way to the desk before I had a chance to ask what he meant.
“I hope you have recovered, Miss Du,” he said as he sat down. “Would you like a sip of whiskey to calm your nerves?”
“Why don’t you lay off her, Inspector?” Ping Man-ho looked ready to pop out of his seat. I almost jumped in to restrain him, but I didn’t want to move too soon. “You’re bullying her for no reason.”
“You have been acting gallant all afternoon, Mr. Ping. It would be edifying to see a man come to the aid of a perfect stranger, except you two know each other, have known each other for quite a while.”
“That’s your theory, Inspector. You’re welcome to your theory.”
“No, it’s more than a theory. You are the one who invited Miss Du to Gao’s; you are the one who watched her lose a fortune, more money than you’d ever seen in your life. You didn’t gamble much yourself; MSS didn’t give you much compensation.”
I figured Ping would lunge, and was about to move in when my uncle gave me a look that held me in place. Ping’s body tensed, but then he sat back in his chair. I wished I had frisked him when he came in.
“Should I go on, Mr. Ping, or do you want to say something?”
Ping looked at Miss Du. “It’s over,” he said.
That was all he uttered before Miss Du whipped out a small pistol and shot him twice in the chest. From that point on, things happened fast. My uncle threw the piglet trotter and knocked the gun from Miss Du’s hand; Madame Fang pushed her to the ground, and Gao, in the excitement, kicked her in the head with his cast, which knocked her out cold.
I retrieved the pistol from under one of the chairs because having a weapon lying around in that sort of situation usually isn’t helpful. Meanwhile, Wu rushed up to check Ping Man-ho.
“Double damn,” he said. “Dead.”
3
That night, after a dinner of noodles and dumplings that we ordered out from a pretty reliable restaurant on Jinxue Street, my uncle sat at his desk, reading. Wu was relaxing in the red velvet chair, chewing on a toothpick and holding a glass of whiskey. I’d asked him to stay for dinner and then to hang around. He knew plenty, and maybe he’d help us find our way through the maze as we pulled on the loose threads. My theory had been mostly shot to hell by events earlier in the day, although a few fragments still appeared intact.
“Did you know,” my uncle said, not looking up from the book, “that trees can sense earthquakes coming days in advance?”
“I didn’t know it, and the reason I didn’t is because it’s not true. What are you reading?” The last thing we needed was to get off on the wrong track.
My uncle closed the book. “A lot of foolishness. Where do you get books like this, anyway? What about you, Wu, read anything good lately?”
Wu shook his head. “I never read anything but files. Better than fiction.” He moved the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “Out of curiosity, Inspector, how did you figure out that Handout was Ping Man-ho? Even I didn’t know his identity, and I’ve been working night and day on that problem for weeks. Major Bing didn’t know either, and Handout was supposed to be his agent.”
“You have to give Lu Xin some credit; he did everything necessary to make sure no one realized Ping and Handout were one and the same. I’ll bet Handout’s personnel dossier is incomplete in all the wrong places.”
“You been showing him files he has no business seeing?” Wu grinned at me and took a sip of whiskey.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “The Third Bureau must have known who Handout was. Fu Bin was running him for years.”
Wu growled like an old dog. “The Third Bureau can’t find its way to the toilet in the middle of the day. Your man Fu never met Handout. They were supposed to have face-to-face meetings, but when we checked, we found out that Handout always left his reports in a tree.”
My uncle perked up. “What sort of tree?”
Wu shrugged. “The sort that has leaves.”
“That’s strange,” I said to Wu. “You told me you didn’t know who Fu Bin was.”
“I lie now and then. Shocking, isn’t it? How about you, Inspector? Are you going to tell me how you knew about Ping, or are you going to make something up?”
“It’s not how did I know about Ping Man-ho, but when,” my uncle said. “It’s when that’s important. I should have realized it sooner. Instead, I was rummaging around in the wrong bag of hypotheses.”
“Blue Sparrow, here we come,” I muttered.
Wu started to say something, but my uncle kept talking. “If I’d realized it so
oner, I would have taken more precautions, Ping would still be alive, and we might figure out exactly what Miss Du had done. She won’t talk, I guarantee you.”
“That’s no problem.” Wu seemed more relaxed at how things had turned out than I would have imagined. The whiskey seemed to be helping.
“Oh? You have a theory?” My uncle closed his eyes and let his head lean against the back of his chair.
“Better than that. I have something I can tie up in a neat little package and send off to Headquarters. They know this is too much of a cock-up on their part to complain that I’ve left gaps.”
“Go ahead, you have my undivided attention.”
“Understand, I have nothing to do with the planning, and I don’t play in external operations. I just clean up afterward. But I need to know a certain amount in order to do my job. Some of this tracks with what the major ran by me yesterday, but you had gaps.”
“More whiskey, Wu?” My uncle opened his eyes and looked squarely at me. “Nephew, top his glass off.”
Wu held his glass out, and I poured several weeks’ salary’s worth of expensive whiskey into it.
“No more for me, Major,” he said when the glass was nearly full. “I’ll sit with this for the rest of the evening. Where was I?”
“Your job,” my uncle said. “I think you indicated it gives you access.”
“Yeah.” Wu put the toothpick in his pocket and gave himself a mouthful of whiskey. Another couple of those, I thought, and he’ll end up unconscious on the floor. He was already getting a little extra color in his face. “When Beijing learned that the South Koreans were going to Mongolia to sign deals on rare earth and so forth, people decided they had to move quickly. Outbidding the Koreans isn’t possible; bullying the Mongolians is possible, but people would rather hold off on that for now. The best idea, as I heard it, was to discredit the South Koreans in the eyes of the Mongolians, and what better way to do that than to convince Ulan Bator that dealing with Seoul meant getting mixed up in the messy, unending business of inter-Korean confrontation.”
I almost said that we’d already figured out as much, but my uncle scooted in ahead of me. “Fascinating,” he said. “So why did Miss Du kill Handout?”
“Because she owed a pile of money to Dr. Mike, more than she could possibly pay. She lost a lot at Gao’s, but Gao only gets to keep what comes from the small fish. Mike gets the big losers, and he squeezes the life out of them by collecting interest on interest, hourly from what I hear. Gao gets a percentage of a percentage, a few scraps.”
“In that case, why not shoot Mike?”
“There’s a nice thought. I wish she had. Maybe she would have if she could have found him, but Mike doesn’t show up in public very often, as the major knows, and he’s smart enough to stay away from people who owe him money and thus don’t wish him well.”
“Back to the original question. Why Handout?”
“I’m getting to that. Before they had a falling-out, Miss Du and Ping Man-ho had the hots for each other. We weren’t watching him, but we were keeping track of her. They were ripping each other’s clothes off every night for a few months, but then something happened. She got tired of him, told him to get lost, but he kept finding his way back to her. By that time she was deep in debt, and Ping figured if he helped her fix her problem with Mike, she’d fall in love with him again. What is it with these lovelorn types?”
“Sappy bastard. Always the weak link in these things.” My uncle sounded disgusted.
“Yeah, well, he died for his sins. Anyway, here we have to switch gears. Ping was panting after Miss Du, and in the meantime, thanks to Lu Xin but unbeknownst to us thanks to a big hole in our network, Handout wriggled himself in the middle of the counterfeit state seal gambit. Beijing dreamed up this complicated operation to use the seal to discredit the South Koreans. But Lu Xin had his own game. He decided to use the Chinese game as cover for his return home. As a first step, he had to get word to us that he planned to redefect. Word got back, I never figured out how.”
“Always gaps,” said my uncle. “Minor detail.”
Wu might have given my uncle a suspicious look, but his eyes were starting to have a little trouble focusing. I topped off his glass.
“Yeah, details,” Wu said. “The operation was already going two directions at once, and then Handout decided to use the seal to win back the heart of Miss Du.”
“Beijing didn’t get wind of any of this?”
“Hell, no. It never occurred to Beijing that a little germ like Handout would play such a big game. I doubt if Lu Xin knew either. If he had, he probably would have tried to stop it because it could end up compromising his own efforts to screw with Beijing. This is normal. This is why I run cleanup teams every day of the year. Always something going wrong.”
“Dismal.” My uncle shook his head.
“You said it. This one was over the cliff before it even got moving, total failure on all counts. I had planned a vacation right about then, but Beijing could tell it was starting to rain shit, so they canceled my leave. I was about to get on a plane when the courier came running up with orders to pull a travel team together in a hurry.” He turned to me. “You know, those special orders wrapped in that fucking tape. I hate that tape.” He took a healthy swallow from his glass. “That’s why I ended up in your office at 2:00 A.M. Don’t think it was my idea. It wasn’t.”
By this time I was settled in the chair behind my desk. No one needed my two cents.
Wu picked up the story. “From here on out I do a little creative thinking. I don’t know this for sure, but I like the flow.”
“I’m with you,” my uncle said.
“Once Miss Du learns about the plan for the counterfeit seal—”
“She learned of the plan?” My uncle had it down to a fine science, exactly when to break into a narrative. “How?”
Wu smiled a crooked smile. “I figure it was Ping. Maybe not, but my money goes on Ping. There was a leak somewhere. Anyway, Miss Du pleads with her father to offer his services in crafting the state seal for Mike. She doesn’t give a damn about the Chinese plans, and she doesn’t know anything about Lu Xin’s game. She just wants to get out from under her debt, and the best way to do that is to have her father offer to make the seal for Mike for next to nothing if he’ll promise to let his daughter off the hook. This is fine with Mike because a world-class counterfeiter like Du charges plenty. You know how much plenty?” He gazed unsteadily at my uncle.
“No, how much?”
Wu examined his glass, searching for an exact figure. “A hell of a lot. If that expense goes away, Mike gets more for himself, more than enough to compensate for giving up what Miss Du owes him. So what do you think Mike does?”
My uncle yawned and looked at his watch. “I don’t know, what does he do? Are we near the end of this tale yet?”
“Almost. You want to see it tied up with a pretty bow, or don’t you?”
“Don’t worry about me, I can live with uncertainty in these things. The world exists mostly in a palette of grays. Very soothing if you know how to adjust to it.”
“Good for you, good for all of you Koreans. Life’s uncertain, that’s for sure.” He raised his glass to my uncle and then to me. “Come on, aren’t you going to drink with me? The Kazakh lady complained you wouldn’t drink.”
The room suddenly fell into a profound silence. The color drained from Wu’s face. He put down his drink and looked at my uncle. “Nice,” he said finally. “You pulled me into that so I didn’t even see it coming. What next?”
Since my uncle didn’t say anything, I figured it was my turn to throw in a few words. “Keep talking. You’re doing fine.” I held up the bottle. “Want to finish this? It might ease the pain.”
Wu shook his head. “Let me get to the end. Then I’ll drink the rest and to hell with everything.” He took a deep breath. “Beijing was going to work Du into the plan anyway. This phony state seal had to be perfect, and no one but Du could do that
. When his daughter jumped in and got Du involved before it could be done according to the script, Beijing got a little nervous. You probably don’t realize how nervous Beijing gets when it isn’t holding all of the reins.”
My uncle started tidying the top of his desk. “No, I didn’t realize that.”
“Du is a master, we know that, but sometimes he’s too meticulous. He fell behind on the timeline Mike had been handed as his part of the deal. Mike didn’t know for sure who he was working for. He thought it might be the North Koreans, but the offer came to him through a chain of cutouts and he didn’t have time to trace it all out. Anyway, it was nearly a million U.S. in advance to take the deal, and another million if he delivered according to the schedule, which was tight. There was a bonus of two million if the South Koreans accepted the seal without sneezing and used it in Mongolia to ratify the mining deals, though Mike was simply told the bonus came ‘if subsequent performance was satisfactory.’ The lawyers insisted on that language. Mike didn’t really care where the offer came from; he just wanted to get the work done and out the door. But like I said, Du was meticulous; he told Mike a job like this couldn’t be hurried. Mike screamed at Du if it wasn’t completed on time, he wouldn’t be doing any finger painting in the future. These triad guys cut off their own fingers all the time. I guess Mike didn’t think twice about waving the threat around. But it rattled Du. We heard he freaked out, couldn’t get anything done for weeks because his hands were shaking so much. Mike started sending packages to Miss Du in hopes she would encourage her father to get to work.”
My uncle scoffed. “I knew it, I knew those weren’t Du’s fingers.”
“We’ll never really know, unless we find Du. Mike was the type who might cut off someone’s nose to spite his face.”
“What about all that fancy DNA testing I hear about?”
“Forget it. This is an MSS operation that everyone wants buried. Beijing doesn’t want to know what happened to Du. Better for them if he really is in pieces. Why, do you care what happened to him?”
