Shadow of a Tiger

by Michael Collins

  I couldn’t see Claude Marais until morning. I went home. My five rooms were hot and lonely. The extra loneliness of knowing that someone who had been there often would not be there again.

  I sat with a beer and thought about what to do next. I could knock on more doors, ask more questions, go around it all again to see if I could have missed something.

  I drank beer, and watched television, and went to bed.

  Captain Olsen, Gazzo’s fill-in, was with Lieutenant Marx in his office the next morning. I could talk to Claude Marais at noon, not that it would do me any good.

  “Even that lawyer Kandinsky isn’t saying much this time,” Captain Olsen said. “Marais’ll talk soon. They always talk in the end.”

  “No confession yet?” I said. “That’s funny, if he wants to be locked up so badly. Leaving that knife and all.”

  “You’re saying it’s a frame-up,” Marx said. A statement, not a question. “Marais isn’t saying it’s a frame-up. You’d think he’d be shouting it if he thought it was.”

  “Unless,” Captain Olsen said, “you think he’s protecting someone. Maybe you think that, Fortune? Who could it be?”

  I leaned on the wall of the office, but I was alert. Were they playing with me? Or did they know something?

  “Who would he protect?” I said.

  “Yeh, who?” Marx said. “We’ve booked Manet for not reporting. We’ll drop the robbery, make it obstructing in a murder. He’s going to know what it’s really like being a prisoner after all. The report came from Paris, it fits. They don’t much like it over there. The French won’t defend Manet this time.”

  “We like our people all to be heroes,” I said.

  Captain Olsen said, “The wife, maybe? Or the sister-in-law, Viviane Marais? Or the girl, Danielle? Claude might try to protect them. The trouble is, we can’t think of any motives for them to have killed Eugene Marais at all.”

  “That knife,” I said, “it bothers you. So stupid.”

  “We’ve got to believe it, though,” Captain Olsen said.

  “A half-crazy killer,” Marx said. “War experiences.”

  “You’ll convince a jury,” I said. “If it’s a frame-up, it’s a very good one.”

  “We don’t want to convince a jury,” Marx said.

  Captain Olsen was going to add something, maybe about who they did want to convince, but I never knew what it was. The telephone rang. Marx listened. First idly, then with a frown, then alert. He said, “Yes,” and hung up. He stood up.

  “The wife,” Marx said. “That was some priest. Noyoda, or something like that. He says the wife, Li Marais, is down on the steps of his temple. She’s going to burn herself on his temple steps!”

  I saw her, Li, from three blocks away. Lieutenant Marx cursed at his driver to go faster through the narrow Chinatown street that was clotted with traffic. The driver swore back, inched along the street blocked by the cars, pushcarts, and people of Chinatown.

  I watched only Li Marais in the distance. Alone on the three steps of the Buddhist temple.

  I could see her clear. The block of the temple as empty as the next block was crowded. A deserted street in front of the temple in the distance, the people gathered a hundred feet away on either side—from fear or respect I never would know.

  She was a tiny, distant figure all in yellow. Saffron yellow. A kneeling doll in a saffron robe, her head down in prayer or meditation or both. What did it matter?

  We were still two blocks away, blocked in the traffic and crowd, when I saw her tiny yellow figure move.

  “Li!” I shouted. A shout into the wind.

  The flames exploded around her. In the distance on those temple steps she was engulfed in flames in a second.

  “Gasoline,” the driver said. “Christ.”

  “God damn!” Marx said.

  We got out and ran. The last two blocks. We ran, knocking people away, but even the last small flames were fading by the time we reached her.

  Lieutenant Marx went to her. She was dead. Only the black, charred shape of what had been one small woman. A human being.

  Marx went to her, I couldn’t. For her last words to me? What was Dan Fortune to her? There were no words anyway. There wouldn’t have been even if a spark of life had still been in her. Li Marais had said all that she had to say.

  Marx cursed his driver, sent him for the ambulance. It couldn’t help, but Marx had to do something. She had done her work too well. Perhaps she had cheated just a little. She had been away from the Orient and Buddha a long time. A small poison pill to make it quicker? I hoped she had.

  The priest, Noyoda, stood over her with us. Some of the people were down on their knees now. Marx swore at Noyoda. The Lieutenant was white. To our Western minds, it’s a horrible form of suicide.

  “You let her!” Marx shouted at Noyoda. “That’s a crime, you hear, mister? Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “I could not stop her,” Noyoda said.

  He meant, I knew, that by his beliefs he could not stop a believer who wanted to immolate herself, perform her special devotion, improve her life and her eternity. But Noyoda was an American, too. He knew the law.

  “She poured the gasoline on herself before I discovered her on the steps,” Noyoda said. “She had a cigarette lighter in her hand. She said she would light the flame as soon as anyone came near her. I did all I could, and I called you.”

  He was right, of course. The empty gasoline can lay some yards to the right. The cigarette lighter lay blackened near Li Marais. Marx could do nothing to Noyoda.

  “So it was her after all,” Marx said as the ambulance began to wail up in the distance. “She killed them after all.”

  “No,” I said. “She was with me when Charlie was killed.”

  “Killed?” Noyoda said.

  I explained the murders to the priest.

  “Buddhists do not commit suicide to escape their own guilt or problems,” Noyoda said. “Almost never.”

  Marx nodded. “She couldn’t have killed Charlie Burgos, I guess that’s sure. Distraught, Dan? She knew Claude Marais killed them both, and couldn’t go on alone?”

  “I don’t think so, Marx,” I said. “For a Buddhist, suicide, especially this way, is a positive act.”

  “Positive? How in hell is it positive?” Marx swore.

  Noyoda said, “You have arrested her husband for these murders? Is there any doubt that he is guilty?”

  “None,” Marx snapped. “If she figured to fool us—”

  “She thought there was doubt,” I said. “So do I.”

  Noyoda looked down at Li Marais’s charred body. The ambulance had arrived, the doctor just looking at the body too. Noyoda reached into his pocket.

  “Then I think I can say why she did this,” the priest said.

  He handed Marx a piece of letter stationery. It was Hotel Stratford stationery. I read the note on it with Marx: My flame will light the truth.

  “I think,” Noyoda said, sadly now, “she has done this to make you seek the truth, Lieutenant. Her death was to make you know her husband is innocent, make you find the truth.”

  “Crazy,” Marx said, watched the ambulance men put the dead Li into their basket. “What a lousy, useless thing to do. For nothing.”

  “Useless?” Noyoda stared at Marx. “You are a fool, Lieutenant. You are impertinent and insulting!”

  The priest walked into his temple. I could hear the chanting going on inside the temple already. They would chant for a long time. Marx stared after the angry priest.

  “What the hell is that all about?”

  “Religion,” I said. “To Buddhists, a man is composed of two elements, Lieutenant. The manas, the organ of understanding; and the karma, the entirety of the acts accomplished in the course of his life. When a man dies, the manas, the understanding organ, pass into another body—higher or lower in quality according to the quality of the karma, what he has done on earth. If the karma has been exceptional, then there is no reincarnati
on, the man has attained nirvana. So for a devout Buddhist, suicide for some noble purpose—like freeing an innocent man—is a way to improve his karma, make himself much better, and maybe even achieve nirvana.”

  “You think Li Marais believed all that?”

  I watched the ambulance drive away. “I’m not sure. To any good Buddhist, though, it would be self-evident. It would be understood right away.”

  “Damn it,” Marx said, “I’m an American cop, not a Buddhist. You think she really thought she could influence the police this way? Make us see we had to be wrong? It’s crazy, Dan.”

  “A Buddhist believes that by suicide he creates problems for the person responsible for forcing him to do it, one way or another,” I said slowly. “It’s an infallible way of making someone know they are wrong. To a Buddhist, no one could be indifferent to that. The truth must come out.”

  “You think it was all for us? The police?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but she’d been in the western world a long time. She knew about American police, she knew it would mean nothing to you. She was distraught, maybe, but she wasn’t a fool.”

  “Then what the hell was she doing?” Marx said. “Do you know, Dan?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  27

  I said I thought I knew what Li Marais expected her death to do. That was all I said.

  Marx swore at me. But if I’d said any more, Marx would have ruined it. Ruined her death, what she had done it for.

  “I’ll explain when I’m sure,” I said to Marx.

  If I was right, what she had done it for would take a little time. The major reason she had ended her life.

  I didn’t kid myself that another reason hadn’t been guilt, maybe shame. For what she and I had done. She had betrayed Claude Marais, he was in real trouble, and she had to help him. Help and atone. I had to face it. I had bad nights while I waited for what I was sure she had expected to happen next.

  I waited three days.

  My flame will light the truth. Had she made a mistake? Her flaming death a tragic miscalculation? I had the sick feeling that it had been. A straw she had grasped at, almost hopeless, and maybe she hadn’t really cared if her death was useless.

  But I cared.

  After three days, I had to act.

  The woman, Marie Schmidt, opened the door of the tenement apartment. Her ugly face had lost its snap and vigor.

  “He’s in the back room. It’s not locked,” she said. “Three days in and out of back there. No sleep. Like a crazy tiger in a cage. I can’t take no more. He scares me now.”

  I went through the spartan living room. I had my old gun in my pocket. The outer door closed behind me. Marie Schmidt hurried away down the stairs Jimmy Sung kept so clean.

  I opened the door of the empty back room. It wasn’t empty now.

  Flags hung on the walls—Chinese Communist flags, Viet Cong flags, flags I didn’t even recognize. Giant photos of Mao Tse-tung. Modern Chinese rifles, and ancient muskets. Swords and curved knives. Portraits of Confucius and Genghis Khan. Mongol helmets with horsehair hanging. A map of China. A painted Buddha. An ancient map of the Mongol Empire stretching far into Europe. A photo of the Chinese H-bomb test. Parades of Chinese youths. Headlines from New York newspapers during the Korean War—all of Chinese victories.

  The room a hymn to China. Powerful—and yet confused. Not all China, and irrational. Madame Chiang was there, and photos of the rich Soongs. Ho Chi Minh, and some Chinese emperors. The Burmese U Thant, Japanese soldiers in a banzai celebration of some victory over America. A samurai sword beside an ancient Mongol lance. A twisted celebration of Asian glory that filled the room, hidden perhaps for years in an open trunk that stood in a corner of the room.

  Among it all, Jimmy Sung kneeled before the small jade Buddha. Incense burned, and a half-empty quart of vodka was on the floor beside Jimmy Sung. He drank as I watched, shivered. He wore the padded blue uniform of a Chinese soldier, and another samurai sword was near his hand.

  “How long have you had all this, Jimmy?” I said.

  He turned to look at me. His face was like the hundred-year-old woman in Shangri-La who had never aged, and who then aged the whole hundred years in a single moment. Wasted, ravaged.

  “Long time,” Jimmy said, slurred. “Long damn time.”

  He was drunk. But how drunk? On that plateau where he functioned, or over the edge? A manic shine to his dark eyes.

  “Where did it all come from, Jimmy?” I said.

  “All over. Junk shops, Chinamen shops, sailors,” he said, nodded as if agreeing with himself. A sudden cunning grin. “I get from dumb soldiers back from Korea, Vietnam. I make them think we all friends, buy the souvenirs, and inside I’m cheerin’ for China, Viet Cong—the ‘gooks’!”

  “You’ve lived in America all your life, Jimmy.”

  He spat on the floor. “Lousy Chinaman! Chink!” He hunched where he still kneeled. “We are great people, great culture. In time of the Khans we ruled the world. Great teachers, wise men.”

  “You should have gone back, Jimmy.”

  “No way. I dream, but no way. Only here, spit on.”

  I watched him drink the vodka. He dreamed of China, but somewhere inside him he knew it was an insane dream. America was the only real world he knew. China would be an alien place. In his small, rational core, he didn’t really want to go back. But alone in an America that ignored him, he had to dream. He had to believe in his hidden dream, and now he was tortured, confused. Three days tortured in this dream room because Li Marais had immolated herself to reach him.

  “My flame will light the truth,” I said. “Li Marais knew her suicide wouldn’t touch the police. That wasn’t why she did it. She did it to make you tell the truth. A Buddhist way to force another Buddhist. She knew that you killed Eugene Marais and Charlie Burgos.”

  Jimmy Sung thrashed at an invisible stake, tried to deny it even to himself. “Crazy woman! Liar.”

  “She told me the day they arrested Claude Marais the second time,” I said, “but I didn’t understand her. She didn’t want me to understand. Not then. She said she had seen the hat badge on Claude’s bureau, had seen the knife in his suitcase. She meant that she remembered that she had seen both the badge and the knife in the suite on that day the police first arrested Claude. They had been there in sight. The hat badge had not been in the register with the package. That evening when you were so brave against Gerd Exner.”

  “Chinese are brave,” Jimmy Sung said. “Strong. Yeh.”

  “You had put that package of diamonds into the register, you went to the suite to talk to Li Marais a lot. After the detective found the package, while we all looked at the diamonds, you just walked into the bedroom, got the hat badge, and said you’d found it in the register. Who thought of doubting that you had? How could Claude Marais have denied it, even if he had remembered where he’d last seen his badge? You took the knife then, too. No one was going to search you. No reason to. You’d been cleared of any robbery, and what other motive did you have to kill Eugene Marais or anyone?”

  “My friend, Mr. Marais,” Jimmy Sung said, nodded to himself.

  “But when Claude was arrested for killing Charlie Burgos, Li Marais began to think. She was sure Claude was innocent. She knew Manet couldn’t have killed Burgos. So who was framing Claude? Why? That was when she realized it had to be you, Jimmy. She realized what the motive was, and killed herself to make you tell the truth and save Claude.”

  I talked, but in that hot room I felt unreal. A room that was a museum to an illusion. An illusion that battled with the real world where Jimmy Sung had lived his bleak life. A battle that had gone on inside him now for three days. A struggle, started by Li Marais in her death, that moved Jimmy Sung between the real world of America, and the illusion world of China.

  “Li knew,” I said, “because she realized that, in part, you had killed for her. It wasn’t Eugene Marais you wanted dead, it was Claude Marais. Eugene was an acci
dent. It was Claude you wanted to kill.”

  “That Claude!” Jimmy Sung drank, drank again. “Medals. French hero. Steal women, steal everything. Steal countries, murder babies, kill my people, get medals.”

  I had heard almost the same words before, but I hadn’t been listening. I had been thinking of other things that day in the bar when Jimmy Sung had been released from jail.

  “Claude Marais,” I said. “The enemy. In the pawn shop in full uniform. The enemy who stole a child bride.”

  Jimmy Sung shook where he kneeled in the room of his secret world. More than half drunk. Scared in one world, proud in the other. Hate for Claude Marais and his uniform, and more than a little in love with Li Marais. A dream of Li Marais, too. That had to be part of it. An illusion of China, and of a woman, and of Buddha. Of a religion that demanded the truth now.

  “All lies,” Jimmy said. “That Claude. Steal a kid.”

  He was balanced on a hair. Half of him lived in America, and a man did not convict himself of murder because a woman burned herself to death in a yellow robe. But the other half lived in the illusion of China, of Buddha, where he was better, stronger and prouder than the white men who looked at him but never saw him. Balanced on the edge between.

  “Lies,” he said. “No one knows. Who will know?”

  He talked to himself, his shadow inside. Ripped up between his empty real world of America, and his glorious illusion world of China. Aware of the danger to him in the real world if he acted by his illusion, but aware, deep inside him, that if he did not act according to his illusion he would lose his dream forever. If he denied the reality of China and Buddha now, he could never believe in it again. A drunken zero with no name in a world that ignored him. All he needed was a push.

  “I’ll know, Jimmy,” I said. “And Claude Marais will know. Claude Marais will know the truth about you. No Buddhist, no believer, no man of China. Claude will know, and Li.”

  “That Claude!” Jimmy glared his hate.

  “A man of China would have to tell the truth,” I said.