The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I)

by D. L. Kung

  The taxi turned off the river and crawled northeast through Canton’s crowded main streets. When they finally reached the gate of the medical center, the taxi was waved through the front gate by a blasé guard wearing sunglasses despite the winter morning mist. Then Claire’s driver wove the car carefully through streams of students on foot, bikes, and motorcycles.

  Dr Law waited for her in a moldy reception room. Threadbare red plush sofas lined the sides of the room, ashtrays waited on every table, and a tray of mugs steaming with jasmine tea were immediately laid before them by an elderly woman. Law was a wall-eyed little man with a crew cut and a white coat over a hand-knitted cotton sweater and dark cotton pants that barely reached his ankles.

  Claire spent a few moments on pleasantries and couched her first questions with care. They talked of the early years of transplant experiments during the Cultural Revolution, when most of the state’s energy went to rehabilitation of injured proletarian factory workers.

  ‘We developed ways of transplanting toes to replace fingers, for example,’ said Law. ‘We could even recreate some appendages, like penises, using grafts. We did not, however, develop transplants of internal organs from other individuals right away.’ He related the history of kidney operations, followed by livers and corneas, starting with work in the 1960’s done with the help of foreign experts.

  ‘Then two factors gave us a great leap forward in our work,’ the doctor said with genuine excitement. ‘The wonder drug Cyclosporine A came to China, the drug that reduced rejection of new organs. And the yan-da campaigns, which were held every year after 1983. That increased our supply of organs.’

  Claire swallowed hard, but didn’t interrupt his account. She poured herself another cup of tea.

  Dr Law nodded and continued. ‘The police were ordered to meet their annual quota of criminal arrests for corruption, embezzlement and drug trafficking. So tens of thousands were executed.’ Law watched Claire scribble in her notebook. ‘So you see we do not have the so-called donor problem of the western countries. Criminals are happy to redress their crimes against the state by helping the masses.’

  ‘But the Chinese government always denies that prisoners’ organs are taken.’

  ‘Not any longer, Miss Raymond,’ Dr Law said. ‘Because now consent is obtained and the families are well compensated. I would be happy to show you the consent forms. Organ donation restores esteem to the criminal’s family.’

  The forms looked straightforward enough, but Claire wondered how often they were used voluntarily.

  Law said it was routine for the hospital to receive prisoners’ health records, blood types and other details long before their execution to match against the list of potential organ recipients. ‘In this way, we increase the success of matching donor to patient,’ he smiled.

  ‘Very efficient and effective, Dr Law,’ Claire replied. ‘Do you ever schedule an execution to match the needs of a recipient?’

  Dr Law hesitated. ‘We conform the medical situation to the strict requirements of due legal process.’

  Claire smiled again. ‘I’m sure you do. But the pressure on your hospital must be tiresome. After all, I think I heard you have some fifty people on your waiting list?’

  Claire prayed he wouldn’t catch on to her ruse.

  Dr Law fell for it.

  ‘Oh, no, Miss Raymond. We have performed one hundred and seventy-two operations over the last year and we have a waiting list of some six hundred patients.’

  ‘I had no idea the pressure on your department was so great,’ she commented. Dr Law offered to show her around the operating rooms at First Affiliated Hospital, but Claire begged off, saying her magazine was more interested in the economic equation of China’s advances, and besides, she wasn’t qualified to assess the conditions or equipment of a medical room.

  Clearly though, the flattery of her visit was starting to thaw the doctor out.

  ‘It is not just the broad masses that benefit from our work here,’ he said. ‘Foreigners also come to China to take advantage of our skills. Many of the names on that waiting list I mentioned come from Hong Kong and Macau.’ He whispered conspiratorially, ‘Even Taiwan.’

  ‘What is the cost of an operation, say, for a kidney?’ Claire asked casually.

  ‘About five thousand yuan for the average patient,’ said Dr Law. It wasn’t much on the global scale of things, thought Claire, and it didn’t jibe with Dr Liu’s accusation that someone had paid five million yuan for a murderous dissection of his half-sister.

  ‘Anybody willing to pay more?’ Claire pressed the little man.

  ‘Some foreign people show their gratitude with donations, but it is not a requirement,’ Dr Law avoided her eyes.

  ‘That’s exactly the sort of example that would make a nice opening for my story,’ she urged. ‘It would show how relations between Hong Kong and the mainland grow closer every day.’

  She could see Dr Law was torn. ‘No, nobody that I can mention.’ he demurred.

  She nodded understandingly. ‘To change the subject, just to flesh out my story, are there any new wings going up at the First Affiliated Hospital soon?’

  ‘Why yes,’ Dr Law said, now suspicious and unsure. ‘A gynecology department.’

  She rose to say goodbye. Law loaded Claire down with laudatory medical articles in Chinese about the latest in successful experiment with Chinese herbs to suppress organ rejection. Clearly, the Chinese doctor’s next goal was to get rid of those big invoices from the rapacious Swiss at Sandoz and take out a patent in anti-rejection herbs in his own name—or that of Sun Yat-sen.

  Claire headed out of the hospital and scoured the compound for cranes and jackhammers. Law wasn’t going to get off the hook that easily. Hong Kong donors preferred to work with Hong Kong construction companies, even if the labor remained local. Her next hunt was to find out who had the strangle hold on the latest contracts.

  The journey from Guangzhou was uneventful, if rain-sodden, and she couldn’t sleep without at least making sure everything was fine at the bureau. The streets glistened from the latest downpour, reflecting the reds, yellows and greens of the neon lights that emblazoned Queens Road East.

  Everyone was back to business after the long break. The Choi’s were packing up their flower shop in the lobby at the regular time, having sold off all their New Year orange trees at a big profit. Mr Shuk, the building supervisor, was back from his holiday, the butt of a ‘555’ hanging out of the side of this mouth as he manned the reception counter. Was it possible that even Vic was back, sitting at his desk schmoozing to his pals back in the States?

  Claire hoped so, against all common sense as she stopped to check the bureau. Cecilia went home exactly at 5:30, even on the long Tuesday nights when Claire stayed at the bureau to close a story with editors in New York. But tonight the girl was sitting reading, her small handbag sitting in front of her on the cleared desk top, when Claire shoved open the warped door.

  ‘Cecilia, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Nancy Chew has disappeared from her insurance job. She hasn’t been home since Monday Inspector Slaughter called here for her home number.’

  ‘Jesus, what is this, the Cheung Chau Triangle?’

  ‘But that’s not why I stayed late. I wanted to talk to you about Vic.’

  ‘Did you call your mother and tell her you were coming home late?’

  ‘Yes, I called her anyway, because I wanted her to know what I’m going to propose to you now.’

  ‘Cecilia, you’re not quitting on me?’

  Cecilia stared and jolted up straight in her chair. ‘No! How could anyone imagine I would quit right now when you need me so much?’

  ‘Precisely.’ Claire laughed a little with relief. She went to the hot water thermos and made herself a quick tea and pulled out the Ascot Noodle Paradise take-out menu stuck behind the file cabinet before plunking her weary bones down in the visitor’s seat next to Cecilia’s desk.

  ‘Did you find Vic?�
��

  ‘You know the answer to that.’

  ‘I did not expect you would. That is why I wish to go to Punyu myself.’

  Claire shook her head with defeat. ‘You must be joking. Yesterday I was accosted, practically manhandled, by a very strange electronics cadre named Chen Jiafang who picked up my trail at the Punyu Hotel. All I came home with is Vic’s laptop here. We’ll have to see what he left in it. Do you know his code?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too bad. Anyway, Chen insisted Vic left for Guangzhou by hired car.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘So let me go. My mother has relatives in Punyu. We visited there once a few years ago. This Mr Chen won’t have any idea I’m in his vicinity, and I won’t make any inquiries at the Punyu Hotel. You’ll see. It’s easier when you’re Chinese. The large breaches the tall door while another slips through the small.’

  ‘I never heard that proverb.’

  ‘I just made it up.’ Cecilia looked scared, but determined.

  Claire knew that look. ‘Forget it. We don’t know what happened, and I’ve got to say it, because you never would, that you didn’t really like Vic—’

  ‘Claire—’

  ‘You didn’t, and it has nothing to do with the way you worked with him or doing a good job. You did that as professionally as anybody could. But this is different. The magazine can’t be responsible for anything that might happen to you. New York isn’t going to send someone to rescue you. And if something happens to you, we might not even get as far as the Consulate. Think of those three overseas Chinese-Australians in jail on fraud charges. They make a lot of noise, but actually Canberra couldn’t care less. It would be the same for you.’

  Cecilia raised her chin higher. ‘I don’t expect any help from New York if I get into trouble. And my personal feeling about Vic is not important. I think it is my duty as a Chinese. I think if something happened to him in China, I share the responsibility. I don’t expect you to understand.’

  Only if you had spent years in Hong Kong did it make a curious kind of sense, thought Claire. Cecilia was the product of Baptist missionaries and British administration, but most of all, she was a hua chiao, an overseas Chinese longing to belong to something. She was an outsider among Cantonese in Hong Kong, the refugee from the Mandarin-speaking mainland, and the exile from the family’s temporary home in Indonesia.

  So Cecilia saw herself above all as part of that great Chinese family stretching all over the world. Collective responsibility was an idea Cecilia’s family had clung to as something that preserved their identity in all circumstances. They had endured every indignity Cantonese factory managers and Indonesian customers could inflict on them by retaining an inward sense of what it meant to be Chinese. Claire reflected on how external, how separate from her personal concerns, was her own sense of responsibility for Vic. For Cecilia, the risk was a part of a deep compelling moral obligation.

  Claire wasn’t going to fight Cecilia on this, because it just might be their only chance to get Vic back. They spent the next hour checking schedules and getting the most detailed maps in Chinese they could from Harris by fax.

  ***

  Locking up her office Claire saw herself in the lobby mirror—frizzes of fiery hair around a wide-eyed expression of unabated, generalized fear. Would Chen have complimented her on her hazel eyes if they had met this evening? Or perhaps this was what it meant to get older—what used to be ‘looking a bit tired’ was the way she was going to look from now on every day. For a minute she thought that a thin line of mascara had somehow been smudged. When she tried to rub it away, it wasn’t makeup at all; it was simply a new crease in the skin caught by the unforgiving fluorescent light overhead.

  Suddenly, she thought of Vic and how much his youth had played a part in the tension of their relationship. He thought nothing of spending hundreds of dollars from their budget discussing basketball scores with colleagues back at the Pittsburgh or Denver desks. When he drank too much, dragging in late the next morning or calling in sick, his apologies were couched in terms of his male right to sow his oats and to enjoy his Asian adventures on company time.

  Maybe that’s what had bugged her, despite her empathy for him.

  In earlier days, she herself had tried the patience of older editors with over-ambitious story ideas and draggy, hung-over starts to the day. These memories brought a smile tinged with self-recognition. But she’d never missed a deadline. And for sure, she had never thought she had a right to screw up. For that justification, it seemed, you had to be a guy.

  The soles of her shoes were soaked through with rainwater and as she waited for the elevator, one spoke of her umbrella escaped its casing. She fumbled outside on the sidewalk to fix it and as she did so, a dark blue sedan drove by the building entrance. It crawled by without braking, but just as Claire glanced up to see the passengers, two Chinese in the front seat looked away.

  The car turned the corner and disappeared. It was her imagination, surely, but the passenger resembled the man overloaded with duty-free liquor at the Lin Hua Shan border.

  Claire had never understood the western cliché that all Asians looked alike. In fact, she’d lived in Hong Kong so long she often forgot that she herself didn’t look Chinese. She shrugged and reminded herself that she had been through a lot since last week. It was an uncanny resemblance—a coincidence.

  Her phone was ringing as she unlocked her apartment door. Perhaps it was Xavier. She ran to catch the call before the answering machine picked it up, but all she got was the click of someone hanging up.

  She slung the backpack and computer into her study and it fell on one file she had left behind: the MacGinnes bio file.

  There were two photos, each showing an extremely handsome man of medium height. The first marked a large donation MacGinnes had made to the local Community Chest. MacGinnes stood in the center awkwardly holding a huge cardboard replica of a HK$100,000 check. Next to him stood a British banker, the chairman of the recipient charity, and on the other side, a large grinning Chinese woman wearing a bad wig.

  In the second photo, MacGinnes looked more avuncular. He stood in the center of a group of visiting mainlanders wearing cheap Communist-tailored ‘western-style’ boxy suits and bad haircuts. His arms stretched over the shoulders of the two Chinese closest to him. Apart from the photos, Claire found only one old feature on MacGinnes of any interest. It dated back to the high watermark of America’s honeymoon with China investment in the mid-1980s.

  ‘Vietnam vet finds capitalism and Marxism make a revolutionary marriage,’ said the subheading. ‘Paul MacGinnes came to Hong Kong in 1972 seeking financing for his first movie project, an account of his days with the American tactical forces serving in Vietnam. He planned to show the Vietnamese revolution from both sides of the conflict. Instead, one side trip to Guangdong province persuaded him that with a little investment, he could actually make a real revolution of his own, showing the Communist Chinese how capitalism could work for them.’

  The story said MacGinnes and a pair of fellow veterans had invested in a small computer export company, producing personal computers assembled from imported components. They named their hottest-selling PC after southern China’s famous fruit with the slogan ‘Forget the Apple, the Lychee will crack the nut of all your software problems.’

  Yuk, yuk, thought Claire.

  She skipped a few paragraphs. ‘Sales soared when their third version of the Lychee came on the market last year. Lighter than the standard laptops and just as powerful, the Lychee left MacGinnes too busy building a computer empire to produce movies. He was one of the first Hong Kong entrepreneurs to transfer large-scale technology manufacturing to Guangdong province. In the last year or so, hundreds of other manufacturers have followed his example.’

  She scanned the rest of the page. The article was already outdated. Still, one MacGinnes quote arrested her. ‘Invest in a country at the beginning, even if yo
u don’t agree with everything they do. Money can make people change faster than any ideology.’ It was a common view among businessmen in Asia—from Thai generals moonlighting in illegal teak trading with Myanmar’s corrupt military regime to Westerners turning a blind eye to Indonesian atrocities in Timor.

  Claire put the file to one side. She shuffled through the mess of calling cards she’d found under Vic’s monitor. One belonged to MacGinnes. It carried a logo in gold of a tiny little computer screen displaying an even tinier little Chinese character, jin for gold.

  She ran a warm bath and tried to call Xavier. She didn’t like calling him since it skewered the delicate balance of his careful, low-key pursuit of her. She was enjoying that and didn’t want it to end. Anyway, there was no answer at his apartment. She had to admit she was disappointed.

  Where was he? It would have been nice to cuddle up against his solid warmth tonight. Instead, she settled for her green chenille robe, and sinking into bed, suddenly thought of the face glancing at her from a sedan cruising down the slick streets in the Wan Chai darkness. She recalled the features of the stranger, and his lopsided apologetic smile, at the ferry dock. Could they have been the same man?

  And where was he now? The rain and wind started up again and within minutes was streaking across her windows. The bamboo trees thrashed against her bedroom windows. She quickly went into the living room and bracing herself against the door, pulled the chain securely across the length of the slot and shot the bolt firmly closed.

  Chapter Nine

  —Thursday—

  Cecilia set off for Punyu the next morning. She planned to hire a taxi in Lin Hua Shan and—avoiding the Punyu Hotel and its licensed drivers and any government officials—head straight for the Brainchild factory to see if she could learn anything by mingling with the factory girls there. If her driver seemed trustworthy, she would enlist his help in locating Cha Ling. They joked how her tiny slush fund—one thousand American dollars and two thousand Hong Kong dollars—might make her fast friends, real fast.