by D. L. Kung
Guns had their uses, providing you treated them with respect. This gun had already killed one man. She respected it—and how.
An hour later, Claire sat in the air-conditioned chill of the high-speed jetfoil to Lin Hua Shan, squeezed between two indifferent commuters in the anonymous racket of a Cantonese crowd. The young man on her right wore Discman earphones while reading a cheap kung fu cartoon book. The older man on her left shouted to a friend, his voice battling the noise of a radio belonging to his neighbor who was following the horse races in Sha Tin. Two middle-aged Chinese women wearing cotton pajamas in garish prints, their short hair tightly permed, were trading gossip at the top of their lungs from their seats on either side of the aisle. One had a chunky cell phone with a cover that matched her handbag.
Over the loudspeaker, a badly recorded voice was giving instructions on playing the lottery dots pasted on the back of each passenger’s ticket.
Claire heard none of it.
While confined to her bed, she’d pondered if pieces of the truth were all lying in front of her, pieces that would reveal the story to a methodical mind. But in the silence of her room, pain drummed productive thought out of her head. This commuter clamor created a nest for thought. She would work the logic backwards, carefully re-ordering what she knew.
Nancy had given her the gun, but for her protection? If Nancy were Hager’s murderer, she wouldn’t have shown up blithely for lunch carrying the murder weapon in a shopping bag.
Yet, Nancy had the gun. Had she found it—in Vic’s flat when the police search had overlooked it? Then why not say so, if only to clear herself of Claire’s suspicion? It would be more like her to have stayed as uninvolved as possible, just leaving the gun there for the police to find.
Claire considered whether Nancy brought the gun to her because it was useful in some way. Perhaps she was afraid the police would find it or she was trying to protect someone by removing it. Or was it a blackmail tool? Hager’s murderer must be someone Nancy knew. Vic after all? Or Lo-man? Because the gun was surely another accessory of Lo-man’s underworld existence. Claire could imagine Vic’s naïve delight at his first sight of a PLA weapon.
A suspicion floating through Claire’s mind overnight was crystallizing. A number of motives came to mind.
There was Slaughter’s theory that Vic had murdered Hager out of jealousy. But Claire dismissed that one.
There was the problem that by sleeping with Nancy, Hager stood in the way of Lo-man’s plan that Nancy marry Vic and get them away from the Communists as soon as possible. Hager certainly wasn’t the marrying kind. Maybe Lo-man thought, why not get rid of Hager, keep the drug money, and let the police blame it on some Thai drug dealers?
What had Nancy said? ‘We’ll make another plan?’
Maybe she meant buying themselves overseas passports with Hager’s delivery windfall? When she said, ‘too late now’ did she mean Vic was too dead to marry? How could she know for certain?
The craft plowed through the waves, spattering gray spray against the double-plated windows. Claire worked her way up the crowded aisle, stepping over children playing on the floor and past a pair of businessmen comparing figures on a palmtop.
She stood in line for a Styrofoam cup of chicken broth thick with meat and steaming white noodles and, still deep in thought, went back to her seat.
Why had Nancy given her the gun? Why not throw it away? She’d hinted that the gun had some value if deposited with Claire. Was Nancy holding some leverage against someone? As long as the murder weapon could be produced, Nancy could control that person. She was afraid to possess the gun, yet wanted to know that it could be retrieved.
Anyway, Nancy had gambled that Claire was unlikely to turn her in to the police as long as there was a chance to save Vic. They were unlikely allies, but Claire had to admit Nancy had calculated well. Claire realized that she was coming to think more sympathetically of Nancy since their lunch. The poor girl hadn’t had an easy life, and thanks to bad luck with brothers and worse taste in boyfriends, things were unraveling.
She couldn’t imagine Vic as the murderer no matter how she tried.
She considered a slightly different scenario. Suppose Nancy told Lo-man about Vic’s unexplained delay in coming home and confessed that Hager had seduced her. But that’s all. Suppose Nancy doesn’t completely trust Lo-man. Privately, she regrets Vic’s disappearance, but she hopes to play Hager well enough into sharing his drug profits with her alone. She keeps this a secret from her brother, who sees Hager as a threat to his emigration strategy. Lo-man kills Hager before Nancy admits she has hatched a better plan—to use Hager one way or the other as their exit strategy. She returns to the apartment alone because she knows where Hager has hidden his cash.
Claire closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself in Lo-Man’s erratic, desperate mind. He’s worried. It’s freedom in America or a Chinese prison for him and he’s tried Chinese prison already. The gun he used to kill Hager goes missing from its hiding place at Vic’s, but the police don’t mention it and no one arrests him. The sister he was pushing into a useful marriage is keeping something from him. Lo-man follows Nancy to the Cheung Chau flat to discover what draws her back there, what she’s looking for. He hides and watches, but she hasn’t found anything by the time Claire barges in.
Unexpectedly, he nearly gets himself apprehended by Claire. The only way to escape more involvement with Claire and her friends is to—wham! Lo-man escapes down the slope of the hill, eluding Slaughter’s surveillance.
It was only a theory, but Claire shivered. The air-conditioning blasted a stream of cold air across the top of her head, but it was the memory of her blackout that made her nauseous. She took a deep breath and settled back to her mental explorations.
She tried to imagine Lo-man striking her down, but something didn’t fit. Why would Nancy look so wild at the sight of her own brother?
She recalled the interrogation at the US consulate. Nancy had left the room, saying, ‘If you find the person who shot Craig . . .’ If the killer was Lo-man, was Nancy trying to mislead them into thinking she didn’t know the killer’s identity?
But looking at it another way, supposing Slaughter had drawn the wrong conclusion from Nancy’s sayonara aside? Wasn’t it strange that Nancy mentioned Craig had been shot, when he’d been knifed as well?
She had an awful thought.
Had Hager been murdered—not by drug pushers or a jealous rival—but accidentally?
Even stranger, had Hager had been murdered on the same night twice?
Had someone found him in the flat or been found by him, and knifed him, leaving his body neatly tucked up in a freshly–made bed? And had someone entered the flat later that night to shoot Hager without realizing he wasn’t just asleep, but already dead?
Was it possible that Nancy was protecting or blackmailing someone who wasn’t really guilty?
It was only a theory that posed a new one yawning and horrible question.
If Lo-man shot Hager to get him out of the way for Vic’s visa promise or the drug money, then who was Hager’s first killer?
The police were looking for someone with a motive to kill Hager—either Vic or someone in the drug business. They were assuming that Hager’s death was planned.
But what if someone hadn’t gone looking to murder Hager? What if Hager just got in the middle by mistake? Suppose someone unexpectedly discovered Hager in Vic’s flat, or vice versa—someone who couldn’t risk being caught?
The anonymity of the ride was soothing, but there were too many holes, too many ‘what if’s’ to ponder. Claire gazed out of the window. There was another half an hour or so of choppy, gray sea before they started up the Pearl River estuary to Lin Hua Shan. She tried to stop thinking about where all this was leading. If she added up all the risks, she would stay on the jetfoil and simply head home. But while the boat pounded its bow against the waves, there was nothing else for her to do but speculate.
She had to thin
k harder. She herself had gone to the flat, looking for anything that would help her find Vic—more files or notes. Perhaps someone else had done the same thing. Or, instead of looking for something to assist the search, perhaps the idea had been to frustrate the search. Perhaps the question to ask was not what she’d found, but what she hadn’t found.
That thought stuck hard and solid. It felt right. Why it was so simple, she found herself laughing out loud. No one around her noticed in the chaos of noise. She threw back her head, shaking it slowly, swallowing at the clarity of it all.
Of course. All she had had to do was picture Vic on any given Tuesday, racing against a deadline. He was late as usual for an interview, leaping up from his desk, grabbing his ‘interview tie’ pinned to the corkboard, thrusting his cigarettes and his tape recorder into the breast pocket of his sports jacket and rushing headlong past Cecilia’s desk and out the door.
With belated affection, she imagined Vic saying, ‘Call them up and tell them I’m having trouble getting a taxi or something.’
At last, things were coming into focus and at least two points were in Vic’s favor: someone had taken his recorder and cassettes and with Cecilia now missing, the chance that Vic’s disappearance was self-orchestrated was eliminated. Cecilia hadn’t gone on a binge, scuttled back across the border to attack a love rival or joined a drug ring. She’d followed Vic’s tracks and, following him, had been swallowed up at the same point.
It was so simple. Chen Jiafang had lied to MacGinnes and her both. What the laptop had told her, the other two deductions proved.
Then how could she explain immigration’s record of Vic’s return across the border?
Claire once again ticked off the possibilities. Supposedly, Vic had left two traces—the computer message from Shanghai and the computer record of his ID card passing through the Shenzhen border turnstile. Claire assumed that the Shanghai telex was just a decoy laid by Hager to keep Claire out of his hair until he and his illicit earnings were safely back in Bangkok.
But what if both computer traces of Vic were red herrings? Now that Cecilia and Vic had dropped out of sight along that dark road out of Punyu, the question was, who pushed Vic’s ID through that turnstile? Who looked enough like Vic in height and weight—at least just enough to dupe a Chinese immigration officer on a busy day?
She knew who.
Claire felt her stomach heaving with nausea. The urgency to rescue Cecilia made her sick with anxiety but she also wanted to jump off the boat and hide back at home.
There was one question that now eclipsed all the others, a question that no amount of deduction could penetrate.
The question, wrapped in pity and horror and bewilderment, was simply, why?
She clambered down the Lin Hua Shan quay along with the other day commuters. This time there were no foreign buyers on their way to inspect T-shirts or silk underwear. She spotted a lot of returning mainlanders laden with rice cookers, air-conditioners, and even auto parts bought in Hong Kong. A few well-dressed women in the immigration queue chatted away—Hong Kong wives visiting their young husbands, factory foremen transferred up full-time from the colony.
Then Claire saw what she had hoped for—a trio of western tourists ahead of her. She quickened her step and fell in behind them in the queue for non-Chinese arrivals. They were Swedish or Dutch; an anorexic blond girl wore baggy khaki shorts and sported a thin silver ring through her nose. She was with two tanned and gangly men with very short hair except for tiny braided twists hanging over the back of their collars. They had that permanent layer of dust on their brown skin that backpackers collect, but their faces were genial enough. They were stooped over by the weight of heavily laden rucksacks strapped across their shoulders.
Claire hoisted her smaller pack onto her shoulders in the same way and moved extremely close to one of the men. He was too engaged in the process of filling out an arrival card propped against the backpack of one of his companions to notice her pressing against his pack. If she were lucky, she would be passed without the immigration guard calling up a computer check of her name or passport number. Her best hope was to be given the most cursory treatment as part of a group, no matter how small.
She avoided eye contact with the first young officer sitting behind the wooden counter. When the trio put their Dutch passports on the counter to be checked, she nudged herself closer to them instead of standing behind a line on the floor to wait for their party to clear. She slapped her passport down on the counter. The officer took hers with the Dutch passports together and started checking the visa in each one.
Damn, she realized, their tourist visas had been issued in The Hague and hers in Hong Kong. They didn’t match up. She held her ground in their group, fiddling casually with the shoulder strap of her bag. The second officer took the passports in his fist and checked the first Dutch passport against a printed list of numbers. Now he was checking the second. Had Chen reported through his Ministry to keep an eye out for any more illegal entries by a reporter named Raymond? The officer took the second passport and started to run his finger down the list again. He glanced up at the counter, mumbled something to his partner. Now most of the passengers were in the dingy concrete hall, shuffling in a line that snaked back out toward the jetfoils.
He slammed all four passports back onto the top of the counter.
He waved them all on.
Now all she had to do was clear customs with a gun in her bag. Sure. She would never have dared to smuggle it across the border had she been crossing into China at one of the bigger checkpoints equipped with X-ray machines. Even at Lin Hua Shan, she recognized that carrying it was a measure of her temporary insanity. If the gun were found, no one could keep her out of a Chinese jail. But if her latest theory was right, she was safer in a Chinese cell than her own apartment. All she asked was a dry cell cot well clear of a seaweed cemetery. Luckily, the port of Lin Hua Shan was more like a bus junction than an international border crossing.
A thin, pretty Chinese girl half-yanked the pack off Claire’s shoulder and tossed it down on a long, low wooden table. The weight of the pack made a suspiciously heavy thunk on the bare wood. The girl felt the bag and Claire watched in horror as the woman’s small fist encircled the barrel of the gun through its towel padding. Looking at Claire, she said in a nasal whine, ‘Open it.’
Claire slowly unhooked the metal fastenings of her pack and reached for the rope pull that closed its circular opening. She had tied it tightly, and she tugged at the knot without success, hoping to frustrate the girl. Unfortunately the officer was in no hurry. She rested her weight on one foot and readjusted her cap with its tiny red star more neatly over her fashionable hairdo.
Claire smiled apologetically and slung the pack off the table and down to the floor, as if to struggle with the reluctant rope while sitting on her haunches. The customs girl lost her patience. A line of commuters, irritated by a foreigner’s idiotic packing, was cursing ‘Ta ma de,’ ‘Your mother’s,’ behind Claire. Leaning over the table to stare at Claire contemptuously, the girl glanced into the pack. Claire smiled sheepishly as she brandished her metal flashlight out of the bag. It had the same circumference as the gun barrel. The girl uttered a blessed release, ‘Oa-ke-kay,’ and brusquely gestured Claire away.
Claire moved on, holding back her sigh of relief there were no X-ray machines at Lin Hua Shan until she was out of earshot. Her cellphone didn’t work up here, so she found a dilapidated phone booth. and hoped Fresnay had dropped into his office by now.
Her luck was holding. His brisk ‘Hullo, Claire?’ was like a breeze of good sense blowing through the grimy phone cubicle. In place of the nausea she had endured on the boat, she now felt sticky and feverish. She pictured Fresnay standing in his cool and well-ordered office, his sunburned legs sticking awkwardly out of his baggy shorts.
‘You should have waited before going there. It’s hard to explain on the telephone. Listen carefully.’
‘What is it?’ she shouted. A
ll around the dirty arrival hall Chinese were shouting and scuffling huge suitcases and boxes away from the baggage check. The connection was bad and there was no door to the booth.
‘I’ve found Cha Ling, but there has to be some mistake. But then again, I don’t see how or where.’
‘What are you talking about?’
The priest raised his voice. ‘The Chinese coast may be decentralizing like crazy, but it is still Communist. That means it is a huge bureaucracy. They can hide whatever they want from foreigners, but they can’t hide anything from their own bureaucracy because it has to function.’
‘Robert, are you going to start jabbering about the post office again? Where is Cha Ling?’
‘That’s what I’m going to tell you. I couldn’t figure it out—it wasn’t showing up on any map, even the most recent county maps I could find.’
‘Robert!’
‘Be patient, lass. There is one part of the bureaucracy that has to function, at least serve the rest of the secret system, no matter how forbidden it might be to the rest of us: the postal service. The Chinese government has to deliver the mail, just like anywhere else. So I checked the classified postal directory, the one issued by the provinces for internal use by their postmen.’
‘But you didn’t find Cha Ling. I know, I know.’
‘That’s right. So I went into our storeroom, where old Father Lazlo used to keep classified materials for decades. I worked back, year by year. I found Cha Ling—in the 1985 postal directory.’
‘The same year P. C. Wong started the Huan Ji Company.’
