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

by D. L. Kung

  ‘So Friday night MacGinnes goes out to Cheung Chau to recover Vic’s tapes. Hager surprises him. Christ! Who’s this guy popping out of the bedroom? Nobody he knows. They must have had a confrontation, two guilty bastards in each other’s way. Something Hager said or the drugs paraphernalia lying around clues in MacGinnes that Hager is trouble. He can’t afford another criminal blackmailing him—there’s too much at stake. He stabs him neatly under the solar plexus, the way he learned twenty-five years ago in Vietnam, upward thrust—no muss, no fuss, no broken bones. Tucks Hager bleeding into bed. Leaves with the incriminating interview tapes.’

  ‘My dear girl, what you are saying is therefore that—’

  ‘—That when Chew Lo-man shot Craig Hager in cold blood, sneaking up on him in bed in the dark, Hager was already dead. You’ve got nothing to charge Chew with, except tampering with a corpse. Go back to that apartment with a fine-tooth comb and I bet you’ll find a match for MacGinnes’ DNA. Especially since he was the man both Nancy and I trapped in Vic’s apartment, the man who knocked me out. MacGinnes must’ve been spooked by our conversation at the Mandarin. He couldn’t resist going back out to Cheung Chau the same day to make sure he’d got anything that tied him to Vic. Fortunately, I got to Vic’s notes first.’

  The two men looked at each other. There was a long silence and Claire sipped her tea, and then, without warning, Harris’s watch started to beep. He slipped out for a moment and then returned, smiling

  Slaughter was the first to clear his throat. ‘I take it you’ve located MacGinnes’s prison. Where is Mr D’Amato?’

  Claire started weeping and then found she couldn’t stop. The two men looked at her, their expressions changing to alarm.

  ‘He died of fear. They put him in some kind of solitary cell and told him he wouldn’t get out with all his body parts. He had a story that would make the New York Times sit up and beg, and what does he do? He starves himself so they won’t cut out his kidneys and eyes, and curls up, gets a fever and dies.’

  Harris nodded. ‘Probably a coffin cell., a mainland favorite. No room to extend your legs, no light and no window. The only difference between that and a coffin is that a coffin lets you stretch out. The experience of being buried alive in one of those could break a lot of people, Claire,’ he said gently.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ said Claire, brushing away what seemed a wash of warm tears coursing down her cheeks as fatigue overcame her. They were the first tears she had shed for Vic but not the last.

  ‘After he died, they sold his kidneys and his eyes—’ she started to gag with a dry retching into Slaughter’s wastebasket.

  ‘It’s a big black market with the Hong Kong hospitals, ‘ said Harris. ‘They harvest body parts from executed prisoners to sell here. I’m afraid in China the sale is legal, although harvesting from live people is not. Claire, please, let us put you in a taxi.’

  Claire suddenly took in the sea-fresh smell of Harris’s aftershave and crisp button-down shirt and, in contrast, her sweat-drenched top, muddy running shoes, dust-coated hair, and tear-streaked cheeks.

  Harris must have read her mind. Always gallant, if transparently so, he took her arm and said, ‘Never looked lovelier. May I escort you to an air-conditioned pumpkin?’

  She shook hands with Slaughter and thanked him. She hadn’t forgotten the surveillance, and suspicion he had put her way, but he was a professional. Sometimes the people who looked the most successful, attractive, or reliable turned out to be truly dangerous.

  They emerged into the blinding Hong Kong sun of a spring morning. The month’s rains had steamed off the pavements. A block away from police headquarters the waterfront lay dotted with ferries crossing from Wanchai to Hung Hom. They were only two blocks from Claire’s bureau, but she needed a rest before she phoned McDermott.

  Luckily the New Yorkers were sound asleep.

  When she reached home, the answering machine was blinking. Fresnay had left several messages. Xavier had called many times, too, his voice increasingly anxious as he found himself dialing through the night from Tokyo. She returned Fresnay’s call and invited him to have dinner at the end of that week, once Xavier was back, as a proper thank you for the tip about Cha Ling.

  ‘Not on Friday night, the night I’m hiking out to Tai Long,’ he remonstrated her gently. ‘Or maybe you two would like to have a spaghetti dinner with me?’

  ‘Even better,’ laughed Claire. ‘But if we spend the weekend, do we have to attend Mass on Sunday morning?’

  ‘If you don’t, my little chapel will have no congregation,’ said Fresnay. ‘I’ll also be hearing confessions. Are you saying you have nothing, absolutely nothing on your conscience?’

  The priest was only joking. But she saw Chen’s cigarette singeing his dead fingertips in the rain-soaked Cha Ling mud.

  She said quietly, ‘It’s not a confession you would want to hear.’

  Epilogue

  —one week later—

  There were phone calls to New York all week. Harris tied up the loose ends of the paperwork attached to Vic’s demise one week after doing much the same for Hager, and personnel officers from the US Consulate in Guangzhou drove to Cha Ling for his body. They found it in a shallow grave behind the compound’s clinic.

  MacGinnes was arrested and charged with the manslaughter of Vic and first-degree murder of Hager the day after Claire returned to Hong Kong. An expensive San Francisco lawyer was flying in to prepare the American’s defense side by side with one of the colony’s top barristers, a Queen’s counsel, and a team of three local solicitors.

  Harris filled her in over the phone before he headed off to give a speech on ‘Old Chinese Politics and the New Chinese Economy’ at the East-West Center in Hawaii. ‘I gather MacGinnes is pleading not guilty to Hager’s murder, and he alleges Vic’s demise resulted from a misadventure by his Chinese joint-venture partners.’

  Senior Superintendent Slaughter had disappointing news. ‘There’s no tape to be found. And it’s going to be hard to prove anything regarding Hager. MacGinnes left no fingerprints and what’s the point of searching his office or home for a knife? Even if we found it, the corpse was too damaged by its time in the sea to do a reliable forensic match. He was a real pro even though he was taken by surprise. Chew Lo-man admitted that he shot and dumped the body into the sea.

  Claire was angry. ‘Vic always used a tape recording. MacGinnes had it.’

  ‘He got rid of it. You haven’t got enough to hang the man.’

  ‘Then I’ll hang him in print.’

  Harris warned, ‘Watch out for libel.’

  ‘I saw it! I saw the camp myself. Vic is dead, and Cecilia witnessed that. I’ve got the ownership records from the company registry. Fresnay has the Chinese records of the camp’s history, thanks to the demonic efficiency of the Communist postal system. We can finish tracing the electronic cargo from Cha Ling via the Brainchild Singapore export firm. We’ll do a sidebar on Dr Liu’s story of his stepsister with photos of her and the documents showing she was transferred to Cha Ling from the Women’s Detention Center in Guangzhou. Jason Ng has confirmed his side of the kidney deal, provided I don’t use his name. And I’ll report how Vic died and how nobody in that camp knows they work for a Woodland Hills company, but instead still think they’re prisoners in the Chinese gulag.’

  ‘And you can build a story around that? Even without the Hager murder?’

  You bet I can,’ said Claire. ‘Have a good time in Hawaii.’

  McDermott scheduled Claire’s story for the following week’s edition. New York held six columns open, eight if Claire could get pictures of the camp. They had good file photos of MacGinnes sitting on his desk, one hand resting on a ‘Lychee PC.’ Claire hired a top photographer, Ho Ping-peng, known as ‘Ping-Pong’ to his friends, to spend the day in Punyu, photograph the offices of P. C. Wong and shoot the exterior of Cha Ling with a wide-angle shot of the camp clinic where she’d found Cecilia.

  She reco
mmended Ping-Pong hire a driver named Albert Wong.

  ‘Here’s Albert’s card. Tell him I’m covering all his expenses. Note his bank branch for payment is right here. And don’t forget to take earplugs for the ride.’ Claire added.

  There would be a follow-up story after the Guangdong authorities released MacGinnes’s ‘prisoners,’ Harris told her. Already some five hundred Cha Ling detainees had been told that they were no longer detainees—their years of misery were a ‘political error.’

  Preparations for returning these ghosts to their families took time. One man serving a life sentence had divorced his wife only so she could marry his brother on the promise of taking care of her. He’d committed suicide at the prospect of further disrupting the lives of two people he still loved. Two other prisoners had sold one kidney each for cash to support their children. They were preparing a lawsuit against MacGinnes’s headquarters in Hong Kong. Claire would report these and other sad consequences in a few weeks’ time.

  Xavier returned Tokyo from a tiring series of seminars on development projects in Cambodia. He heard her tale with incredulity and admiration.

  ‘I thought you worked for a quiet business journal,’ he said. ‘Since when did you need a gun to meet your deadline?’ But joking was over that night when he held her tightly. More than once he woke up to embrace her quietly and protectively all over again.

  Claire wasn’t ready to tell him the biggest news of all. Her bouts of nausea had continued. She could no longer blame bumps on the head or bloated corpses. Ten minutes with her doctor, the precise and soft-spoken Dr Helen Wing, had explained all her fatigue, nausea, and heavy sleep.

  She was carrying Xavier’s child. She was happy. She’d botched responsibility before. Somehow this felt different already. Vic would haunt her conscience for a long time to come and sometimes she could expect nightmares of Chen’s eyes and voice. She could feel the exhausted weight of Cecilia in her arms still.

  Now she had a different kind of weight to carry. Instead of hiding behind a facade of professional coolness, she felt a warm confidence deeper inside.

  She nestled down into Xavier’s arms.

  Claire went into the office to write her exposé on the same day Cecilia was scheduled to come back to work. The Queen Mary staff said the trauma of Cecilia’s time at Cha Ling would fade faster if she could settle right back into a dependable routine. That morning Cecilia was already at her desk, her handbag hung carefully over the back of her chair and her beige cardigan thrown over her shoulders.

  She’d cleared off Claire’s desk to ready it for a day of writing. To one side of her chair stood a tall pile of newspapers ready to be marked and clipped. Another pile stood on the other side. More than ten days’ worth of BBC Summary of World Broadcasts waited to be examined for the minutiae of shifts in the Chinese political scene. Some invitations had been saved and Cecilia had put question marks on two others with her yellow marker.

  But all that had to wait. Claire felt like a matador about to do battle with an invisible bull named MacGinnes. She switched on her computer screen, but nothing came up. She pressed all the buttons, but there was no green light.

  ‘Cecilia, call Compu-Fine right away! The system’s crashed,’ said Claire with exasperation. She wanted to scream with frustration.

  Cecilia came over to Claire’s desk and looked down at the mute black screen.

  ‘The biggest story we’ve had in a long time, and now the computer goes bust on me,’ said Claire, pointing at the dark monitor window with disbelief.

  ‘Claire,’ Cecilia shook her head in mock despair. The slim girl reached down behind the printer and a moment later the disk drives gave a reassuring whirr and the screen turned bright green.

  ‘The cleaning amah knocked the plug loose.’

  ‘Thank you, Cecilia.’ Claire rolled her eyes in embarrassment.

  ‘It’s my pleasure.’

  The End

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One’s story of a forced organ transplant carried out on a prisoner mid-execution was based on classified Chinese accounts of such practices passed to the author in the early 90’s by a researcher for Human Rights Watch. Over the years, there were other such reports, but none as comprehensive and horrific as The Weekly Standard’s article December 5, 2011, by investigative reporter Ethan Gutmann, entitled µThe Xinjiang Procedure§. Gutmann interviewed a mainland doctor who confessed to carrying out just such operations in vans belonging to Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-Sen Medical University under official auspices in 1991.

  As recently as the µ2012 American Transplant Congress in Boston§, veteran transplant surgeons expressed their concern. “Many of the organs being used for transplantation in China are coming from executed prisoners. So there’s really concern about who these people are, what role do they have in consenting to have their organs removed, and are they being executed because of this, whereas they shouldn’t be, just because someone may be making a profit off their organs, so there’s a lot of ethical concerns.” And in June 2012, µThe Epoch Times§ published their own exposé, including a map of China showing the proximity of Chinese military hospital transplant centers to detention centers.

  Readers who remain unconvinced of the role that Chinese state policy and profit have played in the harvesting of organs for transplant should also read the report on Chinese state procedures published by the American University, µIllegal Human Organ Trade from Executed Prisoners in China§, the Canadian investigation into organ harvesting from the incarcerated religious group, Falun Gong, µBloody Harvest§, the summary of accounts detailed online in µOrgan Transplantation in the People's Republic of China§.

  The government does not deny the state organ export is flourishing. The state-sponsored µChina Daily§ newspaper reports that as of August 2009, despite international outrage at Chinese state policy, approximately 65% of transplanted organs still came from death row prisoners. To his credit, the Chinese Vice-minister for Health, Huang Jiefu, urged belated reform.

  The story line that foreign investment might be involved in Chinese prisons was based on my own research in the same decade on the extent to which supply chains for exports to the West reached deep into the prison labor system. The Japanese Consulate in Shenyang was kind enough to give me extensive details, down to the kind of machinery, training and investment financing, they had personally channeled into prisons in northeastern China.

  In The Wardens of Punyu, I entwined these two well-documented phenomena into a single narrative in the hope that it would raise awareness of these abuses.

  D. L. Kung, 2012

  About the Author

  The author of six novels, D. L. Kung worked in Asia for over twenty years, writing for a number of publications, including as China bureau chief for The Economist and BusinessWeek and before that, as a staff contributor to The International Herald Tribune, National Public Radio, The Washington Post and The South China Morning Post. Kung won The Overseas Press Club’s award for Best Human Rights Reporting in 1991 for an exposé on China’s prison labor exports, and Kung’s play based on Chinese writer-in-detention He Depu, Dear Mr Rogge, won a commendation from the BBC World Service/British Council’s biennial International Playwriting Contest in 2009.