The Hua Shan Hospital Murders (13 page)

Fong looked at the document:
“One more should bring the light to this dark place. One more could release the light. Just one more and the light will be free at last.”

“Is this some sort of evangelical talk?”

“Our experts say no. This Larry Allen confirmed that his group is at a loss as to what this means.”

“What do your experts say?”

The consular man took a deep breath then said, “They think it’s Manichaean.”

“What?” he said, but his mind wandered back to his conversation with the bishop of Shanghai.

“Manichaean. It’s a famous heretical sect of Christianity that the Catholic Church has tried to stomp out for years.”

“And it uses an equilateral crucifix,” he thought. But he said, “Where is this Larry Allen now?”

“We don’t know. He disappeared with his daughter the day before yesterday. Right after he contacted our consulate here.”

“Great.”

“We’re trying to find them.”

“Are you really?” said Fong as he pushed in the auto stop button and the elevator continued downward.

Twenty minutes later, Fong, Captain Chen, Lily, and Wu Fan-zi were back in Fong’s office watching the amateur video. Chen slowed down the image every time the camera panned the crowd.

“He has to be there,” Fong said leaning for support against the large plate-glass window that overlooked the Bund promenade.

“Go back again, Chen,” said Fong. “There has to be a Caucasian in the crowd.”

They went over and over it, but every face, no matter how blown up or zoomed in on, was clearly Asian.

Fong began to pace. “There was phosphorus at the second blast site wasn’t there, Wu Fan-zi?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else important?”

“Hard to tell. But basically it was the same as the first. A cage. A fetus. This time the warning said
“Zai yi ci bao zha jiang gie zhe ge hei an de di fang dai lai guang ming, zai yi ci bao zha jiang shi fang guang ming zhi yao zai lai yi ci bao zha, guang ming jiang zui zhong de dao shi fang.”
Fong sat at his desk, his head in his hands. Wu Fan-zi continued, “But no other real leads to follow. If there were more clues at the site we didn’t see them before the fire forced us out and that section of the building collapsed.”

“Great,” said Fong. Then without lifting his head he shouted, “Run the tape again, Chen. But slower this time. He has to be there. He has to.”

Halfway through Chen stopped the video. “What about the guy with the camera, himself?”

“Thought about it, Chen. He arrived by JAL six hours after the bombing at the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Chen. It’s good thinking. But now help me find a fucking white guy in that crowd of people outside the hospital.”

“Are you sure he was there?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be . . .?”

“Because this turned up in the sector search outside the hospital that Chen conducted,” said Fong placing a transparent evidence bag on the table. Through the plastic everyone could see the note that Angel Michael had dropped.

“What does it say, Fong?”

“THIS BLASPHEMY MUST STOP. THE LIGHT WILL COME,” said Fong.

Wu Fan-zi muttered, “Same fucking words we found etched in the sheathing.”

Fong nodded. “Play the tape again, Chen, he has to be there.”

But no matter how slowly Chen went – the faces stayed Asian.

“Asians,” said Fong standing and moving toward the plate-glass window. The new Pudong Industrial District shone hard and bright across the Huangpo River. “All Asians. But he’s an American.
All Asians. No Caucasians and how would a Caucasian get in and out of the hospitals without drawing attention to himself anyway?”

“He could have Chinese working for him,” Lily answered.

Fong touched the glass. “No he couldn’t,” Fong thought. He caught his reflection in the window. He was beginning to look like an old man. Maybe it was just the exhaustion. Or maybe it was the fear that he was nowhere with this case. “And this guy’s going to strike again – and soon,” he whispered to the window.
“One more should bring the light to this dark place. One more could release the light. Just one more and the light will be free at last.”

“Fong?” Lily prompted.

Suddenly Fong lashed out at his image in the plate-glass window. The thick pane shattered from the impact of his fist. Lily shrieked. Wu Fan-zi ran to his old friend but Fong pushed him aside. “Don’t you all understand! We have a mad man on the streets of our city and we have nothing – not a single fucking clue who he is.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Robert peeled off another 1,000-yuan note and put it on the dirty tablecloth. Across from him the small man eyed the money with the kind of disdain that Robert had come to expect. On the far side of the restaurant, an aging beauty was showing a new girl how to properly deliver a drink to a table. Much attention was given to turning the body so that the customer would be looking directly at the young waitress’s chest.

Why did his informants always want to meet in cheesy places like this? Well, better than the new “high concept” restaurants that were all the thing in Shanghai. The newest and most successful of these was an eatery called Cool Chains that was a mock-up of a Chinese federal prison. Diners ate in their own cells, receiving their food through a metal slot.
Ridiculous.

The man across the table cleared his throat. “Go ahead, spit. It doesn’t bother me,” Robert thought.

At first, bribing people for information about the fate of his sister Rivkah had been difficult for him.
But over his three years of inquiry he had acquired an appreciation for the finer points of the art. In fact, he had of late, gained a genuine taste for it. Just as he had for the gelatinous Shanghanese dishes that made most Westerners’ gorges rise.

The man across the table extended a pinky finger with a long buffed nail and poked at the money as if he were not sure whether it was alive or dead. The finger retracted. Robert added another 1,000-yuan note to the pile. The man smiled. Robert had done this little dance many times and knew he was now close to getting answers to his questions.

His investigations had taken him down two paths. The first had to do with the events leading up to and the eventual period of the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. It was relatively easy to find this information and not all that expensive. But the second path of investigation, into the life of the infamous Iraqi Jew Silas Darfun, had taxed both his ingenuity and the bankroll he had amassed from his illegal trading in antiquities.

Silas Darfun had somehow, even in death, erected tall thick walls around his secrets. Robert hoped the man across the table might just show him a way over those walls.

“And you would like to know what precisely about Mr. Darfun?”

“You were his gardener?”

“One of his gardeners. It was a big place. It needed many gardeners.”

“And you were with him during the war?”

The man cocked his head and gave a crooked smile. “And what war is it that you refer to? The war of liberation?”

Robert hadn’t met this form of resistance before.
The man knew perfectly well which war he was talking about but Robert didn’t know the name the Chinese used for the Second World War. While doing work in the American South Robert had been astonished to hear the American Civil War referred to by Southerners as the war between the states or the war of northern aggression. He’d quickly learned that south of the Mason/Dixon line referring to the conflict by anything but those two terms led to an intense silence. So he feared not being able to come up with the Chinese name for WW II would silence this gardener.

“The time of Japanese occupation.”

“Yes, I was there throughout that time.”

Fine, that hurdle was behind him. “Were you there when Mr. Darfun took in the children?”

The man pulled out a cigarette, a Snake Charmer, and struck a match against the table. Robert controlled his impulse to pull away from the flame. Abitter cloud of smoke escaped the man’s lips, then he began to cough. The cough shook him like a strong wind does a piece of laundry satayed out an apartment window on a bamboo pole. The shaking subsided and he picked a tiny brown flake off his tongue as if that bit of tobacco had caused the coughing fit.

“Which children would that be?”

Robert knew that Silas had gained intense notoriety in both Shanghai’s Chinese and Jewish communities when he married his Chinese mistress. He had also ruffled many feathers when he and his wife took in forty street children and raised them as their own. Robert looked at the man.

The man smiled thinly and let out another bitter cloud of smoke, “Ah, you don’t mean the street children – you mean the Jew brats?” Robert’s shocked look seemed to please him. “You have been asking questions about Mr. Darfun for almost three years now. Surely you don’t think you have been able to keep such inquiries secret.”

He had. In fact he’d never really considered that the Chinese men and women he had bribed for information would even admit to having talked to him. Why should they? He looked at the man. How little he understood these people. Then he smiled. How little they understood him.

Fine.

“Yeah, the Jew brats.”

“I was there then.”

“Did Silas keep a record of their names?”

“Of course.”

Robert waited but the man said nothing. He stared at the 1,000-yuan note. Robert put three more 1,000-yuan notes beside them. The man reached over and folded the bills together, then pocketed them. “Are these the proceeds from sales of the priceless cave frescos, books, and statues from my country’s glorious past?”

Again Robert found himself surprised. Odd that a gardener would be so well informed. He put on his best “fuck you” smile and said, “You wouldn’t be suggesting that I am involved in smuggling antiquities, would you?”

The man met Robert’s fuck-you smile with one of his own. “No – not suggesting – knowing.”

“Knowing what?”

“That you are a smuggler, Mr. Robert Cowens.”

A smuggler. Not a usual occupation for a nice Jewish boy. But then again Robert wasn’t all that nice and he wasn’t Jewish in the sense of being religious. In fact, he enjoyed referring to himself as an active and committed agnostic. Despite that, he was definitely a Jew – a card-carrying, yeah-but-is-it-good-for-Jews kind of tribal member.

A smuggler Jew.

He had first come to Asia four years ago when his law firm had insisted that there was big movie business to do in the far east. “Kung fooey films?” he’d asked. But when they showed him the grosses from the latest Jett Li film he’d whistled through the gap in his front teeth. Then they showed him the cheap cost of production. He calculated the net profit without their help. All he asked was, “When’s my flight?”

It was that night. He flew to Chicago then transferred planes. The JAL flight took him up the Mackenzie River, over the pole, then down to Hong Kong. He’d lived in Canada all his life but had never even remotely appreciated the vastness of the country until that trip. He didn’t even know where Great Slave Lake was until he saw it slide beneath the belly of the plane. It changed him. But not the way turning forty had changed him or the way leaving his wife had. He had touched the Plexiglas window of the plane and sensed the movement of time through the vibrations. He allowed himself to think about his recently deceased father – and their snooker games.

Robert used to play snooker with his father every Wednesday right up until six weeks before he died.
They’d lunch together at his father’s golf club – his father still played well into his late eighties. Robert never played. The two of them would eat downstairs at the snack bar, then retreat to the large L-shaped room that was known as the men’s section. Truth be told, the women referred to it as the
old
men’s section. There were a few card tables, a glassed-in smoking area, a large-screen television usually tuned to a station that had stock quotes running across the bottom, and a single full-sized snooker table.

At the card tables, gin rummy was the game but bullshitting was the entertainment. The elderly Jewish men seated there were the last remnants of their kind. The very end of the European Jews in North America. “From whence we came,” Robert thought as he watched an old guy slam his cards down on the table and announce to the room, “I got a hard on for this one.” Robert looked back at the pool table where his father was carefully setting up the snooker balls. The man at the card table who had shouted was named Itch. Or at least that’s what he was called. Robert assumed he didn’t like the nickname. At least it could have been grammatically correct: Itchy. Well, whether that mattered to Itch or whether he did or didn’t like the appellation, Robert was certain of one thing about Itch. The man hadn’t had a hard on – for a card game or much of anything else – for quite some time.

Robert’s father broke the stack of red balls, being careful to hit the cue ball so it travelled back down table. Despite his age, Robert’s father was a good snooker player. For as long as Robert could remember, his father had been a good snooker player. As he walked over to the cue ball, Robert remembered how his father had convinced his crazy mother to allow him to buy a pool table for the basement of their house: “It will keep the boys out of the pool halls.”

Robert came down on the very first day the pool table arrived and grabbed a cue. His father took it from him and showed him how to form a bridge with his seven-year-old hand. He wouldn’t let Robert even hit a ball until he could glide the pool stick across his bridged fingers perfectly parallel to the green felt surface for a full three feet. That took more than a week of practice.

Robert never forgot the feel of finally hitting cue to ball. The solidity of it pleased him. But it was the pure mathematics of the game – the controlled, totally non-subjective reality of it – that hooked him. His father insisted that he learn how to play English billiards first. He blocked the pockets with plugs and put a red ball and a black ball and a white ball on the table. “The black is yours. The white is mine. The red is common. Now make your ball hit my ball, bounce off a rail, then hit the red. Each time you do, it’s worth two points.” There were no sinking balls in the game.
Just caroms and spins to position your cue ball.
Robert lost that first game 100 to 8. After three months of practice, his father finally removed the pocket plugs. He took three red balls and put them in an arc about a foot and a half away from a side pocket. Then he took the cue ball and put it down table on the snooker spot for the pink ball. “When you can pot each of those balls twenty times in a row without a miss, call me.” Then he left. It took Robert just under two months to accomplish this task.

Thereafter he and his father played nightly.
Snooker. Only snooker. The only night he didn’t play with his father was on Thursdays when his father had his cronies over and there was big money changing hands in the basement – sometimes over single shots.

Robert remembered returning home one Thursday night after a summer evening of carousing with his high school friends and hearing his father and his buddies whooping it up downstairs. Maybe it was his desire to show off his skills with a cue stick – or maybe it was the false courage induced by the excellent Lebanese hashish that coursed through his veins – for whatever reason, Robert found himself downstairs – $120 of his hard-earned dollars on the table, a pool cue in his seventeen-year-old hands.

His father took every penny from him in less than an hour, then asked if he wanted to play double or nothing on three balls. Robert agreed. He never got to shoot in the game. As he left the basement, hurt and angry, his father spoke to him. “Two lessons, Robert.
One, don’t ever make any decisions about money when you’re in that ‘condition,’ and two, you’ll pay me back every penny before you spend a single penny on anything else. Is that clear?” Robert nodded. His father patted his cheek hard and said, “Check on your mother before you go to bed. I don’t want her wandering the halls.”

Robert ignored the order, assuming his father must have been light on his insulin dosage that day.
His mother had been dead for some eight years at that point. Robert didn’t ignore the rest of the order though, and paid back every penny he owed his father. And $240 was a fortune to a seventeen year old in 1965. But the lesson was worth the cost he thought, as his father’s liver-spotted hands began to shake causing his cue to tap a red ball to his left. All those years later, Robert once again worried that his father had forgotten to take his insulin shot.

Snippets of conversations floated over from the card table:

What a cash-business he had.

You bet, you wanted a coat you went to Morty, period.

But not pants.

Nah, never. Morty’s pants were
fercached.

Pants can’t be
fercached.

Why not?

’Cause they can’t, people yes, God sure, your procrastinate, usually, but not pants.

Why not?

He asks again.

Again I ask.

’Cause pal o’ mine, it makes no sense – pants can’t be
fercached
and that’s that.

Listen to him, the dentist’s the expert.

In this yes.

Want to take a peek at a crown in my mouth?

Thanks no, it’s your play and I got a hard on for this one.

Why should this hand be different from all other hands?

The rummy player’s fir cushes.

Don’t start.

An unexpected silence descended on the room.
Robert looked up from his shot. He knew what he’d see – someone much nearer to the end than the other elderly men must have entered. Such quiet always greeted the cold breath of near-death.