The Golden Mountain Murders (22 page)

As Robert and Fong drew every eye in the restaurant, an elderly Chinese man dabbed his lips with a linen napkin and rose from his seat. Passing Robert’s table, he nimbly slipped one of the sweet pastries into his coat pocket then continued out of the restaurant, careful to keep his distance, but also careful not to lose sight of Robert Cowens and Zhong Fong.

Fong hailed a cab and shoved Robert into the back seat. “Go to your hotel. Rest. I’ll call you.” Robert resisted, but only for a moment. Then he sat back and closed his eyes.

Alone on the dark streets again, Fong re-envisioned the columns on the desktop back in his Shanghai office and mentally swept the column headed by LAWYER into the garbage can. He had actually thought it was their best chance. But now that it was gone he turned his attention to the second column, the one headed with the family name, CHIANG.

Gelati-eating couples passed by him as he leaned against a building, pulled out his cell phone and pressed #9 on his speed dialer. Once again the eighteen numbers were dialed and the young Shanghanese cop with Special Investigations answered.

“Wei.”

“Is everything ready?” Fong asked.

“Yes, sir.” The young cop’s voice had a waver in it. Fong thought about that, considered cancelling his plans, then thought of AIDS in Anhui and said aloud, “Fuck it.”

“Sir?”

“Start the plan we discussed. Now. This very moment.”

Fong hung up.

Within twenty minutes of Fong’s call the wheels of his plan were set spinning. By the end of the day the streets of Shanghai literally ran with blood and blood products that had been ransacked from warehouses by incensed Chinese mobs shouting, “Chinese blood for the Chinese people.” At the same time a massive sweep of blood heads began in Anhui Province. Hundreds were arrested, dozens of officials publicly shamed – many were badly beaten. Within twenty-four hours China was alive with protest and the blood business was in a shambles.

Fong knew this would not last long but he hoped it would be enough to force the Chiangs’ hand.

Fong was alone on the streets of Vancouver and the night was deepening – and, although he couldn’t see anyone else, he knew he was not alone. He turned – and began to run.

Back in Shanghai, the four Anhui peasants were flushed with excitement. “The Middle Kingdom is rising – rising to revenge our shame!”

“S
it down, Suzanne.” Old Chiang’s voice was hoarse. He tightened the plastic oxygen mask on his face and breathed deeply. The Chiang sons stood to one side as Suzanne sat down at the fifties-style Formicatopped kitchen table across from their father, her grandfather.

“I read the articles too, Grandfather. But will the Beijing government really pass laws against the blood trade? Many peasants make their living by giving blood. To say nothing of all the government officials who have bought new Lexuses with their share of our business.”

Old Chiang thought about trading Chinese blood for Japanese cars. “Suzanne, you must remember that we are now talking about taking blood from our people and bringing it to the Golden Mountain.” His voice sounded thin through the plastic. “This is about blood. It is about the black-haired people.” He took a deep breath then took off the mask and inserted the plastic clip into his nose. “There are already mobs on the streets of Chengdu and Nanjing and Shanghai. Two of our warehouses have been destroyed and some nuts are running around jabbing stupid Round Eyes with needles.”

“It won’t last.”

“Don’t be too sure.” The Chiang patriarch was referring not only to the mobs but also to the ominous articles in opposition to the blood trade that had begun to appear in Chinese newspapers. He had no way of knowing that Fong had planted the newspaper articles before he left Shanghai.

Fong’s timing this time had been impeccable. The first newspaper articles had come out just before the ship arrived and then at least one had been in the paper every day since.

“What do we do, Grandfather?”

Old Chiang allowed the sounds in the room to come into his consciousness. He knew he was at a crossroads. He looked at his beautiful granddaughter and knew that the path he took would determine her future as well as his. He turned to his sons, “Leave us.”

Slowly, with open malice, the boys left their father.

“Was that wise, Grandfather?”

He spoke slowly, “Family and business do not always mix well. Remember that.” He winced and readjusted his breathing tube. “Now, we have lost some money.”

“Yes.”

“But our partners lost significantly more than we did.”

She nodded. She always knew that there were silent partners but she never knew who exactly they were. Was he going to tell her now?

“And who would these new Chinese laws against the blood trade hurt most?”

“Depends how much of our business is our money and how much belongs to the silent partner or partners.”

“Partner, Suzanne – partner.”

That surprised her.

“Ninety/ten split,” he said flatly.

She held her breath. Ninety percent from us or ninety percent from them?

“You must learn not to wear your questions on your forehead, Suzanne. You have known me a long time. Would I really put up ninety percent of any investment in the Middle Kingdom?”

Slowly she shook her head, “Of course not.”

“Suzanne, we are Chiangs. We supply infrastructure and expertise. Skills, connections and our family’s history. We are middlemen. We get paid both coming and going. Only fools put forward their money to make money. Fools and harlots. Your brain and your abilities and the family’s historic contacts allow you to make money – not investment capital.” The last words were spat out like a curse.

She paused for a moment then asked, “So how much did we lose in this shipment, Grandfather?”

He smiled. For the barest moment, the handsome young man he had been returned to his face. “Nothing. I sold our percentage long ago to a broker.”

“Then we have no problem since we lost nothing,” she said.

“Not true, Suzanne. We lost nothing but our partner lost much.”

“But surely that’s their concern.”

“They are our partners and have been for generations. We can work here because of them and they can work in the Middle Kingdom because of us. If they are hurt, we are hurt.”

“I see.”

He didn’t look at her. Was it possible that whoever was behind all this was trying to hurt his silent partner? He didn’t know. But he knew he still needed the family’s historic Long Nose partner. Then he took his first step down the new path by saying, “I think it’s time you met our partner in this business.” After a moment of silence he asked her, as if it were the natural next question, “Do you ever read the
Vancouver Sun?”

“No, Grandfather.”

“Well I do. Every day. The personal ads are most interesting.”

For a moment she didn’t follow him, then she smiled, “Is that how you contact our silent partner?”

“It is. If I want a meeting I place an ad with the words ‘Gold, Desire and Mountain.’ If our partner wants a meeting the ad always includes the words ‘Gold, Purity and Illness.’ The meeting always takes place at noon on the following day. I grant it is clumsy but it is also secure. Everything that promotes speed permits unwanted intervention. It is a trade-off.”

“You have already placed the ad, haven’t you, Grandfather?

“Naturally, one must consider the feelings of one’s silent partner.”

“He did what?” Fong demanded so loudly that the warehouse echoed momentarily then returned to its dirty silence. All eyes turned to him.

The Tong guy stiffened at the rebuke. Not for the first time, Fong questioned the wisdom of using these thugs. But what choice did he have?

“Like I said, the old guy placed a personal ad in the
Vancouver Sun
.”

“That’s all he did?”

“You heard me. He placed a personal ad. Then his granddaughter, the icicle princess, came to his place in the British Properties.”

“And there’s been no more phone activity since then?”

“None.”

Fong thought about that. Personal ads to communicate? Finally he said, “Is it still the Cold War here?”

“Chiang’s been around a long time.”

That was true. Fong also knew that personal ads although slow were usually a secure way of communicating. “You don’t have anyone on the newspaper . . .” He didn’t bother completing the question.

“So what do we do?” Matthew asked.

“We wait,” Fong said, “and increase our surveillance. Their mutual business interests are going up in flames. They’ll have to meet and we have to follow them. It may be our last chance of getting to the silent partner.”

The Dalong Fada men looked at each other, then sat. Matthew and his men did the same. The Tong guys ordered food and drink. Then they all waited.

The guild assassin watched the shadows moving in the warehouse windows, then pried open a rusted door hinge and slipped in. Soundlessly, he climbed a metal ladder into the overhead I-beam superstructure. He checked to make sure his cell-phone ringer was off then he curled up on a large cross-span and watched the men below him – like a snake in a tree eyeing its prey.

The air in the warehouse was stale and stunk of unwashed men and cigarette smoke – and more of that damnable General Tso and his stupid chicken. After more than thirty hours in the room, the phone finally rang. The Tong leader grabbed it, listened for a moment, then put his hands over the mouth piece, “They’re moving.”

Midday traffic in Vancouver is not as bad as in Shanghai, but it was challenging to get from the warehouse upriver near Deep Cove to the Gastown area of Vancouver with any speed at that hour. But they barged and honked and shouted their way there.

Outside the forty-storey building they were met with another surprise.

Police officers everywhere.

The building was cordoned off. The head of the Tong surveillance team raced over to his boss, “The cops arrived moments before Chiang and his folks entered the building.”

The Tong leader swore. “Did you at least see where Chiang was going?”

“We tried, but the cops kept us outside and they kicked out our guys who were already positioned when they cleared the lobby. One of them did manage to see Chiang and his people get on an elevator. That’s all he saw before he was thrown out. The cops claim there’s a sequence from
Star Gate
being shot in the lobby.”

Fong sneaked a peek. There were cameras set up in the lobby and officious-looking technicians making as if they were important walking around. Fong approached Matthew. “Would there be hair and makeup people there?”

Matthew nodded.

Fong raised his shoulders and said, “So what are you waiting for?”

“Not all hair and makeup people are gay!”

“Oh, please, this is hardly the time for correct politicalness or whatever you people call that! Is there anyone in there that could help us?” Fong shouted.

The silent partner was thinking about purity. The silent partner often thought about purity – actually, about the price of purity – whenever they had to meet face to slant-eyed face with the family’s traditional Asian business partners. At least fewer of them smoked now – but it still remained a room of rotted teeth, rice-paper dry hands, toad-belly skin and . . . them. True, the old man brought along the granddaughter this time. Pretty thing. A no-doubt frigid MBA from somewhere expensive. But it made no difference. You always felt as if you had to swallow a large soapy facecloth inch by sodden slimy inch when dealing with them – while protecting the purity of this ungrateful land.

The silent partner thought about ingratitude of Canadians, then about disease and sickness, and then looked at the “partners” – the family’s historical partners – the bringers of contagion whose coils were wrapping tighter and tighter, bringing the British Columbian deeper and deeper into the silence.

The silent partner glanced out the window towards the mountains – the purity. Between where they stood now in this tastefully furnished flat and the mountains was clear evidence of the ingratitude of this land’s newcomers. The detritus of those who came to Canada for only one reason: to take her money, then return “home” with their booty. The silent partner was always furious upon returning from speaking in San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago. The magnificence of the architecture of those cities was the direct result of the beneficence of those who left buildings behind in gratitude to a land that had given them refuge, honoured them and made them wealthy. But not here. True, Vancouver was not as atrocious as Toronto – the physically ugliest big city in the entire Western World as far as the British Columbian was concerned. None of the whores there – the wops, the Caribbean Negroes and the kikes – left any sign of their gratitude to the place that had allowed them in and made them welcome . . . and made them rich.

Things really began to go to hell in this country in the late 1960s with the advent of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, hell! Non-gratitudism, non-nationhoodism would be more accurate terms. Come on in, we’ll hold the country still, spread her legs, while you assault her! Nah, pay no attention to the people who made this country from the heathen rock, ignore their values, blaspheme their churches, degrade their language – mock their ways – and we are to roll over and agree? We never did in the past, we do not now.

Let them freeze in the dark!

Oh for the days when you wanted to buy something you got your fat little fanny down to Eatons or Woodwards. Our stores, not theirs. Then in the early 1970s discount stores from the East tried to what they called “open up” Vancouver – to upset our world. Funny how their trucks kept slipping off the roads in the mountain passes. Funny about that. One’s an accident, two’s suspicious . . . nine and they got the message – NOT WANTED OUT HERE IN GOD’S COUNTRY!

Going back a little further in the family history, there was the ill-fated raid on Japtown that ended with six white men hanged from the lampposts in that ill-begotten part of Vancouver. Then when the Supreme Court of the land couldn’t figure out who to punish – so they punished no one – our anger went into dormancy. But it did not die. Our anger never dies. Eventually the war came and our revenge fell upon them. Not a stick of furniture, a garden, a home or a farm was left in the hands of the Asians. We shipped their sorry asses to southern Alberta to live out the war in the harshest climate in the country – without so much as a twig of firewood to heat their badly built sheds. Welcome to Canada, fellas!

Purity has a price and part of that price was sitting in the room with these slant-eyed monkeys. They were talking again – they were always talking. True, they were better dressed now but they were still monkeys freshly down from the rutting trees. The Chinese men spoke quickly to each other in Mandarin. The silent partner wanted to smile but didn’t – all these years and they still didn’t get it that the British Columbian spoke their doggerel tongues. All of them – Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka – even the highly idiomatic Shanghanese. The silent partner listened a little further. So they wondered aloud if the complexity of the situation was understood by the stupid Round Eye – if their Long Nose partner had gone senile since their last meeting. The British Columbian allowed their Mandarin slanders for a few more highly insulting moments then said, “So the shipment is totally spoiled?”

That swung Chiang’s head, breathing tube and all, in the silent partner’s direction, “Totally spoiled.”