The Hamlet Murders (16 page)

Li Chou smiled. “How long will it last?”

“It draws power from their bug. As long as their bug’s bugging, our bug’s bugging their bug. They draw power from the cell phone; we draw power from them.”

“Power drawing power,” Li Chou thought. He liked that. Then he looked closely at the young man before him. Being a devious man himself, he assumed that this man would also have a hidden side – and more immediately important, a hidden agenda. Li Chou knew that the best way to defeat such agendas was to demand exact details. “How did you mange to bug Captain Chen’s bug?”

“Your man saw Chen enter central stores. I called my contact there. He informed me that Captain Chen had requested a bug. Well . . . ” the man shrugged, “my friend bugged their bug and gave me the software to follow it.”

Li Chou didn’t like it. This young man was too clever by half then by half again. He smiled but filed away his concern. He would not nurture potential competition in his ranks.

“Is there a problem, sir?” the man asked.

“No,” Li Chou lied easily. “You can leave.”

The man waited to get at least a nod of appreciation or a mention of a job well done – but none was forthcoming. He turned and left.

He wasn’t brave enough to slam the door.

Li Chou hit the Enlarge icon and immediately the scale of the street map changed. Li Chou checked the street coordinates. There was some sort of Christian temple right there.

He reached for his phone.

Evening prayers began just after sundown. A call to the Bishop of Shanghai confirmed the exact time. Fong had all the cathedral’s side doors locked so everyone had to use the main entrance. Just inside the front foyer, Fong had positioned four uniformed cops facing the entrance doors. He and Captain Chen waited outside on the front steps in the hope that a Dalong Fada member would enter the cathedral, see the cops and, as surreptitiously as possible, head right back out.

Fong reached into his pocket and touched the bugged cell phone with the wireless Internet connection he had retrieved from behind the toilet.

“Is this a religious place, sir?” asked Captain Chen.

“Yes, it’s a main Catholic church, Xujiahui Cathedral. It was built by the Jesuits. In English they call it St. Ignatius Cathedral.”

“We have nothing quite like this in the country.”

“No. But with all the beauty out there why would you need it?” Fong checked his watch. It was 8:30 p.m. The service had begun twenty minutes ago. Fong cursed himself for not asking the bishop how long it would go on.

All the people who came to this evening’s service had gone past the cops without comment and had stayed for prayers. Shanghanese were usually unfazed by the presence, even the large armed presence, of the police. Fong and Chen watched, but no one had turned around and come back out since the service began.

Li Chou looked at the six CSU detectives in his office. “Keep in cell phone contact with me. I’ll guide you. No one is to make any move toward the suspect until I order it. Got that?”

Nods from all six.

“Good. Let’s go.”

Fong and Captain Chen moved down to the bottom of the cathedral’s wide front steps. Time seemed to move two paces forward, one back and one sideways. Then the front doors of the cathedral opened. Fong checked his watch. Evidently evening services were a little longer than an hour. People began to leave the large building. Fong didn’t look at the faces. Unless his contact was already inside the cathedral she would arrive soon, looking for a tall white man with what Westerners called black hair but people in the Middle Kingdom knew was really red hair. “We Chinese have black hair,” Fong thought. “That’s why spoken drama from the West is called Hong Mao Ju, literally red-haired drama.”

Then he saw a small middle-aged woman make her way slowly up the steps. She had a slight limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. Her face was pleasingly calm as she passed by Fong and entered the cathedral. A moment later she re-emerged, shielding her eyes from the remains of the setting sun. She strode down the steps with a quick but unhurried stride.

“Is the bug activated in the phone, Chen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long will it last?”

“It’s hooked into the power supply. Every time the cell phone charges, the bug fills its capacitor. So in theory it could last forever.”

Fong just heard this last as he raced to the curb.

The Dalong Fada woman had already crossed the six lanes of traffic and four of bikes on Caoxi Beilu with remarkable ease and was headed directly to the Xujiahui subway station entrance. Fong moved as quickly as he could through the traffic and raced down the stairs to the subway. He dug in his pocket for change, found none, flashed his badge at the ticket-taker then hopped the barrier, to a chorus of complaints from his fellow citizens.

The platform was almost empty as the train pulled out. Fong cussed and was about to turn away in disgust when the last car of the train moved past him revealing the Dalong Fada woman standing patiently on the opposite platform.

Fong ran through the underpass and came up on the platform. He pushed his way through the densely packed crowd ignoring the colourful insults hurled at him and took a position right behind the Dalong Fada woman.

The train came into the station. The Dalong Fada woman stepped in and held onto one of the vertical central posts with her small left hand. Over her right shoulder she had an open red-white-and-blue nylon bag. Fong came up behind her and found a handhold above hers. As the train lurched forward, he slipped the cell phone into her bag then made his way around the pole to look at her.

Instantly, fear bloomed in her eyes. “It’s in your bag,” Fong said as casually as he could manage.

Her fear receded. She said nothing.

Fong smiled then pushed his way through the throngs in the car, pulled open the door between the cars and stepped into the next car.

He got off at Caoxi Beilu station, took out his cell phone and called Captain Chen. “She on your screen?”

“Yes, sir, I’ve copied the software to track her onto my PalmPilot and the signal from her cell phone is coming through just fine.”

“And our Li Chou?”

Chen laughed aloud, something that Fong had never heard from the man before. He wasn’t sure exactly what to make of it. “Where are you, sir?”

Fong told him.

“Shall I pick you up?”

“Is there any hurry?”

Chen checked the screen of the PalmPilot, “The cell phone’s still in motion so I don’t think so.”

“Fine,” said Fong and snapped his phone shut.

Chen looked at the screen of the PalmPilot and then at his cell phone. He thought of Fong’s warnings about understanding the politics in the office. Then he thought of his obligation as a husband to Lily and a guardian to Xiao Ming and made a call.

The younger Beijing man picked up and listened for a moment. “This was the wise thing to do.” He hung up the phone and turned to the older Beijing man. “He’s doing just what we expected.”

The older Beijing man nodded, “As Mao said: allow a man to marry and have a child and he is lost to the Revolution.” The younger man hadn’t heard Mao quoted in quite some time. No one quoted Mao anymore. But it was the wistful tone in the older man’s voice that drew his attention.

“Perhaps, but more to the point, they’ll lead us right to Xi Luan Tu.”

The older man didn’t reply; he just looked out the window at the miracle that was modern Shanghai.

Xi Luan Tu saw the limping woman make her way down the alley. He wheeled his barrel of grub pupae through the rusted gate at the back of the old Sovietstyle apartment block, where he slept on a basement mattress with twelve others. It was the appointed hour and he’d been waiting there every day at that time for the past two weeks. He watched her limp by, knowing she would make at least three passes before she made her drop.

He hadn’t seen her for years. What had once been the slightest imbalance had progressed to a fullfledged limp. She was no longer young. Then again, neither was he. She didn’t look in his direction. It surprised him they had sent her. He questioned the wisdom of their choice. Her second time round came quicker than he thought it would. And her third that much quicker again. This time, she paused in front of the seventh garbage can in the row of cans – the assigned one – dropped something wrapped in newspaper into it – then made her way, this time quite slowly, along the alley. Just a good citizen who didn’t litter – not an old lover anxious to see her former mate.

Xi Luan Tu wanted to chase after her but knew better. He put a tight metal mesh over the barrel with his grub pupae and locked it in place to an iron ring in the cement wall. Then he took out a cigarette, a snake charmer – he still liked the old brands – and lit up. If she was just a conscientious citizen then he was just a workingman enjoying a butt after a long day’s work.

He smoked the harsh thing down to the filter as his eyes scanned the alley for watchers. He smoked a second then lit a third. Lots and lots of people, as there always were, but no one with any seeming interest in either him or the seventh garbage can in the row. He finished his third smoke then headed toward the row of garbage cans.

He executed the pickup with casual precision.

Five minutes later, crouching behind his barrel of grub pupae, he activated the cell phone he’d picked up from the seventh garbage can and made Internet contact – the first of many steps to get him out of Shanghai.

Two minutes after that, Chen contacted Fong, “I believe she delivered the bugged cell phone.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Is shrimp dumpling made with shrimp?”

Fong knew that Chen intended this as an affirmative answer to his question although in Shanghai it was extremely unlikely to find shrimp or anything even like shrimp in a shrimp dumpling. “Good, Chen. I’m at Dong Tai Lu in the Old City.”

“I’ll be right there,” and after a brief pause added, “sir.”

Fong heard the momentary pause and the slightly pushed end of Chen’s speech but didn’t know what to make of it.

Xi Luan Tu didn’t sleep well that night. He knew he was approaching some very complicated decisions. He wondered about leaving Shanghai. If it were right. Then he wondered about his ability to withstand the pain of torture. Then he wondered at the ingenuity of his brother to arrange all this. Then he wondered at the movement itself that had grown from so few only fifteen years ago into the second strongest force in the People’s Republic of China. That thought calmed him and as the dawn crept closer he nodded off.

Chen snored as he slept in the front seat of the car. Fong glanced over at the small screen on the PalmPilot. The bugged phone had not moved all night. Fong assumed that nothing of any real event would happen until the replacement money and the documents for those that Geoff had to burn were finally delivered to Xi Luan Tu. He assumed that the bug would lead them to that hand off. “Then what?” he asked himself. “Then we follow,” he answered his own question. But when the question “Why?” popped into his head he simply ducked it. He had absolutely no answer to “Why?” He had, often in the past, successfully followed what Westerners call hunches but he knew were insights. But this was not one of those occasions. He knew, in his heart, that he was following that cell phone because he didn’t have anything else to follow. That he had no real clues as to who murdered Geoff. No one with motive. No one who he even needed to interrogate further. Once again it occurred to him that he may have overlooked something obvious, something important.

A car passed by and Fong slid down in his seat. The car turned the far corner of the market and sped away. Fong sat up in his seat. Is it possible that the two Beijing keepers were in that car? No. It’s just all this waiting. It’s made him jumpy, given him way too much time to think.

And there was lots to think about. Why was the commissioner so quiet in all this? Why was Li Chou at least seemingly being cooperative? Why was there no diplomatic pressure from the Canadians to solve this murder? Or did they think it was a suicide? Had no one even raised the possibility with them that Geoff’s death was a murder?”

The PalmPilot beeped. Slowly the street map overlay began to move. He nudged Chen who awoke with a start, as if he had just had a guilty dream. “What time is it, sir?”

“Just before dawn, Captain Chen.”

As Fong turned on the ignition and put the car in gear, a phone call was placed. “They’re moving, sir,” was all the voice said. The elderly Beijing man stretched. The younger Beijing man was surprised how fresh his elderly companion was.

In the predawn cool, Fong and Chen moved carefully through the outdoor street market while the merchants set up for the day. The blip generated by the bug in the cell phone had moved then stopped here in the market. It had been still for a full half-hour. As Fong and Chen moved slowly south through the market toward the blip, others were moving too – toward them.

At the height of the market’s morning rush, a peasant woman with a shabby bundle on her back and an awful haircut approached Xi Luan Tu’s barrel of grub pupae.

“They’re for birds,” he said, “not humans.”

“Do you think I am such a fool as to eat grubs?” she barked back.

He noticed her southern accent and the exact use of the complex idiom
such a fool.
Then he saw her hands. Dirt-encrusted palms, ragged fingernails – but soft fingers. Not a callus to be seen. Not workers’ hands. He shallowed his breathing, ready.

“Are you of the second wave?” he asked.

“I bring the storm,” she responded.

“Ah,” he said and handed her a large paper sack and began to ladle grub pupae into it.

As she had been instructed, she yelled for him to stop. No one really took note – just another woman trying in vain to get a good bargain at the market.

She unslung her pack, knelt down and opened it. He knelt down beside her with the bag of grubs between them.

In her mind, she’d reviewed the scenario she’d read on yesterday’s Internet contact several times. She took a deep breath to clear her head then reached into the grub-filled bag and pulled out a handful of the nascent things. She was surprised they were so slimy but it was their movement inside their casings that almost drew a cry from her throat.