The Hua Shan Hospital Murders (10 page)

“One of them,” he said.

“Did the great Fu Tsong like this play?”

“She did. Very much, although she had many questions about it, but then again she had many questions about all the plays she acted in.”

“What troubled her most about Desdemona?”

“The woman’s belief in being saved. I don’t think she ever found the equivalent in herself to the Christian concept of being saved.”

“It is very un-Chinese that idea.”

Fong nodded.

“Do you understand it?”

“No,” Fong said.

Tuan Li smiled sadly at him and said, “Perhaps that is why you are so alone.”

Fong didn’t follow that and was about to say so when Tuan Li was called back to the stage.

Fong watched her and her Othello work the entirety of the scene again. This time Tuan Li took volition and defended herself brilliantly against Othello’s attack. But Fong noticed Tuan Li doing something that Fu Tsong had often talked about. He recalled Fu Tsong’s words: “This is not realism, Fong. That’s life. Plays are done in naturalism, that’s art. In realism people deflect anything dangerous that comes at them. It becomes the reason why when I attack you, only later do you think, I should have said this to Fu Tsong or that to Fu Tsong. It is because you weren’t able to stay present during my completely justifiable attacks on your person. You are a civilian after all dear husband. But I am not. I am an artist and I am paid to stay in present tense. Hence I can never deflect anything. Every awful thing you say to me goes in and hurts. That’s how naturalism works. It is the strength of the heart of the actress that allows her to honestly accept the attack, fall, then rise like the phoenix to fight again. Artists exist solely to share their knowledge of the heart – and what an artist does to her heart by forcing it to stay present is as unnatural as what a ballet dancer does to her body.”

Fong turned to the stage and there he saw Tuan Li’s Desdemona doing precisely what Fu Tsong had told him an artist’s job was – accepting the pain of each sledgehammer blow from her Othello, even allowing the possibility that Othello was speaking truths, then falling, then rising to fight again.

Fong wondered where this strength came from. He would have been astounded to hear Tuan Li’s answer to that question: “Faith,” she would have said, “Faith, dear Fong.”

The director stepped forward but before he could open his mouth Tuan Li put a finger to her lips. For the first time in Fong’s memory a Chinese rehearsal room went dead quiet. Tuan Li stared at her Othello and he met her gaze. She was clearly challenging him to find the book upon her features, the pages on which were written the word: Whore. For the barest second Othello faltered beneath the challenge then he turned and spat directly in Tuan Li’s face.

The men in the audience leapt to their feet but Tuan Li didn’t move. She accepted the insult, fell inside herself, then rose and withdrew a handkerchief from her sleeve.

It was only then that Fong saw that it was not the handkerchief that Othello had demanded that she produce. The rest of the audience saw it too and realized that they had been drawn into a clever trap that allowed the play to ratchet up the tension to yet a higher level.

As so often in the presence of art, Fong felt full but humble. He knew he was not capable of fulfilling an artistic endeavour himself but he was grateful, so grateful that there are those who could lead him through the heart’s dark corridors.

The touch of Lily’s hand on his shoulder shocked him back to the present. He snuck a peak at his wristwatch. He had been in the theatre for more than three hours. “My cell phone didn’t ring,” he said.

“I’m not here, Fong, because the office called,” Lily said simply.

After a beat Fong asked, “Why are you here, Lily?”

“No, Fong. The question is why are you here and not at home?”

Fong looked at the stage. Iago had just come on from stage right. Othello pecked Tuan Li on the cheek. She openly mouthed “Good luck” in reference to Iago then walked right past the British actor without acknowledging his presence.

Iago approached Othello with his hand extended. “No hard feelings, I hope.”

Othello took Iago’s hand and held it tight. “Lie better, Gummer. Lie better and don’t ever let me catch you lying. ’Cause you know this play isn’t about a dumb . . .”

Iago hesitated and finally completed Othello’s phrase with the words, “ . . . person whose parentage was at one time native to the African continent.”

“Yeah, that.”

“Well, after all, it’s only a paper moon, isn’t it?”

“Moon looks damn real to me.”

Iago went to speak but no words came out of his mouth.

“What’s that all about?” Lily asked.

“Art,” Fong replied.

Lily didn’t know what to say to that. She shrugged it off and asked again, “What are you doing here, Fong?”

“Watching toads gender each other,” he said.

“Fong!”

“Lily,” Fong said, turning to her, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, but I know I need to be here. I know it.”

Lily sat back in her seat surprised by the intensity of his response. Finally she said, “You are married Fong. You are married to me, not to Fu Tsong.”

Fong heard the hurt in her voice. She had accepted the pain but had not been able to rise to respond. She had answered while still falling. “I know Lily, I do . . . I just need a little more time.”

“To do what?” Lily demanded.

“I don’t know, Lily. Honestly, I don’t know.”

When Fong arrived home two hours later he wasn’t surprised to find the bedroom door locked to him. The baby wasn’t in her crib. She must have been in the bed with Lily.

Fong stared at the empty crib and then reached in and picked up Xiao Ming’s baby blanket.

He was surprised, when he was awakened at 4 a.m. by the sharp ring of his telephone, that he was clutching the baby blanket to his chest.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Fong was expecting a call from either the banking people or the cops looking for the American hotel guest with the camcorder but it was from one of the detectives who had been at the very first meeting. Fong had ordered the man to find the head nurse from the abortion clinic at the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital – the one who had left hair and blood but no other remains in the blasted-out surgery. He’d found her – or rather, her body.

Fong stepped past the detective and entered the small sub-basement room. Like so many other Shanghanese, the head nurse of the abortion clinic of the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital had lived below ground level. The small room was moldy and felt close. It smelt of things burnt – hair, cotton, something else he couldn’t identify. Curtains covered two walls; rugs lay on the floor. “I’ve got some basics from the house warden,” said the young detective handing Fong his notepad. Fong ignored it and approached the body. It lay on its back on the central rug, its arms out, palms up – inside a lightly scorched circle that circumnavigated the body. Fong touched the darkened circle on the carpet. It was cold. Then he saw it – a thin metal thread – phosphorus. He allowed the shiver to go to the base of his spine and spiral there. Phosphorus. Much light but little heat –
he
had been here. Right here.

Fong looked at the rest of the room. No signs of struggle. Nothing even a little out of place or toppled over. He eyed the scorched circle again, then looked back at the body. Light scratches on the cheeks and just one deep cut at the base of the throat. A jagged ugly wound. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and picked up her left hand and looked at her nails. They could do scrapings but Fong doubted that there was anything beneath her fingernails. He checked the right hand – the same. He slid his hand under her body – nothing. He put a finger on her chin and pushed gently. The head rocked to one side. The neck clicked. He looked at the scratch marks on either side of her mouth, then he opened her mouth and felt inside. Nothing.

Fong got to his feet, ordered in a CSU team, and then took the detective to one side.

“Good work.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Who is assigned to live here?”

“She is, sir.”

“What? Didn’t you check here first?”

“Certainly, but she wasn’t here then and her neighbours said she hadn’t been here for a while.”

“Then?”

“The house warden knew I wanted to speak to the head nurse so she checked in and found her – like this.”

“Why did she check?”

“Someone reported the smell of smoke coming from the room.”

“When?”

“Less than an hour ago.”

“He’s covering his tracks,” Fong muttered.

“The bomber, sir?”

“That’d be my guess.” Fong looked around. “No struggle except for those odd scratches on her cheeks.
No forced entry. She knew her killer. She let him in.”
Fong stopped and stepped away from the body and stood very still. “Her head was facing that way, wasn’t it?”

“Toward the curtain on that wall, right.”

Fong looked at the curtain then pulled it aside. A photograph of an old woman hung on the wall behind the curtain. “Find out if that’s her mother.”

“Why . . .?”

“Just do it, Officer.” Fong wasn’t in any frame of mind to answer questions. As he shoved his way toward the door his cell phone rang. “
Dui
,” he said into the device. He listened for a moment, then on a long line of breath let out a single English word:

“When!!!!”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The second blast dwarfed the first. It ripped through the entire fourth floor of the People’s Fourteenth Hospital. It was hard to see how many were dead. What was not hard to see was the fear etched deep on the faces of the citizens of Shanghai and the edgy creep of panic rising like a waking dragon shaking off its lethargy and staring, wide-eyed and hungry, at the new day.

Wu Fan-zi ran past Fong into the burning hospital. An attractive Asian woman in Western dress was at his side. Fong ordered a cordon be set up around the hospital, activated the house wardens, and contacted Wu Fan-zi on his cell. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I’m leaving crowd control out here to a sergeant. You be careful in there.”

“Will do.”

“I want to be at your fifty-third birthday.”

“Me too.”

Fong hung up and took one last look at the gathering crowd – no Caucasians – then headed back to the Hilton. He was tired of being hit. He wanted to hit back.

Angel Michael had been angry. Out of control after the refusal of the head nurse. What should have been a gift, gladly received, became a murder. It enraged him. So much so that his work with the explosive at the People’s Fourteenth Hospital had been shoddy.

His pre-queued e-mails would have already reached stateside newspapers. But would they publish them after the false alarm at the Hua Shan Hospital? It was all getting messy. As he stepped into his luxury hotel suite, for the first time he wondered if he could pull it off – if he could bring back the light.

Instantly, Matthew felt a dull pain start in the nape of his neck. He waited helplessly as it moved upward until it sat directly behind his left eye. Then it exploded, obliterating his sight and releasing wave after wave of pain so intense that Matthew fell to the floor in agony. But even as the pain overwhelmed him, Matthew thought, “Why?” A line from an early Manichaean text floated up to his mouth: “I look for the light but I behold the darkness.” Yes but why, he demanded. An approaching wave of pain caught his attention then it crashed, releasing its crystalline fury. He was pulled down beneath the surface of the pain. Then he bobbed up to the air. He sensed the next wave gathering. But in the pause, the respite, a face came back to him. That woman at the Hua Shan Hospital. The one he’d seen speaking English to the Chinese man. The one who had bought the fresco that had been mistaken for his bomb – she was the one who had derailed his well-laid plans. A fierce wave of pain swamped him, but as he was dragged along the razor-sharp bottom, he saw the woman’s face and began to plot how to make her pay for what she had done to him. For, as Mani has said, “A bringer of the light must destroy those who would keep us all in the pitchy darkness.”

Wu Fan-zi knew that fire is a living thing. It consumes oxygen, constantly searches for food to sustain itself, and like all life, is programmed to maintain its existence and propagate. The fire beast inside the People’s Fourteenth Hospital was a wild thing trapped within the walls of the fourth floor of the old building.

Joan Shui crouched at Wu Fan-zi’s side in the stairwell. The firewall door to the fourth floor, the floor where the abortion surgeries were, was a mere twenty steps up from them and it was the only thing stopping the fire from racing into the stairwell. But the differential of the heat on the corridor side from the relative cool on the stairwell side was exerting tremendous torque pressure on the metal. The door was already buckling. It was getting harder to breathe in the stairwell as the blaze sucked all the oxygen it could to feed its fury. Wu Fan-zi touched the wall. It wasn’t hot but it was warmer than it should be. He pointed at the firewall door, “It’ll be behind that.”

“Crouching,” she said.

He looked at her and nodded. “Yeah, crouching.”

She nodded back at him.

“You understand,” he said simply.

“Yeah, I understand. I’ve been around fires since my father first brought me along with him to his work.”

“And his work was?”

“A fireman, what else?”

He laughed. A slow groan came from the door as one of its hinges was forced from the wall. Smoke slithered beneath the firewall door. “Ready to meet her?” he said.

“Sure, but I always thought of fires as he, not she.”

“To each their own.” He wrapped a kerchief around his face to cover his mouth. She pulled out a mouth filter from her bag and slipped it on. They looked at each other – only their eyes were visible.
She thought he looked solid, like a brick. He thought, “What’s a spectacular woman doing here, at my side?” Then they ran up the last set of steps and threw themselves at the firewall door. It flew off its remaining hinges and crashed to the floor without offering any resistance. So much so that their force carried them some five or six yards into the corridor where they stood in a daze before they realized what had happened.

By then the fire had leapt behind them in response to the new source of oxygen from the stairwell. Joan took a step back toward the stairwell and was stunned by the intensity of the heat. She put up her hand to shield her face. Wu Fan-zi seemed immune to the extreme temperature. Overhead a beam creaked. Joan looked up just as it swung free from one side and headed straight for Wu Fan-zi’s back. She leapt at him, pushing him out of the way just in time. The beam sent shocks of sparks up the far wall and immediately cut off any possibility of their access to the north side of the building.

Wu Fan-zi took it all in quickly. The stairs would be on fire before they could get back to them. He grabbed her hand and pulled her forward toward the south end of the building, toward the abortion surgeries, toward the source of the fire. The next five minutes were so intense that Joan could only remember the feeling of her hand in his. Her eyes were scalded with the heat and her hair was singed, but his choice to run toward the source of the fire saved their lives. A fire needs motion. Once it has eaten a field it must move on to another. Going to the source of a blaze can lead you to a calm behind the storm. Although Joan knew this, she had never been forced to put theory into practice. It was the single most terrifying thing she had ever done.

When they finally got to the second abortion surgery, they were stunned by what they saw. The whole room was tilted. The blast had been so intense that there was almost nothing left in the room. Kicking aside the remaining timbers of the doorframe, Wu Fan-zi ushered Joan into the scorched room and he immediately began to take in the blast site, noting details, trying to remember everything he saw. While he did so, she was drawn by some force she didn’t even begin to understand to the fetus in the cage. He saw her and quickly raced to her side.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded but couldn’t take her eyes off the thing in the cage.

“Look at me,” he ordered.

She tried but couldn’t take her eyes away from the thing – the being in the cage.

“Look at me,” he said again but with infinite gentleness this time. Then he reached over and pulled her head toward him. “Puke if you need to but don’t faint. I couldn’t carry you out of here and I’m not leaving you here.” Something cleared in her eyes and the slightest smile creased her lips. “You’re on fire,”
she said pointing to his suit coat.

“Damn!” he said whipping off his jacket and throwing it to the ground. As he stomped out the embers, he swore, “Fucking hell.”

“Never been on fire before Wu Fan-zi?” she said with a quiver of hysteria on the fringes of her voice.

“Dozens of times – but my jacket! Do you know how hard it is to find a jacket that fits a guy built like me? Fucking hell.”

“Get me out of here and I’ll buy you three in Hong Kong. I know just the right tailor.”

Wu Fan-zi leaned in toward the cage. “What does the etching on the sheathing say?”

“It doesn’t translate well into Mandarin but basically it says NO MORE GAMES. THIS MUST STOP. THE LIGHT MUST COME.”

“The light,” Wu Fan-zi muttered, “. . . more with the fucking light.” He was on his hands and knees searching.

“What are you looking for?”

“Yes!” he said scooping up metal threads from the floor.

“More phosphorus?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“And there’s the window,” she said.

“He likes to watch.”

“No. It can’t be that. You wouldn’t be able to see much of anything out of a window like that – it probably leads to an airshaft or an interior courtyard. I think the window is just there to assure a good flow of oxygen.” She glanced at the titanium banner again.
“He likes to bring the light,” she said.

“Maybe, but he fucked up this time. Too much something or other. The last time the building didn’t burn. This whole place is going to go up. Look at this with me. I don’t think there’ll be a second chance to go over this crime site.”

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“It’s why I ran into the building, yeah. And you?”

She didn’t say. She wasn’t sure why she’d run into the building. Then she looked at Wu Fan-zi and she was less “not sure.”

“Force centre beneath the operating table,” he said.

“Right. Uneven scoring. Much more force to the north side than the south.”

“Right. And so much explosive that it destroyed the planch.”

“Could be he got bad exotic.”

“Why wouldn’t he buy it all at once?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was too expensive.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s getting hot, what else?”

“The cage.”

“The etching on the metal wrapper.”

“The fetus.”

She wavered and he steadied her.

The fire whooshed up a wall across the way.
“Fuck, back draft.” He turned to her. “Ready for another run.”

“With you? Sure.”

“Hold on and we’ll get out of here. If that window leads to a corridor or even an airshaft we have to head in the other direction.”

“Through the other abortion surgeries?”

“Yeah.”

“Hold on tight.” She grasped his hand and he pulled her hard through a flaming hole in the wall.
Into a second surgery.

The voyage out was simpler than the one going to the surgery. Going out all they needed to do was avoid the fire beast. As well, since they didn’t need to go to a specific destination as they had coming in, they could keep veering away any time they encoun-tered fire. And fire had one significant disadvantage – it liked going up and they were going down.

When they stepped into the cool air outside the back of the hospital, she looked at him. “You’ve got ash in your hair.”

“Yeah, well you’ve got a little less hair than you had when we went in.”

“Then there’s your jacket.”

“Just an offering to the beast. You’ll get me a new one.”

She took his arm and squeezed him. “I’ll get you two and twenty if you want.”

They sat at a stone table in the hospital’s back courtyard staring into each other’s eyes. “It’s just the excitement of the moment, you know,” he said.

“Yeah, getting out alive is a bit heady,” she responded.

“Your hair’s still smoking.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I like it.”

“Really?”

“I’m a fireman, after all.”

With that she came into his arms. Her elegance and his rock squareness fit together with remarkable ease. Then his cell phone rang.

Fong’s charge into the lobby of the Hilton sent ripples of anxiety throughout the great building. His anger dared even the manager to approach him. So he didn’t. The cops in the lobby manning the phones were exhausted. No one had slept. The news of the second blast had spread a thick layer of impotence over their fatigue. But Fong didn’t care. Things were escalating out of control and he knew it. Only a break in the case could regain them the initiative, put some lead back in their pencils.

“It’s not complete, sir,” the middle-aged man in charge of the banking investigation said as he pointed to the hundreds of pages of printouts in front of him.

“It’ll never be complete, damn it!”

“Well sir, banking no longer sleeps so–”

“Just give me your best guess.”

The man reluctantly flipped through the pile to a red ribbon marking a page. “This man. Tator is his name. He had two large sums of money transferred here from overseas. Each a few days before a blast.”

Fong grabbed the page with the man’s Shanghai hotel address and threw it at two detectives, “I want him in my office in half an hour. And I want him shackled.”

The detectives ran out and Fong turned to the team in charge of finding the American tourist with the camcorder.

“Well!” Fong demanded.

“We’ve got it down to thirty-eight, sir. They all seem to fit the description and every American in Shanghai seems to have a camcorder.”

“Pick your top three and keep them in their hotel rooms. I’ll see them after I meet this guy Tator.” After the men were sent scurrying to round up the suspects Fong approached the Hilton’s front desk.
“The manager,” he barked.

Quickly, a primly dressed young Caucasian male stepped out of the back office. Fong wondered if he were an Asian if he would have risen so high at such a young age.

“You know who I am?” Fong asked.