The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice (10 page)

The shiver again — the mongoose was running.

Fong understood synchronicity. He understood it in his bones. And he didn’t believe totally in human will. At times he knew that accidents were caused by nature. That two things in one place often meant something. He would totally deny that he was superstitious — but serendipity was a way of conveying meaning. Angels, silences, children, bloom and December — clues as far as Fong was concerned.

He put the CD back on the table. “What does it say?” asked Chen.

“Nothing important,” Fong answered.

The coroner laughed deep in his throat. All eyes swung to him. “I just love the way he lies, don’t you?” he said. “What does it say, Fong?”

Fong translated every word on the CD. “Satisfied, or would you like me to translate the liner notes, too?”

“No, I think that’s enough, Fong.” But the coroner was smiling as if he’d been lied to.

“Who cares?” demanded Lily. “Some girl took off her clothes while that stuff played. What’s the difference what the songs were?” Her vehemence ended the discussion. She tossed a bag of dirt on the table. “That was found on the runway. Again I’m not sure why the specialist thought it was important.” The bag was handed around. Fong made a point of hardly looking at the thing and handed it on to Chen.

“What else do you have, Lily?” asked Fong, making sure that he didn’t look back at the bag in Chen’s hands.

“A stack of clothes that I’ve only begun to catalogue. Seventeen wallets. All of which identify who these guys were but little else. Drivers’ licences, picture IDs, pictures of grandkids.”

“No visas or passports?” asked Fong.

A silence descended on the room. Everyone knew what the question meant. If these men entered China without visas or passports, then they were government guests and this whole thing was even bigger than it already was.

“I’ve asked Chen to check their hotel in Xian. It’s possible that the men left those kind of documents with the front desk, I guess,” said Lily.

Fong wanted to leave this behind for a while. There was more than enough fear to go around without the possibility of government involvement. Although they all knew that was silly. There was government involvement in everything that was important in the Middle Kingdom. It was just a matter of how much involvement . . . and who in the government.

“What else have you got, Lily?”

“Just a roll of film from one of the Japanese men’s cameras. The other camera had no film in it.”

“So what’s on the film, Lily?”

She switched to English despite the obvious anger of the coroner. “I don’t know, Fong. No black room here, safe.”

Quickly, he responded in Shanghanese, “There is nothing secret here, Lily. Why do you think they put us up in this abandoned factory? It’s got to be bugged. Just get the pictures developed. There’s nothing else we can do.” He turned to the men. “Lily was concerned that she couldn’t find a secure darkroom to develop the film.”

“No, sir. Miss Lily was concerned that I am untrustworthy,” Chen stated.

The tension in the room mounted exponentially. Fong got to his feet. “That’s enough, Captain Chen. Lily was wrong. It was nothing more than a mistake for her to use English. Apologize, Lily.”

Lily glared at him.

“I said apologize, Lily.”

After a moment of resistance, Lily bowed her head slightly. A gesture so old that Fong sensed the Earth growing beneath her feet, her legs up to the knees in dung-filled water, a peasant’s hat on her head. Fong was always astounded how vibrantly alive the old ways were even in the likes of modern women like Lily. “For this insult I ask your forgiveness, Captain Chen.”

Chen waited for a beat then snapped his head down then back up quickly. The tension was gone. Through the ritual, forgiveness had been found. Through the old ways.

“Can I see the shots of the Japanese again?” Fong asked.

Lily pushed twenty-odd photographs across the table to him. He sorted them quickly.

“What, Fong?” Lily asked, but Fong wasn’t answering questions. He was staring at the wide-angle photo of the runway and its six chairs. Five of the six were occupied by the dead Japanese men, but the sixth sat empty at the head of the runway — the best view. “If this had been a banquet,” Fong thought, “the head of the fish would have pointed in that direction — the place of honour. An empty chair. An extra room at the hotel in Xian. One and the same?” Fong rifled through the photos again. The man with the ill-fitting expensive glasses was to the right of the empty seat. The men with cameras were both to the left. “From the missing piece, deduce the whole,” he told himself. He allowed words into his mouth, “Cameras, empty seat, glasses. Glasses, empty seat, cameras.” Seeing. All about seeing. Yeah, but seeing what?

Fong looked up. They were all watching him closely. Fine. But he was leading this meeting. He signalled to the coroner that it was his turn.

“Why don’t you call me grandpa, Fong, everyone else seems to think it fits.”

“Fine, Grandpa, your turn.”

The coroner started by lamenting the nature of the search and then tossed the specialist’s request for a toxicology scan on the table. “A wee bit late for that now. There was no doubt alcohol on board. Maybe opium or hashish. Whatever it was it. . .it had to be pretty potent to subdue that many men. Seventeen men are a lot of men to execute. The others would have to have been either restrained or drugged while the murderers got on with their butchering.”

“Your best guess, Grandpa?” Fong asked.

The coroner waggled his head back and forth a few times. “It’s an agricultural area, there’s always the possibility of adding that government insecticide crap to their drinks.”

Swallowing the tasteless insecticide was the most common means of suicide in rural China. But it was a woman’s death choice. Fong thought it more likely that the eel farming in the area provided better opportunities for toxins. There was always the possibility of local concoctions. Poisoning had a long history in China.

Poison in drinks had a particularly long history.

“Perhaps that explains why there were no half-empty glasses found anywhere on the boat,” suggested Fong with a wry smile.

Lily, Chen and the coroner reached for the photos and scanned them quickly. Not a single glass appeared in any of the shots. Lily looked up at Fong. “You noticed that.”

“Crime sites consist of what is there and what isn’t, Lily.”

“Very good, Fong.”

“Thanks, Grandpa. What’s next?”

“The cut marks are interesting if your delectations move in that direction. The Japanese were gutted in a mockery of that thing they do over there whenever someone burps after dinner or some such silliness.”

“Hari Kari,” said Lily.

“Yeah, whatever they call it. The men who did this knew how to butcher things. It’s like the Japanese were ‘dressed’ for an exhibit or something.”

Fong was sure to let his breath out slowly. His pulse was racing. The mongoose was in furious motion.

“What do you make of the way the Koreans were shot?” asked Chen.

Fong looked at the young man.

“Again, you’re too young to know about this kind of thing. At the end of the war before our glorious liberation,” his sarcasm was so thick that the air in the room seemed to hover for a moment, “Korean gangs made major inroads in our cities. They spread terror by shooting people beneath the armpits and then hanging them from beams. It takes a long time to die that way. Shooting someone from right to left pretty much guarantees that the bullet will stay in the body, but it will not kill immediately. Just pain. Lots of pain.”

“Koreans are good at that.” The flat statement from Chen surprised everyone. Fong added it to his mental “Chen file.”

Fong nodded for the coroner to continue. “The knives were sharp but beyond that I haven’t got a thing to go on. But these . . . ,” he tossed out several close-up photographs of the faceless Chinese men, “are interesting. Take a look at the top of the cut mark. The guy who ordered these pictures really knew what he was doing. See the angle he’s guiding us to look at?”

As the others looked, Fong considered grandpa’s last remark: “. . . he’s guiding us to look at.” Could it be that the specialist knew that they, or someone like them, would come to investigate further than he’d been allowed to? Is it possible that he arrested those three men knowing full well that they weren’t the real criminals? Were they left by him as possible clues for investigators like us to follow? Was the specialist actually, somehow or other, still guiding this investigation from wherever he was?

Fong returned his attention to the coroner as the old man said, “The stroke was definitely from top to bottom as indicated by the bevel at the forehead and the overlap on the chin.” He felt his own chin and pulled on the single long whisker there. “And it was done with one stroke.” A dark look passed his features. Perhaps an undigested piece of beef. “So what we’re looking for,” he concluded, “is an incredibly sharp weapon that’s wider than the widest of these faces.”

“A kind of axe?” Lily asked.

“None that I’ve ever seen.”

“How about a long knife or machete?”

“No, it would leave a slant from whichever side it was used. This was used straight up and down.”

“Like a hoe?” Chen asked.

“Some hoe,” the coroner chuckled mirthlessly.

“Let’s not dismiss that,” said Fong.

“Fine,” said the coroner. Chen made a note on his pad. Lily glanced at Fong, but Fong looked away. He stood and stared out the filthy slanted windows, his back to the table. When he sensed that all their eyes were on him he spoke. “What do you know about
chi,
Grandpa?”

“The black mania? Chinese madness?” the old man was clearly offended. “Western nonsense.”

“Perhaps.” He turned toward them and spoke slowly, knowing the danger of the territory that he was entering. “In May of 1920, huge posters appeared everywhere in Beijing . . .”

“Kill the foreigners, throw them in the sea, China for the Chinese,” said the coroner wearily. “We all know the story.”

“Do we really, Grandpa? Thousands of foreigners were killed in two days. Heads were switched on white men’s bodies and Chinese collaborators were hog-tied and bled to death. Sound familiar?”

“Fairy tales, Fong,” grunted the coroner.

“I was born in the Old City, Grandpa. These were the stories of my youth. Perhaps elaborated. Perhaps. But my grandmother witnessed the event. She was amazed by the bravery of the revolutionists. The complete disregard for their own safety. She called it, ‘So un-Chinese.’” An image of his grandmother yelling at him to get over his typhoid and stop embarrassing the family welled up within him. He shrugged it off. “And she wasn’t one to be easily impressed.” Lily looked at him strangely. This was new information. But he avoided her eyes and went on, “She brought back one of the red kerchiefs they wore. It had the word
Fu
emblazoned on the front.”

“Happiness,” Lily said in English as she turned away in disgust.

“Did they succeed, sir?” asked Chen.

“No. Their ferocity grew beyond their understanding. They leapt from tall buildings, frothed from their mouths uttering incomprehensible omens of doom and prophecies of the future. One leader, in his ecstacy, sliced his daughter into pieces and threw the bits to his followers. They were so taken by their furor that bullets only slowed them. Death was their companion.”

Lines from
Measure for Measure
leapt into his head:

If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride,

And hug her in mine arms.

Fu Tsong loved those lines. An awful thought flitted through Fong’s consciousness.

No one spoke. They could hear the hum of the building’s air intake system.

Finally Fong broke the silence. “You three can take a look at the recreation now. But be forewarned. The model’s potent.” Fong returned to his notes. “Lily, you take the film in the camera, try to get an analysis of the dirt from the runway and I want you to find out more about American patent law. If you need to get information in English, Lily, show me your translations before you send them off. Captain Chen, take the specs on that hoe thing and find out whatever you can on those old cartridges and the gun that might have fired them. Then locate the ship owner and try to figure out where the crew was during all of this. Maybe the owner supplied girls as well. Grandpa, find what you can about those ligature marks on the arms. Let’s see if we can narrow down the type of wire they used, if nothing else. Then get me as much data on the knife wounds as you can. As well, you can interview the restaurant owner who supplied the food.” Fong glanced down at a picture of the brown blotch on the rug near the bar room door. “Ask him about alcohol on board. While you’re with him, maybe he can address your complaints about the local cuisine. Let’s start with that.”

Chen got to his feet, but the other two didn’t move. Fong knew perfectly well what Lily and Grandpa were waiting for. At last he spoke. “I’m going to begin with the local Triad. I want to ask them about the burn marks.”

“The what?”

“The burn marks.” He paused for a second then continued, “After all the killing was done, the boat was torched. It was only the shoal and the ice that kept it afloat for a few days.” He tossed close-ups of the hull’s scorch marks on the table.

“Why, Fong?” asked the coroner.

Fong chose his words carefully. “When I look at that model and the photos I’m struck by many things, but the one impression that is strongest for me is that the entire crime site looks carefully planned. As if it’s an exhibit. I think it was done as a warning. I don’t think there’s any doubt that it was meant to be seen.”

“The positions of the victims, you mean?” asked Chen.

“That and the way they were killed. The whole thing looks like a bizarre object lesson.”

“That goes with the Triad motto on the overhead mirror,” said Lily.

“So, some hoodlums play show and tell. So what? What does that have to do with burn marks?” pressed the coroner.

“Maybe nothing,” replied Fong, “but why go to all that trouble to create an object lesson — then try to sink it?”