The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice (20 page)

“What’s in the bags?”

“My old clothes, Chen,” she snapped. Then in her sweetest voice she said, “I take it that you approve of my choices.”

“I do.” Chen did his best to collect himself.

“And the older member of our team?”

For a moment Fong thought she was referring to the coroner, then he remembered that the old man was at the morgue. He did his best to hide his disappointment. “Your choices are excellent for our purposes.”

“You sound like a Russian.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah.” Then in English she pleaded, “Tell you me like it. Please.”

Fong was touched — and relieved. In English he replied, “I like it Lily. I really do.”

She smiled and handed the bill and the card to Chen. “I wouldn’t try using that thing until it’s refuelled. Oh, by the way, in case you didn’t know, you have overdraft protection on the card. Had overdraft protection,” she corrected herself. “I used that up too.”

* * *

Fong’s decision to have Lily lead the interrogation at the China news agency was a good one. The three Westerners were charmed by her and answered her questions without a moment’s hesitation. On occasion her Shanghanese accent puzzled the men, so Fong translated into English.

“On the night of December 28 you were contacted?”

The eldest reporter, the one from Reuters, brushed at the coffee stains on his expansive white shirt, as he answered for the others. “Two of us were. Me and him.” He pointed at the handsome CNN reporter. “We were the only ones here then.”

“Who contacted you?”

“Beijing.”

“Beijing’s a big place.”

“It was a woman. An older woman. She called and told us that there had been a massacre of foreigners on Lake Ching.”

“Did you go to the lake?”

“We tried, but our usual drivers had been told not to take us out of Xian. Even our gypsies had been grounded.”

Lily spoke in highly colloquial Shanghanese so the Westerners couldn’t follow, “So someone called them to tell them about the murders then someone else made sure they couldn’t get to the lake?”

“That would be my guess. Parallel lines again.” Fong turned to the reporters. “When did you finally get to the lake?” Fong asked in English.

“Late January. And there was nothing to see.”

After the specialist came and the boat sank.

“Except that incredible model.”

“Very fancy, but who could tell dick from that?”

Lily wore a puzzled look, “What means
who could tell
dick?”

“Richard. Dick. Remember?”

“Oh,” Lily blushed. Fong thought she looked lovely when she was a little off-balance.

Chen tapped the elaborate display on the telephone on the reporter’s desk. “Did the call come to this phone?”

“Yeah,” said the Reuters man.

“This has call display, doesn’t it?”

“Sure.”

Chen flipped over the phone and read the Chinese inscription on the bottom. “It has memory.”

“So?” demanded Fong.

“So maybe it still has the number that called you from Beijing.”

The new world. It was as if he’d been asleep for a hundred years on the west side of the Wall.

Chen followed the digital instructions to the memory. He punched in 12/28 and three punches later several blinking zeros appeared in a neat digital line.

Chen was about to apologize, but Fong cut him off and turned to the reporters. “You keep a phone log don’t you?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

Fong followed the man’s eye line to a well-thumbed notepad on the desk. He flipped it to December 28. There, logged in as the sixth call of the day, was an eightdigit number preceded by the Beijing area code.

“Hey!”

“We’re taking this as evidence.” Before anyone could complain further, Fong headed toward the door with the phone log under his arm. He had already memorized the number. Fong repeated the number slowly to himself. Was this a way back to a rogue in Beijing? Probably not, but at least it was a place to begin. He looked down at the tracking bracelet on his leg. Its single red eye blinked up at him. “A way to be free of you, you cyclops,” he thought. He didn’t dare think it might be a way to get home, back to Shanghai.

Half an hour later Chen pulled the Jeep up outside the Xian morgue. The coroner looked ancient. He was sitting on the poured concrete steps with his pants rolled up exposing his bony pale shins. Fong got out of the car and went over to him.

“You asleep, Grandpa?” The coroner looked up at Fong and shook his head. “Sick?” The old man looked away. “What then?”

The coroner spat on the pavement. Then said one word: “Typhoid.”

Fong suddenly felt he was sweltering with fever, his grandmother looming over his bed. Her words hot with anger at his sickness, his weakness:
“Die boy if you’re going
to, but be quick about it.”

Years later a ragged man had come to the rooms he shared with Fu Tsong at the theatre academy and announced that Fong’s grandmother was gravely ill and had requested his presence. He’d slammed the door in the man’s face. Then he warned Fu Tsong not to question him about this. Not about this!

He shook himself free of the memory and asked, “This girl from the island, this Chu Shi, she died of typhoid, Grandpa?”

“That’s what the autopsy report says,” he said, struggling to his feet.

“But that can’t be. They’ve been farming with feces as manure for ages. Why would typhoid all of a sudden break out?”

“It didn’t, Fong.”

“It didn’t . . . what?”

“This was a cultured strain of typhoid.”

“A what?”

“Cultured strain.” On seeing Fong’s lost look, the old man spat on the pavement a second time and said, “It was grown in a lab, Fong. This strain can’t naturally occur in nature. It was grown. Planted. It was cultured.”

He moved past Fong toward the car, his figure even more bent now than before. As if the extent of human evil were weighing him down.

Fong insisted that they drive back to Ching immediately. Lily and Chen protested, but Fong was adamant that the work could only be completed near the lake. He refused to specify what work. Chen drove; Lily sat beside him. The coroner sat in the back. He hadn’t spoken since his announcement about the cultured typhoid on the steps of the Xian morgue. No one spoke much.

Fong closed his eyes. His thoughts bounded from image to image as the Jeep bounced along the pitted road. He didn’t open his eyes until they stopped in front of the abandoned factory. It was already dark.

When they entered, Fong saw a large stack of boxes by the door.

“More projectors, sir. I thought they might help,” said Chen.

Fong nodded. They couldn’t hurt.

After a quick meal, Fong sat by himself beneath the bare bulb that illuminated his wide, flat-topped desk.
Lily sat in the far corner, a book on American patent law on her lap. The book looked like it weighed in excess of forty pounds. The coroner dozed in his chair. Chen was spending the night at home with his “sad” wife.

Memories of his office on the Bund in Shanghai flooded through Fong as he slowly cleared his desktop. He took out the box of chalk Chen had brought him shortly after he arrived in Ching. That seemed a long time ago.

He selected a piece of chalk. This was his own private ritual. Something he didn’t share — not even with Fu Tsong. She would have laughed at him. He couldn’t have borne that.

He rolled the piece of chalk in his fingers.

A piece of chalk was the only gift he’d ever gotten from his grandmother. She claimed his father had been able to draw with “stupid things like this.” Landscapes. Gossamer impressions of things he’d never seen. Fong couldn’t draw a straight line — with a piece of chalk or without it. But he could think very well with a piece of chalk in his hand.

He turned on the projectors. Images of the death rooms surrounded him. After a moment he flicked them off and stared at the bare desktop as if its ancient wood grain would spur him to thought. Then he drew a large circle at the top. In the circle he wrote the words
DNA
PATENT WANTED.
In smaller letters beneath that he wrote
From the Islanders.
Then in bold letters he wrote
WHAT KIND OF DNA?

It all started there somehow.

At the bottom he drew another circle and was about to write in it but changed his mind and drew a circle two-thirds of the way down. In this circle he wrote the words
SEVENTEEN DEAD FOREIGNERS ON A BOAT.

“They were not the end, just a means to an end,” he said aloud. Lily glanced in his direction then returned to her tome. “And Hesheng — the man whose name means ‘in this year of peace’ — was murdered because he might lead us to that end.”

He drew a line from the
DNA PATENT WANTED
From the Islanders
circle to the
SEVENTEEN DEAD FOREIGNERS ON A BOAT
circle and then continued the line down to the circle at the bottom.

The empty circle at the bottom. There was always an empty circle to be filled at the bottom.

Then he drew two parallel lines from top to bottom on either side of the page. Fire and ice. “Where do parallel lines meet?” he muttered. “Never,” he said aloud. Then he rethought that. No. No law defies death — or endless life. “Hesheng — in this year of peace,” he whispered. Then he smiled, looked at the piece of chalk, almost said thank you aloud, and set to work.

An hour later he had almost filled the desktop with circled words and connective lines. A maze of interlocking events finally began to yield up their pattern — evidently parallel lines do meet.

At the very bottom of the diagram in the empty circle he wrote in heavy letters
HOW DID THE GIRL GET TYPHOID?

Then he recircled it three times.

“Why all the lines, Fong?”

He hadn’t heard Lily approach. In fact, he didn’t realize that she had put a hand on his shoulder. Then he did and felt awkward but pleased. She sensed his discomfort and removed her hand. “Why does the girl who died from typhoid get so many circles, Fong?”

“She might be the link back to the rogue in Beijing, Lily.”

“That’s what they want you to find for them, isn’t it, Fong?”

“Yeah. They sure as hell didn’t bring me back from west of the Wall to find out who committed these murders. They really couldn’t care less who slaughtered those men. All they want to know is who their opposition is — the name of the rogue in their midst.”

“That phone number in Beijing?”

He nodded, but there were still big pieces missing, pieces that fit in smoothly. Pieces that joined it all together. He stared at the diagram. A phrase popped into his head. Aloud he said, “And they fish in all weather.”

“Who does?”

“And one of them helped the whore Sun Li Cha to safety.” Suddenly he was in motion. As if the building had tilted and he was loping down a slope. He would have been surprised to know that the piece of chalk in his hand was spinning rapidly between his fingers.

“Drawing pictures, Fong?” The coroner had been stirred to waking by Fong’s pacing, but his words were slow and his cough a hoarse rattle.

Fong looked down at the tabletop. It was as if he’d never seen the diagram before.

The coroner coughed again. Another rattle. Fong looked at him and his heart sank. “I owe him so much and I’ve given him so little,” he thought. “A parting gift’s the least I can do for this man whom I’ve known so long but know so little.”

“I need the two of you to go to Beijing,” Fong said quietly.

“Why?” Lily demanded.

“To find out whose phone number that is in the phone log from the China news agency office. Right?” The coroner’s words were slurred.

“Wrong, Grandpa. That number’ll be no more than a place to begin. I can’t imagine anyone would be stupid enough to use their own phone.”

“But you want to pursue it anyway?” asked Lily with more than a hint of suspicion.

In English he answered, “Think of it as a free trip to Beijing, Lily.” He allowed her to see that he was asking for a favour and nodded toward the old man. “Don’t ask any more questions — please?”

Lily nodded and replied sadly, “Okey-dokey. Next time Hong Kong, okay?”

Fong was surprised that the coroner didn’t complain about their use of English. He had gotten to his feet, which seemed to shuffle although he didn’t move. “Where’ll you go, Fong?”

“Fishing.” Before they could question him he added, “Then back to Xian, Grandpa.”

“But we just got back from there.”

Fong moved to the old man. “True, but there are connectives between that island and Xian which I think I missed. And I think I know what they are.”

The coroner looked at Fong for a long time. “You mean who they are, don’t you, Fong?” Then he reached out and touched Fong’s face.

Fong felt a pang of sadness. The old man was being sentimental. “I do, Grandpa.”

“Be careful, Fong.”

“You fly safe, Grandpa.”

“China is beautiful from the air,” said the coroner and returned to his chair. He sat erect but his eyelids were shut, heavy with fatigue.

Fong watched him for a moment. Was he asleep or had he just closed his eyes for a second? Or was he floating?