The Last Six Million Seconds (32 page)

At Mongkok he started to walk toward his block, then changed his mind and went to the station. The traffic and operations corridors were buzzing as usual, but homicide was quiet with a skeleton staff. It was midafternoon, and most of the weekend murders happened after dark. He locked the door to his office behind him, emptied his bag out on the desk. There was a pair of wet swimming trunks, the book, his regulator with mouthpiece, mask and fins. He examined the inside of the bag, then pressed firmly over every inch. The mouthpiece was clean; the regulator did not block his breath when he blew through it; the fins were clean, as were his trunks. Someone had thoughtfully taped the cover of his book so that it would not open inside the bag. He broke the tape. The inside of the book had been carved out in a rectangle, a small package in polythene placed inside. He took out the package, opened it. Inside was a black and viscous substance the consistency of warm tar. He sniffed, took a sample on his finger to taste, then rewrapped the packet. From his desk drawer he took a roll of tape, cleaned the
packet with a tissue, went to the small kitchen at the end of the floor, taped the packet under the sink at the back. He returned to his desk, carefully wiped the book with another tissue, replaced it in his bag.

At a bin two hundred yards from the station he dumped the book.

37

“S
outheast Asia’s like the Bermuda Triangle: People just disappear without trace,” Aston said. He dumped a stack of faxes on Chan’s desk.

“What d’you want me to do with these?”

Chan sifted through, glancing only at the letterheads. San Francisco Police Department, Manila CID, Royal Thai Police Force. Most of them were extracts from missing persons files with reference to the disappearance of young Caucasian women. A small number referred to Chinese males who had also disappeared.

“File them,” Chan said.

“Those concerning the girl—we can forget them, right? Jekyll and Hyde, though, they could be in here somewhere.”

“You know the approximate ages; check it out,” Chan said.

“But there are no dental records for PI. What am I supposed to do if I find some likely candidates?”

Chan lit a cigarette, shrugged. “Positive identification is what they didn’t want. That’s why they shredded the bodies. You’ll have to get hold of relatives to see if they have dental records. Without fingerprints dental records are everything.”

“DNA?”

“Only proves that the heads fit the bodies; who they were is another problem. Unless the relatives kept locks of hair …”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a thought. Locks of hair.”

•  •  •

The day when Paddy left for good Chan found a small pile of books at the end of his bed with a two-word note scrawled badly in Chinese characters: “Forgive me.” He stared at the note for over an hour before he was able to accept what it meant. Then he went down to the sea with the books: the
Barrack-Room Ballads
of Rudyard Kipling; the
Selected Poems
of W. B. Yeats;
Alice in Wonderland
and
Alice Through the Looking Glass
, and the
Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám
, which Paddy must have bought recently in Hong Kong. Inside the
Rubaiyát
he’d pasted a lock of his brown Irish hair. With tears in his eyes and fierce Chinese anger in his heart the young Eurasian boy tore up the books, by the spines at first and then page by page, piece by piece. He floated them on the water, saving the ragged corner with the hair still attached to it until last. He watched it float until it sank somewhere in the vast South China Sea. He walked back slowly to the wooden hut where they had lived, but the hut wasn’t there anymore. While he had been by the sea, he had entered a time warp; a building resembling the hut in every particular was on the site where the hut had been, but the small house, imbued from floor to roof with the love that only children know for inanimate objects, was gone. Before that day he had never noticed the smallness of the shack or the stigma that attached to living in it. Afterward he began to resent it.

The half of him that was Chinese started a war with the Irish half that was to last a lifetime. Against
Alice in Wonderland
he set the
Tao-te-ching
; against the
Rubaiyát
the
I Ching
and the poet Li Po; against Kipling he set Shen Fu’s
Six Records of a Floating Life.

In the war between the selves the Chinese side always won, but never with finality. The Irishman was always there; sometimes he dreamed of him, a soft, weak, lecherous man with a charming smile and a love of poetry that almost saved him. The sterner the Chinese half became, the more frequently the Irish side turned up unexpectedly. Moira, for example. It took an Irish connoisseur of the lowlife to appreciate an alcoholic shoplifter forty-nine years old.

•  •  •

Sifting once more through the faxes that Aston had brought, Chan wondered if Paddy was dead. Without that lock of hair identification might be difficult. Certainly he had no fingerprints or dental records and he’d never recognize him after all these years. Among the papers Aston had included a confirmation slip from Riley’s office in Arsenal Street: Chan’s application for assistance from Scotland Yard had been approved; the scrappings had been sent. Chan knew it could take a month, though, for the results to be available.

There was a fax from the New York Police Department he’d overlooked first time round. “Reference your fax of April 21, Captain Frank Delaney will arrive in Hong Kong on April 26 United Airlines flight U.A.204 with information of interest to you. Signed: Frank Delaney, Captain NYPD.”

He showed it to Aston.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, Chief, I forgot to mention it. Tomorrow afternoon. Want me to meet him at the airport?”

Lunchtime. Chan pushed his way through the crowds back to his flat. It had been a weekend full of people. Granted, one could have wished for less challenging company on a boating trip than an aging psychopath, a sex-hungry billionairess and a scheming diplomat; nontheless, when he found himself solitary once more, loneliness and squalor crept into his bones like the first aches of old age. At the same time his body was still glowing from the sun and the sea. And then Emily had left her own particular glow. He heard her voice, not so complacent, almost sorrowful:
When you need another clue, you know where to come.

Well, that would require an erection. Another hurdle.

All his life he’d been what the British called a tits man. He’d always taken it on faith that the pleasure he derived from fondling was in some way transmitted through the breasts and nipples to their owner. To squeeze a plastic bag filled with saline solution was to turn the seduction process Pavlovian. Maybe it was anyway, but Pavlov’s dogs never saw the seam.

In his mind’s eye he saw again the two U-shaped scars, livid against Emily’s olive skin. The billionairess who bought perfection, or tried to. But that had been
his
question:
You wanted to be perfect?
Suppose he’d been bold enough to phrase it another way: Why did you mutilate yourself?

From there it was only a short hop to a more intriguing question: Why did one of the world’s most successful women want to discuss the murder of three people in Mongkok, but was afraid to?

At times of genuine uncertainty he consulted the oracle called the
I Ching.
It was not a process recommended in any police manual, but Chan had the greatest respect for the book’s wisdom. He was gratified that in the past thirty years quantum mechanics had been able to corroborate what Chinamen had known since ancient times: God was playing dice with the universe. Consequently the sages had been connoisseurs of chance, which in their view rewarded study more than science. As Chan put it, what would you rather know, that
e = mc
²
or that you will save your life if you leave the car at home tomorrow?

Consultation of the great book, though, was a subtle art. It was important to phrase the question in a precise and dignified manner. Thus, Is the human penis a legitimate organ of detection? He threw the coins and read the judgment: “Removing corruption promises success. If one deliberates with great care, before and after the starting point, then great undertakings are favored.”

Then the image:

As a wind, blowing low on a mountain
,
Thus does the wise man remove corruption.
As a wind, he first stirs up the people.
As a mountain, he gives them nourishment.

Chan lit a cigarette. Sometimes he thought that the Chinese mind knew too much. Burdened with five thousand years of conflicting insights, it was like a computer with more data than its chip could handle. Meaning was the first casualty of overload. He closed the book.

In a four-table restaurant serving duck and rice he ate lunch, exchanged curses with the owner, smoked a cigarette, drank green Chinese tea a light amber brew with almost no taste and a way of settling the stomach. Who was he kidding? Why not admit that there existed another oracle of infinitely greater precision, though less wisdom: Cuthbert? From a wall telephone he called the commissioner’s office. Tsui was at home, but Chan had his home number.

“What took you so long?” Tsui said when Chan had explained what he had in mind. “Come and see me tomorrow afternoon. We’ll talk about it.”

38

A
s a bilingual Eurasian Chan suffered, and on occasion inflicted, racial prejudice from both sides of the wall; in a bigoted mood he could be ambidextrous. The English were red-faced, blustering, arrogant, poor, infantile, given to incomprehensible failures of nerve that they called compassion. On the plus side they were good administrators, fair, and their women had large breasts. The Chinese were obsessed with money, callous, slant-eyed, incorrigible litterbugs, superstitious and rude. Nevertheless, they were resourceful, industrious, respected the family unit and had a genius for making money that left the rest of the world slack-jawed with envy.

Chan had tried to explain it to his politically correct English wife, when he’d had one: In Hong Kong nothing one race said about the other could dent that other race’s conviction of unassailable superiority. To weep over the nasty things the two nations sometimes said about each other was like feeling sorry for Everest because K2 called it a dwarf—or vice versa.

One frequent observation made by the Chinese about the English, though, was neutral in character and endured in the mythology of the Raj because it was true. While the Chinese only collected information that could be used in the pursuit of commerce or malice, the English compiled records for the sake of it.

As he had risen through the ranks of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force Chan had become increasingly aware of this quirk. Often it seemed to him that 90 percent of what
they
knew was not made
available even to senior police officers, yet someone somewhere possessed and leaked information on a need-to-know basis.

Chan had personal experience of this Whispering Wall school of administration through the more important cases he had been given to solve. He had noticed that when failure to catch the perpetrator of a crime was particularly embarrassing to the government—a spectacular kidnapping and murder of a famous billionaire by a renegade Communist group, for example—leads and background detail fell from some exalted but invisible source with obscene plenitude. Investigations into atrocities that failed to attract publicity or lacked political overtones had to limp on without such executive-level support. It was difficult, in the end, to resist the conclusion that a small group of men at the top of government had access to a database so extensive that they knew almost everything about the six million official inhabitants of Hong Kong and used this knowledge in accordance with a logical but restrictive policy. And who more likely to control such a committee than the political adviser? So why had Chan not yet confronted the great mandarin to demand a sharing of this secret knowledge? Chan knew why.

Irrational terror of authority was not merely a Confucian virtue; it was the bones of the Master’s system that had molded the Han mind since 500
B.C
. Only one administrative tool had held together the imperial system with its nine grades of mandarin, its eighteen ranks of civil and military officials, its rules of precedence for princes of the blood, wives, concubines and pirates:
paranoia.
It was the flaw in Sino psychology.

Chan remembered a trial of thirty counts of rape on separate women by a slim Chinese man about five four with the physical presence of a twig. His MO was simple. He obtained the names of housewives from the telephone directory: “Good morning, Mrs. Wong, I’m from the government medical department, and I have reason to believe you are having trouble with your marriage. I would like to visit you at a convenient time to perform a medical examination.…” When he arrived, he always closed the curtains and turned out the lights. Rape without violence. Only thirty of
more than a hundred victims would give evidence. More than half didn’t know that they had been raped. Put another way, what was the difference? The Chinese had been raped by Authority for five thousand years. K’ung Fu-tse—Confucius, as the West called him—was an anal retentive who had a lot to answer for.

That’s
why it took me so long to get to this point, Chan muttered to himself as he was shown into the commissioner’s office.

Chan smiled after he had presented his request, added: “Confucius stole my nerve.”

Tsui shook his head. “Slowed you down, perhaps. Well, you’re here now.”

“Every facility,” Chan said, still cursing his own timidity. “That fax you showed me in your car after the meeting with Cuthbert and the others said
every facility.
”