The Hamlet Murders (13 page)

“Well there’s the standard Laertes–Ophelia attachment.”

“Attachment?”

“Well, Laertes does seem to be a little more than just expressing a brotherly concern for his sister.”

“Thus his anger at Hamlet?”

“Absolutely. Well, there is also the fact that Hamlet killed his father and Ophelia committed suicide when Hamlet dumped her.”

“Don’t you think those two little things just might be enough to lead to a bit of animosity from Laertes toward Hamlet?”

“I guess it could, do that, that is,” said Donny in all seriousness.

He guesses! Fong shook his head; he’d never understand academics. The watermelon of a man smiled. Fong didn’t. “Thanks.” He ushered Donny toward the door. The man was still talking. Then he stopped and looked at Fong for a long moment. “Hey, I’ve met you before.”

“No, I’m sure you’re . . . ”

“No, I have a really good memory for faces. Yes. Fuck the Dean then do the Bishop!”

“Excuse me?”

“At that stupid play. Right. I saw you at that stupid play.” Donny rubbed his hands in satisfaction then looked hard at Fong. “Hey, you were with a really pretty lady, right?”

“Right.”

“An actress, right?”

“Right.”

“Hey, how’s she doin’?”

“She’s dead. A long time ago.”

“Sorry to hear that. Beautiful girl. Really beautiful.”

Fong finally manoeuvred Donny out the door and shut it. He took a deep breath. That was hard. Too hard. Fu Tsong was still so completely present. So entirely there – her ghostly weight almost too heavy to bear – and Fong knew it.

Only the hulls of the junks that, before the war, used to ply the Su Zu Creek were still extant. In these rotting containers lived the poorest of the poor in Shanghai. The Su Zu Creek is not what is meant when real estate agents advertise “with river view.” The stink of the creek announces its presence well before one sees the turgid, shallow waterway. But water is water and summer is summer so kids are in the creek – and so is the body of a woman who used to hand out keys at Geoffrey Hyland’s guesthouse.

Two children throw a colourful button they pulled off one of their grandmother’s blouses into the water then dive after it. It’s a challenging game because the Su Zu Creek is thick with silt that is constantly churned up by wakes coming up the creek and produced by passing barges on the Huangpo River. It made every dive for the button an adventure. None more so than the dive when the young boy reached into the silt and touched something rubbery and yucky – something that had been a lady who gave out keys in Geoffrey Hyland’s guesthouse.

A pug-nosed Shanghai detective watched the flesh thing that used to be a body emerge from the creek’s dark water. He’d been an investigating officer for almost thirty years and although he had only a few years left on the force, he wasn’t looking forward to his retirement. With almost no money saved and very little pension, he knew his future was uncertain. After surviving all the regime changes in the Shanghai police force to be left maybe literally out in the cold struck him as particularly unfair but somehow infinitely Chinese. He smiled and indicated that the divers should put what was left of the body on the far shore. He didn’t believe they’d find out much about the death of this old woman – or at least she seemed to be an old woman. The eels in the creek had already eaten away most of the extremities of the body, the gelatinous facial parts and the liver. He lit a cigarette and allowed himself a fulsome cough. Then he saw the button the boys had been diving for. It had snagged on a string extending from the pocket of her quilted Mao coat. He pulled on the string and out came a key. A key to what? There had been a tag attached to the key but the acidity of the creek had removed the writing. He bagged the key, checked for ID and, finding none, instructed the officers to remove the body. Old people died all the time. Some fell into the creek. Some were dropped there. He allowed the key to roll around in his palm and wondered how he’d find out into what lock this key fit.

The rest of Fong’s afternoon was filled with disappointments – to be expected – but disappointments nonetheless. Like clockwork, cops appeared at his office door with confirmations of alibis from the theatre people. The only one of any real interest was the confirmation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s alibi. Several gay men, after a little bullying, verified Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s presence at the party. Not surprisingly, both party members who had been named by the actors had denied any knowledge of either the gathering or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Both had demanded Fong’s phone number and made the usual threats. That was fine with Fong. He filed away the two men’s names and phone numbers. They could prove to be very useful at some time in the future. Then he sat back in his office chair and stared at the Pudong out his window. The dozens of new buildings stood proud against the fading August sunlight. He thought about how the Pudong only ten years ago had been nothing but a swamp across the Huangpo River. Now it was the Pudong Industrial District, the very centrepiece of the new China. Fong thought about how power had brought those buildings into being. He thought about how power worked. Then he thought about how good it was to have diverse attitudes like those of the two gay party members within the halls of power of the Middle Kingdom and he allowed himself a smile.

It was the third locksmith that the Shanghai detective went to that informed him that the key was newly minted and probably was from a guesthouse because it had markings that indicated there could be a master key to override it.

A guesthouse? This could be trouble. Guesthouses were used by foreigners. He was a basic Shanghai street cop. He didn’t deal with crimes that had to do with foreigners. That was done by those damn snobs down on the Bund. Well, so be it. He picked up the phone and gave Special Investigations a call.

The call was received at general dispatch at Special Investigations just before sunset. Because the general dispatcher was a party hack’s son he didn’t mark it as urgent. Since there was no way of knowing if it was a murder and no way of knowing if it was committed by a foreigner, he filed the gist of the report in the boxes for Fong, Li Chou and the commissioner and didn’t give it a second thought. All three glanced at it before day’s end. All three had more important things on their desks than the remains of an old lady who probably had too much to drink, hit her head on the side of the junk and fell into the creek.

In accordance with the department’s new policy of limiting expenditures, an autopsy was put on hold. It wasn’t until days later that Fong asked for the full report of the old lady’s death that had the reference to a key to a guesthouse buried in the bottom.

I
t was just past eight in the evening but the aggressive heat of the day still held a grip on the vast city. The morgue workers were packing up and heading home. Fong looked from Lily to the morgue slab where Geoff’s body lay.

“I need you to sign off on the autopsy report as the head investigator, Fong,” Lily said in her lilting Shanghanese.

Fong nodded but didn’t take the pen Lily was holding out to him.

“So just do it. There’s nothing more this corpse can tell us and our refrigeration allowance was halved in the last city budget. It won’t be long before he begins to stink.”

Fong couldn’t take his eyes from the corpse. Over and over he punished himself with the thought: “Fu Tsong loved this man.” He was shocked when Lily stood behind him and put her hands on his back – but he was glad for the contact. Lily moved in closer and whispered softly, “It’s time this was returned to the earth.”

Fong took one last look then nodded. “Thanks, Lily,” he said in English.

“Nothing think of it, Short Stuff.”

Fong took the pen from her, held the autopsy report close to his face then signed it.

“You need glasses,” Lily said, taking back the document and her pen.

Fong was momentarily surprised that it was so obvious but he left that thought quickly as he realized that in the entire time he’d known Lily “You need glasses” was the only grammatically correct use of English he’d ever heard come out of her mouth. Maybe her English was improving and their daughter Xiao Ming stood a chance of speaking English properly.

“You’re something, Lily,” he said in English.

“Yeah. What but though is question,” she replied.

“Nope,” Fong thought. Linguistic improvement: strictly temporary.

Lily didn’t like the look on her ex-husband’s face so she shifted to Shanghanese, “So have you found out who this Long Nose was fucking just before he died?”

Once Fong was back on the street he called Chen. “Are our Beijing guests there?”

“Yes, and they’re a bit annoyed, sir.”

Fong smiled, “Good.” He hung up and decided to walk back to the office. They’d made him wait at the prison, now they could cool their heels for a while in his office.

The heat had finally backed off a pace although it would most assuredly return with the dawn. The evening was just beginning to soften. As he walked Fong marvelled at the human reality that is Shanghai. His home. He passed by sidewalk barbers cutting hair for customers seated on small three-legged bamboo stools; and sidewalk bicycle repairmen, often referred to as maestros, who busied themselves stuffing fat redrubber tubes back in tires; and sidewalk cobblers repairing shoes while surrounded by neat rows of upturned high heels from women’s pumps; and sidewalk seamstresses working on foot-powered sewing machines. Shanghai lives on its sidewalks. You can buy anything there. Fong passed by sellers of sugarcovered fried dough and soda-fountain pop and icecream bars made from frozen soya, and repackaged Western candy bars, and pirated CDs and pirated audiotapes and pirated DVDs, and old couples sitting on ratty chairs, their pant legs rolled up to their thighs. The latest Hong Kong pop tune floats on the air. A fivespice egg-seller blocks one nostril with a filthy thumb and discharges the contents of the other nostril onto the cracked pavement just a quarter-inch to one side of her cook pot then looks up at Fong: “I missed,” she cackles. A leather-skirted girl parades her legs as if she were the only person with gams in this part of the world. Passing by the Hilton, the quotient of expensive cars increases as do the number of pimps selling their wares. A shop window almost entirely covered with snakes coiling upwards, their blunt snouts pushing against the uppermost pane, draws Fong’s eyes as do the large glass jars of dried country roots and herbs in the next store. A countrywoman carrying a filthy baby barely covered in rags approaches a man with a hand out and a plea for help. A pregnant woman crosses a busy eight-lane street with all the pride and confidence that only a woman carrying a child in a single- child society can have. The blunted trees in front of a walled former French estate release their scent to the night air adding a sweetness that was not there only moments before. Men hand out cheap flyers advertising dance clubs, inexpensive pants,
Ye Sheng
(literally wild food), appliance repairs, bundles of kindling and coal, bulk rice and of course young girls.

On a city wall, a black-and-white eight-photo object lesson shows a corrupt official being caught by the federal police, tried by a federal judge and hanged before the populace. The photo lab’s work is better than in the famous fraudulent photo of Mao swimming the Yangtze, but the eight photos were frauds nonetheless – and everyone knows they are frauds.

Two elderly Go players attract a crowd crammed with Shanghai’s most abundant commodity – unsolicited advice. A young street sweeper with a mask across her mouth moves her bound-twig broom slowly as she breathes in the street fumes that will first make her prematurely old, then collapse her lungs before she’s forty. The sound of Western music draws Fong into Renmin Park where old couples practise the steps of Western ballroom dancing to the sounds from a CD player that gets its energy from a hand crank. Above the dancers, the Marlboro man leers down from his billboard, clearly suggesting that a smoke and a horse are all a real man ever needs. The park is filled – no seat is free. The heat backs off another pace allowing in the gentle breeze from the mighty Yangtze. A child in new clothes plays with a large plastic toy to the glee of his parents and all four grandparents. Fong wonders when the child will realize that the dreams of all six of these adults lies squarely on his slender shoulders. Just a different kind of ghostly weight.

In darkened doorways couples steal kisses, hands caress curves and clutch hardness only to be laughed at by the local crone. Nightclubs pour their relentless beat onto the streets and Mao-jacketed elders shake their heads in disgust. A young man holds onto a lamppost and vomits in the gutter as others watch but no one helps – the fear of disease from the West now alive on the streets of the great city.

A dark alley’s mouth emits sounds of anger and a whimpered apology. Floral wreathes outside a storefront announce the opening of a new business and plead for good luck from whichever gods have not yet forsaken the secular state of the People’s Republic of China.

The recyclers are out in force with their large metal tongs extracting scraps of paper from the sodden waste in the garbage cans. Then, as if on some unheard cue, jetting flares erupt from the seven tall chimneys down by the Huangpo River. Shortly thereafter clouds of dark smoke belch into the night sky – the city’s garbage begins to incinerate.

And the people and the smells and the lives in motion – Shanghai. Home.

“Present your alibis, please,” Fong said for the third time.

The two Beijing men didn’t move. They certainly didn’t answer Fong’s request.

Fong got up from his desk and, turning his back on the Beijing men, stared out his floor-to-ceiling office window overlooking the Bund. Just getting these two into his office was a major coup – but it wasn’t enough. At this point in a murder investigation gains were made by subtraction and he had to be sure he was right before he removed anyone from his list of suspects. So alibis had to be demanded and checked. Without turning back to the Beijing men, Fong said, “This is a murder investigation. The murder of a foreigner in Shanghai falls within my jurisdiction, not yours.”

The younger Beijing man took a step to his left, putting himself right beside Fong in the window’s reflection. “What did you find in Geoffrey Hyland’s room?”

“Old books, stupid tapes and dirty underwear,” Fong answered the reflection without turning back to the men. He was careful not to lie since these facts could be checked.

The older Beijing man took two oddly elegant steps making it a trio of reflections in the window. “You have been back to see Mr. Hyland’s play, this
Hamlet,
twice since his death. Why?”

“To figure it out.”

“What is there to figure out?”

“Mr. Hyland was a great artist. Great artists often include their present concerns in their art.”

“So you wanted to see what ‘concerns’ of Mr. Hyland’s life he put in the play?”

“Yes.”

“So what was there?”

Fong hesitated for a moment. He could lie about this because the truths he found were ephemeral – not evidence but ethos.

“What did you find, Traitor Zhong?”

“Ghosts and ghosts of ghosts,” Fong said. But even as he spoke he thought: “I have seen that damned play one too many times.”

The older man examined Fong’s face in the window’s reflection. Finally he said, “Be careful, Traitor Zhong, be very careful.”

Fong responded quickly, overriding the threat, “Was Mr. Hyland a spy?”

The younger man took a step toward Fong’s back, but the older man shot him a hard look and he stopped. “Why do you want to know that, Traitor Zhong?” asked the older Beijing man calmly.

“Mr. Hyland’s version of
Hamlet
strikes me as heavy on the spy stuff. Since you guys are the only ones I know who deal with spooks, I thought maybe there was a connection.”

“I doubt that he was spying in any ordinary sense of the term,” said the older man.

“And in an extraordinary sense of the term?”

The older man did that elegant moving thing again then said, “Perhaps.”

“Ah,” said Fong and turned to face the two Beijing men. “Now that we have that cleared up, where exactly were you two clowns on the night of Mr. Hyland’s death, say between 11 a.m. and 6 a.m. the next morning?”

Eventually the Beijing men coughed up alibis. The younger one had been in a K-TV lounge until almost three and the older man had led a seminar on counterterrorism late into the night in one of Beijing’s many Shanghai safe houses. Both were able to supply several names and addresses of people who could corroborate their stories.

Upon completing his answer and then threatening Fong in an entirely predictable fashion – Fong thought of it as just more blah-blah from Beijing – the younger Beijing man shouted a final warning and stormed out of Fong’s office.

Fong stood and once more turned toward the window – this meeting was over.

Fong glanced up into the pane and was surprised to see the older Beijing man take a quick step toward him.

Fong turned.

Then the younger Beijing man reappeared in his office door. The older man stopped in his tracks, shouted a threat that Fong found oddly half-hearted then whirled on his heel and left the office followed closely by his younger partner.

Fong watched their retreating figures and wondered if he needed to recalibrate where he thought they – or at least the older Beijing man – might fit in all this mess.

And what a mess it was. Geoff’s death was not a suicide, although he had no idea who murdered him or why.

Fong reminded himself that Geoff was smart. Geoff had tried to communicate with him through his business card – maybe he had tried to communicate in other ways. Geoff’s
Hamlet
certainly was concerned with spying and his two Beijing keepers were clearly more interested in Geoff’s comings and goings than in his death. “The play’s the thing” Fong remembered from the front of Geoff’s business card. It would be like Geoff to leave messages on both sides of the card.

He checked that his office door was locked, noted that Shrug and Knock was gone then headed toward the old theatre on the campus of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Despite the fact that he had seen Geoff’s
Hamlet
twice since the director’s death, Fong had the gnawing feeling that he had overlooked something – something obvious.