The Hua Shan Hospital Murders (11 page)

“Yes.”

“Good. You have a secured line.”

The man hesitated so Fong repeated his statement but this time more forcefully. “You have a secured line.”

The man nodded and turned. Fong followed him into an oak-panelled office. Oak in Asia! Senseless when there are so many exceptional hardwoods here, but so many Europeans never really see the beauty of Asia. The young man pointed at the phone and left the room.

Fong flipped open a small phonebook he carried in an inner pocket. He had to check for the number.
After all, he’d never called the head of Shanghai’s Communist Party before.

The party boss took Fong’s call without hesitation. Fong didn’t really know how to begin so he just spat out the facts of the second firebombing as he knew them. He was only momentarily surprised when the party boss stopped him by asking, “Has there been newspaper coverage – foreign newspaper coverage?”

“I’ll check but I would assume that there will be, just as in the first bombing.”

“So what is it that you want from me, Traitor Zhong?”

Fong allowed the reference to his previous felony conviction to pass and said, “I want the airport closed and access to Shanghai by all other means curtailed.”

Silence greeted his request. Both men knew that granting the request would cost the great city tens of millions of US dollars a day. Finally the party boss asked, “For how long, Traitor Zhong?”

“Until we catch the arsonist, sir.”

“No, Traitor Zhong. Three days. You have three days at the end of which time either this maniac is caught or you return to that small village west of the Great Wall – I understand that you made quite an impression on the peasants there.” Without so much as a goodbye, the party boss hung up on Fong.

Fong muttered to himself, “If I don’t find this guy, you’ll join me west of the Wall, oh great party boss man.”

The party boss made a call – a single phone call – and all services in and out of the biggest city in Asia began the process of coming to a full stop.

The West always underestimates the degree of control available to the Chinese government and the country’s inherent efficiency. Communist China is not the comically inefficient former Soviet Union or the hopelessly ideological Cuba. The huge number of people living on the relatively small amount of arable land had always forced efficiencies on the Chinese.
As well, the country had been on a quasi-war footing for years. So preparedness was a given.

The call went to the command centre beneath the new radio tower in the Pudong Industrial District, across the Huangpo River. The call activated a vast civic protocol – and this being China – there was no questioning the order that commanded all who received it to stop and wait exactly where they were until a further countermanding order arrived.

Within the hour all buses stopped and pulled over to the sides of the road on highways all around the perimeter of the city. All aircraft were diverted away from the Shanghai International Airport. No planes left. Trains literally stopped in their tracks. Ships throughout the vast river networks leading to the Shanghai Port Facility simply threw anchors over their sides and waited. On the access roads to the great city all traffic, whether car, bicycle, or foot was stopped and turned back to from whence it came.

In the third hour after the phone call from the party boss not a single person came into or left the eighteen-million-souled entity known as Shanghai. Within six hours of that, because there is little refrigeration in the city, food everywhere began to rot. Within seventy-two hours, the city would begin to go hungry.

But it was the newest parts of the stop protocol that had the greatest effect on Joan Shui as she and Wu Fan-zi retreated to her hotel room. The most recently added section of the protocol closed all long distance phone lines and totally shut down the thirty- four massive servers that handled all Internet and e-mail traffic in and out of the region.

“What does REJECTED FOR PUBLIC SECURITY mean?” asked Joan, holding out the phone for Wu Fan-zi.

He took the phone and listened. “You were calling Hong Kong?”

“Trying to report our new findings.”

He punched a local ten-digit number and it rang. He hung up.

“What?” she asked.

“Local calls work.” He dialled a Beijing number and quickly got the REJECTED FOR PUBLIC SECURITY message. “Try your computer.”

“It’s a long distance call to get to my server in Hong Kong.”

“My server’s local.” Wu Fan-zi punched in his access codes on her laptop. “Give me the e-mail address of your office.” She did and he typed it in and hit the send button. Instantly his “in” box dinged. He opened the returned message: REJECTED FOR PUBLIC SECURITY.

“Can they do that?”

“Not meaning to be flip, but they just did, Ms.
Shui.”

“So, Big Brother really is listening over on this side.”

“Not listening, rejecting.”

She smiled. “So we’re sort of isolated.”

“Yep, only eighteen million people to play with.”

Her smile grew. “That might be enough, if . . .”

“If what, Ms. Shui?”

“If you, Mr. Wu, are one of those eighteen million.”

He opened his wallet and withdrew his Shanghai residency permit and let out a deep sigh. “Hey – lucky me – I’m one of the eighteen million.”

“No,” she corrected him, “I’m the lucky one to be with the one of the eighteen million who is standing — now sitting, right here.” Their hands touched. She was tempted to say something smart. He was tempted to ask why him. But neither spoke – although their bodies did a lot of talking in the next hour.

Fong’s cell chirped. He spoke into it sharply, “
Dui
.”

“We’ve picked him up, sir.”

“Bring him to my office and officer . . .”

“Sir.”

“As I said before, I want him shackled.”

Fong sat in his office on the Bund and straightened his Mao jacket. It was a useful thing to wear when interviewing Westerners. It tended to scare the shit out of them.

For a moment Fong allowed himself to remember the pockets he’d sewn into the lining of his jacket when he was in internal exile west of the Wall. Then he stood up and shouted, “
Dui
! ”

A young German couple was guided into the room. They stood very close together. He was shackled hand and foot. Fong flipped open their file. “Mr.
and . . .?”

“My wife, Mrs. Helen Tator.” His English was fine although the accent caught Fong off guard. He totally ignored the shackles that bound him.

Fong allowed a smile to come to his lips.

“What can we do for you, sir?” The man’s voice was icy.

“You are in Shanghai on business?”

“Yes, I’ve been here for two weeks. My wife just arrived yesterday. It’s her first time in China. I doubt she’ll wish to return.”

“Really,” Fong said pushing that aside. Fong glanced down at the file in front of him to get the figures right. “You had seventeen-thousand-five-hundred American dollars transferred to your account in Shanghai on Monday of last week Mr. Tator and the funds were removed in twenty-five-hundred-dollar increments.” He looked up. “There’s only five thousand dollars left.” Mrs. Tator was obviously shocked. She went to say something but Mr. Tator shot her a look. Fong watched the body posture of the two change. They were no longer putting on the show of being together.

“She must be quite a woman,” Fong said simply.

“Who must be?” asked Mrs. Tator sharply.

Fong smiled – she did speak English. He’d had it up to his eyeballs with being nice to wealthy Western businesspeople who thought they had every right to do whatever they fucking well wanted to in Shanghai. “Why, Mrs. Tator, the woman your husband was paying twenty-five-hundred dollars a night.” The moment he said it he was sorry that he’d ventured into this territory. Revenge was never as sweet in actuality as it was in anticipation.

“Why did you do this, Inspector?” Mr. Tator’s question was surprisingly simple and honest. Almost the question of a child asking a parent about some misdeed – like leaving Mommy for another woman.
“Because some foreigner is setting off bombs in our hospitals and he must be getting his financing from outside the country,” spat back Fong, more angry with his own rash behaviour than with the Tators.

“And you thought I was this person,” said Mr.
Tator. “Just for the record, Inspector, I have been paying that money to a registered agency of the government of the People’s Republic of China in an effort to secure an infant. It is why my wife is here. It is why I am here. It is what the money was used for. We are unable to have a child of our own.” He reached into his pocket and produced a series of Interior Ministry receipts and put them one after another in a straight row on the desk in front of Fong. “Do you have any more questions for me, sir? Or have you done with insulting me and my wife?”

Fong waved his hands and the officers unshackled Mr. Tator. Fong started to apologize but the look of pure racial hatred on Mrs. Tator’s face stopped him. Just for an instant he considered doing what he could to stop the adoption. Then he saw Mr. Tator’s eyes. They were pleading with him not to.

“Please,” he said, “I will be very good to this child. I will.” Fong noted Mr. Tator’s use of the first person pronoun. “I know my wife, officer. I do.” His plea reminded Fong of another case where a man thought he knew his wife. Fong was just a young cop long before he was in Special Investigations. A house warden had called. There had been screaming heard coming from a small room and the door was locked.
Fong had broken down the door easily enough but what greeted him was not so easy for him to forget. A child had been impaled against a wall with a kitchen knife through his side. The mother stood beside him covered in blood, her eyes wild. The father stood against the far wall, his sister behind him cowering.
When Fong entered, the mother immediately grabbed a cleaver and headed toward him. The husband leapt on his wife’s back, tackling her to the ground. Fong took the cleaver from her. Hatred roamed the woman’s eyes – and madness, most palpable. The boy was rushed to the hospital and survived. The husband pleaded with Fong to allow him to care for his wife, that she was sick, that he knew his wife – didn’t need to be in jail – needed to be looked after. Fong had relented. Three days later the husband was found dead in the alley behind the building.

Fong turned to Mr. Tator. “If anything happens to that baby–”

“It won’t.”

Fong nodded.

After the Tators were escorted out of his office, Fong sat for some time. He was tired. His fatigue was clearly affecting his judgment. He wanted to lash out but he didn’t have a target for his rage. Then the phone on his desk rang and a glimmer of hope danced across his face.

They’d found the white guy with the camcorder.

Robert Cowens, Devil Robert to most of his Chinese associates, stood very still watching the Chinese children. They swarmed around the Caucasian guests just as they had the other times he had visited Shanghai’s famous Children’s Palace. He looked at the mass of children, then up to the small balcony on the south side of the vast entrance hall in which he stood. It didn’t take much imagination to see Silas Darfun’s ghost looking down at the assembled Europeans who had come to ogle his Chinese children. Well, why shouldn’t old Silas’s ghost be here – this place had been his home. After all, it was the very house in which he had adopted and raised his street urchins – and others, if Devil Robert’s father was correct. The house was actually a mansion built in the late twenties. It sat on the triangle of land at the crossing of Ya’nan Lu and Nanjing Lu. The property was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high, broken-glass-topped wall of field stone. On the southern wall along the much travelled Nanjing Lu side, a governmental “photo” lesson was on display for the populace. In the ten simple photographs a corrupt official is captured and tried and apologizes to the people of China and is executed. Throughout the city these graphic reminders that your government is watching you are on display. The forty-two-room mansion, sitting gracefully behind the wall, was classic English Victorian – rendered entirely in dark Asian hardwoods. Lofty ceilings and stained glass added an air of cathedral to what was actually a rural British palace design. Needless to say, a rural British palace – complete with extensive gardens – was a complete anomaly in Shanghai’s urban crush.

The tour guide’s English was better than usual for the People’s Republic of China. A lot better than the first guide Robert had when he initially ventured into the castle keep of his enemy.

Robert felt a small hand grab his fingers. Looking down he saw a round-faced five- or six-year-old Han Chinese boy tugging at him. The boy opened his smiling mouth and shouted: “Well Come t’China!!” Three or four times. Robert finally replied in Mandarin, “
Shei, sheh
.” The boy’s smile grew and he shouted in Mandarin to his companions, “This stinky one thinks he speaks Chinese.” The others laughed. Then Robert’s little snot pulled hard on his hand and yelled, “Come! Dharma Club.” They surely meant drama club, but it certainly did sound like Dharma Club. “You come Dharma Club.”

Robert and about half of the large group of Caucasians were “Shanghai’d” up a wide set of steps and shepherded into an expansive room that had a raised stage at one end. Unlike the other art rooms that he had seen on previous trips, the “Dharma”
room seemed to be run by the children, not the teachers – the phrase
inmates not wardens
came to mind. The first twenty minutes of the children’s performance took just under half of forever. Bad dharma does that.

Robert knew that in the Children’s Palace children were taught in the discipline most appropriate to their talents. Those with musical skills were trained to play instruments. Those with physical gifts were trained in dance. Those with drawing skills were trained to paint. From the dharma performance it was clear to Robert that when a child had an artistic bent but no particular skill – or shame – they were guided toward the dharma program.

The dharma performance ended with perhaps the most unique rendering of the old Broadway hit
Oklahoma
that anyone, anywhere, had ever heard. As it crescendoed toward an ear-splitting conclusion a Caucasian woman, somewhat older than Robert, came out from the wings and gestured to the children. They looked at her and ended the song as if someone had unplugged them. Amomentary blessed silence followed but was quickly shattered when the dharma kids stepped forward and demanded a standing ovation. Which they got.