Whispering Shadows (6 page)

They walked down the west side of Shennan Road to the metro station in silence.

“Shall I take you to the border?”

“Thanks, but I'll manage on my own. Do I look that tired?” asked Paul.

“Yes. Exhausted.”

“I am. It was all a bit much for a hermit.”

Zhang nodded understandingly. “Can you do me a favor, though? When you speak to the Owens tomorrow, please ask them if their son ever injured his left knee.”

“Why?”

“The body has a big scar on the left knee, probably from an operation. Wu thinks it's from an accident or a sports injury.”

VIII

The voices of the night were no more than a whisper. The water lay smooth as a mirror in the glow of the red and blue neon advertisements, and a lone barge or tugboat made its way across the pond every now and then. Tiny waves lapped against the walls of the quay in exhaustion, as if the harbor had been transformed into a deserted, windless lake. The white lights in the office blocks had almost all been switched off, bit by bit, like lighting for a celebration that someone had carefully blown out candle by candle. Even the never-ending roar of traffic during the day had fallen silent. The hour after midnight was the time when the city that never otherwise stopped allowed itself a rest.

Paul stood at the pier from which ferries to the outlying islands departed and thought about what he should do. He had missed the last ferry. At this hour it was impossible to find a private vessel that would take him to Lamma, and there was no one he could stay the night with. Undecided, he sat down on the steps that led down to the water. He had slept in the train, and felt wide-awake in some strange way, yes, almost a bit hyper, but not unwell at all. The air was still pleasantly warm and smelled not of gas but of the sea and the humid, sweet, and heavy air of the tropics. He thought about what could be making him feel so keyed up. The many impressions of the past few hours? The pleasure he always felt when he saw Zhang and Mei? Did he care more about the fate of Michael Owen than he admitted to himself? Or was it the smells, the music of the streets,
the faces, the sights of Shenzhen, which were different from Hong Kong's, that stimulated him so? That awakened memories in him that he thought were buried so deep that two lifetimes would not be enough to unearth them?

China! The other side of the world. The better side.

He had first read about Li Si and her father, the emperor of Mandala, in a German children's book when he was eight years old. The little princess was the first girl he fell in love with. In her country lived an imaginary giant and there grew wonderful trees and flowers in the strangest shapes and colors, and they were all transparent. Plants made of glass! There were rivers there with porcelain bridges swinging over them! Some of these bridges had strange roofs with thousands of small silver bells hanging from them, which tinkled with every puff of wind and glittered in the morning light. In the capital city of Ping the streets were full of hair counters, ear cleaners, magicians, acrobats, and hundred-year-old ivory carvers, who carved away at a single piece of wood for their whole lives. From that time on, he had dreamed of traveling to Mandala, and when his father explained to him that there was no such country and that China was the country the book meant to describe, a huge empire on the other side of the world with a big wall around it and a secretive Forbidden City in which the emperor used to live, he had set his sights on traveling to China.

The life that he longed for was in China. In China the people were smaller, not so heavily built; there were no children there who were a head taller than him and who bullied him to chew the gum they spat out. In China no one cared if his father was Jewish or his mother German. In China parents did not quarrel and it was easy to make friends. In China the people were just much friendlier and more honest and cleverer; it was not for nothing that they had invented gunpowder, paper, and the compass.

China! The word alone drew the young boy to it like magic. Full of wonder, he discovered Chinese characters, tracing his finger across the paper over and over again, copying the strange lines with
slow, respectful movements. What kind of country was it where the people drew small pictures instead of using letters like
A
or
Z
? Where the same sound could have completely different meanings depending on which tone it was spoken in? In New York, while the other boys played baseball on weekends, he went to Chinatown and hung around the vegetable and fish stalls, trying to catch snatches of words and to identify them again, because he was so incredibly fascinated by the sound and the color of the language.

Later, he spent a great deal of time in the public library on Tenth Street at Tompkins Square Park. There, surrounded by old men and women who kept coughing in winter or blew their noses noisily into handkerchiefs the size of pillowcases, he studied Marco Polo's accounts of his travels, Confucius, Laozi, and Mao, understanding little of what he read. But that did not bother him, as long as the books helped him to keep dreaming of China.

On his travels later, he learned how little his fantasies had to do with the Chinese reality, but bidding farewell to the land of his dreams was not too difficult for him. The reality in the 1980s, the period of gradual opening up, was even more exciting and interesting that he had ever imagined, and he no longer needed China as his castle, a place in which he could seek refuge in his dreams. With the birth of Justin, his interest in the country and in traveling there had waned, and after the diagnosis, it had been totally extinguished. He had refused Zhang's repeated invitations over the past few years for him to visit or for them to take a trip to Shanghai or Beijing together. China no longer moved him. Or did it? Just a few hours ago he would still have said that with conviction.

Paul stood up, thought about which hotel was nearest on foot, and walked slowly up the empty streets toward the Mandarin Oriental.

———

The quiet murmur of the air-conditioning, a low hum from the bridge, and a cell phone that kept on ringing somewhere. Paul opened his eyes and reached for his mosquito net. It was a few long
seconds before he realized where he was. The cell phone stopped ringing, only to start again shortly after. Eyes heavy with sleep, he looked at the display. He did not recognize the number; it was neither Christine's nor Zhang's. Probably the Owens. Paul switched his phone to silent. He did not want to speak to anyone, least of all to the Owens. The alarm clock showed it was 7:15
AM.
There was a piercing pain in his head and his whole body hurt, as though he had drunk too much alcohol last night. Had he gone to the hotel bar? He could not remember anything. He turned on his side, pulled the light blanket up to this chin, and fell asleep again.

When he woke the second time, he felt even worse. The headache had gone but now he felt as if someone had bound him tightly around the chest. He tried to lie there quietly, but still could not breathe. He felt hot, even though he had felt cold the whole night through because of the air-conditioning and the blanket that was much too thin. He was afraid. Afraid of speaking to Elizabeth Owen. Afraid of too many impressions. Afraid of too many voices, sounds, smells, people. He could feel this fear growing with every moment that he lay alone in this strange bed, in this strange room.

He got up and called Christine. Her voice calmed him a little. Yes, she had time, always had time for him. He could come to pick her up for a lunch in an hour.

Paul went to the metro entrance on Statue Square. He wanted to take the MTR to Wan Chai, but the deeper he descended into the station, the worse he felt. When he saw the crowds of people waiting for the train and got shoved in the back by the first elbow, he turned around and hurried back up onto the street. On the tram, there was a seat free in the first row on the upper deck; he held his head out of the window, and the breeze from the movement of the tram dried the sweat on his brow.

The stairwell at 142 Johnson Road was even narrower and dirtier, and the World Wide Travel office was even smaller than he had imagined from Christine's description. She and her two employees sat in front of three computer screens; all of them were wearing
headpieces and in the middle of conversations with clients, talking loudly over each other in order to be heard above the air conditioner rattling in the background. The desks were piled with catalogues, brochures, bills, and tickets. The walls were covered with yellowing pages from a Cathay Pacific calendar, with photographs of pagodas in Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. The room had no window. Paul wondered how she put up with these cramped and noisy conditions every day.

Christine led him to a dim sum restaurant not far from her office. She wove her way through the bustling throng of people on the overcrowded sidewalks so quickly and so skillfully that it was only with some difficulty that he was able to keep up with her.

The restaurant was as big as a soccer field and as noisy as a rock gig. Every table was occupied, and as soon as anyone stood up the people waiting would rush for the empty seat as if there was something to be had for free at that table. After a brief exchange between Christine and the maître d', a waiter led them past a row of fish tanks to the back section of the restaurant, to one of the few tables for two. Christine checked the boxes for their order on a piece of card, and Paul told her in a few sentences about what had happened in Shenzhen and about the phone call he had to make that he had been postponing for a few hours now.

“What is it you want to hear from me? Advice?”

Her voice had lost its lightness of tone. She sounded stern and tense.

“I don't know,” Paul said quietly. “Maybe.”

“I would call these people and tell them that you're sorry, but you can't help them, and that would be the end of that. The police in Hong Kong or in Shenzhen or the American embassy in Beijing can worry about the rest. You have nothing to do with it. I would stay out of it.”

She looked at Paul, her lips pressed firmly together. Her tone had probably been much sharper than she preferred it to be, but she could not help herself. Paul was thankful that she did not even try
to cover it up. He knew her face and he knew that she did not trust the mainland Chinese. And how could she, after everything that had been done to her family? Any attempt to do so would be marred by the memory of the sound of the boots of the Red Guards, the creaking stairs, the sound of the wooden door splintering as it was kicked in, her father's face filled with the fear of death. The jump from the window. An accident, they said. An accident! That was still what they said today, nearly forty years later. If it had been possible, she would have emigrated to Canada, America, or Australia before 1997. She did not want reunification. Her family had fled China for Hong Kong in 1967 only to fall under Beijing's control after all, thirty years later. Of course, a lot of time had passed and the government of today apparently had nothing to do with the government of all those years ago. She knew the arguments, she knew them all; she had argued often enough with her friends about this, had tried to explain something that perhaps could not be explained. But the same party was still in government, and this party had never apologized to the people for the crimes that it had committed; as long as it did not do so, as long as it did not ask for forgiveness from the victims of all its campaigns and purges, Christine Wu would not trust it. And she would not attend one of the Mandarin language schools that now dotted every corner of Hong Kong. Nor would she organize any tours to China or travel there herself. She had tried once, and taken the train toward Shenzhen. She had grown more and more tense the nearer the train got to the People's Republic. Finally, she had stood at the border to the land of her birth, her heart racing with fear. She had heard the voices of her parents. The voices of her grandparents. After a long struggle, she turned back. Because the shadows of the past were too long. Because the whispers would not fall silent.

Paul said nothing. He felt annoyed at himself for having asked her in the first place.

“I'm sorry. What I'm saying sounds very selfish and is perhaps not what you want to hear.”

As two waiters brought the first few bamboo baskets of dim sum
dumplings to the table, Paul's phone rang. It was Zhang.

“Hello, Paul. Did you catch the last ferry?”

“No. I spent the night in a hotel.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don't be. It was the Mandarin Oriental. It's right next to the ferry terminal.”

“Where are you now? It sounds as though you've been put to work in a restaurant kitchen.”

“I'm sitting with Christine in Wan Chai, having dim sum.”

“Then I'll make it quick. Have you spoken to the Owens yet?”

“No.”

Zhang did not say anything for a moment. “I know that it's not going to be pleasant conversation.” He did not sound formal, but it was impossible not to hear the detective superintendent in him speaking. “But I have to know as soon as possible if the body is Michael Owen. Even if it turns out this afternoon that he died of heart failure. With murder, time is mostly on the side of the murderer.”

“I know,” Paul whispered into the telephone.

“What did you say?”

“I know,” he repeated, a little louder.

“Can you tell those people to stop rattling their plates? Why do the Chinese have to shout so while eating? I can't hear a thing.”

Did Zhang really not hear him or was that his way of telling him that he should call the Owens as soon as possible?