“Shouldn’t the custodian have a list, sir?”
Fong thought of saying that he would pick up the list then put that idea aside. He would just have to weather the storm that list would let loose.
“Surely he’d know who has keys,” said Chen.
Again Fong nodded – that old man knew. He knew too much.
The old geezer rummaged through a stack of papers on the floor and mumbled angrily. Chen stood patiently waiting for the standard Shanghanese complaints about authority to run their course. They finally did. “Keys? It’s keys you want? To the theatre?”
“No,” Chen almost shouted. The man was clearly hard of hearing but it was also possible that he was delaying for some reason. “I want to know who has keys to the theatre.”
Then the man brightened and pushed aside a desk to get at an old filing cabinet. He opened it by twisting the handle and giving it two sharp knocks to the side – your basic Soviet-made locking mechanism. The cabinet, surprisingly, had only one tall drawer. The old man took out several large, mounted, theatre posters and dropped them onto the desk with a thud.
The poster on top featured a lithograph of a profoundly beautiful actress. Chen read the information. The play was by an English playwright whose name he didn’t recognize. But the name of the actress was extremely familiar – Fu Tsong. Chen looked at the image, the exquisite skin, the deep deep eyes, and marvelled.
“She was more than just a looker,” said the old custodian. “She made birds sing in the trees when she acted. I never missed a performance when she was acting. And her Peking Opera work was . . . ” Unable to find the words, he waved his liver-spotted hands like a fan in front of his face. Then he smiled unabashedly showing off an almost toothless maw.
“Have you found the list of theatre keyholders?”
“Yep,” the man replied and handed over a muchrumpled pad of paper and then returned to admiring Fu Tsong’s likeness.
Chen read the handwritten list on the top page. Names were printed, then a signature appeared beside each name. Chen assumed you signed out the keys. The list was predictable: Mr. Hyland as director had one, as did his two Canadian producers, as did the old man in front of him – those names were expected. Chen flipped through the following pages. Each entry was signed and then crossed off when the key was returned. Nineteen pages later he saw the first entry that had not been crossed off. The name there was Zhong Fong.
Back in Fong’s office on the Bund, Chen reported most of his findings.
“I’ll want to interview each of the keyholders at the office. Out of courtesy we’ll see the custodian in his room.”
“No need, sir. He gave me an alibi for the time in question and it checks out.” Now it was Chen who hesitated.
Fong stood. “There were more keyholders?”
Captain Chen nodded.
“Tell me,” said Fong knowing full well his name and signature ought to be on the list.
“You’re the only other name on the list, sir.”
Fong nodded. “Want my alibi, Captain Chen?”
Captain Chen looked past Fong, out the window, to the Bund. Fong felt for the young man, trapped between his admiration for him and his need to do the right thing. Fong sighed. “I took Xiao Ming to the theatre and brought her back to you and Lily by 10:30 p.m. The rest of the night I was home. Alone. Reading. Not much of an alibi is it?”
Chen didn’t meet Fong’s eyes.
Fong took a step toward Chen. The younger man backed away. “I’ve told you that this is a political place. You must protect yourself in a situation like this, Captain Chen.” The country cop nodded and finally met Fong’s eyes. “Tell the next in command about my name on the list then arrange for me to interrogate the other keyholders.”
Captain Chen bore the brunt of much mockery from Li Chou and his men. But this afternoon they were not busy thinking up nasty cracks about his appearance. This time they offered him a seat and listened carefully to his story about theatre keys, keyholders and Zhong Fong.
Li Chou had to stop himself from chuckling and rubbing his chubby hands together as he closed his office door behind Chen. All would be inappropriate under the circumstances but all were burbling up inside him. Motive – jealousy; means – counterweights that Fong had deviously pointed out to all and sundry; opportunity – Fong lived literally two minutes away from the theatre because his wife had been a star there and he had a key. His name and signature were on the caretaker’s list.
A knock at his door. “The commissioner wants to see you in his office now, sir.”
Li Chou nodded. Of course he does. After the report he put on the man’s desk about Fong’s history with the dead Westerner, what else could he possibly want?
Li Chou stood up and did his best to straighten his jacket. His weight was beginning to show. “That damned cheese my wife likes so much,” he thought. It never occurred to him that he was not being forcefed the Western-style sweet dairy confection. Be that as it may, he now had girth where there did not used to be girth.
“I want Chen followed,” he said to his men. “He may lead us to even more interesting information.”
This was a good day. A very good day. Passing by Fong’s office, he nigh on clicked his heels and Shrug and Knock smiled broadly. But when he got to the commissioner’s office, his joyful bubble burst all over his puffed-out chest.
“This report is garbage. Nothing more than speculation. Why are you wasting your time on this?”
Li Chou couldn’t believe it. He was sure that the commissioner was as anxious to rid the police force of Zhong Fong as he was. Here was the perfect opportunity and the man was letting it pass by. Why?
“Have you shared this with your men?”
“No, sir,” he lied.
“Good. Don’t. And that’s an order.” The commissioner slid Li Chou’s report into the shredder beside his desk and flipped a switch. A brief electric humming followed and shortly thereafter Fong’s comeuppance was little more than strips of indecipherable text.
But why? Then Li Chou looked at the commissioner’s desk. There had always been two phones there – one internal, one external. But now there was a third phone that had no keypad. A direct line, no doubt scrambled. Such things in the People’s Republic of China only went to one place – Beijing. Li Chou covered his new knowledge with a smile and backed out of the commissioner’s office. So there was more to this than Li Chou had first seen. Fine. But was that to Li Chou’s advantage or not?
An hour later, there was a light tapping on Fong’s office door. “It’s open.”
The door swung open slowly revealing the figure of Shrug and Knock leaning against the door jamb. “There’s a really white Long Nose here who says he needs to speak with you. Or at least I think that’s what he’s trying to say. His Mandarin is awful.”
“Take a name and get his phone number and tell him I’ll get back to him,” said Fong, returning to the dossiers on his desk.
“Fine,” said Shrug and Knock as he closed Fong’s office door.
Two minutes later, he returned with a baby-blueand- yellow business card and a small oblong leather case. “He said to give these to you. Something about he was concerned you were going to bump into things without them.”
Fong looked at the business card with the sickening colours – he’d seen more attractive baby puke – and couldn’t help but smile. Dr. Morris Wasniachenko – the Ukrainian optometrist. Then he flipped open the small leather case. What he saw there took the smile from his face. Eyeglasses.
More proof that he was getting old.
“Nice,” said Shrug and Knock with a big smile. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, your ‘interrogatees’ are here. The people who had keys, those who were last in the theatre and those coming to rehearsal are ready for you, as you wanted, Detective Zhong.”