He looked at the clock on the wall. Enough for today. He picked up the piece of paper and turned off the lights in his office. Standing in the dark, he looked at the dancing neon of the nighttime Pudong across the Huangpo River. Every day it seemed to grow.
He left the office, putting the phone number on Shrug and Knock’s desk with a note attached to it saying “I want him in my office first thing tomorrow morning.”
The office was almost deserted. He headed down the back stairway, crossed the eight lanes of traffic and four of bicycles on the Bund and entered a pedestrian underpass.
And there he was. As always. The ancient man with his arhu and begging bowl. Fong spread out a piece of newspaper and sat on the dirty tiles across from the old man. He pressed his cheek into the coolness of the tile wall.
“The weight is heavy on you tonight,” the old man said.
“Yes,” Fong agreed.
“Things must be permitted to end to allow other things to begin.”
Fong nodded but said nothing.
“The weight of ghosts can crush a man.”
To this Fong was afraid even to nod his head, “Play something for me, Grandpa – and help me forget.” Fong slipped some yuan notes from his pocket and placed them in the begging bowl.
The man’s ancient fingers touched the arhu’s strings. The instrument’s unearthly tones bounced like living things off the hard tile surfaces of the tunnel then fell from on high like diving birds into Fong’s ears where they fell, fell, fell through endless space to the still terribly deep pond beneath that was him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The next morning when Fong opened his office door he saw a bearded white man behind his desk, sitting in his chair. With a kind of jolly hop, this fireplug of a man stood up and, with his right hand extended, approached Fong, “Your assistant let me in. In fact, he was in here when I arrived.”
Fong was about to reply that he had no assistant then understood that Shrug and Knock must have been in his office. That one never learns! He turned his thoughts back to the Long Nose in front of him.
The man wore large glasses on his oval face, which Fong guessed were designed to keep his eyes apart, because whenever he laughed, which clearly happened often, his face threatened to fold in at the centre. He was barrel-chested and had tufts of greying hair sprouting from the top of his tight-fitting shirt. The man must have thought this stylish but no Chinese man would be caught dead wearing clothing that was too tight. And of course few had chest hair.
Something about the man made Fong want to laugh out loud. He didn’t because he was too stunned by what Westerners call serendipity but what he knew was actually meaning manifesting itself. He’d seen this strange white man before! But where? The man was already talking, something about being the West’s foremost Shakespearean scholar. Fong nodded. He wanted to speak to an expert on Shakespeare’s plays in performance because he wanted to follow up Geoff’s assertion that “great directors put their present lives into everything they direct,” and Geoff was, as far as Fong was concerned, a great director. Fong suspected that clues to what was going on in Geoff’s life were embedded in his production of Hamlet. To that end, they’d found this man for him to interrogate.
“Donny,” the man said.
“That’s your name?” Fong asked.
“Donny. Some call me Don.”
“And you’re a . . . ”
“A professor of dramatic literature in performance.”
Fong thought about that for a moment. Literature in performance, what could that mean? An image of books dancing about a stage spouting lines leapt into his head.
“Would you like to see my passport?”
“Sure,” Fong said, while he thought, “Why is this man offering me his passport?”
Donny handed him his American passport and Fong quickly understood. There it was. Don or Donny had a Class 2 visa status. Only politicians and big businessmen came in on higher classification. Directors and actors came in usually as Class 4 or Class 5 visitors. It had always pissed off Fu Tsong that academics were allowed into China on a higherstatus visa than artists who came over to actually do something. Fong handed back the passport, didn’t know where to start, so he said, “So you teach.”
“For almost thirty years.”
Fong wanted to say those were probably the longest thirty years of most of his students lives but didn’t. “Tell me your name again.”
“Don. Donny to my friends.”
Fong stared at this pumpkin of a man.
Donny put a thick, hairy fist on the desk and assumed a professorial air, clearly something he had done many times before. “At any rate, I saw Mr. Hyland’s Hamlet. Very interesting.”
“Good,” Fong said nodding, not knowing whether it was his turn to speak or not.
“It was good, quite good, I thought,” Don said answering a question that Fong had not asked.
“Me too, I thought it was excellent.”
“Are you an aficionado, Detective?”
“No, but I liked Mr. Hyland’s Hamlet very much.”
“I see,” Don or Donny said noncommittally.
“Was there anything about the production that struck you as out of the ordinary . . . ?”
“Donny. I prefer it to Don, which is so East Rutherford, don’t you think?”
Fong had absolutely no idea if he thought that or not but said, “Donny. So was there anything that struck you as unusual in Mr. Hyland’s production?”
“Well, the opening . . . ”
“Yes, I grant that.” Fong knew that the opening with Hamlet almost naked and screaming on the platform was unique, but he assumed that anything going on in the director’s head would worm itself into the production on a more subliminal level. “Other things . . . ”
“Call me Donny.”
Donny! Donny, Donny, Donny! Got it! The memory came back whole. Donny! It was years ago and his wife Fu Tsong had dragged him to the theatre. Sometimes she made him accompany her on what she called her “obligation.”
“Come on, Fong. Do it for me,” she’d said as they rushed to flag down a cab on Nanjing Lu. Fong agreed, held out his badge and a cab immediately swerved across six lanes of traffic to pick them up.
He loved Peking Opera, but modern spoken drama left him cold.
“What is this play?” he asked as the cab busted its way through a twelve-cyclist-deep line.
“This new thing, Fong. About the Qin Dynasty.”
“A new play about the Qin Dynasty? Does that make any sense?”
She gave him a be-good look.
Their seats were, thankfully, near the back of the auditorium. He was pleased to see that the four seats in front of them were empty. If boredom gave way to yet more boredom he could put up his feet and take a snooze.
She looked at him with an oddly sad expression on her face then put a slender index finger to her lips, “Shh.” The buzzer sounded and the play began although that did nothing to silence the audience who continued to chat, prepare full dinners at their seats and call across the auditorium when the fancy took them. Fong had brought along a snack, a dumpling wrapped in rice then steamed in a large grape leave, but he decided against eating it just yet.
The opening scene had something to do with trouble in ol’ Xian, a princess, a tax collector – something else. Fong had already lost interest and was about to “assume the position” when three white people and an elderly Chinese lady hustled in and took the seats in front of them.
The Chinese lady was clearly a party member with pretences of importance. Fong’d met her type before. She was of little interest to him, but the Caucasians were another matter. As head of Special Investigations in Shanghai he’d dealt with a lot of North Americans. But none quite like these three! Two were women. One was tall and darkish, pretty but somewhat put-upon – Tall Lady; the other, who Fong surmised was married to the man, was short and had a wide expanse of curly hair – Big Hair. Fong wondered for a moment if her head was just very wide. The man, Donny they called him, seemed to think he had to look after the women although it was obvious that these women needed no supervision.