“I took my shoes to the cobbler.”
“Very good. Good, now watch the words.” He twisted some dials and the sentence split in two, the part on the left higher than the part on the right. Then the good doctor took a much-used chopstick that seemed to have the remains of a bean sprout stuck to the end of it and began to wave it back and forth in front of Fong’s eyes, “Just tell me when the two parts of the sentence align with one another. I mean when they are side by side. You could think of them as forming one long line. So that they would say ‘I took my shoes to the cobbler.’ If you get my meaning.”
Fong had got his meaning long ago but was unable to get a word in edgewise so the part that had been higher was now lower and they had to do the whole thing again. This time it worked fine, although Fong had trouble not laughing at the image of this large, round, doughy man sitting on a small stool with wheels moving a dirty chopstick back and forth very rapidly, the remains of the bean sprout moving in counterpoint to the stick.
Forty minutes, two more protestations that he had never met Mrs. Jian, and seven times being called Mr. Jian later and the good doctor informed Fong that he needed to wear glasses. What he called corrective lenses.
It had never occurred to Fong that he would need glasses. And even more important, it had never occurred to him that his vanity would resist the very idea.
Dr. Wasniachenko finished writing out a prescription just as Fong’s cell phone rang. Fong flipped it open, “Dui.” He listened for a moment, then got up as he said, “Where exactly?” He put on his coat saying, “Cordon it off. I want to get in before Li Chou, okay?”
Fong rushed out, leaving the prescription for his glasses between two of Dr. Wasniachenko’s plump fingers.
“Yet another victory for vanity – just the reason we Ukrainians lost our freedom to the Russians,” the good doctor thought.
But Dr. Wasniachenko was not as addled as he appeared. While he popped the prescription into an envelope and jotted Fong’s address on the outside, he phoned the Office of the Commissioner of Police for the Shanghai District and informed the duty officer there that Detective Zhong Fong would have to wear prescription lenses if he was to stay on the force. True, it was not until three days later that he remembered the prescription in the envelope, and not until two days after that that he got around to delivering it.
CHAPTER THREE
The white man’s left cheek was pressed hard against the green blotter that covered the centre of his chrome-and-glass desk. The blotter had done, with admirable efficiency, what blotters are designed to do. Of course, it was blood, not ink, that had been sucked into and then successfully held by the porous fibres of the material.
Fong looked at the small weapon on the floor beside the dead man. “Guns,” he thought, but resisted the impulse to kick it aside. Fong hated guns and hadn’t fired one, even on a practice range, since his fluke shot had felled the Chinese-American arsonist who called himself Angel Michael. Fong actually found guns to be stupid. They made very bad hammers and only adequate paperweights. What they were good at – in fact, all they could do – was kill. Even little guns like the one on the floor beside his foot.
Fong took a pen from his shirt pocket and used it to tilt the dead man’s head, exposing a tiny exit wound beneath the now tattered right earlobe. The small calibre of the bullet had caused little damage on its voyage in one ear and out just below the other. This guy was lucky to have managed to kill himself with such a narrow projectile. If lucky was the right word – and, if in fact, he had killed himself.
Fong told the other officers crowding the room to leave but signalled Captain Chen to stay. Chen took a small digital camera from his pocket and began to collect images. Fong liked this country cop he’d met way out at Lake Ching, although it was somewhat more complicated now that Chen was married to Fong’s ex-wife, Lily, and was stepfather to his daughter, Xiao Ming.
Fong fished the dead man’s wallet out from a coat pocket and checked his ID. “He’s an American.” “Should I notify the consulate, sir?” Chen asked, taking out a pad and pencil.
There was a time in Fong’s life when he would have responded with a jibe about Americans’ desire to be first to know everything about everything, but he was past that. “Not yet.” Chen looked up from his notepad. “They don’t need to know just yet, Captain Chen.”
Fong moved behind the large desk at which the dead man sprawled – and would sprawl forever if he were not moved – then turned back to the room. It was a small office in one of the dozens of gleaming new towers in the Pudong. But it was hardly elegant. “What’s the nameplate on the office door say, Chen?”
Chen opened the door to check then turned back to Fong. “I can’t tell, it’s in English.”
“Sorry,” said Fong as he moved to the door. “International Exchange Institute. Pretty neutral, I’d say. Like calling a street Avenue Road.”
Chen didn’t laugh. He still didn’t know when he was allowed to laugh in Fong’s presence. All he could think of saying was, “Do they exchange money?”
“Not in any normal sense or they would have been registered with our office. Special Investigations looks after banking, as well as crimes against foreigners.”
“I know, sir. So what do they exchange?”
Fong thought about that for a moment then dismissed the question and returned to the body. The cops in Forensics weren’t happy when Fong insisted on being left alone with bodies, especially if he got to the crime site before them. “Just more turf wars in the department. Just the desire to identify exactly who owns which box. Tough,” he thought as he canted his head toward Chen. The younger man crossed over to him. The two of them gently lifted the dead man from the desktop and leaned him back in the overly large chair. The man’s features were rounded, his nose tinted a bright red from an array of tiny broken blood vessels. Fong felt the material of the jacket – very fine, very expensive even for foreigners in Shanghai. He checked for the label and made a note, a Hong Kong private tailor. Then he looked at the man’s hands. Heavy, beefy and deeply calloused. He turned to Chen.
“Expensive suit, but worker’s hands,” said the younger man.
Fong nodded. A quizzical look crossed Chen’s face, or at least Fong thought that was what that look was.
Fong pulled aside the dead man’s tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He paused for a beat, then quickly rolled up the man’s shirtsleeves and pant legs. Not an inch of the exposed skin was free from the tattoo artist’s needle. “Find out the style. See if it was local. It may have been Hong Kong, like the suit.”
Chen started to photograph the skin art.
“Who heard the gunshot?”
“His secretary.”
“She’s here?”
“Drinking downstairs in a bar.”
“We let her . . . ?”
“She called us from there. I put an officer at the door.” Fong nodded and began to move about the room again.
Chen had worked with Fong several times since Lake Ching and knew the procedure. Fong prowled and Chen waited. Finally feeling he had waited long enough, Chen asked, “Should I bring her up?”
“No. Bars are just as good for interrogations as offices.”
“It’s a suicide, right?”
Fong wanted to agree but he was troubled by the calibre of the gun. He was troubled by a big man even owning such a small gun. It was a woman’s gun. Fong was also troubled by a man committing suicide. In China, suicide was a woman’s choice. More often a countrywoman’s choice. Most often accomplished by swallowing the omnipresent clear colourless pesticide provided by the government. But then again this was an American urban male, not a Chinese rural female. Fong gently returned the man’s head to its original position on the desk. “Call in Li Chou’s Crime Scene Unit and Forensics. And get our business folks on this. I want to know exactly what the International Exchange Institute does.”