Fong smiled. So the vest was nothing more than his old enemy, vanity, at work. “And the flowers?”
“Even easier, Fong.”
“They are?”
“Yes, what are the flowers called, Fong?”
“Forget-me-nots.”
“So there it is.”
“There what is?”
Then she said the flower’s name slowly – one word at a time – Forget – Me – Not. “Surely Ophelia put them in Mr. Hyland’s pockets as a final memento, a final love token. A warning not to forget her.”
Fong shook his head but smiled.
Joan got to her feet and her face turned dark. “There is however another mystery that strikes me as potentially far more sinister than anything to do with Mr. Hyland’s death.”
Fong nodded. He knew what she was going to say.
“Who told the two Beijing men that you’d planted a bug on Xi Luan Tu? It wasn’t the snitch in the central stores. He worked for Li Chou.”
This time Fong didn’t even nod.
“Was it Captain Chen?” Joan asked.
Fong looked away.
It was almost midnight when Fong heard the knock on his office door. He’d been sitting in the dark lit only by the ambient light from the neon across the river in the Pudong. “It’s open, Captain Chen.”
The lights played chase-the-colour across the uncomely features of the young man as he entered the office and stood cap in hand. “Sir?”
Fong said nothing.
“You found out, sir?”
“Yes, Captain Chen, I found out. You betrayed me to the men from Beijing.”
After a slight pause, Chen said, “I knew you would figure it out, sir.”
“Then why did you do it?” Fong was on his feet. His voice was loud enough to rattle the glass in the window.
But Chen didn’t flinch. “Because of Lily and Xiao Ming,” he said simply. “This office is a political place. You told me that. I have to protect myself so that I can be there for Lily and Xiao Ming.”
Fong looked at the young man. The colours seemed to float across the man’s unfortunate features.
Then Fong nodded and turned to the window.
“Sir?”
“We all do what we need to do, Captain Chen.” He reached up and touched the cool glass pane of the window. “All of us do what we need to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
A long silence followed. Captain Chen stood very still. Fong stared out at the Pudong. Then Fong turned to Chen. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Captain Chen.”
“Sir?”
“We understand each other now. I will see you tomorrow. We have work to do here, Captain Chen. Much work.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Fong opened the door to the safe house without knocking. The table in the centre of the room was covered with official-looking documents. A few of the mocked-up photographs were there of Geoff in handcuffs. The room’s windows were all closed and curtained so the place was oppressively hot and stuffy despite the late hour. Fong threw open the draperies and pried open a window. It made little difference. Fong leaned out the window. Far-off he heard the gentle lap of the Huangpo River. Looking up, he thought he saw the moon about to set.
Fong checked the other rooms in the house. The elderly Beijing man wasn’t there. Then he heard the front door open.
The politico with the large raspberry stain on his left cheek whom Fong had seen with the two French contractors in his courtyard, what seemed like years ago, strode into the room. The man hoisted a heavy briefcase onto the table and began to pack up the papers.
“Where’s Sheng, the older man from Beijing?” Fong asked.
“Not here, evidently.”
“Where is he?”
The politico looked up at Fong. “You know better than to ask something like that, Traitor Zhong.”
Fong didn’t reply.
The politico continued to pack his briefcase.
“Doesn’t it ever bother you?” Fong asked, knowing full well it was better to keep his mouth shut – tight.
The man looked up from his packing. “No, it never bothers me, Traitor Zhong.”
The single word WHY leapt out of Fong’s mouth. But he wasn’t really asking. He was falling. Begging for an answer. Lost.
The man on the other side of the table was Chinese like him. He was of flesh and would die like him. He probably loved and wanted and yearned like him – yet he did things that were beyond Fong’s comprehension. Then, much to Fong’s surprise, the man answered Fong’s question. “Because, Traitor Zhong, we all need direction. It is wrong to believe that each of us wants to cut our own path. That each of us determines how and where we go. People like you have deluded yourselves into believing that your fellow citizens want to control their destiny. It is not true. It is not even remotely true. Most people, the vast majority of people, want to follow, not lead. They want to be led. We live, we follow, we die. Not hard to understand even for a person as confused as you, Traitor Zhong.”
“And do we leave this world a better place?”
The man looked at Fong for a long moment, then finally said, “How can one possibly know such a thing?” He pushed one of the documents on the table toward Fong. “As chief investigator this requires your signature, just another one of the new formalities, our little step toward transparency.”
The politico snapped his briefcase shut and then, without looking at Fong, turned and headed toward the front door of the safe house.
“People died here,” Fong said to the Beijing man’s back.
The Beijing man stopped for a beat, but he did not turn – did not respond – just left Fong alone – with his thoughts and an empty room.
Fong grabbed the official document and sat. The new state font must have been reduced in size. He held it close but it remained just a blur. He tried it at full arm’s-length – still no go. “Damn,” he muttered as he reached into his coat pocket and put on his new glasses. The fog of dark strokes cleared and the shapes emerged as characters.
As he signed the document, Joan entered the room and sat opposite him.
“Nice haircut,” Fong said.
Joan touched her ragged hair and shook her head. “How nice of you to finally notice. It makes me look Parisian, don’t you think, Detective Zhong?”
Actually Fong didn’t know from Parisian, nor did he care. Joan Shui’s short hair simply allowed him a better view of the strength inherent in her face.
“I like you with glasses, Detective Zhong.”
Fong had forgotten he still had them on. “Thanks.”
“They make you look intelligent.”
“Well, looking intelligent is something.”
“Yes, it is. Let’s get out of this place.”
A half-hour later, Fong and Joan Shui stood side by side on the Bund Promenade looking across the Huangpo River at the Pudong as he finished telling her about his confrontation with Captain Chen.
“It was the right thing to do, Fong. Now you know where his loyalties lie. You know him well enough to work with him.”
“I think so.” A silence fell between them. The distance between her left hand and his right on the railing was a mere four inches – yet it could have been a mile or seven hundred miles.
“So what happens next?” Fong asked.
Joan wasn’t sure exactly what he meant but chose to believe he was talking about her next professional move now that this “unpleasantness” was over. “Well,” she said, “Shanghai’s becoming a modern city. It’ll need its own arson department soon enough. You folks can’t always be calling over to old HK for help.”
“That’s true,” he said – but nothing more.
Somehow their hands, despite the fact that neither had moved, seemed even farther apart – no longer a mile or seven hundred miles – now a light year or twenty.