Fong heard the hurt in her voice. She had accepted the pain but had not been able to rise to respond. She had answered while still falling. “I know Lily, I do . . . I just need a little more time.”
“To do what?” Lily demanded.
“I don’t know, Lily. Honestly, I don’t know.”
When Fong arrived home two hours later he wasn’t surprised to find the bedroom door locked to him. The baby wasn’t in her crib. She must have been in the bed with Lily.
Fong stared at the empty crib and then reached in and picked up Xiao Ming’s baby blanket.
He was surprised, when he was awakened at 4 a.m. by the sharp ring of his telephone, that he was clutching the baby blanket to his chest.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fong was expecting a call from either the banking people or the cops looking for the American hotel guest with the camcorder but it was from one of the detectives who had been at the very first meeting. Fong had ordered the man to find the head nurse from the abortion clinic at the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital – the one who had left hair and blood but no other remains in the blasted-out surgery. He’d found her – or rather, her body.
Fong stepped past the detective and entered the small sub-basement room. Like so many other Shanghanese, the head nurse of the abortion clinic of the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital had lived below ground level. The small room was moldy and felt close. It smelt of things burnt – hair, cotton, something else he couldn’t identify. Curtains covered two walls; rugs lay on the floor. “I’ve got some basics from the house warden,” said the young detective handing Fong his notepad. Fong ignored it and approached the body. It lay on its back on the central rug, its arms out, palms up – inside a lightly scorched circle that circumnavigated the body. Fong touched the darkened circle on the carpet. It was cold. Then he saw it – a thin metal thread – phosphorus. He allowed the shiver to go to the base of his spine and spiral there. Phosphorus. Much light but little heat – he had been here. Right here.
Fong looked at the rest of the room. No signs of struggle. Nothing even a little out of place or toppled over. He eyed the scorched circle again, then looked back at the body. Light scratches on the cheeks and just one deep cut at the base of the throat. A jagged ugly wound. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and picked up her left hand and looked at her nails. They could do scrapings but Fong doubted that there was anything beneath her fingernails. He checked the right hand – the same. He slid his hand under her body – nothing. He put a finger on her chin and pushed gently. The head rocked to one side. The neck clicked. He looked at the scratch marks on either side of her mouth, then he opened her mouth and felt inside. Nothing.
Fong got to his feet, ordered in a CSU team, and then took the detective to one side.
“Good work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Who is assigned to live here?”
“She is, sir.”
“What? Didn’t you check here first?”
“Certainly, but she wasn’t here then and her neighbours said she hadn’t been here for a while.”
“Then?”
“The house warden knew I wanted to speak to the head nurse so she checked in and found her – like this.”
“Why did she check?”
“Someone reported the smell of smoke coming from the room.”
“When?”
“Less than an hour ago.”
“He’s covering his tracks,” Fong muttered.
“The bomber, sir?”
“That’d be my guess.” Fong looked around. “No struggle except for those odd scratches on her cheeks. No forced entry. She knew her killer. She let him in.” Fong stopped and stepped away from the body and stood very still. “Her head was facing that way, wasn’t it?”
“Toward the curtain on that wall, right.”
Fong looked at the curtain then pulled it aside. A photograph of an old woman hung on the wall behind the curtain. “Find out if that’s her mother.”
“Why . . .?”
“Just do it, Officer.” Fong wasn’t in any frame of mind to answer questions. As he shoved his way toward the door his cell phone rang. “Dui,” he said into the device. He listened for a moment, then on a long line of breath let out a single English word:
“When!!!!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The second blast dwarfed the first. It ripped through the entire fourth floor of the People’s Fourteenth Hospital. It was hard to see how many were dead. What was not hard to see was the fear etched deep on the faces of the citizens of Shanghai and the edgy creep of panic rising like a waking dragon shaking off its lethargy and staring, wide-eyed and hungry, at the new day.
Wu Fan-zi ran past Fong into the burning hospital. An attractive Asian woman in Western dress was at his side. Fong ordered a cordon be set up around the hospital, activated the house wardens, and contacted Wu Fan-zi on his cell. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I’m leaving crowd control out here to a sergeant. You be careful in there.”
“Will do.”
“I want to be at your fifty-third birthday.”
“Me too.”
Fong hung up and took one last look at the gathering crowd – no Caucasians – then headed back to the Hilton. He was tired of being hit. He wanted to hit back.
Angel Michael had been angry. Out of control after the refusal of the head nurse. What should have been a gift, gladly received, became a murder. It enraged him. So much so that his work with the explosive at the People’s Fourteenth Hospital had been shoddy.
His pre-queued e-mails would have already reached stateside newspapers. But would they publish them after the false alarm at the Hua Shan Hospital? It was all getting messy. As he stepped into his luxury hotel suite, for the first time he wondered if he could pull it off – if he could bring back the light.
Instantly, Matthew felt a dull pain start in the nape of his neck. He waited helplessly as it moved upward until it sat directly behind his left eye. Then it exploded, obliterating his sight and releasing wave after wave of pain so intense that Matthew fell to the floor in agony. But even as the pain overwhelmed him, Matthew thought, “Why?” A line from an early Manichaean text floated up to his mouth: “I look for the light but I behold the darkness.” Yes but why, he demanded. An approaching wave of pain caught his attention then it crashed, releasing its crystalline fury. He was pulled down beneath the surface of the pain. Then he bobbed up to the air. He sensed the next wave gathering. But in the pause, the respite, a face came back to him. That woman at the Hua Shan Hospital. The one he’d seen speaking English to the Chinese man. The one who had bought the fresco that had been mistaken for his bomb – she was the one who had derailed his well-laid plans. A fierce wave of pain swamped him, but as he was dragged along the razor-sharp bottom, he saw the woman’s face and began to plot how to make her pay for what she had done to him. For, as Mani has said, “A bringer of the light must destroy those who would keep us all in the pitchy darkness.”
Wu Fan-zi knew that fire is a living thing. It consumes oxygen, constantly searches for food to sustain itself, and like all life, is programmed to maintain its existence and propagate. The fire beast inside the People’s Fourteenth Hospital was a wild thing trapped within the walls of the fourth floor of the old building.
Joan Shui crouched at Wu Fan-zi’s side in the stairwell. The firewall door to the fourth floor, the floor where the abortion surgeries were, was a mere twenty steps up from them and it was the only thing stopping the fire from racing into the stairwell. But the differential of the heat on the corridor side from the relative cool on the stairwell side was exerting tremendous torque pressure on the metal. The door was already buckling. It was getting harder to breathe in the stairwell as the blaze sucked all the oxygen it could to feed its fury. Wu Fan-zi touched the wall. It wasn’t hot but it was warmer than it should be. He pointed at the firewall door, “It’ll be behind that.”