A young German couple was guided into the room. They stood very close together. He was shackled hand and foot. Fong flipped open their file. “Mr. and . . .?”
“My wife, Mrs. Helen Tator.” His English was fine although the accent caught Fong off guard. He totally ignored the shackles that bound him.
Fong allowed a smile to come to his lips.
“What can we do for you, sir?” The man’s voice was icy.
“You are in Shanghai on business?”
“Yes, I’ve been here for two weeks. My wife just arrived yesterday. It’s her first time in China. I doubt she’ll wish to return.”
“Really,” Fong said pushing that aside. Fong glanced down at the file in front of him to get the figures right. “You had seventeen-thousand-five-hundred American dollars transferred to your account in Shanghai on Monday of last week Mr. Tator and the funds were removed in twenty-five-hundred-dollar increments.” He looked up. “There’s only five thousand dollars left.” Mrs. Tator was obviously shocked. She went to say something but Mr. Tator shot her a look. Fong watched the body posture of the two change. They were no longer putting on the show of being together.
“She must be quite a woman,” Fong said simply.
“Who must be?” asked Mrs. Tator sharply.
Fong smiled – she did speak English. He’d had it up to his eyeballs with being nice to wealthy Western businesspeople who thought they had every right to do whatever they fucking well wanted to in Shanghai. “Why, Mrs. Tator, the woman your husband was paying twenty-five-hundred dollars a night.” The moment he said it he was sorry that he’d ventured into this territory. Revenge was never as sweet in actuality as it was in anticipation.
“Why did you do this, Inspector?” Mr. Tator’s question was surprisingly simple and honest. Almost the question of a child asking a parent about some misdeed – like leaving Mommy for another woman. “Because some foreigner is setting off bombs in our hospitals and he must be getting his financing from outside the country,” spat back Fong, more angry with his own rash behaviour than with the Tators.
“And you thought I was this person,” said Mr. Tator. “Just for the record, Inspector, I have been paying that money to a registered agency of the government of the People’s Republic of China in an effort to secure an infant. It is why my wife is here. It is why I am here. It is what the money was used for. We are unable to have a child of our own.” He reached into his pocket and produced a series of Interior Ministry receipts and put them one after another in a straight row on the desk in front of Fong. “Do you have any more questions for me, sir? Or have you done with insulting me and my wife?”
Fong waved his hands and the officers unshackled Mr. Tator. Fong started to apologize but the look of pure racial hatred on Mrs. Tator’s face stopped him. Just for an instant he considered doing what he could to stop the adoption. Then he saw Mr. Tator’s eyes. They were pleading with him not to.
“Please,” he said, “I will be very good to this child. I will.” Fong noted Mr. Tator’s use of the first person pronoun. “I know my wife, officer. I do.” His plea reminded Fong of another case where a man thought he knew his wife. Fong was just a young cop long before he was in Special Investigations. A house warden had called. There had been screaming heard coming from a small room and the door was locked. Fong had broken down the door easily enough but what greeted him was not so easy for him to forget. A child had been impaled against a wall with a kitchen knife through his side. The mother stood beside him covered in blood, her eyes wild. The father stood against the far wall, his sister behind him cowering. When Fong entered, the mother immediately grabbed a cleaver and headed toward him. The husband leapt on his wife’s back, tackling her to the ground. Fong took the cleaver from her. Hatred roamed the woman’s eyes – and madness, most palpable. The boy was rushed to the hospital and survived. The husband pleaded with Fong to allow him to care for his wife, that she was sick, that he knew his wife – didn’t need to be in jail – needed to be looked after. Fong had relented. Three days later the husband was found dead in the alley behind the building.
Fong turned to Mr. Tator. “If anything happens to that baby-”
“It won’t.”
Fong nodded.
After the Tators were escorted out of his office, Fong sat for some time. He was tired. His fatigue was clearly affecting his judgment. He wanted to lash out but he didn’t have a target for his rage. Then the phone on his desk rang and a glimmer of hope danced across his face.
They’d found the white guy with the camcorder.
Robert Cowens, Devil Robert to most of his Chinese associates, stood very still watching the Chinese children. They swarmed around the Caucasian guests just as they had the other times he had visited Shanghai’s famous Children’s Palace. He looked at the mass of children, then up to the small balcony on the south side of the vast entrance hall in which he stood. It didn’t take much imagination to see Silas Darfun’s ghost looking down at the assembled Europeans who had come to ogle his Chinese children. Well, why shouldn’t old Silas’s ghost be here – this place had been his home. After all, it was the very house in which he had adopted and raised his street urchins – and others, if Devil Robert’s father was correct. The house was actually a mansion built in the late twenties. It sat on the triangle of land at the crossing of Ya’nan Lu and Nanjing Lu. The property was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high, broken-glass-topped wall of field stone. On the southern wall along the much travelled Nanjing Lu side, a governmental “photo” lesson was on display for the populace. In the ten simple photographs a corrupt official is captured and tried and apologizes to the people of China and is executed. Throughout the city these graphic reminders that your government is watching you are on display. The forty-two-room mansion, sitting gracefully behind the wall, was classic English Victorian – rendered entirely in dark Asian hardwoods. Lofty ceilings and stained glass added an air of cathedral to what was actually a rural British palace design. Needless to say, a rural British palace – complete with extensive gardens – was a complete anomaly in Shanghai’s urban crush.
The tour guide’s English was better than usual for the People’s Republic of China. A lot better than the first guide Robert had when he initially ventured into the castle keep of his enemy.
Robert felt a small hand grab his fingers. Looking down he saw a round-faced five- or six-year-old Han Chinese boy tugging at him. The boy opened his smiling mouth and shouted: “Well Come t’China!!” Three or four times. Robert finally replied in Mandarin, “Shei, sheh.” The boy’s smile grew and he shouted in Mandarin to his companions, “This stinky one thinks he speaks Chinese.” The others laughed. Then Robert’s little snot pulled hard on his hand and yelled, “Come! Dharma Club.” They surely meant drama club, but it certainly did sound like Dharma Club. “You come Dharma Club.”
Robert and about half of the large group of Caucasians were “Shanghai’d” up a wide set of steps and shepherded into an expansive room that had a raised stage at one end. Unlike the other art rooms that he had seen on previous trips, the “Dharma” room seemed to be run by the children, not the teachers – the phrase inmates not wardens came to mind. The first twenty minutes of the children’s performance took just under half of forever. Bad dharma does that.
Robert knew that in the Children’s Palace children were taught in the discipline most appropriate to their talents. Those with musical skills were trained to play instruments. Those with physical gifts were trained in dance. Those with drawing skills were trained to paint. From the dharma performance it was clear to Robert that when a child had an artistic bent but no particular skill – or shame – they were guided toward the dharma program.