“Are you really?” said Fong as he pushed in the auto stop button and the elevator continued downward.
Twenty minutes later, Fong, Captain Chen, Lily, and Wu Fan-zi were back in Fong’s office watching the amateur video. Chen slowed down the image every time the camera panned the crowd.
“He has to be there,” Fong said leaning for support against the large plate-glass window that overlooked the Bund promenade.
“Go back again, Chen,” said Fong. “There has to be a Caucasian in the crowd.”
They went over and over it, but every face, no matter how blown up or zoomed in on, was clearly Asian.
Fong began to pace. “There was phosphorus at the second blast site wasn’t there, Wu Fan-zi?”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else important?”
“Hard to tell. But basically it was the same as the first. A cage. A fetus. This time the warning said “Zai yi ci bao zha jiang gie zhe ge hei an de di fang dai lai guang ming, zai yi ci bao zha jiang shi fang guang ming zhi yao zai lai yi ci bao zha, guang ming jiang zui zhong de dao shi fang.” Fong sat at his desk, his head in his hands. Wu Fan-zi continued, “But no other real leads to follow. If there were more clues at the site we didn’t see them before the fire forced us out and that section of the building collapsed.”
“Great,” said Fong. Then without lifting his head he shouted, “Run the tape again, Chen. But slower this time. He has to be there. He has to.”
Halfway through Chen stopped the video. “What about the guy with the camera, himself?”
“Thought about it, Chen. He arrived by JAL six hours after the bombing at the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Chen. It’s good thinking. But now help me find a fucking white guy in that crowd of people outside the hospital.”
“Are you sure he was there?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be . . .?”
“Because this turned up in the sector search outside the hospital that Chen conducted,” said Fong placing a transparent evidence bag on the table. Through the plastic everyone could see the note that Angel Michael had dropped.
“What does it say, Fong?”
“THIS BLASPHEMY MUST STOP. THE LIGHT WILL COME,” said Fong.
Wu Fan-zi muttered, “Same fucking words we found etched in the sheathing.”
Fong nodded. “Play the tape again, Chen, he has to be there.”
But no matter how slowly Chen went – the faces stayed Asian.
“Asians,” said Fong standing and moving toward the plate-glass window. The new Pudong Industrial District shone hard and bright across the Huangpo River. “All Asians. But he’s an American. All Asians. No Caucasians and how would a Caucasian get in and out of the hospitals without drawing attention to himself anyway?”
“He could have Chinese working for him,” Lily answered.
Fong touched the glass. “No he couldn’t,” Fong thought. He caught his reflection in the window. He was beginning to look like an old man. Maybe it was just the exhaustion. Or maybe it was the fear that he was nowhere with this case. “And this guy’s going to strike again – and soon,” he whispered to the window. “One more should bring the light to this dark place. One more could release the light. Just one more and the light will be free at last.”
“Fong?” Lily prompted.
Suddenly Fong lashed out at his image in the plate-glass window. The thick pane shattered from the impact of his fist. Lily shrieked. Wu Fan-zi ran to his old friend but Fong pushed him aside. “Don’t you all understand! We have a mad man on the streets of our city and we have nothing – not a single fucking clue who he is.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Robert peeled off another 1,000-yuan note and put it on the dirty tablecloth. Across from him the small man eyed the money with the kind of disdain that Robert had come to expect. On the far side of the restaurant, an aging beauty was showing a new girl how to properly deliver a drink to a table. Much attention was given to turning the body so that the customer would be looking directly at the young waitress’s chest.
Why did his informants always want to meet in cheesy places like this? Well, better than the new “high concept” restaurants that were all the thing in Shanghai. The newest and most successful of these was an eatery called Cool Chains that was a mock-up of a Chinese federal prison. Diners ate in their own cells, receiving their food through a metal slot. Ridiculous.
The man across the table cleared his throat. “Go ahead, spit. It doesn’t bother me,” Robert thought.
At first, bribing people for information about the fate of his sister Rivkah had been difficult for him. But over his three years of inquiry he had acquired an appreciation for the finer points of the art. In fact, he had of late, gained a genuine taste for it. Just as he had for the gelatinous Shanghanese dishes that made most Westerners’ gorges rise.
The man across the table extended a pinky finger with a long buffed nail and poked at the money as if he were not sure whether it was alive or dead. The finger retracted. Robert added another 1,000-yuan note to the pile. The man smiled. Robert had done this little dance many times and knew he was now close to getting answers to his questions.
His investigations had taken him down two paths. The first had to do with the events leading up to and the eventual period of the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. It was relatively easy to find this information and not all that expensive. But the second path of investigation, into the life of the infamous Iraqi Jew Silas Darfun, had taxed both his ingenuity and the bankroll he had amassed from his illegal trading in antiquities.
Silas Darfun had somehow, even in death, erected tall thick walls around his secrets. Robert hoped the man across the table might just show him a way over those walls.
“And you would like to know what precisely about Mr. Darfun?”
“You were his gardener?”
“One of his gardeners. It was a big place. It needed many gardeners.”
“And you were with him during the war?”
The man cocked his head and gave a crooked smile. “And what war is it that you refer to? The war of liberation?”
Robert hadn’t met this form of resistance before. The man knew perfectly well which war he was talking about but Robert didn’t know the name the Chinese used for the Second World War. While doing work in the American South Robert had been astonished to hear the American Civil War referred to by Southerners as the war between the states or the war of northern aggression. He’d quickly learned that south of the Mason/Dixon line referring to the conflict by anything but those two terms led to an intense silence. So he feared not being able to come up with the Chinese name for WW II would silence this gardener.
“The time of Japanese occupation.”
“Yes, I was there throughout that time.”
Fine, that hurdle was behind him. “Were you there when Mr. Darfun took in the children?”
The man pulled out a cigarette, a Snake Charmer, and struck a match against the table. Robert controlled his impulse to pull away from the flame. Abitter cloud of smoke escaped the man’s lips, then he began to cough. The cough shook him like a strong wind does a piece of laundry satayed out an apartment window on a bamboo pole. The shaking subsided and he picked a tiny brown flake off his tongue as if that bit of tobacco had caused the coughing fit.
“Which children would that be?”
Robert knew that Silas had gained intense notoriety in both Shanghai’s Chinese and Jewish communities when he married his Chinese mistress. He had also ruffled many feathers when he and his wife took in forty street children and raised them as their own. Robert looked at the man.
The man smiled thinly and let out another bitter cloud of smoke, “Ah, you don’t mean the street children – you mean the Jew brats?” Robert’s shocked look seemed to please him. “You have been asking questions about Mr. Darfun for almost three years now. Surely you don’t think you have been able to keep such inquiries secret.”