He looked down at his hands. On the night of his exile from Shanghai, a train porter had slammed the carriage door on his left hand. It had snapped a small bone and broken a blood vessel under the nail of the ring finger. The snapped bone he had ignored, but the broken blood vessel had forced a small pool of blood to form at the very base of the cuticle between the nail and the skin. The pain caused by the pressure took four days to pass, three days before the hard-seat journey to the west ended.
The purple stain rose as the nail grew. It was now, more than two years later, all but gone. “Like much of my life,” he thought as he walked around the cell consciously avoiding looking into the polished steel mirror a second time.
Late that night he awoke. The cell’s mesh-covered overhead bulb flooded the cell with a garish green light. Fong had no idea of the time, but he knew it was late because of the silence in the place. Jails are noisy, except in the dead of the night. Then he saw three large manilla packets on the floor of the cell.
They were the same as the one he’d seen in the car. He knelt down and opened one. There were over a hundred 3 1/2” X 3 1/2” photographs. The second contained a few less. The third a few more. The top of each photo had a hole punched in it.
He tossed the packets aside – but not through the bars.
He knew they wanted him to look at the pictures – to be lured into analyzing them. Despite that. Despite knowing that, he picked up a packet. Once he looked at the first photo he was hooked. Suddenly he was back in Shanghai. A real police officer again. The head of Special Investigations. For, if ever there was a case for special investigations – a crime against foreigners – this was it.
A boat. Naturally – they were going to a lake!
He sorted the pictures. Exterior shots, shots of a bedroom, shots of a room with a small runway, shots of a video room and shots of a bar. Shots of Triad markings and a 14K medallion.
He went back to the exterior shots of the flat-bottomed boat. He examined the Triad markings just above the waterline. They glistened. At first it was hard for him to discern that the boat was covered in ice. Then he saw the scorch marks through the ice and a shiver shot down his spine – the mongoose rolled over and blinked into waking.
Fong got up and paced. He went to look out the window, as if he were still in his office on Shanghai’s Bund. As if he could see the rising figures of the great new buildings of the Pudong industrial area just across the Huangpo River. Of course, all he saw was brick and bars. This was hardly the splendour of his office on the Bund. This was a provincial jail and he was being used, but he didn’t care. He felt alive. On the trail of something. Then he stopped himself. No. Not on the trail of anything – except a way home.
He flipped through the pictures of the boat’s exterior, separating out the photos of the Triad insignias and the scorch markings. Then he took four that had close-ups of the portals. He went to lean the pictures against the base of the wall then noticed the surface was covered with small nails placed at four-inch intervals, perfect for hanging photos like the ones in his hands.
“Fuck them,” he thought, but he couldn’t resist hanging the four pictures he’d selected. Then he chose photos of the rooms that showed exterior windows. It took him some time, but eventually he figured out the positioning of the four rooms in the boat. All were in the bow. The video room on deck level to port, the room with the raised stage beside it to starboard, the two other rooms directly beneath them.
He couldn’t guess what was midship or aft. He’d never been on a boat. He hated the water almost as much as he hated the countryside.
Then he sorted the photos of the victims. Using the wide shots of the spaces, he was able to divide the victims into their respective rooms. Quickly he realized that the five gutted men were Japanese, the two decapitated men were Caucasian (from their clothes he guessed American but he’d noticed in his last years working in Shanghai that most Westerners dressed like Americans – he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why). The three in the video room were Korean. He guessed that the seven faceless men were Chinese.
Fong hung the full-body shots beneath the photos of the rooms in which they’d been found. Then he hung the many detail photographs of each victim below the fullbody shot.
He paused for a moment and approached the pictures of the bar room. Something was missing. He checked the wide-angle shots. What was missing? What? Then he figured it out – and smiled.
By the time he had all the pictures arranged it was midmorning and there was hardly any empty space on the cell walls. It had taken him at least six hours. Maybe more. It was as if he’d fallen into the photographs and time had slipped away. Now, surrounded by the gruesome gallery, he examined the panorama of his handiwork, the order he had brought to this stupendous chaos. Another shiver up his spine. He couldn’t tell whether it was from excitement or fear.
Fong turned slowly in the midst of the images. He was an intruder here, a voyeur of the dead. Then he stopped. He understood why he’d shivered. All this death made him feel alive. Gave him a reason to be. “No,” he told himself. “A way home,” he insisted. Yet he wasn’t sure.
“Nicely done, Zhong Fong.”
Fong turned to see a uniformed officer standing outside his cell door. He immediately tucked his chin to his chest and bowed his head. But even in his brief look at the man, Fong was struck by his blunt, stocky, pimply ugliness.
“No need for that. My name is Captain Chen. I am in charge of the investigation. We are honoured to have a man of your reputation working on the case.”
Fong looked up. Captain Chen was younger than Fong. Probably in his late twenties, definitively ugly. His square hairless face bore just the slightest wisp of foreign markings. Tibetan? No, Korean. They were the only things of delicacy in his entire being. Fong pulled his eyes away from the younger man’s face. He noted the army bars on his uniform. Only Shanghai, Beijing and Ghuongdzu had their own police forces. The rest of the country was policed by the army.
Chen repeated himself. “We are honoured to have a man of your reputation working on the case.”
“I bet you are,” Fong thought. But when he lifted his chin, the smile on his lips was completely noncommittal. A Chinese smile.
Chen pulled on the door and entered. It wasn’t locked.
“If I may, Zhong Fong,” he said as he took a close-up of one of the Americans and put it under the other American’s full-body shot. “The heads had been switched.”
Fong found himself raising his eyebrows. Interested. He immediately covered by coughing into his hand.
“A specialist from the North supervised the taking of these pictures. I hope you find them adequate.”
“This ‘specialist’ knew what he was doing.”
“He was very efficient.”
Fong looked at the photos again. Each was one of a set. A shot of a body then the same from a higher elevation. Perhaps standing on the shoulders of another man. Perhaps not. But meticulous. A professional. Someone who knew his way around a crime scene. Fong took in the pictorial display again. “A lot of dead people on a boat,” he said.
“A boat covered in ice, stuck on a shoal, out in a lake. Ironically, it was also burnt.”
“Burnt in the ice?” Fong was surprised by the intensity of his own interest.
“We had a freezing rain followed by a frigid snap. The three coldest days in living memory.”
“So can I assume these were taken in March?”
“If you did, you’d be wrong. January. Very early January.”
“January? That’s over three months ago!” Fong almost shouted.
Captain Chen nodded. “It’s a sensitive case. Beijing wanted all due care taken.”