Chen followed the digital instructions to the memory. He punched in 12/28 and three punches later several blinking zeros appeared in a neat digital line.
Chen was about to apologize, but Fong cut him off and turned to the reporters. “You keep a phone log don’t you?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Fong followed the man’s eye line to a well-thumbed notepad on the desk. He flipped it to December 28. There, logged in as the sixth call of the day, was an eightdigit number preceded by the Beijing area code.
“Hey!”
“We’re taking this as evidence.” Before anyone could complain further, Fong headed toward the door with the phone log under his arm. He had already memorized the number. Fong repeated the number slowly to himself. Was this a way back to a rogue in Beijing? Probably not, but at least it was a place to begin. He looked down at the tracking bracelet on his leg. Its single red eye blinked up at him. “A way to be free of you, you cyclops,” he thought. He didn’t dare think it might be a way to get home, back to Shanghai.
Half an hour later Chen pulled the Jeep up outside the Xian morgue. The coroner looked ancient. He was sitting on the poured concrete steps with his pants rolled up exposing his bony pale shins. Fong got out of the car and went over to him.
“You asleep, Grandpa?” The coroner looked up at Fong and shook his head. “Sick?” The old man looked away. “What then?”
The coroner spat on the pavement. Then said one word: “Typhoid.”
Fong suddenly felt he was sweltering with fever, his grandmother looming over his bed. Her words hot with anger at his sickness, his weakness: “Die boy if you’re going to, but be quick about it.”
Years later a ragged man had come to the rooms he shared with Fu Tsong at the theatre academy and announced that Fong’s grandmother was gravely ill and had requested his presence. He’d slammed the door in the man’s face. Then he warned Fu Tsong not to question him about this. Not about this!
He shook himself free of the memory and asked, “This girl from the island, this Chu Shi, she died of typhoid, Grandpa?”
“That’s what the autopsy report says,” he said, struggling to his feet.
“But that can’t be. They’ve been farming with feces as manure for ages. Why would typhoid all of a sudden break out?”
“It didn’t, Fong.”
“It didn’t . . . what?”
“This was a cultured strain of typhoid.”
“A what?”
“Cultured strain.” On seeing Fong’s lost look, the old man spat on the pavement a second time and said, “It was grown in a lab, Fong. This strain can’t naturally occur in nature. It was grown. Planted. It was cultured.”
He moved past Fong toward the car, his figure even more bent now than before. As if the extent of human evil were weighing him down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fong insisted that they drive back to Ching immediately. Lily and Chen protested, but Fong was adamant that the work could only be completed near the lake. He refused to specify what work. Chen drove; Lily sat beside him. The coroner sat in the back. He hadn’t spoken since his announcement about the cultured typhoid on the steps of the Xian morgue. No one spoke much.
Fong closed his eyes. His thoughts bounded from image to image as the Jeep bounced along the pitted road. He didn’t open his eyes until they stopped in front of the abandoned factory. It was already dark.
When they entered, Fong saw a large stack of boxes by the door.
“More projectors, sir. I thought they might help,” said Chen.
Fong nodded. They couldn’t hurt.
After a quick meal, Fong sat by himself beneath the bare bulb that illuminated his wide, flat-topped desk. Lily sat in the far corner, a book on American patent law on her lap. The book looked like it weighed in excess of forty pounds. The coroner dozed in his chair. Chen was spending the night at home with his “sad” wife.
Memories of his office on the Bund in Shanghai flooded through Fong as he slowly cleared his desktop. He took out the box of chalk Chen had brought him shortly after he arrived in Ching. That seemed a long time ago.
He selected a piece of chalk. This was his own private ritual. Something he didn’t share – not even with Fu Tsong. She would have laughed at him. He couldn’t have borne that.
He rolled the piece of chalk in his fingers.
A piece of chalk was the only gift he’d ever gotten from his grandmother. She claimed his father had been able to draw with “stupid things like this.” Landscapes. Gossamer impressions of things he’d never seen. Fong couldn’t draw a straight line – with a piece of chalk or without it. But he could think very well with a piece of chalk in his hand.
He turned on the projectors. Images of the death rooms surrounded him. After a moment he flicked them off and stared at the bare desktop as if its ancient wood grain would spur him to thought. Then he drew a large circle at the top. In the circle he wrote the words DNA PATENT WANTED. In smaller letters beneath that he wrote From the Islanders. Then in bold letters he wrote WHAT KIND OF DNA?
It all started there somehow.
At the bottom he drew another circle and was about to write in it but changed his mind and drew a circle two-thirds of the way down. In this circle he wrote the words SEVENTEEN DEAD FOREIGNERS ON A BOAT.
“They were not the end, just a means to an end,” he said aloud. Lily glanced in his direction then returned to her tome. “And Hesheng – the man whose name means ‘in this year of peace’ – was murdered because he might lead us to that end.”
He drew a line from the DNA PATENT WANTED From the Islanders circle to the SEVENTEEN DEAD FOREIGNERS ON A BOAT circle and then continued the line down to the circle at the bottom.
The empty circle at the bottom. There was always an empty circle to be filled at the bottom.
Then he drew two parallel lines from top to bottom on either side of the page. Fire and ice. “Where do parallel lines meet?” he muttered. “Never,” he said aloud. Then he rethought that. No. No law defies death – or endless life. “Hesheng – in this year of peace,” he whispered. Then he smiled, looked at the piece of chalk, almost said thank you aloud, and set to work.
An hour later he had almost filled the desktop with circled words and connective lines. A maze of interlocking events finally began to yield up their pattern – evidently parallel lines do meet.
At the very bottom of the diagram in the empty circle he wrote in heavy letters HOW DID THE GIRL GET TYPHOID?
Then he recircled it three times.
“Why all the lines, Fong?”
He hadn’t heard Lily approach. In fact, he didn’t realize that she had put a hand on his shoulder. Then he did and felt awkward but pleased. She sensed his discomfort and removed her hand. “Why does the girl who died from typhoid get so many circles, Fong?”
“She might be the link back to the rogue in Beijing, Lily.”
“That’s what they want you to find for them, isn’t it, Fong?”
“Yeah. They sure as hell didn’t bring me back from west of the Wall to find out who committed these murders. They really couldn’t care less who slaughtered those men. All they want to know is who their opposition is – the name of the rogue in their midst.”
“That phone number in Beijing?”
He nodded, but there were still big pieces missing, pieces that fit in smoothly. Pieces that joined it all together. He stared at the diagram. A phrase popped into his head. Aloud he said, “And they fish in all weather.”
“Who does?”
“And one of them helped the whore Sun Li Cha to safety.” Suddenly he was in motion. As if the building had tilted and he was loping down a slope. He would have been surprised to know that the piece of chalk in his hand was spinning rapidly between his fingers.