Available for what, Fong wondered. He contemplated calling Commissioner Hu and begging off the Mrs. Fallon chore but decided against it. He’d need to interview her anyway.
The consul general’s abrupt departure hadn’t really surprised Fong. It occurred to Fong that the Americans were not being represented at the meeting, but rather that a single consul general was attempting to pass on information he knew he could not pass on in any other way. Or perhaps he was just an American piece of shit who enjoyed pulling the coolie’s pigtail. Fong knew that it was unlikely that he would ever find an answer to this one, so he shelved it and moved on.
He got up and closed the door to his office, but not before he saw the prying eyes of his assistant, whom he now called “Shrug and Knock.” He crossed to his desk and opened the top drawer. Sliding the things in it to one side, he popped open a virtually invisible bottom panel by using the long fingernail on the pinkie of his left hand. From the panel he removed the photographs of the body that were taken before anything had been moved. After a day of investigation he knew what some of the objects in the picture were. The body, although carved up, had been put back somewhat in its godly order. The torso was badly twisted but from above you could clearly see the figure of a man lying on his stomach, his chin in the cement, staring straight forward, his arms and legs spread. The fingers of his left hand were extended unnaturally to point directly toward the alley wall. Directly toward the wallet. The small blob of bloody pulp directly between his legs on the pavement Fong now knew was the piece of the heart the killer had chewed on and then spat out. It was no doubt overlooked as just another piece of viscera and either discarded or thrown in with all the other guts when they were transported to the Hua Shan Hospital morgue. The air sickness bag seal hadn’t been found but that didn’t worry Fong now that he knew what had been carried in the waterproof bag-half of Richard Fallon’s heart. Carried where? That he did not know yet. A left hand that points to a wallet, a piece of heart between the legs-but the fingers of the right hand were pointing as well. To what? Something had been there. Something intrinsic to the message the killer wanted to send. Something that was now gone.
He was about to dial Wang Jun’s number when the light on his phone came on. “Who?”
“Gae Fee Hai Lan.”
“Who?”
“A long nose who speaks terribly. I think he said Gae Fee Hai Lan.”
Fong was still unsure who was calling but decided to take it. “Can I help you?” Fong said in English.
“Your English is a lot better than my Shanghanese, Fong.”
With a laugh he did not feel, Fong said, “So you’re Gae Fee Hai Lan?”
“I guess so. What does that mean?”
“Water buffalo hill country or something, I don’t know, depends how you inflect it.”
Small talk dies quickly between men who hate each other. Between two men who loved the same woman.
“What can I do for you, Geoffrey Hyland?” Fong’s pronunciation of the Canadian’s name was crisp, perfect, and infinitely cold.
Geoffrey did have some shortcomings as a director but the inability to recognize true feelings in someone’s voice was not one of them. Fong’s chilliness did not escape his attention but he let it pass. “There was a message in my room to call you. So I’m calling. That’s all.”
“I didn’t leave a message for you to call me.”
“Well, someone did.” Geoffrey’s voice rose dangerously.
“And I’m telling you I didn’t,” returned Fong with the snap of a cracking whip. The silence that followed was slowly filled by the line’s electronic hum. The line now connected the two men electronically as surely as Fu Tsong’s being had connected them emotionally, in the peculiar erotic bondage of lover and cuckold.
Geoffrey considered hanging up the phone and then thought better of it. “I start rehearsal this afternoon, but maybe we could meet for dinner.”
The ludicrousness of that suggestion was clear to both men. Finally Fong broke the silence. “It would be hard for me, I’ve got a case that’s pretty explosive here.”
“The Dim Sum murder?”
“You heard.”
“The papers are having a field day.”
“The restaurants aren’t very pleased about the whole thing. Look, Gae Fee Hai Lan, maybe it is time that we sat down and talked, but it’ll have to be later. I know where to find you, at least. Once you get going you’ll never get your nose out of that damned theatre-or has that changed?”
After a brief pause, Geoffrey sighed, “Things do change, don’t they, Fong?”
That hung in the air between the two men like the half a world that separated their home cities. Neither broke the silence for almost a minute. Finally Geoffrey said, “Yeah, I’ll be in the theatre a lot, come by sometime.”
As Geoffrey hung up, an obscenity ripped up from his gut and tore at his throat. It landed flat and useless in his quiet room.
Fong suddenly felt as if he were somehow falling.
The moment of vertigo passed and he punched Shrug and Knock’s line. “Get me all the morning papers and their editors’ phone numbers.” Without waiting for a response he clicked off and called Wang Jun.
Between Huai Hai and Chong Shu there is a pleasant side street called Dong Lu. About halfway down its curved short stretch is the Long Li Guest House. On the north side of the guest house is a tea house complete with gardens. On the tea house’s south side is a small cinema specializing in American action films and softcore porno flicks. In front of the guest house, extremely expensive, mostly black, late-model automobiles were double and triple parked. All had Taiwanese plates. The Taiwanese, forty-five years after dragging their sorry asses off the mainland thoroughly defeated in war, had returned victors in commerce.
The security here was discreet. The Taiwanese clientele often less so. There was a bar called the Standing Room Only, not twenty yards from the guest house, where the girls were usually kept. They drank and played cards and planned their next shopping spree. Some of them had pock marks on their faces. Many had tracks in their arms. All had the demarcations of transient beauty that had already bloomed and was now on the wane. So the lights in the bar were kept low. The back exit from the Standing Room Only accessed the private grounds of the Long Li Guest House. A businessman could go into the bar, buy a drink, indicate his choice to the bartender and leave his key. The girl then arrived on her own, shortly thereafter, without having to go through the front reception area and potentially embarrass any wives that may have insisted on joining their husbands. The expenses of the tryst were dealt with in confidence through the hotel. They simply appeared on the client’s bill as “Cleaning.”
But on this day, the men meeting in the back room of the Long Li Guest House were not there to swap stories of favourite whores and bedding techniques. They were there to discuss the death of Richard Fallon and the arrival of half of his heart at one of their hotel rooms.
At the same time as the meeting was taking place at the Long Li Guest House, there was a more formal gathering across the Huangpo River in the Pudong’s newest building, appropriately enough, a power plant. There were no fancy cars here or girls in the bar next door. There were just the simple trappings of power, real power.
Because of the health of the old man who presided, the lights were always kept low. With the lights so dim, the meeting became more about voices than faces.
The ancient cracked Asian voice gulped air to carry its sounds: “Has our message been received, do you think?”