Even as Fong was formulating his arguments against going into the water town, not the least of which was that his clothes smelled like the shit used to fertilize the rice paddies, Loa Wei Fen was watching Ngalto Chomi, Zairian consul general. Once again the agile African completed his office chores and headed down toward Fu Yu. Loa Wei Fen looked to the eastern sky. No rain today, he thought, but dust. The dry hot wind straight off the Mongolian steppes was running strong. The city’s grit would mix with the loess from the country, carried by the strong wind-by the cleansing wind of the plains. Loa Wei Fen noted that many people chose to stay indoors to avoid the dust, that the endless strings of bicycle riders on Yan’an were thinner than usual.
As he pedalled his bicycle following the black man’s car, he slipped his hand into his inside suit pocket. There the snake-handled Mongolian knife seemed to roll over into his palm as if a thing alive. A day kill in the Old City would provoke the kind of response that his employers wished. A day kill would also move him nearer to the eave of the roof. Nearer to the leap to the curved pole with the other lion cubs.
Amanda found the bus ride from Narita to the JAL hotel vaguely reminiscent of travelling through the clean New Jersey suburbs. At the hotel it took less than a minute to check her in and JAL had booked her bags all the way through to Shanghai.
The deep tub in the bathroom was a joyous sight. She had been travelling since eight in the morning and the trip had taken a total of seventeen hours. So that made it one in the morning her time, although it was 3:30 in the afternoon in Tokyo, but the next day. It didn’t matter what time it was. She was tired and a bath would unwind her enough, she hoped, to sleep. On the bed was a cotton bathrobe and a pair of paper sandals. Without bothering to draw the curtains, she removed her travelling clothes and undid her hair. Out the window there were crowds of Japanese men, many of whom would be happy to pay a healthy portion of their monthly paycheques to get a glimpse at what was offered so freely to the late afternoon sun.
The bathwater was softer than she expected. She sank into its warmth and sighed. Then, holding her breath, she slid down farther so that her head was beneath the water.
She didn’t know if the tears started while she was beneath the water or whether they began their flow when she came up for air. It hardly mattered. Her body began to heave with sobs. She didn’t know if she was crying for the death of a man she had married but had never really known or for all the lost years she had spent with that man. All she knew was that alone in a cubicle of a hotel room in Japan she finally began to mourn.
Loa Wei Fen had made a mistake, but he’d been lucky. The black man had been much stronger than he had anticipated. And the opium had made him physically unpredictable. Once he had managed to cut the African, his knife had done its work with its usual precision. It was not the knife that had faltered. He, Loa Wei Fen, was the one.
There had been no time to dawdle. No time to arrange body pieces. It surprised Loa Wei Fen that Ngalto Chomi carried no wallet. He must simply let the driver settle his accounts. But the wallet was no matter. A black man was not hard to identify in Shanghai.
It was the other thing that he had failed to leave that so angered him. It was not in fact until he was back in his room at the Portman that Loa Wei Fen reached in his pocket and remembered it. His employers would not be pleased. But more important, he was not pleased. He was trained not to make errors. He was trained to be perfect. And here he clearly was not.
He threw the slender white objects at the ceiling.
They shattered. But the sound did not pacify him. To him the ivory shards were nothing more than snowflakes falling on the roof, making it slippery for the lion cub to jump to the pole.
About the time that Amanda was sinking into her hotel tub, Fong and Wang Jun finally reached the outlying suburbs of Shanghai. Both men would have been amazed to learn that the new housing going up there looked exactly like lower-income homes in Southern California commuter communities.
Shortly thereafter in one of the alleyways off Fu Yu, a five-year-old boy brought a piece of what he thought was “funny dark meat” to his grandmother’s outdoor cook stand. The old woman’s screams did the unthinkable-they brought Shanghai’s traffic momentarily to a halt. This in turn brought the police. Which in short order brought a phone call to Special Investigations.
By the time Fong and Wang Jun got there, the crime scene had been severely compromised. The alleyway off Fu Yu was densely travelled, so despite the best efforts of the local police, it quickly had become almost impossible to tell what was left where and by whom. Fong ordered the evacuation of almost the entire alley and despite the protests of the citizens and a cellular query from Commissioner Hu, he got his way. Then he had construction site searchlights set up all along the alley and quarter-meter sector lines laid down. Seventytwo police officers picked through every inch of one of the filthiest alleys in Shanghai for the better part of twelve hours and came up with almost nothing.
Over and over again, Fong was approached with “What are you looking for?” And over and over again, he said, “I’ll know when I see it.” So they brought him everything they found. A small handful of one-fen coins, half a well-leafed-through Hong Kong porno magazine, bits of several different kinds of food in various degrees of decay, a sole from the toe of a lady’s shoe, and many more things-none of which pleased Fong. He had already found the piece of heart and the strip from the JAL airsickness bag, where he thought they would be. The Chinese driver informed the police that his Zairian charge never carried a wallet, that he, the driver, always went in after his client was finished and paid the bills. So that accounted for the wallet’s whereabouts.
As the driver headed downtown with a police officer to make a full statement, Wang Jun approached Fong. “One hand points to the guy’s ID.”
“The other to the second part of the message,” replied Fong.
“Which is?” asked Wang Jun.
“Which is what we are looking for. No! What we’ll keep looking for until we find.”
Wang Jun slipped a cigarette into his mouth. “Did you notice that the body pieces weren’t put together very well this time?”
“I noticed that.”
“Could it be that our guy is slipping? Maybe he made a mistake.”
“Perhaps.”
Wang Jun looked closely at the younger man. Fong’s face seemed hard as a river stone. Set. Not looking outward at all, rather turned inward as if probing a memory.
Fong had told her it was nothing more than a mistake. A slip of the tongue. That whatever she was carrying he would love and cherish as he loved and cherished her. But Fu Tsong knew her husband, the cop who loved the actress. She knew the pride he had in coming from the depths of the Old City to his present job, she knew his training in being a man. And she knew that part of that training insisted that he have a son.
Spending her life in the relativity of art, she adored the factual solidity of Zhong Fong. His bluntness pleased her. So did his unrelentingly straight-line maleness. He never apologized for it, yet could easily converse with her many gay and effeminate male friends from the theatre. She enjoyed the pleasure of his touch and thrilled at how after all these years she still roused him by the simple removal of her blouse. She’d catch him in the mirror watching her put on her makeup. Walking into a room with a towel around her, fresh from the shower, provoked a smile from deep inside him. And his smile made her smile. Even the momentary slip of a bra strap outside a loose blouse attracted his attention. As if they were kids-no, not kids, but young lovers who thought their love the only love in the garden of delights.
She also liked his incisive intelligence. He’d read each of her scripts and often had questions that made her see the text in new and different ways. He’d approach things deductively, always starting with “Now what would make someone use that exact phrase?” And then that liquid mind of his would put together backgrounds, often several of them that would lead an individual to say precisely those words. More often than she admitted she used his insights in her work.