But now, as he pleaded his case before her, claiming it was just a slip of the tongue when he said “I’m lifting you and our son,” she knew differently. She applied his thinking. What could possibly make a person say that exact line? And there were very few answers. In fact there was only one. A person would only say “I’m lifting you and our son” if what the person wanted was the wife he held aloft to be carrying a son deep in her womb.
Fong was almost ready to call it quits when the brother from the country raced down the alleyway shouting, “I want my fucking carpet back.”
“Do you have something for me, comrade?” inquired Wang Jun as he threw an arm around the peasant’s shoulders.
“I do, but I want my fucking carpet first.”
He wouldn’t speak until he was shown his carpet. So Fong, Wang Jun, and the brother hustled into a patrol car and sped off to the police warehouse by the airport. Once inside, the brother was given a glimpse of his carpet and the other pieces of his property. Fong then sent everyone else except the brother and Wang Jun out of the enclosure. “So you have something for us,” said Fong.
The brother hesitated for a moment and then reached into his pocket and pulled out three small intricate white carvings. Taking them, Fong said, “These? These are what your sister took from the alley off Julu Lu?”
“Those.”
“There wouldn’t happen to be several dozen more of them would there, comrade?” snarled Wang Jun, but Fong waved the question aside and turned to go.
Catching up to Fong, Wang Jun stared at the delicate figures. “Ivory?”
“Yes, ivory.”
“Like ivory-from-elephants-type ivory?”
“The same, Wang Jun,” said Fong as an idea tickled at the side of his brain but refused to come forward. From far behind them, they heard the brother scream, “How’m I suppose to get my fucking carpet back to my house?” Ignoring this Fong asked Wang Jun, “You don’t think he beat the street sweeper to get her to tell him, do you?”
“If it makes you happy to believe that all of a sudden out of the goodness of her heart she fessed up so be it. For me, I hope he didn’t kill her. That’s all I hope.”
The murder of the Zairian consul general was all over the papers. This time, every paper in town had the story and all could have gotten it legitimately. No one jumped the gun. The inevitable call from the Zairian embassy in Beijing was handled at a higher level so Fong never even knew the content of that no doubt unpleasant exchange.
Fong was alone in his office as the dawn crested the river. On the table in front of him was a puzzle. Not a godly jigsaw puzzle this time but rather a number of human events whose points of intersection were still in doubt. One part of the puzzle was the personal data on Richard Fallon, another part was the personal data on Ngalto Chomi-between them were the three small ivory statuettes. Fong took a thick pencil and drew a line to join Richard Fallon to the ivory. Then he circled the ivory and continued the line to Ngalto Chomi. Then he put question marks over each of the connecting lines. He drew a wide arc over the ivory joining Fallon and Chomi. Again he put a question mark over that line. Below the ivory he put the few pieces of data he had on the Dim Sum Killer-weapon specs, a professional, leaving a message, daylight and populous alley kills- and drew a line to the ivory. Then he erased it. He drew lines to Fallon and Chomi and on them wrote the word “contracts.” Then he wrote out questions.
Who authorized the contracts? He drew a line from the Dim Sum Killer to an empty circle with a large question mark in it.
If a message is being sent, to whom? He drew a line from the ivory to another empty circle with a question mark in it as well.
Then he took out a piece of paper and wrote LEADS TO FOLLOW UP. Under it he put:
Shanghai Daily News publishes story before it happens
American consul tries to warn me of something, then disappears
ivory
the specs on the weapon
the shards in Fallon’s lung tissue
He divided up his personnel. Wang Jun would take the newspaper problem in his usual diplomatic fashion, Lily was following the shards, Detective Li Xiao was already at work on the weapon specs, and he suspected that the American consul was a dead end.
That left the ivory to him.
DAY FOUR
Fu Tsong had called it “the Mess.” She had labelled it “perfect Hilton Lobby art” and that is exactly where they had first seen it and where Fong was now looking at it again. It was just after 9:00 A.M. and he had not slept. But he knew what he needed. He needed to see the Mess.
The Mess was a white plaster statue about three feet tall and two feet wide that stood inexplicably in a place of honour in the lobby of the Shanghai Hilton, China’s only five-star hotel. On the left was a Mongol warrior, complete with shaved head and lengthy braid, who was riding a fighting pony. Fair enough. But this fighting pony was now rearing high on its hind legs because a huge hovering eagle was pulling a long snake from the ground near where the horse’s front feet would have been had it not been rearing at the time. Sort of fair enough. But then, just to round out the Mess, the Mongol warrior, braid flying maniacally, had drawn his sword and was leaning over ready to cut the snake in half. Now why exactly was he doing this? The Mongol warrior’s dilemma, as Fu Tsong put it, was that he was going to fall on his pigtailed head because his horse was rearing. Now it was logical to assume that the large eagle, not five inches from the horse’s nose, could be the thing causing the poor animal to rear and hence should be the object of said Mongol’s sword. But no, the sword was raised against the snake. If the horse was frightened of the snake, that danger was taken care of by the eagle. But not if the Mongol warrior had his way. Well. . . as Fu Tsong put it, it’s a mess. It had unity but no sense. It’s not art, it’s kitsch. It’s the Mess.
But Fong wasn’t so sure that Fu Tsong was right this time, because he saw sense here-not logic, but sense. He saw that the Mongol warrior was at his wits’ end. That he was inexplicably at the whim of fate. That he was falling through no fault of his own. That the warrior who was so used to control was going to meet his end completely and utterly as a joke of nature. A cosmic “gotcha.” The warrior’s reaction to this injustice was to lash out. At the nearest thing. In this case, the snake.
Fong understood that. It was what he felt now. It was why he came to the lobby of the Hilton to see the Mess.
Fong knew that the proverbial shit was going to come down on him today. A second dissection experiment on the streets of Shanghai would not go over well with the powers that be. It was going to be a shitty day, no two ways around that. But like all policemen everywhere, Fong had his sources of information and he was going to tap them before he was handed his head by Commissioner Hu. He was going to tap them until they hurt.
Fu Tsong had called it his “round up the usual suspects” mood. Casablanca was one of the few American movies, which Fu Tsong had insisted he see, that Fong actually liked. Fu Tsong had been surprised. He’d never told her that he liked it because the hero was short, like him. He would never have the chance to tell her that or so many other things, after what happened to her in the Pudong.
He slammed down hard on the brakes of his Volkswagen Santana and flipped off the flasher. With the hint of a smile on his face he crossed the street and entered the favourite whorehouse of one of his “usual suspects.” Fate might be throwing him from his horse but he was going to cut the fucking snake in half before he hit the ground.