“I’m not on trial here, Li Xiao,” snapped back Wang Jun.
Li Xiao looked at the older man and wondered what was in it for him. He’d always assumed that Wang Jun and Zhong Fong were close. But a sixty-year-old cop staring a pension in the face in a city whose inflation rate might shortly skyrocket was an easy mark. Easy to turn-even against a friend. Out of the side of his eye he saw Shrug and Knock smile. The crosscurrents in the room were intense. Clearly Shrug and Knock was having a good time. The commissioner was staring down Wang Jun, and it seemed that both the coroner and Lily were unnaturally silent.
“Any new physical evidence?” Li Xiao barked out.
“We only found pieces of the two bodies from the construction site. Small fragments. Cement was never intended as a preservative of human flesh. But nothing new has come to the morgue, so I wonder why I am here,” the coroner said.
“Nothing new has landed in Forensics either,” said Lily.
Li Xiao looked around the table and finally bellowed, “Then why are we all here?”
After a moment the commissioner rose. Shrug and Knock followed suit. “You are here to arrest and convict Zhong Fong for the murder of his wife. That is why you are here. I want him apprehended and brought in with all haste. I want our case against him made as quickly as possible. In the meantime, when you catch him, he’s to be kept in Ti Lan Chou Prison.” Then directly to Wang Jun, “Is that clear?”
Wang Jun nodded. The commissioner and Shrug and Knock left the room.
Ti Lan Chou was the political prison perched on the east reach of the Huangpo near its confluence with the Yangtze. It was the largest prison of its kind in China and hence probably the largest of its kind in the world. People were held there for crimes against the state. Sentences were long. Never commuted. No pardons or bail. Lots of time spent in sweatshops making goods that the state sold to the West. It was not a prison with which Special Investigations dealt. This was federal police territory. Even in a hardened policeman like Li Xiao, the threat of Ti Lan Chou Prison struck a rich vein of fear. Li Xiao knew why Zhong Fong was to be held there. It would give the feds time to rig a case that would be presented to the public in photographs, which were referred to as object lessons and could be viewed in various strategic locations throughout the city. These sets of photographs, which detailed crimes and punishments, were immensely popular during the Cultural Revolution, a regular people’s art form. Li Xiao’s favourite had been the one that was up for months near Jing An Park on the Nanjing side. It consisted of several gory photographs of the murder victim followed by photographs of an arrested suspect, photographs of the suspect tried, and finally photographs of the suspect executed-a complete morality play on six yards of fence. It was indeed very impressive and bespoke tremendous efficiency on the part of the police and the judiciary. All well and good except that Li Xiao had worked on that case and they’d never caught the perpetrator. What they had found were photos of him which had been cleverly doctored into this cute little political lesson. The photo technicians had advanced their art mightily since the days of Mao swimming the Yangtze.
Li Xiao knew that with the priority APB issued by the commissioner they would catch Zhong Fong. That was for sure.
Li Xiao was troubled, though. Troubled by the timing of it all. Troubled by the arbitrariness of it all. Troubled by what he felt was the betrayal of a friend.
Wang Jun’s new portable phone rang in his pocket. Li Xiao looked at the man. Would a man sell a friend for a phone line? In Shanghai, maybe? But no, it would have to be bigger for Wang Jun. He was alone in the world. No wife, no children. And age with its inevitable inevitability was working its terror on him. Where was honour in this city of greed? Things were truly getting out of hand.
He almost didn’t hear Lily guide the conversation round to the Dim Sum Killer case. She had information on the bike and interesting tidbits from three informers. As she went through these Li Xiao pulled out the photo of Loa Wei Fen and put it on the table.
“And this is?” asked the coroner, at last interested in the conversatIon.
“A man trained to work with a swolta, a six-inch double-sided blade with a piercing point. He also is in Shanghai as you’ll note by the airport sign in the photo. He’s ambidextrous too,” said Li Xiao.
“Distinguishing marks?” asked the coroner.
“A cobra carved into his back. That distinguishing enough for you?” Then turning to Wang Jun, “I guess you’re the chief on this one now, do you think that’s enough for an APB on a real killer?”
Lily took the phone out of her mother’s hands before the old woman could say hello. She knew who it’d be. Before the caller could say anything, she rifled off a phone number and an address and then said, “Half an hour on the dot. I won’t call twice. Don’t call here again.” As she hung up she said to her mother, who was looking shocked, “A date, Mom, your little girl’s got a date.”
Exactly half an hour later Lily dialled the number of the payphone in the kiosk at the corner of Delicious Food Street and Huai Hai. It rang once and Fong picked it up. He was dressed in an old blue padded Mao jacket and wore a cap. His hair had been cut off and dirt was worked deep into his palms. There was a nasty cut across his cheek as if he had shaved that morning in cold water. He looked older. Worn. He wore army issue spectacles. Fong listened to the news about the meeting. He openly gasped when he heard about the idea of arresting him and putting him in Ti Lan Chou Prison but he managed to control his fear.
“Can you get me the picture of this Loa Wei Fen and the reports from our snitches?”
“How?”
“I don’t know, Lily, you’re the devious one-think of something devious.”
“Do you remember the case of the boy with the bike?” Fong certainly did; it was one of his first cases as a member of the Shanghai Police Department. A plump, six-year-old boy had taken a bicycle from a fourteen-year-old neighbour and ridden it on the sidewalk. The bike, being too big, was too much for him to control and he had run right into an old man. The man staggered onto the street had a heart attack and died on the spot. His family went nuts.
When Fong arrived, the dead man was still on his back in the street, snarling traffic. His wife, completely ignoring him, was screaming at the boy, whom she was holding against the wall with her strong peasant hands. Her aged sister had slipped a clothesline over a tree and then around the boy’s neck and was heaving mightily, trying to hoist the boy off his feet and hang him in the middle of the busy block. A crowd had gathered around them and was offering unsolicited advice on the art of hanging fat kids. It took all of Fong’s moral authority and the help of three block wardens to break up the would-be lynching.
After calling for a coroner Fong had walked the boy, who still had the rope around his neck, back to his home. As soon as he handed the boy over to his doting parents he turned completely unrepentant. He snarled at Fong and screamed that he should arrest those stupid old ladies and that the old man had had his turn and was better off dead. One less old revolutionary idiot. He was only sorry he didn’t get more of them. But he would with the next bike he took. He was going to be a businessman and drive a big car, his fat little mouth said. Not some stupid policeman.
At that comment Fong grabbed the roll of fat around the child’s neck, pulled him toward a park down the way and would have beaten the daylights out of him had Lily not happened to have been there flirting with her boyfriend.
She took the boy from Fong and brought him home. “I know which park you’re talking about,” said Fong.
“I’ll leave the things you want in the garbage can by the statue of the Long Nose. Give me an hour. I don’t want to see you, understand?”
“I do Lily.”
“In the meantime, the whore from the opium den called in. I don’t think anyone else got the information. You check her out and by the time you’re finished with her you can go to the park to pick up the stuff.”