Very slowly, without any inflection, Fong replied, “No, I don’t, Geoffrey.”
Pulling a mock look of shock Geoffrey said, “Why don’t you come up into the light like the rest of us lovelost buffoons?”
“I’m not an actor, Geoffrey.”
“So you say. So you say, Fong.”
“You have two children, don’t you Geoffrey?”
Geoffrey quickly corrected him. “Had two children, a boy and a girl.”
“Why had?”
Then in a voice filled with self-loathing Geoffrey yelled back, “Had because after I met your wife, your fucking amazing wife, I could never really go back to them. Not really. Children know. Everyone knows. Even you know, don’t you, Fong? Look into your heart, Fong! You know, don’t you!” He took a long pull from his bottle.
The stream pumped water. The ancient lights flickered. And Fong knew that Geoffrey Hyland was adrift in an ocean of pain and recrimination. Enough of both to have driven him to the police. So at least Fong had learned that much.
Leaving the theatre Fong hugged the sides of the buildings as he made his way toward his apartment. Untalented students rehearsing scenes; an extraordinarily loud television set in the open-sided faculty room; the staircase leading up to the apartment. No guards, no police. It wasn’t possible that they would have overlooked his apartment with an all-points-bulletin out for his arrest. He pushed open a basement door and tiptoed past the couple asleep on a mattress on the damp concrete. Then he ran up a back stairway to the second floor.
Even as he opened the door to his apartment, he knew that he had not been the first to open that door this evening. Lived-in rooms, especially rooms of love, have a consistency to them. A firmness that links one object to the next in a continuous flowing idea.
There was no flow here now. At first he thought it was because of him and Amanda but quickly his eye lit on the telltale clues of another kind of brief but serious intrusion. The bathroom door, always hard to close, now left slightly ajar; the puff in the drapery fabric that always results when opened and not given the necessary attention when subsequently closed-but more than these telltales was the feel of the other’s presence.
As the key was turned in the lock and the door cracked open, Loa Wei Fen allowed the knife to turn in his right hand. His left was pressed flat against the surface of the top of the armoire, upon which he was hiding. “Always attack from above.” The leap would be awkward unless the policeman, who was now dressed like a peasant, moved one step farther into the room.
Loa Wei Fen had been waiting on top of the armoire for over two hours. The police search finished over three hours ago. He had watched the search while crouching on the tile roof across the way. There were so many police and then none. This troubled him. So he waited for a full hour before slipping into the apartment.
He too had felt the former solidity of the place. Anger surged through him and he reached for his knife.
Fong stood in the door, a slash of light from the hallway across the apartment’s carpet. What was wrong here? The police had been here, yes. But that was not all that he was sensing. What else was here? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that his body was preparing him to run. And that’s what he did. Leaving his apartment without entering, without closing the door, he raced to the basement and out a rear door into an alley. He threw himself over the now locked gate of the academy. Pushed through the crowded Marco Polo club across the way. Barged into a washroom and pried open a window. Then he leapt out. He could only hope that he finally lost whoever or whatever was following him as he merged with the traffic on Yan’an.
Loa Wei Fen followed as fast as he could. The basement, the gate, the club all were no problem. When he saw the policeman racing toward the washroom he knew that the man would be looking to crash out a window so he headed back out of the club and ran toward the side of the building. But Loa Wei Fen was unlucky this time. An electrified fence awaited him. Its fourteen-foot height prevented him from following the escaping figure of the policeman who, emerging from the high window, looked so much like a serving man escaping from a princess’s boudoir.
Fong had no idea whether he’d fully thrown off his ghost. His fear was still very real. He grabbed the phone from one of the public kiosks and threw a five-jiao note at the owner. Amanda picked up at the top of the second ring.
“Are you all right?”
“Never better, but I’m not coming back there this evening.”
“What about your promise, Mr. Policeman?”
There was mockery in her voice and a seductive taunt. For a moment he considered going there. Then he saw Loa Wei Fen half a block down the street walking slowly, sectoring the area with his gaze. Searching. Searching for him.
“I’m being followed. I don’t want to lead him to you.”
“The man in the picture?”
“Yes. Go to the Portman tomorrow and find out what room he’s in.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Loa Wei Fen was too close. His gaze moving with terrifying precision.
The half-demolished, three-story Victorian house stood empty-more accurately forceably emptied-at the junction of Yan’an and Nanjing. Across the way the compact car stood on its metal pedestal, some sixteen feet in the air. The wrecking ball had taken a bite out of the circular balcony at the top of the house. No glass remained in the windows, no wood panelling on the walls, or fixtures on the doors. Red tiles, seemingly defying gravity, balanced precariously on the now sodden roof. Outside the building was a vast hole, the beginnings of a mega-story building. Inside, in the one remaining corner of a third-story room, Fong sat and tried to stop shivering. He was safe until morning. His mind knew that, but his body was still filled with adrenaline.
Then a wind picked up from out of the east. A breath from the Mongolian steppe travelling pure and cold, blowing aside for a moment the haze of Shanghai summer. It surrounded him in the bleak of night and roused him from his stupor-the way she used to. With a subtle change of the air pressure Fu Tsong was there. All around him.
It didn’t help that Fong knew that this was only a dream. It didn’t help because he’d had this dream many times before. And it would not stop at his command. Each time the dream supplied him with more bits of the memory that he had so desperately tried to erase.
This night it began with him racing out of the theatre, with Geoffrey Hyland’s voice ringing in his ears. “If anything happens to her, I’ll chase you wherever you go. Wherever you go I’ll find you and get my revenge.”
He had to think clearly. Fu Tsong was gone. She had gone to the theatre to get a cab. She was carrying a small bag.
Where would she go?
Back at their apartment, Fong called Wang Jun and got him to start tracking down the cab. Fong had to consciously steady his thoughts as he hung up the phone. She took a small suitcase. Which one? He opened the armoire in the bedroom where he kept their few suitcases. The small brown wicker bag was gone.
It was so small, what could she take that she couldn’t have just carried? The phone rang. It was Wang Jun. The cab company had given him the probable cab number and a general vicinity in which to look. Dispatcher shifts had changed since the cab was sent out and since the dispatcher had no radio link with cabs and no records are kept after a call, they had to find the off-duty dispatcher. Wang Jun said they already had a lead on his whereabouts. Then he hung up.