Now we are in a cab on our way to some other part of Sun Bin’s precinct. Now we are entering a high-end apartment building with a lobby to beat the Ritz, uniformed security, marble everywhere. Sun Bin flaps his wallet at the receptionist, who sees his police badge and nods. On the thirty-third floor we exit the lift and stride down a corridor until we come to a yellow tape stretched between two traffic cones. Sun Bin takes out a key, and we enter the apartment.
It is vast and must boast about six bedrooms. The floor-to-ceiling windows reveal a modern city like no other. In the distant days of aristocratic art, it was said that architecture is frozen music; I guess what I’m looking at is a pretty good three-dimensional representation of iTunes, with the great rap phallus of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower thrusting into the skyline, the Bolshoi-ish Exhibition Center, the orphic HSBC building, and the pop-songy Sassoon House in a riot of eclecticism. Sun Bin takes me into the master bedroom, where a tall figure in a floral tourist shirt and smart casual slacks is waiting, hands in pockets.
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Chan says.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I counter.
He jerks his chin at the king-size bed upon which three life-size paper cutouts have been placed, to represent where and how the bodies were found. Chan and Sun Bin give me a couple of minutes to take it all in, then raise their eyes and wrinkle their brows.
“It’s a copycat triple homicide, with Asian attention to detail,” I advise.
“Laid out in exactly the same way as the bodies in Phuket?” Chan says.
“Exactly the same way.”
“Same positions on the bed-I mean longitudinally, with heads pointing to the wall?”
“The same.”
“And the bodies at the morgue?”
“In my opinion the injuries are identical to those suffered by the victims on Vulture Peak.”
“In your honorable and expert opinion, would you say they were murdered by the same professional team?”
“Certainly.”
Chan and Sun Bin exchange glances and let a couple of beats pass. “Want to bet on it?”
The two Chinese cops are looking at me with hardened expressions. Even Sun Bin, who has been the very avatar of Oriental hospitality, seems to have succumbed to a demon more powerful than himself.
“Maybe not,” I say, mentally backing away from those two.
“I’m offering six to one these killings were carried out by a totally different team. Put in a thousand dollars, you get six thousand back plus your original bet. If you’re so sure it’s the same team,” Sun Bin says.
“He wants me to open an escrow account in Hong Kong, so punters feel safe betting with him,” Chan says. “He’s already got half his precinct signed up.”
“Why would you be so sure it’s a different team that did it?”
Chan says something to Sun Bin, which I think must be standard Putonghua, because it doesn’t sound like the Shanghainese dialect I’ve been hearing since I arrived. Sun Bin looks at me and smiles sheepishly. “I must humbly beg your pardon. The inspector here has reminded me that it is contrary to Confucian wisdom to take advantage of strangers. Naturally, we of the mainland need to take lessons from our Hong Kong brothers and sisters in such matters.”
I have no idea if Sun Bin is serious or exercising a local form of sarcasm. Chan doesn’t seem to know either and Sun Bin is unusually inscrutable for a Chinese. “You mean there are reasons for thinking this is some kind of revenge conspiracy killing for the murders on Vulture Peak?” I ask.
Now they are both staring at me. “In China, conspiracy theories are always well founded,” Sun Bin advises with a smile.
I take a couple of steps back so that the two of them are silhouetted against the mad city on the other side of the window. I think I’m beginning to understand what are sometimes referred to as the “deeper” layers of the case.
“Would it be consistent with the new Confucianism to tell this humble stranger exactly what you two honorable forensic geniuses think is going on here?”
Both nod independently. “Come into the kitchen,” Sun Bin says.
The kitchen is a fashion statement in stainless steel. It is also starkly empty except for a tablet laptop, manufactured by LG, on the stainless-steel island. The computer is plugged into a socket in the center of the island. The three of us pull up the stools that go with the island and watch Sun Bin jog the mouse and bring the machine to life. My eyes are swamped by a swarm of Chinese characters I cannot decipher. It’s amazing to me how quickly Sun Bin can manipulate the 47,035 characters of his alphabet; it seems superhuman. Now we are looking at a split screen with a graph on one side and what looks like an address book on the other.
Chan and Sun Bin both stare at me as if I’m supposed to experience revelation.
“Start with the address book,” I say. “If that’s what it is.”
“It’s a list of suspects, except they are not people.”
“So what do you have for suspects if not people?”
“Government departments, especially the uniformed services, large private enterprises, and some groups that are consortia in all but name but have no legal status.”
“But there seem to be thousands of them.”
Sun Bin nods. “That is correct. There are thousands and thousands of them. With two billion of us, everything is multiplied. It’s logical, isn’t it? In a country like America, with only three hundred million, you have-say-half a dozen suspects at the beginning of an inquiry. So we generally start with a hundred times that number. The increase is exponential.”
“He’s trying to impress you,” Chan says. “He knows who did it, don’t you, Sun Bin?”
“I’m working with a short list of ten,” Sun Bin says.
Chan sighs. “He does everything by the book. Including the gambling. He has no emotional intelligence at all. Do you, Sun Bin?”
“None at all,” he confesses. “When I was at school, everything was about industrial logic. Now when I start hearing about ‘emotional intelligence’ from foreigners like you, it makes me feel stupid.”
“See what we have to contend with?” Chan says. “I live in Hong Kong, China, but to him I’m a foreigner. Sun Bin thinks Shanghai is sooo special, don’t you, Sun Bin?”
“Shanghai is the eye of the storm called modernism,” Sun Bin says.
Chan groans. “I’ve said it a hundred times. The Yips didn’t do the Phuket job, and they didn’t do this one either. Just because I know that intuitively, and can’t prove it, doesn’t mean I’m not right.”
“You have inherited from the British a tendency to overuse the word I. At the time of Chairman Mao, it would have been said that you suffer from bourgeois self-centeredness,” Sun Bin says.
“It would have been said that I was a Capitalist Running Dog, and they would have shot me. But I think the West won that side of the class war.”
“But your addiction to either/or strikes me as quite American monopolar, even British colonial,” Sun Bin says. “It lacks a sense of the plurality of the modern world.”
My eyes are flitting from one to the other, then to the computer and back again; at the same time I begin to see the China connection as an impenetrable wall. It’s like being told that the answer to your question is to be found in the Library of Congress without anyone specifying the department, never mind the full reference.
“You mean there could be a third party?” I say.
“Third, fourth, fifth, sixth.”
“Are there really so many skilled in the art of organ removal?”
Sun Bin seems embarrassed and looks away. Chan stares at me with his lips twisted. I have a feeling that I’ve transgressed some unwritten rule of local etiquette. Into the silence Chan says, “Hey, let’s take a walk down Nanjing Road.”