The Hua Shan Hospital Murders

  A ZHONG FONG MYSTERY

  THE HUA SHAN HOSPITAL MURDERS

  DAVID ROTENBERG

  NERO

  Published by Nero Books,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd.

  Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane

  Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia

  email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  http://www.nerobooks.com.au

  First published in Canada

  by McArthur & Company, Toronto, 2003

  First published in the United States

  by St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1998

  Copyright © 2009 David Rotenberg

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mech anical, photo copying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Rotenberg, David (David Charles)

  The Hua Shan hospital murders : a Zhong Fong mystery / David Rotenberg.

  ISBN: 9781863954402 (pbk.)

  Subjects: Detectives--China--Shanghai--Fiction.

  Shanghai (China)--Fiction.

  813.54

  Design & Composition: Mad Dog Design Inc.

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  For Susan, Joey, and Beth

  Author’s Note

  Robert Cowens‘ family story is based on historical fact. Some of the names of the characters have been altered and some of the technical details have been changed to help the fiction, but the basis of the story is true.

  There is no intention in this novel to slander Manichaean ideals or those who follow this creed. However, Manichaeism, like all faiths, is subject to interpretation by its followers. Some of these interpretations are heinous and turn toward violence. Sometimes this happens because such interpretations are based on misreadings of the original texts, or on only partial readings of those texts, or on readings of deliberately mistranslated sections of the texts. For whatever reason, the texts are quoted to support actions that are dangerous to others. At such times, both those who are of the faith and those who are not must step forward and be counted. Any creed that professes to be the only true path must be questioned. It is in such a light that Manichaeism, and other faiths, are being held up to scrutiny in this novel.

  BEFORE

  Fong reached over and touched Lily’s cheek. A smile creased her face as, without waking, she tried to kiss his fingers. “Don’t get up, Lily,” he whispered.

  She rolled over and snuggled into his side. “Mine,” she sighed.

  Fong permitted himself a moment of satisfaction. Their three-month-old daughter Xiao Ming had given them a break. She’d actually slept for five straight hours – a record. Fong pulled back his side of the covers and stood on the ancient wooden floor. He slid his bare feet back and forth along the smoothness of the boards – an old familiar thing.

  He looked back at Lily. In sleep her features were so soft. He was grateful for her and Xiao Ming and for the rarest of all things – a second chance.

  He entered the bathroom and lit the flame beneath the small rusting water heater connected to the shower. Then he went to see if there was anything to eat. No apartments had kitchens in Shanghai but there was an old breadbox. Inside was a half-eaten pastry that Lily told him was called a palmier. He took a tentative bite then put it back. Wheat-based products were new to him and he didn’t care for them. Lily, on the other hand, seemingly couldn’t do without them.

  He unbuttoned his pyjama top and headed back toward the shower. The glint of light off a polished picture frame on the table drew his eye. So, Lily had finally gotten back the photos and even had one framed.

  He lifted the picture and angled it toward the large window that overlooked the courtyard. Laughter burped from his mouth. There he was in a costume from the American Civil War with Lily at his side wearing a very wide green dress with a tight bodice and blond curls – nine-plus months pregnant.

  “This itches, Fong,” Lily had said as she took a handful of crinoline and yanked it away from her butt.

  “Whose fault is that?” said Fong smiling and striking the pose the photographer had shown him.

  “Need picture, we do,” said Lily changing to English so the photographer couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then again even if the photographer spoke English it was doubtful that he could follow Lily’s own particular variant of the language. “Proof for baby that I married me.”

  “You sure did, Lily.” Fong’s English was textbook perfect. It had to be in his position as head of Special Investigations for the Shanghai district.

  “Stand still,” shouted the exasperated photographer in highly accented Shanghanese.

  “What’s with the costumes, Lily?” asked Fong in English.

  “Very modern, Fong. Do it everybody in Shanghai. Everybody who everybody. Do this. Modern. Hop. Very hop.”

  “Hop?”

  She scowled at him.

  “Okay, I think I get that. So who am I supposed to be?”

  “Rhett Butler in Pffftf with the Wind.”

  “Pffftf with the Wind?”

  “Name of film famous. Famous famous famous.”

  “Ah that Pffftf with the Wind. And who are you supposed to be?”

  “Scarlet Hara.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah, yourself.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay.” Lily straightened her wig trying to get two very long blond curls out of her face. In Shanghanese she said, “You look very handsome, Fong.”

  “And you look quite unusual.”

  Lily looked at him, not sure what he meant.

  “Please,” the photographer shouted.

  Lily said in English, “Play part Fong. Play part!”

  “Please,” the photographer pleaded.

  “Yeah, Lily, behave yourself.”

  She made a face and yanked at her crinolines again.

  “Still itches?”

  “Like mice nibbling my privates.”

  “Ah.”

  “More with the ah’s from you, husband.”

  The photographer clapped his hands. “Folks, this is costing you a small fortune. Why not just take the pose, say the line, and I’ll shoot you?”

  Fong took the pose. “What’s the line again, Lily?” he asked under his breath.

  “Frankie, my dear I didn’t do a dam.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded, stomped her foot and with her best I-love-you-but-I’ll-kill-you-if-you-fuck-this-up look said, “Yes, really.”

  “Who played these roles, anyway?”

  “Clark Kent played you. Famous actor, Clark Kent and very good-looking.”

  “Ah.”

  “And Vivien Laid play me or Janet Laid – somebody laid played me.”

  “Ah – I’m sure she did and I’m sure she was.”

  “What, Fong?”

  “Ah, nothing, Lily, ” he said putting the prop cigar into his mouth and puffing out his chest as he had been told to do.

  “One too many ‘ah’s’ from my leading man, you having way too much fun,” said Lily as she stomped down hard on his foot.

  Fong howled and chomped down on the cardboard cigar. That was the exact moment captured in the photograph.

  Fong laughed out loud, put the picture back on the table, and headed toward the shower.

  As he did, a distant roll of thunder echoed across the human vastness that was Shanghai – and Xiao
Ming began to cry.

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN OLD CROSS

  Fong looked down at the bones of the half–exposed skeleton that protruded from the slanted side of the Shanghai construction pit – then at the local detective who had called for him. The man was an old–style cop. Almost bald. Definitely tough. Probably right most of the time, but in this case dead wrong. “Officer, I have no idea why you contacted me. It’s a skeleton, yes, and at first glance I’d agree that whoever this used to be was a victim of extreme physical trauma . . .”

  “You mean he may have been beaten to shit by a fat club or something?”

  Fong wouldn’t have used those exact words but that was the gist of what he thought. He nodded. A shaft of light pierced through the heavy cloud cover and lit Fong. “Yes officer, this person was probably killed in an assault with a blunt instrument.”

  “Fuckin’ murdered.”

  Fong liked the man’s aggressive gruffness. It made him want to laugh, but in the presence of death, even ancient death, laughter dies quickly. “Yes, that would be my guess officer but I’m with Special Investigations not homicide. I only investigate . . .”

  “. . . crimes against foreigners, Detective Zhong. I know that.” The man spat into the thick mud of the construction pit.

  “Then why did you call me?”

  “I think the guy – this guy – this dead guy – was wearing this.” The cop opened a large, calloused paw. Nestled in the fleshy portions of his hand was a tarnished metal cross on a thin silver chain. Although it was more equilateral than most crucifixes, Fong assumed it was a Christian cross of some sort. Fong took it in his hand. It was surprisingly heavy. Its heft was oddly pleasing. “Was it around his neck?”

  “Hard to tell. I found it in the mud behind the neck bones which you might have noticed were crushed.”

  Fong leaned in closer to the skeleton. No, he hadn’t noticed.

  The officer held out a Polaroid. It clearly showed the position of the cross stuck in the mud behind the neck bones.

  Fong looked up at the officer and raised his shoulders – the pan-China gesture for, “So?”

  “You want my guess?”

  “I do, officer. Take a guess.”

  The man picked briefly at his brownish teeth. When he spoke his face revealed nothing, but his voice was a little further forward than before. “Not many Chinese Christians. This was probably some crazy Long Nose who got himself in a bit of trouble.”

  Fong closed his fingers around the cross. Its weight was suddenly not so comforting.

  “How long has the body been here, officer?”

  “My forensic guy thinks long. How long? On that he’s got no guess.”

  Fong looked up the wall of the almost completed construction pit that had yielded up the dead man, then back toward the yawning cavity behind him. “What’re they building here?”

  “Something big. Who knows what?”

  Fong nodded. Shanghai was full of empty pits that quickly became big who-knows-whats.

  “So I was right Detective Zhong to call you in?”

  “Yes. I guess you were, officer.”

  “Good. Then the case is yours. I’ll send you a copy of the initial findings.”

  “Fine.”

  The cop began moving up the steep side of the construction pit.

  “Where are you going, officer?”

  “Home. It’s going to rain.”

  Fong looked up at the sky then down at his hand. The equal-sided cross sat flat on his palm. A fat raindrop spatted right at the crossing of the crucifix’s arms. Fong looked up. It wasn’t going to rain. No. It was going to pour.

  After calling in his forensic team, Fong made his way through the muck of the construction site to the supervisor’s hut.

  The large man who greeted him there was a classic of his type. A foreman whose only concern was completing the project on schedule, safety be damned – fuck the poor men from the country who lifted and hoisted and toiled in the mud for next to nothing. This kind of man had been put in his place after the liberation but had emerged from his hole to make money in the “New China.”

  Fong was no card-carrying Communist, but human beings are not animals. They are not meant to be worked from before dawn til after dusk, seven days a week, at labour that might actually kill some of them.

  “How long, Mr. Police Man?” barked the foreman.

  “As long as it takes,” Fong answered – happy to ruin the man’s day.

  “That’s not all that convenient – sir.”

  “No kidding.” Fong enjoyed the shimmer of confusion that crossed the man’s face. “Want to make a phone call?”

  “To whom?”

  “To whoever is the money behind this pit. He’ll want to know what’s going on here.”

  “Will he really?”

  “They usually do.”

  “She won’t.”

  “She?”

  “As in woman – yes. Madame Faisan’s explicit instructions were to finish the work as quickly as possible and avoid the rash of unforeseen difficulties that seem to plague so many large projects in the People’s Republic of China.”

  “And this Madame Faisan lives–”

  “Hong Kong now. Kabul before. Apparently the Taliban weren’t keen on her.”

  Fong nodded, only peripherally aware of the Taliban and its doings. A slash of lightning lit the world outside the hut. Then the rain began to pelt down on the corrugated iron roof. The din momentarily deafened both men.

  “Well, you can tell Madame Faisan that like the rain, the delay that our investigation will cause is just one of those unforeseen difficulties that do tend to plague business in the People’s Republic of China.”

  “She’ll call her political friends and raise hell.”

  “Raise hell is an interesting phrase,” Fong said slowly.

  “Why’s that?”

  Fong didn’t bother answering the man. But as he left the hut he mulled over the words: Raise hell. He thought of the skeleton poking up from the ground. Was that raised hell? He permitted himself the indulgence of free association for a moment longer then got back to work.

  Fong’s forensic team was yellow-taping the area when he returned to the pit. The ground in which the bones had been found was already covered in a thick plastic sheet to keep the rain from further deteriorating the crime site.

  The workers were kept back and away as the cops proceeded methodically despite the downpour.

  As Fong approached he heard a muffled cry to his left. He turned to see Lily, his wife, mother of their three-month-old baby and head of his forensic team. She was kneeling in the mud, her long black hair pasted by the rain to her lean angular features.

  When she saw him, tears welled from her beautiful eyes and mixed with the rain coming down her face. Fong had never seen Lily cry like this before. Then he followed her outstretched hand. There, peaking through the thick mud was the severely weathered skull of a child – no, of a baby.

  Despite Lily’s pleading look he stepped away from her and forced himself to take in the whole scene.

  An adult skeleton on its back, head turned toward the child. The child on its stomach turned away. They were close together.

  Close enough to reach out and hold hands.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DEVIL ROBERT

  The rain thrummed against his large umbrella as Robert Cowens stood on the Bund Promenade. A decaffeinated coffee, hard to find in Shanghai, sat cold and unsipped near at hand on the rail. To a casual observer it would seem that Robert was lost in some deep complex thought. But in fact he was trying to recall the lyric to a song.

  A gust swept beneath Robert’s umbrella and blew his thinning blond hair across his forehead. Robert tasted the salty tang of Yangtze River air and turned to face the Bund building from which the infamous Silas Darfun had controlled an empire.

  Robert’s usually dancing eyes hardened.

  The Chinese men standing in the rain at his side chatt
ered on, seeing none of this. They knew little of the man they referred to as Devil Robert. They did know that Devil Robert was a thing called a Jew, which like everything else in the world as far as they were concerned, had originated in the Middle Kingdom – the remnants of which still existed to this day in Kai Feng. They also understood that, although they didn’t like Devil Robert, they needed him to sell the goods they claimed to have plundered from far-off desert airees on the fabled Silk Road.

  Robert listened to the Chinese men yatter on, pleased that they were unaware he had learned quite enough Mandarin since his first trip to China four years ago to get the gist of their conversation.

  It was prudent to know some Mandarin when a very special part of one’s income was made from the illegal buying and selling of Chinese antiquities. True, Robert made the bulk of his money as a lawyer working through an international law firm out of Toronto – but he had never really been satisfied with making large sums of money by making even larger sums of money for people who already had very, very, very large sums of money.

  There were more important things in the world than making money – revenge, for example, was more important. But revenge in the People’s Republic of China cost money – much more money than it was legal to bring into or move out of the Middle Kingdom.

  He looked back at Silas Darfun’s building on the Bund, then focused his eyes on a far distant point. His breath settled and a shiver moved through him – he’d remembered the lyric to the song.

  He cracked open the tiny memory drawer in his mind and a Joni Mitchell tune slipped out: I’m travelling in some vehicle; I’m sitting in some café. And suddenly he was back. Back on the first plane that had brought him to China. The plane was darkened and quiet. People all around him were deep in sleep.

  Robert let out a warm breath that misted the window. With his baby finger he printed the words: Silas Darfun rots in hell. As the mist began to fade, taking the writing with it, another message on another frosted window came back to him. His mother’s angry scratch in the cold frost of his bedroom window when he was nine years old. It was just one word – and misspelled at that: BECAUS! It was the last thing his crazy mother did before she doused herself in gasoline and set herself alight in front of Robert and his two brothers – No, Mommy! No Mommy no!