The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory Read online

  “Point taken.”

  “Good, now get this,” he said, grabbing the wallet.

  “The person or persons who sliced and diced this guy were pros. They carved him up like a side of beef, and my bet is they knew exactly what they were doing. It wasn’t even that late when it happened and there are people out here at all hours. So this was done fast. This was thought through. This was done by a pro, agreed?”

  Fong nodded, noting that Wang Jun had already dropped the “or persons” part of his earlier statement.

  Wang Jun held up the evidence bag with the wallet and asked, “Then what the fuck was this doing near the body parts, happy as a leech in a rice field?”

  Fong took the bag and used a pen from his notebook to fish out the wallet. Then, laying it flat on the plastic bag, he flipped it open. With a set of tweezers he removed a New Orleans Police Department ID. Holding it up to the light he said, “My guess is that our killer’s sending a message. He wants it known that—” Fong tilted the plastic card toward the light and read the name in his singsongy English—“that Richard Fallon of the New Orleans Police Department met his end in a Julu Lu alley and that he was filleted like a fish.”

  “Wants it known by whom?”

  Fong didn’t answer but he did step farther out of the light. He didn’t want the older man to see his face. “I want statements from every house warden in the alley and from everyone living on the street out front.”

  “That won’t do—”

  “Just do it, Wang Jun.” Almost as an afterthought he barked, “Interview the street cleaners, they may be helpful.”

  Fong turned and headed away, returning the wallet to the evidence bag.

  “Since you’ve got my night planned, bring that to Forensics for me, will ya? It’ll save me a trip.”

  Over his shoulder Fong shouted back, “Sure, but I want your completed report on my desk in the morning.”

  Normally Wang Jun’s cursing response would have brought a smile to Fong’s face, but not tonight. Tonight Fong’s thoughts were very far away as he headed back through the throng to his car.

  As Wang Jun watched the younger man’s retreating figure, he wondered, and not for the first time, just how Fong managed. Managed to keep sane, that is, after what had happened to his wife in the Pudong.

  Before the building boom, which started in 1990, the Pudong across the Huangpo River from the Bund, had been an area of low, ancient homes and twining streets filled with sidewalk vendors and tiny shops. The area lacked sanitation and electricity. Although the police were aware of the comings and goings in the Pudong, they basically left things to the locals to work out. There was opium and even brown heroin but nothing that greatly concerned the authorities.

  That was until Shanghai began to enforce the country’s single-child-per-family law in 1978.

  Within weeks the quacks and mountebanks appeared in the Pudong.

  In 1949, on the eve of the revolution, China had a population of under four hundred million. Large, but not large enough for Mao Tse-tung. Soon after stabilizing his victory, he set out to increase the population of his country. By guaranteeing that there would be food enough for all, and granting residency and job bonuses to families with more than five children, Mao opened the proverbial floodgates. In the fifties, sixties, and even into the seventies it wasn’t uncommon to see Chinese families with ten or even thirteen children. The great love for children inherent in the Chinese character was unleashed when the fear of having to feed more mouths was removed. The result was that by the late 1970s the Chinese population had more than tripled. Mainland China had more than 1.2 billion inhabitants and a problem that could not be ignored. Promises to feed everyone could be met in the seven years of plenty, but in the seven years of fallow starvation stalked the land. And Mao knew only too well that in the hunger of the stomach is the foment of revolt. So in the late 1970s the Chinese government reversed itself. The single-child-per-family policy was enacted and strictly enforced—and places like the Pudong had a new and thriving industry. It was not hard to find those in the area’s squalid back streets who would “diagnose” a female fetus and abort the unwanted fetus for a price.

  The day that Fu Tsong, Fong’s wife, told him that she was pregnant he grabbed her by the waist and swung her high into the air, feeling that he was holding aloft not only her but also his son. And to his eternal damnation that is exactly what he said to her.

  Fu Tsong was tiny even for a highborn Han Chinese, and the doctor warned her early on that she’d have to be careful. That she’d have to cut back both on her work at the school and her performing at the People’s Repertory Company.

  She sighed and agreed, on one condition.

  “And what may that be?” asked her doctor skeptically.

  “Assure me that I am carrying a boy.”

  The doctor put aside his chart and looked at her sternly. Before him was one of the most delicately beautiful women he had ever seen. A woman with a deep fire in her eyes and a strength of will that frightened him.

  “Fu Tsong, you know that there is no way I can in all conscience assure you of that. It is beyond my power to know such things. All that is important is that the baby is healthy, and that is in your power.” He reached out to pat her head, and the silk of her hair astounded him.

  At that time, Fong was on the rise in the police force. The heir apparent. He was putting in sixteen-hour days trying to prepare himself for the examination that would allow him to head Special Investigations. The hardest part was the English-language proficiency requirement. It was the greatest challenge of his life. He found the English sounds initially incomprehensible and he struggled nightly with basic verb tenses and noun lists. Fu Tsong was a great help throughout, and in the weeks leading up to the exams she drilled him nightly, late into the dawning hours.

  One night after throwing aside his English book, she tore open his pants and, hiking up her skirt, straddled his legs while inserting him into her centre. As she rocked he grew within her and she smiled. That smile grew devilish as she threw herself forward and, pinning his arms above his head, hissed, “What if it’s a girl?”

  She had said it in jest but the look of shock that crossed Fong’s face was clear for her to see—a gesture that, once expressed, could not be taken back. She released his arms and leaned back with her hands on his legs.

  He saw her close her eyes and sensed her moving far away from him. Then he heard her say, “I know it’s a boy, I know it is.” She arched her back and threw back her head. Her hair fell to his feet.

  In that moment Fong knew in his heart that he had lost her. She let out a low moan, a release. But this was her alone, without him.

  As a policeman Fong knew that a moan is the sound a body makes when it has lost all hope of recovery. As a lover he knew that same moan comes from a woman in the throes of pleasure. What Fong could not understand was what kind of god would make a world where hopelessness and pleasure both made the same sound.

  At dawn’s first light Fong walked along Julu Lu toward the alley. The city was already alive, the air beginning to get heavy with the fumes of buses and the promise of the year’s first real heat. At the mouth of the alley, the police tape had been trampled underfoot. There were still a few policemen finishing off their interviews.

  The alley itself was not surprising. There were thousands of these densely populated, teeming side shoots in Shanghai. The five-spice egg seller was preparing her cooking pot as he entered off Julu Lu. He nodded to her. She ignored him and blew her nose onto the sidewalk. At least not into the eggs, thought Fong.

  The alley travelled for about eighty crooked yards and was over sixteen feet wide. The buildings were all four and five stories high with basements—most with sub-basement as well. Fong estimated that upwards of three thousand people lived in the buildings that fronted the alley. Bedding was hung from most of the lower windows while in the upper windows shirts, satayed on bamboo poles, projected from the sills like strange nautical
signal flags.

  It was an alley, so it smelled. But what it smelled of was life, abundant, roiling life.

  An angry voice to his left drew his attention. The warden of the first large building was yelling at him. “Who the fuck you, who?” She’d probably lived in Shanghai since the revolution but she’d never learned Shanghanese, typical. He flashed her his badge and continued on. She muttered loudly, “Too late, all the fun finished, flathead.” As he moved down the alley there were similar scenes with other wardens. Some workers were just rising, others were already getting on their bicycles and heading to work. Some were well dressed, others obviously worked as manual laborers. Many wore white gloves to ride their bikes. White woollen gloves had become popular bicycle attire during the winter months and although it was clearly going to be a warm day many bicyclists were still wearing them. Ah, ever fashionconscious Shanghai. The odd lucky soul had a motorcycle or a bike fixed with a pedal motor. Two of the large handdriven tricycles for the infirm were chained to a rusting water pipe. The air was thick with the smell of porridge and coal fumes from the outdoor braziers. Electrical wires formed a cross-hatch pattern in the sky over Fong’s head—random and as potentially deadly as the poison snakes that fall from trees in distant Yan’an province.

  Fong noticed other things as well. Things that angered him deeply. Hundreds of windows faced the alley. Some of the windows contained plank extensions used for sleeping half in and half out of the crammed rooms. So many people! And children. This was a most unlikely place to choose for a murder. Shanghai seldom sleeps, but this place—this vibrant artery of the city—was vitally alive no matter what the hour. This murderer didn’t just take a life and then mutilate the body that encased that life—he did it consciously in a place of abundant life itself. As if affronted by the fact of the life here, he had chosen this very spot. Fong looked down to his feet. He knew what he would find. There on the cracked square paving tiles he saw the taped outline of the body, marking its likely position at time of death. Fong was standing squarely on the heart.

  The morning after a murder the police station was always a riot of paper. Special Investigations handled most of the murders in Shanghai, a city of fourteen million. Most but not all. Domestic violence was handled by another unit. Shanghai had fewer than two hundred fifty murders a year. Per capita that was less than one one-hundredth of the murders in Detroit. But Special Investigations also tracked major fraud cases, multiple injury cases, and anything that influenced the growing foreign community in the city.

  Murder, because of its relative rarity, was newsworthy. Murder of an American was especially newsworthy. And somehow the news about the Dim Sum Killer had already hit the stands.

  Fong arrived at his office on Zhong Shan Road, in the old English Concession, in a fury. He hurled the newspaper on the table and exploded with anger at his assistant. “Who the hell let this out? What moron allowed the press access to this material?”

  His assistant, a young man who claimed he had been assigned by his commune first to the police academy and then to work as Fong’s assistant, was not one to take responsibility for anything, so he did what he always did, he shrugged.

  “That’s it, a shrug?”

  “You want two shrugs?” For the umpteenth time it occurred to Fong that his assistant’s story of communal assignation had a hollow ring to it. Fong thought it more likely that this innocuous little rodent probably had good party connections and was there to keep an eye on him. Putting the thought aside, Fong snapped, “I want the editor of the paper on the phone, I want a meeting with the commissioner, and I want the coroner to call me. You capable of arranging that?”

  The assistant shrugged again.

  “That is an affirmative shrug, right?” Before the assistant could shrug again, Fong spat out, “From now on you hit the desk once for yes and twice for no.”

  After the briefest pause in which Fong saw the unmistakable traces of hate in the young man’s face, the assistant hit the desk once.

  “You’re progressing.” He pointed to a new file on the desk. “Is that from Wang Jun?”

  The assistant was about to shrug but decided against it. He hit his desk once.

  Fong picked up the file and headed toward his office.

  All the lights on his desk phone were blinking as he entered. He punched through to the desk operator to ask who the calls were from. Two were from newspapers and one was from the American consulate. He told the operator to tell all three that he was in the field “avidly pursuing promising leads“ and could not be reached at this time. He then turned to Wang Jun’s report.

  The older man had a terse style that pleased Fong.

  PLACE:

  Hianpi Alley off Julu Lu

  TIME:

  Arrival 10:47 P.M. April 18, departure 4:58 A.M. April 19 [then he gave the date in Chinese]

  PROCEDURE:

  Sectoring, blood typing, interviewing of area wardens and prefects on alley and across Julu Lu.

  RESULTS:

  Blood samples sent to laboratory. Photos of scene before and after removal of body enclosed.

  Fong put aside the document for a moment and looked at the photos. They were taken with standard Wang Jun accuracy. Each was one of a pair—before with the body and after without. Each set was taken from precisely the same angle. There was a series of overhead shots, most likely taken while balanced on someone’s shoulders. A series of wide-angle shots of the alley came next. Nothing surprising here. The arrangement of the body parts on the pavement caught Fong’s eye. He went back to the wide-angle overhead photo. What was it here? No, it wasn’t the arrangement of the body parts as such, but rather some of the parts themselves. He rifled through the rest of the pictures looking at closeups of torso, of legs, of feet, and finally of hands.

  Something about the hands. Both had been severed at the wrists then placed back where they should be. Something nagged Fong about the hands, though. He stood up and walked around the room trying to clear his head. What? What was wrong with the hands? He placed his own hands on the window and pressed them flat. Then he released the pressure and was about to walk away from the window when his eyes were drawn to his own curled fingers. Without pressure, fingers naturally curl. Of course they did. He raced back to the pictures on his desk. The fingers on both hands were not curled. They pointed. The killer had arranged the fingers to point. At what? He looked at the shots of the alley and couldn’t come up with an answer to his question.

  Then he picked up the overhead full body shot. Wang Jun had drawn a grease pencil circle on the photo with a question mark at the side. Fong grabbed an old-style magnifying glass from a side desk drawer and examined the circled area. Between the legs a piece of viscera and a sealing strip came into focus. Neither were in the overhead “sans body” shot. Not a surprise really as they’d probably been discarded or put into the coroner’s package. He moved the magnifying glass to allow a further enlargement of the area. He could just make out the writing on the sealing strip. It said “Rip here for air sickness bag.” The writing was in both English and Japanese characters so he knew it had to be from a JAL flight. But that wasn’t his concern just now. Now he wanted to know what a killer would put into an air sickness bag. A waterproof bag that could be flicked open with one hand. Without putting down the picture he picked up his phone and punched the coroner’s extension.

  The coroner answered with a cough and the particularly acute clearing of the throat that is the god-given right of every Han Chinese male.

  “And good morning to you too.“

  “Dim sum will never be the same,” croaked the coroner.

  “Yeah,” Fong said, putting an end to this line of conversation.

  “I hope to shit you’re not calling me for that fucking report at this ungodly hour of the morning. It took me a long time to work this one out.”

  Still holding the picture in his hand, Fong allowed the older man to vent his spleen. He knew the coroner had probably worked all night at hi
s ghastly trade.

  “No, I can wait for the report.”

  “Good.”

  “I was just wondering if you checked for all the body parts.”

  There was a lengthy pause at the other end of the line. Finally, the coroner responded, “I thought we were concerned with time of death, weapon used, that kind of shit.”

  “I am, naturally, but I’d also like it noted if there are missing body parts,” pressed Fong.

  In exasperation, part of which Fong knew was aimed at himself, the coroner lashed out. “You guys bring a carcass cut up into dozens of pieces and plop it onto my table and I’m supposed to miraculously put it back together and . . .” He ran out of steam more than stopped. After a moment, Fong could hear him light a cigarette and cough. “I’ll haul it out of the freezer and count.” The phone went dead.

  Fong breathed a sigh of relief. It was hard for him to contradict his elders, especially when it would force the older person to acknowledge making an error.

  Before he could even return to Wang Jun’s report, the light on his phone came on. Picking it up Fong barked, “Who?”

  “The editor of the Shanghai Daily News, the paper that ran the story.”

  “Put him through.”

  At that moment Commissioner Hu entered the office. His smug look and tailored suit bespoke party affiliation. An affiliation that sat well with his contained manner, square features, thick tinted glasses, and white hair. Before he could speak, Fong punched the speaker phone on his desk.

  A silky intelligentia voice, speaking an almost lisped high Shanghanese, came on the line. “This is Executive Editor Goa Ke Fee of the Shanghai Daily News. I have been informed that you would like a word with me.” Fong gave a get-this-guy’s-act look to the commissioner. The commissioner chose not to comment.

  Fong punched in his response button on the phone. “Yes, Mr. Goa, this is Zhong Fong, head of Special Investigations, Shanghai District—”