David Rotenberg - The Lake Ching murders

Lily didn’t look back. She liked the unobstructed view. She liked shopping, especially on someone else’s budget – no, not someone, the government’s.

The selection was not as varied as in her favourite shops in Shanghai, but the quality of the merchandise was extremely high. The prices were shocking.

“Good,” she thought, “Beijing owes me something for my trouble.”

She paused by a display of eyeglass frames made in Paris. Such things were still extremely hard to find, even in Shanghai. A small sign indicated that these glass frames were for display purposes only but the frames could be ordered and that delivery would take between three and five months. “Probably closer to a year,” Lily thought.

At the end of the next aisle she saw one of the Chinese women looking at an array of mannequin torsos displaying lacy bras from Los Angeles. The woman’s beautiful figure hardly needed the accents offered by the expensive lingerie.

“Would you like to look, also?” asked the salesgirl from behind her.

“I’ll call for you when I need you,” Lily announced contemptuously. But the moment she’d spoken, she wished she could take back her words. This was a country girl. Pretty. Trained, but a country girl. Not a hardened Shanghai store clerk. Lily turned around. “Perhaps you can help me.”

The girl’s eyes lit up.

Lily came down the stairs of the store like a queen descending from her throne. The two shopping bags dangling from her arms swayed to the rhythm of her hips.

The men were standing by the car. Chen stared openly at her, his mouth a little too agape. Fong examined her as he would a work of art. His eyes were not easily deceived. The black silk shirtwaist was delicately embroidered with silver threads. The garment accentuated her narrow waist and the length of her slender upper body. The leather skirt just peeked out enough to announce its presence. Her long elegant legs were silvery grey in sheer stockings that led the eye to black pumps with high heels. She was a corporate vision in black and grey. Her always-deep eyes were now alive and bright.

She raised her hands and executed a half-turn while keeping her eyes on the men. “So?” She looked at Chen, whose mouth had opened even a little more than before. “Good,” she murmured, “You may comment if you wish.”

“What’s in the bags?”

“My old clothes, Chen,” she snapped. Then in her sweetest voice she said, “I take it that you approve of my choices.”

“I do.” Chen did his best to collect himself.

“And the older member of our team?”

For a moment Fong thought she was referring to the coroner, then he remembered that the old man was at the morgue. He did his best to hide his disappointment. “Your choices are excellent for our purposes.”

“You sound like a Russian.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah.” Then in English she pleaded, “Tell you me like it. Please.”

Fong was touched – and relieved. In English he replied, “I like it Lily. I really do.”

She smiled and handed the bill and the card to Chen. “I wouldn’t try using that thing until it’s refuelled. Oh, by the way, in case you didn’t know, you have overdraft protection on the card. Had overdraft protection,” she corrected herself. “I used that up too.”

Fong’s decision to have Lily lead the interrogation at the China news agency was a good one. The three Westerners were charmed by her and answered her questions without a moment’s hesitation. On occasion her Shanghanese accent puzzled the men, so Fong translated into English.

“On the night of December 28 you were contacted?”

The eldest reporter, the one from Reuters, brushed at the coffee stains on his expansive white shirt, as he answered for the others. “Two of us were. Me and him.” He pointed at the handsome CNN reporter. “We were the only ones here then.”

“Who contacted you?”

“Beijing.”

“Beijing’s a big place.”

“It was a woman. An older woman. She called and told us that there had been a massacre of foreigners on Lake Ching.”

“Did you go to the lake?”

“We tried, but our usual drivers had been told not to take us out of Xian. Even our gypsies had been grounded.”

Lily spoke in highly colloquial Shanghanese so the Westerners couldn’t follow, “So someone called them to tell them about the murders then someone else made sure they couldn’t get to the lake?”

“That would be my guess. Parallel lines again.” Fong turned to the reporters. “When did you finally get to the lake?” Fong asked in English.

“Late January. And there was nothing to see.”

After the specialist came and the boat sank.

“Except that incredible model.”

“Very fancy, but who could tell dick from that?”

Lily wore a puzzled look, “What means who could tell dick?”

“Richard. Dick. Remember?”

“Oh,” Lily blushed. Fong thought she looked lovely when she was a little off-balance.

Chen tapped the elaborate display on the telephone on the reporter’s desk. “Did the call come to this phone?”

“Yeah,” said the Reuters man.

“This has call display, doesn’t it?”

“Sure.”

Chen flipped over the phone and read the Chinese inscription on the bottom. “It has memory.”

“So?” demanded Fong.

“So maybe it still has the number that called you from Beijing.”

The new world. It was as if he’d been asleep for a hundred years on the west side of the Wall.

Chen followed the digital instructions to the memory. He punched in 12/28 and three punches later several blinking zeros appeared in a neat digital line.

Chen was about to apologize, but Fong cut him off and turned to the reporters. “You keep a phone log don’t you?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

Fong followed the man’s eye line to a well-thumbed notepad on the desk. He flipped it to December 28. There, logged in as the sixth call of the day, was an eightdigit number preceded by the Beijing area code.

“Hey!”

“We’re taking this as evidence.” Before anyone could complain further, Fong headed toward the door with the phone log under his arm. He had already memorized the number. Fong repeated the number slowly to himself. Was this a way back to a rogue in Beijing? Probably not, but at least it was a place to begin. He looked down at the tracking bracelet on his leg. Its single red eye blinked up at him. “A way to be free of you, you cyclops,” he thought. He didn’t dare think it might be a way to get home, back to Shanghai.

Half an hour later Chen pulled the Jeep up outside the Xian morgue. The coroner looked ancient. He was sitting on the poured concrete steps with his pants rolled up exposing his bony pale shins. Fong got out of the car and went over to him.

“You asleep, Grandpa?” The coroner looked up at Fong and shook his head. “Sick?” The old man looked away. “What then?”

The coroner spat on the pavement. Then said one word: “Typhoid.”

Fong suddenly felt he was sweltering with fever, his grandmother looming over his bed. Her words hot with anger at his sickness, his weakness: “Die boy if you’re going to, but be quick about it.”

Years later a ragged man had come to the rooms he shared with Fu Tsong at the theatre academy and announced that Fong’s grandmother was gravely ill and had requested his presence. He’d slammed the door in the man’s face. Then he warned Fu Tsong not to question him about this. Not about this!

He shook himself free of the memory and asked, “This girl from the island, this Chu Shi, she died of typhoid, Grandpa?”

“That’s what the autopsy report says,” he said, struggling to his feet.

“But that can’t be. They’ve been farming with feces as manure for ages. Why would typhoid all of a sudden break out?”