Michael Collins - Shadow of a Tiger

“Damn it,” Marx said, “I’m an American cop, not a Buddhist. You think she really thought she could influence the police this way? Make us see we had to be wrong? It’s crazy, Dan.”

“A Buddhist believes that by suicide he creates problems for the person responsible for forcing him to do it, one way or another,” I said slowly. “It’s an infallible way of making someone know they are wrong. To a Buddhist, no one could be indifferent to that. The truth must come out.”

“You think it was all for us? The police?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but she’d been in the western world a long time. She knew about American police, she knew it would mean nothing to you. She was distraught, maybe, but she wasn’t a fool.”

“Then what the hell was she doing?” Marx said. “Do you know, Dan?”

“I think so,” I said.

I said I thought I knew what Li Marais expected her death to do. That was all I said.

Marx swore at me. But if I’d said any more, Marx would have ruined it. Ruined her death, what she had done it for.

“I’ll explain when I’m sure,” I said to Marx.

If I was right, what she had done it for would take a little time. The major reason she had ended her life.

I didn’t kid myself that another reason hadn’t been guilt, maybe shame. For what she and I had done. She had betrayed Claude Marais, he was in real trouble, and she had to help him. Help and atone. I had to face it. I had bad nights while I waited for what I was sure she had expected to happen next.

I waited three days.

My flame will light the truth. Had she made a mistake? Her flaming death a tragic miscalculation? I had the sick feeling that it had been. A straw she had grasped at, almost hopeless, and maybe she hadn’t really cared if her death was useless.

But I cared.

After three days, I had to act.

The woman, Marie Schmidt, opened the door of the tenement apartment. Her ugly face had lost its snap and vigor.

“He’s in the back room. It’s not locked,” she said. “Three days in and out of back there. No sleep. Like a crazy tiger in a cage. I can’t take no more. He scares me now.”

I went through the spartan living room. I had my old gun in my pocket. The outer door closed behind me. Marie Schmidt hurried away down the stairs Jimmy Sung kept so clean.

I opened the door of the empty back room. It wasn’t empty now.

Flags hung on the walls-Chinese Communist flags, Viet Cong flags, flags I didn’t even recognize. Giant photos of Mao Tse-tung. Modern Chinese rifles, and ancient muskets. Swords and curved knives. Portraits of Confucius and Genghis Khan. Mongol helmets with horsehair hanging. A map of China. A painted Buddha. An ancient map of the Mongol Empire stretching far into Europe. A photo of the Chinese H-bomb test. Parades of Chinese youths. Headlines from New York newspapers during the Korean War-all of Chinese victories.

The room a hymn to China. Powerful-and yet confused. Not all China, and irrational. Madame Chiang was there, and photos of the rich Soongs. Ho Chi Minh, and some Chinese emperors. The Burmese U Thant, Japanese soldiers in a banzai celebration of some victory over America. A samurai sword beside an ancient Mongol lance. A twisted celebration of Asian glory that filled the room, hidden perhaps for years in an open trunk that stood in a corner of the room.

Among it all, Jimmy Sung kneeled before the small jade Buddha. Incense burned, and a half-empty quart of vodka was on the floor beside Jimmy Sung. He drank as I watched, shivered. He wore the padded blue uniform of a Chinese soldier, and another samurai sword was near his hand.

“How long have you had all this, Jimmy?” I said.

He turned to look at me. His face was like the hundred-year-old woman in Shangri-La who had never aged, and who then aged the whole hundred years in a single moment. Wasted, ravaged.

“Long time,” Jimmy said, slurred. “Long damn time.”

He was drunk. But how drunk? On that plateau where he functioned, or over the edge? A manic shine to his dark eyes.

“Where did it all come from, Jimmy?” I said.

“All over. Junk shops, Chinamen shops, sailors,” he said, nodded as if agreeing with himself. A sudden cunning grin. “I get from dumb soldiers back from Korea, Vietnam. I make them think we all friends, buy the souvenirs, and inside I’m cheerin’ for China, Viet Cong-the ‘gooks’!”

“You’ve lived in America all your life, Jimmy.”

He spat on the floor. “Lousy Chinaman! Chink!” He hunched where he still kneeled. “We are great people, great culture. In time of the Khans we ruled the world. Great teachers, wise men.”

“You should have gone back, Jimmy.”

“No way. I dream, but no way. Only here, spit on.”

I watched him drink the vodka. He dreamed of China, but somewhere inside him he knew it was an insane dream. America was the only real world he knew. China would be an alien place. In his small, rational core, he didn’t really want to go back. But alone in an America that ignored him, he had to dream. He had to believe in his hidden dream, and now he was tortured, confused. Three days tortured in this dream room because Li Marais had immolated herself to reach him.

“My flame will light the truth,” I said. “Li Marais knew her suicide wouldn’t touch the police. That wasn’t why she did it. She did it to make you tell the truth. A Buddhist way to force another Buddhist. She knew that you killed Eugene Marais and Charlie Burgos.”

Jimmy Sung thrashed at an invisible stake, tried to deny it even to himself. “Crazy woman! Liar.”

“She told me the day they arrested Claude Marais the second time,” I said, “but I didn’t understand her. She didn’t want me to understand. Not then. She said she had seen the hat badge on Claude’s bureau, had seen the knife in his suitcase. She meant that she remembered that she had seen both the badge and the knife in the suite on that day the police first arrested Claude. They had been there in sight. The hat badge had not been in the register with the package. That evening when you were so brave against Gerd Exner.”

“Chinese are brave,” Jimmy Sung said. “Strong. Yeh.”

“You had put that package of diamonds into the register, you went to the suite to talk to Li Marais a lot. After the detective found the package, while we all looked at the diamonds, you just walked into the bedroom, got the hat badge, and said you’d found it in the register. Who thought of doubting that you had? How could Claude Marais have denied it, even if he had remembered where he’d last seen his badge? You took the knife then, too. No one was going to search you. No reason to. You’d been cleared of any robbery, and what other motive did you have to kill Eugene Marais or anyone?”

“My friend, Mr. Marais,” Jimmy Sung said, nodded to himself.

“But when Claude was arrested for killing Charlie Burgos, Li Marais began to think. She was sure Claude was innocent. She knew Manet couldn’t have killed Burgos. So who was framing Claude? Why? That was when she realized it had to be you, Jimmy. She realized what the motive was, and killed herself to make you tell the truth and save Claude.”

I talked, but in that hot room I felt unreal. A room that was a museum to an illusion. An illusion that battled with the real world where Jimmy Sung had lived his bleak life. A battle that had gone on inside him now for three days. A struggle, started by Li Marais in her death, that moved Jimmy Sung between the real world of America, and the illusion world of China.

“Li knew,” I said, “because she realized that, in part, you had killed for her. It wasn’t Eugene Marais you wanted dead, it was Claude Marais. Eugene was an accident. It was Claude you wanted to kill.”