David Rotenberg - The Hamlet Murders

A door slammed in a far-off corridor. Fong flinched. He’d forgotten how loud prisons were. How noise bounced off the concrete and steel and bounded and bounded unhindered and undiminished by anything soft to soak it up.

Another sound, this of a key turning in a heavy lock followed closely by an electronic connection being made and the snapping-to of metal. Then the door opened. It was only then Fong realized that when the warden had left him alone in this room with the door closed and locked that he was not sure it would ever open again.

The two Beijing men entered. Fong thought to rise but decided against it.

Bad idea.

“Stand up, Traitor Zhong,” said the older of the two.

Getting to his feet, Fong said, “I am the head of Special Investigations, Shanghai District . . . ”

“You are as long as we let you be . . . Traitor Zhong.”

Fong breathed in that truth then jumped quickly to the corollary. If they let me it’s because I can do something of value for them. And what is that something?

The younger man lit a cigarette and said as if to no one in particular and as if apropos of nothing, “No one is above being replaced in the People’s Republic of China. No one is that special.” His pronunciation of the word special was particularly venomous. But Fong declined to take the bait and the invective splatted to the table like a dollop of glutinous brown sauce from a dish of Hei Pei pork.

The older man said, “Would you like to see the cell you spent two years in, Traitor Zhong? It’s fortuitously available at this time.”

Fong took a deep breath, “What do you want?”

“We want you to investigate the unfortunate passing of Mr. Hyland. What else would we want?” The man smiled. His teeth stuck out of his gums at odd angles, like fenceposts after a monsoon. “We expect your best efforts. We expect you to think creatively. We also expect something else.”

“And that would be . . . ?”

“Your discretion, Traitor Zhong. You see, there could be much more here than may at first strike the eye.”

Fong thought of the lines Hamlet says to Horatio about there being more things in heaven and earth than are ever dreamt of in philosophy. Then he got angry. “Why don’t you just tell me what you know?”

The younger man smiled. “Maybe we don’t know anything.”

Fong almost snarked back “That would be no surprise,” but he resisted that temptation. “Why were you assigned to keep an eye on Mr. Hyland?”

“He’s a foreigner.”

“He’s been here before and I never saw keepers with him then.”

“Maybe this time he had more on his mind than directing plays and fucking your wife.”

Fong couldn’t believe they’d gone there. All he could manage was, “What more?”

The older man leaned against the wall, “Two weeks ago, Mr. Hyland entered the Jade Buddha Temple at 7:15 a.m. Once inside, he managed to lose our surveillance team in the morning crowd. He was gone for a day and a half. We don’t know where he went or what he did.” The man shifted position. “We want to know.”

“What do you suspect?”

The man pushed off the wall and began to pace with an oddly rhythmic elegance. “Mr. Hyland was a lonely man. A sentimental man. Someone who perhaps was looking for something to which he could dedicate the final years of his life.”

“He was an artist. Artists have their art. They seldom need more.”

“We think Mr. Hyland needed more,” shot back the younger man.

The older man tossed a grainy photo onto the table. A young, handsome Han Chinese man in Western casual dress was hopping into a taxicab in some downtown area. There was a Caucasian in the back seat.

Fong took the photo, “Shanghai?”

“Yes. Near Julu Lu and Nanjing Lu.”

“When?”

“Over three months ago.”

“And I’m supposed to know who this is?”

“No. You’re not. The important thing is the man in the back seat of the cab. He’s Mr. Geoffrey Hyland.”

“Geoffrey was here three months ago?”

“Without papers.”

“So this wasn’t a suicide, then?”

The older man looked at the younger man who looked at Fong. “I don’t think either of us said or implied that, did we?” He looked to the older man who shook his head.

“We didn’t,” said the older politico. “Keep in touch, Traitor Zhong. Now, I think both you and we have other things to do with our day.” He made an odd hand motion that was meant to be dismissive but came off more as the appropriate gesture for someone who says goodbye using the word toodles.

Lily took the report from the young coroner. The young man’s hands were noticeably shaking. No doubt this was the first time he’d had to do an autopsy on a Caucasian. It was often a trying experience for Han Chinese. The very size of white people, even lying inert on a metal table, could be daunting. Then there was the smell. Han Chinese eat very few, if any, dairy products. The Caucasian diet of milk, cheese, yogurt, etc., leaves, to the Han Chinese olfactory sense, a most unpleasant odour on the skin. Then, of course, there was the fact of the suicide, so un- Chinese. At least for males.

Lily thanked the young man and indicated that he was to leave the room. She looked at Geoff’s body. The handsome face, the inevitable thickening of middle age, the long – almost elegant – fingers. She briefly examined the ligature marks on the neck and compared them to the data she had about the rope that was in her office with the rest of the physical evidence. Then she checked for defensive wounds. Nothing. No skin under his nails, no cuts to either his skin or the clothing that he had worn.

She examined the clothes. Well worn but not terribly expensive jeans, a vest – odd to wear in the heat – a broadcloth shirt with a Bloomingdale’s label. Lily knew from her CNN-watching that this was an expensive American store. The shirt, like the jeans, was well worn. Underwear, standard North American issue. It was his shoes that struck her as odd. They were of some sort of soft but durable lightbrown leather with a thong shoelace. Totally flat on the bottom with shoemaker’s nails in the soles. They had been handmade; machines didn’t leave the heads of nails visible. She lifted the shoes and was surprised by their light weight. Then she held them away from her face and was again surprised, this time by the pleasing fact of their dimensions. There were the normal kind of scuff marks that shoes pick up and a bit of paint on the outside edge of the right shoe.

She put the shoes down and looked at the body again. For the first time, it occurred to her that she had a relationship, no matter how tenuous, to this entity on her autopsy table. Fong had been her first husband. Fong’s first wife, Fu Tsong, had loved this man. Lily had loved Fong. Fong had loved Fu Tsong. Fu Tsong had loved Geoffrey Hyland. It creeped her out.

She took out her cell phone and called Chen. His voice was reassuring. It was wonderful to live with someone who was thrilled just to hear from you. They chatted briefly about the investigation then Chen asked about her daughter, Xiao Ming. She told him that her mother was baby-sitting and had promised not to play mah-jong. The slamming down of the tiles bothered the child.

Chen laughed. She loved that. He found her funny, he found her beautiful, he found her infinitely desirable. She found him just right for her present needs. She ended the conversation and returned to the report.

The alcohol level in Geoff’s body was high but not extraordinary, unless he wasn’t much of a drinker. She made a note to check. She flipped the pages of a basically negative toxicology report then stopped as something leapt out at her.

There had been a stain on his underclothing. It was seminal fluid mixed with Nonoxynol. Lily grabbed her book on chemical compounds and began to search. There was very little information on Nonoxynol except that it was an anti-organic – a toxic substance used to eliminate growth. No specific uses were named. She grabbed her pharmacology book and repeated her search. Nonoxynol wasn’t even listed.