David Rotenberg - The Hamlet Murders

He hadn’t seen her for years. What had once been the slightest imbalance had progressed to a fullfledged limp. She was no longer young. Then again, neither was he. She didn’t look in his direction. It surprised him they had sent her. He questioned the wisdom of their choice. Her second time round came quicker than he thought it would. And her third that much quicker again. This time, she paused in front of the seventh garbage can in the row of cans – the assigned one – dropped something wrapped in newspaper into it – then made her way, this time quite slowly, along the alley. Just a good citizen who didn’t litter – not an old lover anxious to see her former mate.

Xi Luan Tu wanted to chase after her but knew better. He put a tight metal mesh over the barrel with his grub pupae and locked it in place to an iron ring in the cement wall. Then he took out a cigarette, a snake charmer – he still liked the old brands – and lit up. If she was just a conscientious citizen then he was just a workingman enjoying a butt after a long day’s work.

He smoked the harsh thing down to the filter as his eyes scanned the alley for watchers. He smoked a second then lit a third. Lots and lots of people, as there always were, but no one with any seeming interest in either him or the seventh garbage can in the row. He finished his third smoke then headed toward the row of garbage cans.

He executed the pickup with casual precision.

Five minutes later, crouching behind his barrel of grub pupae, he activated the cell phone he’d picked up from the seventh garbage can and made Internet contact – the first of many steps to get him out of Shanghai.

Two minutes after that, Chen contacted Fong, “I believe she delivered the bugged cell phone.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Is shrimp dumpling made with shrimp?”

Fong knew that Chen intended this as an affirmative answer to his question although in Shanghai it was extremely unlikely to find shrimp or anything even like shrimp in a shrimp dumpling. “Good, Chen. I’m at Dong Tai Lu in the Old City.”

“I’ll be right there,” and after a brief pause added, “sir.”

Fong heard the momentary pause and the slightly pushed end of Chen’s speech but didn’t know what to make of it.

Xi Luan Tu didn’t sleep well that night. He knew he was approaching some very complicated decisions. He wondered about leaving Shanghai. If it were right. Then he wondered about his ability to withstand the pain of torture. Then he wondered at the ingenuity of his brother to arrange all this. Then he wondered at the movement itself that had grown from so few only fifteen years ago into the second strongest force in the People’s Republic of China. That thought calmed him and as the dawn crept closer he nodded off.

Chen snored as he slept in the front seat of the car. Fong glanced over at the small screen on the PalmPilot. The bugged phone had not moved all night. Fong assumed that nothing of any real event would happen until the replacement money and the documents for those that Geoff had to burn were finally delivered to Xi Luan Tu. He assumed that the bug would lead them to that hand off. “Then what?” he asked himself. “Then we follow,” he answered his own question. But when the question “Why?” popped into his head he simply ducked it. He had absolutely no answer to “Why?” He had, often in the past, successfully followed what Westerners call hunches but he knew were insights. But this was not one of those occasions. He knew, in his heart, that he was following that cell phone because he didn’t have anything else to follow. That he had no real clues as to who murdered Geoff. No one with motive. No one who he even needed to interrogate further. Once again it occurred to him that he may have overlooked something obvious, something important.

A car passed by and Fong slid down in his seat. The car turned the far corner of the market and sped away. Fong sat up in his seat. Is it possible that the two Beijing keepers were in that car? No. It’s just all this waiting. It’s made him jumpy, given him way too much time to think.

And there was lots to think about. Why was the commissioner so quiet in all this? Why was Li Chou at least seemingly being cooperative? Why was there no diplomatic pressure from the Canadians to solve this murder? Or did they think it was a suicide? Had no one even raised the possibility with them that Geoff’s death was a murder?”

The PalmPilot beeped. Slowly the street map overlay began to move. He nudged Chen who awoke with a start, as if he had just had a guilty dream. “What time is it, sir?”

“Just before dawn, Captain Chen.”

As Fong turned on the ignition and put the car in gear, a phone call was placed. “They’re moving, sir,” was all the voice said. The elderly Beijing man stretched. The younger Beijing man was surprised how fresh his elderly companion was.

In the predawn cool, Fong and Chen moved carefully through the outdoor street market while the merchants set up for the day. The blip generated by the bug in the cell phone had moved then stopped here in the market. It had been still for a full half-hour. As Fong and Chen moved slowly south through the market toward the blip, others were moving too – toward them.

At the height of the market’s morning rush, a peasant woman with a shabby bundle on her back and an awful haircut approached Xi Luan Tu’s barrel of grub pupae.

“They’re for birds,” he said, “not humans.”

“Do you think I am such a fool as to eat grubs?” she barked back.

He noticed her southern accent and the exact use of the complex idiom such a fool. Then he saw her hands. Dirt-encrusted palms, ragged fingernails – but soft fingers. Not a callus to be seen. Not workers’ hands. He shallowed his breathing, ready.

“Are you of the second wave?” he asked.

“I bring the storm,” she responded.

“Ah,” he said and handed her a large paper sack and began to ladle grub pupae into it.

As she had been instructed, she yelled for him to stop. No one really took note – just another woman trying in vain to get a good bargain at the market.

She unslung her pack, knelt down and opened it. He knelt down beside her with the bag of grubs between them.

In her mind, she’d reviewed the scenario she’d read on yesterday’s Internet contact several times. She took a deep breath to clear her head then reached into the grub-filled bag and pulled out a handful of the nascent things. She was surprised they were so slimy but it was their movement inside their casings that almost drew a cry from her throat.

“These are the finest . . . ” he began to protest.

She harrumphed and threw her handful of the squirming things at the side of the barrel. He squacked a protest, turned to the barrel while still making a racket and grabbed for the grub pupae. As he did, she shoved the open bag of grubs into her bundle and pulled out another brown paper bag containing the $25,000 in US currency, the passports and the four sets of identification papers that she’d taken from her bundle. He whirled back on her and shouted obscenities, grabbed the bag as if he were taking back his precious grub pupae and told her to get out of his sight.

No one paid them any mind. Joan shouted a particularly colourful obscenity and then stomped away. She felt relieved that the switch had gone so smoothly although mildly disconcerted to think of the hundreds of grub pupae now perhaps loose in her pack.

She moved quickly, looking for the way out – back to her life in Hong Kong.

She passed out of the grub-seller section of the market and turned the corner. Immediately she was assailed by the sound of thousands of birds. Everywhere she looked, wrens, finches, canaries and kingfishers perched in bamboo cages that were piled by the walls of the buildings – sometimes four or five stories high.