David Rotenberg - The Shanghai Murders

She picked up her pace. After another fifteen minutes of walking it was pretty close to her appointed hour to meet Inspector Fong, and Cheng Dou Road was still nowhere in sight.

So, taking her courage in hand, she stepped to the side of the road and held up her hand. Several taxis sped past her. The light on the top of the cabs was on so she assumed that they were available. As they whizzed by, though, she saw people inside and realized that the light on the top didn’t mean shit in Shanghai. Finally a cab stopped and she was faced with the question of where to sit. She chose the back and climbed in. Inside she found the driver almost entirely encased in a thick fibreglasslike material that separated him from the front passenger seat as well as the back.

He barked something which she took to mean “Where to, ma’am?” She said the name that Inspector Zhong had given her. He turned around and gave her a funny look. She said the name again, slower this time. He sucked on his teeth and looked at her out of the side of his eyes. She tried a third time with a totally different intonation, in fact, what she thought of as Jerry Lewis Chinese and, to her surprise, the cabby’s face lit up. He put his hands into his armpits and flapped his arms. He looked like a pimply bird. She smiled and nodded, hoping that they weren’t heading toward the zoo.

The car sped into traffic, made the first left and then screeched to a stop. He pointed across a small construction site, in which a woman was washing clothes in a mud pool. Once again he did his bird imitation. Then he pointed at the meter. It had said 14.40 when she got in and it said 14.40 now. She gave him fifteen yuan and was about to get out of the cab when he hollered at her. She stopped in her tracks. She hadn’t given him enough tip and he was mad! But no, he was holding out some of the filthiest money she’d ever seen-her change. The little ratty pieces of paper, two two-Jiao notes and two one-Jiao notes gave her a real understanding of the phrase “dirty money.” She took the bills and smiled. He pointed, bird flapped again, and drove off. Her cab ride had taken less than twenty seconds.

She looked across the construction site. Like most of Shanghai, this area of town was awash in buildings coming down and new structures rising. To her right an apartment building had been half demolished, exposing once lived-in rooms to the elements. Former life got little respect in Shanghai. On one of the green-painted walls she could make out the silhouette where a picture had hung. On another the mildewed wallpaper peeled forward like a flap of decayed skin.

She heard a tinkling bell close behind her and turned. A man sat on an ancient bicycle with two large round iron buckets attached to the back. Inside was a putrid compost of food waste. His bell may have rung gaily but he was not pleased with the big white lady standing in his way. She stepped aside, barely avoiding an old man whose walking stick landed on her foot as he moved past her. The mass of humanity heading toward the bird and fish market was all being funnelled into one small path in an effort to avoid the water from the construction site.

As she waited her turn to cross the thin dry isthmus of bricks, she looked more closely at the construction site and marvelled at what she saw. Again huge scaffolds of bamboo lashed together with vines and then diagonally supported with further bamboo. And everywhere there were human beings carrying large loads on their shoulders, on their backs, and at their sides. Bricks, mortar, beams, wooden supports, buckets of nails, garbage, all the stuff of building pulled and toted by human beings. The worst was the mud. The ground in Shanghai seemed to be permanently saturated with water so that digging a simple hole was a monumental task. The men’s thin arms were stretched to breaking as they lifted their bamboo-handled shovels with the heavy muck.

Crossing the little brick bridge at last, she noticed that the woman was not washing her clothes in the muddy water as she had at first thought. Rather, she had taken the sump pump hose, which was causing the pool of water to form, and had put it into a red plastic tub in which she was scrubbing clothes with a large bar of orangish soap.

Halfway across the bricks she spotted Inspector Zhong. He was standing beside a gruff-looking older man. The two were smoking and looking at their respective watches.

Once across, Amanda strode over to the two men and said good morning. Fong introduced Wang Jun. Then, after consulting Ngalto Chomi’s itinerary, which his driver had given them, they set off. Wang Jun dropped back. A quizzical look crossed Amanda’s face.

“The killer tracked a man named Ngalto Chomi two days ago. He stalked him, I believe the American phrase is. Because Ngalto Chomi was an important man he had a driver and the driver knew where he dropped off Mr. Chomi and where he picked him up.” Pointing to the other side of the small pool, Fong said, “The driver dropped him off there where you got out of your cab and then he crossed, as you did, and came to where we are standing now.”

“How do you know he didn’t cross and move down that side street? ”

“Because I asked that merchant over there.”

Openly surprised she blurted out, “And he actually remembered? ”

“Mr. Chomi was a six-foot seven-inch black man. Not something we get to see every day in Shanghai. People would remember. Like they will remember you.”

“I’m not that tall.”

“No you’re not, but you’re funny coloured too.” Without waiting for a response, Fong started down the crowded street. Catching up to him Amanda demanded, “And where’s your friend?”

“He’s watching us, the way the killer watched Mr. Chomi.”

She looked back but couldn’t see Wang Jun. Fong, seeing this said, “This killer was very good. He would pick vantage points that even if Mr. Chomi knew he was being followed he would not be able to spot.”

With a big smile she pointed to one side and up a floor. There was Wang Jun. “There.”

“The killer was very good, Wang Jun is merely fair.” They moved on. It took a while for the idea of walking a dead man’s steps to sink in and even once it did, Amanda’s eyes were constantly being drawn to the extraordinary array of things around her. It never occurred to her that the bird and fish market would actually sell birds and fish. In fact on the first stretch it sold nothing but tropical fish and things to put them in, things to enhance their underwater worlds and things to feed them. In the crowd people carried little plastic bags with their newest acquisitions swimming in what seemed to Amanda like small clear water bubbles. After the fish came a section of bonsai trees and tropical plants. Her eye was drawn to a display of ancient roots that had been unearthed and polished to a high sheen. The knarls and whorls rivalled the artistry of any human hand. Behind the roots were large plastic buckets of polished stones. Fong pointed out the rocks with red markings. “We call them blood stones. The more red the more expensive they are.” Then came several stands selling polished brown Yangtze River stones whose surfaces fit perfectly in the palm and whose heft was particularly pleasing. As Amanda knelt to sift her hand through one of the larger buckets Fong talked to the woman at the stand. Then, as he grabbed a small tub from under the stand, he turned to Amanda. “Stand on that, will you?” She did, wondering exactly what this was about. But then she remembered that the black man had been six foot seven. She was herself close to six feet tall and the bucket was probably another six inches. Which put her close to the dead man’s height. She felt a shiver start in the base of her neck and work its way down.

“Can I step down now, please?”