David Rotenberg - The Shanghai Murders

As Fong stood in the empty space, he heard the flick of an electric switch and in a moment the sound of a compressor pump. Slowly a dim light bathed the stage set-a scene of a Victorian garden. On stage left going downstage and then across the front was a shallow stone-bordered stream. The compressor pump was forcing water into the stream. Fong was not surprised when Geoffrey Hyland walked out of the wings into his Victorian Twelfth Night world. What did surprise Fong was that he was holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Geoffrey gestured to the set and the water. “Do you like?” he called out. Fong chose not to respond. “Ah, your silence speaks volumes. Long time no see, Fong old bud. I’d begun to look forward to your cryptic presence in the back of my rehearsals.”

“Why?”

“You give it all a kind of edge. After all, you’re the real thing aren’t you, Fong?”

“What real thing?”

“The real thing. That which would kill for love. You are Orsino in action. Willing to kill your love before allowing another to touch her. I told you that everyone could find themselves in this play. I told you that.”

“You truly believe that?”

“I do, I’ve said so twice now.”

“And you believe I’m Orsino, willing to kill for love?”

“Once again I say, I do,” pronounced Geoffrey with a mawkish bow. A wobbly mawkish bow. Fong had never seen Geoffrey drunk before. He wondered why he was drunk now. He was afraid he knew.

“Are you all right, Geoffrey?”

“Couldn’t be better,” he said, righting himself. He waved at the stage. “Do you like my pathetic little stream?” Then he pointed downstage right. “Malvolio sits down there, dangling his footsies in the cool stream, like this.” Geoffrey crossed to the corner of the stage, and kicking off his shoes put his stocking feet into the water. “It’s surprisingly cold. Be that as it may, the conspirators put the letter, folded like a boat, in the stream up there. The water carries Malvolio’s demise right to him. It hits him on the foot in fact. We’ve practised. It works every time.” Then smiling, he said, “Neat, huh? The poor ass does nothing, but God’s water brings him his doom. Like me. No? I just sat in this fucking theatre and in walked your wife. But then you know all about that, don’t you, Fong?”

Very slowly, without any inflection, Fong replied, “No, I don’t, Geoffrey.”

Pulling a mock look of shock Geoffrey said, “Why don’t you come up into the light like the rest of us lovelost buffoons?”

“I’m not an actor, Geoffrey.”

“So you say. So you say, Fong.”

“You have two children, don’t you Geoffrey?”

Geoffrey quickly corrected him. “ Had two children, a boy and a girl.”

“Why had?”

Then in a voice filled with self-loathing Geoffrey yelled back, “Had because after I met your wife, your fucking amazing wife, I could never really go back to them. Not really. Children know. Everyone knows. Even you know, don’t you, Fong? Look into your heart, Fong! You know, don’t you!” He took a long pull from his bottle.

The stream pumped water. The ancient lights flickered. And Fong knew that Geoffrey Hyland was adrift in an ocean of pain and recrimination. Enough of both to have driven him to the police. So at least Fong had learned that much.

Leaving the theatre Fong hugged the sides of the buildings as he made his way toward his apartment. Untalented students rehearsing scenes; an extraordinarily loud television set in the open-sided faculty room; the staircase leading up to the apartment. No guards, no police. It wasn’t possible that they would have overlooked his apartment with an all-points-bulletin out for his arrest. He pushed open a basement door and tiptoed past the couple asleep on a mattress on the damp concrete. Then he ran up a back stairway to the second floor.

Even as he opened the door to his apartment, he knew that he had not been the first to open that door this evening. Lived-in rooms, especially rooms of love, have a consistency to them. A firmness that links one object to the next in a continuous flowing idea.

There was no flow here now. At first he thought it was because of him and Amanda but quickly his eye lit on the telltale clues of another kind of brief but serious intrusion. The bathroom door, always hard to close, now left slightly ajar; the puff in the drapery fabric that always results when opened and not given the necessary attention when subsequently closed-but more than these telltales was the feel of the other’s presence.

As the key was turned in the lock and the door cracked open, Loa Wei Fen allowed the knife to turn in his right hand. His left was pressed flat against the surface of the top of the armoire, upon which he was hiding. “Always attack from above.” The leap would be awkward unless the policeman, who was now dressed like a peasant, moved one step farther into the room.

Loa Wei Fen had been waiting on top of the armoire for over two hours. The police search finished over three hours ago. He had watched the search while crouching on the tile roof across the way. There were so many police and then none. This troubled him. So he waited for a full hour before slipping into the apartment.

He too had felt the former solidity of the place. Anger surged through him and he reached for his knife.

Fong stood in the door, a slash of light from the hallway across the apartment’s carpet. What was wrong here? The police had been here, yes. But that was not all that he was sensing. What else was here? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that his body was preparing him to run. And that’s what he did. Leaving his apartment without entering, without closing the door, he raced to the basement and out a rear door into an alley. He threw himself over the now locked gate of the academy. Pushed through the crowded Marco Polo club across the way. Barged into a washroom and pried open a window. Then he leapt out. He could only hope that he finally lost whoever or whatever was following him as he merged with the traffic on Yan’an.

Loa Wei Fen followed as fast as he could. The basement, the gate, the club all were no problem. When he saw the policeman racing toward the washroom he knew that the man would be looking to crash out a window so he headed back out of the club and ran toward the side of the building. But Loa Wei Fen was unlucky this time. An electrified fence awaited him. Its fourteen-foot height prevented him from following the escaping figure of the policeman who, emerging from the high window, looked so much like a serving man escaping from a princess’s boudoir.

Fong had no idea whether he’d fully thrown off his ghost. His fear was still very real. He grabbed the phone from one of the public kiosks and threw a five-jiao note at the owner. Amanda picked up at the top of the second ring.

“Are you all right?”

“Never better, but I’m not coming back there this evening.”

“What about your promise, Mr. Policeman?”

There was mockery in her voice and a seductive taunt. For a moment he considered going there. Then he saw Loa Wei Fen half a block down the street walking slowly, sectoring the area with his gaze. Searching. Searching for him.

“I’m being followed. I don’t want to lead him to you.”

“The man in the picture?”

“Yes. Go to the Portman tomorrow and find out what room he’s in.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Loa Wei Fen was too close. His gaze moving with terrifying precision.

The half-demolished, three-story Victorian house stood empty-more accurately forceably emptied-at the junction of Yan’an and Nanjing. Across the way the compact car stood on its metal pedestal, some sixteen feet in the air. The wrecking ball had taken a bite out of the circular balcony at the top of the house. No glass remained in the windows, no wood panelling on the walls, or fixtures on the doors. Red tiles, seemingly defying gravity, balanced precariously on the now sodden roof. Outside the building was a vast hole, the beginnings of a mega-story building. Inside, in the one remaining corner of a third-story room, Fong sat and tried to stop shivering. He was safe until morning. His mind knew that, but his body was still filled with adrenaline.