David Rotenberg - The Shanghai Murders

Fong took aim at one of the two large arc lights and fired. The gun kicked hard to the right and the bullet pinged harmlessly off the side of the light’s casing.

“They gave you to us, Loa Wei Fen. They’ve used you, and now they want you gone. They gave you to us, you stupid shit.”

Loa Wei Fen was slightly surprised by the gunshot but encouraged by the miss. The lights were to his advantage as they were aimed down at the quarry, not up at the hunter.

He felt the cobra markings on his back begin to fill with blood. Without conscious thought, he spread the muscles of his upper back, opening the cobra’s hood. He slid down to the sixth floor of the bamboo shaft. His quarry was directly beneath him, hollering at the wind.

“They used me too. We’re both just pawns for them,” Fong screamed into the now sheeting rain. He aimed and fired a second time. This bullet found its mark and one of the two arc lights snapped off.

Like the taking out of an eye, the blinking off of one of the lights robbed Loa Wei Fen of his depth perception in the middle of his swing to a central strut of the fifth floor. His fingers reached and found only air. For a moment he plunged, but instinct saved him as his other arm, in full extension, struck and held a cross strut. And there he hung by one arm as the wounded man below him began to yell again.

“We don’t mean anything to them! They don’t give a shit! They want us both dead, you idiot!”

Fong fired three times at the remaining light and missed each time.

Loa Wei Fen, after hanging for almost thirty seconds, pulled himself up by one hand and then continued his progress down. The shouting man was directly beneath him, looking tiny through the curtains of rain now blowing almost parallel to the ground. Loa Wei Fen put the hilt of the knife in his mouth and tasted the acid of the snake’s skin. Blood engorged the markings on his back so they stood out like brilliant red welts.

His next move downward knocked free a low-voltage auxiliary electric cable.

The slender power line popped and hissed in the puddle at Fong’s left. He leapt aside and traced the dangling wire upward. And there, two and a half floors above him, was the great cobra of his nightmares, its hood spread, its sinuous body ready to drop on him from above. Fear coursed through him so strongly that he soiled his pants and dropped his gun into the puddle beside him. It glowed blue in the electrified water.

With an expert push, Loa Wei Fen, swolta in hand, began his spinning fall toward his prey, arms outstretched, legs spread, knife ready.

Fong saw the approaching, twisting shadow, framed perfectly by the elevator platform. As the snake’s head rose, its single fang glinting in the arc light, Fong reached high up on the diagonal piece of bamboo that supported the major electrical cable, and pulled with all his might.

Below him Loa Wei Fen saw the man reaching up toward him, beckoning-like the little monk on the peacock at the end of the strut of the Jade Buddha Temple. The little monk below. He, the fearful lion cub, above. This finally was the leap to the path.

The bamboo snapped free and severed the heavy cable. The exposed end of the cable touched the scaffold. The electricity, offered a new avenue of escape, leapt up the soaking bamboo toward Loa Wei Fen. With the same speed it raced down to the arm of the small man now almost knee deep in the mud.

The electricity hit both men at the same time. For a moment both were lit by a ghostly fire. Muscles involuntarily knotted in response to the jolt. The voltage surge threw Fong to his back on the cement slab, his limbs twitching. It forced Loa Wei Fen to bite through his tongue as he plummeted earthward.

Then the electricity crossed the thick main cable high up the scaffolding. Bamboo burst into flame. Sharp lengths of the solid vine plunged like spears toward Fong.

Fong’s eyes snapped open. Lightning bolts of flaming bamboo were streaking down at him and in their midst the huge snake twisted its body, trying to turn, even as it fell directly at him. Fong never felt the bamboo spike pierce his left biceps and splinter against the concrete slab. He didn’t feel it because the cobra’s tooth, the swolta, was free falling, point downward, directly toward his heart.

The cobra completed its turn. For a moment the two men locked eyes. One on his back on the slab, the other plunging face down toward the earth, the swolta between the two.

Fong instinctively reached up to protect himself from the falling knife.

Loa Wei Fen saw the little monk signalling for him to follow. And he understood. At last he understood how to make the leap to the path. He lunged downward toward the plunging swolta and with a flick turned the blade upward toward himself.

Loa Wei Fen’s body crashed limb for limb on top of Fong. There was no cry, only a solid thud and the ripping sound the swolta makes as it slashes through bone and muscle.

Loa Wei Fen’s left hand fell off the slab into an electrified puddle. The electric current jolted through his body a second time, scorching the snake from his back. As he smelled the odour of his own seared flesh, Loa Wei Fen had a momentary clear vision of the little opium whore in the back alley with the large black man. Of the thrill on her face as the black man caressed her breast. And with this vision clearly in focus, his mind came alive with joy-his body a chimera of electrical impulses.

Fong felt the world spin. As the bamboo shaft burned away it revealed a horizon of tall buildings where once the old town had been. Where once people’s lives were their own to live. Where once he had held his wife and their unborn baby above a yawning maw in the ground. And then committed them to space and eternity-her arm gesturing to him, her mouth alive with silent words.

Loa Wei Fen moved on top of him. Their bodies were fitted together piece for piece. He could feel the man’s laboured breath on his cheek. Something was pooling, thick between them. He reached around the man and felt the point of the swolta protruding a full two inches out of the man’s back. He pushed with all his remaining strength and Loa Wei Fen rolled off him and lay on his back. As Fong struggled to his feet he saw the snake handle of the knife standing above Loa Wei Fen’s sternum, as ungodly a gift as ever offered man.

Loa Wei Fen smiled up at Fong. He moved his right shoulder and his hand lifted from the ground. It moved toward Fong and then back to himself.

Fong blanched.

It was the exact same movement that Fu Tsong had made as she fell toward the construction pit. It was the terror awaiting him at the end of each nightly horror excursion back to the Pudong.

The hand came up and made the same motion again.

Fong couldn’t move.

Loa Wei Fen’s mouth was moving, blood and bits of tongue bubbling on the lips but no words.

For a moment Fong was on the edge of the construction pit again. Fu Tsong was in the air falling, with the baby, her arm moving exactly as Loa Wei Fen’s was moving now. Fu Tsong’s mouth had moved too but there were no words. Nothing to explain what the hand movement meant.

Loa Wei Fen tried one more time. Tried to communicate to the little monk to complete the job-to set him free. The little monk didn’t seem to understand.

With the howling of the storm in his ears, Loa Wei Fen forced words into his throat.

“Thank you,” came out cleanly. Then with great effort, “You’ve set me free.”

Fong saw the blood trace the words on the lips of the dying man. He saw the arm gesture again mated perfectly with the words.

And then he wasn’t there anymore. But with Fu Tsong. In midair her arm tracing the same path. But this time her lips moved and there was both sound and meaning. As clear as a lover’s sigh she said to him, “Thank you. You’ve set me free.”