John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

Although part of him resented it, he was feeling good. He was working again and officially rehabilitated, despite those who maintained that anyone that lucky could not be entirely honest. At the funerals of Higgins and the divers he had stood at the back, left early. Now Saliver Kan, foot soldier in the Sun Yee On, was sitting in the chair on the other side of Chan’s desk for the second time in a month. Aston had nicknamed him the Walking Spittoon.

“I told you, Firstborn,” Kan said, “this wasn’t triad.” A snort executed on an inhalation temporarily cleared his troubled nasal passages. “Nice work, though. Maybe we’ll use a mincer on the 14K next time they try to take over Nathan Road.”

“You want a Kleenex?” Chan asked.

“Fuck your mother.”

“It was just a hope.”

“Pass the wastepaper basket. Thanks. Heard you found the machine? Will that be, you know, auctioned, like old police cars?”

“No.”

With an internal rumble Kan made a substantial contribution to the contents of the wastebasket. “Too bad. Doesn’t matter, you can buy them, right?”

“Suppose there’s money in it. A lot of money?”

“Money doesn’t make it triad, Firstborn.”

“Three people were tortured to death. There had to be screams, struggle. They had to be taken to where they were killed; then the vat had to be removed and taken to that warehouse-probably by truck with lifting gear. Somebody must have seen or heard something.”

Kan sniffed loudly. “How much money?”

Chan had checked with Commissioner Tsui that morning. There was no limit to what the government was prepared to pay at this stage.

“Maybe a million Hong Kong dollars.”

For the first time Chan felt he had Kan’s full attention. The triad rubbed the blue singlet across his chest, hoicked thoughtfully. “Fuck your mother. For three little murders? They mince the emperor of France or something?”

“If you hear anything-”

“I’ll be knocking down your door, Firstborn.”

“It has to be-”

“I know. ‘Information leading to the arrest’ et cetera. You had a wanted poster out on me once. Five thousand you were offering, for a bank heist. Next time I’m using a mincer. A million! Fuck me slowly down the Yangtze. Wait’ll I tell the red pole. He might put me on it full-time.” Getting up to leave, Kan paused. “Come to think of it, maybe I won’t tell the red pole. If it was, you know, really good evidence-”

“I confirm the figure’s negotiable,” Chan said.

Kan nodded. At the door he paused again, gathered together a bolus, which he swallowed. “Million’s just the starting figure, right?”

Throughout the day the same chair was occupied by other assassins with pebble eyes, hewn-rock features and cartoon names: Fat Boy Wong; Four-Finger Bosco; High-Rise Lam.

Joker Liu said: “Maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree, Chief. Maybe it was an industrial accident.” He stood up to mime his theory. “Sort of thing that happens all the time. The mincer stops, so victim one sticks his hand down to fix it, like this. Whoops! It starts up of its own accord-it was a mainland model, right?-it pulls victim one down, look, headfirst. Hearing his screams, victim two rushes to the rescue, grabs victim one’s foot while he still has one, like so. Hangs on too long, fuck your mother, he’s trapped too. Victim three to the rescue-same thing.” He sat down. “Lucky the whole of Mongkok wasn’t minced, seeing as how we care about each other so much.”

“We’re offering a million for hard evidence.”

Joker Liu paused on the brink of more black humor, nodded slowly, scratched his face. “No kidding.” At the door he said: “A million-that’s the starting price, right?”

Chan’s standard lecture to recruits who came under his care, usually delivered at the moment of the recruit’s first experience of an investigative dead end, had not varied in ten years: “Most criminals inform on their colleagues at some stage in their careers, motivated by greed, envy, spite, malice or no good reason at all beyond a love of treachery. Such one-off aberrations can be valuable, but a successful detective needs at least one source for whom informing is a vocation.”

To young recruits to whom he took a liking, he would add that a detective’s career could rise or fall depending on the quality of his most important informants. If you were exceptionally lucky and made contact with an informant of genius who trusted you, then you were a fool not to cultivate him, pamper him, put up with him, no matter what the price. You’d be a fool too not to make this person’s identity one of the most closely guarded secrets of your life.

Chan never allowed Wheelchair Lee to come to his office and always took elaborate precautions to avoid being seen when he visited him. Leaving Aston to write out the reports of the day’s interviews with some of Mongkok’s more prolific killers, Chan slipped out of the police station complex, crossed Nathan Road between the bumpers of gridlocked cars, from which exhaust fumes rose steadily like steam from a throbbing morass, took turns down alleys with Chinese names only, then finally down a footpath with no name at all. The footpath led to the back of a computer store open at both ends. Chan walked through the store to exit into a small road with lockup garages more or less dedicated to the storage and onward dispatch of stolen goods and the illegal copying of computer software. A complicated knock on the heavily fortified door of one of them brought a curse in Cantonese and, eventually, the unlocking of the door, which began to open vertically. Chan ducked under before it was fully open. Lee maneuvered his wheelchair to pull the door down again once Chan was inside. A battery of lights illuminated the garage with its half dozen trestle tables piled with computer hard disks, coaxial cables, highly colored boxes of software, screens and cardboard boxes full of floppy disks.

Lee: under a navy cutaway T-shirt, the magnificent musculature of a paraplegic. Neck and arm muscles bulged as he twisted to shoot a heavy iron bolt across the steel door, then twisted his head up again to look at Chan. Overbright eyes scanned Chan’s.

“How’s business?” Chan asked.

Lee shrugged. “Which side? Computer repair never ends; there’s a hundred beginners every day panicking because they’ve lost a masterpiece on their word processors or can’t log on to the Internet. I have people all over town now. We charge on an hourly basis. That’s the legal side. You don’t want to know about the other. Illegal copies still sell like hot cakes, though.”

“I need your help.”

“Something new? After the Mincer Murders, what next? The Hamburger Homicides?”

“I’m still with the mincer.”

Lee spit on the floor. “I told you, no one’s talking about that. Everyone I speak to, they act baffled. It looks like triads, it smells like triads, but if it was triads, someone would be boasting by now. Foot soldiers never keep their mouths shut. Not unless they’re very frightened anyway.”

“There’s more money available now-a million, maybe more.”

Lee nodded slowly. “So, it is something special. I was right.”

“There’s an extra dimension. We’re not talking about it, though.”

“Extra dimension? Who’s paying the million, government or private?”

“Government.”

“So, there’s a China side. Only China gets them that excited.”

“Maybe.”

“Anything new?”

“There were drugs found in a light fitting over the vat. Heroin. Pure white, number four.”

Lee raised his eyebrows. “How pure?”

“Almost hundred percent. Uncut.”

“Export quality. You don’t get it on the streets, not even gross. They’d rather make the markup in New York or Amsterdam. Very strange, but at least it gives me more questions to ask.”