John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

“DNA?”

“Only proves that the heads fit the bodies; who they were is another problem. Unless the relatives kept locks of hair…”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a thought. Locks of hair.”

The day when Paddy left for good Chan found a small pile of books at the end of his bed with a two-word note scrawled badly in Chinese characters: “Forgive me.” He stared at the note for over an hour before he was able to accept what it meant. Then he went down to the sea with the books: the Barrack-Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling; the Selected Poems of W. B. Yeats; Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass , and the Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám , which Paddy must have bought recently in Hong Kong. Inside the Rubaiyát he’d pasted a lock of his brown Irish hair. With tears in his eyes and fierce Chinese anger in his heart the young Eurasian boy tore up the books, by the spines at first and then page by page, piece by piece. He floated them on the water, saving the ragged corner with the hair still attached to it until last. He watched it float until it sank somewhere in the vast South China Sea. He walked back slowly to the wooden hut where they had lived, but the hut wasn’t there anymore. While he had been by the sea, he had entered a time warp; a building resembling the hut in every particular was on the site where the hut had been, but the small house, imbued from floor to roof with the love that only children know for inanimate objects, was gone. Before that day he had never noticed the smallness of the shack or the stigma that attached to living in it. Afterward he began to resent it.

The half of him that was Chinese started a war with the Irish half that was to last a lifetime. Against Alice in Wonderland he set the Tao-te-ching ; against the Rubaiyát the I Ching and the poet Li Po; against Kipling he set Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life.

In the war between the selves the Chinese side always won, but never with finality. The Irishman was always there; sometimes he dreamed of him, a soft, weak, lecherous man with a charming smile and a love of poetry that almost saved him. The sterner the Chinese half became, the more frequently the Irish side turned up unexpectedly. Moira, for example. It took an Irish connoisseur of the lowlife to appreciate an alcoholic shoplifter forty-nine years old.

Sifting once more through the faxes that Aston had brought, Chan wondered if Paddy was dead. Without that lock of hair identification might be difficult. Certainly he had no fingerprints or dental records and he’d never recognize him after all these years. Among the papers Aston had included a confirmation slip from Riley’s office in Arsenal Street: Chan’s application for assistance from Scotland Yard had been approved; the scrappings had been sent. Chan knew it could take a month, though, for the results to be available.

There was a fax from the New York Police Department he’d overlooked first time round. “Reference your fax of April 21, Captain Frank Delaney will arrive in Hong Kong on April 26 United Airlines flight U.A.204 with information of interest to you. Signed: Frank Delaney, Captain NYPD.”

He showed it to Aston.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, Chief, I forgot to mention it. Tomorrow afternoon. Want me to meet him at the airport?”

Lunchtime. Chan pushed his way through the crowds back to his flat. It had been a weekend full of people. Granted, one could have wished for less challenging company on a boating trip than an aging psychopath, a sex-hungry billionairess and a scheming diplomat; nontheless, when he found himself solitary once more, loneliness and squalor crept into his bones like the first aches of old age. At the same time his body was still glowing from the sun and the sea. And then Emily had left her own particular glow. He heard her voice, not so complacent, almost sorrowful: When you need another clue, you know where to come.

Well, that would require an erection. Another hurdle.

All his life he’d been what the British called a tits man. He’d always taken it on faith that the pleasure he derived from fondling was in some way transmitted through the breasts and nipples to their owner. To squeeze a plastic bag filled with saline solution was to turn the seduction process Pavlovian. Maybe it was anyway, but Pavlov’s dogs never saw the seam.

In his mind’s eye he saw again the two U-shaped scars, livid against Emily’s olive skin. The billionairess who bought perfection, or tried to. But that had been his question: You wanted to be perfect? Suppose he’d been bold enough to phrase it another way: Why did you mutilate yourself?

From there it was only a short hop to a more intriguing question: Why did one of the world’s most successful women want to discuss the murder of three people in Mongkok, but was afraid to?

At times of genuine uncertainty he consulted the oracle called the I Ching. It was not a process recommended in any police manual, but Chan had the greatest respect for the book’s wisdom. He was gratified that in the past thirty years quantum mechanics had been able to corroborate what Chinamen had known since ancient times: God was playing dice with the universe. Consequently the sages had been connoisseurs of chance, which in their view rewarded study more than science. As Chan put it, what would you rather know, that e = mc 2 or that you will save your life if you leave the car at home tomorrow?

Consultation of the great book, though, was a subtle art. It was important to phrase the question in a precise and dignified manner. Thus, Is the human penis a legitimate organ of detection? He threw the coins and read the judgment: “Removing corruption promises success. If one deliberates with great care, before and after the starting point, then great undertakings are favored.”

Then the image:

As a wind, blowing low on a mountain ,

Thus does the wise man remove corruption.

As a wind, he first stirs up the people.

As a mountain, he gives them nourishment.

Chan lit a cigarette. Sometimes he thought that the Chinese mind knew too much. Burdened with five thousand years of conflicting insights, it was like a computer with more data than its chip could handle. Meaning was the first casualty of overload. He closed the book.

In a four-table restaurant serving duck and rice he ate lunch, exchanged curses with the owner, smoked a cigarette, drank green Chinese tea a light amber brew with almost no taste and a way of settling the stomach. Who was he kidding? Why not admit that there existed another oracle of infinitely greater precision, though less wisdom: Cuthbert? From a wall telephone he called the commissioner’s office. Tsui was at home, but Chan had his home number.

“What took you so long?” Tsui said when Chan had explained what he had in mind. “Come and see me tomorrow afternoon. We’ll talk about it.”

As a bilingual Eurasian Chan suffered, and on occasion inflicted, racial prejudice from both sides of the wall; in a bigoted mood he could be ambidextrous. The English were red-faced, blustering, arrogant, poor, infantile, given to incomprehensible failures of nerve that they called compassion. On the plus side they were good administrators, fair, and their women had large breasts. The Chinese were obsessed with money, callous, slant-eyed, incorrigible litterbugs, superstitious and rude. Nevertheless, they were resourceful, industrious, respected the family unit and had a genius for making money that left the rest of the world slack-jawed with envy.