John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

“Your prints were on the belt that was around her neck,” Siu said, looking Chan in the eye. “There may be an innocent explanation. If not, we’re going to charge you with murder.”

“Normally I would suspend you from duty until conclusion of this matter,” Tsui said, avoiding Chan’s eyes. “However, in view of the pressure on the mincer case, you will proceed with that and that alone-until further notice. You’ll need a lawyer. Don’t try to leave Hong Kong; you’re on the stop list. You can go.”

From Western spoors strange cultures grew. As a kid Chan had visited the west of the New Territories often, mostly to go clamming. He remembered paddy and duck ponds with fish. The symbiosis of the ponds fascinated his Chinese side: All day ducks sat on the still water and shit. Their droppings fertilized the ponds, causing algae and other vegetation to burgeon, which in turn were eaten by the fish. Either you fed the fish to the ducks or you sold the fish and the ducks at the end of the season. It was an example of money growing from nothing, Oriental magic at its best.

The ducks, though, didn’t pay half so well as the container companies. Coming over a low hill, he saw it now, a horizontal city floating in the heat; closer, it was a necropolis of steel tombs, stacked two high, that came in two sizes: twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet or forty feet by eight feet by eight feet. “Roll on, roll off,” abbreviated to roro , had entered the Cantonese language. It was a mantra that conjured money from nowhere. Nothing defecated, nothing grew, but the rent came rolling in. In twenty years Hong Kong had become the second-busiest container port in the world, after Rotterdam, and those outsize trunks had to be put somewhere. Southern China, the destination of most of the goods, had no facilities for moving containers around, so the contents were emptied onto trucks in the container yards, and the containers left to wait in the parks until a ship needed them again. Roro , ho ho : it had happened so quickly the government hadn’t any legislation in place for regulating this particular use of land.

Photographed from the air, it could look eerily regular in layout; on the ground a certain Chinese chaos intervened. Paths between the rectangular boxes lurched, some of the steel was rusted; in the older, discarded containers families had begun to keep pigs and chickens; some of the newer containers were raised on jacks to provide shelter for domestic pets and, occasionally, ducks. Old cars, stolen cars, disemboweled cars crouched in the shadows. The narrow corridors that were created, lengthened or closed off each time a container was parked remained uncharted and changeable; only local children were reliable guides.

Good place to hide, Chan, murder suspect, had to concede. Driving an unmarked car with Saliver Kan beside him in the passenger seat, he had no plan how to proceed. He slowed down as they came alongside the first huge double-stacked boxes, which carried the EVERGREEN logo. It was like being a child again, unable to see over the furniture.

“Shit,” Saliver said, lowered the window, spit.

On the top of the car an antenna sent signals from a transmitter installed in the dashboard instead of a radio. Chan wore a smaller antenna and transmitter that he was under orders to turn on as soon as they left the car.

Chan was more than ever mystified. The Hong Kong Police Force had its own unit of highly trained men to attack, disarm and, if necessary, kill dangerous fugitives or terrorists, and Chan had heard that Commissioner Tsui had wanted to use them for this operation. Cuthbert had persuaded the governor to overrule him: the uranium again. The men receiving Chan’s radio signals were all British Special Air Services officers, hard, white, fine-tuned killers with the personalities of anvils. The investigator had turned bird dog. Well, ever since his last meeting with Jack Siu and the commissioner, Chan was just thankful for any excuse to get away from the office.

His early intuition after the standoff with the Communist coastguards that day on the police launch had been that Beijing would exert pressure and the investigation would be aborted. As with so much in this case, he had been completely wrong. All of a sudden the Raj had woken up and was in a rage; at least Cuthbert was. Chan was forced to carry a machine pistol strapped to a harness around his chest. It was heavier than it looked and under pressure from the seat belt began to chafe. When they were strapping it on, Cuthbert had whispered in his ear: “Don’t be afraid to use it, Charlie. There won’t be any inquiries; you have my word.” There was a hunter’s eagerness in his tone.

Chan shifted the harness with one hand. “I thought you knew where it was?” he said to Kan.

“Here. It’s here,” Kan waved at the containers. “I didn’t know there were this many.” He hoicked thoughtfully. “Imagine what you could hide here.”

Chan slowed to fifteen miles per hour, tried to guess what Kan was thinking.

“We’ll have to ask someone,” Kan finally said.

“Ask them what?”

“There’s a pattern made by the containers where they’re hiding. Distinctive. I’m not telling you what. I know what you’d do. You’d cut me out.”

Chan stopped the car for Kan. He watched while the killer crossed the pavement to talk to a young girl about twelve years old. She had large oval eyes, a fringe of hair like a black velvet curtain, a smile to melt meat cleavers. Saliver returned cursing.

“Can you believe that little bitch?” He shook his head in philosophical disbelief.

“What?”

“She wants a thousand dollars.”

“So what are you waiting for?”

Saliver stared at Chan as if he were stupid. “For her to come down, of course.”

Kan stood by the car with his back to the girl. Chan watched as she ambled closer, hit the murderer softly on his forearm.

“Okay, nine hundred,” she said.

“It comes out of your reward,” Chan said to Kan, and smiled at the child. Getting out of the car, he remembered to switch on his radio.

More abandoned cars and motorbikes. Chan’s practiced eye picked out used condoms, the sites of large, small and medium-size fires, dog and cat corpses, abandoned underwear both male and female, broken Walkmans, the remains of ducks roasted in the fires, aluminum saucepans used to cook rice: East meets West.

He and Kan followed the child as she picked her nonchalant way down paths strewn with criminal rubble. Once they came upon two old mattresses, a collection of rubber bands, disposable syringes, cotton balls and wine bottle caps. American cops called them shooting galleries: rubber bands to make a vein bulge; caps to cook up the heroin; cotton balls to soak up the last drop. Chan felt they were getting closer.

Without warning the child stopped and pointed. The path was blocked by double-stacked containers. She gestured that it was necessary to make a detour; what they were looking for was on the other side. She held out her hand while reluctantly Kan counted out nine hundred Hong Kong dollars. A deal’s a deal. Anyway, a chief inspector of police with a machine pistol was watching.

Chan told Kan to wait while he made the detour. He had to go back three containers, turn left, then left, then left again. On each attempt, though, the path was blocked; the center of the maze was cut off by a steel fort. Finally he came upon a ladder. His eye traced five trip wires across the ladder, probably attached to some primitive warning system. He took out the automatic pistol, climbed the ladder slowly, carefully stepping over each trip wire. Near the top of the container he could see an unexpectedly large area, perhaps a hundred feet square, open to the light but completely closed to the rest of the area by containers packed closely together. Hitched across one corner a wire held blue jeans, male and female underwear, T-shirts. On the ground, leaning with her back against a steel wall, Clare Coletti sat hump-shouldered. Heroin had aged her. On a quick take, in a crowd, he would have registered her at about fifty.