“No, sir. Miss Lily was concerned that I am untrustworthy,” Chen stated.
The tension in the room mounted exponentially. Fong got to his feet. “That’s enough, Captain Chen. Lily was wrong. It was nothing more than a mistake for her to use English. Apologize, Lily.”
Lily glared at him.
“I said apologize, Lily.”
After a moment of resistance, Lily bowed her head slightly. A gesture so old that Fong sensed the Earth growing beneath her feet, her legs up to the knees in dung-filled water, a peasant’s hat on her head. Fong was always astounded how vibrantly alive the old ways were even in the likes of modern women like Lily. “For this insult I ask your forgiveness, Captain Chen.”
Chen waited for a beat then snapped his head down then back up quickly. The tension was gone. Through the ritual, forgiveness had been found. Through the old ways.
“Can I see the shots of the Japanese again?” Fong asked.
Lily pushed twenty-odd photographs across the table to him. He sorted them quickly.
“What, Fong?” Lily asked, but Fong wasn’t answering questions. He was staring at the wide-angle photo of the runway and its six chairs. Five of the six were occupied by the dead Japanese men, but the sixth sat empty at the head of the runway – the best view. “If this had been a banquet,” Fong thought, “the head of the fish would have pointed in that direction – the place of honour. An empty chair. An extra room at the hotel in Xian. One and the same?” Fong rifled through the photos again. The man with the ill-fitting expensive glasses was to the right of the empty seat. The men with cameras were both to the left. “From the missing piece, deduce the whole,” he told himself. He allowed words into his mouth, “Cameras, empty seat, glasses. Glasses, empty seat, cameras.” Seeing. All about seeing. Yeah, but seeing what?
Fong looked up. They were all watching him closely. Fine. But he was leading this meeting. He signalled to the coroner that it was his turn.
“Why don’t you call me grandpa, Fong, everyone else seems to think it fits.”
“Fine, Grandpa, your turn.”
The coroner started by lamenting the nature of the search and then tossed the specialist’s request for a toxicology scan on the table. “A wee bit late for that now. There was no doubt alcohol on board. Maybe opium or hashish. Whatever it was it. . .it had to be pretty potent to subdue that many men. Seventeen men are a lot of men to execute. The others would have to have been either restrained or drugged while the murderers got on with their butchering.”
“Your best guess, Grandpa?” Fong asked.
The coroner waggled his head back and forth a few times. “It’s an agricultural area, there’s always the possibility of adding that government insecticide crap to their drinks.”
Swallowing the tasteless insecticide was the most common means of suicide in rural China. But it was a woman’s death choice. Fong thought it more likely that the eel farming in the area provided better opportunities for toxins. There was always the possibility of local concoctions. Poisoning had a long history in China.
Poison in drinks had a particularly long history.
“Perhaps that explains why there were no half-empty glasses found anywhere on the boat,” suggested Fong with a wry smile.
Lily, Chen and the coroner reached for the photos and scanned them quickly. Not a single glass appeared in any of the shots. Lily looked up at Fong. “You noticed that.”
“Crime sites consist of what is there and what isn’t, Lily.”
“Very good, Fong.”
“Thanks, Grandpa. What’s next?”
“The cut marks are interesting if your delectations move in that direction. The Japanese were gutted in a mockery of that thing they do over there whenever someone burps after dinner or some such silliness.”
“Hari Kari,” said Lily.
“Yeah, whatever they call it. The men who did this knew how to butcher things. It’s like the Japanese were ‘dressed’ for an exhibit or something.”
Fong was sure to let his breath out slowly. His pulse was racing. The mongoose was in furious motion.
“What do you make of the way the Koreans were shot?” asked Chen.
Fong looked at the young man.
“Again, you’re too young to know about this kind of thing. At the end of the war before our glorious liberation,” his sarcasm was so thick that the air in the room seemed to hover for a moment, “Korean gangs made major inroads in our cities. They spread terror by shooting people beneath the armpits and then hanging them from beams. It takes a long time to die that way. Shooting someone from right to left pretty much guarantees that the bullet will stay in the body, but it will not kill immediately. Just pain. Lots of pain.”
“Koreans are good at that.” The flat statement from Chen surprised everyone. Fong added it to his mental “Chen file.”
Fong nodded for the coroner to continue. “The knives were sharp but beyond that I haven’t got a thing to go on. But these . . . ,” he tossed out several close-up photographs of the faceless Chinese men, “are interesting. Take a look at the top of the cut mark. The guy who ordered these pictures really knew what he was doing. See the angle he’s guiding us to look at?”
As the others looked, Fong considered grandpa’s last remark: “. . . he’s guiding us to look at.” Could it be that the specialist knew that they, or someone like them, would come to investigate further than he’d been allowed to? Is it possible that he arrested those three men knowing full well that they weren’t the real criminals? Were they left by him as possible clues for investigators like us to follow? Was the specialist actually, somehow or other, still guiding this investigation from wherever he was?
Fong returned his attention to the coroner as the old man said, “The stroke was definitely from top to bottom as indicated by the bevel at the forehead and the overlap on the chin.” He felt his own chin and pulled on the single long whisker there. “And it was done with one stroke.” A dark look passed his features. Perhaps an undigested piece of beef. “So what we’re looking for,” he concluded, “is an incredibly sharp weapon that’s wider than the widest of these faces.”
“A kind of axe?” Lily asked.
“None that I’ve ever seen.”
“How about a long knife or machete?”
“No, it would leave a slant from whichever side it was used. This was used straight up and down.”
“Like a hoe?” Chen asked.
“Some hoe,” the coroner chuckled mirthlessly.
“Let’s not dismiss that,” said Fong.
“Fine,” said the coroner. Chen made a note on his pad. Lily glanced at Fong, but Fong looked away. He stood and stared out the filthy slanted windows, his back to the table. When he sensed that all their eyes were on him he spoke. “What do you know about chi, Grandpa?”
“The black mania? Chinese madness?” the old man was clearly offended. “Western nonsense.”
“Perhaps.” He turned toward them and spoke slowly, knowing the danger of the territory that he was entering. “In May of 1920, huge posters appeared everywhere in Beijing . . .”
“Kill the foreigners, throw them in the sea, China for the Chinese,” said the coroner wearily. “We all know the story.”
“Do we really, Grandpa? Thousands of foreigners were killed in two days. Heads were switched on white men’s bodies and Chinese collaborators were hog-tied and bled to death. Sound familiar?”
“Fairy tales, Fong,” grunted the coroner.
“I was born in the Old City, Grandpa. These were the stories of my youth. Perhaps elaborated. Perhaps. But my grandmother witnessed the event. She was amazed by the bravery of the revolutionists. The complete disregard for their own safety. She called it, ‘So un-Chinese.’” An image of his grandmother yelling at him to get over his typhoid and stop embarrassing the family welled up within him. He shrugged it off. “And she wasn’t one to be easily impressed.” Lily looked at him strangely. This was new information. But he avoided her eyes and went on, “She brought back one of the red kerchiefs they wore. It had the word Fu emblazoned on the front.”