Blood, uncontained by skin, was seeping from the remaining flesh of his face.
Chan gulped. “Why don’t-”
“Because he’s dying,” Cuthbert snapped. He looked at the doctor.
“That’s right. If we hadn’t shot him full of morphine, he’d be screaming the place down. After a certain amount of exfoliation has taken place there’s nothing we can do. Unpleasant way to go, frankly.”
They marched Chan to a small room off the ward. A set of shelves at the back held dusty box files; there was a large white box with a red cross on the lid lying on the floor, what looked like some ancient sterilizing apparatus in a corner. No table, no chairs.
Chan’s teeth were chattering. His eyes pleaded with Cuthbert. The political adviser handed him the packet of cigarettes he had taken away when they had arrested him.
The cigarette waved up and down in Chan’s mouth. “What happened?”
Cuthbert stared at him. “You tell us.”
Chan fumbled in a pocket. They had left him his lighter, a sure sign that they didn’t mind if he committed suicide. He moved his eyes from man to man in the group. They all gazed steadily back.
As a skilled interrogator Chan kept an intuitive checklist of body language indicating dishonesty: flushing with anger, looking away in an evasive manner, overanxiety, confusion, the defeated shoulder slump, wringing of hands, tightly folded arms, displacement activities like heavy smoking. In the course of a couple of minutes Chan expressed the whole repertoire. He wondered how he would behave if he ever committed an offense.
“You’re making a mistake.” His voice cracked, and his tongue slurred the words at the same time. He could not recall ever sounding so dishonest. “I know nothing.”
Cuthbert exchanged glances with one of the officers. “Possibly. But how do you explain your miraculous escape? You led the divers to the new dive site where you said you had seen a trunk. They found it, hauled it to the surface and, not unnaturally, opened it. They found some guns and other weapons-and a long lead case. Inside was what appeared to be a piece of pipe. They all handled it, but Higgins handled it the most. He wanted to help with your investigation, Charlie. He liked to play the fool-he’s young-but he was keen, a good policeman. Everyone on the boat that day has some degree of radiation sickness; these three are the worst. Except you. You don’t even have a rash.”
Chan gulped. “I was taken off. Higgins insisted. I nearly drowned by diving too deep. He thought I might get the bends.”
“But you found the trunk. You. All alone at a hundred and fifty feet. After abandoning your two companions, against all the rules of scuba diving.”
Chan’s eyes watered. His right hand juddered. “A hunch. Why assume that only one object had been thrown overboard? They would never have let me dive if they’d known I was going to search around, but someone had to. It was an obvious thing to do. It’s in all the manuals: ‘Check the scene of the crime or the scene of evidence collection in an expanding radius.’ ” He looked into Cuthbert’s eyes. “I’m a detective. And why would I have told them about it if I was bent? It doesn’t make sense.”
“You could have been double-crossed, framed. The point is you knew where to look. Impossible that anyone would have found that trunk by accident; it was in a fault line half hidden by coral.”
“I followed the smuggler’s route, for God’s sake. I was looking for evidence thrown overboard along the line the boat must have taken when they dumped the mincer.”
“And then you disappeared.” Cuthbert made a cathedral out of two hands, put the tips to his lips, discarded the gesture in favor of a wagging finger. “That’s what swung us against you. Charlie Chan’s not the type to find a key piece of evidence and then just disappear. Everyone said so. Even the commissioner. Not even a phone call to check on progress? You haven’t taken more than two days’ leave in two years.”
“Since I divorced.”
“We had a full radio alert out for you, a stop at immigration at Kai Tak Airport; we even checked the fishing fleets.”
“You should have checked the Grand Hyatt.”
Detection was a tedious business, Chan thought, there was no doubt about it. Checking, double-checking, cross-checking. There was no art. Ninety percent of it could be done by a clerk or junior librarian. A detective’s experience culminated in the knowledge that 100 percent of human adults were liars when it came to issues of personal comfort and survival. But each urban tribe habitually lied in a different way. As a general example, the blue collars lied about stolen goods, the white collars about tax. There lay the difference between a professional and an amateur; the pro always knew what kind of person he had before him and wherein lay the preferred lines of dishonesty. Would a chief inspector, for example, lie about checkable details?
Back at ICAC headquarters Chan sat in silence, politely unimpressed. In a room more inviting than the first only inasmuch as it possessed a window and no Forte, he sat in a chair identical to the one he’d raised in defense against the now-hospitalized South African. On the other side of the desk another officer made telephone calls, sent for Chan’s working files, made more telephone calls. It was extraordinary how reticent people became when told it was the ICAC on the other end of the telephone. And Chan had thought the police had it tough.
Eventually the tiny pieces of evidence began to form a pattern. The life and times of Chief Inspector S. K. Chan took shape on the brown government desk. A dry life for the most part, full of work and little play, distorted by early trauma, slashed by divorce, with a red flash of romance toward the end. On the plus side, an unusual success rate in the detection of serious crime, black belt in karate, medal for bravery when young. On the negative, a self-destruct streak manifested in heavy smoking, occasional surliness toward superiors, failure to attend social gatherings that might have aided his career. Borderline antisocial.
“You’re piecing it together?” Chan asked. The officer glared. “Want any help?”
Cuthbert had disappeared. Chan suspected him of lurking somewhere to avoid embarrassment. There was a motto his kind of Englishman followed, handed down from imperial times: Never apologize, never explain.
It was another half hour before the officer picked up the telephone and asked to speak to Mr. Cuthbert. Chan found it heartening when the English used reverential tones to communicate with mandarins. Give them another thousand years, and they’d be starting dynasties.
“It seems he spent the day and night with his lady friend at the Grand Hyatt, sir. His story holds together on the circumstantial evidence, sir. I don’t think I have anything to hold him with, sir. Shall I let him go?”
He put down the receiver and looked at Chan. “You’re taking a week’s leave, home leave. Sleep every night at your own flat, and phone in twice a day. Don’t go scuba diving.”
25
The considerable bulk of Sir Michael Henderson emerged from the first-class compartment of Cathay Pacific flight CX250 from London and was immediately greeted by a senior immigration official who called the six-foot-three, 250-pound Englishman “sir” and asked if he’d had a good flight, to which the undersecretary nodded and replied in a booming voice: “Excellent.”
The official quickly led the senior British civil servant to a door marked “No Admittance” and down a corridor that bypassed the interminable row of passport booths and led directly to the other side of the Kai Tak Airport buildings, where Milton Cuthbert waited. The two men shook hands warmly before Cuthbert showed his patron and boss to the waiting air-conditioned white government Toyota driven by Cuthbert’s chauffeur. The two diplomats settled into the backseat as the driver made for Central.