“Don’t be stupid, how was I supposed to prove it anyway?”
“Underwater? What kind of Western decadence is that?”
“It was fun. And you owe me a million U.S. dollars. Why be petty? What does a million matter to you? You gamble that every day on mah-jongg when you’re in Shanghai with your cronies.”
A pause. Cuthbert could imagine the old man scowling.
“Okay, you win, one million off the bill. It doesn’t make a lot of difference. At least I know he was in your cabin just now. He didn’t stay very long.”
“Long enough, though?”
A short pause. Then the general’s voice: “Oh, yes, long enough.”
“And when I’ve got him under control, what then?”
“Then we watch. They say he’s a very talented detective. But I can see he’s more than that. He’s a Chinese who doesn’t give up. Like me. Men like him and me-we cannot be defeated.”
Emily’s surprised voice: “You like him?”
“He reminds me of my youth.” A chuckle. “I was a Communist, you know.”
A long pause. The general’s voice again: “You seem upset.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You had a good time with the detective this morning? I hope you’re not having another depression attack.”
“Do I look as if I am?”
“I don’t know, you look upset.”
“What does it matter to you?”
“Not at all. Just don’t forget who you owe money to. And I don’t want to hear that you’ve been walking around your house at night telling stories to the walls. Walls have ears.”
“Apparently.” A long pause. Emily’s voice: “I’m going now. I need some sleep.”
A grunt, then the sound of a door opening and closing. Cuthbert took off his headphones.
Entering the mouth of the harbor, the boat came within the radius of the city’s thunder. To the six of them relaxing on the rear sun deck the vibrations of the metropolis were unavoidable. Like a nerve gas, it corroded all sense of comfort. Chan counted three loud sighs before giving vent to one himself. As the boat converged with other craft, he could see the same long faces on other decks. Migration back to land had begun.
At Queen’s Pier good-byes were hurried. He kissed Jenny on one cheek, shook Emily’s hand, waved good-bye to Cuthbert, Jonathan and Xian, disappeared down an escalator to the underground.
At Mongkok he started to walk toward his block, then changed his mind and went to the station. The traffic and operations corridors were buzzing as usual, but homicide was quiet with a skeleton staff. It was midafternoon, and most of the weekend murders happened after dark. He locked the door to his office behind him, emptied his bag out on the desk. There was a pair of wet swimming trunks, the book, his regulator with mouthpiece, mask and fins. He examined the inside of the bag, then pressed firmly over every inch. The mouthpiece was clean; the regulator did not block his breath when he blew through it; the fins were clean, as were his trunks. Someone had thoughtfully taped the cover of his book so that it would not open inside the bag. He broke the tape. The inside of the book had been carved out in a rectangle, a small package in polythene placed inside. He took out the package, opened it. Inside was a black and viscous substance the consistency of warm tar. He sniffed, took a sample on his finger to taste, then rewrapped the packet. From his desk drawer he took a roll of tape, cleaned the packet with a tissue, went to the small kitchen at the end of the floor, taped the packet under the sink at the back. He returned to his desk, carefully wiped the book with another tissue, replaced it in his bag.
At a bin two hundred yards from the station he dumped the book.
37
“Southeast Asia’s like the Bermuda Triangle: People just disappear without trace,” Aston said. He dumped a stack of faxes on Chan’s desk.
“What d’you want me to do with these?”
Chan sifted through, glancing only at the letterheads. San Francisco Police Department, Manila CID, Royal Thai Police Force. Most of them were extracts from missing persons files with reference to the disappearance of young Caucasian women. A small number referred to Chinese males who had also disappeared.
“File them,” Chan said.
“Those concerning the girl-we can forget them, right? Jekyll and Hyde, though, they could be in here somewhere.”
“You know the approximate ages; check it out,” Chan said.
“But there are no dental records for PI. What am I supposed to do if I find some likely candidates?”
Chan lit a cigarette, shrugged. “Positive identification is what they didn’t want. That’s why they shredded the bodies. You’ll have to get hold of relatives to see if they have dental records. Without fingerprints dental records are everything.”
“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.