The Last Six Million Seconds Read online

  2

  Chan and Aston carried the bag to the box situated under the fixed awning amidships, dumped it inside and packed it around with dry ice. White smoke rose up around the three heads that formed a triangle back to back, as if guarding a mystery.

  “Should take the pictures really.” Chan rubbed his hands, cold from the ice. “Even chilled, the evidence is decomposing. I guess it can wait.”

  “I’ll do it,” Aston said.

  “You really want to? It’s a shitty job.”

  “I know. It was a shitty job to stand up to those coastguards too, but you did it.” Aston swallowed. “Me, I never would have had the guts. There’s no point risking the evidence after all that. It could be a while before we get them back to Mongkok. In this heat…”

  Chan nodded.

  “Just answer one question. It wasn’t a coincidence, was it, those guys showing up today?”

  “No.” Chan seemed on the point of saying more, then turned instead to leave Aston with the heads.

  The trick, Aston told himself, was to regard them as objects. Not to hear their pain, above all not to identify with the misery of those grinning lipless mouths. He opened the bag standing as far away from it as he could, took out the first by the hair. It swayed in his hand to the motion of the boat.

  It was bloated from its voyage in the warm sea and had developed marine hues: purple, mauve, green-gray, the colors of sea slugs. Aston set the Caucasian on a table, attempted to align it along the Frankfurt plane as the handbook required. To keep it from rolling, he borrowed a life belt from the side of the boat and adorned the head with a Day-Glo orange ruff. He followed the protocol as best he could, taking shots in profile and face-on close-ups of the gashes where the nose, ears and mouth were supposed to be. He gagged on the stench. The Caucasian’s blond hair was longer than the others’. Did hair continue to grow after decapitation? Probably. Aston didn’t want to think about that.

  Within minutes they started to arrive: small, black and zooming straight to the eyes. Even at sea the flies came from nowhere, in ones and twos at first and then in winged armies. They loved the heads of mammals. From his forensic science course Aston knew that with perfectly designed needles they injected instar larvae into the eyes, mouth and nose. Aston was particularly angry that they should violate the blond-haired head, but not for reasons of race. The more he photographed it, the more he suspected it of having belonged to a woman. He hit out at the swarm that divided around his hand and continued to grow. Then, giving up the fight, he worked more quickly, trying to complete the job while the ice was still smoking. By the time he had finished with the last head he was working inside a black, buzzing cloud.

  Aston went below to change. He rejoined Chan on the bridge, where he was smoking and talking to the captain. He stood apart from them and tried to follow. He had spent his regulation six months learning the local dialect and was able to say, “What is your honorable name? I am now going to arrest you,” and many other useful phrases, but Chan cursed a lot and indulged in wordplay. Chan threw him a glance from time to time yet made no effort to slow his speech or include him in the conversation.

  Behind them Chinese constables kept their distance from Aston, the man who handled the dead. He heard a word repeated over and over that sounded like the number “four,” pronounced say. It was almost identical in sound to the word for death, which was why four was an unlucky number. Aston’s apartment block was the forty-fourth building in his street, but the postal address was forty-six; few Chinese were prepared to live in a building twice named death.

  Aston kept his eyes on the chief inspector. One thing about Chan Siu-kai, nicknamed Charlie by his British colleagues: He was not inscrutable. Under pressure a slight twitch appeared under his left eye, and his lean face expressed every mood. He was the product of an affair, they said, between a wandering Irishman and a Cantonese girl and had benefited from the conjunction of opposing genes, although he would never have put it that way himself. In the mess they whispered that he often cut himself shaving because he hated to look in a mirror at a mostly Western face, albeit a handsome one. Aston could testify that Chan frequently bore signs of such mishaps.

  For all his good looks, Aston guessed that the chief inspector did not much like himself. But then Aston, who had been a policeman now for nearly three years, had begun to wonder who on earth over the age of thirty did. Still more intriguing to the young Englishman, who had no problem with mirrors, was the way the Eurasian’s rugged self-disdain sometimes attracted the fiercest and most desirable women; Chan, divorced, never paid them any mind.

  Finally Chan left off talking to the captain. Aston shouted in English over the noise of the engines. “I guess those heads fit the other remains.”

  “Either that or we have six homicides instead of three.”

  “Well, the DNA will tell us. There’s plenty to do now, even if we still don’t have any fingers to print. I’ll get to forensic first thing tomorrow for the odontological profiles. Some of the missing persons lists actually include dental records.”

  “Okay.” Chan twitched but showed no enthusiasm.

  “At least we’ve got a good chance of finding out who those poor bastards really were.”

  Chan exchanged glances with the captain. “Sure.”

  “And when the forensic artist’s produced some drawings, we’ll have something to fax to the foreign consulates. The Caucasian was probably from overseas.” Aston finally detected embarrassment in Chan’s mobile features. “Hey, is there something I’m missing?”

  Chan shrugged. “Just that the investigation may be over.”

  Aston froze. “Over?”

  “You heard what the coastguards said. They had orders to intercept that bag.”

  “So what?” Aston’s voice had risen an octave. “You bribed them. We have the bag.”

  Chan pushed the hair back from his forehead. “Yeah, I bribed them.” He looked out to sea, hesitated, spoke into the distance. “But the people who gave them orders to intercept the bag, they’re the ones who’ll be running Hong Kong in two months’ time. See?” He looked at the young Englishman, so typical of the raw recruits who had been coming out of England for as long as he could remember. “Everything has already changed. The rules are different now; they just haven’t got around to telling us yet.”

  Chan waved a hand in the direction of Hong Kong Island, which had begun to appear full ahead. “Enjoy the view, why not? You don’t have to live here after June. This is a vacation for you.”

  Aston gulped at the implications of what Chan was saying, then obediently stared out through the bridge window. For the moment the wind had died again, a calm before the storm. In the twilight of an early tropical evening lights were being switched on from Aberdeen to North Point, burning electricity and money with an exuberance like nowhere else in the world.

  It was an awesome skyline, not dissimilar to Manhattan’s except that it was surmounted by a mountain and the scores of office towers presided over a huge harbor where some of the largest ships in the world lay at anchor. Neither the city nor the harbor ever slept. And it all happened on a rock not ten miles long that hung west to east off the south coast of the largest remaining Communist country in the world. Thirty miles north there lived 1.4 billion people whose collective attention was focused on Hong Kong just two months before its reversion to rule by the People’s Republic of China. It was like living in a spiritual wind tunnel: You could feel the pressure of uncontainable envy, loathing and longing pressing in from over the border. Somebody said Hong Kong was a borrowed place living on borrowed time. That time was now being measured in hours: about fifteen hundred at the moment, but reducing quickly. The Communists were coming; they were almost here.

  He left Chan to his private chat with the captain, stood at the bows again, where he had spent most of that afternoon. Hong Kong was the first hot country he’d visited. Standing in the warm, damp breeze created by the boat and gazing at the constellation of lig
hts on the island were like a dream he’d never dared to believe could come true. He didn’t care that he’d be made redundant in June. He would have had almost three years. Three years! He couldn’t believe his luck.

  Swinging around into the harbor itself, they slowed to the regulation four knots. Aston watched a tiny woman in a wide-brim straw hat fishing from a sampan, her silhouette balancing against the bucking of the tiny boat. The Star Ferries, lit up from stern to bow, were crossing from Hong Kong to Kowloon and back every fifteen minutes. A jetfoil bound for Macao rose up on its skis like a praying mantis. There, crawling up the mountain toward a saddle near the top, were the lights of the Peak Tram, a funicular railway that had put the coolies with their sedan chairs out of business nearly a hundred years ago. To the far west a fleet of green fishing trawlers, just visible in the dusk, was making for the typhoon shelter at Aberdeen where they’d raft up until Alan was spent.

  As the launch drew closer to Central, comparisons with Manhattan no longer held. There was no grid system; the jam-packed futuristic city had sprung up without any planning at all. It was as if a giant spaceship had stopped by one day and hurriedly unloaded ten thousand assorted buildings for storage; from the sea it was hard to understand how traffic, or even people, managed to squeeze between them.

  It was this intensity, physical and mental, Aston knew, that gave the place its fascination. There was no time to stand still and no space to stand still in. Weeks, then months, then years had flashed by at ten times the speed to which he was accustomed. He had been drunk with excitement since arrival; he liked the sensation of never quite catching up with himself. But it was true what they told you when you first came out: The longer you remained in the Far East, the less you understood. Take today. A detective he had never thought of as brave had stubbornly, cleverly held on to evidence in an inquiry that the same detective expected to be aborted for political reasons. Perhaps he’d risked his life and Aston’s too. It didn’t make sense.

  During the transit of the harbor the rain returned, a sticky, wet blackness that swallowed huge tankers and cut the launch off again from land. He’d told his mother she wouldn’t believe what fell from the skies out here. And it was warm. What in the world could be more exotic, more wonderful, more mysterious than the warm, stench-enriched rain of this tropical city?

  It was weird how the East changed you. There was more life and more death, and you felt twice as real for it. Soaked to the skin in a second and clutching the safety rope as he made his way back over the flooding deck to the wheelhouse, he caught Chan’s eyes and grinned. God forgive me for loving these Hong Kong storms full of money, sex and corpses. If there was a way to stay after June, he would find it.

  3

  At Queen’s Pier Chan showered and dressed in the cabin, then told Aston to stay with the heads on the boat while he found a car to collect them. The captain dropped him off at the concrete steps, then backed out into the harbor to escape the crowd of small craft using the public pier. It was rush hour in the rain; all streets and pavements were flooded with people who seemed to be fleeing some disaster over their shoulders. Above high-rise office buildings the remains of a savage light glared between charcoal clouds. In half an hour it would be night.

  At the Star Ferry Terminal, next to Queen’s Pier, the sergeant at a small police incident cabin let Chan telephone for a car to meet Aston at the pier to collect the heads and take them to the morgue.

  “Heads?” The sergeant was accustomed to writing out reports of pickpocketing and loss of credit cards. He stared at Chan, silently begging for details. Replacing the telephone, Chan mimed decapitation.

  “Then they cut off the lips, ears, nose, eyelids.”

  The sergeant let his mouth fall open. “Fuck your mother.”

  Chan nodded. He had made one man happy this day.

  He knew there was no point trying to find a taxi, still less to hope for a car to collect him within the next forty minutes. Aston would be on the boat with the heads until the rush hour was over. On the other hand, he wanted to discuss those Chinese coastguards with Chief Superintendent John Riley at Arsenal Street Police Headquarters without delay.

  Ordinarily Chan would have reported to his immediate superior at Mongkok Division, the assistant district commander/crime. Recently, though, headquarters had required officers in charge of sensitive cases to report important developments to a designated officer at Arsenal Street. After the media interest arising from the extreme cruelty of the murders he was investigating (CNN and the BBC both had carried clips of Chan saying, “I have no comment to make at this time”), and following his discovery that his telephone had been tapped and case files tampered with, he had been ordered to bypass the command line at Mongkok and report directly to Riley. He decided to walk to the complex of buildings that constituted headquarters for the Royal Hong Kong Police.

  Edinburgh Place, City Hall, Murray Road, Queensway: British names whose sell-by date was fast approaching. Queensway Plaza was an air-conditioned Oriental shopping mall crammed with Chinese tailors, Chinese takeouts, Chinese computer stores, Chinese jewelry shops and Chinese pedestrians. People moved in tidal waves in both directions. As Chan allowed himself to be carried forward into the mall, the cool from the air conditioning froze the rain and sweat on his body. He could smell on himself and everyone near him the musty odor of tropical damp as it cooled.

  In their rush to escape the wet and hurry home, people pressed against him and closed off all movement to the left or right. If he had wished to enter one of the shops, it would have required an extreme and antisocial effort of will. There was a hard knot of people who weren’t moving, though, immediately in front of Wong’s Watches. Chan allowed himself to be deposited on the outside of this crowd, where he paused for a moment. The fashion for countdowns had started in Beijing some years before; now almost every street in the territory had at least one large digital clock recording how many days, hours, seconds until midnight June 30, 1997. Wong’s was extralarge, filling half his shopwindow. Chan realized why everyone had stopped when he saw the “seconds” panel: six million and twenty seconds. The woman next to Chan started counting down in Cantonese: nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. When the panel registered a clear six million, a small cheer went up, and the woman turned to Chan: “One second for each of us-and disappearing.” Chan broke away as the crowd dispersed.

  On the other side of the twin office towers called United Center the walkway toward Arsenal Street lost a little of its human density. Chan thought about how to handle the chief superintendent, who would surely be alarmed by the problem with the coastguards. Riley? Chan had known him on and off for ten years, had watched him grow and change in the manner of gweilos since he first stepped off the plane at Kai Tak. His nickname in Cantonese could be translated as “rubber spine.” A permanent condition of self-doubt made him especially sensitive to political sea changes, which was why he was appointed to supervise delicate investigations. Not so much a willow bending in the breeze, this Riley, as an artifact of empire broken by the storms of change. Chan didn’t hold it against him; there was a disease that went with expatriation and grew worse as the years passed: schizophrenia.

  “You went into Chinese waters?” Riley said when Chan had finished.

  “It was a mistake.”

  Chan watched the Englishman try out various responses: a blink; a frown; a sedate placing of the hands together in prayer; a muted thump on the table.

  Finally Riley bit his lower lip. “But they were expecting you, you’re sure?”

  “Someone must have been listening in to our ship-to-shore and given orders to those coastguards to take the bag from us. I told you, this isn’t an ordinary investigation. Last week someone bugged my phone, and they’ve been in my files; today they listened to the ship-to-shore. As it happened, the coastguards were just dumb thugs.”

  “But they didn’t seem to know what was in the bag?”

  Chan shook his head. “They asked me several times. When
I told them, they laughed as if I was joking.”

  Riley stared at the wall, then back to Chan, then back to the wall. Chan watched Riley. Taoism posited a center of energy in the human body called chi. Riley’s chi was like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing between two identities: master race/indentured servant.

  “You were incredibly brave. Or incredibly stupid. Time will tell.” He drummed on his desk. “I have to say it does make my blood boil, though. What business do those Communist bastards have interfering in my investigation? Excuse me, our investigation-well, yours really. Five years ago I would have been behind you all the way. Even twelve months ago I would have supported you.” Riley’s eyes were more pleading than annoyed. “But we’ve only got two months left, Charlie. The Commies practically run the place already! Now they could have my arse for this-well, yours really. I’ll have to see the commissioner. Please stay home tonight, in case someone wants to see you.”

  When Chan had gone, Riley sought and obtained an immediate interview with Ronald Tsui, Hong Kong’s first Chinese commissioner of police.

  Half an hour later Riley was sitting at a huge desk in the largest office on the fifth floor of Caine House, the most prestigious building in the Arsenal Street complex. On the other side Commissioner Tsui sat in a leather chair under an oil painting of the queen of England in full ceremonial dress. Tsui, who had been educated in England, spoke in that language to Riley.

  “And you say that these coastguards had orders to intercept this bag with its incriminating contents?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? I mean, Chief Inspector Chan just happens to follow a lead that just happens to take him toward the Sokos at the same time that these chaps just happen to be in the area?”

  Riley looked at the desk, then up at the commissioner. The game they were playing was a kind of double bluff that penetrated every aspect of life in government. Tsui knew that the coastguards had deliberately intercepted Chan’s search, but he wanted to report the allegation as Riley’s, not his own. Riley wanted to report it as Chan’s, not his.