The Last Six Million Seconds Read online

  “I believe I told you, Commissioner, according to Chan, there have been a number of other attempts by an outside agency to monitor the investigation into these murders.”

  Tsui nodded. “Yes, you did. At least you convinced me that he convinced you that someone had tapped his office telephone and copied some of the confidential files related to the case.”

  “Well, if this other agency went so far as to tap one of our phones as he alleges, which presents some logistical problems for them, it’s not farfetched to imagine they were intercepting ship-to-shore radio reports that Chan was issuing every half hour from the time he left Queen’s Pier. After all, ship-to-shore can be monitored by just about anyone with the right frequency on their radio.”

  Tsui nodded. “So?”

  “I think you see the point, sir. If his radio reports were being intercepted, it would be a simple matter for them to issue instructions to the nearest Communist coastguards to keep an eye out and to be especially interested in anything he salvaged from the sea.”

  “That’s how you see it?”

  “That’s how Chan sees it.”

  Tsui looked as if he were considering the possibility for the first time. “I think I follow you so far, Chief Superintendent. But one thing still puzzles me. If the coastguards had been given such instructions, why did they let him go?”

  “Firstly, they weren’t sure whose waters they were in, ours or theirs. He managed to bluff them. Secondly, and most important, these were not high-flying cadres with a passionate concern with national security. Chan describes them as the usual bunch of yobs in uniform who could be persuaded to betray just about anything for the right price.”

  The commissioner sighed. “This will have to go higher. The political adviser will have to be informed.”

  Riley saw that the interview was over. He stood up. “Yes, sir,” he said in English, repeated the same words in Cantonese, turned smartly and left.

  After he had gone, the commissioner sat for a moment. He tapped the government-issue blotting pad with his forefinger, then lifted the telephone.

  “Get me the commissioner for security. When I’ve done with him, I’ll need to speak to the political adviser. And I’ll need a summary of Chief Inspector S. K. Chan’s personal file, please.”

  4

  Arsenal Street Police Headquarters was only a short walk from Wanchai, where Chan had trained as a cadet. On the surface the area was a red-light district of international renown, but Chan was intimate with its other features. He liked the old-style low-rise apartment blocks in the narrow back streets with their external chaos of air-conditioning units, hanging gardens, illegal balconies, chicken-wire aviaries and satellite dishes. In a side alley he opened his lungs to Chinese odors. Every neighborhood had its essence; Mongkok, where he lived and worked, was a full-bodied diesel with nuances of glutamate. Wanchai’s was a lighter palette: fried cabbage, stale beer and hundred-year-old sex.

  Despite his Caucasian features, he merged effortlessly with the pavement beggars and bag people, the street vendors and the small shop owners who rarely closed their narrow roll-down shutters before ten o’clock at night. Culture was a matter of personal history expressed through subliminal gestures; within seconds people who had never met him before accepted him as Chinese. His mastery of the street slang helped. He sank gratefully into a feeling of ethnic belonging. Speaking the language his mother had spoken to the kind of people she had spent her life with, he became almost loquacious. In the vegetable market that meandered for a quarter mile the length of Wanchai Road he bargained for pleasure at stalls selling half-black eggs that had been buried in the ground, jackfruit, garlic, ginseng, live frogs and chicks. He watched three women pick at bean sprouts; he discussed next Wednesday’s racing at Happy Valley with men he knew to be triad members and matched them expletive for expletive. Chan would have turned down the governorship of Hong Kong so long as he could always be Chinese in an Asian street market.

  He basked in anonymity for forty minutes before he admitted to himself that he had come to see the old man. He turned down a side street in which five men strolled toward him in single file, each carrying a bamboo bird cage containing a tiny yellow bird. A few yards down the narrow street he stopped at the Kwong Hing Book Store Ltd. The name of the company was the only Roman lettering in the store. Every book was printed on a Chinese press in Chinese characters. Chan liked the smell of Chinese books, subtly different from Western books. There were no pictures on the heavy paper covers, no commercialism at all; the print was everything. It was the way books should always smell: paper, binding and words, no frills.

  There was no counter and no register at which to take money, only a cheap wooden desk in one corner and behind it an old Chinese man with a gray beard constructed of sparse hairs, some of which reached as far as his T-shirt, which was black and bore a portrait of John Lennon. He looked up.

  Under the beard the skin was stretched over unfleshed bones. The eyes glinted like water at the bottom of a well. It was a face that shocked; it bore no sign of physical abuse, yet Chan could not look at it without seeing suffering beyond that which humans were designed to endure. The old man nodded.

  “Well, well.” He spoke English with an American accent.

  “I was just passing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Aren’t you pleased to see me?”

  “The man who saved me from exile? Sure. I thought you’d dropped me. It’s been a long time.”

  “Only six months.”

  “Too long.” The deep eyes flashed at Chan. “I scared you last time, huh?”

  “You scare everybody.”

  The old man sighed. “Not me. Truth. That’s what scares everybody.” Chan nodded. “But you came back. I knew you would.”

  “Did you?”

  The old man chuckled. “Actually, no. But I hoped you would. You’re not an ordinary Chinese. You’re half Irish. Sometimes the Irish are attracted to truth. It’s a kind of minority reaction against the main bias of their culture.” He smiled. The American English was perfect and somehow dated. Chan thought of American films set in small towns in the fifties. “And then there was my little problem last year. You showed character. You’re different, for sure.”

  “They were abusing the law. You were right.”

  “ ‘They’ being the government of Hong Kong. Your employers, as a matter of fact. They were looking for a pretext for deporting me, and you spoke up for me. It could have damaged your career. That showed guts.”

  Chan shrugged. “They didn’t hold it against me. The British aren’t vindictive.”

  The old man turned his head thoughtfully as if considering the point. “True. They’re hard to like, but they have definite qualities. If the Third World had remained at the emotional age of thirteen the British Empire could have lasted a thousand years.”

  “You’ve been writing?”

  He nodded emphatically. “I’ve found a new publisher in San Francisco. Outrage doesn’t sell the way it did in the sixties, but he thinks the whole China thing is more marketable than it was.” He held up his hands. “I do what I can.”

  Chan smiled, despite a sense of doom. “If they try to deport you again, they won’t listen to a cop like me telling them you’re an honest citizen and you loved your mother. They’ll find a way. The British only take so much democracy; then things happen behind closed doors. They’re like that.”

  The old man harrumphed. “I would like them to deport me for publishing a book. Think of the publicity. Someone might actually buy it.”

  Chan nodded. “Well, no one can say you’re a quitter.”

  The old man frowned. “I told you why. You steal a man’s soul only once. Second time he fights to the death. I told you that.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “That’s what scared you?”

  “No.”

  “So what scared you? I like to know these things; it helps refine my marketing.”

  “The photo
graphs, of course. Photographs scare more than words.”

  The old man looked at Chan. “I don’t really believe I scared you. I know every shade of fear, every nuance. I’m a world authority on fear, and you weren’t afraid. You were upset but not afraid.”

  Chan shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps I need to see them again. You still have them?”

  “Even more. I get photos like that almost every month now.” Chan remembered the old man’s curious way of sliding his eyes over him. It was like a radar scan that was over in less than a second. Chan knew it as a survival skill developed by long-term prisoners. “Something happen to you today?” The old man looked away as he said it.

  Chan shrugged. “Just a case I’m working on.”

  “So?”

  “There’s a China dimension; at least there might be.”

  “Ah! The dragon blew on you. Now you want to know more about the dragon?”

  “Maybe those pictures will focus what I’m feeling. I don’t know.”

  With difficulty the old man stood up. “You’re a good boy. A little slow but good. I’ll show you those pictures, and some new ones, on one condition. I have a potential recruit coming next week with his wife. I would like you to be here.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t pretend to be dumb. On my own I’m an eccentric old fart with poor Cantonese and an American accent. I’m also a world-class loser, according to the value structures of this city. With a chief inspector of police in the room, though, I could look almost respectable.”

  Chan looked the old man in the eye. “You’re ruthless.”

  “You mean I’m using you? Of course. Not for any hope of personal gain, though. You’ll come?”

  Chan remained silent.

  The old man smiled again. “You’re a real old-style Chinaman, even if you do have Irish genes. You bury gold under old rags. I bet I’m the only one in this whole town who knows you have the heart of a saint.”

  “You’re right, you need to refine your marketing. Me as saint isn’t even vaguely credible.”

  He followed the old man into a tiny bedroom adjacent to the bookshop. The old man pointed at black-and-white photographs strung on lines across the bed. Chan gave the old man a sharp glance.

  “You took them out of the box?”

  “I sleep with them,” the old man said gruffly. “Weird, huh?”

  Chan did not answer. In the picture in front of his nose he recognized the fallen features of someone condemned to death. A printed caption at the bottom of the photograph read: “Female prisoner being escorted by military policemen in an execution parade held in Baise Municipality of Guangxi Autonomous Region on August 29, 1990.” As his eye took in the other photographs on the string, he saw that each one recorded an execution. Some of the captions recorded executions that had taken place as recently as a month ago.

  The old man’s hand was gripping his arm because Chan had started to shake. Blinking down tears, Chan pulled himself free. “I better go.”

  The old man followed him back into the bookshop. He looked into the black tunnel eyes. The old man made his features plead. “Try to make Thursday.”

  At the door Chan left without saying good-bye. Out in the street he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. China: The Hong Kong experience was like camping in the mouth of a cyclops’s lair. Survival required meticulous study of the creature’s habits, but everyone came sooner or later to the same conclusion: The cyclops was insane.

  5

  Although it was fairly late in the evening before a slot could be found when all three men would be free, the commissioner for security, the commissioner of police and the political adviser all considered the matter sufficiently urgent to meet that night. Tsui picked up Caxton Smith, the commissioner for security, in his chauffeur-driven white Toyota. Together they entered the lift lobby of the government buildings in Queensway, which, at 10:00 P.M., were almost deserted. On the twenty-first floor they walked down the corridor to the office of the political adviser.

  Of all the many hundreds of English men and women working for the Hong Kong government, only the political adviser was appointed directly by the Foreign Office in London out of its diplomatic service. He answered not to the governor but to the colonial masters in London and was intended to be the mother country’s eyes and ears. He oversaw every action by the colonial administration that could conceivably have an effect on the precarious relationship between London and Beijing.

  Like the political adviser, the commissioner for security also spent 90 percent of his time preoccupied with Chinese matters, but for opposite reasons. Almost all of Hong Kong’s frontier, land and sea, was shared with the PRC and it was the C for S’s job to deal with the many border incidents that arose, from smuggling to illegal immigration to calculated border intimidation by Beijing.

  Tsui, who had come from home, wore an open-neck shirt and casual trousers. The two Englishmen were still in their business suits. They sat at a long table in an anteroom to the PA’s main office.

  Milton Cuthbert looked up from the short briefing Tsui had been able to send over before the meeting.

  “Tell me, Ronny, about the murders first. That seems to be where it all begins.”

  Tsui cleared his throat and hesitated a moment before speaking. “Apart from the sensational aspect, not that remarkable. You read about them in the papers. The so-called Mincer Murders. A vat of human flesh, which forensic analysis showed to be the product of three different bodies, was found decaying in a warehouse in Mongkok. The bodies had been put through an industrial mincer and were therefore totally unrecognizable. Further examination showed that all three had been minced while still alive.”

  Cuthbert jerked his head up and raised his eyebrows. “You can tell that?”

  “It’s all a question of the condition of the nerve endings and blood composition. When the body is in extreme pain, the nerves literally shrink in terror, just like the owner himself, and some sort of chemical is secreted into the blood. The mincer left fairly large chunks, permitting a minimal forensic examination. The mincemeat in the vat showed consistently clenched, terror-stricken nerves, and blood analysis supported the view that the victims were alive when minced.”

  “Dear God,” Cuthbert said.

  Caxton Smith rubbed his knees nervously. “Dreadful business.”

  “Go on, Ronny.”

  “There was one other startling revelation by forensic. The bodies had been decapitated during or after the mincing. That is to say that the heads were not minced. No cerebral matter at all was found in the vat.”

  “Just a minute,” Caxton Smith said. “These victims were still alive whilst being minced, but decapitated?”

  Tsui shot Smith a sharp glance. “Hardly. The only explanation is that at a certain point in the mincing-probably when the victims had already bled to death-the heads were removed.”

  “And not found by the investigating team until today?”

  “Evidently not,” Cuthbert said, “but let’s not jump the gun. Historical sequence, if you don’t mind, Ronny.”

  Tsui paused to take a cough sweet out of a small box before proceeding. He sucked it as he spoke. “Preliminary investigations suggested that the murders were drug-related. At first we assumed the triads-who else? The district commander at Mongkok appointed Chief Inspector Chan to lead the inquiry. However, with the intense media interest and the discovery by Chan that his telephone was tapped and that someone had been copying the case files without his consent, I gave instructions that Chan should report directly to headquarters, a precaution I habitually take with high-profile cases. I appointed Chief Superintendent Riley to supervise the investigation.”

  “How did he discover the illegal copying?” Cuthbert asked.

  Tsui smiled. “Chan’s basically a streetfighting man. He came up through the ranks and has a hundred tricks up his sleeve. I seem to remember he pasted a hair over the file-something like that. I forget exactly what, but it was sufficient to convince him th
at there had been some copying done.”

  “What was done about it?”

  “The tap was removed, and the files were kept in a safe from then on. As far as we know, there’s been no further interference-at least until today.”

  “The coastguards and all that?”

  “Yes-it’s all in the briefing paper I sent you.”

  The three men sat silently for several minutes. Caxton Smith was the first to break the silence. “Just to set my mind at rest, Ronny, why did you think it was a drug-related case?”

  “It’s not a question of what I think. You simply have to start with a reasonable hypothesis to give your investigation direction, and drugs were the only one. First, Mongkok is a notorious triad center. Second, with the premeditated torture of three people it just doesn’t look like a crime of passion. Third, the perpetrators would have had to buy or borrow a large industrial meat mincer-an indication that money was no object. There are plenty of cheaper ways to intimidate and murder. Fourth, there had to be a degree of organization. Organized crime is financed in large part by drug dealing.”

  “But it could have been a gangland vendetta?”

  Tsui sucked loudly on his sweet. “Which brings me to my fifth and probably best reason. There have been no gangland reprisals as far as we know, and our intelligence is pretty good. Which suggests that the victims were murdered by their own organization.”

  “Why?”

  Tsui shrugged. “Who knows? Betrayal? Hands in the till? Knew too much? Tried to usurp someone higher up the triad pyramid?”

  Cuthbert tapped the table. “Very well, three drug-related murders seem an eminently reasonable hypothesis. That doesn’t encroach on my patch at all.”

  Tsui looked at him with something approaching amusement. Caxton Smith also smiled. Cuthbert looked from one to the other.