The Shanghai Murders - A Mystery of Love and Ivory by David Rotenberg Page A

lucky. The black man had been much stronger than he had anticipated. And the opium had made him physically unpredictable. Once he had managed to cut the African, his knife had done its work with its usual precision. It was not the knife that had faltered. He, Loa Wei Fen, was the one.
    There had been no time to dawdle. No time to arrange body pieces. It surprised Loa Wei Fen that Ngalto Chomi carried no wallet. He must simply let the driver settle his accounts. But the wallet was no matter. A black man was not hard to identify in Shanghai.
    It was the other thing that he had failed to leave that so angered him. It was not in fact until he was back in his room at the Portman that Loa Wei Fen reached in his pocket and remembered it. His employers would not be pleased. But more important, he was not pleased. He was trained not to make errors. He was trained to be perfect. And here he clearly was not.
    He threw the slender white objects at the ceiling.
    They shattered. But the sound did not pacify him. To him the ivory shards were nothing more than snowflakes falling on the roof, making it slippery for the lion cub to jump to the pole.

    About the time that Amanda was sinking into her hotel tub, Fong and Wang Jun finally reached the outlying suburbs of Shanghai. Both men would have been amazed to learn that the new housing going up there looked exactly like lower-income homes in Southern California commuter communities.
    Shortly thereafter in one of the alleyways off Fu Yu, a five-year-old boy brought a piece of what he thought was “funny dark meat” to his grandmother’s outdoor cook stand. The old woman’s screams did the unthinkable—they brought Shanghai’s traffic momentarily to a halt. This in turn brought the police. Which in short order brought a phone call to Special Investigations.

    By the time Fong and Wang Jun got there, the crime scene had been severely compromised. The alleyway off Fu Yu was densely travelled, so despite the best efforts of the local police, it quickly had become almost impossible to tell what was left where and by whom. Fong ordered the evacuation of almost the entire alley and despite the protests of the citizens and a cellular query from Commissioner Hu, he got his way. Then he had construction site searchlights set up all along the alley and quarter-meter sector lines laid down. Seventytwo police officers picked through every inch of one of the filthiest alleys in Shanghai for the better part of twelve hours and came up with almost nothing.
    Over and over again, Fong was approached with “What are you looking for?” And over and over again, he said, “I’ll know when I see it.” So they brought him everything they found. A small handful of one-fen coins, half a well-leafed-through Hong Kong porno magazine, bits of several different kinds of food in various degrees of decay, a sole from the toe of a lady’s shoe, and many more things—none of which pleased Fong. He had already found the piece of heart and the strip from the JAL airsickness bag, where he thought they would be. The Chinese driver informed the police that his Zairian charge never carried a wallet, that he, the driver, always went in after his client was finished and paid the bills. So that accounted for the wallet’s whereabouts.
    As the driver headed downtown with a police officer to make a full statement, Wang Jun approached Fong. “One hand points to the guy’s ID.”
    “The other to the second part of the message,” replied Fong.
    “Which is?” asked Wang Jun.
    “Which is what we are looking for. No! What we’ll keep looking for until we find.”
    Wang Jun slipped a cigarette into his mouth. “Did you notice that the body pieces weren’t put together very well this time?”
    “I noticed that.”
    “Could it be that our guy is slipping? Maybe he made a mistake.”
    “Perhaps.”
    Wang Jun looked closely at the younger man. Fong’s face seemed hard as a river stone. Set. Not looking outward at all,