The Last Six Million Seconds

“What’s your name, Firstborn?”

“Charlie.”

“What?” The coastguard tried to repeat Chan’s rendering of his nickname. “Gar-ha-lee?”

“Don’t they teach you anything over there?”

“I told you, don’t insult the Revolution.”

The coastguard pulled the trigger of the AK-47. Chan and Aston hit the deck. Chan heard guffaws from across the water.

“Power comes out of the barrel of a gun,” the coastguard said.

Chan used the rail to pull himself to his feet. “I bet you made that up yourself.”

The coastguard stiffened. “No, Chairman Mao.”

“Who’s he?”

“I’m warning you, Firstborn.”

Chan held up a hand. “Don’t shoot, I have bad nerves. Look, it’s teatime in Hong Kong. Let’s all go home.”

“Give us the bag, Firstborn.”

“We could discuss it over a beer.”

“Nothing to discuss. You picked up something from Chinese waters. It belongs to us.”

“A thousand dollars,” Chan said.

“No.”

“And two cases of Carlsberg.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Nothing you want.”

“We have orders.”

“Don’t tell them you saw us. Look, there’s a typhoon. We have to get back. So do you.”

The coastguard rubbed his hand on the stock of the gun, then looked at the sky.

“What’s in that other bag, the one protecting your crotch?”

“Money.”

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“I think there’s at least two thousand dollars in there keeping your balls warm.”

The crew on the Communist boat chuckled.

Chan’s twitch subsided somewhat. “Okay.”

“And all your beer.”

“Okay.”

“Now tell us what’s in the bag.”

“Three human heads.”

The coastguards guffawed again.

“You’re a real comedian, Firstborn. How’re you going to bring the money and beer over here?”

Chan gestured toward the stern. “I’ll send the tender.”

He ordered the inflatable lowered from its davits. The crew didn’t need to be told to hurry; they had the outboard roaring within a second of its entering the sea. Two constables handed some twelve-packs of Carlsberg to the crew in the tender. Chan extracted all the notes from his money belt and borrowed some more from Aston. The wind had started to moan.

“Did he say, ‘Ten years ago we would have killed you’?” Aston spoke in a half whisper.

“He was being macho. It’s not true.”

“Right.” Aston waited while Chan watched the tender reach the Communist boat, his black eyes fixed like stones. He relaxed as soon as he saw the beer unloaded and the tender put off again from the other boat.

“Twenty-five years ago they would have killed us, though.” Chan caught Aston’s gaze. “During the Cultural Revolution it wasn’t a good idea for Hong Kong police to stray over the border.”

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