The Last Six Million Seconds

Damned wicked thing to do, in my view. You know, I just don’t think… I mean-”

“You mean it’s not the sort of thing a white man would do?”

“Yes-I mean no. Of course that’s not what I mean.”

Of course. “Imagine a nose, would you? How far out would it stick? A little Chinese nose, I mean, not a great Caucasian conk.”

Riley looked at Chan’s nose, which managed to be small, flat, cruel and aquiline at the same time.

“Add a half inch for ears too. Now, watch.”

Chan lowered the head into the funnel. It slid in neatly until the frozen section of neck rested on the screw.

“Even with a half inch each side for ears and, say, three quarters of an inch for the nose, it would still mince- don’t you think? Riley?”

Chan left the head in the bottom of the mincer, ran around to the other side of the table, caught the tottering chief superintendent.

“Steady, sir.” Chan sat him down in the chair, shook him. Riley groaned.

“Good Lord.” Set into a bland face, a child’s frightened eyes looked up at Chan.

Chan walked back to the other side of the table, climbed back on his chair, retrieved the head from the mincer, placed it on the trestle, took out the other. Like his companion, the small Chinese fitted the bottom of the mincer with millimeters to spare. Clare’s head was larger, however. It would not have minced without further mutilation.

Chan replaced Clare’s head in the icebox, looked at Riley, who was staring at him.

“An interesting experiment, without any firm conclusion,” Chan said.

By then Riley was on his feet, a hand over his mouth. Chan opened the door for the chief superintendent on his way to the washroom. Pensive, Chan lifted the Chinese head from the trestle by the hair. Thawed now, the jaw dropped open as if the owner had finally decided to talk. Chan noticed the broken incisors and, toward the back, tiny flecks of something dark jammed between gaps in the teeth. On checking the other two mouths, he found similar particles. From a secretary’s desk outside the evidence room he called Dr. Lam. It was late Friday, but the odontologist seemed happy to meet at the morgue the following morning.

Shades of gray: steel gray for the bench top; government gray for the walls; blue-gray for the blades of butcher’s instruments hanging from hooks above the postmortem table. The air, tinged with formaldehyde and ether, was gray too. Chan wouldn’t have minded if he could have had access to nicotine, but a No Smoking sign was strident in blood red on stark white. He watched while Lam pulled the heads out of a gray steel box packed with dry ice and tossed them onto the bench with professional flamboyance. Frozen now, the mouth that had seemed to want to speak the day before was resolutely shut and resisted Lam’s strenuous efforts to open it. Chan used his eyes and chin to indicate the door.

“Coffee?”

Only thawing would overcome postmortem omerta, and smoking was permitted in the gray canteen on the first floor. When they returned ten minutes later, hinge joints had warmed and freed, but new condensation on the metal table formed a piste on which the heads skied away from Lam’s reach. The dentist looked around. Everything except a head clamp apparently. Chan grunted. From the opposite side of the bench he leaned over and with his face turned away held open the jaws while Lam probed. Through the bones in his hands Chan felt the vibrations as the dentist began to scrape with a steel instrument. Every few seconds Lam cleaned the point on a stiff sheet of transparent plastic. In less than ten minutes the dentist was tossing the heads back into the box.

“You’re right, there are particles in the mouths that might not be food.” He pointed to a minuscule pile of scrapings on the plastic.

“What could it be?”

“Impossible to say. There’s not enough of it for anyone in Hong Kong to analyze properly. You’d need Scotland Yard to take it down to molecular level.” He gave the scrapings a glance and shrugged. “Up to you.” He adjusted the thick glasses on his nose. “You could feel pretty stupid if it turns out to be bay leaf or some herb that was in a meal they shared before they died.”

At the steps of the morgue Chan lit a Benson while he watched the dentist be driven away by his chauffeur in his black Mercedes. And they said cops were insensitive. With a plastic bag in his pocket containing the scrapings he took a taxi to Arsenal Street, left the bag with forensic and walked up to Riley’s office to fill out the forms: RHKPF form hm91: “request for permission to seek scientific assistance overseas (if the agency you wish to consult is not Scotland Yard, give reasons). This form should be typed in quadruplicate.” Chan looked around Riley’s empty office: no typewriter, no carbon sheets, only a state-of-the-art printer. He completed the form in black ballpoint and left it in Riley’s in tray.

Most of the rest of Riley’s corridor echoed with Saturday morning vacuum. He was surprised to see Angie on the stairs in jeans and T-shirt, taking a mug of tea back to her studio. She turned away quickly when she saw him, then changed her mind and faced him with an exaggerated pout. Brought to a halt on the stairs, Chan fidgeted, tried a grin.

“Hi.”

“You bastard.” She said it with a sly smile, though.

“I should have phoned. Sorry.”

She sighed. “That’s all right, mate. I understand. Come here a minute. I’ve got something to show you.”

He followed her into her studio. She nodded at the easel, where she had clipped a wad of sketches. Angie sipped from her mug. “You were right about one thing.”

From the easel the blond boy smiled out. It was an excellent likeness.

“Check the others.”

Chan lifted the sheets one by one. Blond boy in T-shirt, blond boy in bed, blond boy with erection, blond boy in centerfold pose.

“You’ve captured him very well.”

She curled her lips into a sneer. “At least Australians know what our bodies are for.”

Chan steered a course across the room and around her, back to the door. “Sooner or later the rest of the world will catch up.”

“Wanker.” The word bounced off the walls as he hurried down the stairs.

32

Often on Saturday afternoons Chan went to a beach or pier to watch the human species migrate from land to water. Square miles of sea disappeared under a counterpane of sampans, junks, tiny catamarans, seventy-foot sailing yachts, snakehead boats, twin-engine motor cruisers, board sailors, swimmers, divers, snorklers, water scooters, fleets of sailboats of a specific class competing in races, very large luxury yachts that almost deserved to be called ships. There was no real need to stare and yearn; he could have bought a small dinghy or rejoined his diving club. Ever since his divorce he had tended to deprive himself of pleasure, although he could not have explained the connection.

For example, the Emily was a 120-foot triple-decker, the largest pleasure boat in Hong Kong, fully equipped with compressor and diving equipment, and Chan had refused the invitation to spend the weekend on it. When his sister, Jenny, had insisted, he had finally given in as a kind of social duty, like grave sweeping and writing Chinese New Year cards.

He rode the underground from Mongkok, emerged at Central and took a taxi to Aberdeen. The marina was a large crescent with floating wooden docks attached to a spacious club that sold debentures to large corporations and consulates. The biggest boats berthed along a finger that pointed at the famous three floating restaurants where all tourists must eat once. Top heavy with lions and dragons in gold, red and green, they had emerged out of Western fantasies of mysterious China and were still cashing in. The Emily took up a double berth at the end of one finger with her stern pointed toward the largest of them.

Chan could see her from the other side of the marina. Her hull was white with blue trim, her triple-deck