“In your honorable and expert opinion, would you say they were murdered by the same professional team?”
“Certainly.”
Chan and Sun Bin exchange glances and let a couple of beats pass. “Want to bet on it?”
The two Chinese cops are looking at me with hardened expressions. Even Sun Bin, who has been the very avatar of Oriental hospitality, seems to have succumbed to a demon more powerful than himself.
“Maybe not,” I say, mentally backing away from those two.
“I’m offering six to one these killings were carried out by a totally different team. Put in a thousand dollars, you get six thousand back plus your original bet. If you’re so sure it’s the same team,” Sun Bin says.
“He wants me to open an escrow account in Hong Kong, so punters feel safe betting with him,” Chan says. “He’s already got half his precinct signed up.”
“Why would you be so sure it’s a different team that did it?”
Chan says something to Sun Bin, which I think must be standard Putonghua, because it doesn’t sound like the Shanghainese dialect I’ve been hearing since I arrived. Sun Bin looks at me and smiles sheepishly. “I must humbly beg your pardon. The inspector here has reminded me that it is contrary to Confucian wisdom to take advantage of strangers. Naturally, we of the mainland need to take lessons from our Hong Kong brothers and sisters in such matters.”
I have no idea if Sun Bin is serious or exercising a local form of sarcasm. Chan doesn’t seem to know either and Sun Bin is unusually inscrutable for a Chinese. “You mean there are reasons for thinking this is some kind of revenge conspiracy killing for the murders on Vulture Peak?” I ask.
Now they are both staring at me. “In China, conspiracy theories are always well founded,” Sun Bin advises with a smile.
I take a couple of steps back so that the two of them are silhouetted against the mad city on the other side of the window. I think I’m beginning to understand what are sometimes referred to as the “deeper” layers of the case.
“Would it be consistent with the new Confucianism to tell this humble stranger exactly what you two honorable forensic geniuses think is going on here?”
Both nod independently. “Come into the kitchen,” Sun Bin says.
The kitchen is a fashion statement in stainless steel. It is also starkly empty except for a tablet laptop, manufactured by LG, on the stainless-steel island. The computer is plugged into a socket in the center of the island. The three of us pull up the stools that go with the island and watch Sun Bin jog the mouse and bring the machine to life. My eyes are swamped by a swarm of Chinese characters I cannot decipher. It’s amazing to me how quickly Sun Bin can manipulate the 47,035 characters of his alphabet; it seems superhuman. Now we are looking at a split screen with a graph on one side and what looks like an address book on the other.
Chan and Sun Bin both stare at me as if I’m supposed to experience revelation.
“Start with the address book,” I say. “If that’s what it is.”
“It’s a list of suspects, except they are not people.”
“So what do you have for suspects if not people?”
“Government departments, especially the uniformed services, large private enterprises, and some groups that are consortia in all but name but have no legal status.”
“But there seem to be thousands of them.”
Sun Bin nods. “That is correct. There are thousands and thousands of them. With two billion of us, everything is multiplied. It’s logical, isn’t it? In a country like America, with only three hundred million, you have-say-half a dozen suspects at the beginning of an inquiry. So we generally start with a hundred times that number. The increase is exponential.”
“He’s trying to impress you,” Chan says. “He knows who did it, don’t you, Sun Bin?”
“I’m working with a short list of ten,” Sun Bin says.
Chan sighs. “He does everything by the book. Including the gambling. He has no emotional intelligence at all. Do you, Sun Bin?”
“None at all,” he confesses. “When I was at school, everything was about industrial logic. Now when I start hearing about ‘emotional intelligence’ from foreigners like you, it makes me feel stupid.”
“See what we have to contend with?” Chan says. “I live in Hong Kong, China, but to him I’m a foreigner. Sun Bin thinks Shanghai is sooo special, don’t you, Sun Bin?”
“Shanghai is the eye of the storm called modernism,” Sun Bin says.
Chan groans. “I’ve said it a hundred times. The Yips didn’t do the Phuket job, and they didn’t do this one either. Just because I know that intuitively, and can’t prove it, doesn’t mean I’m not right.”
“You have inherited from the British a tendency to overuse the word I. At the time of Chairman Mao, it would have been said that you suffer from bourgeois self-centeredness,” Sun Bin says.
“It would have been said that I was a Capitalist Running Dog, and they would have shot me. But I think the West won that side of the class war.”
“But your addiction to either/or strikes me as quite American monopolar, even British colonial,” Sun Bin says. “It lacks a sense of the plurality of the modern world.”
My eyes are flitting from one to the other, then to the computer and back again; at the same time I begin to see the China connection as an impenetrable wall. It’s like being told that the answer to your question is to be found in the Library of Congress without anyone specifying the department, never mind the full reference.
“You mean there could be a third party?” I say.
“Third, fourth, fifth, sixth.”
“Are there really so many skilled in the art of organ removal?”
Sun Bin seems embarrassed and looks away. Chan stares at me with his lips twisted. I have a feeling that I’ve transgressed some unwritten rule of local etiquette. Into the silence Chan says, “Hey, let’s take a walk down Nanjing Road.”
Sun Bin seems to have fallen into depression and says he won’t come. Chan grabs a cab at the ground floor of the apartment building, and within seconds we are stuck in a jam. Chan tells the driver it’s worth double the usual fare, which inspires the driver to take a few shortcuts. In the middle of the traffic jam, I ask why Sun Bin’s mood suddenly changed.
“Everyone has mood swings,” the inspector says, looking defensive.
“Okay.”
Chan sighs. “He’s shy of you because at least two of the suspect consortia are police. One of them is run by Sun Bin’s boss. He may have to give up on the case.”
“But if the Yips didn’t do these three in Shanghai, what was the point of dragging me over here?”
“Two reasons. The main one is I talked him into it. But he chickened out.”
“Chickened out of what?”
“My idea was that he would tell you everything. He wasn’t supposed to just show you three corpses at the morgue. He was supposed to show you more than a dozen others-logistically, not all of them could have had their organs removed by the Yips. Nor could any one single agency be responsible.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m explaining what Sun Bin was supposed to explain. In every major Chinese city today, right this minute, the recently dead are having their organs removed by a skilled team under the protection of one consortium or another.”
I let a couple of beats pass, unable to process this revelation. “And the other reason-there was some other reason why Sun Bin agreed to invite me?”
“He’s desperate to go to Bangkok to get laid. It’s tough in China at the moment, unless you’re rich. Sure, there are women who will sleep with you, but it’s a battleground-like sleeping with your enemy. He yearns for the sweet pussy of your medieval culture.”
Chan is indulging in one of his smirks. I think I’ve begun to read him better. “You’re lying, just to make some politically incorrect point.”
The smirk broadens. “Of course Sun Bin wants to go to Bangkok to get laid, but that’s not the only reason for getting to know you.”
“So?”
