Читать онлайн «The Shanghai Murders»

LETTER INTERCEPTED FROM THE POST BOX AT THE SHANGHAI INTERNATIONAL EQUATORIAL HOTEL

Dearest Sister,

I went on a dead man’s walk today, breasting the air that the murdered man had pushed before him, not two days earlier. His name was Ngalto Chomi and he was a six-foot seven-inch black man from Zaire. He was hacked to bits in an alley off Fu Yu in the old city. The temple gods in their shrine around the corner did him no good. This city simply opened a crack and accepted his soul without a pause in its race toward oblivion.

None of this came clear to me until I saw the merchant skin the snake in the marketplace. Skin the snake while it still lived. Skin the snake as he had skinned another snake two days earlier while the black man had watched. Watched because he had bought the snake and taken it with him to a restaurant to be cooked.

But it wasn’t the snake that brought home the meaning. It was the skin. Still alive with electrical pulses, it lashed back and forth on the ground, seemingly unaware that its life, its core, was now in the hands of a man with a knife. I thought of Richard. Like the skin of the snake, on the ground, a knife already having removed his life from him with one deft stroke. Dead, but he didn’t even know it. Like the chimera of life in the skin of the snake.

Amanda

TO BE SHREDDED

DAY ONE

The body on the Hua Shan Hospital’s morgue table looked as though it had all the right pieces-but they seemed to be in the wrong places. A divinely challenging jigsaw puzzle awaiting the Maker’s few spare moments.

As he lit up, he noticed that the paper of the cigarette was soaked through with his perspiration.

At forty-four, Zhong Fong was the youngest man to head Special Investigations in Shanghai, PRC. He knew he was good at what he did, but he also knew that he was the beneficiary of history. The Cultural Revolution had removed many older police officers who in the past would have stood in his way for dozens of years.

So Mao wasn’t all bad, he thought, as he mentally reconstructed the human form in front of him. White male, probably over thirty, definitely under fifty, at one time over six feet tall and probably in excess of two hundred pounds but just now eviscerated, carved up, lopped off and very, very dead. Fong blew out a long trail of bluish smoke while the others waited for him to speak.

Finally he said, “I don’t suppose we have any idea who this thing used to be, do we?” The aged coroner only grunted and turned toward the bloodstained industrial sink. The ashen-faced young cop, who had found the body parts only a few hours earlier, felt he had better say something, so he said, “No, sir. ”

“I would never have guessed,” said Fong. This evidently left the young cop confused, but Fong had bigger things on his mind than the confusion of a rookie. “Call the consulates. ” The rookie took out his notebook and began to write. “Start with the Americans, they like to be first. Tell them what we have here: foreign national, Caucasian, no identification, male, thirty to fifty, cut up and ready for dim sum. ”