The ICAC was created in the early seventies, when the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was known to be the most corrupt in the world. Desk sergeants were millionaires with Swiss and Taiwanese bank accounts; senior officers absconded at Kai Tak Airport with suitcases full of cash; outlying islands suitable for importing morphine were nicknamed Treasure Island by the wealthy constables who patrolled them. Questions were asked in Parliament; the governor, Sir Murray Maclehose, responded by creating an organization with powers of arrest without charge, with authority to obtain confidential documents from banks and to interrogate potential witnesses whether they agreed to it or not. It was an organization answerable to no one except the governor. It investigated allegations of corruption in the police force in particular and was loathed by most policemen for its aggressive tactics and envied for its successes. Hardened criminals who never gave statements to police had a way of talking after seven days in ICAC custody at its offices on Queensway Plaza.
It was said that policemen made pathetic defendants, being subject to a form of guilt to which hardened criminals were immune.
“Scum.” The big South African spat a fleck of his contempt into the wastepaper bin. His name was Jack Forte. The other, the slim Englishman, was Milton Cuthbert, the political adviser. Chan had recognized him from numerous appearances on news flashes about the progress of talks in Beijing concerning the future of the colony. Such an honor, to be intimidated by a celebrity.
Forte stood up, walked around his desk, stood very close to Chan, who was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. Languidly Cuthbert looked at his watch.
It was always instructive to watch a fellow professional at work. Chan had no idea what he was supposed to have done, but fear of Forte induced an ardent wish to confide in Cuthbert, who was always on the point of leaving him alone with the South African. Forte’s nationality helped. In small bare rooms such as this blacks and coloreds had been beaten to a slow death in Forte’s hometown only a few years ago, a fact it was not easy to erase from one’s mind. In Forte’s system Chan was colored. Ironic considering the rainbow of shades that, close up, could be found in the white man’s face. As the South African bent down to breathe over Chan, the chief inspector discerned purple veins and russet blood vessels bursting in a spray of pink and blue under an alabaster membrane, a blue eye set in porcelain flared with orange and mauve; red, gray, white and black whiskers close enough to be counted twitched around the near-lipless rim of a small mouth with a prodigious capacity for loathing.
“I hate you as I hate all bent coppers.”
The big fist slammed into the big open hand two millimeters from Chan’s left eye. Chan knew fists from his karate days. There were fists that no matter how big never succeeded in inflicting more than superficial bruising, others that were weapons of assault capable of smashing rib cages, splintering sinuses, crushing skulls. Forte was proud of his fists.
Cuthbert stood up, stepped across the floor, bent down so that both men were staring into his face.
“Who’s paying you?”
“Paying me?”
“Why?”
“Which agent are they using here?”
“Agent?”
“Where’s the rest of the guns?”
“Guns?”
“What are the weapons for?”
“Is it heroin?”
“Heroin?”
“What do they want?”
“Who?”
“What does it all have to do with the bodies in the vat?”
“Ah!”
“Why did they kill the girl and the two Chinese?”
“What did they know?”
“Where did the other stuff come from?”
“Yes, Chan, the other stuff?”
“The poison, Chan, that kills everything, who owns it?”
“Who owns it?”
“Who told you where to find it?”
“It?”
“Who owns it?”
“I’m lost.”
“Were they delivering or receiving?”
“Were you delivering or receiving?”
“Which one, Chan?”
“Which is it, Chan?”
“Who is Chan?”
“I’m going to leave now, Chan.”
“He’s leaving, Chan.”
“I’m leaving, Chan.”
Cuthbert stepped toward the door. Chan heard it open, then close. He made the mistake of looking behind him with pleading eyes. Cuthbert was gone.
“Oh, yes, Chan, he’s gone all right,” Forte said. He was leaning over him, leering.
Chan felt the twitch opening and closing his left eye. He was glad Moira could not see it. Where was she now? Somewhere over the international date line. Safe from Forte anyway. He drew in both feet under his chair, made sure both heels were firmly planted on the ground, bent his head slightly forward, sprang up, using the power of his thigh muscles to drive the top of his forehead into Forte’s face. The South African stepped back with a squeal, blood spurting from half a dozen broken bones in his small nose. Chan skipped to one side, grabbed the chair, held it by the back with legs horizontal as he retreated into a corner. Forte stared at the blood on his hands. The door sprang open. One by one five large men entered the small room. Cuthbert was the last. Chan waited like a cornered cat.
“Get the chair off him. We’ll take him to the hospital.” The political adviser’s voice wasn’t languid anymore.
Handcuffed in the back of a tall van, Chan could feel a bruise developing at the top of his forehead. Inexplicably he worried that Forte’s blood was matting his hair. He hoped Forte used condoms. The South African was in the front of the van with a white folded towel over his nose. Three other ICAC officers were in the back of the van with Cuthbert. Everyone glared at Chan. It occurred to him that he was surrounded by Englishmen and that smashing Forte’s nose had been a faux pas, like farting at a dinner party. The English never forgave faux pas. Even Cuthbert had grown a layer of sweat across his forehead that seemed to signal a countdown.
He guessed with impeccable hindsight that Forte had never intended to hit him. Now he’d ruined Cuthbert’s choreography, and they were chasing Plan B. Something had happened to threaten the security of the territory and disrupt the relationship between England and China, and it was all Chan’s fault. That much was clear. Only details were missing. Like: What? Where? When? And why the hospital? As far as he could tell, only Forte needed medical attention. Not an observation it was advisable to make, though.
They removed his handcuffs before leading him out of the van, an ambiguous gesture since he was surrounded by big men who pressed so close around him he hardly needed to walk at all. The lift, not the public variety but the kind used by teams of medics attending a body on a stretcher, was particularly claustrophobic since everyone wanted to be near Chan. The doors opened to two more Englishmen in army uniforms holding small black automatic guns. They glanced at Cuthbert, then at Chan. Someone had definitely been spreading rumors about him.
There were two more armed guards at the entrance to the small ward. An English doctor in white coat walked toward them down a narrow corridor formed by light green screens on either side. Cuthbert left the group to speak to him for a few moments. Chan heard him call the doctor Major. A military hospital then.
“Bring him over here,” Cuthbert said.
They took Chan behind the first set of screens. His eye traveled from bandaged legs hanging from wires suspended from a frame above the bed, to hands also bandaged and hanging off the edge of the bed, to the distorted face of one of the divers. He gurgled when he saw Chan.
The diver’s face was a mass of lesions with yellow crusts. His mouth was permanently open, showing large ulcers that had eaten away part of his lips. The man was shivering.
Cuthbert did not take his eyes off Chan as the doctor spoke.
“Agranulocytosis-infective lesions, severe ulcerations indicating radiation dermatitis, taking into account the other symptoms.”
“Tell him about the other symptoms,” Cuthbert said.
“Acute anemia, swelling in the lymphatic system, severe pains in the gastrointestinal tract, low white and red blood cell counts, beginnings of exfoliation-shedding of the skin.”
Cuthbert nodded, led the group back to the corridor.
“The others, please, Major.”
They followed the doctor behind another set of screens. The other diver lay in similar condition. His eyes burned at Chan.
The last victim: Higgins. Skin had already shed from his face, hands and forearms, his hair was gone, his skull was bloated more on one side than the other, pink-blind eyes stared at nothing; he looked like a giant fetus. Chan would never have recognized him. On a square plastic board hanging on the end of the bed someone had written in black felt tip: “Higgins, James Malcolm, Senior Inspector, RHKPF.”
Blood, uncontained by skin, was seeping from the remaining flesh of his face.
Chan gulped. “Why don’t-”
“Because he’s dying,” Cuthbert snapped. He looked at the doctor.
“That’s right. If we hadn’t shot him full of morphine, he’d be screaming the place down. After a certain amount of exfoliation has taken place there’s nothing we can do. Unpleasant way to go, frankly.”
They marched Chan to a small room off the ward. A set of shelves at the back held dusty box files; there was a large white box with a red cross on the lid lying on the floor, what looked like some ancient sterilizing apparatus in a corner. No table, no chairs.
Chan’s teeth were chattering. His eyes pleaded with Cuthbert. The political adviser handed him the packet of cigarettes he had taken away when they had arrested him.
The cigarette waved up and down in Chan’s mouth. “What happened?”
Cuthbert stared at him. “You tell us.”
Chan fumbled in a pocket. They had left him his lighter, a sure sign that they didn’t mind if he committed suicide. He moved his eyes from man to man in the group. They all gazed steadily back.
As a skilled interrogator Chan kept an intuitive checklist of body language indicating dishonesty: flushing with anger, looking away in an evasive manner, overanxiety, confusion, the defeated shoulder slump, wringing of hands, tightly folded arms, displacement activities like heavy smoking. In the course of a couple of minutes Chan expressed the whole repertoire. He wondered how he would behave if he ever committed an offense.
“You’re making a mistake.” His voice cracked, and his tongue slurred the words at the same time. He could not recall ever sounding so dishonest. “I know nothing.”
Cuthbert exchanged glances with one of the officers. “Possibly. But how do you explain your miraculous escape? You led the divers to the new dive site where you said you had seen a trunk. They found it, hauled it to the surface and, not unnaturally, opened it. They found some guns and other weapons-and a long lead case. Inside was what appeared to be a piece of pipe. They all handled it, but Higgins handled it the most. He wanted to help with your investigation, Charlie. He liked to play the fool-he’s young-but he was keen, a good policeman. Everyone on the boat that day has some degree of radiation sickness; these three are the worst. Except you. You don’t even have a rash.”
Chan gulped. “I was taken off. Higgins insisted. I nearly drowned by diving too deep. He thought I might get the bends.”
“But you found the trunk. You. All alone at a hundred and fifty feet. After abandoning your two companions, against all the rules of scuba diving.”
Chan’s eyes watered. His right hand juddered. “A hunch. Why assume that only one object had been thrown overboard? They would never have let me dive if they’d known I was going to search around, but someone had to. It was an obvious thing to do. It’s in all the manuals: ‘Check the scene of the crime or the scene of evidence collection in an expanding radius.’ ” He looked into Cuthbert’s eyes. “I’m a detective. And why would I have told them about it if I was bent? It doesn’t make sense.”
“You could have been double-crossed, framed. The point is you knew where to look. Impossible that anyone would have found that trunk by accident; it was in a fault line half hidden by coral.”
“I followed the smuggler’s route, for God’s sake. I was looking for evidence thrown overboard along the line the boat must have taken when they dumped the mincer.”
“And then you disappeared.” Cuthbert made a cathedral out of two hands, put the tips to his lips, discarded the gesture in favor of a wagging finger. “That’s what swung us against you. Charlie Chan’s not the type to find a key piece of evidence and then just disappear. Everyone said so. Even the commissioner. Not even a phone call to check on progress? You haven’t taken more than two days’ leave in two years.”
“Since I divorced.”
“We had a full radio alert out for you, a stop at immigration at Kai Tak Airport; we even checked the fishing fleets.”
“You should have checked the Grand Hyatt.”
Detection was a tedious business, Chan thought, there was no doubt about it. Checking, double-checking, cross-checking. There was no art. Ninety percent of it could be done by a clerk or junior librarian. A detective’s experience culminated in the knowledge that 100 percent of human adults were liars when it came to issues of personal comfort and survival. But each urban tribe habitually lied in a different way. As a general example, the blue collars lied about stolen goods, the white collars about tax. There lay the difference between a professional and an amateur; the pro always knew what kind of person he had before him and wherein lay the preferred lines of dishonesty. Would a chief inspector, for example, lie about checkable details?
Back at ICAC headquarters Chan sat in silence, politely unimpressed. In a room more inviting than the first only inasmuch as it possessed a window and no Forte, he sat in a chair identical to the one he’d raised in defense against the now-hospitalized South African. On the other side of the desk another officer made telephone calls, sent for Chan’s working files, made more telephone calls. It was extraordinary how reticent people became when told it was the ICAC on the other end of the telephone. And Chan had thought the police had it tough.
Eventually the tiny pieces of evidence began to form a pattern. The life and times of Chief Inspector S. K. Chan took shape on the brown government desk. A dry life for the most part, full of work and little play, distorted by early trauma, slashed by divorce, with a red flash of romance toward the end. On the plus side, an unusual success rate in the detection of serious crime, black belt in karate, medal for bravery when young. On the negative, a self-destruct streak manifested in heavy smoking, occasional surliness toward superiors, failure to attend social gatherings that might have aided his career. Borderline antisocial.
“You’re piecing it together?” Chan asked. The officer glared. “Want any help?”
Cuthbert had disappeared. Chan suspected him of lurking somewhere to avoid embarrassment. There was a motto his kind of Englishman followed, handed down from imperial times: Never apologize, never explain.
It was another half hour before the officer picked up the telephone and asked to speak to Mr. Cuthbert. Chan found it heartening when the English used reverential tones to communicate with mandarins. Give them another thousand years, and they’d be starting dynasties.
“It seems he spent the day and night with his lady friend at the Grand Hyatt, sir. His story holds together on the circumstantial evidence, sir. I don’t think I have anything to hold him with, sir. Shall I let him go?”
He put down the receiver and looked at Chan. “You’re taking a week’s leave, home leave. Sleep every night at your own flat, and phone in twice a day. Don’t go scuba diving.”