Chan noted with approval that the top secret fax from London had had a bracing effect on the local corridors of power. Cuthbert instructed that the chief inspector should have free run of what the diplomat called the Toys Department of the local chapter of MI6, and Commissioner Tsui promised to authorize, if necessary in retrospect, any electronic surveillance that Chan deemed necessary. From an ingenious collection of eavesdropping and visual surveillance devices, Chan chose a button-size microphone/transmitter with accompanying receiver and recorder and five cameras the size and shape of a lipstick tube. He locked the microphone and receiver in his safe at work and slipped the five cameras into his pocket.
The owners of the warehouse in which the vat had been found had finally lost patience and, from Albuquerque, instructed lawyers in Hong Kong to threaten the commissioner of police with legal proceedings if he did not release their property, currently losing ten thousand dollars per day in rental income, but despite writs and threatened injunctions, the warehouse remained empty, blocked by police barricades at both entrances. Chan edged past the barricade, used keys to open the door, pressed the heavy-duty light switch. Fluorescent strips blinked and blazed. The ladder remained where he had left it, under the still-defective light.
He dragged the stepladder to a pillar ten feet from the flickering tube, took from his pocket a small tube of glue that he used to stick a Velcro pad to the top of the pillar. The cameras were wide-angle automatic focus and enclosed in Velcro jackets. Chan tried to guess the angle as he pressed the camera into the pad. He repeated the process on two other pillars, then took from his pocket a small plastic bag that he had partly filled with sugar previously ground in a mortar. He tossed the bag on the floor to dirty it, then dragged the stepladder back to the flickering light, which he dismantled in order to stow the bag. Finally he returned to each of the three cameras to switch them on. Powered by nickel cadmium batteries, they were activated by body heat, which triggered an invisible infrared flash. The batteries had to be replaced every five days.
The remaining cameras he placed at the entrances to the warehouse.
It was a long shot, based on Chan’s knowledge of the behavior of addicts. To a drug addict the substance he or she abuses acquires a religious value as well as an irresistible compulsion. Chan felt the same way about nicotine. If a fellow addict had seen Clare Coletti hide her dope, it would take unusual discipline, over the long term, to resist coming back to retrieve it. True, someone could have returned already and found the stash gone; that was a risk he could do nothing about; he’d only that day been given use of the cameras. He increased the odds in his favor by leaving both doors unlocked and dismissing the two uniformed policemen at the ground-floor lift lobby who for weeks had been checking the identity cards of everyone entering the building. He walked back to the police station, where he had scheduled meetings with murderers for the rest of the day.
Chan had been through the process of interrogating underworld cognoscenti once already, when the vat was first discovered, but the records he had kept were scanty. The related deaths of three policemen from radiation sickness, though, imparted a new spirit of formality to the investigation. It was likely that in time the case records would be mulled over by security forces, diplomats, politicians and even, perhaps, historians. He wanted to be able to show that he’d questioned the usual suspects, fired up the usual informants, recorded the usual dead ends.
Although part of him resented it, he was feeling good. He was working again and officially rehabilitated, despite those who maintained that anyone that lucky could not be entirely honest. At the funerals of Higgins and the divers he had stood at the back, left early. Now Saliver Kan, foot soldier in the Sun Yee On, was sitting in the chair on the other side of Chan’s desk for the second time in a month. Aston had nicknamed him the Walking Spittoon.
“I told you, Firstborn,” Kan said, “this wasn’t triad.” A snort executed on an inhalation temporarily cleared his troubled nasal passages. “Nice work, though. Maybe we’ll use a mincer on the 14K next time they try to take over Nathan Road.”
“You want a Kleenex?” Chan asked.
“Fuck your mother.”
“It was just a hope.”
“Pass the wastepaper basket. Thanks. Heard you found the machine? Will that be, you know, auctioned, like old police cars?”
“No.”
With an internal rumble Kan made a substantial contribution to the contents of the wastebasket. “Too bad. Doesn’t matter, you can buy them, right?”
“Suppose there’s money in it. A lot of money?”
“Money doesn’t make it triad, Firstborn.”
“Three people were tortured to death. There had to be screams, struggle. They had to be taken to where they were killed; then the vat had to be removed and taken to that warehouse-probably by truck with lifting gear. Somebody must have seen or heard something.”
Kan sniffed loudly. “How much money?”
Chan had checked with Commissioner Tsui that morning. There was no limit to what the government was prepared to pay at this stage.
“Maybe a million Hong Kong dollars.”
For the first time Chan felt he had Kan’s full attention. The triad rubbed the blue singlet across his chest, hoicked thoughtfully. “Fuck your mother. For three little murders? They mince the emperor of France or something?”
“If you hear anything-”
“I’ll be knocking down your door, Firstborn.”
“It has to be-”
“I know. ‘Information leading to the arrest’ et cetera. You had a wanted poster out on me once. Five thousand you were offering, for a bank heist. Next time I’m using a mincer. A million! Fuck me slowly down the Yangtze. Wait’ll I tell the red pole. He might put me on it full-time.” Getting up to leave, Kan paused. “Come to think of it, maybe I won’t tell the red pole. If it was, you know, really good evidence-”
“I confirm the figure’s negotiable,” Chan said.
Kan nodded. At the door he paused again, gathered together a bolus, which he swallowed. “Million’s just the starting figure, right?”
Throughout the day the same chair was occupied by other assassins with pebble eyes, hewn-rock features and cartoon names: Fat Boy Wong; Four-Finger Bosco; High-Rise Lam.
Joker Liu said: “Maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree, Chief. Maybe it was an industrial accident.” He stood up to mime his theory. “Sort of thing that happens all the time. The mincer stops, so victim one sticks his hand down to fix it, like this. Whoops! It starts up of its own accord-it was a mainland model, right?-it pulls victim one down, look, headfirst. Hearing his screams, victim two rushes to the rescue, grabs victim one’s foot while he still has one, like so. Hangs on too long, fuck your mother, he’s trapped too. Victim three to the rescue-same thing.” He sat down. “Lucky the whole of Mongkok wasn’t minced, seeing as how we care about each other so much.”
“We’re offering a million for hard evidence.”
Joker Liu paused on the brink of more black humor, nodded slowly, scratched his face. “No kidding.” At the door he said: “A million-that’s the starting price, right?”
Chan’s standard lecture to recruits who came under his care, usually delivered at the moment of the recruit’s first experience of an investigative dead end, had not varied in ten years: “Most criminals inform on their colleagues at some stage in their careers, motivated by greed, envy, spite, malice or no good reason at all beyond a love of treachery. Such one-off aberrations can be valuable, but a successful detective needs at least one source for whom informing is a vocation.”
To young recruits to whom he took a liking, he would add that a detective’s career could rise or fall depending on the quality of his most important informants. If you were exceptionally lucky and made contact with an informant of genius who trusted you, then you were a fool not to cultivate him, pamper him, put up with him, no matter what the price. You’d be a fool too not to make this person’s identity one of the most closely guarded secrets of your life.
Chan never allowed Wheelchair Lee to come to his office and always took elaborate precautions to avoid being seen when he visited him. Leaving Aston to write out the reports of the day’s interviews with some of Mongkok’s more prolific killers, Chan slipped out of the police station complex, crossed Nathan Road between the bumpers of gridlocked cars, from which exhaust fumes rose steadily like steam from a throbbing morass, took turns down alleys with Chinese names only, then finally down a footpath with no name at all. The footpath led to the back of a computer store open at both ends. Chan walked through the store to exit into a small road with lockup garages more or less dedicated to the storage and onward dispatch of stolen goods and the illegal copying of computer software. A complicated knock on the heavily fortified door of one of them brought a curse in Cantonese and, eventually, the unlocking of the door, which began to open vertically. Chan ducked under before it was fully open. Lee maneuvered his wheelchair to pull the door down again once Chan was inside. A battery of lights illuminated the garage with its half dozen trestle tables piled with computer hard disks, coaxial cables, highly colored boxes of software, screens and cardboard boxes full of floppy disks.
Lee: under a navy cutaway T-shirt, the magnificent musculature of a paraplegic. Neck and arm muscles bulged as he twisted to shoot a heavy iron bolt across the steel door, then twisted his head up again to look at Chan. Overbright eyes scanned Chan’s.
“How’s business?” Chan asked.
Lee shrugged. “Which side? Computer repair never ends; there’s a hundred beginners every day panicking because they’ve lost a masterpiece on their word processors or can’t log on to the Internet. I have people all over town now. We charge on an hourly basis. That’s the legal side. You don’t want to know about the other. Illegal copies still sell like hot cakes, though.”
“I need your help.”
“Something new? After the Mincer Murders, what next? The Hamburger Homicides?”
“I’m still with the mincer.”
Lee spit on the floor. “I told you, no one’s talking about that. Everyone I speak to, they act baffled. It looks like triads, it smells like triads, but if it was triads, someone would be boasting by now. Foot soldiers never keep their mouths shut. Not unless they’re very frightened anyway.”
“There’s more money available now-a million, maybe more.”
Lee nodded slowly. “So, it is something special. I was right.”
“There’s an extra dimension. We’re not talking about it, though.”
“Extra dimension? Who’s paying the million, government or private?”
“Government.”
“So, there’s a China side. Only China gets them that excited.”
“Maybe.”
“Anything new?”
“There were drugs found in a light fitting over the vat. Heroin. Pure white, number four.”
Lee raised his eyebrows. “How pure?”
“Almost hundred percent. Uncut.”
“Export quality. You don’t get it on the streets, not even gross. They’d rather make the markup in New York or Amsterdam. Very strange, but at least it gives me more questions to ask.”
As he was leaving, Chan said: “I’d like you to have the million. But there’s competition.”
Lee shrugged. “Money-who gives a shit? If I can give them pain, that’s what counts.” The eyes burned still brighter. The hysteria under the surface burst in him like a boil. Chan hurried to open the door. He didn’t want to hear what always came next. Too late. The cripple’s hand shot out to grasp Chan’s arm. Lee was stronger than he looked. Even if he strained every muscle in his body, Chan could not have loosened that iron grip, not without smashing Lee in the face anyway, and the paraplegic had ways of dealing with that maneuver. Shackled to the wheelchair, Chan turned his face away while Lee hissed: “To kill a man is one thing. To cripple him is one thing. But to make him watch in a mirror-in a mirror-while they cut his spinal cord-to make him watch-you understand, Chief Inspector? You understand?”
Outside, Chan stood in the road sweating. Most informants demanded money. Lee demanded something more. He demanded the right to unnerve you, to suck you into his private agony, to make you see the world if only for an instant through eyes of total hatred. No, I don’t understand.
It was early evening; he pushed through the crowds on his way home, automatically scanning faces. In the underworld army of Mongkok one could discern every human calling except honesty. All in all, it would be a relief to spend the next morning at the university with a lethal radioactive isotope.