The Hua Shan Hospital Murders (7 page)

Fong hung his head. “You’re right, Lily. What am I thinking?”

“You scared me,” said the head nurse of the abortion surgeries at the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital when Angel Michael entered the room he had rented for her.

“Did I?” asked Matthew as he took out the evensided cross and handed it to her.

As she took the icon she turned from him. The wide patch of missing hair exposed the nape of her neck. Matthew had read that the nape of a woman’s neck is very erotic. He looked at the back of the nurse’s neck but saw nothing but slack sinew and aging flesh.

She turned back to him. The cross now hung directly beneath her Adam’s apple. “Would you like a drink to celebrate our glorious start?”

He looked at the woman before him. “
Our
glorious start?” he thought. But all he said was, “That cross suits you.”

CHAPTER NINE

There was palpable anger in the air of the over-air-conditioned room in Virginia. Copies of the
New York Times
and several other papers were spread on the table. All screamed of death and mayhem in a Shanghai abortion clinic – and, of course, of the fetus in a cage.

“This is completely beyond what we agreed to,” said Larry, a tall, thin, Yale-ish man.

There were loud expressions of agreement around the table.

“This was a slaughter.”

“Jesus! What was Angel Michael thinking of?”

“God,” said the older man, who Angel Michael called his father. That silenced the room. The whitehaired man looked at the last speaker, “And I’d remind you that it’s a sacrilege to use His name in vain.”

“Yes, but so many dead!”

“A hundred dead, two hundred, five hundred. That place murders a thousand beings every week – year after year,” snapped back the older man. “What are those dead to the fifty thousand killed every year? This is a war. I warned you when we started. I warned you that this wouldn’t be simple. But there is a simple reality that we all must face. Mid-term Congressional elections are approaching and not a single candidate in this country has even mentioned abortion. Not one has come out against the slaughter of babies. We have to put the evil of abortion back in the light where it belongs. That’s why we’re here. That’s what we are doing.”

“Yes, but–”

“But nothing. The sword is in Angel Michael’s hand – we put it there. All of us here did that. And we know why we did it.”

Eyes were averted around the table.

“Lest anyone have second thoughts now – I’ve had all our conversations in this room videotaped.” Before the uproar could start, he continued, “There’s no going back. In the eyes of the law we are all accessories to multiple murder – a crime punishable by death in Mr. Bush’s America.”

“That’ll shut them up for a while,” the older man who Matthew called his father thought. As the truth of the situation sank into the minds of the people around the table he allowed his thoughts to drift to Angel Michael. Such a big first step and so melodramatic – the fetus in the cage. So gaudy. So unlike the boy he had carefully raised as his son – his weapon to return the world to God. He looked out the window at the setting sun, at the quiet beauty of the Virginia farm country. Then for the first time in his life he questioned the wisdom of his plan, the wisdom of putting the sword in Angel Michael’s hand.

Later that night, after he read the reports more closely, he had a second question about Angel Michael. Where did the boy he raised as his son get the money necessary to pull off such a feat?

* * *

The arrival the next morning of a large unmarked package at the reception desk of the Hua Shan Hospital set alarms ringing all over Shanghai. Fong raced out of his apartment still wet from a shower meant to fool his body into believing that it had slept well. He ran past the academy’s theatre in which
Othello
was being rehearsed. Out the gate and down Ya’nan Lu to the Hua Shan Hospital. People streamed out of the hospital complex as the sound of approaching sirens filled the air. A tourist with a video camera taped the proceedings.

The local block wardens stepped aside as Fong approached them. The head of hospital security ran over to him, “A large unmarked package arrived at reception, sir.”

“Has anyone touched it?”

“No, I immediately had the lobby cleared and started the evacuation of the hospital wards.”

“Then you called me?”

“Right, sir.”

“Fine. Call my office and get the arson division over here.”

“It’s already been done,” said Wu Fan-zi as he moved toward Fong while putting on the last of the bomb protection gear.

Fong took him by the arm and guided him to the top of the steps leading into the Hua Shan Hospital’s front entrance. “You take a good look?”

“Only a peak. It’s big.”

“Does that mean it’s powerful?”

“Not necessarily. In fact, it makes no sense for a bomb to be that big.”

“Then why get into the suit?”

“I’m fifty-two, right?”

“If you say so.”

“Well, I am and next year I’d like to be fifty-three.”

Wu Fan-zi turned and looking like something that could walk on the moon entered the front door of the Hua Shan Hospital.

Fong moved down the steps to the front row of the gathering crowd and waited with everyone else. Then he felt flesh press into his hand. He looked to his left. Lily was at his side, her fingers intertwining with his.

“A bomb, Fong?” Lily asked in English.

“I don’t know. Wu Fan-zi is in there now.”

“Everyone out?”

“Everyone who can safely be moved is out or in the process of getting out. Most are in the back courtyard.”

“From bomb far enough?”

“We think so, Lily,” Fong said, still speaking English.

The young man standing to one side was surprised by the crowd on the hospital steps and even more surprised to see the delicately boned middleaged man speaking English to the younger woman beside him. He heard the wail of sirens and saw more cops arrive. Something had clearly gone wrong. They couldn’t have found the cage already and the fully wired bomb was still in the briefcase he carried at his side – the message in an envelope in his left hand.

What had gone wrong? He mentally retraced his steps that day. It had been a little more complicated to get the cage with its grisly contents into position. More complicated without the assistance of a nurse, but not impossible – just a little climb. Surely they hadn’t already found the cage. Not yet. If not, then why is the place swarming with cops?

He could have placed the bomb at the same time as the cage if his explosives supplier hadn’t suddenly doubled the price and demanded cash – but he had. Then another thought occurred to him and he almost swore. He thought about the e-mails queued and ready to be sent to newspapers throughout the Western world. Then he sighed. There was no way to stop them now without making contact with his remote server and he knew that contact could be traced back to him.

A setback, but not a disaster. All around him police officers were readying themselves. “For nothing,” he thought. Then he remembered the note he was carrying in his left hand. He knew he should get rid of it.

He surveyed the scene before him. For a moment he considered abandoning his briefcase and its incriminating contents, but the explosive snuggled there had cost him a small fortune to obtain. He looked back at the middle-aged Chinese man who had been speaking English. A cop? Maybe. Then his eyes went to the younger woman at his side. Her gaunt features struck an odd note in him. “Was he responding to her beauty?” he wondered. Then he saw her sad eyes and he almost gasped aloud – they were filled with light. For the first time in many, many years he had a yearning to reach out and touch flesh that was not his own.

She turned and looked right at him. His heart skipped a beat – then another. Her eyes moved past him. He had a terrible desire to tell the lady with the light in her sad eyes not to worry – that it was only he, Angel Michael, bringing back the light.

Chen introduced himself to the two detectives who had started tracking down the origins of the titanium cage. He hadn’t gotten out more than an awkward hello before a familiar grin crossed the faces of the two men. Chen allowed a beat to pass then asked them to present the work that they had done so far. After an initial resistance they presented their preliminary findings because they quickly recognized two things: Fong and Lily were this guy’s personal backers, and this ugly young man with the country manners and peasant accent was a talented cop.

Chen was happy that it hadn’t taken too long to win the men over. He knew there was much work to do and that Fong was counting on him. He asked to see the actual cage. The men unwrapped the thing and put it on the table.

Chen stared at the titanium structure. The idea of the fetus in the thing left an indelible image in his mind. It was in fact his inability to implant such a thing in his wife’s womb that had led to the ignominious end of their six-year marriage. He had been lucky to have her even that long – everyone had said so. Even his mother had agreed when he told her of the divorce.

Divorce was not complicated in China but it was highly frowned upon. Divorce in the countryside, where Chen lived, started with a trip to the county seat where the estranged husband and wife had to undergo counselling from a party representative. The advice, often a directive, was invariably to stay together. However, when Chen arrived with his wife, the party representative, a busybody old lady, took one look at him and said to his wife, “How long have you been married?”

“Six years,” Chen’s wife replied.

“You deserve a medal,” the party lady said.

A phone call from the party representative was followed by a ten-minute wait; then there was a knock at the door. A man entered holding a document with a government stamp on it. It had been issued in record time by the marriage court. Chen was a single man. His wife was ecstatic. In fact, she seemed happier at their breakup than she had been on their wedding day – to say nothing of their wedding night.

So, Chen was pleased when only six weeks later word had come that he was wanted in Shanghai. For once timing had worked in his favour. And then there was Lily. If Chen were honest with himself he’d admit that what little energy he had for patching up his marriage had dissipated after he’d met Lily. He found her infinitely appealing – although totally out of his league.

Chen turned the titanium cage over. He was good with tools and understood technological things with surprising ease. He admired the skilled welding joins for a moment and then held the cage at arm’s-length. His keen eye immediately saw the complex internal symmetries of the piece. This was not a craftsman’s work but rather that of an artist.

Artwork executed in metal was a rarity in China. Painting was common, even in the interior of slendernecked glass bottles. So was porcelain and other forms of pottery, but sculpture was almost exclusively confined to ivory carving. Yet here before him was a work of art rendered in the most complicated of metals – titanium.

“Shanghai went through the Great Leap Forward in the fifties, didn’t it?” Chen asked.

“Yeah, Shanghai’s part of China despite what Beijing likes to say,” one of the cops replied, wondering where this was leading.

“So there were blast furnaces set up all over the city like in the country?”

“It was before my time, Captain Chen, but yeah, I think there were,” the man replied.

Chen nodded. It was before his time too but the Great Leap Forward was an idiocy that had left its mark. The idea had been to catch up to the West’s steel production by putting small blast furnaces in almost every commune. Then each commune, or in the city each urban unit, was given a quota of steel ingots they had to produce. The failure to produce the quota resulted in severe punishments for all involved.

One small problem: the geniuses in Beijing never supplied any iron ore from which to smelt steel!

Initially the quotas were met by tossing every conceivable metal object the people owned into the blast furnaces – farm implements, picture frames, cooking utensils, door knobs, etc. This simply resulted in the increase of the quotas, which in turn forced more and more sacrifices from the people. Before the end of the first year there wasn’t a wok left in all of China. By the end of two years almost every available piece of wood had been used to fuel the blast furnaces. The result was the denuding of the countryside and this led to massive desertification of valuable farmland. What land escaped the onslaught of the desert often lay fallow since the wooden farm tools used to work the land had been burned to fuel the blast furnaces. And of course farmers who spend their time working backyard blast furnaces don’t spend their time in the fields. Famine was the most immediate and ultimately the most profound result of the Great Leap Forward. Afamine that gripped the land and was felt throughout the Middle Kingdom. By some estimates as many as sixty million people starved to death as a direct result of the Great Leap Forward.

The final irony, as if idiocy needed irony to make its point, was that over 80 percent of the steel produced was of such poor quality that it was completely unusable. That left a lot of scrap metal around. Artisans quickly learned to work in the metals that were suddenly so readily available – unlike good clay or quality ivory. In the dawning hours of morning, they could be seen by the furnaces trying different mixes of metals in an effort to find workable combinations. Many became quite proficient creating and working with new metals. Chen’s father had been one such artisan. That’s why Chen knew so much about this. After all, as the saying goes: “A dragon is born to a dragon, a phoenix to a phoenix, and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in a wall.”

“Can we get a map of Shanghai from the period of the Great Leap Forward showing the exact locations of the blast furnaces?”

“Sure, but . . .”

“Would you mind?” The Shanghai cop was going to question Chen further, then he saw something hard in the man’s eyes.