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David Rotenberg

The Hamlet Murders

CHAPTER ONE

THE INSIDER’S PRICE

It started with Fong in the shower, naked and covered in soap, when the water in his rooms on the grounds of the Shanghai Theatre Academy suddenly, for no apparent reason, just stopped. It ended with four people dead, one unaccounted for and love in tatters. But love, even torn and shredded and stomped on like something disgusting that crawled out of a sewer grate on Fuxing Donglu – even just the hope of love – remained the only thing that made getting out of bed in the morning worth the bother, whether there is any water in the shower or not. And love, even in the secular kingdom of the People’s Republic of China, still needed a miracle to lure it out of the dark cool shadows into the hot light of day-especially in the intense heat and humidity that is August in Shanghai.

Fong pushed aside the shower curtain and reached for a towel, and because he could see even less than usual with the soap in his eyes, he actually missed it. On his second attempt, he grabbed the towel, scraped the soap off his chest and then shouted, “Wo cao!!!” to no one in particular.

“Such language,” the ancient house warden shouted back from the courtyard outside his window. “And who exactly is it that you want to tickle your privates, Detective Zhong?” The crone cackled at her own cleverness then added, “Those renovations before the condo conversion you voted for are coming along just fine, don’t you think?” More of her throaty laughter came next, then a choking sound, then a horking and finally the distinct sound of something moist splatting to the cracked courtyard pavement.

Fong tried the taps a second time – no water. He was going to swear again, but really, what was the point? He wrapped the towel around his waist then headed back into the bedroom. Opening the blinds, he saw two paunchy white men wearing expensive raw silk jackets, the backs of which were turned up at odd angles like the pages of a paperback novel left out in the rain. Bum wings, the Shanghanese called them. As Fong wondered what idiots would bother with raw silk in the sweltering reality of a Shanghai summer, one of the men pulled a set of blueprints from a long tube and unfurled it. “Ah, contractors,” Fong thought. The man began gesticulating with his arms as if he had stepped on an open 220-volt line. Fong revised his assessment, “Ah, French contractors.

” The French, Fong found, often spoke no Mandarin and only very bad English. For some reason, they expected people in the Middle Kingdom to learn French. Why? There were one point three billion of us, how many were there of them?

Before he could answer that question, a middleaged Han Chinese male emerged from the scene shop across the way with a steaming jar of tea. No doubt he was the Frenchmen’s Beijing keeper. Foreigners tended to look on their keepers as tour guides. They aren’t. They are ranking party officials who keep tabs on the comings and goings of powerful foreigners in the People’s Republic of China. The Beijing keeper turned his head. Almost the entirety of his left cheek and much of his chin was covered by a dark raspberry-coloured stain. Florid stain, bad suit, worse teeth, and probably enough power to have whole areas of the city closed down with a single phone call. Looking at the trio, Fong grinned. They sure deserved each other. All they had to do was add a full-dress mullah – are there any other kind – to make a full deck, or whatever the proper name was for a complete set of incompetent but powerful morons.