The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I) Read online

  The Wardens

  of

  Punyu

  D. L. Kung

  E&E

  EYES AND EARS

  By the same author

  The End of May Road (The Handover Mysteries II)

  The Shadows of Shigatse (The Handover Mysteries III)

  A Visit From Voltaire

  Love and the Art of War

  Under Their Skin

  Dear Mr Rogge (a three-act play based on the true story of Chinese dissident He Depu)

  Eyes and Ears Publishers, Inc.

  130 E. 63rd St., Suite 6F

  New York City, New York

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  mailto: earsandears.editionsatgmaildotcom

  **

  Copyright 2011 by D. L. Kung

  All Rights Reserved

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  Published by Eyes and Ears Editions at Smashwords

  ISBN 978-2-9700748-5-4

  To Peter

  Chapter One

  —Friday morning, February 23, 1996—

  If he came to work late today, she’d kill him.

  Hong Kong’s Lunar New Year holiday was finally over; the Year of the Rat had skittered in, and although it was a Friday, today marked the beginning of Business World’s weekly news cycle. To catch up with New York after a week’s break, their bureau would have to file two stories by next Tuesday.

  The clock hanging over the crowded lobby of the Dominion Building showed 9:30 already. He wasn’t in the elevator as Claire rode up, pressed against the back wall by the crush of secretaries and clerks.

  If he wasn’t in by ten, he was cutting it pretty fine. When he did show his sheepish mug, he’d better not give her the usual bull. In less than two months of being his exasperated bureau chief, Claire had heard all the excuses available to white man in Asian fleshpot: missing the commuter ferry from his island digs on Cheung Chau, waking up in the wrong apartment after a night ‘interviewing’ a German exporter, and his best yet—helping a bar girl elude one of her pimps on a two-day chase from the dives of Mongkok to the Mandarin Hotel’s Captain’s Bar.

  The expenses filled in for that heroic and apparently educational tour of Hong Kong’s underbelly had been a work of art.

  Claire could see Vic’s puppy-dog appeal but unfortunately for him, she was a cat person. He was trying her patience. His excuses showed more imagination than his story proposals. There were the hangovers, the tardy interviews, the hackneyed pitches for features they’d done long ago, but what really got to her—really, really irked her as a woman trying to run an major bureau with fifteen stringers spread between Sydney and Beijing—were his chummy calls placed from his apartment behind her back to pals back in their New York headquarters.

  He was pitching ideas to New York without first passing them through her.

  She’d warned him on the eve of the annual holiday that he’d better shape up. Or rather, she’d asked their Chinese assistant to explain the traditional Chinese New Year to him in terms even he couldn’t misunderstand.

  ‘Cecilia, why don’t you explain to Vic the importance of his Chinese birth year?’

  ‘It’s my pleasure,’ smiled the guileless young Chinese woman. ‘So, Vic, people born like you in the year of Pig are practical, down-to-earth and industrious, always looking for the next project to take on. They enjoy working in groups and work well with other people.’

  ‘Got it?’ Claire asked Vic. ‘There is no Year of the Lazy, Bull-shitting Hound Dog.’

  This morning she’d see if Vic had, indeed, ‘got it.’

  The bureau door was swollen tight by the island’s humidity. Claire turned the key again and this time kicked hard. The wood gave way with a groan, sending a pile of newspapers at her feet sliding across the mildewed carpet. She sidestepped them to get past Cecilia’s reception area into her private office. A six-foot tongue of telex paper snaked across the shabby carpet, stories filed and copied to her bureau by her colleagues around the region. Now it was her turn to pick up the slack. New York was desperate for Asian business copy and never satiated, no matter how many stories they filed.

  ‘That’s the trouble with China copy,’ Claire muttered, ‘One edition later they’re hungry all over again.’

  She gathered the whole bundle into her arms, checking only to see if there were any messages for Vic, or ‘DVIC,’ as the computers in New York knew him. The telex was old-fashioned insurance against a breakdown in their newish e-mail systems that still took some getting used to, and—in the case of Jakarta, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur’s patchy Internet service—didn’t work at all. She dumped the armful of paper into the trash. She’d read all her own messages on her home computer before breakfast. There was only one bright aspect to these urgent demands. While she got a head start, her international editors—McDermott and his merry band—were sleeping soundly twelve hours behind her on the other side of the globe.

  Cecilia arrived exactly at one minute to ten and, smiling with the fresh calm of someone eating delicacies prepared by her mother for the last five days, took her place at the spartan desk near the front door. She was fine-boned, pale-skinned and petite, making a sharp contrast to her lanky, flame-haired boss. Dressed in pressed khaki slacks with a damask vest over a short-sleeved silk T-shirt, Cecilia looked as precise as her filing. Her severe black bangs framed wide-set eyes and a small mouth innocent of lipstick.

  Her eyes met Claire’s over Vic’s empty chair. Nothing needed to be said.

  Claire sat down in front of her computer the same way she had been trained as a child in Berkeley thirty years before to sit at the piano every day. ‘You are a little red-haired Busy Izzy and if you don’t slow down long enough to concentrate, you play like a music box, all wound up too tight. Take a deep breath, now, and stretch the spine, stretch, up, up. That’s good,’ she heard the Viennese accent of her beloved music teacher, the late Miss Frankenberg, coach her.

  She stretched and took a deep breath. As the machine booted up with the day’s work, she gazed northwards out the window. Between the high rises on Queen’s Road East, she could just make out the colony’s gray harbor awash in mist. February wasn’t Hong Kong’s best month. The entire city was stuck inside a cold, wet cloud.

  Yet for most of its six million Cantonese, the last ten days had been the biggest, and for many, only holiday of the year. Claire loved Hong Kong as the lunar calendar shifted from one mythic animal to the next—rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. She loved the smiles on the faces of everyone around her but was even happier when they disappeared. During the annual exodus, the city fell quiet and abandoned, nearly hers alone to savor, as everyone flocked to see relatives in Guangdong Province just across the busy border with the British colony, or by plane to beaches in Thailand and the Philippines.

  The two women worked in silence, Claire re-reading the more important traffic from her editors and Cecilia reviewing her stack of Chinese-language newspapers, her yellow highlighter poised to pounce on any tidbit of insider Chinese political news. The pressure to use the day well was palpable, but manageable. If Vic presented his hung-over mug soon and wrapped up the stringers’ contributions on the Chase Bank feature by noon, if Claire could manage to w
angle a briefing on China’s inflation from the Hong Kong Bank economist at three and do a sidebar on Chinese boom-bust economics by six or seven, they’d slide into home base in time for New York’s story conference—at ten p.m. Hong Kong time.

  Someone knocked on the door. Vic would have just barged in, and the Wan Chai mailman always knocked, flung, slung, and collected bundles in a single balletic pirouette that didn’t disturb the ashes dangling from the end of his ‘555.’

  A polite knock was so unusual when there were no appointments Claire raised her eyebrows and stretched around the sliding office partition to check out their caller. It was a Chinese man of medium height wearing cheap polyester trousers and an acrylic sweater topped by the lank collar of a white nylon shirt. He glanced around quickly and when he saw Claire, stared for a moment at her un-coiffured strawberry mane and blurted, ‘Miss Raymond?’

  Claire rose to greet him, noticing immediately that the visitor was so nervous that he was having trouble with the simplest of all local urban rituals—presenting his calling card. She took his hand and led him to the two rattan chairs at the back of her small space that constituted Business World’s ‘conference corner.’

  ‘My name is Dr Liu Heng Han. I didn’t telephone ahead because your office was closed for the holiday. It’s urgent and I am leaving this afternoon for San Francisco. I . . .’

  ‘How can we help you?’ Claire looked over his shoulder and saw with mixed feelings that the well-trained Cecilia was automatically boiling water to offer him tea. There was no time today for socializing. Only the man’s obvious stress kept Claire from asking him to state his business on his feet and leave.

  ‘Father Fresnay, your priest friend? He urged me to talk to you.’

  Robert Fresnay was a Jesuit priest—half Scottish, half French—who ran a China-watching operation on Mosque Junction, one of the few crumbling corners of Hong Kong’s ‘old’ Victoria Island yet to be yuppified with glass towers. Claire was a routine face among Fresnay’s regulars of journalists and diplomats who met singly or in groups to track and analyze Chinese political and economic developments. If Mosque Junction was the closest thing to a Vatican ‘intelligence’ service following Chinese affairs, Father Fresnay was ‘M’ and George Smiley combined.

  Fresnay wouldn’t waste Claire’s time.

  Cecilia placed two mugs of green tea in front of them.

  Claire forced an encouraging smile, wondering where she would get the minutes to spare. Beads of sweat rolled down the doctor’s scalp between the strands of spiky black hair. It wasn’t that hot in their air-conditioned office.

  Liu took the cane seat closest to the door connecting Cecilia’s reception area with Claire’s office and glanced at the main door, as if he half expected a posse of policemen to barge in any moment.

  ‘I have worked at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences in Guangzhou for five years, mostly in sports medicine. Oh, yes, thank you,’ he took sip of tea and paused. ‘I carry out surgery from time to time, but my specialty was sports trauma and rehabilitation. I have even done some microsurgery, but not so much. Most of my work was a mix of traditional and western treatment of muscular injury.’

  His English was good enough, with an American accent betraying either a stint in the States or a lot of American television viewed from across the increasingly porous border.

  Claire’s eyes strayed to Vic’s empty desk. Where the hell was he? She could have been working on the inflation piece while he handled this.

  Dr Liu continued, ‘I am a member of the Party, and I have never had any political trouble in my past. Now, well, I am leaving the mainland very suddenly because of something that happened last week. I haven’t slept very well and I finally decided I had to leave China, maybe forever. A friend of mine in Guangzhou knew of Father Fresnay’s writings and wrote me a letter of introduction—’

  ‘Dr Liu, I don’t want to seem rude, but I have a lot to do today. Our offices in New York—’

  ‘I’m sorry. Father Fresnay heard my story. He told me something I was never taught in China, that there are two parts to an act of cont—, contri—’

  ‘Act of contrition? Are you Catholic, Dr Liu?’

  ‘My brother belongs to the Party-approved Patriotic Catholic Association of China. Not a real Catholic, I suppose you would say. ‘

  ‘The Pope doesn’t speak for everybody. Anyway, go on.’

  ‘Father Fresnay says confession is only half way. Reparation is the second half. Telling you, a journalist, is my reparation.’

  ‘You want me to report something?’

  Dr Liu seemed emboldened now that his awkward introduction was behind them. ‘Maybe it is useful to you sometime. So. Well. Last week I was awakened in my room at the medical dormitory before dawn and ordered by two policemen from the Guangzhou People’s Armed Police to accompany them. They insisted I bring a full surgical kit. I followed immediately. I thought perhaps some top official was in a serious accident. Of course I asked no questions.’

  ‘I understand.’ She also saw his hand was shaking too hard to hold the tea mug.

  ‘Two more officials were waiting for me inside a white van, the kind that the hospital uses. Something was odd. The van had no markings or identification of any kind. One of the PAP officers stopped me when I started to put on my white coat in the van. He said, “You won’t need that.” And I started to wonder, why didn’t they want the van or me to look medical?’

  ‘Who was the patient?’ Claire couldn’t see how his tale was going to end up in Business World. Her impatience was getting the better of her journalistic training to just listen.

  ‘Please wait. I must tell this my way, please. We started driving south, and when we reached the suburbs I noticed a lorry, you know, a truck, was always ahead of us. It was open in the back, the kind that farmers use all the time, with three people standing up behind the cabin. I saw one of the people resembled a young woman from my own village. The two men seemed to be guards. When I could glimpse better through our van’s window again, I saw they were carrying pistols. One was holding the end of a rope tied around the girl’s neck and her mouth was shut up tight with tape. When I saw that, I became quite frightened.’

  ‘You guessed what was going on, didn’t you?’

  Dr Liu nodded. ‘I’d seen such scenes many times when I was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution. I just didn’t understand what I was doing there. Any prison doctor can verify an execution.’

  Liu sipped his tea and stared around the office, as if he was afraid even the furniture might betray him. He took a deep breath and gripped the teacup with both of his slender hands. Claire realized both his hands trembled almost beyond his control.

  ‘Then we drove through open farmland, just a few houses were in sight, and finally the lorry ahead of us pulled off the road. We stopped behind, and one of the policemen gave me the order: ‘Prepare to operate. We want both kidneys.’

  They uncovered equipment in the back of our van. Under a canvas they’d hidden everything we needed for transporting fresh organs. Of course I protested, Miss Raymond. This was not my work. Call somebody else! Then suddenly I remembered that our urology team had used the lunar holiday to attend a world health conference in Geneva.’

  Dr Liu’s hands were now shaking hard. His voice was growing softer, his eyes wider.

  ‘ . . . I felt sick, but I thought, maybe it would be easier to comply once the execution was over. It would be just a cadaveric transplant. My mind was racing, but I could present no resistance. Then they forced the girl down on a stretcher on the floor of the van. She struggled but her arms were tied and her ankles were weighed down with—’ he gestured toward the floor. ‘Jiao liao, and her hands had shoukao.’

  ‘Handcuffs and leg-irons,’ Cecilia explained from her desk. Claire nodded thanks. She used everyday Mandarin, but in fifteen years, she’d never needed to talk about leg-irons.

  Dr Liu took a cigarette out of his pocket
and with difficulty, lit it and took a deep drag. ‘They didn’t even remove the rope from her neck, just pulled it tighter. I hadn’t brought anything to anaesthetize a patient for surgery. All I had was a simple injection of morphine for pain, some bandages, and a little antiseptic. She was struggling hard but they managed to yank down her trousers, lift up her blouse. They gestured to their guns threateningly and told me to get started.’

  ‘I did protest then. I said this was against all rules of organ transplantation but they put a gun to my head. I wanted to give her an injection of morphine, but they grabbed it out of my hand. They didn’t want her system slowed down. I demanded to know who ordered this and they just told me that the kidney recipient was the daughter of an important Hong Kong real estate boss—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They didn’t say. But nothing was to go wrong. I started yelling like a crazy man, “You’re supposed to kill her first!” but they said . . . they said the orders were to remove the organs as fresh, as fresh—’

  Liu put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook with remembered trauma.

  ‘That’s all right. Cecilia, please get Dr Liu more tea.’

  ‘It’s my pleasure,’ the girl whispered.

  The visitor wiped his face off with a soiled handkerchief, and stared wild-eyed up at Claire. ‘Her screams were terrible, even through the gag.’

  He clenched his hands to stop the shaking. ‘I thought the whole thing could be forgotten, pushed into the past like everything else. But there was one thing that made this worse than all the stories I’d heard around the hospital. The moment I sliced into her, I’d killed her, I’d murdered her and all the time, I knew she was innocent of any crime.’

  Claire prodded him as gently as she could, almost more as reassurance than as a question. ‘How could you be so sure she was innocent? Because she resembled someone from your village?’

  ‘No.’ Dr Liu gulped for air. Claire waited. She felt both scared and moved by Dr Liu’s account, but just then, the ancient telex burst into clattering action, churning out copies of more messages from New York that were arriving simultaneously by e-mail into her computer. Cecilia came into the inner office as discreetly as she could to rip off the length of paper curling toward their feet so she could file it away for backup.