Snake Agent: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel (4 page)

"Shit," Lao said, brushing ash from his hands. "Couldn't hold it. I fucking
hate
losing them."

"You did what you could," Chen said in resignation. "You probably saved my life, anyway." From the look on Lao's face, this accounted for remarkably little.

"But not Mrs Tang's," the exorcist added bitterly. Chen straightened up.

"Where's her husband gone?"

"What husband? Was Tang here?"

"She jumped me when I came through the door. I saw him lying on the rug."

Lao passed a distracted hand through what remained of his hair. "When I came in—the front door was wide open, by the way—there was just you and the woman. She was on the point of finishing you off, so I skipped the formal introductions."

They stared at one another for a moment, and then Chen said with quiet anger, "Then where the hell's Tang?"

Together, Chen and Lao conducted a hasty search of the mansion, but there was no one to be seen. Tang had mentioned the presence of his personal physician, but Chen could find no trace of anyone. The servants' quarters were tidy and empty and quiet.

"All right," Chen said wearily, as they came back down the stairs. "One corpse, and one missing person. At least. I'd better call the specialists."

It was some time before the forensic unit arrived. Chen and Lao spent the time cautiously searching garden and house. Chen lingered in the bedroom that had evidently belonged to Pearl: a sad shrine, with cosmetics and stuffed toys lining the large, white dressing table like objects upon an altar. Methodically, Chen searched all the obvious secret places, found nothing except a box of novelty condoms, and turned his attention to the undersides of drawers and the backs of photographs. This yielded a single item of interest: a snapshot of an ornamental facade, a dragon lantern washed by rain and a girl's face staring from a window. The face was not that of Pearl Tang. This girl was equally as young, and in the sharp, digitized image of the photograph her face seemed filled with a kind of repressed excitement, the mouth pursed as though she was trying not to laugh. Her hair was arranged into an over-elaborate style that looked curiously antiquated. Chen tucked the photo carefully into his wallet and resumed his search. He found nothing more.

Downstairs, the forensic unit was arriving. They were not, as Chen had specifically requested, the special team that dealt principally with supernatural cases. Chen sighed. Yet more evidence of prejudice on the part of the department, or, more likely, sheer penny-pinching. Beside him, Lao echoed the sigh.

"Just what we need. A bunch of skeptical arseholes trampling over everything and ignoring the obvious. Are you going to deal with them, or shall I?"

"Best if I do it," Chen said hastily. Lao had a tendency to become patronizing, and subsequently argumentative, when dealing with non-specialists.

The scientist in charge of the team was someone that Chen had never seen before: a small neat woman of Vietnamese extraction. Chen took her aside and explained the situation as best he could. To his relieved surprise, however, Dr Nguyen volunteered none of the usual inane remarks to which Chen had become resigned over the years, saying only, "I see. Well, we'll take the body back to the lab and I'll make sure that your team gets a look in at the autopsy. Tell me what tests to run and I'll make sure they're completed."

Chen gave her a brief itinerary, then went back into the hallway where Lao was pulling on his coat.

"Can I go back to my dinner now? You won't be needing me any longer," the exorcist said. In the half-light, his long face looked even more mournful than usual, and his rat's tail moustache quivered. "Or so I fervently hope."

"I hope so, too," Chen said, and meant it.

Two hours later, the forensic team completed their work and left. Chen checked back with the station to see how the search for Tang was progressing, and decided that enough was enough. He took a taxi back to the harbor, then walked along the wharf. It was now close to midnight, an hour that Chen preferred not to spend alone. Dark water lapped against the sides of the wharf, and the neon lights of Shaopeng obscured the stars. In the little window of the houseboat, a single candle was burning, welcoming him home.

"We were worried," Inari said. She got up from the couch and padded across to the stove, where the teakettle was once more sitting, peacefully inanimate. "It changed, you see, and told me you were in danger. We tried to phone you, but there was no reply. So we phoned the station and they wouldn't tell me where you were. So I cursed them."

"Oh,
Inari
—" As if he didn't have enough to worry about, Chen thought.

His wife said defensively, "It was only a little curse. And it won't last beyond dawn."

"The thing is, love,
your
ideas of what's little and other
people'
s tend to be a bit at odds. Remember that poor man's beard?" A startling sequence of possibilities was flashing before Chen's mind's eye: the precinct house transformed, scorpions in the lavatory, filing cabinets changed to the semblance of decaying flesh. "And remember that I'm the one who has to do penance. Not to mention apologize to my colleagues."

Inari's face fell, and she looked down at the floor. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I've made problems for you. Again."

Chen reached out and took her hand. It was no use blaming Inari; she was what she was, after all. "Oh, look. No, I'm sure you haven't. It'll be all right. Don't worry." He spoke as swiftly and as reassuringly as he could. It was nearly one in the morning, he had a case starting that had all the hallmarks of the murder from Hell, and the last thing he wanted was to make Inari feel guilty over what she couldn't help. They were back to the same old problem again: the pivotal difficulty on which their marriage spun, and at this hour of the night Chen simply couldn't face it. He turned and looked at his wife. In the dim light of the houseboat, her pupils had expanded until they lay like great dark wells among the elegant planes of her face. Only a thin rim of crimson delineated each iris. In this light, Chen thought with a rush of affection, she might almost be human.

"Let's go to bed," he said, and rising, blew the single candle out. Beyond, there was only darkness, and the soft sound of water under the night wind.

When Chen awoke next morning, the sun was flooding through the shutters and Inari was already up. The bitter fragrance of green tea was spreading throughout the houseboat. Chen wrapped himself in a silk dressing gown and went out onto the deck. Something soft and furry brushed his ankles as he stepped through the door; looking down, he saw nothing, but the teakettle was no longer sitting on the stove. The neighbors were already up, and going about their business. Old Mr Wu was doing his t'ai ch'i on the dock, and empty spaces among the houseboats revealed that the fisher families had long since departed for the morning's catch. The skyscrapers of Shaopeng were towers of shadow against the strong morning sunlight, which lay in a dazzling arc out across the bay. A single gull wheeled up from the water and was lost in the sun's glare. Chen moved briskly through his
ch'i kung
exercises, then went downstairs to get dressed. It was still not eight o'clock. Inari was humming under her breath: a quick, complicated tune, very different from the discordant songs that she had sung when Chen had first met her. Like himself, she was not one for conversation first thing in the morning, communicating via eyebrows and gestures. They drank tea in companionable silence.

"Weather forecast says there might be more storms this afternoon," Chen said at last.

"That'll be nice."

"Going to the market today?" Chen asked, with careful indifference.

"Maybe," Inari said in a small voice.

"Well, look after yourself," Chen said, and was rewarded with her startled smile. "Time's getting on. I'd better go."

As usual, he caught the tram to the temple of Kuan Yin, which lay a few blocks from the precinct house. At this hour of the day, the temple was always busy, filled with office workers from the banking district and, lately, the lab technicians of the new
gherao
dormitories of the bioweb, the latter clad in their distinctive white overalls. There were the regulars, too: the madwoman who ate chrysanthemums petal by petal, the young boy with an anxious face who seemed always to be looking for someone, a pale girl in a black dress. Chen exchanged small nods of mutual recognition and purchased his customary gift: a thick stick of crimson incense, which he placed carefully in the sand below the brazier, and lit. Then he bowed his head in prayer, and said the words that he had, a year ago, so painstakingly written:
Kuan Yin, forgive me for my betrayal. Hear my penance, and my regret for causing you, the Compassionate and the Merciful, such sorrow. Hear my prayer, and my plea. . .
As always, he was obliged to force away the ungrateful thought that he was not regretful at all. If he had to do the same thing all over again, he would; he could not do otherwise. It was ironic, he reflected, that it was effectively the goddess' own instructions which had led to his sin, but then all gods were like that: the knife behind the smile, the drop of poison in the honey jar. They like to bind you to them, make you dance on razorblades. Now, Kuan Yin's voice echoed inside his mind, the words she had spoken at his dedication so long ago:
All you have to do to merit my eternal protection, Wei Chen, is to be immaculate in your dealings. All you have to do. . .
From the way she'd said it, with all the calmness and serenity of the changeless celestial present, anyone might think it was easy. To his eighteen-year-old self, indeed, it
had
sounded easy and perhaps it even would have been, too, if Chen had been a poet or a gardener, but it was hard to behave in a manner worthy of a Taoist sage when you were a functioning member of the Chinese police force, with corpses and informers and double-dealing colleagues at every turn. But then, Chen had to admit, it had been his own choice to compound his problems a thousandfold, and marry a demon.

He was getting off the subject again. He repeated the prayer, trying to infuse it with a greater degree of conviction, and opened his eyes. The incense was smoldering, sending a thin thread of mixed emotions into the ether on Chen's behalf. Uneasily, he turned to bow to the statue of the goddess that stood, book in one hand, peach in the other, at the far end of the courtyard. Her flawless jade face looked even more austere than usual; Chen felt like the boy at the back of the class, caught with comics or catapult. It was an uncomfortable feeling at the age of forty-three. Chen had to restrain himself from shuffling his feet.

Leaving the temple, he walked quickly to the precinct, lured by the possibility of repaired air conditioning, but as soon as he sat down at his desk he found a summons to the captain's office waiting for him. Chen sat and stared at it, hoping it would go away. The last thing he wanted right now was another political lecture. At last he crumpled the note between his fingers and went across to the captain's office. Sung swiveled around in his chair, impatiently drumming his thick fingers on the desk.

"Good, you're here. They think they've found Tang," the police chief said. "But they're not sure. A man corresponding to his description was picked up on the security camera at the Zhen Shu ferry terminal."

"Ling's Funeral Parlor," Chen said. A piece of the puzzle seemed to click into place in his mind. "That's in Zhen Shu." Sung's eyes narrowed; his face became even more of a mask.

"You think that's where he's gone? Why?"

"I've no idea why, unless he planned to speak to the owner about his daughter's death. But two related elements of the case are now connected with the Zhen Shu district. I'm inclined to think they fit together."

"Would he have gone to the funeral parlor for protection? The owner's known to have connections with the—" Sung glanced uneasily at his subordinate "—the underworld. In both senses of the word. Perhaps he thought Ling could protect him against whatever possessed his wife."

"Or perhaps he wanted to warn Ling that whatever game they're playing was about to be up."

"Explain."

"I think Mrs Tang was sincere in her desire to find out what had happened to her daughter. But I also think she suspected her husband of having something to do with it. She was adamant that he shouldn't know she'd gone to the police. It's at least a working hypothesis that he was suspicious when she came home after a prolonged absence, searched through her bag, and found my name and number. Then, I think he arranged for an associate to take care of Mrs Tang and tried to avert suspicion from himself. He saw the exorcist coming—a person who could reasonably be expected to tackle a demon and win—and fled."

"All right," the police chief murmured. "As you say, it's a working hypothesis. I've sent a man down to Zhen Shu, to watch the funeral parlor. I suggest you go down there and join him."

"Who have you sent?"

"Tzu Ma."

"Sergeant Ma? With respect, Chief, is that a wise choice?"

Sung's eyebrows rose slowly up his broad forehead.

"And why wouldn't it be?"

"It's just that me and my—connections—seem to make Sergeant Ma particularly nervous."

"Well, he'll just have to get over it, won't he. He's a big lad, after all," said Sung, dismissing the matter. With a distinct sense of déjà vu, Chen went down to the ferry terminal and caught a boat across to the island.

In the bright morning sunlight, the zone seemed especially dark: a little fragment of night scored across the glittering expanse of the harbor. He found Sergeant Ma sitting disconsolately in a teahouse across the street from the funeral parlor. Ma blanched visibly when he saw who had arrived.

"Nothing's happened yet," Ma said defensively. Chen sighed. Ma was clad in a fawn jacket and huge boots: evidently his idea of civilian garb. Chen had never seen anyone who looked more like a policeman.

"I hope someone's watching the back," Chen said, with a faint note of query. Ma nodded.

"A patrolman. Don't worry, he's well-hidden."