The First Excellence: Fa-Ling's Map (13 page)

It took Jiu more than an hour to thoroughly search Dahui’s hard drive, save the data to a portable storage unit so he could study it at his leisure, and transmit all of the relevant documents to his fake recipient in Thailand. Each email was date-stamped for six o’clock the previous morning, prior to their visit to the Tan residence. Then Jiu changed the date and time on the PC once again to reflect reality, and eradicated the operating system’s record of his having altered it.

Next he began purging all of Dahui’s records. This took him another two hours.

By four a.m. he had run a double-check on the operating system to ensure there were no revealing fragments left behind that could later be re-constructed by an overly-eager techie. When the hard drive was wiped clean, Jiu disconnected the tower and carried it to Ho’s office. He placed it neatly on the floor in the corner. He wrote a little note, which he taped to the top of it, saying the hard drive had been found in a local dumpster in excellent condition, and perhaps Ho had a young niece or nephew who might make use of it for schoolwork.

Then he re-wired his own computer and made himself as comfortable as possible by slouching over his worktable. Chief Ho Lon-shi seldom arrived at the office before ten, leaving his staff free to wander in whenever they felt like it. The general crew was supposed to be in the office by eight, but Jiu never saw another soul except for Ng-zhi before eight-fifty at the earliest.

Yi invariably arrived between nine-forty-five and ten, appearing minutes before Ho himself checked in.

There would be plenty of time for Jiu to get some shut-eye before the new workday began.

In their ninth floor luxury suite of the Golden Lion Hotel, Yvanna and Chris Brahn sat on the edge of their beds alternately reading their travel guides and talking in hushed excitement. The Brahns were not new to travel. They had been all over the world several times. They owned homes in Switzerland, Spain and the Caribbean in addition to their Toronto three-storey Forest Hill residence.

This trip was different, and they both knew it. By this time tomorrow they would have a son!

Boys were a rarity in Chinese orphanages. Because of the country’s blatant gender preference, sons were highly prized. In most cases, only boys that had been born with physical or mental defects or other serious health issues were cast aside. In rare cases, a second or third son would be abandoned to avoid the ‘second child penalty’, a government levy that was enforced to discourage multiple births.

Daniel — they would name the boy after Chris’s grandfather — was a rare exception, a healthy boy in need of parents. He had probably been born to an unwed mother. Childbirth out of wedlock was something that did not occur in China, according to official propaganda. It was not ‘allowed’. When, in defiance of the accepted social order, it did occur, the disgraced mother was quick to get rid of the evidence of her shame.

One of the new traditions that had developed since International adoption was first permitted by the Chinese government in 1994 concerned the handling of these ‘precious gifts’, as little boys were called. It was decided and enforced through unwritten policy that boy children would be available for adoption only to applicants from the uppermost stratum of society. In other words, to adopt a baby boy the parents had to be minor royalty, movie stars, politicians, or extremely wealthy.

All lesser applicants were free to request a boy, but they were warned by their adoption agencies that to do so could put their entire proposal at risk. It was highly recommended all applicants request a girl child. If a boy was available and officials deemed it appropriate, they might suggest the family adopt a boy instead. This was a rare occurrence.

Yvanna and Chris were shocked when they received their proposal from the Chinese government and learned they were going to adopt a baby boy. At first they were mildly disappointed, having told all of their friends they were expecting a girl. Fortunately re-decorating the nursery was not a problem for them. They had the money and could hire the help to do it.

In the end, they agreed that rejecting any child based on its gender would be an offence against their liberal and religious beliefs. They welcomed the idea of a son with open hearts and prepared themselves to receive Daniel.

Now, wide awake at four in the morning and thrilled at what was to come, they faced one another in the opulent suite, more in love than they had ever been.

**

On the sixth floor, Fa-ling thought she heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner next door where the suicide had taken place. No doubt hotel management was anxious to clean up the broken glass that was left in the room before other guests woke up and started asking questions.

Fa-ling had noticed her bathroom had a problem with its plumbing. When she ran the water, it gushed through the cupboard door and onto the floor below the sink. She opened the cupboard to see what the problem was, only to discover the pipe under the sink had fallen apart. It was dangling with no connection to the main takeaway outlet.

She decided to use the bathtub for washing her hands and leave the plumbing problem to be dealt with in the morning. However, since there seemed to be a maintenance person already nearby in the next room, she might as well try to get the thing fixed right away. She slipped her bare feet into her walking shoes and stepped into the hallway.

The door to room 607 was not quite closed. Fa-ling knocked, but could not be heard over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. She did not want to disturb the other guests by knocking loudly.

She pushed the door open. Alarmed by what she saw, she closed it again and raced back to the safety of her own room. She locked and bolted the door and turned off the lights before sinking to the floor, her heart racing.

She had not seen a mere chambermaid in room 607. Instead, to her surprise, she had discovered a muscular man in a black suit with a pair of white paper slippers covering his shoes ‘sweeping’ room 607 with a high tech cleaning tool.

What was going on? The big detective, Cheng, had told her a suicide had occurred. Why, then, was there a guy who looked like he belonged to the Ministry of Security posing as Molly Maid in the next room?

Fa-ling willed her heart to slow down. She did not believe the man had seen her. The noise of the vacuum cleaner and the desire to be thorough in his task had consumed his attention.

**

Two doors down the hall in room 608, Guy Kader lay facing the wall, pretending to be asleep in order to avoid talking to his wife. He was tired and depressed. He didn’t know how he was going to get through the next few days, the exertion of touring Southern China with the adoption group while simultaneously trying to adjust to becoming a father.

He no longer had faith in the stability of his marriage. That was the thing that hurt the most. He had believed that if he gave Paula everything she needed, then they would be able to work things out. He had wanted to believe it, but in truth he had long suffered from doubts that nibbled away at the back of his mind like mice behind drywall.

Guy no longer had the energy to guess what his wife might be up to. Whatever it was, he had the sinking feeling affairs were going south, and fast. He could smell the panic on his wife. The more she insisted on presenting a cool front, the more convinced he became that disaster was just around the corner.

When Paula had been fired from her Bay Street position two years earlier, Guy had stepped up. He had worked two jobs, struggling to repay her losses to the firm. He almost admired her nerve. In the boiler room atmosphere of the trading floor under the boss’s watchful eye she had somehow managed to use the bank’s time, resources and client base to feed her compulsion for making high risk investments.

No one wanted to go public with the figures, but Guy’s boss told him the total damage was near the one million mark. There was no way, even with his parents’ help, Guy would ever be able to cover that much of a loss.

He’d known his boss Sam for over ten years, but their friendship couldn’t protect Guy from the fallout. Sam allowed him to save face by asking for a transfer to another department where he would not have access to client records. Ashamed of his demotion, Guy still told people — their neighbours and friends — he was a trader. In time, Sam would give the nod and let him move back onto the floor, but at the moment, corporate memories were still crisp. Until they faded, there was no place for him among his former colleagues, not as long as he was still married to ‘Cool Hand Kader’.

That’s what his co-workers called Paula. He smiled, going along with the joke, but it hurt. Guy had always believed his greatest asset was his integrity. Now he doubted whether he could ever earn back the trust of his peers.

**

Paula crawled under the covers of her single bed at around four a.m. She lay facing the window. Her mind raged with anxiety, playing every scenario over and over again with a multitude of possible endings.

The events of the past few hours had made it clear to her that China was indeed a perilous country, and hers was a dangerous plan.

In the little back-street house in Shanghai, Randy woke at daybreak to the sound of a Chinese melody coming from behind the red silk curtain. The kitchen and living room were in fact one large room, separated more by imagination and furnishings than by design. At the back of the house were two proper rooms: a bedroom belonging to Master Long, which was now being used by Shopei, and a bathroom featuring primitive but well-maintained plumbing and a large tub for bathing.

Such high-quality amenities were rare in the old quarter, and Long was pleased to show them off. Many years earlier, when his wife was still alive, he had gone to great effort to provide her with a modern bathroom. He still took pride in the polished floorboards and sturdy pipes.

Randy rose from his mat on the kitchen floor to look for Shopei, but she was nowhere in sight. He assumed Long must be in his bedroom at the back of the house, so he called out for the old man, but got no answer. He peeked behind the curtain that separated the living room from the kitchen.

The girl Wu Gui-Jing was awake, though still delirious, her blank eyes staring at the ceiling. Her mouth moved silently in time to the music. She seemed to be praying, perhaps trying to keep up her spiritual discipline despite her injuries. She had managed to answer only a few of Randy’s questions the previous night before sinking once again into fevered dreams.

Long did not hold out much hope for the woman’s recovery. He had tried several times to pry information from her about her next of kin. So far, Gui-Jing had not regained sufficient consciousness to tell Long about her people. The infection in her lower back should have begun to heal already. Her injuries and general poor nutrition had drained her immune system, reducing her body’s ability to restore order.

Long did not practice Falun Gong. Of course, like many traditional Chinese, he believed in the spiritual and physical benefits of Qi Gong and T’Ai Chi. In fact, he was properly known as Master Long, having instructed the art of Shaolin Kung Fu for many years prior to his official retirement. He felt, though, that Falun Gong followers took the ancient disciplines to an unreasonable height, destroying the natural balance of life in their quest to attain a higher spiritual experience.

Long was a healer. He had studied medicine as a young man, and he understood first hand the power of
belief
. If Wu Gui-Jing believed long hours spent in Falun Gong meditation ritual would help her to recover, then Long would encourage her to stick to her discipline.

Master Long believed a person’s life was not balanced or complete until that person had pursued the goals established by Confucius. The Great Master taught a balanced life must not focus all of its energy on one discipline, as Falun Gong members were doing with their daily hours of deep meditation, but must branch its energies outward to achieve mastery of the Five Excellences.

Like Confucius, Long believed that in the course of one’s lifetime one should strive to attain mastery of whatever five disciplines one most loved. By doing so, one would never become bored with life.

Long’s own chosen excellences were: medicine, to enhance his sense of compassion; martial arts, to build his strength and unify his spirit to the environment; philosophy, to develop his understanding of mankind; painting, to create beauty in the physical world; and gardening, to bind his
chi
firmly to the earth.

Of these five, all had been mastered and were still practised daily. The only “excellence” that still challenged him, and probably would until the day he died, was his garden. Season after season, he did what he could to strengthen the poor soil behind his house, and every year his efforts were foiled by the rains which washed all nutrients from the sandy ground.

Over time, he came to understand that nature knows what is best. He gave up on trying to foster the lush, colourful flowers he loved and instead looked to foliage that was native to the area and not easily harmed by the city’s destructive pollution.

It was in Long’s garden that Randy found the old man and Shopei, moving in unison to the rhythm of nature. Background music for their dance was provided by the birds and insects that flocked to the safe haven provided by Long. Randy joined their ritual, but was soon overwhelmed by the intricate hand and foot movements. They were practising ‘Wu style T’Ai Chi Chuan’, which Long had learned directly from Master Wu Chien Chuan at his Shanghai academy in the late 1930’s. Randy was not familiar with the version.