The Golden Mountain Murders Read Free

making the fat man eat the documents, then thought better of it and simply ripped them into little pieces and dropped them into the soup.
    The man looked truly hurt by this. Maybe he really liked soup.
    As they walked back to their vehicle, Chen asked, “Was that smart, sir?”
    “No, Chen it wasn’t, but I’m tired of being smart – smart’s not getting us anywhere with this.”

    And so their investigation went – over and over again, for month after month. From sick peasants to blood heads to blood merchants to blood packagers to local political officials who, for a cut, licensed the practice.

    Back in his bug-free Shanghai office overlooking the Bund, Fong threw his files to the floor.
    “Sir?”
    “What kind of world are we living in, Chen?”
    “The new . . .”
    “There must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people involved in this, Chen.”
    “And many more than that quite sick, sir.”
    “Yes. Many more. But every middleman we put out of business is replaced by another in a week. The lure of the money is too great to stop the trade. There are always poor Chinese who are looking for a chance to better themselves.”
    “It is encouraged by the government,” said Chen.
    “What?” snapped Fong.
    Then Chen added as clarification, “Bettering oneself, not collecting blood.”
    Fong thought about that. He wondered how much difference there really was between those two things: bettering oneself and collecting blood.
    “Sir?”
    “There’s almost no use working from this side. As long as the money is available from the West we won’t be able to stop this.”
    “But this is happening here, sir.”
    “Yes,” said Fong as he turned his back on the setting sun. Then he pointed east towards the coming darkness. “But the money comes from there. The Golden Mountain.”
    Then his eyes panned down to the crowded streets and his heart skipped a beat. He blinked and it was gone. But for an instant Fong was sure he had seen a peasant man standing on a bench on the raised Bund Promenade looking right at him – no, through him.

CHAPTER ONE
ON THE WAY

    F ong’s eyes soaked it in. The puffs of clouds over the shallow upland valleys, the sharp snow-covered ridges that, Great Wall–like, connected the coastal peaks. Then the high meadows followed by flatness – cut into rectangular demarcations of farms, then another set of wooded foothills.
    So un-Chinese these Canadian mountains.
    Where were the rice paddies climbing every hill, the fields growing right to the edge of the villages? But then again, through his airplane window he hadn’t seen many urban areas since he’d boarded the plane in Vancouver.
    Then yet more mountains and a river cutting deeply through it – and a single road – a paved highway in the midst of nowhere – very, very un-Chinese.
    Wide dirt paths joined the upper level pastures, but in the valley a pristine, empty, paved blacktop cut through. Fong shook his head, unable to comprehend the logic behind spending vast numbers of yuan to build an unused road.
    Here in the early-twenty-first century, a mere nine months after two airplanes brought down the World Trade Towers, Inspector Zhong Fong, head of Shanghai’s Special Investigations Unit was seeing North America – the Golden Mountain – for the first time.
    He listened to the English spoken around him and marvelled at the variations in both the use of the language and the origins of the speakers. But what drew his attention most was the wealth – everywhere such wealth.
    Another valley town, a river to the north, train tracks to the south, a four-lane highway seemingly through the centre, slid silently beneath the belly of the plane.
    He was heading to an international conference on terrorism outside a place called Calgary in a canton called Alberta. He had to do a lot of prompting and cajoling to get the assignment, but finally the new powers in Beijing had relented – then in their inimitable style insisted – that he