The Last Six Million Seconds Read Free Page B

since arrival; he liked the sensation of never quite catching up with himself. But it was true what they told you when you first came out: The longer you remained in the Far East, the less you understood. Take today. A detective he had never thought of as brave had stubbornly, cleverly held on to evidence in an inquiry that the same detective expected to be aborted for political reasons. Perhaps he’d risked his life and Aston’s too. It didn’t make sense.
    During the transit of the harbor the rain returned, a sticky, wet blackness that swallowed huge tankers and cut the launch off again from land. He’d told his mother she wouldn’t believe what fell from the skies out here. And it was warm. What in the world could be more exotic, more wonderful, more mysterious than the warm, stench-enriched rain of this tropical city?
    It was weird how the East changed you. There was more life and more death, and you felt twice as real for it. Soaked to the skin in a second and clutching the safety rope as he made his way back over the flooding deck to the wheelhouse, he caught Chan’s eyes and grinned. God forgive me for loving these Hong Kong storms full of money, sex and corpses. If there was a way to stay after June, he would find it.

3
    A t Queen’s Pier Chan showered and dressed in the cabin, then told Aston to stay with the heads on the boat while he found a car to collect them. The captain dropped him off at the concrete steps, then backed out into the harbor to escape the crowd of small craft using the public pier. It was rush hour in the rain; all streets and pavements were flooded with people who seemed to be fleeing some disaster over their shoulders. Above high-rise office buildings the remains of a savage light glared between charcoal clouds. In half an hour it would be night.
    At the Star Ferry Terminal, next to Queen’s Pier, the sergeant at a small police incident cabin let Chan telephone for a car to meet Aston at the pier to collect the heads and take them to the morgue.
    “Heads?” The sergeant was accustomed to writing out reports of pickpocketing and loss of credit cards. He stared at Chan, silently begging for details. Replacing the telephone, Chan mimed decapitation.
    “Then they cut off the lips, ears, nose, eyelids.”
    The sergeant let his mouth fall open. “Fuck your mother.”
    Chan nodded. He had made one man happy this day.
    He knew there was no point trying to find a taxi, still less to hope for a car to collect him within the next forty minutes. Aston would be on the boat with the heads until the rush hour was over. On the other hand, he wanted to discuss those Chinese coastguards with Chief Superintendent John Riley at Arsenal Street Police Headquarters without delay.
    Ordinarily Chan would have reported to his immediate superiorat Mongkok Division, the assistant district commander/crime. Recently, though, headquarters had required officers in charge of sensitive cases to report important developments to a designated officer at Arsenal Street. After the media interest arising from the extreme cruelty of the murders he was investigating (CNN and the BBC both had carried clips of Chan saying, “I have no comment to make at this time”), and following his discovery that his telephone had been tapped and case files tampered with, he had been ordered to bypass the command line at Mongkok and report directly to Riley. He decided to walk to the complex of buildings that constituted headquarters for the Royal Hong Kong Police.
    Edinburgh Place, City Hall, Murray Road, Queensway: British names whose sell-by date was fast approaching. Queensway Plaza was an air-conditioned Oriental shopping mall crammed with Chinese tailors, Chinese takeouts, Chinese computer stores, Chinese jewelry shops and Chinese pedestrians. People moved in tidal waves in both directions. As Chan allowed himself to be carried forward into the mall, the cool from the air conditioning froze the rain and sweat on his body. He could