The Weight
of Jade

The body had been in the water long enough to lose its urgency. That was what Detective Inspector Raymond Cheuk told himself when the harbour police handed it onto the Wan Chai pier at half past five in the morning — that a body that had drifted this long was a problem belonging to yesterday, and yesterday was someone else's shift. Then the sergeant lifted the dead man's right hand from the dock planking and Cheuk saw the ring, and yesterday became very much his problem indeed.

The ring was jade. Not the cheap tourist jade sold in the market stalls of Nathan Road, pale and mottled and barely worth the silver setting. This was imperial jade, so deeply green it looked almost black in the grey pre-dawn light — the kind of jade that wealthy men wore to announce that certain things were better left hidden. Cheuk had last seen it on the finger of a man named Victor Lam three weeks ago, at a reception in the Hong Kong Club that Cheuk had attended because his superintendent had insisted and that he had left early because the company had been precisely as unpleasant as he'd expected.

Victor Lam was not the dead man. Cheuk established this quickly — the dead man was younger, leaner, with the calloused hands of someone who worked with them and the broken nose of someone who occasionally got that work wrong. He was also, once they got him to the mortuary and cleaned him up, vaguely familiar in the way that faces are familiar when you have spent eleven years policing a city and everyone is eventually connected to everyone else by two or three degrees of debt, favour, or threat.

"Who is he?" said Sergeant Lo, who was twenty-three and still wrote information on a notebook with the careful pressure of a student sitting an examination he expected to fail.

"His name," said Cheuk, "is — was — Tommy Fung. He ran errands for the Lam family. Among other things." He paused. "Among other things is the interesting part."

The Lam family occupied a particular stratum of Hong Kong society that Cheuk had spent his career learning to navigate without losing either his integrity or his life, the two demands being frequently in competition. Victor Lam's father had made money in Shanghai before the war, lost most of it during it, and remade it after in ways that the colonial administration preferred not to examine too closely in exchange for the Lams' continued cooperation on matters the administration preferred not to handle directly. Victor had inherited both the money and the arrangement, along with a talent for acquiring jade and a temperament that combined great charm with what Cheuk had always recognised as a complete indifference to consequences that did not affect him personally.

The question of how Tommy Fung came to be floating in Victoria Harbour wearing Victor Lam's ring was therefore not a simple question. It had layers. Cheuk was experienced enough to know that the first explanation offered for anything in this city was the one designed to be believed, and that the truth — when it eventually surfaced, as bodies did — tended to arrive looking considerably less presentable.

He went to see Victor Lam at ten o'clock, which was early enough to be inconvenient and late enough to be reasonable. The Lam house on the Peak had views that cost more than Cheuk would earn in a decade. The houseboy who answered the door did not want to let him in. The houseboy reconsidered when Cheuk showed his warrant card with a particular stillness that conveyed, without requiring words, that the alternative to cooperation was a scene that would be visible from the road.

Victor Lam received him in a room of pale wood and serious art. He was forty-two, immaculate, and concerned — not frightened, Cheuk noted, but performing concern with the precision of a man who had prepared for this visit and chosen his register carefully.

"Tommy," he said, shaking his head with what appeared to be genuine sorrow and was probably something more considered. "I heard this morning. A terrible thing."

"You heard," said Cheuk. "From whom?"

A fractional pause — almost undetectable. "The harbour master's office telephoned. We have a connection there. Business."

"The harbour master's office." Cheuk wrote nothing in his own notebook. He found that writing things down in front of witnesses changed what they said next, and he preferred to hear what came naturally. "Mr Lam, Tommy Fung was found wearing your ring. The jade ring. The imperial jade."

Victor Lam looked at his right hand, where the ring was not. He did this with what might have been surprise if Cheuk had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, which he was not. "I gave it to him," he said. "Two weeks ago. He was — he was carrying something on my behalf. A delivery of some sensitivity. I gave him the ring so that the receiving party would know he was acting for me."

"A delivery of some sensitivity," said Cheuk. "To whom?"

The pause this time was longer, and during it Cheuk watched Victor Lam perform a rapid internal calculation of the kind that men in his position performed constantly: what was more dangerous, the truth or the lie, and which could be more safely offered to the man sitting across from him with the patient expression of someone who had heard every version of both.

"A man named Petrov," said Victor Lam, finally. "He operates out of the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. Russian — I don't know his full name. He has access to certain items from the mainland that are difficult to acquire through conventional channels."

Cheuk was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, the harbour lay grey and enormous below the Peak, and somewhere in that grey water Tommy Fung had spent the last hours of his life going nowhere in particular.

"What was Tommy delivering?" said Cheuk.

"Documents," said Victor Lam. "Property documents. For a transaction I am completing in the New Territories."

"Documents," said Cheuk, in the tone he used when the word being offered was doing too much work.

"Documents," confirmed Victor Lam, in the tone of a man who had decided this was his answer and intended to die on it.

Cheuk was not tall, but he had the stillness of a man who had learned that stillness is more intimidating than size, and he used it now, standing at the centre of the pale wooden room with its serious art and its harbour views and its careful, charming occupant. "Mr Lam, Tommy Fung was struck twice on the back of the head before he went into the water. The blow that killed him was the first one. The second was confirmation. He was told it was not and was not disturbed." He picked up his hat. "I will need to speak with you again."

"Of course," said Victor Lam. He extended his hand, and Cheuk shook it — it was that kind of meeting, in this city, at this level — and noticed that Victor Lam's grip was entirely steady. Not the grip of a man who had ordered Tommy Fung killed. Possibly the grip of a man who had arranged for someone else to make that decision, which was a different thing, and considerably harder to prove.

Petrov was not hard to find. Men like Petrov were never hard to find, because they depended on being findable — the difficulty was in approaching them without announcing your approach, and Cheuk had spent eleven years developing a talent for that particular piece of choreography. He went to the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront at two in the afternoon, when the light was flat and the heat made everyone inclined to look at the ground, and found a tea house three doors from the address Sergeant Lo had pulled from the harbour authority records, and sat for forty minutes drinking bad tea and watching a door.

Petrov came out at a quarter to three. He was a large man, fair-haired and unhealthily-looking, with the particular pallor of someone who spent most of his time in rooms where the windows didn't open. He was alone. He walked toward the ferry pier with the purpose of a man going somewhere he had already decided to go.

Cheuk followed him.

They walked for four minutes through the afternoon crowd before Petrov turned into a lane that went nowhere useful and Cheuk understood that Petrov had known he was being followed since the moment he stepped onto the street. The lane was narrow and ended in a wall and contained, besides Petrov, two other men who had apparently been waiting there for some time.

Cheuk stopped at the entrance to the lane. He looked at the three men. He considered his options, which were limited, and his advantages, which were also limited but not entirely absent.

"The documents," he said to Petrov, clearly, in Cantonese that Petrov probably didn't speak and Russian that Cheuk didn't speak and English that both of them did. "Tommy Fung was killed for them. Either you killed him, or whoever hired you to receive them did. Either way, they exist, and either way, I will find them. The question is whether you prefer to have that conversation now, in this lane, or later, in an interview room where I control what gets written down."

Petrov studied him. The two other men said nothing.

"You are a brave man," said Petrov, in English that had the texture of gravel. "Or a stupid one. In my experience they are difficult to tell apart until it is too late to matter."

"In my experience," said Cheuk, "men who have something to trade always prefer to trade it before the market closes. The market closes when I walk out of this lane alone. After that, whatever you know becomes evidence instead of leverage, and evidence is worth considerably less."

The silence in the lane lasted long enough to become uncomfortable and then a little longer. Then Petrov said something to the two men in Russian that sent them back along the lane and left Cheuk without looking at him, and Cheuk and Petrov were alone.

The documents, it turned out, were not property documents. They were letters — fourteen of them, written over two years by a senior colonial official to a woman in Macau who was not his wife and who had, in the last of the fourteen letters, made a request that the official had been ill-positioned to refuse and too frightened to comply with, and whose true, communicated across that distance in careful ink, had become the property of a man named Victor Lam who had used it quietly and profitably until Tommy Fung had decided that fourteen letters were worth more than his employer's goodwill.

Tommy Fung had been wrong. He had been wrong in the particular way of men who underestimate the distance between what they know and what they can survive knowing.

Cheuk arrested Victor Lam three days later, on a Tuesday, in the same pale room with the harbour views. The charge was not murder — proving that would take longer than the colonial administration's patience for the case would allow, and Cheuk was experienced enough to know which battles to fight when. The charge was conspiracy to extort, which was provable, which was serious, and which would, when the relevant officials found out what the extortion had involved, produce consequences for Victor Lam that a murder charge might not.

The jade ring went into evidence. Cheuk looked at it once, through the evidence bag, before it was catalogued — its deep green almost black under the interview room's fluorescent light, the kind of colour that promised things it had no intention of delivering.

Outside, the harbour moved as it always did, indifferent and enormous, carrying its freight of commerce and history and the occasional secret toward the open sea. Cheuk watched it from the window for a moment before turning back to his paperwork. Eleven years in this city had given him the useful understanding that the sea kept nothing — that everything it took, it eventually returned, altered by the journey but legible if you knew how to read it.

He picked up his pen. He began to write what had happened, in the careful, compressed language of a police report that would record what could be proven and leave room in the margins — if you knew where to look — for everything that could not.