1.          The Call

With covert operatives and faux naif

                Someone’s been killing American expats in Taipei. The American Institute was contacted and the FBI was brought in. There I would go with my forensic team. Three months and three bodies later, they were no closer to finding the perp.

  First went Darren Street; slumped over his high school office chair. Then there was Rufus Davis, a guitar string wrapped tightly around his neck. Third came Elijah Gray; found in a dog cage, his chopped parts fed to the guests at a pet sanctuary on Yang-Ming Mountain. A serial murder was feared.

                “Hey Nate; there’s a call for you on three,” said Jake, my partner of twenty years till they moved me to sex crimes the month before; I was getting testimony in the conference room from a Richmond rape victim when I got the call. I begged him my pardon and stepped out to get the phone. We still use landlines in headquarters; real high tech.

                “Nate Fisher here.”

                “You’re the detective who solved the Chinatown tourist murder case last year, aren’t you?”

                “The Brill-Law case; that’s me.” The perp was a juvenile Taiwanese male whose parents had dropped him off in San Francisco as a child to get an American education; he sure learned fast.

                “We need a detective fluent in Mandarin with experience in the Chinese community, particularly Taiwan.”

                “What about?”

                “Someone’s killing expats.”

                “I’m not working homicide anymore; I’m in sex crimes.” I guess the sons of bitches hadn’t told him, yet. 

                “They’ve put you back on homicide.”

                “Who, may I ask, am I speaking to exactly?”

                “Christopher Drew here, L.A. FBI International Liaison Office for West Coast Asian Affairs.”

                “I didn’t know there was one.”

                “Now you do. Could you meet us tomorrow? We’ll come up if you say ‘yes’.”

                “From where?”

                “L.os Angeles.”

                “You mean I can say ‘no’ if I want to?”

                “We’ll see you two o’clock; room 1420 Transamerica Building.”

                I knew I was in for a rough ride. It had been years since I walked the streets of Taipei as an enlisted airman on R ’n R from Vietnam. Though the place changes, the people are the same. The tactics and manipulations common in Taiwan are still there. Luckily, I have a road map in Malcolm Carter; he knows Taiwanese like the back of his hand and will be my right-hand for the investigation. He literally wrote the book identifying the challenges we would face; the modern Sun Tsu “Art of War.”  

                After discharge, I liked Taiwan so much that I returned after a short stop home to family in Oxnard. When I got back off the plane, exile rations quickly became despair. Soldiers with assault rifles. Customs looking like a hearing room. They were going to march me off to prison. Two heavily-armed guards were going to do whatever they wanted with me when the customs agent said okay. They smirked. They shook their heads in disbelief. The agent lifted items from my luggage. I was a communist bandit and I would pay. They didn’t believe I was a patriot.

    Faint pink onion paper, in Chinese said Nate Fisher was screwed. No phone calls home. “Go with them,” the agent said. They prepared for me to flee; I didn’t. They escorted me, sweltering, to an unmarked door in the dimly lit terminal; at the end of the check-out counters. The door was opened and I was told to enter. 

     Who dared bring in these books? It never occurred to me when I was here in the air force. I knew Taiwan was a replica of China, home of Chiang Kai-Shek; his Kuomintang. I wondered how I could have been so naïve; how I didn’t think those books were contraband; propaganda printed behind enemy lines. These peace-loving people of Taiwan. Even my red shirt meant trouble. Dripping with sweat, humidity and fear, contradicting the cold sweat on my forehead, the kind that doesn’t evaporate.

      “You’ll have to wait here.”

      “Yes, I know.”

      “Know what?” A stern guard asked. I didn’t answer.

      In the years between my discharge and return to Taiwan, December 1978, Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. would cut its official ties. They took two books of poems from me; Song and Tang Dynasties, printed in Beijing. They took Rand McNally maps because Mongolia was an independent country. In fact, China was erroneously called the People’s Republic. I could understand why they took my souvenir, the little red book of Mao’s Quotations, but why the others?

Malcolm met me outside the airport and drove me home. He told me things had changed; stories of foreigners being struck with bats by passing motorcyclists over the shift America made from Taiwan to China; be careful he said. Those were angry days in Taiwan.

                A month later, I was called to go to The Bureau of International Affairs office to pick my books up. I showed my receipt, they checked my passport. With the contraband bundle tied in pink plastic cord, the clerk came through the swinging door.

“Follow me,” he said, turned right and walked up the street to the post office. Once inside, the clerk-turned-chaperone put the books on the counter where a clerk weighed it. “240 dollars; sign here,” and handed me onion paper form with primitive bilingual instructions; parcel mail back to the U.S.

Outside, President Chiang Ching-Kuo had postponed elections. It was getting scary. Yu Deng-Fa and son, outside the KMT, were arrested for propaganda for the Chinese communists. There were some wild demonstrations and people being hurt. Malcolm cautioned me to keep a low profile working as an undercover spook.

                A dozen years later I was back getting clearance at customs after a non-stop flight to what was once called Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport, now called Taoyuan, Malcolm Carter and Tim Chen were waiting for me. On the way to their car in the garage, they filled me in on the three murder cases and drove me to the Grand Hotel in Taipei to rest the night.

It was a short walk from there to the American Club where our team was to meet at noon Monday; they kindly gave me a full day to get over jet lag. But I was up and fidgety early that Sunday morning. Thought I’d wander down Chung-Shan North Road Section One. I waved off a taxi outside the lobby and circled the hill at the top of Taipei. I could see the 101 Tower to my left and the bridge across the Keelung River before me. It would be closer to walk to Min-Tzu Road than to Shih-Lin northward, so I headed down the hill past the old zoo across from the new art museum.

The red cement tiles on the sidewalk were the same ones I pounded years before first as an airman, then an agent for ten years; the place pretty much looked the same; a slew of motor scooters, taxis, but more private cars than I remember, fancy models, too. The stifling humid air thick with pollutants was the same, too; my thoughts went to finding surgical masks before my throat could get sore, but I thought all the stores would be closed at six a.m. If I was lucky, I could find a breakfast place open for a bowl of cool soy milk, a cruller and tortilla with fried egg with hot sauce. I dreamily walked the boulevard breathing the memories of life in Taipei. I found a place.

 To a ramshackle open storefront with aluminum tables stretched across the sidewalk my eyes were directed; on Ba-De Road, like I thought. I told the owner what I wanted, received the requisite compliment on my Mandarin, and sat down on a stool to wait for his wife to bring it over. It was the end of March; I knew the plum rain would start soon and smother the hot air with humidity all summer long; I’d better get used to it.

As I sat on a plastic stool at the fold-up sidewalk table inches from the curb, the past came flooding back; as a young man, I walked the streets of Taipei and Beitou, sometimes stopping at a coffee shop for a taste of American coffee in a café on Chung-Shan North Road before turning right at Ba-De Road to the bus terminal behind the train station and back to the barracks. I relished those walks amid the hustle and bustle, despite choking fumes from hundreds of buses, bus-girls in uniforms ticket-punching back doors, blowing whistles around curves, warning drivers at break-neck speed. Manual-transmission mind you, running noisy routes alongside taxis, Yue-Loong scooters. We were uniformed American servicemen, walking in pairs, stopping at brightly painted store fronts with covered windows, illuminated from inside. We were young and strong and knew what was going on inside.

In my mind, I see adorable Taiwanese woman approaching, entering storefronts. A door opens, music, local and western rock ‘n’ roll, wails through the tobacco Taipei air, steamy air-conditioner exhaust filters into the streets; sweaty drifts of alcohol and cigarette smoke pour out like curling fingers welcoming Americans with money. The Bar District several blocks around Chung-Shan North and Min-Chuan East Roads, I cut my teeth on Taiwanese dance girls. At the Lin-Kou Club, where unlisted men like me could get a snack or the "Officers' Club" for more refined ladies, above the Keelung River and MAAG Compound, and below at the 63 Club where you could get a blow job eating breakfast.  Navy Sea Dragon with blue boys could be had by R.O.C’s finest. It was 1977 just after the end of the Vietnam War.

I remembered the Flamingo Club, Florida Bakery, but Suzie Wong Bar was special, I can see it now the look on Julian’s face after he set me up with reward me for paying his girlfriend’s debt; she was the reward.  The Oasis Hotel up ahead on the left is where we went for a short stay,. The King's and Central Hotels illuminating the street in the distance; Wu-Chou's Massage Parlor’s blue vertical sign partially visible above the on the opposite side of the street. I drank them all with buddies and fellow spooks, a hundred women into anything, until I came to an end.  Nothing lasts forever. One of them got me good. 

 All the Taiwan clubs were closed on Lunar New Year's Eve and for several days afterward during the fifteen-day observance. That’s how I ended up with one lady that brought me home.

Thousands of us were positioned in Hong Kong and here, from 1954 on; 10,000 of us in Taiwan until 1977, and I had to be one that caught the Taiwan bug; I came back to work and live with one.

 The clubs are gone now. Besides that, the place looks the same thirty years later. The price of breakfast is almost the same, too! I paid my bill and headed back to the Grand Hotel room for a nap. Jet lag was finally overcome.

The next day, The American Club, a long, squat cement ranch compound, dated; felt like walking into a dental clinic in Santa Barbara; florescent lighting, buff colored walls, outdated modern furniture, tall white men and women passing through the lobby looking like dentists and hygienists; I must have looked like a patient, ethnic, mismatched, a transplant from the east coast, but in L.A. it was acceptable; so many of us had escaped New York City; my only saving grace in this club was that I wasn’t oriental; I might have been stopped and questioned otherwise. I had never been in the club before; only commissioned officers were allowed here back then. Now it was a sanctuary for expats.

“I’m here to see Malcolm Carter and Tim Chen,” I told the desk.

“You are…”

“Fisher; Nate Fisher.”

“Fisher!” I heard from an approaching voice. It was Malcolm. It had been years. His temple’s had turned white, even his eyebrows. His thinning hair was shorter than ever. His face was a triangle to his chin.

“Nate? Is that you? I can’t believe it! How long has it been; ten, fifteen years?” A tall, slender man two years my junior, around fifty, in beige chinos and a light green button-down short-sleeve. He approached and grabbed my outstretched hand.

“How about that? How the hell are you, Malcolm?”

He looked around feigning secrecy and whispered in my ear, “I’m so glad they could get you here; this is really something we have going on.”

“You have a profile on the perp?” He motioned ahead and we walk up the corridor.

“Well, he is an American,” he said as if he was embarrassed to admit it.

“How do you know that?”

He stopped abruptly and faced me. “Come. I want you to meet Tim.” The two of us walked through the lobby nodding our heads at every glancing smile. We were, after all, in the same American club.

To the left, large glass doors of a game room; to the right, a shorter corridor ten feet deep with a door on either side; Malcolm knocked on the one on the left and opened it without waiting for a response. We entered to find Tim Chen in the process of standing up from his seat along a long wide dark wooden table.

“Tim, this is Nate Fisher.”

A tall slim man in his thirties, well-built, well-dressed smiled widely. “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“The pleasure’s mine.”

“Please sit,” said Malcolm and pulled out a heavy padded chair for me at the head and sat opposite; Tim to my left. The air-conditioning was cool and I wish I had a jacket but Malcolm didn’t seem to mind.

“Thank you for coming at such short notice,” said Tim smiling politely.

“Before there is another murder,” added Malcolm looking worried; shaking his head.

“You said you think the perpetrator is a male and he is a serial killer; why do you think that?”

“All the victims are Americans in their 30’s,” responded Malcolm.

“So?”

“And they all worked in Taipei,” said Tim.

“So?” The two local agents looked across at each other. Malcolm spoke.

“You think these three murders were unrelated? I have to tell you: there has been no expat, American or otherwise, murdered in Taiwan in years.”

“Seven exactly,” Tim added.

“Now these happen within three months.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“I’m only saying that we need more to go on than what you just said.” I brought my attaché case to the table, snapped it open, and took out the manila file I’d been adding to overseas. Holding a paper I spoke. “It says all three victims were murdered differently; no discernable similarities except none were killed by the bullet.”

Tim said that it wasn’t unusual in Taiwan; murderers have a limited choice of methods. He went on to say that strangulation or death by sharp objects, like crimes of passion; not surprisingly different in Taiwan where there are few guns outside of organized crime circles.

“Okay then, what did you check; their computer histories?” I turned to see both men shaking their heads slowly. “No e-mail correspondence? Facebook chat rooms? Phone calls? Text messages? Did they know the same person or persons; frequent the same places? If so, why or why not?”

“Not foreign nationals. We had to get the FBI on it; that’s why you’re here.”

“I’ll do it through your liaison at AIT.”

“I am the liaison at AIT,” Malcolm responded, embarrassingly.

“So you’ve come up in the world,” I said jokingly. Tim chuckled. “And what are you?” I asked Tim.

“Taiwan intelligence.” I was going to make a joke but I remembered that Taiwanese didn’t respond to cynicism.

                “Where are the bodies?”

                “Next of kin claimed them. They were flown back to the states.”

                “What did the autopsies reveal?”

               “There were no autopsies; the causes of death were obvious; physical violence,” said Malcolm defensively.

“But what in their blood streams; was there anything unusual?

We don’t know; right? Damn; we could have pumped their stomachs; seen their last meals; maybe drugged-.”     

                “-the families wouldn’t agree to it.”

                “-looked for unusual marks… Did you ask?” The men looked across at each other again. I reassured them I wasn’t blaming anyone; they were probably correct in assuming it was blunt trauma, strangulation or death by sharp object alone at cause. 

                “Fisher, the bodies are gone; buried or cremated,” said Malcolm forlornly. That was strange. It was not SOP to let murder victims go so fast.

 I know we had lost a few steps already. There are no clues to tie the three murders together. The profile the Taiwan agents assume is inconsequential and conjecture. We have to get to it before the trail ran colder, that is, unless there was another murder soon; it would be a break for us but not the victim.