The fury of beijing, p.1
The Fury of Beijing, page 1
THE
FURY
OF
BEIJING
An Ava Lee Novel
The Triad Years
Ian Hamilton
The Ava Lee Series
The Dragon Head of Hong Kong: The Ava Lee Prequel (ebook)
The Water Rat of Wanchai
The Disciple of Las Vegas
The Wild Beasts of Wuhan
The Red Pole of Macau
The Scottish Banker of Surabaya
The Two Sisters of Borneo
The King of Shanghai
The Princeling of Nanjing
The Couturier of Milan
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi
The Goddess of Yantai
The Mountain Master of Sha Tin
The Diamond Queen of Singapore
The Sultan of Sarawak
The General of Tiananmen Square
The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung
Fate
Foresight
Fortune
Finale
Bonnie Jack
Copyright © 2024 Ian Hamilton
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Published in Canada in 2024 and the USA in 2024 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
houseofanansi.com
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to readers with print disabilities.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The fury of Beijing / Ian Hamilton.
Names: Hamilton, Ian, 1946- author.
Series: Hamilton, Ian, 1946- Ava Lee series ; 16.
Description: Series statement: An Ava Lee novel : the Triad years ; 16
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230506410 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230506429 | ISBN 9781487012359 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487012366 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction) | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8615.A4423 F87 2024 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
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Book design: Lucia Kim
Text design: Alysia Shewchuk
Ebook developed by Nicole Lambe
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House of Anansi Press is grateful for the privilege to work on and create from the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee, as well as the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
For Bruce Westwood and Kristine Wookey,
without whom there might never have been an Ava Lee.
( 1 )
Ava Lee sat at the kitchen table in her Toronto condominium looking blankly outside at the swirling snow. From a nearby bedroom she could hear the sobs of her lover, Pang Fai. It was difficult for her to comprehend how, in the space of less than one hour, their moods could have swung so brutally from joy to total grief.
Ava could only remember a few other occasions when her life had been so abruptly turned upside down. One was when she had been drugged and raped in Surabaya, Indonesia. The pain from that emotional and physical violation may have eased over the years, but it had never gone away. Another was discovering that Uncle—her business partner, mentor, and grandfather figure—had cancer and had only a few months to live.
This time it was different, because the reason wasn’t so directly personal, but its suddenness and awfulness had shocked and shaken her and left her immediately fearful that other friends, as well as Fai, could be in peril.
The cause of Ava and Fai’s grief was the murder of Lau Lau, one of China’s greatest film directors, and Chen Jie, who had produced Lau Lau’s latest and maybe best film, Tiananmen. The two men had been gunned down outside the Palais de Chine hotel in Taipei while on their way to a dinner celebrating the Oscar nominations the film had received less than an hour before.
Ava and Fai were in Toronto but had been on speakerphone with the men and Chen’s partner, Silvana Foo, when the nominations were announced. It had been a joyous occasion as Lau Lau was nominated for best director, Tiananmen for best picture, Silvana for best supporting actress, and Fai for best lead actress. Fifteen minutes after the shooting, Ava got a phone call from a friend of Silvana’s telling her that both men had just been killed.
As shaken as Ava was, it paled in comparison to Fai’s reaction. She was devastated, unable to stop crying, and could barely speak. Given the length and depth of her relationships with Lau Lau and Chen, Ava wasn’t surprised. Chen had been Fai’s agent and friend for close to twenty years. Lau Lau had discovered her, cast her in his early films, and eventually married her. The marriage provided cover for both of them because they were gay, and their careers in China would have been over if that had become public knowledge. But Lau Lau’s drug abuse and behaviour eventually became too much for Fai to bear, and they divorced. He came back into her life after Ava met him in Beijing while helping Fai with a problem. He was a mess of a human being then, but remembering how brilliant his early films were, Ava convinced him to go to rehab and to try to write a script. He did both successfully, and when she read what he had written, she decided to find a way to finance making it into a film. Tiananmen was the result.
The financing and the shooting of the film had not been easy to manage. For the Chinese government, the subject matter—the massacre of protestors in Tiananmen Square in June 1989—was the most sensitive subject in recent history. All references to the event had been deleted from the public record, and any attempts to discuss or memorialize it were forbidden. The government went to great lengths to ensure compliance, and the punishment for anyone who did raise the subject was immediate and harsh.
The fact that Ava’s two business partners, May Ling Wong and Amanda Yee, lived respectively in Wuhan and Hong Kong—and that their company, Three Sisters, owned businesses in China that could be at risk—meant that the financing had to be done in secret. Ava had managed to find money that couldn’t be traced, and set up a banking facility in the UK for a bogus company called BB Productions that also couldn’t be connected to them.
As for the filming, Lau Lau had shot backdrop scenes in Beijing, but the vast majority of the filming had been done in Taipei—where the Taiwanese government were co-operative to the point of lending tanks to the production.
The finished product had been good enough to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival—and good enough, in fact, to win the Palme d’Or. But with the film’s initial success came trouble.
It had begun even before the Cannes screening, when the China Movie Syndicate, a government organization that controlled every aspect of the film industry in China, went to senior officials of the festival in a futile attempt to stop Tiananmen being shown.
The trouble that came after Cannes, though, wasn’t simply restricted to blocking distribution. The Chinese government had decided that the people who made the film needed to be punished, and Chen was their first target. On his way from his new home in Bangkok to Los Angeles he was waylaid at the Bangkok airport and put in a cell. The request to detain him had come from Chinese security officials, who wanted to deport him to China and were willing to pay the Thais to make that happen. Ava managed to free him by paying more than the Chinese had offered.
The tribulations surrounding Tiananmen didn’t end there. In opposition to Top of The Road—the distribution company that had the rights to the film, and were being paid by the Chinese government not to release it—BB Productions went to court in Los Angeles and won the right to show it in a local cinema. It ran for seven days—the minimum requirement for Oscar eligibility—before the verdict was overturned.
When the week was over, the judge ruled in favour of Top of the Road, and the film’s future was again in doubt. BB launched a yet-to-be-heard appeal against that decision, but Chen’s hope had been that the Oscar nominations and perhaps a win would finally give them the leverage to re-acquire the distribution rights. In Ava’s mind, the murders of Chen and Lau Lau changed everything. She was certain their deaths were linked to the film, and she saw no way forward if it meant putting Pang and Silvana at risk.
As she sat there remembering every torturous step of their journey since her first meeting with Lau Lau, she found herself swinging back and forth between guilt and anger.
The guilt came in the form of questions. What if she hadn’t sent Lau Lau to rehab and had just left him to his own devices in the artists’ commune in Beijing? What if she hadn’t found a way to finance a film that everyone she spoke to considered controversial to the extreme? What if she hadn’t asked Chen to sign on as producer?
Short of actually making the film, it had all been her doing. Tiananmen wouldn’t exist without her active support, and Chen and Lau Lau wouldn’t be dead. She had forged ahead, perhaps not belie
The anger was directed at the Chinese government, who she was convinced had hired the men in Taiwan—or had sent their own men from the mainland—to do the killings, and that was something she was determined to confirm.
But the government was a monolith—a mainly nameless, faceless collection of communist functionaries in suits. Someone inside that monolith, though, had given the order to kill Chen and Lau Lau. Ava wanted to know who it was, but realized it wasn’t going to be easy to pinpoint someone specific in a system that was well practised in delegation and deniability.
There was one face that did have a name to it, though, and it belonged to Mo, the chairman of the China Movie Syndicate. Having failed in France and Los Angeles, he must have been under pressure from the people above him to make sure the film stayed buried. Instead, the Oscar nominations would keep it in the public eye, and the idea that Lau Lau and Chen might win must have made him and his superiors insanely angry. What Ava couldn’t figure out was what they thought killing Chen and Lau Lau would achieve. Surely all it was going to do was generate more publicity, perhaps create sympathy among the Oscar voters, and increase the pressure to properly distribute the film.
But that would be a short-term fallout, and Ava understood the Chinese government thought in the long term. Killing Lau Lau and Chen was a message to everyone that the subject of Tiananmen Square was as off limits as anything could be, and a message to every filmmaker in China—and every foreign filmmaker who wanted their work to be seen in China—that there were rules that could not be bent.
So what to do?
As she pondered that question, her phone rang and she saw it was an incoming call from Wuhan.
“May, I imagine you’ve heard what has happened?” Ava asked her business partner and friend.
“I just did, from a friend in Singapore, and I’m in total disbelief,” May said in a hoarse voice. “I know the government feels strongly about the film, but this is going overboard, even for them.”
“They don’t care what anyone else thinks.”
“I’m just grateful that they didn’t harm Silvana as well.”
“Speaking of whom, I need to talk to her. She was with them, and she must be hysterical. She was barely holding it together when she couldn’t locate Chen after the Chinese had him detained in Thailand. This might have pushed her over the edge.”
“How is Fai holding up?”
“Not well. She’s in bed and hasn’t stopped crying since we found out. I only hope she doesn’t blame herself for bringing me, Lau Lau, and Chen together. I’ll see her after I calm myself down a bit.”
“And Ava, I hope you aren’t blaming yourself either,” May said.
“Why shouldn’t I? Without me, there wouldn’t have been a film.”
“You had no way of knowing any of this would happen. You were trying to resurrect Lau Lau, and you did—and you also gave Chen a new lease on life. As I see it, the film was secondary, almost incidental.”
Ava paused, then said, “Oh fuck, May, I haven’t felt this sad since the day Uncle died. Except this time there’s some guilt to go along with it.”
“You can’t heap all of the responsibility onto your shoulders. Even knowing it could be dangerous, everyone made their own decision to go ahead with this. And you know, when we won in Cannes, I was so happy for even having made a sliver of contribution to something so artistic and meaningful. It was the same kind of feeling I had when we launched PÖ in London. And if I was that happy, can you imagine how Lau Lau and Chen felt?”
Ava saw she had another incoming call, and this one was from Amanda. “Amanda is trying to reach me,” she said. “I actually don’t feel up to talking to anyone else right now. When we hang up could you call her for me and tell her I’ll be in touch later?”
“Sure, but what are you going to do?”
“Console Fai.”
“I mean what are you going to do about the killings? My first thought when I heard about them was that you would try to seek some kind of revenge, and my second thought was that I hoped you wouldn’t. None of us who love you want you putting yourself in harm’s way.”
“It is way too soon to start thinking about doing anything. I need to get my emotions under control.”
“Good, that’s the right starting point.”
After saying goodbye, Ava hung up, grateful yet again for May’s friendship.
( 2 )
Ava and Fai spent the day curled up in bed, and it was late afternoon when the tears finally ebbed and hunger kicked in. Neither of them felt like cooking, so Ava turned on her cell—which had been off since May Ling’s call—and phoned Blu Ristorante, a local Italian restaurant that had become a favourite. She thought comfort food was needed, and ordered for delivery two tagliatelle bolognese, and a dish of braised beef cheek ragù for them to share.
After freshening up in the bathroom, she checked her phone for messages, saw that her voicemail was full, and that she had received more than fifteen texts. Fai’s phone, which had also been off, had even more calls, and texts.
Ava opened a bottle of Chianti and they sat at the kitchen table to respond to the texts. Most of the calls were from Asia and it was too late to return them, but Ava’s mother, Jennie, had called in tears. Ava phoned her back.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, but Fai and I didn’t get out of bed today after hearing the news,” Ava said when her mother answered her phone.
“All the girls are in shock,” Jennie said, referring to the mah-jong-playing group of single women and second wives who were her friends. “They met Fai when she came to my house, and knowing how close she must have been to Chen and Lau Lau makes it that much more personal.”
“Did you speak to anyone in Hong Kong?”
“I spoke to your father. He is very worried about you and Fai—but of course, especially you. He said that Amanda was so upset that she left the office early. Michael doesn’t want her to go back any time soon.”
Ava’s father, Marcus Lee, had taken Jennie as a second wife in the traditional Chinese sense, but when things didn’t run smoothly, he had dispatched her, Ava, and Ava’s older sister Marian to Canada. He had continued to support them financially, spoke to Jennie every day on the phone, and normally spent two weeks out of the year in Canada with them. Michael was Marcus’s eldest son from his first marriage, and was married to Amanda Yee. Ava’s gweilo friends were often taken aback by how complicated her family life seemed from the outside. They would have thought it even more so if she’d told them Marcus had taken a third wife, who lived in Australia with their two children. But she didn’t get into that level of detail, and didn’t find her family life that complicated at all. It was all she had known, and there was no lack of love or support.
“Michael is forever trying to get Amanda to quit our business. He doesn’t understand her, and I can tell you that if he keeps nagging at her and pushing like that, she’s more likely to leave him than us,” said Ava. “It might be helpful if you could pass that opinion on to Daddy so he can talk to Michael.”
“I’ll do that,” Jennie said. “But right now I don’t care about Michael or Amanda. I care about you and Fai. How are you holding up? Is there anything I can do?”
“We’re doing the best we can under the circumstances, and the circumstances are horrible. We watched the Oscar nomination show with Chen, Silvana and Lau Lau on speakerphone, and then said goodbye as they went off to dinner. It was no more than half an hour later that I got the phone call telling me they’d been shot.”
“My heart breaks for them, and for you and Fai.”
