The Woman Who Pretended to Love Men

by Anna Ferrara

  I was pleased to see the crowd; it meant I was less likely to stand out or be noticed. Benny, the man Everquest assigned to train me for six whole months, told me that being inconspicuous was non-negotiable. “The bird that sticks its head out is the first to get shot,” he said, quoting a popular Chinese proverb. The more invisible you can be, the better. Due to his teachings, I had in my arms a large basket of fruit; I picked it up, at the gift store conveniently located right outside the hospital’s entrance, to look the part of a visitor, just in case anyone asked.

  I weaved through the crowd and noticed most of all the lack of security guards at the hospital. The whole way up, I had only seen one—right at the end of the ninth floor’s corridor, in a blue uniform, perched atop a ladder, changing the tape of the only ceiling-mounted security camera I could see within the entire floor.

  I looked at my watch—the Casio I had been wearing since the day I started the job. It read ‘11:03am’.

  The longest a tape of that size—a VHS—could record was 6 hours; that meant the security camera’s tapes were likely changed at 11am, 5pm, 11pm and 5am each day. Those would thus be the best times for me to get myself into C39’s ward, whichever one that was, without getting caught on camera, I noted.

  “Ward 912,” that raspy voice suddenly said in my ear. I jumped a little because the voice hadn’t spoken a word the whole journey over and I had just about forgotten how intimidating it sounded. “Enter his ward and check out the file clipped to his bed to find out what’s wrong with him.”

  I didn’t reply because there were too many people around me but I did proceed to locate Ward 912, exactly as the voice ordered. A plastic sign on the wall indicated Ward 910-915 was at the corner where the security camera and guard was. I lifted my basket of fruit higher, so that the part of my face below the nose would be shrouded by it, and moved towards the ward with the same hastiness a concerned visitor would likely have.

  I’m here to see Danny Diaz, I rehearsed in my head. I’m a friend. I hadn’t done much acting work in school or in my adult life but I had done my fair share of lying while growing up—about my father’s presence in my life, mainly, but occasionally also to avoid getting blasted by my mother when I did something I knew she wouldn’t approve of—so I wasn’t all that bad at speaking untruths. Even so, on that day, I found myself uncharacteristically on edge. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my boss had said: that the job would ‘require a lot more of (my) wits and skills than (my) previous assignment ever did’. I wasn’t quite sure why and how much more he actually meant.

  “What do you mean you can’t find him?” I heard a man shout in Cantonese, from inside Ward 912. “He was a vegetable. Did he wake up?”

  “We don’t know yet,” a woman replied, also in Cantonese. She sounded like she was suffocating from self-restraint.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Don’t you have sensors to tell you if your patients die or fall off the bed or something?”

  “Yes. But, please help me tell her we can’t say for sure what happened right now. We are checking the security camera’s footage to find out what went on but we need more time.”

  “More time? Your patient goes missing WITHOUT his life-support machine and you need TIME to find him? Are you kidding?”

  “I’m just telling you what I’ve been told. It’s not my fault he’s missing so please stop yelling at me—”

  “Not your fault? You work here! You were supposed to be watching over the patients!”

  “He was right here when I ended my shift at midnight yesterday and disappeared in the morning when I wasn’t even at work yet! Please be reasonable, sir, and please move on out! You’re not allowed to be here right now!”

  I took a step forward and peeped past the door.

  Within Ward 912 were four local men, dressed from head to toe in black, with tattoos all over their thick, muscular arms. They were standing around an empty, slept-in hospital cot that was surrounded by wires, tubes, monitors and all kinds of uncommon medical machinery. Next to them, a nurse in pale green scrubs, with a mask around her neck and her hair in a net, was hugging a clipboard to her chest so tightly, her knuckles were all white from the effort. Behind them, a relatively tall and somewhat tanned Caucasian woman with pencil-straight, dirty blonde hair that went almost to her waist; she too was dressed completely in black—in a long-sleeved black dress and ankle-high black boots that accentuated her athletic calves and slim thighs. There was no file clipped to the bed. I gathered it was already in the nurse’s arms, smothered by her bosom.

  “She’s his girlfriend,” the long-haired man—who looked a little like the most handsome of the Four Heavenly Kings (the four male pop singers who were all the rage in Hong Kong at that time)—said, in a manner that was altogether rude. “She has every right to know what happened to Danny!”

  “Like I’ve been saying, we need time!” the nurse replied. “I have nothing to tell her right now! Tell you what, get her to write down her name and telephone number. We’ll give her a call once we know anything.”

  She released her death grip on the clipboard she was holding, flipped the stack of papers on it upward and pulled out a white sheet of paper which she clipped above all the other papers. She then handed the entire clipboard to the Caucasian woman who immediately turned to the long-haired man as if expecting him to tell her what the nurse wanted.

  “She said leave your name and numba and they’ll call you when they know what happened,” the long-haired man explained in English, with the sort of pronunciation only native Hong Kongers ever used. “Now, they don’t know. They need to check the security cameras and policemen will check the ward later. They need time.”

  The Caucasian woman nodded, took the pen the nurse offered and scribbled two lines of words onto the clipboard.

  “Here,” she said in English when she handed the clipboard back to the nurse. She turned to the long-haired man next. “Tell her I want daily updates.”

  Her accent sounded American.

  “Call her every morning to update her!” the long-haired man shouted at the nurse with a raised flattened hand.

  I saw the nurse’s knuckles turn white again as they tightened their grip over the clipboard she brought back to her chest. “I got it! Please leave now, sir! All of you! I need to lock this place up!” She straightened her back to look that little bit taller and glared at them with all the fight she had in her—a hell lot of fight, if you ask me.

  The Caucasian woman got the hint; she turned and made her way towards the door.

  I backed away the moment she moved, went behind a party of six elderly men and women who were in a circle discussing something and ducked onto the floor with my back facing Ward 912. With my basket of fruit in front of me to block my face from sight, I unravelled the shoelaces of both my sneakers and made a big show of tying them up again.

  “Remember! Call her!” I heard the long-haired man shout behind me.

  The nurse didn’t reply but I heard all of them moving out of the ward. The door of the ward slammed shut shortly after and a key jiggled within its lock before being pulled out.

  “What do you want to do now?” the long-haired man said in English, over the noise of the corridor, as the mass of black moved past the party of six elderly friends.

  “Let’s talk outside,” the Caucasian woman replied. She sounded like a boss: fearless and decisive.

  The man said okay, in an agreeable manner that was not in any way disrespectful; the exact opposite of the way he had been with the nurse. He cracked both knuckles and followed behind her. The three other gangster-like men did the same.

  All four gangster-like men had identical tattoos on their right hands, I noticed, on the top of three of their fingers: ‘8’ on the fourth finger, ‘1’ or ‘I’ on the middle finger and ‘M’ on the index finger. Together, the tattoos made the word ‘81M’.

  I knew what that meant. 81M was, at that time, the biggest, most power
ful triad in Hong Kong. My mother told me many stories about them, all involving the loss of limbs, property and life.

  Might be a good idea to stay out of sight. I kept myself low till the Caucasian woman and her four men crammed themselves into an overloaded lift and left.

  Only then did I grab my basket of fruit and go in search of that nurse.

  I found her at the very end of the corridor, outside Ward 915, right under the security camera. The security guard who had been changing the camera’s tape was with her, now standing next to the ladder he had been using, with a VHS tape in his hand. She handed him a ring of keys—one of which, I suppose, was the key to Ward 912.

  “...as annoying as a collapsed pussy is,” I heard her say to the guard in Cantonese as I got close. “I hope he drops dead on the street.”

  The guard laughed. I nearly did too—a collapsed pussy was an annoying situation indeed; I could think of so many scenarios, many involving my mother, for which the description would be apt—but because I was at work, I swallowed my amusement and approached them with a straight face.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the nurse in Cantonese. “Where can I find the patient named Danny Diaz?”

  A smack of apprehension appeared in the nurse’s hard, uncaring eyes. “Are you family of his?” she asked in Cantonese.

  “No, just a friend. I’m here to visit him.” I lifted the heavy fruit basket higher as proof.

  She sighed. “I can’t tell you anything now. Do you want to be updated when we find him? If so, leave me your name and number.” She offered me the clipboard she was holding and the same pen she had given to the Caucasian woman in Ward 912.

  The sheet of white paper the Caucasian woman had scribbled on was still on the very top. Now that it was right in front of me, I could see that the name ‘Cindy’ had been written above a local phone number that would most definitely lead to a home or office.

  I burned the digits of that phone number into memory as I wrote the name ‘Carmen’ under it. Under ‘Carmen’, I wrote a phone number that wasn’t in use; a number that wouldn’t connect to any place or phone.

  Benny had given me that number almost six years ago; it was just one of fifty such numbers I had to memorise and regurgitate before I could graduate from my training course. “A day’s planning is done in the morning,” he said when I groaned. I hadn’t understood what he meant then but that day at the hospital, after having finally found a use for those phone numbers, I think I finally got what he meant.

  “Are you saying you can’t find Danny Diaz?” I said to the nurse when I handed the clipboard back to her.

  “I can’t tell you anything just yet. Sorry. We’ll call you if we find out.” She gave me a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and walked away with the haste of someone trying to flee, barely hiding the look on her face that suggested she found me as annoying as a collapsed pussy too. The security guard picked up his ladder and left when she did. He didn’t even bother smiling at me. I guess it wasn’t in his job description.

  Alone at the end of the corridor with a basket of fruit in my hands, I thought about my next move. I had the tools to pick the locked door of Ward 912 in the leather satchel bag I was carrying but I knew it wasn’t a good time to be doing so. The security camera on the ceiling had a good view of Ward 912’s door and there were too many people around. What I could do was make my way to the row of greenish-greyish plastic chairs right opposite Ward 912 and leave a camera under one of them so I could see if anyone else came to visit C39 over the next few days and know if the hospital did find him.

  That was what I did. I made it look as if I were waiting to see a patient and sat down on the chair directly opposite Ward 912. Once there, I made a tent out of my hands, put it over my mouth and nose as if I were merely deep in thought and said, softly, “Alpha, bad news.”

  “I am aware,” the raspy voice said at once, sending chills down my spine yet again. “Your mission has changed, Sandra. We need you to find C39, find out who else might be looking for him and find out who his girlfriend is, how she’s related to 81M.”

  How she’s related to 81M? “Got it,” I said, as a jolt of wariness hit me in the core. Alpha could see and hear what I was seeing and hearing! I guessed they could hear from my earphones but how could they see? The glasses? Definitely the glasses; why else would they have given it to me to wear? How it worked, I wasn’t entirely sure, but I knew the glasses were never joining me in the bathroom ever again.

  I dug into my bag and pulled out a packet of tissues, and also an eraser-sized camera that had already been stuffed between a wad of plasticine. I slipped the wad under the chair I was on right before making a show of taking out a piece of tissue from the packet and wiping down the sides of my face. Even without having to check, I knew the camera was facing exactly where I wanted it to.

  I hadn’t always been that smooth. When I first started, I dropped a few cameras, got spotted a few times, failed a few attempts. Six years on, I was practically an expert. Not one person on the ninth floor of King George Hospital noticed what I had done.

  Chapter 5

  22 Jun 1999, Tuesday

  I got to work the moment I got back to my apartment that very afternoon, switched on the standing CPU I had under my desk—a former dining table I painted black, the only table I could fit in my pint-sized apartment—and the yellowing boxy monitor on it as well.

  In the two minutes it took for the Linux system on the computer to boot up, I changed out of my reporter getup and made myself a cup of Cup Noodles (noodles and garnish in a handy styrofoam cup; just add water and wait three minutes).

  In the time it took for my modem to dial up and connect to the web, I set my Cup Noodles on my dining table/desk, with the one fork I owned balanced on its paper cover, and checked out the headlines in the copy of the East Asian Morning Post I picked up on the way back from the hospital.

  ‘Y2K Bug Spurs Fears Of The Apocalypse’, the headline read.

  I grabbed an apple from the fruit basket I brought home and ate it while reading the article and a little bit more of the rest of the paper.

  Once the computer was set up and connected, I sat down on the one chair I had in front of my desk—a former dining chair I painted black—and went right into hacking the Hong Kong Immigration Department’s database. I would have hacked into King George Hospital’s database if they had it online but they didn’t, likely because the hospital was short of funds.

  It was Benny who taught me how to hack, of course, as it was with everything else I learned to do to get my job done. Close to the end of training, however, I surpassed him; I became faster, savvier and more adept than my own teacher. As the years went by, with practice, I became an even better hacker. I managed to crack all the tricky governmental databases Benny once said were impossible to get into and even managed to install backdoors in some without anyone realising I had them there. Those backdoors allowed me easy access into those databases without having to bypass their security protocols a second time. They were the reason I managed to get myself into the Hong Kong Immigration Department’s database in less than three minutes that afternoon. A day’s planning is done in the morning indeed.

  I ran a search for ‘Danny Diaz’ and, while waiting for the results to load on the remote administration interface I created, I found myself missing Benny’s nurturing presence a little bit. Benny had been like the father I never had; he taught me more about real world survival than my mother ever did and, while he had been awfully strict, he also pushed me to achieve what I never thought I’d ever be capable of. Too bad I didn’t have his number. I asked for it on the last day of training but he said, almost right away, ‘no’. He was going to retire after training me, he said; I was to be his last student. I never heard from him again.

  The results appeared; white words on a black screen. There was only one ‘Danny Diaz’ in Hong Kong at the moment. I clicked on his name to load more details. ‘Status: Within Hong Kong, T
ourist VISA. Date of entry: 6 June ‘99. Purpose of visit: Holiday. Residence in Hong Kong: The Regent Hong Kong. D.O.B: 4 August 1977. Passport Origin: New York, U.S.A.’ The photograph the Hong Kong Immigration Department had in their database was the same one that had been clipped onto the envelope my boss gave me.

  Hmm. The Regent was one of the classiest hotels in Hong Kong. A room there didn’t come cheap but according to the U.S. Federal Government’s database, which I searched the day before, C39 was a jobless individual with no assets and no surviving family members. His mother, an immigrant from Mexico, had died many years earlier. He had no siblings and the line that said ‘Father:’ was blank after the colon. How would a man like C39 have been able to afford a room at The Regent? I had no idea.

  I ran a search for the words ‘Cindy’ and ‘U.S.A.’ next. Just ‘Cindy’ because I had no other details. The search ended with thirteen results; thirteen tourists named Cindy from the U.S.A. within Hong Kong at the present. I clicked on each and every one of their names to pull up a photograph but found that none of them looked anything like that Caucasian woman I had seen at the hospital.

  That woman had been... way prettier.

  There was no way around it; I had to search for her photograph manually. I typed in the command that would bring up every single female visitor from the U.S.A. in the past year, with photograph, and dug into my Cup Noodles while watching the nine thousand results load, one after the other.

  One hour later, long after my Cup Noodles had been emptied and left, forgotten, next to my monitor, I spotted the photograph I had been looking for.

  ‘Milla Mona Milone’ was her real name; the white words next to her photograph told me so.