by Anna Ferrara
I ordered two Yuan Yangs—a drink that was a mix of coffee and tea—and watched the waiter leave our side as I was hoping he would.
“You’re really brave,” C39’s girlfriend said to me the moment I turned back to her.
She stared at me with such interest, I felt myself get all self-conscious and uncomfortable yet again. Could she tell I was lying? Was that why she thought I was ‘brave’? Because I dared mess with her? I turned my eyes to the grease-covered plates in front of me because I could feel myself starting to blush as nerves and guiltiness began crawling underneath every inch of my skin. “No, not really. I’m not brave at all, actually.” It took a whole lot of self-control to sound as nonchalant as I did. “There are so many things I’m afraid of that I don’t even want to talk about,” I said.
“Like what? Tell me. I want to know more about you.” I felt her eyes burning into the top of my eyelids as she said so.
Was she trying to out me for lying about my identity? My nerves intensified and this time, no amount of visualising calm would calm my body down. “I... don’t want to talk about it. It’s... work-related and silly and... boring, actually. I’m just a reporter. My job takes up all of my life. I don’t even have any time for anything else most of the time.”
“Except... dating?”
I felt my palms grow damp and pressed them into my jeans in an attempt to get them dry. The stack of papers on Sandra Sum had said she was a single woman, more interested in climbing the career ladder than in dating; Sandra Sum wouldn’t be interested in dating at all. I shook my head. “Not even dating. It’s been a few years since I last had a boyfriend. Many years, actually.”
“Same here.”
Oh? I looked up and back into her eyes to see if she was exhibiting any of the giveaway signs Benny had said most people would exhibit when lying but I found none; she was simply smiling at me in the same way she had been doing all evening long.
“I don’t believe you.” I held my gaze in hers because I wanted her to think I was not at all perturbed. “I can’t believe men aren’t lining up just waiting for their chance to date you.”
She laughed. “Oh, they can line up all they want and it won’t mean a thing.” She smiled again.
No change in tone or speed of response. A seasoned liar? Benny said there were some who could lie without giving anything away; those were usually professional criminals. “So you’re the picky sort?” I said, a tad playfully, as if I wasn’t at all wary of her words.
“Sort of. But in the rare circumstance I do meet someone I like, I find I’m always a hundred percent enthusiastic.”
She stared right into my eyes and I soon found myself struggling to stay motionless while adrenaline began filling out my muscles. I realised I was afraid of her and as much as I wanted to look calm and hold my gaze in hers, I couldn’t. I gulped again. My eyes fell onto the empty plate in front of me and my finger began running along its rim before I could stop it from doing so. The weight of the glasses on my nose seemed to double in the split of a second.
“I see,” I mumbled. “How long are you planning on staying in Hong Kong for?”
She shrugged. “Till I’m ready to leave, I guess? Why? Would you... like to see more of me?”
I frowned. “Well... yes... actually. There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“Ask away.”
“Do you mind joining me in my investigation of the Danny Diaz story?”
Silence. When I looked up, I saw her smile gone and her eyes, large with surprise.
“Why?”
“Because you’re American and about the same age as he. If you pretend to be Danny’s girlfriend, the hospital and police might open up more than they’re willing to do for me. They’ve been so tight-lipped, I’ve gotten nowhere. If you got involved, we could get to the bottom of the mystery together? It could be really fun. In exchange I’ll show you around Hong Kong, take you anywhere you want to go.”
“I... don’t know. Is it safe?”
“I’ll make sure you stay safe, no matter what. I promise. Your safety will always be my priority.”
C39’s girlfriend blinked. Her breath quickened and I soon realised the black inner circle of her otherwise blue eyes had grown a great deal larger. She didn’t say a word or even attempt to. Two cups of iced Yuan Yang came between us. She looked away. The waiter who brought it counted the plates on our table and told me the amount we owed in Cantonese. I got out my wallet. C39’s girlfriend looked up only when she realised what I was doing.
“Hey no, I should be paying for this.” She grabbed her Chanel handbag from the sticky-looking plastic stool it was sitting on. “I’ve got this.”
I removed a wad of cash from my wallet and handed it to the waiter anyway. He left at once. “Don’t worry, it’s done. You can thank me by considering what I asked, maybe?” I smiled, in a friendly way, which was hard as hell to do given the way I was feeling in that moment.
She stared at me for a really long time, with her hands on her handbag and her body motionless. “Okay,” she said eventually.
“Thanks.”
“No, I mean, okay I’ll do it. I’ll join you in your investigation of Danny Diaz.”
I heard myself gasp. “Really? You will?” That easily?
“Yes. Do we start Monday? 9am? What’s the schedule?”
“Yes. 9am. Just for a couple of hours. I’ll pick you up from your hotel?”
“Yes. And by the way this is like the best meal ever. Thanks for taking me here.”
“Best meal you’ve had in Hong Kong?”
“No, best meal of my whole life.”
I forced myself to laugh. “I don’t believe you. You’re from New York! I’m pretty sure the food there doesn’t suck.”
“I swear it really is the best tasting dinner I’ve ever done. I think I want to stick around you for dinners forever now.” She looked right into my eyes and beamed and the big, black middle portion of her startling blue eyes seemed to catch the reflection of the florescent lights above us more than ever.
“That sounds... a bit much…”
“Would you mind if I do?”
I thought hard about what to say to that and eventually decided to shrug. “No?”
“Thought so.”
She was smiling again for a long time after that. And I was simply speechless.
Chapter 7
28 Jun 1999, Monday
“I’ve got a better idea,” C39’s girlfriend said the Monday after, as we sat side by side on hard, plastic chairs within King George Hospital’s Admissions Hall, in the middle of rows of strangers, most of whom looked perfectly healthy. “Why don’t we break into the security office like you said instead.”
The man next to me coughed and cleared his throat. All around us, strangers shifted in their seats or sat stiffly; some sighed. “Are you serious?” I turned my eyes away from the nurses darting about the hall in pale green dresses and turned them on her.
“Look at their faces, Sandra,” she said. She had her arms crossed around her torso and her face was now shinier than it had been when I picked her up because the hospital had barely any air-conditioning going on. Behind her, endless rows of locals sat with their arms folded, staring blankly at nothing; a television set hanging from the ceiling played a programme nobody was interested in watching. “I don’t think any of them are going to tell you a thing or even if they do I doubt it’d be the truth. I think you should just watch the tape from their security cameras and find out what really went down yourself.”
I made myself laugh. “I was kidding. I wouldn’t be able to get us into the office if our lives depended on it.” That was a lie, of course. In truth, I had been planning on doing just that that week; just not with C39’s girlfriend next to me. “Let’s just stick with the plan.”
I turned my eyes back to the nurses with faces black as thunder and tried to make a decision—which one of them would be tired en
ough to let slip information they weren’t authorised to reveal? The man next to me coughed yet again; he sounded like he was all choked up with phlegm this time. I concealed my revulsion, out of politeness, but edged a little closer to C39’s girlfriend, as subtly as I could.
“Look, I might be able to get us in. Here’s the new plan: We go to the security office, you distract whoever we find in the office, I’ll get the tape.”
I turned to face C39’s girlfriend yet again and found our faces a little too close for comfort this time. I imagined her seeing me with my basket of fruit in the tape and found myself leaning more towards the coughing man all over again. “Isn’t that... stealing?” I said, my skin suddenly icy cold.
She shrugged and tucked her long blonde fringe back behind her ear. “We could always put it back once you’re done watching it? It won’t really be stealing if it isn’t actually gone, right?”
“No, it still isn’t... right.”
“But it’s not like you’ve got any choice right now, so let’s go. Remember, you distract whoever and I’ll get the tape.” She got up and walked away.
I caught up with her and followed her out of the hall, towards the crowded lift lobby. “Shouldn’t you distract whoever while I get the tape? Last time I checked, I was the reporter and you were the wingman.”
“Your wingman can’t hold a conversation in this country. You speak Cantonese, you distract them.”
“We’ll end up in deep trouble if we get caught, Milla. I could lose my job, you could get repatriated. Or we might end up stuck in a jail cell together for the rest of our lives.”
She stopped, turned to me with a cheeky yet completely mesmerising smile and said, “I wouldn’t mind that at all, honestly.”
Something about the way she looked at me as she said so made me feel so stupendously, dizzyingly uneasy, I found I wasn’t able to come up with anything else to say to stop her when she turned from me and went right inside a lift.
Ten minutes later, the two of us were standing along a deserted corridor in a quiet part of the hospital, staring at a white door labelled ‘Security Office’, both in English and Chinese. Under the door’s label was a flimsy plastic structure shaped like a clock, with movable, plastic hands that had been turned to the numbers eleven and three. The words at the very top of the plastic structure read: ‘Back at’.
I looked at my Casio. 10:50am. Twenty-five minutes before the guards or guards would be back; more time than I would have liked us to have.
C39’s girlfriend tried the handle. It wouldn’t budge. The door was locked.
“I guess we’ll have to wait,” I said with a weak smile. Unbeknownst to her, I was fighting to get my racing heart calm. I couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d react if she saw me in the security tape; if she’d send one of those 81M men after me or my family. My mother’s former neighbour’s acquaintance’s brother-in-law had lost two fingers when he failed to repay the loan he borrowed from them; I didn’t want to end up like him.
“No, we don’t,” she replied. “This is better.” To my horror, she fished out two hairpins from her pocket, one of which was already slightly bent at the tip. She pulled the other into a ninety-degree angle and stuffed them both into the door’s lock.
“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”
“Yes.”
“You actually know how to do that?”
“My dad taught me how.”
“Why?”
“Shh. I need to concentrate.”
I watched C39’s girlfriend fiddle with the hairpins for a good few seconds and could tell right away she wasn’t doing it right. She was putting too much pressure on the hairpin she was using to turn the lock and as a result was finding it difficult to get a feel of the pins she was supposed to be pushing into place with the upper hairpin.
Out of habit, I began counting the seconds in my head. Thirty… Sixty… One hundred and eighty…
“How long will you need?” I asked when I got to three hundred.
“I don’t know, maybe half an hour?”
“Half an hour? We only have twenty minutes.”
“Shh, stop stressing me out, I haven’t done this in a while.”
I watched C39’s girlfriend fumble and restart the process three times over and decided she wasn’t likely to get the lock open ever; not even if she had the whole day. But why was she trying so hard? Why was she so enthusiastic about seeing the tapes? Was this her way of telling me who she really was? Was that what all this was about? What would she say if we saw her in the tapes? How would she explain why she lied about not knowing C39?
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked when I ran out of possibilities to think about.
“Yes, I just need… time.” She frowned, wiped her hand against the front of her pants and started the process from the very beginning for the umpteenth time.
How would she explain why she lied about not knowing Danny Diaz? That, I wanted to know. I got a better idea. “Okay, tell you what, let me try.”
“You? You won’t know how to do it. You need practice and sometimes even lots of practice isn’t enough.”
“I learn fast. Maybe we’ll get lucky?” I took the hairpins from her and placed them in the lock the way she had been doing before. “Come on, just talk me through it. How does it work?”
C39’s girlfriend sighed. “You need to feel for the pins inside the lock with the top hairpin and push them to the height that will allow the bottom hairpin to turn a little more.”
“Okay…” I jiggled both hairpins as violently as an amateur might and made a big show of struggling.
“You’ll know you’ve gotten a pin at the right height when you can feel the bottom hairpin turning further than it ever did before. You start from the outermost pin and work your way in one by one. There should be three or four such pins in there.”
“Okay… trying…”
“You know what, just let me keep on trying. Nobody ever gets it done on their first try—”
“Wait, just a minute more.” I pretended to struggle for another fifty seconds then snapped the lock open and gave her an expression that would suggest I was utterly surprised.
C39’s girlfriend looked more surprised than I did. In fact, she looked completely flabbergasted. “Well. I guess we really did get lucky,” she said and stared right at me as if she had only just found out I were an alien.
All that eye contact made my body go into panic mode again. “Come on,” I said to the door I pushed open. I went right in without looking back.
The security office was smaller than I anticipated: only wide enough for a standard-sized grey desk; only deep enough for the desk, an office chair in front of it and, I think, five rows of tape-filled metal shelves on rollers behind the chair. There were no windows; only a ventilation grate next to the florescent lights on the ceiling.
On the desk were stacks of VHS tapes next to a boxy television set that was just about the size of a shoe box. Under the television set was a VCR player and in front of it were a few black files and stationary items. At the foot of the table, leaning against the legs of the desk, was a black backpack—a men’s backpack by the size and looks of it.
I checked out the metal shelves on rollers first. They were all filled to the brim with tapes, positioned one in front of the other. You could slide the shelves at the front to the side to access the shelves at the back. The labels on the tapes told me they were arranged by date and time, in chronological order. The most recent ones were... not on the shelves but... I scanned the room and found them... on the desk.
“That’s a lot of tapes,” I said right after I spotted the tape labelled ‘9th Flr, 22/6/99, 11am-5pm’.
It was sitting right at the top of one of the stacks on the desk, just waiting to be spotted by C39’s girlfriend.
Good thing her attention was still on the tapes on the metal shelves. She hadn’t yet figured out how the tapes were org
anised. “Go stand guard outside,” she said without turning her eyes on me. “Knock and lead the guard away if he comes back. I’ll call you when I find the tape.”
I did as she said only because I wanted to get the tape labelled ‘9th Flr, 22/6/99, 11am-5pm’ out of the room. I grabbed the tape from the top of the stack as I left and went out the door without her seeing what I had taken with me.
Once outside, I slid the tape into the back of my pants, under my baggy shirt, and dug out one of the wads of plasticine I had in my backpack. With it in hand, I opened the door and popped my head back in.
“Shouldn’t I be the one searching while you stand guard outside?” I said to C39’s girlfriend while holding on to the side of the wall. She was now standing in front of the desk, staring at the stack of tapes on it.
“No, we already discussed this, you can watch them better. So go, watch the outside, now!”
“Okay, okay.” I let go of the wall, left the mound of plasticine I had planted on it hidden behind a stack of tapes, and I pulled my head out—
—just in time to see a uniformed security guard appearing round the corner. He would have seen me had he not had his eyes on his own body, his hands searching all over his person for an object of some sort. I jumped right back into the security office at once and closed and locked the door behind me.
“The guard’s coming,” I whispered. I grabbed C39’s girlfriend by the hand and pulled her towards the metal shelves as quickly as I could. Feeling her soft hand in mine once again reminded me I had to start moisturising again. I made a mental note to grab a bottle of moisturiser on the way home.
In the meantime, I slid four rows of metal shelves to the side, squeezed C39’s girlfriend and myself into the space between the third and fourth rows, then slid the two rows in the front in front of us, right as a key sounded in the door. One second later, the door opened and the uniformed security guard walked in.
C39’s girlfriend and I fell silent. We stood very still, with our bodies and faces only inches apart, and listened to the security guard rummaging through the black backpack on the floor with bated breath. I left my hands on both her arms because I couldn’t put them down in the tight space without hitting something and making a sound. With them there, I could feel every one of the rapid quiet breaths she was taking. I could smell her perfume and my own sweat whilst hearing the frantic pounding of my heart in my ears.
