Fall Guy

by Scott Mackay

  He was surprised by how small the place was, no more than twenty feet long by twelve feet wide, roughly the size of his rec room at home. Old Chinese men played pai-gow and mah-jongg at folding card tables. Many had birds in bamboo cages on their tables.

  “What’s with all the birds?” asked Lombardo.

  Gilbert shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Lombardo shrugged, looking ready to accept anything.

  A middle-aged pockmarked man in a white short-sleeved shirt—a shirt decorated with what looked like little purple TV antennas—came up to them. “Nay ho mah?” he said. The man wore a hairpiece, not a good one, one that fit him like a hat, the hair so black it looked blue.

  Gilbert handed the money envelope to the man, who inspected the gold writing on it carefully. His face grew still, cagey. He looked at the two detectives, first at Gilbert, then Lombardo, as if he was trying to ascertain something about them. Finally, he beckoned with an index finger.

  “You come,” he said.

  He led them to a table at the back beside a window. On the wall next to the window Gilbert saw a faded, water-stained poster for the Miss Asia 1983 Beauty Pageant, nearly twenty years old, replete with lovely young Chinese women, all wearing the same identical one-piece pale orange bathing suit and pale orange high heels. Gilbert and Lombardo sat down. The manager brought them tea, a pungent green steaming liquid that both detectives looked at suspiciously.

  “You going to drink it?” asked Lombardo.

  Gilbert gave it a whiff. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ll wait until I can find a coffee somewhere.”

  Lombardo pushed his own little Oriental cup away. “Me too,” he said.

  An hour later the manager brought them an identical Chinese money envelope. Gilbert opened it and found further instructions inside. He handed the computer-printed missive to Lombardo.

  “They want us to cross the harbor to Kowloon,” he said. “We’re to wait on the corner of Shantung and Ferry Streets.”

  Out in the police van Ian Dunlop looked over the instructions. “Right,” he said. “We’ve got a four-mile drive. Shantung and Ferry. That’s right next to the water.”

  They drove east until they came to Causeway Bay, then took the Cross-Harbor Tunnel to Kowloon.

  Kowloon huddled on the peninsula directly north of Hong Kong Island, a densely packed municipality of multi-story apartment blocks. They passed apartment block after apartment block. Security bars covered many windows, laundry hung everywhere, and Gilbert saw tired-looking plants and canary cages on several of the cramped concrete balconies. The traffic moved as slowly as molasses, even at this time of night. Gilbert saw dozens of shanties in narrow alleys—squatters finding refuge wherever they could. An old man living in a refrigerator crate sold oranges and smoked oysters to passersby. A few palm trees sprouted from a brown scrap of park in front of an apartment complex. Up ahead, a truckload of naked department store mannequins had fallen off a truck. Farther on, teenagers swarmed around a man who had a box of Britney Spears T-shirts. An old man with a Confucius beard and mustache stared drearily at the melee from behind the smoke of his thick hand-rolled cigarette, then shook an old noodle container at passersby, hoping for coins. Barbecued dog hung in windows. So did barbecued rat.

  “I’ll be dropping you at the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter,” said Dunlop. “Ships and boats cast anchor there whenever we have a typhoon. People live there. On their boats. They run businesses there. A lot of floating brothels, some drug dens, dozens of water taxis. At any given time there’s over a thousand boats out there.”

  Twenty minutes later Inspector Dunlop slid the van door open at Ferry and Shantung Streets.

  “Now, look,” he said, “I don’t know where this crowd came from, maybe there’s something on somewhere, but half the people here already look suspicious to me, and we know you’re being watched. That man over there in that doorway, I’m sure he’s triad. And so’s that man over there. Something in the way they hang about. The constable and I will hide a few blocks back. We should still get good radio reception from that distance. Nathan Road should be far enough. If you happen to lose your transmitter, or if it’s taken away from you, you can call me on any public pay phone afterward. Don’t try anything dangerous. You’re my responsibility. Your safety comes first. Those are my orders.” Dunlop smiled thinly. “Let’s not risk my pension playing hero, shall we?”

  Gilbert and Lombardo got out and waited on the corner. Across Ferry Street, Gilbert saw the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter, a dim expanse of boats moored up and down channels in regular rows, with larger access channels intersecting smaller ones at measured intervals. An old man in a peaked bamboo hat steered a sampan through the shelter by standing at the stern, moving a pole back and forth, shaking his hips from side to side, looking as if he were performing a bizarre dance. The sampan, garlanded with old tires, protected from inclement weather by a tin awning, moved slowly over the green water. Gilbert turned around and gazed west along Shantung Street. Dozens of signs hung from overhead poles—a thicket of neon placards so abundant they blocked out much of the night sky, bold and bright, their Chinese characters glowing like embers. Cars packed the street. Pedestrians thronged the sidewalks. Vendors hawked their wares amid the noise and smoke of the Kowloon evening. Gilbert covered his Camels with his hand and turned to Lombardo.

  “Dunlop bothers me,” he said. “I smell fish, and the fish aren’t kosher.”

  Lombardo looked at the covered listening device, then at Gilbert. “You think so?” he asked.

  Gilbert couldn’t define his distrust. But it was there, as unsavory as the smell coming from the harbor.

  “He’s trying too hard to convince us of his own legitimacy,” he said.

  Lombardo peered down the street, thinking about this, and finally nodded. “He’s not the genuine goods, is he?”

  Gilbert shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  They waited an hour.

  Ten minutes into their second hour, Gilbert saw two men in a large speedboat motor up to the dock across the street. The speedboat looked out of place, a rich man’s plaything, glimmering with orange sparkle paint, hardly typical of the ragtag and idiosyncratic collection of vessels out in the typhoon shelter. The driver, a short man whose skin looked momentarily blue in the fluorescent lights along the pier, cut the engine and said a few words to the other man, who got out, glanced briefly up Shantung Street, then tied the boat to the dock. The speedboat driver got out also, and the two Chinese men climbed the steps to Ferry Street.

  The rain had stopped and the clouds began to clear. The two men dodged traffic across Ferry Street. They picked Gilbert and Lombardo out quickly—the only two white men around—and walked along the sidewalk toward the detectives in long, purposeful strides. The driver, a man of about thirty, wore a nightclub singer’s blazer—purple velour with black satin lapels—pointed black shoes, and had a cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth. His epicanthic eyelids were so pronounced Gilbert could hardly see his eyes through the slits. When the driver reached Gilbert he looked him up and down, slid his hands into his back pockets, struck a tough-guy pose, glanced at Lombardo, then turned back to Gilbert. Despite his tough-guy pose, the man had ridiculously big ears, didn’t look threatening at all. Gilbert glanced at Lombardo. Lombardo raised his eyebrows. The man’s posturing was comical.

  “You have the second envelope?” the man asked in English.

  Gilbert pulled out the second envelope and handed it to him. The man apparently took this cloak-and-dagger aspect of the arrest extremely seriously; he looked over his shoulder like a spy and acted so suspiciously that Gilbert thought a beat cop might come along any moment and arrest him. He first examined one side of the envelope, then the other, as if he were looking for a code, then shoved it in his pocket.

  “Come to the boat,” he said. “We have Mok out there, in the shelter.”

  He spoke in low tones, obviously thinking he was impressing th
e hell out of the two detectives. Gilbert and Lombardo followed the two men across Ferry Street, down the steps to the pier, and onto the boat.

  Once in the boat, the driver drew his gun on Gilbert and Lombardo in a lazy and routine way, trying to make it look as if drawing his gun on police officers were something he did a hundred times a day. Gilbert couldn’t get over the blazer, purple velour with black satin lapels, something Hugh Hefner might have worn in 1962 at the Playboy Mansion, a barbarous garment, but a garment the driver no doubt thought was the height of style. The nightclub blazer looked diseased, with balding spots on the velour.

  “Your weapons,” he said.

  Gilbert and Lombardo opened their jackets and relinquished their guns. The driver said something in Cantonese to the other man. This other man was older, had a crabby face, an extremely red face for a Chinese, and wore a brown polyester blazer that looked two sizes too small for him, pinching him at the armpits, the sleeves riding up his forearms every time he reached for something. He frisked both detectives, checking for concealed weapons. His body odor, at once salty and sour, assaulted Gilbert’s nostrils. His hair looked waxy from lack of washing, and had chunks of dandruff in it. The man took out Gilbert’s cigarettes. He knocked one out, stuck it in his mouth, and gave the rest to Gilbert. He looked at Gilbert, as if challenging Gilbert, but Gilbert simply ignored him, and put the cigarettes back in his shirt pocket without comment.

  The driver started the boat.

  They pulled away from the pier and angled out into the channel. They veered north until they came to the first access channel. They followed this channel west, passing sampans, two junks, and six houseboats coming the other way. Several narrow channels led directly south, each lined with hundreds of boats. Gilbert saw the Hong Kong skyline, towers of glittering light, Eastern-looking, ultramodern, with the dark peaks of the island rising in a ragged and ungainly line behind. He felt on edge. Having to go out on the water like this struck him as an added risk, yet he had to admire Hope’s tactical choice, using the barrier of the water as a way to give his associates double protection against arrest, from any kind of physical contact with the Hong Kong Police Force.

  They traveled at five knots for ten minutes. The channel widened and the driver increased speed. Up ahead Gilbert saw open water. The driver puttered to the last channel and turned left. Dozens of boats—cabin cruisers, houseboats, junks, and sampans—lined the channel. The driver eased up to the side of one of the larger houseboats and turned off the engine. The outboard Johnson shuddered a few times, then grew silent, leaving a cloud of blue exhaust drifting above the stern.

  The other man climbed onto the houseboat and tied the speedboat to the railing. The houseboat looked as if it had at least three decks, was as large as a bungalow, painted green and brown, and listing to port.

  The clouds broke up overhead, but to the southwest another cloud bank moved in. To the east, Gilbert saw a full moon the color of copper magnified by Hong Kong’s blanket of smog, its craters and seas showing up like dim blue bruises. The typhoon shelter stank of diesel exhaust and drifting seaweed.

  The driver left the wheel. “Let’s go up,” he said, smiling, his white teeth protruding, angling out from his gums, reminding Gilbert of the white keys on a piano. “We’ve got him in the cabin.” He treated Gilbert as if they were old friends now.

  Gilbert and Lombardo followed the driver onto the houseboat. They negotiated a walkway around the back of the boat and entered the cabin. The other man followed behind, his body odor clinging to him in a dismal cloud of stinkiness.

  Tony Mok sat on the cabin floor of the houseboat guarded by two old men, several small cuts and bruises on his face, his wrists tied behind his back, his ankles bound with packing tape. The two old men looked like grandfathers; they wore caps and were minding Mok the way they might mind grandchildren—with benign grins on their faces. The cabin reeked of whiskey, and if the shards of the broken J&B Scotch bottle in the tin pail were any indication, the old men had obviously knocked a fifth of the stuff to the floor in their geriatric drunkenness and were now working on a fresh one.

  “He’s all yours, Detective Gilbert,” said the speedboat driver, looking as if he were about to salute, endearing despite his utter lack of style. “I’ll give you a lift back to the pier with him.”

  The speedboat driver spoke in Cantonese to his other men. Instructions of some sort?

  Gilbert and Mok looked at each other. In Mok’s eyes Gilbert saw something he never expected to see, an unspoken plea, an attempt to make Gilbert see that there might be more to this than just a handover. A quick intelligence and awareness emanated from Mok’s dark Chinese eyes. Mok looked tired but alert. His jeans were dirty, had a grass stain on the knee, and he didn’t have any shoes on. His leather jacket had a tear in the sleeve. Mok was a fighter, wild and unpredictable, but looking into Mok’s eyes now, Gilbert saw an awareness that went beyond the wild and unpredictable.

  The driver finished talking to his men. He turned to Gilbert. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Gilbert nodded. “Can we get our weapons back?”

  “I’ll return your weapons when we reach the pier,” he said.

  Mok stared at his Chinese captors. His eyes changed. They went dead. They showed nothing. It was as if he had lowered a veil over his eyes. Mok was gagged. Gilbert removed the gag. Mok had deep welts on either side of his lips. He moved his jaw from side to side and looked at Gilbert. He said nothing, but again, something passed between them, an attempt, at least on Mok’s part, to establish a common ground. One of the grandfathers cut the packing tape from around Mok’s ankles. Gilbert leaned down and helped the suspect to his feet. Mok got up and followed them outside.

  They escorted Mok into the speedboat without difficulty. He sat docilely in one of the backseats. Lombardo sat beside him, guarding the small, wiry, and amazingly fit young gang member. Gilbert sat next to the driver.

  “Aren’t we going to bring anyone else to guard him?” asked Gilbert.

  The driver looked at him, dismissing the idea with a careless shrug, smiling with those big teeth of his. “He’s not going to cause any trouble,” he said. “He’s had the trouble beaten right out of him.” The driver glanced at Mok. “Isn’t that right, Tony?”

  Mok didn’t answer, stared straight ahead.

  “Shouldn’t we at least have our guns?”

  “I told you before,” said the driver, “you’ll get your guns at the pier. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. Everything’s okay.”

  The driver started the boat, eased away, puttered down the narrow channel, and veered east toward Ferry Street. Clouds floated like tattered sailing ships across the sky, drifting in front of the moon. A warm wind meandered up from the south. Gilbert grew apprehensive. He glanced over his shoulder at Mok. The prisoner continued to stare straight ahead. Gilbert remembered Mok’s energy, strength, and agility from the night of the failed takedown. He glanced at Joe. Joe jogged a few miles a day and belonged to a boxing club. But Mok was young, so vitally young, chiseled into shape, as quick as a bird, as decisive as a thunderclap, and ten years younger than Joe. Twenty-six years younger than Gilbert. Next to Mok, Gilbert’s own flesh felt corrupt, withered by age into an undignified mass of wrinkles, flab, and graying hair. He felt energy coming off Mok, like sparks off a flywheel. In sensing that energy he grew even more apprehensive, knew then and there that Mok was going to try something—but was too late in formulating a response, even as he saw the precipitating twitch in Mok’s shoulder, the widening of his eyes, and the spring in his knees. A microsecond later, Mok jumped for the speedboat driver. His hands, though ostensibly bound behind his wrists, came suddenly free, the cords slipping from them as if they were no stronger than yarn, his left thumb bloody, as if cut by glass. Gilbert remembered the broken J&B bottle. Had Mok been able to cut the cords with a piece of broken glass?

  Mok reached under the driver’s nightclub blazer and secured the driver’s gun from the waistband
of his pants. Both Gilbert and Lombardo lunged for Mok, but Mok was too fast. Mok fired the weapon, blasted the speedboat driver’s head with three quick rounds. The driver slumped forward onto the throttle, pushing the throttle forward so that the boat gained speed. The wheel twisted right and the boat lurched. Mok swung round and, using both hands clasped around the weapon as a club, hit Lombardo in the head. Lombardo stumbled backward. The boat gained yet more speed. With no one steering, it careened sharply to the right, pitching Gilbert off balance. He clutched the windshield, steadied himself, tried to grab Mok’s weapon, but the weapon disappeared like smoke, Mok pulling it away in a blur of speed. Lombardo regained his balance and landed a punch to the side of Mok’s head, but the punch seemed to have no effect. The boat lifted on its side, bobbed nervously on the water, cut a reckless arc through the typhoon shelter, narrowly missing several old pier supports. Gilbert grabbed the wheel and tried to steady the vessel. In those two or three seconds, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mok strike Lombardo in the face, once, twice, three times, hands clenched over the grip of the gun, stunning Lombardo, knocking him off balance. Gilbert thought for sure that Mok would shoot Lombardo, but for one reason or another he didn’t. Mok pushed Lombardo. Lombardo stumbled backward and tripped over the twenty-gallon gas tank. Tripped just as Gilbert turned the wheel to avoid an oncoming boat.

  That’s all it took.

  Lombardo tried to regain his balance but he couldn’t. He tumbled over the side of the boat into the water.

  “Joe!” cried Gilbert.

  The boat gained yet more speed. Gilbert looked over the stern and saw his partner break the surface in a foam of white and green bubbles. Lombardo cleared the water from his eyes, gazed after the boat, and started treading water.

  Mok swung round, pointed the gun at Gilbert’s head, then flicked his eyes beyond the windshield.

  “Turn,” said Mok.

  Gilbert whirled around. The typhoon shelter’s concrete embankment loomed dead ahead. He wrenched the wheel to left. The boat shuddered, came within a few yards of the concrete embankment, knocked against an unoccupied sampan, then heaved 180 degrees, breaking free of its own wake, hopping over its own waves in a breathtaking leap, the propeller leaving the water for a second and howling in the air. Mok flung himself in the chair next to Gilbert’s. Gilbert hunched over the dead man. He maneuvered the boat into the access channel, steering clear of obstacles.