Joe Lung never got up before noon. He spent his evenings in Monitor’s casino or doing his rounds of the various nightclubs. If the pickings were slim, he usually ended the night in one of the various whorehouses in Macao. Lung rarely got to bed before three or four in the morning, and he rarely changed the routine unless there was a job to do.
He lived in one of the new condos that were already beginning to destroy the centuries-old beauty of Macao, the tiny city at the gateway to China.
He stirred and reached over, touching the woman beside him. She was a blonde, a beauty he had picked up the night before in the Fire Duck Club. Lung liked the gwai-lo women, and this one was wilder than usual. She moaned and turned over on her back, still asleep, and he rolled over on his side and pressed against her, sliding his hand across the top of the silk sheet. He began to stroke her awake.
The phone began to ring. Annoyed, he turned away from the woman and gruffly answered it.
‘Hatcher is here. Room 512, the Peninsula,’ the voice on the other end said in Chinese.
Lung sat straight up in bed. ‘No mistake?’ There was urgency in his voice.
‘No mistake. It is Hatcher.’
‘Is he there now?’
‘Hai, but who knows for how long.’
‘Mm goi,’ Lung said and hung up. Lung’s pulse was racing. Lung long ago had given up any hope of avenging the murder of his partners by Hatcher. Then Tollie Fong had sworn to kill him, and since Fong was his boss, the possibility of revenge became more remote. He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, smiling, for Tollie Fong was out of town. What a sweet surprise it would be, thought Lung, to stick the gwai-lo before Fong got back. Otherwise Tollie Fong would perform the execution himself.
The girl responded to his overtures. She was fascinated by the green dagger tattooed on his forearm, aroused by his muscular body, and she found his faulty attempts to speak English attractive. It was a new experience for her, making love to someone whose culture was so totally alien to hers. At first she was frightened by his gruff manner, afraid that perhaps he was into some strange Oriental sex rites and would hurt her. But it was just his manner, and it had turned out to be one of the most satisfying sexual experiences of her life. She leaned over and began to stroke the inside of his thigh. He slapped her on the rump. ‘We will have again later,’ he said in English. ‘I do business now.’
After he had sent her back to the hotel, Lung took an ice-cold shower. He toweled off, opened a chest in the corner of the bedroom, and slid a long, narrow dagger out of its soft calfskin sheath. He tied the sheath to his left forearm, covering the tattoo, then got dressed in traditional Chinese workingman’s clothes, black sateen pants and a shirt with wide sleeves. He studied himself in the mirror, shifted his gaze to the reflection of a dart board behind him on the wall.
Lung folded his arms across his chest, then whirled, lashing out his right arm, pulling the dagger and snapping it across the room. The silver blade flashed in the morning sun, hit the board dead center and stuck there, its handle quivering.
Lung smiled and uttered a tight little grunt of satisfaction. What was it the gwai-lo said? Practice does perfection?
Hatcher had checked his main bags through to Bangkok, so he had only an overnight bag with a change of clothes and the usual overnight necessities in it and his Halliburton case. He took both when he left the room. He went first to the wine store in the lobby of the hotel, a connoisseur’s shop, and bought a bottle of wine, a Lafite Rothschild ‘72, that seemed to fit the occasion. When he left the hotel, he walked around the corner from the hotel and strolled up Nathan Street, window-shopping while he checked behind him in the window reflections. By the time he reached Kowloon Park four blocks away he had spotted the car.
Two men. One in the car, the other on foot. One Oriental, one Occidental. In five blocks they switched off twice. Pretty good.
Hatcher was sure these were Varney’s men, and now he became even more suspicious of the Hong Kong cop. It was possible that a computer had turned up Hatcher’s name. But after all these years, it did not make sense for them to be this interested in him. Cops throughout the world were overworked. It was highly suspect for them to be ‘protecting’ Hatcher without his request.
He walked across the park, doubled back down Kowloon Drive to the Star Ferry slip and boarded the ferry, standing near the stern, staring out over the bay. To Hatcher’s surprise, the two men did not follow him. The man on foot got in the car; they drove off up Salisbury Road as the ferry pulled out.
They were very good, Hatcher thought to himself. By now they’ve alerted their people on the island. The new tail would be waiting for Hatcher when he got there. He would have to play the game again when he got to the island. He did not want Varney and the Triad Squad to know he was going to visit the Tsu Fi.
Joe Lung entered the hotel through the servants’ entrance. Because of his dress, he was easily mistaken for one of the laborers that worked around the hotel. Lung went straight to the fifth floor and quickly, silently, picked the lock on Hatcher’s door. He let the door glide open, standing alert as it did, then jumped inside and closed it just as silently. He entered the room cautiously, checked it thoroughly.
Hatcher was not there, nor was his luggage.
Lung stood in the middle of the room thinking. Had Hatcher left the city? Perhaps he was on the way to the airport at that moment.
Lung went to the lobby and checked the desk from the house phone. Had Mr Hatcher in 512 checked out? No, the desk answered.
The temporary setback had no visible effect on Lung. He was a patient man accustomed to setbacks. They were easily overcome. But he might have to change his plan. Obviously the job was going to require different tactics.
When the ferry docked, Hatcher strolled off and turned right, heading west on Connaught Street toward the downtown section. There was a cool breeze blowing, and he was surrounded by the sounds of Hong Kong, by music and taxi horns, laughter and ship’s bells, by the rustle of banyan trees and the constant undertone of conversation.
He acted like a tourist, strolling past the nightclubs of Wanchai, where Suzie Wong had fallen in love with an American GI and died for her sin. American music blared from loudspeakers outside the doors of the clubs, and the girls wore American jeans and had had their eyes straightened.
As he got closer to the business district the crowds increased, until he had to thread his way along the street, stopping occasionally to check behind him. There were two men assigned to him again, using the same routine. By the time he reached the shabby gate that marked the beginning of notorious Cat Street he was trapped in the steamy crowd of tourists heading up the steep, winding street choked with shops, seeking bargains.
Hatcher turned into the crowded thoroughfare, moving along with the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. He approached the acupuncture parlor where he had first met Cohen, thought about the dusty office with the uncomfortable chairs, and considered cutting through it to throw off his tail. No, he thought, too obvious.
Instead, Hatcher leaned over and bent his knees slightly, making himself shorter so that his head was below the level of the rest of the crowd. He continued to walk in that fashion for nearly a city block until he came to a tiny clothing store jammed between other shops. The store was so cluttered with goods Hatcher could not see beyond the display window. He dodged quickly inside.
The tail lost Hatcher in the Cat Street crowd. Then he thought he saw Hatcher dodge into a shop. He rushed ahead, elbowing pedestrians out of the way.
The tiny store was crammed with racks of jeans and sport clothes. Shirts and blouses were stacked from floor to ceiling and shoppers stood elbow to elbow looking for bargains. Hatcher had gone straight through the store out the back door, had turned back in the narrow alley to Connaught Street and jumped in the first rickshaw he saw. He leaned back in the seat, out of view.
‘To the tram, and hurry,’ he told the rickshaw boy in Chinese. He didn’t look back.
; Back up Cat Street, the man following him stepped out the back door of the clothing shop and looked both ways. There was no sign of Hatcher. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and pressed the button.
‘He ditched me,’ he said with disgust.
The rickshaw boy trotted rhythmically down Connaught Street to Garden and turned up to the entrance to the Victoria Peak Tram. Hatcher paid him and got out, looking back down the street. Just the usual traffic.
So far, so good, he thought and entered the tram.
THE WHITE TSU FH
From the balcony of his home on the side of Victoria Peak, Cohen watched the tram rise up the side of the mountain. He had seen Hatcher arrive in the rickshaw and board the funicular. Cohen also scanned the street and park below to see if anyone might be following his friend. He saw nothing suspicious. But with Hatcher, one could never be sure, and now, to suddenly appear after all the years, Cohen wondered what his old friend was up to.
Cohen’s mind drifted back in time, to a dark night upriver when his friendship with Hatcher had first begun to blossom.
Cohen was coming back down from the Ts’e K’am Men Ti with a load of contraband goods when a boatload of maverick river pirates had loomed up behind him and fired several warning shots in the air. Cohen had only half a dozen men with him. After all, nobody, nobody, attacked the Tsu Fi, a fact that unfortunately had eluded the bunch of river scum. They ordered his two boats to heave to.
Then Cohen heard the deep roar of engines and a coal-black gunboat materialized out of the darkness. It had the profile of an American riverboat but had no markings. Standing on the bow was the white man he had seen upriver a few months earlier. He dredged the name from his memory: Hatcher. A dozen armed brigands were lined up along the rail of Hatcher’s boat. Then Cohen noticed that the gunner manning the M-60 in the gun tower was wearing a shirt with Army stripes on the sleeve. A sergeant? Were these American soldiers? he had wondered. Nobody else was wearing a uniform. Hatcher wore camouflaged pants and an olive drab tank top, but so did everybody else these days. There was some conversation, and although Cohen could not hear Hatcher, whatever he said had been effective. The pirates had turned to and headed back upriver. Hatcher pulled alongside Cohen’s tiny but elegant snake boat.
‘We meet again,’ he said with a grin.
‘So we do, mate, so we do,’ said Cohen. ‘And just where the hell did you come from, not that I’m complaining?’
‘We’ve been a mile or so behind you for the last hour,’ Hatcher answered. ‘Then those bows pulled out of a creek and dropped on your stern, so I figured we better check it out.’
‘I owe you,’ Cohen said with a bow.
‘I’ll remember that,’ Hatcher said. ‘Come aboard, I’ll buy you a drink.’
The gunboat had been customized by Hatcher and his men. It was a sleek, fast-moving craft built for action and little else. It had skimpy quarters for the crew but a large, amply supplied kitchen, more guns and armor plate than a tank, and was painted coal-black. Hatcher’s crew of a dozen bearded GIs was as motley as the gangsters he had just chased away. Hatcher led Cohen to his spartan quarters, a small cabin with a liquor cabinet, a desk covered with homemade river charts, and a hammock strung from the rafters. Cohen knew better than to ask his host any direct questions. Hatcher took a bottle of gin from the cabinet and poured them both a generous slug.
‘Where you headed?’ Cohen asked cautiously.
‘Back into Hong Kong for a little R and R,’ Hatcher answered.
Cohen’s face brightened. ‘Ah, I’m delighted. Now there’s an area in which I am truly an expert,’ he said. ‘You will be my guest while you’re in the colony. I insist.,
Hatcher smiled and hoisted his drink. ‘Who could turn down an offer like that?’ he answered.
For the next two weeks, Cohen had entertained Hatcher like a crown prince. They had raised hell from Macao to Kowloon. A sweet time, a time to develop mutual trust and confidence. They became comrades. For Cohen a first, while for Hatcher, Cohen was his first true friend since Murph Cody. Cohen tutored his friend on the operations of the Hong Kong triads while Hatcher regularly supplied Cohen with information about the whereabouts of the British customs patrols. But what had cemented their friendship was that they genuinely liked each other. The two loners traded personal confidences and their friendship had matured in a way that endured through the years. While Cohen was the Tsu Fi and could travel the rivers with immunity from Sam-Sam Sam’s interference, he always had the feeling Hatcher was somewhere nearby just in case he got into trouble.
Then, as suddenly as he had appeared on the river, Hatcher had vanished without a word. Good-byes were not Hatcher’s style.
Now Cohen’s pulse quickened at the prospect of seeing his friend again.
Hatcher, too, was excited at the thought of seeing the white Tsu Fi. After his first meeting with the little man, he had asked about him on his occasional forays into Hong Kong. There were vague rumors about him, but he heard nothing specific until one night when he was having a drink with a group of reporters in the Godown Bar on Connaught Street. It was a favorite hangout because of the live American Dixieland band and the generous drinks. There, a boozy ex-reporter named Charlie Rawlson perked up when Hatcher mentioned Cohen.
‘I knew him when,’ he said over a glass of Bombay gin and lemon juice. ‘I was at Harvard with him.’
‘Harvard!’ said Sid Barnaby, a Time magazine correspondent.
‘Nieman fellow,’ Rawlson said ‘with a flourish.
‘Back in the late sixties,’ Rawlson began. ‘At the time, Cohen was kinda the campus joke. You’d see the little bugger dashin’ across Harvard Square with his briefcase hugged up against his chest like he was afraid somebody would run off with it, hidin’ behind this fringy little beard of his, with never a word for anyone. Had all the social grace of a friggin’ water buffalo, he did. His old man was a hotshot Westchester lawyer or something. And old Cohen did his parents proud. Summa cum at Princeton, a DBA from Harvard. When he got his doctorate, every big company in the country lined up to interview him. Then they found out he was a brain without an ounce of social grace, a genius who could hardly say hello to a stranger. He was written off as a reclusive looney tune. Actually he was just shy, is what he was. Shy ‘.vas invented to describe old Cohen.’
‘So what happened?’ Hatcher as}ed.
‘His parents decided what he needed was a round-the- world cruise to get him back in the social world. “Time you had a little fun,” his father tells him. “Find yourself a nice lady and see how the other half lives.” Well, the old boy could not have conceived the limits to which Cohen would carry that bit of advice. That was the last I heard of him until about a year ago I see him waltz out of a bank on Connaught wearing a red silk cheongsam. He gets in a Rolls-Royce and tools off. God knows what happened in all those years in between.’
Later, Cohen had filled in the blanks for Hatcher.
On his balcony, Cohen, too, was reminiscing, remembering the first time he had ever seen Hong Kong harbor. He had hidden in his cabin all the way from San Francisco, terrified of facing all the strangers on the enormous ship. The first night in, he sneaked out on deck to take a look around and was awestruck by the towering mountain peak, the blazing lights of the city and the sampans that surrounded the big ship with the children yelling for a handout. That was when Cohen was spotted by a purser named Ringer, a seasoned and perverse hand, who genuinely felt sorry for Cohen.
‘See here, sir, I’m going over to the Central District by myself— care to come along?’
Cohen, nervous but interested: ‘That’s the business district, isn’t it?’
Ringer: ‘Yes, but there are other things to see. I thought you might enjoy going to Fat Lady Lau’s House of Orchids.’
Cohen: ‘Is that a restaurant?’
Ringer, that rogue: ‘Well, uh, I suppose you might call it that.’
Restaurant indeed. Fat Lady Lau’s was perhaps the greatest whorehouse
in the world and Ringer led him to it, believing he was going over to the island for egg rolls and chop suey. The moment Cohen entered the double doors of Fat Lady Lau’s his life changed. His sexual imagination was ignited and a new door opened for Cohen.
He smiled to himself as he remembered that night. The living room was lit by pink candles, and Chinese minstrels played somewhere out of sight. The buffet! The buffet was a succulent miracle. Every imaginable delicacy was on that table. Caviar from Black Sea sturgeon, garlicky sparrow’s wings the way they do it in Canton, shark’s fin and mushroom soup spiced with Chinese vinegar, slices of Peking duck served on bao bing and chun juan rolls stuffed with curried pork and squid, vegetables steamed in champagne.
And the women! Cohen was mesmerized. They were all revealed in that soft, flickering candlelight — tantalizing shadows and each one an individual, each dressed in her own manner, under the approving eye of Fat Lady.
One was wearing a naughty French nightgown, another a lacy thing with nothing under it, still another a black garter belt and corset, There was a tall Peruvian beauty wearing a high-necked Victorian blouse and not another stitch, a Nubian princess wearing a teddy as thin as air. There were women from every remote corner of the world. Eurasians and Japanese and Chinese and Thais and Egyptians and Greeks and French. There were Africans and Israelis. There was even an American Indian princess and a pair of Eskimo twins they called the Mucklucks, who always performed together in a mirrored room.
My rite of passage was a truly remarkable experience, thought Cohen with a smile.
Fat Lady Lau, who was anything but — as tall and slender as a French model, all high cheekbones and broad shoulders — was the one untouchable prize in a place where everything else was given away or for sale.
‘Why do they call her Fat Lady?’ Cohen asked.
Thai Horse Page 23
