Chasing the Dragon: a story of love, redemption and the Chinese triads (Opium Book 2)

by Colin Falconer

  I would rather drink my own vomit through a plastic straw, Ruby thought. “Busy tonight,” she said. She put the torn note in her purse, got up, and walked away.

  ***

  Ruby emerged from the cross harbor tunnel with the top down, the wind in her hair. The energy of Central drummed like a pulse, the clamor of the grid-locked traffic, the thump of jackhammers. With the sand filtering away towards 1997 the city had become ever more frenetic, there was bamboo scaffolding everywhere spidering up the raw cement flanks of yet another high rise.

  She turned up Cotton Tree Drive, weaved through the city canyons to the Mid-levels. The Elliot Tower on Conduit Road rose like a pencil of pure graphite, its smoked glass façade reflecting the anarchy of the high rises sprouting from the hill below. Ruby parked her BMW in the undercroft, between a red Saab and a black Mercedes 480 SEL, and rode the elevator to her apartment.

  She fumbled in her crocodile skin bag for her keys, the adrenalin pumping through her system making her light-headed. So easy to cheat stupid triads, even for a girl from a duck farm!

  She threw open the door.

  Someone grabbed her wrist and pulled her inside. A hand clamped over her mouth. “I've been waiting for you,” a man's voice said.

  He held her arms tight to her sides with his other hand. She back-heeled him in the shins and he grunted with pain but his grip didn't weaken. He pushed her ahead of him to the bedroom.

  “Didn't know I'd be waiting, did you?” he whispered.

  He pushed her face down onto the bed, pinning her with his own weight. She tried to wriggle free, so he put his elbow on her neck and she couldn't move.

  “I thought this was a security apartment,” he whispered.

  He pulled her dress up around her hips and yanked down her underwear. She struggled but he was too strong for her. He forced himself inside her easily.

  There was a mirror at the end of the bed, framed with lacquer panels, dragons writhing in sinuous lines around it. She saw herself pinned underneath him, like a butterfly. He forced her wrists behind her, holding her so tight all the blood was squeezed from her fingers.

  Just a few thrusts and he thrashed, whimpering like a wounded animal. Then he rolled away from her and lay on his back, his chest heaving, his mouth open to gulp in air.

  Ruby rolled towards him and her lips fluttered over his eyes, his mouth.

  “Eddie-ah,” she whispered. “Baby, why you not been to see me for so long?”

  Chapter 8

  She sat up. Her new pink briefs were torn. “Look what you done,” she complained. “Pure silk. From Paris. Five hundred dollar.”

  “Buy you another pair, okay? Buy you ten.”

  He stripped off his clothes and went into the bathroom. Ruby heard him run the shower. She rolled on her back and saw the Samsonite case on a shelf in the robe. Ten kilos of Eddie's heroin in there, heya!

  She cleaned herself with the ruined briefs and walked out of the bedroom. The apartment was polished chrome and leather, crisp and functional, the exquisite Thai prints on the walls bought for her by an interior decorator. The smoked glass window offered glimpses of the harbor through the commercial towers of Victoria. A large goldfish circled lazily in its aquarium - it was supposed to bring good luck - and the pictures on the walls were all at slant so that the ghosts who brought bad joss could not rest there, and would simply slide off.

  Ruby poured Rémy Martin into a glass with soda and ice and went back to the bedroom. Eddie emerged from the bathroom, his jet black hair plastered straight back from his forehead. His body was covered with triad tattoos; a serpent coiled down his right leg, a dragon decorated his back in vermilion and blue, an eagle spread its wing over his left bicep. There was scarcely an inch of skin left bare, except for his hands and his face.

  He laid face down on the bed and Ruby knelt down beside him. She began to massage his shoulders. Up close she could see where the tattoos were distorted by a patchwork of scars.

  “They are looking for me,” he said. “Li has talked. He broke his sacred triad oath.” His voice was soft and sibilant, like something rustling in the undergrowth of a forest. “Steals my number four and now he talks to the police, the king chat! I'll dig up his grandmother's grave and piss on her bones!”

  “You must get out of Hong Kong, Eddie-ah. Maybe go to Taiwan.” Because that would suit me perfectly.

  “Eddie Lau is not going to run away from a few policemen.”

  “You know who steals our powder?”

  “The wind whispers a name.”

  ‘What name?’ she said, and it felt as if her heart had stopped.

  “Pak yok-kong.”

  “The Ox? You sure?”

  “The Onion tied Li's leper of a brother-in-law to a chair and put a blowtorch to his Secret Sack. If that piece of dung knew anything, they would have heard him shout it in China. He swore to the moment he went to the west that four pirates stole the powder and that they shouted out The Ox's name.”

  “You believe this?” Ruby said, her own voice tight.

  “If it's The Ox I shall cut off his stalk and make him eat it.”

  Ruby worked the muscles in his shoulders. While he thinks the thief possesses a jade stalk, she thought, I am safe.

  “How can we be sure?”

  “I have a ghost inside the Sun Yee On, little flower. I will soon find out the truth.”

  Ruby bent to kiss the nape of his neck. “Love you too much,” she murmured in English.

  “Must stay here tonight, Ruby-ah. Police will not look for me here.”

  “Wrap my arms and legs around you like a flower round a bee.” She ran the tips of her fingers across his buttocks and between his legs.

  “Oh, Ruby-ah,” he whispered, “Sometimes think you are the only person in the world I can trust.”

  Chapter 9

  Kennedy Town, in the Western District, lay in the shadow of Mount Davis; once a fishing village it was now tight-packed with sixties apartment blocks, the air thick with the fug of bus fumes and the miasma from the docks and the abattoirs. Mister Chau - or Golden Seven as he was known to his clients - lived in Davis Street, on the top floor of a decaying five story colonial building with peeling stucco walls.

  Ruby climbed the creaky staircase to the top floor. Even in the middle of the day it was so dark she had to feel her way along the walls.

  Mister Chau's apartment looked through a framework of bamboo scaffolding onto the grey walls of a newer, more modern apartment block, its walls already stained with the leakage from air conditioners. From the open window the noise of car horns and the roar of the buses and trucks on Catchick Street was relentless.

  ***

  Mister Chau's teeth were capped with gold, his moon face shiny and pink, as if he had already been embalmed. But his hands that were his most striking feature. They were an artist's hands; the fingers were long and soft, the nails pink with perfect half-moons and a slender margin of white tip.

  He led Ruby to a chair by the window. The sunlight was filtered by the slats of a cane blind and fine layers of dust floated on the air. Mister Chau's cat watched them from the corner, blinking its golden eyes.

  He perched on his stool and took Ruby's face between his hands, tracing the contours of her nose, her lips, her jaw, her forehead, like a blind man memorizing the features of a stranger's face.

  “Got lucky forehead,” he told her. “But you cover with your hair. You cover with hair, your luck will go away. Must change hairstyle, okay?”

  Then he took her hands, holding them closer to the light. “You make money very fast, you lose very fast. Think with your heart, not your head. This is not good thing, this is bad thing.”

  “Is tomorrow lucky for me, grandfather?” she asked him.

  “Tomorrow you will have good luck,” he said.

  “Got lucky future also, grandfather?”

  “Only if you stay in Hong Kong,” he said. “You leave Hong Kong, you have very bad luck. Nothing you can do. Just
happen.”

  “You see many children for me, grandfather?”

  Mister Chau hesitated. He rubbed at the lines on her palm. “I see grandchildren,” he said. “Many.”

  Ruby smiled, satisfied.

  ***

  Ruby Wen gave him her money and he listened to her heels clatter back down the ancient wooden stairs. There were no grandchildren in her future, but then he could not tell his customers everything he saw. Ruby Wen was a very good customer, and he did not want to frighten her away.

  ***

  She made an appointment that afternoon at the Grand Hyatt's Il Colpo and had her hair re-styled. She told the hairdresser to cut off her shoulder length hair, especially the fringe. When she emerged an hour later, her hair was cropped short, swept back from her forehead with lashings of moussing gel. She studied her reflection in a shop window and smiled at her lucky forehead.

  Aberdeen

  It had been a fishing village once, now it was just another jumble of housing estates, like North Point or Sai Wan Ho, a jungle of soaring buildings proliferating like shoots in a rainforest, competing with each other for the sky and the light. Brian Kwok's tiny flat was on the sixteenth floor of a high rise off Aberdeen Main Road. It afforded glimpses of the power station on Ap Lei Chau.

  His children were watching the Star Chinese Athlete Karaoke contest on Jade when he walked in. His wife rushed to greet him and he followed her into the kitchen. There was a salty broth on the stove for him, and he took it to the table in the tiny living room.

  The flat was small, just two bedrooms to share between three adults and three children. But it had its own kitchen and bathroom, so compared to some, they were well off. There was even a tiny balcony, crammed with small metal racks of ferns and orchids that Grandmother tended every day.

  He drank his soup in silence. He knew there was something wrong; his wife was too pleased to see him, chattering away like a sparrow, covering her nervousness with talk. Brian Kwok had been a detective a long time; he noticed things like that. And his wife, of course, he knew better than anyone.

  “Is the soup really good?” she asked him for the third or fourth time.

  He looked at his children, huddled around the television. His son, Ah Soong, had his hand in front of his face, hiding something.

  “Ah Soong,” he said.

  They all turned around at once. They looked scared.

  “Come here,” Kwok said to his eldest son.

  The boy got up and came to stand by the table, his head bowed. He was ten years old, wiry, with prominent cheekbones, like his father.

  “Look at me.”

  Ah Soong raised his head. His right eye was pulpy and swollen, his nose and lip was cut, his mouth so badly bruised it looked like he had lychees under his upper lip. “What happened?” he said, trying to stay calm.

  Ah Soong looked at his mother, but she lowered her eyes. “I was in the playground,” he mumbled, the swelling making it hard for him to speak. “There were three boys.”

  “How old were these boys?”

  “Older boys. I don't know. Thirteen, fourteen.”

  “And what happened?”

  Ah Soong lowered his face again. “They said they knew who I was. That my father was yellow air.”

  Yellow air, triad slang for the police. “And then?”

  “They beat me up. They were laughing the whole time.”

  “Why?” When Ah Soong did not answer he turned to his wife. “Why?

  “They said you would know why,” Ah Soong mumbled. “They said the Wo Sing Wo had sent them and that you would know what to do.”

  Kwok jumped to his feet. Ah Soong flinched backwards. He went to the window and fumbled to light a cigarette. Take it easy, he told himself. It's just a few punks, talking big, I can deal with this.

  But suddenly he was afraid. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Down there, in the street, that was where his kids played football and where they went to school, where his wife and his mother-in-law walked alone with their baskets of vegetables and fish, he could not protect them there.

  He stared at the lights from the flat in the next block. Cameos of the restless city; a young Chinese woman, ironing; a young boy bent over a computer; an old man working at a bench with some sort of machine, sewing or soldering.

  Easy for the gwailos to talk about locking up the triads. But they did not live in this world. Here in the estates, on the stairwells and in the playgrounds people like him were alone. He looked at his son's bruised and torn face and knew he had hard choices to make.

  ***

  Ruby stood on the corner of Hennessey Road and Jardine's Bazaar in Causeway Bay. Trams rattled past, painted with the colors of the city's commerce; the red and white of Marlboro, tartan for Caledonian, the blue and white of Olympus, a grinning dolphin for Ocean Park. She took her mobile phone from her shoulder bag, ignored the jostling of crowds scurrying to and from the markets and shops and MTR. She punched in a number and waited.

  “No problem?” She shouted over the din of the traffic.

  “No problem.”

  “Five minutes,” she said, and ended the call.

  It was a three minute walk to the yum cha place. It was squeezed between a dingy shop selling car batteries and a timber merchant. The hubbub of the street was punctuated with the scream of a bandsaw. The yum cha was tiny, just a dozen Formica tables crammed into a narrow hole in the wall. It smelled of boiling meat and steam. A man sat behind the cashier's till counting bank notes, a bill spike overflowing at his right elbow. Office workers ate on the pavement.

  As she walked in, a young man in a dark suit and silk tie got to his feet. Their eyes met for a moment. As he stood up she took his place at the table. Ruby lit a cigarette and watched him cross the traffic to a 7-11 on the other side of the street.

  ***

  The man walked along the aisle to the glass-doored refrigerator at the back. A shorter man, with a wispy Fu Manchu moustache and a zippered rain jacket, was staring at the array of soft drinks.

  “Are the drinks really cold?” he said, in Cantonese.

  The other man did not reply. Instead he took out a torn one hundred dollar note and handed it to the younger man, who checked the serial number against his own half of the banknote: PP 236314.

  He reached into his pocket and handed the shorter man a set of car keys. He took them and walked out of the shop.

  ***

  The man with the Fu Manchu moustache walked into an alley opposite the Excelsior Hotel. There was a black Mazda parked there. He checked the tag on the car keys. Satisfied, he opened the boot, took out a Samsonite case, put the keys in the exhaust and walked away.

  ***

  The man with the silk tie joined Ruby at her table. Two secretaries from a bank in Hennessey Road occupied the other two stools, eating beef congee. The man in the silk tie did not speak. Ruby finished her dim sum lunch, and got up.

  But when she left both halves of the torn bank note were in her purse. It was her receipt for twelve kilograms of 85% pure number four heroin, worth seventy million dollars on the streets of New York.

  Chapter 10

  Aberdeen

  A boat boy helped Ruby Wen aboard the walla-walla. He roped up the outboard, and started the motor with one sharp pull. Then he settled onto his haunches, the tiller in his left hand. A blue curl of exhaust coughed into the wash.

  The sun sank behind some torn white clouds, and the junk-heavy waters were cast in a romantic gloom.

  The blackened hull of the junk appeared enormous from the walla-walla. Ruby stood up, unsteady, her floor length Sonia Rykiel gown and the heavy briefcase she carried with her unsuited to scrambling in and out of boats. The boat boy helped her onto the creaking wooden pontoon, which was slick and black with seawater. She lifted the hem of her dress and climbed the steep companionway up to the deck of the junk.

  A young boy in a frayed white jacket helped her aboard. Other guests were still arriving below, mostly men in bl
ack tuxedos. As night fell across Aberdeen the junk set sail for international waters to the south.

  ***

  A canvas awning of lucky crimson and gold was suspended over the deck from the poop to the bow. The deck boy opened a flap to allow them to enter. A balcony running the width of the poop overlooked the main deck, which was lit by a row of tasseled red lanterns. Wooden steps led down on either side.

  There were six gaming tables, ranged on each side of the bulkhead, three a side. A sofa had been constructed around the mast housing in the center, and at the far end, near the bow, the bar was tended by white-jacketed waiters. Below her was a scatter of low tables and couches upholstered in red brocade.

  The timbers creaked as the hull rolled with the swell.

  The gaming had begun already. They had the fever bad, some of them, could not even wait until they were outside the territorial limit.

  As Ruby came down the companionway she saw Peter Man. “Respectfully hope you get lucky,” he said, smiling and bowing to her.

  But then he gave the same welcome to all his customers. Everyone knew he didn’t mean it.

  ***

  She looks like a beggar staring at a banquet, Peter Man thought. Her relationship to Eddie Lau made her situation problematic. She already owed him five hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars. How was he going to get it back? He could not forgive the debt, it would be a bad precedent and invite others to default. But he could not lean on Eddie Lau's girlfriend. He almost hoped she would win tonight so that he would not have this problem. If she lost again he would have to sell the debt to Eddie Lau, and he would lose thirty per cent.