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

by Colin Falconer

  It was two years now. The best he could say was that he didn't think about Anna and Caroline every minute of every day like before. He had thrown himself back into his work, even though he no longer believed in it as he did before.

  Why had he made a move on Lacey? Would he feel like a cheating husband for the rest of his life? It would have been Caroline's third birthday next week.

  He got out of the elevator and looked around. It was the wrong floor. He looked around, bewildered. For a moment he had no idea where he was. A receptionist asked him if he was all right. “I haven't got her a present,” he said and then the lift doors opened and he got in and pressed a button, any button. He watched the bewildered look on the young woman’s face as the doors closed again.

  Chapter 28

  San Francisco

  A Mercedes stretch limousine arrived outside the canopied entrance of Ruby's hotel in Campton Place at exactly three o'clock. A thick-set man in a Versace suit held the rear passenger door open for her and she climbed in.

  He drove her across town to Pacific Heights, enclave for the city's lawyers and bankers and stockbrokers. She caught glimpses of fake Tudor and Georgian mansions, their facades hidden behind gardens of neatly tended shrubs. Her driver pulled on to Buchanan and touched a button below the sun shield. A pair of electrically operated gates swung open and they drove through.

  A curving driveway led to a Victorian mansion, the entrance shaded by a white portico supported by columns of rococo plaster. The stone facade was fretted with ornamental balconies, and gargoyles perched on the flat roof. The Henry James effect was spoiled by the appearance of the help. Instead of a white-liveried servant, the man who opened the door for her wore red braces over a white T-shirt, and a leather shoulder holster with a .44 Magnum.

  ***

  Frank Bertolli sat at the end of a long polished mahogany table. He was a large man, his hair thinning on his crown. The only place he didn't seem to have any, she thought sourly. He was in his shirtsleeves, braces hanging loose around his dark trousers and a napkin around his neck. He was eating chili mussels with his fingers, discarding the shells into a large bowl. His two companions, also Italians, were not eating. He dismissed them with a nod, and then rose to greet her.

  “Ruby.” A voice like gravel. “Good to see you again.” He wiped his fingers on the napkin and extended his hand. “Sit down. Wanna drink?”

  “Maybe soda water.”

  “Yuppie juice,” he said, and clicked his fingers at Magnum, who went off to fetch it.

  Ruby looked around. There was a marble bust of a Caesar on a plinth in one corner, cut glass chandeliers on the ceiling, an ebony lamp in the shape of a naked woman, and an oil painting of a Bible scene in an elaborate gilt frame taking up almost an entire wall.

  An archway opened onto a large empty room with thick cream carpet. She heard muzak from a video game. She peered round the corner and saw two small boys sitting on the floor in front of a huge television screen, both holding joysticks.

  Bertolli returned to the chili mussels. “Help yourself,” he said, indicating the bowl.

  Ruby shook her head.

  “Thought you people liked your seafood.”

  You people? Which people did he mean? Chinese people, civilized people? She watched the juice run down his thick fingers, broad knuckles interspersed with little tufts of black hair and thick chunks of gold. Ruby knew Frank Bertolli from her last trip to Golden Mountain. She found him physically disgusting. She imagined it was men like this who first presented themselves at the Imperial Emperor's Court and earned westerners their reputation as monkeys and barbarians. Hair sprouted in tufts from under the collar of his shirt, his ears, even his nose.

  She watched - and listened - while he finished his lunch. When he finished he wiped his fingers and mouth on his napkin and lit a cigarette. He studied her, his eyes candid. She was wearing a flaming red cashmere Melton jacket with a velvet collar and short skirt, matching leather gloves from Hermès and high black suede courts. Must create good impression every time, Eddie had always told her that.

  “Got nice house,” Ruby said.

  “Should be, it cost a fuckin' fortune. How long you in town?”

  “Three days. Maybe four.”

  His eyes speculated. Thinking maybe dipping his stubby fingers into a little Hong Kong honey, she thought. Wait and see. Never know myself what this poor little farm girl will do to clinch a deal, heya.

  Magnum re-appeared with a glass and a bottle of cold Perrier water and placed it on the polished table in front of her. He withdrew without a word.

  Bertolli reached for a glass of red wine. She expected him to swill it down, but he only sipped at it, swirling the glass almost like a person.

  “So, you wanna talk business?” he said.

  “How much you want?”

  He shrugged. “Depends on the quality, depends on the price.”

  “Top quality, ninety eight per cent, from Burma. One forty.”

  Bertolli blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling. A crucified Christ writhed on the wall. Ruby stared at it and shuddered. Gwailos. Laugh at us burning paper money in the street and their god is a naked man being tortured with sharp nails.

  “One forty's too high,” Bertolli was saying. “I can get one thirty these days almost anywhere.”

  Ruby did not answer. Almost anywhere was probably an exaggeration, but it was true the price was slipping in the States. A lot of powder was getting trucked along the old silk route through Yunnan province and out through Canton, it was cheaper than smuggling it through Thailand, the squeeze price to customs people not as high.

  “How much you want?” Ruby asked him.

  “Ten units.”

  “Buy fifteen, maybe I can do one twenty five.” I can afford to be generous, Eddie paid for all the overheads except Three Finger.

  Bertolli thought about it. “Fifteen units is a lot of horse.”

  “One twenty five is a lot of discount.”

  A small boy ran into the room. “Papa! I did it! I beat Mohawk!”

  Bertolli grabbed the little boy around the shoulders and pulled him onto his lap. “You did what? What did you do?”

  “I beat Mohawk!” An older boy stood in the doorway, his face sullen. His little brother pointed his finger at him from Bertolli's lap. “I chopped you good!”

  Bertolli grinned at Ruby. “When I was a kid the TV was I Love Lucy. Now they got all kinds of shit I don't understand.”

  “Let's play basketball,” the older boy said.

  “I want to be the Lakers!”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  The smaller boy clambered off Bertolli's lap and ran back into the other room. “Kids,” Bertolli said.

  Ruby heard the metallic voice of a basketball commentary, as the two boys started another game.

  “Very good to have sons,” Ruby said.

  “Little Aldo's just like his old man. Hates to get beat. Ever.” He drew on his cigarette. “One twenty.”

  Ruby shrugged. “One third now, two thirds when you get, okay?”

  “When can you deliver, Ruby?”

  “Can deliver any time.”

  For the first time Bertolli looked surprised. “This shit's already in town?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe,” he echoed. “Okay, Ruby. You got yourself a deal. Tomorrow call that number I gave you, I'll arrange for the first payment.” The number was a paging service, so calls could not be traced.

  Ruby had on her blackjack face, like she did seven figure deals all the time. But her head was spinning. Ten and half kilos at one twenty was one and a quarter million dollars.

  Now the only problem was Three Finger.

  Wanchai, Hong Kong

  The fat man in the Brioni suit turned his Mercedes off Luard into Jaffe Road. The street was choked with Mazdas and Toyotas and when he could not find a parking space, he simply turned off the engine and left it there. No one was going to complain. Not to Won Ton.

&n
bsp; As he lumbered across the street other Chinese hurried to get out of his way. He was well known in Wanchai, ever since he had thrown a live snake into a restaurant that had refused to pay the protection Eddie Lau was demanding.

  It was nine o'clock in the evening, ninety five per cent humidity, the promise of rain. He was already sweating when he reached the crimson and gold facade of the Water Dragon restaurant. Rows of shiny ducks hung from a long metal pole, crabs nudged each other for space in a bubbling aquarium.

  ***

  Half an hour later a middle-aged German couple, out for a stroll from the nearby Wharney Hotel, thought the Water Dragon looked like a nice place for dinner. They didn't mind that the restaurant did not have an English language menu or that there were no other westerners inside. They sat down at a corner table, opened their guidebook, and pointed to the Chinese characters for chili crab. They paid little attention to the four young men in sports jackets and jeans who barged in shortly afterwards and ran up the stairs next to them.

  The room above the restaurant was a private mah-jongg parlor. It was brightly lit, if shabby. The paint was peeling off the walls, which were mostly bare except for a 1989 calendar with a picture of a Chinese Opera star. A broken wooden fan revolved slowly on the ceiling.

  There were around a dozen men at the various tables, engrossed in their games. The rapid-fire clack-clack of the tiles and the shouts of the players almost drowned out the clatter of plates and pans from the kitchen directly below.

  An old man in a dirty white singlet sat at a hard-backed wooden chair by the door reading a newspaper. When the four men walked in he jumped to his feet and went into the office, locking the door behind him.

  Won Ton had his back to the stairs and didn't see them. One of his playing partners looked up and whispered a warning. Won Ton stood up and turned around, his chair clattering onto the wooden floor behind him. He reached inside his jacket for his automatic pistol, but he was too late. One of the men was already on him, a meat cleaver in his right fist. He chopped down and Won Ton screamed as the blade sliced through his right shoulder.

  The four men went to work. The steady thwack-thwack of the meat cleavers continued long after Won Ton had stopped screaming. His fellow players crowded back along the wall and watched.

  When it was over, one of the assassins pointed a dripping chopper blade at them and told them they would meet a similar fate if they talked to the yellow air.

  As if they needed to be told.

  As soon as the men had left they all rushed for the stairs, leaving the owner to explain the demise of one of his best customers to the police.

  ***

  Sian Lacey was still in her office, collating the activity reports from the multiple slaying in Johnston Road. The call came from the dispatcher as a homicide with a police officer down. She followed Brian Kwok out of the door, throwing on her jacket as he went.

  The restaurant was just three hundred meters away. It was raining when they arrived, the blue police motorcycle beacons reflected in the black puddles on the street. The road was packed solid with traffic, and a crowd had gathered around the restaurant, tourists and local Chinese rubbernecking for a glimpse of the excitement.

  Kwok barged a path through the crowd, Lacey behind him.

  There were at least half a dozen uniformed police controlling the scene. They seemed relieved to see CID. “Upstairs, sir,” one of them said.

  The injured policeman was propped against the wall. His partner was holding a tea towel against the side of his head. There was blood on the floor, another man lying face down in the middle of it, among a litter of mah jongg tiles and upturned chairs. A Chinese in a white vest stood beside the stairs with a mournful look on his face.

  Lacey snapped open her ID. “Detective Inspector Lacey. This is Detective Sergeant Kwok.”

  “Constable Martin Boon,” the first policeman said. He had a red tab on the sleeve of his uniform to indicate he was an English speaker.

  “What the hell's going on?”

  “A chopping, sir,” Boon said. “We were on a routine patrol and we heard shouts from the street. A couple of tourists ran to fetch us, told us there had been a fight.”

  “Is he all right?” Lacey said, bending down to examine the bleeding policeman.

  “He slipped on the blood at the top of the stairs,” Boon said. “I think he's concussed.”

  “Dew neh loh moh!” Kwok muttered.

  “Where are these tourists?” Lacey said. "Did they see anything?”

  Lacey heard the wail of an ambulance siren from the street. Kwok pulled Boon to his feet. “No one to come in or leave without the okay of Detective Inspector or myself. Bloody no one, even other police or ambulance officer. Clear?”

  Boon nodded. His face was ashen. It was just his second week out of training school.

  “See if I can find the tourists,” Kwok said to Lacey, and went back downstairs.

  Lacey made a quick sketch of the scene and the position of the body in her notebook. By the time she had finished, Kwok was back. “Gone,” he said. “Two constables searching the crowd for witnesses. Maybe we will be lucky.”

  Lacey squatted down a few feet from the body. “This looks like a bad leak,” she said.

  The dead man's face was turned towards her, but Lacey would have guessed his identity just from his size and shape.

  “Won Ton.”

  “More like chop suey now. What do you think he was attacked with? A Combine Harvester?”

  There were gaping wounds on his shoulders, his back and his skull. The fatal wound had almost decapitated him. It always seemed to her that there was something peculiarly vicious and uniquely Oriental about killing someone this way.

  The spray patterns on the wall were spectacular. She wrinkled her nostrils. She never minded about the blood, but the metallic smell of it always made her slightly nauseous. She put on latex gloves and emptied the dead man's pockets, passing the contents to Kwok, who squatted beside her holding the plastic evidence bags; a thick roll of Hong Kong five hundred dollar notes, a crocodile skin wallet, car keys on a leather Mercedes key ring.

  Beside the body was a type 54 Chinese-made Makarov pistol.

  “Black Star,” Kwok said.

  A significant part of Won Ton’s hand lay under a table a few feet away. “That's the trouble with guns. You need fingers to pull the trigger.”

  Kwok flipped open the wallet: Tak, kam-chau, HKID D-671783, date of birth 15/7/61. An address in the Mid-levels.

  Lacey peeled off her gloves and dropped them on the corpse. Boon told her the ambulance crew were on the stairs but she told him to send them away. There was no rush to move the body. It could wait until after the forensic team and the coroner had finished their work.

  She nodded to Kwok, indicating the old man in the vest watching them from the other side of the room.

  “Ask him what happened here.”

  Kwok leaned close to the man's face. “You big mountain of dung,” he said, “you were here, tell us what happened.”

  The old man cleared his throat. “I would like to help you,” he said in Cantonese, “but I was busy reading the newspaper. When I looked up, there he was, dead.”

  Kwok shook his head. “I think we better find these tourists,” he said to her.

  “The press and television are going to eat this up. This is turning into an all-out war.”

  Chapter 29

  Chinatown, San Francisco

  Grant Street had the familiar aromas of pickled ginger, soy sauce and cabbage. Maybe they have a Chinatown smell machine, Ruby thought. This place is fake as a Disneyland theme park. Tour guides shepherded knots of tourists from Kansas and Sydney and Frankfurt along the streets, pointing out green-tiled roofs and stylized stone lions copied from the Forbidden City, before disappearing into gaudy shops stuffed with factory-made antiques. China not like this anymore, Ruby thought. China is apartment blocks and two minute noodle and get-rich-quick.

  The beat of tom-t
oms and the clash of Chinese cymbals echoed along the street; a lion dance in progress. Firecrackers popped and crackled as the lion cavorted outside one of the restaurants for the money offering. The dancers performed in pairs, in short bursts of frenetic activity, before passing the costume on to their comrades. Two waiters rushed from inside with the lai tze - the lion's food; a packet of money wrapped in red paper, dangling from a piece of string.

  The tourists ate it up. She wondered how many of them knew that this wasn't a carnival, it was a stand-over. If the lai tze was considered inadequate the restaurant would get a visit tomorrow from some local 49 boys. But the tourists wouldn't be around to see that.

  She turned down a laneway and stopped outside a door with a handwritten sign that said:

  Acupuncture

  Master Chen Chong-po

  Increase virility

  Cure Baldness, poor digestion, bad luck

  Guaranteed 100% effective

  Next door was the place she was looking for, a restaurant called the Siu Lam. Dragons in good-luck red and gold coiled up the pillars either side of the entrance, and huge carp swam in two enormous tanks just inside the door.

  Ruby went in and looked around. The place was crowded with brokers with braces and designer ponytails and elegant thirty-something women, all squeezed in shoulder to shoulder with the tourists.

  Ruby told the tuxedoed Chinese maȋtre d' that she was there to see Henry Pi. He led her through the restaurant to a private room at the back. Three Finger was there alone, a cigarette clamped in his claw, a pot of Iron Buddha tea on the table in front of him.

  “Ruby-ah,” he said, and his wet lips split into an unctuous smile.