by Dawson, Mark
“I do not think you have thought this through. You want me to approve his death?”
“Not approve it. The only thing you have to do is tell me where to find him. Somewhere he feels safe. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“That is a semantic difference, Chau.”
“You are not friendly with him.”
“No. But what you are proposing is drastic.”
Ying looked out over the harbour. Chau could see that he was considering his suggestion. He knew, too, that his answer would determine the path that his life would take from this point on. There were no other cards to play if Ying turned him down. And, if he decided against him, he knew that there was a very good chance that he wouldn’t have very much longer to live. If Donnie Qi found out that Ying had been talking to him, in circumstances where their conversation could only portend bad things for him, he would take grave offence. Ying would not be comfortable with risking Donnie’s ire. The best way to demonstrate that Ying was not interested in causing difficulties between the two societies would be to deliver Chau to Donnie.
Beatrix Rose was on the ferry somewhere, assuming that she had been true to her word, but, even so, she was just a woman. A peculiarly dangerous woman, perhaps, but a woman nonetheless. What would she be able to do against Ying’s goons?
Chau’s attention was drawn down to the rail. Ying was drumming his fingers against the metal. He was reluctant to prompt him for an answer that he expected to be bad. He knew, for sure, that he had just a few moments of liberty left. He did not want to wish them away.
Ying turned. “Let me think about it,” he said. “This is not a trivial thing.”
“Of course.”
“What will you do in Kowloon?”
Chau exhaled. He found he had been holding his breath. “I do not know.”
“I have a restaurant in Tsim Sha Shui. The Golden Lotus. Go there and tell them that Mr. Ying sent you. You will eat and drink well. Be on the last ferry back to the island. We will discuss it then.”
#
CHAU SPENT four hours wandering the streets of Kowloon. He started in Salisbury Road, turned onto Chatham Road South and then walked south on Nathan Road. He tarried in the food market, the crazed open-air bazaar where you could, it often seemed, buy absolutely anything you wanted. The place was full of life, with locals and tourists alike jostling for space. The banter of the sellers was loud and intense, and the stalls were a riot of colours. He stopped and bought a lychee from a stall that also sold oranges, pineapples and coconuts, and gazed at the dozens of chickens that had been beheaded and plucked and now hung from metal racks on S-shaped spikes next to beef and pork. He allowed the eddy of the crowd to jostle him along the street until he was deposited before a particularly popular attraction. A superannuated old man, as thin as a stick and with skin that looked as thin and crinkled as parchment, was sitting on a rattan mat next to a large wicker basket that was full of snakes. He reached into the basket, plucked out a snake and, with a small and wickedly sharp knife, made an incision at the back of the reptile’s head. He tore the skin of the snake away with a single movement, discarded it on a pile behind him, and dropped the snake—now a gruesome pink—into another basket, where it writhed with similarly denuded brethren, ready to be cooked and eaten.
Chau flinched. It was difficult not to see the display as a metaphor for his own life. He was one of the snakes, waiting in the basket to be plucked out and skinned.
He wandered to the restaurant that Ying had recommended, but he had no appetite. He wondered, too, how safe it would be. If Ying had already decided to decline his offer, going into a business that he owned did not strike him as a particularly sensible idea. He would be taken out to the kitchen. Perhaps Donnie Qi would be waiting for him there. There would be no ‘apology’ this time. No amputation of his fingers. They would take their cleavers and hack him to pieces. No, he did not feel hungry. Not at all. He passed the restaurant and kept walking.
Chau looked for Beatrix, but he couldn’t see her. She had explained that they could not meet until they were back at Chungking Mansions, but she had promised that she would be close at hand in case the meeting with Ying went badly. He was beginning to doubt that. Paranoia? Possibly. But why would a woman whom he had barely met want to involve herself in a scheme that would involve the murder of a triad leader? The more he walked, and the more he thought about it, the more he thought it likely that she had abandoned him. What was he thinking? He was putting all of his hope in this one woman, and the only experience he had with her had been to watch her attack the three triads who had set about him. It wasn’t just naïve, it was foolhardy. She was a lunatic, and he had played himself into a position where he had no one to depend upon but her.
He ambled back to the dock and joined the queue of people, waiting for the gates to open. He looked around, but he couldn’t see Ying. He couldn’t see Beatrix, either. As he stood there, shuffling impatiently from foot to foot, he realised how stupid and credulous he had been. He should have fled into the mainland. Donnie Qi might have found him, but his chances would have been better than they were in this insane scheme.
“Move!”
He turned around, fear all over his face. He didn’t recognise the man behind him.
“The gates are open,” the man said irritably. “Move!”
Chau turned back and saw that the man was right. He apologised and shuffled ahead, across the gangplank and onto the ferry that would take him back to the island. Back to Donnie Qi and Fang Chun Ying and the short, brutal fate that destiny had planned for him.
#
CHAU TOOK the same spot at the rail as before. The lights of the city played out across the rolling waters in long painterly strokes.
He looked around for any sign of Beatrix. There was none. As he swivelled, looking left and right, he saw Fang Chun Ying’s bodyguards approach him. They stopped ten feet away. Ying was nowhere to be seen. One of the men brushed through the crowd and took the space on the rail next to him. He had a cigarette in his mouth, the tip flaring red as he drew down upon it.
“There is a place,” he said. “A brothel. It is in Tsim Sha Shui. The Venice. Do you know it?”
“I think so.”
“Donnie Qi has a girl there. He visits her every week.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BEATRIX TOOK the Tsuen Wan line to Mong Kok station. It was eleven when she passed out of the station exit and emerged onto the Tsim Sha Shui street outside. The atmosphere was hectic, a shifting morass of revellers piling into and out of the station. The street was lit by an onslaught of flashing neon that advertised the businesses nearby: the vast bars of Ned Kelly’s Last Stand and Bottoms Up, as well as tens of competing dives and nightclubs. She passed through a throng of gaai bin dong vendors, their brightly covered handbarrows loaded with an array of aromatic wares: skewered beef, curried fish balls, roasted chestnuts, congee, noodles and tofu. The barrows were lit by paraffin lamps, their warm amber glow filling the street and illuminating the faces of the vendors as they proclaimed why their food was better than the food offered by their rivals.
Beatrix had intercepted Chau as he had disembarked from the ferry. She told him to meet her in a bar that she had suggested and then followed fifty feet behind him to ensure that he was not followed. He had informed her of the opportunity to dispose of Donnie Qi and, after a moment of tactical consideration, she had determined that this was likely the best chance that they would get.
She ignored the mad display and followed the directions that Chau had given her. The Venice was on Portland Street, a popular thoroughfare that ran north to south, parallel to the main drag of Nathan Road. It extended through the districts of Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok. It was a place where high commerce and base human nature existed cheek by jowl. It was dominated by a large business and retailing skyscraper complex, but gathered around it were massage parlours, karaoke joints, hostess bars, cheap restaura
nts and the brothels of its infamous red-light district. Girls paraded in windows in cheap lingerie. Signs in the windows promised a good time in Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and a host of other languages. Neon signs suspended above the crowds advertised half-naked girls, pouting open-mouthed at the camera, and the promise of live flesh.
Beatrix walked north, passed restaurants with names like Supreme Beef and Brisket and Yokohama Japanese. She passed the Portland Street Rest Garden on her left, crossed over Pitt Street, passed a 7-Eleven, the Sun Shine Centre and Galaxy Wifi, until she saw the brothel she was looking for. She paused on the other side of the street. She surveilled it discreetly, looking at its reflection in the window of the karaoke bar opposite. A large neon sign was affixed to the wall, with VENICE SAUNA written in flashing green next to a representation of a Roman arch. Chau had explained that it was owned by Fang Chun Ying, an outpost amid Donnie Qi’s territory. Donnie tolerated it. He patronised it to make a point that he was magnanimous.
She saw that the front door was wide open, with a large man just visible in the neon-tinged gloom inside. Triad security. The building was three storeys tall, with two covered windows on each floor. The street in both directions was busy with idling passers-by, plenty of them drunk and looking for a good time. She saw a loose group of men, their hair cut short in regulation buzz cuts, crew from the Nimitz looking for a good time with the Filipina women who worked the clubs. She walked on, the men staggering along the road to her left. She continued for five minutes, turned when the road reached the end, and then came back.
She crossed the street to the entrance. There was a small lobby with an open door, obscured by a curtain of beads, to the right. There was a flight of stairs straight ahead.
The big man pushed himself away from the wall and blocked her way inside. “What you want?” he asked.
“Mr. Ying sent me.”
“For?”
“Donnie Qi.”
“You?”
“That’s right.” She stared him out. “Problem?”
“He didn’t say—”
“He didn’t say it would be a woman?”
“A gweilo. You have no place here.”
“You want to call Mr. Ying about it?”
The man grunted, his hostility adapting to a kind of lazy distaste. “Upstairs,” he said.
She climbed the stairs and reached a waiting area. A mamasan, dressed in a cheap leather miniskirt and smoking a cigarette, was negotiating with a potential customer. A girl had been brought out for him. She was Asian, and pretty, but he was not impressed.
“White girl,” he said, in English, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Not Filipina.”
“Russians all busy. One hour. You wait.”
The man shook his head. He turned, saw Beatrix, and, as if suddenly embarrassed, he scurried down the stairs.
The mamasan looked angrily at Beatrix. “You make customer go. You make him ashamed.”
“Mr. Ying sent me.”
She harrumphed.
“Donnie Qi.”
Recognition dawned, and then bled into surprise.
“Where is he?”
The woman assessed her, wrinkled her nose, and pointed down the corridor that led away from the waiting area. “Room with red door.”
Beatrix nodded.
The mamasan stepped aside.
Beatrix took the corridor.
#
DONNIE QI stretched over so that he could reach the crystal meth that he had left on the stool that was next to the bed. He took the baggie and his glass pipe and rolled onto his side. It was good shit, manufactured in an underground lab in the Philippines and smuggled to Hong Kong by the triads. Donnie had bought a pound of it, and, before he handed over his money, he’d had it tested. It was ninety-nine per cent pure. Some of his more old-fashioned colleagues had a problem with selling drugs. But, he knew, with ice as good as this, pure enough to bulk out and sell for a serious profit, they would come to accept it.
His woman, Chuntau, reclined on the bed next to him, naked, a sheet covering her from the waist down.
“Got some for me, baby?”
He ignored her, putting a small pile of ice into the bowl and placing his lips around the slender stem. He took his lighter, thumbed the flame, and held it underneath the bowl. The meth liquefied and then began to smoke. He moved the lighter quickly back and forth beneath the bowl, playing the flame across it, and inhaled. He removed the heat, but the meth continued to smoke. He inhaled until his lungs were full, and the meth had started to recrystallise.
He waited for the hit, gazing with absent-minded interest at the 1980s porn that was playing on the TV. It came on him quickly, a dizzying rush that prickled his skin and sent a spasm of delicious energy around his body.
“Donnie?”
He handed her the bowl and his lighter. She was a fine girl. She was nineteen and had run away from a life in Shenzen where the height of her ambition would have been to work in one of the big Foxconn factories, making electrical goods that she would never have been able to afford. Her name meant spring peach and that, he thought, was about right. Big tits, nice arse. Donnie could have taken her away from here, and he had considered it many times. It wasn’t as if she had never asked him. He had declined. There was something about the nature of their relationship that gave him particular pleasure. It was no more than a commercial arrangement. He paid, she performed. There was no emotion and no attachment. That, it seemed to him, was one of the reasons why he found such enjoyment in visiting her here. He could make her do whatever he wanted, just by taking out another note from his wallet and tossing it onto the floor with all the others.
There was more to it, of course. It was squalid and cheap and that, he knew, was another reason. It was a ready reminder of his upbringing in the slums not too far from here, and of all the girls like her who had looked down their noses at him. He had been a runt of a child, skinny and nervous, and he knew that they had looked at him and had come to the conclusion that he would amount to nothing. They would not have looked at him that way today. He had money, more than they could imagine. He had power. He had respect. He could buy and sell them, and he did. It did him no harm to be reminded of where he came from. It whetted the edge of his ambition. It made him hungrier to succeed.
Chuntau was quiet. He looked over at her. She was asleep, snoring loudly.
The meth hit his brain and his eyes rolled back into his head. He slumped down into the embrace of the sweaty sheets, listening to the frantic sounds of the street outside.
He heard the creak as the door to the room was pushed open. He blinked, trying to focus. He saw the white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, standing there. She was lit by the flickering naked bulb in the hallway, an on and off glow that alternately silhouetted her and then cast her in darkness.
“Who are you?” he said. It was an effort to speak through the torpor of the drug.
She said nothing.
“Wrong room. Get out.”
She stepped inside.
Something was wrong, but the cloud in his brain was so thick and cloying that he couldn’t think what it was.
She closed the door.
What was it? His thoughts were scrambled, and he couldn’t make sense of them. A white woman. He knew there was something that he needed to remember. What was it?
She took another step inside and unzipped the leather jacket that she was wearing.
He smiled then, propping an elbow beneath him so he could raise his head a little. He grinned, hungry and lascivious. “Maybe not wrong room. Ying sent you?”
“Yes,” she said, in slow and heavily accented Cantonese. “But not for what you think.”
Yes, this was Ying’s doing. Donnie and the older man had clashed lately. Ying was too conservative, almost constitutionally unable to grasp the scope of the opportunities that the new modern world had made available to men like them. He was obsessed with staying below the surface, better to avoid the attention of the a
uthorities on the mainland. Donnie knew that the Chinese were corrupt. He had politicked for the triad to open direct lines of communication with them. Ying and his cronies in the old guard had shouted him down, the same way they had tried to stop him from selling meth.
Perhaps Ying had changed his mind. Perhaps this was a peace offering?
He patted the bed. “Come over here.”
She did.
Donnie pressed himself into a sitting position. He caught sight of himself in the cracked mirror that was fixed to the wall. He was lithe, muscled, his skin covered in tattoos that were themselves daubed in a sheen of sweat.
The woman drew closer so that Donnie could see her more clearly. She was very beautiful, with porcelain skin and cool eyes. He grinned at her. The ice fired his appetite. He was ready to go again. He saw her looking at the glass pipe on the stool.
“You want?”
“Sure,” she said.
As he turned away from her and reached to the stool, he realised what it was that was bothering him.
Chau.
The bar where three of his men had been shot.
The hotel where another three had been killed.
The blonde white woman.
Fuck.
He tried to get off the bed, but the meth was thick and sticky in his brain. His legs became tangled in the damp sheet. He kicked the sheet off, but, his balance gone, he fell off the edge and landed on the bare floorboards between the edge of the bed and the wall.
He scrambled his feet beneath him, his back pressed against the peeling paint. The woman had come around the bed. He looked down at her hand. She was holding a syringe.
He was naked now that the sheet had fallen away. He picked up the lamp from the floor and threw it at her, but she deflected it with a sweep of her arm.
He backed up, into the corner, with nowhere to go.
The woman stepped up and thumped her right fist against the fleshy part of his thigh. He felt the prick of the needle and then the sensation of something cold, working its way up his leg and into his groin. He felt woozy. His balance deserted him and he tumbled down onto the bed. He tried to roll over, to look up, but he couldn’t. All he could see were a series of circles in an ever tightening spiral. The last thing he could remember was the feeling of taking a deep breath of cold sweet air.
