Dragon Breath

by Valerie Goldsilk

  “We must have another statement.”

  “Look, I’ve told you everything there is to tell about this bullshit complaint. Why don’t you spend your time investigating big-shot businessmen who are getting millions of dollars in bribes instead of government officials who are just trying to do their job?”

  “We are doing our job, Mr. Scrimple. If you don’t cooperate we have to write this in a report to your senior officer.”

  “Oh, fuck you. Call me on Monday,” Scrimple said and hit the “End” button, followed by “Power Off.”

  It was as if he’d crossed someone who was now determined to get him. What had he done to be the victim of this kind of persecution? Anything specific? Or was it just bad luck, something that came along every few weeks and just screwed with you until you begged for mercy or had to crawl into the bottom of a vodka bottle. Life was like that. Just when things are ticking along nicely and there’s not too much to worry about, along comes somebody and turns you over and shafts you good and hard from behind. It’s either the bank, or Inland Revenue or your girlfriend…

  Marie-Tess was awake and watching him with sleepy eyes. He smiled at her and stroked her cheek.

  “Better get up soon. Kenworthy might not want us here all day.”

  “I have to go back to my boarding house,” she said. Somehow she was shy and despite what they had done a few hours earlier she was careful to cover her breasts with her clothes and kept her back to him while she slipped into her underpants and blouse.

  Scrimple watched with amusement. He really wanted to do her again but she obviously wasn’t up for it. Maybe tonight or later in the week.

  She came back from the bathroom.

  “Your friend is still here?”

  “Don’t know. He’s probably had to go to the office,” he said.

  “He’s also a policeman?”

  “Yep, old and jaded like me, been around too long.”

  “He’s very handsome.”

  “Yes, I know,” Scrimple replied, slightly irritated. He got out of bed and put his clothes on while the girl brushed her hair.

  She said, “The Triad men, they said they’d do the killing outside the Marseilles Nightclub. I think it was Marseilles. Do you know any club like that?”

  “Yes, it’s in Tsim Sha Tsui East. It’s a Chinese style hostess club.”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “That’s where I think they said he’d be and then they would catch him.” She paused and turned to look at him. “Will you stop them?”

  Scrimple made a noise of impatience. “I’ll try but it’s not a lot of information. I’ll tell the TST Duty Officer. They can make sure some PC’s hang around in that area. You’ve still no idea whom these guys want to chop up then?”

  “No, some Chinese man who has cheated them, I think.” Then she seemed to forget about it and carried on brushing her black hair vigorously until Scrimple said it was time to go.

  He left Kenworthy a thank you note and pulled the door and metal safety grille shut. They took a taxi towards Wanchai where he dropped her off and then he carried on to his place in Tai Koo Shing.

  When he opened the door to the flat he immediately noticed that things were missing. He glanced around trying to figure out what Freda had taken. The picture of a Chinese landscape that had been over the sofa was gone. Half of the CD’s were missing, probably hers but he’d have to check carefully. She was capable of taking some of his CD’s as well if she’d left in a bad mood. The carpet from under the occasional table had gone. He remembered that she had bought it but it seemed as if it had been a housewarming gift. He’d get a new one.

  In the kitchen, most of the plates were missing as well as the microwave and the electric kettle. He opened the fridge and found that she’d left him some milk that was past the due date, and his stock of beer.

  He decided against a hair of the dog, filling a pint glass with water from the tap instead and topping it up with Ribena. Then he put his feet up on the sofa and switched on the television. It was good to be single, especially if you’d gone off and shagged a new bird within hours of being dumped. Who needed women? They were all nightmares anyway. He smoked two cigarettes and watched the cartoons, not really taking them in.

  Finally he reached for the phonebook and the phone and dialled a number.

  “Mr. Cheung. Yes, I need some locks changed.”

  The man said he knew where because twice Scrimple had locked himself out of the flat and needed Mr. Cheung to jimmy open the doors again. An hour later he was there.

  The locksmith was middle-aged and Scrimple had seen him pull up in a Mercedes the last time. It was a lucrative profession. He dumped a big leather bag of tools on the floor and began examining the locks.

  “You want Yale again or something better, Ah-sir?” The man knew Scrimple was a copper and gave him the necessary respect.

  “What’s the price difference?”

  “I have a new German brand. Much harder for the burglar to do.”

  “Yes?” Scrimple said.

  “This one four hundred, this one six hundred, this one six fifty.”

  “Give me the four hundred. Nothing to steal anyway.”

  The locksmith shrugged as if he didn’t care anyway. “The outside grille I can only put another one like this inside.” He put his hands in his pockets, searching for something. He came up with a heavy ring of keys and began testing them one by one on the door. Scrimple wasn’t sure what he was doing but didn’t want to ask.

  Mr. Cheung said, “What happen? Someone steal things?”

  “Yeah, my girlfriend steal some things and she might come back and steal some more.”

  “Ah, trouble with girls.” Mr. Cheung tutted and bent down to his tool box to get a Phillips screwdriver. He probably made a regular and handsome profit from couples breaking up.

  * * * *

  Saturdays he didn’t work, unless there was some serious problem on. Today Jim got up late and pottered around the flat doing nothing specific. He was planning to hit the health club later and then pop into Sainsbury’s to get some milk, wine, fruit and frozen food—enough to last him the whole week.

  Something was bothering him but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He didn’t feel contented. He felt that things in his life were out of control and it was disconcerting him. He felt like this sometimes but this time it was more acute and didn’t go away after a few days. It had something to do with the girl and the assault outside the Chinese take-away but also he wasn’t happy with the atmosphere in the office. Something didn’t feel right. It was as if he feared that events would suddenly overtake him and everything go horribly wrong. He was filled with an irrational sense of foreboding. That bad things were waiting in the wings.

  He’d tried to shake it off the night before and only ended up with four empty pint glasses on the table and accusations of moodiness from his two drinking companions, old schoolmates with whom he met up regularly. They were investment bankers and both had steady girlfriends who would soon be demanding all of their time that wasn’t spent sitting behind a desk as well as the obligatory golden bands on the relevant fingers.

  Jim didn’t have a hangover but he felt dehydrated. Nothing that a hard game of squash and an hour lifting weights at the Club wouldn’t cure. He made himself another cup of coffee in the espresso machine and sat down to read some emails and surf a bit on the Net.

  He skimmed over to www.scmp.com which was the homepage of the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s major English language newspaper. There were headline articles about the new budget and a Chinese girl who’d been falsely imprisoned after Immigration claimed incorrectly that her passport was a fake. It took three months to sort out the mess and release the innocent girl whose family had immigrated to America but who couldn’t speak a word of English, which hadn’t helped much during the proceedings. There was another article concerning the tycoon Henry Chan who was planning to launch an Internet services company called henrydotcom. It was slated to be a
success since his corporation was solid in property and other businesses and his connections in China were impeccable. The author of the article did make some fuss over the fact that so far it appeared as if henrydotcom had no real product and no actual clients.

  Jim moved on, not really interested in what was happening on the other side of the world. He had enough aggravation from Asia during office hours. He checked out the Wall Street Journal site and various other investment companies. He’d bought shares monthly and was keeping a close eye on their performance but none of them were doing anything dramatic.

  At twelve he took off his bathrobe and put on his work-out gear, grabbed his gym bag and went downstairs. He could walk to the Health Club in ten minutes but since he wanted to do his groceries he chose to take the car. The headlight hadn’t been fixed and it angered him instantly when the memory of that evening came back.

  Sawyers was waiting for him at the club, chatting to a tall blonde who was one of the attendants. She appeared more interested in the athletic-looking young man than he in her. Sawyers had this friendly, casual air that women went for. The best thing being that he had no idea what effect he had on the girls and laughed it off when his mates enviously pointed it out.

  “Ready?” Jim said and they went down to Court No. 5 where they thrashed the ball around hard and fast until all their aggressive energies were transferred into the little rubber sphere from which they dissipated into the white-washed walls.

  “So, Dougie is going off to the Far East?” Sawyers said afterwards at the bar, sipping a multi-vitamin drink.

  “Yes, he wants to have a chat with Bob Chen.”

  “It’s about time. The crap they get up to down there…” Sawyers sat up a bit to study a trio of girls passing by, then set back disappointed because they all looked the married, older types that were of no interest to him. He preferred them young, with apple-red cheeks and figures as taut as the strings on his squash racket, preferably between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one.

  “Good game,” Jim said. “Could have taken you in the second and third set but…”

  “Your mind wasn’t on it, eh?”

  “Probably.”

  “You’re working too much, that’s the problem. Don’t take things so seriously. You won’t get promoted. There’s no place to be promoted to. Unless Dougie drops dead from a heart attack or gets mugged on the train back to whichever suburb he lives in.”

  “Bermondsey.”

  “Unlikely. Lung cancer is more likely.”

  “Takes a while, that though,” Jim said.

  “Precisely my point. He’ll move on eventually but that’s a good few years down the line. And ask yourself. Do you still want to be in this job with this company by then? Some big corporation should have headhunted you away by then, if you’re smart.”

  “So, a good reason for working hard. Get a good reputation.”

  “No, you’ve got to pretend to be working hard. Not actually flogging yourself to death. There’s no mileage in that.” Sawyers nodded knowingly.

  “It’s what you think, Rupert. Speaks the man who is treading a very fine line at the moment between a decent job and the dole queue.”

  Rupert frowned. “Can we not talk about that, okay? It makes me feel uncomfortable. My old man would kill me.”

  “I need to remind you because I’m your manager and if you don’t pull up your socks, you’ll be pulling up your collar standing outside the post office waiting for your P45 or whatever they call it these days.”

  “Hardly. There’s plenty of work around these days.”

  “If that’s what you think.”

  “Did you watch the rugger last night?”

  “No, I heard the French got annihilated.”

  “Smelly garlic eaters. Got what they deserved.”

  “Very European spirit that.”

  “There’s no such thing as Europe. It’s a figment of some German bureau-kraut’s imagination.”

  “So what’s the score with you and that gorgeous black bird?” Jim finally asked the question.

  “No score,” Sawyers said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Look, if I’d got so much as a hand-job from her I’d be telling you but she’s just a hard bitch. Money, money, money.”

  “Does she realise you come from a long line of money?”

  “It’s not the sort of thing you go around telling dancing girls, is it.”

  “It’s what they want to know about. That’s why they’re there, strutting their stuff, wiggling their bare bottoms, shaking their big bosoms…”

  “She’s got no bosom.”

  “Great buttocks, though.”

  “Yes,” Sawyers said non-committally.

  “Can’t you get her to come for a dinner date and then lay on your charm a bit?”

  “She’s always working.”

  “Didn’t she respond to three hundred pounds?”

  “I’m not paying any money for sex.”

  “What about all the money you spend on having her dance naked in front of you.”

  “That’s different.”

  The conversation turned to politics and the new Mayor of London. When they were ready they went to the weights room and spent another hour there, talking and lifting.

  Jim got home by four and flopped on the sofa. He’d tried calling Doris three times from the car but only got her voicemail box on the mobile. He thought she might call back.

  She didn’t.

  He watched the football, made himself a salad, did some work and went to bed by midnight. He wasn’t in the mood to round up a bunch of lads and go and hit some nightclub. It was an obvious sign that he was getting older, settling down. Soon he’d be having a serious girlfriend, talk of babies and then wedding rings like the rest of them. The next day he was planning to drive up to Cambridge to visit his parents. His father taught at the Polytechnic, although these days it wasn’t called that anymore.

  Chapter 5

  It was Saturday night. There was an obligation to go out and get obliterated.

  Scrimple had fallen asleep on the sofa trying to read a Grisham that didn’t seem to have much plot. After a hot and cold shower he felt much better. He put the old kettle on—the one which worked on the gas stove—and began sorting through stuff, tidying his house and making it a man’s home again. He ended up with a big bin-liner full of things Freda had left behind. He decided to keep them for a week and if she didn’t call by then they’d go in the skip downstairs.

  After the house clearing he felt better, cleaner, more in control of his immediate surroundings. He felt as if he had a sharper overview and could get on with his life. Things were less cluttered around the flat. Women had this habit of leaving all kinds of crap around everywhere. And they loved little useless ornaments. Men preferred functional things. Women loved decorative, useless shit.

  He’d had three cups of tea and now felt ready for something more serious.

  He put on a clean pair of slacks and a Marks & Spencer polo shirt. It looked the same as a Ralph Lauren but didn’t have the horse and rider or the price tag.

  Then he tried his new keys in the locks—they all appeared to work. He fitted them onto his key-ring which was attached to a piece of plastic encasing the Royal Hong Kong Police logo. Nowadays the police badge was different. They had dropped the “Royal” with the picture in the background which had once been of ships and bales of opium on a dockside. Instead there was something boring like a Bauhinia flower leaf. He’d never studied the new logo properly. He liked the old one better and one day his cheap plastic key-ring might be a collectors’ item.

  Scrimple walked the short distance to Tai Koo Shing MTR station. His estate was a cluster-fuck of high-rise buildings embedded in concrete gardens but it was convenient and it was as much as he’d been able to afford. When he’d bought the flat in 1996 for four million Hong Kong dollars it seemed a good price and he wasn’t to know that the property market would come crashing down with the Asia
n economic crisis and Hong Kong’s other difficulties leaving him with only two million dollars worth of equity and the bank bleeding him dry every month.

  The train took him to Tsim Sha Tsui. He came out on Peking Road and crossed the road to Delaney’s. They had good Irish food here and he fancied a pint of Kilkenny.

  Later he wanted to take a look at—just out of curiosity—the Marseilles Night Club. Of course he hadn’t done anything about the girl’s information. Firstly she probably had misunderstood half of what the men had said. Even if her Cantonese was functional it couldn’t be good enough to follow the rapid, invective-ridden language of a bunch of Triads bullshitting with each other. Secondly, even if what she had overheard was true, he’d look a right pillock if he called up CID Tsim Sha Tsui and explained to them that a Filipina bar-girl had told him there might be a murder committed on their turf sometime in the next few days. It was nonsense. And finally he didn’t care: if a bunch of triads wanted to chop up some other Choggy they were welcome to it. He’d had enough of that when he was working CID himself and been involved with a number of the gangsters. That had screwed up his career, he’d always told people. At least it hadn’t helped much. In his heart he knew his career had never ever gotten off the ground, triad run-ins or not.

  He found a corner at the end of the bar and nursed his bitter.

  About ten minutes later a hand was placed on his shoulder.

  “It’s Scrimple. All by himself. And what are you looking so miserable about?”

  He turned and found a guy they called Stump standing behind him. Sitting at a table, not far away were two other guys he recognised.

  “If you must know, I just dumped my girlfriend so I’m having a beer to clear the cobwebs out.”

  “Good on you,” Stump said in his light Irish accent. He was small, not more than five foot four but thick around the waist and shoulders and known to be a hard man when the occasion required. They’d been in the Police Tactical Unit together, not the same Platoon, but the same company and there’d been many a company piss-up and Anti-Illegal Immigrants Operations where the gwai-los had made command decisions under the influence of San Miguel—not the archangel but the beer.