Riding the Snake (1998)

by Stephen Cannell

  Fu Hai sat on a rock in Wong Chuk Hang under the five-thousand-year-old Neolithic carvings that no longer had meaning, and waited. As night came, he fell asleep and didn't wake up until morning.

  When he awoke, he was looking right into the eyes of a large, black naja naja. It had crawled up close to investigate. Its tongue slithered out as its prehistoric eyes gleamed, showing the viciousness of the ages. Fu Hai didn't move. He was terrified. He knew the hooded cobra was one of the most venomous in the world. His heart almost stopped beating as he stared at the deadly reptile. Then, unexpectedly, the snake just turned and slithered away.

  Fu Hai sat up. He took a giant breath. He thought maybe this was an omen. He was "Riding the Snake" and this deadly snake had left him alive to go to America.

  At a little after ten in the morning, Big-Eared Tou's cousin came for him. She was tall, slender, and very beautiful. She wore the old-style slit Chinese dress, which had made a fashion comeback with the repatriation of Hong Kong to China.

  "I will take you to a place where you will stay. It is not very beautiful, but you will be safe from the police there until we can get you travel papers." She had a small suitcase, and she handed it to him. "Put on these clothes," she told him, "so you will blend in."

  He went behind a rock and opened the suitcase. He pulled out a blue suit. The stitching was poor and the suit had little style, but still, it was the most beautiful suit of clothes he had ever had. He took out the new white shirt and tie and unfolded them. He put it all on, then took the socks and the cheap new shoes out of the suitcase. The shoes were two sizes too big, but he laced them tight, and cinched the belt holding up the new pants. Once he was dressed, he put the old clothes from the silkworm factory into the suitcase and came out from behind the rock.

  "I will never be able to pay you back for these beautiful gifts," he told her.

  "Yes you will," she said. There was something about the way she said it that unsettled him, as if her words held some dark secret. Then she handed him a cellphone to clip onto his belt. He looked at it in amazement.

  "It doesn't work," she told him. "It has no mechanism, but with it on your belt, you will look like you belong in Hong Kong."

  Then, without holding his hand, she led him down the hill to a taxi. They got in and she gave the driver an address in the New Territories of Kowloon.

  They took backroads, but still Fu Hai was startled at the magnificence of the Colony. Rolls-Royce, Lexus, and Mercedes sedans transected the wide streets. People hurried to their destinations. The city, with its rickshaws and floating junks, skyscrapers and neon signs, mixed East with West.

  They headed through the tunnel that went under the harbor, leaving Hong Kong Island. The pretty girl said nothing. She didn't look at him or even appear to notice that he was smiling proudly in his new Western clothes.

  They finally pulled up across the street from what looked like a wall of crumbling buildings. She paid the taxi driver and got out of the cab, then motioned for Fu Hai to follow. Strangely, there was a beautiful Rolls-Royce parked in front of the shabby buildings.

  "This is the Walled City of Kowloon," she told him. "It is a ghetto, but it is controlled by our Triad."

  He nodded and looked at the Rolls-Royce. He had never seen such a beautiful car like this up close.

  "That is the car of the new Shan Chu of the Triad," she told him as he stared at it. "His name is Henry Liu. He is very thin and very vicious. ... He limps badly from an old wound. In the street, they call him Limpy Liu. When you are inside, he will tell you what you must do to earn your way. You must agree to whatever he tells you."

  They walked across the street, and Fu Hai noticed that they were walking across hundreds upon hundreds of old human teeth.

  She saw him looking at them in horror and smiled. "From the unlicensed dentist shops that line this street," she explained. "They like to show off their workmanship."

  They crossed the road and were standing in front of the wall of buildings when suddenly a huge United Airlines jet, with its wheels down, came low over the Walled City, ready to land at Hong Kong International a mile and a half beyond. Fu Hai was startled at the noise, looking up as the jet thundered overhead, throwing a black shadow over him. Fu Hai wondered if the shadow was an evil omen.

  "A flight from America," she said, smiling. Then she took him inside the dentist shop and out the back door and into one of the pitch-black, dank alleyways inside the Walled City. The stench in the garbage-strewn alley was unimaginable. She led him a short distance to a door. They went inside and she turned to him.

  "You will wait here," she said.

  He looked around the room in the dim light from a dull hanging bulb. An octagonal mirror hung on a wall above a small red-and-gold shrine to Amitabha, the Buddha of the Hereafter.

  "The mirror keeps out evil spirits," she explained. "The spirits cannot stand to see their ugly faces." Then she turned and left him there, closing the door behind her.

  Fu Hai leaned against the damp wall and sighed with relief. He had journeyed clear across China, from the Domes of Wrath to the edge of the South China Sea. He would do whatever they asked of him to earn his freedom.

  Fu Hai didn't know he was standing in the same ghetto where Willy Wo Lap was born.

  He didn't know that inside the huge airliner that had thrown its shadow over him were two Americans, who were on a course to change his life forever.

  *

  PART TWO

  CITY OF WILLOWS

  Chapter 19.

  Hong Kong

  Like a Dowager Empress, the Peninsula Hotel sat on Tsim Sha Tsui Point, its top-floor picture windows staring indolently out on Victoria Harbor. Its carved stone back was turned to the hustling cacophony of Salisbury Road, ignoring the ugly commercial squalor behind her.

  The world-famous hotel was known by its guests as "The Pen," and that Tuesday it was almost completely full. Wheeler discussed this with a polite woman at the reservation desk and finally booked the two-bedroom Mandarin Suite in the new central tower on the twentieth floor, using his American Express card. It was more than he wanted to spend and he and Tanisha would have to share a sitting room, but it was the best he could do. Since they had no luggage, he told the room clerk that he would see himself up, then crossed the ornate marble-floored lobby to the rust-colored antique sofa where Tanisha was seated. When he told her that they were going to share a suite, she just looked at him, her beautiful black eyes pinning him mercilessly like a bug on a board.

  "Paucity of rooms," he said nervously, using a canned British accent.

  "Bear in mind I'm combat-trained," she replied.

  They crossed the lobby adorned with massive Elizabethan antiques, found the elevator, called a lift, and rode silently in its polished mahogany splendor to the twentieth floor.

  The Mandarin Suite was magnificent. It was on the next-to-top floor of the hotel and had a commanding view of Victoria Harbor. Louvered doors and ceiling paddle fans paid homage to its colorful past. The hotel was owned by Hong Kong Shanghai Hotels, Ltd., one of the largest companies on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Pen had a rich historical background and had even once been the headquarters for the Japanese Imperial occupation forces in 1943. Recently it had been refurbished to bring out the original neoclassical design. From their windows, they could look south across the bay to Hong Kong Island. Tanisha moved to the plate glass and stood there for several minutes, her right hand up to her face, stunned by what she saw.

  Multicolored Chinese junks seemed poised, motionless, on the bay. Heavy oatmeal-colored clouds were just sweeping in off the South China Sea, partially blocking the late-afternoon sun and throwing shafts of filtered light down on the blue-green water. Across the harbor, high and commanding, were Jardines Lookout and Victoria Peak. To the west, they could see all the way up the coast to the Macao Ferry Terminal in Sheung Wan. Water taxis zipped across the bay, throwing out frothy wakes in disappearing wedges. Wheeler thought it was as beautiful a v
iew as there was in the world, remembering how it had stunned him the first time he'd been here with his mother and brother.

  He and Prescott had been twelve and ten. His father had business in Sydney, Australia, and was supposed to join them, but something came up and he never made it. Even at the age of twelve, Wheeler had trouble deciding whether he was angry that his humorless father didn't make the trip or glad that he would be free of the relentless judgments. Wheeler never seemed to be good enough to please him. It was in this very hotel, when his mother announced that Wheeler Sr. wouldn't be coming, that he decided to stop competing for his father's love. That same night he'd flooded the hotel bathroom, causing a leak that swamped rooms two floors down. It was right here at The Pen where the Prankmeister made his first appearance.

  His mother had taken them sightseeing, cramming their heads with Eastern culture and guidebook literature. Back then, they'd been staying in the Presidential Suite, which was just one floor above. He and Prescott had sat by the window, looking at the timeless and colorful junks tipping precariously with cargo. He had marveled at the mysteries of this place, the endlessly throbbing beat of Hong Kong. The Colony was now in the hands of the Chinese Communists, but from their window twenty stories up, very little seemed to have changed.

  After a moment, Tanisha turned away from the view and looked at him. "My God," she said, her voice like a reverent whisper in an empty church.

  "Pretty amazing, isn't it?"

  All the way in from the airport, along South Chatham Road, through the teeming, overpopulated outskirts of Kowloon, to the Peninsula at Tsim Sha Tsui, Tanisha had remained silent, looking out the window of the Mercedes-Benz taxicab at streets overflowing with humanity and bright neon signs. Now she seemed to finally be digesting it.

  "It's so beautiful," she said, "so different than I thought it would be." It was hard for her to imagine that this incredible place shared the globe with the ugly, graffiti-scarred four square blocks in South Central that had been her Crip turf. While she and her homies were shedding blood to protect those desolate street corners, all of this exotic beauty and splendor was half a world away, unknown to any of them. It made her sister's death seem all the more tragic. What had they all been dying for? What made them treasure a place so dangerous and ugly?

  "We're prisoners of our environment," Wheeler said, reading her thoughts like a psychic.

  She was surprised by the direct hit. "How did you know I was thinking that?" she asked.

  "Because it's what I thought the first time I saw this."

  "How the hell is somebody a prisoner in Beverly Hills?"

  "You can be trapped anywhere, Tanisha. We make our own prisons. They're in the mind. You don't have to be from South Central to be a captive."

  "Maybe," she said, but knew they weren't talking about the same thing.

  Later that evening, they called Detective Julian Winslow's number and got him on the first ring.

  "Why don't you pop over to the police headquarters in the A. M.," he said pleasantly. "I'd buy you a spot of supper, but I've got my Black Watch tonight. I play the pipes for the old Scottish regiment. We used to wear the kilts and tartan ... march in parades and the like. The detail was disbanded by the Commies, but we still hold practice once a week to remind us of the old days, then we head off to some bag a' nails for hops and mischief. I think I should bring in Johnny Kwong to help us." He continued, changing subjects without taking a breath, "He's a right copper and he's got the juice we need with the new Police Department. What say we make a diary engagement for ten o'clock tomorrow?" His voice chirped through the line with high-tenor English cheer.

  "We'll be there," Wheeler said.

  "You know the which-way?" Julian Winslow asked. "It's at 2600 Harcourt Road in Wan Chai--any livery driver will know it, only we don't call it the Hong Kong Royal Police Headquarters any longer. It's now the bloody People's Police Building. These Commie blighters got damn little sense of color, I'll tell you that much," he complained. "I'll leave your name. Have the lad knock me up when you're in the lobby," he instructed before he hung up.

  They had dinner in the Felix, the top-floor restaurant in The Pen, which was the vision of the world-famous interior designer Philip Stark. Since it was during the week, they got a table by the window. Wedgwood china and sterling silver cutlery glittered on Danish linen. The room was framed with dark mahogany and crowned by chandeliers that hung above them like huge crystal mushrooms. Wheeler ordered French goose liver with truffles and the house trademark dish of roasted milk-fed veal on a ragout of baby potatoes, carrots, and pearl onions. Tanisha wrinkled her nose in thought and finally ordered a cheeseburger.

  "Why did you become a cop?" Wheeler asked unexpectedly, jerking her thoughts off food and the princely decor, snapping her back like a ball on a rubber band to bang against dark childhood memories.

  "You mean, instead of pursuing my short, ass-puckering career in gang warfare?" she said, dodging him deftly, not wanting to discuss Kenetta . . . Kenetta with her wide smile and nappy braided hair, Kenetta with the ugly, bubbling hole in her chest.

  "You still don't like me much, do you?" he said. "I usually overcome that attitude with women well before this."

  She sat there, looking at him for a long moment, not sure how she really felt about him. It was true, of course, she had hated him on sight, but it had been an unfair value judgment and she'd set it aside. She had come to a place where she actually respected him. For somebody who grew up rich and pampered, he had some unusual attributes. ... He didn't kid himself. In fact, he was brutally honest. . . too honest. She had learned that a little self-deception, applied carefully on social or psychic wounds, stemmed emotional hemorrhaging. And he was brave. He had "come from the shoulder" when he'd faced down the three Chinese Tong gangsters in his brother's house. She wondered what exactly it was she was feeling about him. "We're not . . . compatible," she finally said.

  "Funny way to put it." He was feeling strange with her now, unable to connect.

  Time slowed as waiters scurried to clear dishes. Out the picture windows on the bay beyond, the listing Chinese junks moved in lazy disrepair.

  "Why do I feel you judging me?" he said.

  'Tm not judging you. The few things we have in common are nothing compared to the things that separate us/' she continued. "Even though we're the same age and were born just a few miles apart, we aren't even from the same universe."

  "What makes us so different?" he challenged. "People are people."

  "Not to your Confederate great-grandfather. To him, people were property."

  "What hopeless bullshit," he flared. "You want me to write his checks? I didn't even know him. He was dead seventy years before I was born. He's a name in a history book."

  "It's okay, Wheeler," she said. "Calm down. We both still know you wouldn't trade skin with me. I'm not pissed off about it, but it's a fact. . . . You can't change it. It's still the main thing that defines us."

  Again, they sat in silence. The sun was setting, dipping below the green sea, lighting the bellies of gray storm clouds with colors from some godly spectrum. Against her better judgment, she finally tried to explain her feelings to him. She hoped to hell it wouldn't sound like whining.

  "While you were going to Sandy Hill Academy or John Dye Prep, or wherever your nanny chauffeured you every morning, I was at Walker Jones Hundred-and-third Street School. My friends started dying on me in the first grade. I was Crippin' when I was seven. Most of my friends were hooked to dope rides before sixth grade and off-line by high school."

  He cocked his head in a silent question.

  "Dead," she explained. "My first sexual boyfriend was Bobby Hughes. He was a Kitchen Crip from a Hundred-and-ninth Street. A tiny gangster whose street handle was 'Li'l G-Rock.' Bobby was already on State paper when I met him. We were only thirteen when he got me pregnant. He'd been busted a bunch for selling seams--that's crack or heroin in foil packets. He couldn't take another fall or he'd get sent to a C. Y
. A. Farm. He got careless selling rock to help pay for the baby we had coming. The Crash Unit rode down on him and he took off running to avoid the bust and got faded by two cops in a cruising Z-car. It was on Halloween. 'Trick or treat, motherfucker.' Month after that, I miscarried. I had my first Department of Corrections appointment around then. My Doc-man was a boned-out redneck named Boyd Jeeter who always wanted to meet with me after work. He told me I could skip some of the appointment dates if I'd put out. He meant business, too. He seemed constantly on the edge of jumping me. I was so scared of him I kept a clean spout in my purse whenever I met with him."

  Again, Wheeler looked confused.

  "That's an untraceable handgun. I was so hard by then, if that ugly Gomer had tried anything, I woulda gauged him on the spot and never thought twice about it. Then, my baby sister died in a drive-by and mosta my friends got sent upstate. That was my childhood, Wheeler. Dead babies in pigtails. Friends boxed up in jail or coffins, and the strange thing was it seemed perfectly normal to me. So don't tell me about the prison you were in in Beverly Hills. I don't wanna hear it." When she finished, the anger in her voice hung there, distorting the atmosphere like cheap perfume. What about him made her so edgy? she wondered. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get angry. It's not you. It's me," she finally added.

  Again, nothing to say. Waiters cleared the plates and time took the tension. After the busboys left, she went on, her voice softer now.

  "When my mother died, I was at the mortuary," she said. "I was there to pick out a box for her, and I was in that room they have upstairs, where they have all the different coffins on display. I looked out the window and I saw this Beemer blow into the parking lot full of T. G. S. Not one of them was old enough to drive. I figured the car was probably a Valley hot-roller, but I was upset about my mother and I decided to let it slide. A few minutes later, these little boys are up in the same room with me. They're baggin', saggin', and braggin', struttin' around with their hats on backward. I thought they were trying to pick a coffin for a dead friend. Then I heard one say, 'Hey, J-Dog, this here be one top-rank box fer you t'possy out in/ It took me a minute before I realized those babies were in there to pick out their own coffins. They had so little belief in their futures that at age fifteen they came there with their drug money to pre-buy their own funerals, and they were right. Those little boys were all in the diamond lane to Forest Lawn, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.