Second Sister

by Chan Ho-Kei

  “This one—” said N, glancing at Nga-Yee as he held up a white blouse, gray jacket, and black A-line skirt. “No. Forget it, your legs are too short.” He pulled out a pair of black trousers instead. “What size shoes?”

  “Um, thirty-eight,” said Nga-Yee uncertainly.

  “European thirty-eight—that’s a British five or five and a half.” N bent and picked up a couple of pairs of black pumps. “See which of these fits you better.”

  N shoved the clothes and shoes into her arms, ignoring her bewilderment, then pointed at the dressing table. “Put on some makeup and comb your hair. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Hang on!” Nga-Yee protested. “What—What are we doing? Am I … am I selling my body?”

  N stared at her, then burst out laughing. “Are you serious? You don’t have the face or figure for that—I’d be waiting decades for my money. Anyway, who goes whoring at ten in the morning?”

  “I thought maybe—AV porn—” She’d seen quite a few books in the library exploring Japan’s adult film industry.

  “This is Hong Kong, Miss Au, not Japan.” N covered his mouth, but couldn’t stop laughing. “Anyway, if that’s what we were doing, wouldn’t I have asked you to change your cheap underwear for something classier?”

  That almost made sense. Before she could protest any more, he’d left the room. She had no choice but to change into the outfit he’d picked out, which fit well—how much time had he spent studying her figure?—and get made up. Pulling open the dressing table drawer, she found a profusion of cosmetics: at least forty shades of lipstick and five or six powder compacts. She didn’t normally wear makeup other than a touch of color on her lips, so it was an effort to redden her cheeks. She had no idea what would go with her outfit.

  Fifteen minutes later, the door behind her opened. She’d been ready to berate N for forcing her to get all dolled up, but it was a stranger who walked in: a rather dashing man in a navy blue suit and red tie, with a pair of rimless glasses.

  “Are you—”

  “My god! What are you trying to look like, a baboon’s ass?”

  Only when she heard his voice did Nga-Yee realize who this spiffily dressed man was. Clean-shaven, his hair neatly slicked back, and in decent clothes, he looked like a completely different person.

  “N?” she said, staring at him.

  “Who else?” He crinkled his brows in amusement. It was definitely N—he still sounded the same. Clothes really do make the man—this was a much bigger difference than she’d ever have imagined. Then again, she wouldn’t have recognized him in his old man disguise either.

  “But you—”

  “Sit. You’ll give us away if you go out like that.” He pressed on her shoulder, so she sat down, and he pulled up a chair across from her.

  “Don’t move.” He got some wet wipes from the drawer and removed the red rouge. Seeing this well-groomed version of N right in front of her, Nga-Yee felt a little awkward, a little embarrassed, but mostly confused.

  “You know how to do makeup?” she said indistinctly, her face in his hands.

  “Not really, but I guess I know more about it than a tomboy like you.”

  His insults were actually reassuring—at least she knew he was the same person.

  “Shut your eyes.” N dabbed pale bronze eye shadow onto her lids, then some eyeliner. He crimped her lashes and applied mascara, then put on a little of the rouge. Finally he took out a tube of lipstick and put on a tiny amount.

  “There’s nothing I can do about your hair. Luckily it’s not too long, so it won’t look too bad if we just leave it.” He ruffled it, then put the cosmetics back in the drawer. Nga-Yee looked in the mirror, crying out in surprise. She’d been transformed into an executive. She could have stepped out of an office in Central. She now looked beautiful and, more important, self-confident.

  “Stop staring at your reflection, Narcissus.” N was heading toward the door, beckoning for her to follow him. “Leave your own clothes and bag here.”

  N’s meanness still made her want to puke, but this whole situation was so bizarre, she couldn’t think straight. Why was she in these clothes? Why was N in disguise? Where were they going?

  Back in the living room, N led her not to the front door, but the one behind the couch. Over his shoulder, Nga-Yee could see that it led to another narrow staircase. She followed him in; he shut the door and pointed down.

  “This is—”

  “The back door.”

  They walked down to the ground floor, where a heavy metal door let them out into an alleyway that ended in a stone wall in one direction and a blue iron gate in the other. Looking up, Nga-Yee could just about make out the sky, but mostly the impression was of being in a small crevasse between tall buildings. N turned right and opened another door; Nga-Yee followed him down a clean, brightly lit passageway. They turned a corner, and Nga-Yee realized where they were: the parking lot of a large residential building on Water Street, adjacent to Second Street.

  No wonder she’d never been able to track him down. When she first tried to get him to take on her case, she’d staked out his tenement building—now she knew how he’d come and gone without her seeing him. The saying goes that “the cunning rabbit has three burrows”—for all she knew, N might well have a third secret passage from his home.

  N walked over to a fancy black car where Ducky was standing. He, too, was unusually dressed: a black suit and gloves, exactly like a rich man’s chauffeur.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.” N said. “All her fault—”

  Ducky said nothing, just nodded and got into the driver’s seat.

  N climbed into the back seat. Nga-Yee stood frozen, uncertain where she was supposed to go.

  “What are you gawking at? Wake up, okay?” N gestured at the back seat, and she got in resentfully. Ducky started the car, and they set off for the underwater Western Harbour Crossing.

  “Where are we going now? What are we doing?” asked Nga-Yee.

  “Calm down,” said N lazily, his legs idly crossed. He looked like a wealthy playboy. “Didn’t I say? You’re taking part in an operation.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes opened wide. Now she knew why they were all dressed up—this was a con job. “N, I told you, I don’t want to—what?” Before she could finish, he’d placed a tablet computer in her hands. A picture of a man she’d never seen.

  “This is our target,” said N nonchalantly. “His name is Sze Chung-Nam.”

  “What does he have to do with Violet To?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Huh?” She stared at him, uncomprehending.

  N took the tablet back and tapped at it. “I’m just being a busybody, dealing with this guy. I was planning to work alone, but after the way things ended with Violet, I’m guessing you have some feelings that need to be burned off. Anyway, you were the one who led me to him, and this is all connected to you, so you might as well have a ringside seat.”

  Nga-Yee didn’t understand a word of that, but before she could ask, he’d put the tablet back in her hands. Now the display was cut into four quadrants. Where had she seen this before?

  “Oh! This is the security camera footage from the MTR. We looked through it when you were trying to track down whoever sent the messages through their Wi-Fi connections.” Nga-Yee remembered it clearly. She’d cleaned up for N that day and made him tea, and when he’d turned on his computer, this crowded platform was one of the images he’d looked at.

  “Check out the top left corner.”

  This quadrant had the numbers 3 and 4 along its bottom, and it showed the MTR train at a station, with passengers streaming on and off. Something odd was going on at one of the doors: several commuters were looking back into the car, and some had their phones out to film whatever was going on inside. Only one man seemed completely indifferent. He walked briskly toward the escalator, not looking back. Nga-Yee looked closely and realized it was the man from N’s photo.

  “This is t
hat Sze Whatshisname?” She pointed at the screen.

  “Correct.”

  “What about him?”

  N tapped to fast-forward, then lifted his finger so the footage went back to normal speed.

  “Now look at the bottom left corner.”

  Nga-Yee did as he said, uncertain what she was meant to be looking for. Perhaps Violet would be there. But no, Sze Chung-Nam appeared again on the platform, standing by a pillar.

  “Are we watching him? He came back?”

  “Very good. At least you’re a little observant,” N jeered. “He got off, but didn’t exit the station or change lines, just walked around and came back to wait for the next train. He didn’t interact with a single person in between, so it’s not as if he’d arranged to pass something to a friend or something like that, nor did he use the station bathroom. I’ve checked the footage all over the station during that time, and I’m certain he was just walking around on his own. I took note of the train he reboarded and saw that he got off at Diamond Hill. Once I’d checked the footage of him leaving that station, I tracked down his identity from his Octopus card. Like you said before, that’s easy to do if you know when the person you’re looking for left a particular station and have them on film. The problem was there were so many people, I couldn’t possibly have known who to pinpoint as the one sending the messages.”

  “But so what if he returned to the platform? Was he logged in when Violet sent those messages? Looking at the footage now, I don’t—”

  Nga-Yee broke off, her eyes fixed on something in the background. Something was wrong here. Every station in the Hong Kong MTR system has a different-colored interior, to help passengers tell them apart and get off at the right one. The pillar on the screen was sky blue, but N had said that Violet was at Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, and Prince Edward when she sent those messages; those stations were pale gray, red, and purple. As for sky blue, that was Kowloon Tong.

  Violet had nothing to do with Kowloon Tong station, but Siu-Man did.

  Nga-Yee looked at the bottom right corner, which showed the time and date. How could she have missed such an obvious clue? It was 5:42 on November 7, 2014.

  The day of Siu-Man’s assault.

  N saw from Nga-Yee’s face that she’d worked it out, and he touched the screen to send it back a few minutes. This was right after Chung-Nam exited the train. Now Siu-Man, in school uniform, was being helped off by a middle-aged woman, followed by a large man frog-marching Shiu Tak-Ping.

  “Here’s an easy question.” N grinned. “When something like this happens, who do you think is most likely to slip away, wait for things to quiet down, then come back and get a later train?”

  “The—the real pervert?” Nga-Yee stared at the screen, then at N.

  “You’re improving—you got straight to the answer.”

  “So Shiu Tak-Ping is innocent?”

  “You could say that.”

  “But he pleaded guilty.”

  “Martin Tong is a mediocre lawyer,” N sneered. “He had a good hand but refused to play it. In order to avoid trouble, he advised his client to accept a plea deal. People like that shouldn’t be called lawyers. They’re basically pinch hitters.”

  “What do you mean, a good hand?”

  “What it said in the Popcorn post! Shiu Tak-Ping’s behavior was a bit strange, like when he tried to run, but it makes just as much sense that he was a coward who made the wrong choice.”

  “A witness said that Shiu claimed he’d touched Siu-Man by accident. Isn’t that admitting he did it?” Nga-Yee was finding this hard to accept, having spent so much time thinking of Shiu Tak-Ping as the cause of her sister’s suffering.

  “Like I said, that lawyer was useless. When you handed me the materials for this case, I looked at your sister’s statement, and the answer was there: she said someone touched her ass, that it felt like an accident, but then the hand started fondling her bum and went up her skirt. Why didn’t the police and that lawyer ever stop to wonder whether the first touch was by the same hand as the second? There’s no way to be sure on such a crowded train. If the defense had brought this up, that’d definitely be enough reasonable doubt to get him off.”

  Nga-Yee stared at him. “So Shiu Tak-Ping happened to bump into Siu-Man; then, by coincidence, someone else molested her, and he got the blame?”

  “It wasn’t necessarily coincidence. Maybe Shiu Tak-Ping brushed against her, and Sze Chung-Nam, standing nearby, noticed the way she reacted and started having lewd thoughts.” N shrugged. “If you want to talk about coincidences, the main one would be that these two men were wearing similar-colored shirts, so the older woman mistook one for the other. You can also blame Shiu Tak-Ping for being foolish enough to think they were talking about the half second that his hand brushed against your sister and raising such a ruckus that it was the perfect cover for Sze Chung-Nam to get away.”

  “But … you’re just guessing, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” N took back the tablet. “So I went searching for proof.”

  He pressed play on a different video and put the tablet back in front of Nga-Yee. This was of scenery zooming past an MTR window, though from a lower angle than most people’s line of sight, capturing a lot of hands clutching the overhead straps and metal poles. The people seated behind them were drowsing or engrossed with their phones. Close to the camera was a young man holding a pole with one hand; his other hand was out of shot, but he was probably on his phone too. Just as Nga-Yee was about to ask N what this guy had to do with anything, she realized she’d been looking at the wrong person. To the right of the screen, near the door, was that Sze man, looking up at the electronic display at the other end of the car. Between Sze and the door was a girl in school uniform, aged maybe thirteen or fourteen. Her face was contorted, and she was staring out the window. Sze Chung-Nam’s right hand was pressed against her buttocks, and moving.

  “He—his hand—” Nga-Yee sputtered.

  “Ducky’s been following him around for two weeks,” said N, nodding toward the driver’s seat. “Turns out this guy’s made quite a habit of it. A new victim every few days, always a girl around this age. He even gets to work and leaves early, to fit better with school hours, and he chooses the most crowded trains to go hunting in. I don’t mean to praise him, but he definitely knows what he’s doing—the girls he picks are the sort to panic and freeze. He also keeps a close eye on the people around him and stops as soon as anyone starts paying attention. His closest shave was probably with your sister last year, and he still got away scot-free. Ducky had to use a specially made camera to gather this evidence.”

  N produced what looked like a pair of glasses with thick rims. Nga-Yee noticed tiny apertures on its arms—pinhole cameras. Unlike most secret cameras, these were perpendicular to the user and would shoot what was to the left and right.

  Nga-Yee turned her attention back to the tablet. There was a second segment, then a third. These were all virtually the same—only the victim was different.

  “Why didn’t you stop him on the spot?” she yelled at Ducky, watching Sze Chung-Nam stick his hand up yet another schoolgirl’s skirt. These girls looked the way Siu-Man must have, and Nga-Yee felt great pity for them.

  “Because he can see the bigger picture—not like you,” said N. “My goal wasn’t just to catch this guy being a pervert on the train.”

  “Your goal? What do you—”

  “Never mind that for now, we’re almost there,” N said, looking out the window. The car was on Dundas Street in Mong Kok, approaching Fortune Business Centre, where GT Technology was. The journey here from Sai Ying Pun had taken only ten minutes, thanks to the tunnel.

  “We’re here? But you haven’t told me what we’re doing!” Nga-Yee protested. “Are you going to do something to Sze Chung-Nam?”

  “What a lot of questions you have.” N frowned. “Just follow me, and don’t say a word. I’ll do all the talking. You just have to stand behind me, pretend to be my assistant, and watc
h.”

  Ducky dropped them off on Shantung Street. Nga-Yee followed N into an office building and up to the fifteenth floor, self-conscious about her appearance and the way she walked, hoping she wouldn’t give them away.

  “Remember, not a word,” said N as the elevator doors opened. There was the hint of a smile on his face—he looked like an actor about to go onstage.

  “Mr. Szeto! Welcome, welcome.”

  “Kenneth, sorry to be a little late. The traffic—”

  Nga-Yee managed to conceal her surprise at the change in N’s accent—he sounded like a foreigner speaking Cantonese, though only slightly. For a moment she even wondered if this was N—

  Not an actor, but a con man—she corrected her earlier impression.

  She followed N into a tiny conference room. That Sze guy was nearby, talking to a couple of his coworkers, apparently urging them to join the meeting.

  When she saw Sze Chung-Nam in person, Nga-Yee felt for a second as if she knew him. She told herself this was from the photos and videos, but she couldn’t shake the sense that they’d met somewhere before. This momentarily distracted her from her rage. At the end of the day, everything that happened to Siu-Man was because of this bastard.

  “Doris had to take the day off, so this is my other assistant, Rachel.”

  So that was her fake name. Nga-Yee made a mental note.

  “Let’s get started,” Sze Chung-Nam said, moving to the front of the room, smiling confidently. He pressed a button on the remote control, and the words “GT Technology Ltd.” appeared on the eighty-inch screen, with his English name, “Charles Sze,” and job title. The presentation followed Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule: 10 pages, 20 minutes, 30-point font. “Hello, everyone. I’m Charles Sze, GT’s director of technology. Today I’ll speak about our business strategy and plans for development, as well as the benefits we can bring to SIQ.”