Second Sister
Page 49
“When was that?” Nga-Yee thought of something when she mentioned the money.
“The work took place last year, but we got the money back only two or three months ago.”
Heung kept talking a while longer as they stood on the sidewalk outside 151 Second Street, but Nga-Yee didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the conversation. This must be what N was talking about at Cityview Hotel—in other words, he was targeted by the triad because he’d intervened on behalf of Heung. At the time, she’d been impressed by how quickly he dispatched the gangsters, but after spending more time with him, she couldn’t help wondering: he could surely have escaped their notice altogether if he wanted. How could he have been so careless as to let them find out his address?
Nga-Yee got the opportunity to ask N this question in the afternoon when she went to his sixth-floor apartment to sort out the utility bills. “Didn’t I mention?” he said. “Brother Tiger in Wan Chai had just taken over. I knew the crooked contractor was friends with Brother Tiger. New triad leaders need to be shown who’s boss, and I was getting revenge for Heung, so I found a way to do both—and they took the bait. It’s better to bundle troublesome things together and deal with them all at once, don’t you think?”
His tone was casual, but once again Nga-Yee found this inconceivable. She might never get to the bottom of N. He had the ruthlessness of a hardened criminal, but was more upright than most people, always using his abilities to help the weak. He was more than able to keep himself safely above the fray, yet willing to make himself vulnerable in order to turn the tables and secure victory. N’s very existence seemed to go against regular human behavior and psychology.
This led Nga-Yee to have some strange thoughts of her own. She couldn’t help wondering if N hadn’t predicted from the very start that she wouldn’t go through with her revenge against Violet To, and he’d never planned to have her commit suicide in the first place. It was still a mystery to her how Violet’s big brother managed to appear at just the right moment that night—unless N had allowed one of Violet’s cries for help to actually get through? In which case, the opportunity he’d created was for Nga-Yee to abandon her vengeance completely.
She would never ask N this, of course. Even if she’d guessed right, he’d never admit it.
“Oh wow. Is this your sister, Nga-Yee?” Wendy was holding up the photo frame she’d just pulled from a box: Siu-Man’s selfie with Nga-Yee and their mother in the background. After N returned the cell phone to her, Nga-Yee had taken it to a shop to have the photo printed and framed.
“Yes.” Every mention of Siu-Man still gave Nga-Yee a jolt of sorrow, but she now accepted that her sister was gone.
Wendy placed the picture on a nearby shelf and clasped her hands, speaking to the photo. “Wherever you are, please protect your big sister. I’ll look out for her too.”
It was typical of Wendy’s brash personality that she would mention Siu-Man so freely in front of her sister, but at this moment Nga-Yee was grateful. And perhaps Siu-Man really was keeping an eye on her from the afterlife.
When they’d put everything away, Wendy put on some music on her phone as they cleaned up. Nga-Yee had no idea that her coworker had such interesting taste—apart from Chinese pop songs, she also had the latest K-pop hits and some Western rock. To Nga-Yee’s amusement, she sang along to some of them in her rather dubious Korean.
As Nga-Yee flattened cardboard boxes, Wendy’s phone played a familiar tune.
“Oh no, not this one,” said Nga-Yee. It was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
“I didn’t know you listened to rock music,” said Wendy from the closet, where she was putting away some clothes.
“Rock?”
“This is the Rolling Stones.”
“Oh, I just heard it by accident.” Nga-Yee pursed her lips, remembering N giving her a hard time. “I hate these lyrics. They say you’ll never get what you want.”
Wendy stared at her. “What are you talking about? Have you listened all the way through?”
She turned up the volume. Nga-Yee wasn’t sure what her point was, but she dutifully paid attention to the words. At the last line—“sometimes you get what you need”—she realized that she’d misunderstood.
“Um, Wendy, I need to head out for a second. There’s something I need to take care of.”
“Where are you going?”
“To have a chat with my landlord.”
As Nga-Yee walked up the stairs, she thought about the end of her conversation with Heung.
“It was Loi who introduced me to N,” Heung had said. “The market was bad then, and I’d just lost my job. Loi said he had a friend looking for a cleaner for his tenement building—and that’s how N helped me get through the financial crisis. I found him weird to start with—he wouldn’t tell me his real name, just went by a single letter. I tried calling him Mr. N, but he scolded me for that. When I got to know him better, I asked why he didn’t like being called Mr.—and he said that words like “Mr.” and “Miss” are phony. They make it seem like you respect the person you’re talking to, even if you despise them. Why not just stop being fake and call people by their names? At least that’s honest. He said all relationships should take place between equals.”
In the sixth-floor apartment, Nga-Yee found N at his desk, his fingers flying across the keyboard.
“Now what, Miss Au?” He looked up, but didn’t stop typing.
“I want you to stop calling me Miss Au. Nga-Yee is fine.” She walked up to the desk.
His hands stilled, and he looked steadily at her for a moment, then let out a snort of laughter.
“Have you and your friend had lunch?”
“No, we—”
“I’ll have a large wonton noodles, reduced noodles, extra scallions, soup on the side, fried greens, no oyster sauce,” he said, handing her a banknote. “Nga-Yee.”
She took the cash with a sigh and scowled at him, though actually she wasn’t unhappy.
When she left her old home that morning, she’d already been certain this would be the day her life changed completely.
About the Author
CHAN HO-KEI lives in Hong Kong. He has won the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award for his short stories, and in 2011 he won the Soji Shimada, the biggest mystery award in the Chinese world.
JEREMY TIANG’s novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including Chan Ho-Kei’s The Borrowed, and also writes and translates plays. He lives in Brooklyn.
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