by John Burdett
Pushing open a door to a fourth spare bedroom, Chan heard a murmur, an intake of breath. Angie held back, but Chan entered the room just long enough to glimpse a couple, a Western man with a Chinese woman, in an airtight embrace. It was the man, apparently young and blond, who was showing the most flesh with his shirt nearly off, backed up against a window while the woman pushed against him. The woman turned at the disturbance, raised her eyes at Chan, then turned back to the man. Chan had glimpsed a long jaw on a Chinese face; from the back she was mostly black hair, strong shoulders and a silver dress that shimmered like water and revealed 80 percent of her vertebrae. He closed the door with care until the last inch, which he completed with a malevolent bang. Angie grinned.
They returned to the party, but after forty minutes Angie admitted she was hating it too. The women sneered at her cheap cotton dress, and the British men cringed at her accent. The Chinese noticed only that she didn’t have money and ignored her.
Chan used his chin to point to the door. “Let’s go.”
Angie gave him a grateful smile. “It’s all right, I can stand it for another twenty minutes. Hadn’t you better talk to your sister and your brother-in-law?”
“I guess.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
Chan shrugged. “You know… parties. I don’t know why she invited me.”
Angie looked baffled. “But she’s your sister, Charlie. She loves you, mate.”
Chan nodded. “Sure, you’re right.”
He found a criminal defense lawyer he knew for her to talk to while he went to the kitchen to hunt for Jenny. She was there supervising the Filipino maid. Her husband, Jonathan Wong, was talking to a famous Chinese woman whom Chan now recognized from newspaper stories about the glitterati. He recognized her from her dress too. It was silver and shimmered like water.
“This is my notorious detective brother-in-law,” Wong said when he saw him. “Charlie Chan, meet Emily Ping.” Chan summoned a smile for the famous Chinese woman, who looked into his eyes, winked once and held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
Chan glanced around the kitchen for her blond friend. Apart from the Filipino maid there were only Chinese in the room. “Hi. Look-”
“It must be fascinating to have a lawyer and a detective in the same family,” Emily Ping said. “What do you talk about?”
She was tall for a Chinese woman, over five feet seven, but she would have been striking at any height. Her black hair was swept back from a high forehead, the silver dress dipped almost as deeply in front as at the back, revealing most of two ivory globes that Chan found difficult to ignore; she stood straight as a post with a jaw you could hang a Chinese lantern from. More Rambo than bimbo, Chan decided. She was older than he would have guessed from that first glimpse. Mid- to late thirties with an unbroken history of money and power; only the very rich were quite so shameless. She gazed at him for a moment with a kind of nonspecific lust, then smiled. The blond boy? Eaten and forgotten already?
“Oh, he has all the interesting cases. We only talk about his work; mine’s too boring for words.” Wong spoke in English with an impeccable Oxford accent. He pretended not to see the brazen gaze in Emily’s eyes.
“What are you working on right now, for instance?” Emily asked Chan.
“The Mincer Murders. Maybe you read about them. Three people fed live into an industrial mincer.”
She was tough. She blinked, smiled again. “How interesting. Yes, I remember. In Mongkok, wasn’t it?”
“Where else?”
“And have you solved the mystery yet?”
Despite himself, he was held by the authority in her manner. In an unbroken motion he drew a packet of Benson & Hedges from his pocket, flipped open the top, knocked it against the palm of his left hand, withdrew the cigarette with his lips, lit it with the lighter he’d lodged in the other hand in preparation: the expertise of an addict. Then he looked into those fearless Chinese eyes. To his surprise they seemed genuinely interested.
“No. We don’t even know who the victims were. No fingerprints, no ID tags-nothing to go on. They were shredded. All we have is a vat full of human hamburger.” He didn’t mention the heads. He was keeping them out of the public domain for the moment.
The other people in the kitchen had stopped to listen. There were muted squeals and winces all around, except from Emily Ping. She was amused by his provocation. Or perhaps she enjoyed gore. The rich could have strange tastes.
Chan turned to Jenny, drew her into a corner. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.” He spoke in Cantonese, exaggerating tones to carry his point.
She made a face. “Is it really that bad? Jonathan had to invite all these people; it’s business. You’re my only real guest.”
“I don’t believe you. They all love you, and you’re a perfect hostess. Look, it’s just me, isn’t it? I’m sure they’re all great, wonderful, warmhearted, humble-like most billionaires.”
Jenny’s eyes pleaded. “Don’t go yet. Let’s go somewhere private for a moment. I need a real person to talk to, and I have news.”
Her eyes searching his face expressed something close to adoration. He noticed Wong looking at her, a husband’s complaint in his expression: You never look at me like that.
“Okay.”
Chan followed her to the same corridor and eventually the same room as that where the seduction of the blond young man had so recently taken place. Chan sniffed at a fading odor of sex and perfume and told her about it as they entered the bedroom together. Jenny winced as she closed the door.
“She has a hell of an appetite. I think I’ll lock the door. God knows what people would accuse us of if they came barging in.” She looked up at him and cocked an eyebrow.
She turned a bolt, then held his hand to lead him to a small window with a view over a mountain at the back of the apartments. The room was unlit except for safety lights from the grounds of the apartment building and from lamps that lined a mountain road. About every thirty seconds a car rounded a certain point in a bend and illuminated the room. He stood still while she kneaded his hand. Her dress was a deep crimson that contrasted with her black hair. It was as expensive as any other woman’s, but, on her, twice as beautiful. Standing so close to her, he could smell her perfume and underneath it a faint musk that he remembered from childhood. Odors could be like fingerprints.
Her voice was full, rounded, confident; she was a natural princess who found it easy to charm these people. When she was in the mood, anyway. Tonight there was a glint in her eye.
“We’re going through a bad patch, Jonathan and I. I’m not sure how much of all this socializing I can take. He lost his rag with me when I refused to wear a triple string of pearls that he bought me last week.”
“How selfish of him.”
“I refuse to be got up like a pet poodle. I don’t mind the odd party, but it’s every night, sometimes cocktails at one place followed by dinner at someone else’s-it’s so artificial. What are you grinning at?”
“The problems of the rich-how can you stand it?”
“I’m serious. We’ll have to reach a compromise.”
“Two strings of pearls?”
“Smart-ass. You know, sometimes I feel, living this life, that I’m being disloyal to Mum.”
He lit a cigarette without offering her one. “That is a little farfetched.”
“Is it? Okay, you being so street-wise, tell me what you noticed about all those people out there tonight, especially the Chinese.”
“Apart from wealth, arrogance and a serious lack of depth, nothing. They all looked disgustingly happy to me.”
She lowered her voice. “Exactly. They’re mostly Emily’s people. Jonathan invited them because of her. Her main business is with the PRC; she’s well in with some big shot general called Xian. Only two months to go till the Communists march in, and these people alone are happy, not a care in the world. Why no June neurosis? Because they’ve made their connections, their
guanxi, as everyone’s calling it now, with the killers over the border. Their positions are secure after June. That’s why they’re so happy.”
Chan shrugged. “There’s no money in heroic resistance. They’re smart; to survive an invasion, you have to befriend the invader.”
Jenny scowled. “You don’t really think that; you’re just saying it because you know I’m stuck with these people, for better or worse. To me, it’s like collaborating.” She looked him in the eye. “You loathe them as much as I do. More, probably. You don’t really approve of Jonathan. Why did you encourage me to marry him?”
Smiling, Chan looked her in the eye; she knew the Chinese answer to that question. Since her early twenties her looks had raised her above her class. She was a natural member of the aristocracy of beauty. Not only her looks; her grace, elegance, a kind of poise that cut through social strata. It would have been stupid not to capitalize while she could. How many attractive women from their background ended by working in bars and nightclubs? That would have broken his heart. It wasn’t the job of older brother to be romantic on younger sister’s behalf; his duty was to save her from poverty and shame, a duty he’d discharged in a rare act of social shrewdness by persuading her to enter a beauty competition. Quite amazing, the respectability that a title could bestow: Miss Hong Kong. The wealthy suitors alone would have filled a house. Not all eligible from Jenny’s point of view, though; Wong had been among the prettiest.
She was safe now; even if the marriage didn’t work, she’d be protected by a share of Wong’s money. Chan was still proud of himself. Would marriage to a pauper have been less stormy?
“Okay, he was a good catch, and you were being the Chinese patriarch. Well, I have real news. I’m probably pregnant.”
“Whoopee.”
“Right word but not much feeling. Are you pleased or not?”
“Of course I’m pleased.”
“You’re going to be the godfather.”
“Honored.”
“And in addition to your usual duties, you will make sure that he or she grows into a real person. If I catch them prancing around like those creeps out there, you’ll be in trouble.”
“Agreed. I’ll be a blue-collar street-cop uncle. Weekends we’ll spend at the morgue.”
She smiled and kissed him, held his arms while she gazed into his face. He made to move away, but she held him still. She wore no pearls, no jewelry at all. A neckline like that could not be improved.
“No one compares to you.” She said it in a hurried whisper, before he could stop her.
He admonished her with a finger, tutted, returned to the door to release the bolt, let Jenny out first. She led him back down the hall to the huge reception room, which had filled since he’d left it. “You didn’t even introduce your new girlfriend,” Jenny said.
Chan looked for Angie over the heads of the other guests. Finally he saw her talking to the young blond man, who was now fully dressed. “She’s not. This is the first night-I mean, she’s a colleague.”
Jenny smiled. “I’m so glad. I hope she stops you smoking.”
Chan pushed his hair back. “It’s not that serious.”
He saw Angie say something to the young man while keeping her eyes on Chan. The blond boy-he was hardly more than that-took his leave of her before Chan arrived. A pity, Chan thought, they seemed to go well together. The boy looked Australian too.
“We can go,” Chan told Angie, feeling suddenly nervous; it was so long since he’d had to entertain a Western woman on his own.
12
Three hours later outside the Bull and Bear Chan stood with Angie in the taxi queue. Nearly midnight and still as hot as a sauna. In the pub she’d felt instantly at home and talked for hours. He’d forgotten almost everything she’d said. Something about family and Australia, with an unlimited collection of sports anecdotes that had grown cruder as the alcohol took effect. Apparently she was homesick.
He’d never seen a woman drink so much beer. There was something almost professional about the way she poured it down; she held it well too, except for a moment on the steps of the pub when she’d swayed and almost fallen. Now she stood very close, a hint having condensed to an assumption without any help from him. He didn’t want to offend her. How did you explain that you were just too Chinese to take a woman to bed on the first night? Or that your complicated sensitivity found drunkenness a turnoff even in the last years of the twentieth century? Or that your flat was designed for Chinese-size lovers?
The hand that had been stroking his arm suddenly gave up.
“You’re not going to take me home, are you?” Chan appreciated the effort she was making to keep the slur out of her speech.
“No.”
She turned, put her arms around his neck. “Why not?” He felt the weight of her heavy breasts on his chest, as if she’d decided to make them his problem.
“I can’t.”
“Why? Still destroyed about Sandra?”
“Maybe.”
She dropped her arms. “You don’t like me.”
“I do. A lot. Can we talk about this another night?”
She overlaid a pout with a smile. “Sure.”
“I thought, I mean, you’re very popular with the men. Surely there’s someone?”
She shook her head. “Ain’t that easy, mate. The white men chase Asian women like there’s no tomorrow, and the best Chinese stick to their own.”
“Leaving me?”
She squeezed his arm, buried her lips in his neck. “You’re so intense, Charlie. It turns me on.”
A small hand slipped between his thighs to find the outline of his penis expertly. He caught the hand, wrapped it, for want of a better place, around his waist. “Didn’t that blond guy get your phone number?”
She sighed deeply with undertones of irritation, looked up at the black sky. “You never go off duty, do you?”
In his mind’s eye he saw them, two Australians far from home comforting each other with rugby jokes and drunken sex. The fact was that Hong Kong only pretended to be superficial, crass and transient. Underneath there was a depth of cynicism that began to frighten after a while. And then to appall. When the beautiful blond boy and Angie swapped stories about the predatory Emily Ping and the intense Chief Inspector Chan, it would be with an Anglo-Saxon relief at having escaped from some complex Oriental trap. They would look into each other’s blue, round eyes and see-well, to the bottom anyway. It would have been better if she had been rude enough to go off with him directly from the party.
“He’ll ring you tomorrow,” he said with a smile as he put her in a taxi. He was about to take the next one when he decided to walk to the underground instead. Free from the pressure of seduction, his mind leaped back to the case. There was an adage by Confucius-or was it Raymond Chandler?-Never dwell on a mystery that has been solved.
In other words, forget the front teeth. Forget the muffled screams of agony. Why had Polly, an attractive Westerner, allowed her fillings to fall out? Self-neglect placed her in a specific category in her culture. Like where? What caused a young woman to fall into the drifting class, to become indifferent to her own well-being? Not thwarted love-not these days. Self-indulgence, an aversion to work, an adolescent need for adventure untamed even in adulthood?
It all came back to drugs in the end. Drugs sold provided the funds; drugs abused provided the adventure; drugs shared provided the company; drugs prescribed provided the cure. The First World was a drug addict. Illegal drugs were only the tip of the iceberg. Take into account the barbiturates and the amphetamines, then add in the spectrum of antidepressants; in other words, make a list of all the popular tranquilizers and stimulants of prescription, and you had not so much an epidemic, not even a pandemic, as a colonization of the human species by traders in chemicals, from the multinational pharmaceutical companies at the top to the street corner dealers at the bottom. And it had all happened in the last years of the twentieth century.
It was a five-ci
garette meditation that took up most of the ride home. Emerging at Mongkok station, Chan realized he was short of cigarettes. Only one pack left and only two left in that pack. He’d forgotten to add the tobacco companies to the list. And the brewers and distillers too. Was there a single person left on earth who took reality straight? Some thoughts led to mountains too high to climb. Especially without a nicotine stash.
In the small hours of the morning the streets of Mongkok were less crowded. It was possible to distinguish individuals as opposed to clumps of humans, although it was not in the nature of Asians to be solitary. The heat upset everyone’s sleep rhythms. Lovers walked hand in hand as if on an early-evening tryst; children played; an old woman in rags begged. A swarm of starlings chattered around a streetlight while small bats swooped. Only Chan was entirely alone, walking quickly toward a small supermarket near his block that sold English cigarettes. Only Chan and a Western woman, in her late forties or early fifties as far as he could tell, who emerged from the shadows as he passed.
A habit from his patrolling days produced an automatic description: about five eight, dirty blond, baggy black shorts and red T-shirt, no bra, an extralarge money belt slung around her waist, slight stoop, slim with heavy breasts. Sensual. She wore sneakers and socks and was therefore American. In this heat every other nationality wore plastic thongs, but Americans feared foreign soil. Morose but healthy. Not lost, for she was not examining street signs; purposeless. She didn’t fit. Tourists stayed on Hong Kong Island or in Tsim Sha Tsui, not Mongkok. He turned once to catch her face in the glare of a streetlight. Possible drink problem.
She followed him into the supermarket. He walked to the end of an aisle to pick up some Rickshaw tea bags. The cigarettes were behind glass at the cash desk at the other end of the aisle. Looking up into a convex security mirror, he saw her pocket a quarter bottle of whiskey. By holding her arm against the large pocket in her shorts, she disguised the heavy weight of the bottle. Chan paused over the tea bags. A civic duty was being invoked, but on the other hand, the owner of the store was a wealthy Chiu Chow named Fung who could look after himself. Also, it was late, and he could do without filling in reports for the rest of the night. He looked up again into the mirror. This time it was a toothbrush and toothpaste. Such huge pockets on those shorts.
