“Sifu Hung. Sorry, sorry, sir. Just a small disagreement. Nothing important. ”
Big Hung. Ko’s blood ran cold. This old man was the senior boss of the entire 14K triad, half of Hong Kong’s criminal enterprises firmly in the pocket of this dumpy doughball ex-contender. The youth marvelled at the idea of it; the stories he had heard about Big Hung’s ruthless nature, of the fear he instilled in other men—and now to look at him, the mobster looked like nothing more than a fat old geezer in an expensive suit. The elderly guy leaned closer. Ko smelled cologne and the faint aroma of tiger balm.
Hung gave Ko a measuring stare, and he made it clear he didn’t like what he saw. “You don’t belong here, boy. Stop bothering my lads and get lost.” More men were approaching now, Hung’s personal guard. All of them held shiny handguns in deceptively casual stances.
“Ko brought a car…” began Rikio, in an attempt to justify himself.
Hung turned his puppy-like brown eyes on the Vector and sniffed like he smelt something bad. “Corp wheels? Is this boy a fool?” he asked Rikio, “He won’t earn our graces by doing a stupid tiling like this.” He gave the car a dismissive wave. “Burn it.”
“What?” Ko blurted. “But—”
Hung eyed Rikio, ignoring Ko so completely that it silenced him. “Torch it,” he repeated. “And then make the idiot go away.”
For old time’s sake, Rikio let Ko take the bag from the back seat and leave with just a few bruises and a split lip. By the time he was at the highway, the night had closed in and unleashed the rain. Feng was waiting there for him.
“You lie with pigs, you become dirty,” said the swordsman.
Ko made a spitting noise and kept walking.
We are not so blind that we cannot see. Do you understand what will happen when the sky cuts like SILK and the BEAST pours in?
Do not accept the way of no mind and the CALMNESS of the false Zen—this is a lie made to entrap you, a coil cast down from the dragons in the toivers! Turn your face from false IDOLS. Find truth in your HEART.
The poison of dead emperors taints the Fragrant Harbour! Touch life and live! Go on and LIVE!
Excerpt from a tract distributed in Temple Street Market. Origin and author unknown.
3. Happy Together
He tried the Banana Dog and the Rama-Rama, Club 19NineTee7 and the House o’ Boots before he found his Toyomazda Ranger wedged poorly between two light buses in a side street off Waterloo Road. A few doors down, a shiny chrome elevator led to the Lucky Dot Bar. So, then. His sister was back there, making a fool of herself, braying that mock nasal laugh she put on when she faked amusement at the off-colour jokes of rich guys.
Ko approached the car and his face fell. She’d left it unlocked—again. The old familiar bite of that special anger and frustration he kept for his sibling rose and fell in his chest. He slid into the front seat and made quick and angry work of gathering up MacDee wrappers and dozens of tiny vodka bottles, the kind that crowded hotel minibars. He threw them into a public flash-burner and stomped back to the Ranger, the rain drumming off the awning of the store next to the parked car, clattering off the sunroof. He sat and watched the silver doorway. Every so often, two light strips either side of the elevator would illuminate and people would blunder out, cursing the acrid rain and unfolding their umbrellas. Mostly they were identikit corps, men and women with little or no difference to them. Some were fatter than others, some had better suits, but they all stumbled around the street like they owned it, pushing people out of their way or kicking at the slow-moving bots that wandered past them, projecting holo-adverts.
The evening moved on in slow, unpleasant surges, and Ko took the time to tape the cuts on his face with a spool of DermFix from the glove compartment. From behind the steering wheel, in the morose damp, he glared at the corporates and the gaudy hangers-on who trailed them in and out of the Lucky Dot. Ko’s fingers dug into the plastic of the wheel with such powerful, impotent fierceness, it made his eyes tight in his head. A knot of them slipped and giggled as they moved toward the main road, at their head a raucous woman in the scarlet kimono of a senior Paradise executive, dragging a boywhore behind her. Under a thermoplastic parasol, she led her gaggle of suits right in front of the Ranger and for a moment Ko imagined the look on her face if he were to stamp on the gas and ram the lot of them against the flank of the minibus. He saw it unfold in his head as a colourless manga strip: cut frames and jagged edges spattered with pools of black ink blood, wheels spinning on corpses. Screaming. Terrible laughter.
“That hatred will burn you alive one day.” Feng shifted in the back seat.
Ko didn’t bother to look at him. “You have a bloody proverb for every day of the week, don’t you?”
“I’m just making an observation.”
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was alone again.
The night drew in and the transit company programmer came to load the routes for the light buses. He gave Ko a sideways look from under the hood of his acid-resistant rain slicker and did his work. The two buses came to life in blinks of neon running lights and rumbled away to service the shift workers massing at the Metro stations. Tubed in from the outlying shanties across the border wall in Shenzhen, Hong Kong’s population would swell by a third once the day ended as cooks, cleaners and prostitutes came in to fill the low-rent gaps in the city’s service infrastructure. By dawn they would all be gone again, pockets lined with a few more yuan, the messes made by the suits cleaned up so the rich could do it again the next night. The migrant workforce was visible at the edges of every street, edited out of the world that people like the kimono woman moved through.
The digits on the dashboard display moved with glacier-like slowness toward closing time, and the higher they climbed the more suits ejected themselves from the Lucky Dot. In big, splashy steps, a skinny man in a laser-cut Mirany original lurched over to the Ranger and collided with it. Ko jerked awake from a clammy doze and cupped his balisong knife in his hand.
“C’mon! C’mon!” the drunk called to a group of similarly dressed men. “I gotta car! Let’s play go-gangers!” He tugged at the door handle, but Ko locked it. The man frowned, his beer-fogged brain slow on the uptake. “Hey.” He banged on the window. “Geddout. I want this car. I’m driving. ”
“Fuck off,” Ko replied, and showed him the length of the blade.
The guy frowned, unperturbed by the implied threat, and then dug out a roll of yuan. He waved them around. Paper money was a novelty for a lot of corporate types who had been raised inside walled executive enclaves, where wealth only existed as ones and zeros. Hong Kong’s night economy was still traditional at heart, though, and cash remained a quaint throwback in many quarters. The suit peeled off hundred-yuan bills and threw them at the Ranger, one after another. “Gimme the car, street boy. I can buy you. I can buy anything! I wanna play!” He yelled at his friends. “I want to be Hazzard Wu!” He slapped the window with the flat of his hand. “I promise not to kill you…” he chortled, repeating Wu’s signature line from last year’s big hit, the action racer flick, Spider.
From the back of the group came a man who was decidedly not a drunk. He reeked of corp security. With gentle force, he guided the other man away, pausing only to gather up the wet banknotes and throw Ko a slight shake of the head. “This way, sir,” he heard him say. “There’s a limo waiting.”
“A limo!” shouted the drunken man, and his gaggle of friends repeated him with noisy, idiotic gusto.
The lights around the door blinked on again as the lift dropped from the Lucky Dot on the fourteenth floor. Nikita came out and she listed like a galleon in high seas, her face puffy and red with drink, screwing up in irritation at the rain. Another girl came with her—a bottle-ginger Korean dressed in retro kogal style—and trailing behind a bald fellow with a simpering, pleading look on his face.
Ko was out of the car in one swift motion, the balisong still concealed in the curve of his fist. “Niki!” he shouted,
and beckoned her toward him.
Nikita threw Ko a look and then smiled back at the Korean and the man. “Are we going to have a party, then?”
The faux-ginger girl gave Nikita a sharp prod that was not the friendly jab she pretended it was. “I’ll take it from here. ”
“He wanted to go with me—”
“Girls, I like you both…” said the bald guy.
“With me,” snapped the Korean and this time she gave Ko’s sister a shove.
Nikita brought up her hand to slap the ginger girl, but Ko was there. He grabbed her wrist and turned it. Her slow-burning ire instantly turned on him and she bit Ko where his forearm was bare.
The Korean was already melting away. Ko ignored the pain and dragged his sister, screeching and complaining, back to the car. He forced her into the passenger seat and they set off.
Nikita spat and hissed at him on the way back to the apartment. Now and then she would look directly at him and he could see the dull, doll-like cast in her eyes that told him she was stoned. She alternated between ranting and babbling, the coherence of her speech ebbing and flowing. Ko just concentrated on the driving and tried not to think about it too much. Every time he did, every time he thought honestly about his dissolute sister’s self-destructive life, it made his gut tighten and his temper flare. She worked at places like the Lucky Dot ostensibly as a hostess, which in real terms meant she was paid to look pretty, and ply the corp clients who frequented the bar with overpriced drinks while they pawed at her. It was just slighdy less sordid than being a sexworker. Nikita wasn’t like the girls in the Mongkok sinplexes – although Ko often said she was to get a rise out of her—in some ways, she was worse. It made his blood boil to think that the highlight of her day would be some suited creep, like baldy back, there making eyes at her.
“Least I got a job,” she slurred.
Ko realised too late he’d spoken his thoughts aloud.
“Not like you,” Nikita went on. “What do you do, little brother? Play with your stupid cars—” she smacked the dashboard. “Run stuff for the triads ’cross the border, steal? I’m trying to make something of myself.”
“How? By playing corp wannabe, by sucking up to every suit that comes through the door? What, you think one of them is going to fall for you and make you his mistress, shower you with diamonds and credits? One day, one of those scumbags is going to take you for games back at his place and you’ll end up spent and dead!”
“Don’t judge me!” she shot back. “You’re just like Dad—”
Ko stamped on the brakes and the Ranger screeched to a halt in the middle of Kwun Tong Road. In a low voice, without looking at her, he said, “Don’t talk about him. ”
Nikita fell silent and after a moment they drove on.
Eventually, Frankie had to use the Penfield beside the bed just to get some sleep. Half-considered thoughts and strange, ghostly dream fragments hovered at the edges of his weary mind. Exhaustion and jetlag struck hard the moment he laid eyes on the bed, the inviting spread of cream and chocolate-coloured silk sheets open to him in the middle of the suite. Alice talked about the meeting, but he wasn’t really listening. He remembered falling asleep in his suit.
Once or twice he awoke with that peculiar kind of disassociated fear that comes from finding yourself in a strange bedroom. The subtle electromagnetic aura of the Penfield generator eventually sent him into deep REM and finally Frankie relaxed. He thought, just once, that he had seen the Monkey King in the room with him; but that blurred like rainwater on glass and faded.
A service bot woke him by singing a traditional folk aria. It was a silver ball balanced on two convex wheels that emerged from its flanks. A rotating head presented a pair of cute eyes and a sine wave mouth. It giggled like a child as it did its chores, making him coffee and tuning the shower. The device offered him a trio of vitamin and nanobooster tablets as he got dressed, gravely informing him of the dangers of dehydration on the international traveller. Frankie didn’t argue; his face felt like old paper. When he was done, the metal ball rolled away along the corridor and used arrows projected from laser slits to direct him to the hotel’s rooftop heliport. Alice was waiting for him in an idling spidercopter, with Monkey King in the cockpit.
“Where’s Ping?” The question popped out of his mouth as he strapped himself into a seat.
“Occupied,” Alice replied, as the rotodyne drifted off toward the towers of Central.
Frankie watched the world go by, the glass and steel skyscrapers passing beneath him, the near-distant glitter of Kowloon across the bottle green waters of the bay. There was no need to provide a spidercopter to take him to Yuk Lung’s headquarters—a car would have got him there almost as quickly—but the gesture was obviously important. Everything about Francis Lam’s return to Hong Kong was being choreographed with infinite care and precision. For his part, Frankie could not be sure if it were to make him feel special or just inferior.
Monkey King flew them around the dagger-like shape of the China Bank building, giving the sheath of protected airspace around the fluted NeoGen pyramid nearby a wide berth. The rotorplane turned and made an orbit of the YLHI tower. The company headquarters resembled a column of creamy green jade rising like a pillar of heaven; bright ribs of lunar steel studded the sheer walls, and at the level of the ninetieth floor the ultramodern lines of the tower suddenly stopped. Capping the building was a reproduction of a Qin Dynasty castle, deposited there like something from an ancient legend. Only the discreet clusters of satcomm dishes and ku-band antennae seemed out of place. As the flyer approached, a helipad unfolded from a hidden balcony to accept them, a bee settling into an open flower.
Alice read a message from her watch and beckoned Frankie. “Mr Tze will receive you in the library.”
They were met by one of Monkey King’s counterparts. This one had a mask of green with red and white detail, a little trim of gold here and there. Frankie searched his mind and came up with a name: Deer Child, a mountain guardian from an opera that he couldn’t recall the title of. Deer Child was shorter and stockier than Monkey King, but they were cut from the same cloth. The masked man had the same smooth gait and effortless sense of menace about him.
Frankie followed Alice into the castle and Hong Kong vanished behind him. Inside, the building was warm and close, full of the natural noise of feet on stone floors and creaking wooden doors. Tapestries and art hung on the walls, and there were suits of armour at each intersection of corridor. Frankie wondered if they were more than they seemed; if an alarm sounded, would they suddenly leave their plinths and stand to the defence of the castle’s master?
He glimpsed other rooms as people passed them along the way, doors opening and closing with flashes of glass and steel, banks of holographic monitors and server farms. Behind others came the snapping of wooden practice swords and the patterns of voices from sparring fighters. They emerged in the library and Frankie wandered to the centre of the room to get the measure of the place. Books lined every inch of vertical space, rising far out of reach to the ceiling. Trios of full-size terracotta soldiers, some holding weapons, guarded discreet lamps in the corners of the room, looking on across the centuries with blank stone faces. Frankie hesitated by the low table in the middle of the library and something made his eyes fall to the oak platform. A box made of brushed aluminium sat there, shiny and out of place.
From behind him there came the thud of a heavy door and an intake of breath that was deep and sonorous.
“Francis,” said Mr Tze. “Welcome home. I am so sorry we were required to meet under these terrible circumstances.”
The radiator complained as Ko turned the temperature up a notch or two, the elderly pipes rumbling and knocking. He padded through the apartment in his socks, the quiet routine of breakfast so as not to disturb his sister ingrained in him. He microwaved a couple of meatpockets and made strong tea. The atmosphere inside the apartment was patchy; where the kitchen and the closet-sized bathroom lay against the outer
wall, it was chilly and damp from the rain; the two bedrooms and the living room—the patch of space Nikita laughingly called “the lounge”—were warmer, closer to the central courtyard in the middle of the block where caged heat from the lower floors wafted upwards. The apartment felt gloomy and confined, as if the resonance from their argument on the way home had followed them in and leached into the walls. The sullen ambience in the room was infectious.
Through the walls he could hear the woolly sounds of the Yip family next door, the strident noise of the mother ordering the kids out to school and the usual arguments in return. One of Ko’s other neighbours had told him the Yip boys both had ADHD, but Ko was less inclined to be so generous. The kids were just noisy, unruly and argumentative, and the Yips and the Chens had come to loggerheads over it on many occasions. Nikita didn’t help, with frequent bouts of playing her musichip collection at ear-stunning volume. Plenty of times Ko had come home to hear the strains of some Petya Tcherkassoff ballad reaching down the stairwell from the eleventh floor. He hated that whiney sovpop. Ko’s musical tastes ran to rapcore and PacRim turbine bands like Nine Milly Meeta, 100 Yen or the Kanno Krew.
He glanced over his shoulder as Nikita’s door opened and she clattered into the bathroom. Ko tried to think of more pleasant things as she went through her regular purge ritual in there. Watery morning sunshine filtered in through the peeling UV sheets on the window, casting a faint cage of shadows across the floor where the safety bars crisscrossed outside. Ko wandered over, nibbling at his food, letting the hot tea warm his chilled fingers. In the dull glass he saw a frowning reflection, and peered past it, scanning the street below. The wan daylight revealed skinny tower blocks looking like something from the building set of a patient but unimaginative child, tall rods of polymerised stone growing out of the face of the Kowloon hillside, their footprints barely enough to cover the acreage of a conventional two-tier home like the ones in the walled enclaves. Through the gaps between the other towers, Ko could spy parts of the city beneath its constant cowl of yellow-grey smog. Soon that view would be gone forever. Another new housing project was already sprouting on the hill, a series of con-apts that would rise to twice the height of Ko’s block. Right now, they were just greenish humps in the middle distance, fuzzy shapes like desert cacti from the vat-grown bamboo scaffolds that concealed them. In a few months they would be finished, and a hundred thousand new citizens would feed into Hong Kong from across the border. The city had slowly been advancing out from the bay for centuries, gradually consuming every bit of spare land from the outlying New Territories. There would come a time when the Hong Kong Free Economic Enterprise Quadrant would collide with the ferrocrete wall that marked the edge of True China. Ko did not want to be here when that happened; for a moment his brain flashed on that idea, of he and Nikita as wizened little eldos, still here, still fighting, but too old to go anywhere else.
Jade Dragon Page 4
