Hiroshima Joe: A Novel

by Martin Booth

  The avenue was a tree-lined road that wound serpent-like up a low hill. The buildings upon it, some of them houses and others low-storied, luxury apartment blocks, were the homes of the exceptionally rich. Few people in Hong Kong could afford a house at all, let alone a garden, but some of these properties had substantial gardens with shrubs and flower borders and trees that kept the buildings cool in the summer and protected them from the strong, cold winds of winter which blew straight down from northern China.

  The lighting in the street was subdued and provided by old-fashioned lamps in glass lanterns on cast-iron poles. The branches of pines hung over the stone or brick walls of the gardens, and the pavements were crisp with fallen needles. For this Sandingham was grateful, for the debris silenced his footsteps somewhat.

  The gates to the house were shut. Mounted on the wall beside them, covered by a lintel in the shape of a classical-style Chinese roof, was a bell-push. Sandingham pressed it and the light in the switch went out as he rang. Over his head, in an adjacent pine tree, a light snapped on. A Chinese guard came to the gate.

  ‘Who you?’

  ‘My name is Mr Sandingham.’

  The guard scrutinised his wristwatch, holding it at an angle to catch the light from the tree.

  ‘You early. Not you turn yet. Qwartah ‘our. You come.’

  He walked off through the shrubbery.

  It was certainly not what Sandingham had expected. He had thought he would be taken in, given a talking to, have his pecunary offering accepted and then be ejected into the shadows of Kadoorie Avenue within a matter of minutes.

  Thirty yards up the road Sandingham stopped by a China Light and Power junction box on the pavement. It was between street lamps and in semi-darkness. From it he could see the gateway. To make sure he was unobserved, he walked past it and into a cul-de-sac on his left, then doubled back to squat down on his haunches by the metal cube. Thus camouflaged, he began his watch on the entrance to the gardens.

  He did not have to wait long. A Cadillac drove up the hill and the chauffeur stopped it by the gate, the sidelights off and the engine running. The gate opened and a European came smartly out from the grounds, crossed the road and got into the car. It drove off; the headlights were not switched on until it was halfway to Prince Edward Road. As it passed him, Sandingham hopped his way round the junction box.

  He rang again and the guard reappeared.

  ‘Who you?’ he asked again, although he could clearly see Sandingham.

  The name given, he unbolted the gate and allowed Sandingham to enter.

  There was a short driveway curving round to a circular area before a porch. The house was modernistic and square, with deep-set balconies along the top, second storey. To the left of the porch was an American convertible with the roof up. It struck a tiny chord in Sandingham’s mind.

  The guard pressed a buzzer on the front door and it opened.

  ‘You go in. Wai’.’

  He did as he was told.

  The hallway was marble-floored, the walls hung with ornately framed mirrors and pictures of Chinese scenes in a mountainous region. Upon a table was a white telephone and, above it, a white-fronded pampas-like plant dipping its ferny seeds over the telephone directory. Sandingham noticed that the disc of card in the centre of the dial had been reversed. No visitor could tell the number. A stairway rose to an upstairs landing.

  A door at the far end of the hall opened and an elderly amah in servant’s uniform, black trousers and a loose white shirt, shuffled towards him. Her feet were tiny, having been bound in her childhood. She had a slight stoop and her hands seemed older than the rest of her body. She kept her eyes on the floor before her.

  ‘Come,’ she instructed without even looking at him and he followed her off to the right down a passage carpeted with coarse, colourful Afghan rugs.

  The amah stopped at a deep-stained wooden door and knocked quietly. She waited for a moment, then twisted the brass handle, stepping aside that Sandingham might enter.

  The room was large. The marbled floor was strewn with deep-piled Tientsin carpets and on the beige-coloured walls hung a miscellany of pictures. Sandingham recognised some of them as Chinnery’s. A wood fire was burning. On the mantelpiece above stood another gilt-framed mirror before which stood a huge ivory statue of the Goddess of Mercy, Kuan Yin. Her frail figure was erect and hanging in wraiths of carved ivory cloth, as if she were dressed in clouds. Sandingham appreciated, in a morbid way, the irony of such a deity in such a room.

  Before the fire was ranged a lounge suite in white leather, with maroon, emerald and azure Thai silk cushions scattered upon it. Two of the four armchairs had tall backs. The tables were all under a foot high and made of camphorwood. An antique brass tea urn rested on a trellis by the curtains that, Sandingham realised from their size, must cover a large glass patio door leading on to the garden.

  ‘Good evening, Joseph.’

  Francis Leung was behind him, had been there as the door opened. He was holding a goblet of brandy which he had just poured from a cocktail cabinet. He was wearing a dinner suit.

  ‘Good evening, Francis.’

  ‘Mr Leung, please. Sit down.’

  Leung pointed to an armchair in the centre of the room. As Sandingham went towards it he discovered that there was another person present, seated in one of the high armchairs.

  She was a remarkably beautiful woman in her late teens or early twenties. Such beauty could only be the possession of a Eurasian – and of Francis Leung. Her cheeks were high and her eyes almond. Her skin was smooth and held the inner glow of health. Her fingers, where they rested on the white leather, were long and artistically thin. Her hair was auburn and gleamed in the firelight. She was wearing an ankle-length evening dress of black brocade with a sparsely embroidered decoration of tiny blossoms.

  ‘Good evening,’ Sandingham greeted her. He had not expected anyone else to be in the room save perhaps a guard. It was unfortunate.

  She tilted her head to him and smiled, but there was no friendship in her movements. Leung made no attempt to introduce them.

  ‘Will you have a drink, Joseph?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. I’d like a scotch.’

  While Leung poured this into a cut-glass tumbler, Sandingham studied the room. He wanted to say, ‘What a nice place you’ve got here,’ but thought the better of it. Instead, he looked at the girl and then it came to him. He had seen her, months before, driving the convertible parked outside, on the day he had gone to see Francis Leung when the old man and the youth had tried to get his money off him at the bus stop by Kowloon City.

  ‘Here.’

  Leung handed him a glass with a mere splash of good whiskey in it. The amount was intended as an insult but Sandingham tried to ignore this and sipped it, enjoying the aroma in his nose as much as the burn in his throat.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now. Have you the two hundred?’

  Sandingham reached deep into his pocket and produced the envelope. It was slightly stained from rubbing against oily metal. He could smell it as it left his hand. As he walked across the room and took it, Leung did not.

  ‘This doesn’t feel like two hundred,’ Francis Leung observed, slitting the envelope open with his index finger. ‘It feels,’ and he flicked through the notes, ‘like seventy-five.’

  ‘Seventy-one,’ Sandingham replied, surprised that Leung could be so accurate. He drained his glass.

  ‘I see.’ He put his hand out. ‘Another scotch?’

  Sandingham lifted the tumbler.

  Leung put it down on one of the tables, turning away as he did so and counting through the money.

  ‘Seventy-one bucks,’ he mused. He placed the money in his pocket, picked up the empty glass and, quick as a cat, smashed it into Sandingham’s ear. The glass did not break but Sandingham’s ear began to bleed.

  ‘Not even the interest,’ Leung said as if nothing had happened.

  ‘I’m sorry?…’

  Sa
ndingham couldn’t hear. His ear was twitching with the fluid movement of his blood.

  Leung leaned over.

  ‘Not even the interest,’ he repeated. ‘I still want the whole amount. This is inconvenience money.’

  ‘How can I?’

  ‘I do not know. How do I care? It is your business.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘No. It was the fault of the Chinese Government. But you are responsible for my investment in you.’

  It was time to appeal. Bargaining was useless and reasoning less so. Sandingham put a hand to his head to staunch the blood. It was congealing inside his ear.

  ‘Does nothing of the past affect you? We were once equals, once in the same hell and we helped each other. In the trenches of Kai Tak. Against the Japs. We fought side by side.’

  ‘No. We were never equals. We did not fight together. You were a prisoner, a slave worker. I was the fighter. I took the risks. I killed the Japanese, not you. You never ambushed Japanese in the New Territories. I did. You surrendered. I would never surrender.’

  ‘But the circumstances –’

  ‘They don’t count,’ Leung interrupted him. ‘You should have died – fighting. That’s the trouble with you Europeans. You value life too highly. Life in the East is cheap.’

  Sandingham knew only too well life’s intrinsic value. But nearly four years in prisoner-of-war camps had taught him the lesson that it was not cheap at all, but cost dear. And it wasn’t just Europeans’ lives either. Mr Mishima’s face flashed across his mind’s eye.

  ‘So don’t pretend, Joseph, that you are a comrade of mine. You are just like my guards. Expendable in time. They know that. Why do you not accept it?’

  It dawned on Sandingham then that all that Number 177 had done for them in the war was not done for them at all. It was a part of business. That made him furious, but he locked his anger in.

  ‘So now what?’ he questioned Leung sullenly.

  ‘So now you have at least three hundred dollars by Saturday. Or else I may have to accept that you are a loss and write you off as one.’

  There was a knock on the door. Leung spoke and the amah entered with a miniature package the size of a matchbox. It was placed on the drinks cabinet. She left as soft-footedly and as limpingly as she had come. In her was epitomised, that moment, all the cruelty for which Leung stood: an old woman who had had her feet bound and deformed as an infant in the dictates of good taste and the sexual fetish the Chinese had for small feet.

  He did not have to be told what was in the package, wrapped as it was in brown greaseproof paper, but Leung could not resist telling him.

  ‘Opium,’ he said. ‘But not for you. Not until I get the settlement. Three hundred this Saturday, three hundred the next and then we’ll see.’

  Picking up the drug, he tossed it to the girl who caught it daintily and put it in an evening bag.

  ‘A gift for a friend,’ she said mockingly, the first words she had spoken. Her accent was very feminine and yet icily cold.

  ‘Now you leave, Joseph. We have a supper party to attend on the other side of the harbour. I will show you out.’

  He spoke briefly in Cantonese to the girl who stood up and smoothed her hair in the mirror.

  Sandingham raised himself from his armchair, his right hand in his pocket. Leung half-faced him as he put out an arm to open the door.

  ‘I’m sorry about the money,’ Sandingham muttered as he got nearer to Leung.

  The steel spike was so much heavier than he had expected it to be. But it was so fast. He tore it up through the material of his jacket, through the white front of Leung’s evening shirt and under his ribs. He slid it in so easily. He wondered if perhaps the oil on it helped.

  Leung spluttered. His left hand dropped from the unturned door knob and his right grabbed for his heart. He dropped on to the marble and his blood puddled out from his chest. Falling, the spike that was jammed in a rib-space tore free from Sandingham’s coat.

  The girl heard the brief commotion and looked over her own shoulder in the mirror. She saw Leung drop and she also saw Sandingham halfway across the room towards her. She opened her mouth but not a sound issued from it. Sandingham spun her round, hit her on the side of her head with his fist and knocked her to the floor. He then kicked her in the side. She grunted. He grabbed hold of the ivory statue. It must have weighed ten pounds. He bludgeoned her head with it. Her blood smeared the yellowing ivory.

  By the door, Leung was moving. His free hand was trying to get at the inside pocket of his jacket. Sandingham kicked him hard on the side of his neck.

  Sandingham secured the lock on the door, then turned Leung over. In a shoulder holster under Leung’s jacket was a pistol. It was a Webley .455 Mark VI: standard British Army issue in the war. The weapon was in prime condition.

  Leung was still breathing. Sandingham pulled the spike free. He would have liked to have used the pistol but it would have made much too much of a noise in the confinement of the room.

  Leung’s eyes were glazed with encroaching death. He attempted to say something.

  ‘Don’t try to speak, you bastard,’ Sandingham whispered.

  It would have been good, Sandingham thought, to have left Leung to die slowly, but to do that might have risked him surviving. He had to finish it.

  ‘The debt’s settled now, you son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘For me, for Lucy, for the whole fuck-up you’ve made of my life.’

  Leung’s eyelids fluttered, which Sandingham took to be comprehension.

  From Leung’s pocket he retrieved the seventy-one dollars in the tell-tale envelope. He was disappointed to find nothing in his wallet. Rich men hadn’t the need to carry cash, he reasoned.

  He held the spike over Leung’s forehead for a moment, then plunged it into the skull. It took three attempts to get it through the dome of bone. At each strike, Leung’s limbs jerked, marionnette-like.

  Sandingham returned to the girl and opened her handbag. He took out the money it contained and the opium and tossed what was left on to the fire.

  He checked that the patio doors were not locked, then put out the lights.

  The drinks cabinet was very well stocked. Good cognac, ordinary brandy, scotch, bourbon, gin, vodka, rice spirit, rum … more than one bottle of most. He started with the white rum and finished with the brandy.

  The final bottle he emptied in a stream towards the fire. It ignited and the flames spread in a leisurely flow across the spilt alcohol towards the leather suite and the tables and paintings and the two corpses which Sandingham had replaced in their chairs, close to the fire. For good measure, he had dowsed both bodies with spirits. Looking back, he saw them both aflame but could not bear to stand and watch: he had had enough of that.

  He drew the curtains after him, but left the patio doors open by a foot or so. Fires need to breathe.

  The garden wall was eight feet high and decorated along the top with broken glass. He climbed a pine tree, stepped gingerly on to the glass and jumped into the street. Still no one in sight. Keeping as much as he could to the shadows, he went down the hill to Argyle Street, crossed over and was in his hotel room, shaking with uncontrollable excitement, within five minutes. He opened the window, but did not hear the fire brigade racing along Argyle Street. By now, they would be too late anyway. It was then he sliced open the opium.

  * * *

  He was not sorry that he had killed Leung. It was his only viable option. However, the act of killing both him and the girl had filled him with disgust. He lamented that the situation had left him only this way out.

  To kill was so sordid, so messy, so incredibly irreversible. To destroy life was to eradicate creation and the beauty of existence, totally and irrevocably. His grandfather had once said to him that when you shot a rabbit you weren’t killing an animal but causing a complex machine to cease functioning: you were stopping for eternity a living unit.

  The girl had not been in his plans, and he was sorry he had bee
n forced to get rid of her too. In her case, it was real beauty he was removing from the world. It was as bad as setting fire to the Chinnery paintings and the ivory statue of Kuan Yin. They could not be reconstructed from the ashes. The thought of ashes made him shiver. Setting light to their bodies had been the worst thing, far worse than killing them, even. He knew what they must look like by now.

  Yet the more he thought over his actions of the evening the more he grew distanced from them. Like killing the guard in the wheelhouse of the Lisbon Maru – it was necessary. It was a function that had to be fulfilled. One didn’t question it. One did it as a matter of course. For the python to live, the hare must die. Some Chinese sage must have drawn that conclusion, and stated it so.

  The magical fumes from the pipe began to seep into his nerves.

  He reassessed his day. A new friend lost through selfish blundering. An old friend lost through hatred and the inner conceit of men always to do better than their peers, regardless of the price. A killing – two killings – that showed to him he was just the same as ever, just as capable of inhuman behaviour as ever.

  Drifting into the blissful mist of the opium, Sandingham allowed his regrets to fade. For a moment, though, just before the drug owned him completely, he wondered if the same reasoning hadn’t been logically structured in the mind of Fujihara as he had commanded Willy’s firing squad, or in Mr Hoshigima’s son’s thoughts as the undercarriage dropped away from his aeroplane or in the brain of Captain Parsons, in the belly of the B29, as he gave the last screw its final tweak.

  * * *

  The police did not arrive to arrest him. For three days, Sandingham remained in the hotel fearing that every footstep along the corridor was an inspector and two constables with a warrant and a pair of handcuffs.

  The story did not reach the newspapers, either. There was no report of the fire or the deaths. A week later, however, there were a few column inches on an inner page about the remains of two bodies – a man and a woman – being found in the sea off Lau Fau Shan. They had been badly burned and identification was impossible. It was also impossible to discern the date of death. It was assumed they were illegal immigrants who had met with a grizzly fate trying to negotiate the treacherous waters of Deep Bay.