The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Eighteen months, Happy Valley, researcher with Business International,’ she said, eyes flashing. The voice was soft and very American.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

  ‘They’re the answers to the three questions everybody asks. How long have you been in Hong Kong, where do you live, what do you do? I thought it would save time. My name’s Jenny.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said, and clinked glasses with her. She looked like she was drinking gin too. ‘Three days, the Excelsior Hotel, journalist.’

  ‘You’re Sally’s brother,’ she said, suddenly looking serious. ‘I’m sorry to be so flippant, I didn’t realize.’

  ‘This is one hell of a small town,’ I said, and took a mouthful of gin and tonic. She looked hurt so I gently nudged her shoulder. ‘It’s OK, really. Are you a friend of Sally’s?’

  ‘I liked her a lot,’ she said, nodding eagerly. ‘Though I’d only known her for six months or so. She was very, how shall I put it, lively. Things seemed to happen when she was around. I’d no idea she was so unhappy.’

  ‘Unhappy?’

  ‘To have killed herself. I suppose she must have been depressed.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Two weeks ago, I think, at a disco in Tsim Sha Tsui East.’

  ‘Did she look depressed then?’

  Jenny laughed, tossing her head back and showing me a set of perfect teeth that were every bit as white as the pearls. ‘No, she was having a great time.’ She frowned. ‘You mean, you don’t think she killed herself?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But at the moment I’ve no idea what did happen.’

  We sat in silence for a while, and watched the guests fill their mouths with food. The party began to split into two, the gweilos moved onto the upper deck leaving the Chinese jostling around the buffet. We were looking down on the heads of two Chinese girls, reporters I guess, who were arguing fiercely in Cantonese.

  ‘What are they so riled about?’ I asked her.

  ‘How should I know?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I mean what are they saying?’

  ‘I can’t speak Chinese, I’m an ABC,’ she said.

  ‘ABC?’

  ‘American-born Chinese. Also known as a banana.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain that one.’

  ‘Yellow on the outside, white on the inside,’ she laughed. ‘You’ve more right to be here than I have. You’re a Brit, you can come and go as you please. I’m a Yank and have to get a visa.’

  ‘And you don’t speak any Chinese?’

  ‘Not a word. Well that’s not exactly true, I can say please and thank you, but that’s about it. I went to a small school in San Francisco and Cantonese wasn’t on the curriculum.’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘They were born in the States, too. I’m a second generation American. And it doesn’t make for an easy life in Hong Kong, I can tell you.’

  ‘Because everyone treats you like a Chinese?’

  ‘That’s it. The gweilos think I’m a local, and the Chinese think I’m stupid because I can’t speak Cantonese. A lot of my friends are in the same boat and it can cause all sorts of psychological problems.’ She saw me smile. ‘Seriously.’

  ‘I believe you. But you can always learn, surely?’

  She raised her glass to her lips, and licked it sensuously, like a snake testing the air.

  ‘There’s nothing sadder than a group of Chinese Americans taking Cantonese lessons,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to go in search of my roots. My roots are in San Francisco.’

  ‘You mean your heart, as the song goes.’

  ‘Yes, my heart, too.’ She looked serious again, frown lines appearing on her forehead. ‘I really am sorry about Sally. I liked her a lot. I still can’t believe she’s dead.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I keep thinking she’ll phone, or I’ll bump into her on the street.’

  ‘What’s going to happen about … I mean, is there going to be a funeral or something? Will it be here, or in England?’

  I shrugged. ‘I hadn’t even thought about that. There’s going to be an autopsy first, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, and closed her eyes.

  Without realizing it I’d taken Sally’s watch from my pocket and was playing with it in my left hand, twisting the strap around my fingers. It was still going so it must have been battery operated but I couldn’t see how the makers could have fitted one in because it was so thin.

  ‘Is that Sally’s?’ asked Jenny. She’d opened her eyes and was leaning forward, her chin resting on her hands.

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s lovely. May I?’

  I handed it over and she laid it flat in the palm of one hand. ‘It looks very expensive. Well, I suppose it would be. Sally loved expensive things.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She had good taste. And in Hong Kong taste doesn’t come cheap.’

  She turned the watch over. ‘I should have known,’ she said, and handed it back. ‘Dennis bought it for her.’

  I’d missed the engraving on the back. ‘To Sally,’ it said. ‘With love,’ it said. ‘From Dennis,’ it said.

  ‘Dennis Lai,’ I said, under my breath.

  ‘You know about Dennis, then?’ she said.

  ‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘And some. He’s loaded. And smitten with Sally.’ She made it sound like a disease, Christopher Robin’s gone down with Alice.

  ‘Have they been going together for long?’ I asked. I couldn’t stop using the present tense.

  ‘As long as I’d known her,’ said Jenny.

  Did she know he was married? I wanted to ask. One of the waiters had appeared with a trayful of smoked salmon and triangles of brown bread and butter. He moved into the centre of a circle of the bank people, four men and two women, one of them the PR organizer, deep in conversation about whether there was more money to be made investing in the yen or the Deutschmark. Money had been their sole topic of conversation since I’d sat down.

  The engines stopped with a splutter and the husband and wife team anchored the junk about two hundred yards from a thin strip of sandy beach. There were no lights on the wooded hillside beyond the beach, no buzz of traffic, just the chirping of unseen insects coming alive and the sound of water sloshing against wood.

  Loudspeakers hidden around the boat suddenly came alive with Dire Straits and I shuddered at the typical Hong Kong style – find a vacuum and fill it, find a need and service it, find a plot of vacant land and build on it. Come across a bit of peace and quiet and murder it. I’d have felt worse if it hadn’t been Dire Straits. I hate boats, I hate the movement, the cramped spaces, the dampness, the smell. Give me an aeroplane every time, but if you had to go to sea then there were much worse ways of doing it than on a Hong Kong Bank junk.

  Beads of condensation were trickling down the crystal cylinder and soaking the paper napkin so I drank it in one and placed it empty on the wooden deck.

  ‘Where did you meet Sally?’ I asked.

  ‘One of the discos in Lan Kwai Fong, I can’t remember which one,’ she said. ‘Sally was as high as a kite.’

  ‘Drunk? Doesn’t sound like Sally.’

  ‘Not drunk, high.’

  ‘She didn’t do drugs.’

  Jenny laughed, and then stifled it when she saw the look on my face. She reached forward and put her hand on my knee. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh.’ She leant back as a waiter walked over and handed me down another gin and tonic.

  She waited for him to go before speaking again. ‘Perhaps there were some things she didn’t tell her big brother,’ she said, handing back the watch.

  ‘It’s beginning to look that way, isn’t it,’ I replied. ‘Did she often get high?’

  ‘When I first knew her, but recently she’d slackened off. Hey, she wasn’t into anything heavy, I know that much. She sniffed a little cocaine, but who doesn’t these days? That
’s as far as it went. She wasn’t an addict or anything.’

  I got to my feet and patted her gently on the head. ‘Jenny,’ I said, ‘it’s been nice meeting you, but I have to get something to soften the impact of all the gin I’ve drunk. I’ll catch you later.’

  She smiled but her eyes were full of concern, for me or for what she’d said, I didn’t know which. Maybe both. I went down the stairs backwards, feeling for the steps one at a time, one-handed because I was still carrying my drink.

  The Chinese reporters were still attacking the buffet en masse like hyenas after a wounded gazelle, elbowing and pushing and piling their plates high with expensive food. Howard and Healy moved in for their share of the kill, Howard holding onto the arm of another young Chinese girl as if afraid that she’d try to escape. Beyond the buffet at the rear of the boat was a large U-shaped seat, upholstered in blue and white striped leather and I flopped onto it.

  Healy had bent his head close to Howard’s ear and was saying something to him, something that made him shake his head furiously. I wondered if it was true what Jenny had said about Sally taking drugs. Of course it had to be true, she had no reason to lie.

  Dick came down the stairs and joined Healy and the two of them came to sit by me, leaving Howard to his food and his girl.

  Healy drained his can of lager, flipped it over his shoulder into the sea and took a replacement out of his jacket pocket while he balanced a plate of food on his knees.

  ‘Keep the harbour clean,’ said Dick, shaking his finger. ‘That’s the slogan the government is trying to push.’

  ‘An uphill job, I’ve given up,’ said Healy, and nodded down at the two plastic bags that were floating past, full of God knows what. ‘The harbour here is practically a sewer, sacrificed, like everything else, to commercialism.’

  ‘It’s better than it was, but I’ll grant that you’ll never see salmon jumping here,’ said Dick.

  ‘They spoil everything, they pollute, they ruin whatever they touch. They show no consideration for the environment,’ said Healy, and I could feel his fiery resentment.

  ‘Why should they look after it?’ Dick asked. ‘Borrowed place, borrowed time. You’re more careful with something you own than something you rent.’ He chewed on a chicken leg.

  ‘Hell, Dick. The people here just don’t care, locals or expats.’

  ‘It’s hard to care when everything you’re working on could be taken off you in a few years.’

  ‘Bullshit. That’s absolute bullshit. The people here are concerned with just one thing – to get as much as they can out of Hong Kong before it’s handed over to the Chinese. It’s asset-stripping that’s got more in common with a West African dictatorship than a crown colony. It’s always been that way here, fortunes earned and won and then shunted offshore as quickly as possible. Expats live here in rented flats and pack their kids off to boarding school in the UK. They’ve probably got a house in London which they’ve rented out and most of their money is sitting in a Jersey bank account. The firms are even worse.’

  ‘You’re an expat, too. You’re not Chinese. You’ve got the sanctuary of a British passport.’

  ‘I’m half British,’ he said. ‘And all I’ve got is a British Dependent Territory passport. And we both know that’s going to be practically useless come 1997.’

  I swirled the gin and tonic around in the glass and listened. Dick wasn’t looking at Healy, his eyes were on the bank’s people and the guests who were gathered around a buffet table. The clink of knives and forks against plates cut through Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing and now and again he was accompanied by the shriek of girlish laughter or a loud, bellowing guffaw.

  The wind caught Dick’s hair and blew it across his head, undoing his cover-up job and revealing his bald patch like a pale piece of raw chicken in the moonlight. For a gut-wrenching moment my mind flashed back to Sally lying naked in the mortuary but I stamped on the thought. Hard. A full eight inches of hair now flapped in the breeze like the flag at the back of the junk.

  ‘Even you guys can see which way the wind is blowing,’ said Healy and I had to smile at that one, ‘because more than three-quarters of your business comes from outside Hong Kong.’

  ‘I can’t see why it upsets you so much,’ said Dick, pulling his hair back into place with his free hand. He’d have had more luck solving Rubik’s cube with one arm tied behind his back.

  ‘If you really want to know, it’s because the whole place is run by amateurs, from the government down. People who wouldn’t be able to cut it back in London living the life of Riley on the backs of five million Chinese. Civil servants who wouldn’t have got above the rank of clerical assistant in an English tax office being able to make the sort of decisions here that at home they’d only read about in the Telegraph. Property developers with maids, houses on the Peak and Rolls Royces.’

  ‘They have these in London too.’

  ‘Sure, but they work for it there. They get it on merit, on skill. Here, it’s because they’re Englishmen abroad. Look at the sort of ponces you’ve got on this boat. What would they be back home? Deputy assistant manager of some piddling little branch in Clapham. Here they’re Lords of the Manor, waited on and courted by all and sundry. Yet the bank is nothing. Nothing. Most people in England haven’t even heard of it.’

  ‘We’re big in Hong Kong,’ said Dick. He’d swayed to his feet and was standing like a punch-drunk boxer waiting for the bell to sound.

  ‘And what’s Hong Kong? Nothing. A pimple on the backside of China and it’s you and your kind who are squeezing it. A casino of a stock market with ideas above its station, a sprinkling of banks, a property market that makes its money solely on the back of scarcity of land, and a manufacturing sector that’s ten years behind the times. What do they actually make here – clothes, watches and toys. Its one saving grace is its place in the time zone, and Tokyo’s taken that advantage clean away, and the fact that it’s a gateway to China. Before too long it’ll just be a very small part of China, so what then?

  ‘It’s nothing, Dick. And so are you lot. Amateurs every one.’

  Dick refused to be beaten and he waved his plate at me, looking for me to back him up.

  ‘You’re a visitor,’ he said, ‘what’s the view from London?’

  I sipped my gin and tonic. Most of the ice had melted but it still tasted OK.

  ‘The view of what?’ I asked. ‘The place or the people?’

  ‘Both.’ Healy lit another cigarette and waited for me to speak.

  ‘The place? I guess the exotic Far East, rickshaws and coolies. A place where they make plastic toys and cheap clothes. A town where sailors can get a little R and R. That’s about it. The way its financial community acted during the stock market crash didn’t do much for its reputation. It got a terrible press back in the UK.’

  ‘Damn right,’ said Healy, jabbing the air with the stub of his cigarette. ‘Mickey fucking Mouse. The stock exchange just shut its doors for four days and fell through the floor when it reopened. And what did the British administration do? Sweet FA, just stood by and watched. And then called in an English merchant banker to help bail out the futures exchange.’

  ‘Yeah, that got in the UK papers, too,’ I said, and I could see that Dick regretted asking for my support. I suppose he thought we British would stick together. Pompous bastard, he’d asked for it.

  Healy flashed me a smile. ‘And the people?’ he said quietly.

  ‘One of the last bastions of the British empire,’ I said. ‘And the expats here are the same as everywhere else in the world. Has-beens and also-rans who couldn’t make it back home proving that the mediocre can still thrive so long as you have another race to lord it over. Only in Hong Kong’s case it’s like the band playing as the Titanic went down.’

  Dick missed the last bit because by then he’d turned his back on us and ambled to the stairs so that he could join the pals Healy and I had put such a lot of effort into slagging off.

  Maybe h
e hadn’t deserved it, though to be honest I didn’t care.

  ‘Twats like that really get up my nose,’ said Healy. ‘They act like they own the fucking place.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘I suppose he’s going to sulk.’

  ‘No doubt about it,’ he laughed and we both sat there chuckling. When he stopped I asked him if he’d ever known Sally take drugs, and he squinted at me.

  ‘No, why do you ask?’

  ‘Dunno, just a feeling.’ I nodded at the deck above us. ‘Drugs just seem to go with this sort of lifestyle, you know, the moonlit cruise, the flash parties, fiddling while Rome burns, all that sort of crap. Drugs would just seem to fit in, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s a lot of it going on, I can’t deny that. But as far as I know Sally wasn’t involved in it.’ I wanted to ask Healy if he was a part of the drugs scene but he was hardly likely to say yes, and if he was, why had he put Sally on the cocaine story? ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get some fresh air at the sharp end. See you later.’

  I weaved through the scavenging pack of Chinese reporters and walked up to the prow where I leant against the waist-high stainless steel railing looking down at the water lapping against the boat with the sound of a face being slapped.

  Sally on drugs? Still didn’t seem likely, not the Sally I knew anyway. I remembered a conversation we’d had three or four years ago when I’d called round at her flat and found it reeking of pot. I’d ended up playing the heavy elder brother, sitting on her sofa and lecturing her as she’d knelt by my side with her chin on my knee, dimples in her cheeks.

  ‘You’re angry,’ she’d said and pouted, and I tweaked her nose.

  ‘Of course I’m angry,’ I fumed. ‘I’m fucking appalled.’

  ‘Don’t swear,’ she said, still smiling, but the dimples had disappeared.