‘There is one thing you should know,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Mr Yip here thinks the orders came from overseas, from Europe. And he says the same connection ordered the American to be killed.’
‘The triads have connections in Europe?’
‘The gangs are no different to anyone else in Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘They are getting nervous about 1997 and what Communist control will mean. Many have already moved to Amsterdam where they mastermind the importation of Golden Triangle heroin through the EEC. Every major city has its Chinatown, and every Chinatown has its triads. It would not be difficult for anyone in a European city to make contact with the triads, believe me. They are a fact of life.’
‘You seem to know a lot about them,’ I said, as he replaced the lighter in his pocket. The blowtorch was six feet away but I could feel the heat on my face.
‘It is impossible to do business in Hong Kong without coming up against them. The larger ones consist of more than twenty thousand people, men and women, bigger than many companies. Very well organized, too. Look at this, for instance.’
He took a radio pager off the table and held it out to me. I took it, a small plastic bleeper with a built-in speaker. ‘Most of them carry pagers, and some of them even have portable telephones now.’
‘Dial-A-Villain,’ I said, but he obviously didn’t understand, so I just shrugged and put it back on the table next to his telephone.
‘There are very few of my businesses that don’t deal with the triads,’ he continued. ‘They’re into construction, distribution, and of course protection. And like everybody else, I pay. On occasions they are even useful.’
A thought struck me. ‘Why did the European connection want Seligman killed?’ I asked him.
‘You miss the point,’ he said. ‘The bomb in the car wasn’t just meant for the American. The idea was to kill you both. They expected you to be in the car as well.’
‘All that means is they knew I’d been into China to see the mining camp. We were making them nervous.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lai. ‘But Mr Yip here says that before Mr Ho planted the bomb he removed a briefcase from the car.’
‘A Gucci briefcase?’
He nodded. ‘Sally’s,’ he said.
‘What are you going to do with him?’ I asked, and nodded towards Yip, whose eyes were wide with fear now as he tried to swing away from Lai and the torch.
‘What do you think I am going to do?’ Lai replied. ‘I am going to find out everything I can from him. I have yet to find out why they were ordered to kill you and the American. He says he doesn’t know why, but I have yet to be convinced.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I will kill him.’
‘And if the police find out?’
Lai laughed out loud at that, and he spoke quickly in Cantonese to the three men who’d brought me in the Mercedes. They joined in the laughter, their guffaws echoing around the room.
Eventually Lai decided that it was time to let me in on the joke. ‘What on earth makes you think the police don’t know?’ he said, and pointed at Rotten Teeth, who reached into his jacket and pulled out a laminated warrant card which he waved gleefully in front of my face. ‘It isn’t only the triads who have friends in the police,’ said Lai, grinning widely.
‘The best police force money can buy?’ I said.
‘Not money,’ he said. ‘Favours. Favours given and favours owed. That’s why they came to me when they’d traced Mr Yip, and didn’t just throw him in jail.’
‘How did they find him?’
‘Hong Kong is a very small place,’ he said. ‘Sally’s death and the bomb in Central attracted a great deal of attention. A lot of police have spent a lot of time asking a lot of questions of a lot of triads. With all this fuss it has been hard for either side to get on with business. The other triad organizations have been particularly upset at what happened, and it was one of them who tipped off the police, and they in turn came to me. Together we will bring this to its conclusion.’
He turned his back on me, a signal that I was dismissed.
‘They will take you to find Mr Ho,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Mr Yip here says that he has the case. You will take it, I will have Mr Ho.’
I didn’t wait to hear any more, I fled the room, eager to get away before the screams started and the air filled once more with the stench of burning flesh.
The three coppers followed me into the lift and we were soon back in the car, heading God knows where. Mong Kok, Lai had said, but that meant nothing to me. A hand grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and once again my head was thrust between my legs for five minutes before they allowed me up again. Sometime later the green taxis became red so I knew we were out of the New Territories and back in Kowloon.
We parked the Mercedes on a single yellow line and the driver took a handwritten notice out of the glove compartment and shoved it on the dashboard where it could be seen from the outside. The four large Chinese characters on the card could have said ‘Doctor on Call’, or ‘Broken Down’, or ‘Back in Ten Minutes’ or ‘For Sale’, but to me they looked for all the world like a man with an axe chasing a three-legged horse towards a thicket of trees. You ought to see me taking the ink blot test – I’m a riot.
All around us there were large open-topped lorries piled high with cardboard boxes. They were being loaded by young men wearing boxer shorts and training shoes, all were marked with tattoos and all had the ubiquitous bleepers attached to their belts. The tattoos ranged from small daggers on their shoulders to huge red and green dragons that rippled and waved as their owners worked, moisture glistening on their bodies. They worked noisily, shouting and cursing in Cantonese, a constant barrage of chatter like monkeys in a zoo. Once the lorries had been loaded as high as was physically possible the boxes were lashed down with rope and then the vehicles would back into the road, the loaders banging the wooden sides with steel hooks to sound a warning. Most of the drivers had their radios on and their windows wide open, and all seemed to be tuned to different stations, so as we walked along the road there was a wall of incomprehensible sound as each programme merged into the next.
While the lorries were loaded the drivers slept sprawled across the front seats of their trucks, feet sticking out of the windows. They even snored at full volume.
The road was a mixture of factories and shops, and at one point we walked past a restaurant with plastic-covered tables spilling out onto the pavement. Most were occupied by men sitting on small stools, shoving in meat and rice with chopsticks from bowls lifted close to their chins, chewing with relish and then spitting the bones onto the table top. Even as they ate they were talking, shouting, and arguing. The food was ladled from huge steaming vats by a lady with a weightlifter’s forearms into blue plastic bowls held by two old men in stained white T-shirts and what looked like pyjama bottoms held up with string. The two were well past pensionable age and could have been twins, the years wiping away most of the distinguishing features and leaving them bald, wrinkled and toothless. They smoked as they worked, ash scattering across the tables as they leant over and clattered the food down in front of the customers.
The shop next to it was a butcher’s, where a team of men with bloodstained T-shirts hacked away at fresh carcasses with cleavers, ripping out the offal and throwing it into wicker baskets where it lay steaming. As they cut off individual joints these were speared on hooks and hung from the ceiling. A young housewife with a small child strapped to her back with a strip of bright yellow cloth poked at a pile of tripe and one of the men wrapped it in brown paper for her. The child giggled and played with its mother’s pigtail.
At the back of the shop was a large brazier and a boy sat next to it with half a pig impaled on a wooden stake, turning it slowly above the flames as it blackened and the fat hissed and smoked. The smell made me want to throw up.
In front of the shop was a line of cages raised off the ground, full of cluckin
g chickens. A housewife opened a hatch on the top of one of the cages and reached in to pull out a bird by its wings. I’d seen the SPG use a similar grip on a student protesting against apartheid in Trafalgar Square a few years back, in the days when students were more concerned about politics than whether or not they’d get a job after graduating. It squawked angrily and tried to peck her as she squeezed its breast between her bony fingers. Satisfied with her choice, she deftly swung the bird upside down and held it by the legs before paying one of the butchers with coins from a small purse.
One chicken had managed to escape from its cage but it stayed close by, pecking idly at grain on the pavement as it waited to be returned to its mates.
The next building was a tall factory, and water dripped down from the air-conditioners high above and then trickled along the pavement and into the rubbish-filled gutters.
The space alongside the wall wasn’t wasted, though, hawkers had pulled up their barrows and were selling British Home Stores shirts and Charles Jourdan belts and silk ties, their wares displayed on circular trays the size of dinner tables, protected by umbrellas to deflect the falling water.
A key-cutter had set up his grinding machine and was idly exploring his mouth with a toothpick as he waited for a customer. Down on the floor by his side sat a woman of indeterminate age with short frizzy hair and a purple birthmark the shape of a lizard stretched across one cheek, the tail nestling against her upper lip. In front of her was a low-sided wooden box, about three feet square, filled with small cars with red flashing lights that buzzed around, reversing each time they hit the wall. They seemed to be making more of an attempt to escape than the chickens.
The factory building curved around to the right and we followed the bend past the last of the shops and turned into a narrow alley, dark and dank despite the heat. Twenty feet into the passage was an open doorway which led to a flight of stone stairs. As we climbed them in single file the air was filled with clicking noises, like a geiger counter gone mad.
The stairway led into a hall and at the end of the hall was an ornate wooden entrance that opened into a room the size of a small tennis court pitch packed to the edges with small square tables and men and women playing with small ivory tiles. Around the edge of the arena were dozens of private rooms with their own games going on.
A great deal of effort was being put into making the games as noisy as possible, the players were banging and crashing the tiles onto the tables, rattling them around, or just tapping them together while they planned their next moves. There were four at each table, but three times as many spectators crowding round, chatting to each other and by the look of the wads of notes that were being handed around, gambling furiously. Old men shuffled around pouring tea or brandy into glasses, emptying ashtrays into metal buckets and sweeping the floor with battered brooms. Just like a casino there were no windows and no clocks, no sense of time passing.
I looked at Rotten Teeth and he shrugged. He didn’t have to put it into words – we didn’t have a hope in hell of spotting Ho among the hundreds of mah jong players and spectators. Even assuming he was one of the three men who’d beaten me up – I was getting past the stage of thinking of it as a fight – I would be hard pushed to pick him out of the crowd, especially as most of the players had their heads down scrutinizing their tiles.
I motioned towards the door and this time we left with me leading the way. The three cops were talking quickly among themselves, but I guess they realized I knew what I was doing so they kept up with me.
Back in the car I managed to explain to the driver that I wanted him to call Lai and when Lai answered there was a disappointed edge to his voice as if we’d taken him away from a good meal or a favourite film.
I explained the problem and I asked him to persuade Yip to give us Ho’s bleeper number.
‘No problem,’ he said, and he left the phone switched on as he went back to the hanging man. I heard the blowtorch roar and then a far-off scream before Lai picked up the telephone again. ‘I have it,’ he said, his breathing even, completely calm. I thought I could hear moaning in the background but it could have been my imagination.
‘Give us ten minutes and then call the paging company,’ I said, and rang off.
We went back to the mah jong club and spread out among the crowds of spectators, trying to cover as big an area as possible so that hopefully one of us would be within earshot of the bleeper when it went off. The three cops attracted no attention at all as they stood and watched the games but I was on the receiving end of a lot of sidelong glances as we waited. I guess it wasn’t the sort of place that gweilos normally went, and it probably wasn’t helped by the fact that I looked like a policeman myself. That’s partly deliberate. After working the crime beat for a while you start to look like you work in CID, you dress in the same clothes, have a similar hair style, talk the same slang. You have to if you want to be accepted, it’s the camouflage that lets you get in close. Some papers take it even further, and make sure that their office cars are the same colour and model as their local CID uses, even down to the same aerial configuration. It makes it a lot easier to get to the scene of a crime, and with the right look on your face you can often get waved through roadblocks and the like. I’ve had more than my fair share of salutes from zealous uniformed cops, too.
Looking like a copper also helps when you’re sniffing around an accident asking questions. If you don’t identify yourself everybody assumes you’re a cop. People talk to the police whereas they might tell a journalist to go fuck himself. Camouflage.
But looking like a cop in a triad haunt probably wasn’t too smart a move, a bit like being disguised as a turkey on Christmas Eve.
The bleeper when it did burst into life was on the belt of a young Chinese guy at the table next to the one I was standing at, and as I turned my head towards the sound he looked up and we recognized each other immediately. The last time I’d seen him he’d been lying flat on his back in the Excelsior Hotel, clutching his balls and squealing. He jumped to his feet, his chair tipping back, hands moving up to grab the table. I started to move towards him but he heaved the table over, and the spectators scattered, falling backwards to avoid being hit. The tiles slid against each other and then avalanched to the floor. I was bumped and jostled, maybe because there was so much confusion but more likely because they realized that I was an enemy after one of their own.
Suddenly I was in the middle of a crowd, not hostile, just passively blocking my way. There was no point in shouting ‘Stop’ or ‘Wait’ or anything, but I yelled anyway, to express my anger and to get my three little helpers over to where the action was. I tried to push through the human wall but the more effort I made the more resistance I met.
‘Immigration,’ I screamed at the top of my voice. That seemed to do the trick. I immediately knew how Moses felt when he waved his staff over the Red Sea. The crowds began to pour out of the doors and within seconds all that were left were the staff, my three helpers, and Ho. Yeah. OK. So I lied. The cops were laughing and Rotten Teeth clapped his hands together to show his appreciation, but they stopped when Ho reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife. I recognized it. The look on his face was pure hate as he stepped forward waving the knife, his feet crunching on the fallen mah jong tiles and broken brandy glasses. One of the old men was busily sweeping up the breakages with a straw broom, head down and seemingly oblivious to the conflict. He cleared his throat noisily and spat, a white, frothy blob hitting the ground about six inches away from my left foot. I grabbed the brush from his hand and it was like stealing a rattle from a baby. He saw my anger and backed away, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. I hefted it in my hands, felt the weight and swung it gently from side to side as Ho moved in. Rotten Teeth and the other two kept their distance, hands on hips as they watched Ho weighing me up. Rotten Teeth was laughing gently, as if refusing to take the fight seriously.
I had the advantage when it came to reach, but if it came to a choice between
being stabbed in the stomach or belted on the head with a stick, I knew which I’d go for. He kept the blade low, holding his free hand out towards me with the fingers twitching up and down as he made a hissing noise through pursed lips. He got to within three feet of me before Rotten Teeth pulled a pistol out of the back of his trousers, pointed it at Ho’s head and spoke to him in rapid Cantonese. I could appreciate the joke now, and saw why they hadn’t rushed to help me.
Ho grunted and threw the knife onto the floor and raised his arms above his head. I stepped forward, dropped the broom to one side and kicked him in the crotch, hard. I got a round of applause from the three cops for that and they helped pick Ho up off the floor, his hands once again clutched to his private parts, and carried him back to the Mercedes.
I sat in the front passenger seat while Rotten Teeth drove and the twins worked Ho over in the back, nothing serious, just enough so that he’d tell them where he lived. It didn’t take long and, to be honest, I would have been quite happy to have given them a hand. Or a foot.
He lived on the twenty-eighth floor of a high-rise block five minutes’ drive away from the mah jong hall. Ho sat on a grey plastic sofa and gently rubbed his groin, his eyes full of resentment. I wanted to make a joke about red poles but I knew he wouldn’t understand so I helped the cops rip the flat apart instead. The kitchen walls were thick with grease, and as I went through the cupboards I was watched by a lazy cockroach which stood on an unwashed wok in the sink. Nothing, just bottles of strange vegetables, packets of freeze-dried soup and a big polythene bag of Australian white rice with a red kangaroo on the front. There was a small fridge rattling away in the corner but all it contained were cans of San Miguel and a half-empty bottle of Kowloon Dairy milk.
Back in the small lounge Ho was screaming at Rotten Teeth who was merrily pulling everything out of a teak veneered wall unit and throwing the contents over his shoulder. By the time he’d finished the floor was littered with comics and dirty magazines. The twins had started on the main bedroom, grabbing all the clothes from a closet set into the wall and going through the pockets. One discovered a roll of red notes and he pocketed them without a word.
The Fireman Page 24
