by Dawson, Mark
“What you want?” the barman asked in harsh, rough English.
“The same as before.”
The barman went to the cabinet and pulled out a drawer. It was full of small plastic bags, each of which was stuffed with a green-brown material. He opened one of the bags, ripped out a handful of buds and wrapped them in a piece of newspaper.
He held up a finger. Beatrix nodded that she understood, took out a hundred dollar bill and gave it to him.
“Want something else?” He looked to his two colleagues, gave a stagey wink, and pulled out another drawer. He took out more bags, but these contained different substances. Beatrix saw fibrous brown opium, white meth crystals, and small tablets of ecstasy.
“I’m good,” Beatrix said. “Thanks.”
She turned to go, but the man clicked his fingers twice and told her to wait. “You like the hashish, yes? It good? You ever try opium?”
Beatrix turned back. The barman had picked up the bag with the stalky brown contents and was holding it out to her. His accomplices were watching avidly.
“No.”
“I give you. As gift.”
She knew that she should leave, that staying here was a bad idea with bad consequences, but she looked down at the opium and found that her reaction to it was more ambivalent than she had expected. Her experience of drugs was limited. She had smoked weed ever since her teenage years. It had been almost medicinal during her service with the Group, easing the pain of the numerous injuries that she had suffered. She had smoked a little more of it these last six months. She had more to forget, more pains to salve, and, when she was high, her troubles receded just a little. But weed was weed, nice but limited, and she wondered whether she might appreciate something more. Something that offered a deeper retreat.
“Come on,” the man urged. “Free sample.”
Beatrix extended her hand and the man dropped the bag into her palm. “Thank you.”
“You like, you want more, you come here, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
She put both baggies into her pocket and went out into the bar and then into the street beyond.
#
BEATRIX’S BUILDING was twenty-five storeys tall. She summoned the ancient shoebox lift. The flat was on the penultimate floor. The elevator opened onto a narrow hallway with two doorways on either side. The shaft was in the centre, with the stairs winding their way around it. She doubted if the hallway had seen a paintbrush for twenty years. The floor was cold stone and the windows were empty, with rusting decorative ironwork taking the place of a pane of glass. There was a door that led out onto a balcony and an open archway led to a large recess, into which years’ worth of trash had been stuffed.
She paused, as was her habit, and listened. She could hear the bustle of the street below, and the grumble of a jet passing overhead, but, save that, it was quiet. There was nothing that made her anxious. She had been in Hong Kong for six months and, during all of that time, there had been nothing to make her suspect that the Group was any closer to finding her.
She turned to the other doorway. The flat, which she guessed was identical to her own, was occupied by a woman and her daughter. Beatrix did not pry into the lives of her neighbours once she had satisfied herself that they were not a threat to her, but she had very quickly gathered that the woman was a prostitute. The flat was one of the one-woman brothels that were legal in Hong Kong. Clients would come to the flat, business would be transacted, and then they would leave. Beatrix had seen the woman a few times. She would have been pretty once, but now she was haggard, her emaciated body bearing witness to the meth habit that her hooking funded.
As she stood, staring at it, the door opened.
It was the daughter. She backed out of the door, dragging two large bags of rubbish that were almost too heavy for her to manage. She hadn’t seen Beatrix and, as she half turned and caught sight of her, she jumped in surprise. She lost her grip on one of the sacks and it tipped over, spilling dirty takeout cartons and empty tuna cans over the floor. The girl blushed immediately. Beatrix stooped down and started to collect the escaped rubbish.
“No,” the girl said. “It is fine. I can do it.”
Her English was heavily accented. Beatrix’s first thought was to wonder how the girl had known that she spoke it and not Cantonese. They had never conversed before. It made her a little uncomfortable.
Beatrix smiled at her. “It’s okay.” She collected a chicken chow mein can and dropped it into the open mouth of the sack.
The girl sank down to her haunches and quickly gathered up the other bits of rubbish. “I am sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
It didn’t seem possible that she could blush any more, but she did.
“What’s your name?” Beatrix asked her.
She started to speak, but bit her lip.
“My name is Beatrix.”
She would never normally have provided her real name, but the girl was young—no more than twelve or thirteen—and Beatrix felt uncomfortable with the prospect of lying to her.
“My name is Grace.”
“Hello. Nice to meet you.”
She found a sweet little smile. “Hello.”
Beatrix nodded at the trash. “Taking the rubbish downstairs?”
“Yes.”
“Where is your mother?”
A quick flash of discomfort passed across her pretty face. “She is asleep.”
“And you’re not?”
She squirmed. “I have work to do.”
Beatrix knew that there was no point in pressing any further. Grace seemed uncomfortable with that subject and most likely wouldn’t answer. The woman had probably been hooking all night and the chances were that now she was in a drugged-out stupor, leaving her daughter to take care of the domestic chores. It was a shabby, unpleasant kind of life for a young girl, but Grace wasn’t Beatrix’s daughter, and she had long since abrogated any right that she might have had to moralise about anything.
Beatrix stooped to collect her bag and was about to bid her farewell when the girl’s face broke into a smile. “Do you like my English?”
She rested the bag on the floor again. “It’s very good. Did you learn it at school?”
Her face clouded again and Beatrix guessed that she didn’t go to school. “I learn it on YouTube.”
“It’s excellent.”
She beamed with pride. “Thank you.” She collected the bags and dragged them to the lift. Beatrix pulled the grille back so that she could get inside and then slid it closed for her.
“Goodbye, Grace.”
“Goodbye, Beatrix.”
She waited until the interior door had wheezed shut and the car had started to descend, and then she turned to her own door. She unlocked it and went inside.
There was a single window in the sitting room. The window was uncovered. The view was of the buildings directly opposite, but, behind them, she could see the towering edifices that comprised the business district around Causeway Bay. When she pushed her head close to the glass and looked to the right, she could see a sliver of dark blue from the harbour. It almost counted as a sea view.
The flat was miniscule. The main room was large enough for an armchair and a small bookshelf, onto which Beatrix had stacked the books she had purchased from market stalls in Kowloon: Woolf, Forster, Dickens, and Hardy. The dark wood parquet floor was scuffed and aged. The kitchen was crammed inside what was not much bigger than a cupboard, with a single ring cooker and a sink. The toilet was in a similar cubbyhole, with a shower directly overhead so that you had to sit on it to wash.
The walls bore a variety of documents, maps, photographs, lists of names and addresses, all of them decorated with the felt-tip markings that she had made across them. The photographs were of girls whom Beatrix’s investigators had suggested matched Isabella’s description. They were all taken with a long lens and, although they all shared superficial similarities—the blonde hair, the blue eyes
—she had known immediately, every time, that none of them was Isabella.
She went through to the bedroom. It was big enough for her futon, but only when the last few inches at each end were pushed vertically up the walls. She could sleep by lying flat out, but there was barely any room to spare. The room had a concrete floor that had been stained with numerous unpleasant and noxious-looking liquids.
The room had the only other window in the flat, although the view through the dirty panes was spectacular. It framed the high-rises on Lockhart Road and, behind them, the looming majesty of the Peak. She opened the window to ventilate the stuffy room, leaned out and looked down. She was vertiginously high and, from up here, she could see the squares and rectangles that formed the backyards of the businesses down below. The spaces were hemmed in by plywood fences and protected from the elements by makeshift roofs that were constructed from sheets of plastic made opaque by years of birdshit that had rained down on them. The roofs had collected the plastic bags, trash and other detritus that had been tipped out of the windows of the building. Beatrix watched the silvery outline of a huge gull as it swooped down onto a bag that must have been a recent addition. It tore through the plastic with its beak, liberated the carcass of a chicken and flapped away with it.
She was tired. It had been a long night, powered by adrenaline, and it was catching up with her. She was not as young as she used to be, after all.
She collected the dope and headed for the roof.
#
THE ROOF was accessed through a door on the top floor that opened when Beatrix put her shoulder to it. She stepped out into the darkness. The exit was in a raised brickwork housing and the roof was arranged in three staggered levels, all of them littered with all manner of debris. Air-conditioning units whirred and glugged. Discarded trash, snagged on sharp points, flapped and rustled in the gentle breeze. Television aerials, bent flat by decades of resisting the typhoons that tore in off the East China Sea, prickled densely. The motors that raised and lowered the building’s unreliable elevator buzzed into life. Fat gulls took to the air as Beatrix stepped out, and the concrete surface was slick with their guano.
Beatrix picked a careful path through the rubbish to the edge of the building. The view was spectacular. The harbour was a palette of black and greys under the looming moon, the skyscrapers on both sides of the water vying for her attention. Rolling away above even those were the vastness of the nine hills that surrounded the city. Local mythology said that they were nine sleeping dragons. They warranted their names.
She drew her focus in a little. The next building, a little shorter than this one, was close at hand, to the east. Windows faced her, some of them lit and uncovered, and, through frosted glass, she saw a blurred figure raise its arms and stretch. She drew closer to the edge, dropped to a sitting position and dangled her legs over the side. Beatrix did not suffer from vertigo, which was just as well. When she looked down, the cars and lorries that were jammed up along the length of Lockhart Road looked small and insignificant. The span between the two buildings was connected by a taut metal wire that suspended some sort of electric cabling. The distance between one building and the next was thirty feet. The pipe was attached to the wire along its length by a series of regularly spaced plastic ties. Beatrix looked down to where the pipe was attached to the parapet by a metal ring. A similar fixing supported it at its destination.
She took the joint from her pocket and lit up. The air was fresh this high up, absent the smells of the city that she had come to accept as its unavoidable background: the fried meat and fish, vegetables, peanut oil, soy sauce and chilli and vinegar, the sweat of her fellow inhabitants and the faint, but unmistakeable, odour of excrement. She held the joint below her nose and inhaled the sweet scent. She put it to her mouth and drew down on it. She inhaled deeply, right down into her lungs, and held the smoke there. She felt the tension seep away from her taut muscles.
She planted her hands behind her, leaned back and angled her head towards the moon. She closed her eyes and exhaled.
CHAPTER THREE
CHAU HAD tried to persuade Beatrix to take a cell phone so that he could easily get in touch with her. She had refused. She had no interest in owning a piece of technology that could be used to track her location. When she needed a cell phone, as when they were working on an operation, she would purchase a prepaid burner and then dispose of it when she was finished. She had set out a procedure whereby he could get in touch with her. He would hide a coded message in a Facebook group dedicated to model boats. She visited a local Internet café every day and, when she saw his message, she would respond with a variation of one of several messages that she had told him to memorise. Each message contained the venue and time for a meeting.
She saw the message the week after she had poisoned David Doss. She replied, nominating the Lookout Restaurant at the top of the Peak. The message suggested that she would be there at midday, but she set off three hours earlier so as to arrive in plenty of time to check that Chau had not been followed.
She took the MTR to Central Station and walked the short distance to the foot of the Peak. She rode the century-old funicular railway to the top. She circled the area twice, eventually finding a spot in the restaurant where she could watch the comings and goings without being seen herself. She had an hour to wait for Chau. She ordered a latte and entertained herself by drinking in the vast, improbable view. She had travelled all over the world during her career, and the vista from here matched any that she had ever seen. The harbour stretched out between the mainland and the island, crisscrossed by the Star Ferry and the legion of private yachts and junks that plied its waters. The Peak was elevated enough to look down on the stupendous sight of the skyscrapers on both sides of the water, so audacious and lofty that Manhattan’s was rendered pedestrian in comparison. It was a crystal clear day, without a cloud in the sky, and she was able to see beyond the buildings to the mountains that penned in the city to the north and, beyond them, the rest of China. It was a view of which it was impossible to tire.
The funicular ascended the side of the hill at a quarter to the hour, and Beatrix knew Chau would be on it. She watched him disembark from the railway and approach the restaurant. She had been trying to teach him the basic elements of tradecraft, but he found the whole thing too exciting, like some cut-price James Bond, and she had not been impressed with his progress. She knew that he found her attractive, and that revealing what she was capable of doing had not soured her to him. Worse, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.
All very annoying.
She sipped her coffee and watched. He stopped, just as she had instructed him to do, and she watched for a sign of anybody who might have been tailing him. She saw nothing.
She switched to a chair that faced the door and waited for him to climb the steps to the restaurant and come inside. He saw her, started to wave before remembering that she had told him never to attract attention to himself, then came over and sat down.
“Hello, Chau,” she said.
“I was not followed.” He said it proudly, like a child fishing for praise.
“You sure?”
A disappointed frown passed across his brow. “Yes. I—”
“What about her?” Beatrix said, nodding at the pretty girl who had just sat down at a table on the other side of the room.
“She was not… She did not…”
“I know. I was kidding.”
Beatrix very rarely joked, and she delivered it with the most deadpan expression that it took Chau a moment to realise that she was making fun of him.
He started to speak, but she cut him off.
“Well?”
“He is dead,” he said. “Three days ago. They did not find a cause. Unhealthy living, they say.”
“Mr. Ying?”
“He is pleased.”
“As he should be.”
“He has paid the rest of the fee. I have it.” He made an exaggerated gesture at the bag that he had
slid under the table.
“Just leave it there when you go,” Beatrix said.
“I know,” he said with a little flash of indignation. “I remember.”
There had been a good amount of money from the work that they had done together. She kept some of it in a safety deposit box ready to pay the investigators who were searching for her daughter back home. Then, she would transfer it in batches from various Western Unions throughout the city. Chau kept the rest for her.
“Did he say anything else?” she asked.
“There will be another job soon. No details yet. He will contact me when he is ready.”
“Very good, Chau.” He made no move to leave. She sighed. “Is there anything else?”
“You said you would think about having something to eat with me.”
“And I was joking, Chau. I told you before. No mixing business with pleasure.”
“I would cook, Beatrix.”
“Then the answer is definitely no.”
She was being unfairly harsh. He had cooked for her while she was recuperating from the stab wound. It was simple, homely Chinese food and it was good. But she wasn’t interested. She had no interest in companionship. She was quite happy to eat takeout, read, get high, sleep. She knew that Chau would want to know about her history, and that he would probe and probe until she would have had to tell him about Lucas and Isabella. She had no interest in talking about that with anyone. It was dangerous. More to the point, it was too raw. And his view of her as a glacial, humourless killer was useful. There was no profit in him digging beneath the harsh exterior.
