by Claire North
She cackled brightly at her wit, and I thanked her in English and Japanese, and left to the sound of her merriment.
Discipline.
A run.
A walk.
A talk.
Back straight.
Eyes forward.
Head up.
Shake hand.
Wash face.
Study target.
Prepare plan.
My life is a machine.
I am a machine, living my life.
Click click click, the gears turn, and I live.
I live.
Chapter 39
In the middle of the night, I woke, and found that I was missing Byron14.
Missing Gauguin, even.
Missing people who missed me.
I thought of Luca Evard, and found myself by my laptop, wondering what crime I could commit to bring him to Tokyo.
I went out into the streets, dressed too thinly for the cold and the dark.
Found a man in a bar.
He was tipsy, but alcohol made him sentimental, childish, an affectionate drunk.
Found a room in a love hotel, booked it for two hours, was done in twenty minutes, left him snoring in a stupor, went back to the hotel room, back to the hotel bed, could have been anywhere in the world. Electric life, electric key, electric footprint in a digital age. CO2 emissions I have created, things I have consumed, windows broken, surfaces scratched, I am the mark my life leaves behind, I am a number in a system, I am the smell on a drunk man’s lips when he wakes, naked, in the love hotel, which he washes off in the morning.
I am destruction.
I slept badly, and brief.
The third time I met Luca Evard, I went looking for him.
The job had been in Kunming; the exchange was in Hong Kong. Arriving for the swap, jewels for cash at Hung Hom Ferry Pier, I found three men instead of the expected one, and when I went to leave, a fourth stopped me, gun in hand, sunglasses and slicked-back hair, shining with gel used in so much profusion that pale blue beads clung to his temples. He seemed unperturbed by the few late-night commuters waiting for the ferry to North Point, his only concession to their presence being to gently turn his body until it was between them and us, pushing me back against the wall, hiding the gun. He signalled with a tilt of his head to his colleagues, who formed a tight pack, blocking air, light, sound, and then, in a surreal twist of camouflage, proceeded to chat loudly and cheerfully about their favourite pop group and how hard it was finding a place to live cheaply these days.
Against this babble of merry noise, my assailant leant in gently, his breath meeting mine, and whispered in flawless, private-school-precision English, “You match the description I have been given.”
Words remain in people’s minds, even if my face does not. Dark skinned, dark haired, hair twisted into long ropes down my back, a runner’s body, a woman waiting for the ferry who is all these things – there were only so many candidates. I gave it my best stab regardless, whispering, “Not me, not me, I don’t know—”
“If it’s not you,” he breathed, “there’s no reason not to shoot.”
His gun was a .22, and the sound – while noticeable – wouldn’t be as great as it could be if fired directly into my belly. Even if the noise disturbed people, it is easier to dismiss a loud bang as an engine or a firecracker, rather than an act of murder happening not ten yards from where you stand. The payoff was that a .22 bullet might not kill me; but a perforated stomach or a collapsed lung had long-term implications, especially given my condition. What would happen if my surgeon needed to pee during a life-saving operation?
Blood vessels in the stomach: inferior vena cava, celiac trunk, renal veins and arteries, gondal vein and artery, common iliac vein and artery, leading to the great saphenous vein and femoral artery. Someone cut in the femoral artery can bleed out in less than two minutes; first aid requires the first-responder to stand with all their weight on the injury to prevent this.
“I’m not alone,” I lied, as the man with the gun began to search me, fingers against my skin, pulling at my clothes, touching, prodding, gripping, words I didn’t want to find, probing, fondling, more than just the gun a threat, more than just death. “You do this and there’ll be consequences.”
He shrugged; he was a crook in Hong Kong, he’d met consequences before and didn’t think much of them. Men had died, women had died, and still he stood so what the hell did it matter?
His fingers wrapped round my shoulder bag, eased it down my arm. He pressed it against his own body, then pushed his body against mine, so I was squeezed further into the wall, our combined shapes supporting the bag between us. With one hand he opened the zip, rummaged within.
His fingers closed round the brown jiffy bag where I’d stashed the jewels. Emeralds, paid in tribute by the kings of Thailand to a Chinese emperor, the tribute system, buying peace, China, , the Middle Kingdom, centre of the world, rivers flow from its heart, the world is the sea, the emperor, the mountain, , , the job had taken less than four minutes to complete from entering the museum grounds to exiting with my prize. A buyer on the darknet, a collector in Hong Kong, drug man, money man, trafficker, killer, but he loved all things Thai, the food, the art, the jewels, he had built temples, buying his way to heaven, good karma, should never have taken the deal.
A moment. The man with the gun could feel something in the jiffy bag, but he wasn’t sure. A glance down, his eyes briefly turned from me, checking, he needs to see, needs to verify that I haven’t planted a dummy in my bag. I hit him, my right hand across his face, simultaneously my left pushing the gun to one side. I stepped to the right and his finger jerked around the trigger on automatic pilot, I heard it hit the wall behind me, felt the passage of the bullet tug at my clothes, the bag which had been supported between us fell.
The three friends, three would-be murderers, kids hoping to impress their boss with their killing, looked to their employer. One made a lunge for me, and I hit him blindly, panicked, with the side of my elbow, having no room to move, no space to get a decent punch. He looked barely seventeen years old, but put his hands up to protect himself as my arm turned. His fingers bounced back with my strike, hitting himself in the face, and as he recoiled, more bewildered than wounded, I pushed past him and ran.
The gunshots were definitely gunshots now. The idiot with the .22 shot wildly, catching the boy with the bruised jaw in the shoulder. The few passengers in the terminal began to run; not screaming, not shouting or crying for mercy, but rather as sparrows turn in the sky, a single silent consensus to move.
I didn’t feel the bullet that entered my leg, but when I tried to turn a corner the turn went wrong, and I slipped on washed tiles and found myself hanging onto the low green barrier that separated pier from water. I heard feet behind, saw blackness below, and with absolute certainty, tipped myself over the side of the pier, head-first into the water.
How long does it take a stranger to forget?
A minute?
Hold your breath for a minute.
Ready?
Go.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve
If you had time to inhale, your cheeks are puffed up with air, pushing against your lips from the inside out, so you can see, at the bottom of your vision, the curve of your own expanded face.
Thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five
Your cheeks begin to ache from the pressure.
The first bubble of air breaks from your nostrils.
Your mouth deflates.
Your diaphragm rises.
Your throat tightens.
As you exhale, you feel your lungs shrinking down to wet envelopes in your chest.
Forty-nine fifty fifty-one
Trachea, collapsing.
Face, collapsing.
Chest, collapsing.
Heart, collapsing.
How long to forget?
I hold myself beneath the pi
er, hands pressing against it to keep me under.
I am the cold.
I am the darkness.
I am the sea.
I am the sea.
Respiration. Muscle, lungs. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, motor neuron disease, the body shuts down from the limbs inwards, eventually autonomic function in the lungs begins to fail, breath fails, life fails, life on a respirator, life trapped, frozen, death from suffocation, death from drowning, ice buckets and the internet, drowning for an emperor’s emeralds in Hong Kong, I am the sea, I am the sea, I am…
My body broke the surface of the water, and I was relieved. I did not control its action, my legs kicked, my arms pulled, and I gasped down air, felt my nose explode with it, my head explode, my eyes popping from their sockets with it, and looked up.
My pursuers were gone.
The police were called.
Someone had fired a gun on Hung Hom Pier, so the police arrived, white cars, blue shirts, polite and organised. Someone gave me an orange blanket and a carton of sugary drink. I said, “I think I scratched my leg,” and it took a while for a paramedic to cut back my trousers and reply with the calm of a professional, “I do believe you have been a little bit shot, ma’am.”
Then they put me on a trolley and took me to an ambulance, and a plain-clothed police inspector asked me what I knew, how much I remembered.
“Almost nothing,” I replied. “I heard shooting and felt a pain in my leg and I ran, and I guess I must have slipped and fallen because next thing I know I’m in the water and the people have gone.”
“Did you see how it started?”
“No, officer, it was all very confusing.”
The inspector forgot about me quickly enough; the paramedics were attentive enough to get me to hospital, and the efficiency of paperwork and queueing systems saw the bullet removed by a junior surgeon under local anaesthetic. They said I could go in a few hours, and I stole a pair of crutches, a handful of painkillers and antibiotics, and let myself out as soon as the bandage was secure.
The shooting made the evening news.
I saw a picture of my own face, captured on CCTV, as I ran away and plummeted into the water. It looked like an alien, someone fearful and unknown, and, as no body had been found and no one matching my description could be remembered, a manhunt was underway for a possible victim in the sea. There was no footage of the hold-up itself, but the suspects’ faces were caught, grainy and looking the wrong way, as they fled the chaotic scene. My bag was in their hands; my work stolen.
That night, sitting in a warm painkiller glow in a hotel room overlooking the bay, I compiled a file for Luca Evard. I gave him correspondence between myself and the buyers, detailed physical descriptions of my assailants, details of the jewels that had been stolen and the agreements surrounding the heist. Most of all, I gave him the number of my mobile phone, hidden at the bottom of my stolen bag, and hoped it wasn’t too late.
Nine hours later, the man who’d held a gun on me was arrested. He’d tried to sell my phone to a second-hand store in Mong Kok, an act of greed – unforgivably stupid. The store-owner, when suddenly faced with fifteen heavily armed police on his porch, had given up the customer’s details in a flash.
They found him in his underpants, joyfully wired on cocaine, watching tennis in a flat near Sham Mong Road. He lived with his mother, who tried to attack one of the arresting officers with a mop when they took her son away, before being informed of the nature of his crimes and declaring, “His father always set a bad example!” and asking if the police could help have him cut out of her will.
Within three hours, the rest of his confederates were in custody, but none were willing to give up their employer. I trawled my records, seeing if there was anything I could find which might help incriminate him, and pulled a blank.
Five hours later, Luca Evard arrived in Hong Kong, looking for the woman who’d vanished over the side of the pier.
I found him on Tsim Sha Tsui as the sun went down, sitting on a bench, watching the sea. Behind, the lights of the city were beginning to burn: Philips and Hyundai picked out in blue and red, white Hitachi and green hotels, a competition in neon and LED. I sat down on the opposite end of the bench, and started reading.
The book was called The Lemon and the Wave and was a mostly bizarre account of a brutal murder in northern Italy, written in a hectic, breathy style by its author, R. H. It wasn’t my thing, but it had been a book by Luca Evard’s bed in Brazil, and now I sat next to him on the bench as the daylight faded and the white light of the promenade took over, and leant back so he might see the cover.
He looked, and looked away, then looked again, and now looked at me, and hesitated. His head tilted down, and he thought perhaps of speaking, of asking me my name, of approaching the beautiful woman who sat by him on the bench. But that second passed, and he seemed as though he might stand so I lowered the book and said, in English, “Do you have the time?”
He did.
I closed the book, slipped it into my bag, stood up, leaning on just one crutch to support the weight of my wounded leg. He, having begun the process of standing, stood too, and looked at me again, and wanted to speak, and turned, and began to walk away. I limped after him, heading away from the pier, towards the hotels, and when his speed threatened to take him away from me I said, “Excuse me, are you American?”
He stopped, turned, smiled – no he wasn’t.
“Sorry, I realised when I spoke – speaking in English, I mean, you don’t look like you speak Cantonese, but you might, sorry, that’s presumptuous, but I shouldn’t assume, but it’s… anyway, I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“You weren’t rude, ma’am.”
I smiled again, a last-ditch effort, urging him come on, come on, come on! He smiled back, turned to walk away.
I cursed inwardly and swore to track him to the hotel, meet him in the bar, over supper, put the damn book between us, or maybe a cutting about the Hung Hom Pier, or something, anything, to pull his attention.
Then he stopped, and said, “Are you able to walk, ma’am? Do you need assistance getting to a taxi or a bus?”
I leant a little more on my solitary crutch, smiled, said, “No, thank you; I had an accident at work, but I’m fine, really, it’s not as bad as it looks.”
“All right,” he murmured, unconvinced, and again turned to go, and again stopped himself, looked back. “Forgive me, the book you’re reading… Do you… did you find it in Hong Kong?”
“Yes,” I replied. “At a second-hand place in Ho Man Tin. Have you read it?”
“Yes – many times.”
“I haven’t finished it yet, but it seems like a funny choice of book, I mean, if you’ve read it that often.”
“It’s not… it’s something to do with my job.”
“What’s your job?”
“Police inspector.”
“Oh, sorry, I had no idea! In Hong Kong?”
“No. Interpol.”
“Seriously? I didn’t realise Interpol had inspectors. I mean, sorry, that’s rude. I’m being very rude aren’t I? I just… can we try again?”
I am my smile.
I am beauty.
Luca Evard, a man who lived his life by ironed shirts and folded underpants, toothpaste squeezed from the bottom of the tube, looked at me, and looked at the sea, and perhaps in that moment thought of the thief he’d pursued halfway round the world, who’d been at Hung Hom Pier the night gunshots were fired, and wondered if she’d drowned that night, or if she lived still and was thinking of him.
And he looked at me.
And he said, “May I help you get to a cab?”
“No need – my hotel’s nearby.”
“Which one?”
“The Southern.”
“I’m staying there too.”
“Really? What a coincidence. In that case, you’d be welcome to help me get to the bar.”
Chapter 40
Words to characterise my behaviour:<
br />
• Obsessive
• Needy
• Unprofessional
• Stalker-esque
• Manipulative
• Cruel
Words to characterise Luca Evard:
• Conventional
• Tidy
• Driven
• Unrewarded
• Socially inept
• Lonely
• Obsessive
He was not a man who had a drink with a strange woman in a strange city, however much she may have dressed herself for his delight. He was not a man to open up about himself, his life, his fears. That was not who he was.
Have a drink, I said. We’re both strangers in a strange land, we both read the same books. I’m an injured woman; have a drink with me.
Just one, he said at last. I don’t really drink in hotel bars.
On the third glass of wine I said, Are you single?
Yes, he replied, tongue loosened by good Australian wine. For the last three months.
I’m sorry, I said, feeling a flush of something that might have been… surprise? I hadn’t considered the possibility of anything in his life except his work – except me.
We drifted apart, he said. My work, her work – you know how it is. You?
Single, I replied. It’s how I like it. Tell me about this book – The Lemon and the Wave. Why have you read it so many times?
He smiled at nothing much, ate fried squid from a bowl, studied the room where we sat, taking in people, décor, sound, light. Every table was glass, blue lights ran beneath to cast strange shadows through the plates, lights brushing up the line of his chin and neck.
“I think it’s written by a killer,” he explained. “There was a spate of murders in Austria in 1989, four women and a man all killed the same way. One man came under suspicion. The police wanted to arrest him, but there wasn’t enough physical evidence, and they had to let him go. He left the country three weeks later, and then in 1993 this book came out, and though the names are different, the chronology, the manner of the murder, down to the finest detail, down to where the victims were left, the knots used in the nooses that strangled them, the size and make of the blade, everything, the same. The writing takes the point of view of a policeman, but he never catches the killer, comes to admire him by the end, becomes a killer himself, the policeman is transformed by what he sees into a murderer. I was part of the liaison, tried to trace the writer, this R. H. – but he’d moved on, somewhere in North America. We alerted the FBI, but again, what do we have? Nothing. A work of fiction. A killer laughing at the men who cannot catch him, perhaps. A flight of fancy from a twisted mind. You can’t arrest a man for fiction, can you?”
