Mud was everywhere. The Post came out with photos of horrendous damage: trees washed down from hills blocking roads, people being dug from rubble. In it all, as the wind and rain lessened, the emergency teams were magnificent. Casualties were rescued from unbelievable plights, buildings were shored, roads cleared, pipelines mended, services miraculously resumed. It was a feat of magic such as I’d never seen.
And throughout Hong Kong chattered, laughed—and kept trade going. Like, in spite of the crisis we each had a couple of clients at nearby hotels, plus one surreptitious effort on a liner.
“Well, Lovejoy,” Steerforth said when all was order, days later. “How d’you think they did?”
“Superlative.” We were on the tiny balcony looking at the world. “Hong Kong’s answered a problem.”
An hour later I phoned Surton and broke the bad news that my firm’s junk had sunk in the Pearl River.
“Yes, the one bringing the few original autograph documents we had of Song Ping—
gone,” I confirmed mournfully into his appalled silence, sighing my most grievous sigh.
“A catastrophe. I’m afraid the problem’s insuperable.”
We ended the conversation differently, he with genuine sorrow, me with a brokenhearted sob and a private smile. I brewed up and returned to sit by the phone.
Ten minutes later it rang. Surton, excited.
“Solution?” I said, carefully sounding baffled and stirring my tea. “Impossible!”
He crowed. “No problem’s insuperable, Lovejoy! Don’t you see? We simply refashion the lost documentation! Remake that as authentically as possible, like the rest!”
“Good heavens!” I gasped, bored out of my skull and thinking for heaven’s sake, get on with it. “You can’t mean… fakery?”
“Certainly not, Lovejoy! Replication. Labeled as such.”
I said piously, “Well, as long as it’s honest…” Label? Over my dead body. I’d have to arrange to get this innocent old saint out of the way as soon as he’d done his stuff, that was for sure.
We talked, each amicably planning our different versions of mayhem.
The phone down, I cheered up. The Surtons were friends, the first I really felt I’d had in Hong Kong. I didn’t count Steerforth—he was too weird, too hooked on Ling Ling. But even the Surtons were bugged. So wasn’t it time to find a real ally, one even the Triad wouldn’t dream of? I smiled at the idea of me and Titch the leper against the world.
Time to take a risk with Ling Ling herself.
26
« ^ »
LING LING had hostessed a combined Thailand-Japan merchant syndicate, supper and women for a hundred and eighty wassailers. It was three-ish, a few days after Typhoon Emma roared on to wreck western Japan. Leung and Ong’s limo collected me at the Flower Drummer Emporium and transferred me to a junk in Deep Water Bay, a bonny spot looking nicked from the Mediterranean. I tried asking Leung to stop and let me inspect the junk builders at Aberdeen Harbor, but they gestured me to silence. I was heartbroken, because some of these shipyard places make antique models of their vessels. Since famous ship museums—Venice’s, for example—began collecting them, they’ve become unbelievably expensive. Still, worth a try.
The huge craft was decorated with enormous multicolored trailing flags. A few Cantonese on board grinned at me, but I was otherwise left alone to watch the coast as we upped anchor and headed southeast. What with white launches and the lush palms fronting the hotel’s veranda walks, Repulse Bay must be a playground. White villas studded the steep greenish hillsides.
“Nice, Lovejoy.” Marilyn, under a parasol.
“It chills my spine.” I was on the raised stern. “You leave no trace in places like that. In the slums somebody’d at least notice you were gone.”
“That is sentiment, Lovejoy. Slums are terrible.”
“Not as terrible as resorts like that.” I indicated our bare masts. “Why don’t we use sails instead of diesels?”
“Sails are old,” she said contemptuously. “You talk as an old man, though you are not.”
That made me laugh. “I’ve lived centuries, love.” I meant in careworn experience, but she stared.
“Have you? Really?” Her brown eyes searched my face.
“Every second,” I said. “One thing. Why are there no old rickshaws?” Mind you, the gadget was only invented in the 1870s.
“New is best, Lovejoy.”
As she spoke, a woman carrying an infant papoose fashion padded behind me, berating a skeletal old bloke. He was lugging two jerricans of water, being shoved along the deck by a tiny grandson and bawling abuse back. I smiled, loving it. In Western society the old go to the wall from poverty, hypothermia, loneliness. Say what you like, but the old in Hong Kong were part of life’s game until they dropped.
“People keep telling me that,” I said sardonically, “but never say why.”
We chugged across West Bay and made a long eastward loop into Stanley Village.
Behind us lay Lamma Island, its fawny green deepened in silhouette by the falling sun.
The sea was unbelievably calm but an ugly khaki color, showing where the laterite soil had been washed from Hong Kong’s mountains.
Stanley Village was a cheerful low place, not seeming very affluent. I was accompanied across the strand by my two goons, Marilyn staying behind.
A religious procession was going on, a little girl propped upright on a kind of lofty palanquin. She was plastered with garish makeup. Her clothes were an embroiderer’s dream of exploding colors and shapes, phony flowers everywhere. Pity none of the gear was antique. She was carried on the shoulders of a dozen men. The procession to where a tent had been set up for prayers included a straggle of shaven monks in saffron robes. Incense wafted out on the chants. An ancient gong was struck, thank God correctly—in a rapid succession of light taps that crescendoed into truly beautiful sound; not one quick wallop like Bombadier Wells at the start of those old Rank movies.
It pulled at my heartstrings to hear that exquisite antique. You can make a fortune with one gong, so desperate are collectors for them. The goons hustled me into a car for the half-mile drive up Stanley Peninsula.
Ling Ling was in a palatial villa, overlooking a bay and a parallel peninsula from the patio, quite alone except for three lovely attendants, two servants, and a tableau of four bodyguards watching me through glass. Everybody cleared off, leaving me. The view was sheer delight. I’d have believed her if she’d told me she had ordered it specially. A genuine full set of Chinese Tien Jesuitware was laid on the table before her, ready. This giddily valuable porcelain is seventeenth century. Imagine black penciled-looking drawings with pastel colors on the cup bodies, with blue and gold designed squares below the outer rim. The scenes are often deer and tiger hunts. She was about to have afternoon chocolate, but not with me.
“Your urgent matter, Lovejoy?”
“Er, a studio, please. Air-conditioned. The equipment I’ll need’s on this.” I pulled out a sweat-sogged paper. “Within six days, from these addresses—”
Her hand moved a fraction. A goon nipped in, took my list, vanished back into his aquarium. “And?”
“Help. Somebody neat, precise, trusted.” We waited. A distant junk drew a slow shining line across the bay. I could just hear its chugging bloody engine. Its ancient russet sails would have made a superb picture. Christ, but I was frightened. I asked, “Was that the hill, the one over there?” I knew it wasn’t.
So far she had not looked at me. “Hill?”
“Where they left you.” I discovered you can be terrified and dejected together. “Your mother and father, when you were born.”
She looked then. My existence hung. I swear her face went white as chalk. Life, but not as I knew it. Her voice was almost inaudible.
“You cannot know this.”
“It’s a miracle you survived,” I said helpfully. “Snow in Hong Kong and all. Look on it as a kind of luck. From nothing to everything.” I he
sitated. This was no time to remind her of her power over a nerk like me.
“Luck? Cast on a hillside to die? Luck?”
“Certainly, love.” I sat down on the carved chair unasked, eager to convince. “Who succeeds most, eh? Why, the one who starts off with least and gets farthest! Like you.”
“Luck? Existing all my infancy hidden in a hovel by the lowest of the low, fed on stolen scraps? Without parents?”
“Without—? You’re bloody barmy! Sorry, I meant, er, he provided for you as well as he possibly—”
“He?” I got the white visage full on. “He? How can you know these things?”
“Well,” I said lamely. I was going to say that blokes seemed to be the providers in Hong Kong. And I’d read that the man of the family was referred to as See-Tau, the
“Business Head.”
“I’ve a secret crystal ball.”
“Where?” She looked about to faint, her lips blue.
“Just pretending,” I said frantically, scared to death. Was she batty, believing my jokes but disbelieving everything else?
“Leave, Lovejoy.”
“Er, please. Can I have Marilyn for my helper? You see—”
She moved her hand. Three hoodlums hurtled in and dragged me out of the villa backwards and into the limo. Leung for once didn’t offer me any sunflower seeds. We careered down the peninsula and shot westward through Stanley with Ong rabbiting into a radio. I was breathless. What was I supposed to have found out, for God’s sake?
I’d assumed I was being friendly. We slowed to a sane speed by Repulse Bay.
Then a strange thing. They stopped at the junk builders’ slipway in Aberdeen and politely let me see the great seagoing craft being created. No antique models, but I felt it was a sign. Things were possibly looking up.
27
« ^ »
YOUR expensive materials will be in Hong Kong in three days, Lovejoy.”
“Oh, aye.” That couldn’t be right, for most of the stuff was from East Anglia. But I’d learned not to argue.
Marilyn tapped a thick envelope with that laugh I was coming to recognize as Hong Kong’s way of signaling that money had been mentioned. It means anything or naught.
“You will select your studio today.”
We were in the Canton Road jade market noshing some dim sum, the waiters flitting about carrying wicker cylinders full of hot bite-size grub, jubilantly yelling what they’d got. Beats me how they keep going without getting scalded. Marilyn hardly ate anything.
“Some of that’s not jade.” We were watching a jade seller. “It’s Burmese agate.” The old devil was parading a string of lovely translucent green pieces much shinier than jade. “And those other pieces are from a funeral.” Jades in halves have usually been cut from a corpse—bangles especially. In the old days jade was buried with the deceased as an emblem of immortality. “Rotten twister.”
“Say nothing. It’s survival for him.”
That shut me up. He went on his way, offering and boasting. Most of the street jade I’d seen was from New Zealand or the Americas, and carved no earlier than last week.
“Did you get the list of addresses I gave to Ling Ling? Paints, brushes, materials, canvases in special sizes, all that? Only, it’s urgent. I can phone East Anglia. This bloke—”
“Your Tinker is insufficiently fast, Lovejoy.” Which stopped my breath. That’s my trouble. I always think I’m secret.
“Your agents know that everything has to be handmade? The pigments must be ground from natural minerals, made by old processes.” She gave the money laugh. I was all on edge, maybe because I’d had a couple of kai bau tsai, chicken buns steamed to solidity, which slam your belly to the floor. It was a struggle finishing the sweet fungus dumplings and coconut pud.
I shrugged and rose. The waiter came to tot up the bill. The little dishes littering our table were all different shapes—easy to price the nosh, see. Marilyn paid and we stepped outside into the slamming heat.
“Okay, assistant,” I said. “Let’s stop mucking about and go for gold.”
Now to pull off the eighth wonder of the world.
Searching for my studio was an incidental, tiring and of little importance. But something happened which gave me understanding.
We scoured Hong Kong both sides of the harbor. I had a good look at some places Marilyn showed me, and finally decided on a second-floor flat in Wan Chai, big windows, north aspect.
“Ah,” she said. “This one may not be possible, Lovejoy.”
I was narked. “The Triad promised me anything, love.” Just because a woman’s beautiful doesn’t entitle her to welsh on a deal. When my life’s on the line it especially doesn’t.
“Ah Chuen?” We’d collected this old lazaroid bloke who smoked incessantly—cigarettes, I hasten to add—and trailed us in a rickety van. I’d asked Marilyn about him because he was treated with respect by our bodyguards.
Chuen gave me a long look, walked about the empty place, touched the windows. “No, Little Sister.” He explained to Marilyn in Cantonese. And walked out.
I was flabbergasted. “No? What the hell’s it got to do with him?”
She laughed her embarrassed laugh. “Fung shui, Lovejoy. He’s the geomancer.”
“A wizard?” See what I meant about Hong Kong? You’re always wrong. “You’re off your bloody head.” I could have clouted her.
She pointed at the harbor. “See those banks, Lovejoy? The hotels? They cost billions, ne? Every building is placed according to its fung shui. Its disposition, shape. And forces. Balance of wind and water. Of dragons.”
Hellfire, I thought, closing my eyes. I’d give anything for just one day without a splitting headache. Frigging dragons. I felt her take my arm sympathetically and we started downstairs.
“You see, Lovejoy, these things are vital. For business, luck, success, to good fortune.
You Westerners have forgotten all your ancestral wisdoms, ne? We Chinese dare not.
Chuen says this place would spoil your creativity.”
“He’s in on it?” I screeched, in a panic sweat.
“He belongs to us.” She was quite calm. “He is paid twenty American dollars a square foot. He has seen that two dragon spirits fly out of those windows to Causeway Bay.
They do not like doors, ne?”
“Course not,” I said. Always humor nutters.
“You think it is superstition, Lovejoy. But Peking is situated where it is because fung shui decided so. And the multibillion-dollar Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank redesigned itself to preserve the yin yang. As all government buildings, hotels, factories, shops.”
“Here, er, Ah Chuen.” Outside on the pavement I caught him up lighting another fag.
“Are you a fraud? Honest, now.”
“Lovejoy See-Tau,” he said politely. “Fung shui governs life. The taipans say you must be given your wish, whatever place you choose.” He coughed, indicated the apartment block. “Go ahead. Take this one. You find out if fung shui is fraud.” He gave a grin full of bad teeth. “Then you tell me.”
Loony, but fair. I got in the limo and off we trekked to the next. I’ve said I’m not superstitious, hand on my heart. I honestly believed all this gunge about ghosts, dragons, fung shui was balderdash. I mean, the Triad owned megazillions, yet hires a tubercular old scarecrow to sus out how floors feel? Barmy. I can see how superstitions spread, though. Look at the Surtons— educated people, yet calmly explaining how the university authorities de-ghosted their buildings by ritual redecorating.
After that I waited until Chuen had done his magic divination before bothering to take a look myself. No good risking any narked dragons nudging my elbow on their way to a quick swim. Ne?
We finally settled on two upstairs rooms where Cleverly Street runs between Queen’s Road West to Bonham Strand. I could see the trams along Des Voeux Road West and the harbor if I giraffed out of the window. Old Chuen, hands in pockets and looking as unmysterious as anybody could, nodded wh
en I said I could have two rooms knocked into one.
“Can,” he said. “Have downstairs flat for amah.”
“Okay. No bad dragons? No silly ghosts?”
“No.” Quite calm. He’d been criticized before.
I showed where I wanted the wall removed, a bench installed, water piped.
Two architects appeared to draw squares and argue while I peered out of the window.
“You are smiling, Lovejoy.” Marilyn was watching.
I hadn’t realized. “Mmmh? Just remembering. That’s where the horses used to go.”
“Horses? There are no horses in Central District.”
“Not now. Hundred years ago, I mean. Don’t you Cantonese still call it Big Horse Road?”
“You can’t speak… How do you know this?”
I was practically dangling out of the window. The street below was crammed with shops, people streamed along in a hell of a clatter. I liked it. I pulled myself in and found everybody staring silently.
“Know…? Oh, read it somewhere.” I smiled reassurance, looked out. “Can’t you just see pompous old Sir Henry Pottinger riding along!”
“You see the horses?” Marilyn asked shakily.
“Oh aye,” I said. “Hundreds of the bloody things.” Barmy.
But not quite so barmy. In two days the flat was rebuilt, decorated, fitted out, and spotlessly ready. And the day following I arrived to find the materials I’d asked for from a world away, the boxes laid out in a long line.
After one quick gulp at the power of the taipans, I started work.
28
« ^ »
UNPACKING parcels is a woman’s game, like getting letters. I abhor them (letters, not women). Always bad news. But these seven boxes were fascinating in an ugly kind of way because my scam was dodging and ducking in there somewhere.
Six small cases and one huge teak crate. I began undoing them, only after the studio’s atmospheric and humidity controls were stabilized. I checked that the army of amahs had done their job—I couldn’t risk any telltale fragments of modern decorators’
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