Jade Woman l-12

by Jonathan Gash

  He would try to arrange a public exhibition very soon. Such fortune should be shared, ne?

  Hai, I said in agreement. All well so far. Only three more moves and Fatty would get his comeuppance.

  In quiet hours I drew up additional extracts of the mythical Song Ping’s life, snatches of his diaries, bits of hearsay. I became quite fascinated by his quirks and foibles, even though I was inventing them. I wrote out chunks of garble, letting him ramble on about Monet, Sisley, Renoir, not so much Pissarro, made him in awe of the staid Manet. For authenticity I included a place-name, mentioned the café the young Impressionists frequented, even gave details of a vaguely improbable row between Monet and poor Frederic de Pazille, who died in the Franco-Prussian War. Because so many of my materials came from East Anglia, I included a few taped readings—my voice, disguised over the phone. My best was a fragment of a crudely translated letter supposedly written by Song Ping from London in the 1870s. I made him speak disparagingly of Renoir’s “rainbow” palate.

  After I’d finished I tried it all on Marilyn in celebration. She listened, perched on her studio stool. I acted out the bits, ran the tapes, mimicked Monet’s quarrelsomeness, showed her how the withdrawn Sisley’s taciturnity must have irritated, the lot.

  “Well?” I said, exhausted. “Convincing?”

  She was silent a moment. “These are people you knew?”

  Women. “No, love. How many times have I to tell you? They were in France, over a century ago. It’s my plan, see?”

  She nodded. “Very good.”

  So that day I took all my made-up notes and concocted tapes to the university. The old man was delighted. I explained, sadly, that these were the very last fragments of everything I had been able to get from my firm about Song Ping, RIP.

  “Some of it is disjointed. Most is in English or French, I’m afraid. Our firm’s phoned in a few fragments on these tapes. Other bits might turn up. We might get a Canton address where he first exhibited.”

  “Excellent!” He handled my sheaf of scraps with so much care my heart went out to him. A real honest pro. We’re a dying breed. “No chronology, I see, Lovejoy?”

  “No. There’s, er, a special chronology fee for putting them in what you think’s the right order.” I’d have to see that Sim authorized the fees directly from a London bank. Life’s all go.

  He hugged himself. “Imagine it all in Chinese calligraphy of the period, authentic paper, proper typology! It shall be a truly realistic exhibition!” He rubbed his hands, cackling a merry don’s laugh. “Lovejoy,” he said, eyes misting. “Thank you for this task!”

  “But it’s a mammoth—”

  “Genuine learning, challenged by time’s decay, emerging triumphantly in mankind’s pursuit of—” He spouted this rapturous crap for some minutes.

  “Great, Stephen.” I was moved in spite of myself.

  Leaving the steep garden, I met Phyllis Surton just disembarking from the number 3

  bus in Bonham Road. Her grayness seemed to blot all color from the surroundings as we enacted a dithery reunion. The racket from St. Paul’s school opposite made conversation difficult, so I turned back with her.

  “I’m just taking some materials to Stephen, Lovejoy.” She carried folders and a box.

  “Old inks, brushes.” She was like a sparrow, nervy and dithery. We uttered commonplaces: can I carry your stuff; aren’t the flowers nice. She made to sit on a stone seat. The least I could do was sit beside her.

  “Do you notice the plants?” she asked.

  “Plants?” We were in a garden, for God’s sake. “Aye. Great.”

  “No. There.” She pointed.

  “Grass?” It was low-lying frondy stuff.

  “Look.” She smiled, touched a finger to a frond by the path. Instantly the greenery collapsed. Its falling movement touched others, and the whole green carpet cowered down.

  I found myself standing in alarm. “It’s alive!”

  “Not really that way, Lovejoy.” She was smiling. “Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant.

  Touch it and it, well, crumples.” She held my gaze as I returned uneasily. “It’s me, isn’t it?” Slowly the greenery was straightening, warily recovering. “I pretend to be like everyone else. But afraid of touch, encounter.”

  “Me too.” I kept my feet off the ground. For all I knew this bloody grass had teeth.

  “I know,” she said unexpectedly. “I sense it. I look, but can’t dare myself to…”

  “Bloody cheek,” I said, stung. “I’m not scared of anything.”

  She smiled at that. “Should I tell you something, Lovejoy? I know you won’t tell—

  Stephen wouldn’t understand anyway if you did. It’s… about the bar. Where you get picked up—”

  “Listen,” I began, but she shushed me.

  “… Meet ladies, however you put it.” She stared away. “I’ve saved up, scrimped. For months I’ve had enough to… to, you know, hire somebody. And… and I desperately wanted to. There!”

  My gasp sounded really authentic. “Phyllis!”

  “I knew you’d be shocked. I actually tried once, even went as far as writing out a note.

  I picked out a man and everything.” She watched a group of students climbing the garden path. “I’m so hopeless. Pathetic.”

  “Which was he?” I already recognized a few of the other gigolos, the idiot musician Rich, Dennis the blond with a good line in patter, Sidney the pretend aristocrat forever dropping names, Juanito—

  “You, Lovejoy.” Still not a glance. Her face was red. “To me you felt the same timid creature riven by unrequited desire.”

  “Nark it, Phyllis.” Though it proved she was a woman of taste. “I’m only doing it because I have to.”

  “You’re not offended, Lovejoy?” She looked askance.

  “I understand.” I gave her my most soulful gaze, really profound sincerity. Saying you understand makes women think you agree. She smiled hesitantly, reached out and touched my hand. I didn’t collapse.

  “Thank you, Lovejoy. You’re sweet.” She paused, until the students were out of sight.

  “There’s one thing, Lovejoy.”

  “Yes?” More sordid secrets? I suppressed a yawn.

  “Hong Kong’s dangerous. Please remember that. It fights dirty. So keep safe from risks.”

  I chuckled, debonair. “I know all about risks, love.”

  Her gray careworn face hung its sadness at me. “Promise. If there’s any way I can help, you’ll come to me. Even if you think I’ll be useless.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said, doing my cheap gangster act, not getting a laugh.

  I left then, waving to her as she went towards the Tang Chih Building and I trotted downhill to the curving road.

  Happy now the scam was underway, I paused, attracted by a crowd near Centra]

  Market watching crickets fight. One called Golden Double-Eight Super Dragon won hands down. It ate its vanquished opponent. The sight made me ill. The loser had seemed so sure of itself.

  We were in the Lantern Market one evening, me and Marilyn, strolling after supper. It was a couple of days after I’d started work. The place is actually a car-park near the Macao Ferry but becomes a vendor’s paradise at dusk. Hundreds of folk arrive and simply set up business, each around a paraffin lantern. Instantly it could be a scene from the Middle Ages, the yellow glows on huddles of faces against a starry sky.

  “Here, mate.” I paused, gave an old bloke a note. He seemed poor, having nothing to sell. He took it without acknowledgment, which narked me. Bloody cheek. He could have said a ta. I’d only given it him because I’d glimpsed my little stumpy leper Titch talking to him, before poling himself off on his rollers as we’d approached.

  “Sin Sang.” He was calling after me. Marilyn had halted. The old bloke was effortlessly hunched down, smoking. I saw he had a blackish pet bird in a bamboo cage.

  “Go, Lovejoy,” Marilyn said. “Your fortune.”

  “Eh?” I didn�
�t want my fortune told. “It’s all rubbish.”

  A number of Chinese paused with us, loudly speculating.

  “You must, Lovejoy. You’ve paid.”

  The old bloke spouted in Cantonese, pointing, flicked the hemp loop off the cage and presented a deck of cards. Beside him was a pile of small bamboo slivers in an old Coke tin. The bird came out, picked out a card rather snappishly, I thought. I gave it an inexpert trill whistle like I do in my garden back home, just being pally. It ignored this, picked out a bamboo sliver, cast it on the card, and slammed back into its cage. Do not disturb. I was conscious of the crowd’s excited interest. The fortune-teller was silent, looking.

  “Two! The bird should have chosen card or stick,” Marilyn said.

  “I distracted it whistling, I expect.” I shrugged.

  The old man spoke, chopping the air enthusiastically. Guillotine? The chop from some hoodlums? The crowd went wild. I grinned modestly, it was nothing. I thanked the bloke and his bird and walked us on among the lanterns.

  “Good news, eh? Maybe I’ll be lucky.”

  “He said that the double luck had not come together since his first Hong Kong ancestor, Lovejoy.” She was distant, unsmiling. “You will survive much trouble—”

  “Look, love.” I could see what she was thinking. “Don’t start all that superstition stuff.

  I’ve got a job on, remember?”

  We strolled until about ten, then parted. I saw her into a taxi. She never looked back.

  No rule that she had to wave, was there? I watched the taxi out of sight. Under the Triad’s rules I could do as I wished about Steerforth’s, ah, lucrative escort agency, as long as I made regular reports that the painting was on course—though I bet Marilyn was updating them every couple of hours.

  This evening I felt restless, really out of sorts. Partly it was being so long away from home, partly the emotion—fear of what the Triad would do, the effort of painting in the style of somebody who never existed, all that. Ten-thirty I decided what the hell.

  By eleven I was at the Digga Dig, up to no good. Steerforth was relieved to see me. My client he got me was French, sophisticated, impatient, world touring for a film distributor. Or was I her client? Anyway, she got on my nerves, even though we were a riot and she paid up. Superstition’s for the birds.

  The inevitable’s never quite unavoidable. I’ve always found that. The trouble is that women make you want not to avoid it, if you understand. To be blunt, Marilyn and I made smiles, after a desperate painting session in which I marouflaged canvases onto wood for future masterpieces and laid my first touches on the Song Ping. I used quite narrow hog’s-hair brushes like Monet, touching the sky spaces. I was shaking with elation. From now on I’d slog daily, building up the surface and always remembering the white which the French master in his old age called “poison white” and deplored having used so much. I mixed paints on old blotting paper, Monet’s trick to reduce the oil content.

  “Is that all, Lovejoy?” Marilyn scanned the canvas.

  “For now. I wouldn’t want my old friend Monet to be mad at me, would I?”

  “No.”

  Her face was so trusting, her eyes rounded in agreement, that I grabbed hold of her and waltzed clumsily round the floor. She laughed, showed me the proper steps, but I was hopeless. We’d made love almost before I realized what was going on. I came to, thinking that samples of pollen and fine dust should soon be arriving from Cap d’Antibes, France, as I’d asked, and was too preoccupied to say good-bye properly.

  It was a pity, because Leung and Ong came at six o’clock, with a summons to the presence, and by then Marilyn had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  30

  « ^ »

  USUALLY Marilyn was somewhere around when I was called before the terrible trio—

  Fatty, Sun Sen, and Dr. Chao. This time she was absent, though I’d tried to hang about downstairs in the Flower Drummer hoping to arrange more ecstasy. Steerforth could gigolo alone.

  “You saw our television leakage, Lovejoy?”

  I sat facing them, a partisan under trial from guerrillas. The screen was in its place, of course, but by now I’d given up trying to work out who hid behind it. Ling Ling was odds-on favorite, but why?

  “Yes. It went well.” I coughed, shuffled in my seat. My scam was planned in four stages. Would it be safer to dish them out one stage at a time, as insurance? Weakly, I compromised. “We do the next two stages simultaneously. Tomorrow night.”

  “Yes?” They leaned forward eagerly. I was fascinated by their different expressions.

  Fatty vicious, Sun Sen shifty, Dr. Chao interested at some clinical exercise.

  “We need a student protest.”

  “Against what?”

  “Exploitation of art.” I was getting edgy, wondering why Marilyn hadn’t shown. “Rent a small empty shop somewhere near Jordan Road. Protect it from prying eyes. Then start the rumor that the Song Ping painting’s inside.”

  “Why?”

  “Art students protest,” I explained. “Placards are in their nature. They never know what for. It’ll help to authenticate Song Ping.”

  “Very well.” Dr. Chao raised his forehead in interrogation. God, but I was tired of smiles.

  “Second. We hire an art expert. To expose us.”

  Silence, utter and impermeable. Fatty broke it by wheezes. The old doctor laughed in the Chinese way when startled to incredulity.

  “You wish us accused of fakery, Lovejoy?”

  “Correct. He needn’t name us, merely blames the work as an out-and-out repro.”

  “How, exactly?”

  Suddenly I was so tired. The day before, I’d weighed myself at the Star Ferry terminal in Kowloon, bored waiting for the ferry. Since my arrival I’d lost seventeen pounds.

  What with gigoloing all night, working all day, worrying myself flaming sick, I’d had enough. I was knackered. My life-style would be called idyllic by some. Not me, because love is loving and art is art only when you aren’t pushed.

  “Why the hell ask me? You’re the all-powerful Triad. I’m a prisoner here, remember?

  Let me go. I’ve work to do.”

  “You are insolent!” Fatty trilled. His chins fibrillated with anger. “You be punished—”

  A handclap shut him up. It wasn’t much, just a tap, and barely audible at that. But it came from behind the screen, and abruptly we were in a silent world. Stalemate.

  Whoever sat behind there listening was no serf. He—she? —was the superpower.

  Dr. Chao gently snapped his fingers, sort of willco, I suppose. “You may go, Lovejoy. As you say, tomorrow evening.”

  Do you ever wonder how many plans actually turn out right? Like I mean, did Michelangelo’s David finish up exactly as he intended? I doubt it. Nothing ever does.

  Love affairs, robberies, holidays—they all bend out of true. It’s simply the horrid way the world is.

  That evening I was at a loose end. I took a taxi, told the driver anywhere, and found myself started on a tour of the island. It was all standard stuff to me by now. Jardine’s Lookout, the place they fire off the noonday gun, Aberdeen Harbor, the Peak, the oddly remote empty upland area of ang Lei Chung Gap. Finally, in despair at my moroseness, the driver landed me at Amah Rock.

  “Amah with baba,” he laughed, fog in his gold teeth. “Look out to sea for boat, not come. So, stone!”

  The hunched stone looks down over the Lei Yue Nun channel, the beautiful harbor’s eastern exit. It felt remote there, cold. I shivered. Indeed, the tall stone did resemble a Chinese woman with a baby piggyback. The gods did her this favor, turning her into stone when her man’s fishing boat failed to return. A few red-and-gold Hell Money papers fluttered in the evening breeze. Joss sticks had recently burned in the crevices.

  So in Hong Kong everybody honored all forebears’ spirits. The sun was fading, that side of the panorama sinking into dark gray. It was less gorgeous, ominous with spreading darkness.

/>   Abruptly I returned to the taxi and told him the Des Voeux Road tram stop.

  The gods would have been kinder to bring her bloke’s boat home.

  Marilyn wasn’t at the studio. No sign, no message. For a while I hung around hoping she would appear. I went to the Luk Yu in Wing Kut Street for oolong tea and dim sum—it’s the best traditional teahouse—but no sign. I ended with a few daan tat custards to cheer myself up, didn’t succeed, and was at Steerforth’s within an hour.

  We’d drawn a couple of Mexican ladies. The plan was for J.S. and me to arrive at a glitterati party about ten o’clock, where we would “accidentally” meet our clients. Their politician husbands were on a fact-find mission around the Third World, chuckle chuckle. They would spend their Third World funds being entertained all night by six choice girls in Deep Water Bay.

  Mine was Eva, quite possibly the most sophisticated woman in the galaxy. Proof: she showed no perturbation when admitting two Chinese maids to our vast bathroom where we were, sort of, resting jointly. They fetched oysters and champagne and grub with seven types of perfume on trolleys. I tried leaping into the bath and sinking decorously below the suds but they brought more trolleys until they were all along one wall. Eva was amused when I played hell.

  “That’s the first laugh I’ve had for ages!” She fell about. “You were so funny! Hands over your middle and everything!”

  Angry, I stalked to the picture window and stood glaring out at the night sky above Kowloon. We were on the eighth floor.

  “Why didn’t you put your dressing gown on, stupid man?”

  “Haven’t got one.”

  “Really?” She was delighted. “Aren’t all you expatriates in Hong Kong rich?” She waited, a cigarette between her lips. “Light. And vodka orange.”

  “No,” I said. “No. And get your own.”

  “What if,” she said, fury controlled, “I don’t pay you? I’m not used to refusals.”