Ship to Shore

by Peter Tonkin

  Richard came up on the comer of O’Brien and Lockhart Road, right at the heart of Wanchai. He stood here for a moment looking across the heads of the seething bustle, then he plunged into the mass of busy tourists. He needed to eat first and tonight he fancied Szechuanese; something with a bit of spice and bite to it. Sze Cuan Lau was full, but he didn’t care where he sat tonight so they shoved him in a window seat as an advert in case any other gweilo tourists showed up. He proved his gweilo status by throwing proprieties to the winds and wading through his favourite dishes with no regard to order or balance. He had half a duck with pancakes, prawns with chilli paste on a bed of noodles, maa-boo bean curd and crispy rice. When he left the restaurant at half past nine, things were just beginning to warm up.

  Once again Richard hesitated, his eyes flicking up and down the busy road, calculating whether he would be better to start here or go straight across to Tsimshatsui. In the end he simply crossed the road, pushed past a muscular young man, brushed aside a bright beaded curtain and walked down a narrow set of stairs. At the foot of these was a large, ill-lit room full of busy little tables which were being waited on by girls dressed in tiny bikinis. Richard crossed to an empty one and sat, straight-backed. The ice-blue of his eyes caught the occasional beam of white light from the glitter ball which turned lethargically on the ceiling and lit up the two girls dancing sensuously on the stage.

  ‘Hundred dollar,’ said an abrupt voice. Richard looked up at a Filipino girl who held a bottle of Chinese champagne and looked to be in her late teens. The air conditioning made her nipples lift the clinging silk of her bikini top. The shadows did more than the tiny pants to protect her modesty. Richard got out his money and she sat. After a drink or two, he placed a tip on the table, rose and left. In the next bar the Thai girl who presented the champagne wore smaller panties of a vaguely transparent material and no top at all. Here the drink cost him one hundred and fifty dollars. Once again, after a sip or two he left a tip and exited quietly.

  After that, the girls began to wear more as they passed between the tables, but they were offering more than wine. The drinks became more and more expensive. And the floor shows became more and more explicit.

  Finally, just before midnight, Richard parted with two hundred and fifty dollars just to get in through the door of another little dive. The Mermaid Club was in near darkness, but all the light required was supplied by the blue neon brightness of a glass-sided swimming pool which towered three metres behind a busy bar. Richard crossed to an empty stool and sat. At once there was a stirring on his left as the occupant of the nearest stool moved and a tall girl in a tiny dress sat beside him. She looked about sixteen but in the strange light it was difficult to tell. She smelt of ginger and cardamom, a welcome relief in the searingly smoky atmosphere of this particular bar. ‘Thousand dollar,’ she said.

  ‘Drink first,’ he said.

  ‘Champagne. Two fifty dollar bottle.’

  ‘Perfect.’ He leaned forward, signalling to the barman. The girl ordered. His eyes wandered apparently casually down the faces of the other people at the bar. They were almost all men.

  One after another they looked away, fearing bad luck if they met the gaze of a gweilo in the season of hungry ghosts.

  Only one did not.

  Richard looked up at the big blue swimming pool just as someone jumped into it. Bubbles cleared to reveal the slim body of a naked girl who proceeded to dive to the bottom of the tank and swim languorously and increasingly revealingly up and down the glass wall nearest the bar. The water did strange things to her body. It made her long black hair perform a genuinely erotic striptease with the clenched coral points of her breasts. She had clearly been chosen to give this performance because those breasts were of just such a shape and weight to gain fluidity and motion from the movement of the water across them. Her belly hollowed and rippled as she swam. Her long legs kicked and parted apparently artlessly. It was a very accomplished performance. Another girl joined her. Another. Each one perfectly suited to the strange underwater ballet they were performing. Like pale, cleft dolphins, they began to swim closer together, winding themselves sinuously round each other, touching and stroking with increasing intimacy.

  There was another stirring of bodies on Richard’s left, a whine of protest cut short. The fragrance of cardamom was replaced by the smell of bitter Chinese Henan tobacco. ‘At last,’ said Richard quietly. ‘I was beginning to think I would have to come to Gloucester Road in the morning.’

  ‘Not a good idea,’ said Lawkeeper Ho. ‘This much better.’

  ‘Maybe for you,’ said Richard, ‘but God alone knows how I’m going to explain to Mr Shaw and Mr Feng where their petty cash went.’

  ‘You got hard times in Kwai Chung,’ observed the detective drily. Unlike the coastguard captain, Daniel Huuk, who had disappeared from the streets of the new Hong Kong after the Chinese took over. Ho Sun-yi, known as Lawkeeper though his milk name had been Longnose, had made the transition well. He had risen from uniform sergeant in the Royal Hong Kong Police to detective officer in the Hong Kong contingent of the Chinese Police Authority. Whether this was a reflection of his undoubted intelligence and dedication or of his rumoured relationship with Dragon Head Twelvetoes Ho was a moot point. But the fact was that he was a coming man and, as far as Richard was concerned, a valuable contact. Where he could not go to the official authorities with any real expectation of help, he could very well go to Lawkeeper Ho. And he had never been disappointed when he had done so in the past.

  ‘It gives me more face,’ said Lawkeeper, ‘to be seen in the smartest night spot in Wanchai with a gweilo smuggler than it does to be seen in my office with a foreign businessman who has a complaint against the customs authorities. Same fact, different effect.’

  ‘Very Confucian,’ said Richard. He had a great deal of respect and not a little affection for the laconic detective, not least because every time he looked into those long, dark, fiercely intelligent eyes he saw his old friend Twelvetoes. Or supposed he did.

  ‘So, short of arresting Comrade Fuk and his grubby little associates, what can I do for you?’

  ‘I really have no idea. Advise me, I suppose.’

  ‘That is easy. I advise you to accept Fuk’s dirty magazines and deliver them in Osaka. I advise you to pay the Triad squeeze. I advise you to get fung shui men to go through both of your ships and guide the luck dragon into them. I advise you most earnestly in this particular season to ensure that there are no hungry ghosts left walking in either of your vessels. And then I advise you to get the best possible officers and crews. Your problem is not the system but the fact that you will not fit into it. You are like one of those English adventurers one reads about who retires to Provence but refuses to speak French.’

  ‘So corruption is the language of Xianggang, the new Hong Kong?’

  ‘Corruption is in the eye of the beholder,’ said Lawkeeper easily. He looked up suddenly, his face all planes of ice-blue, sapphire and indigo. ‘Is that art or erotica?’ he asked.

  Richard looked at the tank. The girls were entwined round each other, their aquatic dance slow and intimate. He was actually tempted to say ‘art’ until he saw that, during his conversation with Lawkeeper, one of the girls had got hold of a shell which resembled nothing so much as a fiercely erect masculine member.

  ‘It’s not art,’ he said.

  ‘And yet,’ whispered Lawkeeper. ‘And yet … ’

  ‘In the meantime,’ said Richard with some asperity, ‘and philosophy aside, do you know the whereabouts of Twelvetoes Ho?’ He was always careful to refer to the old man as though he could not possibly be related to the detective.

  ‘What part of the dragon does not know where the dragon’s head lies?’

  ‘You admit then that you are a part of that particular dragon?’ asked Richard, sidetracked for a moment.

  ‘No. Of course not. I was asking you a riddle. While you ponder the answer I will ask a man who might know.’

&
nbsp; Richard did ponder the answer — which was perhaps as well for his peace of mind, for the girls in the tank were becoming less artistic by the moment, pausing in their aquatic ministrations to each other only to grab a heaving breath at the increasingly agitated surface of the pool.

  When Lawkeeper returned, Richard was ready with a pretty good answer. But he was not called to give it at once. ‘The Dragon Head is in Guangzhou at the moment,’ said the policeman. ‘Neither you nor I can go there. The Port Authorities have closed the Tai Kok Tsui pier for the time being. And apparently he is not to be disturbed in any case. Within the week, however, he will be in Macau — only a jetcat ride away. With things as they are, you do not even have to inform the authorities you are popping across.’

  ‘Within the week. Well then, perhaps I will try and sort things out here for myself. There is no need to disturb him if I can resolve things myself.’

  ‘True. Not very likely, though.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I shall try. I have a week.’

  ‘The choice is yours.’ Lawkeeper Ho shrugged. ‘In the meantime, you would be wise not to linger here. I recommend that you withdraw now while your problems are relatively simple.’ His eyes drifted back to the goings-on in the tank, where a sturdy and apparently extremely fortunate eel had suddenly appeared.

  Richard rose to go. Then he turned back. ‘The claws,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Lawkeeper was deeply preoccupied.

  ‘The riddle. What part of the dragon does not know where the dragon’s head is. The answer is the claws. The dragon’s claws know nothing.’

  ‘Except how to tear and destroy. A good answer. And one worth remembering. There are many dragons in Xianggang. And many, many claws.’

  Richard was still considering the full implications of this observation as he climbed back up on to Lockhart Road. He was right down by the Canal Road flyover, and as he came out on to the busy thoroughfare he paused, wondering whether to walk back to the Wanchai MTR station or whether to go on up to Causeway Bay. As he stood, indecisive, a siren split the busy, bustling air. He thought nothing of it at first, the fire station was just the other side of the flyover after all, but as he turned to retrace his steps to the Wanchai stop, he saw a squad of police vehicles smashing their way up Lockhart Road, like lifeboats butting through surf. The full implications of Lawkeeper’s words hit him then. He began to push his way purposefully away from the nightclub, his mind filled only with the impact it would make on the local papers if he should be caught up in a raid upon such a place.

  Suddenly he found himself at the centre of a knot of young men very like the doorkeeper of the club he had just left.

  No sooner had he registered that the young men existed as a group and in very close proximity than he felt an agonising pain in the side of his right knee. He had no sensation of being struck — the knee was held together by pins and given to weakness in any case, courtesy of a terrorist bomb some years earlier — but the pain caused the whole leg to give way. Richard felt himself falling sideways off the pavement, across the gutter and into the path of the approaching police cars. He saw the glare of the oncoming headlights and he heard the screaming of brakes. And that was all.

  Until, some uncounted time later, he found himself lying on his back in a hospital bed looking up into the frowning face of Lawkeeper Ho.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Lawkeeper. ‘You had us worried for a moment there, but I’m told there’s no major damage. You’re in St Paul’s Hospital and Mr Stephenson is on the way.’ He turned, crossed to a teak door, and then looked back. ‘I’ll be here again later today to talk this through with you. You should be out on Thursday. I advise you to rest on Friday and then come with me on Saturday.’

  ‘Come with you where on Saturday?’

  ‘On to the jetcat. I have to go across to Macau. I think you have business there.’

  4

  That Tuesday, 7 September 1999, was one of the loveliest days Robin could remember. The weather was perfect, almost tropical for Cumbria. Her father, often grouchy and snappish these days, especially around his grandchildren, was in his mellowest mood. This had much to do with the fact that Helen DuFour, his chief executive and long-time lover, was with them. The twins were subservient and calculatingly angelic — they knew how the week would end and were storing up Brownie points now. And Robin’s mood was in sunny reaction to the stark horror of receiving Gerry Stephenson’s phone call about Richard. Two years and four months ago she had received a call just like that one at Ashenden on the very night she returned from a short holiday with the twins but without Richard. Then, in May 1997, she had hurried out to Hong Kong to find Richard severely wounded and amnesiac, accused of the slaughter of thirty-eight people on board Sulu Queen which had been found drifting inbound from Singapore. It had without doubt been the worst experience of her life, with the exception of the arrival of the twins, and she had been queasily reliving it ever since she had arrived in Cumbria on Saturday night. Once Gerry had assured her that Richard was relatively unhurt and had been the victim of a bungled mugging, rescued almost immediately by a police squad providentially raiding a nightclub nearby, she had calmed down and went about the rest of her holiday in the sure and certain knowledge that the worst that was likely to happen had happened now.

  That feeling spilt over into a cheery hopefulness about all their prospects in Hong Kong. She suddenly, groundlessly, became certain that Richard would find some way of sorting out the mess with the Sulu Queen and getting the China Queens Company on its feet and pulling its weight. That was the sort of thing he was particularly good at, after all, she thought indulgently. And, just as Gerry had put a positive gloss on what he had reported to her, so she put a positive gloss on things in discussion with her father and co-executive as the five of them rode in Sir William’s Bentley down from Cold Fell to the coast at Silloth. As Sir William guided his open-topped pride and joy sedately down the A69 with Helen relaxing languorously in the front beside him — and Robin in the back tried to keep the conversation up and her offsprings’ dirty sandals down — the blue day stretched out around them, hummingly warm, with the sultriness cut by a slight onshore breeze blowing in off the Solway Firth.

  ‘Richard’s well over that nasty business a couple of years ago, is he?’ Sir William was sensitive to matters of health nowadays. He had suffered a massive heart attack live on television six or so years ago, just before he had retired as managing director of Heritage Mariner.

  ‘He’s fine, Daddy. And Gerry says that that business the night before last hasn’t even shaken him up. They’re only keeping him in for observation. It’s all very different there. He’d probably be out again if it had happened here.’

  ‘Probably still be waiting in casualty if it had happened here!’ Helen DuFour, Provencal to her fingertips, maintained her French preoccupation with things medical and ranked the Health Service just a little below mushy peas and pork scratchings among things British.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ huffed Sir William, whose life had in fact been saved by the quick work of National Health paramedics — and by the kiss of life from the delectable Maggie DaSilva. ‘But you’re not telling me that health care in a section of communist China is superior to the provision here!’

  That was the nub of things, of course. Xianggang was just a part of China now. It was all very well for the Party to promise that for the next forty-seven years Xianggang would stand at the heart of a Special Economic Zone, but they still had the overall right to define what that Special Economic Zone actually meant. Inevitably, it would mean what they wanted it to mean. And that in turn was likely to be something beyond the ken and calculation of even the wisest China watcher. But on the other hand, if anyone could make a go of the situation, then Richard Mariner was that man, and if he needed specific advice or back-up, chief executive of Heritage Mariner Charles Lee was a Hong Kong Chinese by birth. Charles had been banned from the colony after the authorities in Beijing discovered he had been supportin
g the student movement destroyed in the Tiananmen Square massacre. He had hoped to be allowed to return after the handback and had spent a long time in China two years ago. But the authorities in the new Zone had decided to continue his ban for the time being, not least because of the nefarious activities of his elder brother Victor.

  Still, Robin held her peace. It was too lovely a day for worries. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said.

  ‘Even though you won’t let Richard go back to sea? I think that’s a mistake, you know.’

  ‘I know, Daddy, but I don’t think he minds too much. Each time he’s gone to sea recently it’s turned into a disaster.’

  ‘He hasn’t been to sea recently,’ said Sir William. ‘Not for two years and more.’

  Robin would not be drawn. ‘You know what I mean,’ she said.

  The conversation flagged. Sir William guided the huge green car through the back of Carlisle and on to the B5307. All around them the countryside undulated slightly under the wide, deep-blue sky. Gorse and coarse grass testified to the fact that there was nothing underneath but sand. Between Carlisle and Dumfries the whole west coast was a low scoop of mud and silt which settled slowly into the great flat reaches of the Solway itself. Little rivers like the Wampool and the Waver wound through this almost fen-like countryside, with their estuaries adding to the overall curve of the waterway where the Esk and the Eden came down to the sea. Like the Firth of Clyde, further up the coast, the Solway was shallow and wide. The tidal stream surged sluggishly under the dictates of the moon, revealing and covering great acreages of sand.