The Black Dragon

by Julian Sedgwick

  “Hong Kong?!”

  “Why not? You’ve always wanted to go, haven’t you? See where Lily came from—bless her soul. It might help.”

  “I don’t know.”

  On the one hand he just wants to stay put. Enjoy that quiet, cozy half-term break as usual, surrounded by the salvaged stuff from the Mysterium. Tuck up in his attic room with the Houdini biography and watch YouTube clips of David Blaine and people like that. Afternoons poring over the Escape Book maybe, trying to crack the many coded entries.

  On the other hand—Hong Kong, Mum’s birthplace? Actually doing something rather than holing up, nursing his wounds.

  “Thought you’d jump at it,” Laura says.

  The thought of travel does chime with that urge for action and movement . . .

  “And I’d appreciate the company, Danny boy! Some of these gangs I’m investigating are scary as anything.”

  “So would I be helping?”

  “God no. You’ll be sightseeing. Having a good time.”

  “On my own?”

  “You’ll need a companion,” Laura says, playing her trump card. “A minder, if you like. Someone trustworthy. Someone whose shoulders we can rely on?” A smile flickers on her lips. “Someone like . . . Major Zamora, for example?”

  He has guessed as much before she says it. After all, a dwarf who can lift a motorbike over his head? Now, those are reliable shoulders. Pinned to Danny’s bedroom wall are the postcards Zamora has sent as he drifts from one contract to another. Pictures of Paris, the Acropolis in Athens, the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

  And now? Somewhere new and unrelated to the Mysterium? Danny feels his face lifting. And to see Hong Kong at last . . .

  Laura glances at him again. “I’ll take that smile as a yes, then.”

  She pushes hard on the accelerator and the Citroën leaps into the fading light.

  “Yes.”

  From around his neck, hung on a bootlace, Danny takes his talisman: Dad’s lockpick set—one of the few items that survived the fire. Five slender picks and a detachable tension tool folded into a stainless-steel handle. Goodness only knows how many locks Dad picked with the thing. Danny looks at it for a moment as it turns slowly on the bootlace, rolling the names of the tools in his head: snake rake, half diamond, hook pick, double round. It’s like a prayer, saying those words. A prayer of escape. And maybe it’s being answered.

  It’s dark by the time they reach home. Laura drives past a parking place right outside the house.

  “You missed a space.”

  She swears, then weaves into another one, some twenty houses farther down the street. “Wasn’t concentrating.”

  But before she unlocks the front door, she throws a quick look over her shoulder. There’s something hyper-alert in her eyes. Checking to see if someone or something’s there? Even though Danny is glad to be back—even though he feels the reassurance of his own room beckoning—he’s alert enough to catch that glance.

  “Come on, Danny boy!” Laura calls, disabling the alarm.

  He turns and scans the street. Nothing to see. Just a frost blinding the car windscreens. Imagination getting the better of me maybe, he thinks, and turns to head up to his room.

  “Chuck your school clothes in the basket,” Laura says. “We’ll wash them when we get back.”

  Deep in his back pocket the charred piece of paper with the diagram lies forgotten—the question he meant to ask forgotten with it.

  Two days later they are standing in a check-in line at Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5.

  Laura has arranged everything smoothly, effortlessly, by her standards. Normally she would flail around and misplace something and make ten phone calls—and then find the thing she was looking for in the first place. To Danny it’s almost as if the change of flight and his inclusion have been anticipated. Her behavior is a bit out of character, and although—for the first time in ages—excitement is building inside him, he keeps a watchful eye on her.

  Laura is studying the e-ticket, pulling a face. “Jeez, I wish the newspaper could have stumped up for premium economy. I need to work a bit. And get some sleep.”

  She looks at Danny’s small bag on the floor. “Sure you’ve got enough?”

  “Never had much on tour. Dad always said too many things—”

  “—stop you from living properly. Yeah, I heard it! Too often!”

  Danny has packed light—cards, iPod, a few clothes. The Escape Book nearly came too, but much safer to leave that at home. There’ll be time to trawl its coded secrets later.

  Laura looks ruefully at her own bags bursting with notebooks, camera equipment, files. As she shuffles toward the desk, kicking one suitcase in front of her, she turns her head. That same quick glance, senses alert, just like the other night. Something’s up, but what? He looks round to follow her gaze, but again there is nothing unusual to see on the wide, bright concourse.

  “Are you OK, Aunt Laura?”

  “Perfecto. Hey, our turn!”

  The British Airways attendant at the counter smiles her made-up smile at Danny, comparing his passport photo with his face.

  “Danny Woo? Going home then?”

  “Um . . .” How to answer that? The Mysterium trailer was home, even if it was a home that moved every week. But now that’s gone. And “home” certainly isn’t Ballstone. Or Laura’s house—not quite. I’m not that same boy anymore, not the circus boy who watched Mum and Dad and the rest of them. And I’m not a Ballstone student either. Not really.

  Feels like he is always defending himself at school from being typecast as some weirdo outsider or a grief-stricken orphan straight out of some Victorian novel.

  If I don’t fit anywhere, then who am I?

  “You must know where home is, young man!” There’s something patronizing in her manner and it spurs him on to try something. Do Laura a favor. OK. Animate your face like Dad used to do. Get the woman on your side.

  “Sort of going home,” he says. “Woo is my mum’s name. It’s a tradition to take your mother’s surname where she came from.”

  “Oh, really? Where’s that?”

  “Chinese circus.”

  “Fancy that!”

  “But our circus was in Europe. The Mysterium,” he says, keeping firm eye contact, making sure she can see their glowing colors.

  “Goodness me.”

  “We went everywhere. Germany, Italy, America . . .”

  Bit by bit, he starts to mirror the movements she’s making with her eyes, eyebrows. When her hand reaches up to scratch her forehead, he mimics her, and when she reaches down to the keyboard, he does the same.

  Laura is rummaging away in her leather shoulder bag. “Ugh, where did I put my passport?”

  The British Airlines lady hesitates, glancing uncertainly back at Danny. Now’s the moment. He opens his eyes wide and looks deep into her pupils. Then waves his hand across them. “We upgraded yesterday. Booking reference IS4JS,” he says.

  The woman checks her screen and, as she does so, he raps hard on the counter with his knuckles. “To business class,” he says, voice ringing with conviction.

  Laura opens her mouth, but he kicks her foot under the counter—and she quietly hands over her own passport. The check-in lady blinks a couple of times, taps the keyboard—then blinks again.

  “So you have. I think. Business class. How nice. Here are your boarding passes.”

  They head for security leaving the woman looking at her screen, puzzled. Danny feels a glow taking hold of him, a spring in his step, like he’s grown a few inches. I did it, he thinks. Just like it’s supposed to go.

  “Bad boy,” Laura says, smiling. “One of your dad’s tricks, I suppose?”

  “It’s a ‘mirror force.’ You just copy their breathing, movements, that kind of thing, until they feel really relaxed.” He shrugs. “Then hit them with the suggestion. Never works on teachers, though.”

  “What about your friends?”

  Danny is putting the lockpick s
et in the plastic tray. He shrugs again. Friends? There are people he can chat with at school. But no one you could really call a “friend.” Not like the ones he had in the Mysterium. Friendship in the circus was vital, a serious business, Mum always said. You had to trust—and be trusted—to walk a wire or be chainsawed in half by your husband.

  Laura watches him as he slips through the arch of the metal detector, contained, wrapped in his thoughts. Listed on the back of his Mysterium tour T-shirt are the dates for that last fateful show, Wonder Chamber. A roll call of European cities in block capitals that tick away the days and venues to BERLIN and—after that—all the places that were destined never to be played. After the tragedy, the company parted and ceased to exist in anything other than memory.

  She frowns hard, holding back her own emotion for a moment, and then follows him through the gateway of the scanner. This is the right thing to do, she thinks—trying, but not quite succeeding, to convince herself.

  4

  HOW TO TRAVEL IN TIME

  The Boeing 777 cuts its way through the night and Danny settles back to enjoy the experience. As a small child he traveled tens of thousands of miles, but most of them were spent sitting high up front in one of the Mysterium’s dark-blue trucks, or alongside Dad in the van as they cruised down yet another long European motorway. He was too young to remember the U.S. tour and can only just recall South America in fragments, so long-haul flight is a novelty.

  I’ve missed the traveling, he thinks. New sights, new sounds. That feeling you get as you come into a new city. New people. The sky map on his monitor shows the familiar cities of Western Europe slowly being replaced by places he has never seen in Russia.

  “Feels a bit odd, I expect,” Laura says. “Finally making this journey, I mean . . . You must be thinking about your mum?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Dad too, I guess.”

  He bites his lip. The truth is he doesn’t know what to think. Doesn’t even know if he wants to think about it or not.

  Maybe Hong Kong will help, he thinks, repeating the thought like a mantra. Even if it brings up the painful stuff. Mum always talked longingly about the food, the weather. The temples and the lush hills and countryside. But when he pressed her, tried to find out more about her past life there, she would clam tight and change the subject. And when, in response to his persistent questions, she promised to take him there one day, it always had the feeling of “one day” that would never come.

  “I wish I remembered more Cantonese. Mum used to speak a bit, but in the end we stuck to English.”

  “Your dad was always a terrible linguist,” Laura says. “One thing he couldn’t do! Maybe some of it will come back to you. Anyway, most people who deal with tourists still speak English. Not that long since we rented the place from the Chinese, after all!”

  “Can you tell me about the story you’re doing?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, Danny boy,” Laura says brightly. Slightly too brightly. “Just have a good time with Zamora. Eat noodles. Leave the bad guys to me.”

  “It feels like you’re not telling me things, Aunt Laura.”

  “Honestly not, Danny. Scout’s honor.”

  “I’m not a little kid anymore,” he says, cutting her short. “There’s something you’re not saying. About the trip.”

  It comes out sharper than he intends. But it’s frustrating the way silence descends whenever he asks the tricky questions. About his parents’ deaths, for example. People were kind and supportive, of course—Laura especially—and he appreciated that. It helped him cope with the shock, cope with how much he missed Dad’s deep voice describing the world and the wonders in it, missed Mum’s quick smile, steadfast optimism. Their love. He can just about cope with that. Most days.

  And he can generally push from his mind the wreck of their trailer, the deathly hush that hung over the Mysterium encampment, the white-sheeted stretchers. He can cope with all that.

  Just about.

  But he can’t cope with the fact that nobody, not even Laura, ever seems to want to answer the “difficult” questions directly.

  “I’m growing up, Aunt Laura. I can deal with stuff.”

  “I suppose you are, Danny. Fair point.” She glances around the cabin, then drops her voice. “Well, this lot are a really nasty triad gang.”

  “Triad?”

  “Organized criminal gangs. Centuries old. Bit like the Mafia with a big code of honor and secrecy. This lot are called the Black Dragon. A bunch of upstarts forcing their way into the Chinese underworld. And they’re reaching out to gangs back home in Britain. I want to get up close and personal—and show how dangerous they are. Not glamorous. Just thugs.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Most of these gangs stick to drugs, human trafficking, stuff like that. But this lot have their fingers in a lot of pies. Getting into kidnapping. People are paying up because they realize the Dragon means business.”

  “How?”

  Laura taps her fingers on the tray table. “They send the relatives locks of hair, with a warning to pay up fast. If they don’t, they get something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “A box of steamed dim sum, wrapped up like a gift . . . and in one of the dumplings there will be the victim’s little finger. Maybe two.”

  Laura laughs apologetically. “Like I say, Danny, ‘fingers in a lot of pies.’ Just experimenting with a tagline. They use bolt cutters, I believe.”

  “How would you know whose finger it was?”

  Laura waggles her little finger in front of his face. “You’d recognize this little piggy, wouldn’t you?”

  Danny’s stomach tightens, a brief image in his head of Laura’s lively finger severed and bloody on a white plate. He pulls a face. “And how do you get close to them? The Black Dragon?”

  “Curiosity killed the cat. Don’t you know that?”

  “Doesn’t seem to stop you.”

  “This cat’s got a lot of lives left, Danny boy.”

  “Mum always used to say that . . . if something went wrong—”

  “And anyway,” Laura adds quickly, “I’ve got an inside source in the Hong Kong Police. Organized Crime and Triad Bureau. Going to meet him tomorrow. Decent guy. Not like some of them, bent as old nails.”

  A stewardess is working a trolley down the aisle, pulling level with them.

  “We’ve got English or Chinese for you today, young man,” the stewardess says. “Which do you feel like? Sausage and mash, or a lovely selection of dim sum . . .”

  “Sausage and mash,” Danny says quickly, the image of Laura’s severed finger still sharp in his head. But then he changes his mind. “No. I’ll have the dim sum. Thanks.”

  “Good choice,” Laura says. “After all, at least a part of you is going home!”

  After dinner he lifts the blind on the porthole and stares out into the dark. Laura is rattling away on her laptop, humming like she does when working a story. Dad would have been able to read so much in her eyes from micro-muscles you can’t voluntarily control, which betray memory, emotion. Or by the exact way she’s set her shoulders. Danny knows how it’s done in theory, but hasn’t enough experience to be sure of anything. I’ll just have to wait and see, he thinks.

  As the engines pulse, he watches ice crystals form in the glazing of the window and slowly he drifts into a reverie: not quite awake, not quite asleep, eyes half closing. He slips in time, memories playing again in vivid color. When his guard is down they come back, unbidden, in bits and pieces . . .

  Now, in his mind’s eye, he’s there. He’s at the Mysterium again. Kaleidoscopic images well up into consciousness: he sees the Aerialisques tumbling on their red silk ropes from high in the hemisphere, finishing their burlesque-like act to a chorus of wolf whistles, applause, cheering.

  Half asleep, he drifts with the memory and sees the bearded electric guitarist, the pretty tattooed cellist, climb to their places high in the rigging and start the hypnotic
riffs that signal Dad’s great new escapology routine. The amplified music throbs around the arena.

  And there’s Mum watching from the performers’ entrance, peeking between the curtains, her bright- green eyes fixed on Dad as he is fastened into the straitjacket and chains. She doesn’t normally watch, but this is a first performance. She can’t help herself. Maybe more tension in her face than normal.

  And there, bright in the spotlight, Danny sees the water torture cell waiting for its prisoner. Every detail clear, as if he is still standing in front of it. A reinvention of Houdini’s famous escape: a glass tank—full to the brim with water—the size of a small elevator. Its wooden frame is freshly painted red, the water inside reflecting the strobing lights, a projected image of Houdini’s own garish publicity poster.

  And then Dad’s feet are fastened into the ugly-looking stocks and hoisted up above his head by the winch. He dangles upside down at the end of the chain, smiling out over the expectant faces of the crowd, spotlight bright on his powerful figure, over the head of Zamora, who waits, axe poised “just in case” for dramatic effect. But there will be no need to use it. Nothing ever goes wrong for Dad.

  The straitjacket and padlocks confine his arms tightly to his side as he hovers for a moment in the air. And then down he goes, kerploof, head first into the water . . .

  Bubbles stream from his mouth and nose as he twists and writhes in the tank. Time runs through the animated hourglass now projected on the tank. The music picks up, insistent. Dad’s hair waves like seaweed in the churning water, his face a mixture of concentration and effort. Two minutes left to free himself, or he will drown.

  The tank is visibly shaking as he puts all of his effort into the escape, body flexing and straightening as he usually does to start to loosen the bonds. The water laps over the top, running down the glass, distorting his figure.