The Black Dragon

by Julian Sedgwick

  But this guilt is more concrete.

  He ticks the items off in his mind. I knew about the dots. I knew White Suit was following us. I should have made Laura listen.

  Danny takes a breath—feels the ground firm beneath his feet—loosens his shoulders, softens his knees. A Qigong move that Blanco taught him. This time he won’t let the guilt take him prisoner. He won’t let it get the better of him.

  Zamora comes to stand beside him in the downpour.

  “I’m going to sort this out, Major.”

  “One step at a time now, Danny. Let’s start with the police . . .”

  The rain batters down, clearing Danny’s head. Not just from the jet lag and the tiredness of the journey, but from that long hibernation of the last sixteen months. Waking up. A process that began with the explosion is continuing now under the full force of the storm. He looks up and lets the drops sting his face, slapping his skin into tingling life. Determination growing, he shakes the water from his head.

  “I’m going to find her, Major.”

  Zamora looks hesitant.

  “Are you with me?”

  “Of course, Mister Danny. Every step of the way. But let’s get out of this monsoon. And talk to the police, no?”

  “What happened to Sing Sing? And Mr. Chow?”

  In all the chaos it seems they have vanished into the night. Even with the shock of the kidnap and fight buzzing his veins, Danny feels dismayed at that. What did the girl know about Dad? Why does it feel like he’s met Sing Sing before? And what has happened to her?

  They go back into the Golden Bat and survey the damage. Waiters are escorting diners out through the broken glass and upturned furniture, while two chefs mount a rescue operation for the fish, scooping the frantically twitching survivors into a plastic bucket.

  In the midst of the chaos, sparked out between two broken chairs, is the man who shattered the aquarium.

  Time to act, Danny thinks. He crouches over the body, feeling his pockets, making the quick moves he used to watch Jimmy Torrini do in the pickpocket routine. Long fingers working quickly. Easier when your mark is unconscious, of course.

  A lighter, some cigarettes. A return ticket stub for the Star Ferry. Today’s date. A receipt for a shoe repair outfit called Heart and Sole in somewhere called Wuchung Mansions. Danny commits them to memory and tucks them back in Ponytail’s pocket. He glances at the man’s feet. One of his slip-on shoes has come loose and his foot is bare.

  On the hard sole of his left foot is a neat tattoo—and there’s the same pattern again! Forty-nine dots, seven by seven. Alongside are two Chinese characters.

  Again, one of the dots is circled: second column in from the right about halfway down. Is it the same as the one in the diagram at school? It’s hard to remember, and he curses himself for a moment for not “paying attention to detail.” Dad would have grumped about that. Zamora comes over, shaking his head as he too clocks the pattern.

  “Major,” Danny says. “As my lifelong friend, tell me about this sign.”

  “We’ll talk later, Danny. Police will be here in a moment. That’s the priority. Ah, there’s my hat.”

  He stoops to pick up his bowler and frowns. A hole has been blown through the crown. Zamora puts his index finger through it, waggles it thoughtfully, before reaching up to feel his head. “Must have missed by millimeters!”

  But Danny isn’t listening. “Can you at least remember if one of those dots on our hotel door was circled?”

  “Does it matter?” Zamora snaps, his usual good humor now decidedly off balance. He stops himself short, holding his hands up in apology. “Sorry, Mister Danny. Bad day.”

  Danny nods. He still has the lighter in his hand. It’s stamped in red with the same characters as on the man’s foot—and quickly he shoves it into his jeans pocket.

  But his thoughts have slipped to Sing Sing again, the sense of disappointment deepening. After all, her disappearance during the kidnapping is pretty suspicious. He thinks about the toughened hands, her defensive manner. He sees the challenging, direct smile sparking her eyes—and wonders what she meant about Dad. Where is she now? Back with her triad friends? She must be with the bad guys. Otherwise surely she, or Chow, would have stayed to help. Waited for the police. Maybe her interest was feigned and nothing more.

  Zamora goes over to the pony-tailed thug and gives him a nudge with his boot. The man groans and rolls away. There, tucked under his thigh, is a little snub-nosed pistol. The major looks around quickly, sees Danny is staring out into the street again, and then stoops to pick it up in one neat movement.

  Over the sound of the rain on the restaurant’s canopy comes the wail of a siren.

  9

  HOW TO READ SOMETHING HIDDEN FROM VIEW

  The first police to arrive on the scene seem almost uninterested. When Danny and Zamora do eventually get to explain what has happened, the policemen simply shrug and seem more concerned with the damage to the restaurant.

  “We need to get a move on,” Zamora barks. “Comprende?”

  “Wait for boss,” the shorter one says. For a moment Danny is worried that Zamora will punch him, but the dwarf turns away abruptly, shoves his hands in his pockets, and goes to stare out at the street.

  The rain thickens, falling in curtains of water from the Bat’s awning. Danny sits on a bar stool, thinking hard about the events of the last twenty-four hours. First, there was Laura’s heightened alertness—as if she was expecting something. Then, Sing Sing mentioning Dad from out of nowhere. There was that unusual jagged edge to Zamora—even before the kidnapping. And then there’s White Suit and the stupid dots that keep turning up everywhere. But as to how these pieces fit together, he has no idea.

  Ten minutes later a plainclothes policeman arrives, shaking the rain from his shaggy mop of hair.

  “Senior Inspector Lo, B Division,” he says. “Organized Crime and Triad Bureau.”

  “We need to get a move on!” Zamora says again, exasperated.

  “Just need to go through details.”

  Lo has sharp features, an intelligent face. A thin, white scar jags down his cheek. As he asks his questions he keeps glancing at Danny.

  “I see. And tell me again exactly what your aunt was doing here?” he says, looking at Danny, interrupting Zamora’s blow-by-blow description of the fight.

  “She was investigating something called the Black Dragon—” Danny stops himself. Lo seems decent, but Laura’s warning about corrupt police flips back into his head. Better to be on the safe side.

  Lo pulls a face. “Black Dragon?”

  “Maybe it was something else,” Danny says quickly.

  “Why don’t we do this down at OCTB headquarters,” Lo says, motioning them toward his unmarked car outside. “Much quieter there. No prying eyes.”

  “At least they got those two idiotas,” Zamora says, looking back up the street as they make their way through the puddles. Ponytail is being led to a squad car, head bandaged heavily, eyes vacant, while the other man, still unconscious, is stretchered away to an ambulance.

  And all this time, Danny thinks, the gang is spiriting Aunt Laura into the Hong Kong night. We should be out there. Doing something.

  He frowns and then strides toward Lo’s car.

  They sit in the detective’s cluttered office and wait.

  And wait.

  Three hours pass and the clock hands shudder slowly to half past midnight. People come and go in the corridor. Men in shirtsleeves, others in jackets stamped with OCTB in big yellow letters. Now and then somebody peers in, raises their eyebrows—and then drifts away again. Zamora drums his fingertips on the desk and the rain keeps tapping away on the skylight overhead.

  Adrenalin and jet lag are tugging Danny in different directions. Hard to tell whether he’s buzzing, or going under from the sleep deprivation. He shakes his head. I must concentrate. Keep focused.

  “Where’s that blasted detective got to?” Zamora says, slapping the desk hard.


  Danny looks out into the corridor, and as he does so, the door opposite opens. Slumped in a chair, and brightly lit by a desk lamp . . . is White Suit.

  The drowsiness rips from Danny’s system. Wide awake again. I knew it. I knew he was after us! So they’ve got him. Maybe now we’ll get to the bottom of it. Maybe Laura won’t take long to find. Maybe even by morning we’ll all be sitting round the breakfast table laughing about the whole thing.

  But then the man glances up, eyes widening a fraction as his gaze meets Danny’s. It’s hard to read the look. Could be surprise? Or anxiety? A bit of both. But there’s also something conspiratorial in the look. Something that makes Danny wonder whether he’s reading the situation correctly. White Suit gives a very small shake of the head—then someone kicks the door shut and the slam echoes down the corridor like a gunshot.

  “Major—”

  But at that moment Inspector Lo comes back. A smile on his face and two Styrofoam cups of coffee in his hands.

  “Sorry to have kept you.”

  “Madre mia. At last,” Zamora huffs.

  “Thought you might need refreshment.”

  Danny is about to ask about the man in the white suit—but then sees that little shake of the head again in his mind. Maybe not. With that movement the man was saying, Don’t say you’ve seen me. Or Keep quiet. Something like that. Only an instinct, but there’s not much else to go on right now.

  “What we need is for you to get a move on,” Zamora says, jabbing the table.

  Lo spreads his hands to placate. “We have Miss White’s description out to all units, all informants. Ports and border control. We’ll hear something soon.”

  “Will the kidnappers ask for a ransom?” Danny asks.

  “Very likely. Your embassy has been informed.”

  Lo lights a cigarette, looking down at the paperwork on his desk.

  “What about the scumbags you caught at the Bat?” Zamora says.

  “It seems they may not have been involved in the kidnapping, Mr. Zamora.”

  “Of course they were!” Zamora says, getting to his feet. “We saw it! And it’s Major Zamora!”

  “Please sit down,” Lo says, very calmly. “It’s a bit more complicated. They claim you assaulted them, you see. They may press charges. One of them is badly concussed. And there’s lot of damage in the restaurant.”

  “But there were witnesses,” Zamora splutters.

  “It seems nobody saw it happen.”

  “One of them had a gun,” Danny says, frustration building. Maybe he can try something, attempt the mirror force again. Worth a try. Probably a tougher nut to crack, though.

  “But we find no gun,” Lo says, tapping the desk emphatically. Danny does the same and shifts his breathing to match the rise and fall of the detective’s chest. He emphasizes it with a slight movement of his hand, fingers wafting up as Lo breathes in, down as he breathes out. In, out.

  “What about Detective Tan? The one Miss Laura was trying to find?” Zamora presses.

  “Detective Tan is on holiday, I’m afraid.”

  “But Laura said—” Danny stops himself short in time. Need to focus.

  “Hawaii, I believe.”

  Lightning flashes in the skylight overhead. As Lo glances up at it, Danny does so too.

  “What about the tattoo on the man’s foot?” he says, trying to pace his voice into the hypnotic rhythm, the one Dad always used to relax, persuade, mesmerize his “marks.” He opens his eyes wide, showing the colors. “The pattern. You’re going to tell me what those forty-nine dots are, aren’t you!?”

  The detective returns Danny’s look, stubbing out his cigarette irritably. “No idea,” he says. “No idea at all. And the way we do things is that I ask questions. OK? You’ve had a shock. Let me do the police work . . .”

  Danny sits back, deflated and rather embarrassed.

  “And what about the Chinese characters next to the pattern?” Zamora insists.

  Lo fires up his laptop. “They just say Kowloon, Mr. Zamora. Nothing else. Now, just need to do one more form. P28. Shouldn’t take twenty minutes. Maybe a little bit more.”

  Danny groans. “But if it was the Black Dragon, why can’t you just go after them?”

  “But we don’t know it, do we?” Lo answers. “And no one knows where they are.”

  Disappointed with his attempt at the hypnosis, Danny idly watches the detective’s fingers stump across the keys as Zamora spells out his name, profession—Circus Daredevil—Laura’s details, their hotel name, what they did this last twenty-four hours.

  It’s interesting, he realizes; if you keep the image of the QWERTY keyboard in your head you can tally letters one by one to the keystrokes.

  Z, A, M, O, R, A

  G, O, L, D, E, N, B, A, T . . .

  Intrigued, he sits up a bit and focuses as Lo punches the keyboard two-fingered. Something’s not quite right, Danny realizes after a while. Not right at all. The keystrokes aren’t matching their answers. Not all the time at any rate.

  The phone rings.

  “Wai?” Lo barks into the phone, grabbing a pen. He scribbles on a Post-it pad.

  “Neih dim chingfu a?” He’s pressing very hard, Danny thinks, the knuckles of Lo’s hand white as he grips the pen. Stressed.

  The detective underlines what he has written, then rips the note off the pad.

  “Gotta go,” he says, grabbing his jacket. “Busy night. You go back to your hotel. We’ll do everything we can.”

  An idea leaps into Danny’s mind. He stands and makes as if to shake Lo’s hand.

  “Thank you for your help—”

  But as Lo reaches for his grip, Danny moves his hand quickly sideways. The unexpected movement confuses Lo’s attention, and Danny’s left hand sweeps across the Post-it pad, whipping the second sheet.

  “Sorry.” He shakes Lo’s hand now firmly, palming the note like a playing card, transferring it to his back pocket in one smooth movement right under the detective’s nose. Feels good to be doing something. And he has done it for good reason.

  He’s convinced that Lo has been less than straight with them.

  The detective leads them out into the corridor. “I’ll have a couple of officers take you back to the Pearl. Keep to the hotel. Don’t trust anyone you don’t know. If the Black Dragon are involved then we will all need to be careful.”

  He adjusts the gun in his shoulder holster. “Understand?”

  Danny glances at the door that slammed on White Suit. There are raised voices coming from inside now, but indistinct. There’s a muffled thud, like a heavy weight falling to the floor. Another—and then a stifled cry of pain.

  Lo glances at the door, seems to hesitate a fraction, and then turns on his heels, striding briskly away down the echoing corridor.

  Danny nods at the door, drops his voice. “The white suit man’s in there.”

  “Caray! Why didn’t Lo say?”

  “I think he’s being interrogated.”

  “Maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye,” Zamora says.

  “You have no idea who he is? White Suit?”

  “Not a clue.”

  A police car takes them back to the Pearl on rain-slicked streets. So many lights overhead that they fuse into a white smoke in the humid air. Danny gazes up at them. The feeling that has been growing these last few days—that began with the explosion and that washed over him in the rain outside the Bat—is loud in his head. Something’s coming. Something I’ve been trying to avoid, but can’t avoid any longer. And ever since the trip began it has felt like Mum and Dad are closer again somehow. Their personalities, their actions conjuring themselves back to life around him.

  He turns to Zamora beside him on the backseat of the patrol car. The dwarf’s profile is giving nothing away except grim determination—the kind that used to play on his face when they were facing a difficult crowd or pitching the big top in a high wind. In the glow of the neon signs overhead he looks older than Danny remembers.
Tired.

  “At Mum and Dad’s funeral you said I could always trust you.”

  Zamora shifts on his seat.

  “Well, of course you can, Mister Danny. Let’s keep focused on the immediate problem . . .”

  But the memory of the funeral is stirred now. Danny remembers how well Zamora supported him then. Danny had found himself alone, standing in the steadily falling snow, the entire company of the Mysterium gathered under the skeletal trees in the Berlin Kreuzberg Friedhof. Darko Blanco was saying how hard it had been for the gravediggers. Pneumatic drills were needed.

  Danny had desperately tried not to think about what Mum and Dad looked like in those long silent caskets. The worst of it was this: when you were used to seeing them escape from confined spaces—despite being bound and shackled—you couldn’t help but assume that any moment now the coffins’ lids would spring open, and there they would be, smiling and taking their bows after another daring stunt. But the lids stayed resolutely shut. Danny had thought about Houdini’s escapes from the “living burials.” It was one trick his father never wanted to emulate. (He had started working on it, but couldn’t cope when the soil hit his face, choking him. Each time he sat up and shook his head violently—and then got out of the open grave.)

  In the cemetery Zamora had come up and stood next to Danny, letting his quiet presence do the work. After a long while watching the snow fall the dwarf had said, “You can always rely on me, Danny. Always.”

  Danny believed it then. He needs to believe it now.

  10

  HOW TO REVEAL HIDDEN MESSAGES

  Thirty minutes later they’re sitting by the window in their hotel room. Across the South China Sea the last of the lightning is guttering away to nothing.

  Danny looks at Zamora. “So you were going to tell me about the dots.”

  The dwarf looks thoughtfully at his hat as he twirls it in his stubby fingers.

  “Please.”

  “I don’t know much. Honest. Your aunt always keeps things close to her chest, you know. Remember, it was three weeks before anyone even knew she was in prison!”