The Black Dragon

by Julian Sedgwick

  “You were Dad’s closest friend,” Danny presses. “He trusted you. I need to know.”

  “Well. There’s always been a rumor. A rumor about a criminal organization—a global organization—that pulls all the strings behind the big gangs and crime families. That’s what Laura told me. She got interested in it some time ago. But she was sure it was just a myth. Like Bigfoot, or UFOs. She thinks some gangs use it to scare people . . . you know, what do they call it—a bogeyman.”

  “Go on.”

  “Laura wrote about it a year or so ago. And then she got a number of anonymous notes and emails via her editor. That same symbol on each one. She thinks it’s just some crank trying to put the wind up her and make out that it really exists.”

  “That what exists?”

  “It’s called the Forty-Nine. Because there are meant to be forty-nine members from affiliated gangs around the world. A kind of supercrime syndicate. Always forty-nine. When one dies—or disappears—another takes his or her place. Sounds fantastical really, but now with the dots turning up all over the place, well . . .”

  “And what has it got to do with the Black Dragon?”

  “Laura didn’t say. She just wanted to bring you along to . . . show you Hong Kong. What with school being shut and all.”

  “And that’s all you know?”

  Zamora turns to look out the window, but Danny catches his reflection in the glass. Caution. His hands are tensing slightly, as if holding on to something.

  “That’s all I know about the stupid dots.” Something definitely unsaid. Danny goes to challenge him, and then decides to let it pass. He will trust Zamora. People always said that Zamora had the word honest running through him like a stick of rock candy says Brighton. If he’s not being a hundred percent truthful he must have his reasons. So forget about it for now. Find the right way forward.

  It was Dad’s contention that any problem—almost any problem—could be solved if you just broke it into small enough parts. He would sit Danny down, with a mug of tea for each of them, at the big table in the trailer, then write a problem in capital letters at the top, like HOW TO DO THE BURNING ROPE ESCAPE.

  “But it could equally well be how to mend a tap or how to make a cup of tea,” Dad said. “The principle is the same. I call it my atomic strategy. The main thing is that your problem contains masses of other little ones hidden inside it. Maybe ten, maybe a hundred. You have to take it to pieces, so it becomes something like: ‘How to escape from a burning rope, while you’re held fast in a straitjacket and you only have sixty seconds to get free.’ Then you can see how to break it down further, stage by stage . . .”

  He started to draw radiating lines, write down new subheadings, expanding the problem across the sheet.

  “And so, old son, the burning rope part has at least nine elements including thickness of rope, the kind of fuel you put on it, and so on . . . and then those can subdivide.”

  And pretty soon his tea would be cold and the paper would be covered in writing and lines.

  “But that looks impossible,” Danny said.

  “No, it’s not. It just looks bad. But now all the problems are little ones. Solvable. It’s just a matter of working through it one by one. You write them in the order you need to solve them and then you just go at it one at a time, Danny. Lock by lock, so to speak!” And then he crumpled up the paper into a tight ball, tucked it down into his left fist, blew on it—and it was gone, vanished into the bright light from the window. “But we don’t want anyone getting their hands on trade secrets, do we now?!”

  Danny grabs his notebook. He takes a pen and writes down HOW TO RESCUE AUNT LAURA.

  He looks at the problem and adds a new line. How to find Aunt Laura. How to release her.

  Zamora looks over his shoulder. “We’ll need clues.”

  “We’ve already got some,” Danny says. “The man in the Bat had a Star Ferry ticket marked today. Yesterday, I mean. The ticket had our room number on the back. He must have been stalking us. And he had a shoe repair receipt for somewhere called the Wuchung Mansions.”

  “How do you know?”

  “From the man with the ponytail. I checked his pockets.”

  “Maybe you should have left that to the police?” Danny shakes his head. He writes down a new line: Work out who to trust.

  “What do you mean?” asks Zamora.

  “When we were answering Lo’s questions, he wasn’t typing what we said. Not all the time. I could see where his fingers were going. He typed our names all right. But when you said ‘Golden Bat’ he typed something that had at least three p’s or o’s in it. Top right on the keyboard. Like ‘Happy House’ for example. Something like that.”

  “Madre mia—you sure?”

  “Sure. Same again when we told him what Laura was doing in Hong Kong. He didn’t type ‘journalist.’ I think it was ‘shopping!’”

  “That’s the last thing your aunt would do.”

  Danny draws two lines from the last question and puts Detective Lo and Detective Tan in little boxes.

  “Better add Charlie Chow to that list. I don’t trust him at all,” Zamora says, tapping the sheet. “Not at all. Made himself scarce. That girl too.”

  Danny’s hand hesitates for a beat. And then reluctantly he adds Sing Sing to the list.

  “We might have one more clue here,” he says, taking the blank Post-it note from his back pocket. He holds the paper up to the light, turns it side on.

  “I don’t see what that’s going to tell you,” Zamora says. “I saw you swipe it, of course. Nicely done.”

  Danny takes a pencil from his bag and the craft knife he uses to sharpen it. He snaps the pencil in two, and quickly pares away the wood from one side, exposing the graphite core. He spreads the note out, rubbing the cored pencil across it.

  “Clever lad!” Zamora says, leaning over.

  Clearly revealed—negative white lettering through the graphite—is the imprint of what Inspector Lo scrawled on the sheet above.

  A short string of Chinese characters—and two numbers below: a 4 and a 9. The goosebumps prickle up Danny’s skin.

  “Are you still sure this is just a wind-up, Major?”

  “I’m not sure about anything, to tell you the truth.”

  “And Detective Lo claimed to know nothing about it. We need to find Laura’s notebook. That’s what she shouted as they pushed her into the car. It’s the one she always keeps on her.”

  He adds WHERE IS THE RED NOTEBOOK? to the list of problems.

  “Let’s start at the Golden Bat. There must be a reason that Lo wanted to divert attention away from it.”

  “I take it we won’t be following his advice then?” Zamora says with a smile.

  Danny shakes his head.

  “But we’re going to take my advice,” Zamora says, straightening himself to his full height and stretching. “We’re going to eat something. And get forty winks. Recharge. No good running around on empty. We’d just make stupid mistakes. Like that time I fell off the Wall of Death. I was just tired.”

  He rubs his thigh thoughtfully at the memory, the old break aching there like it always does when the weather’s stormy.

  “Strength and balance, Danny, that’s what Rosa always said. Doesn’t matter whether we’re doing trapeze or acrobatics or voltige or cyr wheel or tightwire or cloud swing or any of the other skills. We always need to be balanced—and we always need to keep our strength up. That way we don’t make mistakes. Take our ringmistress’s advice even if you won’t take mine.”

  Danny nods, remembering the way Rosa could manage the wilder elements of the company. Get the best from everyone with her Italian charm. Or turn on the anger just when it was needed.

  “You’re right. But just a few hours. And then let’s get on with it.”

  11

  HOW TO CONCENTRATE COMPLETELY

  But sleep doesn’t come easily for Danny.

  He lies awake for an hour, then two, listening to sirens, the s
ounds of boats in the bay, while his mind churns images, thoughts, fears.

  When he does drop off, it’s into that strange halfway place again, into the borderland between waking and sleeping—his head blurred by the long-haul flight, sleep deprivation, and shock. The last thing he’s thinking about is the aquarium in the Golden Bat, and its tumbling bubbling water, the breaking glass, the fish.

  The surge of water from the shattered tank repeats and his mind links one event to another, and slips a gear—and he’s back there again, under the hemisphere of the Mysterium, standing beside the water torture cell.

  His father has loosened the chains and is wrenching himself up toward the top of the tank, working the ankle locks. His expression is slightly different from normal. But then, he has only ever done this in practice, never as a performance. He looks surprised. And rather tired. As if all the energy is draining out of him.

  “Two minutes ten . . . fifteen,” Danny calls, his voice sounding small against the music. You can sense the expectant crowd, waiting, holding one long collective breath . . . Two minutes thirty is the limit and they’re past it now. Come on . . .

  His father makes one more assault on the ankle locks and suddenly flops back down. Defeated! A few more bubbles escape from the corner of his mouth, his gaze searching out Zamora’s. A single shake of the head, eyes wide, imploring help.

  And then it all goes very quickly. Major Zamora takes a mighty heave with the axe. Clung. It bounces back off the glass. Zamora takes another swing and this time the glass splinters with a resounding crash. There is water everywhere. Simultaneously Danny can hear his father gasping for breath, retching, the crowd noise rising in uproar. Rosa Vega, their beautiful ringmistress, is stalling, her voice bright but faltering on the PA system.

  The Khaos Klowns are coming on instead—they’re only half changed but are snapping into their emergency charivari act like they know to do when there’s an accident or hiccup in the running order. They rush past, some of them in the skull masks, brandishing torches and fire staffs, some made up with the leering smiles that haunt Danny’s nightmares. Roustabouts are rushing to pull Dad from the wreckage.

  Darko Blanco is crouched over him, helping him to his feet, supporting his sagging weight. And Mum’s there too, hurrying to Dad’s side, eyes flashing in fear.

  In the Pearl Hotel bedroom Danny’s eyes pop open, as he snaps back out of the memory. He sits bolt upright, and knows that this time something had been added to the memory. Something he hasn’t seen before. What is it? He grabs for the thought—but too hard. Like trying to hold on to a wet fish, it slips his grasp. And then the reality of where they are now, of what has just happened to Laura, comes rushing back and the dream memory is swamped.

  Even a week ago he would have pushed the unwanted surge of memory to the back of his mind, but now he actively follows it. I need to start to remember properly, he thinks. Systematically.

  So what can I remember if I choose? If I don’t just wait for the memories to come?

  That night after the failed escape it was Blanco who helped Dad back to the trailer. We followed them and Mum told me not to worry. But I could see she was beside herself . . .

  The knifethrower saw to it that Dad was comfortable, and turned to leave.

  Danny had never felt entirely at ease around Blanco, but there was something cool about the way he did his meditation every morning. Back straight, eyes half closed, radiating calm. You felt he had a clarity in his pale-blue eyes.

  I stopped him on the trailer steps.

  “Why did it happen, Blanco?”

  “Why does anything happen?”

  “Dad never makes mistakes.”

  “But we all do,” Blanco said. “It’s about concentration. Mindfulness. Can you count slowly to ten without thinking one thought? Without clutching at a single thought? That’s what we have to do when we try and escape from underwater. Or throw knives. Or push long nails through our noses. Concentrate one hundred per cent and think of nothing else.”

  He smiled then. A sad smile.

  “Maybe your dad just has a bit too much on his mind.”

  It’s Zamora who wakes him, shaking Danny gently by the shoulder, bringing him back from the sleep that has finally pulled him under.

  “Rise and shine, Danny. Six in the morning.”

  Danny rubs his eyes, sitting up, trying to get his bearings. “Have they found her? Any news?”

  “No. Nada. Nothing from kidnappers, or police. But you know what they say. No news is good news.”

  It just doesn’t feel like that, though. Surprising that nobody has come to find them.

  “Let’s start working on our list.”

  “Better than twiddling our thumbs, no?” Zamora rummages in his pocket and produces a card. “And I was thinking maybe Kwan can tell us something about what your aunt got up to yesterday. Got his number here. I’ll call him from the lobby. But first you’re going to eat some breakfast.”

  In the Pearl’s foyer, a plasma screen is looping BBC World News, sound muted. The tail end of the ticker feed catches Danny’s attention—and he keeps watching, waiting for whatever it was to come round again. The Prime Minister smiles and delivers a speech on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street. Then a famous soccer player deadpans platitudes in a post-match interview. And then a still image of the rusting hulk of a cargo ship fills the screen—an ugly, squat vessel, with the headline MISSING CHINESE FREIGHTER.

  The image shifts to shaky handheld footage of a kind of rubbish dump, protected by high fences that are dotted with yellow radiation signs. PIRATE HIJACK SUSPECTED: AUTHORITIES DENY LINK TO RADIOACTIVE CARGO, the caption reads, before the bulletin flips to the start and there’s the newsreader and the prime minister opening his mouth again, stuck in the loop.

  “Vamos!” Zamora says. “I got hold of a dispatcher at Kwan’s office. They’ll get him to meet us at the Golden Bat.”

  The heat’s already building as they retrace their steps to Mong Kok. The streets are emptier and, in the clear light of day, the exoticism of last night is replaced by something harder. Crumbling concrete on some of the buildings. Peeling paintwork. Laundry hanging out to dry in the gritty air while restaurant and shop owners scrub down the pavements.

  They have expected to find police tape cordoning off the restaurant—or even an officer on duty—but there’s nothing at all to suggest the events of the previous evening. The door and main window are blinded by graffiti-covered shutters, both padlocked shut. One small window is uncovered, gazing at the street blankly from just above them.

  “You take a look, Danny. You’ve got the advantage over me now,” Zamora says.

  Standing on tiptoes, squinting into the gloom, Danny can just make out the wreckage of the aquarium, shoved back against a far wall. Chairs are stacked on tables, but otherwise all the glass, broken furniture, water and dead fish have been cleared away.

  “Can’t see much.”

  “We need to get inside,” Zamora grunts, rattling the shutter.

  Danny touches the lock pick set on the end of its bootlace. Maybe it’s the kind of simple padlock that springs easily?

  He remembers Dad giving him the basic lessons and going on and on about Houdini’s great moment of discovery as a boy when, working in an ironmonger’s, he had been asked to free a convict from handcuffs. He had succeeded and—hey presto—that was the start of a whole career. Everyone has to start sometime, Danny thinks. Saw rake is the best bet when you’re in a hurry. He flips open the pick set, then cranks the lock with the tension tool and starts dragging the rake in and out, feeling the pins moving, trying to make them fall into the shear line. Nearly. Try again.

  But then he hears footsteps approaching quickly and, guiltily, he snaps the tool shut.

  Looking up, he sees Sing Sing.

  She’s coming at a half trot down the hill, eyes hidden behind a big pair of wraparound shades, a small rucksack slung over one shoulder. The sun catches her bright-green trainers. Danny feels s
omething lift, as if a small weight has come off his shoulders. In broad daylight she looks like any other early teen—hardly like an enemy. He’s glad to see her.

  “What do we think about her?” Zamora whispers.

  “Not sure,” Danny says. “But it felt like she was waiting for something to happen last night—”

  “Oi, señorita!” Zamora booms. “We want a word—”

  “What happened to you last night?” Danny says, cutting across the major.

  She comes close up to them, but then walks right on by. Zamora goes to grab her elbow but she sidesteps neatly and hisses, “Shut up, dumdums. Follow me.” And hurries on.

  “Nothing to lose,” Danny says. “But let’s keep our eyes peeled.”

  Three shops farther down the lane, Sing Sing swings around a corner into an alleyway. Danny tries to relax, open his senses up, eyes wide, scanning for trouble as they follow close behind.

  The girl is moving at speed, ten or so paces in front of them, turning right again, into a much darker, narrower passageway that cuts along the back of the shops. She comes to a halt.

  “Back door to the Bat,” she says over her shoulder. “I have a key—”

  “Why did you disappear?” Danny interrupts. “Where’s Laura?”

  Sing Sing shakes her head. “No time. Not good to be seen around here. You want to look for something, right? Something that belongs to your aunt?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Now, listen, Miss Sing Sing,” Zamora says. “Where’s Chow?”

  With her eyes shrouded by the sunglasses it’s very difficult to read anything on her face. “No idea.”

  Sing Sing looks away, her mouth set in a firm line. “You coming or not, boys?”

  Zamora glances at Danny. “What do you think?”

  “We’ll take a look,” says Danny. “But we need to ask you some things—”

  “You got five minutes,” Sing Sing says, shoving the key in the lock. “Or we’re going to be in big flipping trouble.”

  The metal door squeals open to reveal the Golden Bat kitchens.